Leveraging Technology: Innovating In Sales With Steve Bonvissuto
Continuous and incremental improvement is the name of the success game when it comes to innovating in sales. Leveraging the right technology, including AI, gives sales teams the edge in the sales process. In this episode, Rich Blakeman sits down for a talk with the Vice President for Innovation at MarketSource, Steve Bonvissuto. Steve discusses how they use technology to keep improving the sales process and provide total support and service to their customers. Learn more of their secrets to success by tuning in.
---
Listen to the podcast here:
Leveraging Technology: Innovating In Sales With Steve Bonvissuto
I am thrilled to have with me a friend and an expert. If we were going to talk about having the word sales in our show, the words AI, our guest is on top of both on the largest scale that you could imagine from working with the largest companies that exist. I'm glad to welcome, Steve Bonvissuto to our show. Steve, if you could introduce yourself, tell folks who you are and what you're up to, then we'll jump right in.
Thank you so much for the nice words. I'm Steve Bonvissuto. I'm the Vice President of the Innovation Center at MarketSource. It is a sales outsourcing organization. We help some of the biggest brands in the world sell their products. My role is to work with our sales teams and apply engineering and technology principles to help them hit their quota.
That's a pretty concise purpose statement as to what you're doing and why you're doing it. Not many people can get that down into that concise of sentence. How long did that take you?
To master that statement? I don’t know. I could ramble down a long time. For a long time, Rich, you know me, but I figured we'd get to it. This is less about me and more about how folks could leverage technologies.
We're going to start on a different place than technology. We're going to start a little bit differently. You and I trust each other. We've worked together long enough to trust each other. I'm going to ask you for a trusting moment here. I'm going to ask you to close your eyes and think about six-year-old, Steve, we're coming out of the end of the summer. You've been out of school for several months. You've been with your friends in the neighborhood. Think about and imagine, what is it that at six years old, what did you do best? What were the things that made you the happiest? What were the things that you and your friends did together that made you feel best about yourself and about what you were doing? Open your eyes and tell us about that.
At that age, that was a long time ago for me, so it's difficult to go back that far sometimes. It was all about having fun. I don't ever remember spending time indoors as a kid. For me, it was always about being outside and being with my friends. I lived in a neighborhood that was a very safe neighborhood. We were always outside doing sports-related things, really playing and that sort of thing. I would say at age six, it was probably hiding and seek with my friends.
That free and play time, every day a new adventure and, “Whose house am I going to go or who's coming to my house? Where are we all going together? As long as we get home by supper time, we're all good.” That freedom, enthusiasm and energy, how does that translate into the Steve now, and how do those same things affect who you are now?
There are things that I get to do in my job that I'm passionate about. For the most part, I love what I do. I have a great sense of freedom and autonomy. Being a little kid, you get out of the house, you're out there with your friends and there's this feeling of being free. It translates to sales honestly.
Sales is fun. It's energizing, challenging, and rewarding. There's a sense of freedom that comes with it.
Most people that I know of that are really successful in sales love sales because it's fun, energizing, challenging, rewarding, and there's a sense of freedom that comes with it. For me, just being able to be who I am and feel good about it is maybe the connection between age six and where I am now. I've gotten to this point in my career, and it’s really all about helping others. I didn't have that at age six, but I certainly do at this point in my career. Being able to help salespeople hit their numbers, achieve their objectives, earn more money and have more opportunities, is the thing that inspires me the most. It's freeing in some respect.
We were having a bit of a conversation before we started. Part of that conversation was around a very important deal that I know your company is working on, and that you and the rest of the executive team were all involved in some fashion or another, as well as getting updates from the guy that's leading the charge. That's a little bit like the same thing. What's going to happen tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to be a new day. How are we going to react to what's going on? It's not going and doing the same thing the same way every day.
We've got 50 or so outsourced sales teams, some inside teams and field teams, a combination of inside and field. Here at MarketSource, we leverage the technologies, including AI and predictive technologies to gain an advantage, find an edge, close more deals. There's always something to learn and there's always someone to help. That's the fun part about this company. If you think about it in the simplest terms, we help people find work, and work is a big part of our lives. It's a third of our lives, if you counted the number of hours in the day. It's always a challenge. You never know what you're going to get as you alluded to.
Let's talk a little bit about the kinds of AI in your firm because you're on the leading edge of all different sales development in all levels of the funnel, everything from inside sales to key account sales, to generic territory sales. What areas of selling have you found AI to have the most impact on in terms of either result or in terms of process improvement because of the business you're in as an outsource and a heavy focus on process? What have been the levers for you?
We started looking at AI in sales a few years ago because we use a sports term here, relative to hockey, “We wanted to be where the puck is going.” We didn't want to chase it, we wanted to be there. We went in, I wouldn't say we dove in but we stepped in. One of the things that I think about a lot from working with me is we use this term ‘red time’ ‘green time’ a lot here.
Red time is the tasks that a salesperson performs that don't lead to sales results. They administer tasks that they have to do. I look at it like, “How can I apply AI? How can I apply predictive technologies? How can I provide learnings and patterns to help a salesperson have more green time than red time in the sales process?”
If you think about the very top of the funnel, we all know that B2B sales, which is my area of focus are very different now than it was years ago. There are a lot more people involved in the buying process now than ever before. We sell our services to large organizations and there are a lot of personas involved in that buying process, including IT, which a lot of people look at and go, “Why is IT involved in sales?” IT is involved in sales because technology is one of the levers you pull to help a salesperson get more effective. IT organizations are very interested in how this technology is going to evolve and impact their environment.
We know that there are a lot of people involved in the buying process. We also know that buyers are much more educated now than they ever before. They've already done a ton of research before you're even having your first conversation with them. At the very top of the funnel, we look for things like intent. Who's looking in this space? We want to get to them early in the buying process.
Innovating In Sales: Here at MarketSource, we leverage technologies, including AI and predictive technologies, to gain an advantage, find an edge, and close more deals. There's always something to learn and someone to help.
There's one way that AI and things like intent data can help us identify people that are out there searching for the services that we provide. We also use technologies to find out who else in their organization based on our experience could we reach out to and engage with early in the process?
What AI and technology allow us to do is find more personas that are involved early in the buying process so that we can engage them early on and have a chance to make that impact. We also know that salespeople spend a lot of time, especially on a sales outsource like MarketSource. Oftentimes, we're given a list of accounts to call on from a client, and a lot of dirty data and inaccurate data in there. Reps can spend a lot of cycles figuring out what part of the data set is no good anymore. We can utilize AI to make more dials more quickly and find out where the accuracy is in the data.
For us, it's all about that first conversation, and that first conversation being a high-quality conversation. We want more of that, we want more conversations, less time cleaning data, making a bunch of phone calls and leaving a bunch of emails or leaving a bunch of voicemails. It's a necessary evil but if we can apply some automation to that, we do that in every opportunity that we get.
There are a couple of things that jumped out at me about things you said, Steve. Probably the strongest mentor in my career was Bob Miller, the Founder of Miller Heiman. One of the things that’s a foundational part of his belief is that when you prioritize for a salesperson, not to spend time, the first and highest priority is at the bottom of the funnel, the things that are about to close.
As soon as you've spent whatever time you need to spend at things that are about to close, the second most important place to spend time is at the top of the funnel. You don't work your way up the funnel and work on next to the bottom of the funnel, then the next stage and the next stage. You are immediately at the top of the funnel when you start working there. If you're not doing that productively, then you're going to waste time.
We're going to be in that red time, green time question. You're not going to have pure selling time where you're talking to people about what it is that they're trying to fix accomplish or avoid, what it is, where they are in their buying cycle, who else needs to be involved, who else is involved.
If you're not having those conversations because you don't have enough time because you’re not being effective at the top of the funnel, then you’ll never going to get back down to the bottom of the funnel or your yield is going to be so poor. That makes complete sense to me in terms of the places where you want to free up more green time by doing the things that you're doing.
The top of the funnel to me is where most red time probably is because we're casting a wide net. Once you get better improving the size of your funnel, you need to quickly determine where you should focus there because you can spend a lot of time there as well. It depends on several factors. It depends on things like deal size. It depends on things like time to close.
One of the things that makes us really successful is being a relationship-based selling organization. We sell with integrity.
Some sales cycles are much longer than others. I've seen in a lot of cases where we spend a lot of time chasing leads that are the wrong leads. You have to make sure that the leads in the top of the funnel are quality leads. Otherwise, a very small percentage of them are going to drop to the bottom of the funnel.
That's a big issue that a lot of sales teams struggle with is, “How do I progress the right leads through the process, through the funnel?” There's also red time in account management because if you’re thinking about it, what are you trying to do when you're doing account management? You're trying to cross-sell, up-sell, and of course, sell more of your product.
We use a term here called get, grow and keep. It’s getting the right accounts to work with. Once you have those accounts, growing those accounts, so cross-sell, up-sell within there and then keep. For a company like ours, where we have sometimes an eighteen-month sales cycle, it's very difficult to close a deal.
When you close a deal, you want to make sure that you service the heck out of that customer, and find as many ways to work within the organizations that you're working with. Then make sure that you keep those customers. AI can be useful throughout the whole new sales and the whole sales life cycle.
I got a curiosity for you on that because we’re talking about the cross-sell, up-sell account management world. A lot of that has turned over to this relatively newly tagged industry called CX, a whole new job category and a whole new career path. A friend of mine over in Australia said, “The best way to differentiate yourself when you're selling is to sell like you've already won.”
What he meant by that was to treat your client at the earliest stage of the sale cycle in the same fashion you would treat them if they'd been your client for three years. Provide them with your best resources, be as responsive as you would be if they were your existing client rather than a prospect. Treat them and start to show them how you're going to treat them when they are your client, as if you'd already won, rather than having this adversarial win-lose scenario between the client and the buyer. How do you go and start to move some of that upstream into the selling process? Is there anything in what you're doing with AI that can help in that scenario?
Most organizations get 80% of their revenue from their top 20% of their customers. Unfortunately, we've got a bad rap in sales because the salespeople have this reputation of focusing on the accounts that always buy from them and not really servicing the accounts that are difficult to conquest. That creates a lot of opportunity for companies like MarketSource. We're often hired by firms that recognize that they don't have the reach to get to that other 80%. We focus a lot on account management and cross-sell, up-sell.
Innovating In Sales: In any services business, including sales, your customer's perceived value of your service diminishes by 50% every year if you don't iterate and introduce change.
One of the things that makes us really successful is we're a relationship-based selling organization. We sell with integrity. We have a set of values here at MarketSource and a culture that is unsurpassed. When we survey our customers, they always say that we represent their brand, we sell with integrity and honesty. That translates to what you said about treating your customers as you treat them in the sales process.
It's interesting. As we work with prospects, we'd get to know them well. They know who we are and what we're all about. That's one of the reasons why customers not only hire us but they stick with us and stay with us. There's a lot to be said about the whole customer life cycle. I'm not just talking about sales. I'm talking about the lifetime value of a customer. We all know that the lifetime value of the customer is much more significant and important than that small little period of time where you may have that customer for six months or a year or something like that.
For me, it's more relationship-based. You want to make sure that your customers know that you're important to them, they are important to you, and they are at the top of your mind. That's where some of the AI technology can come in. You can do some things with some email bots, and sharing some information on a regular basis with your customers so that they know you're there, and you're there to support them. Hopefully, I answered your question.
It's a conversation more than it is an answer anyway, Steve. That's the way it works between us.
We always tend to solve some problems when we talk, don't we?
We do. Last question, what's next for MarketSource? What's in Frankenstein's laboratory of the next place that you may apply AI, that you have been putting out in a couple of beta tests here and there, that you're willing to talk about being a game-changer for you?
I've said this for a number of years. I don't think when you innovate, it's not a big bang thing to me. It's not like we're going to invent the next iPhone here. We've had out dozens of technologies a year, and a fraction of those end up in our toolkit. I'm looking for incremental improvement. I am looking for 1 or 2 things that we could do to get that much better.
Continuous improvement is a really big deal for us. It's one of my priorities. We believe in this concept called service is half-life. In any service in business, including sales services, your customer's perceived value of your service diminishes by 50% every year if you don't iterate and introduce change. A $5 million deal after the first year in their mind is worth only $2.5 million. The second year is worth even less than. We'll try anything. We'll look for a use case. We'll do a pilot and then we'll measure what kind of impact that change had.
IT is involved in sales because technology is one of the levers you pull to help a salesperson get more effective.
When I look at the types of change that you can introduce in sales, to gain a little incremental improvement, you can focus on the sales process, and that's where the red time, green time comes in. If you can help eliminate some of those tasks that are not value-added tasks through the use of technology, automation, pattern matching and intelligence, that's one area that we're looking at.
The other area is around increasing someone's skill and acumen through instructional design. We want to make sure that our people are as knowledgeable as possible, and that the quality of the conversations that they're having with their prospects and buyers is as high quality as it possibly can be, and it's a valuable conversation. There's some technology that we can apply there as well.
On top of all of that, we're starting to look at technologies that can predict the effectiveness of a salesperson in our recruiting process. We want to make sure that when we're hiring people, we have a strong degree of confidence that they're going to hit their objectives out of the gate and we're hiring the right people. We hire thousands of people a year. We hire thousands of salespeople every single year. We have a very small percentage of a fallout there.
Especially for sales outsourcer, an open seat is lost revenue. If we're losing reps because they're not effective and we might have missed something in the recruiting process, we would awfully obviously want to minimize those mistakes as much as possible. It isn't just the sales activities. For us, it’s before that. It's looking at ways of assessing people in the recruiting process so that the degree of confidence that we have, that they're going to be successful is as high as it possibly can be.
There's a bunch of stuff that crosses my desk every single day. Some of it is interesting and none of it is going to solve the problem. It's only going to, in my opinion, address an incremental part of it. I'm looking for small improvements and technologies that are going to help us get an advantage.
That makes complete sense. The way you laid it out 1, 2, 3, it plays backward to me as 3, 2, 1 because you've got to recruit right, train well, and then have them drop into a process that works and it’s efficient. Even though you can take your process and retroactively apply it to your existing teams, at the same time, those other two pieces based on the volume that you're hiring, the hiring and the training piece, that will have an awfully large impact that is maybe more than incremental.
For decades, we've been hearing people, process and technology. It's still about people, process and technology.
I think back to what you're describing, and I first got hired into my first professional career at IBM. We had an aptitude test that was rock solid. People complained at us that we shouldn't use aptitude tests. We said, “It discriminates but it only discriminates against people with low aptitude, and that's not what we wanted.” I couldn't go on quota for a year because we were serious about training. Life has changed a bit since then.
Innovating In Sales: The lifetime value of the customer is much more significant than that small little period of time where you may have that customer for six months or a year.
At the same time, there was a cultural part of that where much like the military, there was the IBM way, the GE way, the Air Force way. The company wanted to ensure that not only did you know what you need to know and do your job, but at the same time, that you were culturally acclimated to how we do things here.
A lot of that is gone by the wayside in a lot of companies because of the need to hire somebody and get somebody in a seat. Putting those things into your equation for where you try and get an incremental improvement, using whatever technology, can bring you that improvement completely understand.
It's all about mastering your craft. In any business, people perform processes using information and technology to achieve their goals and objectives. You break it down in a way where you can increase the skill and act, provide them with the right information and technology and the right processes that will help them achieve their goals and objectives. That's our focus here.
Steve, this is not what I was expecting. This would be another one of an extension of enlightening conversations. I'm certain that our readers will grab from this all of the nuggets that they need to either go a different direction or to be reassured in the direction that they're going already. I appreciate you taking the time to join us on the show. It means a lot to me personally and to our readers. I thank you for that.
You're very welcome. It's good to see you as always. For the last statement I would make, for folks out there looking at this world going, “What do I do?” I would say, try it. Give it a try. Fail fast, learn from your experience and move on to the next thing because there is no answer.
There's an answer if you don't try, that's for sure.
Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you. I've enjoyed it.
You bet, Steve. This has been AI For Sales. Look for us on the next episode. Thank you for your time. Have a great day.
Important Links:
About Steve Bonvissuto
An accomplished executive with more than 30 years of experience translating strategy into results for Fortune 500 companies. Held key leadership positions in professional services for the last 20 years.
Leads, motivates, and mentors the Innovation Center to continuously improve the delivery of MarketSource services to create more value for customers and employees. Responsible for business process engineering, technology, instructional design, training and business intelligence solutions to deliver superior results. Consultant and partner to key internal and external executives to develop, implement, and execute innovative strategies that enable teams to deliver additional value and exceed customer expectations. Leads the evaluation and deployment of sales enablement technologies and processes to create effective and efficient sales solutions by aligning with leading technology partners. Acts as a change acceleration leader to drive adoption of new technology, processes, and methodologies. Served as CIO for MarketSource for 5 years prior to acquisition.
Chief Information Officer for the College Television Network. Responsible for software development and all technology aspects in the creation and operation of a nationwide satellite network and a lifestyle and entertainment site for the 18 to 24 demographic.
Managing Director for Computer Task Group, Inc. (CTG). Launched four profitable business units in eight years to transition the company from flexible staffing to high-value technology solutions, and was often a key member of the pursuit team. Published numerous articles, met with board members and directors, spoke at industry conferences, and taught Solution Selling™.
