Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:00.974)
If you're a business owner struggling to get out of the day to day weeds and focus on revenue generating activities, then our guest, John Boney is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. As a seasoned lead sales leader, John effectively coaches sales teams and delivers actionable results by assisting companies in increasing sales revenue, one salesperson at a time. John, so excited to have you here.
John Boney (00:25.404)
Adam, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here too.
Adam O'Leary (00:28.396)
Absolutely. So I've heard you discuss how elite sellers operate as CEOs of their territory. Why is adopting this ownership mindset so crucial for maximizing revenue in avoiding distractions?
John Boney (00:41.248)
Yeah, so, you know, elite sellers who operate as CEOs of their territory or their patch, as it's often referred to as, they don't just sell, they strategically run a business within a business and the mindset shifts focus from transactional activities within that, within, transactional activities, to value creation. And that's really where they focus their efforts is creating value for their customers.
They prioritize pipeline health more than anything. Customer outcomes are super important to them. They really focus on the outcome versus just closing the deal. And they do strategic account planning. So, you know, an example of that would be, you know, I was working with a top performing seller for a SaaS company and they treated their territory like a portfolio. And it was really interesting to see, you know, as I was working with this individual.
And then treating it that way, they segmented accounts within for growth potential and they align messaging to executive priorities and proactively drove multi-threaded engagement. And the result, they had a 40 % increase in qualified pipeline and faster deal velocity. So it's, it's just an amazing thing that if you can focus as a CEO. And I always say to people that if you own this business, you took your own money and you invested into this piece of territory or.
this business, how would you operate? What would you do differently? And it's amazing how the thoughts start coming through and how they think about things when it's their own money versus I'm working through my organization, it's my organization's money.
Adam O'Leary (02:18.51)
That's super interesting and that makes me start thinking about how would a sales representative be able to identify non-revenue generating tax and focus on what actually drives business growth.
John Boney (02:29.884)
Yeah. So there's a couple of, I'm going to give you some real tactical things here, Adam, that, you know, it's very simple looking at your calendar, right? Like when you start thinking about those non generating activities that we have throughout our week and start by auditing your calendar on a weekly basis. And what I like to do, and I suggest that people do all the time is they color code, right? They color code the things that they need to do in green for revenue generating activities, the prospecting, the discovery calls, the things that are going to generate that revenue.
Things that are, you highlight yellow, necessary but not directly revenue related, right? The internal meetings that we have. And sometimes there's too many of those. We all know that we can get caught up in the internal meetings. I encourage people that if there's not value in those meetings, they should consider canceling them or talking to their leader and asking, how do we drive more value or eliminate the meeting altogether if it's not valuable? And then the last is red, the distractions, right?
the admin work, the reactive tasks that come up. Again, another little simple, very tactical thing of how do we start to eliminate those things of generating revenue? I encourage people to create a rule within their mail system that they use, whether it's Outlook or Gmail or whatever. They schedule rule for emails that they're CC'd on. Because CC'd emails are things that you're informed on. It's not asking you to do something.
And they go into a separate folder and you look at them once a day versus, you know, inundated with all the CC emails of people just responding to respond. So again, give you an example of, you know, somebody I was working with that, you know, they realized that 60 % of their week was spent in internal synchronization, right? Just internal stuff that was happening and delegating and automated reporting. And they reclaimed about 12 hours a week that they could turn into strategic conversations.
And it's just taking the time to look at those things that are happening on your weekly basis and how do I prioritize what I need to do and where I need to go and focus on the efforts that are really important for you to drive revenue.
Adam O'Leary (04:37.717)
That's crazy what you just told me. That's insane. But I totally understand it and it's starting to make me think so One of the things that you just talked about in the first question when I asked is you talked about providing value Okay, and I think this is a thing that most sales representatives get wrong and I'm so excited to hear your opinion on what is providing value to a potential client a prospect
John Boney (04:42.538)
Yeah.
John Boney (05:03.582)
Yeah, that's such a great question. So, so the value piece of this is truly understanding, you know, there's, there's something we say at force management all the time is we have an article that we share with all the clients we work with. called the seller deficit disorder and the seller deficit disorder really highlights two things that are said about salespeople. One, we don't listen to, we don't understand our customers business. And so the first thing we need to do is when we're going to deliver value to our customers, we need to take the time to listen.
we need to take the time to understand what their current challenges are and the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. The days of selling software, especially in the SaaS and software space where we spend a lot of time, the days of selling and buying software just to buy it, those days are gone. Seven, eight, 10 years ago when people were buying all kinds of different software and now you've got...
You know, so you've got debt, IT debt that is piling up and people are trying to figure out where is it going to add value back to my organization? And so we really have to understand and quantify where is the real pain that the customer is having and can we tie it to something more strategic within that organization? And the way I like to frame this for people I'm working with is we've got every organization we sell to, they've got strategic initiatives.
four or five or six or strategic initiatives that need to be accomplished in a calendar year or a fiscal year. If we can associate ourselves to one or more of those strategic initiatives and help be part of the solution to solve for one of those strategic initiatives, we're now bringing value back to the customer versus here's a feature, here's a function.
and to speeds and feeds that make things go faster. Well, how is that going to drive value? How is it going to increase revenue? How is it going to decrease cost? How is it going to decrease risk? How is it going to increase productivity? That's what companies are looking for is value these days.
Adam O'Leary (07:03.852)
Absolutely and I know one thing that I've personally seen and maybe you've seen this as well is that 95 % of people are typically not in the buyers like buying frame of mind right now and about 5 % of them are in the frame of mind. So I'm curious let's say if somebody's not in that sales pipeline at this current moment, okay? What is another way that you can provide value maybe to that 95 % of individuals?
maybe it's business related, maybe it's not, but what are some follow-up techniques that you've personally seen work so this way that you are staying top of mind and it's not like, you know what, they're not in the pipeline, so I'm not gonna follow up with this, because this happens all the time.
John Boney (07:44.983)
Yeah. And it's, it just comes down to discipline, Adam. There's a, know, you've got to block time and you've got to have a strategy with how you're going to go about doing that. So the things that I see work and things that I coach people on all the time is one, you should have a minimum of three times a week, 90 minute blocks where you're generating pipeline, right? Pipelines gold. You've got to have a strong pipeline that allows you, when you have a strong pipeline, it allows you to be more critical of the opportunities that you're working on. When you have a weak pipeline.
You tend to chase those opportunities and those are the ones that typically slip or stall or move to the next quarter, the next quarter, the next month, whatever it may be. And treat those blocks of time as if they're client meetings. Right. You can't just let it slide until it's going to move. You know, we're just going to skip it this week. If you skip one, you skip two. It's like going to the gym. Right. You skip one workout and it becomes easy to skip the second workout and it becomes easy to skip the third workout. So those blocks of time where you're generating pipeline.
They're non-negotiable and that comes down to self-discipline again. And, you know, if, if your IT department allows you to do it, you know, using apps like Calendly to be able to get meetings scheduled. know Adam, you use something very similar to that to get meetings scheduled, to get time blocked on your calendar. So you can get those meetings booked. So again, working with another, another sales rep.
you they were an owner of a, not really a sales rep, they actually owned a marketing agency and they implemented the blocks of time to be able to generate, generate more activity for them. And they saw 25 % increase in inbound leads within 60 days by consistently nurturing prospects during those blocks of time, continuing to talk to them about value and understanding what their pains are within the organization. And it's just super powerful when you can do that and you have the discipline to do it.
Adam O'Leary (09:39.935)
I love that. And this is now going to make me start thinking, okay, so we got to put these 90 minute blocks in throughout the calendar, right? We want to think about it as, okay, we need to stay religious to our calendar. And that is true. I think what you're describing by the gym is a hundred percent accurate, but things pop up all the time. So how would you say it would be best for somebody to sit down and maybe have a planning session to say, okay, this is what this week's going to look like?
Is it once a week, once a day? How do you typically recommend people to do this?
John Boney (10:13.056)
So one, there's so many different activities that get put onto an account executive or frontline leaders calendar, right? There's so many things that are coming at them. so prioritizing those things becomes really important. one, you're consistently have a cadence at least once a week, you're reviewing your pipeline health. You're taking a look at that pipeline, understanding where it's healthy, where it's not. You're identifying where the gaps are, where the risks are within the opportunities that you're pursuing.
You're aligning outreach with buyers priorities. So you're determining, you know, when we think about that from the portfolio perspective that I sharing before, you start to align where you're spending your outreach in common areas, common themed areas. So that way you're not kind of bouncing from finance to healthcare to wherever it may be. You're staying in a common theme. So you can have outreach that is fairly consistent rather than all of the busy work that goes along with having to change, well, this is a healthcare client.
This is an IT. You can stay focused based off of, again, being able to put those in the buckets. And the last, and this is going to sound really simple, but setting really clear goals with what you need to accomplish from generating that pipeline each week. know, the smart goals that we all know of, right? We've got to set those goals and make sure that they are clear and accountable and you hold yourself to it because oftentimes it comes down to you.
Right? Your frontline leader is assuming you're doing these things, but you've got to hold yourself accountable to make sure that you're reviewing that pipeline, you're identifying where those gaps and risks are, and you're aligning those priorities appropriately.
Adam O'Leary (11:53.321)
Absolutely and where do you where would you say would be like? The best place for somebody to focus right now. Let's say if we wanted to give the listeners a simple win Okay, what is the one thing that they can do today that would take them say an hour? To be able to increase their sales or help one of their sales team members be able to drive revenue very quickly
John Boney (12:18.87)
Budget your time, right? It's like a financial budget. You've got to be really maniacal about how you handle your time. So I work with a lot of elite sellers around the globe and they are maniacal, maniacal about the way they handle their time and their calendar. They own their own calendar. They don't allow other people to infiltrate onto their calendar and consume time with things that aren't going to generate revenue for them.
And to me, that's the easiest and yet the hardest thing to do. Because again, as I said, there's so many things that are coming at us on a day-to-day basis, but our job is to generate revenue. And if we're doing things that aren't generating revenue, because things are consuming our calendar, then we're going to get lost in the shuffle and we're going to end up with a weak pipeline, making poor decisions on opportunities that we have in front of us. So budget your time, own your calendar. And I think that's going to be the step one.
as you kind of move forward with everything else that kind of follows along with that that we've been talking about.
Adam O'Leary (13:20.448)
That's amazing and what would you say is the biggest win that you've personally seen from your clients who have budgeted their time appropriately?
John Boney (13:27.744)
So, great question. I think what we see when people are budgeting their time appropriately, the level of awareness that they're able to have on what's going on with their accounts, the accountability, the intentionality, they're able to make better decisions and have faster growth. And all of those things are exactly what every organization is looking for. And so seeing those things.
happen. I've seen increase of 20 to 40 percent in pipeline. I've seen sales cycles go from six months to four months. I've seen improved team focus, right? The team becomes more energized because they're closing more opportunities. Therefore, the morale goes up and attrition goes down. So when you start having that discipline and it's from the top down, it's you start with yourself. But as I said, it's a team game and
If there's things that are happening within your week, your month, your quarter that aren't productive, they aren't bringing value to you or the organization, then have a conversation about it. Talk to others on your team. Talk to your leader about, how do we either A, bring more value to this meeting that we're having or B, why do we need to have it? And it sounds harsh, but the reality is is that we all need to be driving revenue activity. And if we can do that.
We're going to see some of those numbers that I just shared, like the 20 to 40 % increase in pipeline coverage and shorter sales cycles and so on and so forth. So it takes discipline. Yeah.
Adam O'Leary (14:56.996)
I'm so glad that you're bringing that up for sure I'm so glad that you're bringing this up my one of my first companies that I was working with I was doing sales for and This is not a joke every day. There was a 30-minute Roundtable where the whole company would get together and everybody would share for like two minutes about what they're working on and I one day just asked founder and I said look in 30 minutes Do you know what I'm capable of doing in 30 minutes? How many leads I'm capable of generating like?
This is literally wasting my time. So thankfully we got it down to once a week. Thank God.
John Boney (15:30.42)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's true. Like the activities like that, while they can be beneficial cause you can learn from your peers. if they're done too often, they're just a waste of time. Right. You know, I how many, I can't tell you how many QBRs that I've been to internal QBRs that I've been to, and everybody's expected to sit there and listen and pay attention. And as soon as yours is over, you check out, you move on. Like you're thinking about
all the stuff that you need to do from the QBR and the feedback that you got, but people don't pay attention to other people's QBRs as much as you would like them to. So how do we change that? How do we either A, make them so they are more valuable and people are engaged, or do we really need everybody in there? Do we need to have 25 people sitting in a room for four days to listen to everybody's QBR when 90 % of the time?
the AEs that are done are checked out and they've moved on to do other stuff, their laptops up, their phones in their hand, their iPads in their hand, whatever it is. So yeah, I think just, again, if you can change the trajectory of those meetings so it is valuable for everybody, that's great. If you can't, then have the conversation about why are we doing this?
Adam O'Leary (16:32.396)
Absolutely.
Adam O'Leary (16:44.5)
Absolutely, 100%. And where can people go to learn more about you?
John Boney (16:48.15)
So there's a couple of different places. One, I'm on LinkedIn. So easy to find me on LinkedIn, John Boney. You're going to ask me what my actual sign is. I don't remember what it is, Adam, but it's John Boney. Probably not many of us out there. It can also be found on the force management website, forcemanagement.com. And we are in the business of helping sales teams become elite sales teams. As you said, through one seller at a time, we put a framework in place to help them drive productivity.
and to sell on value. it's a great framework that has a 25 year background of doing this with companies all over the globe.
Adam O'Leary (17:28.234)
I love that. Well, thank you so much, John. I really, really enjoyed this episode.
John Boney (17:31.85)
Thank you. Appreciate it, Adam.
Adam O'Leary (17:33.589)
Awesome, well thank you guys for listening and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
