SalesNexus founder and CEO, Craig Klein, sits down with Glen Poulos on Profit Powerhouse Podcast to talk about the most effective CRM solution for sales teams. 

I’m an electrical engineer by background, but I only spent about a year after college working at NASA and that was cool that with those back when they were shooting the shuttles up in the air about every six months, you know, and that was fun. But in between missions, it was just too boring for me.

So I was only there for about a year and got into sales after that. And the rest is history. I evolved and eventually was working for an energy service company selling to big oil companies like Exxon and Shell and Chevron and so on. I was managing this pipeline of deals that are multi million dollars and they sometimes take a year and a half to get the deal done. And there’s just no way to be effective in that kind of sales cycle without having some kind of organization and planning and so on. It means at the end of the day, I needed to be able to go into my management. And tell them, hey, be patient, the big deal’s coming and here’s why, right? Yeah, it’s coming.

Ihis is a long time ago. And back then there wasn’t a lot of options like there are now. The leading, the market leader was ACT which guys with gray hair like you and I will remember, but most of the young guys will not.

But it was great. People loved it because it was really built to work the way salespeople work. I loved it. But we grew and, and we merged with another company and we inherited the sales people that were working from home and trying to manage a database back in the old client server database world across the internet was really challenging and just kind of became a distraction, you know, so we, and this was right when Salesforce had come out.

So we transitioned from ACT! to Salesforce, and it was great to be in the cloud. There was a lot to be said for that. But we missed the ease of use for a salesperson that ACT! really was so great at. Eventually that company that I worked for was acquired and, and so I had a little windfall as a small shareholder in the company and that’s when I decided to start Sales Nexus.

With Salesforce and everybody else, if you ask salespeople… What do you like about it? And what don’t you like about it? All the different systems have their strengths, so that they’ll like different things. But almost always, they will tell you they’re frustrated with one of two different things.

Either it’s just too difficult to use, too slow to use, and that goes back to…salespeople kind of just find it cumbersome, and they can’t get in the groove when they’re smiling and dialing and making their calls. So they’re not getting the input into the system.

That’s one big challenge that most systems have. And then the other one is, it can be super expensive. If you’re going to really use a platform like Salesforce or HubSpot or any of those kind of all, it’ll do everything, Slice your bread and make your coffee in the morning and everything else.

You’re going to need somebody on your team that’s going to pretty much spend 50 percent to 100 percent of their time Internally just babysitting all the different pieces and getting them up and making them talk to each other and all of that. Yeah, and you know in a in a small business or even a medium sized business You’re lucky especially a sales driven business.

You might be lucky if you have a full time marketing person, right? Well, you don’t want to take that person’s time and dedicate it all to just playing with the software. You need them actually creating and executing campaigns. So that’s what SalesNexus does, is we provide a simple, all in one solution that doesn’t Need that much babysitting and attention because the sales people kind of drive it themselves.

The book is inside out selling. And what the idea was is, you know, as a sales manager, I was lucky enough to get involved in the Sandler selling system training early in my management career. I really learned a lot about consultive selling. When starting SalesNexus, I realized that you could combine the consultive approach to selling and a CRM to really take things to a new level.

In other words I need as a consultive salesperson, I got to ask you a lot of questions and learn what your unique needs are. And then present my solution in light of those needs. Well, if I’m really going to do that well, your need, you may be in the same business as the next guy down the road, but your needs and the way you think about them and articulate them are going to be different than that next customer.

I need to know and remember those little differences. In fact, that’s the name of the game in terms of making the sale. And so what Inside Out Selling is about. Is learning to practice the consultive selling and also have a system in place to really organize yourself and make sure that you’re going to be effective and on message and on point for every customer every time without spending 30 minutes researching the customer before you pick up the phone.