This is why a $200M company stops growing

Mick, thanks for having me. We're really looking I was really looking forward to speaking with you.

Evolve? Yeah, no, good good question. So my traditional career, meaning working for companies, I've been vice president of sales for two venture capital backed startups, both in software. But as you mentioned, I've also been vice president of sales within a $17 billion division of General Electric. And as you might imagine, those are two entirely different animals, different organizations, different structures. But the commonality between the two is the simple fact that it was my job to hire the right people, train them with the right skills, empower them to. use those skills to generate interest with the appropriate customers about products or services we offer and to manage that process until there was an actual transaction an actual sale so those are the two common things and i've also in the latter part of my traditional career have been Vice President of Sales at three different private equity portfolio companies. And in private equity, as as as I'm sure you know, it's it's a firm, a private firm, who purchases an an operating business. It's already operating. And they use debt to purchase that company as well as cash. And the goal is to pay the debt down over three to five years and increase the sales and profitability over that same period of time. And after that, three to five years, that company will be sold. And the companies and people with equity, including myself, would cash out. And so after the third. private equity portfolio that I was brought on as the head of sales for that organization, having equity, and being cashed out. I scratched my head, Mick, and asked myself, what are you going to do now? What are you going to do when you grow up? And the interesting thing that helped me in my traditional job was you have to appreciate that When most companies, most companies need or want a new head of sales, it's typically because things are not going well. Sales are not hitting the expectations of the owners or the board. so I'm typically walking into a situation that needs to be fixed, certainly altered. And Throughout my traditional career, I created some tools. And these tools would help me triage and help the team triage, all right, what is our sales strategy now? Let's level set where we are today. What is it? What is our sales strategy? Are there other markets that are growing faster that we should be penetrating? Are there other channels that we should be considering? And we looked at the sales process. Well, how do we generate leads? And once we get a lead, how do we develop that lead into an actual sale? Right? How long does it take? How many steps does it take? what defines a qualified opportunity? All those things are important. By the way, we're also incorporating what marketing is doing to help on the what we like to call the top of the funnel, where the Bottom of the funnel is typically where sales starts to actual sales people start interacting. And out of the output of that funnel are actual sales. So it's looks just like a funnel would look. So we then also take a hard look at the sales organization, the people, the structure, the compensation program. Is it is it driving, motivating the right behavior? from our sales team? do we have the right people with the right skills and mindset to be successful? And the other question is are there other sales models we should consider? For example, oftentimes we work with manufacturing companies. I've worked with manufacturing companies and they may have their own direct sales organization. Going to OEMs, going to other potential customers. Well, if the manufacturing organization has capacity, we could sell that capacity for something else, or to a different organization, if you will, to use that capacity. Or we could use a different distribution model, such as third-party agents or actual distributors for our product. Rather than going direct. So we look at all of those things, and the output is a grade, each of those the strategy, sales process, sales organization, and we then determine exactly what we need to do in order to improve sales. Is it a strat is the root cause, if you will? Is it a Strategy the root cause is this is sales process the root cause? Is it sales organization? And oftentimes it's a combination of at least two of those things. And we create a very specific prioritized plan for our client in ANOVO. But when I was working for other companies, it was my plan to implement at that company. And we execute and then we help them to actually deploy. And make those plans a reality. So we do the homework to determine what we're doing well, what we could be doing better. We create a very specific actionable plan to change things to improve sales and profitability. And then we roll up our sleeves and dig in and help execute that plan. So that's what we do. That's what we That's how it all started for me. And so I'm basically doing the same thing I've been doing since I got into sales leadership many decades ago. But we do it now for only B2B companies, business to business, and their size anywhere from five million smallest up to about 200 million dollars of turn or turnover, you know. Top line revenue. That's where we focus. That's where most of our clients come from. So it's fun. And our revenue model is such that if they engage us to deploy the plan, to put the plan into action, to oversee their sales organization, provide sales coaching and training and help with.

infrastructure like the CRM, look at processes that they're currently doing and could we optimize those? I mean AI, we're huge fans and promote the use of AI within a sales process. There's many, depending on what you're doing, there's many ways to incorporate this new technology to help you get things done faster and in less time. So it's a huge efficiency tool, not applicable to everything. one of the things I'm often asked is you know, will AI replace salespeople? Will AI replace sales leadership? And I suppose from a conceptual standpoint, yeah, eventually it will. Like it will replace pretty much everything that we humans do. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's pretty far in the future, in my opinion. But as it stands today, I do see it impacting people's jobs. I haven't seen it as much in sales, but I've definitely seen it with clients that we have in software development, for example, in some customer support. areas in customer service areas and this is actual companies that we work with i'll give you a good example we we had a client who's in the logistics industry and they basically broker with the company that's shipping with the with the company that will do the trucking to do the actual shipping to truck the products And this brokerage, shipping broker, negotiates with other shippers to try to get the best deal. And that was been done by humans for as long as it's been done, but they incorporated AI. And now the AIs actually do the negotiation in real time. In a conversationally and also digitally where appropriate, and it's not like the AI is getting better deals. Here's the difference if you have one person human doing this work, they can talk to one potential broker or sor excuse me, shipper at one time. The AI model can talk to speak with eight hundred and fifty. at one time, right? Or more than that for that matter. So that's just an example of where the technology has helped to improve and scale businesses. I also find that our capacity, our capacity, and I think this should be the case with every business, whether you're B2B or B2C for that matter, the ability to get more done in less time. So I can flat out tell you I am personally more productive in the amount of time that I have than I was in the past by using some of these tools. I'll give you a quick example. we have another client they're about a 200 million dollar company and they have three different sales organizations or sales People. They have account managers. They have outside sales reps. And they have branch design consultants. They're called design consultants. And each of these have a different role with the different customers that purchase the same product that they sell. It's different channels, if you will. And the company had grown, and they have 26 branches now. And the problem they were having is they couldn't scale. They they they had gotten to two approximately 200 million dollars in turnaround and kind of flatlined for a couple years. And when we did our assessment, And recommendations, I went back to the CEO with some of these results, and I I said, overall, this is the issue. You're a 200 million dollar company acting like a 20 million dollar company. You're selling the same things, you're doing the same things that you were doing when you were 20 million, where one person would wear many hats. Within the organization and could take on different roles as it was needed. Very reactionary. And that's good. I mean, when you're smaller, that's that's a valuable skill. But if you want to grow and then continue to grow, the specialization and standardization becomes extremely, extremely important. So that's precisely one of the things we did. We created sales playbooks for each of these groups. To standardize the sales process, to standardize the language, to standardize the system that each person would use. Now, the way we did that though, because we've created many, many playbooks, but using AI, first we got individual groups of their best design consultants, individual groups of their best account managers. Individual groups of their outside sales reps, and we created an outline of what should be in a best in class sales playbook. Here are the chapters, if you will, the topics. And then we interviewed this group over the course of seven weeks. Each week we'd ask more questions about each of these sections. When they had some sort of document or resource, we'd ask them to send it to us. So in the end, we had recordings of Every one of these great detail from their best people. And AI then created the three different sales playbooks. And they were they're fantastic. They're there's some of the, in fact, I'll say it, they're the best ones we've ever created. and AI was a huge part of that. And then moving on, they also have SharePoint, where they would store information internally so that people can access it. So we work with their IT department, said, look, let's put each of these playbooks and all the resources that supports all the documents and forms and such into a SharePoint protected folder. And we're gonna layer over it AI. So in this case, it was Microsoft, they use Copilot. So now the salespeople, if they have a question, if they're new, if they're more seasoned, if they have a question about Process like how do I put a product on hold, for example? Well, they can use natural language, type that into the AI, and it will spit out the answer. They don't have to go and access the entire sales playbook. It will provide any specific documents that were required. It will reference the specific locations where where this information came from, and they can move on. And again, in terms of scalability, this greatly reduced questions that the branch managers, their bosses were constantly getting like, How do I do this? How do I do that? Particularly newer people. So it shrunk the onboarding time significantly. So the people they hired were actually able to be productive in it in less time than they were in the past. So those are some examples in in the real world of where we've used AI. To help do things faster and more often with equal and to some degree, you could argue, better quality. It's consistent anyway. There's consistency in in the output. And yeah, we're doing a lot more and more of that. A lot more than that. But one thing about AI too that gets lost. People say, well, again, what's the future look like? And yes, technology in general has changed and will continue to change how we work. No doubt. And I often use the analogy of Excel spreadsheets, right? Well, I was around before Excel and It was actually a different product, it wasn't a Microsoft product, were these electronic spreadsheets. And prior to that, there would be large buildings with multiple floors of accountants adding things up with adding machines. That's that's how it was done. So using a tool like Excel allowed folks to get that done much faster without as many resources, much certainly a lot less costly. and yes, people lost jobs. They were repurposed in other areas of the company or got entirely different careers in different areas. But nonetheless, that is that is technology. That is progress. And it's been happening since man discovered fire was useful for cooking food, you know, and and keeping warm. So that will always be the case. But but the common denominator, which has not changed, which is where I still believe certainly management, sales leadership in our case is still highly relevant, is the human being. We, us, we have not changed. We still have the same fundamental motivations, same desires, same procurlivity to Find the easy way, faster way, right? The path of least resistance. That's those these are all human things that haven't changed either. Nor will any technology ever change those things. I mean in the end it sounds crass, but we evolved from you know from invertebrates, you know, into to you know, species that were bipedal. we're we're animals. I'd like to think we're we're good animals, but nonetheless we're still a species of on the planet that has its own limitations, its own foibles. So that that animal is the same. So when it comes to managing and and using the talents of a group of people, focusing those talents into a particular direction, that's a nuanced skill that requires human input collectively. So leadership is still and will be for as for a long time, still a very, very valuable skill.

And profitable. And profitable. And I mean that's a that's well it is important if you want to grow. organizations that aren't profitable aren't gonna be in business long, you know. The there's many reasons why people would say a business is no longer in business, but in the end there's only one reason they spent more than they generated Right. It's it's that simple. Mm-hmm out than coming in. That's not sustainable.

Yeah, thanks, Mick. the best place is just to go to our website. It's Innovo I N N O V O, which is Latin for rebirth. We knew. Innovo-sales. S-A-L-E-S dot com. Innovosales.com. And they can contact us. there's a phone number there as well. And we also developed an offer Innovo coach. Now it's for helping to train professional salespeople. It uses AI and we incorporate and plug in to the model each client's specific company, right? So it's not generic, it's very specific to that company and what it sells. And then we plug in the characteristics, the The the you know ideal customer profile and the persona, job titles, skills that that company and those salespeople would be speaking to as prospects, as potential customers. and using those two inputs, a salesperson simply logs on and they can select do a discovery meeting. So they'll do a discovery meeting with that. Artificial but very realistic prospect and where they can learn to do a best in class discovery meeting. And the system, once they're done, will give them a score of 0 to 10 or 1 to 10, 10 being best. It will provide some very objective feedback, what they did well in certain areas of the conversation, how they could improve. And Then that information is stored and can be sent to their manager to help them see that they're practicing skills because sales, sales in general, it's a learned behavior, it's a skill. You know, some people say folks are born with it. I suppose some are, but there is a skill involved. Like, for example, in a discovery meeting, there's just some fundamental things that We want to help discover between these two parties is do I have something that would be valuable to this person? Are they a good fit for the value that we have to offer? Do they have budget? In other words, they have money. are they the final decision maker? Are there other people involved in making a decision? What's the actual need? Why would they need something that I have to offer or what they're looking for? Then of course, timing. When do they need to make a decision or have the solution, whether it's a product or service in place? And those are fundamental, simple, basic things that should be incorporated into every discovery call, whether you're selling to you know it's B2C or B2B. And so that's what the system is looking for, those fundamental things. And the you know, sales managers these days, sales leaders, they just don't spend a lot of time doing role playing with their sales folks. Most don't anymore. And it's because they just don't have the time, frankly. And it's one of the first things that gets taken off of their calendars by themselves. but we also know that it's extremely valuable and is a tremendous tool, role playing, practicing. Just like you said, you know, you practice and you improve. It's the same thing with sales, you need to practice and you'll improve. Yeah, well, yeah. and you will, and you will improve. you'll you'll go get better than w than where you started. Is it's is

Yeah, thanks again, Mick. Loved it. Talk to you soon. Take care.