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Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to sales lead dog.
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Today I have joining me Reed Perryman.
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Reed is vice president of sales for RCN Technologies.
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Reed, welcome to Sales lead dog.
0:36
Yeah, Thanks, Chris.
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I’m really excited.
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Funny enough, first podcast ever.
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Always agreed by being on one.
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But when the invite slipped in, I consulted some folks.
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And then I said, you know what?
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Why not?
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Sounds like yeah.
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I love it.
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I love it.
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I’m glad you took the lead.
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Tell me a little bit about RCN Technologies.
0:55
Yeah, sure.
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I appreciate that.
0:56
So RCN, we are a small business located in Knoxville, TN.
1:01
We’re about 11 years old at this point and we’re in tech, specifically our little corner of tech that I tell people is wireless Wan, which is a highly technical term translated into wireless Internet connectivity.
1:15
So what we do for our business and government clients on a day in, day out basis, Chris, is we partner and consult with them to understand where is traditional wireline connectivity failing you.
1:27
Typically it fails, it’s unavailable, it’s unreliable, it’s too expensive and we overcome those business problems with wireless connectivity fueled by the likes of T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, so on and so forth.
1:41
So there is a lot more physics involved typically in optimizing that connection for the customer, but the business applications and payouts are typically a myths for the customer not being locked to a terrestrial solution and moving to a wireless solution.
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So that’s who we are.
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It’s what we do multiple Inc 5000 list makers, very proud of that.
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But that’s our little corner of the technology industry.
2:10
That’s awesome.
2:11
So I’m listening to describe all that to me and I’m thinking, OK, if I own a business or I’m, I’m the leader of a business, why would I reach out and call you guys?
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What am I looking for?
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What business problems would you solve for me?
2:25
Yeah, absolutely.
2:25
So the most foundational 1 is backup Internet.
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A lot of people, especially people in our professions in sales.
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Maybe it is B to B sales like RCN.
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Maybe it’s as simple as a quick service restaurant where you’ve got clerks at a cash register and a line of hungry patrons.
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If Internet goes down, you’re dead in the water.
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You can’t transact with customers, you can’t receive phone calls.
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It’s really crippling.
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So people often contact us because they know they have a problem, they’re over reliant on a landline that’s failing them, and they have a true revenue bleed when it fails another application.
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And what’s common, especially in the government, let’s take a Police Department or a fire department.
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They have a computer in their vehicle.
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They have a need for mission critical communications.
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And using cellular is a lot more feasible than a wired connection to a car, as you can imagine.
3:27
So that’s just another common use case in our industry, why people contact us.
3:32
The rest is there’s so many what I call wireline junkies out there.
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Been doing a wired Internet connection so long that wireless seems like black magic.
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What is it?
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We don’t understand it.
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We’re uncomfortable.
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We’re the experts.
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We try to consult them to the best possible outcome.
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You, you only have to lose connectivity once and you’re not able to transact business.
3:54
You’re like never again.
3:56
Exactly.
3:57
Yeah, it’s ’cause you’re, it’s you’re, you’re screwed.
4:00
You’re that’s like you’re not making any money.
4:02
Only has to happen once.
4:04
Absolutely.
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That’s we love.
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We love keeping people connected.
4:08
Yeah.
4:08
Reed, you’ve had a great progression in your career at RCN.
4:13
When you look back over the years, could you nail down to three or boil it down to three areas that you feel really have driven and LED to your success?
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What are those three areas?
4:27
I have this mentality, Chris.
4:28
It’s a great question that I’ve lucked into my career and it’s a really hard question to boil it down to exactly 3 things.
4:38
So I’m going to give it my best shot.
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First, my boss, my owner here at RCNI report directly to him.
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I always have for my entire 8 year career here, he’s been a mentor, he’s been a coach, he’s a serial entrepreneur.
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And when I look at working in a small business for eight years, working for an entrepreneur, a coach that was willing to give me a chance and invest, teach me what he knows, I always liken it to a world class MBA.
5:09
There’s no classroom I could have set in that would have taught me as much as I know about sales, about marketing, about finance, which is the language of business.
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So that’s been a huge quantum leap for me, if you will.
5:23
The second thing, I just had this personality.
5:26
Maybe it’s a flaw, maybe it’s just a quirk, maybe it’s to my benefit, I don’t know.
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But I put such an immense pressure on myself to achieve.
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And it’s not that I’m a slave to achievement, it’s just that I had this posture that I always want to compete with myself, compete with my last best.
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If it’s last year, I want to do better this year.
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If it’s last month, I want to do better this month.
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And that extends to every realm of my life, including my home life, my marriage, my friends, etcetera.
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And then finally, and I kind of already talked about it, it’s working for a small business.
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And I think a lot of kids get the idea out of college.
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I got to work for an enterprise Oregon.
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I failed.
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The logo has to be sexy or I failed.
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I’m not getting my ROI.
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But like I said, working in a small business has been a world class MBA.
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And I got to say, I’m doing really well off compared to a lot of my peers that work in enterprises.
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Is it tougher?
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Are the hours longer?
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Yes, but I’m challenged and I’m growing every single day.
6:32
Yeah, as I as an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, I, I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying.
6:38
And I’ve also looked back saying, you know, did it because of the path I went on.
6:45
You know, there are people that I talked to here on sales lead dog that went to like General Electric.
6:50
I just did an episode with a woman who started career at General Electric, went through tremendous training program and all that.
6:56
And I think that’s what it boils down to.
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It’s not that, hey, I’m part of a big enterprise, Oregon.
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I’m part of a startup.
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It’s am I going to have a leader that can be that mentor, that be that coach that can give me the learning opportunities as well as the ability to fail and fall on my face and then pick me back up again and point me in the right direction?
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To me, that’s that common denominator that that thing that really people need to be looking for.
7:28
I tell people all the time, I was given a really long runway and I was given the grace and the investment to fly and fail and fly again.
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So I like the myth of Icarus, right?
7:43
Weird left turn Greek mythology.
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But he flew too close to the sun, fell.
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I like the redemptive part of that story.
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My boss has allowed me to fly again when I fly too close to the sun.
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But as long as I’m falling forward, that’s really the spirit I try to instill in my team.
7:59
Oh, yeah, yeah.
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Fall forward, fail fast, learn, adjust, move on.
8:04
Yeah, Yeah.
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That’s what it all comes down to.
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And then it’s, I should say, it surprises me it really doesn’t anymore.
8:12
But one of the common themes I see too in in as I do the podcast interview, so many great sales leaders, so many of them their first answers like yours, I had a great mentor and how important that is in developing not only ourselves, but future leaders.
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You can’t do it alone.
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I think that sales leaders have the the biggest duplicative or multiplicative impact out there.
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If we’re not taking what we’ve learned and imprinting that and nurturing the future sales generations, then everybody’s just starting from scratch.
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So I didn’t know I needed that when I got into this, Chris.
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I got that and like I said, have received a world class MBA along the way.
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And I’m just eager to grow my team and see where they land when they fly and fail and fly again.
9:06
Yeah, that’s awesome.
9:07
So when you’re in college, were you envisioning a future in sales, Chris?
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Absolutely not.
9:14
Absolutely not.
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In fact, my vision of sales was probably a majority of non sales people out there in the market.
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I thought sleazy used car dealer.
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I thought retail associate that won’t leave me alone.
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I’m a pretty independent guy.
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Leave me alone.
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I know exactly what I’m after when I go in the store.
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If I need you, I’ll come find you.
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Don’t bother me.
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So that was my idea of sales going into it.
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I actually studied broadcast journalism in college.
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I thought I wanted to be a newscaster and it was great.
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There were all these people affirming me.
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You’ve got the presents for it, you’ve got the voice for it.
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But when I actually did it for a year in college at University of Tennessee, it was just really back breaking work.
10:01
It was long hours, great yard shift.
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It was dog eat dog.
10:05
And to really make a life out of it, you had to be nomadic, move a lot, and you had to probably compromise your morals one day on what you believed to be true.
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And it would take years to get what you’d like.
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So I decided, you know what?
10:22
I had started dating my then wife and I had all these great friends in college.
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Let’s graduate with a calm degree.
10:30
That’s marketable, right?
10:32
We’ll find what’s out there.
10:33
So I actually went through a pretty daunting 7 month process to land here in which I did gig jobs, I started my own side hustle and did everything I could to try to pay my own bills and prove that I wasn’t the worthless son that get a job out of college.
10:52
And I met RCN at a career fair.
10:55
Funny story, I was late because of another interview.
10:58
10 minutes left in the career fair.
11:00
They were the only ones not packing up all these big sexy logos.
11:04
They’re packing up.
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They’re out of their small business.
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RCN.
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They weren’t talked to them.
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Finally, after three months of follow up, met the team, was interviewed on the spot.
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My my boss thought I was a smart kid and he was consulted by her big partner.
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You guys should get into government sales.
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And he thought I was the right man for the job.
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I didn’t have any sales experience, Chris.
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No government sales experience.
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My tech experience extended to my iPhone, my laptop and my PS4.
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So it was really start from zero for me.
11:40
Oh, man.
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Big time.
11:41
That’s a leap of faith.
11:43
Holy cow.
11:44
Yeah, yeah, it was.
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It was sales found me.
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That’s what I tell people it found me.
11:49
That’s awesome.
11:51
I’m sort of thinking about that, that.
11:53
OK, so when he’s hiring you, is he thinking like, all right, well, I don’t know if there’s a market here or not.
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So let’s, let’s throw this kid at it, see what he can do.
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Or if he saw something, he knew that, hey, there’s a market here, maybe this kid can do it.
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Doesn’t really matter.
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You did it, right.
12:11
Yeah, it took a while to do it.
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And that’s why I point to my boss is the number one contributing factor to my success.
12:19
It took about a year to do it to actually put any significant revenue on the board.
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So yeah, big roll of the dice.
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And then really about month 16 to 18 is when our sales in the government division started taking off and today it’s about 70% of our gross receipts.
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So that’s amazing.
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It was, it was a bet that really worked out.
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I haven’t ever set him down and said, why’d you do it?
12:47
He’s got some secret sauce, some madness there that worked out.
12:51
Serial entrepreneur.
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He’s used to taking risk.
12:54
That’s pretty cool.
12:55
I love that.
12:55
That’s a great story.
12:57
So you’re succeeding.
12:59
You’re you’re demonstrated success, you know, delivering revenue for the company.
13:06
Tell me about when you got tapped on your shoulder.
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That says, hey, we, we think you’re ready to consider leadership, a leadership role.
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Tell me about that.
13:15
Yeah, that actually happened right around the time that revenue started taking off.
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When I joined, there were only about 14 employees with a company.
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Today, we’re about 50 employees, give or take, and we were only in about year 4, year five of our inception.
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So we had hunger to grow.
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We were growing.
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And I was tapped early on as really party of one in our government sales division to scale that effort to include a headcount.
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I hired my first Rep in what was it was Labor Day.
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It was right after Labor Day in 2018.
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He started and was with me for about four years after that, really proud of of his start in the business.
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But I think it was just by necessity of scale, which is also why I’m passionate about small businesses, because necessity of scale means opportunity for you to grow into leadership and to lead people.
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So I really think it was just, OK, we have a successful program, we roll the dice, It’s working.
14:21
How can we scale it?
14:23
And we’ve got a party of 1 to scale it that has all this specialized government sales knowledge.
14:28
It has to be him.
14:30
Yeah.
14:31
So tell me when you’re hiring, you know, whatever.
14:34
I’m hiring someone probably, I don’t know, 8090%.
14:40
I’m looking at the immediate need I have now.
14:44
Maybe it’s not quite that high, but I also want to know that they can grow into future roles, likely potentially leadership roles.
14:53
What part of that factors in their ability to become a future leader, factors into your hiring decision?
15:01
Yeah, I think it’s becoming more and more important to me, Chris.
15:06
I’m a young leader.
15:07
I just turned 31 in October.
15:11
I realized that I’m very lucky to be where I am.
15:15
Part of that skill, part of its luck.
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I don’t care.
15:17
I’m here.
15:18
I’m very fortunate, and it’s becoming more important to me to groom future leaders.
15:25
I’ve gone a while without a true middle manager.
15:28
I’m VP.
15:29
I need a sales manager to deal with the day-to-day so I can move up and focus on strategic direction of our business, unlocking quantum leaps in value, a new blue oceans of opportunity for a business.
15:43
I can’t do that when I’m down in the day-to-day nitty gritty.
15:46
So it’s becoming more important.
15:47
You ask what’s important for me to identify.
15:50
I think I have a profile of Rep that I look for.
15:54
I think that that profile includes a competitive spirit.
15:59
It includes A humility to learn, to evolve, that constant hunger, to redefine, to iterate, to fail, to fly, to fail again.
16:07
They can’t be conflict averse.
16:10
Wrong profession.
16:11
If you’re conflict averse, if you’re sweaty, palmed, picking up a phone to cold call or you’re afraid of a customer objection, this is not the industry for you.
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It’s not in your DNA.
16:24
So I really have to pull this out of people during the interview process and I don’t know if I’m identifying anything at this point.
16:33
OK, you’re a great candidate for leadership other than you might have done it before.
16:37
But what I’m looking at when they’re in the program is number 1, you have to prove that you can do it if people are going to follow you.
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I can’t promote a loser.
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They have to do the job.
16:49
They have to hit quota.
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No one’s going to follow someone that they don’t perceive as a winner.
16:56
Secondly, from that point, I have to ask them, do you even want to lead because sales is not for everybody.
17:03
So those are the two, you know, that’s the general profile to hire on.
17:09
And then from there, it’s about leading, coaching, mentoring them to sales success and then having them be honest with himself about would you rather stay course a individual contributor, of course B move into leadership.
17:22
Yeah, I remember when I was coming out of college, I was all focused on, hey, I want to be a young VP because I thought that’s success.
17:31
That’s when I’m I’m going to make it when I get my first VP title.
17:36
And there’s a lot of hard lessons in in that.
17:42
What, what you know, So it’s, you mentioned, are you right for leadership when you’re young, everyone thinks they’re right for leadership.
17:49
Or if they’re at least ambitious, they they do.
17:53
How do you develop that clarity or help people develop that clarity about whether or not leadership is the right decision for someone?
18:01
Sure, absolutely.
18:03
And I think the foundational premise is that it’s absolutely not for everyone.
18:08
And I think there’s this current in America, whether it’s coming out of high school, whether it’s coming out of college, university, where you equate success with title, you equate success with money.
18:22
And they’re certainly ground to stand on there, Chris.
18:24
But at the end of the day, leadership isn’t always the path to success for you.
18:32
And you have to have the DNA for it.
18:34
And I think the biggest linchpin is, are you the hero or are you the hero maker, right?
18:42
Because there’s a big difference there.
18:45
I had to learn early on that not everybody’s me.
18:49
I had a very particular way of doing things that made me successful.
18:52
I can’t force feed that down my whole team’s throat.
18:56
And I also had to learn early on that choosing leadership meant that I am intentionally capping my pay or limiting my pay.
19:06
I tell my team all the time, you want to make the most money as possible.
19:11
At RCN Technologies, you stay an individual contributor because A, I’ll never cap you on your comp plan.
19:18
Very important to me.
19:19
You earn every penny you sell according to the comp plan with no cap.
19:24
Secondly, it’s all up to you.
19:28
You get to do it.
19:29
It’s not up to anybody else.
19:31
You come to my side of the aisle and your pay is proportional to the team’s result.
19:36
All of a sudden, because you’re not on a comp plan, you’re on a bonus plan.
19:40
Big difference, buddy.
19:42
There.
19:43
No, you want to do that.
19:46
So those are just, you know, opening the conversation on.
19:49
Is leadership right for you?
19:50
These are some of the outsets of what I had to learn.
19:53
Hard pills I had to swallow what I tell my team all the time.
19:57
Individual contributor, maximize pay, leadership, you’re going to be more challenged longer hours, you’re going to have a bonus plan that you’re going to hit or you’re going to miss.
20:08
And again, the linchpin is hero or hero maker.
20:11
Which one do you want to be?
20:12
Because the hero’s going to equate you failing every single time as a lead.
20:16
And the key component to that is, you know, for an individual that’s considering that, that transition into leadership is what are my life goals?
20:24
What?
20:25
What is truly important to me, you know, I know for me, I love teaching.
20:30
I love teaching people.
20:31
I love developing people.
20:33
It’s a huge part of my personality.
20:34
I get a tremendous amount of self satisfaction from that.
20:38
Not everybody’s like that.
20:40
And to me that’s a key component of being a leader is you need to be able to teach and transfer knowledge.
20:46
So when you sit down with people, I, I, most sales leaders, I think really to get to know people.
20:51
They want to understand what their goals are.
20:54
Where do you want to be in three years, Fibers, whatever.
20:56
How do you do that with your team?
20:59
Yeah, I think that you absolutely have to get to know your team.
21:06
I mentioned earlier one of my early on mistakes, trying to force my expectation on other people, only I am me.
21:15
That’s not going to work with different people, with different upbringings, different motivations, personalities, so on and so forth.
21:25
So what I like to do, especially when I have a new Rep, is take time to maximize the onboarding experience, have just as much training, teaching as personal time.
21:37
Hey, let’s go out to lunch several times.
21:40
Hey, let’s go out to dinner several times.
21:42
Let’s get to know each other on a personal basis because that’s going to allow me to build a profile for this Rep.
21:49
Here’s what’s important.
21:50
Here’s what’s not important, Here’s what your life goals are.
21:54
And I think it’s hard to uncover that in the interview because people are on their best behavior.
21:59
People are selling, but once the trust is established and that wall drops, then you can really get to know where people want to be in the next 12345 years.
22:12
I think the other part, at least in terms of of leadership and tapping leaders in my org, is just always bluntly setting that expectation.
22:22
Like I’ve said, that you want it all to be on you.
22:26
You want to make the most money, you’re here.
22:28
Are you motivated by stewardship, coaching, mentoring, growing people?
22:35
Are you more motivated by legacy?
22:38
I think even that’s probably the leadership route for you.
22:41
And we just have those dialogues as much as I can.
22:44
I’m always getting more intentional about that.
22:47
That’s great.
22:49
You mentioned one of your early difficulties in in developing as a leader.
22:56
What is a current struggle or current thing that you’re working on to develop your leadership skills?
23:02
So just to clarify the question, my own leadership skills, your own leadership skills, what’s something you’re doing today to become a better leader?
23:11
The number one thing that I’m doing today, I am voraciously reading today.
23:21
There’s not a moment that goes by.
23:24
So not just reading but also consuming business related content.
23:28
And I have multiple channels, whether it’s a podcast like this one, I have multiple podcasts that range from personal fitness, which is going to impact my mental clarity, performance, and mood on a day-to-day basis, to entrepreneurship.
23:44
And there are some media outlets on YouTube that have great content on entrepreneurship that focus mainly on how did you conceive the idea?
23:53
How did you bring it to life, What are your challenges?
23:56
How do you monetize?
23:57
How do you market?
23:58
I love that because even if it’s not even remotely my industry, it shows me how people are being creative to unlock blue ocean opportunities.
24:08
I get up at 4:30 and from 5:00 to 6:00 in the morning, that’s audio book time, and I’m sitting at my kitchen table.
24:19
I have notes.
24:20
If I’m not doing that, I’m at the gym during that time block and when I’m in my car, if I’m not using it as peace and quiet clear my mind.
24:30
I’m using it to consume content that adds value to my daily life.
24:35
So I need the marketplace of ideas out there constantly spinning my wheels, getting my gears turning so I can ideate and I can innovate within this organization ultimately so I can create more opportunity for my people.
24:51
And I take that seriously.
24:52
It’s really at my level all about opportunity for my people.
24:56
That’s awesome.
24:57
I love that it is.
24:59
See, that’s the thing that I think a lot of people when they’re young, they can hang on a bit later.
25:03
They don’t understand or you don’t, you don’t understand yet.
25:07
So many are getting up at 4:30 and doing this work that nobody ever sees because that’s what it takes.
25:16
You know, I, I, I love listening to sports radio and I’m trying to remember who it was, was talking about.
25:26
There’s one of the guys, former Patriot where they won the Super Bowl next day or like next couple days, he’s in the office just he’s the only one there went in to pick something up at their facility and who’s out practicing his footwork and throwing all that’s Tom Brady.
25:45
There’s no one else is there?
25:46
They just won the Super Bowl and he’s already, he’s out there working and it’s just blew his mind.
25:52
And it’s like that’s how you become the GOAT.
25:54
You know, Kobe Bryant, there’s tons of stories about Kobe Bryant doing that.
25:59
All these guys, you know, that Patrick Mahomes, all these people that people think like, oh, they’ve got this God-given talent.
26:05
Yeah, they do.
26:06
But there’s a crap load of hours alone doing really hard work that got them where they are.
26:14
Chris, to your point, I think talent only takes you so far.
26:17
Life, I think doing a personal inventory and knowing where your talents lie and marketing yourselves in those areas, that’s smart, right, but they’re only going to take you so far it’s I, I call it being a genius of hard work.
26:30
That’s right because you really have to do that.
26:34
And again, if you want to progress to achieve your goals in life, whether that’s leadership or not, right, you can trust that there’s always someone out there outworking you and you need to compete with yourself truly every single day.
26:51
If you look at the macro view, man, I want to be this in one year, 2 year, three-year, too big of a time horizon.
26:58
If you say I want to do a little bit better than I did yesterday and I’m crazy, right?
27:03
Just to give you an example, it took me 15 minutes to shower today.
27:07
So I have 5 less minutes audio book time this morning.
27:10
Can I shower in 11 tomorrow in our 4 minutes back?
27:16
That’s that’s the level of compete with myself day-to-day.
27:19
Maybe I’m crazy.
27:21
My wife would probably say that, but I’m just really driven to to get a lot out of life.
27:29
Oh yeah, yeah, no, I get it.
27:30
I can relate to that, that we all have to find our own ways to motivate and and you’re it’s going to change for you.
27:38
This is what you’re doing today.
27:39
A year from now, it’s probably going to be doing something different, you know, because you can’t always stay with one thing.
27:44
We plateau, and you got to find you got to continuously be looking for that thing that’s going to replenish that fire in your belly.
27:52
Absolutely.
27:53
Absolutely.
27:54
Yeah.
27:57
What’s the toughest part about your job?
28:03
The toughest part about my job is truly having to sit at my level and know that I’m graded on the results of other people and having to sit and own that.
28:17
I was the kid in the group project that was the hero.
28:21
I wasn’t the hero maker for every group member, so everyone could contribute and feel like it was a team effort.
28:29
And all I did was teach those kids that someone was always going to come in and save the day for.
28:35
So that’s the hardest part of my job.
28:36
I carry that into adulthood, sitting back on the sidelines and having a coach and advise and mentor and allow other people to achieve the results, knowing full and well my pay is going to be contingent on that.
28:53
It’s very hard.
28:54
The second thing I’d say, Chris, when you get into managing people, it’s managing emotions.
29:01
And I think a lot of first time managers don’t understand that there’s so many emotions.
29:06
I had a guy that we promoted into manager and since then we actually put him back into an individual contributor position and he was relieved.
29:15
Honest to God, he was relieved.
29:18
Wasn’t ready for the level of emotion he was going to have to deal with and sift through.
29:24
And what I’ve learned after right around six years of doing it, I kind of have a personal code for myself.
29:32
Stay calm, maintain control.
29:35
Not that I’m unflappable and unreadable.
29:38
I can modulate according to the occasion, but I’m always focused on staying centered and calm.
29:45
So those two things, definitely the hardest part of my job because sometimes I just want to look at my team and saying you’re acting like a bunch of damn kids.
29:54
Oh yeah, yeah, I know.
29:57
One of the hardest things for me personally was especially as being an entrepreneur, you want to control everything and developing that realization.
30:07
I actually control very little and accepting that.
30:13
And once I was able to do that, that really helped me modulate my emotions that, you know, the world’s not on fire.
30:21
There’s tomorrow, tomorrow’s going to come.
30:24
You know, let’s focus on what we can control, impact that everything else is going to take care of itself.
30:30
And that’s helped me tremendously modulating my emotions.
30:34
Chris, if I’m, if I had to bet, I’m willing to bet that you reached a point in your companies where you had that left hand, that right hand in terms of leaders.
30:45
And you had mentored them and coached them and they got to an operational plane where they had it.
30:52
And you could sit back and focus on the vision and how you are right there holistically.
30:57
Yeah, that’s what it’s all about, shift in the conversation.
31:00
CRM, do you love it or do you hate it?
31:04
Chris, I have a love hate relationship.
31:06
Most do.
31:08
And it has a lot of benefits.
31:11
It has a lot of setbacks.
31:13
And the number one thing I’m always grading my CRM at least in context of my sales team.
31:22
How are you burdening my sales team’s time?
31:26
Because that’s the scarcest resource they have and how much I call it the burden of clicks.
31:33
How much is the CRM creating a burden of clicks for my team versus allowing them to maximize their time creating advancing and closing opportunities for us?
31:44
Yeah, that’s perfect.
31:46
Way to, to sum it up, it’s I, I like to say I reframe it a little differently in that is CRM enabling us or is it an anchor slowing us down?
31:56
And it should be a tool that’s enabling things.
32:01
And I, I deliberately choose the word a tool.
32:04
It’s a tool.
32:05
It’s not going to solve all your problems.
32:07
It’s, there’s no perfect CRM out there, but it should be enabling your team, not slowing them down because they have to fill out 200 fields of which maybe 3 really matter, right.
32:20
And to me, that’s what separates a good CRM or one of the key elements that separates a good CRM versus a sucky CRM.
32:29
Absolutely couldn’t agree with you more.
32:30
I, I have a story about that actually.
32:34
It’s interesting being in a small business and when our company started, our owner and the other sales reps, they had a folder based system where they would create a customer sheet and that would be the customer’s folder, right.
32:49
Well, they invested in our CRM in late game 2016 and so our CRM records go back to 2016.
32:57
Beyond that, nothing exists.
32:59
It’s in a folder in a box somewhere.
33:00
So we actually, one of the challenges is that so many people had their hands in the pot architecting the most important form in our entire CRM, the opportunity form, because that’s what we’re tracking funnel.
33:16
So many people over so many years had their hands in adding fields and no one seemed to go back through and remove the fields that were bloat and never do.
33:27
And it ended up being this massive new op generation form that was probably, I kid you not, like 70 fields long.
33:37
I didn’t mind it because I mastered it, because I lived through it for so long.
33:42
And it’s not until this year our information systems team, which is burdened with system CRM improvement, they went through and said, hey, I I think we can reduce the burden of clicks for your team dramatically.
33:55
Now, did we lose some stuff in that?
33:58
Yeah, there was some collateral damage.
34:00
We’re still working through it, but my team has probably, I no joke, Chris, probably 70 to 80 less clicks.
34:09
Oh yeah, that’s huge.
34:11
It’s absolutely huge.
34:12
And, and that’s the thing that, yeah, I, I’ve told this story many times on sales lead dog, but we had a client when we started working with them, I’m not kidding you, they had over 300 fields on their opportunity and we went through and analyzed it.
34:24
You know, the vast majority had either 0% utilization and the VAT like over 90% had less than 3%.
34:33
And that when you looked at the timeline of when those actually were populated, it was like 4 years ago when those fields were originally created and haven’t been touched since then, you know, and, and so to me, that’s, and that happens exactly what you said.
34:46
Someone says, oh, hey, we need these fields.
34:48
They use it for three months, whatever.
34:50
And then people are like, oh, this is a pain, it’s not helping us.
34:53
They stop using.
34:53
But nobody ever takes that stuff away.
34:56
And that’s where good CRMII tell people this all the time.
35:01
It has to evolve with the needs of the business and align to the strategic goals of the business.
35:07
Otherwise, because that those are always changing.
35:09
So your CRM has to keep pace.
35:13
What what would you say your number one benefit of CRM is right now?
35:17
I think the it’s different from my team versus me, right, because we have two different functions for my sales team and my marketing team because I lead both efforts in addition to a product team as well.
35:30
But my sales team, it keeps them organized.
35:35
They can go in, they can visualize their funnel, they can keep track of updates and they can plan their daily activity around it.
35:44
So to your point, it’s a tool.
35:46
It’s a tool to stay organized.
35:48
And I mentioned earlier, the most valuable currency is their time and you have to be organized if you’re going to maximize your most scarce resource, your time.
35:57
I even remember using our CRM in a non optimal state much less than it is today and I was able to just stay completely organized using it.
36:07
Now I was disciplined enough to stay organized and input the notes and the burden of clicks, but that’s the number one unlock for them today.
36:16
For me, it’s pattern recognition, data analysis.
36:21
Not that I want to be a report warrior and be a keyboard warrior and demand things from my sales team.
36:28
I actually like to get personal and involved with them when we have to make changes based on trend lines and I show them and I walk them through the impact of the trend line as well.
36:38
But for me it’s for example, my data analytics guy pulled a report for me that I asked and I said, OK, Mark, look at our lead sources and pare it down to just our referral partner based resources.
36:52
And let’s look at this specific wireless carrier groups because the big wireless carriers have business units, they refer U.S.
36:59
business and let’s see the trend pattern over time.
37:03
And so we’re in a state of attrition right now for every single wireless carrier since 2022 when it crescendoed to today, there’s something that we’re not doing.
37:16
Some of it’s market conditions, some of it’s emergence of new competitors, some of it’s how they’ve changed their go to market.
37:23
But fundamentally, there’s something we’re not doing today that we did then.
37:29
And I’m going, there’s a leak, we got to go patch it.
37:32
We can’t let that continue.
37:34
Yeah.
37:34
And that’s what CRMA key component of CRM is if you are setting it up the right way and you’re tracking the data the correct way.
37:41
Love that you’re tracking referral sources.
37:43
We, I see so many that companies we come in to help with CRM are not.
37:47
And so they’re not able to do that type of analysis.
37:50
They’re because they haven’t been capturing that information.
37:53
Now they realize, hey, we’ve got a problem, they’re screwed because they don’t have the data to go in and actually analyze and develop a strategy of, of hey, let’s try this and see if it works, but try to recoup some of that business.
38:10
You’re left throwing mud at the wall.
38:12
Absolutely.
38:13
You know, Chris, I think I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about this concept of data fidelity.
38:20
How how is our data?
38:22
How are we maintaining quality high fidelity?
38:25
Because crap in is crap out.
38:27
We’ve always heard that right?
38:29
And we had, we’re on the seesaw constantly of how can we trust our team to input the right data versus how can we monitor that data and manage that data better.
38:44
And we are looking all the time at, well, what’s important for the sales teams to contribute and what’s important from a revenue forecasting and reporting function.
38:57
And how can we create if then logics and mandatory field requirements that are as universal as possible without creating a false OPS, right or data points in there.
39:12
So I don’t want to 0 when I could just have an if then function that doesn’t even represent the field at all.
39:19
So there’s that piece.
39:20
But then we also look at well, through our order booking system and our quoting system, the 2 are actually linked.
39:27
How can we trigger a lot of our data fidelity from a sales order level versus ACRM sales Rep La di da, I’m going to input this and this is going to be my initial impression of the opportunity.
39:43
I’m never going to go back five iterations later on that quote and update the data, right?
39:50
No, I talk about that all the time that it has to be in the moment.
39:54
I just like everyone says, oh, hey, I’ve I’ve created this contact.
39:57
I’ll come back later and and add in whatever I didn’t put in the first time.
40:01
No one ever does.
40:03
Never happens.
40:04
And so you have to do it in the moment.
40:06
It just own it and you’re you’re helping the whole team when you do that.
40:12
So Reid, I can keep going on.
40:14
There’s so much we can talk about, but what are time here on sales lead?
40:17
Doug, really appreciate you coming on.
40:19
If people want to reach out and connect with you, they want to learn more about RCM technologies, what’s the best way for them to do that?
40:26
Absolutely.
40:27
So a couple different ways.
40:28
First and foremost, direct link to myself, two ways.
40:32
First, hit me on LinkedIn.
40:33
Just search, read Perryman.
40:35
In fact, if you Googled my name, it’s probably the top hit on Google.
40:39
So very easy to find and connect me with with me there.
40:43
I would ask, qualify your message right, say that you heard me on this podcast.
40:49
I’ll be more incentive to respond.
40:51
I get a million messages a day.
40:54
It helps me sift through the garbage, so to speak.
40:56
Secondly, my e-mail, [email protected], that’s [email protected].
41:07
Then finally, you could go to our website, rcntechnologies.com, and you could get a hold of me through our general e-mail distro, Always Viable Ways.
41:17
Chris.
41:17
They’re probably, if I guess, are going to be in the show notes.
41:20
They will be definitely be in the show notes.
41:22
You can get those.
41:23
If you didn’t catch that information, no need to hit rewind.
41:25
Just go to impellercrm.com/sales.
41:29
Lead Dog.
41:29
Check out the show notes for this episode and also our hundred plus episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
41:34
Be sure to subscribe so you get all our future episodes as well.
41:38
Reed, thank you so much for coming on.
41:40
It’s been great talking to you.
41:41
And welcome to the Sales Lead Dog Pack.
41:45
Yeah, likewise, Chris, thanks so much for having me.
41:46
It’s been a joy.
41:49
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41:57
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42:00
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42:10
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