TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE
Chris: Yo Logan, what’s up buddy?
Logan: How’s it going man?
Chris: Good, good. What do you want to talk about today?
Logan: Yeah, man, I’ve been working hard in sales off with the teams lately and I figure there’s just amazing technology that I’d like to talk to the listeners about.
Chris: Yeah. Sweet. I’d love to hear about it. I’ve put my hands on it a little bit, but haven’t used it the level you have. So yeah, why don’t you just give us a rundown on what it’s about, why you love it, what you wish it did, maybe, I don’t know.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. So basically, CRM, Customer Relationship Management Software, has been out forever it seems, right? You’ve got Salesforce, HubSpot put together as CRM. Then you have kind of the smaller ones, like the open source stuff, like a SugarCRM. You got kind of the middle of the road in Insightly and these kinds of things.
What was great about CRM is it brought order to what… When I was back in the card business, people talked about note cards, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Logan: So notepads, cards, Rolodex, all that kind of stuff. Then what we had was we had marketing automation, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.
Logan: Marketing automation was great. We talked about HubSpot. We don’t need to talk about marketing automation today. But what happened was you had CRM and then, you had the ability to start to build workflows, like call this person here, email this person here based on time, based on some pieces of CRM. You could base it off of, they click an email, they click a link in an email, they open it-
Chris: An event triggers the action, right?
Logan: Right. But that was really more available in marketing automation, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Logan: So what we started to see was, people, myself included back five, six years ago, we started to try to use marketing automation tools in our sales game. So-
Chris: To achieve those goals, yeah.
Logan: Exactly. So, something that I would do back when I was launching one of my first ventures was, I’d send out a email blast through, say like a HubSpot and then, I’d look and see who clicked and open and all that and then, I would call them. This was a B to C play. So, we’re talking about… What I’m really looking for is I want to prioritize the prospects based on engagement.
So the problem with all of that is now every channel is super important. It’s super easy to engage in that, but there’s so much going on online. So, you’re getting tons of emails, you’re getting… There’s all these different pieces of software that you can see if they opened the email. That’s table stakes now and then, you can log a call, but that wasn’t always the same software as the, for instance, a Yesware or a Mixmax or something like that. These tools that you could do email stuff and then you can automate the email. Then you have Linkedin, right?
So the picture I’m trying to paint it… But before I put that all together, then you have companies, like Owler which give you all this different data on companies, right?
Chris: Yeah, like news and stuff like that.
Logan: Yeah, exactly. So, to be a good salesman or sales rep, especially in the time of account based marketing, account based sales and this kind of stuff, you really need to be able to put all that together. So reps, salespeople, whatever the role, like a BDRs, a sales executive, whatever they are, they need to be able to have all that information in front of them at the same time and they need to be able to get some of that competitive intelligence. They need to be able to get some of that information, those nutrients that are going to help power their next outreach or their next conversation.
Chris: And prioritize their times too, right?
Logan: Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, I was testing out a new workflow before we came onto this podcast. I made 58 dials in about an hour and 20 minutes. Not a whole ton of connects. I set two appointments. So, that if you think about, what does that look like inside of just a straight CRM, like Salesforce, it would never happen. The way that I would do that is I would basically print out the list and then, notate what was going on. Then I would either have myself or an admin basically go into Salesforce and update that.
So much data gets lost. Then you think about, “All right, I’m going to send an email based on the call that I had.” Data is not in the same place when you have an external sort of email automation platform and then you talk about email automation, but that kind of sucks now because you need to personalize stuff.
So, having your templates in one place that you can kind of do the 20/80 rule, 20% personalized, 80% template. So, if we put all this together, a sales engagement tool is that wonderful sort of, a little piece of everything that you need right in front of you that also-
Chris: In one place.
Logan: … has a workflow. Yeah and then, the last piece is, as a sales leader, you can basically put all of this data together and get a good idea of rep productivity.
Chris: Yeah, you can see all this going on, right? Yeah. Sort of trying to merge reports, et cetera.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Then finally, so our SalesLoft is on top of the Salesforce instance. By the way, this is not a sponsored-
Chris: We don’t have any sponsors, yeah.
Logan: No, no. We don’t have any sponsors, but I love SalesLoft. SalesLoft has done a great job for a lot of different reasons. Deeply technical reasons and also, it’s just… I log into SalesLoft or my reps log into SalesLoft and they know exactly what they’re doing and it’s beautiful. So, it’s fun to play with, you know?
Chris: Yeah and I don’t spend a lot of time in there, but I like going in occasionally, see what’s going on for us, different clients, it’s easy.
Logan: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: You get a snapshot real quick of what’s going on. Yeah.
Logan: Exactly and then the cool thing is, from a Salesforce administrator standpoint, the sales engagement tools sit on top of the CRM, so you can pipe the data in. So, gone are the days of the sales guy just completely destroying a record, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Logan: Mingling it and the response is always, I mean even with very senior people who know what not to do, it’s always, “Well, I don’t have time, make it easy.”
Chris: Right. Right or I have a deal that can close right now. That’s the only thing I’m thinking about, so get out of my way, right?
Logan: Right.
Chris: Or I’m going to just be… move too quick and make mistakes and you have to be okay with it because I’m trying to close the deal.
Logan: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: Right?
Logan: Exactly and so, the sales engagement tool, you can kind of make it as one way as you need to, where activities getting recorded. But, if somebody just completely destroys a record, like messes up the last name and then, saves it, it’s not going into the single source of truth. So, I love that piece, where you can really kind of empower a rep to like, “Alright, you’re going to do your thing and you’re going to be kind of in your little silo and I’m only going to suck the information I need out of that into Salesforce.”
Chris: Hey, so I’ve never managed a sales team. I’ve sat close to sales teams, right?
Logan: Sure.
Chris: And I’ve done a lot of selling on my own, but is that a real big problem, the data integrity and just human error?
Logan: Oh yeah, dude. Yeah.
Chris: [crosstalk 00:09:20] So what’s that look like? Just somebody’s entering information or they change it accidentally. What is it most commonly?
Logan: Yeah. I mean, yeah, little things, right? So it’s like the… For instance, the person, a sales rep will realize that, we have the wrong contact in the CRM, right? So they’ll just add another record without noting-
Chris: Oh right, yeah.
Logan: … what’s going on in the other one or there’s a hyphen in one company name, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Logan: And an email comes in. Like today, for instance, one of our clients, we have outreach going. There’s a person who reaches out to our client because her sort of manager said, “You need to reach out to this guy. He can solve our problem.” She’s not in SalesLoft, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Logan: So, company had a hyphen in its name and it was two words with a hyphen, but what the rep thought… This is… We have some serious QA stop sort of checks and balances. What the rep thought was that the company was not in our system because the way that the email was written was that it was a referral.
Chris: Got it.
Logan: So it was easy to think, “Oh, this is a… We write really good content. It’s a referral. This company’s not in the system.”
Chris: You got to pass it along, yeah.
Logan: … et cetera, right?
Chris: Right.
Logan: I mean this all happened in three minutes, but in an organization that doesn’t have hardcore QA systems, that’s a duplicate company. A duplicate account and if that is in Salesforce with no workflows, you’re pooched, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Logan: That sucks because now you’ve got that company name two different ways and you’ve got two different people attached to it. Where if you limit and you kind of break that off in the sales engagement tool and you limit the amount of data that’s flowing back in sort of unchecked, you don’t run into these issues as much.
So, you don’t have to beat on the sales reps as much to make sure [crosstalk 00:11:47] that everything is perfect. You can kind of have some tools and I’m not advocating for lazy sales people. But I am advocating for, let salespeople do their job, right? Then, kind of manage the fallout if it comes, that kind of thing.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sweet.
Logan: Yeah. So, my biggest piece of advice is, if your team is using a CRM, if your sales team is using a CRM, they’re probably using the wrong tool. They’re probably missing out. We have built our stack to be more cost effective than if we were to have everybody using a Salesforce [crosstalk 00:12:33] or a… any CRM just because the amount of labor it takes to manage that is less, the ROI is far more. So really, if you are not using a sales engagement tool, I highly recommend looking into it and I highly recommend looking into SalesLoft. Outreach, I’ve demoed it. It looks great, but SalesLoft does everything we needed to do every time and that, when it comes to software, is rare.
Chris: Sweet. Sweet. All right man. Cool. Well, let’s wrap it up. I’m Chris Battis.
Logan: And I am Logan Kelly. Thank you everybody for listening to our podcast. Have a great day and please give us a five star rating on whatever podcast app you are listening on.
Chris: All right. Take care.
