Episode 45
Leading Through Change: How to Successfully Navigate Sales Pivots
Summary
Lucas Price chats with Tyler Kelly, President of Basis Technologies, about the challenges and strategies involved in transforming sales teams. With over two decades in the digital media industry, Tyler shares his journey from sales to leadership, emphasizing the crucial shift from selling to small markets to engaging with clients that have over $20 million in digital media spending. The conversation covers Kelly's approach to management, the importance of adapting sales strategies, and the differentiation between direct sales and agency sales teams. Key insights include the value of leadership by example, clear communication, focusing on a specific customer identification process, and the necessity of maintaining professional relationships for long-term success.
Take Aways
- When facing major strategic shifts, sales leaders must take the initiative to set an example for their teams to follow.
- Simply declaring a change in the approach is not sufficient; implementing and enforcing accountability is key to ensure the new strategy takes hold.
- Persistent and transparent communication, combined with instilling confidence in the team, is essential during transitions.
Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/
Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Connect with Tyler Kelly: linkedin.com/in/tylerkellycentro
Mentioned in this episode:
BEST Intro
BEST Outro
Transcript
How do you change the company's orientation to larger customers And expand your potential market. That's one of the topics we're going to be talking about today with an accomplished leader, Tyler Kelly from basis technologies. Tyler's a seasoned leader with over two decades of experience in the digital media industry.
t, and excellence beyond his [:Tyler is also an avid water skier and passionate traveler. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas with his family. Tyler. Welcome.
[:[00:01:12] Lucas Price: Yeah. Appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to sales as a profession?
[:So I went to school, I studied for advertising and made sure that I could basically follow in his footsteps. To take this next step.
[:[00:01:50] Tyler Kelly: It was the hardest part. I think of moving from sales to sales management is letting go and teaching others to do what you [00:02:00] can do and then scale, because if you don't let your sales team scale, then it's a problem, . You just one person in the cog. So therefore I think the biggest transition was letting go of things that I held so closely as I moved into the management. And then of course there's people, and I always joke that every problem comes on two feet. With that, just the headaches of managing people, pushing them, making sure that they're doing the same thing and not judging them on how you act, but how they can operate because we're all different people.
[:[00:02:48] Tyler Kelly: For sure. I remember I used to hate Salesforce. Like it was like, when I was in sales, I was like, I'm going to be the best salesperson, I'm going to break every record. And not do Salesforce. And now that I'm in management and have been for a long [00:03:00] time, I'm like, you got to put Salesforce in because management you're blind, .
And you just have to know when you're talking to investors and you're talking to your board or whatever it is. And so it's just so important. And I think salespeople sometimes thinks it's big brother, but it's really about just educating the entire organization. And I didn't see that when I was a seller, I felt like it was big brother versus. Actually trying to help the organization be better.
[:[00:03:33] Tyler Kelly: I do. And we've built scorecards around it. That's how I really run the sales team and see who's being effective. Who's not. It's just our source of truth. And so that was something I definitely did not see as a salesperson that now in management I've 100 percent see.
[:There was something that kind of gave them that drive. Is that, is there anything that you'd point to Hey, this was a defining moment for me where I realized this is, I can do what it takes. I'm going to push through the challenges and become successful in sales.
[:[00:05:00] Lucas Price: So you've had obviously an amazing run at basis technologies. I, starting there, basically at the beginning, bringing it to where it is today. And I'm sure during that period of time, you've gone through changes where it's been like, all right, what got us here is not going to get us there.
And you have to start convincing the sales organization, making changes across the go to market organization. In order to change the orientation. Can you tell us a little bit about, some of those challenges and how you found your way through those challenges?
[:[00:06:27] Lucas Price: When you think about like the personnel side or the strategy side what are some of the like really hard decisions to make where it was like, okay, this is a, we're going this way now that we have to pivot and go a new direction, here are the factors that we have to weigh in order to decide.
And it ended up leading you to some, something that was, felt risky or felt dangerous.
[:[00:08:10] Lucas Price: We're we're challenging to get right. And probably did some great things and also learn some lessons along the way. The two things that come to mind is like getting the customer communications, right? Letting your customers know what's going on. There's probably challenges there. And then communicating to your sales organization and previewing for them, what's going to happen.
I imagine you want to have some communication before, Oh, here's your new comp plan. One of the two directions in terms of, how you manage to go engine, communicate it.
[:And so as a salesperson, you only have so much time in the day. And so where are you going to fish? And, we joke a lot. If you have a bucket and, You scoop a ton of minnows.
get a tuna, you have a tuna [:Everything that we can do is going to help these large customers. And we know it. So why waste your time on these small ones? Because then you can point to that commission structure and say, if you land one of these, this is your wealth moving forward. And that's a big driving factor for a lot of salespeople. And those are the salespeople I want that, are here to try to earn and do big things.
[:You definitely are not in a situation where you want everyone to self select out, . You want some people to realize that this is a bigger and better opportunity for them. [00:10:00] How do you make sure that, they're buying into that? You gave us one great example, actually You set the example, they follow your lead.
What are other things that you need to watch out for in terms of communicating that to them and getting, the vast majority of the team on board with you?
[:[00:11:04] Lucas Price: I went through a transition at one point. I wouldn't say it's similar, but there are some similarities in this case. We had a large sales organization. That was a lot of them were, most of the deals were self sourced. But there was no self serve component for the customers. And so every deal went through a salesperson somewhere, and then we were turning on self serve and we realized okay, some of these deals are going to stop going to salespeople.
That's going to dry up some of the leads, but we're also going to be able to like. Look at what's happening with these customers who self serve and like figure out which of those could be upsold. And so there might be better opportunities. The sales, the salespeople will be able to better understand what they should focus on and what not.
get to decide whether we're [:And that's, that was a message that I tried to give over and over again before, when I, when he could see that the change was coming, but it wasn't here yet. So that, hopefully it really sinks in. People are understanding by the time the change happens, that, they have a choice in terms of which direction they're going to go and how they're going to feel about this change.
[:
How do you go, push that forward? And I think. It up very great, which is the changes constant. We're always going to be doing it. Don't be a victim, and how do we go push through and get this thing done to help the company and to help yourself grow and be better.
[:And there were, you said that you'd felt eliminated some of the risk by going and working with these big customers, but besides having, gotten some of the bigger customers, what were some of the challenges in terms of deciding to make this decision?
[:We all agreed in that meeting that this is the direction we're going to go. And then we, complete change our sales process where we're going, our ICP and so far knock on wood it's it's been successful.
[:But I understand we're going this way and I'm going to commit to it. Is that I've always found that challenging and I'm always like really wanting to try to get people on board rather than disagree and commit.
[:Cause if we're not all doing that, then it will fall apart. And. I truly believe that and the team has really stepped up and moved this direction and the belief is palpable. Now, like when I go out and I was just in, I was actually in Mexico this week with our international team and they're even feeling it like, in Latin America Hey, we can go win big people.
not the same. And so just by [:[00:16:18] Lucas Price: As you've gone through this experience. Are there any any things that you've noticed? Oh, this is a mistake we easily could have made. Or if, if someone, if one of our listeners is out there thinking about Hey, I need to make a similar type of change in my organization.
What would be like a common mistake that they should watch out for
[:yet. We never put any parameters in place and we didn't hold people that accountable.
And I E Hey, we want to go bigger, but they're still out there selling to small customers and we don't say, stop, we don't change anything. And they keep just repeating the same patterns because that's what they know.
think the biggest difference [:You can say whatever you want, but if you're not holding people accountable, and we've, I've definitely done that many times where I say something, don't hold people accountable. The numbers are okay. Okay. We keep moving on to the next year, which was the groundhog day that we had created.
[:So that's some great advice. So one of the other things I wanted to ask you about is when we before this recording, we talked about how. You have [00:18:00] a direct sales team and an agency sales team, and some of the things and some of the differences between them, when you think about building a playbook or building a the go to market motions between those two teams, how are they different and how are they similar?
[:So it's a lot more of a media conversation. And so the skill sets are very different. And so as we broke out the teams, we wanted to make sure the agency team has a lot more business, how to run a business, how to run an agency, how are we helping you save money, not just media performance, but actually how do we actually create efficiencies. Where my brand direct team needs to be very smart and very good at media overall and creating better performance for our end client and having those confidences to [00:19:00] go talk to those people. So on the brand side, it's about media and on the agency side, it's about running a better business. They both kind of overlap, though, to your point, .
A lot of brands will also try to bring media in house, and therefore there are cost efficiencies that both teams need to know. And then, because a lot of agencies or a lot of brands are using agencies, We also use the brand team to help push into agencies, our product to say, this is going to be the best for your brand.
You should have your agency use it. So there's a lot of collaboration every time. We don't have very many off sites that don't include everybody.
It's usually together because the message is very similar at the end of the day. And what we're trying to do is similar at the day, but they are very different go to market strategies.
[:When you're thinking about [00:20:00] hiring someone on one side or the other. Are you looking for slightly different things in that seller? Are you looking for different traits?
[:So on the brand side, I definitely look for people who have a deep knowledge of media and have practiced and been in that space. Yeah. On the agency side, I definitely look more for who can get into the C suite, who has the confidence, and who can actually talk about P& Ls. Who can talk about how they're operating their business with authority. And so they are very different people. And we, people have made the shifts between, so I'm not saying you can't, but for the most part, our most successful sellers on the brand side have media experience. And then I think on the agency side, it's the confidence and the belief in our product.
[:[00:21:02] Tyler Kelly: Correct. Yeah. A lot of times you're working with the VP of marketing or Possibly the CMO, which is the C suite, but usually that's where we tend to get the most success, but it's usually that VP of advertising. And so on that side, on the brand side, it's very successful there. What we've learned on the agency side is that if we're not talking to the C suite, it's very hard to get change. Because our product actually suggests that you can do more with less and a lot of people at the VP level or media or whatever are trying to build bigger teams a lot of times. So having a product that actually helps. Scale down sometimes is threatening to their career. And so we really like to get to the C suite to be like, this is really about, your profitability and how do we get you more profitable?
he company, but we just have [:[00:22:04] Lucas Price: And have you had to put a real clear kind of rules of engagement in place to avoid channel conflict? Or is that not really an issue in terms of the target markets?
[:[00:23:34] Lucas Price: Yeah, that, that makes sense. So getting the communication clear up front prevents a lot of pain down the road. So we talked a little bit about the traits, the different traits between and the backgrounds. Between a channel and brand seller. What about the actual go to market motion and the stages that you track in Salesforce and stuff like that is, are there, are they pretty similar in terms of, are you using the same primitives in terms of the sales process?
eetings we're going to have, [:[00:24:01] Tyler Kelly: There's a small divergence just in terms of the actual stages and we have both, we have two different stage setups in Salesforce for each team. But they're very similar overall. This, the stages are different, but we use medic for everything. And, hopefully a lot of listeners are conscious of what medic is, but it's, the sales qualification tool that we use and we use that across all teams. But the stages are different within our Salesforce. And how do we measure it? How do we measure activity?
[:This isn't a good opportunity for us for various reasons. And so I'm going to spend my time on the great opportunities and in channel, you're always trying to keep the door open and you're okay. If it doesn't close this year, it'll close next year. Do you see it that way in terms of channel or do you still want to get your team focused on, on, their active work being on the [00:25:00] most active opportunities within the channel?
[:And so keep those relationships strong because I do believe more and more even today that sales is relationship based. So much of the, even the C suites that I talk to are like, I want to work with people I like, and that still happens today. And now in a day and age where we all get bombarded with emails and we have the BDRs and [00:26:00] SDR programs across all these companies, everyone's in flooded with Sales reach out. And so I think if you can break through that noise, because you have a relationship, it's going to make you stronger and stronger. And so that's what I tell my team is just don't give up on any of the relationships. You don't know where they're going to end up or be and keep those and foster them throughout your career. A lot of my success today is people I met 20 years ago, and that would be, still stay friends and I can call them up and ask for help or advice or even their business and. That's the other piece. You need to ask for the business, even though they're your friends, you can still ask for the business. And I'm amazed at how many people don't want to do that. I'm like you friends with them just say, how do we work together?
What's the barrier. And a lot of people, I think, try to keep friends in business separate. I'm a big believer in if you're friends, you can have any conversation.
[:Big picture, what are some of the most important things that we talked about today?
[:[00:28:10] Lucas Price: Yeah, I love those. I would also add based on what I heard from you today love when you talked about setting the example, leading by example, and, showing people what's possible. And then when you say you want to do something, you can talk and talk about it, but that's not going to do anything.
And still, until you start to put the pieces in place, the accountability to enforce the strategic direction. So those are a couple of my. Great takeaways from the conversation today. Tyler, where can where can our listeners find you online?
[:[00:28:56] Lucas Price: If you enjoyed this episode of building elite sales teams, please leave us [00:29:00] a review in your podcast app. You can find more of our content online at, on our blog at yardstick. team. And if you have any feedback from us, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining.
