2020 was challenging. With those challenges, we’ll have to learn to adjust our work and business accordingly. We’ll have to get better at working with our team remotely, selling and negotiating online, and catering to our customers even without meeting them physically. And there’s no better way to learn all this than from our guest Steve Benson, who knows all about working and leading sales teams remotely.
Steve Benson is the founder and CEO of Badger Maps, the leading routing and scheduling application for field salespeople. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve worked in software at IBM, Autonomy, Google, and was named the top-performing salesperson in the world by Google Enterprise in 2009. In this episode, Steve shares with us what it’s like to lead remote sales teams, why he chose to merge CSA and SE roles in his company, the challenges of training and coaching remote salespeople, and what companies can do to enable their remote salespeople to perform better.
Key Takeaways:
Tune in to our conversation and learn about:
- The process of building a sales team along with the technical people behind it
- Why he combined the SE and customer success associate (CSA) role
- The importance of breaking up the sales team to maximize efficiency and focus
- Are SEs more fitted in the presales or post-sales space?
- Bringing on a resource for your existing customers
- The difference between training salespeople and customer sales reps or associates
- Why it’s important to have two different people to train two different roles
- The pros and cons of hiring less experienced and more experienced salespeople and SEs
- Why negotiation is such an important thing to freshen up on for all salespeople
- Challenges in remote learning how to do sales
- How to overcome challenges in remote training and coaching
- What is better learned through experiential learning and studying reading material
- How to mitigate the risks of pivoting your business during challenging times
- The benefits of having good leaders and the consequences of bad leadership
- What his podcast Outside Sales Talk is all about
Helpful Terms to Remember:
SDR – Sales Development Representative – generates leads through inbound and outbound
AE/SR – Account Executive or the Sales Representative – takes that lead from the SDR and then manages the sales cycle through to closure
SE – Sales Engineer – helps close the deal in a technical perspective until the prospect becomes a customer
CSR/CSA – Customer Sales Representative or Customer Success Associate – manages the relationship with the existing customer going forward
TAM – Technical Account Manager – charged asset or resource that existing customers have exclusive access to
Quotes:
Choosing to break up the customer-facing roles into two – the CSA and the AE:
10:11 “The key reason that’s so important and that’s the best way to snap it in half, is because presales work is very different than post-sales work… if you don’t manage the account management role, that person’s gonna generally float towards optimizing one or the other.”
11:31 “Frankly the same person with the same skillset could do either role, however, if you have 2 identical guys that could do everything, by snapping them in half by having one do one and one do the other, you’ll get more done across the board, just from the focus.”
How sales managers or customer success managers should train or coach their teams:
24:49 “Sales managers or customer success managers should be spending about 50% of their time coaching their team. It could mean pre-call strategizing, post-call debriefing or doing joint calls with the rep, coaching around a specific opportunity, anything really that makes the rep better and kinda moves them down their skillset down the field would account for that 50% rule of thumb.”
26:09 You often need to rethink how you’re prospecting, with what messaging, and to whom you’re prospecting to, cause the economy has changed.
The skills salespeople should be focusing on:
26:47 “The things you really gotta focus on are negotiation and prospecting, getting your weapons sharp, and getting ready to go out and hunt.”
How sales managers and leaders can navigate their teams to win in times of crisis:
35:10 “Recognize the bad news, embrace it and ask hard questions, but at the same time be positive and build an action plan that is and be transparent with their team abut what that plan is.”
41:53 “You have to be careful changing your strategies too much… Quantity never makes up for quality. Focus on the best leads and the qualified leads, not lowering your qualification standards.”
42:55 “When you make a change or shift, make sure you do what you do in good times too, you test it out and make sure its gonna work for you, try to gather as much data to make a good decision as possible.”
Resources Mentioned:
Connect with Steve on Linkedin
Learn more about his company Badger Maps
Check out the Outside Sales Talk Podcast
If you enjoyed this podcast, please support the show by dropping a review or rating on iTunes. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-sales-engineers-resource-for-sales-engineers-by/id1378292171
And if you’ve been affected by COVID as an SE, please check out our Leave No SE Behind initiative so that we can help you. https://wethesalesengineers.com/no-se-left-behind-initiative/
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