Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, today we have something a little bit different. There were three and now there are two in this podcast that we’re running today. We were all planned for Mike Latch and Gregg Murphy to be on board to talk about all things sales processes, blending the right amount of tech into sales and about some of their incredible successes that they’ve had over their journey. However, last minute technical glitch and we have just Mike and sorry Mike, I shouldn’t say just Mike because having had five or ten minutes with you before the podcast here you have a wealth of experience that I think is going to be really good for anyone listening. But three has become two and there we have it.
So Mike who we have online, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Patter AI company based out of the States and this is where he leads the developer development of its really cutting edge sales enablement technology. Mike’s got 20 years of experience across a technical and sales landscape which is quite rare in this industry. So that’s electrical engineering, physics and sales, right? Combinations you don’t hear all that often, but that unique ability to combine those technical expertise and strategic sales really has helped him I think play a really pivotal role in scaling a previous business of his or his and Gregg’s from 50 million to over $1 billion in revenue. So they’re pretty big numbers and pretty impressive. So well done Mike. And I’ll throw to you in a minute because I’m really keen to hear, but for him that company got bought out by ADT which is clearly life changing. But now Mike’s moved into Patter AI and he’s co-author of a book called “Sales Sucks”. So Mike, welcome to have you on board. Really looking forward to our discussion today.
Mike Latch:
Ben, thank you very much. Thank you for your patience again with the technical glitches and very happy to be here.
Ben Wright:
That’s amazing. We’re in a world where we are now driven by tech and we spend so much time on desktop videos. We have emails, we have phones, but the number of tech issues that can hold up meetings, I think everyone listening will be nodding their head going, “uh Huh”. So, but we got there and we’re away. So can you please tell me a little bit more about yourself, your background and what then we’ll get into what we’re going to talk about today.
Mike Latch:
Yes, a little bit about me. I do have an atypical personality and background for both engineering and sales. So I started actually as a physicist for a defence contractor. And the neat thing was that I got exposed once people realised I had this atypical personality type for a technical person, I’m extroverted. Some people would say, oh, you should go into sales, you know, do sell our technical systems. That was like a bad. I almost was like insulted because in my family they’re all engineers and like, you know, we didn’t have any appreciation for sales or engineering, I mean sales or marketing, other than when I’d be a little kid with my parents going to get a car every couple of years, my mom would start to get nervous as a salesperson got closer and closer in proximity to my dad. That was my exposure to sales.
Long story short, I ended up doing a commission only sales job in Hawaii working for a residential solar company. And I got really lucky. Gregg Murphy was the sales manager and he said, hey Mike, you’re a clever guy. Don’t talk about how solar panels work and all that kind of stuff. I’ve got a great process, just follow it and I’m pretty coachable. And he turned me into a selling machine. And I really liked sales and it was really not, it was just a great experience. His process was just presenting a bunch of information, asking people questions, helping them make decisions. And if they bought or sold, it didn’t really matter at the end as long as they made a decision they were going to be happy with either way. And I didn’t know that sales could be something like that. It’s really a good experience for everybody. And the owners asked me like, how did you get so good so fast? And I said, I just did exactly what Gregg told me to do, which was what I thought I was doing, but I was doing a bit more because I could sort of handle all kinds of edge cases for complicated products. Right then with the customer. You know, in residential solar it might be re-design an entire system. This was 13 years ago on the fly, switch from purchase systems to lease systems and work through a spreadsheet with somebody. So I’ve this kind of teaching style personality and I had this technical background. So then later I got into building software that could do that, those technical parts and just give that to a bunch of reps that didn’t have my, you know, technical background or teacher style experience. And so that’s how, that’s how I ended up with tech and sales and leveraging tech to help large consultative sales teams perform better.
Ben Wright:
Such a simple way to talk about sales. And before I get into today, we are kindred spirits. We both have a background in renewables, which we didn’t know obviously until today. It’s a terrific industry, but one where we’re often bringing in people without a lot of industry experience. So having a really good process for me is far more impactful. So I think you’re very well qualified there to talk about this. And today I’d really like to focus around the importance of blending both a sales process and tech into your sales stack or how you go about your go to market strategy for your teams because they really can have a huge impact when you get them right. But equally they can have a corresponding negative impact when there’s too much process or too little process blended with too much and again, too little technology. So let’s start with the sales process piece. So for you, how important is getting the sales process right in a sales team?
Mike Latch:
For me personally, assuming that we’re in selling something that’s ideally suited for consultative sales, you know, so saying if one end is transactional, like, you know, do you have great bubble gum? Yes. Cool, I will buy your great bubble gum. On the other end, you know, I would like to buy ten 747s for my airline company and it’s going to take two years to iron out that contract. So consultative sales, you know, in the middle, I would say a great sales process. And before I met Gregg, I wouldn’t have thought this is paramount because I’ve seen how well a large sales team made of just regular decent folks that don’t have a lot of sales experience or technical experience can just just learn a process and go and execute in the home and really walk people through like pretty complicated products with all kinds of options and things like that. And a little bit deeper reason why I think process is so paramount is because if you’re selling something like that, and you’re honest with yourself, and you close your eyes and you imagine what are all the things that a customer needs to know to make a good decision to buy my product, product and service. And then what are the questions that they may ask me? Like, if you’re honest with yourself, you can really answer all that stuff ahead of time. And if you can answer it ahead of time, you can actually create a really good process that changed that stuff together. And then that’s the thing that’s very coachable. So that’s what I mean by process as opposed to, you know, like close tactics or something like that. I just mean it’s a bunch of information and decisions that somebody needs to make. And if you think about it in advance, you can really create a pretty good flow chart of all that stuff and then get somebody to say all those things and ask all those questions and answer them the way that is a good way to answer them.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, I’m absolutely hearing for you, it’s a structure to take someone from a journey from A to B, rather than necessarily a whole lot of tactics that you just throw in at a point in time. And fundamentally, I agree there. So I work with a large amount of sales leaders through my business, and I have particularly over the last 20 years or so, come across a lot of leaders. And invariably every leader that I ask the question to tell me about your sales process, the first answer is, absolutely, yes, we have one. And then when I dig a little bit deeper, I find out pretty quickly that that sales process is quite often surface level deep, and there’s not a lot of rigour and governance behind it. What’s your experience when dealing with sales leaders around sales leaders and sales teams around how many of them actually have good, functioning sales processes?
Mike Latch:
My experience is approximately identical to yours. Part of the reason that we wrote the book is because for me, I didn’t know any better. I was an empty glass of water when I met Gregg. And so all I really knew was sales as a layman. Right. So it’s, you know, somebody can sell snow in Alaska or something like that, and which is really no sales expertise at all. And then what Gregg taught me, which was what I just described, so that was my entire knowledge of, like, sales craftsmanship. So I just took it for granted to, like, leverage. That foundation is very excellent for leveraging technology. Right. Because there’s an expectation of a way that a human is going to perform in the sales call. And so once you have like a basis, an ability to predict how you want that sales call to go, you can start leveraging technology to make that go better. And all I knew was that expectation, which other people find very deep and a lot of process. And I was just like, that’s the bare minimum process I can think of to get a thousand people to execute 2000 appointments today the way we want them to, that sort of thing. And so that’s part of the reason that we wrote the book, was to say, I think lots of other companies should be doing what we did, which I’m happy to go in as much detail as I can, like, while we’re talking, and it shouldn’t be a secret. So there’s a lot of folks that really allow all kinds of chaos and they could have a much more efficient business. They could make a lot more sales. They could, you know, they could get a lot more sales out of reps. They probably don’t think that they could. Which is another way to help scaling.
Ben Wright:
Scaling from 50 million to a billion dollars can’t be done without some seriously good systems or processes, if you like, that can invariably be quite different. Let’s start at the beginning. So, sales process, when you’re building out something that’s going to work to allow you to scale, where would you start?
Mike Latch:
It depends on the size of the company and the size of the sales team. You know, if I knew I was only going to have half a dozen sales reps or something like that, I probably would try very hard to find people like you that are, like, smart and charismatic and really good at sales and try to, you know, align them with my vision and create a great comp structure and probably not try to put too much process on them, something like that. Some process, but maybe not so much. If you really want to scale, you know, go from 10 reps to 20 reps to 40 reps, to 80 reps to 160 to 320, that sort of thing. You start running into all kinds of challenges around recruiting, retention, you know, chaos and different territories and that, creating operational challenges and you can’t keep up. So as you get more and more people, you have more and more unintended consequences of everybody’s trying to do a good job and that kind of stuff. And as you get bigger and bigger or you want to grow faster and faster, process becomes more and more and more important.
Where would I start? If it was a small team, I would probably start with simple processes and hire people that can perform better with more expertise. If I knew my goal, if I was starting, though, at a place Where I knew I wanted to get to a very big sales team and very big sales numbers, I would start thinking about process immediately and be like, okay, if this is a sales process, this is going to happen in the home. If our sales call is going to happen in the home, how exactly do I want that sales call to go? What kinds of problems am I going to have? Like recruiting? What are the types of people I’m going to be able to recruit? Am I going to be able to recruit just regular old folks? Okay. I have to have really good processes and really good systems and pretty good tech to compensate for the fact that I’m not just putting a bunch of experts in place. So it depends on where I wanted to end up on kind of where I would start.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Okay, so. And a really interesting way to look at it. And sometimes you can look at the simple and talk about it as being overly simple. Right. Where’s the rigour? Where’s the process? Where’s the systems behind what you’re talking about? But that makes really logical sense if you have a small team invest in the quality of people over the quality of your process. And that might ostracise some people listening, but certainly there’s some really strong merit in that. To say you’re only going to have 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 people. Let’s make sure you’ve got the skill in the team and you sharpen and mould that skill where you need to. Because you simply don’t have the scale to be investing all that time and money and cost into a process that may not give you the upside that it would for 50, 100, 200 salespeople. Then on the flip side, we’re saying, clearly, as that number scales, it hits a point where it becomes really logical that you just have to start investing in system and process. And that will relieve the pressure on you as a leader in the quality of sales experience that you need to hire, because you’re supplementing that with a quality of process. That’s a really logical piece for me and a really logical approach. Let’s have a look at the tech side of that argument. So how much tech or how and when would you decide how much tech to roll into teams? Because for me, quite frankly, you can get lost in the amount of tech that’s available to us now. We have more available to us just simply in the dashboard of our CRM reporting suite. Right. Than most sales leaders are ever going to be able to use. How would you approach blending in the right amount of tech to be driving improvements in performance rather than hindering that performance.
Mike Latch:
That’s an excellent question. And the way that I did it before and the way I would recommend people do it in the future is if you’re interested in tech for your sales team, you’re probably sensing some dissatisfaction with something about your status quo. Reps aren’t entering enough data in the CRM tool. Operations is getting too many issues, too many mistakes. Salespeople, or, you know, I train them up and they quit. There’s something about the situation that’s causing you to like be drawn towards some sort of technology solution or something like that. What I see a lot of people do because they’re busy and oftentimes sales leaders don’t have like deep tech experience. Right? They haven’t. You know, if you’re a VP of sales or CRO or sales manager, you probably haven’t rolled out a multimillion dollar IT project. That’s just not a thing. It’s almost not a thing. It’s weird that I have that experience. So I think a good thing to do is what is it that you want to have happen? What is it that you want to be different in the future that is drawing you towards a particular technology solution and then carefully evaluate what it is that you’re considering. What I’vve seen lots of times is people jump in to different technology solutions, even large companies, because they have these acute, acute problems. And a salesperson from a software company says this is going to solve your problem. And safe assumption is to say, no, it won’t. And you’ve got to prove to me that it really will. And usually through that process, you start uncovering all the things that it’s actually not going to do. And you’re still going to need to do and you’re still going to need to figure out how to fix in your own team. And once you really start dealing with all those things that need to be dealt with to actually make a difference, you start naturally whittling down and not throwing technology at too many things. And that helps you choose the particular solution that you’re thinking about as well as keeps you from doing too many things at once. Because once you really understand what it takes to successfully leverage a new tool, you realise that you’re going to be, you know, there’s training that has to happen and you’re going to be making certain salespeople less efficient while you’re interrupting them to do something new. And a human can only deal with so many new things at once, you know, for morale reasons and from just mental capacity. So really, really asking yourself, what about the business or the sales team is going to be different after the solution helps you kind of slow down the right amount when you’re considering technology and things like that.
Ben Wright:
I certainly like that approach. So rather than looking at tech to say, what tech can I bring into my business, it’s looking at what I want to improve. So it’s the opportunity to take advantage of or the problem that we need to solve. Look at the end in mind first and then go and find the tech to support it. Great. Okay, so I’m going to ask you one more in these line of questions because I really like the simple approach you’re taking to answer these, which, by the way, is unusual for an engineer. Normally an engineer, I’d be expecting a really technical, heavy response.
Mike Latch:
Engineers are who the sales leaders always make fun of in sales training and sales meetings. Right. You’re like, okay, what happens if you get an engineer as your customer? Right. Is like a common, you know, anyway, so I understand.
Ben Wright:
Okay, so scaling, where would you start? If you’re looking to scale, and when I say scale, you’re 2, 3, 4, 5x on your business from where you are now in the next couple of years, where would you start in terms of your sales processes and tech to really ramp that scaling process?
Mike Latch:
So, you know, depending on where you’re starting from, you’ve got to have a strong, you know, you got to be working with your recruiting department and you’ve probably got to introduce some sort of like recruiting requirements for all your sales leaders as well. Like, hey, the expectation is you’re going to need to be able to bring this many people in per quarter or something like that. That’s the augmented what recruiting is bringing in, then you’re probably going to need to set yourself apart. And one of the cool things about if you end up with a very, very powerful sales enablement, like something that really enables the sales call. When I talk about sales enablement, I mean like software that’s literally used during the sales call where the homeowner or the customer and the sales rep are all using this thing together. If you do that right, it makes it a lot easier to recruit because you have a much larger percentage of the population to successfully onboard into your organisation and have them execute because it becomes so apparent to people that it’s so easy to become proficient. So if you know that somewhere above 50 million in yearly revenue is somewhere where you’re trying to get to over the next couple of years, you’re almost certainly within Striking range where the proper leveraging of custom tech is going to make a real difference. There’s fixed costs to doing this stuff, which is why you don’t want to do it if you’re a small company or things like that. But when it comes to scaling a sales team, if you know, knowing that there’s an amazingly effective onboarding for the new sales reps to go through solves so many of your problems and makes so much of the fog of war of growth go away. Because so much of your organisation can now understand, like, okay, we take a, we’re going to take a human off the street and they’re going to sit down and for one week or three weeks or whatever, this is what they’re going to learn. And they’re going to learn our sales process, which is just a bunch of scripts that are chained together purposely so that each. Ideally, you chain information together so that each new piece of information that the sales rep brings up is a natural answer to something slightly dissonant that was just brought up. Right. Like, people remember things better if when you present them information, they perceive it to be the natural solution to a problem they’re experiencing in that moment. It’s very similar to the way humans are really good at stories, at receiving information in a story. Right. If I ask you the plot of Top Gun from 20 years ago, like, everybody just, yeah, they remember it like, this is what happens. They went. They flew these things and Goose died. And it was set like, you don’t have to try. Why? Because it was. The information was brought to you in a story format that was compelling.
So if you take all the information that needs to be delivered to your customer in a sales call, or the 90% most common information and the 50 to 80% most common questions that are going to be asked and you come up with really good answers to that, that’s objection handling. Right. And then that’s also what’s trained into the reps. And then for all the objections that most sales leaders think only the best reps can handle, that’s where technology can really make a huge difference. So if you say, you know, a great rep can handle pricing objections really well, oh, that’s too expensive. What do you mean by too expensive? Oh, you have another quote for something that’s similar but costs a lot less. Do you have more details about that? We probably wouldn’t be a reputable company with this many stars with a great reputation if we just cost a lot more and we weren’t delivering something else. There’s probably some way to figure that out. In my mind, that’s a perfectly moral, ethical way to deal with an objection. It’s not. You didn’t use any pushy tactics. You’re genuinely trying to help the person make a decision. But that interaction, usually people only expect pretty good reps can handle that interaction well. That interaction with the right tech, 80% of your sales team can do really well through that. Right. So you start thinking of like, what is the interaction? What might they ask? How do they gather information? How can the software kind of make that all understandable for the rep and the customer as you go through it together? And so once you have those kinds of features, everybody starts to realise how straightforward and predictable it’s going to be to bring a new person, maybe with no sales experience through your program and put them in front of customers and it’s going to go well. Right
Ben Wright:
Okay. So we’re talking about a really strong onboarding program that teaches new starters how to get up to speed really quickly. Makes perfect sense. It also helps bring down your cycle times. Right. For existing teams. So there’s a whole lot of side benefits there. Okay, great. So we’ve had a look today at sales process. Certainly the smaller your teams, the more we’re relying on existing skill, the larger your teams, the more that we’re relying on process. Technology. We’re talking about have the end problem or opportunity that you’re trying to capitalise on in mind. So that is where you’re trying to get to before you roll in your tech. And then in terms of scaling, we’ve really had a look here about making sure that your onboarding processes are as effective as possible to bring people up to speed really quickly. Fantastic. Thank you for all of that today, Mike. Now before we go, can you please tell me a little bit about “Sales Sucks”, which is about to launch. In fact, by the time this podcast is live, it should be and then where we can find you.
Mike Latch:
Yeah. So “Sales Sucks” is basically a joke about the story earlier about my impression of sales as a kid. And had I not met Gregg and had the sales success I had, I would still think sales sucked. Right. So I don’t think sales sucks anymore. I think sales is awesome and I love talking about sales and I love scaling. So the book is just a lot more detail about how to create those scripts and processes and how to create that technology and all the, all the follow-up training and ride alongs and leveraging like modern, you know, AI tools and things like that to do, like to capture information and give feedback at scale. So that’s what the book is about and it’s going to be at www.SalesSucksTheBook.com
Ben Wright:
Excellent. I like it. Thank you, Mike. This has worked out just fine without Gregg today. We’ve spoken about him, but he hasn’t had a chance to defend himself or confirm or deny. Sometimes you can have a lot of fun doing that. So thank you very much. Good luck with the upcoming launch. I’ll be sure to get myself a copy of the book somehow at www.salessucksthebook.com
Mike Latch:
Yes, or salessucksbook.com or salessucksthebook.com sorry, I forget exactly which one it is.
Ben Wright:
That’s okay. We will put some links into the show notes once we get it live. So thank you Mike. Very nice to have you on board today and for everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E90 Navigating the Fog of Growth through Process and Technology, with Mike Latch
