Lauren Bailey, Founder and President of Factor 8 and #GirlsClub is on a mission to change lives by helping more people find confidence and success in sales. Known on the speaker circuit for her “No B.S.” style and spunk, look for Lauren to make you laugh, keep things moving quickly, and help you take immediate action with her tactical tips.
On today’s episode, Lauren takes us through her journey as an inexperienced sales rep all the way to now, where she’s proven to be a top coach in sales and a champion for women who’ve gotten stuck in the confidence gap- not feeling good enough to apply for jobs they qualify for.
“This is a passion project. This is meaningful, this is changing people’s lives. And it’s awesome. It’s really awesome. So, our mission is to change the face of sales, by helping more women earn leadership positions in sales.”
Tune in to hear how Lauren is changing the face of sales and championing for more women leaders in the field!
Watch or listen to this episode:
Transcript:
Wed, 6/2 12:00PM • 57:27
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, people, leader, crm, women, job, manager, quota, company, team, dashboard, training, salesperson, hire, christopher, data, management, tools, dials, talk
SPEAKERS
Lauren Bailey, 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 am very excited to have a special guest on today. Our guest has been voted top 25 most influential leaders in inside sales, top 25 sales coaches, I’m counting on my fingers if you can’t see this, top 35 most influential women in sales, and top 50 keynote presenters. She’s the founder of Factor 8, The Sales Bar, and #GirlsClub. Lauren Bailey, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.
Lauren Bailey
Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here. You know what I was thinking as you’re reading that intro is that I sure just I can’t crack a top 10 to save my damn life.
Christopher Smith
Hey, you know what, I’d be pretty happy with top 25.
Lauren Bailey
That’s, it’s alright, I, yeah, I’m thrilled about it, but as I’m listening to that I’m like, I don’t know man, that’s, the numbers keep getting longer like top 2356 Women in Phoenix, Arizona who work in a sales career.
Christopher Smith
It gives you something to shoot for though, right? It’s a goal.
Lauren Bailey
There you go.
Christopher Smith
Top 10, I’m getting top 10 next year, right?
Lauren Bailey
Right, yeah, you gotta like.
Christopher Smith
So tell me about Factor 8.
Lauren Bailey
Oh well, you know what, that’s a perfect lead in because this year we were awarded top 20 sales companies by Selling Power magazine, so. We do front line sales rep and manager job training. And just straight from the trenches, I hire really great sales leaders who are done with the politics and the spreadsheets who just miss developing people, and we come in and teach people how to sell virtually and how to manage virtual teams, and we love it. Like it’s, it’s 100% based on my foibles, and, you know, horror stories from doing sales and running sales teams, and all those gaps that I felt in all those frustrations that I had, 20 years later I started a company to fix them. And I love it, it’s, it’s fascinating.
Christopher Smith
That’s awesome. Tell me about how you got your start in sales.
Lauren Bailey
I would tell you that 9/10 women will tell you it’s an accident that they got a sales job, and it wasn’t for me. My dad was in sales, and aside from thinking he was a master of BS, it just sort of came naturally. So, my first job when I was 16 and able to hold down a job, I, you know, slunng fashion. I worked at the limited and Cedar Rapids, Iowa and, you know, I was super proud of being the number one person in the Midwest micro-market which meant like two stores, but it was fun and I, I ate it up. I really enjoyed it, and I had sales jobs then through college and right out of college until I decided that I should be in charge. And I thought, wait a minute, I think I want to be a sales leader.
Christopher Smith
What was that transition like from salesperson to sales leader? Easy or hard?
Lauren Bailey
The most difficult time of my life, absolutely, positively. I mean 20 years later, I started a company, right? So long nights, lots of wine, and crying in my car in the dark before I got out and well, that’s what that was like. But to be fair I was out over my skis. I really was. I was 24 it like it’s my first real big girl, post-college, full-time job. And I applied to the company and the leader, Steve Caldwell said to me, “Lord, I would love to hire you as a rep, right? Like you’ve never been in technology before, you don’t work in the company, you’ve done inside sales, hell, you don’t even live here. Let’s let you come in and get to number one and then we’ll promote you in a year or two,” which is exactly what I would say if I was interviewing little Lauren now. And I don’t know where it came from Christopher but out of nowhere I looked at him and I’m like, “Really not interested in that, so if you’d like to have me join your company, I’d be happy to accept the sales management position.” And I got it. Yeah, like, which was a horrible decision. I was awful!
Christopher Smith
Yeah, but I’m sure you learned a lot in that time. Do you have a crazy story from that time as you know that young Lauren sales leader?
Lauren Bailey
I have I have probably too many stories about that time. It was painful, like I had a new team, and I was new, my team was new. And we were a new outbound group account managers in the Fortune 500 division. Now, there aren’t a lot of new accounts in the Fortune 500 division, right? So like our books were made up of all the stuff that nobody could crack, and we were like this ragtag, I mean, there was one guy on my team who knew what the hell he was doing his name was Patrick, and like he wanted my job, so that didn’t help much. Anyway, we were a hot mess, and we flailed for a good quarter, because every same time they’d have a question, they’d come and ask me, and I did not know the answer. And so I would, you know, be there 12 or 14 hours a day and like I said, go home, cry, drink wine, repeat. And it took us about a quarter to pull it together. And at the end of that, we actually hit number one. Now, everybody else there will tell you we hit number one because we had the lowest quotas, because we were all new, like if you sell some toner you’re going to hit quota in your first six months on the job, but we know that we did it because we learned how to play on each other’s strengths. We created these go to sheets, right? Shawn could crack into any account and Randy configure the computers and Melissa could get assistance to talk and Joe knew how to get things out of product management, and so like, nobody did an entire call, deal, or day by themselves, and we found a way to get through. So the moral of the story is don’t hire a 24-year-old from outside the company with no experience, but in that situation, we found our strengths, because we had to to survive. And we turned inward almost, right, and, and overcame and it was phenomenal. It was really great, but it was painful, and I was pissed that my reps didn’t come out of training knowing how to get somebody on the phone, how to dah dah dah dah, look at Factor 8’s curriculum, and it’s a list of all that we had to go teach ourselves.
Christopher Smith
Right. Let’s talk a bit about your, your, your new initiative, I guess, #GirlsClub. Tell me about #GirlsClub.
Lauren Bailey
This is a passion project. This is meaningful, this is changing people’s lives. And it’s awesome. It’s really awesome. So our mission is to change the face of sales by helping more women earn leadership positions in sales. What we are is a community. At the heart of the community, we are a sales management certification program. We run a six-month cohort, people apply to get in. Many are sponsored to be there by third-party companies who are very eager to support this initiative and steal this talent, right, and invest in the next generation of sales leaders who have amazing sponsors, and we go through a six-month, rigorous training program. We teach people how to be sales managers. You know, all that training I wish I had 20 years ago, right, and we give them mentors, women sales leaders who’ve they probably never seen before in their own companies. We shine spotlights and help them build followings inside the company and outside the company and give them opportunities to grow their network. But I think the heart of that training program is we do a lot of confidence building. And that’s, that’s sort of the theory, Christopher, is I believe from my experience, we don’t have more women at the top like that some of the amazing women we’ve talked about you’ve interviewed. It’s hard to find those women for your podcast, because of two reasons. One, we don’t take that first step, the broken rung of the ladder is the first rung, getting them from individual contributor into management, and my theory that the number one reason for that is the confidence gap. And HP did a study about that a few years back if you remember that, it’s actually called the Confidence Gap. And I said, we saw internally that if we had a job posting with 10 items on it, men would apply if they had six or seven of the 10 requirements. Do you want to guess what women’s number is?
Christopher Smith
It would have to be 10 I would guess.
Lauren Bailey
It is. We don’t apply unless we have 100%. Right, like we won’t apply for the job until we know we can do the job perfectly, even though we’ve never had that job before. It doesn’t make any sense, but this is what happens. And I’ve studied the brain science behind it and it’s fascinating, they’re literally the section of your brain that controls nitpicky and perfectionism, like it’s larger in women’s brains. Anyway, and I thought you know what I have a management, sales management training company, I can solve for this. I’m going to help these women train for the job and build their confidence to apply for the job, and it’s, it’s working. Over 70% of our cohort every year has been promoted before the end of the six months.
Christopher Smith
Oh that is awesome, that’s a great number. I love that.
Lauren Bailey
They take off like rockets. These women are amazing. And it’s, I get goosebumps just even talking about it. It’s always the best part of my day, it’s, we’re doing something special.
Christopher Smith
That’s really cool. If I’m a CMO or VP of Sales, what should I be doing to get more women into sales leadership roles?
Lauren Bailey
We do a really neat thing every year called the Unintentional Boys Club, and I get a couple really brave men, sales leaders from my network to come in and talk about the boys club and is it real and do you treat women differently. Like what’s the, it’s a safe space, right. And we call it the Unintentional Boys Club, and here’s what they tell me: “You know, I was 28 years old, I had a huge job to build and scale a sales team. I went out and looked for talent, I hit up my network and I hired all the very best people for the job I could. It turns out that most of them looked like me,” because that is human nature. Go read a million books about diversity in studies and it will tell you human nature is we are more comfortable with, we trust, we are attracted to, we like people who are like us. It doesn’t matter who the “us” is. So, there you go, right, not a lot of women are getting hired into sales positions and not from there, the ones who are there aren’t raising their hands for the management positions. If you want diversity on your team, you’re gonna have to effort. That’s what I’ll tell CROs. You have to be super intentional about it, you have to carve out time, you have to carve out dollars, and you have to carve out goals. People know what’s important to you as a leader based on where you spend your time and what you talk about. So if you say you want diversity, but don’t ever put it in your team’s MBOs or talk about it at the quarterly reviews, etc. etc. etc. You’re going to do it like everybody else does. “Yeah, I wish I could, I went looking around for some Black people to hire but not applied.” And that’s a bummer. So there it is. If you want women to apply, I do have some tactical advice. Do you want me to go down that road of what I’ve learned?
Christopher Smith
Sure!
Lauren Bailey
Some really easy things to do. So first of all, you know, the study, the list of 10, make your list of job requirements five instead of 10. This isn’t about the ideal candidate. Get to that in the interviews, right. Keep the list short to just the requirements and watch the women go up. Number two, go and ask women to apply. You’ve got some phenomenal women, some in marketing and customer service that should be in sales, they just need a little encouragement. Okay, what’s the worst that could happen? You make their day, right? The third thing is look at the language. So it turns out Christopher, I was, I grew up in sales, right, and inside sales is like only female always, it’s like being raised by a pack of wolves. It’s why I talk like a trucker. And my own job descriptions were rife with like the male dominated aggressive sales language. But if we think about it, sales is a helping profession, and women are more drawn to that. I always feel like I’m talking in mass generalities and stereotypes, but they’re stereotypes for a reason.
Christopher Smith
Yes.
Lauren Bailey
Right? So take a look and let the women on your team read it. If it talks about crushing quota and being super aggressive and win, kill, maim, that doesn’t like it’s not as great for us. Build strong relationships, loyalty, help customers, right, building networks, that is attractive to us. So, three or four quick tips to get more women to apply.
Christopher Smith
I love those. Those are great tips, they’re actionable, like anybody could follow through on that, yeah.
Lauren Bailey
I just can’t stand the bullshit, where people are talking in theories and platitudes and they make really great tweets, but nobody can do anything with it. Stop pushing air and get something done.
Christopher Smith
That’s right, that’s right. Why as a sales leader, why should having a diverse sales team be important?
Lauren Bailey
Oh now see. I’m going to leave that to a lot smarter people, You know you can find a million articles about diversity on Harvard Business Review and other places. Here’s what I took out of them. Number one, your customer set is diverse. If you’re only selling to 40-year-old white males I super invite you to only hire 40-year-old white males. Right? Something funny is I do. Like 98% of my customers are 40-year-old white males. Isn’t that hilarious? And yet I got diversity on the team. So your customer set is diverse, your ideas will be better, your culture will be better, and you’ll stay out of jail. Those are my top four reasons. Actually I think that was five.
Christopher Smith
Love it, love it. So I’m looking to hire a great sales manager, what’s the difference between a great salesperson and a great sales leader?
Lauren Bailey
And yet if you promote your top salesperson to be that leader, you will be like every other sales leader in the world who’s made that mistake. We all have right, we all have. Alright so, and by the way most great sales reps think they want to go that direction because we’re ambitious, and at that age we have blind ambition, I know I did. Right, so I don’t know why I want to be the manager, I just want to be in charge. Not a great reason. I made it work for me, turns out a play to my strengths, but over 50% actually fail within two years, in fact I think that number is 60%. On a related note, did you know that 43.9% of all statistics are made up on the spot?
Christopher Smith
Like that one.
Lauren Bailey
Alright, so here’s the difference. A great sales rep is in the me business, right, and they what they chase is the W. It’s all about the win, come hell or high water. This is why you love them. Great managers are in the we business, right? So if you find somebody who is more lit up about helping someone versus getting the deal, you might have a sales manager on your hands. If you look on your team and you find your top one or two reps, it’s probably not them. Go look to the team for the person who everybody goes to to ask the question, go look at the team for the person that people look to in the room when you’re talking about something, the person who takes the new kid out for lunch. That’s your go to manager. They’re usually a B player, but they love the development. The top reasons I see for them that getting into management are not the money or the title or the power. People who are most successful in my experience are doing it because it lights them up to coach other people, and because they just want to do things better. And that makes all the difference. So look for those people on your teams and then look for some silly things that make a huge difference, Christopher. Organizational skills, time management skills, process thinking. The best sales reps are artists, they don’t have any idea how they do it, they just do it naturally. The best leaders of salespeople are scientists, they have a system in place to onboard, they have a system in place for how they approach their day, they have a system about how they approach their business, ask those questions, and you’ll find a process systematic thinker, and that’s someone who can scale a team.
Christopher Smith
What should I be doing as a sales leader to cultivate and support those people that I’m thinking, hey, they might be a great future sales leader, what should I be doing to support them and grow them to be ready for that eventual transition?
Lauren Bailey
You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question, and I’m so grateful that you did. The number one thing, I’ve got a list of about seven in my head, so we’ll see how many I remember by the end of this. The first thing you should do is have conversations with every single person. Not just them, but every single person. “Tell me about your future, are you looking at management, do you want to stay in sales, do you want to move to AE, or you want to go outside, visit services at marketing? Let’s talk about your future at the company.” You’ll cut your turnover in half just by doing that twice a year. The second thing to do when you find those people is give them someone to mentor. This is not even my advice I’m stealing this from Anna Baird, who is now the Chief Revenue Officer at Outreach and someone you need on your podcast. Anna does that. She, she gives somebody, someone to mentor, and if they love it? Nice, you found somebody who’s gonna be a manager. If they’re like hey, I couldn’t really find the time, or this person wasn’t great, or they blah blah, you know, if they come up with reasons why it wasn’t great, not a natural fit for the love of the game. The next thing you can do especially for the women is encourage. Just like encouraging them into sales, it’s the magic button, and they take off, like it launches the rocket. “I think you’d be an amazing leader, have you thought about sales management?” 9/10 of the women in #GirlsClub have that story.
Christopher Smith
Right.
Lauren Bailey
Yeah, that’s what got them leaning in, it got them over the confidence gap. And thenmy final suggestion is invest in some training for them, because more than half fail, because it is a different game. You’re not going even in the same direction, read a book called “The Leadership Pipeline.” You’re going up and to the right as a rep, and then when you start to become a manager you have to back up, turn directions, and go up and to the left. Every job change isn’t further in the same direction, but a new direction. And we need to teach some of those skills. We’re going to unlearn the closing of the sales and learn call coaching. Right? There’s a million of those examples, I won’t go into them, but we’ve got to unlearn some stuff and relearn some stuff. And if we give them some of that training, we can double their success rate and their confidence and their love of the game. And I think that that’s what in the end it’s all about for me. When people feel successful at work, it ripples, right? It makes our entire lives better, we’re happier humans. The people around us are happier, we’re better wives and husbands, we’re better parents, and when we can help people feel successful on the job, they perform better and their lives are better and that’s how we change lives as sales leaders.
Christopher Smith
That’s awesome. I am shocked when I ask that question to my podcast guests, how did you transition, most of them are like, “Oh I got promoted, and it’s like there’s the deep end, start swimming.”
Lauren Bailey
Every one of us. And I, we can’t do that anymore, right, everybody our age Christopher has that story. It’s why none of them invest in new hire trainings, they’re like, Well, I got a phone book and a rotary dial phone, and I made it happen, right? Your face tells me you had that experience. And we did, we swam, but the world is different now, right? Our hiring pool is a fraction of what it used to be. Our competition is 20x what it used to be. The average lifespan of somebody in sales drops every year by a factor of months. Right? What we’re doing today with this role specialization and the explosive growth requirements that are venture backed companies and SAS are creating, we are throwing 20 year olds on the fire of sales and watching them burnout, and then just going and getting new logs. And you can’t do it anymore. You won’t find the talent, you won’t keep the talent.
Christopher Smith
Right. And you’re also I think you’re, you’re, you’re losing out on those people that had potential that if they just were given a little bit more support, they could have made it.
Lauren Bailey
Just a little, right? And the cost of losing the person, of having the empty seat, of having to grow a new person, and another one find a new person. It’s, it’s funny to watch. I watch people spend about 10x on giving them tools. I watch them spend about 50x on recruiting them. Right? There’s a line item in almost every of your listener’s budget for sales recruiting and sales tools, but I would venture to bet 40% have a line item for training. And that’s how you keep them. It’s how you attract them. You know what the number one thing millennials are looking for? Development. They’ll take the job if you have a training program, they’ll do better at the job if you have a training program, and they’ll stay in the job if you have a training program. But like it’s just, we haven’t gotten there yet. And I think, frankly, I think it’s because most of us didn’t experience good training. You know what I mean? So I’m not gonna invest in that crap.
Christopher Smith
I figured it out. Why can’t they? We forget, we forget how inefficient we were, you know back then, we were struggling and, you know, how much we missed out on because we didn’t have a clue.
Lauren Bailey
Oh, my God, and then we buy tools we buy tools that our former selves would kick ass in. Man, if I had a CRM like that, if I had a sequence cadence system, if I had call recording, right, but you’re not buying it for you. You’re a freaking superstar. You’re buying it for 23 year old who has 17 other tools and can’t leave a voicemail and doesn’t know how to talk to people on the phone.
Christopher Smith
And I tell you, there’s not a CRM in the world that can fix crap process, or people that just don’t know how to do their job. CRM cannot fix those sales problems.
Lauren Bailey
Garbage in garbage out. You got to go process, skills, systems. But most of us are in a hurry, so we go systems, then we realize our process sucks and we hire more people to come in and fix it. Right? And if we think of it, maybe we’ll then do the skills and teach the people how to use it, right?
Christopher Smith
Exactly. That is so spot on. And I’m all about like no, no, people first. People first, then let’s look at process, let’s fix whatever’s broken there, then technology, what tools do we need to support those first two?
Lauren Bailey
And by the way, your adoption will triple. Shove a tool down somebody’s throat and it’s like, I have 17, thank you. And that, but if you have them do the process and do it manually and teach them and they buy in and they love it, then you give them the tool that makes it easy?
Christopher Smith
Yeah. Oh yeah, it’s exactly.
Lauren Bailey
Question, how do you get tenured field teams to use their CRM? I have not cracked that one.
Christopher Smith
Yeah, you know, that’s, I asked that a lot when I have the CROs on, and I’ll, and because adoption is such a core issue for CRM technology or any sales enablement technology that I ask them the question is what, you have to give everyone a reason why you know this, you need them to use the tool, you know, what’s the why? And for most salespeople, it’s a personal why. Like I, this needs to help me make more money or sell more or make my job easier so I can do more calls or whatever. So for them it’s you know it’s personal, but you also have to get them to understand the why for the organization I believe, that you there’s a whole lot of stuff happening downstream that people need insight into, you know that we need to, you know, purchasing if you’re in a manufacturing if you’re selling for a manufacturing company, they’re making purchasing decisions on what’s in the pipeline, and if you’ve got crap forecast, if you’ve got crap data in your CRM because people aren’t putting stuff in or it’s just wrong. The problem is extended throughout the organization.
Lauren Bailey
Oh 100%, and here’s the story to prove it. And when I worked with IBM, and you would get in equal trouble for outperforming your forecast as you would for underperforming your forecast, because they needed to know what to build in Guadalajara. Yeah, so you sandbag? You die at that company.
Christopher Smith
Yeah, isn’t that crazy? If you outperform,
Lauren Bailey
You get in big trouble.
Christopher Smith
Yeah. That’s funny.
Lauren Bailey
Yeah, but there’s your story for why CRMs are,
Christopher Smith
Oh it really is. It’s spot on that people need to understand there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s going on downstream. Yeah, and it’s all coming from the data in CRM.
Lauren Bailey
Yeah, yeah, but there’s a million more people who, you know, manage their people based on what’s in the CRM. I will, right, I will tell you the stories I hear of the you know the crusty sales executive who knows everything about the product and the business and the customer and the industry, who is not putting that deal in until it’s closed. So somebody can steal it, and then somebody is gonna force me into it, and then I’m gonna have to answer all these damn questions about it, and people are gonna get all up my business, and you can just stay out of my deal.
Christopher Smith
Yes. And those are the ones I ask those questions like, are you doing, do you do like quarterly retrospectives or even an annual retrospective on the deals that were lost. And, you know, the only way you can do that is if you’re capturing that data in your CRM. And it’s the only way you’re going to find out, you know, hey, we keep losing to competitor X, why are we losing to competitor X? You know, there’s so much data that can help you in the future, that can help you salesperson. If you’re giving me that data, I can come up with ways and techniques and tools to help you win those deals in the future, but I can only do that if I can look at the data in the CRM.
Lauren Bailey
Exactly. Which is why you’ve got to start with the people, so we’ll prove your claim one more time, because somebody who sets up the CRM, right, doesn’t even have those reasons in there or they put 800 loss codes, and then they’re surprised that everybody picks the first three, because it’s a required field ,right? It’s just hilarious. So you start with the people and what they need and how they use it and build your process around them and then give them the CRM that’s customized to it. That’s right.
Christopher Smith
You have to find the middle ground of balance. You know it’s like you, the mistake people make too as they go like you said, they go to that, you know 5000 code list that someone has to scroll through to find and they’re just like, screw it, I’m just gonna pick one. And I don’t care what it is, because it’s killing me. You know, they go to those crazy extremes to get so specific on things that really adds no value,
Lauren Bailey
Which is when you have a date ahead in charge of your CRM enablement, which is a problem.
Christopher Smith
Exactly.
Lauren Bailey
So here’s another one that, I’m sorry that we’re talking, I want to talk about your business not mine, my thing that cracks me up is dashboards. Like let’s talk about CRM datas and managers, because what most people take as a dashboard breaks my heart. Right? Can I just bang on your competitor for Salesforce for a second?
Christopher Smith
Go right ahead.
Lauren Bailey
Because that’s not a dashboard, people. When you log in, and it tells you that you’re at 2% to goal and you’re in the red on day two of the month. Have you never heard of a run rate? Like, it’s not trend-level data, it’s just a picture of the exact data. Let’s help managers understand the difference between metrics, KPIs, leading and lagging indicators, and results. And look at the right things at trend level across the team, across the floor, across the books, across the time. Right? And now, I have things I can use, but 9/10 companies, I go and look at what their managers, directors, and VPs are looking at, and it’s data, not trends, it’s not a dashboard.
Christopher Smith
I love that, this is like such a passion topic for me, I love that you brought it up.
Lauren Bailey
It must drive you crazy.
Christopher Smith
It drives me nuts. There’s nothing useful to look at a dashboard in day two of like a quarterly dashboard of day two, what is that going to tell me? What decisions is that helping me make?
Lauren Bailey
Nothing! It’s telling you to never look at dashboards again.
Christopher Smith
Yeah, no it’s like you know, completely worthless, and I learned this from actually from an accounting consultant I was working with, that they’re like, the only thing worth looking at are those, as you’re saying, the trends. What is the trend? What is my rolling, whatever that timeframe is, 12 months rolling?
Lauren Bailey
Based on your sales cycle, exactly.
Christopher Smith
I want to know where, what direction I’m heading, am I going up, am I going down?What is, you know, what’s, you know what, what’s the overall picture looking like? That point in time stuff?
Lauren Bailey
It’s crap.
Christopher Smith
It doesn’t mean anything.
Lauren Bailey
And I want to look at a different way. So this is what I keep waiting for somebody to build in my industry. I’m in the people skills business, right, not in the data business. And there are a lot of conversational intelligence tools out there, I love Chorus and Gong, there’s Execvision, there’s DialSource, who’s somebody else now, but you know like, we get it that we need to have that. But what none of them have yet is trend level skill data, yes, I want to look at Christopher’s skills in rolling 90 days. I want to look at my whole team’s gatekeeper skills. I want to look at the whole floors top three bottom threes. Like, let’s, let’s get smart about that and now we can make quality quantitative, and we can reward and measure and promote or fire people, not just based on the dials, but on the quality of that, right? I’ve talked to every one of their developers, it like overseas with this idea, and it does not sell, it does not sell at all, nobody’s buying it.
Christopher Smith
They’re focused on the product, they’re not focused on the people using the product, and that’s what suprises me.
Lauren Bailey
Because they’re sales leaders. Your, your audience is asking for something different, right?
Christopher Smith
I think you’re right, yeah. That’s right.
Lauren Bailey
Sales leaders want to know how many times somebody said their competitor’s name. Sales leaders want to be able to use it to see if they did say they’re on a recorded line. Sales leaders, you know what I mean, we want the aggregate data. We want the voice of the customer, not the voice of the rep. Again in that throw the log on the fire, I’ll just go get a new log.
Christopher Smith
Yes. It’s amazing, I had a call earlier today about data metrics, wasn’t related to sales at all, but it was just about running a business. And the point the gentleman I was talking with said that, you know when you’re selecting those KPIs, it’s, it’s so important to really understand what are the important KPIs versus just, I, I’m getting this daily use of data that really isn’t making me help, is not helping me make a decision.
Lauren Bailey
Yeah and most people don’t,
Christopher Smith
Because ultimately what you need is like I need to make a decision, what’s next, what are we going to do next, what lever do I need to pull?
Lauren Bailey
Yes. When I see this lagging, it’s time to take action, because I know that doing that creates dah dah dah dah. Again, 9.5/10 sales managers don’t get that. We created a class called Driving Performance With Goals just for that, because I’ll tell you that here’s how you can tell a new sales leader, they have two levers, I got metrics, and most people are past dials, but they’re not much so much passive, they’re not, like, talk time. Like, honey you ask for dial, you’re gonna get a dial, sorry. So, you, they’ve got metrics, and they’ve got results. So hit quota, make more dials. And this land between is a vast wasteland of mystery and intrigue, and of course it is, like nobody taught it to them. It’s not their fault, but we can, but when we can break it down, what a difference. That’s how you help your team be successful, even as simple as do they know their daily goal? And do they know their conversions to get where they need to get? How many conversations to a quote? You ask somebody that, you’ve found a future sales leader. If they know that answer, they’re in the middle ground, and they’re leading indicators, and they know their business and their process. So, I brought it all the way back to answer your first question.
Christopher Smith
Yeah, and then are you feeding that information to those frontline people to say where they can look at and say, “Oh hey, I’m off track here, I need to make this adjustment to get back on track.”
Lauren Bailey
You know, seems like I’m having to have more and more dials to get conversations. It seems like I’m having more and more conversations to get quotes, appointments, you know, fill in your KPI here. It seems like I’m having to book more and more firsts that aren’t turning into seconds. When we see those trends, we can reverse them, we can pull levers before we miss the number.
Christopher Smith
That’s right. Yeah, that’s awesome. We, we’ve, I’ve loved where the conversation is going. It’s great. The, I want to kind of loop back a little bit into sales management in terms of if I’m considering becoming a sales leader, what questions should I be asking myself to find out is that the right role for me?
Lauren Bailey
Um, if you’re doing it for the money. Don’t do it for the money, because if you calculate what you make per hour, it’s really a sad thing. If you’ve got the time and the interest for the long term career in, right, your VP of Sales is making bank, and you can get there, but it’s going to take you 10 years. Um, you should look to see if you love teaching what you know or doing what you know. Think about giving away your top 10 accounts and how that feels, because at least half try to keep them, and those are the half that fail.
Christopher Smith
Yes.
Lauren Bailey
Ask yourself if, yeah, I think it honestly, it comes down to teaching versus doing. Um, it comes down to loving the responsibility for making people’s lives better. It comes down to liking to build and fix and mentor and coach. And if you don’t love those things, then you’re torturing yourself. What, right? So, would you rather go to the training class or make five more dials? That’s an early indicator, right. “Oo, I love to learn.” Would you rather go get to know somebody else in another department or take a customer to lunch?” Again, there you go, right, I want to collaborate. I want to give in to this company, I want to see about what’s happening here and how we all play together to make this thing work, or I’m gonna go close more business.
Christopher Smith
Yep. So if I’m a CRO or a VP of Sales and I realize, hey, I’ve got a problem with my sales managers, and I reach out to Factor 8 to help solve this problem, what should my expectations be around solving that problem?
Lauren Bailey
There’s a couple different ways to measure success in sales management, and we all do it a little bit differently, and it’s not easy to do, no matter what. But your expectation should be that you’re going to see it in the numbers within 90 days or it’s not working. Numbers that you may see would be employee engagement up, employee attrition down. You will see a larger percent of the team starting to hit their requirements. You will see turnover go up a little bit, because we’re getting the right people on the bus. You’ll see activity go up a little bit, and then you’ll see quota attainment across the board go up. The sign of a great manager isn’t the one who’s at quota, the sign of a great manager is the one who has the largest percentage of their team at quota. We’ve all written a big deal to make it, managers ride a great rep to make it. But even better when you can get more people there. So absolutely, those are things that you should expect. It’s, rah-rah is great and leadership is great, and you need it. So is how to use the payroll system and how to not sexually harass people, all important training. But what we love is, like you said, tactical and actionable job training. Here are the meetings that you should be having with your team, how often, and what to cover. Just putting in a cadence, that’s what we call this, it’s like a sales process, but it’s a management process. Just putting that into place, night and day. Consistency, managers have more confidence because it’s not wack-a-mole, right, putting out fires all day long. They get proactive instead of reactive, their team knows what to expect. I’m spending time with my manager, whereas I didn’t talk to him for months before. Just that one simple thing makes all the difference. So there’s a lot of tactical know-how that makes a world of difference.
Christopher Smith
It’s awesome. I really appreciate it. We’ve come up to our time, we’ve actually gone a little bit over, but it’s just so great, I loved going over. I appreciate you coming on Sales Lead Dog. If people want to reach out to you, Lauren, and connect with you, if they want to find out about Factor 8, what’s the best way?
Lauren Bailey
Yeah, well, please find me on LinkedIn, Lauren Bailey, Inside Sales Advisor. You can find us at Factor8.com. The other website you want is, wearegirlsclub.com. Christopher, don’t go to GirlsClub.com at work, that’s going to get you in trouble. Wearegirlsclub.com is how you find us if you want to mentor or if you want to nominate somebody to be part of the group or encourage somebody, there, or just email me, I’m [email protected].
Christopher Smith
That’s awesome. Lauren, thanks again for coming on Sales Lead Dog, it’s been great.
Lauren Bailey
It’s been a pleasure, it’s been fun.
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
- “We won’t apply for the job until we know we can do the job perfectly even though we’ve never had that job before it doesn’t make any sense, but this is what happens.” (18:36-18:42)
- “I don’t know where it came from Christopher but out of nowhere I looked at him like, I’m really not interested in that, so if you’d like to have me join your company, I’d be happy to accept the sales management position. And I got it.” (13:37-13:47)
- “I’m going to help these women get trained for the job, and build their confidence to apply for the job, but it’s working. Over 70% of our cohort every year has been promoted before the end of the six months. (18:32-18:42)
- “This is a passion project. This is meaningful, this is changing people’s lives. And it’s awesome. It’s really awesome. So our mission is to change the face of sales, by helping more women earn leadership positions in sales.” (16:30- 16:45)
Links
Lauren Bailey: LinkedIn
Factor 8: LinkedIn
Factor 8: Website
#GirlsClub: Website