You Work for Them – Bryan Vogus

Transcript:

Fri, Sep 30, 2022

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

sales , clients , crm , carbon , deal , business , leader , brian , sellers , technology , sales team , objections , customers , manage , people , understand , purchase order , marketplace , career , losses

SPEAKERS

Bryan Vogus & 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 on sales lead dog joining me Bryan Vogus of carbon 3d. Bryan, welcome to sales lead dog,

Bryan Vogus

Chris, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me, I really appreciate it

Christopher Smith

excited to have you on. Tell me about carbon 3d in your in your current role.

Bryan Vogus

Love to so carbon 3d. I joined them recently, about six months ago. Very unique capabilities in the marketplace. It’s a 3d printing technology. It’s polymers, it’s a bunch of resins, we really help clients cross the chasm for doing nothing or to fully into the additive space. We have, you know, we don’t only do the prototyping and functional prototyping for clients around polymers, but we do production. Carbon is all about production, we’ve got some of the biggest fortune 50 companies using our technology with plastic components in their cars, in their helmets, in their shoes all across the map. So, my role here is really driving sales driving pipeline and closing that pipeline. I’m a senior sales director, I cover a region for carbon. It’s kind of a little bit different role for me and my past where I have more sales leadership roles. But hopefully we start heading down that path here very shortly. But I love talking to clients about 3d printing and how we can help them with our technology.

Christopher Smith

I think it’s like the coolest technology to come out in the recent past. You know, I mean, it when you talk about transformational technology, it’s 3d printing.

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, 100% crush it. 3d printing has been a while been around for a while the difference between carbon and others is we’ve gone through qualification into production. There are parts on a Ford Mustang right now in production, there’s parts on a Lamborghini, every single NFL professional football player has a carbon part in their helmet. So, we’re all about kind of getting through the prototype and functional prototypes and getting them into production, with real components really polymer component components with our technology. So that’s kind of what drew me to carbon, that ability to scale and really to have an impact. Not organizations, but very whether it’s aerospace, industrial space, automotive consumer goods, we cut across a wide variety of clients with our technology.

Christopher Smith

So that’s what’s really cool. 3d printing has been around a while. And my experience initially was like the stuff you’d see in a lab, a school lab or like my kids, lab or in a computer store, whatever, like, Gee, isn’t that cool. But I don’t really care about making a plastic whistle, you know, and but what really, to me, it’s just so cool about carbon, is that you said the manufacturing capability, and that this is really becoming the norm. Now, you know that to have these components produced through 3d printing, it’s really wild.

Bryan Vogus

It’s game changing. You know, it’s early stages of this ballgame. It’s probably the first or second inning of this game. There’s a lot more to go. But the life changing products that we’re making, or medical device companies coming up with products allow you to do surgery directly into an eye with very small, precise parts. It really is game changing for a lot of industries.

Christopher Smith

Yeah, that’s really cool, because I used to, in a prior life used to my first company was focused in the healthcare space. And we did a lot around joint replacement. And back then everything was steel. But now with the advancement of the materials used in medical devices and things like that there are it’s not just all steel or stainless steel anymore. And to me that to be able to custom make components for your patient, and their size, whatever, because everyone’s so unique. Healthcare alone is like would be an amazing space for this kind of technology. That’s, it’s crazy. That’s why

Bryan Vogus

it’s massive. And I live in Orange County, California. We’ve got a lot of folks looking at our technology for those medical devices. You know, the biocompatibility of our technology is different, right? These can be on the skin, they can be in the nose for a long period of one or two weeks, if not months. It really is changing the game and it’s all about the resonance. Right? It’s all about the material the material properties with Polymer parts, it’s really a science. Yeah, carbon is really mastering.

Christopher Smith

Yeah, it’s so exciting to see where this is gonna go over the next 1015 20 years. It’s really cool. Let’s talk about you know,

Bryan Vogus

my favorite topic by the way,

Christopher Smith

there you go. For the next 30 minutes mine too. Why Wow. Did you want to be a salesman, a salesperson when you were thinking about, you know, your career in school?

Bryan Vogus

Great question. You know, I really didn’t, I kind of grew up, I was an auditor, don’t tell anybody. Financial degree. And I was an auditor, and it was a little bit different. I mean, it’s great profession. A lot of smart people, I probably wasn’t the smartest auditor, but I always had a gravitation towards, you know, dealing with customers selling ideas, selling projects. So, I started off finance, winter consulting, where you’re really selling yourself, and you’re selling projects to clients. And that is isn’t, isn’t easy. From my whole career, I’ve had the mindset of, I need to sell whatever I’m doing and think about how the impact is for clients. As I go forward, not only as an auditor, but mostly as a consultant, then I got into business development, and then sales, but I’ve always had that passion for adding value to clients. And I think I can do that best in the sales and sales leadership role.

Christopher Smith

Now, that’s very cool. Tell me about your first sales job. You know, how’d you get it? And what were the major takeaways, major learnings from that first role?

Bryan Vogus

Eric? Great question. So, you know, I was working with a friend of mine, who I’ve had a history, you know, being more of a consultant, you know, having that deeper skill set around being a subject matter expert was certain technologies. And, you know, he loved me, I loved him, we went in there, and I kind of helped it helped him out in terms of a small company carrying a bag. And you learn a lot when you have to roll up your sleeves, and you look around and you and maybe one or two other people on your team, and you have to really execute a pipeline and sales and get in and do those kinds of things. So, I just, I kind of found out about it through a contact in mind and want to be part of his organization. He made me a head of head of sales. And I’ve mostly been in sales ever since that that time.

Christopher Smith

Yeah. When you’re in an environment like that. There’s no hiding, there’s, you know, it’s you. And either you’re making it or you’re not, and everybody knows.

Bryan Vogus

Yeah. 100%. Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Smith

So, let’s talk about your transition into sales leadership, you get that first role in your head of sales, but it’s a small pond. How did you transition your career? Or how did you design your career? To move on from there to where you are today?

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, great question. You know, it’s, it’s something I kind of stumbled upon. Again, I had this sales subject matter expert kind of passion, to really add value to clients. And then I came over with a fortune 50 company that kind of said, hey, Brian, you’d be great for this leadership role. I said, Okay. I mean, I wasn’t, it wasn’t a great plan. It wasn’t a great strategy there. But they believed in me, I thought, well, this guy believes me, I should be able to do this right, right. there with that kind of blind, you know, whatever you want to call it, but the blind luck. But it’s really been my passion ever since. So.

Christopher Smith

What were what did you use as a motivation to develop yourself as a leader in those initial experiences as a leader?

Bryan Vogus

Yeah. So, for me, I was like, well, I’ve never I mean, I’ve managed projects, multimillion dollar projects. I’ve been in a matrix environment. So now I’ve got to manage a team, I go, well, I’ve never done this before. So, I better talk to somebody who has. So actually the guy who hired me, he kind of gave me the best advice I think I’ve ever had I’ve ever been given in my career. He basically said, you know, you’re managing people. But honestly, you work for that. I said, Yeah, he goes, you work for them. You got to make them successful. You got to figure that part out, Brian, this is I know, this is new to you. But we have confidence you can do this. So, taking that viewpoint that I work for the people who I manage, I’ve got to you know, make sure their focus, they get everything they need to execute brilliantly. And that’s been my mindset, which is probably the most important thing in sales, because you have to have the right mindset for selling and helping sellers out to be effective. This is not a one man show. Right? One person, you know, you’re on a team that you can control underneath you to manage. Plus, you’re in a very broad matrix organization with the bigger organizations I’ve worked for, where you really have to rely on other folks to help you execute the sales cycle. So, the mentoring for me was critical to get started.

Christopher Smith

You But what about establishing that alignment and relationship with the marketing team those, as you said, you’re part of the team, you’re part of an ecosystem and sales. What is your experience and, and thought around training that alignment with the marketing team, which is so crucial to the success of the sales team,

Bryan Vogus

marketing sales go hand in hand they love I mean, it’s, it’s definitely a dynamic duo as we attack the marketplace. To me, it’s more of constant feedback, constant communication. I like where I’m at right now at carbon, I very close ties to the marketing folks, I bring them to some of my clients, they hear what the clients are saying, they’re not just hearing it from the sales team, they’re gonna hear from the client. So, I think that was very important to get that firsthand. But just to ask for, you know, gaps that I think are needed in the marketplace in sales, you can’t hide, there’s no you have to deliver. But you need that support in terms of providing valid content, and driving leads from the from the marketplace. So, working hand in hand with marketing, you know, competitive analysis, whether it’s, you know, inviting them to clients, so they can hear some things in a specific industry, right? We look at Industry Solutions, competitive information, all this stuff is critical for selling success, and they’re vital to the process.

Christopher Smith

I love that I’ve done that with taking customers to product teams, etc. So, they can hear, you know, whatever the pain, the struggle, whatever it is that’s going on in that industry, or that that type of a business. It’s a goldmine of information, if we only will take, you know, quotes from those conversations and incorporate that into our marketing material, because nobody says it better than your customers. Right?

Bryan Vogus

Right. Well, Chris, you make a good point. Another point on sales leadership. So, I took my first leadership role in sales where I was managing a team in a new industry, right? It was an additive industry, and I hadn’t been an additive before. So, when I was with this company, I go, well, I work for my people are the people I manage, but what about the customers? So, the first thing I did, let’s go talk to everybody. So, I spent 30 days talking to 50 customers, and listening, I was like on a listening tour, that was vitally important to understand the customer’s perspective, watched the interaction between the sellers and the customers in that in those meetings and really begin to learn the industry, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for language and sales.

Christopher Smith

I think you summed up really well there to be a leader else. So much of it is about learning. And I think some leaders forget that they think that a lot of I think the leaders that have kind of closed themselves off to growth are the ones that forgot that you have to be constantly learning, right? How do you keep your learning going in your

Bryan Vogus

career? What I’m constantly reading books on sales, leadership, salesmanship, you know, podcasts on industry information on, you know, the additive industry, polymer is all new to me this year. And I, every day, I try to get a little snippet in either from our website, from our academy website, from independent people to kind of see what’s going on in the marketplace, you just have, there’s a lot out there, right, we can tap into everything with the with the Internet. So, you just gotta keep when you have a little downtime, you want to take a break from the emails, or from the phone calls. You watch a podcast, go to YouTube, you can see you know, a lot of folks from carbon on YouTube given pitches 234 years ago, they’re so still relevant today. So, you know, books, you know, Internet, and just talking to customers in the industry, see what’s happening, you got to stay abreast or you get you fall behind.

Christopher Smith

It’s a favorite book, or maybe a few books that are like, these are the ones that really helped me the most.

Bryan Vogus

I’m a sales guy. I don’t know why I didn’t get in sales. When I was born. I was like, so I like big league sales by last day. I love closing techniques. Like if you ask somebody, what is sales, they won’t give you an answer. They can’t figure it out. So, understanding what sales is, and closing techniques was one of the best books I’ve ever

Christopher Smith

read. What were some of the key takeaways for you from that book? Well,

Bryan Vogus

so you know, this key to somewhat success I had ever had in my career is all about handling objections, right? Sales is simply a series of agreements that lead to a transaction. That is my mindset, getting some of the big-league sales rings, some other things that I’ve read in the past. You understand the framework, so a series of agreements. In fact, you can do Sal Yeah, us a series of agreements that lead to an exchange of something. That’s what sales is. Every time you disagree with a customer, you get closer to the sale or further away. Simple, you get further away. You don’t agree to everything, but you kind of manage this. You try to, you know, work these things. And it’s a series, right? We agree to do the web, we agree to do the presentation. Yes, we agree to do a demo. Yes. We’re going to do a proof of concept. Yes. If we do this, will we get this? You just leave the clients to the past. So, understanding what sales is, is the most important thing I’ve had in my career and handling objections? Because that’s a whole nother I’m gonna write a book on this, Chris. I’ll give you a little.

Christopher Smith

Oh, I love that.

Bryan Vogus

Oh, 100% handling objections is the is night and day, from the sales lead winners in the sales losers,

Christopher Smith

right. You’re on? It’s funny. I read a lot of sales books, too. And thinking about what you just said, and thinking about a lot of the recent books I’ve read. They don’t really talk about that too much. Why do you think that is? They don’t know how to do it. I love that answer.

Bryan Vogus

How far do you all yeah, great salesperson that What are you talking about? How do you close a deal? sales role is about getting a purchase order and a contract associated with that purchase order. How do you do it? For example, customer says Brian, we’ll give you a Pio on Monday. I told my rep that I was on the call. Monday’s end of the quarter. Hey, thank you. We hang up the phone. I’m done. We’re no more. There’s no more selling when I say we’ll give you a peel on Monday. Yep. That was on Thursday, Friday. They give us a letter. Cease and desist all business activities with our company. A formal letter? Wow. Yeah. Wow. Have you ever heard that the sale? No, no. The rep copy says Brian, I got the cease-and-desist letter. I go okay. I go. Look, I think we got him right where we want him. Yeah, let’s go get this business. Yeah. Got him on the phone. Objection, Objection, Objection, handle handle. Okay, we handle the objections, you may have to come up with a bright idea, right? That’s the other thing. They don’t tell you make the change the dynamics of the deal, right? Understanding what’s in play. So, what happened on Monday at 930? When I’m having dinner with this rep in a different city with a different customer? He says, Brian, we got the purchase order. I said, of course that’s what we do. We get purchase orders. Next one wasn’t who’s next? We don’t know how to. And that’s this, this big-league sales was pretty good on that. Right? In terms of helping me understand that these are objections, you got to either and they’re real, some could be 100%. There are some valid reasons you can’t or objection, you can’t overcome. But you have to try.

Christopher Smith

When do you know when it’s time to stop trying?

Bryan Vogus

Well, you first of all,

Christopher Smith

is there a time?

Bryan Vogus

Look, you got you know, in sales is a fine line. It’s not a science. It’s a science and an art. When the client tells you look, we can’t do this for this reason. Right? Okay, I’ll go away. No, you say, Tell me more. Right? Oh, well, they want to get together in two weeks on site to meet you in person. I said, I told her I was a wreck, get on a plane right now tonight and get that purchase order. We threatened to go and see him in person taking the dinner. That was the threat. Oh, don’t worry about what just give you the purchase order. So, you have to know which ones are kind of like weak, and which ones you really want to go after. But at some point in time, you know, you’ve got to kind of take a step back said, Look, this was a relationship, this is a partnership, you’ve got to understand when to pull back. However, I’m not saying I enjoy this too much. But as the manager, I was the bad guy. I didn’t want my sellers to have those tough conversations. They can lead they’re not good at it. Be, you know, I they have a relationship more so than I did with their clients. So, I’m not you know, I try to be friendly and try to be positive 100%. But sometimes you have to have a strong conversation. And you just have to read the room. I mean, sometimes you just have to pull back and say okay, we’ll come back with this next time. So, it’s a tough, it’s a tough call, to be honest with you.

Christopher Smith

So, you were talking about the customer, the resident customer, how about as a sales leader in your relationship with the sales team. How do you manage that similar scenario where it’s time to push or it’s time to pull back? Yeah.

Bryan Vogus

Simple, very simple. So, managing a person. They have they talked to the client every day for a while. Haven’t heard back. I said withdrawal All, the greatest one of the greatest single sales techniques that’s ever worked for me, is when you withdraw from a client or a prospect who was interested, right, and you can see what they do. So hey, look you’ve been given, what else are you gonna do? I would say, stop communicating with the client, pull back and see what the responses if you get a response, they’re serious, if you don’t get response, you need to get more opportunities in the pipeline, right? The only thing that will cure sales, or lack of sales is sales. And you have to have more opportunities, period. That that is that is my viewpoint. On a bad deal closing, your closing percentage is low. You’ve got to create more pipeline. And that’s candidly what sales is all about managing those two-pipeline creation and closing conversion rates.

Christopher Smith

It’s a sales leaders, a lot of sales leaders, especially early in their career as a sales leader tend to see the metal have a tendency to metal or get over involved in their deals. Did you ever go through that?

Bryan Vogus

You know, I you kind of learn from having the salesperson kind of take the lead, you’re in the meetings with them, but you kind of know what stick you know where they’re at, in the process, where they’re at, in terms of skill, set what they can and can’t do, once you know that it makes it easier. And you kind of have a good symbiotic relationship. So, most of the folks I work for as a manager, I kind of know what I need to do. You know, my first year as a manager, right? Oh, yeah, you guys are gonna do a lot of revenue, we did $450,000 worth of revenue. Just give me a number. I’m the only one I closed that deal. So, what why this was a new business, new industry, I pick up the phone, I said, Can I help you guys out? They said call somebody asked. Okay, let me call one of your accounts. And yeah, they bought it. They bought a machine? Well, the second year, we did 18,000,003rd. year we did 30 million. Why? Why is that? Because I learned each seller what they could and could not do. Right? And I filled the gaps, coached in areas fill the gaps in closed most of their deals. That was the weakness in the team, we want you to find the weakness, you kind of strike that out or help them strengthen it, but you got it over we got to take over sometimes.

Christopher Smith

Right, right. What was the toughest part? Or what is the toughest part about being a leader for you personally?

Bryan Vogus

You know, I love it. It’s tough, but you’ve got to have you got to juggle a lot of balls in the air. So, I’m responsible for number everyone below me is responsible for a number I’ve kind of manage. Okay, what’s realistic over here? Yeah, no, this person may be a sandbag, or this person here is, you know, maybe committee too much. So, I’ve got to have enough opportunities where I can cover my commitments to the business. So, leveraging that I love doing it, this can be a little bit tricky if you don’t have enough opportunities. So that gets kind of stressful when Mike you know, I’m making a commitment to the business, I believe sales management is making a commitment and delivering it to the business. Right. That’s what the job is. And I’ve got to manage five or six people, which I had, and make sure each one gives me enough commitment, so I can commit to the business.

Christopher Smith

That’s cool. I love that. So succinct way of saying, you know, the role is a sales leader. Yeah, it’s when it comes right down to it. Your job is to deliver for the business. Because ultimately, if sales aren’t happening, nothing else in the business is happening either, right?

Bryan Vogus

100%. That’s the job. That’s the job. If I can’t deliver, hey, you need to get rid of me. You need to get rid that sales leader, you have to be able to have confidence in your leadership, that they’re meeting their commitments to the business. Now, there are ridiculous quotas out there, I get all that. But if I make a call, and they know that we’re not the numbers here, the code is here, the calls here, I have to make that call, right? That’s a minimum. And we’ll figure out the Delta from the target to the call. But if you can’t make the call as a sales leader, what are you doing? You’re not doing you’re doing something else? Because hey, what do you what do you do this quarter? I’m gonna do this. Okay. Why don’t you do that? Right? That’s my commitment to the business, right? Regardless of the targets or whatever. If you can’t keep your commitments to the business, that you’re not doing sales, you’re doing something else, right.

Christopher Smith

What’s your favorite part about being a sales leader?

Bryan Vogus

Oh, hell helping people succeed closing business. I mean, I love I liked the individual success or you know, success. That’s, that’s fine. I mean, I love closing deals. I’m doing that in this role. But one of my best experiences here so far was a rep call me up because I kind of have a reputation to you know, focus on deals and getting them across the goal line. He says, Brian, I just lost a deal. I said, Tell me more. Well, we got this we got this. Okay. Okay. Okay, what about this? This is because all we can do that I’m sure. So caught this was Wednesday call me Thursday. Brian, we want to do so yeah, that’s what we do. We went deals, because I kind of helped them with the sale straight. It was late in the game. Don’t get me wrong. The appeal was coming the next day, like Friday, he called me on Wednesday saying he lost to the competition. And I gave him enough competitive, different competitive information, differentiators and the right, the right solution into that account. It was almost a no brainer. But we lost, we lost we want. That’s what that gives me the most joy, I think out of any kind of management, leadership job.

Christopher Smith

Failure is such a key part of I think growth in sales. I mean, it’s just, it’s inherent, you can’t have the wins without the losses. How do you as a sales leaders teach around or treat teachable moments around the losses?

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, well, good. Good point. I learned more from my losses than from my wins, oftentimes, right? You do learn about what you know, but you got to get real information on why you lost. There’s only one factor. This is Chapter Two, my book by the way, there’s only one factor of why you lose a sales, the sales opportunity that you’re winning, there’s only one factor. It’s time, what is it time, time. It’s not the time itself, what occurred during the time, the guy promised me appeal on Wednesday, cease and desist on Thursday or seize this time, a day goes by not the whole world can change. So, time is a major factor. So that’s my first education to client or to reps. Can we go any faster? By understanding all the dynamics, a lot of people in the sales team outside the sales team are not, you know, incentivized to close a lot of deals, we need them involved with the process. But can we get things done faster? What’s the risk of this project? What didn’t we see? Right? The where we selling at multiple levels in the organization. I mean, the best deals, you’ve got the executives cover, you’ve got your champion cover. You know, you’ve got to have a coaches covered, you got to have everyone covered from a sales perspective. Remember, we got to say what happened? I answer your question, but you got it, you got to focus on time, the faster better if you’re winning, if you’re losing, you may want to drag it out. I get that. What I’m talking about deals that you think you’re gonna win. You got to have to execute brilliantly in this day and age. It’s all out there. information is out there everywhere. So, you’ve got to move faster to win these deals.

Christopher Smith

Yeah, that’s good. I like that. When it’s, do you have a deal that you thought you had, and you end up losing it that just the one that really kind of step has stuck with you and your career?

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, it’s my first deal as a sales leader. Oh, no kidding. Okay.

Christopher Smith

What’s your big takeaway from that?

Bryan Vogus

Great question. And you know, when you have to get in front of all the executives, and tell them why you lost what happened, the big the big takeaway is the time was the issue, we dragged it out, you know, we showed up to kind of close it out. And there was only one guy there. There was, there wasn’t, we’re used to talking to and presenting to. So, we missed the time. But what happened during the time that caused us to lose, the competition had a better deal. They had a bet they put together a package deal that we could not compete with. We were too late in the marketplace to be competitive with somebody who’s already been there and done that had reference calls. So being late to the dance in terms of what we have to offer. And just we just kept doing too many cycles. Try Oh, we hear this. Okay, we’ll change the deal. We heard that we’ll change it again. Time killed me on that one. But it was a great lesson learned. We got smarter got better, faster. That was the last major deal I lost. While taking that leadership role.

Christopher Smith

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. CRM. Do you love it? Or do you hate it?

Bryan Vogus

There’s two kinds of people in the world press and sales. There’s people who report the news and people will make the news. I like to make the news but I understand the reporting 100% That’s a love hate relationship. You got to do it. My manager they’re all running these reports. What are you doing? How’s it going? You got to get the data up to speed. So, I love hate, but it’s got to be done because you can’t you’re wasting time. If you’re have to talk to a rep every day of performing meeting houses. What’s the status here? You should see it right there in Salesforce. These next steps, the state probability, some basic information that needs to be updated in some CRM,

Christopher Smith

right? Do you leverage CRM as part of your Analysis retrospectives around the losses

Bryan Vogus

100% to talk about that. Yeah, there’s good feedback. So, the world changes every three months, six months. There’s a lot of dynamics here, especially in our field. So, we go back and look at all the clothes loss in the CRM all the time. I do it all the time. But if I’m looking at specific territory to focus on, oh, let me see what we closed last there. For the past four years, oh, well, we lost this deal because of some pricing issue. But we have new pricing now. So when they call them up, and try to get this over there, so they understand the world has changed for our company, and see if there is any interest in doing something differently. It’s worked out, I’ve got to deal with close in two weeks, just because of that close loss. And the biggest issue was pricing.

Christopher Smith

I love that I use that all the time with our clients to like, they don’t understand how important having that last information, those deals you’ve lost, like you said in going back like, Okay, we lost it this year. But next year, we know they’re going to be in their buying cycle again. So, we’re going to start again, maybe a month earlier, you know, you can start putting that time plan, you know, those plans in place now. So, when it’s appropriate, you can engage with them in the future.

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, 100%. And if you’re a new seller, it gives you a reason to call. Hey, I’m new, I heard you guys were looking at us before I left at least share with you some of the exciting new things we have going on. Now. I’ll be in your territory next week, when would you be available? Right? Very simple. It’s a warm call. Now you get the point of that. And they were very receptive to it, because it could be fans, just something wasn’t, you know, did not click or didn’t close it out? Could be those objections we talked about. So we got we got to handle those.

Christopher Smith

What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to CRM?

Bryan Vogus

You know, okay, so the struggle, I think is you got to what we changed the format. So, formats are changing, it’s kind of customized, which is good. If it comes out Bonilla, and you’re, you’ve got some real specific things to the sales process. That’s a challenge. So, the CRM we’re using is pretty easy to customize. So, we’ve done a lot of that, thankfully, that’s been helpful. You know, getting I mean, I’m a recording guy, I do a lot of reports. So, making sure I get the reports and do the, you know, selections on things I want to look at can be a challenge at times, depending on the date I’m looking for. But the information is gotta be in the system somewhere, right? We’ve got it, we got to capture the information, getting it out, maybe a little bit calmer, somebody’s got to least get it in.

Christopher Smith

Yeah, you know, what are the common struggles I’ve seen, and I continue to this day, I will ask, you know, early on, when we engage with a client, we understand who’s your ideal customer who you’re targeting? And they can tell us that and then I’ll say, okay, is that represented in your CRM frequently? It’s not. And to me, that’s a great, huge barrier for the sales team to be successful. Have you ever experienced that in your career?

Bryan Vogus

Yeah, you know, the, we have what’s called Get accounts for target accounts we’ve identified in there that’s kind of interaction between marketing and sales to figure out what accounts we want to focus on. So, it’s an exercise, it’s an effort, it’s, we’re doing it so it’s not as big of an issue. I’ve seen that accounts where you’re like, where do we even go? What do we what are the sales plays that we want sellers to run into these type of organizations? Right, right. That’s the kind of thing it’s hard to get to if you don’t have a little more analysis of the account in this around. So, I definitely see that as an issue.

Christopher Smith

Oh, yeah, that that’s where it starts, like you have to understand and have the data around your ideal customer in there. But then the next step is like, Okay, now that we have this information, and we can target and segment this data. Now, we want to have specific plays or approaches that we’re going to use to go after additional business, because as you said earlier, it’s about creating more opportunities filling that pipeline, you have to have your CRM set up to do that.

Bryan Vogus

Yep. 100% and the other. The other issue with that is, you know, five years ago, wow, there’s no information, right? This company has been in the system for a long time, I go back, I can’t see what happened or it was categorized differently in a different vertical than we’re going after now. So there needs to be a data cleansing exercise periodically in Salesforce especially with historical data, because when you convert it from one system another system you can lose a lot of the history that’s really slows you down. And when I see that issue now,

Christopher Smith

Brian, it’s been great talking with you around our time here, time limit here and sales lead dog. If people want to reach out connect with you learn more about your but where they want to learn more about carbon, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Bryan Vogus

Sure. Love to have people reach out whatever you know, whatever you need, I’m here to help people be successful. That’s my underpinning goal of what I do now. Or desire. You can reach me at my cell at 8182 6693364 Or you can shoot me an email at Brian br y a NV 9120 [email protected].

Christopher Smith

That’s awesome. Brian, I love having you here on sales. Lee does a great talk. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Good. Welcome to the pack.

Bryan Vogus

All right, appreciate it.

Outro

Thank you. 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 empeller crm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empeller CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.

 

Quotes

• “So, my role here is really driving sales driving pipeline and closing that pipeline. I’m a senior sales director, I cover a region for carbon. It’s kind of a little bit different role for me and my past where I had more sales leadership roles.” (1:31-1:45)
• “There are parts on a Ford Mustang right now in production, there’s parts on a Lamborghini, every single NFL professional football player has a carbon part in their helmet.” (2:18-2:29)
• “You’re managing people- but honestly you work for them. You got to make them successful.” (9:03-9:11)
• “Sales is simply a series of agreements that lead to a transaction.” (14:40-14:46)

Links

Bryan Vogus LinkedIn
Carbon3D Website

Empellor CRM LinkedIn
Empellor CRM Website
Empellor CRM Twitter