The Seller’s Edge in Action: See How Sandler and AI Work Together in the Real World

Julia Nimchinski:

Thanks, and we are transitioning to our demo sessions. Welcome back, Seth Morris, Chief Strategy Officer at Sendler. So great to have you here, and can’t wait to see the platform in action. So excited.

Seth Marrs:

Right. So, let me jump in. the way that I’m gonna look at it today is… One thing we’re building, which is a little bit different than what you would see in a typical, like, in a demo here, is Our goal isn’t to be the tool that you use every day.

Our goal is to allow you to use the tools that you use every day, and then for us to extract the insights to be able to say. you are or aren’t adopting our methodology, and that that methodology is actually leading to the results that you want. So, what you’re going to see is probably going to be a little bit different.

It will be a little bit different. The problem we’re trying to solve, and we’re using agents in the background to be able to do this, is… adoption of a methodology when you invest in it has been nebulous.

You usually can’t see it, you have no way to do it, and to a large extent, you only try to get ROI, like, in terms of just trying to make sure my people went through the training. If you do that, then, okay, I got what I wanted from the training.

ROI is, because of this, you can’t tie to it, because you can’t see adoption, so you can’t really tie to it any tangible… in any tangible way. So, we’re building technology to be able to do that.

And then the other thing that’s super exciting about what we’re working on is once I have all that information, how do I turn it into context that you guys can use to be able to get yourself better and better and better? So.

The old school, let me give you a methodology of best practices, and you just use the best practices, and that’s what you’re investing in? that’s going to be secondary to how we take the methodology of best practices and morph it into what is useful for each individual company to make them the best that they could be.

That’s where we see things going, and that’s what we built the Sandler Performance ecosystem for. There’s also another switch. As we move to use AI, most people do a baseline assessment, or many don’t even do a baseline assessment, but when you do, you use a standard assessment, survey-based. basically a knowledge check.

What we are doing is, instead of doing that, we’re looking at, this is an investment of skills. So when you buy a methodology, you’re buying a certain number of skills, and if this works well, your sellers are going to adopt those skills and then apply them to their deals. And that’s going to result in more wins.

So the way that we broke this down is we created a structure that is the 17 skills that you buy when you buy a certain package through Sandler, and then the way that we’re analyzing to understand whether you have done it or not. is through listening to you apply it, either through an AI roleplay, or ideally, on the call with a customer.

So when you look at the infrastructure around this. we’re connecting to all of the… like, we’re connecting to conversation intelligence, either the web conferencing app, or through a gong, or others, and also connecting to roleplay, and we’re pulling those moments in, evaluating them.

one, identifying the moment happened, or that skill was used, and then evaluating them, and then pulling all that information in, and tying it to results to be able to see what’s happening. So, we’re using AI foundationally.

To be able to extract out skill adoption and make it quantifiable, so that you can see how well you’re doing, and then also align that, how well you’re doing, with results. So, what I want to do for the majority of this session is we’re gonna score a skill. So, I want you guys to listen to… it’s a 2-minute conversation that’s happening.

we’re gonna score the skill, and I’d like you to be able to score it. You put, we’re gonna do the upfront contract. You can see here the upfront contract is this agreement that’s made at the beginning, lining both parties, setting the agenda, really taking control of the call. You listen to this.

take a little less than 2 minutes, and you tell me if you think that this… that Brad, our seller here, actually.

Unknown:

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Hey, Brad, it’s good to see you.

Seth Marrs:

Get it.

Unknown:

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Hey, Sunshine, it’s good to see you too. How’s your day? Audio shared by Seth Marrs: That’s going pretty well, thanks for asking. What do you have for me today?

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Well, based on the last time we spoke, it sounds like it probably makes sense for us to focus on the sales performance ecosystem that we started talking about last time. Is that a good focus for this call today? Audio shared by Seth Marrs: That works for me. Let’s dive into the ecosystem, then.

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Great, happy to do that. And I know we set aside 30 minutes for today’s call. Does that time still work for you? Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Yes, 30 minutes still works. Let’s just keep it focused so we can get into the specifics efficiently. Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Okay, happy to.

And in order to keep it focused, what are a couple things that you want to make sure that we touch on today to make this a good use of your time? Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Well, primarily, I want to understand how your approach to the sales performance ecosystem ensures alignment with our strategic goals.

I’m also interested in how we can gain better visibility into performance across sellers to make more informed coaching decisions. If we can cover those, that would be a good use of time. Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Okay, that’s perfect. And I’ll probably have to ask a couple of questions in order to really understand what you’re doing today.

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: how you’re doing it, and see if it’s even something that we can help solve with the sales performance ecosystem. And if it’s okay, I’d like to be, you know, maybe take 4 or 5 minutes at the end of this call to figure out next steps and what those would look like. Would that be okay?

Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Sounds reasonable. Audio shared by Seth Marrs: I’m ready to proceed with any questions you have and see where it takes us. Let’s dive in. Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Okay, let’s do it.

And by the way, if at any point you feel like, hey, this just isn’t a good fit, there’s a different solution that’s probably better, feel comfortable just saying, hey Brad, this isn’t a good fit for me, would that be okay? Audio shared by Seth Marrs: Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the openness there.

If at any point I feel this isn’t the right fit, I’ll just be straightforward about it. Let’s keep the conversation productive and aligned with what makes sense for us.

Seth Marrs:

Alright, so for those of you who are on, did Brad do a good upfront contract? So you saw the criteria before. mostly what we see is a very surface-level view of whether they did or not.

Anyone who’s seen an upfront contract before or gone through Sandler training would pick up certain nuances that would say that an upfront contract is happening and that you’re using Sandler methodology, but the… critical part of this is, if you’re really going to apply it to results, is you have to have a level of detail to understand, and you need to be able to aggregate that information together in a way that allows you to apply it to actual sales results.

So… The way our agent scores it is we’ve broken that down and built a structured Schema, or a structured set of criteria on what an upfront contract is. And how to score it. So, did the seller propose purpose for a meeting? The way that it works, it says whether it did or did not, and then provides the reason why. In this case, he did.

Did they confirm the meeting duration? Yes. In this case, he did. And you can also see that it will show where on the call it was actually said, so when you’re going back and doing coaching, you can go back to those moments and talk to the… to your sellers about this. Also, did they confirm agendas?

He got a 5 there, that’s a 1 to 5 rating, and it pulls it in and says exactly what they did. And then, in this one, he only got a 4, and the reason he only got a 4 is he did the things he was supposed to do, but didn’t do it in enough detail to justify a 5. And then the final one, permission to say no, did you do that? And it states it.

So… Now, imagine this on 17 skills across the thousands of calls that happen with your sales team, and then aggregating that information together, attaching it to a seller, and then monitoring how the sellers who do this well versus the sellers who don’t do this well deliver results.

That is how you use these AI agents to be able to drive ROI out of methodology. And to give you a brief overview of kind of how this would visualize. one of the things, like, without adoption, none of this stuff works, so we visualize adoption, and we make it a game, right?

So you want… if you’re in the red, that means your seller is actually worse than they were before they did training. That’s a problem you need to address. If you’re in the yellow, that means your seller’s better than they were before training, but not as good as they were… not as good as they were right after.

And then if you’re in the green, it means that the reassess, which we would do a reassessment right after training, is… is better. That you’re better than you were at the reassess. And that’s where this line is.

So a lot of the conversations we’re having with customers is, how do we get your adoption line so that your seller always is as good as they were when they walked out of training? The other thing we’re doing is looking at revenue per rep, and we’re having conversations.

One of the key foundations of what we’re trying to do at Sandler when we built this is give you the visibility to understand growth. We want to be a growth partner rather than a sales training provider. So what we do is we take a snapshot up front of your last 365 of revenue per rep, and that becomes the baseline.

And then every day, we do a rolling snapshot to see how you’re progressing, and the conversations are all about, how do I get your revenue per rep above And ideally, far above the baseline.

And then you can see the role type analysis is bringing those two things together and bucketing your sellers into different groups to see, kind of, where their performance is.

So… An at-risk performer, that person is not doing very well in either, so you have to understand, like, and figure out if they’re a right fit for the organization, so you may do surveys or assessments. Rogue Achievers, so that’s someone who’s successful, but actually not a very good seller.

So, that happens all the time for a number of different reasons. When you see those things, you want to look and see why, and we want to provide the data to be able to show that. when you have a rule follower, they’re able to show that they can demonstrate skills, but they’re not able to translate it into actual sales.

So, when you listen to the demo, it was kind of rehearsed and tinny. This is where you’d see coaching come in to really get that going, so it’s a lot more natural, and you’re able to engage with customers in a way that is as effective as it could possibly be.

And now on the role model side, these are the people doing both, these are the people you want to really expand their skills and make them better and better and more impactful for your company.

So that gives you an idea of how we’re using all this data that our agents are providing and pushing back into the system to make life better for the seller, to help them grow, help your company grow. One final thing I want to talk to you is just from a reinforcement standpoint, what we talked about today was the individual progression.

So that’s us going and saying, oh, I want you to do the things that we taught you to do. The thing that’s super exciting for the long term for us is how do we create the optimization loop? And it goes back to what I was talking about before.

Where we want to look at the information that’s provided and provide unknown unknowns, things that we’re seeing in data, trends we’re seeing in data, sellers who are refusing to do things one way but doing it in another way, and it’s actually working.

That can be taken, pulled back into a baseline to understand where the rest of your sellers are, and then distributed to your entire sales team to help them take an additional skill or an enhanced skill that’s really align to one part of your… or to your specific organization, and use it to win more.

So that’s just a brief overview of what we’re doing with the Sandler Performance ecosystem.

Julia Nimchinski:

Phenomenal demo, Seth, and loved the first thinking. first principal thinking approach to the platform. We have a couple of questions from the community, and the first one is around the methodology piece. Is it methodology agnostic, or does it only work with Centler?

Seth Marrs:

only works with Sandler, and the way that we built it was… is our Essentials platform that does the base. So it’s built to fit with the investment you’re making for that specific methodology.

So even when we do, like, we have sales leadership and we have channel, we’ll have the same thing for each, where we’re aligning the way that we score to the type of seller where there’s differences. But it’s specific to Santa.

Julia Nimchinski:

The next question is, how long before we’d actually see reps selling differently?

Seth Marrs:

It depends on the sales cycle of the seller. The thing that we want to make sure we encompass… so the way that we build it, I mean, and this is… we’re no different than anyone else.

Methodologies are usually sold in a one-year contract where you’re trying to work those through, so our goal is when you sign with us, is that within one year, we can show you tangible benefits. But if you have a 30-day sales cycle, it’ll go faster than a 90-year or a 120 or a year sales cycle.

But the key thing that we want to represent is to make sure that you can see those differences, and that we’re having tangible discussions around why it is or isn’t working, and we’re adjusting with you to be able to get you to that number.

Julia Nimchinski:

And does it work better for new hires or experienced ones?

Seth Marrs:

honestly, I think it’ll work better for experienced ones, because what I… having seen it in our own data, the experienced seller thinks they already know everything. Like, if you’re… if you’re doing a methodology for a new seller coming out, they’re eager to learn, they want to apply the methodology.

If you’re an 18-year vet of seller, it’s probably likely you’ve been through 5 or 6 methodology trainings. You’re like, I got this. And what we’ve seen, and actually it’s… I’m glad you asked the question, like, we ran data around this, and… Methodology companies always talk about the forgetting curve and how people forget over a period of time.

That’s not the real problem. What happens? we would do a baseline with a company, and they would be at, like, say the sellers on average were at 40% comprehension when they came out. We would do the reassess right after training, they jumped up to 86%.

Mission accomplished, we trained them, they understood what we were talking about, this is fantastic. Then we run what we call progressive scoring, where we start tracking the calls through conversations with customers after, right back down to 44. Like, right back down to that number, because the seller’s like, yep, I got it.

no need to change anything, I don’t think I need to take this on. So, your investment that you made so… that you’re putting in the company, the seller is deciding which pieces they want to take, and for a senior seller, they are going to be much more prone to do that.

Than someone who’s really eager to become a great seller and embrace something that they don’t necessarily know yet.

Julia Nimchinski:

Seth, do you really compete with any vendor? Like, is there direct competition?

Seth Marrs:

There… there is absolutely direct competition with the methodology providers.

The… the… The focus has to shift away from that, though, and that’s kind of where we’re thinking, like, if we aren’t able to become a partner with our customers around how do we drive growth by using best practices in the flow of work, then… we can’t be as valued as possible, and we feel that the way we’ve structured this and the way we’re doing it is unique to customers and unique to the market in a way that will allow that to actually become a reality.

So we’re not sitting and having hypothetical discussions around whether things work. We are tangibly looking and saying whether it worked or not, and as fast as possible, so we can help correct it if it’s not.

Julia Nimchinski:

Phenomenal demo. Thank you so much.

Seth Marrs:

Alright, thanks, Ruby.