How to Predictably Grow Your Company with a Sales Operating System – In Just 7 Minutes with Liz Heiman

Resources/Links:

• Download your Sales Operating Guide here and build winning sales strategies: www.regardingsales.com

Summary

Are you struggling with unpredictable sales and cash flow issues, or finding it challenging to get a handle on how things are running?

It seems like your system may be in chaos, which could be impacting your business’s potential to soar. It might be time to fix things and get on track for success!

Liz Heiman is the Sales Operating System Architect and the founder of Regarding Sales. She guides leaders from what’s often a random and chaotic sales process to a systematic and sustainable strategy that fills their prospect pipeline week in and week out.

Listen to Liz as she shares how to implement a sales process that effectively addresses chaos, rather than simply putting a CRM bandaid on top of it, which could potentially worsen the situation.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 02:26 – Liz’s ideal client: I like working with companies that are between like 25 and a hundred million who are changing their go-to market strategies.
• 03:09 – The problem she helps solve: I take the chaos out of sales so that they have a system that is predictable and manageable so they can grow or scale.
• 04:24 – Symptom of the problem: One is that feeling that this is chaos. The second is that projection forecasts are completely unpredictable.
• 05:20 – Mistakes clients often make: That you can just keep doing the same thing for 10, 20, or 30 years.
• 06:41 – Liz’s Valuable Free Action [VFA]: Start doing funnel reviews with your team.
• 07:25 – Liz’s Valuable Free Resource [VFR]: Download the Sales Operating Guide here: www.regardingsales.com
• 08:08 – Q: How did I get here? A: I got to this point of creating this system because I started with systems and processes and then watched it grow and grow.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“You have to change with the market. You have to change with the technology.” -Liz Heiman Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. I’m Tom Poland, beaming out to you from the sunny Sunshine Coast here in Australia. Joined today by Liz Heiman. Liz, good day from down under. Very warm welcome. Where are you based?

Liz Heiman 00:23
Thanks for having me. I am in Reno, Nevada. Not to be confused with Las Vegas.

Tom Poland 00:29
Just had the Super Bowl, right?

Liz Heiman 00:30
That’s where they just had the Super Bowl. Yes, but we are about eight hours north of there.

Tom Poland 00:35
What a long way away. I imagine with …

Liz Heiman 00:39
No kidding.

Tom Poland 00:40
There were like over 1,000 private jets that flew in around Las Vegas for that game. Some tickets were selling for $65,000. Unbelievable.

Liz Heiman 00:52
Wow! I hadn’t heard that number.

Tom Poland 00:53
The question I’m going to ask you today is, did the right win?

Liz Heiman 00:57
No.

Tom Poland 00:58
That’s the tragedy of the triumph and tragedy of sport. Alright, and folks, we’ll get off the Super Bowl, which was very exciting with all the conspiracy theories swirling around it, let alone the game when she went overtime. I think it’s the only fourth one in history. But anyway, as I said, off Super Bowl, Tom and back onto Liz. Liz is, and I love this title, she’s the sales operating system architect. She’s also the founder of regarding sales.com. And I’m going to tell you why you should go there in about six and a half minutes and download a really, really interesting diagnostic tool. Like, like a blueprint for predictable and systematic sales. Back to Liz again, she guides the leader from what is often a random and chaotic sales process. You know, people kind of fly by the seat of their pants to something that’s more systematic and sustainable. A sales strategy that when you push the button and pull the lever on the sales strategy, you’re going to have consistent flows of high quality new prospects coming into your pipeline on a pretty regular basis. Most likely we can wake out. Who doesn’t want that, right? No one put their hands up. So the title today is, How to Predictably Grow your Company with a Sales Operating System, keyword being System. Let’s rock and roll. Our seven minutes starts now. Liz, question number one is, who is your ideal client?

Liz Heiman 02:26
I like working with companies that are between like 25 and a hundred million who are changing their go-to market strategies. So maybe they’ve never had an outbound sales team, maybe their product has changed. Maybe what they do has changed, but they want to grow and they need help redeveloping their sales organization. So they typically have like eight to 10 salespeople and often manufacturing, high tech, med tech, those kinds of things.

Tom Poland 02:53
Perfect. So it’s a mid-sized company, what I’d call a mid-sized company. It varies by people’s definition, but folks, if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a small business, you’re still going to pick up some principles and concepts that can be highly profitable soon. Stay tuned. What’s the problem you solve for these companies, Liz?

Liz Heiman 03:09
Well, I take the chaos out of sales so that they have a system that is predictable and manageable so they can grow or scale. So one of the things that we see all the time, I talk to CEOs and to founders and to COOs and they say it’s chaos. We can’t control it. We have no idea what’s coming next. Right?

Tom Poland 03:28
Right. And they’ve probably got a bunch of salespeople that have been put through training every now and then they put them through a training program and then the salespeople go out and no one has any idea whether they’re following a system or not and they’re probably not.

Liz Heiman 03:39
Right. And training is not a system. Training is just training, right?

Tom Poland 03:43
Well that’s beautiful.

Liz Heiman 03:43
The system starts and strategy starts with the CEO and the C-suite and kind of trickles down to sales as opposed to thinking that, you train them and then, send them out and magic. There’s no magic.

Tom Poland 03:56
Yeah, we’ve got no magic. Noticed that if it’s just training, it’s a bit like a shower. It wears off after a while and people notice it. So that’s absolute gold right there. Training is not a system. So the holistic approach that you bring, how do people, how does the CEO, how does the sales manager, how do the key decision makers in an organization know they need to talk with you? What are the symptoms? What’s going on?

Liz Heiman 04:24
Yeah, so, there’s a couple of things. One is that feeling that this is chaos. That if you are feeling that it is chaos and you need to fix it. The second is that projection forecasts are completely unpredictable. You just don’t know if they’re going to be real or not real. The other is that you have kind of spits and starts, sales isn’t consistent. We have a ton and then we have nothing. We have a ton and we have nothing. And so you’ve got cash flow issues and those are sort of the big things that let you go, oh yeah, this shouldn’t be this way. I have no idea what’s going on. I can’t manage my team.

Tom Poland 04:59
What would you say? Thank you for that. Question four, and we’ve got four minutes left. What do you find are the common mistakes that people make when trying to solve the problem of getting predictable sales? That you just look at it and go, oh geez, I wish I was here 10 years ago. Because that was never going to work. So what are some of the common mistakes that these organizations make before they find your solution?

Liz Heiman 05:20
One of the things that they think is that you can just keep doing the same thing for 10, 20, or 30 years. It just doesn’t work. You have to change with the market. You have to change with the technology. And I think another big thing that people do is they think, well, if we just get a CRM or if we just add some tools, some tech tools, it will solve all of this, right? And if you put a CRM on top of chaos, you have a dysfunctional CRM, you don’t have a better functioning sales team. That’s, that’s

Tom Poland 05:47
So true.

Liz Heiman 05:47
Those are kind of two of the big areas. Yeah.

Tom Poland 05:49
Because the CRM just gets filled with incomplete data or out of data and so on. So the other one I suppose would be that they just hire more salespeople. And so there can be quite often this idea that, well, we just need a good salesperson where that’s all we need. We just need a couple of good salespeople and then that’ll solve the problem. But that doesn’t actually create a lot more problems because you suddenly have this alleged superstar on a team. We all know from the Super Bowl final that a team of champions is always going to beat, is always going to lose to a championship team. So let’s flip this, only two minutes left, I’ll hurry myself up. What would you say is a top tip that you could give people a valuable free action that is not going to solve the whole problem, they probably need you for that, but might get them going in a step in the right direction?

Liz Heiman 06:41
Yeah, so I think the most important thing is to start doing funnel reviews with your team. And what I mean by that is not, what’s the bottom of the funnel? What’s going to close this week, this month, this quarter, but like the whole funnel, what’s going on? If we’ve got a six-month sales cycle, I need to know six months out whether we’re going to hit our numbers in six months. So it’s managing the entire funnel with your team.

Tom Poland 07:03
Managing the funnel. So figuring out what’s happening at every step. And folks just map it out to start with. It may not be perfect, but it’ll be a step in the right direction. Yeah. But let’s take this one step further. Question seven is, where can people go to find out more about what you do? And I’m after something here that’s something they can download. Something they can experience. It’s not going to cost them anything, but it’s going to help them even more.

Liz Heiman 07:25
Yeah. So go to my website, www.regardingsales.com and go to the sales operating page and there is a download of the Sales operating system guide. It’s a great starting place.

Tom Poland 07:37
I had a sneak peek at this before folks and my eyes opened and I looked at this and I thought, this is so well thought out. There’s four elements to it. It’s a holistic approach and it’s very likely that you’re missing at least one of these elements. If not, two or three of them. So go get that at www.regardingsales.com and have a look for what they are looking for, which is the tab.

Liz Heiman 08:00
The sales operating system.

Tom Poland 08:02
Operating system. Thank you. Of course. Last question, what’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t, 20 seconds?

Liz Heiman 08:08
I don’t know. Maybe how did I get here? I think it’s really important that I got to this point of creating this system because I started doing training. I started with systems and processes and then watched it grow and grow. So, I think that the big thing is understanding that I didn’t get here accidentally. Right. That it was an evolution. Yeah.

Tom Poland 08:27
I think a lot of people think, oh yeah, you wake up one morning and go, what am I going to sell? But it’s an evolutionary process and you’re qualified by reason of experience and the fact you face these challenges and you’ve had these problems and you’ve got a system in place that eliminates them. Liz Heiman, thank you so much for your time and your insights and your contribution.

Liz Heiman 08:45
Thanks for having me.

Tom Poland 08:47
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.