Process vs. Creativity in Sales: Where is the Balance?

I reached out to Ryan Reisert — Co-Author of Outbound Sales no Fluff and CEO of the Sales Developers —for his insights on this topic.

Adhering to a formalized process is essential to sales success and company growth. Creativity, on the other hand, is necessary to avoid boilerplate sales pitches and cater to each customer’s unique needs. Despite sales being both a science and a craft, today’s business people seem to predominantly emphasize the scientific aspect of the work.

But where does the line fall between process and creativity?

I sat down with Ryan Reisert — Co-Author of Outbound Sales no Fluff and CEO of the Sales Developers — to examine this question. Over the past 10+ years, Ryan has successfully navigated the sales and digital marketing world. His experience in the startup industry led him to found his own company, a management consulting firm that helps B2B organizations scale their business. The Sales Developers have become predominant players in their field, in part due to their company-wide priorities of process, continuous improvement, and customer commitment. In this interview, Ryan shares why process, rather than creativity, is among these priorities.

Sage: Can you tell me a bit about your background and how you came to your present position as Co-founder and CEO of The Sales Developers?

I spent the last 11 years in high growth software or services businesses in and around the Bay Area. I started as a lead generation specialist, now called a sales development rep, back in 2008, I worked my way up to sales leadership in my first company. I started my first company as an entrepreneur in 2010. I was a co-founder of a sales recruiting company called the Lions. And then, I got employed back to my first company to become the U.S. managing director and then had a couple of stints as the VP of sales at a couple of venture-backed companies that have all been acquired. One was Inc 5,000, one was acquired by a unicorn. So, I’ve kinda gotten to experience all the fun things you get to experience in the tech craziness.

Along the way, as a sales leader especially, what I’ve really figured out, is it’s all about the process first. Once you find the process, you want to enable that with technologies that can eliminate all the manual tedium of the process and focus time, energy, and effort on things that can’t be automated. And that’s where the people come in.

After being head of sales for all these companies, I started my second company, which was Inside Sales Bootcamp. At Inside Sales Bootcamp, I was trying to teach all the things I learned to people coming out of school or people trying to make a transition in their career so they could go land jobs at tech companies. I built and sold that company in 2015, did some consulting for them, some consulting for some other companies, that’s where the management consulting comes in, and I wrote a book called Outbound Sales No Fluff.

And that book with my coauthor Rex (Biberson), took off and that is what started the Sales Developers. It’s really the accumulation of work that I’ve done over the last decade mixed with Rex’s experience as well, kind of built into this process that’s hyper-focused on the top of the funnel. How to take a company that nobody knows and go to the market and start earning conversations with folks as early as possible so you can start scaling your business, without having to scale headcount. That’s that process.

Sage: So essentially you weren’t seeing an adherence to process in businesses and so you guys are coming in to help implement and scale that?

Exactly. Organizations I’ve been a part of as well, you come in and the first thing is, “What’s the process?” So many companies don’t have a process and if they do, it’s not well documented, it’s not very clear, it’s kind of tribal knowledge. It’s salesforce. So they’re like, “the process is updated stages in Salesforce.” Which I guess you can call that process, but there’s not really a system in place where if you eliminate the person that is successful tomorrow, if you had to replace them, most companies will fail because it’s that person that’s really carrying the burden. Whereas really successful companies, that’s not the case. It’s not the person that is really driving the business forward; it’s the process.

Sage: I’ve seen articles that claim structured sales processes are the key to high performance in sales and other articles that say creativity is what drives sales success. For you, where is the line between process and creativity?

I’d be curious to understand what they mean by creativity because I’m very pro process. I would say there’s a place for creativity of course, in terms of how you engage with a deal, how you creatively come up with ways to help a prospect solve a problem, that may not be a script, or written down in your playbook. You have to think creatively around who the customer is, what you do, and how to position things. There’s definitely value in that creativity, you have to have that. But, if you’re saying you can be creative in how you find an account, and how you go about engaging them to earn a conversation. And it doesn’t really matter if they’re doing activities as long as they’re getting enough people in the door, that to me is not scalable.

So I guess to answer that question, if you’re serious about growth, if you’re trying to be a business that is going to be more than a lifestyle business, then you have to have a strict structured process to scale and find long term repeatable success. If you just want to build a small, nice, lifestyle business, you can have people that creatively get you business in the door when it happens from time to time. But, you’re not going to grow a serious business relying on how the rep feels and how creative they are.

Sage: How do you ensure that you and your team avoid relying on boilerplate sales pitches, while still adhering to process?

I think that’s where the argument comes in a lot. So many people always go to one side or the other. So, when you think about the sales playbook or the sales script. Script is a bad word for people because they think that when you use sales scripts you’re forcing your people to follow it word by word and they’ll say, “well what if someone says something that’s not on the script?” It’s like well, they should know how to answer that. The script is a framework that you’re following to ensure you’re adhering to the process. I’m at this stage, what’s the information I need to gather? What’s the information I need to present? What are the next steps? How do we move forward? What are the blockers? And in that case, if you take sales, sales is a process. It’s all about moving the ball down the field from “you don’t know me” to “hopefully you’re referring me business and we work together for a long time.”

So how do you think about it? You should enable the crap out of your process with all of the playbooks, messaging, and frameworks that help individuals work through scenarios and situations. A very well oiled sales machine is going to be probably 80 to 90 percent of the way there so that any conversation there is something there to offer rebuttal if you’re not quite there. You don’t know what to say and so, there’s an example. There should be a knowledge base I can go to and get an answer and get back to you. So I don’t have to go and continuously say “hey, what do I say here? I don’t know, I don’t have an answer.” But, there is always going to be that 10 to 20 percent where the creativity comes in. Like in this scenario I don’t have a script, I don’t have a play; this is new to us! How do I relate what we’ve done in the past, creatively, to their scenario? And that’s where, using the framework, enables creativity, with the right people.

But, if you don’t have that stuff in place, you’re disabling, even the creative individuals because I would move between Game Changers by Dave Asprey and What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data by Malcom Frank. The idea is that AI isn’t going to take everybody’s job, it’s only gonna make what we do better. It’s really fascinating because if you think about the idea behind how work is done today like what we see as work is just going to be very different. So getting ahead of how machines, and machine learning and AI work is actually going to be very advantages. Dave Asprey is a biohacker, so that book is interesting because he goes through all these different things around hacking. It’s hacking the biology of who we are as humans and extending those limits without that structure, you don’t know where to spend your time, what’s the most important thing I could be doing right now to drive the deal forward. All of those things fall to the wayside.

Sage: What types of clients come to you?

If you are a B-to-B organization actively investing in growth, we have a solution for you. The majority of our customers, because of how we started our business, are going to be organizations that don’t have a lot of structure in place. Usually, that early-stage founders funded SAAS company that’s trying to build their first sales organization. But we also work with much larger later-stage organizations, you know $100MM software company that is looking to supplement an in-house team to drive some new products into new markets. They’re relying on us to pave the path for new opportunities in a specific segment of the market that they haven’t tapped into yet.

Sage: What is the one thing that you know better than anyone else as it relates to sales development?

I don’t know if I know it better than anyone else, but I’ve probably at this stage made more cold calls than most. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now and most people in my role as you get up into the VP level, you don’t jump into the trenches and make cold calls. But, I’ve always committed time to be in the trenches with my team and build pipeline alongside my team to provide coaching and development and show “hey, even I am not perfect.” I’ve literally made probably a few 100,000 dials a year for the last several years. So cold calling is something that I know quite well. And if you ask me if I’m the best at that, probably not, but I’ve probably done it more than most.

Sage: What was the most interesting book you read in the last year?

I would move between Game Changers by Dave Asprey and What to Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data by Malcom Frank. The idea behind Frank’s book is that AI isn’t going to take everyone’s job, it’s only going to make what we do better. It’s really fascinating because if you think about how work is done today, what we see as work is going to be very different in the near future. So getting ahead of how machines and machine learning and AI work, is actually going to be very advantageous. There is going to be new careers and opportunities that we’ve never even thought of ahead of us. And for those entrepreneurial enough to get ahead of how to create the models around how data works, you have a huge opportunity to create tremendous wealth.