Most Sales Teams Aren't Undertrained. They're Overloaded

Every sales leader has the same instinct when the numbers slip: train harder, tighten the pitch, find better people. Chris Wallace gets hired to tell them the problem is somewhere else entirely.

As founder and president of Innerview Group, Chris has spent fifteen years walking into sales organizations and diagnosing why good teams underperform. The answer is almost never a skills gap. It's that leaders have stacked more onto their people than anyone could execute, and never made clear what actually matters. He joins Siro CEO Jake Cronin on Tactics to break down what he finds when he gets in the trenches, and the specific changes that move performance.

The Real Problem Is Almost Always Prioritization

Innerview runs a formal diagnostic: an eight-attribute "sales alignment model," built on the work of Harvard's Frank Cespedes, now an advisor to the company. Coaching, performance management, compensation, tools - Chris looks at how all of it lines up to support the behavior a team is actually supposed to produce. When the dots don't connect, reps end up sitting at the end of a broken line, set up to fail no matter how good they are.

But the practical answer is simpler, and it shows up almost everywhere: "The number one challenge that we see with all sales teams is lack of prioritization. Too many things on their plate."

Reps can't figure out how to fit everything their leaders want into a single day, let alone a single customer conversation. The instinct from the top is to keep adding: a new product, a new system, a new initiative, without taking anything away. Chris's blunt version: you can't put ten pounds in a five-pound bag. When a team isn't executing, the cause is usually that leadership asked for too much and called it focus.

Notably, "people" isn't one of the eight things Innerview evaluates. Clients like to think their real problem is talent, but Chris doesn't take the bait. His job is to help an organization execute better with the team it already has and most of the time, the team is more capable than the system gives it room to be.

Your Highest-Leverage Person Is Doing the Wrong Job

If you want one place to intervene, Chris is unambiguous about where it is: "There's no greater leverage point in a sales organization than the last line leader…that frontline leader who is supporting the customer-facing reps."

And it's the role most consistently wasted. Frontline managers get pulled into fire drills, reporting, HR paperwork, and customer escalations until coaching becomes the thing that falls off the calendar. Chris estimates the average sales manager spends less than 10% of their time on rep development. On a peak-performing team, that number should be closer to 25%.

Most managers genuinely want to develop their people, it’s why they take the job, but the work keeps getting buried under everything else, and a lot of them quietly default to the one thing they already know how to do: act like a sales rep. They jump into deals, take over escalations, and become a de facto closer instead of a coach.

Whether that's a problem depends on the kind of sale. In long enterprise cycles, a manager parachuting into a high-stakes deal can be real leverage. In transactional, one-call-close environments — a bathroom remodel, an HVAC system, the kind of in-home sale where the rep is alone with the customer — a manager spending their days on escalations is a poor use of the highest-leverage person in the building. Their team can't get better if that's how their time is spent.

There Are Six to Eight Hours Hiding in Every Manager's Week

The fix isn't to demand more coaching on top of everything else, that's just adding to the five-pound bag. It's to clear room. Innerview does it two ways.

First, take the administrative load off the manager and put it where it actually belongs. This rarely requires a new hire. Most organizations already have a sales support person, an operations role, or an office admin who is a better fit for the HR paperwork and reporting than the sales manager ever was. The move is simply to reassign it explicitly.

Second, and harder, is to work upward. Every manager has a boss, and that boss has a boss, and it all flows downhill: run this report, build this deck for leadership. The team just plays traffic cop at that level, because managers will always prioritize whatever their own boss just handed them. He says, "If you want more sales, have them focus on their team. If they're looking up instead of down at their team, they're typically not delivering the performance you want."

Between the two fixes, Innerview typically gives a manager six to eight hours back a week. As Chris puts it, you'd be surprised how fast you find six to eight hours of completely unnecessary work. That's enough to listen to recordings, run real one-on-ones, and hold a team meeting that's about development instead of just numbers.

Clarity Comes Before Training

Freeing up the time only matters if it's spent on the right thing. And here Chris pushes on a word most leaders use loosely.

He points to a post from B2B sales expert Steve Richard that stuck with him: stop training your salespeople. The argument wasn't about being anti-development, it was about the fact that companies pour energy into teaching reps what a product *does (*features, benefits, specs) while leaving out everything reps actually need to act: how much of their day this should take, where it fits in the conversation, how it ties to their comp and the company's goals. Reps come away informed and still unclear. Chris’ motto: "Training comes second. Clarity comes first."

This is the same overload problem wearing a different mask. Introduce a new product or a new goal and you've changed the rep's entire routine, but telling them the what without the how leaves them to guess. The most common version of the mistake is handing a team a number and stopping there. Chris explains, "Telling them a number, but not connecting it to a behavior, is a classic Sales 101 misstep. The number in and of itself doesn't mean anything."

The diagnostic Chris hands any leader is a single question. Pick your most important goal for the year. Then ask: Have I actually told my team what they need to do differently to hit it, or have I only told them the target? If it's the latter, no amount of training fixes it, because the team was never clear on what to train toward.

You Can't Audit Clarity From a Ride-Along

Once clarity is established, it leaves the question every leader eventually asks: how do I know any of this is actually happening in the field?

At scale, the honest answer used to be that you couldn't. With 500 or 1,000 reps, there was no way to verify that the behavior you defined and trained was showing up in real conversations. Managers who weren't doing ride-alongs had nothing to coach to. And ride-alongs, as everyone in field sales knows, can be theater. Rep cherry-pick the accounts, show up on their best behavior, and plan the day more carefully than they ever would otherwise.

This is where Chris brought up Siro on his own. The reason the loop was always open, he explained, is that leaders never had an unfiltered look at what reps were doing day in and day out. A tool that captures the actual conversations changes the math: now the clarity you built into a playbook can be checked against what's really being said in the room, and coaching finally has something honest to point at.

With Siro, Chris explains, "Now you have the opportunity to bring that intelligence back to the organization and really close that loop."

It's a fitting place to land, because it ties the whole diagnosis together. Prioritization, freed-up manager time, and clarity all depend on one thing: actually seeing whether the behavior you asked for is the behavior you're getting.

The Bottom Line

Chris Wallace's read on struggling sales teams is consistent across fifteen years and dozens of organizations: the problem is rarely the people, and rarely the pitch. It's that leaders overload their teams, especially on the frontline managers who can make the most impact with their team, and define success as a number without defining the behavior behind it first.

The fix isn't to do more: more training, more pressure, more headcount. It's actually about less: fewer priorities, less junk work on your managers, which all allows more clarity about what you actually want your people to do.

So before the next initiative lands on your team's plate, the question worth sitting with is the one Chris hands every leader he works with: Have I told them what I need them to do, and can I see whether they're doing it?

Transcript

Chris Wallace:

The number one challenge that we see with all sales teams, is lack of prioritization. Too many things on their plate. Reps are struggling to figure out how do I get all the things that my leaders want me to do, into my day or into my conversation with the customer.

Hey Everyone, I’m Jake Cronin - the founder & CEO of Siro - the AI platform for in-person sales teams. 

And this is TACTICS, the show that dives deep with sales leaders across industries to uncover what top producing sales organizations do differently.
Today’s guest is Chris Wallace, founder and president of Innerview Group, where he has helped dozens of teams level-up their performance.

Chris pulls back the curtain on the tried and true ways to level-up a sales organization… including simply fixing calendars: A peak performing team has front-line leaders spending 25% of their time on training, whereas your average team has front-line leaders doing just 10%.

So check out the conversation and be sure to like and comment. 

Tell me about how you started InnerView.

Chris Wallace:

So InnerView is... Anytime I have these types of conversations, I always say I'm sort of an accidental entrepreneur. I honestly never thought that I was going to start my own business. At the time, I was working for a large corporation, Fortune 50 company, that company had made a big acquisition, and the division that I worked in, in the entertainment division, if I wanted to basically keep my job, I was going to have to relocate. At the time it was going to be to the North Jersey area, not far from here. And I didn't want to move. And what ended up happening was, I looked for full-time roles there and I didn't find anything, but there was a contract opportunity. And I left that organization on a Friday afternoon as a full-time employee, separated from the organization, came back on Monday as a contractor and it turned into me starting my own business. It will be 15 years in March.

So basically they said, "You know how to sell. We've got all these new products and services that we need our people to be able to talk about. Your job is to translate what the product people are doing, for the salespeople and figure out how to get them talking about it the right way, delivering the right message, selling the right way." And I sort of just figured it out as I went. I certainly didn't know what I was doing in those first days, but hopefully I've learned a couple of things over the last 15 years.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah, you'll learn a few things over time. How has InnerView evolved? So talk about the last three years in relation to its first three years.

Chris Wallace:

Okay. Well, I will share this, I talk about the 15 years, InnerView is a seven-year-old, 15-year-old company. And the reason I say that is because we started InnerView after a couple of different iterations. InnerView itself is a little over seven years old. First three years really was about taking what we had learned in the first portion of our time as sort of entrepreneurs and tried to apply a lot of those learnings and got started with one premise. And I'll be honest with you, and you see this in your world, we were trying to prove product market fit in a couple different offerings that we had as a company. And we really chased some things that weren't necessarily that successful, where maybe we got some false positives early on. And I think what we've done over the last three years is really get sober about what we're great at, what we really have expertise around.

And at the end of the day, it's really about getting in the trenches with sales teams, helping them have better conversations, getting away from trying to do some of the tools and things that we didn't necessarily have the expertise in and really focus on what we know best, and that's the sales conversation.

Jake Cronin:

When you go into the sales organization, what are the signs that give away if this place has great sales leadership or just, okay sales leadership?

Chris Wallace:

I'll tell you the clinical answer and then I'll tell you the practical answer. We, over the years, have developed what we call a sales alignment model. We are friends, disciples of or whatever you want to call it, with a professor from Harvard Business School named Frank Cespedes. Frank Cespedes wrote a book called, How to Align Strategy and Sales. We read that book, we became big fans, we became friends with Frank. He's actually currently an advisor to our company. And we've always been big on the idea that for sales organizations, there's a lot of dots that you need to connect. It's not as simple as saying, "Oh, we'll get these skills," and you're going to sell better. Well, if your compensation is not lined up effectively, or your messaging is not lined up effectively, or the tools are misaligned, you end up in a spot where sales teams sort of sit at the end of the line and they're set up to fail.

So what we do, is we've developed this sales alignment model where there's eight different attributes to the model and it's really all about how do these things line up to support the right behaviors, the right conversation for the sales team. So we're going in and we're actually looking at all eight of those things and we're kind of diagnosing where they sit. Coaching is one of them. Performance management is one of them. Tools is one of them. So we're looking at all these different attributes to determine really what the challenges are, what the biggest issue is with the organization. And usually it's a combination of some of those ingredients. Usually it's not just one thing, there's usually a couple of things that need to be brought into alignment for the organization.

Jake Cronin:

Of those three things you mentioned, I didn't hear people.

Chris Wallace:

So it's actually a good question. Talent is not something that we've ever said that we have true expertise in. People will ask us, "What if we've got the wrong people?" Our answer to that has always been, we'll help you execute better with the people you have right now. There are plenty of times where sales leaders are convinced, "I just don't have the right talent." That's not up for us to decide. We're really focused on the execution side of it.

Jake Cronin:

How many of your clients are struggling more so with aligning or getting excellent frontline leaders versus the sales process, the sales pitch? How much time are you spending fixing the sales reps in the field versus fixing the management layer on top of it?

Chris Wallace:

It depends on the organization. In some cases it all depends on what they want. In some instances, we have people coming to us saying, "We don't have the definition that we need. We don't have the detailed plan. We're not clear with our sales team what we want them to do." Probably more accurate in today's day and age, people will say, "What we have now is very generic, it doesn't fit us. We need something that's more tailored to us, which is the way that we approach it." So in some instances we're going in and we're sort of re-imagining what that selling experience looks like.

What we're seeing more and more over the last couple of years, is companies are really focused on, we need to execute, execute, execute. We need to make sure that we are out there. The blocking and tackling is happening, we're just executing day in and day out. And in those instances where that's where the company is focused on, they just want that extra eight, 10 percentage points of performance, that's where we're focusing a lot with the sales management team. Over time, we have seen sales managers and every organization would say this is true, their sales managers get pulled into a million different things, fire drills, reporting, HR stuff, but they're not really spending their time developing their team, helping their team have better conversations, coaching their team and developing their skills.

So what we come in and do, if we're focusing specifically on the sales managers, we're almost reorienting them to what their job should really be. And the excitement level that we see, not only from the managers, but from the leadership in these organizations, is super high. This idea of, okay, getting them back to the things that they really love doing, taking some of the administrative stuff off their plate, that's really where we see the sparks happen with organizations and that's where you start to see the performance improvement.

Jake Cronin:

And how do you do that? Because a lot of folks, of course, want to be training and supporting their people. You hired these sales reps, you hired or you promote this frontline manager with the promise of potential success. And of course you want to help people see that success, but practically speaking, you got all this stuff to do.

Chris Wallace:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

So how do you make that a reality? How do you actually get someone to be able to have more time to do the coaching?

Chris Wallace:

The fun thing about what we do, I think "fun" is the best word, people pay us to be the bad guy. I mean, there's no other way to put it, people pay us to be the bad guy. You bring in somebody from the outside to come in and diagnose, like you said earlier, but to tell the truth in a way that people inside the company can't tell. We've seen this so many times with sales organizations. They're performance driven, anytime a salesperson says anything other than the party line, it comes across as a complaint. We come in and we're able to really understand what's truth, what's myth. And then, again, say the hard things, kind of speak the truth to leadership.

So where I'm going with that is, when we come in and look at what sales managers are spending their time, I mean, we're doing focus groups, we're doing surveys, we're gathering a lot of information, we're going out in the field with them. So we're making sure that we have a very clear picture of what's happening with the team, but then we are going back to leadership. Leadership hired us to tell them where they need to be better. I have an example with a building materials client that we work with. We went out and we did this analysis around a product that they were launching. And we took a look at what their routines were right now, whether or not they were going to be able to integrate this successfully with their sales team. We looked at the habits, we looked at the conversations and we went back and we said, "You guys got to fix this, this and this."

And the sales leader in the field said, "You can't tell leadership that." And I said, "You don't understand, they pay me to tell them that." So we went back and we said, "Listen, all of these things are on their plate. And if you-

Jake Cronin:

And you're saying things that you're seeing in the field are problems at the structural level, it's not that they're being executed poorly by this office or this team.

Chris Wallace:

That's right.

Jake Cronin:

But they're wrong with the process.

Chris Wallace:

That's correct. Yeah. Usually what it comes down to is, you are asking them to do too much, you're putting too many priorities on them. That's, by the way, the number one challenge that we see with all sales teams, is lack of prioritization, too many things on their plate. Reps are struggling to figure out how do I get all the things that my leaders want me to do, into my day or into my conversation with the customer. So prioritization is a real problem. Whether it's with the sales team or the sales leaders, it all comes down to priorities. We're looking at how they're spending their time. We're sharing that feedback with leadership and we're saying, for these specific business objectives that you have, whether it's a product selling or it's a technology you want them to adopt, if you want them to do it, you have to adjust these things in their routine or their day, or you can't expect them to do that. You can't tell them, "Just fit more stuff." You can't get more than five pounds of you know what, or 10 pounds in a five pound bag.

So figure out how to prioritize. We are bringing that information back to leadership and saying, "You need to reorient. You need to rethink their day, their week, their month." And for sales leaders, typically what that means is get the administrative stuff off of their plate, stop having them chase their tail on fire drills. And honestly, and I'm sure you guys see this with your clients, stop having the sales managers intervene in every single customer scenario, empower the salespeople to have those conversations. Don't have the sales manager jumping in because they just become a defacto sales rep. But that's what most sales managers know how to do, is be a sales rep.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah.

Chris Wallace:

So you've got to take some of those habits and reorient them and fill their day with more productive activity. Usually that means coaching and development.

Jake Cronin:

How many clients receive that positively? If you have a sales manager, often they are the best person, and so of course, if you could have them basically be the red zone offense and intervene in deals that are on the edge, to get them over, that sounds like really high ROI. It's like I've got a solid, maybe okay sales team, and if our sales manager can just go in and help them all close a great sales person by being there for the red zone moments, maybe that should be the job description.

Chris Wallace:

Depends on the type of sales. It depends on the type of sales. If you're selling enterprise software, I can see there being real leverage in that. But think about who a lot of your clients are, think about the conversations that they're having. If Mrs. Jones is having their bathroom done or having an HVAC system put in, having your leaders in the field spending all their time on customer escalations and things like that, their team can't get better if that's how they're spending their time. Organizations have to look at it and determine where they think they are going to get that ROI. But if you are in the account management world or in the, call it, "One call-close," sort of those more transactional type of sales, getting sales managers too involved in customer situations and complaints and escalations and things like that, or in helping close deals, it's not a good use of their time.

Jake Cronin:

So what are people taking off of their plates? Or I guess maybe not what? It's taken off the firefighting, you're taken off getting involved in the frontline, but the how. How do sales managers, or rather, how do your clients get their sales managers to take firefighting off the plate? I'd love to take firefighting off of my plate.

Chris Wallace:

Yeah, yeah.

Jake Cronin:

It's easier said than done.

Chris Wallace:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

How do you take getting involved in the frontline, off the plate, empowering the frontline? How does that actually happen?

Chris Wallace:

I would say that there's really two things that end up happening. So when we go in and build more, like what I'm going to call one of our transformation or sales excellence programs, where we're kind of designing the process for them. Typically, what we do in that scenario is we're going to be upskilling their sales leaders and again, reorienting them to a new schedule. Typically, what we're doing, if we're going to be adding coaching time into their week, they're assigning some sort of administrative person or an administrative layer that's going to take certain things off their plate.

Jake Cronin:

If someone's watching and they want to basically implement the InnerView method on their own, one thing is, this big nugget of, you need to be prioritizing better, your folks are probably overloaded. Great. How do I get them to focus more on coaching? I'm hearing you need to bring on admin dedicated people, so it's a hiring component of this?

Chris Wallace:

It's usually not even a hire, to be honest with you. It's just looking at who you have on your team. There may be sales support roles, there may be sales operations. There may literally be an admin for an office or a location. And that person can take some of the... Whether it's the HR paperwork. Again, every organization is a little bit different, but when you start to look at what all those things are, it adds up.

Jake Cronin:

Right. Built up this admin stuff that probably should be done by other people in the organization anyway, but is falling onto the sales leader.

Chris Wallace:

So looking at some of those things and identifying somebody in the sales organization, again, whether it's a sales support, sales operations, whomever, who can take some of those things off the leader's plate and literally saying, "I'm assigning this to you now. Expect that these five sales leaders are now going to be sending this stuff to you." And it's actually more of a fit with their role typically, than it is for the sales manager themselves.

The second thing that we are doing is, we are working with the higher levels of leadership. So every sales manager's got a boss, right, so we're working with their boss and then their boss's boss, to make sure that the stuff that they're pushing downhill is limited. So we're helping play traffic cop with them and say, "Listen, if you want this to become cultural, if you want this to become ingrained in your organization, you've got to stop pushing down, "Go run this report for me," or, "I need you to put this slide deck together for me because I'm meeting with leadership in a couple of days."" Stop giving them those fire drills, because they're going to prioritize what their boss gives them.

If you want more sales, have them focus on their team. If they're looking up instead of down at their team, they're typically not delivering the type of performance that your organization wants. So trying to play traffic cop at that leadership level and trying to instill the discipline in the leaders, not to keep pushing junk work down to them and waste their time. That's probably the second place where we see the biggest time savings.

Jake Cronin:

Stopping the admin work and the fires, which are sort of like one and the same sometimes, stopping that from rolling down the hill.

Chris Wallace:

Exactly right, yeah.

Jake Cronin:

And then-

Chris Wallace:

And telling leaders, putting a mirror up to the leader's face and saying, "Listen, we talked to them. We went out in the field, we saw and heard from them that the slides and the Excel spreadsheets and the reports and all those types of things are taking up a significant amount of their time. If you can limit those." Typically, I would say we're looking to get somewhere between six and eight hours back in a leader's week. So we're not talking about 25 hours, we're usually looking for somewhere between six and eight hours so they can be listening to recordings. So they can be doing those one-on-one coaching. So they can have an effective team meeting that's development focused, not just numbers focused. So we're looking for six to eight hours. You'd be surprised how fast you can find six to eight hours with completely unnecessary work that they're doing now.

Jake Cronin:

You're creating time with these methods in a sales leader's day. And is this different for a frontline leader or someone who's managing director or individual contributors, versus someone who's a second line, third line manager?

Chris Wallace:

I think there's a lot of the same characteristics, but I think that from our perspective, we're focused more on that frontline leader. In our opinion, there's no greater leverage point in a sales organization than the last line leader, that frontline leader who is supporting the customer facing reps. A person has a hard job, Jake, they really do. They are kind of the tip of the spear for so many different initiatives and so many different goals that the organization has, they're overloaded and at the end of the day, those are the people who can help impact performance with their reps.

Good ones are able to filter out the noise. I told this story the other day, a good friend of mine was sales leader for a field organization, he's a frontline sales manager. And he retired. He decided to retire because he was spending all of his time deflecting stuff from corporate and just trying to free up time so his sales reps could even just go through their day-to-day. He didn't even have any time to coach them, develop them, go ride out with them, do the things that he really enjoy doing. So it becomes hard, they're asked to do so much.

Jake Cronin:

How much should a frontline leader be spending their time on coaching and development?

Chris Wallace:

I mean, we typically say that it's somewhere between 20 and 25% of their time. Now in some organizations, people will bring us in and they will say, "We want our managers spending at least half of their time developing their team." And typically, if that's the case, they're going to have larger teams. Most of the industries that we work in, sales managers are going to have somewhere between eight and 14 salespeople reporting to them. Whether that's call center or field sales or door to door, typically between eight and 14. So it's a little bit dependent upon how many people they have, but we usually say 20 to 25%, we can build you a plan that's going to have an impact. Let's put it that way. If we can reorient them around that 20 to 25% and they protect that time, then you're going to see some sort of a lift in your sales just by carving that out.

The reality is most of it just falls by the wayside, most of them aren't doing any of it. Or they think they are, and then once you explain to them what good coaching, what good sales rep development looks like, they're like, "Oh yeah, I used to do that, but I don't do it anymore."

Jake Cronin:

Yeah. What percent of time do you think most sales organizations spend on coaching, if 20 to 25 is the target?

Chris Wallace:

I'm going to say, because there's some sales managers who are just good at it, they know how to do it. Whether they were trained on it or not, they're just naturally good at it. I would say rep development is less than 10% of the average sales manager's time. When we look at their week, I would say it's less than 10% typically.

Jake Cronin:

You carve out the time so that folks can spend more time on rep training, frontline, super high leverage. Now someone has this time, how should they train? If you, across all of your organizations, the folks who have the best performing, the top tier executors, sales reps, how are they training them?

Chris Wallace:

I'm going to back up on you for a second. I'm going to talk about training's a tricky word. I have a very weird relationship with the word training. It means a lot of different things to different people. Last year I was scrolling through LinkedIn and a B2B sales expert that I've come to know over the years, his name is Steve Richard. His content's great. His ideas are great. He knows the B2B organization extremely well. And he posted something on LinkedIn that said, basically, "Stop training your salespeople. Stop training them." And I read further into the post and what Steve was saying was, the reps are being trained on products and services, but they lack clarity around how much of their time should they be spending on it? Where does it fit into their day? How does it impact their compensation? How does it impact the company's overall goals?

He was basically like, "We're giving reps all this information around what something does, but not giving them clarity on what it means for their day, what it means for their role, what it means for their conversation with customers." And that struck me. So the idea of, "training," in my mind, training comes second, clarity comes first. When we look at organizations, I said the number one challenge that we see in organizations is prioritization. They're pushing down too many priorities to their sales organizations. I think part and parcel of that is what we're finding is organizations are not giving their sales teams clear enough detail, granular enough detail and what it is that they actually want them to do. When you introduce a new product, when you introduce a new goal, you've just changed that rep's routine, you've changed their circuit, so to speak. So you have to make sure that you're thinking that through and being very clear on what you need them to do.

Once you're clear on what you want them to do, then you can train them under what you want them to do. But most organizations, still to this day, it's funny to say, are still focused on what does the product do? What are the features and benefits? They're training the reps on those things, but how to put any of that into action, those are the details that are missing. So you got to flip the script on that, clarity first, train second.

Jake Cronin:

If you're listening to this and you're a VP of sales or sales manager, even frontline, what are the questions I should ask myself to diagnose if we have the clarity that our sales reps should have?

Chris Wallace:

It's one simple question. If you have a specific goal, let's say you have a number, what's your most important number that you need to hit this year?

Jake Cronin:

Let's say close rates, you've got your close rate from X to Y.

Chris Wallace:

Okay. Have I told my team what they need to do better or differently in order to achieve the goal that we have? Do they know specifically how they need to act or how they need to behave, what actions they need to take in order to hit that? Have I told them what my expectations are around that? Telling them a number, but not connecting it to a behavior is like classic sales 101 misstep. The number in and of itself doesn't mean anything, getting underneath that number and really thinking about what the behaviors are and what the actions are, that's where you're going to drive success. So if you're a sales leader, ask yourself, "Have I told them what I need them to do?"

Jake Cronin:

How do you do that at scale? So I guess if I'm putting myself in the shoes of, let's say, one of your large manufacturing clients, got a thousand sales reps. I'm listening to this and I'm like, yeah, we've just been tossing training materials and product information-

Chris Wallace:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

Competitive features and benefits, et cetera. How do I know if my team at the front is getting that clarity? What does it look like for the organization? What do you do as a sales leader to kind of audit the clarity at the front?

Chris Wallace:

Organizations struggle with that. And for years, the question has been, when people have worked with us, it's, how do we know that we're doing that? So I'm going to get back to that question, but I'm going to share something that we do in this process, it's important. I'll give you an example of a manufacturing company that we worked with. It's actually one of the smaller organizations, they were right around 45, 50 sales reps. They had introduced a new product line, they were going to be the exclusive North American distributor for a new product in their space. It was a very different type of sale for their team. What we did was we got in a room with their sales leadership and we asked those questions, about the clarity. Have you told them what you expect? Have you expressed to them what they need to do? How do they integrate this into their day, to their week, to their month? Those types of things.

We then take that information and we document it in a playbook. And there may be some people listening to this saying, "Oh, we've been doing playbooks for years." Some organizations do, some organizations don't. Making sure that what you want people to do is documented and distributed, and in a lot of cases, actually, when you say, "Trained," we're going through workshops with sales teams so they are clear on what they need to do related to a specific goal, specific product line, those types of things.

Then I'm going to bring it back to the first part of your question, how do they audit that? When I first found out about a tool like Siro, my reaction was, now the question that my clients will ask of, how do we know we're doing? How do we know that they're doing it? How do we know the things that you just told them, that we want them to do and say, the ways we want them to bring this up in conversation, how do we know that that's happening? Having tools like Siro takes something that was, how do you do it at scale? You don't. I mean, if you've got a thousand sales reps, 500 sales reps, you can't do it at scale. Now with tools like Siro, you have the opportunity to bring that intelligence back to the organization and really close that loop.

Before it was just kind of dangling out there. A lot of those reps, or excuse me, a lot of those sales managers weren't coaching at all. They didn't really have anything to coach to. Unless they were doing ride-alongs, then they didn't know who to coach to. And everybody knows, all the people watching this episode will know, that ride-alongs, the rep is going to pick out the exact accounts they want to take them to, they're going to be on their best behavior, they plan their day out better than they always have. With a tool like yours, you're getting, I think, a much more unfiltered look at what that sales rep is actually doing on a day in day out basis. So I think the intelligence is that much more valuable. So in the past, they didn't have it, now with tools like Siro, I think it's a lot easier for them.

Jake Cronin:

You have that visibility to see what is actually happening on the field.

Chris Wallace:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

It does seem like the team has this clarity we're looking for.

Chris Wallace:

Yep.

Jake Cronin:

Okay. Lightning round.

Chris Wallace:

Yep.

Jake Cronin:

First, what are your two to three favorite sales tactics?

Chris Wallace:

I'm going to go with one that I think is very effective. In the sales programs that we build, one of the things that we teach salespeople to do, is once they identify what the customers, I don't want to say full needs are, it's kind of before discovery, but, "What brings you in today?" or, "Why are you shopping?" Once they understand what the customer's trying to accomplish, as soon as they know what that outcome is that the customer is trying to reach, we always have them reiterate by saying, "Great, I'm so glad you came to us. I'm going to make sure I take care of that." What we find in the data support is, customers, shopping for a lot of the things that your clients sell, in the home improvement space, a lot of those categories, it's a stressful purchase, you don't want to get that wrong. Whether it's a new appliance or it's work being done in your home, you want to make sure that you select the right provider, that you buy the right thing.

So anxiety is high. Anytime you can bring that anxiety level down and say, "Mrs. Jones, I'm really glad you came to us. I'm going to make sure I take good care of you." Sort of that, "I heard you," reaffirm you're in good hands. The sales teams that we talk to, they tell us that that's the number one thing that they learn, their favorite thing that they learn. So I'm going to go with that one tactic.

Jake Cronin:

Okay. Take the anxiety down.

Chris Wallace:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

What's your favorite sales book?

Chris Wallace:

The book that probably had the biggest impact on me, have you ever heard of an author named Jeffrey Gitomer?

Jake Cronin:

No.

Chris Wallace:

More of a B2B sales guy. But The Little Red Book of Sales by Jeffrey Gitomer. It's the one I always remember as having the biggest impact on me.

Jake Cronin:

I'll have to give it a read.

Chris Wallace:

It's good.

Jake Cronin:

Okay, next.

Chris Wallace:

And it's little, it's quick read.

Jake Cronin:

It's little. It's a little book. What are your three favorite software tools?

Chris Wallace:

Are you saying as a consumer or business-wise?

Jake Cronin:

Business-wise.

Chris Wallace:

Business-wise.

Jake Cronin:

For a sales team.

Chris Wallace:

Okay. HubSpot's growing on me. So the HubSpot CRM is growing on me. I'm finding that there's a lot of tools, if you really dedicate the time to learn it, it's growing on me. Certainly ChatGPT. I feel like our relationship is evolving, I feel like we're becoming more friendly over the last six months or so. So I'm going to go with those two. The ones that I rely upon the most, I feel like it's those two.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah. Finally, who is the most unlikely successful sales rep that you've met or coached?

Chris Wallace:

I'm going to give a more generic answer than one person. I'm going to give you sort of a persona. Over the years, we've done a lot of work with direct sales teams, we've done a lot of work with call center sales teams. Again, the amount of development that those salespeople are getting isn't super high, in a lot of cases, the investment in those people is not super high. I think that the unlikely people are the ones that, when they show up to the programs that we run and the interactions we have with them, their confidence is very low and they don't necessarily think that they can do it.

To me, it's the people that, they're not the high performers, and that's why when you asked the question about you didn't hear people in the thing that we evaluate, we can make any of your salespeople better, by really understanding where they're having struggles right now. It's usually clear that sales teams are struggling on one or two things, excuse me, one or two main things, one or two main hangups. If we can find the reps that lack that confidence that would not appear as the alpha salesperson and you can flip those one or two things and build their confidence, they can shoot right up the leaderboards in terms of their success.

So the, little bit down on their luck, little bit of tail between their legs, lacking in confidence, finding those one or two things, it surprises leadership to see what they're capable of, but it doesn't surprise us.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah.

Chris Wallace:

Because they're with them every day, we get to come in and put fresh eyes on it. So just because somebody's performing in the bottom half of your sales team doesn't mean that they don't have a tremendous amount of potential. So I can think of a lot of examples throughout the years, but I don't know that I could name one specific person.

Jake Cronin:

Confidence, it's not a trait you're necessarily born with that you need to have to succeed in sales, it's something that you can learn, develop.

Chris Wallace:

At InnerView, the thing that we talk about is belief, confidence, and pride. So we're trying trying to get salespeople to show up with belief, confidence, and pride. And you can't train belief, confidence, and pride. You really have to work with people, you have to find where they have hangups, where they have struggles, where they need that personalized development. That's the type of intuition we're trying to draw out in the sales managers so they can tap into these people. So yeah, I feel like the confidence piece is... You're not born with the confidence to be a salesperson, I truly don't believe that. I think that confidence can be developed, sometimes all it takes is a little bit of dedicated attention. Ultimately, you build up that confidence from being able to overcome it and being able to push through it.

Jake Cronin:

Chris, thank you for the time.

Chris Wallace:

Of course.

Jake Cronin:

This was wonderful.

Chris Wallace:

Thank you, Jake. It's been great.

Jake Cronin:

And thanks for watching. We're here to help you level up as a sales leader, so please tell us what you would like to hear on the next episode. And if you do have an in person sales team, be sure to check out siro.ai. I'm Jake Cronin. Until next time.