Good Things Are Rarely Cheap and Cheap Things Are Rarely Good – Aaron Paul

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Transcript:

Thu, Jan 13, 2022

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 
sales , crm , customers , leader , people , helping , aaron , biggest , question , team , company , business , empathy , success , opportunity , solving , thought , problems , person , learn

SPEAKERS
Aaron Paul & Christopher Smith

Intro
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.

Christopher Smith
Welcome to Sales Lead Dog. Today I have joining me, Aaron Paul. Aaron, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.

Aaron Paul
Chris, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, great to have you on the show. Aaron, tell me about your current role and your company advanced technology consultants.

Aaron Paul
Yeah, absolutely, my title is the regional vice president of sales. I’ve been with ATC now for 14 years. And so, what I do, I started as a sales manager. So, I had a territory and I sold direct into that territory. And then over the years now have gotten to where I manage a pretty large territory in our company. But I also still have a small territory that I directly sell in. And I really appreciate that because then our company keeps us fresh as leaders. We’re not talking back, you know, about 10 years ago, this is how I used to sell I’m still selling today and then leading the team as well.

Christopher Smith
Oh, that’s awesome. When you think back over your career, and that’s one of the reasons I had you on the show is that that longevity, you’ve had it etc. It’s not common to see that anymore. Your people are jumping around from job to job to job. But when you look back over your career, what’s really driven your success? Yeah,

Aaron Paul
I appreciate that. And you’re right. Before I answer the question, I mean, yeah, and we’ve done some interviewing, we’ve done some hiring here recently, and the number of people that have you know, two to three years at one place two to three years that another, you know, maybe five years, it’s, it seems to be the norm. And so, I do find it a privilege to be able to be at one place takes me a long time to learn something, once you learn it, you want to stay there and want to go learn something else. So anyway, so no, I think there’s been a few things in I’ve had to think about it over the years, as I’ve been trying to train and lead our team. But I think some of the keys to my personal success. But one of them I think has been staying at one place. For a long time, you know, you start to learn more and more, hopefully, you’re learning every day, you know, I’ve learned something new every day, never running out of things to learn and to apply in this job. But hopefully, you start to build off of that. And so, I think having that longevity, there has helped. Also, I would say probably one of the biggest factors that we tried to instill in our team and that I’ve tried to do personally, is to take care of our customers, the way that we would want to be treated. You know, I’ve heard it said that you can have anything in life that you want, as long as you help enough other people get what they want. We tried to instill that we tried to do that hope our customer genuinely tried to solve their problems to try to provide a solution for them. And it seems to seem to take care of the rest kind of takes care of itself.

Christopher Smith
That’s a good credo to live by. I think, you know, if you’re helping others, good stuff will happen to you.

Aaron Paul
Yeah, yeah, I definitely believe that. For sure.

Christopher Smith
How do you get your start in sales?

Aaron Paul
Well, so it’s a funny story. So, I graduated from the University of Michigan, which we had a little bit disappointing time over, over the holiday break during the bowl games. Sad to see them get destroyed by Georgia. But you know, it’s okay. But I went to the University of Michigan studied mechanical engineering. And just thought, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to graduate, I’m going to go into work as an engineer to the grip of Michigan, and really, everything’s automotive related. And so, as an engineer, I thought I was going to be an interesting graduating engineering, I thought I would graduate and be a an engineer in the automotive industry. And that was around 2007 2008. And that was not a great time to be looking for a job, especially in the automotive industry. And so, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities. I had just gotten married, one of the opportunities I had was, had about two to three months travel at a time in Brazil. And I thought, man, it’s probably not a great recipe for somebody who just got married, stay married. And so had a longtime friend of the family who owned this company, and I thought he sold computers or something. So anyway, I talked to him and thought, you know, maybe there’s some way that my engineering degree can be used here. And so, he introduced me to what they did, and talk to me about sales and I thought, oh my goodness, I don’t think I can be a sales guy. No, because I had this preconceived notion that sales guys you know, they’re all are kind of sleazy. And they’re just trying to get people to buy stuff. And I’m, I’m an engineer, you know, I can’t, I can’t do sales. But it sounded interesting. And, you know, really, for lack of a better reason I needed a job, just got married, so I had to had to do something. And so, I started with it was a TC advanced technologies, consultants I started with them back in 2008. And it was probably three or four years until I really fell in love with sales. And I think what helped make that switch for me, it’s kind of like I said, at the beginning, I realized that sales at its heart is problem solving. If you’ve got a good product, then what sales is, is you’re taking a person who needs that good product, and you’re providing that product to them. We’re not convincing people. I’m not swindling people, I’m, I’m solving their problems with the great products that we have to offer. So, I’ve that’s how I got my certain sales and how I fell in love with sale.

Christopher Smith
I feel the exact same way. I hate selling. To me, I hate it. But I love helping people. And I love transforming whatever problems they’re having into solutions in. To me, that’s it’s easy to sell if you’re doing that, right. Yeah. What was the hardest part or the hardest thing for you to learn?

Aaron Paul
When you’re starting in sales, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of hard things. Probably the most difficult thing for me to learn, I would say was getting over the, I guess you can call it nerve, some of it was just the ego of cold calling. Because you know, a lot of this, this business, the territory that I had moved into was one that hadn’t been covered really well. And so, I had to develop the territory had to go knock on literally knock on doors. I had to go meet people and had to had to do a lot of cold call, I call them warm calls now, but I had to do cold calls. And in that was tough because you’re you know you’re walking in, you’re nervous, you’re, you know, you’re probably literally I was literally sweaty early on, and you’re nervous and that, you know, that comes across very easily to the customer. They get nervous, like why is he so nervous? So, I think learning that was difficult. And I think combined with that, as a young hungry sales guy learning, like we were just talking about learning to view the customer, not as $1 sign and not as a potential sale, but as somebody that I’m going to try to help. Now obviously, if they don’t have money, and they’re not a prospect, you know, I’ve got to, I’ve got to be efficient in the way I’m spending my time. That being said, I think the customers could tell when I was just coming in young, nervous and just saw them as a sales opportunity. They didn’t, they didn’t feel like I was really there to help solve their problems. Now, money is almost an afterthought, I’m going into to find out ask questions, what’s your What are your problems? What are your, you know, what are the solutions we have? And how can we help identify the one that was the most difficult?

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that makes a big difference. Being able to put yourself in your customers shoes and have that level of empathy to feel what you know, the pain that they’re really living in, it’s real, you know, it’s not just some made up opportunity for you to make money off of it’s very real to them. Right. So, what role does empathy for you play in your sales process?

Aaron Paul
Well, it’s a huge one. And I love that you said empathy, because I think there’s two terms, you know, there’s sympathy, and there’s empathy. And I think sympathy is, you know, where you’re, you’re feeling somebody’s pain, because you’re there. And empathy is, I can understand that pain. But I’m not there right now. And I can help you get away out, you know, sympathy is going to lose your sales, because the customer is going to say, This is too much money. I don’t I don’t have this money. And you know, if you’re in that same, same situation, like oh, yeah, no, I know, it’s too tough. You can’t afford it. But if you if you have empathy, you can understand how they feel you understand? That’s a That’s a difficult place. I’ve been there, you know, I haven’t been able to afford stuff. But let me let me take a step back. Let me feel that pain. But now let me let me help you long term, see how this is actually going to long term be a solution to a bigger problem that maybe you don’t even know that you have. So yes, the short term is, you don’t feel like you have this much money. But you know, for example, just throwing a random product out there, you know, that oftentimes, something that is less expensive is usually a lower quality, right? Good. Good things are rarely cheap and cheap, things are rarely good. And so being able to show them how Okay, right now, you might think this decision is the right decision because it’s less expensive but let me help you see how actually the more expensive Short term is actually less expensive and in the long term, so I think that’s empathy.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, big time. So, you like, you know, as we said to be in the show, you’ve had a real progression at etc. What was it about you that made them tap you on the shoulder and say, Aaron, we want you to consider sales leadership?

Aaron Paul
I’ve asked how. And there have been, there been a few things. So, one, I was a, and still am a sales leader as far as just individual sales. I think the last six years, I’ve been number one, five of the six years in our in our company, so that was one. But then another, another one was just there was nobody else to pick not that there was nobody else, but nobody else with the experience. Nobody else with the knowledge of our company. So that always keeps me humble to know, you know, yeah, it was, you know, my sales it had I not, I think it had not been number one, they probably would have tried to look for somebody else had not exhibited some of the characteristics that I exhibit and try to live out every day. But that being said, you know, it keeps me humble, knowing part of it was just the right place at the right time. There was nobody else that was qualified.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, look, I always don’t call it luck, because I think we make our own luck. But timing is hard to control sometimes, you know. And so that that’s, it’s nice that you recognize that. But, you know, I talked to a lot of sales leaders on this podcast, and a lot of people tell me that, hey, look, your top sales guys rarely make great sales leaders. So, there’s something about you as being a top performer. That’s also, you know, that made you a great leader. Can you talk about maybe what some of those qualities are?

Aaron Paul
Sure. And again, this, I’m still learning this every day. So, I don’t I don’t purport to be like the expert at this by any means. But I do think one is, like I was saying at the beginning, it’s not something I wasn’t a sales leader out of the out of the gate. I think I like to joke with my wife, you know, I don’t make the same mistake twice. But I’ve made every mistake you can make at least once. So, I had a learning process. And I think that, in some ways has helped me to be able to lead because I can get back to empathy. I can empathize with our sales guys. And I can say, you know, our sales individuals and I can say, you know, here’s, here’s where I was, here are the mistakes that I’ve made. Here’s how I learned to change that. Here’s the changes that I made that made a significant difference in my personal sales. So, I think that’s part of it. And then part that I’ve always strived to implement is humility, I think as a leader, you know, being able to empathize, but also being able to, you know, to be humble in the way that I’m leading our team in the way that I’m carrying myself in the way that I’m conveying messages to them and trying to instill those same qualities and push the team in a humble way. I think those are two keys that I’ve seen.

Christopher Smith
Were you nervous about making the transition from salesperson to sales leader?

Aaron Paul
That’s a great question. Yes, yes, it was. Because the way that our, the way that our pay is structured in our company, the individual salesperson, I just gotten used to that and it was a it was more much more long term. He was going from an in the visual contributor to now. So, I’m worried about myself and my sales to now I’m supposed to be excited and worried about and caring about everybody else’s sales. So I went from the player to the coach, and yeah, it was, it was scary because it was, you know, I’d get uncomfortable, not getting used to how I could make my new kind of write my own ticket, so to speak as an individual guy and now had to step back and say, Well, I’ve got to, you know, I’ve got to think about this more. As a coach, I have to think about more than just my region I have to think about more than just my customers I have to think about what helps us as a whole it helps us as a company you know, have to be listening I have to be looking at my other guys what are they struggling with? What are you know, what are their strong points? Where are their strengths? Where are their weaknesses, you know, where can they improve and so I was definitely daunted by it but it’s been something that I’ve slowly grown into and really enjoy and I could probably say more excited now when I have a sales guy call me and you know, he or she has closed the sale and they’re excited about it- actually, get more excited about that in my own personal sales now, but it wasn’t right away. Definitely took a took some time.

Christopher Smith
Early on it or at least what I’ve heard a lot of people, when you’re when you’re first in a leadership role. And actually, I think back to when I first became a leader, I would do this to where it’s very tempting to say, well, let me just dive in there, and I’ll fix all the problems. Did you deal with that? And if so, how did you learn to back away from that temptation?

Aaron Paul
Thank you for saying that, because I thought I was the only one that felt that way. Yeah, for the first six months, I was like, What? What did I do? All I’m doing is solving, you know, I had enough problems just by myself. Now, I’m solving everybody’s problems, you know, back to the solving problem thing. And I think what I did was I realized, okay, wait, wait, what, what am I in this role? And in my, my expertise, my skill set, my gifting? What is it? What am I uniquely able to do? And what are things that I, I don’t need to Yes, I could do that. But what are the things that I’m the only things that I could do? I guess it put it that way. And so there was a process again, like anything with me, it was a long process. But uh, but after about six months, I started instead of just answering the call and saying, yeah, here, let me take care of that for you. Or let me you know, yeah, I’ll shoot you an email, you know, later today, I would say, well, you know, here’s who you need to call for that. Or here’s how to figure out that solution. So, I’m helping them find the solution, but I’m not doing it for them. Now, if it’s something uniquely that I need to do, you know, if it’s a I’ve got to talk to our president about something, you know, I can handle those things. But starting to delegate the things that I wasn’t supposed to uniquely do anyway, really helps. So now, I think that’s given me more time, but it’s given me more excitement. And it’s really more coaching. You know, I was, I was doing stuff for people before now and helping coach and help them to do that for themselves.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, a big thing that I had to learn, would think of at the time was I just kind of instituted a rule that, hey, if you’re going to bring me a problem, you also need to bring me what you think the solution needs to be upgraded. And we’ll talk about that. And because I realized I was actually inhibiting the growth of my entire team, because I was solving everything. They weren’t engaging their brains to try to solve it on their own. And I’m like, I’ll be the sounding board. We’ll talk through it because guess what, guys? I don’t have all the answers. I may have the title on the door of my Fischer butter, I don’t have all the answers. And so, we’re gonna have to talk about it, brainstorm whatever. Glad to help you do that. But you need to be prepared to have a discussion when you come to me. And that was a real growth, for me a big leap forward, and also made my life a heck of a lot easier.

Aaron Paul
No, that’s great.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. Thinking back, zero, he’d been in your role now for a while, when you think back to those early days, is there one thing that stands out that you wish you knew? That you know, now that you wish you knew then

Aaron Paul
one thing here? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I wish I knew, I think is probably what I said at the beginning, I think, knowing that if I, if I just really tried to take care of the customer, that, you know, kind of the rest will, will take care of itself. And, and not now that’s a very simple, you know, we can spend hours talking about the whole process. Believe me, I’ve tried to, with our team go through, what does that process look like? You know, it starts with questions. It’s not just coming in and doing a presentation. But I think yeah, if I could say to, to the errand 14 years ago, you know, if you, if you do if you really if you go in seeking to listen, and then solve that problem and not seeing that person as $1 sign. I think that would, that’d be something that I wish and I don’t think I lost a ton of sales early on. I think I just was spinning my wheels for a couple years, just until I started to get them. Right.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, it’s one of our core values is listening, and wait to have a written out like consultants, we love to talk. But I really feel the best consultants love to listen, you know, in because that’s, you’re not going to have an empathy component. If you can’t put yourself in their shoes. If you can’t do that, if you’re not listening and hearing what their problems are,

Aaron Paul
right? If I’m just waiting for you to stop, so then I can tell you, my product. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you hear that in my voice and you’re not buying?

Christopher Smith
Oh, yeah. It’s like, Wait a minute. You didn’t hear anything I just said you blew right. You blew right past that. And you’re just pitching me now. You know what has been your do you think your biggest success as a leader?

Aaron Paul
Oh, biggest success as a leader, I would say, for right now. Now, you know, I’m hoping this will continue to build, I’ve got lots of goals for our team. But so far, I would say the biggest success has been building our building our team. So, I was able to, I was blessed to be able to be in the position at the timing that I was to really each and every guy that we have hired now in my region, I personally hired. So, I didn’t inherit anybody. You know, I didn’t have any of that I was able to build my team, I was able to interview each of those people. And so, I would say that’s probably the biggest success is building that team. But then also, you know, coupled with that is not just hiring those people and putting them on the team, but building structure and camaraderie so that they really view each other as teammates, they are already calling each other, they’re already helping each other, you know, Team selling together. And so, I would say that’s probably, for me, that’s the biggest success, and it gives me the most gratification looking back at this role so far.

Christopher Smith
That’s pretty awesome. What’s your strategy to promote that kind of the teamwork in that communication amongst your team?

Aaron Paul
Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I’d say it’s, it’s two part one is the person. And so, you know, try obviously an interview, you only get to know a person so much, you try to ask questions, unique questions to try to get to know them more. But at the end of the day, you know, there’s a lot of a lot of risk. It’s a lot of face, just saying, I hope that this person is who I think they are. But I think if you get that right person, that’s a huge, maybe the biggest part, if you have the right person, I think they’re, they’re going to be successful on a team and also in sales if you have the right person. But then I think to build that camaraderie, then you take that right person, and you give them a place, regular meeting place regular connection. So, what we do is we have a, and we limited to 30 minutes, we have a 30-minute weekly call as a team on Zoom. That’s one of the things be very thankful for COVID, as it helped us all, you know, get to use these tools that have been out there for a while. So, we do that, you know, we’re all over Texas, but we meet together weekly, face to face, virtually for 30 minutes. And then once a quarter we get together in person. We have a one-day meeting where we’re strategizing, we’re planning, we’re doing training together. And so, I think those two pieces have given us a regular place to meet. And then again, I think they’re the right people, that when they’re given that place, they’re connecting with each other there. They’re building that camaraderie as a team. That’s awesome.

Christopher Smith
When what, when you have a team member that maybe is not performing as you were hoping? What’s your approach to help them elevate and get where you need to be?

Aaron Paul
Yeah, that’s a great question. And how we’ll take a female wants to contact me after give me advice, I’ll take all the advice I can get for what I’ve been doing is doing the SWOT analysis and just sitting down with a person, we do this with all of our, all of our guests. And so, we do what’s called an annual performance review. I don’t do it quarterly, because our businesses, so the sales cycle, so long in the educational sphere, that, you know, we quarterly, so little can, can happen in between a quarter, but a year kind of gives you a good picture of how somebody is doing. So, we do an annual performance review with the SWOT analysis, we look at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and then kind of use that as an opportunity to then you know, bring observations, I also do, what I call ride along, where I’m doing this with everybody, but then I’m making a regular habit of giving feedback to those guys, as we’re reading or writing along. So, I watch their presentations, I see them with customers and then can give them constructive criticism and most of the time, it’s, it’s nothing. Negative is probably one of the biggest challenges for me as a leader is how, you know I’m very hard on myself, but I am not that way with my sales team. And so, you know, trying to know how to how to balance that how to be supportive, encouraging, you know, and cheering them on as a coach for the same time. You know, when they need correction being able to Bring that correction. So that’s what I’m doing right now. And we’ll see this year if it if it works.

Christopher Smith
How do you leverage failure? Those lost deals as a learning opportunity?

Aaron Paul
I think that’s a great question. Well, again, you know, I mentioned before I try not to repeat mistakes, but I’ve made them all, I think so one is, again, with that humility, I come in and say, most of those mistakes I’ve made, and if I have made that mistake, I will use that as an example and say, Hey, here’s, here’s what happened to me. You know, I, I made this mistake, I lost this job in the very same way that you seem to have lost it. And here’s what I did from that. And, you know, usually, hopefully, most of the time I do have a good story after that of, you know, here’s, here’s either what I learned from that, and how it made me better for future sales, or here’s how, in the long run, that person actually decided to do business with us. And here’s what we did to make that happen. And I’ll share that. So, I’ve had a couple opportunities to do that here recently with some of our sales guys. And, again, it seemed to be received well, again, long term, we’ll see if it if it actually took root, and then what happens from it. But that’s how I typically would handle it.

Christopher Smith
Thing I love about that approach is that you’re making yourself vulnerable to your team by sharing, hey, look, I’ve fallen on my face, many times. And but it’s okay, I pick myself up, I move forward. And this is how, and I think, you know, being able to make yourself vulnerable as a leader is really important. Could you talk about that? Because it sounds like that’s a big part of your approach.

Aaron Paul
Yeah, no. I think, again, the key that I was saying before, I think humility is a big, big key to that. The challenge is, you know, being humble yet, you don’t want to, you don’t want to be so weak that they’re not looking up to you, you know,

Christopher Smith
the difference between vulnerable and weak? Right, you know, in my mind anyway,

Aaron Paul
I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, I totally agree. And so, I think it’s a combination, I think it would I would I tend to do is, you know, I think, think back honestly, over my success. And, you know, like you said earlier, I love what you said about luck. I totally agree, I don’t really believe in in luck. I think luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. The opportunities there, oftentimes, you know, run into somebody in the parking lot, you know, like, what I didn’t even know, I was gonna run into this person, had I not been prepared with the elevator speech with the literature in my bag, you know, that that might have gone nowhere. So, I try to tell my guys that, but I would say that humility, thinking through really honestly thinking through the success that I’ve had, and it’s always right next to some kind of failure, you know, something happened, where maybe it was a year before I had lost a job, but it prepared me for that opportunity when it arose. And so I think just, if I’m honest with myself, you know, I’m aware of so many mistakes that I’ve made, but then so many times that I’ve been able to use that as a learning opportunity. So I just tried to share that with the guys.

Christopher Smith
Let’s talk about one of my favorite topics serum. Okay. When it comes to CRM, do you love it? Or do you hate it?

Aaron Paul
Well, it’s a love hate relationship. I think I love the concept of it. I absolutely love the concept of it. I think we’re; I would say the love hate comes in is in having to do the work to set it up. I as much as I would, you know, somebody looked at my schedule and say, Man, Aaron works really, really hard. There are some things that I’m lazy with. And I would say, putting in the work to set up a CRM is probably one that, that I’m, I’m lazy in but I need to need to do more with them.

Christopher Smith
So, when it comes to CRM, so many companies that I talked to they really they answer it the same way you did that, like hey, we look at this as kind of a necessary evil. And that always worries me, or it’s always concerned me that it’s in. It’s become part of my passion to kind of change this and in the world, that you know, CRM if it’s done, right. It’s a tool, but any other tool, you know, it’s there to help you. And it’s not just for the management team, but it’s really you know, if it’s done the right way becomes a really beneficial tool to those frontline people out there trying to help grow the company. Why do you think it’s so hard for people to make that to get their CRM to where truly is it? tool.

Aaron Paul
I think the same reason, it’s difficult for people to get a diet to be a tool, or a calendar or a planner, you know, I think all of those things. And I say this, this is the first year now it’s one of the January 7 Today, you know, I’m weak, I’m a weekend. But this is the most planned I’ve ever been, I took an entire day to just set up my planner for the year, set up a calendar. And it feels great right now the first week. But maybe we’ll use the diet as an analogy, you know, took my wife and I a while to change our relationship with food. But once we did that, it actually gave us so much more freedom in the ways that we’re eating, budgeting the same way, right? If I never create a budget, I don’t know how much money I have to spend. So, I’m actually unless I’m super frivolous, I’m actually a little more hindered in my spending, because I don’t know how much I have to spend. So, I’m just saving it all, hoarding it all. And I think similar with the CRM is, you know, it can give you freedom, because it gives you a direct and clear knowledge of who are our customers, who are we touching? Who are we contacting? Who have we not contacted in a while who, you know, gives you all of that information? So, then you’re free in your marketing strategy, you’re free in your sales approach? In a lot of different ways. So that’s, I would say probably, to answer your question, it’s probably just that, that block of AI, I don’t see it as a good thing long term, I don’t see it as that tool that really is like budgeting.

Christopher Smith
We talked in the before the show that you guys are considering moving to a new CRM, can you talk about what’s driving that move? Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Paul
I think when we, we started with the CRM that we did, we just had an internal champion who said, this is the brand I want to go with a lot of it had to do with pricing. And we just, we just took that person’s word for it. And we went with it. And so, I think what we’re doing now is we’re doing what we should have done in the first place as a leadership team, we’re stepping back, taking time taking two or three days to go through our whole marketing strategy, our whole company strategy. And then based on those priorities, deciding what CRM that’s out there makes the most sense, based on those things. And my guess is, it’s not going to be the company that we currently are working with. So yeah,

Christopher Smith
I love that you guys are doing it. That’s the number one thing when I start one of the first questions I asked when I start talking to companies like what are your strategic goals? And if they don’t have a clear vision of that, then the conversation we have is very different. Because it’s like, hey, if you don’t know where you’re going as a business, how do you expect technology to help you, you know, you have to have a vision, you have to have a direction. And it’s in that direction that you establish your guardrails, of whatever it is technology, business, process, culture, all those things that are impacted by that you need to create that alignment. And that vision, those strategic goals will create that for you. So, I love that you guys are taking that time. To start from that position. I think that’s key to having successful. inflammation implementation not only of CRM, but also the changes, you’re gonna have to make your sales process, data, know, culture, even the things that all the things that go into having that successful deployment. What’s your definition of success for CRM?

Aaron Paul
definition of success for Sarah? That’s a great question. I would say, you know, kind of joking, I think one that we’re using, oh, that would be one. The one we currently have, we are not really using. So that’s not success. So, one is one that we’ve actually, you know, put all of our data of our customer contact into and we’re using. But I think one that’s a success for us would be one that is accurately representing who are our customers? What products do our customers currently have? So, then we can use that data to help with our marketing strategy with our information that we’re sending those customers and with, you know, we still we have boots on the ground. We’re still I don’t want to do old school, but we’re still we want to be in person, our industry. We’ve got to have that face to face. We’ve got to bring in equipment and demonstrate it for the schools. And so being able to give information to our sales team that’s out there on the ground, and accurate information. That’s to me, that’s a successful CRM.

Christopher Smith
Spot on. But you’d be amazed how many companies I talk to. And I’ll ask the question, can you? How long does it take you to compile the list of your customers and what services they’re currently using or products they’re currently using? And more often than not, I’m getting a blank stare back at me. Because they’re like, well, we can do that. But it’s going to take us a while. And shouldn’t be like that shouldn’t be like that at all that you get your fingertips. And that should be driving your business, your market, like you said, your marketing engagement of your customer, you know, so if me as a salesperson, I can look down and say, okay, they’ve got this and this and this, I need to sell them this, you know, that’s the next the natural thing, the next the natural next step in our relationship. And then it’s like you’re saying this, then I’m really truly helping that customer? Not to sell it more.

Aaron Paul
Absolutely.

Christopher Smith
Now, what do you think is going to be the hardest thing about going to a new CRM for your company?

Aaron Paul
Well, I guess the good news is, you know, we haven’t put in a lot of data in the previous one. So, I would have said, you know, porting over that, that data, but I think the hardest thing is going to be just getting started. Because like you said, I mean, we’ve been in business as a company since 1964. So, we have territories where we’ve had somebody selling for over 50 years. That’s a lot of data. That’s a lot of customer relationships. And 90% of that has been in the salesperson, Ted, or paper maybe, or in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, or both paper and Excel spreadsheet and not, they’re not both accurate. You know, and so trying to take all of that data, and take all of these sales individuals that we have all across the nation and getting them all on the same page and getting them to put in the data, I think is going to be the biggest challenge. But I think we have, we’re all on the same page as far as a leadership team and wanting that resource done. So

Christopher Smith
It’s good. It’s got to start there. Well, we’re coming up on our time here on sales lead dog, Aaron, it’s been great chatting with you listen to do if people want to reach out connect with you. They want to learn more about etc. What’s the best way for them to do that?

Aaron Paul
Yeah, no, that’s, uh, thanks for asking, Chris. Thanks for your time. I would say probably the best for me would be on LinkedIn. Either that or my email, but yeah, LinkedIn would be the best way to get ahold of me.

Christopher Smith
Awesome. And we’ll have for those of you listening Aaron’s info on in our show notes, so be sure to check that out. Again, Aaron, thank you for coming on Sales Lead Dog.

Aaron Paul
Chris, thanks so much for your time.

Outro
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Watch the videos on YouTube and you can also find our episodes on our website at empellercrm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.

 

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