Creating a High Performing Sales Team in 2009

Music Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner with Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Paul Staelin, he's the vice president of Sales and Operations with Birst.com. Welcome Paul. Paul Staelin: Thank you, Gerhard. Gerhard Gschwandtner: What I'd like to know is, how can I manage a high performing sales team as effective as yours? Well, certainly, this year is a challenging year to do that. One of the things that I would argue, the best tool in any manager's toolbox is visibility, right. If you can see what's going on, you can actually help. If you can't see it and you're talking to people and you might be getting the sunshine pump, it's a little bit hard to -- Gerhard Gschwandtner: So this economy everybody's in the dark and you sell night vision goggles, right. Paul Staelin: That's right. That's right. We help companies get their information in one spot and they analyze it and figure out how their business is doing, find the spots where they're really doing well, where they should be doing more of it, and find spots where they're not doing so well where either you that you can try to improve or inaudible. Gerhard Gschwandtner: You have ten salespeople. How do you track your salespeople's performance? Paul Staelin: Well, we use, not surprisingly, Salesforce.com -- Gerhard Gschwandtner: Okay. Paul Staelin: -- and use our suite to basically analyze the data that we have within it which helps us blend both kind of information from our financial system with Salesforce and our online marketing software. So we have three main systems that we use and we kind of combine in our own environment to analyze it. What we've tried to do and focus on it is looking at, you know, really kind of three things. And you kind of think of it as worst, expected, and best. But worst you will do this quarter is what you've already closed, right. Expected is kind of your forecast and that best is your pipeline, you'll never be able to close more than your pipe. And if you can track and monitor that week to week and see what's going up and what's going down for which reps, it makes it fairly easy to spot, you know, as compared to this week, this deal looks like this person's forecast went down X-amount, let me go drill in and see what's happening there. Oh, this deal looks like it's slipped, we didn't talk about that, what's going on? How come this is now different? And you start having custom conversations one-on-one with the people to help kind of identify and address those issues. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. So you get an early warning system so you're not surprised when the quarter ends. Paul Staelin: That's critically important. The earlier you know, the more you can do about it. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Paul, would you agree that every sales manager sort of looks at the performance averages and say is it a bottom 20 percent, the top 20 percent and the core middle. Do you look at it that way? Paul Staelin: Our goal every quarter is to have every rep hit every number. Paul Staelin: There are certain times where that's not going to happen. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Paul Staelin: But in general, I think, particularly in this environment, it's going to be more important to get more people productive -- Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Paul Staelin: -- than it is going to be to lavish attention -- Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right. Paul Staelin: -- and focus on the top 20 percent. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what is more important, to either take the best practices of the top performers and teach everybody those practices or to look at the mistakes that all of those salespeople make and isolating them and try to eliminate them? Paul Staelin: That's an interesting management question. Certainly, historically, people have focused on trying to find out what the top 20 percent are doing right. I mean if they're selling the same product into a similar market space, the idea has a lot of merit. There are certainly organizations where the one rep who blows out their number every year and is always the top rep happens to have an unusual patch that's completely unreplicatable by anybody else. So like most things in life, it's going to be a balance of the two. If you can find the things that with comparatively representative territories and processes that people are able to more predictably produce more money, those are things you should be really focusing on. If you can find where the high performers are in which of those chunks, it's going to make it a lot easier to replicate so that someone in Florida who has a very different patch can look to the best practices that actually work for customer bases like theirs. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what have you learned managing your sales force over the last year before October and after October? Paul Staelin: Very interesting. Certainly, the bigger deals have had a lot more conversations about them. We sell a lot to the financial services vertical. Their risk clearly, you know, night and day. Between September 30th and, you know, November 30th, in terms of their willingness to even look up and see what projects can really add value this year. I would argue the big shift that we've kind of seen is, and in certain respects, actually business intelligence tends to well in downturns is as everyone looks up from the wreckage and says, I can't do the same thing this year. I have to be smarter. I need more insight into my business. To be smarter, tends to actually be pretty good for business intelligence. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So the market is coming your way? Paul Staelin: Yes, we're very pleased at the amount of interest that people are expressing in being able to analyze their business better and make better decisions about it. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So how does your solution compare to others that are on the market? Paul Staelin: We have a fully integrated platform that actually solves all four major layers of the BI problem. In general, if you do it yourself, you're buying four different pieces of software, you're hand integrating them every time, it takes months and months and lots of people. What we have done is take and build an integrated platform much like Salesforce did with CRM where it's very quick to get going. You can literally be up in hours or days in a lot of cases with fairly rich complex analytical applications on any data you happen to have. There are other vendors who are trying to do Software-as-a-Service Business Intelligence and then tend to focus on one data set because it's hard. They're still using the four different layers, they've got to focus on a very small problem by redefining the problem and building a completely integrated solution we're able to point at marketing data, sales data, service data, back office order data and put it all in one place so you can get a more holistic view of your organization. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Well, for anybody who is interested in business analytics and I think you should, go to Birst.com. Thank you Paul. Paul Staelin: Thank you Gerhard. It's been a pleasure. Gerhard Gschwandtner: It's my pleasure.

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