Digital Innovations in the Real Estate Domain and Building Successful Sales Teams

Jessica Ly I'm here with Matthew Buchalski, who is VP of sales at RealPage. Hello there, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Matthew Buchalski: Hi, Jessica, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jessica Ly I want to talk about the real estate market with you because I know you guys provide a lot of technology and services to those property owners and operators and managers. Everybody's working from home. Everybody is staying at home now. And so that's a lot of needs. Tell us what are some of the interesting points that are trends that you're seeing in the marketplace?

Matthew Buchalski: Yeah, great question. You know, I think, as you alluded to, COVID has really put a lot of pressure on the real estate market, right? With folks working from home. Owners, operators, property management companies, and even investors are under more and more pressure today than they ever have been to deliver an ultimate tenant experience customer experience. And what we're seeing is really a migration towards a connected experience inside the marketplace. So as we came into this year, a RealPage, we were out ahead of it talking about truly paperless payment systems and coming up with a number of innovative products to go to market with, and few months after we went to market with that, COVID would happen and really accelerate the adoption of a number of different key products in our portfolio. So we've seen a lot of pressure in the marketplace. And luckily, with a broad product portfolio, as we have, we've been able to deliver a lot of great innovation and perspectives to our customers.

Jessica Ly I think that definitely, the digital transformation is accelerating, and now people are being forced actually to adopt and use that. And I think you're doing a great service because there's a lot of property owners and managers who have been doing the old school processing manually, and it's just not very efficient, it's really time to make it a lot more efficient, a lot more cost-effective for both the managers. And I think they the owners and the tenants who have to use other services to stay in touch and do business together.

Matthew Buchalski: I completely agree with that, you know, so not only as for the payments, really the rent collection overall had to change. But you know, if you think about just the pure mechanics of a prospect wanting to go see an apartment, and the amount of contact physical contact they would need on-site and how many people have turned the doorknob that day. And folks being locked in are more and more, I should say, to leave the house, we've been forced to deliver, you know, virtual leasing capabilities, you know, fully outsourced contact center capabilities, and really allow our customers, the property managers, owner-operators and institutional investors in the world, to deliver a lower risk service to prospective tenants to make sure that they stay fully occupied.

Jessica Ly And you have over 90 products and services. So it's a lot of opportunities for everybody to use your system as a one-shop stop.

Matthew Buchalski: Yeah, and I think that's one of the great things about RealPage is that we are a single-source provider. And we have a very, very deep portfolio where, you know, we can cover most, if not all of our customers’ needs and in changing times.

Jessica Ly As VP of sales, I know you have a large team and you've worked at many places, including big enterprise places like HP, CA technologies. So I would like to get your thoughts on how to lead teams remotely, how to be efficient, effective, how to motivate how to recruit. Let us hear some of that. I know you have a particular framework that you say is trust and motivate. Explain to me a bit about that.

Matthew Buchalski: Yeah. So over the course of my leadership career, I've been through a number of different programs done 360s Myers Briggs personality profiles, etc. And gone through a number of different trainings and got a lot of different perspectives. And over the course of time, I really came up with this framework for myself that I like to call trust and motivate and everything about trust. There's been a lot of books written about trust, Stephen Covey wrote the speed of trust, a fantastic book, but without trust, you can never really have an effective team, right. And I think if you break down trust, and maybe we can share the document at some point on this video, but I think you have to be completely open and transparent. You have to invest in relationships with your people. You have to understand where they're and what they're challenged with, the kind of a play on words with Stephen Covey's “Seek first to understand,” “You have to be a true servant leader,” and “You have to take the time to really build the team” and “Invest in your culture.” Without those five key tenants, in my opinion, you'll never have a team that is overperforming, engaged, focused on helping each other and ultimately, as successful as you really want them to be. Trust is just to me is super important. And then, from the motivation side, this is where in my opinion, where it comes down to a lot of tactical responsibilities. In my opinion, the best way to keep your team motivated is a hire people with a lot of intrinsic motivation, which can be, you know, can be difficult, but it's also an art. But to keep your team fully motivated, as a leader, you have to be out in front and pulling away roadblocks and pulling away obstacles, and always thinking ahead to what the team needs next. So I start with marketing. How are you aligned to the messaging into your operating rhythm with recruiting and forecasting? How often are you meeting with finance to understand your key financial drivers and reviewing your P&L? What's your comp plan? What are your incentives? How fast you're moving? Are you moving too fast or not? Or not fast enough to keep up with market trends and keep the team fully engaged? How are you using analytics to find weak spots in your business or find opportunities in your business? Look at what your top performers are doing and go replicate that across the team. These are all really, really important. And then you know, the last two is what I like to call feared or alignment. Real page is not the only big company out there. And there are numbers of different teams and business units and product teams that you need to interface with. And I think it's up to the leader to really sit down and synergize with those various groups, build relationships with the leader, share mutual goals, understand KPIs for success. That’s the old rule. In my opinion, that's really the only way you're going to know if you're truly effective in hitting the mark to help your cross-functional peers be successful. And then the last one, and there's been a lot of talk about this lately, is empowerment and inclusion, right? I think the days of command and control, leadership styles are gone. You can't be Attila the Hun anymore and expect to run a successful organization. You need to bring your people in, ask them for their opinions, help them participate in key projects, and include them in the journey because without you, including the voice of the people, the thought process of your people and your teams. How do you really know if you're serving them properly? And I think the answer to that is that you don't. So that's really been a framework that I've put together over time. I don't think there's anyone solution out there or one framework out there other than capture encapsulates everything. But I published this to my teams. I had them hold me accountable. And it's a good way to take a look at how we're doing as a business and making sure that we're doing as many of those if not all of those 13 things on a daily basis, moving the ball forward.

Jessica Ly Do you want to share tips on actually how you can determine this one has the intrinsic motivation or not?

Matthew Buchalski: Yeah, so intrinsic motivation is hard to really unearth. But one of the things that I have found is very effective is something I learned from Dean Graziosi called the seven levels Why? And all this all starts off with why do you want this job. And depending on where they're at in their career, it's they want to make more money, they want to get promotion opportunities, they want to be with a big company. And then, no matter what the answer is, I always follow up with them. Why is that important to you? And you need to go seven levels deep, not five, not Eight, Seven. And typically, when you're talking to someone that has a true intrinsic motivation, somewhere between, you know, why, number five and why number six, you start to see something, the lips starts to move, or they kind of get red in the face or they start to get a little fidgety. And you know that they're about to kind of give you something that's really, really important to them. Something about their family something about why they want to be successful, something about, you know, their mom that they want to take care of when they get older, whatever it is, when you dig that deep, you unearth that intrinsic motivation, and it can be a very emotional conversation. But when you find it, those people tend to outperform the rest. Some folks, especially folks early in their career, they may not get to question six or question seven. They just realized they might not have one. It doesn't, you know, doesn't make them bad. It doesn't make them a bad candidate, but in my opinion, when you find people with that really intrinsic motivation, they're top performers. And I think as sales leaders, it's our job to build world-class teams. And when you have folks that have that level of motivation, it becomes much easier.

Jessica Ly Okay, Matt, so great. Let's say you did hire the right people. Now, how do you effectively onboard them to make sure that they get resolved as quickly as possible?

Matthew Buchalski: I think that a lot of companies get this wrong, right. And I think it's got to start off with a very, very warm welcome experience for the candidate. But I think that we tend to throw the textbook at a new hire and say, go learn all this product stuff. And we kind of skipped over the part about what are the business needs and business challenges that our customers face in-depth, you can't they shouldn't be just the first or second page on a PowerPoint with 30 pages of product features and functions afterward, you really need to dig into the business side of the pain, especially for folks that are early in career, right? You want to help them really make that light bulb connection earlier. What I've seen happen in other places, you start off with a product, and then they get on the phone talking about the product, and then you try and retrofit says no, don't do that. Talk about business pains, if that's really the method and start off with the business pains that you need to solve. And I think we've done an enormous job with that. And we continue to work with that. But start off with business pain. Think about it from a business acumen perspective. You can always retrofit the right product once you understand the pain. And that to me, that's the real key, then we really need to hone in on is what are your KPIs for onboarding, time to productivity? Specifically, when I first came to RealPage, we were hiring a bunch of people and built a great team. And we started to really look into how long was it taking our folks to start and then get productive? How long before they made their first phone call? How long before they got their first meeting? How long do they get their first deal? And when you start to benchmark those KPIs, as you continue to hire, the goal is to reduce them, make that time to productivity shorter. While not sacrificing any of the quality coaching and training that happens. We've set our teams up so that we cover various market segments on incoming new hires who go into the same team on intake. We have a great leader who runs that team. She’s done a fantastic job. And she works very, very closely with our sales enablement team to make sure that we have the right content queued up in our systems, that content is being used, that there's the team is retaining the information, and that by the end of that two weeks or so timeframe, on onboarding that they've gotten enough, recorded live, and then practical skills training over the course of a couple of weeks, then they're on the phones. And the way we supplement that is our frontline leadership team. We run what we call skill Mills every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and these are short 30-minute sessions in the morning to get the team excited, get the kind of the morning voice out, make sure everybody has coffee, and their quick role plays. So we'll do everything from objection handling to what do you say when a customer is using a competitor? We are overcoming certain objections. How are we doing video prospecting? Very functional, very practical, and very timely delivery of smart content. And they're learning from their peers. And I think that has really given a more casual approach to having folks help each other.

Jessica Ly Okay, Matt, that's great. Your practice makes perfect. And we know that so you hire them, you train them. And I know you have a team of like 40 people. Next is to prove it. Can you really sell right, so let's talk about that the art of selling remotely?

Matthew Buchalski: Yeah. Something I've been doing for a really long time. I think deals are made or broken very early on in the process, specifically when it comes down to the kind of infamous discovery call and into the demo. And I think that those are really art forms. There's an art and a science to selling. There’s both art and science involved. Most desperate to me is a little bit more art. Presentations need to be engaging. I think that rushing into a demo for the sake of doing a demo because it belongs on this part of the flowchart on a PowerPoint may not be the best way to do it all the time, right? You have to build a report. You have to build relationship equity with your prospects super early on and take a very empathetic approach to their business problems. Folks that buy technology have been through the early stages of a sales cycle countless times, and they start to judge you and your ability to deliver real value very, very early. So the more you sound like you're in the herd, the less you're going to ultimately differentiate yourself. So if you were to map out your sales process to initial prospecting, phone call to discovery call, or needs analysis call, ultimately to a demo. Those are not just important milestone calls, but it's what you're doing in between those milestone calls that will determine your success in closing that deal. So are you reaching out to your champion to build relationship equity? If you invite one person to a discovery, call one person to a needs analysis or to a demo? And four or five people show up to that call? How good or how consistent? Are you, as a seller, to reach out to everyone on that call to ask them what they thought? Ask them why they were invited to that phone call? What did they think about the presentation? Do they see any issues or concerns? Where do they fit the valuation process? That’s a critical step that missed and the earlier you can get deeper and wider roots into a customer's organization and really understand how these various people come together. In my opinion, the more likely you are to close that deal is I think there are way too many important sales cycles out there that are single-threaded, where you're really relying on one person to do all your selling for you. Are you always going to be able to get access to everyone involved in the decision criteria? Probably, right. Nothing’s ever absolute. But you always need to try. And I don't think there's enough time being spent on really coaching sales teams and sellers to make sure that the time between those milestone calls is utilized. Phone text videos, I think we've got to get past kind of that generic white paper type of follow up here, you know, read this if you'd like to, and really make it a more human to the human experience of COVID has taught us anything, is at the end of the day, we're probably talking to someone sitting in their living room with kids running around the background that's looking to buy technology and without that human to human connection, especially right now. You could just be, you know, lost in the noise.

Jessica Ly Great tips, Matt. I appreciate you being on the show to talk about RealPage and how to hire the right people, how to motivate them, train them and then actually make it effective in the remote selling phase.

Matthew Buchalski: Thank you for having me, Jessica. This has been a lot of fun.