In this rigorous episode, Steve Wallace, Chief Revenue Officer of MaverickApp, shares his relentless determination, unwavering work ethic, and unshakable commitment to empowering salespeople and business owners to sell more.
You will discover:
– Why you don’t need more leads (and what you do need instead)
– When you absolutely should not start automating sales activity
– When you should start using automation and how to get started
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is the one and only Steve Wallace who stands firmly on the side of doing the work and doing it exceptionally well, while some sales people and business owners seek shortcuts, his messages straightforward, stop evading the work and the invaluable lessons it brings. Is such a such an important point, we’re gonna dive into that. But do it? Take Action, even if you do it imperfectly, and relish the profound lessons within those experiences regarding sales. Steve is an evangelist who believes that automation can empower salespeople, but will never replace them or the essential effort that underpins success. Steven is a beacon of past passionate opposition in an era dominated by business and sales automation, it’s not against automation, but against the easy button. I love this intro, Steve, I love that you’re here. I cannot wait for this conversation. There’s so many things that I’m sitting here quietly to myself, saying yes and amen to but I’d like to know kind of open up here, what is the line between easy and optimized, particularly when we’re talking about sales automation?
Steve Wallace
Sure. Loaded question, which is good. I want loaded questions. I think it reduces down to, are you doing the work that I that I say this a lot, right? But are you doing the work that an automation would do if you aren’t doing the work? And then you ask an automation to do the work that you aren’t doing. Isn’t it right to say that you are asking or asking an automation to be something that you yourself never were? And isn’t it safe to say that you are thinking of an automation as doing something that it isn’t meant to do? Yeah, so it’s kind of a question. Back to your question, right? That’s that’s the line. If you’re doing something already and it’s costing you a lot of time, and I know you’re going to ask another question about this much later, so maybe I’m jumping ahead. But if you’re doing something already and it’s costing you time and money and effort, it’s producing results, but, but you just realize that you can’t do this forever. Now it’s the time to have conversation about automation, not before that. Yeah, automation can be expensive. Like, let’s put let’s put in its place.
Scott Ritzheimer
So here’s, here’s what I love about that. I think that it’s not this like button, hey, either automation or no automation, but it’s this idea that there are some prerequisites that need to be in place before you can really get the most out of automation. Let me, let me tell you one of the mistakes I see happen a lot. And you tell me, if I’m off base here, what I see a lot of folks do, especially early in their their stages as a founder, they’re just trying to get their sales off the ground. You know, they couldn’t really tell you who they sell to, although they have an idea, they couldn’t tell you exactly what they sell, although they have an idea, they couldn’t tell you how much it’s gonna cost, although they have an idea, you know, and they’re sitting there with just the overwhelming number of things that they need to do. Yes, they need to sell, but they also have a couple of clients and have to provide, you know, service for them. They’ve maybe got a couple team members, and they’re trying to get them pointed in the right direction. They’re they’ve got bookkeeping stuff, they’ve got all of these other things that need to happen. They’re trying to do networking so they can have something to sell soon. And they’re like, I have zero time, right? I don’t have time to to go through and just one by one do all these things. There has to be a faster way of figuring this out, so they jump into automation before they figured out what to do. What’s so bad about that?
Steve Wallace
I think a lot of things are bad about that. First of all, in your explanation of the headspace that a lot of founders and sales leaders and CEOs are in especially if they don’t have a sales background. This applies double if they don’t have a sales background, if they do, it’ll help them quite a bit, because a lot of sales people have learned to run a business by virtue of trial and error. But if they don’t have a sales background, this advice applies double. You describe the headspace of a lot of people, really, really. Well, by the way, Scott and if you know what you sell, or you have an idea of what you sell, but not really, right? If you know it costs something, but not really. If you think you know the outcomes of to your customers, but not really, then what you’re telling me is you actually don’t know your sales process. You probably don’t know how much time and money it costs you to acquire a customer. You don’t know how long they stick around. You don’t know what your customer would say you actually do for them. Now, what you say you do for them, what your customer says you do for them, and if you don’t know your sales process, how can you train it if you don’t know your sales process, how can you automate it? If you don’t what people say a. Out your business and the problems you really solve, then how can you teach it to somebody, delegate it to somebody, give it to an automation or anything? So it’s almost like your question is, is almost so perfect that we’re done right now, right? Like the call to action to your audience is like, go write down your sales SOPs based on your own experiences. And that, in and of itself, is a is a pretty big undertaking, yes, but you should not bring on any kind of automation or person, for that matter, like a salesperson, unless you yourself know where your successes and failures have been and can teach it. You need to be a conscious, competent.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yes. Uh, yeah, yes, yes, yes. So yeah, the whole sales thing and hiring another salesperson to do effectively what you don’t want to do, that’s another. We can do a whole episode on that. Probably a few sure, but I want to, I want to dial in on kind of a certain subgroup of folks. So the lesson I want to just pull out there quickly is if you’re early in this process, you don’t you’re just getting your sales off the ground. You’re just figuring this stuff out. I think you’d agree with this. The best way to actually do that is to do that right. And when you start putting in automation, not only does it not work, and not only is it expensive, not only does it take time to set up right, but it robs you have the feedback that you would get from a conversation like this, right? You know, you send someone an email, you have no idea how they respond, especially negatively. Got right? Yeah,
Steve Wallace
if you’re gonna do something bad, if you’re doing something bad or ineffective or unsuccessful, why would you want to do it more frequently, more effective, right?
Scott Ritzheimer
It doesn’t work when we do it once, but if we do it 100 times, it’s guaranteed to work. So what I’ve found in the founders that I work with, because they’re usually a little later in this process that they have, they’ve kind of learned that usually the hard way, right? I tried all this stuff and it didn’t work, but what they don’t recognize is why it didn’t work and how that has changed to now. So they tried it when they were going after their first 500k now they’re one and a half million or something like that, or $2 million and and so let’s take that person who’s kind of once bit twice shy, but maybe is in a better place to actually start to leverage sales optimization. What would be kind of the first step that they could take to implementing some automation to their processes.
Steve Wallace
So I’m a sales guy, and I look at a lot of these questions through a sales lens. Me being the CRO of maverick app, we have to talk about marketing and automations at a lot of different passive and proactive business development endeavors. But for this question, I look at it through a sales lens, which is, what kind of outcomes are you? Are you looking for? What kind of budgets Do you have? Have you actually had a discussion internally in your organization about what your budget actually is, and if your budget is, say, $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month, that number is purely made up, right? You need to have a desired outcome for where that needs to be, and you need to have benchmarks, measures that you can compare, say, a salesperson to we’re not just going into this effort willy nilly. You’re desiring an outcome if a salesperson can do 5x their salary, right? Which is a fantastic situation to be in three to 5x their salary, then you would want your sales, business, development, automation to create a similar outcome while simultaneously saving money. So I don’t know if that helps you answer your question, but that’s where you want it to go. You need to have desired outcomes, not just start the process and right, figure out what happened along the way.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? I love that. I love that. So we’re in, we’re gonna start the process. What’s our budget? I have no idea, right? Like, if it works, I’ll pay you everything if it doesn’t work, you know? And so how do we one, how do you take those first couple steps at a budget? But secondly, how do you deal with the space between where you’ve committed to a budget, you’re doing some of the, you know, the automation, you’re putting stuff in, you’re maybe working with a partner like you guys, and you know, the sales don’t come pouring in. You know, the first minute you strike, the first word of the first email that you’re going to craft, right? There’s this space in between. How long should you allow that space in between to be and going back? What’s a good kind of starting point or reference point for budgeting for, let’s take that kind of million and a half to trying to get to $5 million sales.
Steve Wallace
Sure. So two, the two questions right are, where’s the in between? Is the second one and the first one is a how do you build a budget in the first place? Right? Now, the first one’s pretty straightforward, right? All of your revenue, look at your top. Align revenue, not net. Net, anywhere from five to 30% of that should go towards business development, training, marketing, of in some manner, we all fall into. Different sides of the scale based on where your revenue is, but that’s a decent chunk of change. And when you make sure that you’re smart with your business development decisions and have a team that is tactical and takes action with the tools you give them, your marketing creates more revenue, which creates higher cost, more efficient marketing. It it it snowballs with success. So that’s where you got to start with. Your budget is anywhere from five, which is on the low side, all the way up to 30, right, and heck, if you find a fantastic platform or automation that continues to outperform your expectations, then you increase your budget anyway. Yes. The second, the second answer is, you need to, you to find a place in your your business development, in your marketing, that in between spot. I’m losing my train of thought here, because I tend to talk too long sometimes the in between spot is, I’m sorry, Scott, help me out with the second question.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so I love that five to 30% super helpful. Yeah. I’ll just echo that. Some people will hear that, and they’ll see, like there’s 0% for that right now, like that’s just cost, but that’s not true, because you’re saying there’s 0% cost, but you don’t have access to those other sales, right? And so what I’ve found is that you have to start the process. I think it’s a big range, but really helpful idea of just about anywhere inside of that, if you start doing it, you’ll be able to refine that over time. So I love that. All right, so we’ve said, let’s, let’s call it 10% we’re all in. We start doing some work on it. We’re two months into doing work on it, and we haven’t seen any additional sales come in yet. So how do we start measuring the effectiveness of this automation and and the the budget that we’re allocating to it?
Steve Wallace
Thank you for redirecting me, because I was, I was going through it on my head. I’m like, I think I need to ask the question again, yeah. So again, compare, compare your automation or your platform to what a human being was brought on to do. So if you bring on an SDR, a sales team, how long are you giving them, right? And so the most of the time, what you want to do is you want to evaluate at least quarterly. And you look at this in terms of, not a are you bringing in leads? Do I have ROI? You look at this in terms of, what iteration are we in, right? What have you been doing for the first two to three months, and what have outcomes been? What have we learned from it that a lot of, I think a lot of companies these days are just thinking leads, leads, leads, leads, leads. And I understand why we all want leads, but what did you bring your SDR in for? What did you bring your sales rep in for? How long did you hire them? When are their performance reviews? What are you comparing their performance reviews against? Right? And think about again, what are your desired outcomes? So if I bring a sales rep on and he comes to me and he says, three months later and he has no revenue, I’m a little surprised, right? Because we’re not the hardest platform to bring on board, but I’m also not get thinking about firing him either. I’m going back to the drawing board, and I’m thinking, Okay, what brand recognition did he build for me in the three months prior to this point? Who did he reach? What did he say? What conversations were created? So like revenue is a result of all of those pre existing conditions, right? They have to go perfectly in order to bring in revenue. So if I’ve got a hustling, constantly working sales rep who just hasn’t brought in revenue, why would I treat my my platform, my automation platform, really any different? Maybe they’re not trained correctly. Maybe the outreach is incorrect. Maybe the message doesn’t land with the audience right. Maybe it’s just a pitch slap. Nobody responds to that stuff anymore. So my, my long answer to your to your question is, is, take a look at it at least quarterly, be proactive. But instead of jumping ship and canceling 3456, months of effort, right? Get iterative. Change the messaging, change the approach, because you’ve got to learn from your efforts. And this is why I go back to the drawing board in the beginning, and I say, don’t give to automation what you haven’t learned for yourself, right?
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? It’s so true. I love the behind some of your answers is this idea that one of the best mindsets we can have is to treat automation as another person, right using it, and for founders that are just super busy and don’t have a bunch of time for all the mental math and hoops and everything, so really effective way of looking at, if I paid someone to do this, what would I expect from them there, like that. Love that. Just great, great rule that brings me to this idea, like, where do does sales automation end, and where does the human aspect start? How do you coordinate the automated and non automated activities?
Steve Wallace
Yeah, that’s an awesome question. And I will say that that with AI taking the world by storm right now, it seems like there’s a new AI company every few minutes, the human interaction is more critical than ever before. So I think it’s in the action, though, right? So using using insights that automation can give you to be a more effective salesperson or company leader. So this, you have to know your data. You have to know what’s available to you. I’ll give you a tactical example if I give you Scott a report of you know, we’re an email platform. So I’m going to give you an example that’s relevant for our world. If I, if I give you a report of the top 20 people who have opened my emails a bunch of times, and I’m not talking about once, because this could be, that could be anything, right? But a lot of times, and you have their phone number, and you’re responsible for sales for me, and I give you that list, those people haven’t replied, but they’ve heard something about the brand. This is your call to action, to go pick up the damn phone and call the people, right? This is where, this is where the human interaction comes in, comes in and becomes super, super important, and more deals are closed faster as a result of it. So it’s just about reading your data and doing the work.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. I love that using automation to tee it up, using automation to get the insights that you need, but picking up the phone and making the call, having the appointment, making the human connection.
Steve Wallace
Great, and then loop your automation back in after the call. So if you and I had a call and you say, Hey, Steve, I’m really interested follow up with me in six months. I’m gonna use my automation to do that, because that’d be a manual effort that I would have to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? Love it. Love it. All right, so, Steve, there’s a question that I have for you ask all my guests. I’m gonna fire it your way. And that is, what is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Steve Wallace
You bet. So you don’t need leads. You need conversations. I believe that internally, deep, deep, deep down, especially as this AI automation wave just takes over, a lot of things are trying to be delegated to automation and AI. And I’m for it. I’m here for it. I love it. So I’m not saying don’t do it, but I am saying leads aren’t really a thing, if they were, and we’re all made to believe that leads are this ready, easily findable thing, like, you can go out tomorrow, flip a light switch and boom, here’s a three percenter, meaning somebody who is ready, willing and able to buy from You today. Like, that’s not easy. It’s hard. So you don’t need leads. You need to be put into conversations with the type of people who would normally buy from you, and learn the hard sales skills, learn to ask questions, learn to get into it, learn to either disqualify them quickly, because your job is really important to someone, and if it’s not the person you’re talking with you. Got to move on right? So learn to get into the right conversations and forget about Leads. Leads are good, but I can show you time and time and time again where people are sitting in front of 100 leads a month, and they don’t close a thing.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right, right? Love it. Love it. Steve, there’s some folks listening and just the resonating with every word they want to know how they can find out more about you, the solutions that you guys offer, where can they find more out about you?
Steve Wallace
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m on LinkedIn. Stephen Wallace, Chief Sales Nerd is kind of the tag I’ve given myself, and if you have a conversation with me, you’ll learn I absolutely nerd out over sales processes. You can also reach me at [email protected] and you can find more information about our company at Maverick app.io
Scott Ritzheimer
Brilliant, brilliant. Had a chance to check it out before the we hit record. And fantastic resources, very, very cool solutions. Absolutely love it. You find yourself in this place you need to you need to be leveraging sales automation more. You’re ready to grow and scale your business. Check out the folks over at Maverick out. Give Steve a follow on LinkedIn. Connect with him there, and yeah, you will not regret it, Steve, thanks so much for being here. Just a privilege and honor having you on the show. And for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Steve Wallace
Steve Wallace stands firmly on the side of doing the work – and doing it exceptionally well while some salespeople and business owners seek shortcuts. His message is straightforward: stop evading the work and the invaluable lessons it brings; do it. Take action, even if you do it imperfectly, and relish the profound lessons within those experiences. Regarding sales, Steve is an evangelist who believes that automation can empower salespeople but will never replace them or the essential effort that underpins success. Steve is a beacon of passionate opposition in an era dominated by business and sales automation. He’s not against automation, but against “the easy button.”
Want to learn more about Steve Wallace’s work at MaverickApp? Check out his website at https://maverickapp.io/ or connect with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiefsalesnerd/
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