Thought Leader Interview

Jim Burleigh brings more than 22 years of software experience to Cloud9 from a broad range of disciplines: CRM, supply chain, database, and tools technologies. As CEO of SmartTurn, and a senior executive at RedPrairie, Navis and salesforce.com, Jim has a strong record of achievement as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) executive, strategist, and entrepreneur. Today Jim is CEO of Cloud9, a company dedicated to improving sales forecasting and pipeline management better. Good technology plus Jim’s intimate understanding of the sales process make this a company and a sector worth watching.

Denis Pombriant: Jim, you've been involved in the front office and sales technologies, among other things, for a long time. You were an early employee at Salesforce.com. But what's different today about sales in terms of the customer and the selling environment?

Jim Burleigh: Well, one of the major differences now is how much learning the customer wants to do and actually does do long before they talk to you. You see the impact of the whole social world out there. You see the ubiquity of the Internet manifesting itself. Any prospect that is going to make a purchase decision, and it’s very, very common, will educate themselves long before they talk to the sales rep and get the full court press.

So you have to really understand that when you're selling to people nowadays. You have to challenge your marketing department. It's their responsibility not just to generate leads, but to think about the prospect, all the way from initial exposure and experience all the way through to close. It's not necessarily realistic that the marketing department “close a customer,” but they need to think that way. Because the customer's direction and a heavy amount of their mindset is going to be made up by the time they talk to your sales rep for the first time.

DP: That's interesting and it drives the next question. There are many tools on the market today for selling, all promising to improve sales performance. Can they all be right? Are they all useful? Are some that are better than others?

JB: I think, overall, there are very useful tools, to varying degrees, for the individual sales rep. And absolutely none of them are useful for a sales manager. I've always thought that CRM as a category is unique because it is the only application I can think of where the target user it is specifically designed for absolutely doesn't want to use it, meaning the sales rep does not want to use a CRM system. The sales rep wants a contact manager something like ACT or Outlook or something on their iPhone or just something to keep track of their calendar, keep track of their contacts and maybe make a couple notes. Anything beyond that is for the institution. It's for corporate memory. It's for making sure people are following a process. It's making sure that knowledge didn't walk out the door. That's CRM.

Then we supplemented CRM with a lot of great extensions, whether it is to clean data, find more information about companies, about contacts, help generate leads. There are a number of things there. But again, it's all really at the sales-rep level.

But the sales manager does something completely different. Their job is to get more performance out of their team, and at whatever level you're talking about, first-level sales manager to area vice-president, all the way up to the vice-president of sales. They're trying to get more out of what they have, meaning they’re coaching people, they’re hiring people and firing people. They're looking for risk, for weak spots, for soft spots, blind spots in their deals, in their pipeline, et cetera. And they're trying to take corrective action on all those things. So that's really about knowledge, about pattern recognition, about finding those bits of risk and making decisions on them.

And I don't know of a single product on the market that does that, other than Cloud9, you know. So sales managers turn to spreadsheets, which ultimately are inadequate for what the sales manager needs.