- As a sales leader have you noticed
the world of selling just changing all around you?
Well in this video we are going to be
talking about how a world class sales leader
must adapt to the future of selling.
This video is going to be an interview
with Katie Ng-Mak who is the VP of Global Partner
Strategy and Operations at HubSpot.
But she doesn't have a traditional sales background
in fact, Katie earned her MBA from Harvard business school
and has worked in finance,
but now leads a large organization
on the exact strategies that we're
going to be talking about.
Check it out.
(clicking)
Katie, welcome, glad to have you here today.
- Thanks for having me Marc.
- So I want to just jump right into it,
given your background,
what do you really see is changing
in terms of the demands and requirements of
a world class sales leader?
- That's a great question, so,
I think when people think about sales leadership,
or like a typical salesperson,
they think of someone who is really great with people.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Really great with relationships.
- [Marc] Yeah.
And I still think that's super important.
- [Marc] Yeah.
And I think that people who are in sales
just need to be great at knowing what
really would make people tick.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- But I think the modern day sales leader
need to have that skill,
they also need to be very operationally driven,
I think they also need to be very process-oriented.
- Yeah.
- So like I think the modern day sales leader
just need to have more skills under their belt,
and they tend to lean more towards someone who have
a different set of capabilities
and I think just a relationship-savvy person.
- Yeah that makes sense,
so it's no longer just this idea of having this
schmoozy, archetypal guy
or person that's just great at being
really charismatic, but it goes deeper.
So when you talk about an operational skill set,
what do you really mean by that?
- So let me give you an example.
- Yeah.
- I would say that,
you know, when I started in sales 10 years ago,
the way that I was told to
make sales is I would pick up the phone,
I would send emails, and those were
the two tools that I used.
- Yeah.
- And then basically I would look at
how many dials I made, how many emails I sent,
how many connects I made,
how many opportunities came from that,
how many presentations, how many deals we closed.
And it's actually fairly simple.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Right, even then I would say you would be
considered sophisticated if you knew all those metrics.
- Yeah.
- Today, I think it's much more complicated.
So lets say I have one of my reps,
and my reps are trying to build up their pipeline.
- Yeah.
- They would pick up the phone,
they would send emails,
they would send videos.
- Yeah.
- They would try to connect with
prospects via text messaging.
- Yeah.
- Via chat.
And the thing is that you need to meet prospects
where they are nowadays and you need to engage
them how they want to be engaged.
- Yeah.
- So just off the bat,
I named several ways by which you can just
engage to connect.
So all of a sudden,
you're entire operating system is just more complicated.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- So as a sales leader you actually need to understand
all of that, and then you need to
figure out what are the different tools
that my team needs?
How do I enable them on these tools?
How do I track the engagement of all of that?
And then how does that impact the rest of my process?
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Right, so now, I think that you need
a sales leader who can make these calls
in their changing sales environment.
Just know tools better,
build a process,
really do much more complicated enablement,
and then figure out how to track
all of this stuff,
read the data,
and call the next play.
- Yeah, so what I'm hearing,
and this definitely aligns with what I'm seeing
in the field is that
we have, obviously, far more mediums in which
we need to be connecting with prospects.
And so that's a given.
I think the organizations that I see
that are successful, like you said,
are able to build processes around that.
But that's a big task,
is building processes around,
not only what should people be using but also
how to track it, and how to do it in a way
that kind of makes it systematic.
So what would be an example,
or a strategy that a sales leader could
really use to tie all this together
so that way, if a sales leader has a team
of 15 SDRs they're not just all off using
the tools in any way?
- Yeah, so I think that,
it kind of depends on the organization.
- Right.
- I would say the first thing is that
as a sales leader, you need to determine
whether you have the operational capabilities.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- If you don't have it I think that's okay,
I think you just need a really strong operational partner.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- So you can understand the business,
but you need someone who can build
a lot of this for you.
I would say the second thing is that you
pretty much need to understand
what other people are using.
I mean most of what I'm talking about
are just software.
- Yeah, of course.
- You really just need...
A CRM.
- Of course.
- But you need a CRM that integrates
with other software solutions so that
you can track this information.
I would say like the website now,
can give the CRM a run for it's money
in terms of how important it is to a business.
- Yeah.
- So you need a really robust website.
Even if you're business,
you're customers don't transact on the website,
they engage you on the website.
And you need to be able to track that engagement
back to the information that the sales people
see in the CRM.
So you need those two systems to talk to each other.
- [Marc] Of course, of course.
So I would say that,
you also need a sales leader that understands both systems.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Or at least have partners that
do so that someone can put the picture together.
- Yeah.
So even if you're not a technically highly functional
person you can at least understand
that you know the dashboard and you have someone
who can set that up for you and measure those key metrics.
What would you first of all say are some of the key tools
that a, someone who is effective in today's
world has to at least
either master themselves,
or have access to someone who can master it,
what would you say are those key tools right now?
You mentioned already CRM,
website and tying that together,
what else would you say?
- Yeah, CRM is huge,
certainly website,
I would say a set of sales enablement tools.
- Yeah.
- You know, certainly, I work with HubSpot
and we have a bunch of capabilities there.
I think there are tons of different players there,
I think what's important though is the ability to-
you're using different pieces of software.
You really need the ability to integrate all of it.
We have some really good
call recording software as well.
And that is phenomenal for coaching.
- [Marc] Of course.
- Because it just gives,
like measures ability to just get a perspective
as to what type of conversations are happening.
- Yeah.
- And also, what prospects are saying.
- Yeah.
- Because then you can glean that insight
and just know whether you need to start pivoting.
- Yeah.
That makes complete sense.
So moving forward now,
we have an understanding of the tools.
What metrics should someone be measuring?
You mentioned at the beginning,
10 years ago it was the number of calls, right,
the opportunities in the pipeline,
but what are some of the key metrics nowadays
that a sales leader should really be focused on?
- I can tell you one that we're looking
to track here at HubSpot,
and I think- - sure.
- We were trying to figure out a really
sufficient and smart way to do it.
So we're trying to track how many referrals
that we get from our customers.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Because one of the things we realized is that
our customers are our best source of growth.
- [Marc] Of course.
- Right, certainly with the flywheel methodology.
So we believe that,
then it means that our customers are amplifying
our reach in the marketplace.
And right now we're trying to figure out
how can we track that reach?
Through the website we can track
how many visitors come through,
but we need- we're trying to figure out
maybe some of the visitors coming through aren't customers.
How do we understand and track it back to the referral?
- Yeah
- So I would say that's one.
I think that the other way I think about reporting and KPIs
is that it's not just choosing specific KPIs,
it's actually thinking about reporting not
as something that's static but something
that you can really drill down on.
- Yeah.
- So I would say that for my team,
the way we used to do reporting is
that we have high level reports,
we copy and paste screen shots in there,
and you do a business review.
With my team now I'm actually changing
the reporting this year whereby we
have a set of static reports,
but in the static reports there are so many links
that bring you into a drill down report.
- Yeah.
- So that you can take a look- I have a global business,
you can look at the same view,
see metric on a regional, country, team and rep level,
and then I think those provide you with the trends.
And that helps you figure out the very specific KPIs
that are both the leverage of your business.
- Yeah.
- And then you can constantly, honestly
just change up what you're tracking.
- Yeah it's so interesting.
I see so many clients that are literally
having a sales assistant basically export
the data into an excel spreadsheet and
then it's this static piece of information
so they can't do anything,
but if you're actually staying within the CRM-
most CRMs nowadays have the ability
to just drill down and really understand what's going on.
I think that makes a ton of sense.
You mentioned to me earlier,
before we started this conversation,
this idea of a pipeline scientist.
- [Katie] Mm-hmm.
- That a sales leader has to be a pipeline scientist.
Help me understand what that means
and how folks listening to this can start
to implement some of those ideas?
- So, my former boss who hired me, Mark Roberge,
is the one who introduced the term.
And it's a really neat term,
I think what it really brings attention to is
the fact that you actually can understand
what will be the output of your entire sales team
through looking at metrics.
Which also means that you need to be able
to track the activities of your sales organization.
So I still talk to sales teams
that run their business out of spreadsheets.
- [Marc] Yeah of course.
- And if you do that you'd more or less,
number one, lose that knowledge as soon as
the person who owns that spreadsheet leaves.
- Gosh yeah.
- And number two there's just no way to aggregate data
and capture insights when pretty much your business
is spread across ten different spread sheets,
- Yeah.
- across ten different people,
- Yeah.
- who are probably managing it all in different ways.
- Completely.
- So I would say that being a pipeline scientist
is about first just having a methodology where everyone
is thinking- all the sales reps on your team
are logging their sales activities.
They're also using the same set
of expectations around what to log.
And then you as a sales leader can take an aggregate view
of all those activities and figure out
what's working well and what's not,
and then make business decisions to try
to make your sales process more efficient.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- So just having that understanding allows you
to spend energy on the parts of the sales process
that gets you leverage and helps you drive
to better outcomes.
- Yeah, I think one of the phrases
that I always think that we as sales leaders want to avoid
is stopping by someone's desk and saying
what have you been working on?
- [Katie] Yeah.
- If you are effectively using your CRM you
should be able to just know that.
- [Katie] Mm-hmm.
- What's amazing is that if you're not
really using CRM and what's going into the pipeline,
and sales people they've got a notebook
where they're keeping track of some stuff and a spreadsheet,
and it's not having it in that one place
it's such a lost opportunity.
- Yeah, and you also don't want to just go
to a sales rep and say just do more calls.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Right? You can get more output through that
but you can probably get more efficient output
if you told them do more calls but also do this differently.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- And I think that insight can help them
be a more productive sales person,
- Yeah.
- And just help you run a more productive team.
- Totally. And also if you can be tracking
the types of people that they're making calls to,
so you can really hone in so much.
So I love this, this is so valuable.
Just to tie it up,
What would you say are one or two
real tangible things that sales leaders can
be doing today to improve the productivity
of their sales organizations?
- Some advice to a lot of sales leaders
out there in general?
- Yeah.
- I would say that if you don't have
a strong analytical background,
I would just spend time on activities
that allow you to build some of those skills.
- Yeah.
- For example, I encourage my team of managers
to spend time on operationally heavy projects.
Projects that involves looking at a lot of data.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- Learning how to pull the data,
learning how to run your business
through gathering insights on that data.
And I didn't- that in itself is such an important skill set.
I think it's gonna be the baseline requirement
of any sales leader in the future.
- [Marc] Yeah.
- You could probably get away a little bit nowadays
not having that skill set,
but I think within a couple of years
that's going to be the expectation.
If you're going to be a sales leader,
you need to be great with relationships,
you need to be great at managing people,
but man you better be able to identify
the opportunities in your business
through a set of data and figure out how to pivot it.
- Yeah, I love to see the trend.
I see it in my work.
The idea of the archetypal image of a sales leader
I feel is becoming nerdier and nerdier.
(laughter)
Which I think is really cool.
The image of 1980 was totally Glengarry Glen Ross.
He was Alec Baldwin coming in and really hardcore.
And now I think we just see that it's
so much more nuanced.
It's really- We live in this amazing age where there's
so much powerful data out there.
If you're not utilizing it you're missing out on so much.
- Yeah, and the businesses that use the data will
understand their customers better.
And if your customers are convinced that
you understand them better,
they will trust you more and you will win their business.
- That's so powerful.
There's a direct line between understanding
the data and ultimately increasing sales.
- Mm-hmm.
- Well Katie, this has been fantastic.
I'm so grateful for you talking to us today.
Thank you.
- Thank you for your time.
- Of course.
So there is my interview of Katie Ng-Mak
the VP of Global Partner Strategy and Operations
at HubSpot on how a world class sales leader
must adapt to the future of selling.
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