Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 25: Q & A with Steve Richard, founder of Vorsight and chief revenue officer of Exec Vision

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

Late in 2015 we started producing a bi-weekly radio program called Sales Pipeline Radio, which currently runs every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific.  It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals.

We’ve already featured some great guests and have a line up of awesome content and special guests into 2016. Our very first guest was Funnelholic author and Topo co-founder Craig Rosenberg.  Next we had Mike Weinberg, incredible writer, speaker, author, followed by Conrad Bayer, CEO & Founder of Tellwise.  Recent Guests: Jim Keenan; Joanne Black; Aaron Ross; Josiane Feigon, Meagen Eisenberg, and Trish Bertuzzi.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. We’ll publish similar highlights here for upcoming episodes.  You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.

This week, listen in when Matt Heinz talks discusses sales call coaching done right: Q&A with Steve Richard.

Paul:  Welcome everybody! It’s time again for the only show that takes a look at the whole sales pipeline. So grab your board, jump in the water and catch a wave, it’s time to bring Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing. Hey Matt!

Matt:  How are we doing Paul?

Paul:  I am doing good here, well what part of the sales pipeline are we going to explore today?

Matt:  Well last couple of weeks here to start Q3, we’ve really explored just reviewing your pipeline and making sure you’ve got the right fundamentals in place, especially as you start the new month, new quarter and you are sure that you are on the right track. And I couldn’t think of a better guest to continue that conversation in terms of reviewing what’s working, making sure that your reps and your teams are performing optimally and just providing an opportunity for basically real-time and ongoing feedback and improvement.

Then our guest today, Steve Richard who is the founder of Vorsight and is the chief revenue officer of Exec Vision. Steve thanks very much for joining us today.

Steve:  Matt, thank you so much! This is the time of year to chop the deadwood out of your pipeline, that’s what we are working on over here.

Paul:  It’s funny, we use the term sometimes internally, you’ve got the call the heard. And yeah, it’s important to make sure that you are doing that on a regular basis and in some cases doing that early and often. Last week we were talking about… on the show we were talking about how to make sure that you are evaluating the efficacy of your reps and identifying the early warning signs that they are not working out so you don’t wait until the end of the month or end of the quarter.

How important is it for you to just jump right in on… to look for early warning signs and use that as an indicator of whether someone is going to make it or not?

Steve:  You’re going to be in big trouble if you don’t because there is an ability in our industry of sales to burn lots and lots of calories on total wasted opportunities that have very low probability of ever closing. And you see that in all too many sales organizations especially evangelical sales forces or somebody who is selling some kind of a product that’s a better mousetrap solution Matt where we’ve got to figure out really quickly who are the real buyers and who are the pretenders and the tire kickers and separate those two.

Paul:  Absolutely, very excited today to have Steve Richard on Sales Pipeline Radio. Not only is he a great guy, he’s got some great insight. I learned something every time I hear him speak at conferences; he is a mainstay on the B2B sales circuit.

But recently has taken over as chief revenue officer for Exec Vision. I’ve spent time on this Steve and you and I have talked about it before, I love this platform. If you think in terms of being able to review game film of your sales reps, do that in real time, being able to annotate that, be able to provide comments and commentary and analysis in an online platform, that is essentially what Exec Vision is. So maybe just give people a quick sense for sort of what… how Exec Vision helps solve this problem of not just reviewing the numbers but identifying what reps could be doing in the field on the phone to be better.

Steve:  Yeah, and that’s where we see the missing link here Matt. There are so many sales performance improvement solutions out there, there is a huge sales tech stack as you know and really they are all focused on more, more, more. There is not a lot out there focused on better and at some point we have to have better interactions with people. And in our viewpoint over here at Exec Vision, our big idea if you will is that conversations that happen with buyers and prospects, those are business assets.

And people don’t treat them like business assets the way they treat a computer or a truck as a business asset or even their data into their CRM as a business asset. So what we are helping people to do is get those business assets right inside of their CRM system, which obviously is usually Salesforce and make them very, very usable on a mobile app so now all of a sudden we can do stuff with our game film, with our conversation assets that we could never do before.

Matt:  Talk about that from a standpoint of reviewing like sales calls. I mean historically this has been a total pain in the butt. I don’t mean to tee this up as a sales pitch for Exec Vision but I mean it’s important to talk about just the idea of helping reps be better. I mean we can give them scripts, we can look at their numbers but then historically either we have to sit on the phone with them and hope to catch a prospect live or we get a recording of someone’s phone call and it’s just an MP3 file and you’ve got to listen through that and then you’re just… and then there isn’t really sort of an integrated opportunity for feedback. Talk a little bit about the frustration of really helping reps at a field level from a management standpoint.

I mean a lot of good managers want to spend more time directly coaching and helping their reps but don’t have the tools and opportunity to do it.

Steve:  Yeah, I will tell you a story from HubSpot which was, I just heard the advertisement, one of the sponsors. Hub Spot sales solution is a great story and what happened there is the sales reps all listened to their own sales calls, one per week. And this is the interesting thing Matt; you don’t need to do a lot to get a huge difference.

So you listen to one of your own sales calls per week and then you share it with the manager. So the insight from Hub Spot is that sales coaching and why sales coaching, you are not seeing more of it, it’s a math problem for the manager. If all of the weight and the pressure is on the manager to do the coaching, then they’ve got 10 direct reports.

All of a sudden you take whatever time you are going to spend, even if it’s 10 minutes and you multiply it times 10 and wow, that really starts to add up; versus if you have the rep starts to take some ownership of their own development on the front-end and they can then take their calls and annotate them with key moments and tags and identify the key words based on the transcription. Now we can really isolate where are those problem areas, where are those places where we can improve so a manager can take a quick glance at something a rep did in 30 or 60 seconds and they can tell very quickly if this rep knows what they are doing and click around.

So in sales leadership, we can’t work any harder. It’s just not possible. We have to start working smarter and if you look at all the things that sales leaders do anyways like shadowing sessions and ride alongs and pipeline reviews and forecasts and all of the mechanics of processes in sales management sales leadership, we need to have better ways of doing those with more complete information and let’s face it, information in your CRM only goes so far but the tapes don’t lie.

Matt:  Yeah, we’ve got our guest today on Sales Pipeline Radio Steve Richard who is the chief revenue officer for Exec Vision. And I think you were in the room as well Steve as, maybe a year, a year and a half ago when they, an AA ISP, I think it was one of their frontline summits and one of the presenters actually brought their sales reps up on stage and played recordings of their sales calls. They had their reps in the room, they had a panel of people that were critiquing and providing advice on those calls. And there were plenty of cringe worthy moments on those calls and I remember distinctly as people are kind of… you know there is nervous laughter and in some cases just non-nervous laughter in the audience.

Trish Bertuzzi who you and I both know that upon said hey listen, if you don’t think this is going on on your sales calls, you are fooling yourself. Even the best reps need additional coaching and I think in the same concept; the best athletes, the best musicians in the world still need coaches. This is a continual improvement kind of thing for reps of all levels isn’t it?

Steve:  Yeah it is and the funny thing is people… so if you think about the performance, the bell curve of performance Matt, and we’ve got a bunch of customers I am not going to name here but what they’ve told us is that their low mid performers, they just don’t care. And if you think about the idea of watching your own game film, it’s like looking in the mirror. It seems strange to me that someone wouldn’t want to look in the mirror and make sure that they look okay.

And when a sales rep gets over that initial like “oh my God I hate how I sound on these calls, I hate hearing the sound of my voice,” when they get over that then they start saying huh, I didn’t know I did that before, I had no idea I did that and there is no better teacher than having that happen.

So as cringe worthy as some of those things are, it ends up being an enormous gain and I’ve got to say, the one biggest thing, the one biggest question when we are talking to prospective customers Matt, we have a slide with all these questions about things that you are trying to answer about your market, your team and your prospects. The one that everyone goes to is what do my best reps do differently? And you would think with where we are with sophistication in sales, you would think that we would have an answer. And I will ask them too; Fred what do your best reps do differently? And he goes honestly I have no idea.

Matt:  Yeah, no it’s a real problem and I think to be able to have that resource on a regular basis I think about it for a lot of sales managers that want to spend more time on this but just don’t know how, right? And I think this environment provides an ongoing opportunity for managers and reps to just make it easier to do so, to do it within the platform.

I mean one of the features again, I didn’t really mean to make this a sales pitch for the product but I love it. You’ve got this transcript that you can pull out as part of the audio as well and you can identify keywords that are being used. You can go specifically to where in the recording those keywords are used but also get a sense for it from both your seller as well as from the prospective buyer, what are some of the main phrases they are using that could be both instructive in a good way as well as instructive potentially in a coaching way as well.

Steve: Yeah, so and again I am really not interested in making this a pitch for all the same reasons you aren’t. But I will give you some things that people can think about if you are not a user of Exec Vision right now, if you’re just going to use the old fashion one-dimensional call recording.

So one thing you can think about is what are the things that I want my reps saying and what are the things that I don’t want my reps saying? And we go through this exercise with all of our customers where we identify those keywords which we then in our product we put on the display so then you can tell if those words are being mentioned or if those words are not happening in conversations.

And it’s a really fascinating exercise because usually people start by saying: well it really doesn’t boil down to words or phrases, it’s bigger than that. And I say okay, I understand but just talk me through it. And then they start talking about it and you start hearing these themes Matt like for instance filler words; “um,” “ah,” “kind of,” “Sort of,” “like,” “you know.”

One of my favorites now you hear a lot of is the double “cool,” cool, cool. So there is these filler words like that that we all would agree that we don’t want our sales people doing that; another great one of courses asking questions. Well it becomes really easy for us to figure out if questions are being asked.

So here is another thing you can do. I encourage all of you, go back and listen to your call recordings or even if you are not live on a call, you are a manager that’s a second voice, have a tick sheet and I want you to put a tick mark every time someone asks an open ended question that leads with the interrogative. The Interrogatives are who, what, why, when, where, how.

Write those down and I would even through in “Tell” like tell me more. Go write down how often you hear those words being used in the form of a question as an interrogative and you will be shocked at how little it happens in the course of the conversation. What do you think about that Matt?

Matt:  Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean you can’t stress enough how important language is, how important as… I now do use some of them, those filler words that we often use and just sometimes just getting practice is important. Sometimes just being aware that you do it is important. I’ve been shocked when I listened to recordings of this radio show and I realize how many times I say “um,” “ah” it’s a real eye-opener. As Paul says, I just did it again. It’s an eye opener and the more you are aware of those things and more you can work on it and be better.

We will be back after the break with more Steve Richard who is the chief revenue officer of Exec Coach. We will be talking a little more about effective sales coaching. I want to talk about Call Camp which is open to everybody and is absolutely amazing, talk more about that and a lot more with Steve. We will be right back, Sales Pipeline Radio.

Paul:  All right, let’s pick it up with Matt Heinz!

Matt:  Yeah. Paul you are probably putting that in there to test the software you were telling me about.

Paul:  That’s right.

Matt:  During the call Paul was telling me that they actually have software where we convert this program which is live into the podcast, they have software that actually pulls out about 75% of the extra words.

Paul:   That’s right.

Matt:   So some guests actually probably end up having about 20% of their actual talking time given what they do but that’s fantastic.

Related to that, www.salespipelineradio.com if you want to check out some of our past episodes you will find those up on the site. You will get the full live version of the program  minus 75% of the extra words which will make it a little bit faster to listen to as well you can get all of those at www.salespipelineradio.com. You can always check out our podcast as well available on the Google play and iTunes network, check those out, love to have you there.

We are also a proud member of the Funnel Radio Network. If you want to check out additional shows related to sales and marketing there is some great shows available, some fantastic shows coming up. Check out www.funnelradio.com, we are very proud to be a part of that group; they do some great stuff for sales and marketing professionals.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks we’ve got some great guests as well. Next week on sales pipeline radio we’ve got Joe Chernov who really revolutionized B2B content marketing in Eloqua. If you are a fan of the Hub Spot blog, he really is the architect behind what it is today and just a super smart B2B marketer, so very excited to have Joe on the program next week to talk about content marketing and its impact on B2B sales and marketing.

But today, excited to have Steve Richard who is the chief revenue officer for Exec Coach; and Steve, let’s talk about Call Camp because I just love this concept. If any of you are football fans and you are familiar with Jon Gruden’s quarterback camp, this is somewhat similar but specifically for B2B sales pros. So you give a little overview of Call Camp for us.

Steve:  Matt I hope that ESPN doesn’t shut me down with a cease-and-desist but I’ve got to say I love watching Jon Gruden, I love watching Meryl Hodge and Jaws sit there and break down game tape with the X’s and O’s, so great. So what we do in Call Camp is it’s a movement and that’s the thing I want to leave you with; it’s a movement of sales professionals and sales leaders that want to hear all their people’s sales calls, understand what works and what doesn’t so I invite guests on the show.

Actually the next one you are the guest on so I can’t wait for that in August and everyone can register for that by going to www.execvision.io and clicking our Call Camp. And what we do is break down, Matt, you and I are going to be breaking down inbound lead qualification calls. So if the sales line rings, what does the sales rep say or when there is a requested demo and the sales development team calls to follow up, what do they say?

And I just did one with you mentioned Trish Bertuzzi before; we just did one this past week on voicemails. So what we do with the format is people will submit call so we get calls from everybody. So we would love to have you the audience listening today, if are listening and you have a sales call recording that you want us to hear and listen to and score, you can submit it on our website and then we will break it down and actually for the voicemail thing, we made it a contest Matt.

We gave away and Amazon Echo so we played five different voicemails and we let the people vote on the winner and the winner was Superior Glove. My friends at Superior Glove and they was a fascinating voice mail about the last samples I sent you, the fingers were too baggy. The way she constructed this voicemail was just phenomenal and nothing that I would ever think of doing and that’s what Call Camp is all about, is getting new things in our game that we would never come up with on our own.

Matt:  I mean you’ve done this, you’ve done a few Call Camps, and the product, you’ve seen a lot of customers go through it. What’s the reaction from sales reps when they see this? I would imagine some might be a little nervous, maybe a little defensive, a little worried about what people are going to see and hear but I imagine others are actually kind of excited about having something a little more proactive to help them out. What’s been the feedback, not from sales managers who I imagine are very excited about this, but from the reps themselves were being impacted in many cases, kind of graded and evaluated?

Steve:  Absolutely. Well in this case they are self-selecting Matt, right? So they are submitting a call, and by submitting a call; they know they can be played on air. So I think that they are really excited by it, the ones that submit. But you are right, I mean we had about 625 people on the last call camp and we got 25 voicemails so it’s still a small percentage. But what I think is happening over time Matt is there is, let’s think about it, all of our personal information is available online for anyone to access at any time. The idea of privacy as we knew it 20 years ago is basically evaporated and with that increased transparency in life, there is more transparency in our professional lives and in how we sell.

So there are two kinds of people; there’s the kinds of people who embrace it and there are the kinds of people who resist it. And that’s totally cool if they want to resist it, that’s fine. This is a movement of people who embrace that, this is a movement of people who say hey, I want to make myself vulnerable, I am going to put myself out there because I know I’m going to get more back in return from doing that then it’s going to hurt me.

Matt:  In many cases it may be indicative of the reps that are actually going to be most successful with you, right? How much do you see a correlation between reps that embrace this kind of feedback in whatever format it comes and reps that are the most consistently successful at not only hitting their numbers but improving on their skills over time?

Steve:  Absolutely.

Matt:  Cool. We are talking to Steve Richard today who is the CRO, chief revenue officer for Exec Coach. I definitely encourage you to check that out. He’s also been a long time member, leader in the American Association of inside Sales Professionals. Steve as we kind of finish up here a little bit, talk about the AA ISP. I mean you and I have been involved for a long time. You’ve been involved I think longer than I have.

For people that are listening, I see like as big as the AA ISP has gotten I still talk a lot of sales professionals who don’t know what it is. Talk a little bit about AA ISP and what it means for you.

Steve:  Yeah, the AA ISP, it means everything. Honestly I owe my career to it; I owe my business to it. I heard Jamie Shanks say that as well and I couldn’t agree more. The thing that so great about the American Association of inside Sales Professionals is it’s a family and I think it starts… it got that way because you are dealing with a lot of folks who because of your inside sales, you don’t interact as much with other inside salespeople versus when you are in the field and there is a lot of, still, field against inside type of thing going on out there so there was an opportunity for a comradery with the inside sales leaders to go oh, you are experiencing this, I am experiencing this! And when we get together everybody hugs it out.

Now the funny thing is over time when, what I have experienced being there is you are seeing more and more field sales leaders that are going to the AA ISP events because they are saying you know, my field team, even though they work out of home offices, 70, 80% of their time is spent doing inside sales-like activities. They are doing a lot of screen sharing meetings and using dialers and things like that so there is a real convergence of what sales will be and sooner or later it won’t be inside sales versus field.

But getting back to the AA ISP, Larry and Bob do an amazing, amazing job of bringing in high content, high-quality people making it a true group of peers. And I can’t recommend the local chapters enough; I can’t recommend getting to the regional events enough. They actually have a total fresh format in Vegas, Matt. Did you know about Unite, what they are doing in Vegas?

Matt:  I just read about that. Yeah, just give people a quick overview of what that is.

Steve:  It’s a really interesting take on a sales conference, very different than their other events. They are going to have a lot more interactivity from practitioners leading sessions. They are going to have the opportunity, because a lot of people in the community are saying – I want to see the new sales technologies, demo me. So they are going to be doing demo rooms and having the key with the future and just so many cool things and of course it’s in Vegas, right?

Matt:  Yeah, not a bad draw for the location standpoint as well. Yeah, before we wrap up here, just want to give everybody again that website. It is www.execvision.io and if you go there and click on resources you will get to the Call Camp page. I think the one we are doing Steve is on August 9th I believe and you can register right on that page there as well.

So thanks very much Steve for joining us today, tons of great information. Definitely check out not only the Call Camp but he’s got a lot of great resources, a learning center, past webinars available on ExecVision.io. Make sure you check out SalesPipelineRadio.com for a replay of this call today, of today’s episode with Steve as well as past episodes; every one of them is up there on the podcast as well – Google play, iTunes Store.

Make sure you join us next week and every week at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific. I will get it right one of these days Paul. Definitely join us every week to live on Sales Pipeline Radio as part of the Funnel Radio Network and look forward to seeing you next week. Until then this is Matt Heinz, this has been Sales Pipeline Radio.

Paul:  You’ve been riding along surfing the sales pipeline with Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing!