The Art of the Interview - Greg Grand

“Go deep” says Greg Grand, founder and CEO of G-Squared Advisors. Greg consults for businesses that want to scale up by revamping their sales process, strategy, and execution. In this episode of Sales Lead Dog, host Chris Smith is talking with Greg about what it really means to support sales growth, from training to CRM and about the art of the interview.

Greg is used to diving in and offering practical tips, and that’s exactly what he does in this episode. He talks about adopting a “servant leader” mindset, and investing in both group and individual training for everyone on your team, even top performers. He talks about balancing business and personal goal setting, the art of the interview so you actually get to know someone before you hire them, and what CRM can do for your employees on an individual level–not just for the company.

This episode is jam packed with tips for everyone on your sales team, from the rookie seller to the CEO. You won’t want to miss it!

Watch or listen to this episode about the art of the interview

Transcripts:

Fri, 3/5 1:58PM • 58:10

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
crm, sales, people, salespeople, business, sales team, ceo, client, the art of the interview, sales process, salesperson, leader, big, hunters, crms, important, building, crm systems, talk, run

SPEAKERS OF THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW

Greg Grand, 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 we have joining us Greg Grand of Sales Acceleration. Greg, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.

Greg Grand
Thank you for having me.

Christopher Smith
Very excited to have you on here, Greg. Greg, tell us a little bit about yourself and Sales Acceleration.

Greg Grand
Sure. So what I do Chris is I’m a fractional or outsource VP of Sales depending on how people use the terminology. A lot of times I brought into my clients when you have a CEO, in a lot of cases it’s been trying to run the sales organization, and they haven’t been doing a great job with it, right. They may have hired a bunch of the wrong salespeople, they realize that they’re not set up to scale, a lot of times there’s a huge concentration of revenue from one client, but they generally get to a standpoint where they just realize they don’t know, they don’t know, and they need to bring in outside help. So what I do is I go in and I help companies scale for growth and kind of get things set up so they can beat their all time sales records, and I do that by focusing on sales process, sales strategy, sales accountability, and execution. And that ranges from building compensation plans, getting people in the right seats, configuring and establishing CRM, weekly cadence accountability, all the kind of things that VP of Sales does. Since I’m working in the small to medium business space though, I can generally do those in one to two days a week, so therefore the fractional part.

Christopher Smith
Right. How did you get your start in sales?

Greg Grand
Well it’s interesting. So my schooling is actually in electrical engineering. So that was the initial plan. And once I graduated in engineering, I grew up in New York and moved out to California 30 years ago, when I moved to San Diego, that was a time when about, oh gosh a large percentage of the military contractors were leaving town and that was the hot market down here at that time. So I kept going for engineering interviews, and when I went for those interviews, they said “Nah, you’re a technical salesperson.” I said “No, I’m an engineer,” they said, “No you’re not, you’re a technical salesman.” So I fought it for a little bit, and then I finally said okay, let me see what this is because the interesting thing is when you’re in college as an engineer, they don’t teach you any of these other options that are out there for you, you’re an engineer. There are a whole world of other jobs you can take with an engineering degree that people aren’t aware of. So, I listened to them I went to the dark side and then I started actually as a field sales or Applications Engineer where I was the technical expert that would go out with the sales people and help them get deals on the table. And I realized after about six months of doing that, that I was doing all the heavy lifting, but they were making all the big Commission’s, so that’s when the light went off and then I started in field sales and kind of climbed up through the ranks and then had been leading teams for about the last 15 years or so.

Christopher Smith
What’s your favorite thing about sales?

Greg Grand
Hmm, favorite thing about sales. Helping people. Yeah, being able to help people solve their problems and really move the needle in their businesses and frankly change their lives. You know, when I go into my clients, they’re in pain, right, they’re, they can’t get to where they want to get to and they don’t know how to get there. So you know about two months into my engagement I always have the discussion with the CEO, okay, we’re a couple months in, how are things going? Are you happy with how things are going, is this making a difference? And the responses I get back, and I still get chills when I talk about it, because the responses I get back make me feel like I really have an impact on their lives. When I was in the corporate business, maybe not so much it was more about selling products. But with this type of role, it allows me to change people’s lives and really help their businesses, so that’s the big reward for me.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s huge. Normally when I start the podcast with sales leaders, I’ll ask them what are the three things that have really contributed to their success. In your opinion, what are the three things, there might be more than three, but what are the things that really contribute to success as a sales leader?

Greg Grand
So, I think that there needs to be a changing of the script in some stages because, even as recent as a couple of years ago, I’ve been involved with organizations that still have an old school rule by intimidation view of how things should be done. And I believe that a sales leader really should be putting themselves in a servant leader mindset, that almost in essence you work for the sales team. Now of course, there needs to be the discipline and all the things you need to do as a leader. But, you know, getting to know your sales people as humans I think is mportant. For instance, when I get involved with any new client, I work with their sales teams, and I have them do SMART goals, but not just business SMART goals, I have them do five SMART goals for business and five for personal, so I can really get to understand what makes them tick, right. Not all salespeople are motivated by that huge commission check, they want to be part of bigger. So I think one of the really important things to do is, you know, treat your salespeople right, get to know them as humans, and coach well. Right, coaching is I think the second thing that that leads into is you have to be able to coach. You can’t just sit there in the sales meetings and beat them up for being short on their quota, not making as many outgoing calls, and things like that. What I like to do is while I have my hour long weekly sales meeting, I also do have one hour individual one-on-one coaching sessions with everybody in the sales team. I think a lot of people ignore the top performers thinking that they’re doing great, so we don’t need to talk to them and as you know, that’s not the case. They need some love, too. So I’d say yeah, serving is really important. And then I think to run a truly consultative, you know, enterprise-level sales team, accountability and structure. And by, what I mean by structure is having those right processes in place, making sure the CRM is not only put in, but it’s utilized the correct way and that you have a good pipeline with gates between the different stages to keep everybody honest and make sure all the process is there and it’s understood by all, you’re speaking the same language. It tends to make for a much smoother organization, and you can, if you have to have tougher discussions, you should do that one on one. I don’t believe that the, the larger meetings with the CEO are the place to do that. And then I also believe continual learning, really, I mean I’ve got in the middle of I think six or seven books right now depending on what I’m feeling right now, and the people I surround myself with in my professional network are always lifelong learners. There’s new tools coming out, I’m just reading a great book on virtual selling and I’ve got some other books I’m going through, but I think that things change and especially what we’ve gone through in the last year, right. We used to be able to go have meetings right, now everything’s Zoom. So it requires a completely new skill set.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
How do you look on Zoom? How do you have yourself framed? Do you have a good camera? Do you have the right lighting? You get one impression as a salesperson on that first call, right. So I think we’re at a position right now ,you’re familiar with IQ, you’re familiar with EQ, but the recent thing that’s been popping up is TQ. And that’s, you know, technical. So, if you are not able to keep up with current technologies at a pretty good pace, especially in these days, you’re going to be in trouble. So learning not only from a business standpoint, which all my books are, I don’t read much for fun, it’s always something about business, but also having that other side as well I think is crucial.

Christopher Smith
That’s great. What, you know people that, you say you work with a lot of small and medium sized businesses and lot of times you’re saying that the owner is the, the lead salesperson. What are the big mistakes they’re making, trying to be a sales leader before they’re probably ready to be a sales leader?

Greg Grand
Yeah, I’d say, the most common one is lack of accountability, there’s no sales meetings at all. You know, they just, they go and do their own thing and then the CEOs are, you know, upset because they don’t know what their salespeople are doing, which is a cause of, you know what they haven’t been doing right. So that’s a big one. Another one is they think they can hire salespeople, and I don’t mean to be rude by saying this, but the reality is is you need a sales leader who’s been doing this, has interviewed hundreds of salespeople, to really figure out. Because salespeople are salespeople, they’re going to be great on their interviews. So I do use like disc personality testing, I do behavioral interviewing. I also started doing something a few years ago which has been outstanding, which is when before I even interviewed them I have I do a written evaluation with 10 questions, because I’ve hired some people that were great on the phone, but when I saw them write an email, it was just an absolute disaster. So, getting the right people in the right seats is a challenge. CRM, not only CRM usage, but monitoring which again ties back to the weekly meetings, right, you have to be keeping your people, they have to have those leading KPI metrics there. How many calls you make, right, how many meetings lead to how many proposals lead to how many closed deals and of course we reverse engineer that, that’s just not done, or the CRM is just a repository they’re putting in. I just had a call with a potential client, this morning. And he was telling me the only way they use the CRM was to go and put the name and tag their tag their name to the account name in case something came in, so it was their deal, right. So I see that but yeah I would say, lack of process and accountability and discipline along those things are kind of the overarching things that I see.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, it’s, you talk about CRM, it always amazes me that the different ways people use CRM or fail to use CRM, and that they think, oh hey you know what we’re having problems with sales, let’s get a CRM, it’ll solve all our problems. Can you talk about that a bit?

Greg Grand
Oh gosh, I mean if you were snickering, because it’s almost comedic what I see out there. Well, you know, good thing I can’t say names on here. What I find generally is even if they have a CRM, they’re still using spreadsheets, and they’ll show me their 14 Excel spreadsheets and how they’re trying to track their business. So I think they have the good intentions, right, they think that you need a CRM, but they have never had that sales leader to teach them how to use it effectively. So they sit there and they’re happy to have the CRM and I say, “Okay, show me your dashboards,” right. With my clients I literally have 30 dashboards, 20 are based off of leading KPIs and 10 off of lagging KPIs. I go there, one dashboard there.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
And then the salespeople, and this is just the general CRM thing, I think there’s a just a misconception in large it by the actual sales hunters out there, that this is a big brother thing. Sure, if you leave, the data is there, I get that. However, my belief in CRM is it’s the best personal time management system and efficiency management system you can use, right. Get the lead. You go ahead you set it up in your CRM, what I do is when I’m on calls I actually take my Zoom screen, and I put it up to the top, and then I have my CRM on the bottom, so I can take my live notes as I’m talking you can’t tell, well I’m not a great typer but I look down here and there. Everything’s done there. I get done with that, I set a task right, I’m gonna go make another phone call, and the next day they wake up, you don’t have to think about what you do. You have 30, 40 tasks right there, you click the button, run through them. Now of course on the other side from the ownership standpoint, with a good pipeline and sales process, you’re not just putting “Hey, that’s a million dollar deal.” We’re doing different steps along the sales process with gates that you have to do these things before you go to the next step. And we’re waiting those 20, 40, 60, 80% down the line. So you actually have a much better indication of the true trajectory of where your business is heading from financial standpoint.

Christopher Smith
Yep, I’m a big believer in sales process, and having a good sales process that is facilitated by your your your CRM. Can you, let’s back up a little bit, just before, not even talking about CRM, but let’s talk about sales process. When you work with a client, how do you get them into that world of hey, we’re going to create some structure around your sales process?

Greg Grand
Yeah, that’s actually not that hard, because when they’re bringing me in, they know it doesn’t exist. So that’s, you know, one of the main things they’re wanting from me is to really understand, you know, basic, what’s the difference between a funnel and a pipeline, right? What’s the difference between qualification and discovery, right? And these kind of things. So I can show them how I map it out and everybody’s got their own strategy. Some people have 10 stages, I do it by phases. I prefer to do less steps in the sales process but more individual activities that have to happen within those phases, it’s the sales team and they have to check those boxes before they can move to the next stage. But, again, for me, getting process in place, it’s clearly what they don’t have, and they don’t have any idea what’s going on with their sales team, their revenue, where things are coming from, growing. And they know that at least especially on the sales pipeline from a revenue generation standpoint, now they know that they’re going to have a much clearer picture again to that trajectory of revenue, where they don’t have anything existing at all right now. So yeah, that’s one of the main things I’m brought in for, so it’s never a tough discussion, it’s just what is best for each customer because all my solutions are customized of course.

Christopher Smith
Right. That’s awesome, building a team is super important as a sales leader, you want to have a great team. What are your keys or what’s your strategy for building a great sales team?

Greg Grand
Lots of interviewing. And in-depth interviewing, right. So i think a lot of people will just go off of that I got a good vibe from this person on the phone. But you have to go deeper than that. So for me, building right team is making sure that right person is in the right seat, especially when I’m working with these companies that are maybe five or 10 million, and they’re only gonna hire one or two salespeople, so I have to get those hires right. So I generally use a recruiter on the front end of the portion who I have a partnership with and then they do some initial screening which I give to them, they have a conversation, they do a behavioral interview with them, then they’ll pass the information on to me. I will then, if I’m interested, have them do the written questions. If they pass that, then I talk to them. Then after that, I will give them both the disc and behavioral interviewing assessments to do. If they pass all seven of those steps before, then it will go to the CEO and COO of a potential client for, you know, do you like them, do you want to make an offer. So I think the thing is in the art of interview, building that right team. And of course it’s always getting in the right person in the right seat, but it’s doing that due diligence, deep due diligence, can they speak, can they write, had I had some job interviews where guys were on a couch with dirty socks on the couch. Right, I mean, true story. So, I think it just needs to be detailed and not just taking it they have a good resume, and they seem like a good person. Go deeper, understand their personality. Because the other big thing is part of getting that right team together is is that person going to fit within the culture? And that’s a real big thing, every company has their own culture. So, if you get somebody that you know it’s a conservative culture, I’m in San Diego maybe that’s kind of a more of a beachy kind of vibe, right, here’s somebody that’s just a bull in a china shop, that’s not going to work.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
Let me work with one person. So I’m looking at the entire human, not just this hard sales skill set, because you can have some people that are great salespeople that maybe aren’t the nicest humans, right.

Christopher Smith
Right, right. When I talk to a sales leader a lot about their conflict composing a team, they talk a lot about balance of you can’t have an entire team of hunters, you know, or sharks or whatever, you know, you got to have a mix. How do you go about creating that mix, or how do you know when you don’t have the right mix?

Greg Grand
Yeah, I think that’s specific to each client and you know budget and how many people they can have. The larger the organization obviousl,y they can have dedicated BDRs, dedicated hunters, they can have account managers, right. There’s your three buckets, right.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
You have the farmers, right, and then you have the prospectors and even there’s the different hunters, there’s the field hunters and the insight hunters. So, one of the big ways I do that is by using disc testing, because you can easily get an idea, you know generally in sales, you’re looking for a high DI, dominant, influential person, but I also do have some people that should be born that conservative engineering side, which are going to be like the SCs, right, the steady conscientious kind of folks. My gut feeling on that there was, those are the better people for the account management role. So I don’t like the model of you close the account, you manage the account, unless there’s you know other big deals behind it, you need that field person. If it’s really going to be maintenance type of thing, that’s a good transition point to take that and put it with a more nurturing, caring, you know empathetic type of person, because a lot of the DI’s are not going to have as much on the empathy side. So I think there’s a role for each, and they’re, you know, they have to be blended into what’s right for the organization.

Christopher Smith
Right. So a big part of that is really trying to understand your sales process and what and understanding your customer, and, and what is going to resonate with your customer is that accurate? You know, so like if if my customer if I know from my experience that you know we have to do a lot of consultative type selling, or selling, and and really build that rapport with them, then you need someone that or someone that’s going to be able to do that, correct?

Greg Grand
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s different styles right that work with different people. When you get into, I don’t always go down this whole discord, but when you do that, there’s ways to communicate. You know I’m more of a dominant individual, so I like to be communicated very direct, very to the points. Sending me a blank two sentence email is great for me, I like that. I do that to an engineer though, and I have clients like this that are tech companies that are very engineering-centric. I know when I approach them with something, I need to have the data. So a perfect example would be, I’m looking at some lead generation type of things and list gathering for phone numbers, cause I believe the phone is very underutilized these days. So I have one client, and I can go and say, “Hey, I did the research, I think this is the right one, it’s going to cost us 150 a seat a month.” He’ll say “Okay, great.” When I go to my tech client, I can’t do that. I have to do my research, I have to create a spreadsheet with the different options, the different prices, maybe a couple graphics and show him, “Okay, here are all the options,” because that’s how he makes decisions.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
So I think it’s, you know, matching that up with the people and how do they think, how do they like to be communicated with, and what’s the best way to, you know, maximize effectiveness in that?

Christopher Smith
Right. Once you have your team built, how do you keep your team motivated and focused?

Greg Grand
Well weekly meetings, for sure. How on the table on that, it’s not done, sometimes they’re bi-weekly, sometimes they’re monthly. You have to have, excuse me, a weekly meeting at the same time, same day, every week, and that doesn’t change without fail unless there’s a catastrophic event. I think having the CEO involved in these meetings is important. A lot of times when I’m involved, the CEOs are hiring me so they can get back to working on their business, not in their business. So they tend to pull back a little bit and say okay, well you’ve got this, and you can just give me an update 30 minutes a week, which is fine if they want to do it that way, I can do it. I think when the sales team sees the CEO involved and he cares about what they’re doing and is offering help and things like that, it does make a big difference. And then, I think the one-on-one coaching sessions are really important because you can get really deep and kind of find out what’s going on. What’s going good, what’s not going bad, how can you help them. So just spending time with them, you know so many companies bring salespeople in, and it’s you know here’s a list and here’s a computer, and good luck, you know what you’re doing. So I think, you know, at the beginning, onboarding is super important to make sure they’re brought in the right way. And they have the support. I have a kind of arrangement in my business where I have a relationship with a local sales trainer. I’m not a sales trainer, I’m not going to sit in with the team and do two days of psychological sales training, but he has a monthly program. So when I’m working with my clients, you have someone like myself doing an hour a week, and someone else who’s also been doing it a different area for like 90 minutes a week in a kind of a group setting, so you have the salespeople getting two to three hours of individualized sales coaching. When they see that you’re investing your time in them and you care, right, and you really want to see them succeed, it tends to create some pretty good loyalty.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. I, that’s one of our core values actually is, we, we require everyone in our company to do two hours of training a week and have a training plan for the year. I just like learning and having that, showing that, like this is important to us is so, it pays benefits beyond whatever costs.

Greg Grand
Absolutely, yeah.

Christopher Smith
When,

Greg Grand
This is, this is our point. This is, as you know this, this is the biggest problem with sales training. And I like the Sandler methodology and then he wrote a book and it was I think “You Can’t Learn to Ride a Bike at a Seminar.” And I think most corporate situations, they go okay we’re gonna do sales training, and they bring in the big company and they spend $10,000 and they go in there for two days and everybody’s excited, and then a week later they talk about it, and two weeks later it’s gone. So the way that we do it is the way to do it, because it’s continual reinforcement, and making it, this is the way it works here, and this is the way we all operate, we all talk the same language, we’re all kind of marching to the same drum.

Christopher Smith
Yep. Yeah, I love that. A big part also of being a sales leader is finding who’s next, who needs to be moving into that slot. How do you identify, you know, those people that should be considering or making that move into sales leadership?

Greg Grand
That can be a challenging one. What you see a lot, and I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, is CEOs who really don’t understand the guts of sales, if you will, is that you don’t want to take your top hunters and put them into a management role.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Greg Grand
Hunters are hunters and that’s, they’re revenue generators. But they think oh they’re, they’re the best so we’re gonna put them in. It’s two completely different skill sets, and I’ve worn both of those hats before. It just, it doesn’t work particularly well that way. Right. So anyway just going back on that.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, they do the same thing in the tech world where they say like oh, this guy’s a great coder. Let’s make him put him in charge of all the other developers, always a trainwreck.

Greg Grand
So, how do I find it, I mean I generally would prefer to hire from outside if it’s in the budget and it’s possible, because I built the team and I think everybody’s in the right, I’ve spent three or six or nine months, putting everybody in the right seat. If there is somebody identified that maybe could be a you know mediocre producer that has that management style that that’s something to potentially look at, but it’s hard to give a blanket answer because it really is just so specific on the customer and how their organization is run.

Christopher Smith
Yep, no, that’s fine. Let’s talk about CRM a little bit, we talked about it some more. But I always start this discussion with CRM, do you love it, or do you hate it?

Greg Grand
Can I say it depends on the platform?

Christopher Smith
That answer. Yeah, that’s a great one.

Greg Grand
Yeah, I cuz in my world, sometimes I don’t have the luxury. I have my preferred CRM and I have the CRMs that I despise and I won’t throw those out there, I don’t think this is the thing to do. I as I kind of hit highlights, I think that CRM is absolutely imperative for a salesperson to own and master and live in, because it’s the best way you can then, you know, kind of manifest your own success if you handle it the right way and make sure you’re following and putting all your notes in and setting your tasks and kind of following your own workflow there. So I think it’s an absolute necessity and of course, it also gives the CEO visibility into their business that they’ve never had before. So I’ve never viewed, well, maybe when I was younger in my sales career and I was working on some homespun CRM systems, I felt it was that there wasn’t any value now. But the way that CRM systems are developed now, you can do so much and get so much information that just looking at one or two or three different screens, so I’m a huge fan of CRM.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s great. One of the things I think a big mistake people make when they’re deciding like hey, we need a CRM or we need a new CRM, is they’re focusing on the technology and oh we need a CRM instead of looking at what’s behind this, the thought of why we think we need a CRM or new CRM. And so they just completely skip over sales process and creating that structure that you were talking about. Do you agree with that or disagree with that sentiment in your experience?

Greg Grand
I agree with that 100%. I think that I mean there’s I don’t know, I’ve got a list of the top 40 CRMs, there’s probably over 100 now I would guess all right. So I think the most important thing when you’re doing the front end of the CRM system is looking at the different functionality and what that CRM is really built for. Yeah, we don’t need to throw names but we know there’s some CRMs out there that are very heavy on the marketing side, right, some are heavy on the report side, there are some that are just so bulky you can’t get anything done, right. So I think the key thing and that is looking at your business and what’s important to your business. What are you going to use the CRM for and is it also going to scale with your business?

Christopher Smith
Oh yeah, that’s a big one. That’s huge. Yeah, I hear that one all the time where I was just on, listening to, I had the privilege of listening to about 30 sales leaders talking about CRM, and one of them was claiming how I took, came this job and we had this CRM and it just flat out doesn’t support their business, but he stuck with it and it doesn’t integrate with anything. That’s the other big one, that as your business grows, you’re going to get other systems, other platforms that this now has to connect to. And a lot of CRMs out there can’t integrate with anything. Have you come across that much?

Greg Grand
Yeah, well then you’re looking at, I run across it all the time, and then you’re looking at $15,000 for an API to hook into it.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

Greg Grand
You know they’re looking at $40 a month. And they say, well, wait we need to hook this into our SAP system or our earpiece system. Well, as you said, there’s not many that have hooks, you know they have the basic hooks into Gmail and Outlook and things like that, you can’t integrate with everybody, and then you have like I was working with an IT company and they had a very specific CRM that was made for their industry. It was horrible. You couldn’t even put blocks in between the stages in my sales stage. So there was no, I couldn’t, it was like oh we can just click phase 1 to 4, no problem, right, and that makes the sales meetings a mess. Wait a minute. You’re here right, you couldn’t keep track of anything. So again, I guess the overarching thing is take the time, do your research, figure out what the most important things are for your business. First question is why are you getting this CRM?

Christopher Smith
Exactly.

Greg Grand
What are you going to do with it?

Christopher Smith
Yep. What is your ultimate goal? And, and, and I always ask this question when we’re talking to people is what’s your definition of success with a CRM? What does that look like for you? And if you can’t clearly articulate that, you need to step back and you need to figure that out. I think that’s so important.

Greg Grand
I find in those discussions though, it comes back to the root cause of how we started is this the CEO has been told and maybe one of his you know executive CEO groups that oh, you don’t have a CRM or some sales leader okay, let’s just, we’ll go get one of those and they task it, but they never put that thought into it, right. They think it’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. I mean CRM is, they didn’t even know what CRM was you know customer relationship management system until they heard that word. And so they don’t know what they don’t know, because someone like you who knows this stuff very well, I mean he knows it real well. We know how wide it can go right, we know all the cool bells and whistles that we can put in there. When we first opened up, you know, Excel, right, you know, I couldn’t even add two numbers together. And I didn’t know all the cool things that Excel could do. I still am horrible at doing PowerPoint presentations. I know it can do a lot of great things. And I know probably 5% of what it can do.

Christopher Smith
Right. Right.

Greg Grand
I think you run into that with all software programs.

Christopher Smith
Right. And, and using that analogy, most CRMs, people use maybe 5%, because they’re just, they, someone told him hey we need a CRM, they picked one based on hey, this is what we use, great I’ll use it too. And, you know, they just don’t get, they don’t get, they don’t achieve success you know, .

Greg Grand
Yeah. And the reason is because even when they get it, they don’t know how to set up the process and the accountability behind it to make it work. CRM, I don’t care what you put in there, unless you have a sales leader every week sitting down with the team, reviewing numbers reviewing their pipeline, what’s moved down the stage, what’s going to close this week, this month, this quarter, right. If you don’t do that, then this you’re wasting your money on this CRM.

Christopher Smith
It’s glorified contact management that you’re paying a lot of money for.

Greg Grand
It’s a good repository if you want to annoy people with sequences.

Christopher Smith
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. What’s your advice, do you have, you know, advice for sales leader that hey, our CRM sucks or we’re not happy with it? What should they be doing to address that, those issues?

Greg Grand
Well, the first question would be why do you think it sucks? Right, and then figuring that out, right why what is the CRM, not doing, you know, I can tell you, there were CRMs that I had that I preferred, and then they changed their pricing structures, right, which changed, you had to go to different places, so. It depends what’s not, if you’re having that discussion, my CRM sucks, the first thing is you know, why do you think it sucks, and does it really suck? Have you done the research to check and see all those things? I’ll go into a CRM with a client and say, “Oh, this thing sucks,” but then I go and I take a fifty minute training or I talk to the integrator and spend an hour with them and go, “Oh okay, actually it’s not that bad.” So I think all of us, especially in these days and times where you make snap decisions and can’t watch more than the 30 minute video, it’s easy to just discard a piece of software because it’s not doing what you want it to do. But it’s software, you have to tell it what you want it to do.

Christopher Smith
Exactly. Exactly. That’s awesome. Greg I really appreciate you coming on Sales Lead Dog, it’s been great listening to you. If people want to reach out and connect with you if they want to find out more about your company, what’s the best way to do that?

Greg Grand
Sure, quickest and easiest way would be give me a call on my cell phone which is 619-417-1100. You can certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. My name is just Greg Grand. And if you want to do it the old way on email, it’s just [email protected]. Thank you for having me.

Christopher Smith
First one to give out his cell phone number.

Greg Grand
Yeah I know it’s pretty risky, but hey, if you’re interested and you want to talk to me.

Christopher Smith
That’s right.

Greg Grand
What are the quickest way, I can I have a spam blocker on my phone, I’m okay. Thank you for having me Chris this has really been a blast, I enjoyed talking with you.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, it’s been great having you on, and thanks again.

Greg Grand
Okay, excellent. Have a good weekend.

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 Empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.

Quotes

“…you need a sales leader who has the art of the interview, has interviewed hundreds of salespeople, to really figure it out because salespeople are salespeople they’re going to be great on their interviews.” (12:09-12:18)
“When they see that you’re investing your time in them and you care and you really want to see them succeed, it tends to create some pretty good loyalty.” (24:14-24:22)
“A sales leader should be in the servant leader mindset.”
“I believe that a sales leader really should be putting themselves in a servant leader mindset. That almost in essence you work for the sales team.” (6:52-7:00)