Jason: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode. Scalable call center sales podcast. I am super excited. My special guest today is Michael Aronowitz from Teleperformance and he serves as the executive vice president of digital sales, meaning he’s overseeing their global sales line of business, working with some of the world’s best.

[00:00:22] Brands along with many new business disruptors and unicorn companies and so many things that they serve via Teleperformance. Um, he has done so much things. We’re going to talk about a lot of these initiatives he’s put in place what he, what he’s seen for clients at work, what doesn’t work for companies that are struggling in the industry pre pandemic right now, during this pandemic and where things are going, Michael, welcome to the scalable call center sales plan.

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Michael: Jason, thanks for having me looking forward to our conversation today.

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Jason: So one of the things, and I thought I would start here, cause this puts things into perspective for people. If they’re familiar with Teleperformance, they know that it’s a large organization. There’s a lot of people. When I have people come on the show, they fill out a form, they supply some information that becomes the framework of our conversation.

[00:01:14] One of those questions is how big is your sales team, depending on, you know, who’s coming on the podcast. And, you know, since this is a sales call center podcast, that’s a reasonable question. Kind of get a framework for that. You officially have the most people under you as a sales leader in any organization, just for the audience knows how many people.

[00:01:36] Are under your branch in Teleperformance.

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Michael: So when it comes to the sales line of business that we have, uh, 20,000 plus agents worldwide taking inbound, making outbound calls, doing, you know, every type of sales line of business, you can think of whether that’s B2B B to C and just, I can go on and on, you know, chat non-voice.

[00:01:59] So, um, you know, we have a large range of clients and we consider our. You know, the leader in customer acquisition.

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Jason: I love it. So 20,000 people under the sales umbrella of what the company is running and what you’re in charge of, uh, that’s definitely, that’s definitely a new one. And so that obviously comes with the challenges.

[00:02:22] It comes with some successes, it comes with, you know, the, the services that you’re providing for your clients. Right now in what you’re seeing, we’re talking about late 20, 21, what are some of the biggest challenges your seeing that your clients sales teams are struggling with that you’re then helping out with where they’re like, okay, we’re struggling with this and we just need some help.

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Michael: I mean, let’s, let’s throw it out there that the toughest thing right now is. You know, historically, um, you know, call centers have been a great place and a great opportunity for people to start their career. You know, it’s, it’s very common to meet someone at some point in their life. Fortunately, You know, it’s a great job.

[00:03:07] It’s a great opportunity. Um, it’s, it can make a great living, but just like every other business that you come across in, in the U S and other parts of the world, there’s some hiring challenges. So, you know, most of the conversations we have these days are around, um, helping us fill a need and customer acquisition.

[00:03:26] They can’t hire internally, or, you know, they’ve never outsourced before and they’ve, you know, their sales team is the holy grail of their business. And can they put it in someone else’s hands? Know, that’s the number one conversation right now we keep having is having trouble hiring.

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Jason: Do you see a shift in that anytime soon or anything that’s going to affect that positively?

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Michael: No, I’m not. Uh, I’m not here to. Procrastinate or pontificate or come up with different reasons of what I see. I just think over the next six to nine months, we’re not going to really see a big change. You know, the employment’s going to flip all of a sudden it’s wage rates constantly going up and the employment market is shrinking.

[00:04:14] So, you know, there’s some tension in the marketplace. You know, I, I say to people, um, you know, it’s really important not to put all your eggs in one basket and, you know, look at different ways to grow your business, especially on customer acquisition, that’s the lifeline of your business sales. So, um, if you’re outsourcing, you know, look and see if you could, um, bring in another company, if you’ve never outsourced before, it’s time to have that conversation, but either way, you know, Um, you need a great customer acquisition team.

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Jason: Well, and I love what you said about not having all your eggs in one basket, because obviously what we saw was a lot of companies who eggs were all in their internal basket with a team, pandemic happens. Everyone goes through. Some, some of the reps can handle some can’t. Now they’re trying to hire, that’s not working.

[00:05:10] And now what do you do versus being diversified, um, and you know, just covering against any issues, even if there’s internal issues now. Kind of an external option or multiple options. What’s the, what’s the biggest kind of objection you hear. And obviously you’re dealing with big brands, maybe some startups, like I said, in the beginning, you know, some unicorns that are, are, are disrupting, but you know, what is, what is that objection that companies bring up more often than not about.

[00:05:43] Outsourcing or diversifying their sales team. Like you said, trusting someone else to run some of their revenue,

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Michael: you know, it’s trust it’s, Hey, you know, can you do it better than we can internally? And you know, there’s lots of conversations. And the thing I tell people, you know, I’ve been, I’m an old, I’m an old veteran right now when it comes to sales and I’ve been doing this for a long time.

[00:06:05] And there’s a couple of factors that whether you do it internally or whether you outsource it and, you know, picking the right time. Hiring the right people, the most important thing in any organization, whether you’re doing it internally or externally, are you hiring the right people? Are you building the right culture?

[00:06:22] Do you have the right training in place? And you know, where people sometimes drop the ball is that, you know, you’ll find someone that is a great salesperson. Um, on the B2B side, but they’re used to three appointments a day. You know, field sales is kind of moved away. So when you talk to companies who’ve never really done inside sales, they’ve only been field sales and they’ve done two to three appointments a day.

[00:06:45] You know, that rep would get up in the morning. He’d grab some coffee, have his first meeting, maybe have a lunch with someone at the end of the day, bring some donuts and have three. It’s a different atmosphere right now you’re expected to do 5, 6, 7 meetings a day now with interactive video. So finding that right person, they may have been the greatest field sales person in the world, but now you’re in your room, you know, like you and I are doing a video conference.

[00:07:09] So talent is really important. So a lot of these companies, you know, they’ve never done this before, so they’re nervous. The flip side is that when you work with a company like ours or other outsourcers, that we’re taking our success across multiple different lines of business. So we know exactly where the right people are and to hire the right people.

[00:07:31] So, you know, that’s the one thing that we find that’s really common is that, um, how to build a culture, you know, how to recruit the right way, things like that. That’s what we hear mostly.

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Jason: And it’s interesting, you’re talking about that field sales person going inside, like on the telephone and the volume of appointments.

[00:07:53] I think what, what I see a lot, and this is what I already know about your organization and the kind of work that you do is that a lot of companies, I consider them they’re playing sales, right? They think if I hire some salespeople who know what they’re doing, they have the experience and I let them loose.

[00:08:09] They’ll know what they’re doing. My organization and there’ll be successful. Right. And that systems, not processes, not all of these things, like a machine, more like sales sales, just let me do what I do best. I’m a salesperson, right. And an organization that’s run from the top down in that mode. And then you switched to a mode, like what you’re talking about with your company, which is okay, but you’re going to.

[00:08:36] Like a business and a machine with systems and processes, so you can replicate it and you can make sure that it’s successful. How often do you see that, that issue where it’s like, well, you know, we, we don’t need scripts and we don’t have scripts or we don’t even have training. We just have people. Okay.

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Michael: All great questions. And I always go back to data and analytics, right. So, you know, you, you can’t just put sales into one little bucket and say it. Retention is the hardest sell whatsoever. And some people don’t think every touch in a sale, but you’re reselling an existing customer who mobile wants your product.

[00:09:11] Right? And if you don’t use data and analytics behind that, you don’t know why your customers are asking for reasons why that they may no longer want your product. Right? So two things, you said, scripts, not every customer has the same issue in the same problem nor needs the same product. So you can script things out, but who really wants to talk to someone who said.

[00:09:35] Jason, how can I help you? And they read down each line, that’s not selling, that’s not listening. So, you know, you, we use data analytics, coaching, and all these different methodologies to make a sales person better. But I’ll say this number of times throughout our podcast, putting the right person in the right role at the right time is going to be successful in way.

[00:09:58] Often, most times people put the wrong person in there because they want to fill it. And they think they can teach someone sales. Well, we got a great training program. Great. We’ve got a great recruiting program. Great. But you didn’t put the right candidate in there. Right. And so going back to something that we look at is we go with the, no, maybe right.

[00:10:18] If we’re sitting here out a compensation that maybe there’ll be successful, most likely they’re not right. When you look at an NFL draft. Right. And they have to pick 1, 3, 5, 7, they don’t sit around the draft table and go, okay. We think. We think this QB is going to be okay. He might make it. He might not, but you know, let’s take a risk on him.

[00:10:39] You don’t right. So when you use data and analytics and you put these things together, you build great sales program. Right, but you can’t script out someone to overcome an objection. Someone who can listen at the right time of when to close it when not to close more often than not, people never know how to ask for the sale.

[00:11:01] They’re waiting for the customer on the other end, they go, yes, I want it. And we know that doesn’t happen. Right? So long-winded answer, you have to really find the right people and use tools and technologies to make them better and understand what they’re doing. And when they understand that they get better and better.

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Jason: So you’ve been in this a long time. You mentioned you’re a veteran at the, at, at, uh, the sales career. And obviously there’s a lot of people, you see a lot of internal campaigns when you’re talking about people and getting the right people into the role. And I love that. No, maybe rule, right? If it’s a maybe then it’s definitely a no, um, because of what it’s going to take to get that person to be successful.

[00:11:44] If at all, Is there certain things or are there certain things that you’re looking for or, you know, as, as a baseline or is it purely campaign

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Michael: specific if you, if anyone’s ever interviewed. Sometimes they think, you know, this guy is off the wall because what I like to do is I like to throw crazy questions after.

[00:12:05] So I was interviewing Jason in the middle of the COVID interview. I’d say something like this, I’d say, Hey, Jason, I’m going to ask you a series of questions that are meaningless, right. There’s no right or wrong answer. Just, just personally pops in your mind, you know, tell me, and I’d say, Hey, I’m stuck on a desert island for one year.

[00:12:21] You only be able to bring one book with you. What would it be?

[00:12:28] I don’t know. You don’t know. Okay. What about a movie? One movie one year, one movie.

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Jason: Um, I would say what about Bob?

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Michael: What about Bob? Okay, cool. Yeah, it was the last time you turned your phone off

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Jason: a couple of weeks ago when I went four days on a digital detox to the grand canyon.

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Michael: Got it. Got it. And if I was to talk to the last person you reported to, and I said, um, give me one word to describe Jason.

[00:12:55] What would that word be? So, what I did there, right. Is I asked a series of questions to see if you can improvise. Right? How quick can you make decisions on your feet? Are you honest? Right. Was the last time it turned your phone off, you know, last book you started to think, right? These are things that characteristics that you get when you’re working with salespeople that you need.

[00:13:20] Right. And more often than not, we do. Right. We understand testing and all of that, but the inner personalities, the makings of a conversation. So right there, you and I were having a conversation. And if I got first book, I don’t know, last time I turned my phone off, I’m not sure that’s a no. Right. So when you’re really judging talent, you know, we could, we could look at and say, okay, this guy’s got the greatest resume in the world.

[00:13:51] Okay. Let anybody can do a paper resonate. Let’s go see what they have. You know, let’s go, let’s have that. One-on-one real quick and see if they can have a conversation to close.

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Jason: I love it. And I waffled on the book thing because most of the time I read business books, but if I was on a desert island, I don’t know.

[00:14:09] And then the only other book that could pop in my head was jaws, but I don’t think that would be fun on a desert island. Just reading about man-eating sharks. Right. Um, what, uh, when we’re talking about that, cause hiring, I think is so important and not just because there’s a hiring challenge for organizations, but always getting the right people is.

[00:14:26] There, you know, it’s a, it’s a scary game for organization, so you get it right. That’s great. You get it wrong and it’s going to set you back. What are the kind of deal breaker? No, go things that you’re looking for. I know what you said about like, whether they can think on their feet and answer it, but is there a personalities behaviors, like anything where you’re just like this type of person just generally doesn’t work or this.

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Michael: You know, it depends on the type of sale that you’re really looking at. So if, you know, if we’re doing B2B sales, you know, can they do math? You know, and, and why can they do math? Well, if we’re talking business, you know, there’s always a cost per acquisition, you know, what’s the cost per acquisition. Um, what’s the revenue going to be look like what’s the streamline.

[00:15:13] So, you know, math is important on B2B sales. If you’re doing inbound. Call it, you know, a consumer sales, it’s all about the upsell and the cross sell. Right? It’s about listening skills. So, you know, someone buys product a what B and C go along with that. Right. So listening skills. So this goes back to what we said earlier about working with a company like mine, you know, we have.

[00:15:42] Years and years of experience and finding the right person in the right role, where sometimes when a company needs to ramp for seasonality or a new product rollout, they don’t understand the nuances that may come along with that. So it’s really important when you’re building these campaigns, we always create what’s called a sales playbook and in that playbook, it’s.

[00:16:09] We do testing for personalities and see if there’s specific scores. Sometimes you may have to score an 80 or above sometimes a 90 or above, or sometimes a 75 or above for Pacific sales line of business. But that’s the original profile. And as we go on 30, 60, 90 days into this, the profile is fluid and may change.

[00:16:29] And we’ll find out which I have in the past that, you know, a certain personality trait that we thought was right for this. Necessarily might not be moving forward. So creating sales playbooks in always having that back to let’s go back to recruiting and look at the results 30 days, 60 days and 90 days from now.

[00:16:53] And then let’s really have a deeper dive into training. Right? So you’re training your trainers should be able to recognize. Immediately if this person is going to be successful or not. So if they’re not going to be successful in a training, why are we going to spend two weeks trying to train or three weeks, that’s not going to be successful.

[00:17:11] Um, but Hey, if you see that, you know, these people are successful, let’s look deeper into that background and find more candidates like that. So it’s a team effort when you’re building stuff. Uh, programs. Does that make sense?

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Jason: It does. And it’s interesting that you say that about the trainer side, because I know one of my first leadership roles where I was training, I was recruiting and then training and then managing and running this small team, uh, under 20 people with some telemarketing.

[00:17:44] Boss would constantly come to me and say, well, how much time should we give people? Like when do you know if they’re going to be a good fit or not? And I’m like buy lunch on the first day, right? In training, are they asking questions? Are they engaged? I’ve literally had people who are just tired and they’re kind of sleepy.

[00:18:01] And, and I’m like, if you’re not excited in the first half of your first day, at the most exciting point before things get real and difficult and challenge. Um, then it’s not going to work.

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Michael: So I love the call center business. I love people. Um, I like meeting new people, right? So there’s a couple of things.

[00:18:19] Like if I’m ever, you know, pre COVID I’m in one of our centers, I love to go on the training room and I can identify immediately. Who’s going to be successful or not. And here’s a tip to everybody. I walk in and I say, Hey, I tell them who I am. And then I say, I’m gonna go around the room and point to you and just do me a favor.

[00:18:37] And. Tell me your name, your last position, and something interesting that I would remember you by, you know, so I, you know that, let me start it off. So, Hey, I’m Mike Romano. Um, I won’t say my last company, but something interesting about me is, you know, I got a full parrot that talks, boom. Right. I go around the room and I can tell you immediately who’s going to make it or not just by the way they pop up.

[00:19:05] They say their name and something about. You can tell who’s not gonna make it because they’ll go on. Got my name’s Mike. Uh, my last company was, um, um, they’re not gonna make it because the sales that first 30 seconds is the most important thing that intro, right? Do you have life where you’re monotone, you have voice inflection, right?

[00:19:25] So, you know, I always pulled a trainer around her after the class and go, Hey, if I can see that 30 seconds into this, why are we going to go two weeks with this person? Which we know is not going to make it because if they’re doing outbound calling, they’re never going to get past the gate. Right. So, you know, when’s the right time to pull the plug.

[00:19:41] You’re exactly right. There’s no, it’s, it’s in training when we graduate someone, that’s a whole different story. You know, if, if we graduate someone that has gone through all the processes, sometimes, you know, there’s components that happen in terms of technology or other things. So we got to give them some.

[00:20:03] Right. What’s the ramp to proficiency. What does that look like? So, you know, I’m a big proponent of early on in training if they’re not going to make it, but once we graduate, there’s a ramp to proficiency and you’ve got to really, it’s now the company, the managers, the team’s responsibility to make them successful.

[00:20:26] And another tip I’d say to everybody is this right sales leaders, can you sell. Right. Are you able to get on that call and save the sale? Because you know, sales is all about positive energy. So, you know, you want to be a good sales leader. Don’t let your team, the people you hire, fail on the phone and then come back and tell them all the things they did wrong side Jack, get on the call, save it and show them.

[00:20:51] Right. So many times we talked about, you know, oh, they didn’t do this. Right. They didn’t. No, it’s your job to teach someone. That’s why we have sales coaches. That’s why we have sales trainers. And so with me, it’s not about, you know, let’s cut them right away. It’s right. Role for the right person. They went through everything.

[00:21:10] Now it’s up to the leadership to make them. That’s how I looked at it.

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Jason: Yeah. And I agree that especially if someone’s made it through training and if you built a training with a go-no-go process, not just on personality, but like actually some skills testing and things like that. Once they graduate from this.

[00:21:29] If for some reason you have to let them go. That means, and the way I was taught, it was means you failed as an organization. Either you hired the wrong person or you didn’t support them fully. Right? Yeah. Looking at it in that attitude now that does not a hundred percent true. And it’s not always your fault, but that’s the best approach I found.

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Michael: Yep. But you also have to look at the culture, the compensation, you know, you have the right compensation model. Do you have the right culture? Is it a positive culture? You know, is it, is it a teamwork culture? We high-five and people, when we go to sale or we’re ringing a bell, you know, I mean, what are we doing?

[00:22:05] You know, to make people want to come to work everyday and be happy. And, and so that’s a lot to do with it too, you know, driving a happy culture in sales. You know, I, I look at sales is somewhat to sports, you know, You’re out there. And, um, I don’t know if anyone’s seen the Baltimore game this week, but you know, for three quarters, Lamar Jackson looked like he couldn’t do anything.

[00:22:27] Right. You know, and he fumbled in the game, looked over and, you know, he never blinked and I never thought, you know, he doesn’t have it in him. And he came out and he just had a monster fourth quarter. Right. He doesn’t let the things or the distraction happen and things he has to happen in sales, you know, three or four calls people hang up.

[00:22:47] You know, Laura of averages tells you that, Hey, no matter what, you know, it takes four calls to make oneself. Three of those could go really bad. It comes to fourth one. So that’s where coaching and motivation and culture.

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Jason: Yeah, because sales is a tough mental thing. And just to revisit what you said about asking people in the training room to stand up and talk about it.

[00:23:08] That was a lesson I learned from a friend a long time ago, even before I got into sales management. And I’ve done that forever with group interviews where people come in, it’s a group and then one at a time having them stand because you see that and you know, who’s got. You know, and if you get more of those people, even before it starts, this is a room full of strangers.

[00:23:30] They don’t even sure. They’re not even sure why they were there yet. Cause they’re in the interview process and the people who are willing to get up and, you know, have some confidence in themselves like that’s who you want.

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Michael: A lot of B2B interviews we used to do in the past was in one day. And, um, you put two desks in a big room, one on the right one on the left and you call them up one by one and you have that interview.

[00:23:50] And I would be the interview and I talk really loud and ask them to talk really loud because you want to see, I mean, if you’re doing B2B sales, you have to get past the gatekeeper. You do that. Um, but the other tip that I give people all the time, if you want to be really great, Um, and if I go on a tangent, just bring me back in, I do a lot of training and talking to people and talking to our, you know, our agents and potential agents and especially on the B2B side, right?

[00:24:14] How do you get past a gatekeeper? Right. And there’s a tip. I tell everybody, and it may sound crazy again, but, um, this goes back to my early days of learning, how to sell. You have to learn how to talk to people. So when you’re in training, knowing that you’re going to start doing outbound calls, Every time you can interact with someone, you don’t know, ask them a question.

[00:24:38] Hence, during the grocery store, you’re checking out, right? You got to pay it at $60. You go to the person who’s checking you out and go $60. The average cost of when someone checks out, like, what does the average person spend a day? And they look at you sideways, like you’re crazy. Right? And then they tell you the number and you look to the person behind you and go, is that about what you spend in.

[00:25:01] Right. You’re having conversations with people you’ve never met before. Some of them are going to be really rude to you and some are going to be nice. That’s how you train to get past the gatekeeper. Right? When you’re in the elevator, the most uncomfortable conversation you can ever have with someone is turn to them and go, where are you from?

[00:25:16] They don’t know. I did that last week. You know, they didn’t know what to do. They looked at me again, like I was crazy. Where are you from a sound from south Florida? I’m not used to this place. And then you have a conversation, right? So. What this goes back to what I always say, leadership, right? When you’re building these programs, are you putting these things in place?

[00:25:34] And it goes back to what you said about script. We can write all these things down, but we have to teach the individual how to sell. And, and so going back to what I said earlier about when you work with a company like mine, is that we take all the learnings from the sales playbooks that we have. We take that to the first time outsourcer.

[00:25:55] Who’s never done this before and say, Hey, you’ve been living in a bubble for the last 20 years. We get it. And that bubble has been very successful, but it’s a different landscape out there. Right. The climate has changed and let us help you. And we take all the knowledge that you have to make your program successful, but we take a couple of bits from these pride programs that are really successful to make your us just a little better.

[00:26:17] And that’s why outsourcing, uh, with companies like ours, most of the time is successful. If you do it with the right people, with the right resources, using data.

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Jason: Got it. I love that a mini masterclass on the hiring, the recruiting, the training, kind of what you’re looking for, both for managers, leaders who can take that.

[00:26:37] And then anyone who’s listening to this that’s in sales and thinking, you know, am I, am I on the right track or not? You know, hopefully that helps. One of the things I can’t stop thinking about though, is organizations where they just don’t have. Their sales process built, maybe even the stuff that you’re talking about, where it’s like, here’s the kind of people you want to hire.

[00:26:59] Here’s what you’re looking for. Here’s the right people you want on the bus so we can make sure the bus gets to its destination. And I’m just thinking of organizations. They’re nowhere they’re in their bubble, like you said, and then they want to outsource, or they’re thinking about it. Is there a point at which you actually tell an organization?

[00:27:17] No. You can’t help them as an outsource partner because they don’t have anything in place or do you work with them to put those things in place and build the machine with them so that you can then outsource?

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Michael: Well, I’m in sales. So there is no, no, there’s never a no. Okay. There’s there’s, there’s nothing.

[00:27:36] We can’t. All right, you can build things. So I go back to tools and technology, and I’m blessed to work with an organization that has so many tools and so many technologies that can help the company that you just spoke about. Right. Um, the challenge is the ego that comes along with that. Hey, you know, we’re a multi-billion dollar company and we’re truly successful.

[00:28:01] We don’t need you. Okay. But I can make it. You know, we have an organization that uses tools and technologies that can help you get better. So once the egos get in check, it’s pretty much, you know, we work together and collaborate the most successful programs that I’m a part of is collaboration, right?

[00:28:19] It’s our company and your company working together to build a better product, to get a better end result. And when you collaborate, you get great results. Um, We have a lot of what we call champion challengers, right? So companies that use multiple outsourcers, we have champion challenges. We share the data, we see the success, but then you take what’s successful and you share that with other people and say, Hey, this is what’s working for us.

[00:28:48] This is what we see. Because at the end of the day, if the company we’re working for is more successful, We grow right? If the company is not sharing the data or what’s not working and they’re letting us fail, that doesn’t make sense either. So, you know, it’s really about collaboration with people and leaving their egos in check.

[00:29:11] And, and most of the clients that I work with, we’re a hundred percent transparent. We build programs for the end result, which is my job is to lower your cost per acquisition. Increase revenue per transaction and bring a higher lifetime value to your customer. If I do all those three things, I did my job.

[00:29:41]

Jason: I’m pausing here because I’m thinking about that and that model, which I think is great. And I think about that ego part that you mentioned, which is when they think they know everything and that gets in the way. And obviously that’s a barrier in any sales process when somebody thinks they know better or they’re not open to any solution consumer business-wise, then that’s a, that’s a tough nut to crack.

[00:30:03] I’m also thinking the other end of the spectrum, where a company says, we just want you to do it all. We don’t care what you do. Here’s the result that we want. Take it right. Abdicating the process or sales or client acquisition revenue to an outsource partner, because they don’t have an idea of how to do it internally.

[00:30:26] They’re not successful. And I’ve seen companies do that, where they hire somebody who promises the world. But they don’t give them anything because they don’t even know how to sell their own product successfully at scale. And then of course, outsource partners fail. Where do you see that happen? Or you just know to avoid those kinds of people who are just like, please raise my

[00:30:48]

Michael: baby.

[00:30:48] I live by, uh, information not shared is worth this information right in. Give us something to go off of. You know, if you’re just going to give us a piece of paper and go here, you know, sign the contract, they go build it and be successful. We’re not going to know the nuances that the challenge, you know, the things that worked and didn’t work, it’s going to set us all back.

[00:31:13] So I go back to collaboration, you know, we, we have to collaborate together to build something. And if, again, if we’re just seeing as some outsourced. That’s not who we are, we’re an extension of your business. Um, so when, when you hire us and we work with you, you know, where, where, where we are, you’re inside, outside sales team, we’re just an extension of you under a different roof.

[00:31:42] Um, so, you know, again, do I, I don’t walk away because I feel like. Work with almost any individual and we can build something together. That’s the main reason why you’ve reached out to me. Right. So, you know, it’s, it’s very rare that someone doesn’t say, Hey, come on in and let’s talk and then goes, okay, we got nothing for you.

[00:32:01] It’s how can, you know, let me solve your problems. Um, and, and these days, you know, we’re all in the same kind of bubble, right? That things are changing rapidly, but what’s not changing. Is that the lifeline of every business is their sales team. Um, you know, you, you need new customers, you need to maintain your customers.

[00:32:26] So you need new sales and you need retention. And that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.

[00:32:34]

Jason: Makes sense. I love it. Um, and I agree, and I, and I’ve seen. Some outsource partner, especially business development, B2B, or they’re like, we’ll just do it for you. And, uh, that doesn’t work for most organizations because if they don’t know how to make it successful, the partner,

[00:32:51]

Michael: I think I would say is, you know, and I’ll be careful the way that I say this, but, um, you know, I, I’m not the price war guy.

[00:32:59] I’m not the cheapest, you know, you’re with me and sales, you know, the cheapest usually is the one. Right because it’s, you’re building a sales team, you know, it’s all about compensation and the more you sell, the more you make. Right. So it’s kind of like an oxymoron. I can’t be the cheapest. It’d be the best.

[00:33:17] Right. So, you know, when companies are outsourcing and you’re dealing with some procurement procurement people or other people in individual and they’re, Hey, you know, you’re 20% more. Okay. Well, are we looking at, you know, I can do more with less, right? So what most companies can do with a hundred agents, I can do.

[00:33:33] And drive more revenue per transaction. Right? So again, the mindset of what we’re talking about earlier is that, Hey, there’s an education on both sides when you’re doing sales. It’s not about average handle time. It’s not about, you know, what are the butts in the seats? It’s not about hourly wages. It’s about revenue per transaction.

[00:33:52] You know, it’s about closing numbers. It’s about upselling and cross. Right. It’s a completely different component than a care model. So, you know, again, what you said earlier is like, when you’re having these meetings, you have to make sure the people you’re talking to understand the same concept. You know, I’ve never been with someone who says again, I go back to sports in the free agent market, you know, we want the cheapest guy and he’s gonna be.

[00:34:15] They’ll just doesn’t work that way. Right. They’re looking at, if you have pictures, you’re looking at innings, pitched an era. If you’re looking at a home run bomber, it’s, you know, how many home runs they’re going to have. Right. So, you know, we, we don’t pay that guy the lowest, right. We pay them the highest for performance.

[00:34:31] Right. So again, when you’re outsourcing, you have to really look at what you’re getting. Right. And if you’re getting the cheapest in sales, it’s probably the worst.

[00:34:41]

Jason: So let’s shift a little bit, obviously. Your organization, global workforce, global sales team, different different parts of the world. Everybody was affected by the pandemic.

[00:34:54] What w what was one of the biggest surprises and successes that you saw, especially as a sales leader, like from your internal,

[00:35:05]

Michael: let me start with, yeah, right. Um, I work with some of the smartest individuals you’re ever to. And I don’t say that just because that worked for the company, but we had a work from home workforce before the pandemic.

[00:35:21] We had everything in place doing work from home. So there wasn’t a big shift for us because we had the infrastructure. So it was really just a matter of pivoting, right. People and equipment. But we had the infrastructure in place to do work from home. So we were already light years ahead of most organizations.

[00:35:40] Um, the challenge. Um, on a global scale, is, is bandwidth making sure that you have the right bandwidth in your home. And as you go into some of these countries that don’t have the infrastructure that maybe the us has, right? So it’s bandwidth issues. It’s again, in my world and sales, do you have a room that you could get on a conversation with?

[00:36:04] That’s not background noise, that two kids and a dog or running into the room, you know, Again, we’re all, we’re all working from home school, from home, you know, is there a room that you can dedicate yourself? So we spent a lot of time going back to what I said earlier when you’re recruiting to make sure that to have a dedicated workspace that would have a good broadband connection, that they have the right tools and technology, um, because there’s nothing worse than a bad connection when you’re trying to close.

[00:36:34] Right. And then that becomes the excuse, you know? Oh, got disconnected. When we all know disconnected rings, they hung up on you. And so, you know, um, for us, it wasn’t a big pivot because we had the infrastructure.

[00:36:50]

Jason: What do you see as the near future? Let’s say, you know, we’re recording this October 20, 21, the rest of this year, next year in two aspects, especially you being a very experienced salesperson. So the two parts that I’m really curious about is what’s the near future and what’s upcoming for. Call centers and either technology or, you know, dealing with the personnel issues, hiring issues.

[00:37:17] And then the second part is what do you see changing in the landscape for buyers, for customers, whether it’s B2B or B2C and what they’re looking for and what you see as how your organization especially is going to adapt to that instead of like, just doing it the same way all the time.

[00:37:37]

Michael: You know, we’re, we’re seeing a shift.

[00:37:41] In, in more emerging brands, direct to consumers. Brands has retail starts to fizzle out, you know, malls are physically out and, you know, the brick and mortar retail stores are fizzling out. You’re seeing more direct to consumers. So you’re seeing more opportunities for businesses who have never really outsourced before use call center for sales and things like that.

[00:37:59] So I see that on the horizon, I see video in life, selling on the horizon as a big aspect as we move into the next 24. Especially with the younger generation. Um, but what I see more often than not is companies who have never done this before and now are starting to realize that they’ve learned going back to what I said earlier that, Hey, I may have a captive center.

[00:38:23] I may have two captive standards, but. It’s really about protection of your business and diversifying where your centers are and where your people are. Because especially in the global landscape, we’ve learned that things can happen really quick. So I think what you’re seeing now is more companies trying to understand that, Hey, you know, I may be captive.

[00:38:50] This may not be the way to go into the future. The other thing is. You talked about right now, the challenge is going to be people, you know, um, there’s a, there’s a, um, wage rate that keeps rising and rising and rising, and I’m not going to get political with inflation and things like that. But companies really have to look at how they could increase.

[00:39:20] Revenue per transaction on cross selling and upselling and retention and using all the tools and technologies to keep customers because things like inflation in things start to happen. People look at their bills, you know, as gas prices go up and things go up with heating oil. You start to look at an and that’s where you’ve got to have a really good retention.

[00:39:45] You know, you better have a good customer acquisition team, especially on the B2B side now, because as more B2B companies move to the digital transformation of their business, right now you have a landscape of different opportunities where it may have been someone knocking at your door. Right now you’re proactively seeking something and you’re going to talk to two or three individuals.

[00:40:08] So video again is prevalent. You know, face-to-face selling on B2B using video. So video on direct on consumer and B2B. I would say this, right? And I’ll, it’s like the fifth time I’ve said it, Jason having the right person in the right role, right. Put a lot of more effort into recruiting and training and finding that right person because what you don’t want to do.

[00:40:33] And you’re going to see in a tight labor market is when an opportunity comes along that someone can make three, four or $5 an hour. They leave, take care of your employees. Now more than ever. And so it, my organization, we have so many countries that have one great places to work and make sure that you will become a great place to work, have diversity in the workforce and hire good people and keep them because the companies who are going to succeed over the next 24 months are the ones that have a diverse workforce, where the sales culture is great.

[00:41:10] And the people are happy because if they’re not. They just need to walk down the street and you don’t have a job. It’s a, it’s an employee’s market right now. Right. So, you know, that’s where I see the next 24 months take care of the people who take care.

[00:41:26]

Jason: And I absolutely love the intersection of what you said throughout that too, which is take care of the people, right?

[00:41:32] Hire the right people, take care of them, make it a great place to work, make it a place where people are going to want to come work so you can win that decision and keep your employees. While at the same time, figuring out ways to retain people who might want to cancel or leave as a customer, uh, upsell, cross sell, improve that lifetime value of a client in that way.

[00:41:57] It’s fun. The best place to work and being able to compensate people on performance-based and keeping people happy. And it just loops. I see what I’m sure you see sometimes, which is organizations say they’re not good at the sales part, the upsell, the cross sell the retention they could be, but they’re just not, they’re focused on the new client acquisition, not everything else.

[00:42:17] And so what happens is they feel like they don’t have the mind to pay more because they’re hemorrhaging or bleeding out the other side. And then it’s just this vicious. And what you’re saying is two parts is solved. Both of those, right? You solve one, you solve the other, you solve them both at the same time, improve both at the same time.

[00:42:34] And then it’s just,

[00:42:36]

Michael: there’s so many companies that I help, um, help them understand what their cost per acquisition. Right. And in this day and age, you know, what’s your cost per acquisition all in while they have an all-in number. I know that’s radio TV, that’s paid search non-brand search SEO, email, SMS, social media.

[00:42:58] I can give you 11 different marketing methodologies without blinking an eye. Tell me the cost per cost per acquisition of each one of those methodologies. Right? Let me help you break that down and understand where your marketing dollars are being spent correctly. Or is there attribution, you know, okay.

[00:43:16] Radio, TV, paid search, social media, are you tracking attribution? You know? And so again, you know, that’s where that Eagle sitting comes in. Right? I’ve been doing this long enough to know that there is no perfect science when it comes to attribution, but you’ll hear a lot of people say, we’ve got to keep doing radio.

[00:43:37] We got to keep doing TV. Okay. And is it working well? Yeah. They’re not doing attribution because they’re not using data and analytics. Right. And then, well, retention, you know, they’ll just give the store away on retention, you know, oh one month free or this and that, but they don’t know. They’re not listening to the reasons why of, I love your product, but I may be moving.

[00:44:01] I love your product, but I’m still waiting for it. Right. That’s where voice analytics come in and QA teams. Right. So, you know, again, Look at the whole customer journey from the time they landed on your wet property to that conversation of three months from now, when you’re trying to win them back, something happened in between that 90 days.

[00:44:24] Let’s find out together why they’re no longer want to be your customer. Um, there’s many different reasons, but we’re going into a, uh, uh, a time now where if you’re not using data and analytics and digital transformation, To make you better, faster, quicker, cheaper. You’re going to be left behind. Right. And that’s where companies like mine help you.

[00:44:48]

Jason: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more because there was a time in the past where only the big players might have the resources to pull those things off. And then there was enough share for everyone else. Now with the technology cloud-based scalable systems, companies like yours that are willing to support.

[00:45:07] Anybody has the chance and the ability to scale and do really well and own a very large market share based on data analytics, tools, technology, resources, hiring the right people. And, uh, I agree. I mean, if you’re still hoping that things are going to work, it’s not, well, my goal, I appreciate you being on here.

[00:45:27] So. I thought we were going to talk way more about other topics. And I loved where this went is so fun. Um, I know that if people want to find out more information, they can go to teleperformance.com. I know there’s a ton of resources on there. People want to check that out. I know that you’re active on LinkedIn so they can find you on there.

[00:45:45] Any other cool things, any other valuable things, any other ways that you want people to interact with you, or find out more about what you all doing?

[00:45:54]

Michael: I do a podcast with Stephanie Miller. You could find that on the website. Um, we shoot the breeze of sales. Love to have you come on there one day to, with us and shoot it.

[00:46:06] I’m on LinkedIn. I go to some trade shows and conventions, but you know, just getting back into that mix right now, um, plan on being more active in 2022 as things open up. But I really enjoyed my time today with you. And, um, hopefully, you know, everyone’s staying healthy and getting out there and, you know, it’s, um, I love sales.

[00:46:29] I can talk about it.

[00:46:31]

Jason: Well, we’ll definitely have to do a second part. Cause I feel like there’s still a bunch that we both wanted to talk about and I know that’ll be fun and I’m excited to see you soon at some conferences. And, uh, I appreciate all the value shared, Michael. Thanks for, uh, thanks for coming on the show and, uh, being here with us today

Jason: Hey, what’s going on, everybody. Welcome to another special episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. I have another amazing guest and it’s fun because I’ve done some collaborative work with him, which we’ll, we’ll talk about some of the stuff that we’ve done, which has been fun, but I have Mr.

[00:00:16] Alec Thompson from call shaper on the podcast today with me. And so he is an award-winning executive with 20 plus years, a proven track record. And getting results, implementing sales, training, new sales strategies, marketing, new product strategies, all of that. With his extensive experience in the technologies, security, software, hospitality health, I’m going to guess to everything he’s, he’s done it all.

[00:00:45] Uh, he focuses now with call shaper in helping businesses work smarter through technology, especially phones. This is a call center podcast. He’s in the dialer software technology phone side of the business. So it makes only sense for him to be on here. Alec, welcome to the scalable call center sales.

[00:01:06]

Alec: Thanks, Jason, it’s great to be with you today. I’m excited for this. Yeah. So

[00:01:10]

Jason: to set the stage of where we’re going to go with this, or however many tangents, we’re probably going to take in, in, in providing some value to everybody, let’s start with what’s your main focus. Right now, or with call shaper. And with your experience for call center leaders, what are you focused on these days?

[00:01:34]

Alec: Well, I think the biggest thing really for me, is efficiencies, right? And helping call center leaders have an understanding of how technology can create more efficiencies in their business. And we all get caught up and kind of doing the same thing the same way all the time. And sometimes we, you know, it’s the old forest for the trees type of thing.

[00:01:52] We just keep doing things and bumping our head into the same problem. And, and sometimes, especially with stir shaken, right, there are all kinds of solutions out there, whether it’s with call shaper or, uh, you know, five, nine VG convos. Everybody has some kinds of solutions from a technology standpoint to help make things easier for these business leaders.

[00:02:15] I think that sometimes people just are like, oh, more legislation. I’m scared. I don’t really want to deal with that. Let’s figure out a way to work around it rather than work within the parameters. And, you know, we, we call shape are pretty well focused on helping people to find efficiencies and create efficiencies using the software.

[00:02:35] But we also like to help them, you know, with providing ideas and concepts that they may not have thought about before that are well above and beyond just what we kind of do. So I think that kind of answers your question.

[00:02:48]

Jason: All right. So efficiencies technology, legislation, regulations compliance. You mentioned stir shaken, which I don’t want assume, you know, everyone listening to this show has heard other shows or they’re well aware of it.

[00:03:02] What’s the brief summary of what stir shaken is and how that affects, let’s say a telesales call center inviting.

[00:03:11]

Alec: Well, I think the biggest thing that it’s doing is it’s, if organizations don’t have their phone numbers look, um, logged or, um, made, so that. Well, they look like it’s not spam, even if they would, might be considered spam by some people they’re going to start getting blocked.

[00:03:32] And, and I think that the biggest thing about stir shaken is that the, the actual, um, phone providers don’t really even know what they have to do. You know, when you have laws and legislation that are written, but then bureaucrats get in and actually create how it’s. The poor telecoms. I mean, all of us in the call center industry don’t like them because they block calls because they get in the way of doing business.

[00:03:57] And because they charge us gobs and gobs of money to do it, however they’re kind of rock and a hard place too. Right. They don’t really know what the rules are. So they’re kind of making them up as they go along and you get the companies like T-Mobile that’ll block and spam any call just because they’d rather be safe than sorry.

[00:04:17] And then at, at, and T and Verizon that are more likely like, well, let’s see what this really is before we just jump off and start blocking it. And a lot of that comes from, you know, T-Mobile is part of Deutsche telecom. So they’re heavily regulated German company. They’re used to this. They’re used to heavy regulation, whereas at and T and Verizon are kind of like, Ooh, government involved in our business all over the place.

[00:04:40] But I think that the biggest thing for people to be aware of with stir shaken is that it won’t go away. There’s going to be more and more regulations on the call center industry. So you have to be able to kind of roll with the punches, but more importantly, I think you have to be able to find ways to be efficient and effective in spite of new regulations.

[00:04:59] And don’t let those be an excuse or like a crutch as to why you’re not be having success. Your contact rates are dropping. That’s probably some of it, but there are probably some other things to look at. Right? What are you, where are you? What are your lead files looking like? What’s your actual penetration rate in your lead files from three years ago versus a year ago versus today?

[00:05:22] Not just contact rate, right? And then are you, what are you doing for your reps to get them to be better prepared to be in front of that live person when they get the connected phone call? Right? Cause you need to be able to close more calls because the agents are getting less calls. You have to be able to close more of them to be able to make up the devastate of the number of calls they’re going out.

[00:05:44] So, you know, like I said, stir shaken, it’s not going away, but making excuses about searching and isn’t going to help your business.

[00:05:52]

Jason: Well, and I think it’s interesting too, is to look at the. Uh, where companies fall in, let’s say opposite ends of that spectrum and the, and the different camps. You know, the we’re not gonna abide by these rules because that’s going to impact us.

[00:06:07] And we’d rather, you know, have money set aside to pay for the fines or deal with the issues. And I’ve had a couple of people on the podcast, Eric Troutman and Michelle Schuster, you know, talking about being proactive and trying to help yourself. Being reactive and getting into trouble. How do you set yourself up, especially in a defensible position.

[00:06:25] Um, and so you have that side there where it’s like, Hey, you know, um, uh, oh, what is that? It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission and they just want to ignore it and put their head in the sand and just keep going. And then there’s the other end, which you said, which is the, okay. If I have to abide by this, then it means I can’t be effective and I can’t be profitable.

[00:06:44] And we can’t run a successful business because of. You know, uh, it’s too restrictive and it just cripples my chances. Right? So, same thing with being compliant. Well, I can either sell or I can be compliant, but I can’t do both. Uh, which is an attitude in organizations sometimes at the salesperson level.

[00:07:04] They’re like, well, if you want me to be compliant, then good luck. Cause I’m not going to close any deals. Right.

[00:07:09]

Alec: And it’s that mindset, whether it’s top down or bottom up, it doesn’t matter. Right. Can’t never could. And I think that a lot of people that say, well, Well, you never will. Right? You have to have the mindset of like, we will find a way.

[00:07:24] Right. And you know, that there’s that old adage. What would you do if you knew you could not fail? Right? It’s not to say that at times that you’re not going to go Boston through walls and having to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, that’s going to happen. Right. You’re going to make mistakes, especially with new legislation and new bureaucracies coming up with new things that you have to try to follow.

[00:07:45] And it’s okay to screw up from time to time. That’s why you should have a, like a kitty for paying fines in case. However, you know, you want to be able to take the best of what is happening in the, in this crazy world and be able to turn it to your advantage, right? Your competitors are likely going to be slow to it.

[00:08:06] And they’re going to be the ones I’d say probably 50%, if not 80% of competitors are going to be really, really down on themselves. And whoa, the future woe is me. Everything’s awful. So if you’re one of that 20% that are like, I see opportunity, you’re going to be able to crush it. Right. You’re going to come up with new and innovative ways and find other technologies that might help you be faster and more.

[00:08:31] Right. You sitting around in wine and about it, ain’t going to get the job done. You can either find a way or you can get out of the business. I mean, I don’t know what, you know, what’s Dell people, but I think that it’s a lot easier to find a way and use your team. If you’ve got a great. Enable them, you know, give them the power to go to bat and find unique ways.

[00:08:53] And it doesn’t hurt to try stuff if it fails. So what, you know, it’s not the end of the world. You’re going to bang your head against the wall, worrying about these regulations all the time. It, it, you’re going to have to find a way around them and find a way to work with.

[00:09:10]

Jason: Well, and I think it was great.

[00:09:11] What you said was they’re not going away if I, I’m not a legal or a history expert. Uh, that’s not my, my side, but I can pretty much guess that most of the regulations and legislations that come in, especially against businesses to help protect consumers, they don’t undo those. If it doesn’t seem to be effective, they don’t go back and get.

[00:09:37]

Alec: Uh,

[00:09:38]

Jason: you know, these rules, ah, you know, we’ll just undo it, right. Can spam, you know, I think everyone got the lesson. Let’s just go back to, you know, not worrying about spam emails or robocalls or things like that. Right. And so TCPA is not going anywhere. In fact, it’s only getting mess over and harder because each state is now making their own thing.

[00:09:57] Right. Florida has, what’s called the mini TCPA. So it’s putting your head in the sand and expecting things to just go back to the way. Isn’t going to happen. Um, the other part that you said that I absolutely love, obviously from my own interest in how I help companies is the fact that, okay, so you might have less opportunities.

[00:10:17] There might be less phone calls getting through because of the rules of the regulations and the compliance around making sure you have opt-in data, right? So your salespeople might have less at bats, which means if you want to succeed, they just have to. Better at converting each one of those at-bats right.

[00:10:35] Like if you’re a baseball player and you can’t control how many pitches you’re going to get, you gotta get better at hitting any opportunity that you can out of the

[00:10:42]

Alec: park. And I think something else that’s, that’s important around that too. Jason is. You’re also having an opportunity where you may not need as many heads in your business, right?

[00:10:54] If you have a better train Salesforce and they’re really good at what they do. And you know that the number of calls you’re actually connecting to were low. You know, it may sound kind of archaic to say it, but at the same time, you may not need, you know, another 10% of the workforce. You just don’t need those people that are right on the cusp of being just okay.

[00:11:14] If they’re not going to learn and get better and be actively trying to become really great salespeople. Stop beating your head against the wall as a business owner. Let those people go and find the, you know, the champions within your organization that will take this on and be like, I need to get better.

[00:11:31] I want to make more money. I want to be, I want to be the best at what I do. And those salespeople will really surprise you in how much they can close when you get, when they get live people. So it’s not the old school days where we just use the mirror test and figure out who’s going to fit. Right. You got to use tools like PI and things like that to determine who is really a good fit.

[00:11:56] And then when they get in, you gotta make sure you’re using quality assurance methods and coaching and training to keep them performing. And if they’re not going to be, you know, going on the upswing at some point, You know, cut your losses, man. But there is an opportunity for those businesses that look at it as an opportunity to be able to cut some costs in the human resources side, by spending money on training and developing your people and find out who were the best learners and the people that are going to take the most out of it.

[00:12:30] And then go to bat more times and swing harder every time they’re at.

[00:12:38]

Jason: Yeah, I think it’s important to, for organizations to realize the buyers have changed no matter what you’re selling, it could be direct to consumers. It could be to businesses. You’re still dealing with a human, with a person who is making that decision.

[00:12:52] And the buyers have changed where you’re talking about that whole, like, can you fog up a mirror hiring strategy with high rate of turnover might have been okay. 5, 10, 20 years ago. When consumers had a low expectation, they didn’t have any knowledge or information. They were desperate for help or guidance or data.

[00:13:13] Now everyone has access to all of the world’s information in arms reach. And so they have a very high expectation. Take the risk of talking to a salesperson it’s because they need help. And if your people are still fogging up mirrors and that’s how effective they are, that consumer’s literally going to go somewhere else and fill out another form to talk to a different company or go somewhere else.

[00:13:36] And, you know, they, they won’t have a tolerance like they used to for substandard. So

[00:13:43]

Alec: we’re really good point. You know, that’s something I think we all kind of forget from time to time is that the consumer is so much different, whether it’s B2B B to C, it doesn’t matter, right? That those businesses that are looking are buying they’re buying habits.

[00:13:58] In many cases, mirror their consumer buying habits doesn’t make sense from a business to business, personal. But that’s the way they do it, because that’s what they know. There’s not there aren’t classes that you go to, to learn, to be the best corporate buyer in the world. Right. You’re you’re typically buying based on price and the solution based on those different departments.

[00:14:20] ABC was the best product C had the best reporting D really had great pricing. And then we would suggest we go with D because it had the best pricing and the buyer’s like, okay, then that’s what we do. And, you know, again, it just depends, but I think you’re right. It’s really very important for people to recognize.

[00:14:43] With it, there’s an information overload and you’ve gotta be able to get to brass tacks as a salesperson so that, you know, really what’s important and why they need it and when they need it so that you can make promises that you can. Over instead of over promising, under delivering, you can under promise from the start and really, really over-deliver.

[00:15:03] And that gets that, that goes into the other part of the buyers these days, these days, right, where they’re, they’re able to look online and see, my wife is a great example. Anything we, she buys online. She’ll read through like 40 different reviews. Me I’ll look at it. I see like a overall review, four stars.

[00:15:22] That’s good enough. I don’t care. It’s only 10 bucks. What do I care? My wife will spend an hour reading reviews on that same $10 item and say, well, we’re not buying this right. I’m going to keep looking for a different one. Well, I look at that, that that’s an hour of her life that she just lost. Right. But she looks at.

[00:15:39] That I’m going to make a more informed decision and that’s, what’s happened to the buyers just because they can look at this device and see everything right. They know, or they think they know. So what they’re getting and what they’re trying to be.

[00:15:57]

Jason: Yeah. And then when they interact with a salesperson it’s for something different than information, it’s for guidance.

[00:16:03] It’s for wisdom. So let’s talk about, so we talked about the efficiency, you know, where the technology fits in, obviously to getting people on the phone more, uh, you know, we talked about, uh, uh, what it needs to be done on the sales side. So training, helping them be more successful. What are you seeing now as trends?

[00:16:25] And is the trend for the followup process still the same that I have always seen, which is salesperson makes an attempt or two, and then that lead just dies off in the CRM or somewhere else. Like what trend are you seeing? And then what ways are you seeing companies who are successful maximizing their leads and data without abusing their leads and

[00:16:49]

Alec: data?

[00:16:51] Well, so I think that there are two different ways to look at this, right? The first is going to be in a B to C environment where your typical call center is just plugging away. And whether they’re selling medical devices or they’re trying to set an appointment for vacation ownership or timeshare, it doesn’t really matter.

[00:17:07] Those organizations are, are really trying to go at it from the well from, I think the starting point, it hasn’t really changed. Right. You’re buying a bank. You’re targeting, you’re going after it. And you’re making as many calls as possible, hoping to connect to people. But the followup with those people is it.

[00:17:27] I don’t believe that it’s always as good as it could be. Now. I know from some of our clients that do a bunch of stuff in medical device and pharmaceutical and things like that. That follow-up is actually critical to their business and how I’ve seen them use their follow-up is pretty fascinating. So one company, for example, they typically have about an eight step process.

[00:17:51] Now, I don’t know all of them. They do a lot of different things for their customers. They start with their first contact with the customer who’s calling in maybe for the first time. Typically it is for the first time and they go through a sales process where they’re really flushing out what the needs of the customer are and making certain that they can meet their needs.

[00:18:09] If they can’t, they tell them straight upfront, I can’t do everything. But they can almost always meet the customer’s needs for one, whether it’s a pharmaceutical product or a C-PAP or something like that. But then they get in deeper about like, tell me about habits, tell me about what you’re doing. And they build trust and confidence with the people after that initial call.

[00:18:31] And maybe typically it’s an initial sale cause their salespeople are pretty strong. The next step is a followup call by that same agent the next day to say, Hey, I just wanted to thank you for your time. And it’s a simple thing. And most of the time they just get a voicemail. But the fact that they’re following up and just saying, I just wanted to thank then once everything is shipped, they make another call saying, Hey, your C-PAP stuff has shipped.

[00:18:57] I wanted to make sure you knew here’s, what’s going to be in the box. Here’s what you can expect. It’s still set to be delivered on ABC day. Then the day that it’s delivered, the same rep is calling back earlier in the day to make sure that they know it’s going to be delivered. And the reason that they’ve set all these up is because they found that while the delivery has happened, sometimes the people are really home-bound and they don’t go.

[00:19:22] Side very often. And that a lot of these, the delivery, people don’t even ring a doorbell anymore. Right. An Amazon truck will pop up, drop it off. We’ve well, that’s great if you’re mobile, that PR guy or gal, but if you’re not, if you’re like pretty well home bound and can barely meet. It’s not really helpful, right?

[00:19:42] The ups driver or the FedEx driver will typically knock or ring a bell, Amazon type drivers and delivery like that. Won’t always, so they realized like it’s better to be on top of it and make sure their customers are taken care of and they go above and beyond and constantly do follow up. How did it, how is it working like about three weeks in and then about a month and a half in, is everything still working?

[00:20:05] So it’s those kinds of consistent follow-up. They keep their, like their customers don’t leave them and you can see why, you know, why, you know what you’re going to get. And yeah, they may pay a little bit more for the, for the product, but they’re treated with just gold plated gloves, then it’s a great thing.

[00:20:25] And then I’ve heard of other customers that are literally turning bird. Right. And you know, if, if I’m selling some widget that you’re only using one time. Okay. Who cares? But if I really want to build a long-term relationship and I’m doing a business to consumer platform where I’m trying to build a brand, I need to have that follow-up and it could be as simple as sending out a text.

[00:20:50] No, during the phone call to say, Hey, I just want to confirm your cell phone number so I can reach you. Should I meet too about your shipment? Right. Little things like that can make a huge deal. And a lot of companies do it, but quite a few don’t. And I know of one customer that they’re losing clients because they’ve, they’ve kind of maintained.

[00:21:12] I guess lazy is the best way to put it. They’ve been lazy about it. They haven’t wanted to upgrade or update the way that they do things. They don’t want to send out emails. They don’t want to give their agents any authority to be able to send out emails in their case. They just recently decided to even give email accounts and extensions to their rep.

[00:21:32] They just don’t trust their people and you know, that is going to hurt them and their competitors are taking advantage. They’re eating their lunch and it happens right in a business to business scenario. The, the follow-up that, that I see from, you know, people that I’m working with or trying to work with.

[00:21:54] I w my team is consistently chasing however, customers aren’t really, you know, too open about getting back to you. And a lot of this goes back to that consumer mentality as a buyer, right? So I’m looking at it from the. I’m going to buy a car, but I don’t want to talk to that car salesman ever again. You took two hours of my life and people still equate any business to business relationships sometimes in the same way.

[00:22:21] Like, ah, God, I don’t want to talk to that guy. Call shaper again. He calls me every four days he leaves me a voicemail and then he sends an email like right afterwards, and then he texts me hatch, leave me alone. Well, most of us would, if you said I’m just not going to buy from you and I’m not in. I mean, it it’s as simple as that, but people are, have that mentality, like a car dealer where they, they’re almost afraid of the salesperson.

[00:22:48] And I noticed that that happens with us from time to time. I mean, my team is closing in about 30 to 35% of all deal, all leads that we get. But I know from past experience and the tech. When I had teams of a hundred, 150 people, their biggest struggle is salespeople was getting someone to respond at all right.

[00:23:10] They could make 150 phone calls in a day and get not a single belie person, but they could send 400 emails and get 10 responses. And the bad news for, for me as sales leader is too many of those reps were like, well, why should I even call people in. Well, because they’re going to pick up eventually found and you’ve been sending emails, you’re getting responses, follow that email up with an email and then call them the next day and then call them and call them and call them.

[00:23:40] And then change the days that you’re calling them and change the times of you’re calling, you know, it just it’s, it’s patience, it’s persistence. And it’s being consistent with your methodology and. It really isn’t rocket science, right? It’s just a matter of going after it and knowing what you want and not giving up until you.

[00:23:59] Um, you know, I had one of my greatest sales leaders that I ever worked for. He’s the one that taught me the can’t never could, but he also, he also had this expression that, you know, if you want to win, you got to lose a lot first and every loss get you closer to a win. Now what’s the worst thing that can happen to you at the end of the day, if you had heard no all day, really?

[00:24:25] That, that the word that is the worst thing. Yeah. The best thing about hearing that all day is that you just turn the odds in your favor for getting a yes tomorrow. So people forget that and they forget that there is this, you know, the law of averages and numbers that play into this. And, you know, people get discouraged too easily.

[00:24:43] Life has become so easy for us, uh, in the west that we sometimes forget, you know, you and I were talking earlier about first world problems, right. Having too many clothes and too much stuff, total first world problems. Another first world problem is that we’ve gotten complacent and lazy about just working hard and being diligent.

[00:25:06] That’s why immigrants do so great when they get here because they had to work hard to get here. Now they see how lazy people are and that some people can still get ahead. So. It’s a wonderful thing. When you get people that just, all they want to do is put their head down and work hard and they will find a way and they always do.

[00:25:26] Right. You know, what is the story of the ant in the grasshopper where the aunt is working? I think it’s, the aunt is working furiously, saving stuff all year and the grasshoppers playing. It might be the opposite. But winter comes and one of them doesn’t have any food and comes to the, the other one you say, Hey, can you, can you help me out?

[00:25:45] You know, the other one goes, no, man. I’ve been working like crazy all year to provide for myself. And I think that too many people who’ve gotten that, that first world problem of, uh, I can find something. I can do something else. This doesn’t matter whether you win. Right. And I think that when it comes to businesses, Business leaders have let that happen.

[00:26:05] And they got complacent and they’re not constantly working and finding a new way. I do know that too many organizations and leaders don’t focus on developing their people. They focus so much on, well, this, this process, this process, this way that we do at follow the process and input stuff into the CRM and yada yada yada putting stuff in a CRM, doesn’t make.

[00:26:32] Right. It never has. And never will. It’s important to document things and keep track of stuff, but it ain’t all that important. What’s important is being on the phone and talking to people and writing really powerful emails to get people’s attention and following up and making sure that you don’t forget about people.

[00:26:47] And I think the too many businesses forget about the development and training of their people to. Because, you know, there’s a thing now that I’m living back in new England, after being in Colorado in the west for so long, there are a lot of like swamps. And the thing about swamps is, you know, there’s, there’s very little water, fresh water coming in and the water usually doesn’t leave these things.

[00:27:11] So all of these swamps end up having Lily pads grow in algae and they’re really disgusting. So there’s just, there’s a nice, fresh water coming in, but it gets into the pond and the pond is disgusting. And you’re probably wondering where the hell is he going with this? Well, that’s what happens to businesses, right?

[00:27:29] You get these people that are super excited and enthusiastic coming in there, the fresh water coming into that pond. And then they get into the pond. It’s so overrun with algae and disgusting, garbage and goo from the organization that hasn’t decided to be able to change. And all the organization that needs to do in the case of that pond is open addiction on the other side, so that the water can flow through and things won’t grow and be nasty.

[00:27:56] And what that means is yet. There are some people that need to be let go, but there needs to also be a flow of ideas in and out. Good ideas coming in and bad ideas that are the past leaving too. And there’s not a lot of that in too many businesses, right? You get these small mid-sized businesses where Jimmy at the top just says, boo, and should jump.

[00:28:17] But that’s not really how you’re going to make a long-term successful business. And again, the training and development of people is so critical and I just don’t see it happening. Like it should.

[00:28:28]

Jason: Yeah, and I think. That is so important because obviously there’s a lot of companies who want to bring in technology and sales enablement tools to essentially babysit their kids for them.

[00:28:40] And tools and technology are important, a certain level. That’s the business that you’re in, there’s things to weigh, like you said, early on about making it efficient and effective, but we still need the people. And I think where you said how people just don’t do their follow-ups are not putting in the effort.

[00:28:56] And there’s the people who do, and the people that are. I think that’s historically been my experience at the challenge of any organization that’s providing any kinds of leads or data is I’ve literally seen salespeople sit with their feet up, waiting for the next inbound lead or phone call instead of putting in the efforts to.

[00:29:15] Reach out to their other ones or work harder or be more effective at the conversations they’re having. And it’s always that delicate balance. I mean, you want to provide people the best opportunities, the best pitches possible to hit, uh, at the same time, not spoiling them by giving them too much. And so then there’s that balance.

[00:29:34] So. Obviously, we want to have good people. People who are working hard, they know what they need to do. They’re planting seeds and they’re, they’re putting in the effort, like you said, we’ve got the technology around them. Let’s shift a little bit and look at what’s currently going on in the world. And one of the things, one of the projects that you and I did together was we co-hosted a paid workshop and it was for sales executives for sales leaders who were looking at and dealing with how do they effectively leave and run a hybrid.

[00:30:10] Sales environment. I mean, prior to the pandemic happening, I know from everybody I’ve ever seen or spoken with that, it was. An unfathomable to have a call center or a sales team that worked from home, they had to be in the office. You had to be able to look at them, walk up and down the aisles, answer their questions, you know, do whatever, right?

[00:30:32] Managing micromanaging, leading something like that. You needed everyone in place and or there’s the benefit of everyone being in one place because they can share ideas. There’s the energy, there’s the overhearing. What worked for this person? Let me try that on my phone call. Like there’s a lot of positives with it as well.

[00:30:49] Pandemic happens. Everyone gets scattered. They don’t have a choice. Some are still there. Some are back to work. Then there’s this messy hybrid, right? Like work from home is challenge. Work in the office could be challenging. And then you’ve got people in hybrid, which sometimes they’re at home sometimes at work.

[00:31:04] Where are your leaders? Where should your managers be? When do they work from home? Should they be in the office and all of that since that time, when we did that workshop earlier this year, what have you seen in the work from home hybrid in the office? Just kind of messy spectrum that companies are dealing

[00:31:23]

Alec: with.

[00:31:23] And I think I, you know, I think a lot of companies were desperate to get back to normal quote unquote, by having people come back into the office. Um, I know quite a few did, uh, just they, they just pulled the bandaid off and said, come on back in. Um, that hasn’t worked too well for a lot of. Right. And so they, they’re kind of working with a hybrid now, and most of those that are doing a hybrid or doing a, you come into the office three days in your home today.

[00:31:52] And they, you work with your manager to kind of determine what are those days that you’re in the office versus when you’re in home. But there’s a minimum number of people that have to be in the office every day. And it’s from, you know, my experience with the couple of companies that are doing it that way it’s working pretty well because the three days in the office gives people a chance to have the comradery back there’s face-to-face, they, they can have fun.

[00:32:17] But they, this one company I know of, they would’ve gone out of their way by offering really big spiffs for people that make sales in the office and then good spiffs when you’re at home making a sale, but not like if you’re in the office, so what’s happened. And this is the downside to it is that people are trying to close more deals in the office.

[00:32:41] Then when they’re at home, just cause there’s more money on it, is that what they’re doing? Well, in some cases, yes. But you know the thing about that and this, this company, and it’s hard for them to sandbag deals because it’s just the way that businesses, but they do, you know, of course they do because there’s more money in it, but it’s working generally pretty well for them because what they’ve done is created enthusiasm about being in the office.

[00:33:10] But also a feeling of, Hey, we’re not going to push you away from working from home. We actually would love it. If you work from home a couple of days a week, um, they do have some people that have kind of created a lifestyle with their kids and stuff that they need to be home. More than three days or two days a week.

[00:33:29] So some of them may need to be home four days a week that this company is working with them because they don’t want to lose their good people, but they are requiring that you got to come in at least one day of the week for no matter what. And it may just be for team meetings for, you know, team building activities that may be, you know, that you’ve whatever they just want.

[00:33:51] They want people to see each other and to work with each other. Which is a great thing. And in the call center industry, you know, we know how hard that is when you’re used to being in, whether it’s a giant call center or just a little, you know, call center with 10 agents where people are walking around and run it around and they’re on the phone and they’re standing at their desk and they’re up and down and they’ve got the emotions going and ringing a bell when you close a deal, et cetera, like all those cool things that happen.

[00:34:21] I kind of, they’re the kind of things that we all miss a little bit, even though. We didn’t want to say we missed it. Right. I know of other there’s one business to business company that I used to work for a number of years ago, and they were getting ready to come back full time until the CEO said, well, let me actually do a poll of the organization and see who actually wants to come back to the office.

[00:34:46] And probably 40%. I don’t remember the exact number of that 40% really wanted to come to. The other 60 where like, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to go back. I mean, I don’t mind coming in once in a while, but I don’t want to be forced to come back full time. And so that company is created kind of a unique hybrid work environment, but they’ve also found that I think something like five or six of their employees have sold their homes, bought RVs and work on the.

[00:35:16] Huh. So what are you going to do with those people? These are great employees like sales, engineers, and developers. Are you going to tell a developer that’s been digging on a camper and having his wifi on a satellite phone for so that you can work anywhere. You’re going to tell him now that yeah, Billy, you got to come back in and sit in a cube again.

[00:35:38] That’s not going to work. You’re going to lose that guy. Right. So, you know, there’s a lot of that going on, but I think. We’re going to find that it’s going to go back to kind of a 50, 50, right? I don’t think sales, um, salespeople are going to be, it’s going to be really hard to get, especially if it’s any type of a field sales role where you’re on the phone five days of the week, but mostly that’s on a cell phone while you’re on the road.

[00:36:07] Right. And then you’ve got the inside sales folks that are pounding, you know, 200, 400,000 calls a day. They’re more likely to be the ones that are getting dragged back into the office. Um, those field, those road warriors, probably won’t and the call centers that are doing customer service, quite frankly.

[00:36:28] Why wouldn’t you let people work from home if they’re doing what they need to do? Right. I mean, in a lot of cases, that’s a real efficient way to be, and you can have more people doing more and have really flexible schedules with people that are working from home. There’s some huge benefits to just the work from home and, you know, giving someone that has, you know, three kids and can’t get daycare.

[00:36:53] The opportunity to work from say 6:00 PM. When his or her spouse or partner gets home, they can work from like six till midnight. And then they get to sleep for midnight to seven or something when they got to take care of the kids in the morning. You know, there are a lot of, there are a lot of options for companies to get creative, to keep the best employees and not worry about if you’re going to have to lose some, not so great employees.

[00:37:21]

Jason: Well, and I, I think the real key with that is, is companies who can do that successfully a have a corporate culture. That’s strong where people understand why they’re working for that company and what the mission and vision and the core values are and they’re aligned. Uh, and then also the company is very clear on the KPIs and the metrics for success for each individual role.

[00:37:46] And that person is working towards those key metrics. Um, that way, whether they’re in the cubicle and you can stare at them or they’re at home and you have less visibility. If they’re getting it done and they’re achieving those metrics, it’s then they’re successful. And again, the right people who are right fit for the company, whether they’re at home or in the office.

[00:38:09] Could be managed the same way and led the same way now, of course, there’s the part you said where there’s some people they want to be around others. They really want to be in some people, they either don’t need that or their priorities are different other ways, but they will get it done either way. And I think, you know, kind of going to something you’ve said a few times throughout our conversation, We’re not going back.

[00:38:32] There’s no old ways. Like all companies are not going to all go back and then everyone’s going to be in an office. There will be some variation. And I think one of the things that companies need to keep in mind is. Obviously you have to have the right culture and then the right metrics. But understand if you draw the line in the sand and make people come back, if they don’t want to, they will find another job that is desperate to hire somebody and who is going to let them work from home.

[00:38:59] Right. So you just got to understand what happens. You draw that line, you know, what, what are people going to decide? Yeah.

[00:39:07]

Alec: Well, most of it, you know, you mentioned a lot of things around company culture. Trust is going to be really, really critical. Right? You gotta have people that you can trust from a leadership standpoint.

[00:39:19] So I know that Matt, when he is at home is working just as hard as he would be in the office. And quite frankly, he probably has a way better at it. Then he did when he was in the office. Cause then, you know, he had someone come and tell him that his deal fell through and now we’re clawing back his commission.

[00:39:39] And so Matt’s all ticked off about all. Yeah, but Matt said home mats, Matt, we’ll get over it a little bit easier and Matt’s not going to storm through the office being angry, like going to his boss, what the heck is going on and creating havoc for other people. He’s going to call his boss and give his boss heck what’s going on.

[00:39:57] So there’s some, there are some ways that it can really, uh, that, that trust factor can really work in everybody’s.

[00:40:06]

Jason: Well, and I think to tie it back here, as we finish up is with the technology piece, right? So again, wanting and having humans do what companies need humans to do, right. Which is to interact with other humans, whether they’re prospective customers or actual paying customers, you need that.

[00:40:26] And so you need. Lead them effectively and ensure that everyone is on the right bus, going in the right direction for the right reasons and then bring in the technology and everything else to facilitate it. Because fundamentally going from I can walk out and look at you and if you’re not making enough calls, I can come over there and see it.

[00:40:46] Or I can crank something up or down to you’re at home. How do I monitor that? How do I ensure. The machine is running without any visibility, more on autopilot. That’s where the technology and the efficiency comes in. You mentioned, you know, potentially being effective with less people, which is one avenue.

[00:41:03] One is technology. The things that we talked about to help companies just be as effective with the people they have no matter where those people are. And I, and I think that’s the key. So for people listening or watching this, they want to reach out to you. I know that you’re very active on LinkedIn. So Alec, Alec Thompson on, uh, LinkedIn also call shaper has a business page on LinkedIn.

[00:41:26] People want to check out the website, call shape. Dot com. So you’ve got that there. I know you guys also have YouTube videos and things on that. What other ways, if somebody is listening or watching this, they want to either find out more or something new or interesting coming up that, uh, you know, they may want to find out more.

[00:41:46]

Alec: Well, if any way, if you’re, if anybody’s going to be, at least gone, hit us up at our booth, I think it’s booth 5 24. It’s going to be a great time. We’re launching that new product that I mentioned earlier, the, uh, uh, caller ID autopilot to kind of take over, um, the, the manual side of dealing with numbers that have been marked as spam and being able to flip those out automatically for you.

[00:42:07] So, uh, it’s pretty slick product, and it’s going to make a huge difference for a lot of our customers. So. That’s something cool. And then of course leads gone, but you know, you can always come to our website called dot com. You can give us a call two at (888) 276-1370. Happy to help with anything. And quite frankly, even if it’s just, Hey, I have a question, you know, we’ll help you.

[00:42:31] That’s one of the cool things. And what’s one of our differentiators as an organization. We do just like to answer questions too, even if it’s not about our product. So we’re more than willing to help because my prop, my, uh, philosophy is if I can earn your business today, maybe I can earn it tomorrow. So

[00:42:49]

Jason: that’s awesome.

[00:42:50] I love it, Alex. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this.

[00:42:55]

Alec: Right on. Thank you, Jason. It’s been a blast as always. It’s fun to just sit and talk with you.

Jason: Hey everybody so glad that you’re joining me for another episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. As always, I am excited to be joined by an industry expert, a guest today. His name is Isaac Schloss from Grupo, N G N, which focuses on contact center technology in the call center industry.

[00:00:19] So he’s working for a service from. That’s focused on helping call centers. Now here’s, what’s interesting and fun. And the moment I was introduced to him, I was like, this is going to be a blast because he has a different perspective. Isaac is a IT specialist with over 20 years experience. Focused in the call center industry.

[00:00:39] So he has been a part of helping carriers, uh, deal with their it departments. Uh, it departments of large BPOs helping, uh, you know, he has on his resume helping a top 10 us tele service provider, where he built the technology and the telecommunication architecture to help them expand from a small regional based company to a large multinational enterprise.

[00:01:04] And so his role now at Grupo is CTO. He’s also the board member of pace and he serves as the vice chair of the government affairs committee. And what’s going to be fun about this. I already know in advance is that he’s looking at the call center and that ecosystem from the it side, which is different than usually I talk to.

[00:01:24] And usually we have on the show. So it should be a blast. Isaac, welcome to the call center sales podcast.

[00:01:30]

Isaac: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be.

[00:01:32]

Jason: Yeah. So again, I, I set up a lot of this. I’m just so excited. I, I, I was going to do a little intro and then jump into it afterwards. But I think this is fun because you have, again, your experiences from the I T side and focusing on it.

[00:01:47] And obviously this is a sales podcast, so it’s about how that integrates. Let’s talk about before I dive into a whole bunch of stuff that I want to ask about. W w where do you see like the landscape from the, it support it framework for call centers, contact centers, sales, or, or otherwise, like, where do you see that having shifted, you know, obviously over 20 years you saw what it was like before and where it’s going now, you know, talk about that past and maybe the present and where you see that.

[00:02:21] So

[00:02:22]

Isaac: I’ve seen a big rollercoaster. I saw, you know, when I first got into contact centers in 1999, so a while ago, um, you know, it was very much around the human aspect. It was around because everything was analog. You had the tape recorder in your desk, you had to press record on and hope you remembered to press record before you started the sales disclosure.

[00:02:40] And, uh, you know, you had to, in some places manually dial phones still. And, uh, there was all of it was around getting your people to do the. And then about 10 years later, we started adopting more off shore. Um, maybe even a little nearshore, but then we started thinking, okay, how can we get rid of people with technology?

[00:02:59] And the technology will replace the people and you and I have even talked about that a little bit to where there’s certain things where people can’t, you can’t replace that. And I think. You can it’s it seems like practical, or it seems like it’s a, it’s obvious to see that. Uh, and now we’re seeing more of a shift to the people side.

[00:03:16] So I think what we’re seeing is now the, the shift went from people heavy to technology, heavy to how can we use technology to make our people better? And I think that’s the direction we’re going over the next five years where we’ll be in 10 years might be a little hard to say, but I think the next five years is how do we get technology to better enable it?

[00:03:38]

Jason: And I love that shift where you know, what you’re saying is years ago, or maybe even not that long ago, the goal was how do I use technology to replace people, save on staff, cut down costs, you know, do all these things, right? Like if you look at auto manufacturing, how do we get robots to put together cars so that we don’t have people we have to rely on and not just to save money, but people are human.

[00:04:02] They make mistakes. Great robot generally. Doesn’t so how do we replace that? And then that shift, which I think is fascinating, what you said, which is okay. So we found out there’s things we can replace. There’s things we can optimize. We can’t replace certain things. We need people to do it. How do we just make them better?

[00:04:18] Right.

[00:04:20]

Isaac: And you know, it’s, I, I’m a great example. I love to use is AI. AI is one of those buzzwords where it’s, you know, we need AI, we need AI. And nobody really understands what AI is, but everybody wants it. Uh, you know, gamification when it’s the same thing, when it came out, I don’t know what gamification is, but we gotta have it.

[00:04:34] Cause that’s what everybody else has. Uh, with AI, a lot of the AI systems that are out there aren’t really AI. In fact, I’d say 95% plus we don’t use AI. It’s more. Uh, a decision tree, especially when you talk about an IVR, for example, it’s I listened for key words. So if I hear the word sale, if I hear the word buy, if I hear the word purchase, okay, that’s a sales call.

[00:04:57] Send that down. My sales channel. That’s not really AI that’s decision tree. And instead of using, you know, what would they call DTMF tones in the button presses? It’s just keyword searches. Yeah. When you talk about like the automotive industry, I can have robots assemble an automobile because I can give it a pattern and say, every automobile needs to be exactly like this.

[00:05:18] You know, maybe sometimes you’re going to be putting leather seats and instead of cloth, maybe, sometimes it’s going to have a CD player and other times it’s not, or a GPS. And it or not, but people are very unique. And your experience that you’re looking to have with the company you’re interacting with is going to be completely different from mine.

[00:05:35] So AI can only go so far. AI, I think is great. When you’re talking about the analytics side, kind of the aftermath what’s happened here. Um, you know, how could I have done better, but trying to handle that entire interaction. Just using automated, uh, artificial intelligence. Isn’t we’re not there yet with our technology.

[00:05:55] We’re not even close.

[00:05:57]

Jason: Yeah. And I think when companies try to do that and use either AI or things that I love what you said about it, it’s think it’s AI, but it’s actually not, it’s not that complex. It’s not actually artificial intelligence. It’s not machine learning. It’s just programmed in. Um, the consumers can detect that in some sales, some service that works, right?

[00:06:19] Like at some level, going through that decision tree, some level of AI. You’ll answer your question or you’ll get what you need or whatnot. But for most other things, especially what we’re talking about in dealing with on the sales side, it, you can’t do that. Right. And you need the people and you need the people to do what they are there for.

[00:06:39] Right.

[00:06:41]

Isaac: Exactly. Yeah. There’s a, there’s a Seinfeld episode where, uh, you know, I don’t know if you’re familiar with showing up a Kramer. Who’s one of the main characters. His phone number is really close to the phone number for movie phone. So all of a sudden he starts getting all these calls for movie showings and he’s enjoying answering, and he’s like, press one.

[00:06:57] If you want to see movie XYZ. And then he can’t tell if they’re pressing. Why don’t you just say what you want to see and, you know, there’s a certain aspect of it where you go through Moviefone and you say, okay, well you just listed five movies. I don’t want to see any of them. I want to see movie number six.

[00:07:12] I know it’s in your theater. Why do they have to get through all five of these? Or why do I call in? And I have to listen to your hours of operation and here at my current balances and here my payment options, when I’m calling to let you know that my card has been stolen or something like that, I mean, We’re we think too often from business perspective that we know the customer and we know what they want.

[00:07:32] So we structure things around our institutional knowledge of how products work and that’s what a lot of these automated systems are built upon. Whereas the consumer. Doesn’t understand it from your perspective, they don’t know how you look at things. They don’t know your individual terminology. So they want to call in and have an experience that’s unique to them.

[00:07:51] And if they don’t get that from you, I don’t care what business you’re in. I don’t care if you’re Amazon, Google, you know, one of the big names you’ve got a competitor. And if it’s getting too, too frustrating to deal with you, I’m just going to contact your competitor.

[00:08:04]

Jason: Yeah. And that’s one of the things I talk a lot about these days where, you know, every company that I’ve experienced feels like they’re the best and the most special, and everyone should want to work with them.

[00:08:17] Right. And you should, I mean, you should think that however, the customer doesn’t care. If they have a bad experience on the sales or the service side, they will move on to the others as special, a unique snowflake as every company might think they are. They’re not right. Like it, especially on the side that, you know, we were talking about before this, uh, before recorded, which is the lead gen and the contact side and the performance marketing side.

[00:08:41] I mean, if someone’s not happy, they’ll just fill out a different lead form and get a call from another 10 people. They don’t need you, uh, especially if you’re not meeting their expectations. I love what you said about when you call in, you’re getting the hours of operations and this and that. And all you have is this one specific thing.

[00:08:57] I think that’s a great reminder for anyone listening. Total sidebar is that at some point or regularly, call into your own phone number, go through the process. Like a customer would either sales or service and see if that’s the experience you want them to have. Right. How was that?

[00:09:14]

Isaac: And I would like to see the executives, the people who have very, very little time in their day to be doing that, because there’s going to be frustration.

[00:09:22] You’ve got to take time out of your day to do that already. So now you’re the frustrated customer calling. And if it takes me a minute and 52 seconds to be able to press a button for what I want to do two minutes of my day is a big ask. So, you know, I think that’s a beautiful idea because you’ve got to live your customer’s experience to understand your.

[00:09:42]

Jason: Yeah, I love it. I mean, whenever I get one of those systems, I just start immediately yelling service to service service to 0 0, 0. That’s it. And that leads into kind of the topic that you mentioned, um, that I want to point out when we’re, especially, we’re talking about technology, call centers, BPOs inside sales service.

[00:10:03] What you said, which is we want people, we need people to do what they do, right? Until the robots have taken over the world and AI is running everything. We still need people. The reason we have contact centers is for the contact. It’s the people in the seats have to be the human that interacts with another human to help persuade them to take some action.

[00:10:26] Um, and technology is there to support them. Until it can replace them. So based on that, what are, you know, let’s talk about the technology here and then we’ll dive into the BPO business, the technology that’s currently available, but the, I wouldn’t even say the fo AI stuff, but just like what’s there, what’s some of the great things that you’re seeing out there that is supporting and making the.

[00:10:56] Sales or service person in that seat, more effective or efficient or helping the business run. Like what categories of, uh, of technology is actually helping things.

[00:11:09]

Isaac: Well, obviously it’s gonna be different whether you’re talking an inbound channel versus an outbound channel, if it’s digital versus voice.

[00:11:15] Uh, but I think that at the heart of it, it’s simplifying the customer experience. You know, we we’ve already gone over this a lot, you know, I, I’m a, I’m a contact center solutions provider. I compete with companies like five nines in contact. Readily aware that there are competitors to me. So it’s about my people doing it better, my product being better, but also my people behind it being better.

[00:11:36] So when a customer calls in, I want to create a better customer experience. So how do I get them to cut through all the red tape and get to the person the fastest, um, there’s new technologies being developed that are helping you better identify your customer. We’ve had that for years where we can look at the caller ID, although that’s easy to do.

[00:11:54] Uh, or we can have them enter an account number or something like that to identify them. But I’m seeing technologies now where we’ve got one word, you, you identify why they’re calling much more specifically and something beyond the press, one for sales, two for billing, something like that. Uh, we have a technology, for example, where you go to the website and we track, you know, based on what you allow to be tracked, what’s going on in the website.

[00:12:17] And we send that over to an agent. So let’s say. Uh, your, your ring, uh, Amazon ring and you sell doorbells and one of your, as they call their customers, neighbors there, they’re out. And they’re looking at the different packages and they’re just not sure what package they want to buy. You know, they’re comparing two of them together.

[00:12:33] You can send that information over to the agent when they contact the agents. When the agent gets it, it’s like, oh, you’re looking at home security products. And you’re looking at the professional one versus the small house one. I’m guessing you want to know the difference. So I already know I’m talking to Jason cutter.

[00:12:50] I already know he’s interested in home security and I already know what two products he spent the most time looking at. He goes from being really frustrated because he doesn’t know the difference between the packages and which one it is and getting to somebody who already knows why he’s calling, gives them that humor human experiences says, yeah, that can be a little confusing here.

[00:13:09] This one comes with 10 cameras. This comes with five, two door sensors, tenders, sensors, improving that customer experience. So it’s all about deescalating, any sort of frustration before the call gets to the eight. Uh, so if you create a good experience, your agent may have fewer obstacles to overcome, and now they can focus on, you know, more of the revenue side of things, whether it’s a sale retention, you know, something along those lines.

[00:13:33]

Jason: And what I find fascinating and true about that example is. As much as some people will say, well, it feels weird that you know where I’m at on the site and what I’m looking at and what I might be clicking on. Obviously now with a lot of compliance and the laws around cookies changing, you have to enable that so that it’s there.

[00:13:52] People, people may say they don’t like that kind of stuff. But before that experience to then not have to. Go through all of that and have somebody kind of be a couple of steps ahead from zero in that conversation is great. I mean, it’s, it’s essentially taking out the challenge that we all have had that frustrates everybody, which is you call in, you talk to somebody, they say, oh, you need to talk to this other department.

[00:14:17] Then you have to tell your story. Then they transact what you have to tell, like that frustrating thing, even on the sales side, which is, I filled out this form, why am I now talking to a salesperson that literally has no idea what I wanted? Like, they didn’t even read the info I filled out in that form or anything about me.

[00:14:33] And then it’s like, wait, why am I like, why did I even fill out the form in the first place? If you register, literally don’t even care.

[00:14:41]

Isaac: Right. So if you’ve got an airline you fly with, and I remember I went on spring break this week, or this year I took my family to Mali and I remember just checking all the different airlines and going through Expedia and trying to find the best rate, you know, flying five people.

[00:14:53] That’s a lot of money, right. So I’ve got to find the best deal. And, you know, I got stuck a couple of times and it would be great if I could’ve just click the button on Expedia’s website. And when I talk to somebody say, oh, you’re looking to go to Maui from Phoenix. I date XYZ. You’ve looked at these four airlines.

[00:15:07] It’s five, you for me, I’m going to be super excited about that because I didn’t press a single button. I didn’t have to enter my loyalty number or anything like that. All of that is fed through. And that’s just, that’s one of many examples, but again, I think. Customers are starting to be willing to give up some of the privacy, as long as they see it’s not being abused.

[00:15:26] I mean, you look at the Facebook things that are out there where somebody, you know, based on how you draw the number three, I can tell what kind of person you are and it’s, oh, you’re this beautiful, loving person. It’s all fluff nonsense, but people don’t realize they’re willing to give up all of their personal information, whoever hosts that, right?

[00:15:44] This is different. This is, we’re not going to sell your information. We’re not going to give it away. We’re going to use your information. You can have it right in the. We’re going to use that information to service you on this call. And this call only makes a better experience.

[00:15:57]

Jason: So one of the things, obviously that happened in the last year and a half in the call center contact center sales space that you and I both, uh, deal with is.

[00:16:08] Everyone had to go remote at least for some period of time, right in the U S and you know, many countries, some have come back to work, some came back pretty quickly. Some are still remote, um, which is, uh, wasn’t a never thought to be possible in a contact center call center space, right? You don’t not have everyone in the office where you can see them all the time.

[00:16:28] You would never have 5,000, 500,000 people working from home. Like. Uh, it was not a paradigm that was possible. Then it happened. Where do you see technology facilitating that in the work from home, the back in the office, the messy hybrid, which is some people are in some people aren’t, there’s different shifts.

[00:16:50] Like where do you see technology supporting that? Not just what the company needs, but what the, you know, that individual agent or rep is doing to be pretty.

[00:17:03]

Isaac: I think we’re going to see a big shift away from some of the technologies I’m seeing right now about putting cameras in people’s home. Um, there’s a lot of that.

[00:17:11] That’s been a big thing. It’s, it’s a newer thing to calling it, workspace monitoring, where they’re focused on watching the individual. And I’ve seen demonstrations where, you know, I’ll see a young lady, she looks Filipinas sitting in her home and there’s a camera on. She, you know, gets up from her desk to grab her cell phone and sit down at her computer and her supervisor danger and says no cell phones allowed.

[00:17:34] And that’s what they’re trying to show is how we control a tightly secured environment. In my personal opinion. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a lawsuit behind that. You’re going to have something to get hacked, and now you’re going to be walking someone sleeping, or maybe even a child sleeping.

[00:17:48] Um, you know, you’re going to see, uh, parts of people’s lives that they don’t want you to see, and they’re going to feel violated and it’s going to get messy. So I think that area is going to go away. I think what’s going to be a bigger focus is. How do we worry less about security in the agent environment?

[00:18:07] Uh, you know, what are you talking about? Like, uh, credit cards or medical insurance. You’re usually talking about something about PCI or, or HIPAA or something like that. So, you know, the PII or the Phi, we’ve got to protect that. We do protect that, but we can protect it by creating a secure, locked environment for agents I’ve seen, I’ve got customers that get wanded down with like a metal detector wand before they can go into a clean room.

[00:18:31] Um, Then that’s, that’s great. If your client requires that the other side of it could be, why don’t we just take that information away from them? You know, we talk about AI. We talk about voice interaction. That stuff has practical application. For example, entering a credit card number. If I’m talking to you and you’re about to buy something for me, instead of you giving me the credit card number done, sitting in a hotel room, just outside of Chicago right now, instead of you and I, I could be a telemarketer from here.

[00:18:56] If I wanted no problem, there’s nothing wrong with them. You can’t tell if I’ve got a pen and paper right here that I’m writing on this lower table. Take that away. Transfer the call to an IVR where we process the credit card number and then give the call back to the agent. Um, and then that’s where you could also use some of that AI to listen to the recorded call and hear, well, did the agent say something?

[00:19:17] Oh, I got a message that said it didn’t work. Why don’t you go ahead and give me your number again and I’ll just take care of it later. Uh, so I think those are areas for the workspace monitoring, I think is the biggest piece of the puzzle needs to be fixed. So things like being able to watch the agent’s screen.

[00:19:33] And here are the audio on their PC, you know, make sure they’re not listening to Spotify in one year and listening to the customer and the other ear, um, you know, that type of monitoring and just making sure the agent doesn’t have access to sensitive data. And then that way for agent is working at home or working remote, making sure it’s just a secure and consistent environment, no productivity loss, everything works the same.

[00:19:56] It’s as easy to get into. And there are solutions out there that do it yet. Our solution has been around for 20, some odd years. Uh, I was a customer of it for 15, and I know that, you know, before it was cool to send your agents on, we were experimenting with work at home and it was very firewall friendly, but that was one of the first things we had to sell for as a, as a customer of the product that I know a manufacturer is, how do we handle PCI?

[00:20:22] How do we handle Phi and the solution? Taken away, just take it on a scope and then it doesn’t matter if the agents at home working for bank XYZ because they never hear bank account numbers. So what is it?

[00:20:35]

Jason: Yeah, and I think those are great solutions. I know low tech ways I’ve done in the past is when they transfer for usually a, like a third party verification or someone internal that offshore office takes it to a certain point.

[00:20:47] It doesn’t collect that, you know, that personal information, the social security, the bank account numbers, and literally just does it. You know, I’ve had tech build things like what you’re talking about. And I even have heard that there’s companies now with solutions via tax, which is, you know, the agent triggers something to.

[00:21:05] The color, they get a text. I mean, most everybody is using a cell phone and in that text is a link for them to then the customer to then open up a page that then allows them to enter in that personal information. And then again, the agent never sees it. So I think that’s a great solution. And when I hear about the video monitoring and all of that, All I can think about is just, that’s a company culture that’s focused on micromanaging and controlling everybody and not full of people who understand.

[00:21:39] Why they’re there, why they want to be there, what their role is like, they see it as a job and it’s a battle of management versus the employee of like productivity versus non, which it’s tough to win at scale because you’re just going to have high turnover if you’re, if you’re managing by that classic model.

[00:21:55] Right.

[00:21:56]

Isaac: Well, it depends on what you’re talking about with video monitors. You’re talking about video camera monitoring. Absolutely.

[00:21:59]

Jason: I’m talking about like the I’m watching you, you just picked up your cell phone and now I’m gonna yell at you about picking up your cell phone versus having a company culture where.

[00:22:09] Are held to KPIs and they’re working hard and they know why they want to be there versus I need to do as little as possible and just get. Right

[00:22:17]

Isaac: now being able to watch their screen though. So that’s different having a camera, right. Watching their screen, you know, you’ve got somebody working at home and they say, Hey, every time I click on the shopping cart, I get an error.

[00:22:28] It might help to watch their screen and see, okay, what, what did they click right before that? What else is going on? What does the error message look like? So I can do a screen capture as a supervisor. Um, another interesting thing, and this is something that, you know, as a technologist, I’ve always struggled with in the context of.

[00:22:43] I’m always asked to come up with solutions to fix human problems. And I can’t always do that. So, you know, I I’ve even had the joke before of, Hey, can we hook a cattle product to their seat so that when they don’t click and to call fast enough, it wakes them up a little bit and they, you know, and obviously people are joking.

[00:22:59] In a broader sense. That’s worth, they’re asking if I write. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s that little bit of I’m joking, but yeah. Um, you know, I had a call center in Manila one time and they had these really, really poor, uh, contact rates and no one could figure out why. And so. Instead of operations taking matters in their own hands.

[00:23:19] They said it fix it. So I personally got in as the VP of it for that company. I I’m listening to the calls and I’m and everything’s sounding okay. I started watching the agent’s screen and I see they’re just not picking the right disposition for what the customer says. So the customer says, you know what?

[00:23:33] I’m not interested in. Hangs up. Agent clicks answered. And

[00:23:38]

Jason: I was the first one in the list every time.

[00:23:40]

Isaac: Bingo. So always then I come down, I say, okay, well, from a technology perspective, I can make not interested the first one, but now you might inflate your contact rates and your conversion rate is going to be garbage.

[00:23:51] So this is where you’ve got that human element where you need to do some coaching. You need to do some training, you need to motivate your agents, not just slap them on the hands when they’re doing something wrong, but give them more of an incentive to do. Right. And that’s where things like. No gamification employee engagement start to come in, because now you’re talking about looking at things to help incentivize agents who improve their base.

[00:24:14]

Jason: And, and training and leadership, right? Because I, that, that’s why I jumped in because I was excited. Cause I thought I knew the answer, which was, it was the first one in the list, which is every, every CRM phone system that deals with humans that will, you will always have a majority of that first option.

[00:24:30] Um, and really what I’ve found is one way is again, shifting the culture, helping the team, understand the value of picking the right disposition, which is if you pick no answer or not available over and over. That means the leads are bad or something is wrong. And then we have a serious problem and we might be missing opportunities.

[00:24:49] If you’re picking the wrong one in another category, it might make you look bad. Like you said, the conversion rates now, like you’re in trouble because you’re not converting. Um, and helping people realize the value to the business and to their jobs. In selecting the right thing because of that data and what it means.

[00:25:06] Um, it’s the, you know, there’s, again, I agree with you because I was raised the same way. Like whatever somebody can mess up, they will. So how do you put things in place and how do you make it so that they can’t do that or, uh, you know, parameters in place or, you know, gamification and. Proper training, but just expect it.

[00:25:24] If that’s the first thing in the list, they’re always going to pick that. Um, and I think this goes into another thing that I know that you, you and I had chatted about, which is, you know, one of these big challenges, especially in this environment where I’ll talk about it, at least in the. Is hiring is really difficult.

[00:25:42] Every company I talked to really wants to hire more people everywhere you go, not just call centers, but restaurants like everywhere you go help want, and everyone needs something. And obviously they want to hire hiring is difficult. That’s a whole different topic. Um, but there’s just this thing that happens in a lot of organizations where they just treat people like numbers.

[00:26:02] I’m going to hire 10. I’m going to hire 50 if they work out great. If. But I’m just going to push them this whole, like monitoring and micromanaging thing, not healthy, but like, you know, not appropriate, just pushing on people. Where do you see that? Like where do you see that needs to change? Or how can companies change based on everything you’ve seen in all the contact centers you’ve dealt with that have done it different.

[00:26:27]

Isaac: Yeah, I’ve worked for the companies that the employees were, the numbers I’ve worked for, the companies where they had a, a very big goal of making, uh, the, the business be the place to work. Like I worked for company synergy solutions and Phoenix. They’re actually the ones that convinced me to move to Phoenix and a regular topic of conversation.

[00:26:46] This came from the chairman. This came from the president or your friends. Who’s actually now over at Amazon re. We’re talking about earlier. Uh, but you know, one of their big focuses was how do we get known as a place people want to work at? And one that’s to, you know, compete with other companies pulling for the same resources, but two, how do you create that culture?

[00:27:06] Where the employees have a vested interest in the success of the company, because that cuts back on your attrition rates. And that’s where things get really expensive, because you’ve got to train your new employees. You’ve got to go through all that. Some of your clients will pay for attrition train.

[00:27:19] Some of them are, you know, again, if you’re an outsourcer. Um, so I think a lot of that is creating that good culture at work, creating that fun environment. Um, You know, we’re all we all show up. We’ve all got to do our job. People need to be on time. People need to come back from breaks on time. I think that’s something that you’re going to have everywhere.

[00:27:36] But beyond that, how do you make it fun? How do you make it rewarding? Uh, everybody’s going to pay about the same. You try to compete just on pay. Uh, you’re either gonna over compete and you’re gonna lose money, which none of us want to do, or you’re going to, you know, just, I mean, your only other alternative is really to be the same as everybody else.

[00:27:55] So what do you do beyond that? How do you create a good working. And sometimes it’s about making the employees feel more valued. Uh, you know, because you know, a customer comes in and complaints, you listen to the recording and you hear that customer just laid into that agent. And you say that agent, Hey, you did a really good job.

[00:28:11] That person was. The person was an idiot. You know what I mean? You know, don’t tell anybody I said that, but you know, that person was outlying, you know? Um, but, but ha let them feel like you have their back and then create the fun environment, you know, in the lunchroom, have the ping pong tables and the, the, you know, maybe a karaoke machine or something like that.

[00:28:30] I’ve seen call centers where they’ve got pots set up for their agents to take naps if they have long rapes or, or, or meditation rooms, uh, you know, getting gamification, uh, to where while they’re working, maybe they can. Play a game or they can compete with friends or dress up an emoji or something like that.

[00:28:47] You know, something just to distract them from a monotony because in the context in a world, that’s, that’s one of the other big killers is boredom. You know, I sit there and it’s call after call after call the exact same thing. I can read these disclosures in my sleep. Give them something fun to keep them occupied throughout it.

[00:29:05] You know, I’ve seen supervisors, uh, play cards with their agents during calls or, you know, toss a ball back and forth. And, you know, there’ve been studies that show that when people are physically active, They actually stay more focused. So, you know, chewing gum, while you’re talking on the phone can help you stay focused or candy or something like that.

[00:29:23] Tossing a stress ball against the wall, something like that. So create an environment that promotes that. Um, you know, again, remembering that they’re people too, you know, telemarketers are, or customer service agents are people too, so help them to enjoy their life.

[00:29:39]

Jason: Yeah, I love that advice. And I love where you started with that.

[00:29:43] With the example of the company you were at, where that was, the goal was to be. Thought of as the best place to work because I’ve seen companies put those things in place, the ping pong table, the free lunches, the meditation room, you know, the spiffs and the contest because they’re checking boxes because they think that that’s what they should do to increase employee engagement and retention, but not necessarily a fundamental belief from the top down where it’s like, okay, if you guys want ping pong tables, go ahead.

[00:30:15] Like otherwise just get back to work. And when that’s the sentiment from above like that stuff, isn’t, it’s like giving someone a gift with guilt and obligation behind it. Like it’s, it’s, it feels different. We’ve all received those. Um, and I think that’s the key is making sure that it’s an alignment. From the top down and then it will be effective.

[00:30:34] And at the same time, keeping in mind that all of those things you’re talking about will not have the right effect if they’re done to essentially bribe people to work, because they’ll feel entitled to it instead of still part of something.

[00:30:48]

Isaac: Yeah, look, look, and see if your employees are smiling, looking, walk through your contact center and see the look on your agent’s face.

[00:30:55] Do they, do they look like they’re full of dread? Do they look like they’re just utterly exhausted? And if that’s the case, you need to change something. If they will genuinely happy to be there, they look excited about their coworkers. You know, that sort of thing. Then foster that environment, but happy employees tend to stick around you lower your retention costs or they’re more productive.

[00:31:14] They want to be a part of it. Um, you even listen to their ideas. I mean, I’ve seen some of the best ideas come out of the very bottom of the company or the entry-level person. Hey, why don’t you do it like this? Because we never thought about it. That’s a great idea. And you can really improve it. Um, you know, I’ve been in this industry a long time and I’ve been in leadership for a long time.

[00:31:37] And if somebody says, well, what, what do you expect out of your team? I say, I want people better than me. I want people I can learn from because the day I stopped learning, especially as a technologist, that’s the day I need to read. Because I have to constantly be learning. So I accept the fact, I embrace the fact that I might not be the most talented programmer on my team or the most talented network administrator.

[00:31:58] My value I bring to the table needs to be pulling people together at that table. And then those individual resources are the experts in their different areas. I want to learn from that. So, uh, watch your agents, watch your employees, see how, see how they react and, and try to make sure that they’re all happy or as happy.

[00:32:15] Yeah. I

[00:32:17]

Jason: love it. I think that’s great. So I want to shift gears a lot, um, and specifically focus on the BPO industry. So we’re talking about third party outsourced service providers, whether it’s outbound. You know, dials, inbound, sales, inbound service, and support, whatever that might be, but a BPO business process outsourced onshore offshore doesn’t matter.

[00:32:43] But just that whole category of, you know, third-party one of the challenges I know we’ve talked about this and I’ve experienced this for years is. Their margins are thin. It’s usually pretty competitive and what they’re willing to invest or how they have to approach their business model is going to be different than a first party sales or service center where they have the money, right?

[00:33:04] Like service is already bad, bad enough, or challenging enough. It’s usually seen as a cost center for most organizations. And then you take that as an outsource and then it gets even more difficult. I know for me, I have spoken to. Many BPO’s and want to help them, but their margins are so thin. They don’t know where to allocate those funds.

[00:33:24] What are some things that you’ve seen? Like, you know, there’s obviously the challenges that they’re facing, like what specific things could they do, or even more than that? Like what challenges do they have that they don’t even know that they’re dealing with, that they could be facing. I don’t know if that’s too broad for you or, or

[00:33:44]

Isaac: it is.

[00:33:45] I mean, so again, speaking from experience, you know, one of the things I see as waste, you know, you’ll have areas where you’ll have a knee-jerk reaction because we were, our internet went down on Tuesday, so go out and buy five carriers so that we’ve got lots of extra redundancy. In two years later, I’m paying for five different internet providers and I rarely ever need more than.

[00:34:06] So sometimes it’s just about cutting out that cost. Um, there’s also saving money that costs you money. So you might not make an investment in a better piece of technology that you need, uh, because oh, that’s going to be a big capital expenditure. Okay. Yeah. But the ROI on that is that, you know, maybe I need.

[00:34:28] Twenty-five percent less agents, or maybe my handle times go down 15% or maybe I can increase my sales because I can create a better structure for my agents to deliver the message. Um, you know, so some of that, that cost cutting costs you more in the long run. Uh, a great example of this. I worked for a company once I’m not going to name names.

[00:34:51] Uh, but I worked for this company and, uh, I, the, the, the CEO used to brag about having the best low cost context that our platform in the world it was on. It was even on Gartner’s magic quadrant, which shocked me. Cause I know you’ve got to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on the magic quadrant first place.

[00:35:07] So why did cheap. Contact center solution in the world was on Gardner’s is beyond me, but I went to one of the call centers and I said to the call center manager, you know, what, what do you like the most about this platform? What do you like least? And the call center manager said, well, I can’t really tell you what I liked the most, but if I can get something, I would love the ability to disposition my car.

[00:35:30] What do you mean disposition? I mean, the concept of not being able to split the cost so far, and I asked him to split, it was, oh, well my clients call me and they say, Hey, how many people called? And I can tell them that. Then they say, why are they called? I don’t know. And then I can ask around, but I can’t.

[00:35:46] Yeah, exactly. So, but sometimes we’re so focused on increasing that margin that we cut out little things that then causes to lose clients or cause frustration for our staff running our contact centers. So wasteful spin spending or not having enough foresight to spend in the proper places, uh, can be costly.

[00:36:08] Uh, I think beyond that, attrition is really a big cost factor for a lot of contact centers, especially BPOs. You know, if you’re, if you’re an in house contact center, like you said, you know, you’ve usually got a little bit more, more money to play with. You can run nice incentive programs, but if you are in charge of outsource services for your company, and that includes managing your BPO.

[00:36:28] You want to keep that rate as low as possible. So you’re going to negotiate really low rates, and then that BPO gets there to say, okay, I’m getting. $25 an hour and it’s got to be a US-based employee. So if I’m paying that employee $14 an hour, just to convince them to show up, and then I’ve got that supervisor making $20 an hour, and then I’ve got the life they’ve got this, my fully loaded costs might be 20 to $23 an hour.

[00:36:52] So I’m making $2 an hour. That’s a lot of work for very little payoff. So if I have to pay for attrition training or something like that, I don’t get reimbursed. Anytime I bring in a new hire that’s cost, a little money. That’s eating at my profit. So creating that environment where your agents stick around.

[00:37:08] Okay. Really can help with that kind of improving that margin because you’re not wasting that money on losing the agent or even just the quality loss you get, because maybe your sales DEP or you don’t meet enough of your performance factor to bill for the full hour or something like that. So broad answer.

[00:37:26]

Jason: Yeah. And one, I think that even the attrition side and the retention part of it goes to what you talked about with the second part, which. No want to cut costs, but at what expense, right? The phrase that always jumps in my mind is dropping dollars to pick up pennies, um, where companies see an expense like training and retention and Finn into that like training and leadership training, not just helping the agents, but helping the leaders who were probably agents last week.

[00:37:56] And now they’re managers this week and they have received zero training as well. And being a manager, which is totally different skills. If you invest in those, then it would actually go down the line and help with your retention numbers, which would then help the business. Overall. I have been fortunate enough a few times too.

[00:38:14] Contracted by BPOs who get that, who understand the value of that investment versus, you know, the immediate cost. Um, but yeah, most, most just see that and go, no, we’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing. Right. Right.

[00:38:28]

Isaac: Yeah. And th and those often have the experience of where they’ll say. I could have one $80,000 a year employee, or I can have you on my support structure, my Madden structure, or I can have two $40,000 your employees.

[00:38:40] Well, two’s better than one. It’s going to cost me the same amount of money. So I’m gonna get those two forties, but they lack the wisdom and experience and skillset to where maybe between 1, 180 could get done as much as three forties or at least have a better vision. Uh, but it’s, it’s more that shortsighted vision of leadership to where we don’t necessarily need those, those seasoned leaders.

[00:39:01] Uh, but then you get a cell phone of your problems,

[00:39:03]

Jason: right. And then you’re just on this hamster wheel of, I have high attrition. So what do I do? I need to hire more people and then I lose a manager. And then what do I do? I got to promote somebody who doesn’t have any experience. And then just over and over again.

[00:39:18] When we’re talking about the BPO’s and the call centers themselves. I know one of the things that I have seen from talking to other people, uh, I had, uh, Richard comment as, uh, one of my first guests on the podcast. And he does brokerage mostly for call centers. You and I had talked about this in advance, the same topic, which is one of the challenges for BPS.

[00:39:36] Is not necessarily their own internal service levels and their sales levels. Like some of them are actually really good at what they do, but they’re not actually good at selling themselves and building a sales team or department to actually grow themselves. Uh, maybe they were started by a service minded or a technology minded individual, not a sales minded one.

[00:39:58] And they’re literally. Like they can’t sell it once they get a client. It’s great, but they can’t sell it. Where do you see that coming in? How often do you actually see that being a challenge and you know, what have you seen successful companies BPO’s call centers do for their own sake?

[00:40:14]

Isaac: So selling landing a new client, for example.

[00:40:18] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So some of the things I’ve seen wrong is that having a dedicated sales team, not having somebody that goes out there whose only job is to focus on bringing those new clients you see in a lot of the BPS. The, uh, there’s a mystery hand in the background, changing the air conditioning problem.

[00:40:36] Uh, in a lot of those BPOs, you see that they’ll have the president of the company be the only salesperson for the company, but then they’ll expect him or her to also then make all the decisions on budgeting and to be in charge of opening new locations and to do this at the other. And that, that really hurts.

[00:40:54] I think one of the big trends I saw as a, I wouldn’t say it was a roadblock, but an interesting question I saw the last year or two I worked in BPOs was the question about. A lot of the clients that would come in, uh, companies are coming in and say, Hey, uh, a great example. Uh, I, the, uh, ASP CA the American society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, we were working with them, you know, the Sarah McLaughlin commercials, uh, for animals, um, you know, th they were talking to them about being a potential client from the BPO I worked in at the time, and their questions were things like, well, how often do you let your employees bring their pets?

[00:41:31] Uh, because they were, you know, they believe in animal care and, you know, I went to their offices in New York city and, you know, they’re like, oh yeah, we all bring our cats and dogs every day to work with us and stuff like that. So sometimes it’s seeing the mirror culture, culture at the BPO that mirrors them, uh, other times it’s like, okay, well, you can’t exactly replicate what we have, but how do you get your employees to have fun?

[00:41:54] How do you get your employees happy? Um, they want to see that because I think. Uh, they’re, they’re concerned about the trition. Uh, even if they’re not paying for the attrition costs, they still suffer the quality loans. Um, you know, I’ve had clients like Shutterfly in the past where it’s like an eight week, 12 week training program, something ridiculous like that, because there’s so much product knowledge and they want those agents to do everything perfectly.

[00:42:17] And then you get that person in and then their loss. Okay. Yeah, I can replace. But it’s going to take me three months to replace them. So it’s not like if I have people constantly walking in the door, it’s a three-week process and then it takes them another three months to get good. Um, so that’s, that’s, you know, certainly another thing, uh, the brand identity, I think is finally, is this the last piece, you know, again, I’ve talked about replicating the environment, uh, but you can’t always replicate the environment.

[00:42:42] That’s, that’s kind of the point. Like, um, I worked for a company that was in the confectionary division. They made brownies and they, they were very. Hesitant to outsource because they said, unless you can smell the brownies coming off the production. You’re just not going to get, you’re just not going to be able to understand it.

[00:43:00] So eventually we started setting things up with them to where we do field trips to the factory. So the agents could smell the factories and, or the smell of the brownies, and they ship us big cases of brownies and we’ll be feeding the agents brownies all day long and stuff like that. Uh, in our game of vacation environment, we made cases of their brownies.

[00:43:17] One of the big prizes the agents could redeem so that, you know, we were trying to create a, a replica of the culture because ultimately when you’re going to outsource. That’s your biggest concern is how do I get, you know, when Jason calls in, I want Jason to feel like he’s talking to the brownie company.

[00:43:33] I don’t want him feeling like he’s caught talking to Grupo. NGN, you know, who’s Grupo, we don’t, the consumer doesn’t know them, but they know the brownie company. So creating that replica of the culture is very important as well. So I think if you could sell for that and get the customer or the prospect comfortable that it’ll make it easier to close some of those.

[00:43:52]

Jason: Well, and I think the other point too is, you know, that’s what you’re selling is that experience as the outsourcer, that’s the same as what the company is expecting. But then also having that dedicated sales team internally, not just the president, the founder or the CEO, somebody who’s doing the sales because they’re probably busy and that’s not enough of a force to, to keep everything going and manage a sales pipeline.

[00:44:15] Um, I was gonna ask, but I think you’ve mostly answered it. So if you did, you know, let me know. I was going to ask the last question, which is where, what are you seeing now different with the. Buyers, which would be the companies who are looking to outsource or looking for a contact center, looking for a BPO, looking for a partner.

[00:44:37] What are you seeing now with what they’re looking for versus before? Obviously one of them is, you know, somebody mirroring their culture so that when I call up, I know I don’t feel like it’s different than it used to be. Right. When you get. That it was literally different. Is there anything else that the buyers are looking for now that may be shifted over the last either year and a half, five years?

[00:45:00]

Isaac: Well, other than culture, I think it’s technology. Uh, they want to know that you can meet their needs, not just today, but in two weeks, two years, two decades. Um, this is kind of a commonality I’ve seen over time, but I think the, the end customers are becoming more savvy and more aware. Is that when you’re an outsourcer and your client comes to you and says, we want you to do this new thing, your deadline was two weeks ago.

[00:45:26] I mean, by the time you find out about it and you’re past due, and you’ve got to get it out the door now, so they want to see that you can come to them and do that. Quickly and easily. They also want to know that if a new communication channel comes out or if they just want to try something a little bit different, you have the agility and the technology to make that happen.

[00:45:43] I’d say on top of that, they want you to start making recommendations to them. They don’t want to have to come in and say, We want to start communicating on SMS, use that example earlier. So I want to start sending payment links to them over SMS. They want the BPO’s to come to them and say, Hey, we could make this more efficient.

[00:46:03] If we do that, which requires your BPO people to be more technologically savvy as well and more. Aware of the technology they use and constantly looking for something better. And I think that’s where trade associations, like pace are very helpful because you can network with companies that are doing new and different things.

[00:46:20] Um, we grew up on gen, we bought a company, uh, we, we had during the pandemic, whenever he’s laying people off, we were buying companies and we, we met a company at pace. I’m like, wow, that is a fantastic product. We need that. Let’s buy it, um, because you need to, you need to bring more of that to the table.

[00:46:37] You need to have that anticipation so you can have a well-rounded offering. So when you were the BPO, you need to make sure that you’ve got solutions, that you can go to your customers and say, Hey, let’s try something new. And.

[00:46:49]

Jason: Got it. So being a proactive solution provider, that’s looking to, to actually help your clients, the, the company you’re servicing for, um, in a way that they might not be expecting.

[00:47:00] And you’re just giving them better experience and giving them more value, which is interesting because it’s the same thing you would do as a salesperson. If you really want to make your clients successful. Your customer, the consumer B2B, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to go above and beyond. You’re going to give them solutions.

[00:47:13] They weren’t thinking about, instead of being an order taker for what they think they want. Um, and, and I could see where that’s valuable. So. Isaac. I know for people listening or watching, they, uh, you’re very active on LinkedIn. That’s one of the ways that we’ve chatted many times. So if people want, they go to LinkedIn, they look up Isaac Schloss, they can find you on there.

[00:47:36] I also know for your company, if they want to find out more information, They can go to a group O N G n.com. There’s a ton of resources. I’m actually going to put some other links in the show notes regarding cloud communications and the thing called shadow coach and insight. So those will be in there, or people can just go to Grupo ngn.com two.

[00:47:55] Start there as a hub for all kinds of things. Any other interesting things coming up or any thing that, uh, you know, people watching or listening should go find or, or look from you guys?

[00:48:06]

Isaac: Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, you know, for me personally, uh, I’m heavily involved at, you mentioned the beginning with pace.

[00:48:12] Professional association for customer engagement. Uh, we’re having, we’re hoping to do it online. Uh, unfortunately that didn’t happen or sorry in person it’s going to be online. Uh, at the end of the month, we’re going to be doing a compliance, not really compliance. It’s just our overall association. Um, uh, event I’m heavily involved with compliance.

[00:48:30] I’ll be speaking in a compliance officer forum, I’m doing a couple of round tables. It’s going to be a great event. It’s free registration this year. So I encourage people to go there. That website, I want to say is pace association.org. Uh, you know, Jason, I’m sure you’re familiar with them, so maybe you could throw their link in there.

[00:48:46] Uh, we publish the video, um, but, uh, you know, that LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me. Uh, I do attend a lot of industry events, uh, so, you know, Can I try to have a lot of that posted on our company websites. I’d love to, you know, just engage with people. I’m a talker, as I’m sure you guys could tell watching this, uh, this podcast.

[00:49:05] So, uh, you know, just connect with me and I, I love you chat.

[00:49:09]

Jason: I appreciate it. And that’s awesome. And I know that we’re going to connect to your soon. Hopefully it leads gone, uh, in October, 2021, depending on when people are checking this out. So looking forward to that, Isaac, thanks again for coming on the show and sharing all of your experience.

[00:49:23] I appreciate it. And hopefully it was useful to some people.

[00:49:26]

Isaac: Thank you for your time today, this was important. Did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster. Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations. If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating and review also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center space, we appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, fam.

[00:49:55] And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us@keterconsultinggroup.com.

Jason: Hey everybody so glad that you’re joining me for another episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. I am super excited as always to have my guests Nima Hakimi from convoso so, uh, they are focused on Omni channel contact center software.

[00:00:15] I’ve gotten to known Nima and his team, uh, at Convoso over, especially the last year. Through various conferences and various groups that we’re going to talk about today, for sure. And, uh, he is just focused on helping the lead generation industry specifically co-founded Convoso in 2006 and, uh, it’s all about the customer success.

[00:00:37] He’s also something else I know is going to come up. He’s a board member on leads council. If you remember anyone listening to this, I had Rob Seaver on the show early on when I launched this podcast and he is just all about. The whole ecosystem, which is why I’m super glad that he’s here. Uh, Nima, welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:00:57]

Nima: Yeah, it’s good to be on you. I’m excited Jason , um, you know, ready to rock and roll and really just have some good conversations and hopefully add value to what is, uh,

[00:01:08]

Jason: So here’s the part that’s fun for me is, um, I’ve listened to you speak many times, especially over the last, let’s say nine months of going to conferences, where you were at, where I was at and, you know, the industry events that we did through leads con uh, Leeds con and, um, leads council.

[00:01:26] Um, so a lot of this, like I know the kind of fun stuff that you talk about and things that are there. So I know this is going to be a super easy conversation. Very comfortable with all of this. Obviously our goal is on call centers, contact centers. You know, you have an omni-channel platform. The part that matters the most because it’s hard to sell via text and email.

[00:01:47] Those are vehicles towards it. So let’s talk about the phone side. Um, what are some of the biggest challenges that your seeing contact centers face right now when it comes to the phone?

[00:02:02]

Nima: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest one that’s really, you know, is probably obvious is that, um, Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore.

[00:02:10] We just kind of, um, interesting when you think about it, because if a consumer is, is, is, uh, interested in your product or service and they’re filling out a form online, you think that they want to take that call, right. But, um, you know, all of the call, the IDs now being flagged or labeled as spam scam, um, that confidence has gone down.

[00:02:31] Nobody wants to pick up the phone sites. Definitely one of the biggest challenges that call centers are facing. Um, that’s because of the bad actors that have really just ruined everything right now to telco carriers have taken matters into their own hands and decide which call, um, should either go through or not, or be blocked.

[00:02:49] So some calls are not even going through. One of the most, uh, challenging things. So that’s probably at the forefront of everything that every call center that’s doing, the genders is facing towards a challenge. Um, there’s, there’s always, you know, high agent turnover. It’s a very challenging environment to be on the phones and selling on a phone, right?

[00:03:08] Like you’re getting rejected 99% of the time. So call centers typically have a high turnover rate. Um, and then. Just getting good leads, you know, uh, obviously having consent and then wanting to talk to people that want to talk to you, that interest in your product services is definitely one of the challenges as well.

[00:03:28] Where can you continue to generate leads or bylines of people, consumers that are interested, truly interested in your product or service? Um,

[00:03:36]

Jason: those are a huge three things, so let’s take them step-by-step. So the first one he talked about, which is the calls actually going through and the carrier is blocking them for people that aren’t familiar.

[00:03:47] Haven’t heard about it. Stir shaken was the big thing. That’s kinda disrupted this. Uh, and it’s an acronym that sounds or something. I actually have it in my notes, but I’m not going to read it because it doesn’t matter, uh, for most people, but fundamentally understanding that the carriers are responsible for.

[00:04:04] Who they let through and who they keep from letting through, right. The phone calls.

[00:04:11]

Nima: Is that correct? Well, so still shaking is a little bit, you know, everything is related to each other, but still shaking is more in a sense of I’m supposed to solve the problem of caller ID spoofing, right. Just putting a call ID that doesn’t belong to you.

[00:04:23] And so what the telco carriers are required to do now as mandated, but if the FCC. Um, giving a rating to each call. And if it has an, a rating to let the call go through, if it’s B or C, it may or may not go through. So that’s, it’s actually a good thing that’s happening. But beyond that, um, it’s these there’s certain companies, three companies that are these analytics companies that work with the telco carriers, that monitor calls going through their networks.

[00:04:51] Right. And they see if there are too many. They’re being placed, using the same caller ID and a certain period of time. And nobody knows a true formula of how to decide what gets flagged and labeled a scam spam, but they monitor this and then data side to label that call as scam or spam. Um, and there’s no rhyme or reason in terms of when it happens.

[00:05:14] It’s, there’s all kinds of things that are happening. Uh, nobody truly knows, which is really frustrating. Again, if you got consent from a consumer to say, Hey, I get this call and the phone company decides, Hey, we’re going to mark this call as scam, who wants to pick up a phone that says, um, that is a scam, right?

[00:05:34] No one is.

[00:05:36]

Jason: Um, and I can totally imagine a scenario where you’re running a call center, right? You’re running a sales team. You’re getting consent based marketing, right? You’re buying leads or, you know, stuff is successfully getting. Through the marketing to your sales team. And then you’re literally on the dialer or your reps are maybe even hand dialing and they think the leads are bad, but it might be that nobody’s picking up because it’s literally being flagged and they just don’t even know.

[00:06:05]

Nima: Yeah, that’s the challenge. A lot of customers do not have the insights to, um, to know that their calls are being flagged log until they start to see the contact rate go down or they’re getting too many voicemails or answering machines, right. That are coming through that. The, the biggest signs that it’s, nobody’s picking up the phone and you’re getting a lot of voicemails, then chances are your, or your numbers are getting flagged or block.

[00:06:28]

Jason: Well, and what’s interesting though, is on the surface. If somebody is not aware that that could possibly be what happened is it’s usually the leads, right? Uh, I’ve talked to enough companies where they say, well, our contact rate is low, so we just need better leads or different leads, or, you know, maybe we sold some age data and, uh, that’s what it is, but that might not.

[00:06:49] What it is, right. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah.

[00:06:51]

Nima: I mean, chances, I mean, there’s always, the challenge of, you know, is the, is the place where you’re buying the leads from are to give you good leads. But, um, more so than not every single, uh, Legion company is facing this challenge and problem. And you just don’t know when it hits you, unless you have the right tools and systems in place that let you know when it happens.

[00:07:10] But regardless of who you are, it is going to happen to you one way or another. Um, yeah, I just need to have transparency and information readily available to do something about it. And then there’s obviously other strategies that we’ll talk about in terms of what you can do to try to minimize the chances of getting flagged.

[00:07:28] Um, and even when you do what you should do.

[00:07:32]

Jason: So let’s stay with this topic then, and without turning this into a complete sales pitch demo for continuous. So like how have you guys, cause I know that you have a solution for this or ways that you tackle it, especially with, uh, you know, your brother Bobby and his wizardry behind the scenes.

[00:07:49] Um, you know, what’s the, what is the solution that you’ve come up with to help that like identifying when a, did you have or a number that is now on the bat?

[00:08:00]

Nima: Yeah. So like there’s so many different things you can do, regardless of whether it’s what we do or not. You need to have technology that gives you the insights into your caller IDs and letting you know, um, which carriers are flagging or blocking them.

[00:08:15] Right. So we have a dashboard that lets you know of. But what’s more important is that knowing about that in as real time as possible so that you can quickly, um, fix it, meaning to replace the numbers with clean, um, numbers and there’s no, it’s not perfect. Like you will get numbers. The challenge right now becomes a, you will still get numbers at times that are.

[00:08:37] Flagged right. Like new numbers. I heard

[00:08:41]

Jason: you talk about that a couple months ago to conference. And I was like, oh my gosh. Like, cause there’s how many new numbers are. There is not enough. So you’re buying a recycled number that might be dirty.

[00:08:50]

Nima: Yeah. You’re the carrier supposed to rest it all the for a period of time so that it gets clean and, and give it to you.

[00:08:56] Um, but even with that, you know, it’s something that we’re working on on a continuous basis to minimize. Um, when it is a flag. So those are one thing. I mean, being alerted of it, being able to replace it in a timely manner, you know, by knowing about it in a quick, short amount of time, you can minimize the damage of those two leads, especially if you’re generating real-time leads.

[00:09:17] When a person is filling out a form, if you don’t get a hold of that person and you wait now X number of days, chances are that you’re not going to convert that lead, or you’re going to have a significant impact on your. Right. So having that dashboard available to insight the transparency in the moment, um, on like a daily basis, letting you know which carriers are flagging and blocking it, so you can replace it as one thing, um, registering the numbers to get white listed helps.

[00:09:44] It’s not a full proof system, you know, um, there, we have heard different times where even when you register them, uh, with analytics companies, that it will still. Get flagged, but you have to do a bunch of things. You have to do that Google verify. So what we work with our customers to help them, um, register numbers with Google verified, Google verified as a service that on any Android phone, it will show up a logo of your company, the name of your company, and the reason for the call.

[00:10:12] So now the consumer has more insight into why to call them, you know, why are they getting that call and then make a decision based on that? So those are some of the things that we help our customers. But really the bottom line is you want to be proactive around it. You want to register your phone numbers.

[00:10:28] You want to know when, when it gets flagged, um, what you quickly being able to replace the numbers with cleaning numbers so that your contact with.

[00:10:37]

Jason: And it might be in those strategies, but you had said a few minutes ago about ways to not get them flagged at all. And I know whitelisting would help. Um, I mean, is there like best practices for not even getting on that bad list or is it arbitrary?

[00:10:54]

Nima: So there’s no, there’s some things you can do. Um, you know, it’s kind of funny, right? Because the way that your calls get, um, Flag and nobody has the exact formula, but the more calls you make with the same number, the more likely it’s, it’s a call being made using, um, some automated system, rather somebody picking over the phone manually.

[00:11:17] Right? So while we wish that we didn’t have to do this, meaning, Hey, we’re a legitimate business that has arrived. To make these calls. We shouldn’t have to go through the process of having to use these strategies to, you know, not make it appear that it’s an automated system, but because of the bad actors, having Buena for everybody else, you should maintain a certain number of calls with the same number of caller ID on a day.

[00:11:42] Basis. So you want to lower the number and what we do at Convoso is what scan we’ll take a look at your, um, lead overall leads that you have in your database, where you’ve called them and make a recommendation on how many numbers you should get in what geographies, um, so that you minimize the, the, the load on each phone number, right?

[00:12:03] How many numbers? I mean, how many calls get placed per caller ID so that it doesn’t appear. As a call that’s placed using an automated dialer or some sort of a dilated. So that helps to some extent to minimize, um, the chances that it gets flagged. That would be one of the strategies and then other strategies would be using an AMI challenge.

[00:12:27] So if you’re generating a real-time leaders, maybe you don’t want to call them in the first attempt. It’s not calling them, but sending them a text message where you let them know who you are and then say, Hey, we noticed just fill out a form on ABC and trust.com, um, would like to set up a call with you.

[00:12:44] And so setting a, a text message like that up first, and then maybe following it up with. So you want to have strategies that automate that process and an omni-channel approach where you set up a set of events that takes place using texting, emailing calls. And then knowing when to stop that sequence, the moment there’s a contact made or whatever you define as success on a lead.

[00:13:07] Um, so you don’t continue to harass and annoy that, that person, which is what happens with a lot of systems that just call over and over and over and over again. But they sent a text message, even though they’ve already had a call. So that annoys the consumer. It has a bad customer experience is not something you want to do, but unfortunately there’s a lot of bad technology out there that just doesn’t know how to do that.

[00:13:26] Right.

[00:13:29]

Jason: Yeah, just doesn’t stop. Uh, doesn’t know how to do it. And I liked that, uh, idea that you have about using the omni-channel and really shifting the load off of the outbound dials as part of that initial contact. Like if you can do SMS, if you can do something else that maybe even converts it into an inbound call and then takes that pressure off of your outbound dialing.

[00:13:53] Right. And then the load balancing that you’re talking.

[00:13:56]

Nima: Yeah. I mean, everybody used to use a strategy. Let me call them these 50, a hundred times that doesn’t work anymore. Yeah,

[00:14:02]

Jason: it doesn’t work. And it’s a, it doesn’t work with that consumer and B. It’s only going to put yourself into that hole that you don’t want to be in when

[00:14:11]

Nima: it comes with the carriers.

[00:14:12] Exactly. You get blocked by the, uh, customer gets. There’s no, that’s not a winning strategy, but you still have a lot of cost centers that do this and it just blows my mind. And you need to think smarter, dial smarter, not harder as I say all the time, but it’s really true. Figure out after how many attempts does the contact rate go down?

[00:14:30] Why call the same person 50 times when after the seventh call. They may not respond or majority will do not pick up. Right. That’s just not a good strategy. Why do you

[00:14:42]

Jason: think before we get onto the next topic, why do you think companies still do that? Like call people? Let’s say 50 times. I usually, they don’t do it that many, but like we can all just imagine.

[00:14:54] Why, why did they do.

[00:14:57]

Nima: You know, it’s, I mean, there’s not one specific reason, but you know, one, it, it is habit. This is what’s worked in the past. This is all we know. So we’re going to continue to doing, what’s worked for us in the past. They’re not adapting. Um, they don’t know a better way. They don’t have enough data that their, their system does not give them the insights.

[00:15:16] They only look at the data, right? A lot of cost centers, you know, rightfully so you, a sales mind, individuals that just care about, we need to get X number of sales. We need to have X number of targets, but they don’t go deeper into the data. Some of the, some of the costs that they don’t look at the reporting enough, um, to figure out what a limit is, where they should change.

[00:15:38] And so. I think it’s a combination of, of the technology they’re using, not knowing better being stuck in old habits that they’re not getting out of. Um, and not realizing that this is a new world we’re living in the consumer has a lot of capabilities to decide when to get a call. Well, not when not to get a call and it’s no longer in your direct referral.

[00:15:56]

Jason: Yeah. And I. I can see all of those, especially that this is the way we’ve always done it. Old school. Let me just call them and old school, calling them over and over again. Especially with hand dialing or power dialing versus, you know, some kind of high power dialer. You physically can’t call them a ton of times if you have enough leads, but now you just turn on the switch and you can just obliterate somebody so much that they really don’t want to talk.

[00:16:27]

Nima: Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. So the

[00:16:30]

Jason: second part that you brought in, as far as the challenges that you see that call center space is turnover. And I know from hearing you speak and also, uh, Lisa, uh, light at your company as well, is that, you know, turnover from the sales perspective, from a contact center perspective where you’re making these outbound dials.

[00:16:51] You’re in sales. You’re going to get rejected more times than not just, even if you’re amazing. You’re still never going to win a hundred percent. If you’re calling a lot, it’s going to increase that number even more of the failures and where that balance is between how much you want your reps engaging with those activities versus how much you want to have technology takeover so that they’re not just grinding.

[00:17:18] On, let’s say bad calls or voicemails or ups for their whole career, right. Until you burn them out. Yeah,

[00:17:27]

Nima: yeah. Yeah. I mean, so a lot of it these days has to do in my mind with the quality of leads, the type of leads that they are calling on, you know, there is there’s your high intent deeds, right? These are people that actually expressing an interest in your product or service.

[00:17:47] You have your low intent, which we refer to as Coleridge leads, right? Where they fill out some sort of a, um, some offer to win something. And then they get asked a series of questions in order to, you know, put that consumer in some sort of. You know, did it have a certain amount of debt? Do they own their own home, whatever the case is.

[00:18:07] And so while we all want more leads, you got to find a fine balance between getting that quality leader of the person who’s truly interested in your product and service versus a lower intent who may or may not be an understanding how many times you want to call the leads. Um, you have to have different dialing strategies and different strategies for your high intent needs.

[00:18:26] There is no intent and don’t put them in the same bucket. Um, so that’s very important. So that the agents, when they’re calling on both types of leads, that consumer has a certain kind of experience, that’s more positive. So when they do get on a call, they’re not getting cursed out, you know, or saying I’m not interested and that’ll, where’s the agent down.

[00:18:44] I don’t care who you are. You’re going to get call after call. If people are not interested, it’s going to.

[00:18:51]

Jason: Yeah. And I can see that, right. I’ve been in enough centers where you just see reps just tired of the rejection. And here’s, what’s interesting too, is that, you know, I’ve seen some high volume outbound sales centers where when they do get somebody who is interested in talking longer than 30 or 60 seconds, that rep is also just.

[00:19:15] Out of the game, right? Like they’re out of shape if you will. Um, for when that opportunity does come up, they’re not ready for it because they’re just used to being punched in the face for awhile. Um, whether it’s a half hour, an hour, three hours, uh, it’s like getting them off the bench to hit the game, winning shot.

[00:19:32] Very few people can pull that off. Right. Um, and so now they’re not even ready and when they are given a good opportunity, they blow it because

[00:19:41]

Nima: they’re, they’re not. Precisely. I mean, that momentum that you’re talking about that needs to happen for them to be in that rhythm where, you know, the, in their, at their best, um, that is definitely at the heart of everything.

[00:19:55] And if you’re getting connected, like I said, with people that are mostly not interested or you get a lot of a bigger challenge also is, um, getting too many voicemails. So what happens is ending on what technology is used is, you know, there’s that answering machine detection, which is a very fine line between.

[00:20:10] How it needs to detect a call to see if it is a real person, human answering, a call or a voicemail. And so your data needs to have good sensitivity in terms of deciding when to make that, um, decision of whether it’s a real human and answered a call or a voicemail. And depending on the quality of leads you have, you’d have high intent leads.

[00:20:30] You may want to bring that sensitivity down so you may get more voicemails, but you’re not going to filter through real. Humans that are answering the phone. So you have to play around with it a bit and make sure that you’re not getting too many voicemails that are transferred to copy because the agent will get frustrated and tired and you know, that momentum, they will lose it.

[00:20:51] If they’re getting too many voicemails coming through because they want to talk to people. They don’t want to talk to answering machines that are not going to get them in. Yeah. Well,

[00:20:59]

Jason: and, and to clarify, because I think this is a really interesting point and part of that strategy, like you said, where you have different dialing strategies based on different lead quality, right?

[00:21:11] I’m not talking about the salespeople who always think they want the best leads I’m talking about like what you’re paying for, what the intense. How solid that intent, how much they raised their hand for you specifically versus raising their hand for something, um, and giving permission. So, but what you said is that you’re talking about that voicemail detection, which I believe, right.

[00:21:31] Correct me if I’m wrong. That’s that point when we all get these auto robo, whatever dials and there’s that gap sometimes two, three seconds where we say hello, there’s. And it’s determining if we’re a human or if we’re a voicemail and then connecting us to some sales person. Right?

[00:21:49]

Nima: Yeah. So there’s, I mean, there are a couple of reasons when you’re talking about, um, yes, there needs to be some very limited delay for, for the system to figure out if it’s a human or not.

[00:21:58] But when you’re talking about, for example, two or three seconds, that’s because their dialing is not configured well to handle the call volume, which is the number of available. They’re available or sales to take the call. So what’s happening is it needs to wait for someone to be available. And the system is placing more calls the predictive side or predictive dialer as we call it is not doing its job.

[00:22:20] Right. Um, if you’re waiting too long, um, to talk to someone, but yes, a part of that delay is because it needs to figure it out, you know, with us it’s milliseconds. So it’s very short amount of time. You need any needs to be as short as possible. So that there is a good experience on the other end and they don’t get annoyed saying hello.

[00:22:39] Hello. And then three seconds later, they talk to some. And then yeah, forget about, yeah. Forget about having a good conversation at that point. You’ve already set up that conversation to being on a negative, um, position.

[00:22:52]

Jason: Well, and I think that’s such a valid point and what you said then, which is the next level, which is okay.

[00:22:57] If you have high intent data, someone was on your page, filling out a form saying, I want help with insurance, right. Or a mortgage, but then you want to turn that sensitivity. Down, or you basically want to let more calls get through where you would rather have false voicemails getting through then cutting somebody off was a real person and not letting them get through to your agents, right?

[00:23:24]

Nima: Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s that type of lead. You want to probably have the still thing, be a little bit like, uh, take a little bit more time to see if it’s a human, like, make sure that you will get through. You’ll have a little bit more voicemails comments. Um, if it’s a corridor lead, you probably want to make it, um, less of that.

[00:23:43] There’s more filtering that’s happening. Right. And you have less voicemails that get connected to the agents. Um, so it’s all about the quality of the data that you have to figure out which strategy you should use on your exhibition.

[00:23:56]

Jason: Well, and, and the advice I would give call center owners based on my experience with the training and the work that I’ve done is if possible is to set the agent, the sales reps expectations for, okay, you might get more voicemails, but here’s why this has to happen.

[00:24:13] And this is intentional. Like we know voicemails suck, but just so you know, we don’t want to blow any of the good leads by having it filter too early. So you’re going to get more when the leads are from this other call. You’re going to get less. And so it’s not just a, we don’t care about you and just, you know, grind and leave voicemails.

[00:24:29] It’s this is intentional. There’s actually a strategy behind the scenes

[00:24:34]

Nima: a hundred percent. Yeah. I would imagine most, a lot of customers do not give that direction today. You know, you’re getting leads from so many different places, buying them, generating them. I mean, one thing that you can do in that situation is, um, there’s gotta be some guidance, some, some personalization around that conversation and around the color, the script, which is, should be more used as a guide in my point of view.

[00:24:56] But your system should have the ability to. Um, give you insights on each lead. What offer, what landing page they fill out? What was the offer? Right? What did it say? No, don’t, don’t make it just to be generic, but you have a lot of, um, leisure companies that generate a buyer leads from 10, 20, 30 different sources, especially the bigger you are that you can’t use that same conversation and approach to every single call that you connected to.

[00:25:21] You need to have insights that get shared, whether you’re using a system like, you know, active. That then collects amount of certain information. And then, you know, on, on, on, on under daily side of things, it’s very, it can be very personalized to pull information on the lead. So you can mention the website, the actual website that it filled up the form on.

[00:25:41] And you know, that personal will be more responsive to hearing what you have to say versus just having some generic, um, opening to your, to your call.

[00:25:51]

Jason: Yeah, I think there’s a huge difference from a consumer’s perspective, like which we all are at some level, uh, for getting a call and said, Hey, you filled out a form to get some insurance versus, Hey, you filled out a form on ABC insurance.com and I’m following up because, you know, I want to talk to you about that, right?

[00:26:10] Like that is so important. Um, I know that I know too, is that when you tell your salespeople or your reps that you have different levels or qualities of leads or there’s different sources, they’ll usually make up their mind about which ones they like. And don’t like, so I know from a management perspective, that’s also a, sometimes it’s a dangerous game to, to tell your reps, I’ve got my good leads and I got my not good leads.

[00:26:37] And, um, you know, now I’m turning on the not good leads.

[00:26:41]

Nima: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that happens there as well. For sure. Yeah.

[00:26:46]

Jason: Well, and it’s about balancing. I know that when I’ve run centers with that, it’s about the compensation plans being different. If it’s like, let’s say a co-reg like, Hey, if you can convert those it’s worth more.

[00:26:56] So that’s great. Right. And we want to reward you. Um, so I think that’s important. I think the why is always important when it comes to those strategies. I know that one of the big things, you know, you all like, uh, Take an analytical approach to let’s say, you know, looking at this turnover issue, but not the turnover stats.

[00:27:18] Cause everyone knows turnover stats, but like agent utilization and wasting agent’s time and like how much money you could save just in productivity. Um, When you’re optimizing for contact rates.

[00:27:34]

Nima: Yeah. I mean, do you

[00:27:35]

Jason: have some of those stats or just a general idea, like for people listening to go, okay, well, that’s great Nima, you, you, you know, you want my agents to leave us less voicemails, but that sounds like a lot of work.

[00:27:45] Like why is that even worth

[00:27:46]

Nima: it? Yeah. I mean, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but we did do a study around, um, you know, obviously like when you look at the percentage of calls that go to voicemail, it’s, it’s like always 70%. So majority of calls go, go get connected to voicemail, not somebody answering the call.

[00:28:03] Um, and when you look at the amount of time that agents waste, when you know, you have some cost centers where 20, 30% of the calls that get connected or voicemails. So now you’re talking about how much you’re paying them on an hourly basis. Um, and what percentage of their calls are voicemails? If you say 30% and you’re paying them $50 an hour, Right.

[00:28:27] That’s that’s 30% of that. That’s what is it? Four or $5 an hour to just get wasted, multiply that by the number of hours worked in a day times, the number of agents think we did a study that was like literally millions of dollars over the course of the year. So you’ve been in be really mindful and pay attention to the number of calls that get connected to agents that are voicemails rather than just letting it be and just like saying, okay, it is what it is.

[00:28:52] Just deal with it today. You need to pay attention to that. And I don’t think enough call centers look at that to see what can be done, because they’re just told, you know, this is what it is or, you know, we don’t know what to do about it. And I don’t think that’s a good enough answer. You need to go deeper than that to see how you can solve that problem, because it’s very costly when you do the math on the lost productivity.

[00:29:17] The turnover, right? That the agent morale goes down, which leads to turnover and those costs, we know, um, you know, there’s enough studies and done on terms of hiring someone at the cost of hiring someone new, to replace someone who’s, you know, trained and up to speed on everything. So there’s a lot of different ways that, um, things that get impacted based on this.

[00:29:39] And

[00:29:39]

Jason: that’s why I love that calculation just on the surface, even if we don’t look at the turnover, but then when you factor in all those things, uh, it does make a difference, even when we’re just talking about voicemail detection, right? This one factor, and even talking about lead quality, you can keep buying the same leads that you have, but if you can adjust this one thing, then, uh, it makes a big difference.

[00:30:02] So when you’re talking to companies, right, so you’re, you’re focused on call centers. Contact centers, anybody who’s, you know, would use a system like this. Part of what we talked about was they might not want to change or do anything different with their strategies because it’s the way they’ve always done it.

[00:30:18] Um, what other challenges do you see when you or the team talk to an owner or a leader of a contact center and they just don’t. I think it would apply or they don’t want to change. Like what’s the best way to help somebody or, you know, I guess sometimes if you could just shake them and say, listen, like, here’s why you need to do this.

[00:30:41] Um, you know, what, what would that be to get them to like, if somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, I don’t know, I’m on the fence. Why would I want to change what

[00:30:49]

Nima: I’m doing? That’s the thing about fear of change. We all, as humans do not like change. Nobody does for the most. Um, so I mean, that is, that is usually a big challenge.

[00:31:02] I would say that you need to, uh, look at how you’re currently performing. And, um, if you’re looking at a solution like ours, the only true way you’ll ever know what’s on the other side, um, you have to do a comparison. Right. You got to give it a test and, and see for yourself. Um, what the difference is because just because it’s, you’re, you’re getting by today, uh, technology and things are changing and it’s really, uh, becoming a bigger challenge to keep up with all of these changes, because again, carriers and, you know, the regulators everybody’s taking matters into their hands and they’re deciding your fate.

[00:31:48] So you have to really look at. And understand that if you don’t make some sort of a change to solve some of these problems, you will not be in business maybe in a year from now. And it’s not, if it’s just a matter of when, so you have to really be more proactive around looking at what else is out. Giving it a fair shot, your team has to get bought into it.

[00:32:10] So the way that we do that is obviously involving them in the process and understanding what challenges they’re having, getting to understand how we can help them solve their problems and showing them. ’cause that’s one of the things, right? A lot of times the owner is, is, is all in on it, but then they have to get their team on board because they’re the ones that have to actually make the true change.

[00:32:29] Right. And that’s where you get a lot of pushback is because they’re comfortable with what they have. They don’t want to learn a new system, you know, so we try to make them, help them understand that they’ll go through a training process and onboarding and really showing them how it works and not just making a switch.

[00:32:45] And then them being stuck with something, they didn’t know how to use it. So they’re lot, there’s a training component. There’s understanding their current performance and how we can help them do better. Um, so that they’re more open to the change versus resisting it, which is what happens a lot of times

[00:33:02]

Jason: when somebody is looking at like a platform, like what you’re talking about or any dialer.

[00:33:13] What kind of questions are people not asking? Or what should they be aware of that they might not know. I mean, there’s always the challenge, especially if buying new software, new solution to anything is that we have this fear of change, like you said, which I love that you brought that up. And then also we don’t know what we don’t know.

[00:33:31] And so a lot of times people aren’t asking the questions that would help them, let’s say overcome that fear of change. So what are the best questions for somebody who’s looking at? Dyler contacts, solution, you know, software,

[00:33:45]

Nima: it started with compliance. And what does the company know about compliance? What are they doing about it?

[00:33:50] How are they keeping up with the changes that are happening? What are you doing about . You know, how do they help you, um, with compliance, not to say that you’re looking for legal advice, because that should be something you should do with, you know, with your own counsel and get, get that advice. But at the same time, from the buyer’s perspective, how much do they know about what’s happening and what did it doing about it?

[00:34:15] How proactive are they about. Um, so I would say that’s definitely a really, really big one. And then the other one, you know, we’ve talked about, about how are they helping manage your caller ID reputation? I think at the end of the day, if you don’t figure that out, forget how great the, the, the, the, the dialer might look or feel or whatever the case is, but how are they helping you solve that problem?

[00:34:38] Because you can have the best leads you can have the best agents. You can have the dilator that makes the calls, but if they’re getting fired or blocked, nobody’s picking. So you want to ask specifically what I did do, is it a third party solution? Um, you know, and I would even get on the phone with that third party solution and ask them questions specifically around how did they do it?

[00:34:57] How did they manage the call ID reputation? Because it’s easy for the company that you’re working with to say, yeah, we’re using XYZ and they do it. And it’s great, but you might find that that’s not going to help you on until you truly know. How they go about doing it because sales people sometimes, you know, they want to sell and you want to work with a company that’s truthful.

[00:35:16] And if it’s a third-party you relying on you better want to talk to that third party and understand how they’re doing it, if it, you know, unless it is the company itself, the dialer themselves, the way that we do it is that we’re the ones that are helping you manage. Um, you want to ask those questions about how, how does it work?

[00:35:32] How do you make sure that it doesn’t get blocked? Or how do you minimize it? What are the strategies that are used? Um, and then third, you know, not in these, but last, uh, what is the team behind the company? You know, what kind of changes is there that helps you with the data? How does the onboarding process work?

[00:35:48] Who’s involved? Who’s helping you train what happens after, you know, you’re onboarded on the system. Somebody that’s assigned to your account, that will be there to ask a questions for you to help you implement best practices, to monitor the accounts and the performance of the account. You know, um, it’s a dial is a pretty sophisticated depending on what you want to do.

[00:36:10] And so you want to make sure that there’s a team behind it that can help you get the most out of it over a period of time. That goes beyond just the first few weeks. I mean, there’s a lot more. Yeah. But

[00:36:23]

Jason: I love that list. I mean, it all makes sense from the onboarding training to what’s included and how are you handling compliance and all of those different pieces.

[00:36:32] So, one other big thing that I know happened to the whole world in the past, let’s say year and a half now, um,

[00:36:41]

Nima: is.

[00:36:42]

Jason: Pandemic is most call centers. At least short-term had to go remote and do something that they never thought was possible. I’ve been around enough call centers, contact centers, and sales teams.

[00:36:53] To know that it was never thought that you could let people work remote and be effective in a call center, sales team, anything like that without seeing them all. And then obviously everyone had to, for a period of some time, some are still that way. What do you see for the future? Of the call centers of sales teams.

[00:37:14] Right. Obviously they embrace the power of the cloud and cloud software like yours and like others. Um, couldn’t do premise-based things like they used to. Um, but where do you see things going either from the call center side and how they manage people from the consumer side or what they expect, you know, like you’ve been in this game for a long time.

[00:37:33] Like where do you see things going from?

[00:37:36]

Nima: So, you know, the different ways of looking at it, but with technology these days and the way that technology is moving and how innovative it can be, AI continues to play a role and the term, depending on how you even define AI, but there are technologies out there that help.

[00:37:52] Um, when it comes to agent training, which makes remote working from home type of, uh, uh, programs for agents work better. But there are systems out there that help you monitor every single call. You know, we partnered with a company called Baltimore, for example, that will listen to every single call and give you live, call guidance, to help the agent be on, you know, on track with a conversation and say the right things.

[00:38:14] So there are things like that. And I think that will continue to play a role to make working from home. A good solution. I think there’ll be some hybrid with, you know, some call centers wanting to do some work from home while having some people come into the office. I think it will be combination of that because not everybody wants to continue to work from home.

[00:38:32] Right. It, it doesn’t, um, it’s not, it’s not suited for every single person. So I think there’ll be some hybrid in that. And then just continuing to focus on, uh, better, uh, better. Somebody who’s truly interested in your product and service and being more focused on that. You know, you’re generating these on Facebook and different places.

[00:38:52] It’s better than just calling somebody who may not have raised their hand as, as you, as you stated it. Um, and just being more focused around the consumer and the customer experience, um, not just calling them to death, like we talked about and having better quality conversations and maybe having less conversations, but.

[00:39:12] Conversations. So I think it’s continuing to stay focused on that and having the customer at the heart of everything to ensure that they have a good experience, that your agents can have a good experience at a company can have a good experience all around to deliver whatever product or service that you’re selling.

[00:39:29] I

[00:39:29]

Jason: love it. That’s a perfect list. I mean, I think the key is, like you said, Your agents are going through this. Some are going to work from home. Some are going to be hybrid in the office. Fundamentally the consumers are just like your employees, just like your reps. Everyone is dealing with the pandemic in some way.

[00:39:45] And so also being mindful. And I love that you said. Yeah, basically quality over quantity at some point, wait, whatever’s best for your business, but keeping in mind, you’d rather have more quality conversations, which will then help with all the other factors we talked about from compliance to caller ID to turnover.

[00:40:03] Um, you know, and how do you do more of that quality and just convert better, right? Like, and especially okay. Quality contact rate. Okay. And then what, how do you make sure you have quality conversations that can be. So that you don’t need a hundred conversations to close

[00:40:20]

Nima: and it’s a big shift. Yeah. And it’s a big shift.

[00:40:23] Listen, I’m not saying that don’t, don’t call on corridors. These, because you want to scale, you want more, you want to generate more sales. You just need to look at everything and figure out the right strategies for the type of leads that you’re calling versus just this shotgun approach of calling over and over again.

[00:40:42] Um, that’s just not a good idea.

[00:40:45]

Jason: Yeah. And, and I love that too, where it’s, it’s not just go this route and don’t go this other way. W route with leads or data that you’re buying, it’s more about just be mindful and have a strategy for each and then play the different game with that lead type in that cost, uh, and that contact rate, so that you’re going to win instead of throwing them all into one bucket and trying to win the game, uh, win each game individually.

[00:41:13]

Nima: Yeah, couldn’t have said it any better.

[00:41:15]

Jason: So, uh, first off, I appreciate you being here. Uh, I love this conversation. I love the intersection of this technology with the compliance, both, like you said, at the very end there it’s like about the customer experience. Uh, and it’s about the company and. Benefiting, you know, employees being happy and all of that, but doing that in such a way where it’s just facilitating, what’s being sold and helping customers.

[00:41:40] And I love all that. Um, I know for people listening to this, they want to find out more, they can go to dot com. Also. I know you guys have a very. Uh, well maintained and updated blog. So if they go to dot com slash blog, there’s a lot of articles talking about, you know, various strategies and, and a lot of stuff that you talked about here and in the things that you do, uh, I also know that people can connect with you on LinkedIn.

[00:42:03] So if they go to LinkedIn, uh, Nima Hakimi. And sushi there. I’m pretty sure you’re the only one on there, uh, with that name makes it easy. Any other cool things, anything for people listening or watching the video of this, uh, where they can find out more things that you have coming up or any other resources they,

[00:42:21]

Nima: they could, uh, yeah.

[00:42:24] You know, I would highly recommend, obviously the conference is coming up. Leeds con is coming up. There’ll be a lot of good conversations. Uh, definitely attend, uh, you know, yes, it is great for networking. Um, so that’s always great, but again, because so many things are changing, I would really highly suggest you come.

[00:42:40] You you’ve listened in on some of the conversations and, uh, you’ll find that there’ll be some invaluable things that you, um, will get value out of to help you, not just survive but thrive. And so you need to really be kept abreast of all of that. Make sure you come. And if you can find a way to get access to the sessions.

[00:43:01]

Jason: Yeah, that’s awesome. I know that you and the team will be there. I will be there as well. So that’s going to be fun. Excited when these conferences have started coming back and being able to meet people and learn and network and grow and just stay on, like you said, stay on top of it so that you know how to stay compliant and win, right.

[00:43:17] Not just stay safe, but also successful. Well, Naima, thanks for joining me and being here on the scale of we’ll call center sales podcast. I appreciate it. And, uh, I look forward to seeing. Here soon at the next conference. Yeah,

[00:43:31]

Nima: likewise. It was a great feeling. Did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster.

[00:43:41] Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations. If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating. Also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center space, we appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, family. And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us@keterconsultinggroup.com. .

[00:00:35]

Jason: Hey, what’s going on? Everybody’s so glad that you can join another episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. I am very excited for my conversation that I’m going to have today. I just know it like we’re about to jump into this. I know what we’ve been talking before we hit record, so I know it’s going to be a blast.

[00:00:52] So I’ve got Nick Glimsdahl with me today. He is from press one for Nick, which is a podcast. We’re gonna talk about that as well as VDI. Which is focused on customer service and customer experience in the call center industry. So as the director of contact center solutions at VDS, he is focused on being a thought leader in customer service customer experience.

[00:01:15] Uh, and again, like I said, he hosts this podcast, which we’ll talk about and how that kind of blends in with all of this. Uh, and I know that we’re going to have a blast. Nick, welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:01:25]

Nick: Thank you so much, Jason. Happy to be here. So,

[00:01:29]

Jason: uh, for people tuning in, if you’re a long-time listener of me, my podcast, my presentations, things that I do, then you already know why I would have someone like Nick on a sales related podcast.

[00:01:42] If you’re new to my show, first welcome. Glad you’re tuning in. If this is the first time listening to a podcast of mine, this should be interesting, especially if you’re in sales, uh, because we’re going to talk about. Where Nick’s focus on customer experience. Customer service fits in, in the world of sales and sales leaders.

[00:02:02] And it might not seem like it does, but obviously it does because sales is setting up the customer experience from the beginning, right. It starts with marketing and branding, then customer or a then sales. And then it goes into them being a customer and in a well-run organization. Then sales and customer service, the front of the house, the back of the house, like from my restaurant, they, everyone is working together and there’s a good integration.

[00:02:31] However, and Nick, let’s talk about this. Cause I think this will be fun. Just a warning for the people listening or watching this. If you think sales and sales, operations and salespeople are untouchable gods in an organization. Where they can do no harm and everyone else is there to serve them. You are going to get triggered by this conversation.

[00:02:51] Um, if you believe that customer service or customer success and the company success are what matters the most, then you’re going to love this conversation. And you’re in the right place. How about that for a

[00:03:03]

Nick: up Nick? That’s amazing. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Well done.

[00:03:08]

Jason: So let’s just jump into this. Where do you see like sales? This is a sales podcast, but where do you see sales’ role or part in the customer experience and customer experience journey.

[00:03:29]

Nick: So if it’s done right, I would say it’s part of a start with done, right? If it’s not broken, uh, if it’s done right, man, you just need to be, it’s need to be part of the entire journey.

[00:03:41] The tough part about sales that are what you’re measured on as a sales person is you go through this journey, you, you wine and dine them at the very beginning. You’re trying to build this relationship. You’re saying, Hey, let’s grab dinner. Let me give you a gift. And then it goes to signing the ink and they’re like, Hey, I no longer get paid on this opportunity.

[00:04:00] Uh, yeah, I’m going to go to the next one I’m out. And they kind of wash their hands and go to the next opportunity. From my perspective, they should be part of this journey and they should be continuing to find ways to get paid through that journey so that they are saying, well, what’s in it for me is I need to keep and retain this customer for life.

[00:04:20] Focus on the customer lifetime value, not necessarily just on that one time commission, but focus on the lifetime value of that customer and finding ways to help solve their business needs and improve their experience. And it just happens to be that you can solve their problem with some of the technology or solutions that you have.

[00:04:41] It’s not always just throwing a square peg in a round hole saying, Hey, I try to, I’m going to hit quota this this month by, by introducing you to a new solution. And then I’m going to walk away again. It’s continuing to stay with them for that journey.

[00:04:55]

Jason: And so where’s that balance. So, cause as you’re talking about that, that sounds great.

[00:05:00] Right? So compensated. Salespeople based on the lifetime value and the total journey, but I mean, where do you draw that line? Or what percentage would you allocate to that? I, when you’re mentioning that, the part that jumps in my mind is I think customer service, customer success, operations processing, marketing, they’re not necessarily compensated.

[00:05:24] Or bonused in the same way as salespeople are. Right. They, they do their job and obviously they have hopefully some kind of bonus in place, but now you’re talking about, okay, so we’ve got to essentially bribe

[00:05:34] this salesperson to

[00:05:36] care and stay involved. Long-term more than anybody else.

[00:05:41]

Nick: So I would say that.

[00:05:43] What’s what’s their role on that. And then how does that handoff from sales? Because the sales person can’t be a hundred percent there, a hundred percent of the time they have to go out and, and ground and pound and stay and build relationships with the net new. However, what does that transfer from the sales person to the customer success or to operations or to implementation or to support on that journey?

[00:06:08] And if they’re not a, it’s not a full on. Hey, here’s the brain dump. Let’s meet on a continued basis. Maybe it’s a quarterly business review, uh, that the customer success team is coming back to them. Or account managers is coming back to the sales person saying, Hey, you mentioned this, this and this and this during that discovery.

[00:06:26] And we sold them this, this solution. Here’s the situation today. Maybe it’s a touch base back and forth. Maybe it’s a, and they can jump in on the quarterly business reviews if needed, but it’s not necessarily. Pull back the bandaid and I’m out, uh, situation. I think that both customer success and, and maybe even operations or something should be maybe more involved and, and, uh, when it comes to providing support or, uh, benefit from a commission perspective, keeping that customer for the lifetime and it’s slowly a.

[00:07:03] I don’t think the sales person should say, I’m going to get 20% now and I’m going to get 20% for continuing for it, for infinity. And for the life of that contract, it should be maybe a slowly blend away from it, but there should be constant communication back and forth as needed.

[00:07:20]

Jason: Got it. And just to clarify what type of.

[00:07:26] Sales product sales cycle size. It sounds like you’re talking, this is B2B obviously, uh, you know, in this kind of

[00:07:35]

Nick: framework. Yeah. So from my, for what we do as an organization is more the contact center solution. So it’s the, it’s the cloud contact centers. And then it’s kind of the ancillary products around it based off of what.

[00:07:49] Trying to accomplish and the relationships that we’ve built and it’s the sales cycle is anywhere from one year to two years. Maybe it’s it’s as quick as three to six months, it doesn’t happen as often. I mean, I’m with the market today with people trying to make that move to the cloud, people are. Hey, I should have probably moved three months ago and COVID kind of hit a wrecking ball into my window and I, I should probably do something about that.

[00:08:11] And, and we, we, we just happened to find budget, but, you know, it’s, it’s a constant relationship building. Um, adding value being that thought leader, like I said on, like you said, on the press one for Nick podcast and, and getting, giving them the right value at the right time and not trying to find ways to bamboo.

[00:08:31] Because everybody’s getting bamboozled by, by their organizations and they just want to find ways, like, how do I pull back the curtain from everybody else? And you just tell me the truth like that. That’d be neat. That would be neat. I love

[00:08:46]

Jason: that. Um, well, and I, I think, especially putting in perspective for, for people tuning into this is when you’re talking about a sales cycle, that if you’re lucky and the.

[00:08:57] Universe aligns. Unfortunately like it did with a pandemic, the shorten your sales cycle to three months, that’s like the,

[00:09:04]

Nick: the

[00:09:05]

Jason: fastest cause you know, it’s kind of a crisis for call centers at that time when everyone had to go remote. But normally you’re looking at a one to three year sales cycle. The amount of relationship that’s built with the sales person and that customer, once the deal is inked, right.

[00:09:22] And then moves on. Yes. That can make for a very abrupt ending, which is like, Hey, I know we’ve been friends for a year and I know I’ve been like pretending to be your friend, or it feels like it, uh, for a year. And now that it’s over, like, um, And I’ll never talk to you again. Um, so obviously people tuning in there’s, it’s going to be relative to what your sales cycle are.

[00:09:43] If it’s shorter, it’s like, what does that look like? I think I love what you said though about, uh, you know, uh, especially in a B2B sale, the quarterly business review with that client like that, that should be the salesperson has the initial relationship. And, uh, I think

[00:09:58]

Nick: that advice is, is great. Well, just think of, I always go back to sports.

[00:10:04] Just think if you had a teammate, I dunno football player, and you have the offensive line and you get to know them and they say, Hey, I got your you’re the quarterback, because everybody has a. As a prospect should be the hero of the journey. And so for me, it’s in the marketing story. I am the guide in that.

[00:10:25] So I I’m, I’m covering there six in the, as a quarterback, but all of a sudden the play happens and we get the touchdown. I’m like, Hey, just want to let you. Um, there’s going to be somebody else covering this and, uh, best of luck. I mean, they’re, they’re pretty good, but you know, they’re a little bit smaller.

[00:10:42] Maybe don’t weigh as much and they have only two years experience instead of the 20 that I had. Uh, they’re going to be like, what, what do you mean? I still need you. I still need that protection of the things that I can’t see today.

[00:10:57]

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think that analogy is great. I mean, you see that with, especially if you look at sports, I mean, there’s people who are traded all the time.

[00:11:04] I mean, it’s still a business and, uh, you know, how much that upsets and disrupts, like the trust and the relationships and then how that has to be rebuilt. So what are some examples of. Where you’ve seen that done, right? Not just for you internally, like with what you have with your sales cycle, but obviously, you know, you have an interesting perspective and your organization does, especially with the podcast too, is where you have insight into what others are doing, not just your, you know, what you have on, on your sales side.

[00:11:35] Um, what are some examples of where sales. And the overall, like let’s just call it customer experience. Operation is working together well for the benefit of the clients and the

[00:11:49]

Nick: company. Yeah. I mean, one that just popped into mind. I interviewed a couple people from an organization called Lexus nexus and, um, they’re based out of, uh, Ohio here and they realized that there was a gap between the sales drop off.

[00:12:05] Hey, uh, high five, uh, we made a sale. Everybody’s excited and let’s throw a, a celebration. Let me give you a cake. I go live. And the transition from that day, zero or day one to day 60 day 60, all of a sudden they’re like, well, wait, they promised this, they said this, this was their timeline. This is the communication that they said they were going to do.

[00:12:28] And there was that gray area. Every time there’s a gray area as an, as an organization or as it. I feel like I’m going to go to the worst case scenario. Uh, they hate me. Uh, they’re not doing this. They’re going, gonna overcharge me, like whatever that costs or whatever it is. And they realize that there was that gap.

[00:12:45] So they, they created a department, put somebody in that department and ran it. They built it from the ground up. And now it’s a customer success group from, I think day, zero or day one to day six. And it’s kind of that, that medium, where they’re, hand-holding still that high touch that they were experiencing as a sales group, uh, on the sales team and they transition it and it’s still like, Hey, I’m still your, I’m still a good friend.

[00:13:09] I’m still hanging out with you. I’m still gonna communicate with you. Maybe over communicate with you, give you what you need, answer all the specific questions that you have so that it all is. Uh, so you have peace of mind on this journey because it’s still uncomfortable regardless of how easy. And then they transitioned it to that.

[00:13:27] The next side, the retention that they had was unreal of, of transitioning and just implementing that customer success.

[00:13:35]

Jason: So was that customer success department that they formed actually like doing implementation, onboarding account management in that interim, like you said, it sounded like, uh, like this two day window or like what, what were they actually focused on?

[00:13:54]

Nick: Transition from CA I mean, from my perspective, I’ll have to go back and listen to my own episode. But, uh, from my perspective, it was, they weren’t doing any of the implementation. It was all, it was all communication and making sure that that individual or that organization had that piece of. Got it. Okay.

[00:14:12] So they weren’t the minions on the backend doing the work, the implementation, the technical, the integration, whatever it is, they were the constant communication, more the project managers of, of the org than they were the, uh, implementation. I love

[00:14:28]

Jason: it. I think that’s great. That reminds me of when, uh, I worked at Microsoft for a couple of years, a long time ago when I still didn’t know what I want.

[00:14:35] I still don’t know what I want to do now, when I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Um, when I grew up is, um, I, I met somebody who I became friends with in a training and he, his role was technical account manager. And he was the liaison with Microsoft’s corporate clients. So he was one of a handful of people that dealt with bank of America.

[00:14:55] And his job was to be that intermediary between the customer and what they needed and making sure they were happy. And then the engineers and technicians who talked engineer talk and technician talk and like bridging that gap to make sure the customer was always happy and taken care of. Uh, and I think that’s great.

[00:15:13] I think a lot of. You know, people go from sales to implementation or onboarding or whatever that is. And then that person is technical or in the weeds, or focused on the success of the project and not the success of the customer experience and that relationship. So, uh, I love that example. I think that.

[00:15:33]

Nick: Yeah, it’s awesome. Yeah. Even on our side, on the BDS side, where we really saw a gap between what the manufacturer was doing and what the customer actually wanted, the manufacturer is really good at providing the technology really good at innovating. Really good at integrating, uh, having the developer.

[00:15:52] They were not the best at creating the high touch experience that they wanted and resolving a lot of the problems. And so we stepped in, I mean, this was, we kind of grew up in the UC space the last 10, 15 years now we kind of transitioned to cloud contact center only. And, um, that’s our goal is to be the, be the mortar between the bricks and help solve those problems.

[00:16:18] Designing it implementing it, pull the curtain curtain back on the manufacturer or supporting the organization. That’s it’s been a fun journey to. Help people see that.

[00:16:30]

Jason: All right. So that’s a great example of the Lexus nexus one. And, uh, obviously anyone wants to check out that full episode, uh, go to, uh, was it press one for nick.com/podcast, which we’ll mention at the end, but, uh, I think your podcast is amazing.

[00:16:44] So, but want to plug that as much as I can. So that’s a great example, not from the podcast, cause I don’t want you to point the fingers at guests that maybe we’re doing it wrong, but just in your experience and what you’ve seen, like what are some examples of where you’ve just. Like not affective, uh, that sales to customer experience.

[00:17:03] Just the whole thing. Like

[00:17:05] anything

[00:17:05]

Nick: that comes to mind with that? Yeah. The one thing that just popped into my head a couple of years ago, my front door, we, we, we we’ve been in this house for, you know, quite a few years now when the, the gold handle, uh, on my screen door fell off and I was like, this is awesome.

[00:17:23] Great. Okay. This is, let’s see what this experience is going to be like. Cause I don’t know who the company is and searched around and I found the company’s name and I can’t can’t remember them off hand. But I pulled up their website on my phone and it said, Hey, you want to chat? And I was like, great.

[00:17:36] Yeah, let’s, let’s do this. Let’s chat and, uh, chatted back and forth. They said, oh, what’s the part number? I looked at the part number of somehow I found it in there. They said, tell me about the experience. Is it rusty? What’s going on? How to fall apart? Do you have a warranty on this? And I was like, perfect.

[00:17:54] Like, here’s the, they said, here’s the price. Can I just pay for it? Can I, can I apple pay? Can I, you know, Zelle, like what’s the best way for me to deliver that experience? Uh, actually here’s a phone number. Will you please just go back, uh, into, you know, hang up with me cause I can’t transfer you and go back in queue.

[00:18:14] Cause I was actually chatting, but they, you know, I can’t have somebody call you and go back and Q and a it’ll probably be about 20. That is the worst experience. Obviously, there’s, there’s another one that I can, uh, I won’t throw them under the bus, but, uh, that was one of the experiences. Uh, another one I had to actually reach out to the chief customer officer of the fortune 100, uh, retail company, because, uh, I had 20 interactions with the call center and they basically said I couldn’t do anything.

[00:18:43] And I had a warranty. Uh, the dishwasher was implemented wrong. And the water was coming back into the dishwasher. And that was great because then it was creating mold and there was all sorts of shenanigans on that then, but in less, I reached out to him after 20 interactions with the call center, chat, email, uh, everything, voice, they basically said, good luck until I reached out to them.

[00:19:10] They’re like, yeah, we can’t do anything. Within 48 hours. I had a brand new dishwasher in my warranty. And it wasn’t because they had a great process is because I figured out the best way that to solve my problem. And I shouldn’t have to do that because how many people were in my situation that just said, screw it.

[00:19:30] I’m going to a different company. And I’m taking all of my business with me of my future business with me. And it’s, it’s unfortunate that it has to come to that where I have to say. Not, it wasn’t even a nasty gram just said, Hey, here’s, here’s my experience. Like I even created like a three page PowerPoint and it just said, here’s the steps that I’ve done.

[00:19:50] You tell me how you should solve this problem. And immediately I got to like the executive escalation team in customer service and he’s like, how can I help? I’m here? I’m here for you. How do I have that experience every time that I’m here for you? Yeah. And I, and it’s,

[00:20:09]

Jason: it’s interesting to think of, you know, what an organization did, what they put in place or is not in place to just have those right.

[00:20:17] B, B how much are the frontline people empowered to succeed? Right. We look at

[00:20:22]

Nick: one of the best case studies

[00:20:23]

Jason: for this would be Zappos where you’re buying something online shoes. If you have any issues, call customer service, they literally, each person is empowered with a budget of a certain amount of money to just

[00:20:34]

Nick: fix whatever it is.

[00:20:37]

Jason: And provide a good experience, um, versus like what you had where you know, this disconnect from, I bought this thing too. I need some help too. I was promised that this should work too. I’ve got to go through a lot of efforts to even make things. Right. Which, you know, again, like you said, the challenges, a lot of companies, they’re not going to notice it when those people leave because a lot of people just leave silently and then.

[00:21:05] They don’t realize that the effect of their sales and customer experience.

[00:21:10]

Nick: Yeah. If I could go back to probably go back to, uh, the nineties, maybe it was before that, but, uh, uh, it’s the whole silent. Uh, all right. It’s, it’s, it’s gonna, it’s gonna stink. I don’t know where it came from, but, uh, it it’s going to hurt my business and eventually it’s going to be real slow and then it’s gonna hit me, uh, um, horrible analogy, but I think, um, At the end of the day, people really don’t really measure the retention of the organization because that’s not what they’re measured on.

[00:21:43] They don’t similar to customer experience. I mean, at the end of the day, if you’re not focusing on the customer experience, if you’re not leaning into the employee experience on, on both sides, they’re going to feel it. And you’re going to have retention issues on either. So let’s talk about that. Since

[00:22:01] you,

[00:22:01]

Jason: you brought it up, then we’ll go back to talking about the sales side.

[00:22:05] I was going to say, go back to bashing sales, but go back to the, talking about the sales side. And again, with the goal of making this successful for organizations that are listening to this. Um, but what do you, what, what have you seen work well or what kind of things in place for that employee experience?

[00:22:22] Because whether it’s sales, customer service, pretension, uh, back office, whatever it is. The customer or the employee experience will lead to the customer experience that you want, um, for your customers, right?

[00:22:37]

Nick: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, happy, happy employees, equal happy customers. And the question is what, what does that look like?

[00:22:48] It’s, it’s not this magic bullet. It’s not like, Hey, I have a kegerator in the corner and that’s going to be, you get to wear a Flamingo shirts on Friday. Like. That’s not the, the culture, the experience to drive customer experience, but what is the employee’s journey? What’s the employees. Um, what’s their, why on helping the customer?

[00:23:12] And it could be a director to, um, human interaction with another customer, but at the end of the day, regardless of how many. Employees or between you and the customer, it always ends with the customer. And so if you actually think through that and you understand how, what’s your, why in that, in that journey, you would assume that you would think different.

[00:23:34] You would assume that these people are coming in and they’re trying to solve a problem because we didn’t hit expectations. Customer service happens when customer experience fails, and if you can truly build a relationship, understand where they’re at today. And solve their problem in the least amount of effort, they’re going to have a better experience, but if you don’t have the people, the right people in the right place, right.

[00:24:00] It’s the book traction, are you, am I sitting in the right seat? Am I on the right bus? Am I facing the right direction? Uh, you can have the bus analogy of the canoe analogy or whatever, but. Is there the right people. Do you have the right processes in place to make it easy? And then it’s, I think technology just because I sell technology doesn’t mean, I think technology is first.

[00:24:23] If anything, it should be a conduit to solving business objectives or business issues or customers, experiences, not the other way around. And if you don’t have those in place, And consistently monitoring them through, through data. If it’s poll surveys or anything else, then you’re going to continue to go backwards.

[00:24:44] Um, but if you don’t have all of that in place, you’re not gonna improve your customer experience because they’re not set up for success

[00:24:52]

Jason: from what I’ve seen. And I want to know if you have any idea on how from this house. I feel like there’s a lot of companies that try to solve their operational problems, their people problems, their customer, their sales problems, whatever it is with technology first, if I just get the latest widget or another widget, something in sales enablement, customer enablement, then that will fix it for me.

[00:25:19] How often, or are you seeing that as what companies are asking for. Um, and then where does that fit into you selling? Let’s say technology and going, I can sell

[00:25:30]

Nick: you this, but we

[00:25:31]

Jason: got some other problems to fix first, or it’s not going to work because

[00:25:35]

Nick: everything’s on. Yeah, for, for us at the VA on the BDS side, it’s our goal to do a discovery first.

[00:25:43] It’s not necessarily saying, Hey, let me open up my black leather jacket, show you which contact centers we have and slam on in. And it’s, it’s truly understanding where they’re at. And then what are, what are the customer’s experience or what are their metrics that they’re trying to. What are they, what are their pain points?

[00:26:00] What this what’s the sentiment analysis, maybe that the customers are feeling, but to interview their frontline employees at the interview, the supervisors and let them let’s interview the executives too, because what are the, what are the executives trying to accomplish as well? If you can align all of those, then you can bring it back to technology.

[00:26:16] But the problem that I see, like you said, is people will. We’ll say, Hey, we need this solution. And I’m like, great. Tell me more about that. Like what, what makes you, instead of just saying why, like, why you’re an idiot, don’t do that. You know, that like go backwards a little bit, take a few more steps back and say, what, what makes you want to do that?

[00:26:39] Uh, tell me more about why you feel like that is the right solution. And if you actually just ask the right questions and sit back and shut up and listen to them. And let them be heard. And then you can give your opinion. If you just say, this is the best solution and you say, oh yeah, you’re right. A hundred percent, right.

[00:26:59] Let me implement it for you. And you don’t solve their problem, then you’re just like everybody else. You’re not actually the thought leader. You’re not actually the subject matter expert. You’re saying I’m going to make a sale. Then you’re just like every other sales.

[00:27:13]

Jason: Yeah, and such good advice, such good standard sales advice that I don’t, I still see companies and individuals struggle with where they think their job is to just talk about features and benefits and push, whatever they’re selling on everybody.

[00:27:26] They drank the Kool-Aid. They think everyone should just want it doesn’t matter if it’s actually gonna work for you, which goes back to kind of where we started in this conversation. And. Yeah, and I, and I can see now why you’re talking about your sales cycles being so long because you’re doing that discovery or going through that whole process.

[00:27:41] Obviously people listening or watching this might think, well, I don’t want to have a one to three year sales cycle. I’ve got a one month or a one week sales cycle. I mean, take it and make it relative to what you’re doing, but fundamentally if you’re selling something, especially as a technology piece, here’s what I know.

[00:27:58] And please confirm this, Nick is that if you’re just selling your technology to whoever says they think they want it, then there is a much lower chance that it’s actually going to succeed. If those other parts aren’t in the place, like you said, the people process and then technology as something else.

[00:28:18]

Nick: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, if you’re not solving their problem and you’re not staying with them to, uh, fix the technology that you sold. Then you’re you’re, you’re, they’re going to jump to somebody else. Most of my opportunities today. It’s so interesting. What 20% of the market, I don’t know the exact stats, but have gone to the cloud today.

[00:28:39] Most of the, my opportunities who companies who have come to me to help them solve their cloud contact center solutions have already, again, gone to the cloud once. And so how do I. What does that mean from, for me? I think they are, they’re getting, they’re drinking the Kool-Aid and they’re getting bamboozled by somebody that says we’re the best.

[00:29:00] We’re the greatest. And here’s why all these other guys are not good. And then they leave. And so it’s, it’s a continuous cycle and it’s not healthy and it needs to be.

[00:29:13]

Jason: Yeah. Uh, and I can totally see that. I mean, and then the challenge with that is like, especially this is for the sales side, for people who are in sales is you might think, oh, that’s great.

[00:29:23] Cause they, they already understand cloud and they did it and this’ll be easier. Right. Or they already have signed up for this kind of thing. So this will be easier. Right? The challenge is, is that they didn’t have a good experience if they thought that it was a waste of money. If they feel. Cloud technology is the problem.

[00:29:39] Or they think that I signed up for a gym before and I, it didn’t work out and the gym is the problem. And it’s like, okay, now you’re trying to get them to sign up for a new gym. You’re actually sometimes up against a bigger wall because they have this negative experience, right. Or this waste

[00:29:57]

Nick: of money.

[00:29:58] Yeah. I mean, just think if, again, I have the worst analogies in the world, but just pretend that somebody was a, uh, some dog was an awesome dog, but a horrible owner. And they were like, Hey, I’m going to put this dog up in the kennel and put off her adoption because. I don’t need this anymore. I don’t want to deal with it.

[00:30:19] And then this new owner shows up and they’re like, Hey, I’m going to solve all your problems. I’m going to give you the best toys, the best bed. And by the way, there’s a pool in my backyard. If you want to jump in that and the dog, like, oh, like, who are you? Like, are you going to hit me? Is, are you going to feed me on time?

[00:30:34] Are you going to Kendall me for 24 hours a day? Like. That takes a journey and it takes education. It takes time, and there’s not going to be a time regardless of the technology that sometimes that you just have to take that time and educate them and answer any questions and be there for them. And maybe even have empathy in the moment.

[00:30:52] And then at the right time solve their problems. Where do you see. The

[00:31:01]

Jason: responsibility or, or who, or where in the organization or how do you make it successful to look at the call center? And this is sales to service, to everything, to look at it holistically and want to like integrate as much as possible and look at it instead of the silo, right?

[00:31:19] Instead of customer service leader saying, I want this and sales saying, I want that. And everyone is just totally.

[00:31:27]

Nick: Yeah, it still happens. But I would say that historically the call center or the contact center used to be a cost center or the necessary evil. It is now somebody who once said recently that the contact center is the front door to your business now more than ever.

[00:31:45] And it’s all of the things that it’s, uh, all of its tentacles are getting pushed into everywhere else, all the channels, all the social, the listening, the analytics. And so the more that customer experience is getting pushed out, the more customer experience departments or marketing is saying, wait, you have, you have the data that I want.

[00:32:06] You’ve had it this entire time. I just need to access it and, and, and change it and adapt it and make it clean. And then turn into a story so that I can get more budget or solve more problems. And the contact center leaders like, well, yeah, you just haven’t asked for it or operations or sales. Hey sales, by the way, here’s the things that are, that we’re dropping the ball on.

[00:32:28] Here’s some of the pain points that our current customers are feeling, or that have had along that journey of customer successes, even saying the same thing of, Hey, on that 60 day journey or that window where we’ve helped them on that journey. Here’s some of the pain points that they had that they felt, or they felt maybe that you bamboozled them alone.

[00:32:46] Or you weren’t clear on their expectations. So constantly bringing it back from what they heard and, and kind of having that full cycle that post-mortem at the end of the conversation at the end of the implementation, um, and saying, this is where we dropped the ball and here’s how we’re going to improve.

[00:33:03] But the, the, the context center in general has so much data that can get pushed into every single the operations, the, the marketing team, uh, the customer experience team. Uh, you name it. They all have the ability to gain access and add valuable information from the contact center. So I would highly recommend everybody kind of leaning in saying, Hey, this is the information that I’m trying to solve for.

[00:33:30] Do you guys have it, or can we work with you to do it

[00:33:35]

Jason: for the organizations you’ve seen that have been successful at doing that holistically sharing data back and forth, supporting each other. W what does that take from a leadership standpoint? Or is there anything that they have in place or have created in their organization to foster that

[00:33:55]

Nick: there is a couple of organizations come to mind?

[00:33:59] I think individuals kind of like what I said about getting measured and paid or commissioned on specific things. So if I’m in marketing or if I’m in sales or if I’m an operations, I call it the Heisman approach where it’s the football is, is their department and they just kind of stiff arm everybody else.

[00:34:18] And you’re like, well, if you’re going to try to bring me a problem and I’m not measured on it, or I’m not bonused on that, then I’m good. Like, I’m just going to give you the stiff arm and I’m going to move as fast as I can in the direction that can solve my problem and get paid for it. If you break down those silos and every, you know, maybe you have.

[00:34:39] You’re saying, okay, well you’re in sales or you’re in operations. You’re in customer experience, you’re in marketing, whatever it is. Here’s your purse portion of what you’re measured on when it comes to the customer experience. Um, if the senior leadership is constantly talking about talking about it, not just.

[00:34:57] The pixie destined fairytales, not just the, Hey, I heard about customer experience. So, uh, on this last webinar and one of my peers is doing it. So I think we should probably put 50 bucks towards it. It’s not going to sell them anybody’s problem, or if you’re not actually measuring on it, or if you’re not continuing to talk about it.

[00:35:14] And you’re saying here’s some of the things that we’ve solved for, or here’s some of the pain points that we have and what we’re going to do on that journey. And it’s going to fail. If you can, continuing to submerge yourself. And focus on the customer and you kind of break down those silos and saying, Hey, here’s what we’re going to do.

[00:35:33] Uh, there’s, there’s all sorts of Amazon. I think with all their senior leadership, once a year has to sit in the contact center for, for one day and listen to the conversations and they can kind of see what what’s going on. What’s not going on. Some, some organizations have an empty seat at the table, and that’s the seat of the most important person in the room, which is the customer.

[00:35:54] Uh, there is, are other organizations that then. When you, you talked about the getting the latest and greatest technology at the end of the day. If you’re, if you’re asking that question to the customer, say that they want this, or will this help the customer, that some of those things that you just want to keep in mind at the back of your head, or maybe it’s the front of your front of your mouth, where you’re saying, this is what we’re going to do, and this is how it’s going to solve the customer’s problem.

[00:36:20] Not just because it’s a, it’s a cool gadget that I want him. Got it. I

[00:36:25]

Jason: love it. Um,

[00:36:29]

Nick: what do you see as

[00:36:31]

Jason: the near future for call center sales, operations, customer experience, you know, both of those, um, obviously we’re in the final quarter of 20, 21. Like what do you see for the rest of this year? 2022, uh, from the customer side, their preferences technology regulation.

[00:36:54] What is, what is the press one for Nick’s crystal ball saying for, uh, you know, what’s coming near.

[00:37:00]

Nick: Yeah. So if I can get the, the, the lights down and I can get the crystal ball in front of me and kind of the fog coming over, my, my noggin there’s customers’ expectations are constantly getting more and more demanding.

[00:37:17] Um, and so what I see organizations do. Is how am I taking all of this, um, segmented information, segmented channels, segmented, um, applications in streamlining it for a better experience for both the employee and for the customer, because the more that you can dig down and solve those problems and focus on the customer and the employee, the, the more that you’re going to have success, the.

[00:37:49] They’re going to continue to find ways to say, oh, I want to be on this channel. And I want to be an Instagram. I want to be on a S um, a WhatsApp. I want to be on text, and I want you to meet me there on the challenge of my choice and solve my problem inside that channel with the least amount of effort.

[00:38:07] And if you don’t, I know somebody who will, and it’s, it’s your silent, it’s a competitor, and you’re going to, they’re going to go away. It’s easier now, more than ever. To move to your competitor, to, for your customers to move to your competitor. And they just will, because the, it it’s, it’s no longer, Hey, uh, my, my roommate or my family member bought tide soap when I was younger.

[00:38:30] So I’m going to buy tide soap for the rest of my life. It’s tied. So pay you customer service. In a row in a, in a sea of 4,000 people, you gave me a bad experience. And for that, I’m going to leave your organization. Even though I was there, I was with you guys for the last 20 years. So stay vigilant and focusing on the customer and finding ways to solve their problem and the least amount of effort in the channel of their choice.

[00:38:59] And,

[00:38:59]

Jason: and I think that channel of your choice omni-channel approach, uh, definitely applies to the sales side. So for sales leaders, listening to this or watching it as well, like how do they want to start the process of buying? And then there’s, how do they want service? And you said something earlier and, and

[00:39:16]

Nick: hopefully, hopefully it’s, uh, a

[00:39:19]

Jason: line that you know, that you can repeat because I want people to hear it again right now.

[00:39:22] You said something like customer service is the beginning where customer experience phase.

[00:39:28]

Nick: Yeah, customer service starts we’re customer experience. Our customer service starts where customer experience fails. And because if you’re not meeting the expectation of the customer, Nobody calls into a call center, a contact center and says, Hey, Jason, I just want to let you know, I’m having an awesome day.

[00:39:45] Uh, yet service is awesome. Your, your product is amazing. And, uh, you know, I’ll just talk to you. Talk to you tomorrow. It’s air high five. It’s it’s all about you drop the ball. I’m going to start listening to Rocky music before I call, and I’m getting ready to rip you for the next two minutes and you’re going to take it because you’ve taken it for the last 30 days.

[00:40:06] And I’m going to try to get everything. I’m going to try to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. And it’s, it’s unfortunate, but if customer service doesn’t educate customer experience and bring it back full cycle and say, Hey, we’ve had 17 of these calls. Where were you guys where the organization didn’t meet expectations.

[00:40:29] Maybe we should do something about that. Cause I’m, I’m tired of getting berated every day by the.

[00:40:38]

Jason: One final question, because I think it’s so important, especially in this climate that we have. So we’re recording this in September, 2021. Uh, one of the biggest challenge I see with so many organizations, both on sales and service just in general right now is recruiting. And retention. It’s hiring people.

[00:40:58] It’s finding good people who want to work and then it’s keeping them because just like what you said about brand loyalty, depending on how people are feeling, there’s so many companies that need. Uh, company loyalty. It feels really low right now. If you can even get people in the door, what are you seeing as some solutions or companies who are doing it?

[00:41:18] Well, especially in the call center sales contact center space, where, you know, you’re looking for a certain person, then also you’re not, you don’t have an unlimited budget for.

[00:41:31]

Nick: That’s right for salaries. Yeah, it’s actually funny. So I I’m going to be interviewing a guy and I just, I just read his book and it’s called work quick.

[00:41:39] Uh, so it’s Steve, uh, cat again, he was the chief first chief human resource officer at LinkedIn. And he’s like, you know, at the end of the day, It’s it’s, it’s not necessarily, Hey, here’s all these gadgets here is a, a coffee mug and a, a vast with our logo on it. So you should stay with us for about 10, 15 years, right?

[00:42:03] It’s where are you at today? And at the end of the day, he, he even mentioned. Customers or specifically in the customer service space, if you get 25 cents more per hour, and they’re going to give you a better process, or they’re going to provide a better experience for you on the technology side and reduce effort.

[00:42:22] So you’re not looking at 27 apps trying to solve a customer’s problem and, you know, delaying them and saying, Hey, how’s the weather in, uh, Dallas, while you are trying to fumble your next application, but he’s like help them. From where they’re at, help them understand where they want to go as a individual, as a professional.

[00:42:44] And then if it’s with your organization or not help them. And, and what he’s mentioned multiple times in the book and is it’s not necessarily, Hey, I want to keep you around. It’s what’s the old analogy. What, uh, what happens if I train somebody up and they leave and somebody is like, well, what happens if I don’t train the person up?

[00:43:04] And they stay like, that’s, that’s hilarious, but he’s like, make sure that you build successful people and you continue to adapt and build the 18. And if they, hopefully they stay, but at the end of the day, you’re helping organization or you’re helping individuals grow. And it’s tough. I mean, yeah, you can throw out, um, like I said, the, the flamingos on Friday, and I think that is a fun touch if you really want to or whatever that is.

[00:43:31] But I think it said an individual level to, uh, what is what’s important to that specific. And how can you potentially meet their demands? Hey, you know what, every Wednesday at four 30, my son has a soccer game. Okay. So how can I, what does that mean to that individual and how can I help them solve that problem?

[00:43:53] And then if I said every Wednesday at four o’clock, I hope, you know, you got a 26 minute drive to the soccer game. I know you can make it, you know, uh, tell me about what the, what the score was on Wednesday or on Thursday. It’s a different mindset than saying, Hey, so my workforce management application says that you you’ve missed every Wednesday.

[00:44:15] You’ve left every Wednesday at four. And what that does to me, and that changes their mindset. And you’re like, well, w what, what do they really care? Am I just a number? And if you, if your employees feel like a number, your customers are gonna feel like.

[00:44:32]

Jason: Well, and so here’s what I love about that. And this is where I take this too, as well is, uh, and I used to save this as the closing line of my previous podcast, which is everything in life is sales and what literally you and I were talking about.

[00:44:46] And you were focusing on in our conversation about selling, which you do, uh, and good sales people do, which is asking questions, discovering. Listening being quiet, like using that information to help solve their actual problem. Instead of just assuming everyone wants to buy from you and pushing what you’ve got is you actually take

[00:45:07]

Nick: that same

[00:45:08]

Jason: approach because everything is sales and you move that into leadership.

[00:45:12] And if you did that same thing that you would do for customers in a proper sales process for your employees, which is what’s important to them, what do they want? They’re an individual. How do I solve their problems? How do I make them successful? My product, which is a job. Um, it’s literally the same principles.

[00:45:30] And what’s interesting is when I see organizations that don’t do sales well, or they’re doing it in the classic mode, then generally they treat their employees the same way because they just

[00:45:39]

Nick: think everything is a,

[00:45:40]

Jason: here’s the way to do it. And I already know what you want and it doesn’t matter what you think you need.

[00:45:45]

Nick: Yeah. If you’re selling widgets and if you’re treating your employees like a widget, just to solve a problem, you’re a manager. You’re not. If you are continuing to find ways to engage with your customers or with your employees, you understand what their, what their needs are and why, why it’s important to them.

[00:46:05] Then you can kind of reverse engineer that to meet their expectations. And somebody once said, I think it was Shep Hyken customer service legend. He said, um, oh, actually I think it was, it was as Eisler. Um, he said, uh, You don’t have to be amazing and customer service, you just have to beat the DMV. And I thought that was funny.

[00:46:28] Like you, you don’t just, just be better than average than, than, than everybody else. And you’re going to be just fine. But if at the end of the day, like you said, just, just listen to what people have to say. If they’re your customers or your employees, here’s the amount. And then don’t just say, okay, well, thanks for saying that, but do something about it, acknowledge, understand, and then resolve their problems.

[00:46:49] I love it. Oh, we have that same

[00:46:51]

Jason: saying, uh, in, uh, surfing and scuba diving, which is you don’t have to be faster than the shark. You just have to be faster than your buddy. Um, so it’s, you know, it’s, it’s pretty much the same thing, right? Like I love it. I don’t have to be, I don’t have to be faster

[00:47:04]

Nick: than a shark.

[00:47:04] I should have some faster than you. Uh, I’m now using. Yes. It also applies to bears,

[00:47:10]

Jason: uh, and, uh, all kinds of all kinds of things chasing you. Um, so I think that’s an awesome way to end, you know, wrapping up at tying in all of the sales, the customer experience side. I mentioned it before for people who want to check it out, your podcast is amazing.

[00:47:25] It’s press one for Nick, which is the number one, press one for nick.com/podcast. Also, if they want to find out about the call center cloud contact center solutions, the things that you’re talking to. I know that website for you is go V D s.com. Um, I know that they can find you on LinkedIn because that’s where we’ve chatted many times anywhere else people can find you or some content or anything that you’re putting out there that you’re excited that.

[00:47:51]

Nick: Yeah. I mean, where I appreciate that anywhere where podcasts are played, search four, press one for Nick, if you want to learn more, like he said, he’s focused on customer service and customer experience. We, we bring on, uh, all sorts of leaders and, and, um, you know, I think we’re on episode 98, 99, something like that.

[00:48:08] So looking forward. Yeah, it’s, it’s been, uh, been a blast. Uh, there’s a lot of lessons learned. Um, we can, we can have a whole nother podcast about lessons learned on podcasts, but, you know, uh, any, you know, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I’m starting to get pretty active on, on YouTube as well.

[00:48:26] So feel free to reach out to me. Uh, uh, if you can’t find me, um, then you spelled it wrong. Uh, so, uh, take a look in the show notes and, and, uh, find me and happy to. Awesome. I

[00:48:39]

Jason: appreciate it, Nick. Thanks for coming on here. And, uh, doing what I thought would happen for us, which is talking about customer service sales and blending it, and hopefully helping people succeed while us having some fun at it.

[00:48:50] So I appreciate you and what you’re doing for that side and organizations in general. And I appreciate you coming on here and sharing with this audience. So thank you for.

[00:48:58]

Nick: You bet, man had a blast. Thanks for the opportunity. Did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster.

[00:49:09] Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations. If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating and review also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center space, we appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, fam.

[00:49:28] And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us@cutterconsultinggroup.com. .

[00:00:00] Jason: Hey, what’s going on, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the scalable call center sales podcast. Today with me, my guest is Jeff Baietto from Injoy global. So he is the CEO and co-founder of Injoy global host of the Injoy success podcast and co-creator of revolutionary personal growth platform.

[00:00:21] The, my challenge creator. This is going to be fun because he has a master’s in spiritual psychology background in the video game industry, uh, as well as years of experience in executive coaching, personal development. And essentially he’s taken all of that and built a platform that gamifies. Knowledge, education transformation, all kinds of things.

[00:00:43] Uh, and so we’re going to talk about how this applies to the call center to sales, to inside sales, to basically everybody. Uh, Jeff, welcome to the scalable call center sales

[00:00:53]

Jeff: podcast. Thanks Jason. It’s so great to be here.

[00:00:56]

Jason: All right. So this is a podcast for call centers for inside telephones sales leaders, business owners.

[00:01:04] Right. You know that, um, and in most of those situations, which, you know, they’re some kind of game of education in place. Usually the classic is here’s a spiff or a contest close these deals, or do this many phone calls today. And I’ll give you $5 or a lottery ticket, or I’ll give you this, or you can win a TV.

[00:01:23] And, you know, they’re driving these incentives, whether it’s daily, weekly, quarterly, monthly, you know, putting deals and stats on the whiteboard. Like that’s the classic, let’s just say gamification mode, even though it’s not really in that sense. And of course there’s different apps, but let’s talk about kind of your background, what you saw as a need for development for individuals, for companies.

[00:01:46] Well, it’s a platform for individuals. Now, you started in corporate life with enjoy and, um, you know, where that makes the shift and helps people out there.

[00:01:57]

Jeff: Yeah, thank you. So you, you know, when it comes to people, um, no matter what job they’re in and salespeople, you know, sales is tough. So, uh, there’s an added layer of challenge and certain things that can support sales people, but people fundamentally want for things to really engage and to bring their best self forward.

[00:02:14] And those four things across all industries and all professions are, they want to feel valued. They want to feel connected to others. They want to feel like what they’re doing is contributing to a bigger picture and they want to feel like they’re growing professionally and personally over time that they can stop and look back and say, I’m a better version of myself today than I was six months ago or a year ago.

[00:02:35] So why that’s important is to the degree that you can create that environment, you can bring out the best in your people. And I think we all know, especially when it comes to sales, there’s usually 20% of the people who are doing 80% of the sales. And the goal is if. Some of the people in the 60% in that middle group who are doing okay, if you can get them to just, up-level just a little bit, that can be exponential growth for your business.

[00:02:57] So when you’re catering to what our basic fundamental needs are to bring our best self forward, it’s much easier to, you know, elevate the masses, not just your top performers, but everybody so that you get maximum performance from, from all of your, uh, all of your teams.

[00:03:15]

Jason: Well, and I love that approach because I see a lot of leaders in organizations, let’s say sales leaders, sales managers, just focusing on that top group or trying to find more of the top group, right.

[00:03:27] That 20% that are doing 80% of the deals that work. Um, but you’re right. I mean, if you can move the middle up even just a little bit, maybe they’re never going to be the superstars, but if they can do better consistently, right. Because one of the things. Sales, you see a lot of people go up and down, which is tough on the business, tough on the person, mentally, emotionally morale for the team.

[00:03:51] If you can, even just even out the ups and downs, like over a day or week or month, whatever that cycle is, then I’ve seen that have huge. Differences for the organization and the bottom

[00:04:02]

Jeff: line. Absolutely. I mean, to your, can I just to your point? Yeah. You know, a lot of times, if people would analyze what’s differentiating the great from the good it’s consistency, the great are performing consistently.

[00:04:15] Over time, not just having one good month or one good week, they’re consistently performing. So I think for when it comes to sales that we always have to just kind of back up and look at it and say, what’s different between this group and this group. And really, it’s not the training. Everyone’s getting the same training.

[00:04:30] It’s not the tools. Everyone has access to the same tool. So what is it? And oftentimes if you ask the top salespeople, what are you doing different? It’s just like, well, I do. Every day and they’ve got a ritual and they’ve made them habits. And that’s what we found is we can help people create new habits, which typically is very hard.

[00:04:46] But if you can, then people get the benefits. Of upleveling themselves. And they can see that in real time because it’s usually behavior is the precursor to performance. Right. So if we can just get them to do the behaviors that all modeling that’s Tony Robbins is big deal. If we could model more of the behavior of your top performers, then everyone, you know, then that’ll raise everyone’s game, even though they might not ever be that top person, they can all get better.

[00:05:12] We can all get.

[00:05:14]

Jason: So, how have you found obviously with the platform that you’ve built, but where does that help build those habits and the discipline, especially in terms of, you know, the classic debate of how many days it takes to build a habit, right? 21 30, 66, a hundred, never, you know, how have you approached that with your background and then what you do.

[00:05:38]

Jeff: Yeah, I think it’s important to realize those are a lot of there’s a lot of numbers thrown out there in terms of how long it takes the form of habit. But the reality is if anyone’s ever started going to the gym and that was a commitment, it doesn’t matter if you went for two weeks or three weeks or four weeks, if you stop going.

[00:05:53] You’ve lost it, right? Like there’s a lot of times I was a runner for a while. I ran every day for years now I don’t run. I don’t have that as a habit like we can. So the point of this is, is personal development and professional development is an ongoing game, right? It’s something that we do have to look at making incremental changes that we can actually continue.

[00:06:12] Long-term and the day we stop doing them, we’re at risk of backtracking, right? So this is, it is like working out. We can’t go to the gym one time in January and feel like we’re going to be in shape for the rest of the year. This is something that takes me. We have to make it a part of our daily routine.

[00:06:28] And that’s why we use. You know, challenges as a way to get people into the momentum of seeing what’s possible. And once they start to get a taste of a better them, better results like that, that’s its own reward. Right? So we use a lot of tricks on the front end to trick the brain to make it easy, to start doing something new that we weren’t doing yet.

[00:06:49] Because that can be uncomfortable regardless of how good it is for us. But once we start to see the benefit of that, and we have some encouragement, we have all that, that environmental support that I mentioned earlier, that people are feeling valued for their efforts. They’re seeing that they’re connected to others.

[00:07:03] They’re not alone. Um, they’re seeing that what they’re doing, no matter how small or how, how new they are, is contributing to a bigger picture and that they’re growing. When that happens, they want more of that. And as they want more of that, they continue to do what got them, that feeling in the. Which gives them the best chance of creating a lifelong, a lifelong practice and habit, if that makes sense.

[00:07:24] So it’s not just again, doing something for, we do 30 day challenges and then you’re done and you’re good forever. Most of our successful clients do they do a challenge every quarter. They give. Uh, way that people can get engaged, start practicing, see if they can keep it going on their own. And then they give them another, another dose the next quarter.

[00:07:43] And as that continues, people do find themselves ebbing and flowing, but less, they start to see like, oh, I’m going to keep this and they can keep that habit longer. Um, and they fall back, uh, shallower. Like they don’t, they don’t lose as much when they’re off, then they come back in better. So it is a, it’s an ongoing process is what I want, you know?

[00:08:03]

Jason: Yeah. And if we look at that workout habit or any habit, there’s always times always cause it’s life where you just can’t be a hundred percent, right. Something is going to happen. Uh, it’s really tough to be a hundred percent on, pretty much any habit that you’re trying to build. The key is that recovery, right?

[00:08:20] Like some things I’ve heard is it’s okay to miss one day at the gym. Don’t miss too. Right. It’s okay to miss one day. This thing, but don’t miss too, because then you’ll really start to slip, which I think that’s part of what your addressing and what you’re seeing again with the platform. Now you said a moment ago that there’s some tricks that you do upfront.

[00:08:41] What are those tricks? Because I know building that momentum, getting somebody to go to the gym, not just the first EV you, most people are excited that first day. It’s like the fourth day when the resorts aren’t there. It’s so you’re sore tired. Like, how do you. Use those tricks that, you know, work with the human brain to get them to start and stop.

[00:09:01]

Jeff: Yep. So if we look at how, how most people want to create change, let’s, let’s stay in the kind of working out arena. Like most people are like, I want six pack abs, or I want to lose 20 pounds. Like, it’s this big goal. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. And so they go at it all gung ho and day four they’re in pain.

[00:09:17] Like it hurts, right. So much harder to do something the next day. When, what you felt the day before was pain and you didn’t see the results. Right? So what we have to look at is when we’re looking at setting a goal, we have to know that the 20 pounds or the, you know, the, the next level in our. That’s not a tomorrow thing.

[00:09:35] There’s going to, you know, it’s going to be incremental, but over time. And I think that’s one of those great quotes people, Val, you know, usually overestimate what they can get done in one year, but vastly underestimate what they can get done in 10 and to some varying degree is in terms of time. But the idea here is if you’re feeling that every time you do something.

[00:09:51] If you bite off too much, um, at the beginning working out again, I used to be a runner. I, I thought I should get back into running when I went to run three miles, which was easy for me in the past, but I hadn’t run for a long time. I was sore. I knew I couldn’t do it. I was beating myself up mentally. Like none of this was good and my chance of continuing that was almost zero.

[00:10:10] But if I would set a small goal, just walk around. Walk around like, just something I knew I could do. No problem. I start to get the other side of it, which is the, when I did it. Oh, if I did that, I can probably do one more thing. Now, each thing is starting to build momentum. So the idea here is when we use gamification, one of the.

[00:10:29] Celebrate small, the small incremental wins. Most of us only celebrate the big stuff that happens in our life. And if we’re being honest, we’re not even that good at celebrating that. So what they’ve found from neuroscience is when they study the brain, the brain doesn’t actually distinguish that much from a big win in a small win.

[00:10:45] So if we start to celebrate the small wins, we get all almost all the same physiological and neurological benefits. As we do when we celebrate the big stuff, but we get them all the time. So if we start looking at the things we are actually doing, we made that extra call. We followed up with someone, we did, whatever those things were that we should be counting as wins.

[00:11:03] Those were positive actions in the direction of our goal, but we typically skip over because they’re either we take them for granted or we feel they’re too small to celebrate. That’s one thing when we start doing that, which our platform like gives a simple way to celebrate when. When you do that, and you start looking for small things on a daily basis, two things happen.

[00:11:20] One, you get all those benefits of feeling the benefits of having a win, but it also accelerates getting to the bigger wins, celebrating small gets to the bigger, faster. That’s just one of the tips.

[00:11:31]

Jason: And I think those micro wins are, are really important in, in any goal. And also looking at it small and like, Wherever your goal is right.

[00:11:40] Let’s say losing the weight or, you know, becoming a sales superstar, closing X amount of deals or making this amount of money. It’s not instant. There is no overnight success. There’s no get rich quick. There’s no, you know, instant diet, weight loss thing. It’s going to take time. And again, the key is to play that long game that I found when, especially when you’re talking about sales, like you want to get there.

[00:12:01] It’s about doing these things every day, building the habit, but also building the pipeline, building the momentum. Now I know the trade off with that because I’ve led enough sales teams and also witnessed enough. Other managers is the tendency to not want to celebrate somebody’s small wins. When maybe they’re not performing enough or what you need is bigger.

[00:12:22] So imagine the scenario, Jeff, where I’m a sales manager and I need my sales person to close three deals a day and it’s noon. And they made 50 calls, which could be a micro wind. Hey, you reached out, you sent this many quotes, but we’re losing the game. And so how do you balance that? Or what have you learned?

[00:12:41] Like it’s halftime in the game we’re losing, but everyone’s trying really hard. What do you do about that? Like what are you selling.

[00:12:49]

Jeff: Yep. So good question. And you know, I think again, most top sales organizations or top sales people know that if certain things are being done, if the person is in the right job, right.

[00:13:02] If, if they’re, if they’re a good sales person or have the capability of being a good sales person, if they do these things, results should follow. There are some precursors. They know that if you do this, you know, typically, um, now there are some intangible. Um, which I think is also something to just reiterate, right?

[00:13:19] Not everyone’s built to be a salesperson. So I think that’s one thing, not everyone, you know, it doesn’t matter what you do is going to be an excellent salespeople, but people who are drawn to that, people who do want to make that a career are in it and just want to improve, they have that drive. They have that.

[00:13:34] Most top salespeople would say, now here’s the key to go from here to here. And if you do these things that might not happen today, right? It might not by noon. You still might have a bad day, but you won’t have a lot of bad days in a row. And I think that that’s the important thing for the sales managers to realize is if the entire team is doing more of the things.

[00:13:53] That they know if everyone was doing will definitely increase results. Then over time you start to have clear data, this person, they’re just not a salesperson they’re doing it. They’re just not a sales person. These people are now doing it and they’re seeing the impact. Great. Now they just needed a little nudge, a little support.

[00:14:10] And then my are my superstars. They’re still my superstars. So I think that’s the one thing. If people are doing it and they’re in the right position, then results always go up over time. It might not be on a Wednesday. Within the month within the quarter, unless again, the really the conversation is this just isn’t the right fit.

[00:14:30]

Jason: So one thing that came to my mind just now, and this is kind of related, but kind of not related is the fact that we, as people can only control activities, right? We can’t control results. We can control. How many days we go to the gym, how much you work out, how many calories you try to burn, but we can’t control how much weight we lose, right?

[00:14:51] Like everybody’s different. There’s a lot of different factors. But if you put in enough effort, you should write that formula that you’re talking about in sales, I can control the result, the activities. I can make this many calls a day. I can send this many quotes a month, whatever that is. And that should, if I plant enough seeds, it will equal the fruit that I want.

[00:15:09] Um, in your experience and or with the challenges that you’ve seen successful and the people successful, what’s that balance of celebrating activities that you can control and results you can’t, but those wins that are on the results side, right? The fruits of the labor.

[00:15:27]

Jeff: Yup. So in our current world situation, the.

[00:15:31] I looked at that and measured. And like, we, we know there’s no question of results. We either hit it or we didn’t hit it. We either, you know, we either reached it or didn’t so results are easily. And often the only thing that we look at, but no, one’s confused as to whether or not. You know, got the results.

[00:15:48] So the other thing that behavior is really the thing that, that if we’re going to focus on something that we can control and that we can move in a direction, that’s where we want to focus, because we, we know the results we’re watching those. We’d definitely like that’s clear yes or no black or white, but when you start focusing on the behaviors, which you can control, yes.

[00:16:07] You might be saying like, oh, that’s a small wind that didn’t really like, that’s who cares. That’s not a big thing. It’s not the point. The big, the point is, is that. Triggered something in that person’s brain. To celebrate and put them in a more positive state. They’re a better sales person. Now, the mind psychology of this, they call it positive psychology as a, as a branch of psychology.

[00:16:27] That studies how good we are when we’re in a positive state of mind versus a negative. Now, everybody gets that they’re better when they’re in a good mood. When they’re in a positive state, they’re more patient. They, they, they take more risks. They learn better. All of those things we know intuitively, but just how much better is what the science shows us.

[00:16:43] And it’s not a little bit, we are exponentially better at everything when we’re in a positive state of mind. And the key of that is, is that working with neuroscientists, they’ve found that there are some simple exercises that no matter where people fall on the continuum, we can all learn to move ourselves into a positive state, more frequently and stay there longer with practice.

[00:17:01] Now, when we’re in a positive state sales go up by a lot, that’s it like that the science is not a gray, you know, everything, every single business metric goes up considerably when your team is in a positive state. That’s the only thing I changed, not new training, not anything else. Just getting them into a positive state.

[00:17:21] They make the extra call. They do the relationship building that they need. Like, it’s just all of a sudden, it’s just there, the person that they need to be to close the deal, to build the relationship, to follow up and all those things. I think we all know that again, the difference between these people, what is it?

[00:17:36] There’s something that we in the past said, oh, it’s these things, but we all know if we would model what those people are doing. We would start to get. And so what we’re saying is focused on behavior. That the people who are doing, whether they do it like totally naturally, and they, they’re not even aware of doing it, but these are the qualities of great salespeople.

[00:17:57] These are the qualities of great people, of highly productive people. When you start modeling that. Sure. It might not seem in the moment that that’s a big enough winner. It’s not a big deal. Um, but the balance is if they do that, then over time, you’re, you’re looking at data. These people are doing these things.

[00:18:12] Is that map. And when you have data to base it against, then you can start tweaking. Now you’re playing with a formula. You’re not guessing. Do we bring in this speaker? Do we do this training and hoping that that does something you’re watching their behaviors. Did it translate to the result you want it?

[00:18:27] If not, if you change the behavior and you keep tweaking your formula until you figure out, yeah, this works 90% of the time. Great. Now you’re dialed in and you have a serious advantage in your business versus a group. That’s not using a system for this.

[00:18:42]

Jason: So one of the things that I know from organizations is that if someone’s going to do a challenge or someone’s going to be open to things like this, or training or coaching or feedback or wanting to grow, it has to come from within the organization, right?

[00:18:58] Like everyone’s gotta be on board or it’s gotta be a part of their culture. What do you see as determining factors? You know, with where you started with this platform and your program, it was for companies to run internal challenges with their teams. What have you seen, or maybe on the flip side, what companies have you spoken with in the past?

[00:19:22] Where after you dove into their culture, you said this just isn’t going to work. Like, trust me, like we get start this, but your people aren’t on board. Like what factors, what characteristics, what company called. Must be in place for everyone or the majority of people to want to. Yeah.

[00:19:40]

Jeff: Kind of a challenge.

[00:19:40] We know that upfront, like, because the leadership, the people we’re talking to about this, if they don’t think it’s a good idea, or if they’re not on. That’s a non-starter right. Um, you can’t bring something in for your people that you don’t get, or aren’t a believer in if you’re not going to lead by example, like that’s a, non-starter one of the examples I’ll give is we were working with Thomson Reuters.

[00:20:01] Uh, they have 1200 salespeople, so that was the pilot group that they gave us. They’re all over the. A couple of the things they S they were excited. The team, um, that was bringing us in was excited because they were the culture team and they had just, they’ve been doing trainings. They had lots of great feedback from all the divisions in their organization on the training.

[00:20:18] So this was going to be supporting that culture training. And, um, but they said to us, they said, well, gamification, you know, we’re going to give you the sales team because one they’re self-starters. So they don’t really need. You know, the, they don’t need the motivation of competing against other people.

[00:20:33] And then we highly recommend having prizes and making it fun. Not again. I mean, and I’ll share a little bit about that. There’s just, again, the, the, to, to trick the brain into feeling like we’re playing something, not another thing I have to do, but they said, well, they’re not going to really care about a gift card or other stuff.

[00:20:48] They make plenty of money, but if it works for them, we’ll do it everywhere because this will be like, so we did it and they rolled it out and here are the key things, their VP of sales. Is awesome. Like he is charismatic and he got it. He’s like, you know, 1200 people. I barely see. Like there, they come in once a year for an annual sales meeting, but otherwise they’re kind of on their own.

[00:21:09] Um, this could be really great as a community builder. This’ll be a great way for me just to be kind of seeing what’s going on. So they ran it out, they ran it. And then what they found is one, the salespeople love to just be connected. So these were self-starters, but it still is nice to see that or to feel and be reminded.

[00:21:26] I’m part of a big organization. You know, and I have a lot of other colleagues that are going through the same things. I’m going through some wins, some not wins, but it’s nice to be able to support them. So they found this community element of the challenge, really powerful for what otherwise was just again, a once or twice a year, annual gathering of this.

[00:21:44] The other thing that they found is yes, the salespeople are typically pretty positive people that are self-starters, but it was nice to have something on their phone that was coming and it was branded and it was just on-message and on-point for whatever product or topic or theme that they were all working on together.

[00:21:58] And it was another unifier around content. So the VP could say like, I’m getting my message to everyone on a daily basis, but not having to call everyone or having to be on the phone all the time. So they were getting. A little bit of light reinforcement of the training. They were getting a unifying elements.

[00:22:15] And then the playful aspect of we are going to compete in salespeople we’re naturally competitive. So it did play into a bunch of different reasons and they loved it, which was a surprise actually to the group that we were working, you know, that we were saying, they weren’t sure how it was going to go.

[00:22:29] And when that went well, they were like, oh, this is, this is a really nice tool. Um, not just for our salespeople, but we’ll use this for all.

[00:22:37]

Jason: Well, and I love that example. You’ve told me that before, about how they embraced it and how it was used, especially the unifying. I mean, thinking about now how so many organizations in the past year and a half have had to go remote virtual, spreading people out, right.

[00:22:53] There’s organizations like what you’re talking about. They’ve always been that way or they’ve have little pockets, but they have people all over the place. Um, but now that’s more common. And what can organizations do to keep everyone together and not just zoom meetings, not just slack channels, but like something else that everyone.

[00:23:11] Playing together right there. It’s separate but together, right? It’s like, Hey, I want to win at my game, but I want everyone to do well. And I want to support this community. So I love that. And I appreciate what you said, which has been my experience, which is if the leaders don’t want something or don’t support it, or aren’t interested, then it’s never going to work because it will fall flat.

[00:23:33] When you try to

[00:23:33]

Jeff: put something. And the other thing I just, as a suggestion, is it always just in the positioning, we found just a tremendous difference in the onboarding and the uptake in the initial uptake. Uh, and buy-in when it was positioned as we’ve been listening, like we’ve been listening to you guys as the sales team, and we know that you want some additional tools.

[00:23:54] You’d like to feel more connected. You like a little bit more support. Like that’s almost always true. But almost at any point in any organization, you could say we’ve been, you know, like the sales team would probably want some of those things. So just positioning it as we’ve been listening, we found something we’d like to try.

[00:24:10] Right? Whatever the program is based on your feedback, we’ll either keep it or not keep it right. And now it’s something. You’re putting the power, you know, the power of keeping this new tool, but the intention of it, wasn’t like trying to squeeze more productivity out of us. Um, it was, I think the, you know, what, what I’m hearing is this is what, something that might support you guys and what you’re asking for, which starts to build again more trust and it starts to feel.

[00:24:34] You have more support from, you know, from the management or from, you know, from your leaders, your direct leaders, and that, that goes a long way as well. So the positioning, once the leaders are bought in and they know that this is a good thing, or they like it, it’s not saying, Hey, here’s another thing. It starts on Monday.

[00:24:47] You got to do this. It’s, we’re going to try this because this sounds like something that, you know, we’ve been hearing. And if you like it, we’ll keep it in. Uh, we’ll get rid of it. It’s up to you guys. So give it a try. Hey, it’s Jason

[00:24:58]

Jason: here. We’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first are you ready to help your inside sales team close more deals?

[00:25:04] In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales professionals. The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right mindset. And proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals, email jason@cutterconsultinggroupdotcomorgotowwwdotcutterconsultinggroup.com.

[00:25:29] So there’s one thing that you and I both know, and probably everyone listening to this podcast knows it’s sales is tough, right? If your amazing you’re in that 20%, that gets 80% of the results. You’re a sales superstar. Depending on what you’re selling. I almost guarantee you’re losing more than you’re winning, right?

[00:25:50] Like if you’re an amazing closer, you maybe have a 30, 40% close ratio, unless you’re just being handed referrals or really warm leads, which means you’re not closing more than you’re actually closing. And that’s, if you’re amazing. And then there’s the fact that if you’re not amazing, you’re in that middle group, we talked about wanting to move them up.

[00:26:07] They’re definitely getting punched in the face way more than they’re winning. Just sales and stuff. That’s why most people can’t do it. Most people aren’t interested. They, they, it’s tough to stay in that. So one of the things I know that’s super important and also scary when it comes to sales and sales leadership, and watching people is the mental health side.

[00:26:26] Right. There’s already enough challenge in the world. A lot of people are already struggling, mentally, even pre pandemic just with the way that the world is. And then you throw in sales on top of that life. And then. You know, you have a good day today. Tomorrow’s a terrible day. And just, how do you handle that?

[00:26:43] So within your platform or just what you found with stale, like your psychology side and everything in general, like what do you see as some good tools for that, or the best way to approach that, to kind of support like the more. Mental health side to help people in sales. Yeah,

[00:27:01]

Jeff: it’s really true. I mean, when I was in college, I paid my way through school selling study guides door to door during the summer, and you know, 13 hours a day.

[00:27:09] It was like, I was this nice kid from a small town in Wisconsin. And all of a sudden people were like, get outta here. Like they were mean to me. And I had never just confronted that. And then again, it was maybe one out of 30 that we were closing. Um, in those days in, in that experience, it was awful. Like the pain is real.

[00:27:26] Like this is, you know, for most of us who are in sales, it’s like, we’re nice people. We really have this beautiful intention we want to help. And then all of a sudden people are rude or they don’t get back to us or they say no for whatever reason, you know? And it’s just, there’s a lot of that. And so we’re dealing with rejection, you know, all the time.

[00:27:43] And again, as you mentioned, even a great salesperson is still, probably most of the time hearing a no. A lot of that is here. Right? And I think that that’s why salespeople are awesome. Like in general, if you can succeed in sales, you’re a great person to have in the world because you’ve really figured out how to control your emotions, how to support yourself and make sure you’re full as you go into each day so that you don’t get bumped and bruised by the general malaise of, of, of the population as they’re confronting, you know, they’re confronted with buying decisions in their own stuff.

[00:28:14] So what we found, and, and again, this comes back to this. Is taking care of ourselves. And so in our situation, what we try to do is, again, we want to make sure people are feeling as good as possible for real things. Now you had mentioned in the very beginning, like the carrots, you know, the, if you get this many sales, you get $500, you do this now that’s nice, but it’s just a surface thing.

[00:28:37] Right? And so the same people typically. All the time, because again, they’re okay with the rejection, but $500, $200. Like it’s just not enough for most of us to get over the fact that this hurts or this isn’t feeling good, or what am I doing wrong? And when we beat ourselves up, even after the fact of like, I thought I did everything right, like I’m still not, you know, that’s tough as well.

[00:28:57] So the idea here is put some positive stuff in every morning. Like you just have to have an influx of good material to make sure you’re thinking. Is set up for success and all of there’s lots. That’s why we start each morning on the platform with a quote. So in sales, there’s a whole lot of things, but it’s a lot about attitude.

[00:29:17] If you start to have positive thoughts going through your mind, the rejection doesn’t hurt as much. If you have a way, a practice of celebrating a small win or, um, you know, focusing, reflecting on the things you did well each day, you start to let go of the other stuff, but most of us are default. We had 10 things go right during the day.

[00:29:35] And one thing go wrong and we spend all of our time thinking about the one thing that went wrong and we ended up chalking that up as a bad. And then you ha you do that too many times in a row. You’re really beaten down. But if you reverse that and you have five things go well and five things that didn’t go well, but you focused all your time on the five things you did go well.

[00:29:52] And just a little bit of time on what didn’t go well to learn from it, then you’re really setting yourself up. Well, that was a good day. I learned something and I did these five things and you do that enough times, and now you get resilience, right? You start to feel, you start to create that fortitude and that strength to be able to connect.

[00:30:07] Whatever’s happening in the world outside and say, it doesn’t matter. I’m good. Like I came into this situation feeling good. I’m going to leave this situation feeling good. I got the sale. I didn’t get the sale. That’s how it goes. But I’m going to get the next one and right. That that’s also an attitude.

[00:30:20] What’s next? Who’s next? Who’s next. So often the difference between great and good are great and not good, uh, is attitude. And so that starts with mental health. It starts with, with personal self-care and making sure we’re in a space to be able to take on all of the challenges that come inherently in the career of sales.

[00:30:40] Yeah.

[00:30:41]

Jason: Well, and going back to what you said about the fact that we as humans, aren’t good at celebrating. The wins, the successes and we, we’re not even good at celebrating the big ones. I will speak for myself. I am historically not good and or terrible at celebrating any wins. And what’s interesting is if we look at from a longterm evolutionary, psychological standpoint, wins are great, but losses like way back in the day could equal.

[00:31:10] Right. So it’s much more important to focus on the negatives, avoid them, keep them from happening. Cause the rest just goes into the survival bucket, but you really don’t want to, you know, do things that are going to cause you harm and or death. And unfortunately that part is still at play. And so you’re right.

[00:31:28] I mean, it takes a lot of intention to be like, okay, yes. Five people said no, but five people said yes or five people are moving forward. Like let’s look at those. And just fight against that evolutionary part of our brain. Right? That survival part. That’s just like, no, no, no, everything is bad. Everything is danger.

[00:31:46] Like we need to just stay safe and comfortable where we are and stop trying new things.

[00:31:52]

Jeff: Yeah. It’s a good point because it does feel like we’re our survival’s at risk. Like it does still feel like that even though we’re still okay, we’re still going to go home to our house, but that. That is a base level feeling like they’re rejecting me or I’m, you know, I’m going to lose this deal, lose my job, whatever the case is.

[00:32:10] So kind of creating this game concept around it. I’m playing something. I’m seeing how this work, like, what did I do over here that worked, what did I not? It removes this personal element of it because we fortunately don’t live in a world where a saber tooth tiger is actually gonna eat us. Like, so a lot of the.

[00:32:27] Our experience of the rejection or the no is way greater and blown way out of proportion to what the actual experience is now that’s the human condition. So that takes some, some building of a muscle to make sure that that stays in its rightful place, which is a learning opportunity, but not a, not a, um, a debilitating experience.

[00:32:49]

Jason: Yeah. And that’s, it’s really that keeping it into perspective, which one side is celebrating the successes, but also keeping in mind. It’s not usually as bad as our brain wants it to be or make it out to be. Um, the other thing, and I heard this quote a long time ago. Do you remember where I heard it from, but I use this a lot and I share this with a lot of people.

[00:33:08] Is that so far, uh, you’ve survived a hundred percent of your bad days, which means no matter how bad today was like. Woke up tomorrow, like you survived it, you made it through it. Right. So it’s, you know, especially in the world of sales, getting blown out of proportion, just, you know, making everything’s worse, which goes back to that mental health side, which is, you know, wanting to make sure it, you know, there’s the positive psychology, like you said, which is so valuable.

[00:33:33] And then there’s even the, just staying out of the depressed, anxious, terrible feeling side. Right. And just keeping away from that and shifting over time. The positive mental attitude, which sounds so like woo and hippie, but it’s true.

[00:33:52]

Jeff: And the science shows that shows that as well. Like again, I think from a reward structure, what we really want, right.

[00:33:57] Our deep needs, if those are being met, we’re much more resilient in general. So those deep needs of feeling. Like we’re valued. Right? So again, as a, as a sales leader, valuing your team and having, like having a practice of making sure people are feeling valued for their efforts and for their work and, and for their results.

[00:34:16] Right. But that, that sense of feeling valued is a deeper need than. $100 or $200, or, you know, as a prize, right? The deeper need of feeling connected. I’m not alone. Like that’s, that’s also a very human thing is like, when we feel bad, our mental health goes to I’m all alone in this with 1200 salespeople around the country.

[00:34:35] One of the things like on a bad day, which everybody has. Um, they saw other people listening, like, oh man, I lost something. I thought I was going to get an it system bummed out, but everyone would be like, Hey, hang in there, hang in there. You’re okay. And all of a sudden it’s like, they didn’t feel alone and that didn’t take as long to recover as you mentioned.

[00:34:49] So the recovery from that and that need of connection is way better, is way deeper. So when you start to deliver for your team on the deeper needs, you’re going to find their resilience go up. You’re going to find them just all of a sudden way back. Without actually any more sales training, like they just are better because they’re not, they’re recovering faster.

[00:35:08] They’re learning from their mistakes. They’re separating themselves from the it’s not them failing. It’s just, this didn’t work. So there’s all those things when you start to deliver on deeper needs than just a superficial need of cash for the month, or, you know, a TV is nice to win or, you know, whatever it is, those are nice.

[00:35:25] But the next day I’m still the same. So if you don’t build up, if I’m not being built up or I’m not filling myself up the next day, I have the same insecurities, the same fears and the same, all those things. And I’m hoping. That I win. I’m hoping like, but when you start building the muscles, now I feel much more prepared.

[00:35:42] I still might not do well that day, but I’m, I had a better chance of succeeding. And I know that like, going into this, I’m a better, I have a much better chance of success, which is the game. If we can give that to our salespeople, that’s not only great for business. That’s, they’ll be grateful to you forever for that.

[00:36:00]

Jason: Yeah. And the stat is now becoming more and more well known that most. Leave their jobs because of their manager, not because of pay, not because of benefits, not because of the snacks in the, in the break room, right. It’s mostly because of their manager and either how they’re treated or what they’re not getting.

[00:36:18] And those are the times in my experience, it’s more of how, what they’re not getting. Then just a terrible manager. Who’s, you know, treating people right. It’s usually just those needs aren’t being met. Like you’re talking about which again, for the leaders that are listening to this, that’s so key. You want to, you want to affect your turnover instantly that.

[00:36:37] Start giving your people what they need at that base that, that Maslow’s hierarchy of need level, right? Like moving up that pyramid and giving them that community. And then the other thing I was thinking about too, as you’re sharing this is that I know, and this goes back to that mental health, which I think is so important.

[00:36:54] I know that you and I have talked about that before offline. That one of the best advices when you’re feeling depressed or anxious, you know? Cause most people are just like withdrawing to themselves is to actually do something for somebody else. Right. Like they say, if you’re depressed, go volunteer, go give, go call somebody like go help somebody.

[00:37:13] And then that gets you out of your own way. And I know because I’ve actually, uh, been on your platform and run a challenge for salespeople. So I’m speaking from watching. This is that, you know, when people are struggling, if they can reach out to other people, or even if they’re sitting next to somebody in the next cube, right.

[00:37:30] Like helping them out. We’ll snap them out of as well, which is where I think that connectedness is so important. Like your,

[00:37:37]

Jeff: it goes a long way. And I think for leaders, just as a, just as a button to what you had had mentioned is, you know, most leaders would love to be kind of celebrating or congratulating people, but most leaders are putting out fires all day long.

[00:37:50] Like that’s, you know, the job. Problem problem, problem. Solved problem. Solved problem solved. So when we talked to a lot of executives and leaders, it’s not that they don’t want or don’t need. It’s not that they don’t feel that they love their team or that they really appreciate them, but their team is usually experiencing them only in the presence of an issue or a frustrating moment or a teaching moment.

[00:38:11] But it’s. So the experience, when, when we ask managers or leaders, we say, well, what do you think of your team? I’ll have a great team. They’re awesome. I’ve spent years putting them together. They’re, they’re fantastic. When we asked the team, how do you think your manager feels about you? Uh, he, he or she is like, I don’t know.

[00:38:26] I might, I might be fired tomorrow or I don’t think they liked me at all, or like, it’s so. Consistent that the message being sent. Isn’t the one that they want being received. And it’s understandable, right? Because again, in a day we’re busy and so going to everybody and saying, you know, Hey Jason, great job yesterday.

[00:38:42] I just wanted to tell you that and going to the next person. No, you’re busy. You’ve got things to do. So you need to find a way to easily. Valuing your people, a part of your conversation. And the one example I’ll give is a Bloomingdale’s examples. So they have all their salespeople, um, using the platform and the general manager of one of the flagship stores that I have 400 people.

[00:39:03] And I’ll tell you, I’m a nice person. And she is, she’s a super nice person. But she said, when people saw me. So whatever area of the store, like they were like, oh no, like what do we do now? And she said, like, I just watched them their entire being. And she said, when I started, they were using it again on the, on the platform, there was a way to see the wins and what people were doing.

[00:39:22] She said, I would go in, I’d read, I’d read that just before I go into. I was there to fix something like something went wrong, but I would start it and say, Hey, Julie, I just read that you did this. That was awesome. And Mary, like, you did this great job. That’s awesome. Now I need your guys’ help. Now. Here’s what happened and I need, and she said that the difference there with two sentences of acknowledging the good and then bringing what she needed them to work on, changed her experience.

[00:39:46] Completely. And now they didn’t, they didn’t mind her coming. They knew she was going to be also seeing the good they were doing, not just the things that they needed to work on. So that was a big game changer because to your earlier point, every single year, 70% on average of people rate themselves disengaged from their career, from their job.

[00:40:05] And the number one reason every single year is because I don’t feel valued by my direct supervisor. That’s the reason. So this idea of making sure. If you like your team, if you value your team, figuring out a simple way to let them know, not an exchange of, of teaching them or correcting them or fixing what needs to be fixed, but adding it in.

[00:40:24] And if you can do that, it doesn’t take a lot of you don’t have to do one-to-one even once in a while telling him like, you know what? That was awesome. Great job there. Now I need your help on this. That will go a long way. And they’ll put that into their. You know, kind of, um, in the, into their bank of just like, man, he or she really sees me and that’s important.

[00:40:42] And then they’ll give you they’ll even give they’ll show up at a higher level. Is. And

[00:40:46]

Jason: I will say from my experience leading teams too, one of the biggest things that I have worked on to be very intentional is that when I engage with salespeople or managers who are under me is to not always have an issue or come to them, like the principal and they’re in trouble is to, you know, do as much positive support and positive conversations as possible and not in a fake and phony way, but just in a, like, let’s just have good positive interactions.

[00:41:16] So that when you see me coming, you’re not afraid or cringing or pretending to work or whatever it is. Right. And I think that’s always important. And I think like your platform and these kinds of challenges is good because it’s not tied to anything. It’s not like, Hey, everyone’s in trouble. We all better like buckle up and figure this out.

[00:41:32] It’s let’s do this. Everyone set your goals. Do this challenge together, let’s support each other together. Uh, and then it’s this isolated thing versus like tied to

[00:41:44]

Jeff: what you’re talking about. Yeah. And, you know, that brings up a really interesting point. A lot of sales managers were great sales. Right that got promoted up and they’re not necessarily great leaders of people, you know, that’s a different skill set.

[00:41:55] And so one of the things we’ve found is to become a great coach, right? Which is really the goal of if a sales manager or any executive like being a great coach for the team, bringing out the best in the people around you. Simple way. There’s just like, you know, there’s a great lot of great books on this.

[00:42:09] Um, Carol WEX work on, on the growth mindset is the one that comes to mind. But three simple questions turns everyone into a. Coach. And this is, uh, just to keep in your back pocket. Like what were three w you, you want to have these, like you said, not tied to something negative conversations once in a while, once a quarter, once a month.

[00:42:27] And it’s just, Hey, tell me, tell me three of the wins you have this last. What’s one challenge you had and how’d you work through it. And is there anything I can do to support you and help you be better in the next month? Those three questions. If you’ll just ask them, then just listen. They will feel like you’re an amazing coach.

[00:42:42] And if you do that a couple times a year, like that’s the, that’s it, it doesn’t have to be daily. It doesn’t have to be weekly, but they’ll know that if you really listen, like again, that has to be sincere. But it’s not tied to anything else. And so now it’s not, I’m in trouble from the principal. Oh, this might be like, there’s an openness, there’s an excitement of the communication, but those three simple questions, it turns anyone, whether you’ve had formal training or not at being a, a leader or coach or whatever, into a real, that’s a really powerful, positive conversation that will ultimately bring out the best in your.

[00:43:15]

Jason: I love it. And that last question of those three is so important. And I’ve found in asking that most people are surprised because most people are so in their own lives, even in our personal lives, right. Not just work-wise, but like everyone’s, most people are focused on themselves, such that if they even ask that they don’t really mean it, but it’s like, Hey, you know, what can I do to help you?

[00:43:36] It’s so shocking. A lot of people just don’t even believe. That, you know, somebody would ask them that

[00:43:41]

Jeff: it changes the entire thing to it, to a much, much more of a team environment, which is what you want the feeling to be. If you’re in charge of a bunch of a bunch of.

[00:43:50]

Jason: Well, and it goes to the servant leadership mode, which is I’m here to support you.

[00:43:56] Like I work for you as a manager or a leader. You are the most important asset. I work for you. How can I support you as long as you’re doing what you need to do, if you shouldn’t be in sales or you aren’t working very hard and aren’t doing the activities, that’s a different conversation. Otherwise I’m here to support you.

[00:44:13] So I know one of the things that is instrumental for. Not just changed, but habits. That’s like the, your challenge that I want to touch on before we finish, which is getting people to be clear and then tying things to their why? Like, why do they want to do it professionally personally? Like where does that fit in?

[00:44:35] Where have you seen that? Like as a requirement or where does that fit into like the challenges that you guys.

[00:44:43]

Jeff: Yep. It’s pretty fundamental. And again, I think Simon Sinek and, um, you know, start with the why, like, I think we’ve, most of us have either seen a video or read the book and, and yet we quickly forget that.

[00:44:53] And so first from a manager standpoint, from a, a sales leaders standpoint, if you’re sharing the why that’s powerful and doing it in a way that again, they hear one of the examples we were working with a, um, a team of executives and. President of this division said, let’s talk about, we’re going to talk about goals for a moment.

[00:45:11] And so we asked him to say, Mike, you know, what are the goals for this year? And he said, well, we’re going to increase sales by this amount. Like, that was his first thing. Like we’re going to, and we watched the entire rest of the salespeople’s like energy, just drop in the room and we’re going to do this.

[00:45:25] Well, let me say Mike, did you just see what happened? Like you just lost the room, like you just lost. He said, well, why not? Like he was super excited, like super gung ho, and then we said a watch this, what did you just hear Mike say? So what they heard is we’re not doing enough. It’s never been. We’re not going to be able to do like, like all of it was negative.

[00:45:44] Then we said to the rest of the group, now watch this, Mike, what did you mean? What was the real reason that you want to hit the sales goal? Well, because then we can fund all the stuff that we’ve been saying we want to do. We can bring in the next four people that we needed. We can do the bonuses that we’ve been talking about.

[00:45:58] Then you watch the energy come back in the room, but he wasn’t talking about the real, why he was doing, he was doing. Right. So that was just one powerful example with when we’re explaining things like, why do we want the increase? Why do we want this? Don’t just make it about like, well, we did that last month.

[00:46:13] We did that last year. Make it about like, again, what’s the mission of your organization? Who are you helping? What’s the goal? What happens when we get 10% more sales or 20% more sales? What does that mean? In the bigger picture that they can start to really dig into and say, I’m a part of this mission.

[00:46:31] I’m a part of this, because that is a really big motivator when things aren’t going well. It’s all right. I just, I can do it. Cause this is this isn’t about me. This isn’t about this, this one sale. This is about helping people ex solve this problem. So I think that’s one of those big things as well. That just came up as.

[00:46:49] Yeah.

[00:46:49]

Jason: And I think too, when you have people who are on the sales team and you’re wanting them to make a change or play a bigger game, or, you know, accomplish their goals or what they think their goals are, you know, monetarily. Right. Cause it kind of starts with that is also having everybody understands their why, like why do they want to make more money?

[00:47:08] Why do they want to be successful? Why is that important? Because again, going back to what we started with, which is sales is tough. Yeah, and it’s going to be tough and you’re going to have those bad days. You gotta have that Y that pushes you through at the individual level.

[00:47:23]

Jeff: Almost all great salespeople.

[00:47:25] Like when you ask why you do that, they have a mission. They’ve thought about it. It’s really meaningful to them. I’m doing this. And it means this. And, you know, Zig Ziglar tells a great story of a people on the railroad. And it was, you know, someone who was still working on the line, doing the railroad. And then the president of the, of the railroad comes by and says, Hey Mike, you know, and they ended up knowing each other and someone afterwards said, how do you know, how do you know the president.

[00:47:48] Oh, the railroad. He said, oh, we went to work on the same day. He goes, well, how is it then that you’re still working out here in the sun and he’s the president of the, of the entire railroad. And he said, well, it’s real easy. When I started, I went to work for $10 and 50 cents an hour. And bill went to work for the railroad.

[00:48:02] Right? Like he got connected to what he was up to building, you know, it was this transfer like, and so when you’re connected to a mission, like everything’s different and the little stuff doesn’t bother. Um, you know, it just kinda falls off because you’re, you’re on, you know, and that’s where all, I think when, whether it’s our life or our job, when we start realizing that this is for my family, you know, this is for my wellbeing, or this is because I want to leave my legacy as, as someone who really contributed to making the world a better place.

[00:48:28] And this is how I’m doing that. And almost any job can get there. Every single, like in a few minutes, the janitor and the CEO can both get to why, what they did. Is making a big impact and a big positive that plays a positive role, you know, not only for their organization, but for the world at large, for their family and so on.

[00:48:46] So it’s really context. And I think it’s what were the exercise. If people haven’t done it and that’s why in our challenges, that’s one of the quick things is like everyone reads. They just read, you know, the mission in this case of the, of the organization and a chance for them to read, like what, what does this mean to me?

[00:49:02] And when you have that present our thoughts, like whatever we’re present to impacts our behavior. If we’re present to what, why we do this, that’s going to affect our choices. And if we’re not aware of why we’re doing it, it’s much easier to get thrown off. I

[00:49:16]

Jason: love it. That’s a great spot to end with all of this.

[00:49:19] So I know Jeff is that, uh, you have the website enjoy global.com. There’s also my challenge creator doc. I know that you’re on LinkedIn, Jeff by eight. Oh, I also know if anyone’s listening to this, that I have run some challenges through your platform and sets them up for sales teams. So if people have questions or want even a glimpse at that to reach out to me, anything else you have coming up, any other places people can go to find out more that I didn’t cover or new, cool things that you guys are putting in.

[00:49:50]

Jeff: I will, uh, just a shameless plug for our podcast to enjoy success podcast. Um, we do have a bunch of amazing people and the premise is really just defining success, you know, as to what’s important to you and hearing a lot of different people say here’s what it means to them and how they’ve created an extraordinary life for themselves.

[00:50:07] But that comes down to that foundational thing of really knowing why we do what we do. And when we do then all of life. Even if the outer world were doing the same activities, but our experience of it can be totally different. And that’s our wish for everybody is that we all enjoy everyday more, no matter what it is.

[00:50:23] And especially when you’re in a tough, a tough career like sales, but you realize the bigger picture and that it’s playing a huge role in the service that you’re providing in the product that you’re providing in the good that you’re doing for the greater picture to really remember that because we need you, we need sales.

[00:50:39] Yeah.

[00:50:39]

Jason: Well, I appreciate that. So the enjoy success podcast, we’ll have a link in the show notes for all of these things. Um, but wherever you found this podcast, uh, search for it, uh, and get that positive stuff. I appreciate Jeff. Thanks for the work that you’re doing, what you’re doing to help organizations, individuals.

[00:50:58] I mean, here’s the thing. Platforms out. There’s a lot of things out there that don’t necessarily focus on the individual and helping and the team and helping people be successful. So I appreciate what you’re doing and thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this with the.

[00:51:13]

Jeff: Thank you, Jason. It’s been an honor to be here.

[00:51:15] I really you’re so good at this. So it’s just a, it’s been really a joy to be here. So thank you. Did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster. Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations. If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating and review.

[00:51:37] Also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center space, we appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, family. And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us at Cotter consulting, group.com. .

Jason: Hey, what’s going on. Everybody. Jason cutter here. This is the scalable call center sales podcast. So glad that you’re tuning in and joining me, I’ve got a special guest. He is a returning guest. His name is Steven Benson from Badger maps, uh, which is focused on field sales software.

[00:00:17] And we’re going to get into that. Steve was a previous guest on my other podcast, Steven welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:00:25]

Steven: Jason, thanks for having me. I’m really glad to be.

[00:00:28]

Jason: Yeah. So listeners of the authentic persuasion show, we’ll remember you from episode 328, which was from November of 2020.

[00:00:38] Uh, we are recording this in August, 2021. So some things have changed. Not much has changed. Not a lot has changed since then at this point in the pandemic. And I think what’s fascinating. This is where it’s fun that we reconnected and talked about having you come on this part. Is you with Badger maps is focused on outside sales, field sales, helping companies map out where their field sales reps should go, you know, making them, you know, efficient and optimal in their routes and what they’re doing and their outreach.

[00:01:09] So there’s. And then this is a show for call center sales teams inside telephone sales. And what’s fascinating is there’s, there’s a lot that I know that can apply from what you do, what you’ve done in leadership, sales, leadership internally, what you’ve seen with companies that succeed, that apply to both.

[00:01:26] That’s why I’m excited to have you on the show.

[00:01:28]

Steven: Yeah, well, I’m excited to be here and you know, that that’s a great way of thinking out it. I generally focus on field sales teams, I guess the, the learnings and knowledge that one can take from that, or certainly apply to remote work. And, uh, in a lot of it does also cross over into just inside sales teams and purely phone team.

[00:01:46]

Jason: Yeah. And what’s really fascinating. The more that I thought about it, which a lot of people could appreciate is that if we look at a call center versus field sales, right, somebody who’s knocking on doors, going to homes, going to businesses, that’s pretty different. The strategies are different than marketing the lead gen.

[00:02:03] You know, a lot of those things are different. And then the pandemic habit and then call center inside telephone sales. Went remote went virtual. Some are still remote and virtual. Some may not come back. And what’s interesting is how much managing a remote field sales team. Who may be in the office once a week or rarely, and managing a virtual telephone sales team.

[00:02:26] How similar that is. So let’s start with that because I think that’s important. What are some of the lessons that you have learned and seen from the world of field outside sales that would apply to this virtual remote workforce? That a lot of companies are running.

[00:02:44]

Steven: Well, I think there’s a few things. I mean, first of all, working with people who you can’t manage involves an inherent level of trust and a lack of you lose your ability to micromanage to a certain degree.

[00:02:55] And I think field sales teams have, have always dealt with this, which is why so much of their compensation has been tied to performance as opposed to, um, anything else. And so I think really making sure that you’re you’re compensating people and judging them based on. Performance numbers. When I say performance, I don’t mean activity numbers, but actual the numbers that are aligned with the performance of the business.

[00:03:20] So if it’s a sales team, for example, profitable dollar profit coming in the door from their deals. So not even just revenue necessarily, but also think about what the margins are and actually maybe consider comping them on profit. But focusing on. Aligning their activities and behavior with what the business needs of them, because they’re going to be managing themselves to a large degree.

[00:03:42] You just, you lose a lot of the control with the remote team that you have with a team that is coming into the office. That’s not right.

[00:03:51]

Jason: I love that you use the word, which most people don’t like to use, which is micromanaging, which is the truth of it, right? When you’re running an inside sales team or a team that you can see, no matter what department it is.

[00:04:02] There’s some level of being able to walk out on the floor and look at people or see what they’re doing, or have a meeting or manage them and hold them accountable and push them. And so you lose that other than like the revenue, the profits, the results side, and compensating them for that, which makes. Is there any other KPIs that you know of or can think of that are important for sales management?

[00:04:25] Because obviously the final results, the sale, the revenue is important, but most people can only control their actions. And so what do you see as good metrics for that?

[00:04:35]

Steven: There’s gotta be a balance, right? Between just looking at what their results are and looking at what the actions are that you, you know, as a, as a business leader are going to drive the results.

[00:04:45] There’s a fine line to walk there between you. You don’t want to over-rotate and be only looking at one or the other, it makes, especially people who are ramping up difficult to manage, because they might not be getting the sales results for example, but they might be getting a activity results that are great.

[00:05:02] And so you wouldn’t want to judge them too harshly if they’re still kind of on the ramp, things like that. But yeah, I, I. You want to make sure that you’re actually getting good oversight into what they’re doing. So like, if you’re not able to see your reps working on a day-to-day basis in an office setting, for example, it’s good to get out and get in, get in the field with them, or, you know, visit them in person, get to know them.

[00:05:26] If it has to be your moat, join their calls, things like that. There’s a reason that field sales managers historically have done ride alongs and a part of it is to, you know, keep the rapport going. But also a part of it is just, it’s very hard. Manage someone, if you don’t really know what they’re doing, it’s hard to coach them.

[00:05:42] It’s hard to start to teach them things. Um, you can’t just look at the results, but you have to look at the activities and behaviors that are driving those results so that you can make sure that you’re able to, uh, coach them to be.

[00:05:55]

Jason: Makes sense. And I will say having been pretty much always on the inside of sales, there’s a significant advantage for managing those operations, with the amount of stuff that you can track and report on with the right tools.

[00:06:10] Right? A lot of organizations don’t have the right tools in place, but if they did, they could see all of those things that a field sales manager can’t, unless they’re there. And then when they’re there. They’re only seeing a portion of it, right? Like one day in the life or, you know, a week maybe, uh, versus everything can be tracked on the inside.

[00:06:29]

Steven: The KPIs that you’ve maybe traditionally relied on when your entire workforce was in the office sometimes are slightly different than what you wanted to focus on when they’re less under the thumb and out out of your exact line of sight. Right? So. You’re less hands-on with your reps and you’re not with them.

[00:06:47] And it’s now in this kind of post chronic business environment, a lot of call centers have gone remote and they need to pick up some of these kind of historical remote management skills. One thing they couldn’t think about is you can look at your business and ask yourself, am I over-focused on. KPIs that are backwards looking.

[00:07:06] And what, I mean, a KPI can be backwards looking. It can be like, what are the results of the things that we’ve done in the past or KPIs can be forward-looking and not just those backwards, looking at our lagging KPIs. So current revenue, for example, one of the. Metrics around. That’s a backwards looking KPI, right?

[00:07:26] That’s that is, uh, the result of things that have occurred in the past. And I think, especially in times when cash is tight, when business is hard, it’s easy to just look at those types of, uh, backwards looking KPIs because you know, cash is king, right. But I, I think in these times and this environment, as you evaluate your reps, as you, if you’re working in a remote environment, you have to make sure you’re keeping an eye, an eye on forward-looking metrics.

[00:07:49] So if it’s a sales team, pipeline metrics, activity, metrics, Things that will help you identify. Who’s going to be generating revenue and profit in the future, and you need to realign sometimes your KPIs and metrics around looking forward. Especially if it’s a tough time, you may want to think about if right now it’s really hard.

[00:08:09] You want to think about the future and figure out how can I, how can I get us to a better, a better place? So if your team is having a difficult time building pipeline, and you can, you can count lead gen numbers like meetings or, or, uh, meeting scheduled or. Qualified deals, uh, put into the pipeline. If the challenges are more like middle of the funnel.

[00:08:29] Uh, you could focus on things like number of presentations or proposals that are occurring in this remote environment. Um, if it’s closing deals, maybe, maybe you need to look at the negotiation skills and your team. Maybe it’s harder to find KPIs, and maybe it’s more, this is more of a training play, but there are kind of, you know, you can, you can look at things like margin numbers and, and use that as like an a, if you’re upset, able to negotiate on price, looking at margin is kind of a proxy for who’s doing a good job on negotiation on who could maybe Polish up those.

[00:08:58] Those types of skills, but yeah, I mean, you know, ultimately all metrics are secondary to revenue and profit and if you over compensate or over emphasize anything other than those two things, you can get kind of skewy results, you know, you can have your reps focusing on building pipeline and then maybe we’ll never close, except if you’re just managing them on pipeline numbers as your KPIs, for example.

[00:09:22] So that’s all, all stuff.

[00:09:24]

Jason: Yeah, that that holistic balance is important because like you said, if you’re focusing on pipeline or quotes given or discovery calls, right. And you focus too much on that and you incentivize or make that seem like that’s the most important thing, then what’ll happen is the sales team will put their focus on that to just get to that metric.

[00:09:44] I had a client early on in my consulting where that was the main thing the owner put all the emphasis on demos completed, uh, thinking that, you know, if you do enough demos, you will close enough deals. The problem is the reps were doing demos and then that’s where it mostly stopped because. Trying to check that box and make the owner happy.

[00:10:06] Right. And they were focused on that one thing instead of like the whole process. And I think there’s very few businesses that have such a short sales cycle that the activity of today equals the revenue of today in its entirety, right. From marketing to sales, to close deals. Um, which means looking at revenue today is a result of what happened.

[00:10:26] Weeks months ago, and then, you know, those seeds that were planted. So I think that’s great advice when we’re talking about the leadership changes, like with a remote team, with a field sales team, you know, that outside, not in the office and or things that could go with the call center side, what do leaders need to do?

[00:10:46] Or what can they do that you’ve seen best practices for, for changing their behavior and their leadership style, especially a, from. Let’s say the ability to micromanage, not that most leaders would want to or do that, but they have that in the toolbox and then that’s difficult. So what do you recommend or what have you seen that works?

[00:11:04] Well?

[00:11:06]

Steven: Well, I think in economic crisis, economic difficult times when hard times fall on a company and in this case, it’s an external pressure and a lot of cases, I think that’s one of the hardest times to be a sales leader. Right. You know, the whole company is dependent on the weather. Your team is producing to survive and to pay salaries and to make payroll and, um, pay for all the, all the critical things, you know, inventory, et cetera.

[00:11:31] And so sales leaders, you know, it’s a time when they really need to be at their, at their best it when times are, when times are hard, you know, if you’re just accepting. Orders at a constant rate off the, off the fax machine then, uh, that it’s, there’s less to worry about. Right. But, but in difficult times, that’s when you really have to sharpen the sword and be at your best.

[00:11:51] So, so w what do you have to change and what can you focus on? I think now more than ever, I mean, leaders need to be action oriented. They need to be, they need to confront reality. They need to be honest in their assessments of the challenges that are facing their organizations. I think, you know, as a leader, you have to embrace.

[00:12:10] Bad news. You need to ask hard questions and you need to maintain a positive outlook because people need to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And in this case, I really think there is a light at the end of the tunnel hearing. We’re already seeing that, but you need to build an action plan towards success and be transparent with your team about what that plan is and make sure they understand it.

[00:12:31] I think managers can be more responsive. In general more supportive of their sales reps. You know, your team is probably scared. They don’t like missing their numbers. They worry about losing their jobs, uh, how hard it’s going to be to get another job. Like. Commission checks, evaporating, all these things are worries, right?

[00:12:49] And sales reps don’t pay them their mortgages with their base salary. Right. They really need that. They need that, that commission. And they count on that commission, I guess, to your question, what behaviors does a leader need to do? I think you to guide your team, to coach your team, ask yourself, am I spending 50% of my time coaching my sales reps?

[00:13:10] And if not, Spend more time, spend more time, really helping them sharpen their sorts. Right. And I guess the opposite of what you should do and what I see a lot of sales managers doing in these times. And, and, and, and really whenever they go remote, it’s easy to be silent when you’re in a remote type situation.

[00:13:27] Right. If you’re managing people from a distance, it’s easy to kind of slip into a managing by spreadsheet, as opposed to leading from the front and, you know, meaning, you know, just looking at the metrics and focusing on. And I think instead you, you, you really want. You want to figure out what does it take to make her up successful?

[00:13:46] Figure out who is on the team is being successful right now with selling to what type of customer profile, if it’s a sales role, what was the playbook for that success, understanding that, and then figuring out, okay, well, what’s your reps have figured this out, putting them under a microscope and figuring out what did they do, right?

[00:14:04] How can we replicate that success with the rest of the team? I think that’s really important for leaders take those types of actions during the day.

[00:14:11]

Jason: Well, and I’m glad that you brought up the communication part as well. Because I know that happens. I see that a lot with organizations, even people that I interact with where becomes more emails, more slack, more texts, and less talking, you know, thinking that email is a good form of communication, which it’s not.

[00:14:30] But you know, my recommendation is generally to over-communicate what will feel like over communicate and not in a micromanaging, just over communicate overshare overexplain, because. You’re missing that kind of in the office interactions and things that happen from what your seeing right in, let’s say pre pandemic.

[00:14:52] And now, I mean, cause you have a lot of experience with your own organizations and then now with, uh, you know, with your clients and seeing their best practices, where do you see companies doing well? Or where do you see them lacking in like the training coaching?

[00:15:10]

Steven: Yeah, well, I mean, I’d say, uh, you know, there, there are definitely places that people are doing well.

[00:15:15] Um, and training and coaching. I think a lot of organizations have those types of initiatives right now, but it’s definitely something they could do a lot more with. And I, I think that, you know, why is training and coaching so hard? It’s one of the most important things that we do, right. And, and the challenges around coaching, you know, our are, you know, I, I think what comes, what comes to my mind for.

[00:15:36] Is when I think about challenges that sales managers face as they, as they switched to teams leading their teams remotely is the coaching of it, right? Because coaching is something maybe you’ve just always swung by their desk and kind of sat next to them for a few minutes. Or you could look over their shoulder and kind of, and they coach each other too.

[00:15:54] When they’re at a, when they’re in the office together, they, you know, they pick up on each other’s phrasing, they ask each other questions. Hey, how do you handle this? A lot more of a manager’s job is on, is on autopilot and in the office setting. And when you, when it goes remote, you really have to be a lot more active and, and coaching and upleveling, your team’s skills is so important during these tough times.

[00:16:13] Right? I mean, it really at any time of change, but, uh, whenever there’s like external pressures coming in, but in this economy, you know, we’re all in this adjustment phase, right? I do think sales managers should be spending 50% of their time coaching their team. And I think it’s a, it’s harder and it’s a less natural motion when you’re not face-to-face with them because you just, you’re not, I almost feel like when I’m sitting around team members and I hear some I’ll S I’ll hear out of the corner of my ear, that I’m doing something wrong or do something I’ll, I’ll think of something that I can help them do it better or teach them or.

[00:16:45] Or show them or get, make sure they have this resource that this other team has. And, and, and so there’s just, there’s synergies to being sitting around one another, whereas remote, you really have to be proactive as, as a, as a manager and, and you have to have this, a real focus on it. This comes in a lot of ways.

[00:17:03] It can be pre-call strategizing. It can be post-call debriefs. It could be, you know, doing joint calls with them, right. You know, call, ride alongs, if you will, for virtual ride alongs, um, it could be opportunities specific coaching where you’re going through, you know, the, the, the blocking and tackling of a given deal and figuring out with them almost, you know, riding, riding shotgun throughout the whole deal cycle.

[00:17:25] So you can see how they behave in each piece of the deals. Anything that helps make your reps better counselors, that 50% rule of thumb. And there are a lot of things to coach right now, right. And, and what your team needs, but it depends on your industry and the actual team and their experience. But, you know, negotiation is a great thing to.

[00:17:46] Revisit, you know, specifically how to defend margins in a tough economy. Everyone you’ve got, everyone has a lot of pressure on their, on their margins. So, you know, your, your customers will put, push back on, on what they’re paying you. Your suppliers will ask for more because everyone’s, you know, the news tightens on everyone, right?

[00:18:04] So it’s really important to review with your reps, how to, you know, in this remote situation, What is the value of your product? How do you communicate the value of your, of your customer? That your, your, your company creates for your customers, what the product or service Y count exactly how much more money are they making on a monthly basis with your product and then without it, or how much are they avoiding losing pipeline building, I think is a huge one right now, uh, that you can almost always coach more around that, that I see.

[00:18:37] I said coming up with almost everyone and sometimes you need to relearn. How to prospect and rethink who you’re selling to and an economy because things have shifted and you’re the best person to purchase your product before might be a different person than as you’re the best person to purchase your product today.

[00:18:52] Maybe that’s shifted a little bit. Maybe it’s shifted a lot. But I think, uh, we need to sharpen, sharpen our, our, our weapons and get out and, and learn and, and hunt better. You know, it’s, it’s maybe in good times, food is really easy to come by, but you know, a lot of it’s nobody’s farming and coasting right now.

[00:19:10] Right. You gotta, you know, the Lucas came and they don’t have the crops and you gotta pull out your bone arrows and get out into the woods and hunt some new deals down. So. Yeah, the good news with generating pipeline is I do think the things are picking up right now. I think people are picking up the phones and being engaged in a way now that we haven’t seen for a while, people are pumped and, you know, people are, people have the time and the wherewithal and the desire to evaluate new vendors because it is a time of change.

[00:19:36] So if your prospects are motivated to check out an event, To solve their problems. It can open doors for you. Hey, it’s Jason

[00:19:43]

Jason: here. We’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first are you ready to help your inside sales team close more deals? In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales professionals.

[00:19:54] The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right minds. And proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals, email jason@cutterconsultinggroupdotcomorgotowwwdotcutterconsultinggroup.com. So one of the things that I know, because we’ve talked about this before.

[00:20:18] Yeah. You know, generally I focus on call centers. You’re generally focused on the end of the field, outside sales. However, there’s a lot of companies who have both, either they’re doing lead generation appointment setting. Outside sales teams, right? Let’s say so residential, solar is an example of that, or they’re setting appointments for demos, for software.

[00:20:42] Um, and you know, obviously you’re there’s companies that are doing all of that. So they have both a call center, you know, sales, lead gen aspect. They have their outside sales and they have their call center. That’s doing service support, things like that in that kind of mix thing, or looking at the combination of both of our worlds, if you will.

[00:21:01] What skills do you see have come into more play or become more important? When looking at both of those, whether it’s a phone or in-person, but the in-person wasn’t possible for awhile when dealing with the consumers right now. I mean, cause that’s one of the biggest things is how is the consumer change?

[00:21:21] Whether it’s an individual or a business, uh, it’s still a person that’s buying and bringing themselves to the table. So what new skills are you seeing in that whole ecosystem?

[00:21:33]

Steven: Well, I think. And we do see this a lot. We see our customers that are primarily field sales teams. Right. We, the thing that we do is, is, is to help them.

[00:21:44] We do see a lot of times those field sales teams are being supported by an inside sales team. And that can happen in different ways. Some, some companies will have they’ll have their, their customers segmented into people that can be serviced from the inside over the phone. And then they have other customers that they’ll actually send sales reps out to, to meet with the more important customers or maybe people further down in the sales cycle.

[00:22:07] Other times you’ll just have. More of a pure support play over the phone. So that out of the call center you’ll have a, a, that that’s a sales rep setting appointments. And, and we definitely for the person that’s going out into the field and we definitely support that too. We we’ve got, you know, the routing collaboration tools to help help, uh, the inside sales person set the appointments for the outside salesperson in a way that makes sense.

[00:22:32] And a lot of times you’ll have one inside sales person making calls supporting two or three field salespeople just really depends on the, on the, on the end. Well, we definitely see a lot of that, like inside sales teams supporting the outside sales teams. And I think that’s definitely a trend that I think economically that makes sense.

[00:22:51] It makes sense to, you know, if the field sales person costs the company more money, if you can do parts of their job out of the call center, you want to, you want to split it up. Do you want to focus people that you want to have have people, uh, specialized, uh, another area that we see a lot is people.

[00:23:09] Companies carving off their phone support, uh, you know, given, having a support number that, that the customer can call. That’s not just the sales rep, but goes to a team of people who are on the inside and the call center who can better answer their questions are at a computer Manning, the phone, not driving around, meeting with customers, but are actually sitting there can send you an email, can get, can send you a video showing you how to do it.

[00:23:33] Um, kind of that a faster response and those people can respond to inbound written tickets. They can respond to inbound phone calls. So yeah, I guess appointments setting, uh, SDR work too. We see kind of outbound lead gen. So people making, you know, the, the out of the call center making 80 calls a day and pounding the phones and setting up new deals with new prospects for the field sales team to meet with.

[00:23:57] That’s another thing that we see, and generally, I think the more you’re able to break up. Your sales organization’s roles, the more efficient they become. So there’s a little friction there because now your customer doesn’t just have one person to call for everything. But I think it’s worth the trade-off to always, they can always get the help they want.

[00:24:19]

Jason: Makes sense. And for the part regarding the buyer, the potential customer, right? Again, B2B B to C doesn’t matter. What are you seeing as far as what they’re wanting from the sales side or what they’re comfortable with? Is there anything that you’re seeing as a trend or a change? Let’s say from November of last year when we talked or even before.

[00:24:43]

Steven: I haven’t seen major changes and I think the buyer wants whatever’s best for the buyer. What’s most convenient for them. And so I think that that means sometimes they’ll want a phone call. Sometimes they’ll want to have you show something on zoom. Sometimes they’ll want you to send them a video of exactly how something’s done through video card or one of the, one of the competitive products there.

[00:25:02] Sometimes, and sometimes I want you to come out in person and not only show them how to do things, but take them out to dinner afterwards. So it’s a, it really depends on, I think the customer wants quick responses and they want to get what they need and they want it in the, they want to consume that help in the way they want to consume it.

[00:25:21] So I think it’s important for, and, and, you know, not everyone can have exactly what they want. You know, in different industries, people have to people, different things cost different amounts, right? And so, you know, you have expensive, thick margin product, then you’re, you’re more at someone’s back in call then, you know, it’s more, uh, more of a commoditized product or a smaller sales size.

[00:25:42] You see correlations there, but I think powder across the board because customers expectations. Aren’t trending down. I think they’re expecting us to use technology and give them more, not less as time.

[00:25:58]

Jason: Yeah. And, and more access, more options in the way that they want. Like you said, you know, the customer wants what the customer wants, especially when given the fact that most people don’t want to deal with a sales person, because they’re worried about what may happen.

[00:26:13] However, it’s balanced with the fact that they have a need or a problem they need to solve or a goal. And so they’re willing to take that chance, but they want to do it in a way that they want, which is fascinating. If we look at call centers, Like we use the phone, that’s it having to switch to omni-channel field sales being like, okay, well maybe someone wants to chat or SMS and doesn’t need a demo in the house.

[00:26:36] Maybe zoom works, you know, in the behaviors that are. Uh, over, let’s say the last year and a half. Right. And

[00:26:42]

Steven: custom videos. I mean, that’s something that you didn’t see five years ago, but now I mean that, that’s definitely something that you, you out of the call center, your call center rep. Maybe they don’t even want to talk to him on, you know, right now, but they want that call center up to, you know, make a video.

[00:26:57] And it takes the same amount of time as talking to him on the phone, but now they can consume it whenever they want. Right. So if your call center, it makes it quick. Video. I’m like we we’ve taken a look at big yard products to do this, but there’s a bunch of companies that are doing it now, but, you know, giving them the ability to.

[00:27:13] Make a quick video and send email that video to the, to the customer. That can be a really effective thing you can do right into the call center. So it’s not just a call, I guess. I wouldn’t just think of the call center as a place to take calls. I would look at, look at it as a customer service center, which you might be sending an email out of it.

[00:27:29] You might be sending a call out of it. You might be making a quick video for them. It might be doing a lot of things and that’s all out of the traditional call center. It’s it’s, uh, I would think of it as a customer service center where you’re, you’re giving the customer what they want. Yeah.

[00:27:42]

Jason: Yeah. And I think the more that a organization service and sales can be asynchronous and serve the customer, how they want to be served asynchronous, meaning like it’s not on the phone, that’s synchronous, everything else, like email it’s I send it, you consume it when you’re ready.

[00:27:59] You reply when you’re ready. And then I consume it when I’m ready, you know, that’s what people want more and more of because they want it. When they want it, not just how they want it, but when they want it.

[00:28:09]

Steven: Yeah. Well, you know, one of the, one of the things that jumps out at me here, uh, one of our most successful cost-saving and customers love it, things that we’ve ever done at Badger maps is build out kind of a video self-help suite.

[00:28:23] So kind of any question or problem, or, you know, not knowing how to do something in our product that you can imagine. We’ve built a little article with screenshots explaining how to do it. And there’s a video at the end that fix it through how to do it. And not only can people do. Find those questions on their own and go to the support page and just type, you know, type in the search bar.

[00:28:47] Here’s my problem. But also they can, if they send an email or an, I am, uh, to the support team or, or they’re talking to the support team, sometimes the easiest thing is. This pre-populated pre-written really well done thing that we can just send to them in two seconds. And the, you know, we were able to track how much those videos get watched over the track, how much these articles get read.

[00:29:09] It’s saved us hundreds of thousands of hours over in support over the years, just having that served up and ready to go. And a lot of times it’s the support team who have made those articles have made those videos because they are. You know, they’re the ones kind of on the ground. They know the types of questions that people are asking and they know the answers to it.

[00:29:29] And you can get really fast at responding to these things. Like if you read a ticket into us, The support team, you know, you could have just called us, but the support you, you write in, or I am in they’ll fire, they can fire back our response. And in five minutes, sometimes I think actually their average might be like under five minutes is the goal for that team.

[00:29:48] And they, they turn that stuff around and cause it’s all ready. It’s all. Pre-written, it’s all there already. It’s really powerful that to invest in. Those types of video and training assets for your customers.

[00:30:00]

Jason: Yeah. And I think that really goes into the overall customer experience, right? From the, from the, the marketing, the branding, the sales into them being a customer.

[00:30:09] And then how do you manage and maintain that relationship and keep things going, uh, which is key. So I know that one of the things that has happened in the world in the last year and a half is just a ton of change. I also know that in the world of leading a sales team, running an organization of any size, but especially on the smaller side, is that there’s always a constant need to change, adapt to get better and just become more effective, more efficient at what you do.

[00:30:40] Um, it’s just like one thing I promised new hires that, you know, we’re coming on board is I promised them two things. One is they’d never be bored. Um, and you know, there’s always stuff to do people to call things to, to go over. And then the second one is that change is constant, not just for the sake of change, but for the fact that like, we just want to keep getting better.

[00:31:01] I set that up because, um, where do you see like the balance of changing, changing strategies? Where does that fit in the limit of how much you want to change both internally, extra. Like, what have you seen for strategies around that?

[00:31:20]

Steven: Yeah, I think, I think you don’t, you know, you have to be careful about changing your strategies too much.

[00:31:24] Right? And I’ve seen people get this wrong as often as I’ve seen them get it right on the balance. I think, you know, managers often make the mistake of just blindly increasing sales activity, for example, and they can, they can lose quality and focus and therefore get less profitable sales as a result.

[00:31:43] Yeah, that’s understandable. Right? Fear and panic can lead managers to just want to crank up the volume and sales activity, for example. But sometimes it’s just because they don’t know what else to do. Right. And in quantity, in my experience, very rarely makes up for quality. You need to keep focusing on, uh, the, the most qualified leads that will close at the best margin.

[00:32:07] And you know, it, if you lower your qualification standards that you already have, and you know, are proven out, you can ended up just doing a lot more work with very little results or output to show for it. Right. And, uh, And you want to keep key. So you, you need to make sure that you maintain the focus on what makes a thing qualified, consider your, your leads or your prospects scope their budget, the what is the value of your offering for the certain customer and, and, and other factors that, you know, also defined.

[00:32:40] Makes it successful prospective customer for you and every company, every great sales leader has their finger on that pulse. Right. Um, but we want to make sure that you’re, you’re focused on selling to that, those types of prospects and not just, not just to, to anyone and, you know, especially in a great way to tighten the belt is to eliminate activity for the sake of just looking and feeling busy.

[00:33:03] Right. And frankly, a scattershot approach. Not worth anyone’s time or effort or anxiety. And, uh, so I think it’s a great time to rethink some of those strategies and how you’re doing things and how you’re approaching problems. And, but it’s also, there are some fundamentals that you want to make sure that you don’t get away from.

[00:33:25] Just because times are crazy and you want to make a, you want to make things happen. So I think the, a lot of the most successful companies in these times will be the ones that just, you know, grind it out and don’t do anything crazy because the world does get back to back to normal, uh, eventually here and it is kind of shifting back that way.

[00:33:45]

Jason: I’m thinking too about there’s recruiting and retention. Recruiting, I know is a mystery box, especially right now with trying to get people in there. So what I’m curious more about is from your perspective, field sales, and also what translate inside, you know, call center and virtual is what about the retention piece?

[00:34:05] Like how does the world of field sales approach retention other than just paying lots and lots of money? How do you keep good employees from quitting? Uh, maybe how do you get not good employees to leave? Um, right. Cause there’s good retention and bad retention. Um, w what do you see? Well, I guess, you know, strategies for that?

[00:34:27]

Steven: Well, I think. Yeah, the good news is in America. It’s really released to, uh, to get rid of bad employees. You know, it’s relatively easy to fire people and, and, you know, and that’s, if you think someone should be fired, usually it’s good for everybody involved, right? Because they’re not going to do great at your company.

[00:34:41] If you there’s a reason, you don’t want them there anymore. I have offices, both in America and also, um, in Europe and is a tricky thing about running a company in Europe is that you’re not allowed to fire anyone ever. And, and that, that does change the dynamic a little bit. It’s just very, very difficult.

[00:34:58] It’s possible. They’re very, very difficult. And as a result, I think, you know, as you look around their economy, you definitely see a lot of that. That’s a big inefficiency that jumps off the table and it’s like, well, a lot of people would be better off doing something else. And so they’re not doing what they’re doing well, and it’d be nice if they could.

[00:35:13] Wait, if men were allowed to waver, Alon and reshuffle the deck a little bit, and we have a great team over there, but it has affected hiring decisions before you, you ended up being more gun shy on the higher than you can be here. You, you can’t take the same risks on a higher, you stay between the goalposts a little bit more.

[00:35:30] Whereas here, you know, if I think someone’s got pretended great potential, but if they don’t have the. You know, bona Fides or, uh, you know, educational background or experience, you can take the risk on them. And if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. But, um, you know, I’ve, I’ve found that if more often than not, it does work out.

[00:35:47] And I think we over, we tend to over-rotate on trying to get people that are too perfectly qualified or have lots of years of experience or went to the best schools and like, I think that, uh, there’s a lot of overlooked candidates that if we put aside some of those requirements that, that actually, maybe don’t drive that much value anyway, we’d get a lot more great.

[00:36:08] We’d get more great hires. And, and, and one way you can do that is. Close your eyes and say, Hey, if I can jump into the cold, the cold water here, because if it doesn’t work out, I can fire him. Right. It’s fine. And that’s a great thing about this country. And so you can get, take a risk and give people a chance, right.

[00:36:24] So I guess, how do you retain great people? How do you focus on retention? I think you, you know, it’s about great retention is driven. I believe by. People quit because they don’t like their managers half the time. That’s the biggest issue. So I mean, obviously things like benefits and pay. Those are, those are big issues and, but kind of people know on the balance.

[00:36:46] I think people know what market is for things like that. And you know, if you’re at 25% of the market salary, like if you’re in the twenties, if you’re in the 25th percentile or the 75th percentile, you know where you’re at and that’s going to affect your retention rates, you know, commensurately. But by and large, I don’t think there’s any other wild card greater than like you liking your manager versus thinking your manager’s a Dick.

[00:37:11] And that that’s, that’s a key issue for, for retention. I think people liking their, their coworkers, and this is harder in the remote world. As you onboard people who are remote. And like, traditionally in your call center environment, you might’ve had, you know, you, you, you, everybody knows who’s, who’s, you know, you can think of your, each one of your employees and go, oh, and, and she’s friends with her and he’s friends with them.

[00:37:33] And like, you know, you kind of everyone, you know, who people go to lunch with. Right. And that’s a big part. I think of what drives retention is creating an environment where people have friends and they they’ve had the chance to get to know each other. It’s a lot harder in a remote world. And, uh, which is a big reason why I, I either comradery.

[00:37:51] Men making management hard is one reason. I think remote work doesn’t work as well as actually bringing people into, uh, into the office, into the call center at this point in, in this case, but also the camaraderie. So it’s harder to manage. It’s harder to make friends harder to it. And that’s that’s, I think that’s a lot of what is really satisfying for people.

[00:38:09] So. And, and we’ve, we try to do that now in their remote world. Um, and our offices are reopening right now, especially with new employees that we’ve onboarded. It’s been harder to develop that same comradery, that same corporate culture that you can when everyone’s in the office. But that’s, I think those are some keys to.

[00:38:27] He’s her attention that people often don’t think about. And so maybe managerial training is something that you could do as a, if you’re the CEO of a big organization, if you want to up retention, look to make your managers better at managing, you know, training, managerial training, uh, Empathy training. Um, that sort of thing.

[00:38:46] I mean, I think they know a lot of people think, oh, let’s a 10% raise instead of a 5% raise is what we need that because retention is off, but it might actually be, we need to treat people a little more empathy and ask them what they want and make sure there’s an opportunity for them to give anonymous surveys about, you know, that our 360.

[00:39:06] And we, we, we do that and I think it’s been it’s it allows you to manage better. If you have the 360 review, you know, you want, you know, an intro level and employee to be able to review what the CEO said in that last meeting. If they are, you know, in that last, all hands, if they’re not comfortable with it, or they wanted to talk about it or they want to challenge it, you want to have an anonymous way for them to do that.

[00:39:30] And I think that makes, you know, letting him play. Right. Their managers letting you know, having anyone be able to jump into anyone’s review and leave anonymous feedback, I think is extremely powerful in an organization. And frankly makes people better people.

[00:39:46]

Jason: I love it. I think that’s great. I mean, I think, you know, I see a lot of organizations who try to give more, pay more incentives, more spiffs, more contests and bonuses.

[00:39:56] More of the other things, which would be like, Hey, we’re going to do free lunches on Fridays, or we’re going to do these happy hour events, or we’re going to do this. And that’s good to a certain extent. But like you said, I mean, if they’re not happy with their manager and the other part that totally agree, but it’s not really spoken about much, which is people feel.

[00:40:15] Happy about who they’re working with and having relationships with their coworkers, which can be tough to do virtual in the office. It can be easier if those two parts are missing, there’s not enough free lunches that are gonna fix your turnover, right. And save you from what’s going to happen. Uh, and that 360, especially the anonymous feedback and review is so important and training those managers as the most important asset towards retention is such a key thing.

[00:40:43] Couldn’t agree. Last question for you, where do you see, or what do you see that sales leaders and owners of sales teams, call centers, whatever that looks like, where do you think they should be putting their effort in now, maybe in general or moving forward through the rest of this year as we enter into 20, 22, like where do you see if you could say, Hey, you need to be putting your focus on this and or this right now, what would that be?

[00:41:14] It

[00:41:14]

Steven: depends on the company and how things are doing. I mean, it, there are cases where, you know, hiring is something that should be taking manager half of manager’s time and making sure you’re getting that. If you’re doing a bunch of hiring right now, bringing the right people, as you’re scaling back up, if you’re losing a lot of customers, it could be focusing on your customers and figuring out what’s going on.

[00:41:33] Where, where are the shortcomings? What do we need to invest in? What are we doing wrong? You know, I, I’m not sure if there’s one thing across everyone. I do think, you know, the biggest part of any manager’s job is coaching and making the people beneath them better. Uh, whatever your role is, helping the next as a leader, helping the layer below you be the best they can be.

[00:41:57] To help the layer below that be the best they can be, et cetera, is the most important thing you can do. So, you know, training, coaching, making sure you’re looking at the right KPIs, not the wrong KPIs are really going to drive a real positive change in the organization. I think, you know, the, these are difficult times for a lot of companies.

[00:42:17] And nothing has changed for other companies. It just depends on the industry. And it’s, it’s a great time if you’re in the, if you’re zoom. Right. But I think, uh, there are on the balance. I think this is a time where we do get to retread a little bit. We get to rethink things. We get to think about what we want our organization to look like.

[00:42:35] Coming out of this and a lot of cases, maybe you’ve done layoffs and you’re going to be, as things scale up again, you’re going to be doing rehires. And, you know, you get to kind of reshape the organization a little bit, you know, you get to rethink well, what is the ratio that we want between this role in this role?

[00:42:51] Should we create a new rule to support the existing. People in this role and scale that team that way, instead of just hiring more of them, are there, is there technology that we can bring in that, that makes this team more efficient that we can bring in as opposed to hiring more people or so I think strategizing or around the direction of the organization and where you want it to go.

[00:43:12] Making the people below you, um, and above and equal to you better and just, you know, helping everyone sharpen their sword in the organization. Those are really important things right now at this point, at this crazy point in our head.

[00:43:26]

Jason: Well, and what’s interesting about that list is I think that list is universally true and best practices for organizations start.

[00:43:33] But like you said, some organizations scaled down now they’re going to scale back up. Others are we’re holding steady. And so there’s a chance that some internal resets and restructuring, not just people, but like strategies, approaches, things like that. So for people who want to find out more, I know that one of the best things is Badger mapping.com, which is the company.

[00:43:54] Also, I didn’t mention the intro, but, uh, previous listeners know this. Um, but you also have a podcast, the outside sales talk podcast, which if people, they can find that on all the platforms, they can also go to outside sales talk.com. I know that you’re really active on LinkedIn as well. Stephen Benson, uh, anything else that, you know, people could find you or find more information or anything interesting that you’re putting out there?

[00:44:20]

Steven: No. I mean, uh, LinkedIn is definitely the best place to find me if, uh, if you’re looking for me, if you’re, if you’re looking for Badger, definitely Badger mapping.com. If you’re in field sales or know people who are that’s, that’s, uh, a great resource and yeah, the podcast, if you’re in field sales and when I hear from sales, The kind of talk about their stuff from the lens of field sales outside sales talk is a great choice to, uh, to do that.

[00:44:46] But, uh, but yeah, definitely. I’m, I’m always looking to hear from people. So, uh, hit me up on LinkedIn’s just Stevens and Badger maps. Just drop that in the search bar.

[00:44:55]

Jason: Awesome, Steve. Thanks again for coming on the new show, continuing the conversation we started on the previous one, bridging that, uh, kind of conversational gap between feed sales inside sales sharing, what you’ve learned over the years.

[00:45:09] So I appreciate you coming on here and being a part of.

[00:45:13]

Steven: Well, Jason’s been fantastic. Thanks for having me on, did you get some inspirations of ways to help your call center sales team win bigger, stronger, and faster. Hope you are fired up to scale your sales operations. If you got value from this podcast, please go in and leave a rating and review also make sure to forward this episode to anyone else, you know, in the call center.

[00:45:38] We appreciate your support in growing the scalable call center sales podcast, family. And if you have any comments, ideas, or feedback, contact us@keterconsultinggroup.com. .

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[00:00:00]

Jason: Hey, what’s going on everybody so glad that you’re joining us on the scalable call center sales podcast. I am excited about this guest, the person I have on the show. His name is Jeff Toister from Toister performance solutions.

[00:00:13] He is focused on consulting. Contact center industry. And so Jeff has made a name for himself by being a consultant author trainer. That’s focusing on helping organizations become obsessed and be better at being obsessed with their customers. Uh, he has written four books, one of which his most recent one is the guaranteed customer experience.

[00:00:37] How to win customers by keeping your promises. And, uh, we are going to have some fun Chang today because he is on the customer side. I’m on the sales side. And there’s a lot that we’re going to talk about. Jeff. Welcome to the scalable call center sales podcast.

[00:00:51]

Jeff: Jason, thanks for having me.

[00:00:53]

Jason: So one of the biggest things.

[00:00:56] Let’s just jump into it because your focused on customer experience, customer satisfaction, all of that side now customer usually means they have signed up. They’re moving forward. What’s interesting. Is that customer experience, like you put it in your book that was defined by somebody else’s the sum of all interactions a customer has with an organization over the lifetime of that relationship.

[00:01:19] And to me that also would include before the customer even becomes a customer. Right? There’s all those things that happen, which is facilitated through sales.

[00:01:30]

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely customer experience does include sales. It does include marketing. I think there’s been a little bit of confusion in that. Uh, we’ve seen some contact centers rebrand themselves as the customer experience team, but they’re not doing anything that’s any different.

[00:01:45] So in reality, there’s still the customer service team, uh, but sales, marketing, customer service operations. Product design development, you name it. All of that is part of the customer experience. If it influences how a customer interacts with our brand in any way, pre sale, post-sale you name it? It’s part of the experience.

[00:02:07] Very inclusive. It’s an all encompassing definition, but that’s also, what’s challenging for organizations because we have so many different hands in the pie, so to speak that are influencing what a customer might think or feel about our organization.

[00:02:21]

Jason: Well,

[00:02:21] and what’s interesting is being a, let’s say career sales leader, and now consultant, but focused on the sales side.

[00:02:29] Whenever I hear customer experience, I’m thinking, okay, so this is after the sale is done. This is just everything that happens from that point forward. Even though, one of the things that I know is that, like you said, that relationship starts pre-sale during the sale, after the sale lifetime, what that looks like.

[00:02:47] And I also know, because this is where I think there’s a lot of value for you to share from your experience is where the silos happen. Right. I talk about this a lot, but there’s the silo of sales versus. Operations versus customer service versus product versus design versus marketing. It’s basically sales versus everybody.

[00:03:06] And for the sales leaders and business owners who are listening to this, hopefully they can get a glimpse. And what I want you to share is where those silos come from, why that happens. And then what you have found is a solution to that. And I know it was in your book and it kind of, it surprised me at how simple and great your idea was.

[00:03:27] Well before full disclosure,

[00:03:29]

Jeff: I’ve worked in sales and I saw firsthand where the silos come from. Uh, how do salespeople typically get paid? I get paid. to sell Right. And so there’s a built-in incentive system that says, don’t worry if that product ships or not. Don’t worry if you keep that promise, just close the deal.

[00:03:47] So that creates an incentive for many salespeople, uh, just to push and do whatever they can to get today’s sale. And I think that fundamental structure creates the silos. So what do you do about, or what problems does it cause I think the problems are pretty clear. If you step back as an organization, as an example, my wife and I are looking at adding solar power to our home right now.

[00:04:13] And what’s the piece of feedback we’ve heard from every solar owner. You know what that salesperson told us is not what happened. Don’t use this company and when you promise something to get the sale, because that’s how you get paid, but then that something doesn’t happen. The customer ultimately has a bad experience.

[00:04:33] It’s disjointed the promise. Wasn’t kept, they’re frustrated. Somebody else has to clean up that mess. But now we’re, we’re looking at, uh, how do we get the next sale? You get too many customers saying, whatever you do, don’t go with that company. It’s going to be a tough hill for any sales person to climb.

[00:04:51] So it is about not only make the promises you make to win the sale. In the customer’s mind it’s whether or not you keep those promises. And that’s really the simple concept. If your company can keep those promises by making sure all of these departments are working together on the same page, that’s what ultimately creates the type of experience where the customer’s going to buy more from you.

[00:05:15] They’re going to refer you to other people. And I know as a salesperson repeat business is way easier than new business. And so even for salespeople, uh, there’s often an incentive. To make sure you’re making realistic promises.

[00:05:29]

Jason: And I wonder on that last part that you said about getting the repeat. Yes, that is true.

[00:05:35] It’s always easier to get referrals. Repeat helps someone buy again from a brand they know and trust. And I also know from my experience that sales is full of turnover and there’s a lot of people who either don’t think they’re going to be in sales very long, or aren’t playing the long game. They’re worried more about hunting for today and getting paid, get to eating today in a primal sense versus.

[00:05:58] Planting seeds and growing a farm and being able to reap the fruits from that down the road. I think there’s a lot of salespeople I’ve talked to where it’s like, okay, well you could get repeat business. They don’t even know if they’ll be in the business in six months or three months, right. At the rate they’re going.

[00:06:14] So I think that could be challenging back to the promise part that you said, give me an idea or give the listeners, you know, what a promise would look like. Some examples or, you know, what would be, what an organization would set as a promise that then all the departments would be aiming to fulfill. So

[00:06:35] we think about customer experience.

[00:06:37] One thing that we should understand is that a customer’s ultimately buying from us to solve a problem. Of some kind. And what that promise is then is it’s a promise to solve that problem. Uh, I mentioned solar, what, why am I buying solar? It really price is important, but the price is not why I’m buying it.

[00:07:01] It’s unbind because I want to be more energy efficient, or I want to save money. Why do you buy an airline ticket? You know, price is important, but it’s from to get safely from a to B in a convenient way. So you think about anything that a customer bought. They’re trying to solve a problem. And the sales person often is making a promise that this product or this service will solve that problem for you.

[00:07:30] The challenge then is where the rubber meets the road is. Does that actually come true? And so one of the examples of I talk about my book is a company that provides financing and they provide equipment financing for businesses that sell technology such as copying machines, computer networks, et cetera, and part of the sales process.

[00:07:54] Uh, for this kind of large equipment is you have to give your customers a way to pay for it. And so if you have a financing partner, like the company, I have profiled great America, then it makes it easier to close the deal. But what is great America promising their customers? Their promise is really simple.

[00:08:12] We’re going to help you sell them. And so they’re promising the sales stats of all of their clients. You can sell more because we have these great solutions to help you do this. Now the secret to their success is whether or not those sales teams actually do sell more. If they do sell more great, America’s kept its promise.

[00:08:31] And. That’s easy repeat business, but if they don’t sell anymore as a result of great America’s financing solutions, that’s a broken promise. And it’s going to be pretty hard for great America to continue to be successful. Now, this company is incredibly successful because they keep that promise their clients revenues do reliably go up.

[00:08:52] But that’s just another example of we, we win the business by promising to solve some sort of problem. We keep the business by keeping that person.

[00:09:01] So customers come to companies, to brands, to wherever to solve a problem, right? Like some people, you know, they’re going for a goal, but ultimately at some level it’s probably to solve a problem or change their situation.

[00:09:16] They’re currently in. How often do you see companies that don’t actually know or understand the. Problem they’re theoretically trying to solve or the real problem that their customers actually have.

[00:09:32]

Jeff: I would say 90% plus of the time there’s a disconnect somewhere. And, you know, I’ll give you a real, real, simple example of what it looks like, especially in the contact center world and what it looks like when a company gets, gets it right.

[00:09:48] I went online recently to a company that I wanted to buy a rug, but I was very concerned about how do I care for this rug? Because I’m replacing a rug that that was damaged. I’m like, all right, I need something more reliable. There’s nothing on the website. So shame on you marketing. So now. Uh, there’s a little invitation to chat.

[00:10:10] All right. So now we’re moving into the contact center, right? There’s it says, and here’s the promise. Someone will be able to respond to you in 10 seconds. Ooh, someone’s right there to help me out. Okay. So click, I’m going to chat with a knowledgeable person who can help me figure out is this the right run for me?

[00:10:28] So 10 seconds, 10 minutes. Is there a difference? Well, it turns out there is a difference because it took more than 10 minutes for me to get a live person on this chat session. So there’s a broken promise already. Now I’m already suspicious. You said 10 seconds. I’m in 10 minutes. I’m frustrated now though, I have a live person and they have an opportunity.

[00:10:51] I’m approaching them with an intent to buy. They can answer my question quite easily and say, yes, this is the perfect rug for you where no, it’s not, but here’s one thing. And they closed the deal. This is a perfect example of inbound sales, a simple, easy way to close a sale. And what do they do? I don’t know.

[00:11:10] I think so. I think it should be easy to care for. That was the depth and breadth of their response. Did I buy a rug from that country? No, they lost a sale by the way. I’m a repeat customer, maybe not anymore. So that happens all the time. Every day, where we have a broken piece in the process that alienates the customer causes them to rethink a purchase decision.

[00:11:35] Let me give you a different example company I wrote about in the book called Osprey. And if you or your listeners, aren’t familiar Osprey. Uh, primarily backpacks for people who are really serious about the outdoors. So I live in a big Osprey house, my wife and I both have multiple backpacks for different activities.

[00:11:53] And I’m in the market for a new backpack for bicycling. So the same instance, I go to the website, I look at some options, it’s kind of overwhelming, click to chat. Now I’m connected with a live person. This is in their contact center and instead of 10 minutes, it’s less than 30 seconds and even better. I said, this is what I’m looking for instantly.

[00:12:13] I got a recommendation and not only did I get a recommendation though, I’m, I’m, I’m clicking on a link because it wasn’t just try this model. It’s a link so I can look it at it online. I got an, a follow-up from the, from the, uh, the requisite. Is that too large though? She’s almost sensing like this might be a great option, but maybe it’s too big a backpack based upon my description that I didn’t want something so big.

[00:12:36] Here’s another. We had a very nice chat, really lined up multiple things. Now here’s the last piece of the puzzle. I think that a lot of companies are missing. I did not buy that backpack from Osprey because I really needed to touch and feel. I went into my local REI, the sporting goods retailer on the lookout for the two specific recommendations that that agent had recommended.

[00:13:01] And I was able to touch and feel them and pick out the one that I ultimately wanted. My wife, by the way, winning with me REI had a great selection, but not the specific color and size that she was looking for. So she bought directly from Osprey. So based upon that, Osprey got not one, but two sales, one direct, and one indirect through their retail partner.

[00:13:24] Um, but just because of a better sales experience.

[00:13:28]

Jason: I love it. Well, and that lends to a totally different discussion we won’t get into, which is attribution, which is how do you know that your sales channels are working? Because again, they didn’t sell you, the backpack directly went through our app, but you did get this other sale, which is probably not traced to you.

[00:13:43] And so like how, you know, how does that work? But it’s more of the principle of it and what that looks like when they’re trying to solve a problem and care about solving your. So then this goes into my next question on this topic, which is if you’re talking at 90 plus percent, which I completely grabbed.

[00:14:02] So glad that you said that of companies don’t actually realize the problem they’re solving. Why do you think that’s the case? Why are organizations disconnected from the problems their customers face or want to solve?

[00:14:17]

Jeff: So there’s a few reasons for this one. A lot of companies have just never thought about this.

[00:14:23] So often it will start marketing or product development. And I’ve talked to a lot of professionals in this space and their biggest head scratching. I don’t know how to really communicate what we do. I mean, go to a website for virtually any tech company and try to figure out what they’re selling and you can’t.

[00:14:40] So it starts there. Right? What’s the basic value. If we’ve never thought about the basic value proposition. How do we get everybody aligned? So that’s really the first thing you have to focus your thinking on your customers and what you’re doing for them, not your products, features and attributes, but then the second step is making sure everybody understands that.

[00:15:00] So sometimes, okay, we’ve done that work, but we haven’t shared this with everybody until you share this with everybody, everybody says, this is our brand promise. This is what we’re trying to do for our customers. It’s hard to get people. And, and so if you keep that a secret or something just marketing has, or maybe just sales knows about, but it doesn’t bother to tell everybody else, Hey, this is what we’re promising our customers.

[00:15:21] Can we actually deliver that? That creates some disconnects as well. The last piece of the puzzle then is, do we deliberately align these pieces? Do we make sales accountable for the promises they make? Do we even track whether or not those promises. And if so, how often, and if not, what are the consequences in many organizations, the structure, and you mentioned this it’s a siloed structure.

[00:15:47] Sales has their objectives. Marketing has their objectives. Operations has their objectives. Customer service has their objectives, and none of them are completely aligned. And so not only do you have silos, one thing that I’ve experienced as someone who spent a lot of time in customer service, I’ll go to marketing and say, Hey.

[00:16:05] I could really use a heads up on that next campaign. So our customer service team is ready to go and marketing’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s really affect my goals. So I’m not going to invest time in that. And that creates a challenge to where every department has different sets of goals. Why would they work together?

[00:16:24] There’s in some ways, no incentive.

[00:16:27]

Jason: Yeah. And I’ve also seen that a lot where marketing and or sales will do something. And then customer service finds out about it, basically. The calls they start getting, or the questions they’re being asked or the customers they’re interacting with, uh, where there’s not that alignment.

[00:16:46] There’s not that communication flow, which in my experience, let me know. Your thoughts is just a symptom of the leadership from above also being siloed, right? So you have the leader of the sales leader of marketing leader, of customer service, of operations, and all of those leaders. Also siloing themselves and they have their own goals and they’re, you know, looking at their own fiefdom, if you will, within the organization and just trying to succeed in their own way.

[00:17:15] Again, not being alone. Oh,

[00:17:17]

Jeff: absolutely. It does start in the C-suite and everybody does have their own fiefdom or their own agenda. And that is part of the problem. Now I can also say that as frustrating it is. If you’re not in the C suite, there are solutions. They’re not always easy, but they exist. And I’ll give you an example.

[00:17:37] I worked in an inbound contact center, sales environment, and we were getting blindsided. Marketing campaigns, et cetera. And I was getting stonewalled by marketing. They didn’t want to share information. And I switched tactics where I realized I was always going to marketing saying, Hey, my goals, my goals help me.

[00:17:57] And they didn’t care about that. So what I try to do instead was I said, tell me about your goals for this next campaign. Well, now they’re interested because I’m talking about. And one of the things that our marketing and merchandising teams were working on was they look at slow moving products and they would try to maybe offer a proactive discount to kind of speed up that inventory turn.

[00:18:22] And I said, well, I think my team can help with that. And once they realize, oh, you can help me with my goals. Stonewalling turned into a weekly meeting. Where we would look at what are the products that they’re trying to move, what’s the best way to position them. And just by setting up that weekly meeting, we were able to create a million dollars in incremental revenue just by having a weekly meeting, to talk about your priorities and how my team can help.

[00:18:48] And ultimately. Our customer service team. They liked it because they were no longer getting blindsided. They were a big part of that success, but it took deliberately trying to understand marketing’s goals so that our inbound sales team could do a much better job.

[00:19:05]

Jason: And I am just going to take a moment here, not just in a self-centered way, because this is what I focus on, but you brought it up perfectly.

[00:19:13] And I know that you would agree. The tactic you took, which is different than normal is also the same thing that can and should be applied to sales conversations. Right? Most salespeople approach the potential customer with here’s how great we are. Here’s what we need. Here’s what my goals are. Here’s why you should buy from me.

[00:19:32] Right. Which is the same conversation. That is had with marketing, which is here’s my goals. Why don’t you care about me? And what’s important to me instead, successful salespeople in my opinion. And what I work on companies with is making it about the customer. What do they want? What is important to them?

[00:19:49] What are their goals? And then can I help them? Which is what you did and for people within organizations. Because like I say, all the time, everything is sales. That same approach, understand what other’s goals are, what they want and then how you can support it. I absolutely love that example from within an organization.

[00:20:08]

Jeff: No, and it’s a good point. That that is what would salespeople. Should be doing is uncovering their customer needs. But you mentioned this too, and I think this is the challenge. If as a sales person, if I’m under pressure to meet my numbers this month, that clock is ticking in a way. I have a disincentive to get to know you as a customer.

[00:20:29] Uh, what I’m really trying to do is I’m trying to make sure I hit my numbers. And I don’t want to spend time with you if I don’t think that we’re close to that deal. And when we get close that’s when we talk about price it’s as an example, um, earlier this year, my wife and I bought a new car and I knew exactly what car I wanted.

[00:20:49] And so rather than mess around, I just called my local dealership and said, can you, can you get it? Well, they realized they were going to have to order the car. Right. We’ve had all these supply chain issues and that car wasn’t coming in this month. So all of a sudden they weren’t very interested. So I called the next dealership.

[00:21:04] Hey, I want to buy a car. I want to make a deal today. Can you get this? I’ll get back to you. I gotta talk to the boss and okay. Next dealership. It took four dealerships. I’m calling with an intent to purchase. I already know exactly what I want. The thing is you’re not getting all the money this month.

[00:21:24] You’re going to get that money in a, in a few months. Is it worth it to you? And I finally got a sales person who had probably been there awhile and knew they were still going to be there in a few months to recognize this is an easy sale. There’s not much we have to do to pull the trigger. Hey, it’s Jason

[00:21:40]

Jason: here.

[00:21:40] We’ll be right back to the podcast in a moment, but first, are you ready to help your inside sales team close more? In my experience, there’s a certain percentage of your team that acts more like order takers than sales professionals. The first step to creating a scalable sales team is to equip your reps with the right mindset and proven strategies to transform them into quota breakers, to build a team of authentic persuaders that will crush their goals.

[00:22:03] Email jason@cutterconsultinggroupdotcomorgotowwwdotcutterconsultinggroup.com. Yeah. And those incentives, that’s a huge deal. Like not just incentives in the company, but just internally sales. What they’re focusing on. I mean, you said it earlier that when sales is focused on their production and they’re not.

[00:22:23] What happens is they’ll enroll anybody that they can, if there’s no parameters and guardrails in place. And then that just sets things up with that potential broken promises down the road. And it’s interesting, you know, back to this whole, like companies don’t understand their customers. Uh, one of the things I see is that companies are usually in love with, or think that everyone should want what they have to offer, irrespective of what anybody actually wants.

[00:22:50] Right. Like, of course you’re going to want this CRM or this car or this other thing. And they feel like they don’t need to get to know people and that’s not important. They should just follow the formula when we’re talking about these promises, because I think this is such a huge thing, and this, this can move the needle for so many people listening to this that are running, you know, organizations that have the sales side, as well as the others.

[00:23:13] Right. And some organizations, they just do sales and then they hand that customer off to. You know, company, but it’s about promises that also are not specific enough that leave things a little vague, which I think is one of the things that sales does is they kind of set up this vague promise of what it’s going to do.

[00:23:31] And then, you know, it becomes a square peg in a round hole. What have you seen in that aspect and, or what’s the solution for that other than just specific products?

[00:23:42]

Jeff: Well, so a good promise and the kind of promise it’s going to close the deal really has three characteristics. One is it’s very specific that it deals with the customer’s problem very directly.

[00:23:56] The second is it’s valuable to the customer. So if you just say, Hey, we’ve got low prices. That’s not really the problem the customer’s trying to solve, unless you’re selling a commodity. And if you say, Hey, we’ve got this great product. Got all these great features again, that’s that might not be specific or valuable enough.

[00:24:16] The last piece is it has to be realistic, has to be something that not only can you deliver on, but the customer believes you can deliver on. So a company I wrote about in the book called Zenos, it’s a furniture company. They primarily sell beds and mattresses, and then they’ve expanded into sofas and a few other items.

[00:24:37] What’s interesting about Zenas is I discovered them when. Um, my wife and I have a vacation rental and we were doing a, uh, an inspection of our cabin. We discovered that one of the beds was broken and I don’t even want to think about how the bed got broken. What I do know is that I had to get it replaced in the challenges.

[00:24:58] Our cabin is, is in a remote village. It’s about an hour from the nearest furniture store. So now I’m going online, right? I’ve got an intent to purchase and I kind of have an emergency. And while price is relevant, it’s certainly not the most relevant issue. Right. I need to replace this bed. It needs to fit the decor.

[00:25:15] And I have limited time. And if I look at the value proposition for local furniture companies, that local being relevant, it’s relative, it’s an hour away. It was kind of like, Hey, we have beds or where everything’s on sale that doesn’t speak to mind. Uh, I, I went to a company. I won’t name them, but they are, they’re one of the first companies that really built a big name for, um, simplifying the sales experience for buying mattresses online.

[00:25:43] And it’s like, well, certainly they’re going to have a good process. No, it was we’re on sale. So everything was about price or just, we have these products. Zenith was. We’re going to get you this great looking bed and deliver it to your doorstep. That promise spoke really, really directly to the problem I was trying to solve.

[00:26:04] I’m in this remote village. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to get a great bed and I need to get it now to my door. And they delivered on that promise. Now here’s the amazing thing. That’s the reason I bought for them. But what I haven’t mentioned is that Zane has had the lowest prices of all the options.

[00:26:23] And that’s not what they led. They could have led with. We’ve got the lowest prices in town, but that wasn’t going to solve my problem. So they pushed their lowest prices almost to the side and said, we’re going to solve your problem. The bonus was, we’re going to do it at a much lower price than our competitors.

[00:26:40] And I think for salespeople that, that automatically default to price, you’re really sending the signal that I’ve got nothing good to offer you. So it’s just going to be cheap. Focus on the problem you’re going to solve and price in some ways becomes irrelevant. And if you have a great price, then that’s just the icing on the cake.

[00:26:59]

Jason: I love it. Well, and that’s such a great reminder to sell on value and the value that you’re promising as an organization to solve the problem the customer has, right? Like tying in all of these concepts we’ve talked about so far and why that matters and why that fits into what you want as an organization, which is a lifelong customer, right?

[00:27:22] Some kind of increase lifetime value, some kind of returning customer, brand loyalty, whatever that looks like. So speaking of which let’s shift a little bit into, one of the things that’s happened, it’s been happening for a while, but now I’m seeing it a lot, which is contact center, call center sales teams, having to face the reality that not everybody at scale wants to be on the phone.

[00:27:44] Right? Like you mentioned it earlier with, with chat, widgets on websites. Those have been around for a while, but a lot of the companies I do, yeah. They have ignored that and said, okay, we’ll just do everything on my phone anyway. But now they’re having to go into, you know, what’s referred to as the omni-channel experience of some kind of chat, some kind of email, maybe SMS, and then there’s the telephony side that the teleservice part.

[00:28:10] And so where does that fit in to this, with the promise with aligning everybody and where have you seen. Go sideways because now you’re taking this person who you wanted them to be good over the phone sales. Now it’s like, okay, how do you ensure that the right experience is happening for a potential customer and converting them when it’s either one person trying to do all these, or you’ve got four different people chat, email, text phone in this.

[00:28:41]

Jeff: So there’s a few things that we have to unpack here. And I think we should start with the customers and understand that in today’s environment. And this is regardless of generation. So this is not just a young person thing. Nope. The phone is an escalation channel, unless it’s a very complex issue or a very urgent issue.

[00:29:01] We’re not going to the phone first. And you think about most consumer behavior. What do we do? We’re going to look it up. We’re going to try to figure it out on our own. Is it on your website, on your app? We’re not only want to deal with the person we trust information. We seen posted online much more than we get from an interview.

[00:29:18] The second step then is often messaging. Whether it’s SMS chat, if we’re on a website, even email, email is still incredibly popular because I can send the message and not deal with it. And then get your response an hour later. I hope so. By the time we’re getting to the phone, it’s either extremely complex, very urgent, or I’ve tried those other methods and.

[00:29:42] Been frustrated because it hasn’t worked. And so I think as an organization, we have to understand that we are needlessly frustrating our customers in the sales process. Now let’s look at channels and like, what channels should we offer? And the simple answer is only the ones you’re doing. If you go to Costco’s website and try to send them an email, you’re going to see a message that says, yeah, we’re not good at email.

[00:30:03] So you should really call us or come to a store. That’s where we’re awesome. Try to engage with trader Joe’s on Twitter. Good luck. They don’t. But these are customer focused companies that do a lot of revenue that just recognize there’s certain channels we’re going to be great at and certain channels we’re not.

[00:30:21] And that gives us, I think, to the third part is, well, how do we manage this? If you have just one or two people, and they’re trying to do all these different channels, they’re going to fail. And for multiple reasons, one is the skill set to be great on the phone is not the same skill set to be great on chat or email.

[00:30:39] It doesn’t mean that one person can, can not be great at both. They can, but there are different skills. Some people have. Both of those skillsets. Some people don’t, some people can develop them with training. Some people can not. So if we put someone in a position to do everything without giving them new skills, we set them up to fail.

[00:30:59] The other thing I see that’s very specific and contact centers is trying to handle a synchronous and asynchronous channels. Simultaneously. Let me say that in English handling phone calls, while I’m trying to message or. And what typically happens is I’m degrading that agent’s attention. They’re not paying full attention to the phone call.

[00:31:20] They’re also not paying full attention to the email and the quality of both suffers, but productivity also suffers. And one thing I’ve done with clients, we’ve, we’ve run an experiment and it’s worked every time when you’ve said you’re either on the phone, fully paying attention. Or you’re focusing on messaging channels, like email and chat, and you’re fully paying attention to those.

[00:31:42] What happens when, when we separate those two things is quality naturally goes up. So we’re closing more sales, we’re answering more questions. Productivity goes up. And that’s kind of the amazing part, uh, that happens. But I, I know many, many contact centers. They just throw multiple channels at agents and say, good luck, try to handle all of these as best you can.

[00:32:03] And it doesn’t work very well.

[00:32:06]

Jason: I know that before we jumped on, you were telling me about an experience you had as a customer, which segues into, or fits into this discussion of the omni-channel the challenges that happened. That happens from it, but also one of the important things, especially from the sales side and for the business owners and leaders, listening to this, which is the lifetime value of a customer share the experience you had, that you were telling me about.

[00:32:30] I think it’s super valuable, right? Right.

[00:32:32]

Jeff: It’s it’s frustrated. Cause it’s a brand. I would love to mention a great example about the brand because I’ve been a loyal customer of this brand for many, many years. And I was planning a trip where I was going to be in the same city where they have their flagship store.

[00:32:49] And so I was like, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go to the flagship store and have this great experience. Now here’s the interesting thing. Their marketing team sends me emails almost every day sale sale, sale, new product. And I ignore most. Because I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like, and I know what I want to buy, but now I am planning a trip.

[00:33:08] I have a specific intent to purchase. I want to go to the store. They had this whole fitting experience, uh, where you could work with a professional. They. So shoes and apparel. And so you’d get a shoe fitting and their website, a little information, but not a lot. So I sent this email very glowing gushing email.

[00:33:28] Hey, I want to, I’m planning this trip. I will be in town. Tell me more about how this process works. It sounds exciting. So I’m like I’m going to come in and buy stuff. My research indicates again, that companies should respond to these emails. It took several days to get a response from this company. So already my excitement is deflated.

[00:33:50] It’s like, Hey, I want to come in and buy from you. Cause I love you so much. And they’re like, yeah, we’re going to just ignore you. So several days later I’d kind of written them off. I finally get an email and you think, okay, here’s your opportunity. I contacted you with an intent to buy. And the email basically says, I don’t know, call store.

[00:34:09] Now I think most people look from the outside in would say, that’s a horrible response and you’d be right, but we should ask the question. Why did we get this response? And I will tell you, there’s probably two clear reasons. Number one was the person responding to these emails was clearly dealing with some sort of quota or productivity standard.

[00:34:28] They were not allowed to spend the time you need to spend to read the email thoroughly, understand that customer’s intent. And reply thoroughly. So that’s the first challenge. The second challenge is they did not have the resources necessary to thoroughly and properly answer my question. Just like I was frustrated trying to get information about their store.

[00:34:51] They were frustrated too, and because they didn’t have time. They didn’t feel enabled to just call the store, get the answer to my questions that they could then share with me. So you have multiple broken steps in the process. We have these silos that you’ve talked about, and instead of creating an experience where I walk into a store with an intent to purchase and, and they do track, there is attribution because they have like a whole rewards and point system.

[00:35:15] And I have a lot of points piled up and I’m ready to spend. Instead of that, I get so frustrated. I don’t even go to the. And the next time I have a chance to buy something that they sell. I buy from a competitor. So they’ve lost business rather than gain business based upon a poor experience

[00:35:33]

Jason: that happens all the time.

[00:35:34] And I wonder if they’re actually able to. Put those two together, right? Like what happened, what you wanted to do and the lost revenue and where the say your lifetime value stopped with them. But I think it’s an important lesson too, for organizations, not just for current clients, but other new perspective leads and clients who reach out.

[00:35:55] And are inquiring for information, right? So I’m thinking about clients that I have in companies that, you know, they’re in a commodity type space, let’s say healthcare. And so somebody is filling out a form or insurance, and they’re trying to get insurance. And it’s like, whoever responds to the quickest and the most effective and provides the best level of service is going to win.

[00:36:15] Um, yet organizations are surprised. Uh, that they’re not doing so well when they wait days to actually reach out to a new potential client. Right?

[00:36:25]

Jeff: Well, in a very easy fix to this is what I call a promise audit. And so what’s happening now is they have great stats on those marketing emails. They know what’s the open rate.

[00:36:37] They know the click-through rate. They know how many of those people buy. They could track it down to whether or not I bought those sneakers or not. So they have a really good dashboard for them. But what they don’t have is a really good dashboard that says how many times is there, their contact center frustrated a Woodby or existing customer, but a promise what a promise audit is is that we, we, we identify promises that we.

[00:37:03] And we backtrack to figure out how often are we keeping them. So in this case, this fitting experience, come to the flagship store and get fitted, just walk through the customer’s shoes, so to speak, no pun intended. And the first thing you see is there’s very little information on the website. It’s terrible.

[00:37:20] So we need to update the website because that’s where customers go first. And if we’re going to share that information, we need to ask ourselves if, if you were just sampling. A bit of communication. You could probably figure out how many customers like me contacted the contact center to get information.

[00:37:37] How often does that happen? And if you were to look at the replies, you’d see how horrible they were. And all of a sudden, now you’re building a case. That says, wow, we’re really missing this opportunity. Doesn’t show up on our dashboard anywhere, but we’ve built a case with now multiple data points. This is how many contacts we’re getting.

[00:37:55] This is how many fittings we’ve been doing. This is probably how many fittings we could have been doing. And we probably do have a number that says when we come in and customer comes in and does a fitting, this is how much more they buy. So it takes a little bit of leg. But if you do that legwork and do that promise audit, you can quickly attach a value to that and quickly find some very simple steps to fix the problem such as better information on the website, a faster response and more information.

[00:38:24] In response to those questions, to get customers, to come into the store and have a great experience.

[00:38:29]

Jason: I think that’s a great suggestion idea and not just for the shoe example, but to walk through your process as a customer in your customer’s shoes and see what that looks like, okay. I’m offering this thing, but what happens when they get to the website?

[00:38:42] Instead of, again, going back to what I was talking about with the promises being made and the problem they’re solving the customers, most companies are just so in love and with what they’re on. And they’re blinded by that, that they’re not looking at it from the outside. Right. They’ve spent too much time inside and not outside.

[00:39:00] Uh, so that’s a great idea because I can just imagine if someone looked at that whole process, it’s kind of like why people like you and I, when we go to an organization, we can see lots of things that the company could be doing better or different that they’re just not even aware of because they’re, as they say, inside the jar.

[00:39:17] Right?

[00:39:18]

Jeff: Yeah. And that’s a good point. The fresh perspective that you have as an outsider. It’s tough to see that when you’re working in that organization day in, day out, the more you see something, the less you tend to.

[00:39:30]

Jason: Yeah, makes sense. Uh, you know, it’s why mystery shopping, mystery shopping programs are, can be really effective because they’re exposing things from this completely different outside part.

[00:39:40] Last question I have for you is what do you see as the near future of call center? Mostly on the sales side of operations, like what it takes to be successful, where they’re going the rest of 20, 21 into 2020.

[00:39:56]

Jeff: I’m glad you asked that question because I’ve seen it evolve over time. When I started in the contact centers, I started an inbound contact center where if you wanted to order an item, for example, you had to call, we call them call centers.

[00:40:09] Uh, the, the inner e-commerce did not exist. And then over time, that’s, that’s changed too. Uh, today it’s, it’s really a blend. You’re not often calling. To make a sale. You’re often calling with a question or a desire for more information that might turn into a sale. If we’ve answered the question correctly and we’re looking at the future, I think that’s where we’re going to go.

[00:40:37] Is that increasingly the customer’s going to have multiple touch points, whether it’s in a physical store, on a website, on an app. With the product itself and it’s via those touch points, they’re going to reach out to someone. In a contact center who has the ability to hopefully nudge them into a sale.

[00:40:57] Uh, but as we’ve talked about a few examples that may or may not be a direct sale, like, Hey, I’ll take your credit card. We’ll do this right now. Or it might be here’s the information you need to make the decision, but they’re going to make that sale through another channel. And that complication is, I think really vexing for a lot of companies, because how do I tie all those pieces together?

[00:41:18] As you said, the tribute, all of this. And the future is, is I think companies there’s already software out there that helps to do that. And I think companies that are, are going to start tying those pieces together, we’re realized how critical it is for each step in the process to be very consistent in how they’re serving customers.

[00:41:40]

Jason: Got it. Love it. That makes total sense. So I know that there’s a lot of things that you have going on. So for people who are listening, I know that your main website, which is twister solutions.com T O I S T R solutions.com. I also know you have your book, the guaranteed customer experience@guaranteedexperience.com.

[00:42:00] I know that you’re also really active on LinkedIn, which is where I chatted with you at, uh, in setting this up. Anything else that you have going on? People listening can find out more or what you recommend, where people should go. So here’s

[00:42:13]

Jeff: the easy thing. If you go to either of those websites, uh, you will, you will be able to contact me directly.

[00:42:18] And even in page five of my book, I have my personal phone number, my personal email address. I even have a guarantee for readers that I promise readers, they’re going to increase sales and win and retain more customers. And if they don’t, I’m gonna spend time with them to help make it right. And so I’m really easy to contact and that’s by design.

[00:42:41] I try to be available to people who are trying to solve these problems. The last thing I’ll I’ll share with you, anybody can go to my website, twister solutions.com and I have an email it’s one customer service tip once per week. It’s very simple and straightforward. It’s completely free. Anybody can sign up for it, but it’s a reminder of basic basic skills that often have a big impact.

[00:43:05] So this, this week, for example, was BU and the, the idea behind it is you obviously have a great personality. Don’t be stifled by your environment. Use that great personality to connect with your customers, break the ice, and add some unique value. So every week and get a tip like that at toaster solution style.

[00:43:26]

Jason: That’s awesome. Well, Jeff, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you being here and bringing the customer experience lens to the sales side in the beginning part of the revenue cycle, and hopefully that’s helped some people running organizations kind of break down those silos, make better promises and just ensure more customers, better customer experience, and hopefully increase the lifetime value.

[00:43:48] So thanks for coming on.

[00:43:50]

Jeff: My pleasure, Jason, thanks for having me.