 So I just want to be clear, because somebody asked when they came in, this is not going to be a session about building a CRM to sell. This is not a development session. This is a business session. And so the goal is to talk about the business of selling your services, whatever it is you sell, vertical solutions, custom development training, coaching, et cetera. So I won't be offended if you thought this was a how to develop a CRM or a sales tool. You certainly are free to go and run to another session. Otherwise, I'll get started. So welcome, thanks for coming. My hope is I can get through the slides pretty quickly, and then we can turn the rest of this into a conversation. Because as you're going to see, what I'm going to be focusing on today is process, not method. And I'll clarify what I mean as the difference, but I imagine a lot of you have insight because all of us in some way or another are selling. So my name is Mark Richmond. This is Developing a Sales Process. Who am I? Real quick, the president of Skeleton Key, also Bright Source IT. These are two companies based out of St. Louis, Missouri. I'm originally from New York. We're an FBA platinum-level company. I'm certified in versions 8 through 14, scheduled to take the 15 tests next Friday, wish me luck. I won the Excellence Award in 2011 and 2014. The first was just for win performance-type contributions, and the second one was for lead generation. I ran around and did a huge number of Apple spotlights before they had the idea to iPad or really had a lot of engagement with Apple. I've been speaking at DevCon for a number of years, including this year. And in my company, I am various types of sales roles. I'm a sales manager. I'm a sales person. There's my typo. I know there's always one in every slide deck. And I'm also a sales engineer. We're going to talk a little bit about those roles and also how our sales process is evolving. To keep in mind that anything I talk to you about in terms of sales is obviously going to be through the narrow lens of how I've been selling at Skeleton Key and for Bright Source, which has changed a lot over the years. I'm not trying to also prescribe a particular way. You do it just trying to share what I've learned along the way and hopefully help you all do save you some of the trouble that I've run into. So several years ago, we're talking eight or more years ago, I paid a sales trainer to train me to sell. So I spent a whole year every month meeting with this guy talking about selling. And it was kind of a sandalure method, kind of identify the pain and all these other things that he was talking about. And I hated it. And I immediately went out and hired a salesperson. And I love the guy I hired. It was Jason Thomas. He actually spoke at DevCon a number of years ago. I forget maybe in one of the Florida locations. But regardless, Jason was great. We were a great team. We paired together. He started selling for the IT division. And at some point, it became clear that he just wasn't getting it done the way we needed to get it done. He wasn't happy with what he was doing. So I decided to step back into the arena and start selling. And along the way, we read this book. I actually saw Dan Pink speak at an event in St. Louis. And I was really impressed. And I had my whole team read it. And the real thing that impressed me was sort of encapsulated by this quote. And that is that some of us, we kind of assume a lot the tech people, developers, and so on are introverts. They're OK talking one-on-one with individuals. But to actually put them in front of a crowd is kind of awkward and uncomfortable. And he really talks about the fact that we kind of all fall, we kind of tend to think of extremes. We tend to think of people as extroverts or introverts. But we're really mostly ambiverts. We kind of switch equally between these two different modes. And that's because we're people. We're humans. We're attuned to others around us. Whether it's family or spouses or whatever like that, you're really kind of constantly interacting with other people for better or for worse. And it really means that all of us really have the ability to sell. Because all selling is moving other people. It's getting them to change their position or to come along with you for whatever it is you're trying to get them done. And we're moving people all the time. You can probably think of a number of examples of convincing a friend or a neighbor to do something or not to do something. Or maybe your siblings or your parents or your spouse and so on. There's a number of different people in our lives that we interact with that we don't think of as being formally people we're selling to. But if you're persuading people to move from A to B, whether it's their position, their posture, or whether it's to give you a taste of something or to give you back something, I mean, I've got four kids, as you'll see here in a moment. And just getting them to share with each other is a massive effort in selling. Trying to figure out what actually would move them and change their mind. And so my point of this is to convince all of you that even if you don't think of yourself as a sales person, even if you're like me and you want to hire someone else to do it, in most businesses, especially at our scale, owners are more effective at selling to other owners and decision makers. That's true in a lot of industries. But IT, I think, is sexually so. Because the idea here is that you understand where they're coming from. You've got a business. You've got a P&L. You've got a balance sheet. You've got cash flow. You've got competing priorities for those dollars. And here you are of someone coming in to talk to you. That person better not just be a developer. That person shouldn't just be someone focused narrowly on one thing. That person should understand the pain, the suffering, the worries, the opportunities, all the different challenges that their owner has. And so if I can convince all of you that you, in fact, can sell, that it isn't something completely foreign and requires lots of training, that you can kind of just use your own skills and strengths, then I've done my job for today. So this is a picture of my family. I want you to guess how many times we had to take this photo before we got this acceptable one. A ridiculous number. Not only was the water cooperative, it was the kids work cooperative. This is the best one we could get. And this isn't the same as selling to customers. This is barely controlled chaos. Three of these kids were crying minutes before. There was hitting and smacking with paddles and splashing. It was amazing. We actually got everybody but Clark there in the back with the curly hair. We'd actually calmed down enough for a good photo. Can anyone guess, by the way, where this was taken? Is this sort of an extra credit question? No, it wasn't at DevCon, but it was in San Diego. Yes. So that's the Hilton there in the background, where we had the big hamster balls that one year. So just to give you a peek, this is what it looked like in various other shots. We had nose picking. We had people smacking each other with things and crying. We tried putting everyone's hands up to get people to stop, and it didn't work. But like I said, this is not a process. This was us, again, those still having to be selling and persuasive to our kids. And my hope is that you'll never experience this kind of chaos with your clients, although they also will require various skills and methods. Sometimes we're threatening with our kids. Sometimes we're cajoling. Sometimes we're encouraging and rewarding. It's a variety of different skills. And I think all those things are going to come up as well. But none of those are really process. Those are just method. The process is what are the different milestones or stages or steps you go through? And that's what we're going to focus on today. So methodology is not process. You've probably heard a lot about different sales methods. I've mentioned one already, Sandler. What I'm going to talk about today hopefully applies to all of them. There's strategic selling, which was sort of the, and may still even be, the way that file makers always sell or conceptual selling. There's spin and snap and challenger and solution based in Sandler. There's the value framework. By the way, I can strongly recommend you attend Jonathan Stark session on pigeonholing yourself. To a certain degree, that's about marketing and positioning. To a certain degree, it's about understanding the value of the services that you offer, especially within your niche. And a few years ago, there was a great debate here about value pricing, and there's all kinds of discussions here about fixed fee and so on. These are all methodology type discussions. All of those still require meetings. They still require proposals or agreements. They still require various types of stages of activity with your clients, regardless of the particular approach you might take. So I'm not going to offer you any information or advice about which of these assorted methods is the right one for you. All of them require process to get from the beginning when you first talk to a client to the end when they become an actual customer paying you money to do services. So what's a process? So for my purpose today, I'm just going to define it as a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end repeatedly with some degree of reliability. That doesn't mean every time you do it, it's always going to have the same outcome. It just means that you're improving the odds that more frequently you will have the same outcome because you're doing a repeatable process. So that's all that we're talking about today. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples and then very specific concrete things and milestones and criteria I think you can use to develop your own sales process. But I'm going to use an analogy for starters. So I have a friend, Christy, who owns a little bakery in St. Louis that's doing quite well called Pint Size Bakery. I think they got rewarded like the best salted croissant or salted caramel croissant in the United States, they're doing really great. And they basically have recipes for these various things. So you can get a blueberry tart anywhere, you can get a birthday cake, you can get a quiche or salted caramel croissant, and a lot of different bakeries in the United States and around the world. The recipes may vary, but they all have one thing in common, they require someone to actually bake them. And the baking is a very mechanical process. It's need the flour and set the oven and grease the pan. These things really don't vary that much. Even if the recipe calls for a slight alteration in those things, you can't make salted caramel croissant without using an oven, you can't do it without needing dough, you can't do it even without certain items that are in every recipe like butter. And so I want to make sure we're clear that the recipe to make these things is the method. It's the secret way that you actually convince a client to buy your services or that you come up with the magical estimate that can't possibly be wrong. But the process is very mundane. It's kind of boring, but it's necessary. And without it, every sale is going to be like the Wild West. It's going to be an entirely different type of experience. It's going to be very unpredictable. And more importantly, it isn't going to scale. So as I said in, I think, the session description here is back then it was just me. And then I had one other developer, and that was the two of us. And now I've got a team of nine developers and two project managers and a training coordinator. And in order to keep that many hungry mouths busy so that I'm not worrying about where the cash flow is coming from, we have to be selling a lot. And if we're going to sell a lot, we need a process that we can sell by so that we can plug other people into the process, so that we can refine where we have bottlenecks so that we can really understand the methodology, the words I say, the how we estimate all these things will probably also be altering in the background. But my guess is that the process won't change dramatically. Just the methods will change. You know, we'll edit the process as we go, and it's gone through a lot of iterations. But if you're a small business or you're trying to scale or you're trying to guarantee that sales pipeline for your team now as you've grown, process is a magical way to get that done. It's like any framework. It's sort of like why we recommend databases to people. Don't just keep doing this ad hoc way. Try to come up with a singular methodology that really works. Plug it into a process that supports and provides a framework to support it. And then if you need to change the method over time, accompany that with a better process to move it along. So let's talk about the common elements that you're going to find in the sales process. Independent of the method and to a certain degree, all of these can be interpreted a lot of different ways. So all sales process starts with something that precedes it, like the client or customer, prospect, whatever term you prefer, finding you in the first place. We're not going to talk about that. But it is a preceding step. And before you can actually get into a sales process, there has to be something that brings someone into engagement with you. There's a kind of sequence of ordered actions. So there's some preceding step-by-steps that eventually get someone to engage with you. And then you're going to have a series of actions you're going to perform in sequence, whatever works for you. I'm going to share you with, we do it, skeleton key. That's going to ideally get you where you want to go. You're going to have well-defined stages along the way with specific objectives for each stage. I'm going to show you how these sequence of actions and these stages overlap here in a moment. You're going to have clear criteria on when you should move to the next step or stage. So the idea here is that it's just sort of intuitive. You're going to want to make sure you can dot some i's and cross some t's along the way, so you'll feel comfortable moving things forward. There's going to be different roles and responsibilities. You may be serving all of them. I'm going to try to point out what they are. Again, it's sort of the idea is to give you an opportunity to kind of think about all the different hats that you wear and how you might plug other people into those over time. We're going to talk about how to measure and manage your sales, so you can understand whether or not what you're doing is working. And if so, where is it working best? And if it's not working everywhere, where are those trouble points? And also, if you're a large organization like we are, I may be the primary salesperson for Skeleton Key, but there are still four other people who are handling various types of opportunities. Our project managers are handing repeat business in phase two, phase three type deals. We've got a training coordinator who's handing all the training opportunities and coaching opportunities. I've got a licensing person who's doing all the licensing deals and also doing secondary PM and testing. And then I've got the whole BrightSource division, which is doing IT. And so we've got three salespeople over there. Some of them, again, are doing repeat business with existing customers, and some of them are doing new. And so there's a variety of different hats that you wear. Everything that has to get done has got to be somebody's role and job. And if you can start to define that, not only will you do a better job of it if you're the only person doing it, but then as opportunities present themselves to scale and insert other people, you already know what their job description is. And then, of course, at the end, we have following steps, something that happens afterwards. When you close the deal, there's obviously a whole bunch of stuff that happens, right? You've got project managers, you've got developers, you've got testing, you've got deployment, you've got referrals and follow-on business. And again, we're not going to spend a lot of time on that because I want to focus on the core center. Once they come into your sphere, how do you take them through a sequence set of steps? How do you know that you should keep moving it along so that you can get to some kind of decision at the end? But exactly how you go about persuading them to buy, that's going to be a totally different topic. We certainly can talk about that at the end. So real quickly, what are the preceding steps? Various by company and marketing strategy. If you're anything like us, you probably get a lot of your leads from the FBA partner listing. If you're not an FBA, you might do it because you have local connections, or maybe you have a vertical, or maybe you use SEO really well, or you blog, or I don't know. We've been terrible at marketing at Skeleton Key. You get most of our leads from FBA or repeat business. That's just sort of the magic of being an FBA partner. So Julie Sigfrenius can thank me now. If you're not an FBA member, strongly recommend it. It's a great source of leads. But that's not what this session is about. So that's pretty much all I'm going to say about leads and generating them. But it is worth knowing, since you're going to worry about this later, where your leads are coming from, which sources of leads are the best leads, and which of those sources lead to the best customers. Sometimes the best leads aren't necessarily the best customers. What defines new versus repeat business? Because you're going to have sources of opportunity to do new deals with new customers, or you're going to have sources of opportunity to do deals with the same customers you've done deals with before. Maybe another division, maybe a department, maybe another phase. And you also want to know what these things cost you. At some point, you're going to want to be able to say, how much money am I investing in my sales efforts? And what is my cost per lead? And not to mention, what's my cost per customer? Which are very different things. But again, things we're not going to talk about today. But these are all really useful things to know when you're thinking about the preceding step. But they're really more of a marketing discussion, and one which I'm poorly qualified to talk about. However, I can talk to you a lot about this, because this is my bread and butter of what I do. My sequence of ordered actions. What do we do to kind of keep things moving along? So this is what we do at Skeleton Key. I'm not prescribing this as the way you do it. I'm just kind of throwing it out there as a way to do it. We always have an initial meeting. So the lead comes in. It's a web form or a phone call or something. We have a very quick response time. Same day or less than 24 hours. That's sort of our step one preceding step. The goal for us is to get someone into this initial meeting, which tends to be for us 15 to 30 minutes on the phone. And we're going to talk a little bit about what the objectives are for that in a moment. After the initial meeting, we schedule the client interview. I usually schedule that step to be within five business days from the initial meeting, only if I pass the appropriate criteria, which I'll cover here shortly. And it's usually an hour to 90 minutes. You're usually done over web conferencing. Depends on where the client is. But even clients in town, I do web conferencing, because who wants to drive in park and waste all that time if I can just meet with them virtually? Plus I can record it, and I can refer to it, and so on and so forth. But for me, the step is first meet with them, then interview them. Once I've interviewed them, I should have enough information to do some estimating. So this is an internal process, not a client facing process, which is why I've changed color on the boxes. Estimating can take a variety of amounts of time. It can involve a bunch of different people, usually the engineer, which is often me. Then I have a review of recommendations. That's also scheduled for five business days or less from the interview. So I've got to squeeze that estimating in there somewhere in that five business day window, because I want the client to leave one step knowing what the next step is going to be. We'll talk a little bit about why that's so important as we go here. But we call it the review of recommendations. I'm very much welcome any suggestions. If anybody wants to send me a better description of what that meeting is, it's a mouthful. It takes a really big subject line and an email or a calendar entry. But the goal is there is that we're going to present various options that we've come up with, different paths to get to their goal. And of course, it's about 60 to 90 minutes and involves various activities. Again, our method, we present them, how we do what we do, why they should work with us, and what we've come up with. It's all method. I'm not going to suggest you do it our way, but I'm happy to talk about that at some point that people want to. Of course, after we do the review, we make whatever edits and changes we need to make. We do some kind of agreement delivery. I call it an agreement because I hate the word proposal. I like to think that I'm only sending something to somebody that they're actually going to sign because they already know what it is, and they've already agreed to do it. So it's just at this point academic and maybe lawyers and other stuff that has to happen. And then I always schedule either a week or two weeks out, depending on the client's decision making time frame, a touch base meeting. And I tell them the whole goal of the touch base meeting is to get a yes or a no. And a no in my work is world is about as good as a yes, because it's definite. The last thing I want is a client who's maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, eating up my bandwidth in time, following up with them to see if they want to, forcing me to step outside my process to chase them. If they really want to do this, and they've made it this far down the pipe, they should be able to make a decision. I'll give them the time that they want. They want two weeks. They want 30 days, whatever it is. But I want a touch base meeting on the calendar, because that's my next step in my sequence. And if I don't have that, then the sequence stops, and my process breaks. So I consider that basically a no. But I really would prefer to get them to say no, so I tell them that no is OK, no is better than nothing. So what are the stages? If those are the steps that SkeletonQ uses, let's talk about the stages. These are a bit more generic. And I've tried to keep this simple. This is an area where we could debate on and on what the different pieces of the sales process might be. Again, a lot of this is going to fall into that slippery slope of method. But I'd say that there's basically four stages to happen. And they're kind of amorphous, but they kind of cover general areas. And I actually had a much longer list, and you might have seen that if you looked at the old slides, and I've whittled it down to keep it as simple as possible. There's an engagement step. Some kind of initial, are we a good fit for one another? I actually tell clients this in my initial meeting. The entire agenda, are we a good fit? We're going to talk about what the criteria for a good fit are in a minute. But that's the entire purpose of that initial meeting for me, is to figure that out. At some point, once you've determined that, you can move on to a next stage, which is figure out what they need. Frequently called requirements gathering, or solution searching, or whatever else different methods or such might call it. Then there's some kind of problem solving. All right, so we're a good fit. I know what you need. How am I going to solve that problem? How am I going to fix it? What different ways can I solve the problem? What different paths? Maybe you're a training and coaching customer who wants to DIY. Maybe you're a development customer. Maybe you need a prototype and proof of concept before people are willing to commit the funds and time and energy to building the full thing. But again, that's all internal to how your method of selling is. For me, it's all about figuring out what the solutions are at this point. And then there's some decision making process. A process where you present that information to them, you negotiate, you discuss, you debate, and you ideally get them to come to a choice. So the way that these things overlap, on paper at least, is something like this. Here's my steps and my sales process that we looked at before. And we have engagement. That's really what the initial meeting is about. It's about, are we a good fit? That's all. I don't want to go any further down my sequence of order actions if this client's not a good fit. I just want to stop it right there. No hard feelings. Maybe I can refer you to someone else in your market, or as a specialty in your industry. Maybe you need to go take some training, or go up to Linda, now that we can offer them a free opportunity there. That's even better. I might talk up any number of the people in this room saying, who's really good at that? I saw this great thing at DevCon. You should call David, or that kind of thing. And we've got requirements gathering that typically happens at the interview step for us. That's where I gather the information, ask a lot of questions. I tell my clients, this is a 60 to 90 minute aggressive interview where I will ask you 100 questions. I will interrupt you several times. And my entire goal is to understand what the scope of work is, to kind of understand what I need to know in order to come up with options for you. Then we've got problem solving, which takes place really in two places. During my estimating, we're going to talk a minute how this is on paper. That's an on purpose title there. You're estimating. You're coming up with estimates. You're doing data modeling. You're doing whatever it is you do to solve the problem for the customer. Maybe you're just coming up with a discovery plan, or something like that. And of course, you've got the review of recommendations where you present that to them. And you have to explain how you solve the problem, and maybe negotiate that. And then you've got decision making. This is where you put the agreement together, you put the appropriate payment terms and other things that you think are going to help them make a yes or no decision. And then you actually have a touch base meeting of some kind with them to ask for a yes or no. Now, the reality is that all those things happen all along the way. So I don't want anyone to think that these stages, even though they're well defined, are necessarily clear edged in and of themselves. The steps are. I absolutely know, and you'll see this in a moment when I show you a forecast report. I always know where I am in my steps and my sequence of ordered actions. When we do our CRM, we say, this opportunity or this deal, it's gotten as far as client interview or it's gotten as far as review of recommendations. So I can know exactly how far down that process I've gotten. But I'm still engaging with the client. I might be meeting new people at subsequent meetings. I may be overcoming objections. I may be finding out new requirements when I'm presenting the options that I came up with, which means I have to go back to the drawing board and readdress my problem solving. I'm probably solving problems in that first phone call. I'm sure we've all seen this. You're listening to the customer, and they're describing this process, and you're sitting there nodding because you know, you've seen it a million times. Ad hoc processes, spreadsheets, yada, yada, yada. I had lunch with someone at Holstein's yesterday. Gentleman is using real pages right now. Good solution, works for their market. But there's a lot of little things on the sides and edges that he needs that it doesn't do. And FileMaker's looking like a good fit, and he wanted to talk about it. And he described this crazy process someone went through where they printed out this thing. Well, they transposed this stuff to Excel. They moved all that to another Excel sheet. Sound familiar? Then they printed it out. Then they scanned it to PDF. Then they put it on the server in this folder. Then they put the pile over here. And so the question, of course, is you're all asking, like, why didn't you just print the PDF in the first place, and blah, blah, blah. Well, then they said, well, what happens to the pile? And then they went over and they asked that person. She said, well, half the time when the pile gets big enough, I just shred it. Because it's already on the server. The other half, I put it in the file cap. So how many thousands of dollars of papers being wasted, and da, da, da, da, da. So you're hearing this in the requirements gathering. You're probably hearing this in the initial meeting. And you're already thinking about ways you can solve and make this better. You're already thinking, I can do that in 90 minutes. I can do this in two hours. So none of these are clear edges. But I try to remind myself that my main goal is to kind of achieve those different stages along the way. And to use the criteria that I have for those stages to help me feel comfortable moving along, even though I'm probably going to revisit some of these stages along the way. And I might find that the problem I thought I was solving when I get to the review of recommendations is not the problem I thought I was solving. And therefore, I might need to go back to the interview step. So another benefit about the sequence of ordered actions is that it isn't necessarily just one way. There are times when I get to review of recommendations and proposal out, and then boom, I'm back to requirements gathering, client interview, and I have to go through the process again. Or where it splits. I thought I was planning one solution. Now I've got two deals I'm talking about. Bless you. And I'm going through them in parallel processes with maybe different sequences. So clear criteria for the stages. Bless you. Engagement. So are they a good fit? They're a good fit to me. If they have a heartbeat, they show up to the meeting, don't stand me up. They bring the right people to the meeting, meaning decision makers, subject matter experts, whoever needs to be there. And we can actually meet their needs, their timetable, and their budget, which means I'm asking them questions that they may not be comfortable asking. I'm prepared to give them answers they may not be comfortable getting. So if you saw my session last week about growing your business, we're an open book company. So I asked people straight up in the first meeting, I know you've probably heard this from other vendors, but what kind of budget do you have for this, if any? Or are you just kicking tires and trying to find a budget? Do you have money allocated to this? What is your actual timetable to deliver this thing? Because if you need it in three weeks, then we should probably refer you to someone else, because we're booked out for six. And I just don't want people to waste my time. And I don't want them to waste their time. Taking them down this path of sequenced actions, which could take, even if I do it five business days, five business days, we're still talking about the fact that the whole thing from end to end could take 10 business days. In a perfect world, that initial meeting, client interview, review of recommendations is 10 business days long. So it's a pretty compact process, so I can fit in the other stuff I need in the middle there, like estimating and agreement delivery. And then some variable amount of time later that I'll touch base if they haven't already made a decision right there at the review of recommendations. But I don't want to waste one business day with this person for their sake and for mine if they can't do this. So I'm comfortable. If the person doesn't show up for the meeting or won't confirm the meeting, we'll cancel it, because I've got other people I want to meet with and do other things that need my attention. Requirements gathering. Can they describe what they need? Or are they completely unclear about what they need? Usually you have to help people with this, right? We do a whole bunch of questions. You're trying to illustrate maybe with examples. They're kind of amazed that you understand their problem, right? Because how could it happen? Were you ever in the manufacturing industry? No, but I have got 10 manufacturing clients, and they all have the same problems you have. In fact, the problems that your manufacturing clients are the same ones that the aerospace clients have, and they're the same ones that the hospitality ones have, they're the same ones that the sports team has. They're all the same problems. They're just different industries. Information management, people, routing, workflow, and so on. So you can usually help them do this, but if they are kind of floundering and don't know, then that's criteria that we can't leave client interview. I can't move on to estimating if I don't know what to estimate. So I won't. I'll either try to figure out a different thing I can sell them, or I'll be willing to put in another interview. So there are times when those sequence of ordered actions just kind of jump in back real quickly, where I'll repeat for the right client, for the right opportunity, for the interesting, challenging deal, I will go and I'll run the client interview a second time with a different group of people, or to dig in deeper to the topic. That's just my method. I give this time away. Other people, they pay for discovery. They have one meeting, and they go right to discovery. Again, that's method. For me, it's just about using this as a framework I can rely on to say, am I ready to move on, or do I need to back up or stay right where I am until I've satisfied those criteria? Then we get into problem solving, which is basically that you can offer solutions to meet their needs. There are times when I show up at the requirements gathering, and I say, I'm not really sure how to solve your problem. Here's why. And I just lay it out in front of the customer. I don't have enough information. I thought I did, but it's more complex than I thought. I'm concerned that, based on the interviews I did, that the people aren't going to adopt a new solution, or we've got this huge IT obstacle we've got to get rid of before we can move forward. So I didn't bother wasting any time estimating and drawing an ERD or any of the other stuff I would normally do, because that would have been the waste of our time, and it would have set the wrong expectations to do about our ability to offer a solution clearly that I know is going to solve your problem. And then, finally, they're able to make a decision or take a decision, I think, because if anyone knows the actual grammatical option there, I struggle with that one. The long story short is that a client who's unable to choose, I'm not going to sit there waiting forever. There was a recent opportunity that I was working on with a BAM. We were working really hard to meet this client's short time frame and timetable, and we were jumping through hoops, and I had this back in my head kind of feeling all along the way that they wanted to do it, but they didn't actually have the authority to make the decision, even though they said they did. And lo and behold, we won the opportunity, and I still don't have assigned anything, because they actually can't make that decision. They can't take that decision. They don't have the authority. It's not really the true priority that they thought it was. There's a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors jumping around through hoops. So everything seemed fine, but I had to listen to the back of my head asking me what was going on. Yes, John? You know, I don't know. There's all kinds of labels and terms, client, customer prospect. You could have economic buyer or decision maker or influencer, and I spend a very little time thinking about it, which is probably very unprofessional of me. So John's question is that person the economic buyer, or was it somebody else who's the economic buyer? Is who's the person who's really controlling the purse strings there? They represented themselves as the person with the authority to do it. At some point later in the process, they mentioned that they had the full approval of the actual economic buyer. They just had to offer them the final information. They even came out of the meeting saying, I have a green light. We're good to go. And then I was in vacation, and I said, great. I'll ping you when I get back in a week. And I got back in a week, and I pinged them, and I heard from his assistant. Well, something's come up. Some change in priorities. What was on fire a month ago is suddenly on the back burner and no longer on fire. So this isn't a perfect process, I think, is the main point I'm trying to make there, is that you can do all of the things that you're supposed to do in sales. You can follow whatever method you ascribe to. You can follow your own sequence order of actions and follow these criteria. And you can still find that some deals just don't close, even though all the signals say that they should. We had a great deal. We did a discovery project with an organic farm out of Southern California. And it was great. We sent the guy out there. We developed an iPad prototype and solution and plan. We developed a series of ERDs and diagrams and feature estimates, yada, yada, yada. And then right when it was going to get present, the key stakeholder left the company. So of course, I sent emails to his assistant and to the owners of the company and other people who I knew of, but I had never met, who had already been telling him, yes, we're good to go. Let's move forward. And I said, hey, I'm Mark. You've spent some money with us. You've spent some time with us. We've developed these materials for you. I'd hate to see you squander the investment that you've made. We've already been paid. So the real question is, what are you going to do with this? Because clearly the company needed it, or at least we thought you did. And you guys are ready to do something. So whether it's with us or someone else, I just want to make sure that you have the materials. Here they are. Nothing. Not even a no thank you. Just think they're too busy trying to find that guy's replacement or something. I don't know. So nothing's perfect. This process won't always work. And clients aren't always honest with you about their ability to actually take decisions. So let's talk about the roles and responsibilities along the way, some of which I've mentioned already. You've got a sales assistant. Again, this could be you doing it for yourself. Bless you. In our case, I have Nancy. She schedules and coordinates all the participants in the meeting. So she'll have that first contact. That lead will come in. She reaches out to them via email or phone. Make sure that there's a heartbeat on the other side. There's actually a person there to talk. They're willing to commit to some times that she offers them. She schedules it on my calendar. So I don't have to think about any of that. I don't even engage with that lead unless she's got a problem with it, like it's a confusing post or an email comes in that's unclear. Or she can't get a human, in which case I probably never hear about it at all. On Monday, I might hear that, yeah, we got this lead from this organization, and I couldn't get them on the phone, been trying for three weeks. And so I'm just going to put them in our mailing list and move on, which is great. It hasn't wasted any of my time. Because as you'll see, I've got other hats that I'm wearing. You've got the salesperson. So this person steers the process. This person owns the lead, or the opportunity, or the deal, whatever you want to call it. And they often, and this is something I've learned from other FBA members here, sometimes their job is in about the solution requirements. It's about the business requirements. What's the objective of this solution? What problems are trying to solve for the business? What's the ROI, and who are the key stakeholders, and who's that economic buyer, and who's the decision maker, and what's the PO in purchasing and payment process going to look like? They're really focused on this. I'd like to think of them as the MC. They're running the show. They should be the primary point of contact. The sales assistant should be there to back them up. In their absence, or their lack of responsiveness, because they're in another meeting, the sales assistant is monitoring the communications of the client. If there's a need to reschedule or cancel anything, that salesperson should be able to lean on the sales assistant to do that for them. Again, if you're scaling, this is a critical role. I used to do this for myself. And I would say my assistant activities ate up 10 hours a week. Just coordinating meetings and rescheduling meetings with several different people for several different deals is a huge time-consuming P-I-T-A. But if you have someone else doing it for you, it's a lot less stressful, because you can just show up and be brilliant. Sales engineer. So I also do this now, although I'll admit that we're evolving our process. Another speaker here, Chad Adams, on my team, is working with me to prototype our sales engineering process. But we're also talking to other FBAs about how they do it so we can learn from each other. I think just like they were talking at the keynote, this community is a lot more than just people helping not-for-profits and doing really interesting things with the product. It's also one that tends to be very open and willing to share advice and guidance to each other, including, how do you grow your business and how did you sell so well? And what's your style of estimating? Because it's a pretty big ocean out there. There's a lot of opportunity. We occasionally compete with each other, but less so than you would imagine. And I'm a big believer in a rising tide. So the sales engineer is about gathering solution requirements. What is it we need to build? What thing do we need to do or fix or upgrade or convert or whatever it is? And they are likely the person who's also doing the estimating, because as an engineer, they're probably closer to the development team in terms of understanding the effort required to do things. Right now, like I said, those two middle jobs are mine. I'm the salesperson and I'm the sales engineer. I very rarely have another engineer working with me. I know in order for a skeleton key to go to the next level, we really need to do that. It's hard for me to feed that many mouths when it's just me doing both these jobs. Plus, as a sales engineer, I'm pretty good, but not good enough, which means I come up with this plan and then I hand off this big lumpy plan to people. And there's not this kind of nice gradation of the developer did this. Like, I'll admit it right now. I'm a certified developer, but I develop very rarely. Does anyone else hear mostly sales? Am I the one? Just a few of us, right? I used to develop all the time. Loved it. I still occasionally have to get in there so I can stay certified. And also, I want to make sure I don't write checks my guys can't cash. But we realize that in order for this to scale, in order to come up with better estimates that are easier to deliver, we need an engineer who's dedicated to that engineering task who's focused on these particular role and responsibility. And then finally, I have a sales manager. This person creates accountability in the process. They say, what's your next step? Is it scheduled with the customer? Why is that probability of likelihood of closing set to 50% and why do you think it's going to close yesterday versus next week versus a month from now? Do you know who the economic buyer is? Do you know whether or not they have a budget? Have you dotted all your eyes and crossed all your T's? That's what I do for BrightSource at our company. I don't actually sell our IT services. I manage the team that does. I hold them accountable to the process to make sure they're not skipping steps. And occasionally I offer advice and guidance. Clients stuck, they're not sure they want to do this. I ask if they ask certain questions. I might suggest some options from within our own methodology. Might remind them what our methodology is so they can get back on track. But a lot of what I do is just what we call like process monitoring. Are you following the process? Are you letting things dangle? Does the client know the next step? Do you know the next step? And why isn't it scheduled? Why are we off process? Obviously, tools can help you do a lot of this. We're going to take a glance at one of the reports that comes out of our tools. But I don't care again, just like method. Whether you use FileMaker or use your own homebrewed solution, whether you use a corporate tool that you bought online, like we do, we use a PSA tool called Autotask because our IT division needed it. So we had abandoned our FileMaker custom solution years ago, which was a great solution. Did everything under the sun for us. But it took time to maintain and monitor it. And it didn't do all the IT stuff the IT guys needed to do. And I couldn't really justify building all that functionality in. So we let it go. We still use FileMaker for this and that and the other thing. But we use this other tool. And that's what I use as a manager. It lets me kind of take a big picture of everything going on in the deal flow for my team and then offer insight and ask questions, which is a nice segue to the funnel. So when we talk about measuring and managing, the first topic is the funnel. And the idea of a funnel, basically, is it's a pipeline. It's a visualization of all the different deals and where they are along the process. I mentioned that we have a six or five-stedge process. You saw the initial meeting, client interview, and so on. We have lead. And we have opportunity. Those are our two preceding steps. A lead is somebody reached out to us. An opportunity is there's a heartbeat. And we've actually got someone responding to us and engaging with us. Then we have initial meeting. Then we have client interview. Then we have review of recommendations. Then we have agreement out. Then we have decision. And so these different gradations you see here are intended to indicate at the top, we've got 100 leads come in. And then maybe only 50 of them, just by illustration, make it to the next step and go into initial meeting. And maybe only another 25 of those get into the next step, which get into client interview. Because along the way, I can't meet those criteria, so I'm disqualifying that opportunity. It's not ready to move on, or it never will move on, and it dies right there and goes into the mailing list. And so the idea here is that you kind of visualize each of the opportunities, each of your ordered steps. It helps you visualize the relationship between the steps, because usually there is this kind of conversion ratio thing going on where a lot go in at the top, and fewer and fewer of those items make their way through. If you go online and look for sales funnel, you're going to see all this stuff about content marketing and all the different ways to get stuff in the top of the funnel, and all these different things about how stuff come up at the end. And they're going to label these different stages as sort of like awareness, interest, purchasing, the sort of where the buyer is. And I just kind of ignore all that. I like to think of it as just a way to visualize my actual deals and to categorize them like a subsummary using file maker terminology and to how many are falling into which slot. And then it lets me kind of evaluate conversion ratios. So what's the percentage of conversion? Now these are not my actual ratios at Skeleton Key. They're just to illustrate sort of generally what might be out there. So I use some simple numbers here where I more or less halved everything until I wanted to avoid fractions. But the idea here is it can help you identify the effectiveness of each of your steps. If you're getting a hundred leads in and 98 of them are getting into interview, you are never ever going to get out of interviewing people because you're interviewing everybody. You're not disqualifying anybody. And if all those interviewees move on to review recommendations, then you are a very generous person with your time willing to estimate for all of those people too. So a high conversion ratio in each of these steps is probably a bad thing, especially at the top of the funnel where you've got a bunch of junk coming in, a varying quality and utility. Some of it's not a good fit because it's the wrong industry that you don't specialize in. Some of it's not the right geography and you know someone closer to them who would be a better fit. Some of them don't have a budget. Some of them are just kicking tires or it's the end user who has no authority who just kind of called you is about to waste three of your hours acting like they have the authority to buy solution when actually at the end they say, oh, my boss has got to sign up on this and he doesn't know I'm talking to you. So you should be disqualifying a large number at the top so that you have fewer and fewer high quality leads making their way through. Now at the end of the funnel I like to have a higher ratio because I like to see those numbers get better. I like to feel if I've let them this far down the set of steps, when we get toward the end I want more and more of those to convert. So I'm okay with the 10% ratio at the top as long as I'm getting a 75 or an 80% ratio at the bottom because by then I've invested a lot more time and effort. I've let these people various, it's almost like get smart. You're like letting them through each of the six looking doors and if you get that far into the system you really want them to go all the way. The other nice thing about the funnel is you can kind of use it backwards. Yes, is there a question? So the question is how early in the process am I giving people numbers, costs in an effort to I think help disqualify them? So I'm gonna say first of all that's a method question but I'm gonna answer it because there's a whole bunch of different ways that people choose to do this. I vary, it depends a lot on what the scope of work I think might be. If someone sounds like they have a very lean budget maybe they only want a few small changes or something which seemed to me like something that anyone with a little bit of training can do. Probably at that point we'll start talking about things like if we did this to get the skeleton machine running where 60% of a project is development and 40% is quality control and management and such you're probably looking at 10 grand to build this thing. My guess is that an individual developer or a well-trained knowledge worker could probably do it in 20 hours because they don't have the same concerns we do about quality and liability and so on and so forth. So I kind of put that number out there less in an effort in my case to disqualify them than to offer them alternative paths to get there. Like maybe we should do training and coaching with you instead. Maybe there's licensing I can sell there so that I can still be a trusted collaborator and partner and then eventually as that company matures maybe we do become the developer when they start to get more benefit out of their solution. There are other times for example where I was just talking about the company that does foundation repair. This is a big company, 150 employees they're probably something like 20 million in sales. They can afford to hire us to build them a solution. Then I threw out numbers and that was first couple meetings. We had two initial meetings, one with the CFO and then later another one with the owners of the company and the CFO. And I was saying based on everything you've shown me so far this is feeling like an $80,000 to $120,000 ERP type solution. So I want you to know this could be a six figure solution and solutions like that taking out my calculator and looking at that 60-40 ratio typically take about this many weeks to get done. So if we were to build this and you were to agree to do it you'd be using it in October. And I'll throw those kinds of things out there because I want them to know it could grow to be this big because I've seen stuff like this before. It could take this long to build which hopefully is impressive as well as sobering in terms of you know you're not gonna have it tomorrow. But those for me are less about disqualifying customers than they are about clarifying what the road ahead looks like and we're gonna talk about this at the end but I'm really a big fan of providing information to your clients along the way. Like you would want people to provide to you along the way. We've all gone to like the car shop to get a repair or like called up someone about a major change to our roof or a house and you're getting all these questions and possibilities and stuff when you just really want to know. So you're gonna cost me more than 10 grand. Can you get it done this month before the next storm? You know is this a big repair to my car? Is this a little repair to my car? Do I need to get someone to pick me up? And this kind of hemming and hawing and uncertainty because people don't want to over commit to a number or timetable. I just find frustrating. When I'm buying, I just want facts. Even if they're scary, let me be the judge about whether they're scary or not and so that's the way I approach my method is to be very transparent with clients. And if they ask, I'll answer. They ask me what our hourly rate is. I'll tell them it's 175 an hour and you can judge that all you want. I can tell you how we build by the 10th of an hour and we don't have a lot of rounding and it's a blended rate and why we should charge you that much and how that's a lot more than other people and less than some and I can't necessarily change a client's preconceptions about that answer so I just give them the answer. Hope that answers your question. Maybe more than you. Yeah, sure. All right. So what can you do with this funnel? Once you've kind of put everything in and you start to track this stuff as it goes through the funnel, you know your conversion ratios, you can actually do some interesting stuff. You can take it to the next level and you can do that by doing something like calculating your new versus repeat business rate, calculating your average deal size, factoring in your conversion ratios, determining how much money you're gonna need, that's new business and then working backwards. Now I'm speeding up because I've gone long here on our time, calculating how many deals you need to win, calculating how many deals there should be at each step and monitoring if you're ahead or behind pace. So here's a long-winded example of it that I'm just gonna display. So here's kind of a way to think about that. Imagine on average I had 35% of my business every year was new. I just look at how much new business versus repeat business I got, however I define that and I think of my average deal size, I usually close $25,000 deal, some bigger some smaller but that's my average. And I know that let's just say for the argument for simple mass sake that I converted 50% at every step. So I can say well if I'm trying to get 4 million revenue, that means 1.4 million of that has to be from new business because that's 35%. The rest will come naturally and organically from account management and repeat business. This is just my model. And that means we need 56 new deals at $25,000 each on average in order to hit that number. And if I know that my conversion ratios are 50%, I can double, double, double all the way up the pipeline. And I know that by the end of the year I need roughly 1,800 deals coming in for me to end up with 56 closes at the end, that's the math. Which means that every week I can kind of count, I can say all right on week one of the year I should have one close, 32 leads. So at the second week I should have a total of 64 leads so far which should lead to two closes. I'm just looking at the beginning and end of the entire funnel. And I have a sales guy, Jason started this process for us, he kind of put up a whole chart. Week one to week 52, how many cumulative I should get and then he did how many cumulative he had. And he was able to tell along the way were we getting enough leads aggregate year to date to stay on pace, were enough of them getting to client interview, were enough of them getting to estimating an agreement out, et cetera and so forth. It was a really great way for us to see whether or not we were on pace. In the beginning it's really distorted because it takes time to get this thing going. You have great weeks where you get 50 leads or other weeks where you get zero. The whole idea is that an aggregate, if I punch that many leads into the top of the funnel, that's how many should come out at the bottom if I've got good sense of what my conversion ratios are. And this forecasting which can be another part of your process as well in measuring and managing is part art, part science. We take the projected close date, probability percentage, the total revenue and what was called the factored amount which is probability times total revenue. 50% of a $10,000 deal is worth $5,000. 100% of a $10,000 deal is worth $10,000. And so we use it to generate a report that looks kind of like this, where I can see all the deals that Greg has or I have in our queue and what step they are in the process and what the total revenue probability and factored revenue is for a particular time frame. So even though I've got $238,000 or $236,000 of total revenue, it's only worth about $102,000 based on the likelihood I think that those things are gonna close. And you can do this for like 30 or 60 or 90 days out and really get a good sense about whether or not you have enough opportunities of enough quality in your pipeline that you think are gonna close in such a way to fill your coffers with actionable work and dollars. And this is hard to do. So the hardest thing we do probably at Skeleton Key is forecasting income from sales and forecasting production activity because there's so many variables you can't control. I can't control really when a client is gonna close something, but I'm gonna work like hell to try to control it. And I do that by having that sequence to order of actions. If I end each meeting knowing what the next step is and articulating that to the client, then I can more reliably predict based on the number of days to that next meeting and how many days after that I'm gonna give them to make a decision when I'm gonna close it. Then I have to use the art part to say what likelihood I think it is they're gonna say yes. But the when is it gonna close? I should have a lot more control of. And of course where they are down the pipe and whether or not I've passed the criteria to feel good about that probability, this is where the combination of art and science comes in. Of course there's some following steps, varies by company just like marketing, not what we're talking about today, not that we have time. But some things you should think about here is what are the expectations you're setting and whether or not the team is going to fulfill them is going to be able to meet those expectations and are on the same page as you. So you have to have a process for handing off your deals to whoever's going to actually deliver them. You've got the buyers remorse to factor in, they loved it, they signed up for the $100,000 deal and then when they kicked off the project with the PM they were hemming and hawing and worried about the money. And now you've got a project manager and a development team which is dealing with an unhappy client because they just agreed to spend all this money. If everyone here bought a house or a car you know what I'm talking about. Minutes after you make that sale you feel like it was the wrong idea. Same is true in our business. And then of course who's gonna keep this thing going? Who's gonna get referrals? Who's gonna get the repeat business? Who's responsible for managing that client as you move on to focus on the next new deal? So other questions to help keep you up at night? Do you have enough leads? Are they the right kind of leads? Are you over or aren't qualifying your prospects? Some of that will be revealed by your conversion ratios. If you're getting a lot of leads in but very few are making it through you might be over qualifying them. I mean under, sorry, you might be over qualifying them which means you're making it too hard for them to move along. It may be that you're getting really crappy leads. And so you've got a bad lead source. Are they getting stuck in your pipeline? And if so where? Where are things stalling? What are you doing that might be part of that? That's usually a method question. But the conversion ratios and the pipeline can help you see where those stalls are happening. Where's your best ratio and your worst and do you know why? Are you selling alone a part of a team? And how do you define new business? And can you count on repeat business? It's one thing to say every year we get 65% repeat business but is that just luck or is that because of something that your team is doing in terms of account management? It's another area at Skeleton Key where we've been very lucky. Clients are happy, they come back to us, they love the platform. But we don't necessarily do a lot of account management like checking in with them quarterly to see if things are good or trying to become a trusted advisor of some kind. There's definitely an opportunity there to improve the repeat business. Between you and me, I would just assume have tiny amounts of new business every year and just be able to keep farming the existing customers and solutions because it's a good thing for them. But we're not proactive in that process. So we tend to have a fairly low repeat business rate relative to where we want it to be. And basically are you getting the results you want? If you're not getting the results you want you need to think about doing it differently. But I wanna remind you through the whole thing don't turn this process into something sterile and distancing. You're still selling to people. People, this is where I was gonna go on and I was saying earlier, people want to know what's going to happen. Anyone here have kids? Are we there yet? I mean on and on and on. And I've got four of them. So like the youngest one is asking all the same questions as brothers have asked. And it just goes on and on and on. Questions and questions. It's always about what's coming. Where are we going to dinner? Where are we gonna sit? Where are we going afterwards? Am I gonna have dessert and so on? Clients feel the same way. They wanna know the next step. The fact that we reach out really quickly and have a sales process that involves instant engagement with the client, clear about when we're gonna meet next. And I never end a meeting without the next meeting on the calendar. And if I do end the meeting with the next meeting not on the calendar is because the customer refused to commit and that percentage of probability just dropped down and I tell them so. Well if I can't set another meeting with you then I'm not sure what the next step is. So I'm thinking that the likelihood that we're gonna do this is lower. Well no, no, no, no, no. I just need to talk to someone. Then let's reach out a week after that and put something on the calendar. I just wanna know that we're not just gonna get, oh, what happened to that deal? You guys wanna do this? I wanna do it for you. Let's at least commit to talk to each other and see where things stand. Just a temperature check. But they really want that. The number of clients who come to me and say the best thing about buying from you guys is I always knew where we were in the process. I always knew when the next time I was gonna talk to you. I didn't wonder when was he gonna send me the estimate. Now back in the day when it was just me doing it, I have emails. We talked a month ago and you said you were gonna get me something in a week and I haven't seen it. So I'm wondering if there's something we did or you're not interested in the job anymore. I mean, I was clueless about the process. I had no process. And I was busy developing and troubleshooting and whatever else I was doing. I wasn't focusing on the fact that I had a person on the line who was interested in buying from me and I'd left them floundering wondering whether or not I was really still selling to them. All right, so these are the updates cause the slides that were up there originally were lesser. I appreciate you guys coming despite the lesser slides. Please remember to fill out your evaluations whether it's in DevCon to go or online and I'm happy to stand around and talk about process or method or answer your questions. Sorry I went a little long. Thank you. Jonathan. Thank you.