Why Traditional Sales Metrics Fail and How AI Can Help With Jack Siney, Co-founder of FrontRace
Jack Siney: 13:19
So good, I appreciate that. So let’s go to the second part. So if you have 2 or 3 people in your company crushing it, right. Here’s the reality again in sales. Going back to your question from two ago, 2 or 3 questions ago, like, hey, what’s happening in sales?
We’re doing the same thing over and over. What’s that? That’s the definition of insanity and expecting different things. Here’s what we do today in sales. Forget bad hires.
If you have a bad hire, just forget that. So every once in a while we hire a bad person. We hire good people. We. We teach them well.
We train them well. Right? You teach them the product, the pitch, the pricing, the FAQs, you teach them all the big things, right? So those are not the things that make great success. Not everyone knows those things, right?
Unless you’re bad at training people or, you know, not good at sharing. Everyone knows the big things. So it’s not the big thing. So our theory of watching again, thousands of companies operate the difference between your best people and your average or below average people are 20 little things, right? I just want to repeat 20 little things.
It’s not the big things, but we get wrapped around the axle about the big things. How many calls did you make? How many emails did you send? Let’s do another training on the pitch. Do you know the right answer to the question?
Like, okay, that’s not it. We’ve been at this again, 40 plus years with CRM. That is not what’s making your best people the best. And so to your question, answer your question. For every company, it’s different, but we believe there’s typically 20 little details that make your best people the best.
And those are things like the following. That’s what we help you study and look at the micro details of what people are actually doing inside your company, which is sometimes, you know, when you hire a person and almost every company has this process flow chart and they go, hey, for the time, they’re a prospect all the way to when we close them, here’s our 32 steps or here’s our 20. Like we do, we send a thing and we send an email and then we schedule a demo. Everyone has a thing. Typically, I’ll give you one example.
The best people are doing that process in a totally different order. They’re mixing up the box in the back. They’re moving around the boxes. They would make the CEO or the head of sales have a heart attack. Sometimes they give the pricing way up front.
Sometimes they demo in the second call. So there’s a way that the best people are doing things sometimes impromptu, sometimes strategically, but normally it’s different. And other variables, things like, hey, what’s the timing of things, right? It’s not what you do, it’s the timing of it. We’ve all had this on LinkedIn or social media where somebody requests and wants to be a friend of yours, and then eight seconds later, as soon as you accept, they pitch you something and you’re like, it just doesn’t feel good, right?
It doesn’t, it just doesn’t feel good. So we say to people, go on LinkedIn, connect with people and tell them what we do. And so unless you share, what we really mean is connect with somebody, then get to know them in some way, shape or form that’s, you know, sincere. Then maybe you talk about your companies a little bit, then maybe you could pitch them, right? It’s like, but if you don’t share those details of how to create relationships, what’s the order?
How much time do you wait between the first message and the second? There’s a science to all that that creates success, but it’s different for every company. Get back to your question. The 20 things. It’s not the same for an airline company as it is for a software as a service company, than it is for a product company.
And so we help analyze what your best people are doing and what everyone’s doing. Hey, what does success look like? Right? Because success for most companies has certain characteristics. And when you don’t have success, we don’t talk about this a lot.
What is when we lose, what is that? And typically when we lose, it also has certain characteristics. And so we start to identify those and then again, share them with the team and share them with the company. And, obviously try to stay more on the positive side than the negative side.
Chad Franzen: 16:59
So how does FrontRace use AI to kind of do that to report beyond just what happened, whether you won or lost and, and maybe help them understand why it happened?
Jack Siney: 17:08
Sure, sure. So there’s a couple things. So I’ll try to give you the quickest version. So what front raise does we say to a company, hey, keep whatever you have, keep your tech stack. We don’t want to replace anything.
Right? We’re a little analytical layer that goes on top, the right visual. I always say to people, we go on top of what you have. So keep not replacing anything. You have to keep, you have HubSpot or Salesforce, whatever tools you have, Slack, email, video, keep whatever you have.
Right? We’re going to sit on top of it. Our background is we’re going to connect those data sets, which is kind of what you do with an LLM. Now you’ve connected. We connect the data sets.
That’s one. Two. We normalize the data, which is secret garbage in, garbage out. So the data is not right across all systems. It’s a problem.
So you’re going to normalize the data. And then to your question, we have a set of analytics, some AI and some not AI. So we’ve been using this tool for about ten years internally before the world of AI exploded. And so we take this set of analytics and really at a very micro level, analyze everything that happens in all the systems and then put together it’s like a puzzle. We put together a picture of what success looks like and what’s great about AI.
So you’d be like, well, we could do that for years. Yes. But the magic of AI now is AI can start to measure some things that were really subjective back in the day, right? Very like, hey, what’s a patience score? How, what, what’s the professionalism?
How, what’s, how do they speak from a tonality standpoint, you could start to measure those things to give you a much more complete picture again, but what is success? So again, when you hire a great person, their number one question in sales is how do I become one of your top reps? Well, in the old days, you could be in an office and you could track them and monitor them and they could see other people. Most people today work from home or work in an office part time or the whole time. You have no idea what they’re doing, right.
You’re in Colorado. I’m in Texas. I don’t know, maybe, you know, maybe we get on a video conference once a day, twice a day, if you’re lucky. Right? And you try to share, you try to connect with people.
But in today’s companies, everyone is kind of dispersed and trying to share what’s best is really, really hard. And that’s what we help companies do.
Chad Franzen: 19:12
And it helps people figure out what their best people do differently, and then turn those insights into repeatable performance.
Jack Siney: 19:18
Definitely. Yeah. 100%.
Chad Franzen: 19:20
So when there’s, you know, there’s a million different things every time I scroll, I hit Google and it tells me news, an AI suggestion, news, an AI suggestion. When a CEO or CRO says we need to implement AI. what should they figure out before they buy or even build something?
Jack Siney: 19:37
Well, let me go back to this other context. I know your question, but I live in this world now every day. Listen, we’re all inundated with just AI solutions, right? Like I say to people all the time, if you go to a furniture company and you go to their website today, they’ll mention AI. You’re like, they build furniture.
You’re talking about what we use AI to embed and build. You’re like, man, it’s overwhelming, right? Because there’s a free AI or the $20 version, ChatGPT, Claude, I’m going to go buy it. Any system you’ve already bought has now an AI module right there. And then there’s net new stuff out there.
So it’s like, oh, how do, how do we, how do we possibly keep up and do things? So again, I just lean into that because strategically, having felt that myself, I believe we try to do something a little unique. This is with my sales hat on. I think the biggest thing for people to do is to go slow. Like not to go out and buy a whole new thing and invest. You saw the numbers for last year.
I think the numbers were $650 million. Folks invested in AI and very little of it had any ROI. Very little of it. The companies deployed throughout the whole operation, really a lot of testing and not a lot of quote unquote success, real ROI stuff. And so we believe the magic is in the data you already have, right?
This thing changes everything. It’s not if you, if you have a CRM or your company has data for the last several years, it’s in there. The problem is it’s disjointed a little bit. It’s not standardized. It’s in a couple different systems, like something your video conference system comes in, your Slack internal Slack system comes in, your CRM comes in, your email comes in your social media.
If you’re doing LinkedIn and, and people are just not connecting the dots. And so to your question, we believe that the things to do to be great for the next 5 or 6 years is getting your data in order, right? Garbage in, garbage out. If you’re analyzing the wrong data, you can take quality and put it on top. The wrong data.
It’s going to come out wrong, right? Understanding the process. We help people understand what success really looks like. And then having some AI models that what’s the right word. Stay on track.
So we all know the AI hallucinates and it’ll drift. And so we do some things internally to help folks make sure that the analytics you get from your AI model stays, keeps you strategically aligned. I’ll give you one quick story. Mark Cuban said a couple weeks ago, I love this quote. He said, the problem with AI right now, if you ask a question five times with the same data, you’re going to get three different answers.
It’s a real thing because the way the AI models work, they go out and search everything. They get all the data they can, and then they join. They rejoin back up and give you the analytics. Well, it’s not the same every time. It doesn’t rejoin the same every time.
And if you don’t think that’s true, go do something right. Go ask any question about your business and then say you don’t agree and watch the AI model change its answer. Three minutes later, you’re like, no, I don’t really agree. I think that’s wrong. And so really challenging.
So we do some things at a very micro analytic level to keep your analytics online, make sure that the AI, which has amazing capabilities, delivers a result that’s actually accurate and not just some semi made up answer from the analytics.
Chad Franzen: 22:54
I noticed something about activity intelligence when looking into FrontRace. What does that reveal the traditional sales metrics maybe don’t.
Jack Siney: 23:03
Sure, sure. So it’s really interesting. This part of this part of sales kind of gets a, what is it, a black eye or a bad rap? Just to go back to years ago when Gong showed up on the scene. So if you’re unfamiliar, Gong kind of will record sales calls and do transcripts and do some analytics.
Great tool. I think they’re worth 3 or $4 billion or maybe more. Great tool. But when Gong came out, people were like, you’re gonna listen to all my calls and analyze what I’m saying. And so similar today, it’s like sales reps could be like, you’re looking at my stuff, you’re looking at what I’m doing and what I’m doing.
And so activity management for years was kind of this key stroke or what are you doing through the day and how much work did you do and how many emails did you send and how many minutes were you on calls? When we talk about it, we’re really not talking about are those metrics relative or. Give you some insight into whether it will be successful? Maybe. Right.
But again, we really go at a really micro level, which is what are you what’s a what are your successful people doing? Not judging it, but what are they doing? Maybe, you know, some CEOs don’t hear that and now work from home. Maybe some of your best people, they’re evening people. And so you know what they do all morning.
They go to the gym at 6 a.m., then they go eat breakfast. Then they do some personal things and they don’t they don’t throw off a work thing until 1030. You know what I mean? But if they’re going from 10: 30 until eight at night, you know, and, and, and doing their thing, that’s, that’s a real thing. And that’s what makes them great.
Why do you care? Like, isn’t it about what makes them great? Like at the end of the day in the sales world, we’ve all had a sales rep. That’s so good. You’re like, whatever Mary’s doing, just let her keep doing it.
Right. But what we want to do is kind of peel back the onion and be like, what is Mary actually doing? And what does that look like? And some of it’s really nuanced, like subtleties, like building relationships, like, well, Mary found out that Chad went to the University of Colorado. And so when they won the field hockey championship, send him an email and say, hey, congratulations, alma mater.
Getting another NCAA championship. Like stuff like that is so small, but it’s intuitive for some people and for other people, it’s not. And so unless you share what’s actually happening and how it happens, it all gets lost. And so we try to like it when we talk about a kind of activity management. Again, it’s gathering what is everything that’s done to get to success?
What are all the things not just, I say the historical metrics people have on their dashboard that again, don’t have a direct correlation to whether you have success. Because if they did, if the magic was because some people I know would be cynical if the magic was number of calls and number of emails, then the people that got to those numbers would get to their sales goal. And we all know that doesn’t happen.
Chad Franzen: 25:52
So tell me a little bit about the team at FrontRace. I know that you guys have been together longer than just FrontRace has existed. It’s maybe the third time you’ve built a company with the same core team.
Jack Siney: 26:04
Yeah. This is so going back to your first question, like, how do you find success when you find good people, you try to hold on to them and, and, and stay in the game with them. It’s super hard. You know, you, you, we kind of take it for granted sometimes. But and by the way, when I, when I talk about good people, there’s a lot that goes into that.
It’s not just, hey, surround yourself with really smart people. You have to be able to work together synergistically. What what? You have to have complementary skill sets. You have to also deal with each other when you’re having bad days and good days.
You know, is there goodwill built? And so yeah, our team, this is our third endeavor together. I mentioned we had advanced public safety and then gov spend and now FrontRace. And so a lot of members have been with us through that journey and, and finding good people and, and trying to lean on them. And, and what’s great is you get to this stage, you trust them, you.
Because what happens? My soapbox, I believe we all know the stats. Nine out of ten startups don’t make it. But what happens is that things happen in an operational part of a company. And even you and I chat, we would be a part of a sales call or a product rollout, and we might look at it differently, you know, I mean, you might think it’s great and I might think it’s average, you might hate it and I might love it, right?
So ultimately, it’s trying to find a team. You, you, You don’t want everyone to be just. Yes, people. But you have to find a way. Like, the way I look at it is the way you look at it.
Or if not, can we talk about it in a way that we discuss all the variables and we reach an agreement that this is right or wrong? Right. And what happens sometimes if you hire people and on a sales call, they’ll filter really important pieces of information. You never hear about it as the head of sales or the person responsible, and we lose the deal. And then when you go back and sometimes we lose, it’s the only time we’re more attentive.
You can listen to the two sales calls. You’re like, oh my gosh, you didn’t mention that the CEO was brand new or hey, they just changed like the detail that would make all the difference somebody missed. And so that’s why it’s important to have good people around you that you trust, that can filter through the right things that are comfortable pushing back, comfortable staying in the discussion until we, we both have to be looking at the same. We don’t have to agree with elephants, good or bad, but we have to be able to describe the elephant the same way. You know, has two big ears, a long nose, and big feet.
Because if you’re looking at the other end of the elephant, you might just see a tail. And so we have to agree that we’re looking at the same issue all the time.
Chad Franzen: 28:30
So one thing about entrepreneurship that I’ve noticed, and even from my experience is that, you know, that there’s some success that you’ve experienced, maybe some failure or lack of success that you’ve experienced. It requires resilience. And sometimes even when you have success, it requires a lot of resilience just to get to that point. What kind of overall life experience helped you with that?
Jack Siney: 28:52
Oh, goodness. That’s a great question. Yeah, I think there’s that one. Most people have probably seen this at this point somewhere. There’s a meme online where there’s two guys digging in a tunnel, right?
And they’re, they’re going, they’re going kind of this way. One guy’s about to hit the diamond, but he turns around and goes back right there, and the other person goes through and finds the diamond. I think that’s obviously the paradigm of your question. And like that part is really hard. I think it’s a former high school football coach in Florida.
And when you coach young men in Florida, everyone wants to go to the league. You’re like, coach, I just want to go to the league. You’re like, oh, hey, you have to stop partying. You have to work out three times as much. You have to go watch a film and you’re like, I don’t necessarily want to do all that no one else is doing.
And I’m like, yep, that’s why only 1% of the people get there because everyone says it. But all the things to get there are really hard. And it’s one of those things, hey, it’s easy to say when it gets tough. You have to still go through when the nice you’re going to be sleepless, you have to still show up the next day. And so it’s not a great philosophical answer, but much easier said than done of like, hey, can you tough it out through the rough times?
Because it was easy. Everyone would do it. One of the people that works with me knows that if it was easy, everyone would be in line, right? We’ve all had a run on something that’s easy. When the crypto thing took off, Bitcoin.
Oh, easy money. Bitcoin went up. And then when I came back down, people were like, maybe not so much, right? So it’s all the things that create great companies, all the things that are successful and we see go are really hard. Like everyone is obviously familiar with the Elon Musk story, but if you really study and read his book, they were SpaceX.
They were out of money like he was. He said he’s like one payroll away for Tesla Space X, you know, it’s like we just play the result now. Oh, richest guy in the world dot dot dot. You’re like, I know, but he took all his money from PayPal. He didn’t just stick it in the bank.
He put it all into himself and he took God’s blessing. PayPal then took the money and put it in another company, putting it all at risk again. I would never do that. You know what I mean? Like, oh, you hit the lottery, PayPal.
It’s over. Just go buy an island and shut it down. Nope. We’re gonna take all that money, start more. And you’re like, he’s so easily said that we play the result and it is, hey, don’t get any entrepreneur unless you’re sure.
Okay. There’s going to be tough moments. I’ll just say even being very open with FrontRace, we’ve been at it for about two years of product and market and it’s as if you follow the AI world, you might wake up one morning and there’s a new release and it does this. And so it’s a constant. It’s you have nights you’re like, I don’t know, but you know, you just keep plugging away at it.
And it typically, I, I’m a big believer if you have the stick-to-itiveness to get through it, it typically turns out well because most people do turn around and quit. And so it’s just keep hammering away at it because normally if you have a gut feel and you’re inspired to start the company, there’s something there.
Chad Franzen: 31:51
Okay. Yeah. Good stuff. Hey, one more question for you. But first, just tell me how people can find out more about front raises if they’d like to look into it.
Jack Siney: 31:59
Oh yeah. Sure, I appreciate that. You can go to FrontRace.com, frontrace.com, and the upper right corner. We let folks test the software for free. You know, no obligation.
That’s how much we believe in it. You can have it. We’ll customize it for you. It’s amazing. Upper right hand corner.
Join the race. For your information, you can actually try and see it. You can find me, I’m on LinkedIn, Jack Siney, and connect with me. And we try to put stuff out regularly about the AI world and what we’re doing and in general just being successful. So either one of those works great.
Chad Franzen: 32:30
So you’ve been, you’ve been a part of, you’ve been involved with seven companies and you’ve spent decades in sales and technology. What problem are you most interested in solving next?
Jack Siney: 32:40
Oh, God, what’s going back? It’s this. And the things I’ve done have really been educating the market, trying to, hey, here’s something new. And so going back to earlier in this interview, the soapbox of I just think we’ve been doing sales the same way for so long. Hey, go get a CRM and get your dashboard and here’s your KPIs.
And it’s just not the way this is not, it’s not going to work. I think Covid changed us forever. We’re not going to be in an office environment on a, on a large scale basis, again, on five days a week. I’m somebody I know is not going back to that most people. And so we’re going to find a different way to measure and help people be successful.
And so I think that’s really intriguing. I think we never solved it. I think we accepted. It’s like we accepted B results, you know, trying to get to A, we as companies got lucky and they had more success, but we couldn’t even the successful people, hey, what made Bob so successful? We don’t know.
We’re like, I don’t know, just good at it. And so using AI and using some tech, I think if the sales part, I’d just be really clear what I’m saying. Can you manage the prospecting and some of the front end pieces, let’s just say to a demo. Yes. Can you imagine the pricing and finishing the contract?
Yes, it’s the middle. It’s in the middle. What made the deal happen was a big black hole, a big black hole. And I believe now with AI and FrontRace being one of those solutions, we can shed a light on 80% of that black hole. Is it perfect?
No, I would never claim we can 1 to 1 guarantee success. But it was a big black hole. What made people great? We believe now we can shed a lot of light into that black hole and help people be much better, much more efficient, and be able to forecast and be more accurate in what they’re trying to do with their company. And so that’s to me, a really exciting problem to solve because we’ve been repeating the same thing for a long time with not great results.
Chad Franzen: 34:41
Okay. Well, hey, it’s been very interesting talking to you, Jack. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for giving your time to me today.
Jack Siney: 34:49
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much. God bless. Stay safe.
Chad Franzen: 34:51
You as well. So long, everybody.
Outro: 34:53
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