As business operating systems – such as EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) – grow in popularity and practice, many small and mid-sized businesses are experiencing the power of embracing simple concepts and proven tools to create alignment and strategic growth momentum.
But once the foundation of an operating system is in place, these growing businesses often discover gaps across their functional departments. When these gaps exist within the growth engine of the organization – sales and marketing – that growth momentum stalls, and entrepreneurial tension rises.
No business can achieve healthy growth without a strong revenue engine. But excellence in sales and marketing – and collaboration between these essential functions – doesn’t happen by accident, or even by hiring talented people.
Sales and marketing teams face unique challenges that require experienced leadership and operational rigor. Authentic® and their partners at Sales Xceleration are addressing these needs head-on through their fractional leadership models, paired with proven frameworks and methodologies (departmental operating systems) that teach growing organizations how to achieve sustainable, healthy growth.
Key Takeaways
- Common growth challenges in SMBs include owners wearing too many hats and an overall lack of sales experience at the leadership level. A clear sales strategy and accountability can help.
- Sales & marketing metrics can be a leading indicator of a business’ financial issues. Having a process and structure in place to support growth effectively can help you navigate this.
- To achieve role clarity in hiring a sales team, make sure you’ve got a thorough hiring and onboarding plan and process in place.
- Common business indicators that an organization is ready for outside, fractional leadership include: business is under board pressure, a growth slowdown, and a lack of bandwidth in current leadership to manage initiatives.
Resources Mentioned
- What is the Authentic Growth™ Roadmap?
- The Components of Authentic Growth™ Methodology
- Sales Xceleration
- Why Do Small Businesses Fail?
- CRM Optimization: Aligning your organization for insight and efficiency
Full Webinar Transcription
Welcome & introduction
Jennifer Zick: Welcome. Welcome, everybody. As you’re rolling into the Authentic Growth™ webinar, we’re delighted to have you joining us today. We’re going to give all of our guests just a moment to click through and arrive and land in this digital room with all of us, and then we’ll get started. So take a moment to grab your notebook, get settled, get ready for a fun conversation. I also want to point out that in your webinar controls, you should see a Q and A feature. So please be thinking as we roll through today’s discussion about any questions that you would have for our panel at large or an individual member of our panel. We’re hoping to leave some time at the end of today’s webinar to take some of your questions, make sure you get as much value as possible out of our time together today.
So again, welcome to the Authentic Growth™ webinar today. I’m your host, Jennifer Zick. I’m the founder and CEO of Authentic®. We are a fractional CMO firm that helps great businesses to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently move forward toward healthy growth. And today, I’m really delighted to share this panel with my colleague Mark from Authentic and two of our partners from Sales Xceleration. We’ll be making introductions soon, so you can get to know each member of today’s panel. But first, for those of you who are potentially new to Authentic or new to this webinar series, I want to offer a little bit of context of what you can expect today. So, as I mentioned, Authentic is in the business of marketing leadership on a fractional basis. And the clients that we work with are small to mid sized businesses.
So most of the businesses that we serve are somewhere between 5 million to 100 million in annual revenue. They are across every business model. B2B, B2C, channel, distributor, and a whole range of industries. And so, as we speak today, I want you to know that from the seats we sit in, we’re coming from the perspective of working day to day with executives and revenue leaders of these SMB companies, small to mid sized entrepreneurial businesses. And my guess is that if you’re here for today’s topic, you probably work within an entrepreneurial business, and you might even embrace an entrepreneurial operating system like EOS or something similar in that operating system world, which maybe is why you’re curious about today’s topic.
But even if you’re here from a different kind of business environment, like a large enterprise, or maybe you’re an independent consultant, or maybe you’re on the agency side, whatever your role is, we hope that you get something valuable and actionable from today’s conversation, and we hope that you’ll come back and join us again for future webinars and other opportunities to learn and grow together, because that’s the journey we’re all on. So without further ado, I’m just delighted to have the opportunity to introduce you to my esteemed panelists. And I don’t know how they’re showing up on your screen, but I’m going to move to my right. At my right. Other right. Oh, there we go.
Kelly, from my perspective, I’m pointing at you first, Kelly, so why don’t you share a little bit about who you are and your background so people know what you’re bringing to the table today.
Kelly Crandall: Thanks, Jennifer. I appreciate you having us on today. So I’m with Sales Xceleration. I am the Visionary for that organization. In addition to that, I’m an active advisor with Sales Xceleration as well. Sales Xceleration has over 185 active advisors across the country and in the UK. And we really service the same market, Jennifer, that you’re talking about, that SMB market, we really work with founders, business owners, sales managers. You know, they’re looking to build a path to more sales and there’s a variety of ways that we can do that. And we’re excited today to just talk about some of those ideas and I and how our folks might help. My background is I’ve been doing this my entire career, which is over 25 years. And so I’m just excited to share what I’ve learned with your audience and appreciate you having us here today.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks so much for being here. Kelly. I’m going to move next Tom.
Tom Gardner: Thanks, Jennifer. Yes. Tom Gardner. I am the chief community officer with Sales Xceleration as well, and I’ve been with Sales Xceleration and advisor role for the better part of the last six and a half years or so. But I’ve been in sales and sales leadership for my entire professional career. So the better part of the last 25 years or so, and so I’m excited to be a part of the panelists here today with the rest of the group. Thanks, Jennifer.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks so much for being here. And last but not least, Mark, over to you.
Mark Coronna: Yeah, thank you. Well, hi everybody. Mark Coronna. I am the chief development officer for Authentic and I just joined. Gosh, it’s been a month, but just a little over a month, Jennifer. Sort of deep into it already. My background has been over the last twelve years as a fractional chief marketing officer. I didn’t actually start my career in marketing. I started in sales, though, which I thought was a great benefit. And it was in a tech company that grew 100% six years in a row. And so as soon as we didn’t grow 100%, I thought something was wrong, right? I thought everybody should grow 100% annually. So I was spoiled by that. And then I went to work for a global three information company that grew 1% annually. And like, what’s wrong with these guys, right?
So my early experiences totally biased my perception towards growth, but it made me really interested in helping businesses grow successfully and profitably.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. And that’s fun. My career actually started in sales as well, so hopefully that gives us a little added dimension for today’s conversation. For those of you who might have just rolled in recently and didn’t hear on the front end of today’s webinar, I want to remind you that we have a Q and A option. You should see that in the navigation bar. We would love for you to throw down any questions that you might have for the panel at large or for any of us individually. We hope to have time toward the end of today’s conversation to draw in some audience questions, so please feel free to use that Q and A, and I will keep a side eye on that so we can make sure to make some room for that. But let’s go ahead and jump right in.
Growth challenges in SMBs
Jennifer Zick: As I already kind of teed up, today’s topic is about the benefit of operating system type structures down into the sales and marketing functions of the business. So many of the people on this call are probably familiar with the idea of a business operating system like EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, or similar structures for running a business. And I’m assuming that some of the folks that are attending today’s event have seen the impact that an operating system can bring to an overall business for creating alignment, documenting a vision, giving everybody focus and clarity on where we’re aiming and where we’re hoping to go and what success looks like and who’s accountable for what.
But in my experience, having run businesses with EOS for the last 15 years and seeing the power of a tool like that, I also have been through cycles in my own businesses and now with many clients. Wherever. Once you get the operating system in place for the business and you start to move into departmental rigor, sometimes new gaps appear and you start to recognize that maybe that same kind of rigor could be helpful departmentally. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is how Sales Xceleration and Authentic are helping to address those specific departmental needs. And I know at Authentic, many of the companies that we work with do run on an operating system, but some of our clients don’t have.
And what we’re able to bring to the marketing side of the house is still relevant, even if they’re not running on an operational system as a company. So just to set the table for all of our attendees. So, Kelly, let’s talk about overall growth, because we’ve all spent a lot of time helping businesses in that space, and we’ve seen a lot of common challenges around growth, especially in the entrepreneurial businesses that we serve. Where do you see some of the primary places that these businesses stall out? Are there any early indicators that maybe you’re facing a stall out in terms of overall growth?
Kelly Crandall: Sure, it’s a great question, Jennifer. So, you know, some of the common things that we find are stalling growth is just the owner wearing too many hats. You know, they’re trying to be the CEO, but they’re also, in a lot of cases, trying to run the sales team, maybe operations, too, and they’re just spread too thin. So that’s an early indication that, you know, someone really needs to be more responsible and sit in that seat on a more regular basis. The other thing is they often lack experience in sales. You know, a lot of our founders or entrepreneurs are really great with their product. They were never trained in sales. They may be a great salesperson themselves because they’re so passionate about what they’re doing, but they don’t have the ability to cascade those skills down to the rest of the team.
They’re just not good at sort of translating what they can do with a customer down to anybody else. And they often are frustrated with salespeople a lot of times, too. Jennifer. We see a salesperson who was doing great got promoted into the sales manager role, and they’re struggling because it’s a completely different skillset. And in family owned businesses, a lot of times, the brother, the sister, the cousin, you know, somebody is trusted to run that division. But again, never really had any formal training or experience. So those are pretty, you know, more people oriented reasons that we might see growth, but also, you know, if, say, we’ve got the right person in the seat, a lot of times there’s just an unclear sales strategy. And that’s where a sales system can really help. They may have unrefined messaging.
They may not have, you know, good targeting on what they’re trying to do as a team. And sometimes that can stall growth. They’ve kind of gotten so far with their charm and their sales person, you know, swag. And then they just kind of peter out because there’s, you know, at some point you have to really be able to sell value and have a strong value proposition, be able to communicate that and close the deal. A couple other things, just role responsibilities and clarity. Even in the sales team, you could have somebody that’s account managing their inside sales. And then they’re also supposed to do business development, you know, so now how am I supposed to prospect and find time to do all of that when I’m doing all these other things? So just bringing clear roles and responsibilities can help.
And just making sure if you truly need a business development function that you’re freeing up that person to do it and having the right skill sets. Because obviously a cold call is very different from an inside sales order taker type role. And then the biggest thing I think in a system that we try to implement is just having accountability. What are our goals? Not just metrics and obviously how many calls and emails and meetings and things like that, although many companies don’t have that or goals at all.
So we want to have a scorecard per se in our system, but also just a regular cadence of meetings, what we need to accomplish in those meetings, and then having individual goals as well, not just departmental, but really bringing it all the way down to the salesperson level so we can improve their performance because a lot of times they need that individual coaching. And that’s something that’s often lacking.
Indicators of business growth slowdown
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. So much of what you encapsulated in those examples, Kelly, rings true for us on the marketing conversation side of growth too. Mark, I wonder if you could speak to the times that you’ve been called to the table as a CMO, fractional CMO and advisor, where a lot of these companies have been experiencing growth slowdowns or they’re seeing that growth could be slowing down and they’re bringing marketing into the conversation.
Mark Coronna: Well, I think even the smallest businesses tend to have some metrics that they run to, right. When founders are in the business for many years, their experience basically has taught them that there’s probably one or two metrics they can watch that sort of tell them the business health, it’s sort of like they don’t need 50, right? They certainly don’t need 100. But hopefully somebody, the business does have some metrics, because I like to think of metrics as sort of leading indicators of financial up, looming financial issues. Right. And so if you’re nothing, if all of a sudden, you’re not seeing new customer acquisition at the rate it was. If your core business seems like it’s under pressure in terms of margin because competitors are sort of eating into your space, there’s usually something internally or externally that’s like a yellow flag.
Then I think it’s really important that management digs in. I think. Kelly, to your point, I think it was either the SBA or the National Federation of Independent Business did a study years ago. 80% of small businesses fail because managers don’t have the time to manage. Right. And so that’s sort of like, you need to have a process and a structure so that you can get people sort of working on not just the short term current issues, but the longer term opportunities at the same time.
Kelly Crandall: Yeah, Mark, I’d like to piggyback on that, because a lot of times we in the sales world, we see a lot of lagging indicators. You know, how many deals did you close? And that’s the bottom of the funnel. And we really need to make sure we’re working with teams all the way up to the top of the funnel, where you start, but also, you know, where the salesperson or the conversation begins. And, you know, really looking at, again, how many of those early business development activities and conversations are we having that can lead down to the closed business? So just helping business owners understand those different leading and lagging metrics and how important they both are to watch.
Mark Coronna: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I work with a manufacturing company. They got a new CEO. He was a sales executive. He was a great guy. And then he asked me to sort of dig into some of the sales numbers. And when I did, I found that their average order size was $4,000, and everybody else thought it was $40,000. Not, you know, I’m not the brightest mathematician in the world, right? I barely passed calculus in college, but I know the difference between 4040 thousand after checking my math. Right. And it was kind of like, well, guys, what? You know? And then, of course, what that led to is a deeper dive into it. We found that, you know, some of the accounting executives were quoting business that they should have just walked away from. It wasn’t going to be a profitable business.
They were, you know, one account exec who tried to teach them to be more strategic in selling. He goes, I don’t have time for that. I’m too busy writing estimates. Well, like, okay, what’s your close rate on estimates? Well, you could guess it was awful, right?
Role clarity and hiring
Jennifer Zick: So, well, we’re about to move on. To the next topic, but I’ll just add that I think it’s interesting to observe, in the 25 years that I’ve been in sales and marketing and in various kinds of consulting with client roles, how tempting it is for so many businesses at all stages of growth and maturity to get comfortable during cycles of easy growth. When the sales are coming easily and things are clicking, is when they tend to take their foot off the gas as it relates to keeping an eye on trends in the market, keeping the voice of customer close to them, so that they understand how needs might be changing, so that they’re continuing to innovate and they’re continuing to be in touch with what’s really happening in the market.
Because we see a lot of businesses who think that they’re really healthy until the economy slows down. Right. And what is the analogy I heard recently? Like, you can, when the tides go out, you can tell who’s actually been swimming naked. The tides have gone out in this past year for a lot of businesses. And the ones that are experiencing, like, sudden stops are wondering what they could have been doing in 2022, potentially to set themselves up for a better 2023 into 2024. So it’s interesting just to be conscious of the things that businesses need to attend to continuing growth and in addition to, you know, those kinds of growth levers, there’s the people aspect of the business.
So, Tom, I’m coming to you with this next question, because I confess, as an owner and a CEO, I’m so close to my own business. The people part is hard. It’s hard to get right. It’s hard to know for sure if you’re hiring a rock star or somebody that’s not going to fit, especially in sales and marketing. I find that entrepreneurial businesses have a really hard time there. And I can raise my hand to someone who relates, because if you are the founder and you have been the head of revenue to start the business engines going, it’s hard to let go of that vine and to know how to bring people on board alongside of you and into leadership and into execution there. So why do you think so many companies struggle in this area?
And, like, what are some of the ways that they could increase their odds of success?
Tom Gardner: Sure, Jennifer, and some of this will tie directly back into what Kelly Crandall and Mark were just referencing, too. And the people part can be very hard. But what magnifies, I think that challenge is really the system, or the structure or lack thereof that surrounds them. So start, perhaps even at a high level, the goals that the company wants to accomplish? And have those goals been communicated to all the different parties that are involved? And you move into strategy as an example. So if we’re talking about growth, where’s that growth going to come from? Is it from existing customers and expansion, new products, or are we looking at new customer growth that’s going to contribute to that? And what are the roles that each of the people on the team need to play? I mean, is there role clarity?
Who’s responsible for that net new growth? How much are they responsible for and when are they responsible for? So role clarity and expectations really can come and be a critical part of that. And then, as you mentioned, hiring and bringing people onto the team as those roles really are clarified, you know, what is that hiring plan? And I see a lot of companies struggle with this because they really don’t necessarily have a hiring plan. They’re looking for a salesperson. But that salesperson, as Kelly Crandall mentioned, there’s a different skill set for potentially net new business growth and that prospecting effort compared to a well-skilled account manager for growing those existing relationships. So based on the roles that companies are hiring for, what does that ideal candidate profile look like? What are those skills that you’re looking for to position that role for success?
How are you going to identify those skills? How are you going to attract those candidates? Are you working with a sales oriented recruiting firm as an example to help bring some of those candidates to the forefront? Are you utilizing assessments to help dive into those skills and get to know the candidates as best you possibly can through that interview process? So that thorough hiring plan and transitioning to onboarding plan, how are you going to set that team up for success as they start that first day, first week, first month, first year within that organization? So what does that onboarding plan actually look like to position that salesperson? Success, as an example?
And as you start to look into some of the other comments that Mark and Kelly Crandall had made here just a few minutes ago as well around that system, are you setting an environment up where you are creating that feedback opportunity to look at those skill set or skill set gaps and providing training opportunity for those people to position them for success? Are you measuring your process all the way back to the goals that we started this conversation with, those leading and lagging indicators, and how are you measuring that progress? And so, as much as the people are such a critical aspect of this, what surrounds the people and positioning them for success is equally as important in this case as well, in my opinion.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely on the marketing side of the house. Mark, I’m sure you’ve seen this happen plenty of times, too. In fact, the entire category of fractional CMO was really born out of recognizing that a lot of small businesses get it wrong often when it comes to making the right hires at the right time to staff. And I think while there’s a lot of confusion that I see with clients on the sales side of structuring a sales org, like, what is the difference between biz dev and account management or customer success? Like, all those roles that work to bring in and retain revenue, but they have very different skill sets. There’s confusion there often, especially in a small business, there’s massive confusion on the marketing side of the world as well, because 20 years ago, marketing was more of a supporting role to sales.
And today, marketing is a collaborative role. We’ll talk more about that. But a lot of small businesses get it wrong because they’re looking to hire a magician/unicorn marketer who has two to three years of experience and who can do everything from embroider logos on a backpack to, like, set the strategy for the business. It’s just not realistic. Right. So, Mark, what have you seen on that side?
Mark Coronna: Well, you know, I want to reinforce and expand on a point Tom made because, you know, when you look at, I mean, we typically all look at resumes, these, you know, I mean, if we’ve hired. But today’s resume is really linked in. Right? Nobody even needs a print resume. But I, but the point beyond that is what I’ve learned. And maybe the hard way is that you have to look beyond skills. You have to look at personal attributes, because what makes somebody successful in one job may cause them to fail at another job. Kelly Crandall, you said that when you talked about sales people becoming sales managers. Those are very different attributes. I remember years ago, we had a huge enterprise relationship. You know, the corporate offices said, hey, we’ve got a great enterprise. Sales, enterprise sales guys.
You can have him for six months, you know, and it’s like, great, you know? So the guy showed up and, you know, a three piece suit all buttoned up and whatever, and he failed because he was not a risk taker. He didn’t have any initiative. He wanted confirmation of everything that he was going to do and say and whatever, and it’s kind of like, wait a minute. You know, this doesn’t work for somebody in that kind of a role. A lot of marketing executives have sales backgrounds. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But marketing has become a very complicated discipline. All in itself. And nobody can say, well, I’m good at everything in marketing anymore. There’s just way too many pieces for anybody to make that claim.
So I think that I’ve learned that it’s really about attributes, that’s where you really need to look. You know, do people have, I think every job description should have a set of five or six or eight attributes attached to it, right? These are the things that we want somebody to be really good at that are sort of built into their personality.
Aligning sales and marketing teams
Jennifer Zick: That’s awesome. And that is a great setup for the next question that I’m actually going to put back in your court to start with, Mark, because you just acknowledged what’s absolutely true. That, and especially over the last two decades, marketing has become increasingly complex and micro disciplined. There are hundreds of different kinds of capabilities that even a small business needs to know how to draw upon, either on an as needed basis or as an ongoing basis to run a strong, modern marketing engine. But the other difference is that when I first started in my career in sales and marketing was very much the team that made things look good and sound good, right? Content and imagery, it’s look and feel. Polish it up very much a supporting role to sales which really owned and drove every aspect of the client engagement and relationship.
That is not how the world works anymore. And so marketing has become a true peer in the revenue organization. But yet many small businesses are still led by people whose frame of mind is 20 years ago. And when marketing is reporting as a supporting function in the business, without a seat at the leadership table, I like to say it ends up becoming the junk drawer of the organization. Does something not have a home? give it to marketing. Somebody needs to order lunch. That’s marketing. I mean, that’s a really good way to make marketing not work well. So mark, from your experience, how do you align sales and marketing leadership and roles to really be effective in today’s modern business?
Mark Coronna: Well, I think first of all, you have to grant the fact that they’re both critical, right. And one can’t be subservient to the other, right. I mean, I was, I talked to a large customer at the last large company I worked at and I went down to Orlando because we’re having some problems servicing them and I wanted them to have some in an executive sort of presence, right. So we could talk about the real big issues. And the CEO said, why are you here? You’re marketing, you make brochures, right? And this wasn’t that many years ago, right? It’s not 20 years ago. It’s like, oh, okay. But you know, there, I mean, even really 20 years ago, there were articles being written about marketing as the growth champion.
And there’s a great article I love that talked about six different stages of value that a marketing organization can play of business, all the way from service provider to sales, all the way up to driving the business growth. Right. Being the primary, having the primary responsibility and accountability for corporate growth. So I think everybody needs to kind of get around their heads around what role do you want marketing to have in your business? Right? And that’s typically an exercise where the executive team’s got to get on the same page not to ignore sales, because obviously they’re all part of building the same revenue stream with different responsibilities. Right. But if people seem to understand what sales roles are, they don’t understand as well what marketing roles can or should be.
Kelly Crandall: Well, Jennifer, I’d like to chime in too, because a lot of times we see sales organizations, we see owners think the answer is to hire a salesperson, but they have no marketing efforts. So the lift for that salesperson is extremely heavy. They’re getting no marketing support at all. There’s absolutely no lead gen, there’s no social media. I mean, it’s cold calling and what I’ll call the old grassroots, you know, get out in the community and hope somebody’s going to refer you business and cold call. And so, you know, I think sometimes owners think a salesperson is the answer, where really, if they could just invest in marketing and generate leads for themselves, they can close, you know, enough of that business to sustain and then again, ultimately hire a salesperson.
But to ignore marketing is a big mistake that we see a lot of times in these small businesses.
Jennifer Zick: I would love to double click on that statement, Kelly. We see that all the time. And what’s interesting is that most businesses, just by nature of being entrepreneurial, unless their founder is a marketer, what usually happens is the founder has a great idea, has a great solution of some kind, and you grow with this hypothesis. You bring it to market. Your founder led, you have to be sales driven, because until you’ve sold a few things, you don’t exist as a business. Right? So founder led, sales led companies are how companies get off the ground. But in the process of doing that, they are committing random acts of marketing all over the place.
Because every sales rep is out there mavericking their way through, having to be a micro marketer too, and creating their own decks, creating their own sell sheets, doing the things they need to do to lift the company. And if the company goes too far with being only sales driven, you’re building a really expensive model where in order to grow, you’re adding bodies for every piece of scale. Right. And then you’re exponentially increasing that maverick, you know, risk of diluting your brand and confusing the market. So that’s where, like, we really see that tipping point of when companies have reached critical mass.
And they’re starting to recognize that if they don’t bring strategic marketing in, the money they’re spending to do the things they need to do, like having a website or sponsoring or doing things is getting really diluted, and there’s no way to measure the effectiveness of it or to scale it.
Kelly Crandall: And the cost, yeah, the cost of turnover is so high. So you go back to what Tom talked about and not having a hiring plan and not having the right onboarding, and, you know, you just get this revolving door of salespeople that are not being successful. Take that money and, you know, invest elsewhere.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely.
Mark Coronna: Kelly, there used to be a number that was tossed around that it cost between a million and $2 million to replace a salesperson because of lost opportunity sales, lost customers. When somebody moves on the cost of hiring, the cost of cutting someone loose, that’s pretty expensive. When you think of it, even if it’s not $2 million, it’s still a lot of money that you’ve invested. And I think the loss of momentum is also pretty critical when you don’t have people out working your customer base.
Kelly Crandall: Yeah, I mean, Mark, I had a client who had a salesperson for five years, and they were bringing in $100,000. So the client was like, well, they’re paying for themselves, right? Because they weren’t paying them that much. But then when they finally replaced that person, and the person brought in a million dollars in the first year, look at the opportunity cost that they were foregoing by just holding on to somebody that wasn’t really performing. Crazy, right?
Sales & marketing operating systems
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. So let’s get into the meat and potatoes of our topic today. I want to talk about operating systems to address some of these challenges in sales and in marketing and in the collaboration of the revenue engine. So our two firms are unique in the sense that both authentic and Sales Xceleration provide fractional and advisory leadership to stand in that gap of where there might not be a sales leader or a marketing leader, because either the founder has been playing that role or somebody else or nobody’s been playing that role. Whatever the case may be, we provide that leadership, but we also have methodologies and operating systems that underpin the way we work with businesses. Kelly Crandall, I would love for you to speak a little bit about how Sales Xceleration leverages that toolkit to both in the leadership, but in the ongoing management.
How do your clients embrace that to help them drive performance and sales?
Kelly Crandall: Sure. So, you know, obviously there’s a lot of things that we can do with clients where we go in and we are acting in that outsource or fractional vp of sales role, but we have another offering which is our sales system. So that’s the Sales Xceleration framework, and that’s really putting that systematic program in place for that business owner that exists when we’re not there. And that’s, now what I think a lot of business owners are looking for is to give me the tools and the framework that I need to be successful. So when we work with a client to implement the Sales Xceleration framework, it’s a series of foundation building days with the sales leader and the sales team. So we are bringing it, you know, all the way down to the team member level.
And we, over those first couple of days, we’re building out what we call the sales blueprint. So that’s, you know, getting aligned on the goals, not just the key metrics. Obviously, we talked about scorecards, but also just departmental goals and then individual salespeople goals. Where do you need to improve and really understand the gaps in the organization. We do a sales assessment to really uncover why they are not growing. We get very granular on those reasons and then help them build a plan, either with or without our help. And they can certainly do this on their own once we help them identify all of that throughout this framework, we’re building all of those sales strategy elements with them through workshops. So really putting together their sales stories. And after we do those first few days, they get a full sales playbook from us.
So that is sort of the big deliverable. And then they’re left with a quarterly framework for meetings and accountability and reset. I mean, we have role plays, we have sales training, sort of all those things that we’re able to kind of come in with the client on that initial front end building piece, but then just stay with them once a quarter to keep them on track and to continue to build those skill sets. So it’s been really exciting. It’s a newer offering for Sales Xceleration to roll out in the market, and we’re just having a lot of fun being able to sort of bring this system to our client base.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Well, a little background on Authentic is that, like I said, I’ve worked inside of businesses that have leveraged eos, the entrepreneurial operating system, for the past 15 years. My former employer was one of the earliest adopters of EOS. And when we in that company were implementing EOS, I was learning how EOS was working for the organization, but I was also the head of sales and marketing, and I had to learn how to take the concepts of eos and take them deeper into the marketing organization. And EOS is such a great anchor point. If you use EOS, you’re familiar with the VTO, the vision traction organizer. There’s a little box on it called marketing strategy, which is such a great place to anchor with your three uniques, your niche, who are you targeting, your guarantee, your proven process.
But it is not an actionable marketing strategy and plan. Right? And so that was a lot of the inspiration behind the beginning of authentic is I really want to help entrepreneurial businesses not only fill the leadership gap that they have, because we are usually the first marketing executive in that business, but also teach them how to think about marketing, teach them how the pieces stitch together in today’s modern marketing framework. And I’ll make sure that in the recap from today’s event, we include a couple resources, because this is an ugly prop here, but our marketing authentic growth roadmap is a tool within our methodology that really is used to elevate the IQ of the organization about what marketing is.
What are the roles that have to stitch together between the C suite, all the way into the strategy for marketing, all the way down into the execution of it. Right. So that we can take that journey with them in a way that instills that fabric in their organization long after our work as their marketing leader is done. They have the cadence of meetings like you spoke about. They have quarterly workshops, they have clear accountability. They have the right people in the right seats so they can keep moving and keep scaling and keep growing. So as you can probably tell in my voice, I’m such a huge believer in systems and structure, because when you have that structure in place, you have the freedom to be as creative as your business needs to meet the market that you’re working within.
Kelly Crandall: We’re huge fans of EOS. I think that if you’re running on EOS, if you’re a company that’s already doing that, good for you. I love it. I ran it when I owned my own manufacturing company, and I’ll forever be grateful for how it enabled us as a company to get organized. We want to run the sales system complementary to that. If you’re on EOS, we’re going to keep that terminology and just kind of plug those, like you said, those pieces that are missing in the depth where just the framework itself, it’s sort of lacking. How do I build the sales team skills? That’s what we’re really trying to do here over time, is to make everybody better and get that revenue engine really humming.
Initial steps for structuring sales teams
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Tom, this next question I’m going to tee up for you, because I’m sure that there are guests in the room today, whether they’re running on an operating system for their company or nothing. They are here for this topic because they recognize they probably have some foundational work to do in sales and or in marketing, and maybe they’re not ready yet to bring in an outside fractional leader or another formal system. But what are some initial steps that they could take to just start thinking differently about the structure foundation for their sales organization? Where would you recommend they start?
Tom Gardner: Sure. You know, Jennifer, in thinking of that starting point, that’s usually one of the biggest challenges. Right? Where do I even begin? There’s a ton of really good free tools, checklists, things that can really help business owners get clarity to where that beginning point may actually be. So if you’re struggling with finding some of those tools, you know, the Sales Xceleration website has a resource center there that can help you with some of those checklists, you know, but as an example, there’s think of, and this is circling back to what Mark had mentioned earlier, but with the customers and the types of business that you’re pursuing, take a deep dive into your customer base. Look into who are your best customers, what makes them your best customers.
And a lot of times, people may naturally just go to the top large revenue generation or the revenue component of that. But what are the other characteristics that are really tied to that relationship that make them your best customers? What industry are they in? What geographies, if that plays a role? And what are the characteristics that come along with this? What’s the relationship and the partnership like? Are there referral generations that mutually serve both you and your customers? So what does that relationship really look like? As you’re starting to define who are your best customers and you start to take that step to how do you attract more of those types of organizations? How do you, what’s your plan to go forth and not only bring awareness to, but then ultimately acquire more of those relationships to build out your customer base.
Tom Gardner: And so as you start to really take that deep dive into your customer territory, planning, you know, the specific types of intentional new relationships you’re looking to establish, you then start to forge the strategies and then the people part of things that were talking about earlier. But really leveraging that knowledge around who.
Jennifer Zick: Are your best customers and why that is so valuable. Mark, how would you weigh in on that as a marketing leader?
Mark Coronna: Well, I think the idea of an ideal customer profile or an ideal client profile or an ideal relationship partner profile is critical. Right. You have to have a scorecard before you go out and evaluate and waste your time talking to people who are never going to be the right kind of partner for you or the right kind of customer for you. And, you know, when you look at them, if you try to build your ideal client or customer profile based on demographics, it only gets you so far, right? It’s like, okay, there’s, you know, 23,000 private equity companies in the US. What does that do for you? Right. Not much. I mean, you can pare it down. I think it’s the qualitative aspects of the relationship that are important. Right. Not just, not even just revenue, because, you know, I don’t know.
I actually had a job where I got to fire Walmart as a customer, and that was one of the most fun things I ever did. Right? It’s like, yes, they fire everybody else. It’s like, I don’t think they ever got fired. But, you know, we had such a good system. We knew that we were not making money on that relationship. So it was as much sort of account level profitability as it was. Oh, yeah, they’re a big customer. Right? And once we looked at that and we realized they’re never going to pay more and they’re never going to moderate their appetite for free service. Like, why do we have them as a customer? We’re losing multiple millions of dollars a year on this relationship. Right.
You know, and so I made that call and I said, you know, six month notice, we’re terminating your relationship. And you’re like, what?
Kelly Crandall: You got to be brave.
Jennifer Zick: You have to be brave to build a healthy business. And I think when it comes down to, like, where do you start? Sometimes I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of entrepreneurial businesses have grown to a certain critical mass by being all things to all people. Because you’re trying on a lot of fits. You’re finding out where your solution is the best fit, you’re finding out which kind of clients are the best fit of. But maybe along the way, you have forgotten to stop and ask those questions, like, quantitatively, like, hey, let’s look at our customer list. Let’s look where we have risks. For instance, do we have three big anchor accounts that represent 80% of our revenue? And if one of them leaves, we’re going under and we’re overstaffed, right? Where are our risks?
Have we become a business that the market wanted us to become and told us to be? Or are we becoming the business we want to be, where we’re serving our highest purpose in the world and we’re growing in a healthy way that supports the kind of culture we want to be and helps us all thrive and do our best work, right? So some of those things that I would encourage companies to look at and ask themselves, can you answer the question of what is my cost to acquire a new customer? What’s the cost of acquisition? Do I know the answer to that? What is the average length of our sales process to get to a win? Is there something we can do to tighten that up? What is the average deal size?
Mark, you pointed out a huge gap in understanding between a 4000 and a $40,000 average deal size. But I had a moment like that at Authentic where years ago I had been saying, oh, we have a 18 month sales cycle. Because it felt that way to me. I went back and evaluated three years of my CRM data and found out that our actual sales cycle for the deals we win is 30 days or less. 30 days or less. Which means I don’t allow for sandbagging of deals anymore. If it’s 45 days old and we’re not getting anywhere, it’s a closed loss. Like, we don’t even need to sit with that anymore. Right? So ask the questions of your own data. And if you don’t even have the data to answer the questions, start there. Put a CRM in place. I know Sales Xceleration has one.
So does Authentic. If you don’t have a CRM, you don’t have a business. I already did a webinar on that. So go back to the archives.
Kelly Crandall: Well, it’s funny, Jennifer. That’s what I was going to say. Like, if somebody in the audience is like, I don’t know how to see that data. Like, that is. Step number one is get a CRM and protects it gives you the data and protects you. When you do have turnover to kind of know where we’ve left off with things and then spend time with your people, I just think that’s. I can. That would be my advice for everybody. If you have not been on a call with one of your salespeople or listened, even with your marketer, like how they’re, you know, communicating, get in there and do a little bit of the dirty work. And because your coaching can help redirect them if they’re off track. And the only way you’ll know is if you take some time to listen.
Readiness for outside expertise
Jennifer Zick: That is so true. Staying close to the actual conversations. Right. Before we tee up this next question for our panel, I want to remind our guests that we would love to take some of your questions toward the end of today’s conversation. So if you have a question or a question for any of us individually or for the whole panel, please throw it into the Q and A. I’m watching that. We’ve got one question there now, but I’d like a few more. So take some time, throw your questions our way. But, Mark, I’m coming back to you on the flip side of that. So the last question was, you know, there are people in the audience that aren’t ready to engage outside expertise. They need to start somewhere internally. I think we’ve given them some things to look at. I hope so.
But then there are others in the audience that are like, okay, we know we’re over our skis. We don’t have the right leadership or the right framework to help us move forward. What are some of the indications that maybe they are ready to bring in an outside expert or somebody to come in to fill that seat? Who has that been there, done that wisdom?
Mark Coronna: Yeah. Well, you know, that would be sort of my ideal customer profile. Right. When I was a fractional chief marketing officer. How do I know somebody is really a good candidate? And I look for companies that were under board pressure or owner pressure where somebody who isn’t in the business but still has some responsibility and oversight is saying, guys, you’re only growing at 5%. The market’s been growing at 10%. What gives? I think that there’s. I think there’s a lot of sort of momentum and slowdown issues that one can feel, even if you don’t know numerically or, you know, what’s really driving it. You know, I’ve had business groups that, you know, we had to manage during, like, the 2008 nine financial crisis. You know, we had our first oh, woe is meeting. Right.
And because we lost 300 customers in 30 days, they just decided were in the compliance business. Everybody’s like, well, what do we do now? It’s like, well, okay, so, you know, the business has been good. We had tailwinds behind us. You know, we’re also paid to manage when we’ve got headwinds. Right. So what are we going to do? Right. We came up with a strategy that we, first of all, we’re not going to lose one more customer if we could help it. We started putting longer term subscription plans in place, and, you know, we actually grew 8% during that recession when a lot of our competitors went down 30 or went out of business. I think you have to have that positive attitude that there is something you can do. Right.
And we actually came out of that period much better, stronger, with better products and services than went in because were forced to reevaluate. So that discipline of just, you know, stopping and taking an honest view of your business, looking at your market data, your customer data, your competitors, and your internal performance, that’s kind of the, I think the big one, the place to start. Right. People say, well, I can’t do it in account level p and l. Yes, you can. You know, you just don’t want to. I think that’s, you know, there’s a lot of excuses out there, but I think you have to start with an attitude that there is, there’s an opportunity for growth, profitable growth out there somewhere. You’ve just got to have the discipline to look for it.
Just in the same way a manufacturer’s got great back office or plant discipline, looking at quality metrics and six sigma and whatever, why don’t you apply those same best practices to your sales and marketing operations? They seem to know how to fix those, but they don’t seem to know how to fix the front end of their businesses sometimes.
Jennifer Zick: So true. What are the signals for our friends over at Sales Xceleration? When you’re talking with businesses that end up being right fit clients and they really are ready to take this journey, what are some of the indicators in their business that the readiness is there? I guess I’ll just lob that at Tom.
Tom Gardner: When businesses are struggling, think of that indicator on revenue. It’s plateaued or going the other direction, but the business owner and the leadership, they’re spread too thin, as we’ve heard numerous times. They’re wearing so many different hats in that SMB space that depending on whatever’s most urgent, the hat that they’re wearing at that particular moment. So they’re challenged with bandwidth, and really, where are they best serving their organization and should they best serve that organization? So there’s a bandwidth and there’s also then that desire do I really want to be in this seat? Is this where I’m happiest? Is this why I started my business to begin with?
So as they’re looking at trying to create that path for growth, if they’re struggling both with a bandwidth and just really a satisfaction and a happiness component of if I’m doing this, do I really want to do this, and am I best served to do this? That’s really that hand. Maybe I do need some outside perspective, some help to create these things, to create that path of success and get back to why I started my business to begin with.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, that’s so true. I can see that. I can feel that as a business owner who also has a sales background and has built the sales function here at authentic, I feel that on the marketing side for authentic, some of the indications that we see that tend to bring clients to us at a point of readiness to really take the journey is that the CEO and CFO are starting to look at each other and say, you know, we’re spending a lot of money on marketing, but we have no idea what it’s getting for us. And we’ve taken a couple of running attempts at either hiring agencies and being disenchanted with the outcomes or trying to put together a marketing role that would be the right fit in our business.
But we honest, if we’re honest with ourselves, we honestly don’t know the difference between PR and communications and social media and digital. Like, we don’t know what we’re doing here. And so I think when Mark talks about the kinds of attributes that you look for in a relationship that are more of the qualitative, one of the attributes that we look for in a right fit client is that they’re humble. They’re humble enough to acknowledge that they aren’t marketers, which, you know, it’s interesting if you’re in marketing, you know that a lot of people think that they’re marketers or that they know marketing, but for the clients that are, like, really ready to take the journey, they’re humble.
They’re like, we’re ready to trust this role to a leader who has the expertise to lead us and we’re willing to let them help inform our expectations. Right. They’re not expecting marketing to come in and in 30, 60, 90 days create an automagical lead gen engine that suddenly solves all their problems. Right. It’s a journey and there’s foundation to be laid. And so those are the kind of indications in a business. And of course, that they are at that critical mass point where they’ve got a good solution for the market. They have salespeople that have good management, and we’re all aligned to take this endeavor together and work closely together so. Well, our audience is being a little more quiet today, although they’re still with us. So they’re getting some value, I think, by being here.
But I want to turn to one of the questions in the room and still invite others to throw any questions you might have into the Q and A. But I think this is an interesting question. This person must be looking at some different opportunities because he’s saying, I’m hearing a lot about, right, sizing the amount of responsibilities inside of a sales or marketing role, yet he’s seeing a lot of overstuffed jobs on the hunt. Not all of them, but, like, companies trying to get everything out of one person in one role. Right. So how do we fight against this on the front lines? And maybe, Kelly Crandall, I’ll come to you. Like, how do.
