Bring More Certainty and Less Volatility to Sales

Heidi Messer started Collective[i] with one goal: to bring more certainty and less volatility to sales and improve the livelihoods of every single employee.

According to Heidi, sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales. Higher productivity equals more certainty, so why not improve it. If sales improves every other department has more opportunity. 

In order to bring more certainty and less volatility , Collective[i] focuses on two main innovations:

1. Automate everything possible in the sales process in order to reduce seller admin work and improve CRM accuracy;
2. Train teams on the agile sales process in order to scale revenue.

This is one of the most comprehensive interviews on the modern sales process I’ve ever recorded.  

Highlights:

01:19 All of the time that is spent trying to fix the problems in CRM, we fix so that sellers can sell, managers can coach, and everybody else has absolute transparency into what's happening. 

02:23 Nobody trusts the pipeline reviews. So let's just start with a clean capture of data into the CRM and have it done automatically. Nobody has to worry about trusting it.

02:36 You know that sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales.

03:16 Instead of trying to figure out what happened, we want people to focus on adapting to what's likely to happen.

04:25 What was interesting about the mid 2000s is we actually saw marketing transform from being a gut based endeavor to one that was highly scientific, very adaptive and focused on optimization.

06:54 We're going to own siloed data, not just within companies, but between companies. Everybody told us it wouldn't work. I'm convinced that if you haven't heard that, you don't have a good idea.

07:33 Sales is the lifeblood of companies. Our entire economy depends on sales. If you can bring more certainty to sales and less volatility, you impact the livelihoods of every single person employed by a company.

08:17 There's no entrepreneur I've met who isn't a great salesperson.

10:21 When you start out with a new product you have to find out what's important to their (you customer’s) business? How am I going to persuade them to try this new thing? And then somehow I think what happens when you grow is you get out of that habit of thinking that way,

11:12 There's a significant portion of companies that still believe sales itself is a process, meaning sales is an assembly line. It’s not, it’s more like a sport that needs a playbook and lots of practice.

13:51 So imagine now you have to hire salespeople who sell to people who sell.

15:53 You have to hire salespeople who are able to be trusted advisers. Do they have fundamental sales skills? Do they have enough knowledge that they can provide people with advice on how to move forward and not just explain something?

16:58 I think there's a massive defining line that happened after COVID, and I don't think we're going back.

17:49 There's a particular kind of sales leader who can sell innovation and there's a kind of sales leader who wants to sell the status quo.

22:33 If you're a good founder, you pick advisors who are smarter than you. I want to hire an expert in something that I may not be an expert in.

25:39 We have to do a better job of training our sales teams.

27:13 We drink our own champagne.

27:57 We switched to Agile.

29:11 Agile sales describes an organization that's working perfectly in sync to adapt to changes that are happening real time in marketplaces.

31:46 We automated everything that they were doing that was low value. So there's not a seller that spends more than 10 minutes