46: Sales Evolution And Execution

Hey, it's Morgan J. Ingram. Come see John Barrows and I and dozens of other sales leaders at this year's Rainmaker in Atlanta. Yo, what's up, everybody? It's John Barrows. Make it happen Monday. So, little technical difficulties here. I cleared my cash this weekend to clear off all my cookies and everything like that and screwed up everything from a tech standpoint. So, this was supposed to be me, Morgan, walking you all through kind of what our plan was this week. But, Morgan, if you're watching right now, sorry, man. I don't think I'm going to be able to get you to join here. So, with that, let me get my phone set up the right way here with my little extender here. And if you want to jump on board, I'm still going to go over the same content.

But just, unfortunately, without the presentation or without Morgan being there. So, Morgan, if you're out there, sorry, man. Next time. Whoops. Yep. Continue the technical difficulties. But, all right. So, the premise here, for those of you who are watching, thanks for joining. The premise here was sales execution and evolution. And that is actually Morgan's title. So, when I brought Morgan Ingram on board, I was trying to figure out, like, what are we going to, what's the title of this, what's his title going to be? I don't really care about titles all that much. But, what we thought about, I didn't want to be SDR or director of this, or the plane titles. I wanted it to be something that meant something.

So, we doused around a few ideas and came up with director of sales evolution and execution for two very specific reasons. Because I brought Morgan on board for three reasons, actually. One is to get me off of an airplane, right? Because I got a seven-year-old daughter at home. I want to spend more time with her and my wife. Two is to use my training to help execute. So, first of all, drive results for Jay Barrows, right? Because I'm looking for more business, obviously. But also, to tell me, mother or not, this stuff still works, right? I've always been afraid of being that trainer that is that, hey, back in my day type of guy. You know what I mean? Like, back in my day when I was selling. And you see too many of those trainers out there.

And they're spewing the same shit that they did 20 years ago, you know, talking about when they were selling. And my passion is sales, okay? You know, I happen to be a trainer, which helps. But my passion is sales. So, I'm going to kind of run through the same presentation with everybody. And then, you know, have Morgan, if you want to chime in, to kind of add some flavor to it while I'm on live. That'd be fantastic. But anyways, but again, I don't want to be that trainer that's back in my day, right? So, you know, I brought Morgan on board to use my training to go execute, but also give me feedback on, hey, what's working? So, to keep him going, right? All right, there we go. So, to have him execute so he can give me feedback and say, hey, John, you know, this is working, this is not working, right?

The evolution side of what we're doing here. Because shit gets still fast these days, right? What worked last week, what worked last year is probably not working anymore. And since I'm not banging out 50 dials a day anymore, since I'm not, you know, sending 100 emails anymore, I'm still prospecting. But I'm not doing it at the volume that a lot of the SDRs that I train are being asked to do. And I think we're in that middle world of being, everybody knows quality is the answer here. But everybody knows, but people, reps are still being asked to make 50 dials, make, you know, send 100 emails, that type of thing. So, anyways, that's the third reason is to make sure that this stuff still, or second reason to make sure that this stuff stays relevant.

And then the third reason is to figure out how to manage in today's world. Like, for me, I haven't managed in a while, right? I mean, I used to, my first startup, I had 6, 10 reps reporting to me. And I felt I was a pretty good manager. But when management was my only job, you know, when my job is to go out there and actually sell, market, do, you know, all the operation stuff and everything else and manage, I've always said my management skills are kind of like, hey, keep up, right? But because I'm working with so many millennials right now, I mean, a huge demographic for me are kids between the age of 22 and 28 years old. Because I'm working with so many of them, I got to figure out how to manage and get the most out of them.

And that's another reason, Morgan, what Morgan's helped me out with, right? Actually, you know what? Let's put this right there. I got that there for a reason. So, what we've been honing in on is this topic of structure. And this is what him and I are both going to be presenting together for the first time. We've never been up on stage together. We're both going to be presenting today, this week at Sales Hacker in San Francisco. So, if you're going to be out there, come hit us up. That's on Thursday. And then we're going to go down to Rainmaker in Atlanta on next Tuesday to do the same thing. So, feel free if you're going to either one of those locations, hit us both up. If you're not, follow us on Snap and Instagram and all that stuff because we're going to try to be, you know, chronicling the journey and everything else.

But anyways, this theme of structure is what I keep coming back to with us. And here's kind of the preface of it, which is, you know, when I was growing up at 42 years old, when I was bored in the house, like when I was bored, my parents were like, get the hell out of the house. Go figure something out, right? Whether it was go play in the street or I don't care, just be home by dinner, be home by dark, right? So, inherently, I had, especially now with my daughter, I'm noticing that the younger generations, every minute of their lives is structured to a certain degree. And again, I see this with my daughter right now. You know, she goes to school from this hour to this hour. Then she has soccer practice from this hour to this hour.

Then she gets to come home and play with her friends for an hour. And then she has dinner time for an hour. And then she gets to play with her iPad for 30 minutes. So, and this has been happening for a while now, right? And so, a lot of structure has been put in place for kids. And as we evolve, if you just think that through, right? So, we get, so kids whose lives, a lot of it has been structured for them, all of a sudden get out into the real world and work. And managers like me say, hey, figure it out. You know what I mean? Here's your territory. Good luck. Go figure it out. And you kind of get the, well, what do you mean figure it out? Like, what am I supposed to do? And the knee-jerk reaction from management is to give a script.

To say, hey, okay, here's a template. Here's a script. Whatever. And, because this is what I want you to say. This is, I've learned this, so this is how to do it. And the inherent reaction there by somebody who's been given a script is to go read the script. Or to go crank out these template emails. You know, all these templates that we get given to then put into, like, Sales Loft or Outreach or whatever it is. It's like, okay, cool. Now I just press play. But there's no thought into it. There's no, okay, that's what I'm supposed to do, so I'm supposed to do it. The answer to me, I think, on how we work far more efficiently together and also how we build something that can scale and allow us to evolve is structure.

And let me explain. Structure. My generation, you put structure on me, I try to break it, right? I'm like, I don't like playing in structure. I love building structure, right? And I'm going to be very general here. That's kind of a general overview of my generation, the way that our heads work, right? Where my experience so far with millennials and everybody else is, is that that whole unstructured environment isn't very healthy, right? Because it's kind of like the, okay, it's like find your passion, right? Like, what do you mean? Or I'm sorry, follow your passion. Like, what do you mean follow your passion? Like, that was the advice. Thank God that wasn't the advice that was given to me because I think that's terrible advice.

I think the advice of follow your, find your passion is better, but follow your passion with no direction. Okay. If that was the case, I'd be smoking weed and painting on the corner as an artist, right? Because I'd be following my passion at 18 years old, which was ridiculous. Find your passion though. And this is how to, this is how to think about it. Okay. Now I'm starting to look for something. Once I find it, then I follow it. So that structure is necessary because the younger generation executes within that structure better than I ever would. And they, and they're really creative within the structure, but without the structure, it tends to kind of be all over the place. And it's similar going upstream to forget about, you know, the generational millennia, you know, uh, gen X and millennial thing.

I look at, I wrote a blog post a little while ago called, um, executives are like children. They need structure. Cause if you think about the last time a, uh, you went on a sales call, if you ever went on a sales call with your manager or an executive within your organization, think about how long it takes for an executive. Especially in a sales call to take over that sales call when there's no structure to it. It's like, I want to say five minutes to be very generous here, but I've been on ride alongs with my reps where the rep kind of comes in. They give me no prep at all, right? They're just, Oh, we're doing a ride along to some clients or something like that. And so there's no agenda, there's no goals.

There's nothing like that. And then the rep kind of kicks off the, the conversation say, Hey, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. So how the kids, that type of stuff. And, you know, most executives, they'll sit there for us, you know, maybe five minutes. Like I said, I'll be generous here with five minutes and kind of wait for some sort of direction or, or some guidance and what to do. But then within five minutes, if there's, if they can tell the meeting's not really going anywhere, they'll be like, anyway, so, and they'll take over the conversation. Cause that's just in their DNA. They're, you know, usually a type personalities. So without any structure, they end up taking over the conversation and taking it wherever they want to go.

And sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's not so good, but it just removed the sales rep from the equation. Whereas if a sales rep sits down and says, okay, boss, before this meeting, here's the agenda of this call. Here's who we're meeting with. Here's what my goal for this call is. I want to try to get this. And this is where I need you to really jump in and explain whatever. But after you're done with that, you know, if you could hand it back to me, that'd be great. Right. All of a sudden the executive just plays their role. It's the same thing out there with you all who are dealing with solutions architects or sales engineers. When they, when they, when we give, when we don't give them any structure, they tend to outsell themselves because they give up way too much information.

Right. It's not their job to know what the limit is of information. They end up giving away so much free consulting that if us as a sales rep haven't controlled that and put some structure around it and told them where to start and stop effectively. It's our fault that, that, that a client says, okay, thanks for all the intel. Now I don't have to buy this. Right. So you absolutely have to give structure to a solutions architect, to an engineer, to a manager, and as a manager to your employees. And that's really the theme that I think will make a difference because scripts and techniques come in and out all day long. Structure tends to allow for evolution. And that's what we're working on here, Morgan and I.

And so the concept here of this presentation that we're doing for Sales Hacker and for Rainmaker is I provide the structure and then Morgan talks about how he executes within that structure. So I'll give you an example of how we start. And this is using my training, by the way, the Jay Barrows training to, to guide him through this and give me feedback on. So ideal customer profile, that's obviously where everything starts is what, what does an ideal customer profile look like? But problem is, is that most, some companies don't even have an ideal customer profile. They just run a list in Zoom Info or whatever it is, as companies between this size and this size in these industries, which is a very basic demographic of, of ideal customer profile.

But even the ones that do, what happens is when a sales rep starts, they're like, okay, here's our ideal customer profile. Go, you know, and your territory is cut up this way. It's like, okay, thanks. And then the rep just starts making phone calls, starts sending emails. What I did with Morgan is we came here during his first month and we sat here and I walked him through. I'm trying to light a little bit better lighting, so I'm not totally shaded here. But we walked him through on my, on this whiteboard here. Okay. Here's, here's what our typical customer, you know, size and that type of stuff. The industries. Yeah, there's a better, but here's kind of some of the nuances. Okay. You know, there's, I talk about this inflection point where, you know, when a, when a company has the SDR, BDR, AE model and they've driven a lot of sales through inside and through marketing, but then all of a sudden that kind of levels off.

And there's this inflection point where, you know, quotas go up, territories get smaller and, you know, and all of a sudden now everybody has to do outbound, right? Especially when they're moving upstream to, to like mid market and enterprise, maybe going from that seed and grow approach all the way up. Well, when that happens, I call it the inflection point. And that is a home run for this training. Like that is where this training absolutely hits a home run. And it's almost like not even, you don't even have to sell. Like once you find a client that's in that situation, the talk track is just, okay, so effectively when do you want to get started, right? And, um, so we looked, so I kind of gave him some guidance on that.

And then from there, what he did was I didn't tell him exactly what our ICP was. I gave him kind of some of the things to look for. And then what he did was he went and kind of took a look at the client base, sifted through that. I had him actually do an exercise of cleaning up Salesforce and finding all the information that's not in there. Um, and he got a much better understanding of what that ICP is. And so now when he's talking to clients and if he was on this, uh, he'd, he'd be able to tell you. But when he started calling into clients, when he sees these real nuanced things that make us the real ICP for us. Now, again, the talk track is a thousand times easier. Same thing with personas, right?

So after you identify the clients, now it's the, the, the, the type of client, right? The, the, what the client looks like, if you will, from the outsider's perspective. Now we have to figure out who are the personas that we're going after within those. And, you know, do you do the top down or the bottom up or whatever? And I'm a big top down player, but the kid, the key here is you have to, you have to speak to who you talk like, right? And you have to understand these personas from an executive standpoint. You can't say stuff like, you can tell me about your priorities. And, and, you know, let me tell you, you know, tell me about your company type of stuff, right? They'll get off the phone with you almost immediately.

So you've got to learn what these people care about. You've got to learn what these have, the language that these people speak. So we identified again, structure, Morgan and I, uh, we identified, here's kind of the three personas that we go after. SDR, SDR manager, right? And that's in Morgan's wheelhouse, right? Cause that's what he was. So he knows how to speak that language. I didn't even have to work with him on that, but then there's VPs of sales, like VPs of sales and also VPs of enablement or heads of enablement or training, which was a totally new thing for him. Cause when I brought him to dream force, you know, one of the things he took away from that, that was the first month was dream force.

And so he was running around like a chicken with his head cut off with me and meeting all these people. And I was introducing to all these people. And what happened was he came out of that saying, you know what, John, uh, one of the things that struck me was, you know, a lot of your main points of contact are, are enablement. And he's like, I don't know anything about enablement. I got to figure out how to like what these people care about. So he took it upon himself to go on to, um, LinkedIn and say, Hey everybody, I'm getting into the world of sales training and you know, a target for me is, uh, enablement. Are there any enablement people in my network that we, that would be willing to get on the phone with me and just kind of give me some of their background, you know, about what they care about, what their priorities are and those types of things.

And he got like, I don't know, like 50 people reaching out and being like, yeah, sure, dude, I'm happy to spend some time. Right. And so he spent like, I think a week or two talking to these people and understanding how they thought. And now it's still not as strong for him as SDR, SDR manager, because that's, you know, that's what he was. But now he at least has a talk track around sales enablement and he can, and he can at least speak that language and feel a lot more comfortable having that dialogue with those people and understanding their world a little bit more than he would otherwise, as opposed to just cold calling into one of them and being like, so tell me about your priorities. He can put some context around that and say, Hey, you know what?

Thanks for taking my call. The reason for my calls we're working with typically, you know, VPs of enablement whose main priority is figuring out what to do with all the content they have and how to get it to their reps the right way, scaling their reps and reducing ramp time. And, you know, and whatever the next two or three were. And you get that, you get an enablement person going, all right, at least this kid knows how to speak my language, right? So I'll, I'll maybe entertain the conversation. Same thing with VPs of sales. I had him, you know, he's, he's talking to, and still to this day, you know, talks to some of the VPs of sales that I've worked with in the past and ask them like, why'd you work with John?

Why do you continue to work with John? Like, why'd you stop working with John? Right. At what stage is your business? Because that, that understanding, because I could have given him my, the ideal customer profile. I could have given him the, the personas, right. And said, these are them. Make some phone calls. Here's some bullet points on what they care about. But that's, that's almost like a script as opposed to the structure of how I look at ICP, how I look at that persona. Now, Morgan, go figure that out or, or involve him in that process. And, and, and we've had these conversations and this is what we were going to do dialogue today. If, if my link was working better, but, um, we've had these conversations.

He's like, you know what, John, I have such a better understanding. Um, and because of that, my results are better too, right? Because now instead of just running a list and I think he was popping like 50 to a hundred leads into sales loft on a daily basis in his previous, um, role. Now he's putting more like 20 to 30 in because he knows exactly who's he, who's, who he's putting in exactly what the message should be. And then we're tweaking it to figure out, okay, what's, what's resonating, what's not. Okay. Uh, so I can, you know, I can go through the whole program, but that's really, those are the highlights there of that ICP. And then the persona, then it's okay. Look, look, look for the triggers, like based on that ICP and those triggers, or I'm sorry, those personas.

Now what triggers do these people, can we make connections to, you know, and triggers open up a new office, launch a new product, those types of things, right? Which ones sing best for us? And for him, short term here, it's SDR managers and their LinkedIn profile, what they say, and also hiring. That's a huge one for us. So he's been hitting a home run with that messaging and, but we had to stretch it out obviously to, to VPs of enablement, VPs of sales, that type of stuff. And then we're crafting messaging around that, around those triggers that I had him do because I'm not going to give him, here's the, here's the exact email that you should send. Here's the exact call scripts you should use because you don't learn anything that way.

And so, you know, he went out, he crafted these messaging based on the triggers, based on the priorities, sent it over to me. I gave some feedback. I was like, yeah, you know, this one's good. Here's an alternative version of that. Or here, yeah, I probably wouldn't say that because, or I would shift it this way because. And now with our ICP, with our persona, with our triggers identified and with messaging associated with the triggers and the personas and putting it into like a call structure, which ours is the winning call structure and the email structure, which is the why you, why you now email structure. Now with all that, now it's Morgan's job to use sales loft and other tools to effectively paint the picture and, and say, okay, you know, I'm going to use this message and I'm going to tell my story here.

And what's the contact strategy now with all this content that I have and this knowledge of these personas and these businesses, how am I now going to use all this stuff to tell my story to, to, and, and test to see which messaging is working and which one's not. And that's where we're, where we're using sales loft to figure that out from a, especially from an email standpoint. But now he can get very analytical within that structure and very creative within that structure, as opposed to here's a script, do it six months. Hopefully you'll get promoted if your numbers are decent. I've said, I've said this before my, um, you know, if you'd asked me, John, if you could go back and tell your 22 year old self something, what would it be?

Right. And you've all heard me say split testing, A, B, split test, everything, which is, again, structure and what we're working on together. But the other thing is business acumen. You know, business acumen for me was always a byproduct of my activities in the sense that, you know, I would just do, do, do, do, do, do, do and kind of learn along the way. But I wasn't proactive about it by any stretch of the imagination. Now I'm much more proactive with my business acumen. And I wish I was earlier. And so that's one of the things I'm trying to, you know, work with Morgan on, which is, hey, let's up the ante as far as your business acumen about, you know, how to speak this language. And then let's apply that and see if that resonates or not and learn what's working and what's not.

And so anyways, to wrap up, you know, hopefully this was a value. Again, sorry for screwing up the login here. I cleaned my cache, forgot about everything auto logging in and everything else. But hopefully, first of all, you got some value out of this. Second of all, you see the power of structure. And I would love to get your feedback, too, on whether you think, what you think the value of this presentation is in front of a group of sales hackers, sales lofts, because we're doing it. And I want to make sure that people walk away, not only with some techniques and stuff to think about, but also just the bigger picture of how they can work better together. For instance, BDRs and or SDRs or BDRs and AEs.

It blows me away that there's no structure to that conversation. There's no there's no standard in almost every company that I work with. There's no standard on how you should run a meeting between SDRs, BDRs and AEs like once a week. Like what what should you go over? Right. Some reps do it way better than others. But the fact that there's no structure to that and there's no goals and stuff like that to that conversation blows me away. So, again, if you're an SDR right now struggling with, you know, how to communicate with your AE, why don't you sit down and put together some structure of how you want to see those meetings run, what the goals are and those type of things. Share them with your AE.

Get feedback and then commit to each other. You're going to use that structure. Right. Same thing with your managers. What's the structure of your one on ones? You know, is it just, hey, how's it? You know, what's what are you working on this week? Or is it no like, OK, we're going to go over these things. You have to prepare this way and everything else. All right. That structure will allow you to evolve. I promise if you do it right. All right. So hit me up. Ask questions. Yeah. Morgan sitting down like I said, that's what I'd love to have you on this. Sorry, man. But sitting down. Morgan sat down with his AEs and put together that structure. Super helpful. Right. So anyways, hit us up on comments on this.

For the podcast, you know, ping me an email. John at Jay Barrows. Let me know your thoughts on the theme of structure and the importance of it. And and, you know, what you got out of this. All right. So make it a great day, everybody. As always, hit me and Morgan up on any social channel there is out there. We are more than happy to answer any question that you have through any means possible. We're trying to do our best to spread the knowledge. All right. Make it a great week, everybody. Make it happen. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back.

We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back. We're going to be right back.