Tom Staples‘ career in sales and sales management can accurately be described as, “There and back again.” Tom started out as the Director of Sales at several smaller companies, before leaving to co-found his own company – Cooler Planet. His entrepreneurial spirit paid dividends, as he led the online resource for solar power and renewable energy for 7 years, before the company was acquired last year. After that major milestone, Tom was looking for a new challenge, when Bizible came calling.
Since early this year, the #1 Salesforce Marketing Analytics app – and InsightSquared customer! – has thrived with Tom at the sales helm. We recently had the privilege of speaking with Tom on his career transitions, his primary challenges running sales at Bizible and his emphasis on sales metrics and sales management by the numbers.
1) You left several sales management positions to start your own company (Cooler Planet), before heading back into a sales leadership position. Can you talk a little about this career trajectory and the transitions you had to make?
Cooler Planet was acquired last year by a company called Pure Energies Group. After I finished my consulting relationship with them, helping them get the product integrated, I was introduced to Aaron Bird, the CEO of Bizible by some mutual advisors. Bizible was scaling, growing quickly as a company, and Aaron asked if I would come on board and grow out the sales and revenue team.
There is quite a bit of similarity between all those roles. Sales is a bit of a transferrable and required skill. Within organizations – both at Cooler Planet and Bizible – I viewed my role as developing and creating a revenue engine that can scale with the company. Putting together the pieces of building a process, finding the right people, getting the right software and tools required to generate revenue and hit goals, analyzing data and outcomes to make changes to help the company grow profitability going forward – those are the similar things I thought about at each role and company. Regardless of what my title is within an organization, I’m an online sales and business nerd, and that’s the role I look to fill.
2) What are your primary top-of-mind concerns as the Sales VP at Bizible? What are the pain points that you suffer most in your position?
We have an amazing product – it’s super intuitive and delightfully easy to use to improve our clients’ businesses, once it has been implemented. However, it’s very technical and integrates with a client’s CRM system and ad networks like AdWords, so it touches many different pieces of a client’s business. Just the fact that we sit within their CRM system once we’re installed means that, in the sales process, we deal with a wide range of stakeholders.
Depending on the business we’re working with, we may connect with everyone – from marketing, to sales, to finance, to operations and development on the client’s team. Each has their own criteria for evaluating and eventually implementing our software and services. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to simplify this process for our clients and in turn, reduce the time it takes for us to close new business. It’s important that we streamline our sales process to make it easy for these various different stakeholders to check off approval for implementing it. I’m constantly thinking about how we can improve our sales processes and messaging to get our clients on board and running with the service.
3) What’s it like to run sales at a marketing analytics company? Is there a greater need to understand or be aligned with marketing, compared to other sales executives in other companies or industries?
Interesting question. Yes, I think because of the industry we’re in there is a deeper need for our sales team to be highly aligned with marketing for a couple of big reasons. 1) We are selling to marketers. We need to have a deep understanding of the digital marketing landscape and what’s going on in that world to connect and effectively solve the problems our customers are facing. 2) We use our own product for our own marketing internally, and it has direct impact on our sales processes. Our marketing team is constantly pushing the limits of our technology and the other tools we use and sales is involved in all of that. There are constant experiments, tests, and new initiatives underway. It’s awesome in that we can carry our own experiences over to conversations with clients and relay first-hand advice and feedback.
4) As a VP of Sales, how much emphasis do you put on coaching your managers or your reps?
There are six of us on the sales team, a mix of account execs and customer success folks and me. We’re really lucky in the sense that many members of our sales team are also founders of the company. They’ve been here since the product was thought up and launched. They have contributed massively to its creation and iteration over time. we’re lucky in the sense that we have lots of in-depth product and industry knowledge on the team. This crazy depth of knowledge on the sales team existed before I even got here!
So because of that, I view my role as much more of a facilitator, in that sense. As we continue to grow and scale up the team, I have to think about how we can ensure that we’re sharing best practices and knowledge and continuing to share that within the group, given that there’s so much talent and knowledge just sitting there. I don’t know if it’s coaching, so much as learning from each other. These guys teach me so much every day. I learn a ton from this team, and hopefully they learn something from me too.
5) What was the biggest challenge you overcame in moving from junior, direct sales positions to a sales management position?
It goes back to what I view my role as within an organization, which is keeping an eye on the data and sales metrics and using those insights to help you create a machine that creates revenue at a rate that allows the company to grow. I’ve managed teams that were as big as over 50, with multiple sales managers, to the structure and size here at Bizible. Whatever the structure and the size, I focus on that role. The difference between being a sales rep or a junior manager is just moving that vision one level up and keeping an eye on the data and goal across the whole company.
6) How important is it to you, as a personal sales philosophy or strategy, that you run your sales team by the numbers?
I run EVERYTHING by the numbers. There’s another personal component to just having a good team and having everybody on the same page, but at the end of the day, the business should always be managed on the data. That’s what I’ve always done throughout my career. When I landed at Bizible, my first inclination was to ask, “What data do we have available? How can I get my hands on it? Where do I need to dive in to really understand our metrics?” That’s how I got introduced to InsightSquared.
7) What about InsightSquared convinced you that you had to buy it? How do you use the product in your day-to-day running of the sales team?
I think the most valuable thing InsightSquared has done for us is improving our understanding of the sales process in more detail and identify where we’re strong, as well as ways we can improve. For example, the ability to track over time the changes in the duration of time it takes to move clients through the various stages of our sales process has been awesome. We can see where the inefficiencies are, where clients are getting stuck and where we might be able to improve our tools and processes to help them. As a small team, it’s sometimes hard to see from a higher level what big chunks of the process can be improved. That was enlightening for us, seeing at which stages clients were spending the longest time and thinking about what changes we can make there, what messaging we can provide, what tools, etc. That was really helpful.
Along with the funnel duration analysis, I find InsightSquared very useful for forecasting revenue and growth. We’re a young, small company – which is exciting in that every month is a new record month! It can also be frustrating, because there’s limited historical data to realistically project where we’ll be in the future. InsightSquared has given me the ability to overview our sales cycle and activities, and by understanding those metrics, get increasingly accurate at forecasting the future. It’s unbelievable having that insight into what our process actually yields, in terms of what activities we do today and what they mean in terms of revenues six months from now. InsightSquared has massively helped in forecasting.
I think it’s given everyone on our team, and really across the company, a better idea of what we need to do to fuel growth. I use it the most, our marketing team uses it, our CEO uses it. We now have a much clearer picture of our sales process, and that makes us smarter in determining what we can do today to get to the goals we’re setting months ahead. That information is helpful for marketing and development, as well as in sales planning.
8) How do you see the sales industry trending or evolving over the next 5 years? What can sales managers do to meet and be ready for these changes head-on?
I think data and automation are the two biggest trends. There’s so much software and so many tools available today that massively increase sales efficiency. From automating workflows based on different types of opportunities, to sharing templates and best practices across the team based on real conversion metrics, to scheduling and demoing software. There’s so much software automation and database optimization that is available, and those are trends that can’t help but continue. Being familiar with that stuff is what’s going to allow teams to scale, especially in the startup world. You need to optimize your time and your efforts.
There’s a massive opportunity for smart sales organizations to utilize these tools for huge efficiency gains. The teams love it, the sales reps themselves love it. They can do so much more than if they were working alone, crafting this stuff on their own and doing their own sales processes. There’s room for improvisation and personalization, but the data and the efficiencies you can gain from them make people and sales reps way more effective at their jobs.
More about Tom Staples
Tom is the VP of Sales at Bizible, the #1 Salesforce Marketing Analytics app. Prior to joining Bizible early this year, Tom was the President and Co-Founder of Cooler Planet, which was recently acquired. He had previously served as the Director of Sales at Metrics/Direct and Zango, Inc.
