THE B2B SALES INSIGHTS PODCAST
The B2B Sales Insights Podcast
12:50
Sales in the Construction Industry
Tom Greenwood, Senior Director, Global Sales - Deltek
Key Insights 1 | Min 00:29
Introduction to Deltech
Key Insights 2 | Min 01:10
Best practices to leverage sales
Key Insights 3 | Min 04:30
Challenges faced in sales enablement with a large team
Key Insights 4 | Min 05:42
Coaching the teams
Key Insights 5 | Min 07:19
Encouraging sales enablement team to help sales
Key Insights 6 | Min 09:48
Advantages of virtual training
EPISODE 21 – Sales in the Construction Industry
Tom Greenwood, Senior Director, Global Sales
In this episode, Tom Greenwood, Senior Director of Global Sales at Deltek, talks to our host Jessica Ly about the importance of effective sales, construction in the industry and alignment in the sales domain.
Jessica Ly: I'm here with Tom Greenwood, who is the senior director of global sales enablement at Deltek. Hi, Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Greenwood: Thank you, Jessica. Great to be here.
Jessica Ly: I know that Deltek provides project management software for construction companies, for example, a lot of project-based services. And why don't you talk about that market, the trends, the innovation, and also your thoughts on best practices in sales enablement?
Tom Greenwood: Okay, well, we are the leader in project-based ERP solutions as Enterprise Resource Management. And it cuts across construction architectural engineering agencies and our largest population of customers, which are government contractors.
Jessica Ly: And in that space, you are targeting a lot of the project managers, and you have about 400 reps that you're trying to train and help them to be effective in their sales, enterprise sales. For example, I wanted to get your thoughts on now. What are some of the best practices that you're leveraging? And what impact Are you seeing?
Tom Greenwood: Well, Jessica, the one thing we're trying to do, and this cuts across, no matter what Salesforce you have working for you, if you want them to be more productive, and to be more productive, they need to be more efficient in translation, they need to spend more time with customers. So the best practices are to make sure that they have the technology and tools that they can engage better with customers. And that holds true now for what the country is going through the world is going through with this virus, they have to do most of their work, not all of it online. So they need to have, you know, good equipment, good tools that they can engage with, that they can create, you know, email templates that they can use over and over again, rather than having to reinvent it, they have to use certain social media platforms so that they can do better research, they have to have access to a lot more information because these customers, you know, want to feel like they have been, you know, touched by someone who has really researched them and know what they do. So that's one thing have a good technology stack, as we call it. The second thing is they need really good sales skills. In other words, how do you engage with a client The first time you start talking to them, and what would make these clients or prospects even want to talk to you. So they have to be really good at that. They also have to know the industry. They have to demonstrate that to the customer. And another thing they need to do is they need to be good communicators. A lot of times, it's not what you're telling them. It's how you're telling them. And we're kind of in an age right now where those good communication techniques, whether you're presenting on the phone, whether you're standing at delivering in a conference room when you're writing an email or a text, you don't want to be sloppy about it, you want to make sure that you stand out and it comes across as being quite professional, well thought out so that your message can hit home with that client or prospect.
Jessica Ly: I am curious now that the Coronavirus is making people stay at home and I know your company's headquarter in Virginia. I just saw the news that everybody needs to stay at home. And I suspect that the whole country will have to be staying at home. How do these construction companies still carry on working? If that's the case?
Tom Greenwood: Well, they are in fact, I have a friend who went to PID, and they actually use our software, they're realigning the Holland Tunnel in New York City, a lot of these construction services are absolutely critical to the infrastructure of the country, it doesn't mean that they're all working. But if it's considered, you know, really mission-critical for the country or they've you know, got any job, you know, doing something for the government, I think what you'll probably see a little bit more slow down and you know, retail, construction, housing construction, but construction still goes on, because of some of the necessity of it.
Jessica Ly: I see. Okay, it's considered essential services, right. So I also would like to get your thoughts on the challenges that you face in sales enablement, given that your industry is still running, and it's not like staying at home for everyone. What are the challenges that you face in doing the sales environment for your team of 400 folks?
Tom Greenwood: Well, the good news is is that we are global and we have invested in delivering virtual live and virtual online training, you know, quite a bit. We still have done in the past, you know, standard delivery. I'm a professional instructor. So I did all the time. I really enjoy it. It's a little more challenging. Doing it virtual live because you're not really sure a lot of time if your audience is listening, salespeople have a tendency to want to multitask, particularly if it gets a little boring. But we have ways to do knowledge checks and learning checks. So we've been able to quickly transition to do more of that, you know, in these times ran with the virus. So it isn't anything new. It's just something we're doing more of. And what we do is we make sure we provide more reinforcement, particularly in giving, you know, online tests and quizzes just to see if they've absorbed the material.
Jessica Ly: About coaching, how do you view coaching? I know you've got the managers and their managers are responsible for their teams. A lot of that coaching of I say the tribal knowledge has to somehow be shared and captured as best practices.
Tom Greenwood: Yeah, that's true. So if you're a sales manager, or really any manager, the most important thing you can do for your people is to coach them. Studies have shown that those teams that are coached 75% of the managers’ time are the ones that perform better. It helps get rid of such problems as getting, you know, 80% of your sales from 20% of your people. So you're getting a balanced, you know, coaching scorecard. So what we try to do is we are constantly reinforcing coaching, the need for coaching. And coaching covers a lot of different areas. It's what's called curbside coaching, meaning a sales manager may listen in on a call with a client that one of their salespeople is doing. It could be motivational coaching. Everyone needs to be motivated. It could be very structured coaching, meaning if you have a low well, meaning they don't really have the desire to do the job, the low skill being they don't have the skill to do it, then it requires so much more hands on coaching. We even need that for our high-will high skill players who do extremely well, but everyone likes to be paid attention to. And everyone you know should be coached. So there are coaching methods that we provide. We've done it, you know, face to face. Now we're doing it, you know, virtually, because it is the most important thing and let's face it, the best coach teams always win.
Jessica Ly: I want to ask about how you are incentivized as a sales enablement team to help sales revenue is ultimately your measure on the ROI of the investment you're putting in for sales enablement.
Tom Greenwood: That's true. Now, this is an interesting topic because a lot of sales enablement professionals do not report through the sales organization. Some report through, you know, HR or marketing, I happen to report to the sales organization. So I have, you know, two measurements. One is company performance. I have some control over that, but not as much. That’s how we're doing across the board. But I am directly incentivized by the sales team to do well. And we have done something such as build a sales enablement dashboard, where we can take data from our CRM system and calculate and coordinate it with the learning management system. And we can spot trends to see if we are affecting such things as win rates, close rate, pipeline size, and we use that as proof to show that we are they're impacting the sales organization or maybe not impacting the sales organization. And that's what is used to go into my compensation, my team's compensation plan for itself.
Jessica Ly: Excellence, I think that is a trend that I'm seeing is this sales enablement executives are trying to align with sales, revenue and incentives. Because this way, you have skin in the game, making sure it's very effective.
Tom Greenwood: Absolutely. It's the holy grail to figure out what it is that we provide in training and tools isn't moving the sales needle. That’s always been the question. You know, you can't go to the CEO and say, hey, look, we had a great quarter because our Surveymonkey shows that we got, you know, 4.95 on our last training courses, that's not good enough, you know, he or she is going to want to know, all right, what you delivered what we invested in, is it really having an impact on sales? And that's what we're doing.
Jessica Ly: Wonderful. Well, one of the challenges that I feel now is that we cannot gather in small groups anymore. No more on because I think typically, the sales enablement program is both on-site small group training. And now we're just basically having to do it virtually, pretty much. Has that been a blessing now that we've been forced to go online? Or do you think that's going to hamper the effectiveness of sales enablement?
Tom Greenwood: Well, I think it could be generational. For example, a lot of our generation Zs and millennials. They're used to doing everything online. They're used to take a look at YouTube. We've taken a lot of what we've created and put it out in YouTube clips with some, you know, testing and quizzes with it. So they're very used to that type of training. If you get into, you know, more of the, you know, older generations and they really like, you know, face to face, it's amazing I get a question all the time, Hey, I know your sales enable is coming out with new training, what building is it going to be in, you know, all those types of things that go into, you know, live training, they're just used to being trained like that. So we are getting, you know, good responsiveness and good feedback on delivering training and really to forums now, particularly with the virus going on one is live virtual, where, you know, I can stand and deliver via webcam and you know, other technical capabilities, or I can, you know, produce a module and some of the rapid learning tools that are available out there and send it to them an email, we can track, whether they opened it, how long they looked at it, we can make it mandatory, so we're really not losing anything. Personally, I love to be in front of an audience I love to teach. It's one of the reasons I got into enablement. But, you know, you have to adapt to the times and these times are pretty difficult and strange right now.
Jessica Ly: If it is just as effective to do it remotely, because we're forced to now look for creative ways to do it virtually, it does save money if everybody can just do it virtually instead of being together. It's less time-consuming, not having to fly. So do you actually think that this situation is then gonna have a permanent impact, as far as how much is invested for online training versus on-site training?
Tom Greenwood: I figured out is, first of all, you know, although we are doing well as a company, we could be doing better at this virus didn't exist. So what does that mean? Well, we, you know, have had to cut back on expenses. No one's traveling anywhere. I actually didn't relish it. You know, this next month, hopping in that coach Satan flying to Sydney for hours on end, it will dramatically impact because we're gonna have to recover from a revenue perspective because our business will drop down somewhat. And one way to do that to have a go right to the bottom line is to make sure we're not spending too much and travel costs a lot of money. So you're absolutely correct.
Jessica Ly: This has been a really informative and educational discussion with you on sales enablement and how things are shifting because of this virus. And I appreciate you sharing your best practices with us, Tom.
Tom Greenwood: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. We'd love to do it again, you pick the topic and I'll be there for you.
Jessica Ly
Jessica is a seasoned marketing and sales executive with over 15 years of experience in the US and EU regions. A graduate of Santa Clara University, she studied Marketing Management and practiced the full spectrum of marketing for 9 years in the B2C and B2B space. She knows how having an integrated marketing strategy and a strong execution team can build up a significant funnel for the sales team. Having been on the sales side for several years, Jessica also understands the sales team’s challenges and perspective. So with experiences in both marketing and sales, Jessica brings valuable insight to helping clients meet their business objectives.
Key Insights 1 | Min 00:29
Introduction to Deltech
Key Insights 2 | Min 01:10
Best practices to leverage sales
Key Insights 3 | Min 04:30
Challenges faced in sales enablement with a large team
Key Insights 4 | Min 05:42
Coaching the teams
Key Insights 5 | Min 07:19
Encouraging sales enablement team to help sales
Key Insights 6 | Min 09:48
Advantages of virtual training
EPISODE 21 – Sales in the Construction Industry
Tom Greenwood, Senior Director, Global Sales
In this episode, Tom Greenwood, Senior Director of Global Sales at Deltek, talks to our host Jessica Ly about the importance of effective sales, construction in the industry and alignment in the sales domain.
Jessica Ly: I'm here with Tom Greenwood, who is the senior director of global sales enablement at Deltek. Hi, Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Greenwood: Thank you, Jessica. Great to be here.
Jessica Ly: I know that Deltek provides project management software for construction companies, for example, a lot of project-based services. And why don't you talk about that market, the trends, the innovation, and also your thoughts on best practices in sales enablement?
Tom Greenwood: Okay, well, we are the leader in project-based ERP solutions as Enterprise Resource Management. And it cuts across construction architectural engineering agencies and our largest population of customers, which are government contractors.
Jessica Ly: And in that space, you are targeting a lot of the project managers, and you have about 400 reps that you're trying to train and help them to be effective in their sales, enterprise sales. For example, I wanted to get your thoughts on now. What are some of the best practices that you're leveraging? And what impact Are you seeing?
Tom Greenwood: Well, Jessica, the one thing we're trying to do, and this cuts across, no matter what Salesforce you have working for you, if you want them to be more productive, and to be more productive, they need to be more efficient in translation, they need to spend more time with customers. So the best practices are to make sure that they have the technology and tools that they can engage better with customers. And that holds true now for what the country is going through the world is going through with this virus, they have to do most of their work, not all of it online. So they need to have, you know, good equipment, good tools that they can engage with, that they can create, you know, email templates that they can use over and over again, rather than having to reinvent it, they have to use certain social media platforms so that they can do better research, they have to have access to a lot more information because these customers, you know, want to feel like they have been, you know, touched by someone who has really researched them and know what they do. So that's one thing have a good technology stack, as we call it. The second thing is they need really good sales skills. In other words, how do you engage with a client The first time you start talking to them, and what would make these clients or prospects even want to talk to you. So they have to be really good at that. They also have to know the industry. They have to demonstrate that to the customer. And another thing they need to do is they need to be good communicators. A lot of times, it's not what you're telling them. It's how you're telling them. And we're kind of in an age right now where those good communication techniques, whether you're presenting on the phone, whether you're standing at delivering in a conference room when you're writing an email or a text, you don't want to be sloppy about it, you want to make sure that you stand out and it comes across as being quite professional, well thought out so that your message can hit home with that client or prospect.
Jessica Ly: I am curious now that the Coronavirus is making people stay at home and I know your company's headquarter in Virginia. I just saw the news that everybody needs to stay at home. And I suspect that the whole country will have to be staying at home. How do these construction companies still carry on working? If that's the case?
Tom Greenwood: Well, they are in fact, I have a friend who went to PID, and they actually use our software, they're realigning the Holland Tunnel in New York City, a lot of these construction services are absolutely critical to the infrastructure of the country, it doesn't mean that they're all working. But if it's considered, you know, really mission-critical for the country or they've you know, got any job, you know, doing something for the government, I think what you'll probably see a little bit more slow down and you know, retail, construction, housing construction, but construction still goes on, because of some of the necessity of it.
Jessica Ly: I see. Okay, it's considered essential services, right. So I also would like to get your thoughts on the challenges that you face in sales enablement, given that your industry is still running, and it's not like staying at home for everyone. What are the challenges that you face in doing the sales environment for your team of 400 folks?
Tom Greenwood: Well, the good news is is that we are global and we have invested in delivering virtual live and virtual online training, you know, quite a bit. We still have done in the past, you know, standard delivery. I'm a professional instructor. So I did all the time. I really enjoy it. It's a little more challenging. Doing it virtual live because you're not really sure a lot of time if your audience is listening, salespeople have a tendency to want to multitask, particularly if it gets a little boring. But we have ways to do knowledge checks and learning checks. So we've been able to quickly transition to do more of that, you know, in these times ran with the virus. So it isn't anything new. It's just something we're doing more of. And what we do is we make sure we provide more reinforcement, particularly in giving, you know, online tests and quizzes just to see if they've absorbed the material.
Jessica Ly: About coaching, how do you view coaching? I know you've got the managers and their managers are responsible for their teams. A lot of that coaching of I say the tribal knowledge has to somehow be shared and captured as best practices.
Tom Greenwood: Yeah, that's true. So if you're a sales manager, or really any manager, the most important thing you can do for your people is to coach them. Studies have shown that those teams that are coached 75% of the managers’ time are the ones that perform better. It helps get rid of such problems as getting, you know, 80% of your sales from 20% of your people. So you're getting a balanced, you know, coaching scorecard. So what we try to do is we are constantly reinforcing coaching, the need for coaching. And coaching covers a lot of different areas. It's what's called curbside coaching, meaning a sales manager may listen in on a call with a client that one of their salespeople is doing. It could be motivational coaching. Everyone needs to be motivated. It could be very structured coaching, meaning if you have a low well, meaning they don't really have the desire to do the job, the low skill being they don't have the skill to do it, then it requires so much more hands on coaching. We even need that for our high-will high skill players who do extremely well, but everyone likes to be paid attention to. And everyone you know should be coached. So there are coaching methods that we provide. We've done it, you know, face to face. Now we're doing it, you know, virtually, because it is the most important thing and let's face it, the best coach teams always win.
Jessica Ly: I want to ask about how you are incentivized as a sales enablement team to help sales revenue is ultimately your measure on the ROI of the investment you're putting in for sales enablement.
Tom Greenwood: That's true. Now, this is an interesting topic because a lot of sales enablement professionals do not report through the sales organization. Some report through, you know, HR or marketing, I happen to report to the sales organization. So I have, you know, two measurements. One is company performance. I have some control over that, but not as much. That’s how we're doing across the board. But I am directly incentivized by the sales team to do well. And we have done something such as build a sales enablement dashboard, where we can take data from our CRM system and calculate and coordinate it with the learning management system. And we can spot trends to see if we are affecting such things as win rates, close rate, pipeline size, and we use that as proof to show that we are they're impacting the sales organization or maybe not impacting the sales organization. And that's what is used to go into my compensation, my team's compensation plan for itself.
Jessica Ly: Excellence, I think that is a trend that I'm seeing is this sales enablement executives are trying to align with sales, revenue and incentives. Because this way, you have skin in the game, making sure it's very effective.
Tom Greenwood: Absolutely. It's the holy grail to figure out what it is that we provide in training and tools isn't moving the sales needle. That’s always been the question. You know, you can't go to the CEO and say, hey, look, we had a great quarter because our Surveymonkey shows that we got, you know, 4.95 on our last training courses, that's not good enough, you know, he or she is going to want to know, all right, what you delivered what we invested in, is it really having an impact on sales? And that's what we're doing.
Jessica Ly: Wonderful. Well, one of the challenges that I feel now is that we cannot gather in small groups anymore. No more on because I think typically, the sales enablement program is both on-site small group training. And now we're just basically having to do it virtually, pretty much. Has that been a blessing now that we've been forced to go online? Or do you think that's going to hamper the effectiveness of sales enablement?
Tom Greenwood: Well, I think it could be generational. For example, a lot of our generation Zs and millennials. They're used to doing everything online. They're used to take a look at YouTube. We've taken a lot of what we've created and put it out in YouTube clips with some, you know, testing and quizzes with it. So they're very used to that type of training. If you get into, you know, more of the, you know, older generations and they really like, you know, face to face, it's amazing I get a question all the time, Hey, I know your sales enable is coming out with new training, what building is it going to be in, you know, all those types of things that go into, you know, live training, they're just used to being trained like that. So we are getting, you know, good responsiveness and good feedback on delivering training and really to forums now, particularly with the virus going on one is live virtual, where, you know, I can stand and deliver via webcam and you know, other technical capabilities, or I can, you know, produce a module and some of the rapid learning tools that are available out there and send it to them an email, we can track, whether they opened it, how long they looked at it, we can make it mandatory, so we're really not losing anything. Personally, I love to be in front of an audience I love to teach. It's one of the reasons I got into enablement. But, you know, you have to adapt to the times and these times are pretty difficult and strange right now.
Jessica Ly: If it is just as effective to do it remotely, because we're forced to now look for creative ways to do it virtually, it does save money if everybody can just do it virtually instead of being together. It's less time-consuming, not having to fly. So do you actually think that this situation is then gonna have a permanent impact, as far as how much is invested for online training versus on-site training?
Tom Greenwood: I figured out is, first of all, you know, although we are doing well as a company, we could be doing better at this virus didn't exist. So what does that mean? Well, we, you know, have had to cut back on expenses. No one's traveling anywhere. I actually didn't relish it. You know, this next month, hopping in that coach Satan flying to Sydney for hours on end, it will dramatically impact because we're gonna have to recover from a revenue perspective because our business will drop down somewhat. And one way to do that to have a go right to the bottom line is to make sure we're not spending too much and travel costs a lot of money. So you're absolutely correct.
Jessica Ly: This has been a really informative and educational discussion with you on sales enablement and how things are shifting because of this virus. And I appreciate you sharing your best practices with us, Tom.
Tom Greenwood: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. We'd love to do it again, you pick the topic and I'll be there for you.
Jessica Ly
Jessica is a seasoned marketing and sales executive with over 15 years of experience in the US and EU regions. A graduate of Santa Clara University, she studied Marketing Management and practiced the full spectrum of marketing for 9 years in the B2C and B2B space. She knows how having an integrated marketing strategy and a strong execution team can build up a significant funnel for the sales team. Having been on the sales side for several years, Jessica also understands the sales team’s challenges and perspective. So with experiences in both marketing and sales, Jessica brings valuable insight to helping clients meet their business objectives.