Speaker 1: 00:03 Welcome to the same side selling podcast dedicated to modern sales and marketing innovation and leadership. Here's your host, Ian Altman. Ian Altman: 00:15 Hey, it's Ian Altman. I'm joined this week by Gessie Schechinger who labels himself the laziest salesman in America. He's also the vice president of sales for the OnCourse sales engagement platform. We're going to talk about the biggest misconception when it comes to CRMs, the difference between a sales engagement platform and a CRM and how we can actually make it so that the CRM or sales engagement platform is something that our reps want to use rather than something that they feel like they have to use. You're going to get some great insight from Gessie. Gessie Schechinger welcome to the show. G. Schechinger: 00:54 Hey, so nice of you to let me join. Yeah, Ian Altman: 00:56 well, you know it's early, so we haven't, we haven't ruled yet, but so far so good. Hey Jesse, can you start by sharing something surprising about you that our audience may not know? G. Schechinger: 01:08 Yeah. Well, your audience and many others that even know me might not know that well, but I actually have a massive fear of public speaking. Really? Yes, yes. Especially when you're doing any kind of like, podcasts are cool, I can manage this. I'm really good in the living room type situation where you have like six or seven but like theater or keynote speaking, which I know you do a bunch of that stuff is just, Ian Altman: 01:35 no, that's my game face on. That's, you know what I, I got some, I got some concepts that will, that will help you write through that. It's um, you know, it's kinda funny. It's um, I, I've worn a Fitbit and my heart rate goes up as people are, are introducing me and then on stage my heart rate is like at resting level, which is like just means I believe I Googled it and it says it means I'm a sociopath. G. Schechinger: 02:04 I'm pretty sure. Or did you just sort of mean? Yeah, I was like, if you have any techniques that are besides a picturing the audience naked, Ian Altman: 02:11 that worked for me very well. Yeah. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll spend some time talking about that separate from a separate, from this discussion, but I've got some things that will make you feel a whole lot more comfortable in. There's some people who are experts of that, but I can certainly give you some guidance that'll make it a little bit easier for you. And you know, the reality is that, for the people will get good at it. It just becomes kind of your happy place on stage. And in candidly, some of the people who I know are some of the best in the industry are truly introverts who are on the verge of nausea before they take the stage. I mean, they're just like [inaudible], they're amazing on stage and you know, it's like, it's a feat to get them on the stage each time. It's remarkable. I've moderated a number of events and people were amazing beforehand. They're like, man, I'm really nervous. And I'm thinking they're joking and they're dead serious. G. Schechinger: 03:03 Yeah, no, I, uh, I'll always remember the Seinfeld episode where he talks about, um, the public speaking being the highest fear above death. And so more people would rather be in the casket than talking in the funeral. That always tickled me. Ian Altman: 03:17 Yeah. Well, you know what, I don't know if that's entirely true, but it's certainly a funny episode. So, so what I want to talk about is that the world of CRM, since obviously you've got a lot of expertise in that area, what's the greatest misconception that you feel that people have when it comes to CRM? G. Schechinger: 03:35 Um, I think that if they buy the tool, the tool is going to do all the work for them. I think a lot of people when they get in and like other software, it's got to be organized. It's gonna make all these things better and then I'll realize the commitment that they're going to have to make. I'm kind of one of those garbage in, garbage out type situations. I mean, it won't do all the work for you. Well, uh, as the, uh, as the [inaudible] lazy sales guy in America, um, it'll do a lot for ya, but you definitely have to put in that kind of initial work so that your life will be easier after the fact. Ian Altman: 04:11 Yup. And, and so, so when, when you say, well look, you can't just buy the software you gotta put in the work w what do you mean by that? Like what, what, when somebody is embarking on putting in a CRM, let's say, let's say even an organization who either has a CRM that isn't doing anything for them or they've been using spit chewing gum and spreadsheets up to this point, and now they're looking to put in some sort of a system to help manage their business development. What are some of the steps that are often overlooked that they really need to make sure they get in line first? G. Schechinger: 04:44 Yeah, so a big part of it is just understanding exactly what, like you start with what can the software do for me? And I would say that most people are probably only using 20 to 30% of what the actual software can do for them simply because they don't know what they don't know. Right? And so you want to make sure that you're taking the time to completely understand all that is available for you with the tool. And then most companies I know were successful businesses prior to when they got a CRM. And so it's important that you make sure you get a software that's going to compliment. You already winning business strategy and not make you adjust to it. I mean there's some CRMs that might be only have like one pipeline available or um, a very strict way that they allow you to operate the tool you are winning in business before you got software. Software's is supposed to make your life easier and your customer experience better. And so making sure that you get something that compliments you and that you really kind of study up and train up before you make that investment because, um, make no doubt about it in most cases, changing your CRM software is going to change the culture and at least your sales team. Um, and so you have to make sure that it is a good fit. Ian Altman: 06:06 Yup. And, and one of the, one of the things that I notice, and obviously I work with a large number of sales organizations, is if you go to most salespeople and you ask them what's the greatest asset or tool that you have in your business? You and I know that in most cases, somewhere around number 187 on the list is going to be a reference to their CRM. They're not going to say, Oh, this is the thing that's really doing it for me. And there's often almost a negative perception of the platform itself. And so, so what causes that? G. Schechinger: 06:44 Yeah. And the, well the, the number one cause is that historically, um, there hasn't been enough automation inside of the CRM systems, which is the kind of difference between that and a sales engagement platform. Um, and so there hasn't been enough automation where the guy actually sees your sales going sees a benefit to it. I know that for me personally, um, I used to be a field sales guy for a lot of years and traveled 300 days a year and you know, when you get done and you're at the embassy suites and you just want to have your little cocktail hour from five 30 to seven 30, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to be doing stuff, but you ended up just entering things into the CRM because management wants to know something. You have to update your opportunity or whatever the case may be. Um, and what the difference is is how you kind of pivot out that is you have to show, um, and I, we call it kind of early adopters. G. Schechinger: 07:37 You have to show a couple early adopters, some members of your sales team and successful ones at that, um, how their actual life can be better. Cause to your point they might say that they love new products, love certain features of their company, but they're not going to say, uh, that they love their CRM because it hasn't done anything for them and a lot of things. And they kind of mentioned it was you have the CRM. And then the other side of that piece is a sales engagement platform. Um, and the first time I started talking about this, people were, were just like, Oh cute, you found a new phrase for CRM. But it is really two different things. So Ian Altman: 08:14 let's, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the difference between what an OnCourse you call a sales engagement platform versus a traditional CRM. G. Schechinger: 08:22 Yeah. So a traditional CRM is, I think we would all agree, has some couple of key functionalities, right? So you obviously have that account history portion, these account profiles, you probably have some kind of opportunity tracker that gets into some reporting. You have big customer lists, all that kind of stuff where the engagement portion happens is where you actually have, um, communication features built into that backbone of the traditional CRM functionality. So this is like having your email completely synced and powered through your CRM, being able to have your dialer software telephone. Um, you can, you probably a lot of people these days are selling through LinkedIn and so you probably want some way to track and send messages through LinkedIn coming out of your CRM. And there's a lot of that actual communication and I know that they get a bad rap and I really think that people just don't understand how to use them efficiently effective. But you also want to do sequences, which is like the email templates and drops. Um, I think there is a lot missing there because people just think of some kind of campaign to our secrets and tool as, um, you know, just an email drip. Um, and it could be used way better. Ian Altman: 09:37 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly I think that, you know, for example, one of the things that we do in my business is we ask people what they're interested in them. Based on those responses. We're, we're sharing different types of information based upon people's interests and proactively reaching out so that then if all of a sudden I'm doing an event in, in someone's region, I know of someone was interested in a certain topic area that we can message them in that, in, in that specific topic that's relevant to them as opposed to just, gee, I've got a bucket. Let me go search through it. G. Schechinger: 10:12 Yeah. I mean relevancy is key and preparation is key. I mean, Ian, when's the last time you read a three paragraph email from somebody you didn't know? Ian Altman: 10:23 Um, that would be never, G. Schechinger: 10:25 all right. And nobody does. What are the first things I do every morning and I don't know why I do it with joy. He and I just do. But I wake up and I have a bunch of emails and I crush through and delete all of the ones that I can, I know are maybe templates or I'm getting spammed. Um, and the key is, is to train up your team and show your team how they can still use the automation, but they can get the engagement too and kind of go through those words and relevancy and preparations. A big part of it. Right now in the world of sales automation, we're seeing a lot of, um, eh wild West type activity because you do have the ability to smash through 10,000 contacts a day. Uh, you can do that. It's not gonna make you look great and you know, you can probably get some success. G. Schechinger: 11:09 But making sure that you prepare and understand who that prospect list is before you put them into a sequence or some kind of marketing outreach campaign is critical. Cause the one thing you don't want to do, and especially, um, I think you probably would agree with me on this is, you know, using LinkedIn appropriately is a great example. Um, there's a certainly a place for it as an amazing, powerful place to drum up business and contact with the people you know, but you do need to treat that, um, relationship respectively. And I know for my sales team, we make sure that people, that we're reaching out to relevant people and that, you know, just pitch people randomly only, Ian Altman: 11:49 well, believe me, you know what? I do an episode periodically with a buddy of mine, Bob London, they were referred to as stupid marketing. And most of the, most of the examples of stupid marketing, are pitches that we receive on LinkedIn, where someone reaches out and says, Oh, I see my favorite is I see that we share a number of contacts in common. So I'd love to connect with you here. And I almost always respond and say, gee, what specifically inspired the connection? And 80% of the time, no one replies, yeah, Curtis shows me that it's, it's pure automation. There was no research, there was no human involvement, there is no genuine authenticity. And so I kind of put them in a list of these people are scum, and guess what? They could be great people. They're just using the tool improperly as opposed to if you connected to someone and said, Hey, I see you do this and that. I'm in that space too. I love to connect even though I don't know that we have anything for each other right now. Just seem like someone where we might have, you know, a conversation would be relevant at some point in the future. Hi. Yeah, I'll connect to that. Sure. G. Schechinger: 12:59 Yeah, and I mean the thing is is people like, so for a good example of how you use technology in that situation is LinkedIn's a personal place. In order to actually really get things done, you do need to approach it as it is going to be a future business relationship and like where technology helps you. If you are a company that is largely selling on LinkedIn or if you're interested in selling on LinkedIn, as soon as you get in there, you're going to realize if you start messaging people and connecting and really, um, doing some volume that it's going to be next to impossible to scroll through your previous messages and find out when you last talked to somebody. Um, and so use the personal connection, but use the tool. You know, I know that you know, for example, our tool, do you know, it has the LinkedIn URL right there and it has sets up your automatic followup task. And so it's triggering you to take an action, but you're not just blasting out templates, you're just reminding you to be a good steward of the relationship and do your followups accordingly. Ian Altman: 13:57 Absolutely. Now let me ask you this. So, so there's this, there's this challenge that we know that most people in sales roles don't have a positive view of the tool they're using that's supposed to be allegedly helping them in their sales role. So what are, what are the two or three things that leaders can do to actually make it so that the CRM is something that the individuals want to use or the sales engagement platform is something they want to use because fundamentally people always ask me, well, what's the best CRM? And I know you'd love for me to say it's yours, but the bottom line is I always say it's whatever one your team would want to use, that's the best one. So how do we put it? How do we position this in a way so that those individuals say, man, I love this tool. I can't live without it. G. Schechinger: 14:51 Yeah. So step one to your point is do not make this choice in isolation, right? Get some of your team members need to be involved in the selection process. Um, so that they can find out what's valuable to them. Um, oftentimes, salespeople, whether they are or not, we're always going to claim to be extremely busy, right? Um, and what we need to do is be able to have things that free up some of the more mundane tasks that we can do. And so that we accurately can burn the calories on the stuff that we actually need our brain to do. And one of those cool things for example, is the ability to, you know, when you go into a meeting and you walk out and you have this follow up, um, being able to schedule things out and see the value of like, Oh, I just did my next four emails the second I walked out of this meeting to follow up with this, um, lady or gentlemen on those talking to, it's like, okay, well that is making my life a little bit easier. G. Schechinger: 15:47 And like the other thing is having some of the like again, those mundane tasks that's automating, it's working behind the scenes and so you're actually seeing new leads come up to you. Um, I always use this statement a lot, but without burning calories and anytime that you can help somebody make more, put more money in their pocket, which ultimately puts more money in your business pocket. That's when we see engagement. I'm trying to force down a bunch of just new procedures for procedures sake. Um, that is a costly measure. And then what happens, cause I meet with business leaders all the time as well. And the bad CRM story is when all you're using it for is just pipeline. That's when you know that it did not take the hook the way that it should have. Okay. So, so what do you, what do you mean by that? G. Schechinger: 16:39 And so you people, um, you get a CRM for a couple of reasons, right? One, you want to be able to provide better customer experience, which means you need to have the notes and histories of the clients so that anyone can answer the phone and have a good understanding of how your client's history is with your business. The second reason is you want to track opportunities and you want to find out what different activities went into making this opportunity a win so that we can then duplicate those opportunities that are way more. And then lastly, it's just amplify all of those efforts, right? And so when people, sometimes if they're not engaging in the tool well enough and if the tool hasn't been set up for them to be engaged easier. And what I mean by that is it should automatically sync with your email. People are weird about email. They either going to only do it on outlook, they're going to only do it on their phone, trying to convert somebody on how they use and interact with their email after they're already in with it. Good luck. It's an uphill battle. Um, so the tool has to be able to sync to the way that they're traditionally used those metrics. And so, G. Schechinger: 17:50 and you need to automatically be capturing history into the profile cause again, that sales rep isn't going to want to sit at the end of the day and just chug a bunch of notes in there. Um, lastly, especially for field guys, if there's something that has kind of a talk to text or we can voice command in your phone and so they can be driving and entering opportunities and stuff, that makes it easier for them. But when you don't get that activity and you don't get the data into the system, what your big CRM tool, these spent all this money implementing and do, it comes into a glorified spreadsheet of you're just looking at the opportunity page and that's all you're seeing is not, you don't have any analytics, you know, because the CRM really in, should it be a compass? It should be a compass that helps you steer your business the right way and you're doing that with real information that really resulted in revenue and wins. Ian Altman: 18:40 And if you're not set up to do that, the whole process is for not, right. Yeah. I mean ideally you should be able to look in and in a sales leadership role you should be able to mentor and coach people based on, Hey, I saw this email, I saw that you had this phone call and it sounded like you were going on this path instead of that path and be able to adjust. And I think that in most cases for organizations who haven't thought through this and haven't delivered on the sales engagement a platform, what happens is it becomes a tool that an hour before the sales meeting, people start pumping in a bunch of garbage into it and says, yeah, I need to follow up again next week. Uh, get back to me this week. And they just start pumping garbage into it and to your point, garbage in, garbage out. G. Schechinger: 19:26 Well, and that's, I mean, that's a really funny point because I was in a conversation with, I mean this guy has a 740 person sales team, um, large, uh, distribution company nationwide. And his biggest beef of CRMs were, he just felt like there's this, like, to your point, you have a cadence call or a weekly sales meeting and you know, you're going to get called on the carpet. And so you're just like entering in as much stuff to talk about his possible. Um, when you hook up the engagement part and there's actually a real history to it, that stuff gets harder for salespeople to get away with because it kinda like, um, a Western movie set. It's just scaffolding. Like there's nothing behind it. And you can see in the history and notes and all the activities, it's like, ah, yeah, did this, did you just get this phone call this morning? Or exactly what happened. Ian Altman: 20:14 Sure. So, so let me ask you this. So let's say somebody says, all right, look, I'm going to go down the path of look in different, different CRMs. I'm going to look at a different platform, maybe even consider a sales engagement platform. You said step one is engage the team members. So the people are actually going to be using the system. We might even be so bold as to say, Hey guys, for the men and women on our team, what would help you in this tool? So this tool was great. What would it do that or make it so that you would rely on this tool? And we use it willingly rather than begrudgingly. So that may be the first thing then. Then what else? What else, what other kinds of questions we want to ask to make sure that we're getting the right place? G. Schechinger: 20:57 Yeah, so, um, one I would say, and it's really dependent on your sales structure, but let's say that most organizations have some kind of either an inside sales team or customers, um, customer service team or an outside sales team. Um, in the software world we're really focused on SDRs and AEs. And so you want to have a certain, you want to have impact from all of the potential stakeholders that are going to use. Um, and then what I would ask them is I would start with asking them about their daily activities, right? And it's much easier to, because you can come up with a lot of generic questions, but what you can say is, um, of the last piece of business you won, what, how many times did you talk to that client? What type of interactions did you have with that new client? Um, dig into your business process and what they actually did to get the sell. G. Schechinger: 21:52 And then of those questions should give you a couple of fruits to be like, Oh, okay. That part could have probably been automated. This part, if we made simpler, we, he could probably be doing more of these at once or she asks very situational questions and then take the fruits out of that, um, to find out what functionality you actually need because, and uh, you know, maybe not the greatest thing for me to say as I'm certainly a member of this community, but we all have tons of bells and whistles. Um, and we can all tell you exactly how, uh, amazing and important they are to your business. Um, but to degree every business is kind of a special little snowflake and you're going to have to look into your processes and how you're really winning and you're going to, in order to get that into salespeople, you have to get really, um, as salespeople, you'll get a lot of anecdotal evidence. G. Schechinger: 22:45 And so you want to do a little survey monkey with a couple of key questions, a couple of dwell position questions and be like, okay, so we do a ton of sales by email. It looks like we knew invested in email tool or I didn't realize that these guys were doing follow up SMS or text messages after every meeting and the ones where we're doing that or if we're sending him before appointments, we're really excelling so we're going to need some of that functionality of the tool. That's the kind of stuff that you had to think about and pull out of your team because you have guys winning today. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to find a complimentary tool to your existing process. Ian Altman: 23:21 You know what, I love that and just the whole notion of start with your process and how you use this. I mean I, I, and obviously I see a lot of organizations who invest a ton in these different platforms that don't pan out and the ones that are successful. I agree with you those are the ones where they say, okay, first what does each member of our team who would be using this, what's day? Like, what's a day in the life that we can help streamline and automate? What are the tools that you need instead of most organizations say, well, what does management want from a reporting standpoint? And then how can we force everybody to pump the information in to get that report out? And then it becomes something that will be filed under fiction instead of nonfictional library because everyone's just making stuff up instead of actually tracking the real history and the real engagement across the organization. G. Schechinger: 24:13 Yeah, and here's, I mean, here's a real life example of there is a company, a large manufacturing company that was basically an acquisition mode. They'd done tons of acquisitions and their customer service people were actually in, believe it or not, 87 different software systems. Um, and the one biggest pain point that came out of those questions was they had to go to like four different places for some really critical, how much money does this customers do with us? What is, you know, their order history, stuff like that. And just being able to map that all into one easy place that both sales people and customer service people like that was enough value for them, for them to save a ton of time and make the tool worth that. And so you really, you might think that you know, on what you need, but you can have a very, um, a very practical reason for why you should search for a tool or what a tool needs to do and productivity. G. Schechinger: 25:12 I mean, there's two real reasons or three I should say that people look at software, um, one their current tech stack is outdated. So you have to find something to, you're looking to increase productivity. And then obviously the third is to, you know, help drive revenue and increase revenue. And that productivity piece can, you can find some weird, um, weird little hitches in the process, so to speak, when you start really engaging your team on, to your point, what they're doing during the day and how can you know, is there a place for software to fix that? Ian Altman: 25:48 That's brilliant. Hey Jesse, what's the best way for people to learn more about what you're doing at OnCourse and to connect with you? G. Schechinger: 25:55 Hey, I'm first I would say please go to tryoncourse.com sign up for a demo. It's not one of those crazy hour long things. It's going to be brief 10, a brief 10 minute demo. We can show you exactly what the tool is capable of and if we can bring value. And then also you can find me on LinkedIn and then I'm the real Gessie on Twitter. Ian Altman: 26:15 Excellent. Gessie with a G just so he knows the real Gessie. All right Gessie. Well Hey, thanks for sharing your insight on this. I love the approach that you guys take and um, uh, hopefully some people here will take a look at encores cause I like the, I like the way that you're thinking about this whole world of sales engagement as opposed to just CRM, G. Schechinger: 26:37 eh, Ian, appreciate everything. You do, love your show. There's always a lot of good information on here and so, um, appreciate you giving me a shot and give me some time. Thanks Gessie. Ian Altman: 26:46 Let me give you a quick 32nd recap of the key information you can use and apply from this episode. First just gives you by the CRM, doesn't mean that it's going to do what you needed to do and in most cases you're going to use 20 to 30% of it. So instead of focusing on the features and capabilities, let's start from the end and ask your individuals on your team what would make their lives easier. Have them take you through a situational day in the life to make sure that you're building in the right automation and the right capabilities to support their needs. And ultimately the idea is that if you're just using it for pipeline management, you're probably not getting the most out of the tool. And be sure to check out Gessie and OnCourse. They've got a pretty interesting approach to CRM and sales engagement. Remember, this show gets us direction from you, the listener. There's a topic I should cover or a guest I should have in the program. Just drop me a note to Ian at [inaudible] dot com have an amazing week. Add value and grow revenue in a way everybody can embrace, especially your customer.