Eric Housh

Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast, where we discuss strategies, ideas, and insights about how to help you build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Eric Housh, and today, joined by a very good friend of mine, Max Bevan, principal account executive here at Fast Slow Motion. Max spends his days talking with growing businesses about what’s actually getting in the way of their revenue. And one of those things he constantly hears is, “Man, my pipeline is full.”

But nothing’s moving, nothing’s closing. So if that resonates with you, if that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place. Looking forward to unpacking this with you today, Max. Welcome to the show.

Max Bevan

Appreciate you, Eric, having me. Excited to dive in and talk through how we can close some more deals.

Eric Housh

Awesome. Hopefully this content’s really helpful for folks today. So Max, you have these conversations with business owners every single day. Someone shows you your pipeline or shows you their pipeline and something’s off. What are you actually seeing, and what are the signs that tell you right away something’s broken, this thing ain’t working?

Max Bevan

Yeah. So I think at the first level, you’ve got to assume that they have a pipeline, right? So you’ve got to assume they’ve got a good place to have it accurately. They’re tracking at the deal level, at the product level, across their teams, and they know where deals are. So with the assumption that they’re doing that already, they’ve got a CRM, they’ve got a good sales process, they have things built out, they’ve got a Kanban board, and they know what’s in front of them and what they need to be working on. Then at that point, you really want to dive into the specific pieces at the deal level.

So some metrics are important in terms of activities, upcoming meetings, what are the products they’re interested in, what’s the context of the deal? Do we know what their business objectives are? Have we done appropriate discovery? And really, from a closed-aid perspective, do we even understand at a high level the timing or the impact if they’re going to make this decision? And so all of those things are going to be important to know the validity of the deal. Just because we have it at a top-line stage, whether we’re in discovery, whether we’re

proposal stage, that doesn’t really tell much of the story until we dive into the details. And so how available are those details? Do reps really understand what’s in their pipeline? If you ask them off the cuff what their pipeline looked like, what they were going to close this week, what they were working on, do they have to look at the CRM? Or are they truly dialed in, and the CRM reflects the story that’s also in their head in terms of those details that matter? So really the goal, right, is always going to be deal velocity.

What is the speed of the pipeline? How is it associated? And how are things progressing? And so the way you’re going to tell that story is really dependent on what your sales process is, what products you have, what the procurement cycle looks like, and how you need to structure the CRM in a way where it works for you — really where it’s built out for sales leaders to really understand, not only at the end-user level, what’s helpful to progress a deal and what stages have to be gone through.

But then at a higher level, an executive or management level, they know what KPIs really are coming out of the CRM to tell the story in terms of what is actual versus what’s forecasted.

Eric Housh

So it’s that combination, right? A: do you have a process? B: do you have a system that allows you to see the data behind that process and see if you’re enforcing the process? Are you actually looking at the data and having the conversations? You know, the business leaders we talk to — this kind of thing doesn’t just

happen, right? They don’t set out to have a disastrous sales process or a disastrous sales pipeline. It kind of breaks down over time. What do you kind of see that works at one stage of growth that, as the business scales, tends to make this break?

Max Bevan

Yeah, I mean, you know, at the beginning, you can put a little bit of band-aid on it, you can put a little bit of glue, you can seal some of the edges, but at scale, right, all of that’s going to kind of come crashing down. So really, from an infrastructure perspective, what works for ten sellers absolutely doesn’t work for twenty sellers, which in no way in the world works for a hundred. And so you’ve got to be thoughtful about what we’re actually trying to scale. And we think of pipeline and we think of throughput and we look at revenue targets. Well, when we

dive back and look at our average cost or our average contract, what has to be true in order to get there. And so from a scale perspective and from a build-out standpoint, really it’s being methodical about that process to scale, and then ensuring you have the tooling, right? The CRM, the HubSpots of the world, to be able to build out your deal model in a way where it actually supports that. And so what are those required stages? What is the information that you’re gathering from the seller?

Where is AI coming in to infuse the data within the deal that’s pulling things like meeting notes and other documentation to be able to bring that context? That’s not required to just be handled by one person. And what you’re doing with fewer sellers is you have that hero model — you don’t have the things that are scalable, and you just have things that are built out for that individual because they’re proficient. And then you’re anchoring and building systems with a specific seller in mind,

rather than stepping back and thinking through the entire business and saying, what is the process that needs to be deployed, and how can we ensure that it’s built on solid rock and foundation? Whereas when we bring in 20, 30, 50, 100 sellers, it’s all going to be the same, and you’re just doing more of the same thing rather than scaling processes that don’t scale, that are built for individuals. And then as you bring other people in, everyone’s individual objective data means something different.

So if Max puts a close date in, Eric knows, well, he’s really bullish on close dates. Whereas if, you know, Jeff puts a close date in, we know that, well, he’s actually incredibly conservative. And we can actually probably forecast that a month earlier, because what he doesn’t like to do is push deals out, but he doesn’t mind pulling them in. So again, there is always going to be a little bit of the personality in the scale, but where does the data tell that story? And it doesn’t matter based on the individual marker.

But the objective metrics of the deal are really telling the story of the confidence of how to build out that pipeline.

Eric Housh

And you said that term, which we hear a lot, that hero model — the guy that started the company, it was his idea, he was the first original seller. And what got him to success will not get him or her to that next level. And you’ve got to kind of pause, get everybody on the same page, talk about systems, processes, standards, before we can really start to scale this thing. Otherwise, adding more salespeople is just making the problem worse.

Max Bevan

Yeah. And from a process perspective, there’s really no way to scale the hero model, because they’re doing things that you can’t really hire for. They’re coloring outside of the lines, and the process is not set up for the 80% rule. It’s set up for the 10%, the 20%, or the 1% rule. And those are not things that scale. And so, are we building an organizational structure where it is a little bit of process over people? Of course the people matter. Of course the people are doing the work.

But the idea is, how do we ensure that as we bring new people in, they not only have the visibility, the tools, but the capability to actually deliver what that hero model was doing — where they were maybe not leaning on the three or four people required within the deal structure, because they were able to just push it through themselves. But now the process requires that you loop in other folks, you bring in other procurement opportunities, there are other levels of approval that need to happen. And now it can be scaled, whereas when you bring in more ICs,

the CRM is built out in a way to support that.

Eric Housh

So Max, I’m imagining right now we have folks in the audience listening to us, probably nodding along, probably feeling a little embarrassed, right? Knowing that they are broken, their pipeline is broken, realizing they do not have this visibility. When you run into that in your line of work, where do you tell them to start? Because I imagine the instinct is to try to boil the ocean and fix this thing as soon as possible, but what’s step one?

Max Bevan

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So first of all, if you’re there, you give us tons of job security, because this is what we do all day long. So we’re excited when we hear about problems, because we want to come alongside you guys, be consultative, and actually help fix them. And so the goal, to your point, is not to boil the ocean. What are those initial quick wins? Where are you today? And you can’t go from A to Z, right? But you can go from A to B to C to D. And so really it’s identifying what is going to move the needle, where are those quick wins going to be.

Maybe, to your point, it’s just standardizing the sales process. Maybe it’s building out some of the automation around things like reminders and tasks and follow-up. Maybe it’s a closed-won process that hands off from sales to service to delivery. Maybe it’s just invoicing visibility around AR. All of these things are important. They all matter. And as you build a business to scale, you’ve got to ensure that you have tooling to support those things. But when you think of where you are today, that’s always got to be relative.

So you want to meet the customer where they are. Do they have a CRM? Are people trained? Is it proficient? Or, right, is the tooling actually built out well? They have good infrastructure. There doesn’t have to be a lot of remediation, and it’s an adoption and training issue. And from a UAT perspective, there are some culture problems, there’s some rogueness in the sales team. That could even be the solution, right? And so really our job is to always tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. We want to come alongside you and really be consultative and push back. And if we get on a call and we understand

that you actually do have the processes, infrastructure, and tooling to scale, we’ll be the first to compliment you and say that looks great. And maybe identify, hey, your actual issue is you’ve got a culture problem. You’ve got a leader who’s gone rogue. You’ve got a lone-wolf mentality and mindset, which is what your problem is. And maybe not, right? It’s not the dashboard and the tooling and the automation. And so our goal is really to be prescriptive

about where those incremental steps of value can be added. How do we get you into the tooling? Is it training? Is there an automation opportunity? Is there some rebuild? Is it stepping back and thinking through the process and not thinking through the tooling? And really, the goal is just, what is the definition of success? What is the objective definition of done? If you were able to do X, right, what would be a successful implementation together? And that’s the goal of where we want to end up.

“Well, I need my reps to close more revenue incrementally.” Well, closing more revenue is a great gross goal, but we’ve got to step back a second and say, well, what are the habits that create that result? So maybe it’s activity, maybe it’s outbound outreach, maybe it’s just automation from an efficiency perspective. Maybe it’s things like calendar tools or deal rooms or different types of tech that are going to support and drive velocity in the deal. But that’s not always the case, right? So we’ve got to know where people are and then start to challenge.

“Well, what difference would it make if you guys did this?” “Well, if my sellers did that every time, you know, we would have this percentage increase of close rate, this higher quality of average size of contract, we’d have this progression of quality of the deal.” Okay, great. Well, let’s implement those. Let’s test to get them. Let’s get some UAT training. Let’s watch the data. And then let’s continue to chip away at that and make those improvements. And all you’ve got to do is get 1% better every single day, right? Rather than being in a situation where overnight you’re somehow going to transform

the tooling, the process, and the culture of the business immediately.

Eric Housh

Stale culture, just for a second — how do you get a sales team to adopt a new process or a new way of operating, especially if they’ve been doing it for years? Because these salespeople, a lot of them have been pretty successful over their career, and you’re going to go in there and move their cheese. So what’s your strategy around addressing the people part of this problem, not just the technology?

Max Bevan

Yeah, so I don’t know if you know this about salespeople, but they’re money-motivated. So, you know, if you structure things around commission, all of a sudden they’ll start to care. So a pretty simple example would be: if you close a deal and you don’t have these dependent fields or this type of information from a sales-to-service handoff process, you won’t get paid commission downstream because you didn’t follow the process. That’s an extreme example, but I want to be clear, it’s extremely effective.

So in a situation where you’re able to communicate it proactively, set expectations from a rollout standpoint, and tie their motivation specifically to the process that you want to build — because those are the habits that are going to make their job easier — all of a sudden you’re going to get a lot more adoption. Now, there are ways to not be that aggressive, right? That’s obviously a situation where, you know, that’s kind of the final straw if you can’t get things implemented. But the biggest thing is to go back to the end user.

Right. So when you see this culture, when you see the old way of doing things — well, you know, “I always write it on the back of a napkin, and I don’t ever log any phone calls because I do everything through my cell, and I don’t ever log anything in the CRM because it doesn’t bring value to the deal.” Well, what a challenge, right? So how do we actually reframe that and say, well, what if the CRM helped you do your job? What if you actually got into HubSpot, got onto your dashboard, looked at your deal pipeline, looked at your sales workspace,

and it actually showed you not only where to spend your time, but how to spend your time. And then, AI-driven, it helps you do your job, right? And so the idea is we’ve got to reframe things for the end user, where the people or the culture mindset may not actually be the problem. It’s just that they don’t see value in the tooling that you’ve brought. And so if we want to build out a process and infrastructure that helps them do their job, that means we’ve got to bring in tooling that’s going to help them get there. And so some of that can be trained.

Some of that needs to be through adoption and processes. Some of that needs to be tied back to motivations. But it’s never a silver bullet, right? It’s like, let’s do all these things in a way where they get excited about it. And that’s the only way you’re going to actually shift the culture in a direction that’s objective.

Eric Housh

And that’s got to come from the top too, right? Because we see this sometimes where leadership decides they need a system, they need a CRM, they put it in place. Their behavior doesn’t change. They don’t enforce the fact that the CRM is the source of truth. They’re still walking up and down the hallway and pinging people on instant messenger, asking where the deal is, versus asking their people to keep everything updated and using it as their sort of north star.

Max Bevan

Imagine if micromanagement went away because the CRM data was actually reliable. So they don’t hear from the executives, they don’t get pinged, they don’t get their door knocked on, because they’re leveraging the tooling that gives real-time visibility. And then all of a sudden we’re adults, everybody trusts each other to do their job. And then those “inefficiencies,” so to speak, don’t happen anymore, because the culture has shifted to where we actually trust the data.

Eric Housh

Seems like motivation enough, right? Let’s talk about when everything’s working right. The business has gone through the process, they’ve done the work, they’ve cleaned things up, they’ve committed to using HubSpot or a CRM the right way. What’s different six months in? What changes for those business leaders?

Max Bevan

That’s right.

Yeah, so I really don’t know what doesn’t change, right? We have this idea of a scalable business framework. You basically build your business on a platform — you have process, you have visibility, you have automation. And so in a world where you adopt a CRM and get it built out appropriately, what is going to change is almost everything, right? You’re going to have access to the data that you need, you’re going to be able to make objective decisions rather than feelings-based decisions, you’re going to have the tooling

to be able to scale and grow the business. And really, everything’s going to come down to: hey, these are the habits that are creating the result, therefore let’s change our habits because the data is telling us this. So all of a sudden, you’ve taken out a lot of the emotion, you’ve taken out a lot of the political theater, you’ve taken out some of the issues that happen culturally within a business, because everyone’s looking at the same scoreboard. And we’re all looking at the same dashboard — we’re all having a different morning cup of coffee based upon our role,

what KPIs we have, whether we’re in marketing or sales or service, and those metrics, or leadership or executives. But the idea is we’re all reading from the same playbook. And so in a world where we actually get these things implemented — finance is happy downstream, right? The marketing team’s excited, the sales team’s crushing it, delivery sees the value within the system and what it’s bringing. All of a sudden, right, we’re all kind of on the same line. We’re using it differently, but we’re all reading really from the same metrics. And so

what you’ll see is cohesion from the beginning of the customer journey all the way through. Because again, now my customer service team, in this world, is interacting with my team that also ran the sales process through the same contact record, where they have the rolled-up visibility of when the contract was signed, when they became a customer, and now there’s a support issue. Again, when we get the processes and the tooling in place, we’re able to see that objectively, really, across the customer journey, because it was always the same to them, right? When they interacted with your business, it was one brand.

It didn’t matter if they were talking to marketing, or they were talking to support, or they were talking to billing, or they were talking to sales — for them, it was just your company logo. And so now, what you’ve done by building these systems, by setting up the CRM, by really implementing HubSpot in this way, is you can run your business off of the data. You’ve brought that cohesion together, where they can clearly make those decisions. The customers feel it because their experience is consistent. And now, overall, it’s more of that flywheel effect of revenue

continuing to come in, continuing to come around, because they’re getting a consistent experience across the business.

Eric Housh

Yeah, I just want to put an exclamation point right there and really drive that point home. It’s like, when you fix this problem, when you adopt this sort of approach to this part of your business, it’s going to have a ripple effect. It’s going to maybe surface problems in other parts of the customer experience, but the data is going to allow you to intelligently address those problems. I think that’s something a lot of people just miss when they decide to just sit on this problem or not solve it yet. So, so last question, Max: for a business owner who knows

things are broken in this part of the business — the pipeline is broken — has he pulled the trigger on fixing it yet? We see this a lot: they kick the can down the road. That indecision is a decision. What is the cost of waiting another six months?

Max Bevan

That’s right.

Yeah. So, I mean, it really goes back to opportunity cost becoming incalculable, right? Because it’s a situation where, every single time you go into a situation without having the automation, the task management, the reporting, the objective KPIs, you can’t be in a position to be successful, right? So the perfect analogy and the perfect imagery of this is: if you go into a grocery store and you check out,

every single time they ask if you want to donate one dollar to whatever charity they’re donating to that month — well, if they ask like a robot every single time, so many people say yes, right? How many places do you go where they ask you to tip, and you just end up tipping just because they asked you every single time? So it just goes back to: consistency wins games. So if we are consistent over and over again, and we’ve built out automation where the CRM works for us rather than us working for it,

every single time we go through the process, we do the right blocking and tackling, we have the habits that are going to create the result. The opportunity cost is massive, because you’re now not in a position where human error is inserted — you’re ensuring that these boxes are checked as somebody goes through the process. And so what’s going to happen is your numbers are going to increase, your consistency is going to increase, you’re going to hit your targets, because you can’t help but do the right things, because the CRM is really supporting them.

Eric Housh

Love that. Consistency wins games, consistency compounds. It’s all about that consistent experience. For everybody listening, if today’s conversation hit close to home and you’re ready to do something about it, this is what we do. Fast Slow Motion can help you out. So click the link in the show notes to start a conversation with our team. We work with businesses every day to get their pipeline, their process, their CRM working the way it should. Everything else from today — resources, show notes, how to reach Max —

is all in the description as well. Thank you for listening today, Max. This has been fun, man. Let’s do it again. See you guys next time.

Max Bevan

Appreciate you, Eric.