Rethink Sales Podcast: Return on Sales Investment – Part 2

Join Mark, Michelle, and some special SalesGlobe guests (Roberto Mallmann and Zach Rosenblum) this week as the group sits down to have a conversation about ROSI (Return on Sales Investment) and how to achieve growth as it relates to the sales organization.

Mark Donnolo
Welcome to The Rethink Sales Podcast, I’m Mark Donnolo.

Michelle Seger
And I’m Michelle Seger.

Mark Donnolo
And Michelle, today we’re going to be talking about a really cool topic, one of my favorites, which is ROSI Return On Sales Investment. And we’re going to be getting into the details of what drives ROSI and the components.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, I’m very excited about our podcast today. And Mark, we’re going to have two very special guests joining us today.

Mark Donnolo
That’s right, Roberto Mallmann and Zach Rosenblum on our team. And we’re getting into how tos in the details to really make ROSI work.

Michelle Seger
Okay. So today we’re going to conduct a deep dove on return on sales investment or as we call it at SalesGlobe ROSI. We’re going to be talking about what it means to your business, what it is, what it means to your business, and why it’s so important right.

Mark Donnolo
And it starts, Michelle, with a baseline understanding of where you are and then getting into, well, why am I here and what’s behind it? And how do we how do we move ahead and improve our ROSI?

Michelle Seger
That’s right. So before we dove into return on sales investment, I would like to introduce our guest today. So I’m very privileged and really excited that we have actually two of our own consultants here. And to my right, we have Zach Rosenblum, who is the our business operations and market intelligence team leader here at SalesGlobe, though that is a mouthful.

Michelle Seger
Who came up with that title anyway. And he’s also a part time actor. So, Zach, welcome. And to his right, we have Roberto Mallmann, one of our directors of consulting services who is a go to market expert. So thank you so much for being here.

Michelle Seger
And then to my far right or I guess my left, of course, you’ve got Martin also and me here. So we’re going to have a great, lively conversation today around return on sales investment. So, Mark, the first thing that we thought we would do would be just really level set a little bit around. You know, you mentioned of where you are today and that would be, you know, looking at our revenue and cost and then getting into why we’re there and how we’ll drive.

Michelle Seger
ROSI. So you you developed with our team a great graphic that really describes that. And I’d like you to kind of take everyone through that, if you would.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. So so I think the thing to understand about return sales investment or ROSI’s as we are calling it is that it’s not just about the calculation itself. So if you look at it at its first level, its return or your sales divided by your investment or your cost, right. And you could take it at that at face value. And I think that’s where a lot of a lot of people a lot of companies do that.

Mark Donnolo
They just look at that number or they look at the inverse of that number, which is your cost of sales. So, you know, your cost divided by sales and you go, okay, that’s it. How do you know? What does that mean? How do we compare with everybody else? But I think the key on this, it’s kind of like it’s kind of like getting your cholesterol reading, right?

Mark Donnolo
You got your HGL and your LDL, right? So you got your good cholesterol and you got your bad cholesterol. And the doctor tells you, first thing you do is you you get all mad, and the next thing you do is you go into denial and then you go and then you go, okay, well, what do I do about that, where you got your HDL on the top, which is the good cholesterol?

Mark Donnolo
That’s that’s your that’s your revenue, right? That’s your return. That’s what you’re getting. And then you get your bad cholesterol in the bottom, which is your cost. Right? We don’t want as much of that. Right. So it’s kind of like that. It’s like, okay, doctor, here’s where I am now. What does it mean? What does that mean for the kind of industry I’m in, the kind of business I’m in?

Mark Donnolo
And then what is what do we do about it? So when you start to dig down to the next level of it, that’s where you get into the drivers question. So what are your revenue drivers or your drivers of return and what are your cost drivers? And that explains why you’re there and then you can get down finally to the next level, which we’ll dig into, which is, well, what are the components of that?

Mark Donnolo
So what are the components of those revenue drivers around the markets were lining up to and in our our capacity, etc.? What are the cost cost drivers in terms of our our sales costs and our headcount and other things are technology sales enablement that are they’re feeding into that. And my understanding that that’s kind of like going to the gym, right?

Mark Donnolo
So we figured out our cholesterol and I’m going to go to the gym. I’m not going to have those egg shakes every every morning anymore. But give me the give me the shakes. But but I’m going to do something about that. And and rather than just cutting cost rather than just trying to lose weight, we’re going to build muscle.

Mark Donnolo
And that’s the idea. We see too many companies right now just cutting cost. And so now let’s figure out how to go to the gym and how to fix it, how to get strong.

Michelle Seger
Gosh. Okay. I really I love that analogy. And what we have found is that there’s just a pattern every single time that, you know, times are tough. What we find is that companies are really facing they’re looking at just cutting costs. Right. Right. So they’re focused on that one thing. Or you’re saying the LDL they’re focusing on like, what do I do about that?

Michelle Seger
But they’re not really looking at the HGL, which helps you really far surpass anything that lowering that LDL can do. Right. So I actually love that. That’s a really good thing. So I was thinking about a couple of examples. And the first one I thought about it because I was thinking about some clients who we work with and I was when we’re talking about that HGL or those revenue drivers, if we think about, you know, we’re in a market today and a lot of our clients are saying we’ve got weakened demand, you know, like there’s just not the demand for our products.

Michelle Seger
So rather than just looking at which is the immediate, how do we cut costs? And I was just talking to one of our global partners on this morning, and they said that they’re looking at massive layoffs right now in addition to no travel at all. And if there is any direct cause client facing travel that’s going to be required, it’s going to require like a very high level of approval.

Michelle Seger
So they’re focused on that LDL. But let’s say they they were focusing in this. What we were discussing was their margin, right. So how do we improve margin? So if you have lower demand, they’re not going to do anything to increase the demand for their product. So if you’ve got weakened demand and instead of just cutting costs, you’re focusing on bringing up your margin, or does that help level the playing field and make you healthier all around?

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. You know, another client I was talking to this morning kind of said a similar thing, Michelle. He said, you know, and this is an old adage, you can’t you can’t, you know, cut your costs to to prosperity. I’m paraphrasing. So you can’t cut costs you on your way to prosperity. I mean, you’ve got to do something to grow that top line.

Mark Donnolo
You’ve got to grow your product and productivity.

Michelle Seger
I think we’re going to hear some of that from Roberto in a few minutes as well. So Mark, I just wanted to take a minute and recap our last podcast. So it was a pretty fast introduction and what I really wanted to do today was get into the revenue drivers, the costs, how companies can look at this for their own business to really drive growth in times like we’re facing today and why it’s really important.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. So let’s take a look and just recap on those big pieces of the ROSI equation like so. So what we said basically is that ROSI equals your return on sales investment return, meaning your revenue. Or you could even look at it as other indicators of growth divided by whatever you’re putting into that to get that your investment.

Mark Donnolo
When we break it down on those components, Michelle, we’re looking at five big pieces on the numerator and five big pieces on the denominator. Now, these are not, you know, messy, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, meaning that there are other ways to combine these and other other components you can certainly add on. But these are indicating some of the major ones.

Michelle Seger
That’s great. So now let’s take a look at the big picture of why looking at return on sales investment is so important. And then we’ll get into some of the revenue drivers and levers that you can pull. We’ll talk about the costs and and then finally, we’ll even get into how you can measure your own baseline. So Roberto, let’s get your perspective a little bit on what return on sales investment really means and some of the experiences that you have had in working with companies on growth in times of weakening demand.

J. Roberto Mallmann
And I think that’s a it’s a perfect time to talk about ROSI, especially because we are in this time of crisis and inflation coming up in the environment that I came from, that I grew up, inflation means opportunity. That’s a time that in the market you have a smoke screen. Everybody’s talking about price increases and you can make real big adjustments in your organization, but it kind of can take true approach.

J. Roberto Mallmann
You can hide inside your shell, cut some costs in, wait for the storm to go over or you can plan for it, make adjustments, investing in markets or segments that it’s more profitable, more strategic for you cut the costs that are bad costs and be ready because the storm is going to pass. And when it’s best, instead of being a B player now because you’ve made these adjustments, you can be A player.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So it’s a great time to make decisions about this and think about how do you want to position for the future.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, and it’s a great point. I mean, that, that is the immediate reaction to hunker down and wait till the storm is over. And I forget who said it’s some nefarious person but never let and never let a crisis go to waste. Right. So there’s opportunity in this time. And I think, you know, but to that point, I think that’s probably why we’re seeing so many layoffs with companies as well.

Mark Donnolo
It’s like, okay, there’s a storm, there’s cover for us to do that kind of stuff, but there’s also cover for us to make other adjustments.

J. Roberto Mallmann
It’s not for if you think about the stock markets, the record profits that the organizations are taking, a big part of it is driven by the factor of price that companies are taking. That’s very obvious.

Zach Rosenblum
I think, to piggyback off that in these times of uncertainty and downward economic trends, you know, a lot of companies look at the most typical cookie cutter approaches and just slashing costs or pinpointing, you know, one or two things. And I think the beautiful thing about ROSI is that it goes quite a bit deeper than just revenue and driver.

Zach Rosenblum
And it it really is a look under the hood, as you’ve mentioned before, of all the different levers that they can pull and how each of these variables and factors affect one another. And also obviously at the top line number there. So the companies that that do elect to go, the more courageous, brave route and and try to take a more competitive approach to really understanding their business and envision and how can they come up on top of this time?

Zach Rosenblum
Those are the ones that are that are going to, you know, do well and bode well in the future. So there’s there’s opportunity here outside of the standard approach here. And it’s really, you know, necessitates a deeper look under the hood and we’ll speak a little bit to some of our, you know, projects and experiences kind of in that realm in a little bit.

Michelle Seger
So, Zach, you did some research that I thought was really interesting from DraftKings. And tell us share a little bit of what the CEO’s position is in these tumultuous times. I was impressed with with what he had to say.

Zach Rosenblum
Right, right. So I came across I was reviewing some of DraftKings annual reports and their the report reporting based on the end of the year, looking back on 2022 and you get a lot of good information outside of companies filings that they’re required to do with the SCC. So of course, there’s your 10-K, your proxy, your investor presentations, press releases, all that.

Zach Rosenblum
But I came across the CEO share letter and typically when I view one of these share letters, they’re once again kind of cookie cutter and have a, you know, some sort of typical standard language in it that’s, you know, recapping the year end and, you know, positive look on the the future here. But the CEO of DraftKings put in a little opinion piece within it that I thought was interesting.

Zach Rosenblum
And he mentioned, as we kind of just discussed, the, you know, turbulent times that we’re in, especially compared to maybe the prior decade or so of of, you know, a bull market versus the bear market, some may say we’re in right now. And he mentioned, you know, that there are different types of companies currently right now. And and kind of describing where he believes the top companies that will emerge great versus the ones that will fall or stay where they are.

Zach Rosenblum
And one of the key differences he describes in comparing kind of two types of companies, he mentioned that, you know, a lot of companies realize that they have to cut costs, realize that they have to be profitable all in order to, you know, keep their their capital state and the ones that that are going to come out at the end, which he believes DraftKings is, is one of these are not the ones that are going to take cost cut in and use a hatchet approach of just slack and and slash in some some big, you know, typical areas of cost.

Zach Rosenblum
But the ones that are going to use a scalpel he mentioned and be very methodical in terms of how they cut costs to stay competitive. And I think that aligns very well with ROSI and really kind of doing the deep dove under the hood to understand all these different drivers and costs that go into it and which areas you could pull, levers you could change, you can adjust how they impact each other and ultimately how they the impacts, you know, the bottom line at the end of the day.

Zach Rosenblum
So I found that to be very interesting and we’ll see if they do come out on top in the future here.

Michelle Seger
So I think that we are building the case for why return on sales investment is a more holistic and a better way to look at your business when times are tough, right? So instead of just looking at cost, really look at the revenue drivers. And I think it would be great for us to just take those revenue drivers one at a time.

Michelle Seger
And I’d like to kind of round robin it with us here and talk about what each one of those mean for you and in your own experience, what is it that companies can look for? And one of the things that we know is not every company will do all of them. Some will be more relevant to one company than another.

Michelle Seger
It just really depends on your industry, the factors that are impacting your business, your maturity level, whatever that might be. We know that. So let’s talk about market, which we would classify or we call market and offer alignment. And Mark, I’ll just start with you and ask you to kind of define what that means to you market and offer alignment.

Mark Donnolo
So you’ve got a few pieces in there, you’ve got the market itself and you can say, well, our market is of a certain size, large, small, what is the addressable part of that market and then what are the segments? And then how do we look at that market? Right? So you’ve got your market, you’re playing field and then you’ve got the alignment of the organization to the market and also to the offers that we’re going to bring to market.

Mark Donnolo
So where you may look at the market and say, well, there’s plenty of opportunity here, you have to the action step is to get into what’s addressable and how are the decisions, how do the decisions we make drive our ability to get more of that? Mark And a lot of that is around how we’re lining up to it, what offers are bringing to market, how we’re looking at the market in terms of current customer retention penetration, new customer acquisition.

Mark Donnolo
So a lot of moving parts there. But you could think of this as the big piece of how does our organization, how does our coverage model match up to the market? And so as we’re coming, you know, post-COVID now and then we’re going into this whole new environment. We’ve had so many changes in that alignment situation coming out of COVID in terms of hybrid roles, use of different types of channels, omni channel.

Mark Donnolo
So things have been evolving there and now it’s, you know, I think pushing further to get even more efficient in terms of how we’re doing that and putting it together.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Yeah. And you know, as you’re saying these and explain these in in a higher level, what comes to my mind is an example. So I had a customer like 18 months ago and we, what we decided was should do an approach like a CPG approach on these brick and mortar and these was like a the PITA model. So we try to understand what is the population.

Michelle Seger
Yes, pita like bread.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Like the bread. Yes.

Michelle Seger
Okay

J. Roberto Mallmann
Stands for population incidence transactions in amount. So that was like a market. Let’s think of our supermarkets. I cannot give away the name of the customer and we understood what is the population that he was trying to address and there was 10,000 residents around him. We also understood the incidents that we had. So let’s say that they had 10% of incidents of that residents.

Michelle Seger
A residents would be visits to the what would that be? Visits.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Families were using them. Yeah. And then we also understood the amount of transactions, how often they would be going to that store. So let’s say twice a month. Right. So now you have 10,000 of stores of residents, 10% of them are customers. So you are talking about 1000 and they’re coming twice a month. So it’s 20,000 and they were spending around, let’s say, $20.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So that become a $400,000 as revenue. And they had an issue. They want to grow that business. And as we start to understand the pros and cons of each one of these elements that drive the revenue off that specific location, we try to map this. So we put cameras in the parking lot to understand where it’s coming from consumers.

J. Roberto Mallmann
And we understood that in certain neighborhoods they had a penetration of 30%, 40%, but other neighborhoods, they had a penetration of less than 5%. So that statute designed to us some strategies on how do I communicate? Also the tickets, the average tickets, that’s the transaction, the amount, right? They want to grow that. So we designed combinations, the canvas for that specific location.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So come together also part of the marketing piece. So if you think about this association, how to multiply the numbers, understanding the segments that build your revenue, right, that help you to understand how to drive the growth that you need for it. And of course, when you associate these for the roles that you understand the kind of the ABC cost that you have for each one of the segments, it’s become not a bet anymore, right.

J. Roberto Mallmann
That’s it’s become a very clear option on where to invest in the moments that you need to invest to grow so we can come out of the the storm in a better position.

Michelle Seger
So what I’m hearing you say, too, is it’s important to look at your segments when we’re looking at market and offer alignment, not just like one size fits all.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Breaking down, you’re kind of breaking down your revenue in a way that’s very commercial. You understand in the point of view of marketing, of commercialization, on the way that you sell, you’re breaking down your revenue on these segments or initiatives that you need to have in the market. You can apply this kind of model and other models that we have here in different ways, in different markets, different industries.

Michelle Seger
You know, this reminds me of when I think about market and offer alignment. Another easy thing that companies always seem to jump to, it’s pricing innovation and pricing innovation and actually can be that are new ways to go to market. You know, it was subscription services and things like that. But in times like this, what we find is pricing innovation is still given the same name.

Michelle Seger
It it’s really just a pricing increase. And I mean, we’ve seen everything from what’s the gap? You know, here’s the goal, here’s the revenue, here’s the gap and a peanut butter spread of whatever that differential is across all the business. And I think what we’re saying is dig a little deeper than that. Right. And look at something a little different than that.

Michelle Seger
So, yeah, pretty good conversation. What about let’s let’s talk about sales capacity a little bit. So this is an area that we really focus deeply with our clients on, on just about every project. Good times are bad, right? Whenever we look at their go to market or their sales structure or their sales process, we end up looking at sales capacity.

Michelle Seger
So let’s describe a little bit of what sales capacity is. And then, you know what what the average is on and what sales capacity looks like in the market. And then a little bit on how we think you can drive sales capacity and our approach to that.

Zach Rosenblum
So sales capacity, it can get a little tricky because I think so many other drivers touch on it. And even as we were just talking about market and offer alignment, that certainly connects with sales capacity and you might see sometimes it kind of groups within there. But to me one of the biggest things of sales capacity is certainly sales time how sellers are spending their time and the way here it’s sales growth that we typically define that or or illustrate that is is by classifying different buckets of items different task they have whether they’re true sell in time, their value added time meaning that they’re needed components that help kind of support the sell on

Zach Rosenblum
time or maybe they’re non value added time such as kind of internal meetings or other items that, hey, you know, the sales folks probably shouldn’t be the ones doing this and it’s taken away from their sell in time. So to me, that’s kind of the biggest component of sales capacity. The way that we measure it here is we utilize a product called Sales Time Optimizer where essentially we’ll do a a study on sellers over the course of usually a week or two or two and have them kind of input their time daily in terms of the different activities that they’re doing.

Zach Rosenblum
And then we’ll show those activities to the buckets that I just mentioned in terms of being selling time value at a time, non selling time. And what’s always amazing is, is the results that come back and how many companies and probably sellers themselves think that they’re, you know, selling a lot of their time. And and you’ll be surprised that, you know, a lot of the times under under 50% of their time is actually not spent selling.

Zach Rosenblum
And that’s just a big opportunity there to change kind of some of the behaviors, change some of the processes, change management styles, things that can be done to kind of improve, selling time and ultimately increase sales capacity. So that’s one of the big opponents and I think probably the most significant one under that bucket. But there’s there’s certainly a couple others as well.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And I think you’re right on about that Zach that’s probably one of the biggest overlooked areas of of increasing productivity increasing return on a built in sales investment is simply what are people doing with their time. So you could pretty much increase your headcount without having to hire anybody by increasing the amount of time people are spending on selling.

Mark Donnolo
Or how do you do that? Well, first, you know, you recognize you understand what you’re doing and then you can pull some of these other levers in terms of your market and product alignment. So what kind of roles are we using that could increase the sales time of the field sales organization as an example? And then the other side of capacity that will delve into a little bit further is, well, what are they doing with that time in terms of the amount of effort or workload it takes them to manage current accounts or to sell to new customers, you know, when when new deals.

Mark Donnolo
And so when we get into looking at some of the other components, we can look at how to make that more efficient.

Michelle Seger
So when we talk about sales capacity, I always and we talk about sales time, I, I always go back to world decontamination. So something else that we think about here at SalesGlobe and I example that I’d like to bring up a health care company that we worked with. We do a lot of work with with health care, but in health care company we were working with what we identified is I it’s roughly it was between 32 and 38% of their time was spent on sales activity.

Michelle Seger
But another 30% of their time was spent on prospect writing activity. And these people do you remember that company was spending a lot of money on on lead lists and they were sifting through them and, you know, they they thought they were pretty good, but they really weren’t. And what we determined is they were spending so much time just trying to identify what was actually a good lead.

Michelle Seger
And what we did was we ended up setting up this little velocity to just a little team that their whole job was to qualify all of those leads. It was more entry level that would lead to an inside sales position, and they would then hand these leads over to sales. But they had a method, repeatable method, and that was all that they did and they were able to identify even patterns, right?

Michelle Seger
And they started to ask really good questions to identify good and not so good leads. And what we were able to do was increase their selling time of the key sales reps significantly say better leads. They weren’t spending any time on that activity and they were really able to focus on demos and the other things that were required for that health care software that they were selling to the market.

Mark Donnolo
What’s great about that example too, Michelle, is it’s a subtlety that a lot of times you might not recognize. So when you say, well, they’re spending their time on going through looking at leads, that type of thing, you might say, well, that’s what a salesperson does, right? Well, when you see what they were actually doing, it was really something that was massively inefficient.

Mark Donnolo
It was the they were the wrong job to be doing that. They were their skills were really about being able to go out and convert new customers. It wasn’t about doing the administrative administration work of the their lead calling. You mentioned Demos as well. That was another area in that sales organization where they had a huge demo bottleneck because salespeople were doing demos and they were getting caught up in that.

Mark Donnolo
Well, you come up with a demo team that’s much faster and much more efficient at that. You free up more sales time. So there are some subtle examples like that. And then there’s one we ran into recently, which was just a not so subtle example. It was an organization that when we did the the sales team optimizer, we found that they were spending about 4 hours a week on average in customer contact.

Mark Donnolo
I’m in-person customer contact time, which is crazy that that’s half a day a week. They’re spending actually in front of customers and we dug into that and it was just really blatant. They said, well, you know, we’re we’re a collaborative culture. And collaborative culture meant that they have a lot of internal meetings. They talk a lot. Right. And the CEO took a look at this and she said, this is not going to happen.

Mark Donnolo
We’re done with this because all we’re doing is we’re just talking to each other, not talking to the customer. So she said, you know, basically, we’re not going to have meetings any time during the week other than Fridays. All internal meetings happen on Fridays, and you can turn down any meeting that doesn’t happen on a Friday. They made that change and that was a blatant, dramatic one, but it really increased the capacity of the organization just through that massive, massive shift.

Mark Donnolo
But everybody knew it was happening. They sort of knew was happening. But until you actually called it out and you quantified it, you couldn’t see how how impactful it was.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. So let’s talk about Pipeline now. This will be interesting to get everyone’s definition of this. So when I think about Pipeline and I think about it being a revenue driver, I’m thinking about the size of your pipeline, right? Is it a good pipeline or is there a lot of junk there? So how good is it?

Michelle Seger
Sales process efficiencies and where the bottlenecks might be in certain steps of the sales process, like where you get stuck? I mean, that’s what I think of when I’m thinking about Pipeline. I don’t know what what anyone might have to add to that or.

J. Roberto Mallmann
I think that’s it’s always about the process that we establish. So when you think about pipeline, people think on on these big pipe, maybe they have in their mind and reality that you need to break down these multiple pipes. What is the pipeline of your enterprise customers, the ones that are more profitable? And you understand clearly that’s the one that you need to invest more time.

J. Roberto Mallmann
What is the pipeline of these small customers that are really about what is the pipeline of specific channels A, B or C that you understand in your specific market? And they have certain returns of investments that you kind of understand because you kind of develop an ABC course that’s common in supply chain. When you do ROSI, you’re thinking about A, B, C cost for sales because you kind of understand the activity based costs of each one of the segments.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So the pipeline become an exercise of very clear how many people you’re putting on that pipe, and you’ll know that it’s a bad for a B customer you need to make for a small customer. Maybe I need to redirect resources where it’s more profitable.

Michelle Seger
So when we think about levers that we can pull to have a healthier pipeline, you know, it’s like what I was saying. Roberto I always tend to like look at the sales process because I’m always thinking about the steps in in CRM and I’m always thinking about where to step, get stuck, where might we be spending too much time?

Michelle Seger
Were there bottlenecks? But what you know, what else could people be doing to have a healthier pipeline?

Mark Donnolo
Well, I think I think pipeline management eats or consumes capacity. Right. So the more more stuff you have to manage in your pipeline, the more it consumes capacity. And so I think of the idea of the bulky pipeline versus the lean pipeline, not a lean pipeline like.

Michelle Seger
I’m the lean pipeline and you’re the bulk one.

Mark Donnolo
I think, Michelle, I think of this movie called Pumping Iron. I don’t remember pumping iron from the 1970s and Arnold, but they would bulk up, right? These guys would bulk up for the bodybuilding contest and they would get huge. Right. And people they like to bulk up in their pipeline. Let it be like a huge pipeline because when their sales manager comes asking, you know, how are things going?

Mark Donnolo
If I can show you more stuff, I feel a lot better about sales. People are inherently optimistic as well, so they’ll keep stuff in the pipeline that is really not going to close. Right. So what we have to do is we have to create a leaner pipeline and we have to get a pipeline that’s healthier. Right. And we have to do that sooner.

Mark Donnolo
So we don’t want to bulk up. What we want to do is is we want to be lean. Well, how do we do that? We do a better job of qualification criteria early. So we get stuff out earlier in the pipeline and we’re tougher as we go through each step. And we have triggers, we have criteria. We’re effective at managing as a sales team to know when to pull things out.

Mark Donnolo
So we have to get beyond the subjectivity and become more objective about that. So moving from a bulky pipeline to a lean pipeline, if you think when you look at capacity, the amount of workload it takes for me to close a new customer account is not just the number of hours it takes me to close. A new customer account is the number of hours it takes me to manage every potential new customer through that pipeline that’s going to result in one new customer.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So it’s my attrition rate all the way down. Yeah. So if I can thin that out further up, then I have fewer hours, fewer hours I have to spend to close that one customer that’s going to actually close.

J. Roberto Mallmann
You know, it’s interesting because this this idea of the pipeline is something kind of new. It was created when CRM was implemented. And CRM was something that really adds a lot of value in terms of process. And how do we do sales in the in nowadays. However, brought some issues in the way that we we do business today.

J. Roberto Mallmann
We don’t really are looking at how we are managing the time of our sales organization or really thinking about is that the best way to have the steps, the sales of steps that I built in the pipeline people are building, managing their sales organizations based on some KPIs that are just in there and they’re not thinking about the customer experience.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So it’s every time that I look at Pipeline and some of these big KPIs and in the big screens, I kind of think, stop thinking how are managing our people? Are is the customer taking the best experience and having the smallest amount of steps that’s possible? Do I have a product or I present my product in a way that I need to be true, stay calling the customer or I present my products in a way that the customer wants to.

J. Roberto Mallmann
To me is the difference between the inbound and outbound, and in the end of the day, I take inbound over outbound. Any time of the day because it’s much easier, right?

Michelle Seger
Yeah. That’s a great point that you bring up. So CRM has caused some companies to really get more mechanical process oriented, SLA oriented, but often at the expense of the customer experience. Yeah, we can’t forget about that one. All right. So let’s talk now about velocity. Now again, how I’m thinking about like time to revenue. That would be one of the things where how would we kind of define velocity?

Michelle Seger
I’m thinking about increasing win rates, but what do we think about velocity? And then some of those levers, what they could look like.

Mark Donnolo
I mean.

Mark Donnolo
If if the.

Mark Donnolo
If the pipeline is a picture of where we are any given time, the velocity is defining how quickly we’re able to move things through the pipeline. Our our speed to revenue. The velocity is also defining not just the pipeline but also the velocity of of our sales operation, our sales movement, how how quickly and nimbly we work as well.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So as an organization, it’s not just about managing things through the pipeline, but it’s how we team, how we work together. So it’s increasing the speed of the organization and increasing the speed of the pipeline.

Michelle Seger
So when we think about then velocity, like I’m thinking about TV models that we’ve put in place, I’m going to bring up an example of a national a sports apparel and equipment provider, right to colleges and high schools, a company that we’ve consulted with. And they had salespeople that would go out and visit, which took quite a bit of time visiting these coaches of schools, visiting the the DA’s.

Michelle Seger
And I think that’s what they were. Right. Who am I saying? The right thing.

Mark Donnolo
It’s the AD’s, the athletic director.

Michelle Seger
Directors I knew I was.

Mark Donnolo
They did not want to run to the DA though.

Michelle Seger
They did not. Nobody wants that. But anyway, so the the athletic directors and it took a lot of time. I was spending a lot of time driving and what we put together was a team model for them, because one of the things that we discovered was, yeah, you want these custom uniforms, that’s one thing. But if I just need bats or I need hats or I just need some standard things and elbow pads, whatever that might be, there is a better way than waiting for these these salespeople to show up.

Michelle Seger
And we implemented it inside sales team that partnered with the field rep. And boy, those orders were faster, they were efficient, things were flowing a lot easier, a lot better, and they were able to batch orders together easier. It was just it made a big difference. So when I think about velocity, just to the point that you made, it’s about your sales structure in your organization and how your people work together.

J. Roberto Mallmann
You know, when you think about velocity, there is kind of two goals is one is internal velocity inside the organization and another one is a market organization. The internal organization, if you think about the internal velocity, is all the things that we have been talking about, Zach spoke a little bit about this idea of sales capacity. You were talking about this decontamination of the sales role.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Right. And Mark, you mentioned a few minutes ago some examples of companies that spend four, 8 hours in terms of administrative work in internal meetings and all that. That’s one day of the week. And if you remove these and kind of move to more activities that really help the customer, you’re gaining a lot of time. You put more 4 hours, remove 4 hours of administrative tasks.

J. Roberto Mallmann
You’re talking about 10% additional time. It’s big. And then when you go to the markets, the velocity in the market, the customer, they have their own velocity, they have their own speed, should do the activities, should take their time. But the salesperson has a big role on that because most of the time the customers do not know how to buy it in the role of the salesperson, it’s help them to make a decision.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Here is the difference between the different products in the market. Here is the the the the price. How are we going to save money? Here’s the return of investment as you make these investments on these products and all these things that help your buyer to get approved through procurement, through senior leadership team or whatever it is. But they need to have these extra time to focus on the market speed.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So you associate the issue, you can really accelerate your pipeline.

Michelle Seger
That’s really interesting. Last thing we want to touch on is the when we talk about revenue drivers is your sales talent. That’s a good insight. Roberto So we look at the sales channel, we’re thinking about the requirements across sales roles. Maybe your customer segments you have different required and surround talent with that as well. What else should we think about?

Michelle Seger
If we think about it as a lever that we can pull what we think about around sales.

Mark Donnolo
And think about the idea that we’re not trying to just fill a seat or fill out a job description and kind of meet the requirements for that job description. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to understand the inventory that we have and we’re trying to understand what the requirements of each of those jobs are in. And when you really want to break it into a few areas, one is going to be the the problem solving capabilities that that person has.

Mark Donnolo
The other is going to be how they work behaviorally. Right. So we’re looking for things like certain attributes around drive and motivation and things that are kind of inherent. And we’re also and I mentioned problem solving, we’re also looking at their ability to to do that higher level problem solving in most sales roles because that’s becoming a differentiator.

Mark Donnolo
So, you know, everybody’s talking about the idea of of of AI and of course, we’ve had offshoring and everything. Well, the one thing that’s not going to be AI’ed or offshored is the ability to solve problems. And that’s the big differentiator for people in sales roles. So you have to have an inventory of those things, then you got to have a way to assess them, right?

Mark Donnolo
So we’re looking for I’m use the term loosely a certain DNA profile for each of those roles. And I think one of the issues is we end up in a lot of companies, end up filling roles with the people that we have or the people that we can get. And they are truly not the right people. So if you’ve defined your home model correctly, but you haven’t gotten the right talent, that model’s not going to work as well as you needed to.

Mark Donnolo
So we’re going to be very discerning around talent.

Michelle Seger
So the lever that we’re pulling is we’re looking for a different it could be a different DNA or different type of salesperson with different attributes than maybe we’ve looked for in the past.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. You know, I go back to that old hunter farmer adage and, you know, the idea that hunter farmer is too binary and we really that’s why we use the canine model here in sales. Go with the with the, you know, the laptops, lap dogs of the college or the Retrievers, the Dobermans. And the reason we do that kind of jokingly is because those are different DNA pools.

Mark Donnolo
Right? And so you can’t take a Retriever and stick them into a Doberman role and say, okay, this person’s going to go out and get new business because it’s just not there. Right? You can’t train to that. You can’t really push that. You’re just going to, you know, push that person into adaptive behaviors that are not natural for them.

Mark Donnolo
So how do we find that core DNA that we’re looking for?

J. Roberto Mallmann
I think that you made the the assessment part is always the one that’s scaring me, that there are multiple techniques to assess the the kind of tech skills that are necessary for roles in certain products and things like this. The part that’s scaring me, that’s normally most of the companies, they will say segregate the goods from the bads based on the quotas and the metrics that they have internally.

J. Roberto Mallmann
And most of the time, we know that there are problems and the quotas quotas are defined. That’s what I like to say. That’s the peanut butter spreads technique. Yeah, let’s put 3% to everybody in reality that quota should be based at all market opportunities on things that you see in the markets, new products and a series of other things that can make very different opportunities depends on the geography, the channels that we’re serving in, and new, new products that we’re bringing up and other things and when we look just at quotas, pure and simple, it’s become very hard to segregate who are the good salespeople versus the bad one?

J. Roberto Mallmann
And we create a culture around that and people behave based on the things that we drive on the previous years.

Michelle Seger
That is such a great point and an excellent segway to talk about how we address cost. So I think that we have looked at all the different levers that we believe the revenue drivers and the levers that can be pulled to improve the health and the performance of your company. Now, we’ll talk about the costs. You know, Roberto, building on on your thought when we look at sales talent and staffing and using logic around that, so use it as a lever instead of just a cost cutting measure, it’s reminding me of of a couple of companies that were put in a tough spot.

Michelle Seger
And the first one was an organization that said that they use the accounting term that life of FIFO, but they used to cut the staff. It was the last people hired last year and were the first out because they wanted to use something that was, they believed objective and not subjective and that they could just say, sorry, guys, anyone hired after this day, that’s it.

Michelle Seger
And yet they were missing out on a really good talent pool. They let some really good people go because they did a massive layoff like 20%. So that reminded me of that. And it reminds me of like think about it a little bit differently. And when I think about our approach at SalesGlobe, when we’re looking at restructuring or reorganization, we actually conduct a draft day and draft day.

Michelle Seger
It has what we call those three legs of a stool, right? And we do include some of the quantitative, but then it gets very qualitative. So quantitative is, you know, did they hit their number, right. Which is can be just to it may not be the objective, the objectivity that you’re looking for. So we also look at putting them through an assessment that talks about the qualitative attributes that are required for that job problem solving capabilities.

Michelle Seger
We do a customer scorecard type of thing, get some real time feedback from management as well, and do a more well-rounded approach to understand draft days says, Do we place someone in a certain role? Do we redeploy them into another one? Or is there just no place within this particular organization?

Mark Donnolo
You know, I think that’s that’s certainly a I think a more enlightened approach versus, you know, life over FIFO because there’s really not a lot of a lot of logic to that. Right. So, so we we are going to take the people out that we brought in last, even though some of them may be more talented than some of the people that actually had first.

Mark Donnolo
So, you know, we’re we’re kind of perpetuating mediocrity at that point. And I also find it fascinating out of all these different components that we have in this ROSI model, that this one component staffing is the one lever that everybody’s pulling right now. Let’s just reduce staff. And when you don’t, you go out there just everybody’s doing one thing out of this entire model and that that’s the practice, right?

Mark Donnolo
So that was the practice when the economy was hot and it was the war for talent. Let’s increase staff and let’s pay more now. Let’s just use that same lever so you can see that it’s such a more multidimensional answer to to the problem.

Michelle Seger
Yep. So you talked about we just discussed staffing and that that is the when we look at cost, what everybody looks at. I’d like to talk a little bit about the other factors there and the one is sales comp because this is a real juicy one. It’s a really good one, Mark and team when we talk about that because some of the things that we saw in the war for Talent and some of the things that we believed companies could do instead of just paying more would be to really put that more, if you will, in some incentive and build some pay for performance plans.

Michelle Seger
Right. So instead of just increasing pay, Mark, we were talking about a company that increased pay, what was it, 40 and 50% over what the market price was. And now they’re they’ve got this glut of people that they believe they’re overpaying for.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. I mean, we saw this coming one a year ago. And if you look at our 2020, 2022 predictions, we were seeing these things coming. And that’s exactly what happened in the war for talent. It was, well, 40 to 50% of companies. The first thing they did or the biggest thing they did to keep the people they have or to acquire new people was to increase base pay.

Mark Donnolo
It was not incentive pay. The second thing they did was to increase incentive pay. And then I think you have like 24, 25% of companies that did both simultaneously. But we back then we were saying this is a short run problem that we’re addressing because we’ve got too much demand relative to the supply. So there’s a you know, it’s the market’s out of equilibrium, of a disequilibrium.

Mark Donnolo
That’s a short run kind of issue, right? We’re going to come to a new equilibrium. But if it’s a short run issue and you’re making a long term decision by raising fixed costs, then you’re putting yourself in a corner. And back then we said, okay, you got a few things you can do. You can either raise the price of your product or you can make people more productive.

Mark Donnolo
You can find place other places to cut costs or you’re going to reduce your margins. Well, what did we do? We’re just cutting people back off again. So it’s almost like, you know, a Neanderthal approach to business management here where you look at this. So, you know, sales, sales comp, it was really the base salary that became the big lever and we didn’t.

Mark Donnolo
But, you know, the companies that did it well actually leveraged good sales compensation principles around what’s the base versus what’s the variable, what’s the upside, what’s the quota I need to see in terms of actually being able to justify that increased cost. And they did it in an intelligent way.

Michelle Seger
We just had about two weeks ago our future of sales comp think tank and we asked a poll question and we asked them, how many of you believe your your leadership believes that they have overpaid in 2022 for underperformance? It was 100%. Yeah, we didn’t expect it to be 100%. We thought it would be about 60 or 70%.

Michelle Seger
But everyone had least one major sales role that they or segment of people that they believe they were overpaying for. Now, interesting, in that same study that you referenced that had about 600 was it 600 companies that were in it? That’s the study we did with World at Work last year. Interestingly, is where we saw the greater payment.

Michelle Seger
So leveraged plans, meaning that it was lower base pay and a lot more in incentive. The pay mix, they were really aggressive, like even 30% base, 70% incentive were in brand new roles. So that hybrid sales role, do you remember that? Right. So We’re starting to see more. We are starting to see for some companies that they are beginning to create highly leveraged plans.

Michelle Seger
That means that there’s less fixed costs and you’ve got to actually do something to earn that pay.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And so we saw the emergence of the hybrid role, which is the fastest growing role that that surpassed inside sales. What we also saw, as you mentioned, Michelle, was more incentive pay being used. A lot of that was because we saw an increase in Hunter or Doberman roles as well. So that’s one of the faster growing roles.

J. Roberto Mallmann
And I think that’s the the things are changing. So what we saw in that survey versus the current situation is very different. So I’m working with an animal health care company and the idea that we have is exactly to make all these increases that it’s coming from inflation that’s necessary at this point in time. But everything in the viral piece, but at the same time that we’re doing these changes, is playing to the storm.

J. Roberto Mallmann
You need to plan the storm because it’s a cycle always you’re going to always have these cycles off. I have too much talent and I need to make changes or I lack of challenge and I need to attract people. If you plan for the cycles in a need to have the viable beast because you can play with that versus the base, you really cannot play with that.

J. Roberto Mallmann
If you plan for the storm, you’re ready for any kind of situation.

Zach Rosenblum
The other thing about comp and we just connected it to performance, which makes sense as you should, but it it obviously also connects majorly to behavior which can play into some of the drivers and costs we talked about. So I think about a client that you and I, Roberto, worked on together. I’m going back to kind of the pipeline revenue driver here where they’re lead gen team wasn’t really qualifying doing a good job of qualifying prospects.

Zach Rosenblum
And if you dig into why they weren’t doing that, it was because it was their comp plan that was paying them on just opening up an opportunity, opening up a prospects. So of course the comp plans connects to performance and measure in a pay performance plan, but it also drives a good bit of behavior which could have, you know, obviously connections and factor into some of these other costs and revenue drivers that we’ve touched on here.

J. Roberto Mallmann
They were taking only one year and a half to qualify a customer don’t see the problem.

Michelle Seger
Okay, another hot area because everyone’s saying like if they were going to make again, this came out of that survey any investments they were making, it was in technology. And, you know, let’s talk about the tech stack. Like what? What is it that a tech stack really does? I mean, I think about it as, you know, something that could also help add to capacity.

Michelle Seger
But what do we think about when we when we think about cutting costs or investing or whatever, what what the tech stack has to do with any of this?

Mark Donnolo
Well, I think the the tech stack, as you mentioned, Michelle, can be an enabler. Right. So that can that can actually increase our capacity anyway.

Michelle Seger
Do it the right way.

Mark Donnolo
I think I think the trap is that it becomes a panacea, particularly things like CRM, where it’s going to solve our problems, yet it doesn’t because we haven’t fixed those other areas, many of them in the numerator, in the numerator of our equation, here are a fraction we haven’t fixed those things in terms of pipeline management, coverage, model, that type of thing.

Mark Donnolo
So, you know, our CRM in our tech stack ends up kind of making that even worse, tech stack can also decontaminate sales roles. So when you find out that a royal is spending too much time, which we’ve seen a number of times on things like pricing and quotes, you can actually justify putting in a pricing system to decontaminate the job and make that much more efficient so it can be a huge enabler.

Michelle Seger
So then when we think about enablement, we think about anything else as well as expense. So the reason we have these five cost areas, these five drivers, is because every company we know when they look at their costs, for example, we know everybody has staffing, they have some kind of a tech stack. They’ve got, you know, incentive compensation that they’re paying.

Michelle Seger
But then we look at other expenses, whatever they might be, that can be really custom by company as well as other enablement, whether they’re prioritizing training or not or whatever that looks like. So that’s pretty much where we are on return on sales investment. And now what I wanted to shift over and talk about was how people can how companies can create a baseline.

Michelle Seger
So we’ve talked about, you know, these revenue drivers and we talked about cost, but then it’s like, how do I know what it looks like today? And I know that’s a code that we’ve been trying to crack here at SalesGlobe, and we really decided to take a step back and simplify it because it is it’s it doesn’t have to be that complicated.

Michelle Seger
And once you create a baseline and then you pull levers, you can go back and measure again something simple. And you know, Zach, you helped us on identifying how we can actually look at a baseline from which people can begin to measure their return on sales investment. I’d like you to share a little bit about that.

Zach Rosenblum
Right. So the of course, as we as we just discussed, ROSI is far more complex than it looks on the surface. But in terms of of getting to a baseline and utilizing that as a as a good gauge, you know, we thought it’s best to kind of simplify it, to be able to easily measure it fine. And just, you know, keep consistency across the board.

Zach Rosenblum
So the approach we’re taking here at SalesGlobe is we’ve gone back into our database, we’re looking at our previous clients and really simply taken the total operating revenue for either the whole sales org and the whole company, or if we only have certain divisions or segments of data, we’re taking the operating revenue associated with that division or segment and we’re putting that over a simple sales course, which is their base, plus their incentive to get their total target incentive.

Zach Rosenblum
And that is kind of what we’re utilizing as a topline ROSI number. And like I said, the reason we made it that simple is to be able to keep it consistent easily measurable and and and, you know, understandable across the board. But it’s it’s a high level gauge, right. So, you know, what’s what’s important to know is the the drivers and the costs that really go into that to be able to understand kind of the characteristics of the company, the, you know, their go to market structure, their their strategy, everything, all those factors kind of play into, you know, why ROSI, for one company might be different than another company.

Zach Rosenblum
So that’s the value there. That’s kind of the I guess consultant value is really understanding the the insides there to be able to tell a company why that ROSI looks this way versus that way, what they can do to change it, how it compares to others. So that’s kind of our approach here.

Mark Donnolo
You know, as you describe that, Zach, I think about a a comparison of an of another metric in real estate, which is called a cap rate or capitalization rate, which is basically your your net operating income divided by the value of the property. Right? So we can look at cap rates across markets. It’s a very simple number. Maybe it’s a seven, maybe it’s a ten, maybe it’s a four.

Mark Donnolo
Right. And and that’s useful to know. But then it becomes valuable when you say, okay, well, let’s look at a cap rate for, you know, Brooklyn, New York in a certain area, certain type of property, whether it’s, you know, commercial, I’m sorry, it’s commercial or it could be a residential and so you have to break down to the characteristics to really understand why that’s meaningful.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So when you look at look at the the ROSI across companies, it gets really meaningful. When you break it down, you say, okay, by industry, this is why it looks that way. So when we look at one for a client that say in the beverage distribution industry, they’re there, their return on sales investment is going to be much higher than, say, a company in the software industry.

Mark Donnolo
But it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re healthier or in better shape. Their margins are thinner, they’re lower. They they have huge operational costs and average distribution that software simply doesn’t have. So their cost of sale and is going to be higher and their return on sales investment is going to be lower. So compare software to software. Compare, you know, beverage distribution to beverage distribution, but then look for ideas across industries that you can apply to your industry to maybe improve your return on sales investment.

J. Roberto Mallmann
I and I agree. I think that these are become like good reference points for us to compare with the value that we really create, especially for our customers. You should go down this detail on their own house and understand what do you really need to do to increase the value of this house? To use your reference, do we need to invest in the plumbing?

J. Roberto Mallmann
Do we need to make it knock down a wall so we have a better flow? We need to paint a few walls, have professional pictures and etc., etc. That’s the value that you can drive once you understand the elements of the revenue, the elements of that, the way that I describe as an ABC cost of your sales organization, how much money really make in each one of the segments?

J. Roberto Mallmann
Considering the time allocated of the sales organization in each one of these drill downs that become very clear on our dashboards and so on so far. So it’s should get these references and then compare with the ways that you can improve and drive these improvements in the customer.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, I think it’s I think it’s brilliant, but of course and we came up with it, but not in all seriousness the, the beauty of, of the simplicity of just looking at your baseline. So forget about the cross industry. That’s something that we are trying to figure out and it’s a bit more complex. But if we think about that individual organization, if we we can look at their operating revenue and their sales expense.

Michelle Seger
And then to the point that you all made, we go in there and and conduct we call it a revenue roadmap assessment, but we look at what’s happening in the business and we look across those different lever opportunities to identify the ones that will have the greatest impact for that company. Then when you go back and you look at the operating revenue compared to the sales expense, you should see a healthier number if you’ve actually implemented those changes.

Michelle Seger
So I think that’s a great point to drive home there. So as we wrap up this segment that I think has been really informative, I want to think about, you know, I’d like you each to give a takeaway or something that you want people to remember, you know, I like to think about just don’t cut cost people.

Michelle Seger
I mean, to me, the immediate one of the big immediate messages that comes out is just don’t focus on cutting costs. You’re going to short cut your business in more ways and give up opportunity. And I love the analogy that you made, Roberto, that’s so true about you can go in your shell and you can protect or those courageous companies will actually invest during these times where they need to invest is right.

Michelle Seger
So I would say look more holistically at your business.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, I would agree. I think there’s you know, you can only cut your costs so far, but there are no real limits on your ability to increase productivity and increase your top line. So you’re playing kind of a finite game when you’re just doing cost cutting.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Yeah, and I think that’s I agree with that one. One element that comes to my mind is that we kind of give away a little bit of the management functions to KPIs, dashboards, CRMs and things like these. And we are losing the benefits of the creativity of the management team to think on the way that they look at the sales team and perceive the value of the work that they did.

J. Roberto Mallmann
Michelle said it so well that sales is not a cost to sales as a investment, how to invest this in a better way in the right segments with the right amount of time, with the right process so the pipeline can really fit well and that flows so fast. We don’t take one year and a half to qualify a customer and so on.

J. Roberto Mallmann
So for we give away a lot of these to dashboards and metrics and things that look good in the wall and we need to go back to this to be creative, to have real quality manage. And I think that this kind of tool ROSI can help you to visualize this and give to your team a different way to see the business and the opportunities.

Zach Rosenblum
Right? Yeah. I think it’s a combination of what everybody said, you know, have a sound strategy, think about your strategy. And if does sound and you believe in that, maybe the the results aren’t there right now. But it’s not a simple answer is cost cut and it’s not a simple answer to to pin the issues or the lack of performance on one area or group.

Zach Rosenblum
It’s really understanding and kind of tinkering with the different variables and factors that all are connected and all talk to each other and all, you know, overlap and overflow. So it’s a it’s a complex thing to think about, but it’s there’s not there’s not one simple answer here.

Michelle Seger
All right. Well, thank you so much, everyone. And we hope that this was a really exciting segment. If you any of our audience, you’d like to learn more about return on sales investment, please go to SalesGlobe.com and you know, refer us to your friends. If you enjoyed this podcast, please ask them to subscribe. And we also have a ROSI assessment that we can conduct for you.

Michelle Seger
So anyway, we hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed it, and we’ll see you all the next time. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.