“You need to invest in training on the tech stacks.” – Justin Michael in today’s Tip 901
Are you investing in your own sales tech stack?
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Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skills
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Justin Michael. Justin has set records over the past decade for full-cycle revenue creation in cutting-edge AdTech / MarTech and SaaS startups, both as an individual contributor and global team leader (leading teams of field-based and inside sellers). He’s also the author of the brand new book: “Tech-Powered Sales.” Here he is:
Justin Michael: Hello CyberSpace. Scott Ingram asked me to come on this show and talk about tech stacks. What are the myths, really, most sales leaders, CROs I speak to, they’re trying to cut their tech stack but it’s actually a paradox. You should be investing in higher-quality people to do the opening. Then you need to invest in tech stacks and only 15% of high-growth companies are even using a sequencer. Then you need to invest in training on the tech stacks. Then you need to invest in strategic sales training. So you’re looking at me and thinking, “Wow. All right, Daddy Warbucks, are you going to fund this thing?” But let’s think about it. If you could take a team of 5 and give them the output of 100, would you do that? Is it sensible to write single emails in 2021? Is it sensible to dial the phone one at a time?
I was doing an exhibition of a parallel system dialer and I was able to call 200 numbers in a couple of hours. Connect live 20 times, get 6 referrals, 3 appointments. I was able to do the work of 2, 8-hour days in 2 hours. Well, after 20 consecutive hours, I was able to bring in 1.2 million dollars of pipeline. So do the math. I’m willing to prove it out with the tech folks. It’s a lot like the Navy SEALs. You have to invest in the training and invest in the armor. That’s what I can tell you about RevOps and tech stacks. If you’re a tech stack avoidant, you have to become high technology quotient. I’ve released this term. It’s from Psychology Today, it could be AQ – Adaptability Quotient or TQ – Technology Quotient. It’s your ability to fuse, human and machine.
And the first step is just curiosity. And if you’re using Outreach or SalesLoft, Crescent go look at the University, go online and learn a bit. It’s like Excel you use about 5% but imagine if you used 15%. There’s a lot of lore and legend and myth around field sellers shouldn’t be using advanced technology. But the truth is for field sellers, they get so caught up with mid-funnel and down funnel closing, they lose the time to be prospecting. So the best thing you can do is manually test sequences in AB test and then start to automate and scale that sequencer.
Why is all of this happening? Is can really explosion of tech?
Well, there’s this book, Predictable Revenue. What happened is the AE/SDR Industrial Complex was born in 2011. It’s pretty hard to play Moneyball when you only have 2 positions on a team that are binary. You think about baseball or soccer with 9 or 11 positions in the new play. So what we really need is some specialization. Well, there’s a funding environment where there was a billion dollars, Scott Ingram pointed out, invested in tech stacks in 2020. We’re going to see 5 billion go into tech stacks per sales by 2023.
What does that mean?
Software is eating the world. We’re going to need more reps, more SDRs. And we’re not going be able to get those SDRs and be less trained and have been sitting on these weapons. Weapons are getting smarter, and they’re going to be consolidation. So what are you supposed to do? The way to adjust to this is to invest, look for ways to consolidate your tech stacks. Look for training opportunities and build-out and RevOps components of your organization.
What is revenue operations? Its marketing operations, sales operations, data operations. These are the folks that are the Swiss Army knife holders that are gluing together the technology stack. And here we go, shameless plug my book, “Tech-Powered Sales” is the deepest ever dive on revenue operations. I go through a hundred tech stacks. I talk to thousands of sales leaders. I come up with all sorts of use cases, all for you in the book, shameless plug, techpoweredsalesbook.com the #1 new release on Amazon right now.
I’d be honored if you downloaded the book, check out everything that Scott Ingram is doing and embrace tech. There’s no doubt having the Luddites don’t want to be Luddites. It’s my message. I’ve been called 49% human, I look pretty human today. Ride the wave folks, ride the wave. Tech-Powered Sales. I’m out.
Scott Ingram: For a link to Tech-Powered Sales along with links to connect with Justin on LinkedIn or Twitter, just click over to DailySales.Tips/901.
Once you’ve gotten your copy of Justin’s book, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!