Igniting Growth with James Howe | The SPARXiQ Ignite Series

Thanks, David. Glad to be here.

Well, first, our salesforce is our largest investment at Motion. It's our highest expense per month and it's the biggest opportunity for us to improve our growth rate and our profitability as a company. It's also... we had an inconsistent, a lot of random acts of excellence in our sales team, but didn't have really a uniform customer-centric strategy for making sure that we deliver value on a consistent basis to our customers. So, really important goal for us and we're well on our way.

Motion has had a 75-year-old model where we basically have had a branch-centric sales leadership plan, and every sales team in every branch had a little bit of a different flavor of the kind of value proposition we're delivering to our customers. So it's a very difficult change management task when you're dealing with several thousand sellers and several hundred leaders that all have their own concepts of sales management.

Well, it's really important. And we didn't have a defined sales process, and that really is the starting point for any kind of CRM implementation or any kind of a customer value proposition that's consistent across the team. So the sales... that was one of our first endeavors, and we started with the customer.

It sure does. You know, the goal of the salesforce is to deliver value to the customer, and if you don't understand what the customer is looking to receive and their own challenges, then your salesforce is going to miss the mark. So it all starts with the customer, and I think a lot of companies, you know, they want more from their sales forces, but they become very seller-centric. They start asking their sellers what we need to do better to get better outcomes with our customers, instead of going straight to the customer and identifying the real processes that they go through on a daily basis and how do we help them to buy more from us.

Well, I think that some of the surprise was really positive. We found out that our customers valued a lot of what we did a lot more than we realized, and some of the things that we weren't talking about in our sales conversations were things that our customers valued extremely highly. Our proposition of doing cost savings and delivering plant-level value is highly valued by our customers. Also, interruption is one thing that we found out was a huge fear of our customers, and I don't think we talked enough about our ability to solidify that supply chain and really deliver safety and certainty to our customers in the MRO space. So we really started having better conversations, especially in our corporate accounts team which is where we started, and they're already our high-powered, high-level sellers. So it was well-received, and I think that our customers are receiving a better experience in our sales calls and also better value from our teams in the field.

Well, it was really insightful to look at the data of who was succeeding within Motion and succeeding for our customers, and combine that with the personality profiles and the traits that they had as far as sales skills. And what we did was we developed a profile of what our winners really look like. And, you know, that top quartile of every salesforce is really a unique group that delivers value and they have some of that intangible, just get it done factor. So we profiled those people, used data, and then we started to look at where we have gaps overall in our salesforce and in individual personas on our team. So it was really insightful. If we can just get those middle group of people in the bottom quartile all up to that top quartile, the gaps are huge in delivering value for our customers and for Motion. So, really insightful internal view of where are we hitting the mark and where are we missing it, and then what do our customers value. And that's kind of where it all started. And we've been on this for almost two years now, going through and making sure that when we do implement our systems and our CRM programs, that we're going to hit the mark. We're just making it easier for our sales teams to deliver the value that they need to deliver, rather than imposing a CRM on a sales team and trying to start from the back side. We started from the customer and worked our way back.

Well, historically, Motion had training where we'd bring people into a classroom, we'd give them a big download, and then they would forget it typically 30 to 60 days later. So that was where we came from. We had a lot of product training because there are a lot of application-specific engineered products that we need to learn how to promote and sell. But we didn't have a lot of customer engagement training. How do we actually have the right conversations at the right time and how do we deliver value in each of those meetings with our customers?

So we changed both what we were training and how we were training. We moved to an app-based, mobile device-based training that's really drip training. It's three to four minute videos and they interact, and the leaders and coaches interact with their teams in a collaborative fashion in the training. And it's a consistent piece of the workflow. It's not just a go get a download and then every so often go back and get another download and forget it. It's really part of the ethos of our sales team. That's really what modern technology and mobile devices and a new theory on training of making sure that it's consistently reinforced is a much better application of our time. It keeps our sellers engaged in their territories a lot more frequently and engaged with their leaders because it's a collaborative training exercise. We've just had great feedback from it. It isn't seen as a waste of time anymore. It's seen as something that I thought I knew everything to know about sales, but I'm learning something new every single week. And we're practicing it in the field and we're seeing the difference with the way our customers are receiving us. We're having customer-centric, buyer-centric training. So our conversations are about our customers. It's not about us. We're not coming in and doing the show up and throw up about all the products we have or our company. We're starting with the customer, what they're looking to achieve, and how can we help them win. So it's been a great change for our sales team and a good investment in our biggest resource, which is our talent, our people.

Well, Motion traditionally has had what I would call a player-coach model. Our branch managers typically held large territories and didn't have time to do a lot of coaching on their own. So our training has really reinforced the fact that our coaches need to really spend their time coaching and make sure that their team is delivering value to the customers in new ways. We're really changing from a transactional-type sales force to one that's trying to deliver value at a higher level and be a true partner to our customers. The digital piece has taken that transactional piece away from the sales team and it really allows for a lot more time to be a true partner to our customers. But you need a coach. You need a frontline sales manager that's actually going to coach the team. And we had some great coaches. We still do have great coaches. But we do have some gaps, and it's just that we didn't have a process that was consistent, that was repeatable. We had a lot of random acts of excellence across Motion, which we still do. We're working through that. It's a big organization and transforming that sales team is going to take some time, but we're well on our way.

Yeah, Motion has, you know, we went through a pretty large retirement event in 2020 and we had a lot of talent retire that had a lot of years of experience. So right as we're going through this digital transformation with COVID, we also had some retirement opportunities for people. And what we've done is the collaboration opportunities for the best person that knows steel mills, for instance, that person may reside in one part of the country and where we had gaps in other places, today that person can call in every steel mill in the country virtually and be a part of the solutions if they're not directly calling on them. So as the young people come into the organization, they can collaborate with the experienced tenure folks in a virtual setting. And so it's collaboration internally as we prepare for our conversations with customers. And then when you're going to those quarterly business reviews, everybody can join a virtual conference. It's really expensive to have a large group join an in-person conference. And so we're getting better and better. The travel reduction we've had in our corporate accounts team has been significant. Most of our quarterly business reviews are virtual and the executives can all take place in a lot of virtual calls and really deliver that high-touch customer experience where you got the top leaders of the company right there listening to the customer firsthand of what their needs are. And then we're getting back to more and more in-person business reviews at least once a year, but it's not every review. I don't think it's going to go back to that.

The key thing is to be good at it so that it's entertaining for the customer to be a part of that kind of a sales call and also concise. I mean, somebody sitting in front of Zoom calls for eight hours a day is really untenable. So the key thing is on those virtual sales calls to be concise. Make sure that everything that can be done up front is prepared and done up front and that they have the proper pre-reading if they want to, and a post engagement of this is what the open items are from this meeting. We're still coaching our teams to get, if you had a one-hour sales meeting, it should be about a 15-minute Zoom call. So we're still coaching our teams as to how to make sure that it's not a negative experience for our customers to be in a virtual sales environment.

I think it's a pretty mixed bag, like everything else with sellers. You have your early adopters, you have your high performers, and they're going to optimize everything. Those individuals, no matter what challenge you throw in front of them, they are going to figure out how to be good at it. And then you have people that are a little bit more reluctant to change or different places in their lives or careers. So I think that with Motion, we're still moving that along. The telephone call type interaction with customers has definitely shrunk with all sellers. There's a lot of text message communication going on. I think that the corporate accounts team is certainly ahead of that curve versus our day-to-day sellers, but it's also a different sales conversation. They're looking at rotating equipment and they're inside of plants having conversations. Even though you can send video and do different things throughout COVID, Motion's sales team was in the back of plants that were all essential critical pieces of our economy and also our infrastructure of how do we get food on everybody's plate, how do we keep the energy lights on. Motion's in the back of all of those facilities. So we still have a lot of that person-to-person piece going. But that balance of when do you use this sales technique versus when you have to be in person, I think that is something that all sales teams are still kind of getting their arms around.

That's right. And I think really this is about taking the salesperson much more seriously. It's about thinking of them as a critical resource in the customer experience, understanding the business outcomes they drive for their customers when they do the job well, and being willing to invest in talent selection, talent development, coaching, all of the downstream technologies that we look for with adoption like CRM or like learning platforms and things like that. Those are all technologies that are fundamentally investing in the success of sellers, which I think is elevating the professionalism of the field as well.

Thank you, David. Appreciate our partnership with Sparks IQ.