Episode 423: Elevating Sales Through Process and Coaching

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Enjoy the show.

00:00:46:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m your host, Brynne Tillman, and I am excited to introduce you to today’s guest.

00:00:53:07 – (Brynne Tillman): George Brontén is a lifelong entrepreneur and the founder of membrane, a leading B2B growth platform dedicated to enhancing sales process and empowering sales professionals. With years of experience in sales enablement.

00:01:08:01 – (Brynne Tillman): George recently launched elevate, a coaching platform

00:01:12:01 – (Brynne Tillman): that guides and coaches sellers to higher performance. George, welcome to the show. 

00:01:19:07 – (George Brontén): Thank you very much. Happy to be here. 

00:01:21:15 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m thrilled to have you here today. And I’m really excited to dive into sales process and best practices in coaching. But before we go into your genius, we ask all of our guests one question what does making sales social mean to you?

00:01:38:15 – (George Brontén): You know, when I got that question, I read the question,

00:01:41:09 – (George Brontén): heard or in my head, I saw,

00:01:43:18 – (George Brontén): social selling, which is, you know, a phrase that I’ve been kind of allergic to

00:01:49:20 – (George Brontén): because it sounds almost like, you know, there’s a shortcut that by being sold on social media, sales will be somehow automatic.

00:01:59:21 – (George Brontén): So that was my first to go to, but then I it’s social sales for me, which is how you phrased it is different. I think it’s all about, you know, gaining trust.

00:02:10:21 – (George Brontén): And that human-to-human connection,

00:02:13:09 – (George Brontén): where we, sellers, really can help someone to get from one place to another place in their business or in whatever they’re trying to,

00:02:22:07 – (George Brontén): accomplish.

00:02:22:24 – (George Brontén): So I think for me, social selling is human-to-human based,

00:02:28:15 – (George Brontén): business,

00:02:29:09 – (George Brontén): consulting almost, or,

00:02:31:01 – (George Brontén): you know

00:02:31:12 – (George Brontén): helping someone reach higher goals.

00:02:34:11 – (Brynne Tillman): thank you for that. And as a social selling trainer, I just want to clear the air that, really done well, it’s about leveraging relationships.

00:02:45:04 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s about identifying pathways to buyers through the power of social media or or at LinkedIn in my case.

00:02:53:12 – (Brynne Tillman): But,

00:02:54:02 – (Brynne Tillman): I totally understand where some of the misconceptions on social selling comes from.

00:02:59:00 – (Brynne Tillman): there’s no easy button, but,

00:03:01:09 – (Brynne Tillman): using your relationships makes selling simpler, for sure. But I’m very excited to have you here. And I’m going to start with the first question, which is what inspired you to start membrane? And why did you choose to closely collaborate with sales development experts in your work?

00:03:21:00 – (George Brontén): The background is quite easy. I, ran another company, before I started membrane. And, I struggled to build a sales team. So I hired a lot of salespeople, and I fired a lot of salespeople.

00:03:34:10 – (George Brontén): So I hired and fired, hired and fired until I sort of sat down and really had to think about it.

00:03:41:00 – (George Brontén): What’s the problem here? Really? And, first I was blaming the recruiters. I was blaming the people that I hired, that they weren’t the right ones because of the CVS. And blah blah blah. But of course, I was the only common denominator.

00:03:56:01 – (George Brontén): So

00:03:56:10 – (George Brontén): I came to that realization that, okay, there’s something that I’m doing that’s not working.

00:04:02:15 – (George Brontén): And, that conclusion was that I was making a bunch of faulty assumptions on how salespeople ought to be ought to know ought to do,

00:04:13:03 – (George Brontén): and that the product that we sold was quite complex.

00:04:16:23 – (George Brontén): And I didn’t really realize that in the beginning. So I guess the conclusion was, okay, selling is very different depending on what you sell. And sellers need guidance, much more coaching, guidance, training. And then I that I was, giving them. 

00:04:35:70 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh okay, so that inspired membrane. How does membrane kind of fix that. 

00:04:42:04 – (George Brontén): Yeah that inspired the idea of trying to find the delta between what I was doing because I was selling successfully and what the sellers who did not succeed were doing.

00:04:54:09 – (George Brontén): And I realized that I was, you know, picking things up, that they weren’t picking up. So they were basically pitching product where I was trying to fix

00:05:03:23 – (George Brontén): what the customer was struggling with.

00:05:07:07 – (George Brontén): So I made

00:05:08:15 – (George Brontén): number of different things in my sort of sales process, although I didn’t have a sales process, you know, written down.

00:05:15:21 – (George Brontén): But in my head, I had I, I knew what to do when I encountered,

00:05:21:22 – (George Brontén): problems. And I knew what I had to do to prevent problems within the sales cycle.

00:05:27:04 – (George Brontén): So I wrote down this. What am I doing? Which are the milestones I’m hitting? Which people need to be involved? How do I speak to these different people?

00:05:35:00 – (George Brontén): And then I started interviewing and going on ride alongs with the salespeople, and I realized, wow, there’s a big mismatch here.

00:05:41:04 – (George Brontén): They think they’re talking to the decision makers of they’re jumping to the close. And there are so many things that they were sort of missing.

00:05:49:04 – (George Brontén): So the idea behind membrane was really how can I visualize what I’m doing and what we ought to be doing in order to sell successfully and by visualizing it and making it or putting it into a tool

00:06:05:13 – (George Brontén): by just using the tool, you learn how to do things in the right way.

00:06:10:08 – (George Brontén): So that was kind of the idea behind building a visual sales process with an embedded how to or call it methodology and training.

00:06:18:22 – (George Brontén): And I went to the CRM vendors and they were all like, yeah, you know, we don’t really do it that way,

00:06:24:22 – (George Brontén): but, you could customize our tool. It’ll cost you like X amount of money.

00:06:29:03 – (George Brontén): And, you know, being in software all my life, I knew that. Okay, I can do that

00:06:33:04 – (George Brontén): and it’ll be half good. And then they will update the software and everything breaks.

00:06:38:11 – (George Brontén): that’s how I came to the idea that there is a big need for this kind of technology. So I’ll just build them, build it. And that’s how membrane got started.

00:06:49:09 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that, I love when things come out of our own need. Right. Like when you have a product. Gosh, I wish I had this. All right. Let’s create it. So that’s how we created Ask SSL. And so I’m like I want a product for me. And then yeah well know. Oh okay. Now I can sell it.

00:07:09:06 – (Brynne Tillman): But I love it. So you’ve mentioned sales process a few times, and I could not agree more that having cadence process sequences is the key to consistent pipeline, consistent success.

00:07:23:10 – (Brynne Tillman): But when you’re talking with salespeople, often you get pushback, right? Like, I want to do it my way,

00:07:30:23 – (Brynne Tillman): right? So talk to me a little about how do you combat that negative,

00:07:36:15 – (Brynne Tillman): perception of process.

00:07:40:02 – (George Brontén): Yeah. That’s a good question. And, before I answer that I realized that I didn’t answer your second question you asked in the previous section, which was, why do we work with sales development expert?

00:07:54:16 – (George Brontén): And that can maybe also answer some of this, because what we saw pretty early on

00:07:59:01 – (George Brontén): is that when we went out to sell membrane and sell the idea of membrane, a lot of people were where I was, you know, they didn’t have a sales process.

00:08:08:22 – (George Brontén): They, their best salespeople were doing things right and they were doing it successfully. But nobody has had ever sort of extracted that knowhow out of their brains and put it into a visual and you know, executable sales process.

00:08:22:23 – (George Brontén): when we started asking them, like, what would you do to fix this problem you have that you’re not?

00:08:28:23 – (George Brontén): Not all salespeople are successful in your company. And most of them came back with, well, what we would do is we would go to a sales expert to sales development expert, sales trainer, sales consultant, and we’d ask them to help us and what we saw is that, okay, what you really will be asking for is the how, like, how should we be selling?

00:08:51:07 – (George Brontén): And that’s what many sales, the trainers that we work with, they have a sales methodology. They have,

00:08:57:01 – (George Brontén): training system. They have a lot of knowhow,

00:09:00:14 – (George Brontén): but it’s not really embedded in technology. So we felt, wow, if we could combine technology and all these know-how, that’s how we can drive behaviors, because in the end, that’s how I see this.

00:09:12:14 – (George Brontén): It’s about driving the right behaviors.

00:09:14:06 – (George Brontén): And to the question

00:09:15:04 – (George Brontén): why do people not like sales process? I think as humans we want autonomy.

00:09:21:18 – (George Brontén): we don’t like to be told what to do.

00:09:25:07 – (George Brontén): Especially when we’re experts in a field. We don’t want anyone to tell us what to do. So I don’t really see process as, you know, as, like a recipe,

00:09:35:00 – (George Brontén): okay, take this much of salt and this much of this.

00:09:38:05 – (George Brontén): And that’s not really how I see process. Process to me is just, you know, well-thought-through milestones that help you guide a potential buyer to get their ducks in a row and define their issue, their problem, their intended outcome, and figure out a solution of it that you will be a part of.

00:09:58:18 – (George Brontén): And depending on what you sell, that can take, you know,

00:10:02:01 – (George Brontén): it can go quickly if you have a very simple product or it can be a quite long sales process with with many stakeholders involved.

00:10:09:14 – (George Brontén): So I usually talk to salespeople who have their, you know, their arms crossed. About the checklist manifesto. I don’t know if you know the book, but you know, the surgeon who introduced checklists and they reduced the number of deaths, with 47%. And if surgeons, you know, can embrace a checklist, certainly salespeople can as well, because it’s really difficult to have everything in your top of mind.

00:10:36:11 – (George Brontén): Right.

00:10:37:02 – (George Brontén): If you have if you’re working 20 deals in your pipeline and you have, you know, seven stakeholders in each deal, it’s not even, you know,

00:10:44:16 – (George Brontén): maybe some people can hold that all in their head. I can’t, so I need something to help me keep myself on track.

00:10:52:07 – (George Brontén): So process is not really, you know, prescriptive do ABCD and you will always get a deal.

00:10:58:17 – (George Brontén): But it’s more of okay. Remember to always, you know understand the customer situation. The stakeholders have them tell you what the problem is and then etc. Yeah. Like

00:11:10:13 – (George Brontén): more about guiding and keeping track of what you should be doing so you don’t miss any important things. Like if you everybody hates it when someone pops up, you know, last minute.

00:11:21:13 – (George Brontén): Oh, you know, Bob came in here. He said, we can’t do this project now.

00:11:25:11 – (George Brontén): who the hell is Bob? Why did he show up now last minute? Because you have not, you know, properly, understood. 

00:11:32:70 – (Brynne Tillman): You missed a check.

00:11:34:98 – (George Brontén): Yeah. You missed the check. You missed you know, you have to know that stuff. But it’s easy to forget, right?

00:11:41:10 – (George Brontén): So

00:11:41:24 – (George Brontén): process to me is memory Yeah, just use the checklist like memory.

00:11:48:10 – (George Brontén): Definitely.

00:11:49:13 – (Brynne Tillman): So one thing I know as a LinkedIn and social selling trainer is training isn’t enough. And even process training process is not necessarily enough. It takes coaching. It takes the consistent upskilling and learning from each mistake. And so talk to me about why you launched elevate and how that has improved the experience of your clients.

00:12:20:12 – (George Brontén): Yeah that’s a good one. It’s a newest product is two weeks old. I’ve been talking about it and blogging about it for years. And to me it’s all about getting closer to the individual.

00:12:31:14 – (George Brontén): And it’s funny if you think about it. Like if you go into your the tool a salesperson uses any CRM, where do they go to see everything that’s about them?

00:12:41:18 – (George Brontén): It’s like there is no such page.

00:12:44:17 – (George Brontén): There’s no view where it’s all about you, your professional development,

00:12:49:10 – (George Brontén): you know, and your coaching and who’s coaching you and who’s helping you.

00:12:53:19 – (George Brontén): So that was the intention here. We want a sort of called a room or a space in a, in the software that is all about you. The sales person and the person who will be coaching you to help you improve in your work.

00:13:08:23 – (George Brontén): So because I’m a strong believer that coaching is super important. So no matter if you’re an athlete or if you’re business professional,

00:13:18:23 – (George Brontén): you have the answers within yourself, but you need someone to extract them from you. Or have you extract them from yourself, rather. And that’s what a good coach can help you do. So that’s sort of the background.

00:13:32:23 – (George Brontén): And the reason another, you know, big, reason is that I believe that frontline sales managers is a huge leverage point because oftentimes we, companies promote great salespeople into managers, but they don’t give them, you know, the right training and tools and support to be great managers.

00:13:56:00 – (George Brontén): So elevate is also about helping the managers do a better job in supporting their people and growing through their people.

00:14:04:22 – (Brynne Tillman): So that makes so much sense and I appreciate that.

00:14:07:17 – (Brynne Tillman): So all of this really falls under the umbrella of sales enablement, right? Like it’s all how do we enable our sales to be more effective, more efficient? How are we optimizing the talent on our team? How are we not missing checks in our processes?

00:14:23:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Tell me a little bit about your personal or your professional perspective and sales enablement strategy, so that our listeners, you know, sales and enablement, kind of like you said, social selling has this bad connotation out there.

00:14:41:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Sales enablement sometimes does, too, right. Like, well, what do they do? You just hang out between sales and marketing. But, really all of sales functions on sales enablement.

00:14:53:02 – (Brynne Tillman): so I’d love to hear your perspective on sales enablement. 

00:14:57:73 – (George Brontén): Yeah sure and absolutely. And I think, in our space, the tech space or the SaaS space where software vendors have a lot of cash, oftentimes everybody wants to own a category.

00:15:08:22 – (George Brontén): And a few years back, sales enablement sort of popped up. And the sales enablement society was a thing. So a lot of vendors wanted to sort of own that category.

00:15:20:01 – (George Brontén): And in the beginning, I felt that sales enablement was sort of, molded by these vendors, thoughts about what sales enablement ought to be, which was very much focused on content, like placing the right type of sales content into the hands of the salesperson at the right time.

00:15:38:04 – (George Brontén): That became sort of the definition, almost of sales enablement. I think in the beginning, at least from my sort of technology perspective.

00:15:46:12 – (George Brontén): And I was pretty much also on the land department, like learning and development came up. Those people were very involved, I think, in sales enablement, like, okay, training content, learning content, you know, pitch decks and all that stuff.

00:16:03:18 – (George Brontén): But for me, I think sales enablement is more about, okay, what is our strategy like as a company? Where do we want to go?

00:16:14:11 – (George Brontén): And what’s our ideal customer? Who can we help, and be profitable by doing so. And then we have to figure out how do we get to those customers, how do we sort of make them aware that we exist?

00:16:29:20 – (George Brontén): And then how do we engage these people into dialog, and how do we then become a part of the solution to fix their problem or

00:16:36:17 – (George Brontén): achieve their outcome?

00:16:38:05 – (George Brontén): Which is why I’m so focused on process. Because process to me is the execution of your strategy. And if you don’t have a process that is tied to your strategy,

00:16:49:11 – (George Brontén): and you basically just wing it.

00:16:52:02 – (George Brontén): So I think for me,

00:16:52:19 – (George Brontén): sales enablement

00:16:53:12 – (George Brontén): is how to better execute your strategy.

00:16:56:20 – (George Brontén): for that to happen, you need process. Yeah, of course you need some kind of, you know, way of selling,

00:17:02:07 – (George Brontén): we can call methodologies and training. You need coaching. Of course. You need,

00:17:07:06 – (George Brontén): some kind of content to support you in this.

00:17:10:04 – (George Brontén): You need marketing to do well,

00:17:12:01 – (George Brontén): but I guess you could also throw in customer success in this, because if you don’t make customers happy, they won’t renew, they won’t come back, and you won’t get referrals, which is also sales enablement.

00:17:24:13 – (George Brontén): So it’s, yeah, it’s a broad concept. I see it as basically anything that help you, execute your sales strategy.

00:17:32:18 – (Brynne Tillman): So I think that’s,

00:17:33:15 – (Brynne Tillman): just such a critical piece of all of this, and, I’m, I have seen sales enablement. Really, morph over the years. And,

00:17:44:00 – (Brynne Tillman): I think it’s really a foundational role,

00:17:47:13 – (Brynne Tillman): in today, even though it’s sort of been dismissed in some ways. But I think it really is the bridge between sales and marketing in a lot of ways.

00:17:59:01 – (Brynne Tillman): How are we using Mark in some ways not, you know, how are we using marketing for salespeople? And then how are the salespeople executing what marketing as provided. But then also the tools and the making sure they have the skills. So,

00:18:14:13 – (Brynne Tillman): I really see membrane as a very powerful sales enablement tool, whether it’s a replacement for a CRM or I think you also enhance other CRM, right?

00:18:25:18 – (Brynne Tillman): For companies that are married to their CRM.

00:18:30:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So what would you say is, I’d say are the top three changes that you see in your clients when they have a system, a process in place, like membrane?

00:18:46:21 – (George Brontén): I’d say first off, just clarity. Clarity of what are we doing. Because sometimes, especially for top management, I think sales I mean, the sales function can be kind of a black box. They don’t really know what’s going on. So having a visual, you know, guiding sales process really helps to get that clarity and insights and transparency into the work.

00:19:11:05 – (George Brontén): Another thing is, of course, that once you have all those things defined, you will also get all the right KPIs, because that’s another thing that if you’re using, you know, traditional CRM, it’s really hard to get the right KPIs in place and trust the forecasts. Because if you don’t really know, for instance, when you should put something into the pipeline,

00:19:30:21 – (George Brontén): everybody does it differently because there’s no qualification criteria.

00:19:35:00 – (George Brontén): For instance, then how can you even trust the sales cycle length KPI? You can’t so that the KPIs and just trusting the data that comes out of it for your forecasts, just that’s a game changer.

00:19:50:13 – (George Brontén): And, well, I could come up with a many, but maybe the top of mind comes to mind is onboarding just becomes so much easier

00:20:00:05 – (George Brontén): when you bring on a new sales person, when it’s all laid out in front of you, like, this is who we target, this is how we qualify.

00:20:08:09 – (George Brontén): This is how we engage. This is how we know which stakeholders we should speak to. This is what happens if you encounter competitor X, etc. You know, it’s just so much easier instead of just saying, okay, here’s the sales process. Process. It’s a drop down of four stages and you do your thing.

00:20:30:04 – (George Brontén): It’s like, right okay.

00:20:33:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. You’re picking the best case scenario, not the real scenario.

00:20:39:13 – (George Brontén): Right. It’s really And I think another biggie is what happens when people leave if everything is in their heads. You have you built those structures capital around sales. So when you’re a sales leader leaves or when your best salespeople leave and you’re left with people who don’t really know the job well, you’re pretty much screwed until you can find someone who really knows the game.

00:21:03:04 – (George Brontén): So just having the sales process and the how to do things is so important in my head.

00:21:10:12 – (Brynne Tillman): So I just kind of I want to dovetail off that for one second. How does membrane solve that at the like for how does membrane help to download what’s in those sales folks brains. 

00:21:23:67 – (George Brontén): Yeah, I’d say I mean the easiest way to to visualize the health, visualize it verbally is like seeing it as a checklist on steroids, which is, dynamic and provides you a very good overview of all the milestones you need to hit.

00:21:40:13 – (George Brontén): So not really not a checklist as a recipe, but rather a checklist of milestones and things that have to be achieved in order for the customer to make a buying decision that hopefully includes you. So it’s about having it sales process that goes much deeper than just a four stage drop down or drop, drag and drop kanban board like it goes much deeper. And but it’s also dynamic so it doesn’t overwhelm sellers. 

00:22:13:11 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. Well, I cannot thank you enough for your insights. My last question is, what questions should I have asked you that I didn’t?

00:22:26:24 – (George Brontén): Well I mean, my initial reaction would be, why hasn’t, sales process been more embraced by companies?

00:22:35:06 – (George Brontén): But we kind of touched on that. So maybe I need to come up with another one. What do you say?

00:22:40:06 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay. Well, what if we dive down to what are the top three reasons sales leaders are now embracing,

00:22:51:24 – (Brynne Tillman): process instead of random acts of sales?

00:22:55:20 – (George Brontén):I think right now it’s a pretty.

00:22:59:14 – (George Brontén): Maybe not everywhere in the world in, in every industry. But I think the last year or two has been kind of rough for many.

00:23:06:00 – (George Brontén): And it’s when the going gets tough that they’re tough gets

00:23:10:20 – (George Brontén): get going. Right. We have to a lot of companies and leaders have realized that, wow, we can’t just leave this to chance.

00:23:17:14 – (George Brontén): We have to find out our way of selling. And I’ve heard a lot of these lately, actually, that the company name way of selling is something that you are rolling. Companies are rolling out because we can’t just leave it to chance. We have to know how we do things to be successful. I think that’s probably the main thing that comes to mind for me.

00:24:42:19 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s fantastic. Thank you so much. So,

00:23:47:08 – (Brynne Tillman): for our listeners and those that are like, wow, I want to learn more about membrane. Tell us, tell them, tell us what we should do. What comes next.

00:23:56:02 – (George Brontén): Yeah. Go to membrane.com. That’s the easiest way you can try the software out. You can create the trial.

00:24:03:00 – (George Brontén): There’s a free version. And of course the coaching platform is available as well. And if you want to follow me, I’m on LinkedIn. Easy to find. I have a strange last name.

00:24:12:14 – (George Brontén): I blog once a week, so please follow my blog if you’re interested in complex B2B sales. And that’s membrane.com/blog.

00:21:18:06 – (Brynne Tillman): Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your insights today.

00:24:24:15 – (Brynne Tillman): I really appreciate it. And to all our listeners, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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