Transcript: Identify Friction

Video 1: Rethinking Sales With Frictionless Sales

Hey, it’s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. If you lead a sales team, you’re probably used to thinking of your sales
process as being shaped like a funnel, with a fairly large number of people knowing about your company, and a
smaller number of people engaging with your company, and an even smaller number of people actually buying
from you.

Thinking of your company in this way makes sense. After all, a graph showing a conversion process is most likely
shaped like a funnel. But there are a few problems with thinking about your business or your sales organization
as a funnel. For one thing, it’s inefficient. You have to constantly spend time getting new people into your sales
process at the top of the funnel. And most of those people never make it to the bottom of your funnel. That's a
lot of wasted effort.

And let’s pause a minute to consider how funnels actually work. In the physical world, when you use a funnel, you
pour some stuff into the top and wait for it to come out of the bottom, and then that’s the end. All movement
stops until you pour more stuff into the top.

Furthermore, as you pour things into a funnel, the stuff at the bottom doesn’t have much of an impact on the stuff
at the top. As long as the stuff lower down continues to flow and get out of the way, the stuff going into the top of
the funnel won’t even notice it’s there.

But in business, the people coming out of the bottom of your company funnel can have a huge impact on the
people going into the top of it. If your customers love your company and love your product, they’ll tell their
friends to come buy from you as well--which means the bottom of the funnel can feed the top of the funnel. In the
physical world, that’s impossible--it’s hard to imagine how that could ever happen--but in the business world,
that’s just good business. In fact, many businesses cite word-of-mouth as their largest source of referrals.
Additionally, if the people who buy from you have a bad experience, if they’re unhappy with the way you treated
them, they’ll tell their friends about that, too. Which means that the people coming out the bottom of the funnel
can prevent other people from entering the top of the funnel. Again, thinking of real funnels in the physical
world, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the stuff that’s already exited the bottom of the funnel could
somehow go back up to the top and prevent other stuff from coming in. But this is an important fact about
human nature that every business leader needs to understand. The attitude of people when they come out the
bottom of your funnel directly impacts the number of people who are willing to enter the top of your funnel.

With all that as context, it’s safe to say the funnel isn’t the best model for your company. In the world of inbound,
we use a different model: the flywheel.

A flywheel is a machine that stores rotational energy. When you add force to a flywheel, it starts to spin. If you
add more force to it, it spins faster. And unlike a funnel, where the only way to maintain a constant speed is to
keep adding stuff to it, a flywheel will keep spinning unless there’s enough friction to slow it down. From a
business perspective, the rotation of the flywheel represents the growth of your company. Happy customers
provide the force that drives that growth, either because they buy from you again or because they bring new
customers to you by promoting your product to other people in their network. But if you produce unhappy
customers, either by selling to people who are a bad fit for your offering or by overpromising and under-
 Transcript: Identify Friction

delivering, they’ll add friction to your flywheel and slow your company’s growth. So if you want to increase your
company’s growth, increase the force in your flywheel and reduce the friction.

Okay, so what do “force” and “friction” even mean in this context?

For your sales organization, force is anything that drives sales: an epic sales team, a great product, and happy
customers who refer their friends.

Friction is anything with the power to slow down sales: a clunky process, a sub-par product, and poor customer
experiences that get shared and scare other prospects away.

For most sales teams, adding force is no problem. Salespeople are trained to push through any slog, push deals
forward, and get things done. They do whatever it takes to make quota and hit revenue targets. That comes
naturally. It’s part of the job.

As a sales leader, you could try to add force to your flywheel by increasing your goals, hiring a bigger team,
investing in marketing to bring in more leads, or telling your reps to send more emails and make more calls. But
chances are you’re pretty much already maxed out in all these tactics. When it comes to applying force, it’s
probably safe to assume you’re currently doing everything you can.

What will be more helpful for you is if you start looking for places to remove friction. Make the output of all that
work your team is doing more fruitful. Make your reps’ jobs easier by removing the hurdles and challenges that
are preventing them from selling at the highest capacity possible.

This is the secret to achieving success. We call it frictionless selling.

Frictionless selling is a way of rethinking sales to make it more convenient—for both the buyer and the seller. The
history of sales has always been driven by convenience. Consumers are constantly evolving to favor the most
convenient experience. And this is a story that has played out time and time again.

Think of the music industry. We went from buying full albums at brick-and-mortar record stores to downloading
individual tracks online to now instantly streaming any song on demand. The same thing happened with the
movie rental industry. The hunger for convenience is changing every consumer industry. Whether it’s through
smart home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home that enable people to buy products just by saying they
want to, or through subscription boxes for everything from business attire to arts-and-crafts activities for children,
modern consumers are constantly on the lookout for easier, faster, smoother ways to buy the products they care
about.

Unfortunately, many sales teams haven’t really gotten the memo—especially those of us who are in business to
business sales. Businesses that sell directly to consumers have done a much better job embracing the age of
convenience and effectively removing friction from the buying process. But for B2B companies—and that includes
us here at HubSpot—it seems a lot more complicated. We have complex products and sophisticated pricing. We
need our sales teams to play a critical role in the buying process.

But this added complexity makes it even more important that B2B companies find ways to remove friction from
the sales process. The amount of patience people have for jumping through hoops and sifting through
information is only going to decrease.
 Transcript: Identify Friction

So it’s time to do things differently. It’s time to rethink sales. With frictionless selling, your sales teams can better
address the needs of the modern buyer, spin your flywheel faster, and ultimately help your company grow
bigger, faster, and better.

Video 2: Implementing the Frictionless Selling Framework

Let’s take a look at the frictionless selling framework. If you’ve been in sales for a while, you probably already
have more frameworks than you know what to do with, but most sales frameworks focus on applying force.
Frictionless selling focuses on removing friction, so it will complement any framework you’re already using. The
path to frictionless selling has three main phases: enable, align, and transform.

First, enable. In many sales teams, reps are lacking the organization and infrastructure they need to know where
to focus. And as a result, nothing gets the attention it needs. It’s always too little, too much, or too late.

A weak or inefficient sales process can drive reps to rely on blind outreach tactics, such as lead scraping, cold
calling, and blasting leads. They work in silos without any help or direction from their leaders or teammates.
They’ve got 10 tools and 50 browser tabs always open, and they’re wasting their time inputting data into
different systems. They struggle to prioritize their day, and their focus is almost always on getting more leads
instead of getting better leads.

This reactive approach to sales leaves reps feeling like they’re always one step behind. Administrative tasks take
away from the money hours and prevent them from selling to their full potential.

You need to empower your reps with the information that will make them relevant to their buyers. Encourage
them to work collaboratively as a team, sharing best practices and learning from each other. Make sure they have
a centralized system of record and automated data entry. Put systems and mechanics in place that tell reps what
to do next so that they don’t need to worry about prioritization. Then they’ll be able to focus on the best leads
instead of working through long lists of uninterested prospects.

This might sound like a lofty goal, but you can get there in just a few steps.

First, you need to scrutinize your sales process and tools. Make a list of all the tools your reps are using. Are there
any redundancies? Are there integrations you could be using to make the flow of information more streamlined?
These are the types of things you really want to pay close attention to.

Next, take a look at your sales team’s day. Where are they spending the most time? What are the most painful
parts of the process? Are they inputting the same data in multiple places? How can you eliminate some of those
steps and give them back that time in their day?

Now, ask yourself: What can I automate?

As you set off on this mission to cut the fat out of the system, these are the key metrics you want to look at:
Figure out how long it takes reps to complete key tasks.
See how much time your sales reps are actually spending connecting with customers and working a sale.
As you work to cut out inefficiencies, I promise that you’ll see your reps outperform.
 Transcript: Identify Friction

Okay, so that’s it for the enable phase. In the align phase, you’ll take a hard look at how well your sales process is
aligned with your target buyer.

Here are some symptoms of a sales process that isn’t aligned to buyer needs:

Prospects can’t get access to reps outside of working hours, and setting up a meeting during business hours
requires a ton of back-and-forth emails to find a time that works. And then in that meeting, they might face
hostile negotiations because they’re forced to commit on the sales team’s terms rather than their own. These
problems come from a sales team following a rigid, one-size-fits-all sales process and providing minimal
personalized treatment to their leads.

Compare that to a frictionless sales process, where reps are ruthlessly aligned to the wants and needs of each
buyer. They give their leads 24/7 access to help via live chat and other on-demand solutions. They have a
streamlined, simple experience for booking meetings without the back and forth. They offer transparent pricing
and discounting so that there’s no need for negotiation. And they only sell to the buyer when they’re ready and
give them the flexibility they need to have confidence in their buying decisions. To provide this kind of sales
experience, a sales team must recognize that buyers want to be in the driver’s seat.

Granted, this is an ideal that perhaps no company will ever fully reach. But by chasing this ideal, your company
will be able to constantly improve. And that’s required if you want to keep up with ever-changing buyer
expectations. Anytime you think you’ve nailed down your sales process, something out in the world will change
and mess it up. The important thing is to take ownership over the customer experience, make it a priority, and
constantly course correct.

When measuring alignment, you’ll want to zero in on close rates and time to close, and you’ll also need to find a
way to measure customer satisfaction.

Finally, the transform phase. This is all about transforming your sales team by inspiring your reps to learn, grow,
and constantly improve.

Without this culture of learning, your reps will sometimes hit quota and sometimes miss quota, and you won’t
know why. You’ll be relying on spreadsheets for your data, with managers acting as interpreters and maybe
trying to make it look better than it is. And who can blame them, since reporting is their primary responsibility?
New or struggling reps will have no one there to help them. And worst of all, your team will only be invested in a
prospect’s success until the sales closes, and then they’ll forget all about them.

But when you adopt a culture of learning and focus on data to constantly iterate and improve your sales process,
you’ll see consistent quota attainment across your team. Your managers will have real-time data on how their
team is performing, and they’ll use that as a key part of what they consider to be the most important part of their
job: coaching. As part of that effort, they’ll develop playbooks and resources to onboard and support their reps.
And best of all, your team will be deeply invested in the long-term success of your customers.

So how can you create this culture of learning?

 Transcript: Identify Friction

First, you’ve got to find an easy way for your sales team to see and access the data. You need to make it as easy
as possible for managers and reps to have insight into performance without having to sift through a dozen
different Excel spreadsheets.

Next, develop an army of experts. Make sure you’re training your team with everything they need to get started
as a new rep and to stay up to date with changes in your sales process or your products or services.

And finally, work to embed coaching into your operating system. Make it easy for reps to learn from each other,
to check information, and to access competitive battlecards, best practices, strategy resources, and anything else
they need to do their job better.

And as you work to create this culture of learning, pay close attention to customer retention. Are customers
sticking around? Does the product or service they’ve purchased meet their expectations? You’ll also want to look
at rep productivity and employee happiness. Are your reps happy at work? Creating a culture of learning can
help reps feel more confident and satisfied with their job.

The three phases of frictionless selling—enable, align, and transform— are a progression your team will need to
work through. You can’t expect to successfully transform your sales team through a culture of learning if they
aren’t aligned with their buyers. And it’ll be really hard for them to align with their buyers if they’re constantly
distracted and disorganized. So start by enabling your reps, then move on to aligning with your buyers, and then
you’ll be ready to transform your team.

Video 3: How BabelQuest Fights Friction

For each of us, selling framework really appealed to us as an organization. It helps you remove all that friction
from the process and basically just improve those close rates so that you've got a sales team that are as active as
possible, lots and lots of activity, focused on the right person at the right time and the right message,
consistently. Being able to follow up their calls, being able to follow up their meetings and just being able to
consistently get better and better.

A lot of key steps in the analysis were things we're doing but not in any cohesive way. We were starting to see
some successes but being able to put together as a framework and actually work through steps allowed us to get
much, much better results from using what Friction is selling.

So they enabled phase of Friction selling framework but the key questions we're asking are, what can we
automate? What can we get rid of, and what's missing from the process? We're constantly looking at new tools,
new ways that we could enable the team to connect to people faster and better to actually meet the buyer where
they live but one of the things to be really careful of is that there's 10,000 pieces, sales and marketing tech out
there and it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole so we made a real focus on concentrating on one piece of tech
at a time and evaluating, working out the impact and then they're either bringing it in or deciding it wasn't the
right piece of tech for us. The main thing is that you're freeing up a sales team for customer facing activities, for
actual conversations.

The align phase for us was all about not only aligning ourselves internally, sales marketing service but also
actually aligning what we did with the buyer so going back to understanding the journey our best customers
 Transcript: Identify Friction

went through and what was important there has helped us to make sure that we've got alignment all the way
through the organization and into the buyers' organizations. If you want to completely remove friction from the
whole process, you need to understand what it looks like from the other standpoint so talking to the customers,
asking the questions. How did you feel about the sales process? What bits made it take longer? What bits did
you like? How did it help you to sell internally? Really, really important.

We also like to look at how our customers like to communicate because as a customer, you don't necessarily
want an email or a video call or a video message. You might want a text. You might wanna receive your
information in different ways so actually understanding how the buyer wants to communicate with you is really,
really important.

Finally, understanding that your buyer is not necessarily working the same hours as you, for example, a chief
executive at a large organization is likely to be doing other things throughout the day and if you're constantly
trying to get a meeting with them at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday, you're never gonna get that meeting but if you
show that you're prepared to meet that person out of hours, schedule a video call for seven o'clock at night,
seven o'clock in the morning, we found that they began to offer these sort of options meant that the buyer found
the experience much less jarring because it wasn't interrupting their daily work.

For us, the transform phase was where we took all the learning and all the data and the detail and everything that
we'd done and actually started to pull everything together. The key points here are turning your sales reps into
experts, growing product experience, knowledge, constant learning as well as embedding coaching in your
organization.

And it doesn't end there. You finish the transform phase and you go straight back to analysis. You know, we
made these changes, what is the effect? What's the impact on the bottom line? Where else can you remove
friction from the process and how are our team getting along? Are our team happier? Are they closing more?
Are they making more money? Are our customers happier? Are they getting what they want? Are they buying
faster? Are they finding it easier to buy from us?