If you’ve ever felt the tension between presales and sales, this episode will hit home. Whether you're in leadership, enablement, or part of a revenue team, Michelle Afshar shares real-world strategies to break silos, boost collaboration, and unlock growth.
You will walk away with:
✅ Actionable insights on how to align sales and presales for better deal velocity and higher win rates.
✅ Proven frameworks used at top companies like Darktrace, Zoom, and Palo Alto Networks.
✅ A clear understanding of how shared goals and KPIs can improve team morale—and forecasting accuracy.
This episode isn’t just a conversation—it’s a playbook for any company looking to go from functional cooperation to strategic collaboration between sales and presales.
Michelle Afshar is a dynamic sales enablement leader whose career spans innovation giants Darktrace, Zoom, and Palo Alto Networks. As Global Head of Enablement at Darktrace and playing key GTM roles at Zoom and Palo Alto Networks, Michelle has a track record of transforming how presales and sales work together.
On the podcast, she’ll take us behind the scenes of:
➡️ Overcoming the most common friction points between presales and sales teams
➡️ Implementing joint pipeline ownership, technical qualification, and shared KPIs for seamless collaboration
➡️ The measurable impact these strategies have on win rates, forecast accuracy, and customer experience
Tune in to discover how enabling presales–sales alignment isn’t just a process improvement—it’s a strategic advantage that drives growth, efficiency, and trust.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mafshar/
#presales #sales #SalesManagement #SalesEnablement #SEAMlessSales
Tune in for this informative conversation at TalkRadio.nyc
Art Fromm opens this episode by introducing his guest Anil Shah, CEO of CloudFronts, and highlighting their collaboration on the SOS for D365 app—an enterprise CRM tool that supports the Sales Opportunity Snapshot methodology. He emphasizes how buyer behavior is shifting, with prospects spending less time with salespeople and relying more on self-directed research, which creates both opportunities and risks due to incomplete or inaccurate information. Art explores how AI—especially agentic AI—can bridge this gap by supporting early-stage interactions, gathering valuable customer insights, and enabling sales teams to focus on higher-value engagement where real client needs and solutions intersect.
Art Fromm welcomes guest Anil Shah, CEO of CloudFronts, highlighting his 20+ years of Microsoft ecosystem experience and recent Databricks partnership. Anil shares how he founded CloudFronts to help organizations transition from on-premise to cloud, emphasizing the importance of clean, reliable data as the foundation for AI adoption and automated decision-making. Their collaboration transformed the Sales Opportunity Snapshot (SOS) from a spreadsheet into a CRM-embedded tool, which not only improved sales integrity and efficiency but also set the stage for AI co-pilots and agents to support sales teams, streamline operations, and accelerate business growth.
Art Fromm and Anil Shah discuss how CloudFronts helped embed the Sales Opportunity Snapshot (SOS) methodology into CRM, transforming it from a static repository into a tool that drives qualification, focus, and higher win rates. Anil explains how SOS and Great Demo methodologies gave his team structure, improved discovery, and provided clients with clarity and confidence, while also inspiring customers to adopt these practices themselves. Looking ahead, he highlights that while agentic AI can streamline demos and early interactions, the human element—especially seamless collaboration between account executives and pre-sales—is critical to meeting customer expectations and sustaining sales success.
Art Fromm closes the episode by introducing his “Dear Artie” segment, inviting listeners to share sales challenges for future discussion. He shares a case study about a longtime client who saw declining results after shelving his methods, and how reintroducing the Sales Opportunity Snapshot (SOS) within Dynamics 365—developed in partnership with Anil Shah and CloudFronts—helped restore win rates, improve bookings, and strengthen sales management visibility. Art highlights how blending SOS with Great Demo principles delivers sustainable client success and spin-off opportunities, and he previews next week’s episode with Brian Conway on strengthening sales management and pre-sales collaboration.
00:00:30.680 --> 00:00:36.029 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Hello, everybody. Hello, and welcome to the Making Seamless Sales show.
00:00:36.920 --> 00:00:46.580 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Thanks for joining us once again. My name is Art Fromm, I'm coming to you from lovely Mars, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
00:00:46.690 --> 00:01:00.069 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And I'm so glad that you're all here. I hope you were able to watch the show last week. This is episode 5, by the way, and hope you were able to watch the show last week, which was with Michelle Afshar.
00:01:00.400 --> 00:01:06.949 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Of Dark Trace, so we had a great discussion. This show actually is being
00:01:07.050 --> 00:01:19.389 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: pre-recorded, because I have a very special guest on who's based in India, and it would be very inconvenient for him to join us from India at 7pm on Eastern Time.
00:01:19.390 --> 00:01:32.399 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, we're gonna get into that in a little bit. I'm really looking forward to having Anil Shah on, the CEO of CloudFronts, and we'll talk about the way that we worked together to develop the enterprise-grade
00:01:32.470 --> 00:01:37.120 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: SOS for D365 app, and all the things that are around that.
00:01:37.330 --> 00:01:53.250 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Just so that everybody knows, if you are watching live of this show, feel free to put your comments in. We'll see those, later. And then also, please make sure that you like, share, and subscribe.
00:01:53.250 --> 00:01:59.609 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: If you want to see the replay, and maybe you're listening to a podcast, and you want to see the video and everything.
00:01:59.610 --> 00:02:05.750 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Please go to my events page on Teamsalesdevelopment.com, and you can get all the details there.
00:02:06.070 --> 00:02:21.110 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, as I said, today, Anil Shah's gonna be joining us, and we're gonna talk about the D365 app that he and his team helped not only develop for me, but also used a lot of the concepts in his business.
00:02:21.110 --> 00:02:32.829 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, it is a CRM-embedded tool that supports the sales opportunity snapshot methodology that Steve Bistrez and I discussed on Episode 2 a few weeks ago.
00:02:32.870 --> 00:02:45.570 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, this is somewhat tying it together. If you didn't see that episode, highly recommend you go back and take a look at it. Steve Bistritz, who's the owner and developer of the Sales Opportunity Snapshot.
00:02:45.580 --> 00:03:00.349 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And that's where this app supports that methodology inside of the CRM system. And by the way, that's been in production use since 2017. So we'll touch on that, and Anil has so much more to share also regarding
00:03:00.350 --> 00:03:11.269 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: What he's seeing as trends in his own business, working with clients as a data and AI partner for connecting systems and building future-ready solutions.
00:03:11.620 --> 00:03:13.419 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: One of those trends
00:03:14.240 --> 00:03:21.279 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Is the shrinking amount of time a prospect spends or wants to spend with an actual salesperson.
00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:41.199 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And instead, do some self-research. Now, you probably have experienced that if you have ever gone into a store, and the, you know, person on the floor in that store, let's say it's a clothing store or other things like that, they want to come up and start talking to you about, you know, basically what they'll say is, can I help you, right?
00:03:41.250 --> 00:03:46.679 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And they might even start to… I was, I was actually, in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
00:03:46.720 --> 00:04:02.669 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: a few weeks ago with family, and we went into one of the many, many shoe stores at the outlet there, and there was this person who was trying to be very, very helpful, came up, was like, can I help you? We've got this, and we've got that, and everything. We're like, no, no, no, we're fine, we're fine.
00:04:02.710 --> 00:04:20.899 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So I think this is part of the reason why people are shying away from trying to get involved with salespeople too soon. Sometimes sales is pushy, and I know in, you know, maybe a business-to-consumer situation, such as a store that you walk into, they're just trying to be helpful.
00:04:21.050 --> 00:04:30.500 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: However, in other types of business, business-to-business environments, enterprise sales environments, the same thing is true.
00:04:30.740 --> 00:04:45.779 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Unfortunately, the client, the prospect, the customer, doesn't inherently trust the salesperson. It's just a reality. It's because of some experiences we've all had that might make us push away from that a little bit.
00:04:45.990 --> 00:04:48.489 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So what happens is, is that now.
00:04:48.560 --> 00:05:05.739 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Especially in business-to-business, but I'll boil it down even simpler than that. How many of you have ever wanted to buy a car, or wanted to move to a new house, or were researching an appliance, or something else like that? You know, we do tend to get online, right? Look things up.
00:05:05.740 --> 00:05:08.850 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: See what's available, compare prices.
00:05:09.060 --> 00:05:14.790 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Try to find out what the reviews are and all that, and I think that that's both good and bad.
00:05:15.020 --> 00:05:27.140 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, I think it's good, because now, with the entire internet, and of course with AI, we do have the opportunity to get tons of, you know, access to tons of information.
00:05:27.320 --> 00:05:47.020 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Years ago, it was probably more like word of mouth, and then eventually some information started to appear over the last, you know, whatever it's been now, 30 years, I guess, right? And slowly but surely, we've been getting more and more information. So that's good, because it lets you search without that pressure of talking with a salesperson. On the other hand.
00:05:47.360 --> 00:05:52.010 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: It's bad, potentially, because we don't know what we don't know.
00:05:52.790 --> 00:05:57.359 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So… We've all heard the expression, the customer's always right.
00:05:57.490 --> 00:05:58.530 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And…
00:05:58.740 --> 00:06:08.069 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: what I like to think about with that is a little bit of a flip and say, we want to make the customer right, but unfortunately, the customer is not always right.
00:06:08.130 --> 00:06:26.829 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: They don't know what they don't know, they might not know the right questions to ask, they might have a very narrow idea or only found out certain parts of information, and so, therefore, this self-directed research is potentially dangerous, or at least it might be not as fulfilling or helpful as it should be.
00:06:27.350 --> 00:06:28.210 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Now.
00:06:28.660 --> 00:06:35.540 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: sometimes when it comes to that type of research, again, it's AI. We all know AI can go kind of crazy. Have you ever…
00:06:35.620 --> 00:06:52.539 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: searched yourself on AI, like, go to ChatGPT and tell it to tell you about yourself, try it sometime. It's very interesting. I tried that, and even before my book came out, it said that I had written two books, and those books don't even exist in real life.
00:06:52.690 --> 00:07:08.739 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: It knows that I was involved with sales transformation stuff, so it had said I had won some awards, and those awards didn't even exist, and I was like, wow, I'm doing pretty good for myself. And by the way, it wasn't mistaking me for somebody else. It thought it was me, because I didn't find any references to that.
00:07:08.810 --> 00:07:23.230 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, the caution is, and some of the danger is, bad data and or AI that's not built correctly could be problematic. Now, as Anil will touch on when we talk after the commercial break in a little bit here.
00:07:23.570 --> 00:07:31.760 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: There's not only AI that you sort of self-serve, like ChatGPT, and you can ask it questions and all that, which is awesome, but be careful.
00:07:31.870 --> 00:07:36.570 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: There's also agentic AI, an AI that's an agent.
00:07:36.710 --> 00:07:41.199 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: and AI that's starting to replace agents. Now.
00:07:41.230 --> 00:07:53.389 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: The way this often shows up is with, like, maybe a help desk, and you're on the internet, and you think you're interacting with a person, but in reality, it could be an AI agent that looks like a person, and you've all seen
00:07:53.390 --> 00:08:04.669 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: the videos, and the crazy, amazing videos, and the pictures and other things that are AI, which look very real. And of course, a lot of movies are produced with AI. But the whole point is.
00:08:04.670 --> 00:08:17.750 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: If a company does want to service their customers better, and if customers don't want to talk to salespeople, because they don't inherently trust them, and they want to do research on their own, what can we do to make that research as
00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:30.300 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Best as possible, so that the client, the customer, can have the right amount of information, and when we start interacting with them, we can help them to be right, based on what they've found out.
00:08:30.560 --> 00:08:32.070 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, with…
00:08:32.190 --> 00:08:39.619 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: agentic AI, I think there's good and bad here as well, because the agent will be able to go and find out the information.
00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:54.269 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Companies who want to sell their products and offer their services can train those agents to do essentially what an upfront salesperson might do. So, a sales development representative, a business development representative.
00:08:54.370 --> 00:09:13.909 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Some of the cold calling, I know on LinkedIn, I'm constantly getting bombarded with, you know, hey, we can help you market your book, and hey, we can help you land more speeches, and all that stuff, because they know that's the stuff I do. And I know for a fact that those are AI agents, because a lot of them are very… well, yeah, they're probably AI. They're very generic.
00:09:14.240 --> 00:09:24.399 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Now, some are good, and some are bad. So, so good is that there's a lot more available. It's 24-7. It would allow you, if you have a sales team, to free up the team
00:09:24.400 --> 00:09:35.270 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: to do other things, potentially, or shift more of your resources to that point where the client does need to be engaged, and now you can make a richer experience of that. And certainly.
00:09:35.330 --> 00:09:45.249 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: One of the big themes of this show, and of my book, is client success, right? It's all about helping the client be successful, so we could put a lot more effort into that.
00:09:45.640 --> 00:09:52.080 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Once again, though, be careful as you're interacting with an agent, because
00:09:52.190 --> 00:09:59.990 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Depending on how well it's built, it might not have all the right information. And ultimately, with big decisions, a human needs to be involved.
00:10:00.320 --> 00:10:02.849 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, although we're not quite there yet.
00:10:03.040 --> 00:10:16.089 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Anil Shah and others like him. Now, Anil has a company called CloudFronts, and they are leading the charge with both Microsoft Cloud solutions, and also
00:10:16.150 --> 00:10:24.829 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: just recently, and congratulation goes out for becoming a Databricks partner as well. Companies like that can start to help.
00:10:25.100 --> 00:10:44.520 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Now, what does this mean? It means automated demo systems, even as we as customers are interacting with these systems, be aware that information is being gathered, and rightly so, because now, if you're a salesperson, and you know somebody has interacted with your agent, or interacted with your automated demo system.
00:10:45.040 --> 00:10:55.159 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: and you can understand what that information is, it's super valuable when you then meet the customer face-to-face, or through virtual technology like Zoom or whatever.
00:10:55.500 --> 00:11:00.599 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Why it's important is because in order to have clients that are successful.
00:11:00.930 --> 00:11:08.330 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: We need to address their needs. They need to see value. If they don't see value, they're not going to continue to buy from you.
00:11:08.960 --> 00:11:24.859 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: in order to see value, as we talked about on previous shows, and on my first show, I went into this in some detail, it's the overlap of the client's needs, and what you provide as a solution, and where that overlap is, is where value will be seen. I hit my microphone, sorry about that.
00:11:25.270 --> 00:11:33.020 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And so value is seen at that overlap. That means we need to really understand a lot about the needs. What is it they're trying to do?
00:11:33.490 --> 00:11:49.640 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: If we don't understand their needs, we cannot propose a solution. That's where all these AI systems can come into play. That's where, for all of you that are in sales and using a CRM system, like Dynamics or Salesforce or whatever, that's where those systems are supposed to help you.
00:11:49.910 --> 00:11:54.529 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And Anil, as you'll hear, specializes in helping companies
00:11:54.660 --> 00:12:14.039 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: be able to give you a system that's going to be helpful. My methods are all about helping sales to sell. So now we have that information of what happened left in the sales process, or the buying process, right? What did the buyer do prior to getting engaged with you? And then what is it that you can help them with based on what you found out.
00:12:14.320 --> 00:12:21.130 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: That can help you implement what they need, and allow them to get a solution that's gonna be of more value to them.
00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:31.260 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, as we come up on the commercial break, I want you to be thinking about your situation. What have your experiences been like?
00:12:31.510 --> 00:12:37.440 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Working with and trying to avoid a salesperson, and yet, what could these systems do to help you out with
00:12:37.550 --> 00:12:42.330 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Having a great experience when you do meet with the salesperson.
00:12:42.540 --> 00:12:58.009 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Make sure you share with them what you've learned. And they should have the resources and information to get you started, and then dig deeper with you on your real needs, so that you can have a solution that will satisfy your outcomes. So, when I was in that shoe store.
00:12:58.330 --> 00:13:12.689 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: You know, although we're talking about a live person, but just as a sales situation, it would have been really helpful for that person to say, hey, tell me a little bit about what you do. What type of activities do you like? That's what the agent should be doing.
00:13:12.770 --> 00:13:22.350 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: An AI agent that's proper should be asking questions that are geared toward what your needs are, so that you can find out and tell them the things that you actually need.
00:13:22.380 --> 00:13:35.609 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Alright, so we're gonna go to a commercial break here. When we come back, we're gonna meet Anil, and we'll talk more about this subject and dig into the app and other things regarding making seamless sales. So we'll see you back in a couple minutes.
00:15:48.370 --> 00:15:50.949 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Alright, everybody, welcome back.
00:15:51.270 --> 00:15:55.990 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Welcome back, and I'd like to welcome… My guest…
00:15:56.300 --> 00:16:12.820 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Anil Shah. So, Anil, hello, and welcome to the show. Very, very quickly, let me just introduce Anil. Anil's the CEO of CloudFronts, which is a global AI-first Microsoft and Databricks solution provider.
00:16:13.080 --> 00:16:29.360 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: They are a partner for business applications, data, and AI. And Anil has over 20 years of experience with the Microsoft ecosystem. He's helped organizations, including me, which we'll talk about, deploy and optimize Microsoft solutions to drive business growth.
00:16:29.640 --> 00:16:49.259 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Under Anil's leadership, CloudFronts has become a go-to partner for medium and small-sized businesses looking to modernize operations, connect systems, and prepare their data for the AI-driven future. So, warm welcome to my friend and partner, Anil. So glad that you're able to join me here.
00:16:49.260 --> 00:16:50.630 Anil Shah: Better be… happy to be here.
00:16:50.840 --> 00:17:04.630 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yes, thanks, and thanks for joining us right now, even though we're recording this, it's still a little bit late there in India, and I know we wouldn't have been able to have you live on the show, but I really wanted to get you on because of what you're doing in the industry.
00:17:04.630 --> 00:17:12.729 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: your new acquisition, well, becoming, not acquisition, becoming a partner of Databricks, which is huge, so congratulations on that.
00:17:12.730 --> 00:17:15.579 Anil Shah: Thank you. And, to share with the audience.
00:17:15.579 --> 00:17:32.810 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: a little bit about the way you started CloudFronts, and then some of the things we did together, and even the way that you applied some of the things that you learned in our partnership that you used within your business. So, if you don't mind, can you just start with a quick summary of
00:17:32.820 --> 00:17:37.389 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: you know, how did you start CloudFronts, and how did you get to where you are today?
00:17:38.360 --> 00:17:43.800 Anil Shah: … So I've, you know, as Art, you said, I've spent 20 years in the industry.
00:17:44.020 --> 00:17:46.500 Anil Shah: I'm still young. …
00:17:46.610 --> 00:17:55.689 Anil Shah: And, my first 10 years were working in the Microsoft Partners ecosystem in New York, and then I decided to take the leap of becoming an entrepreneur and saying, you know what?
00:17:55.930 --> 00:18:04.089 Anil Shah: It looks like the ecosystem is gonna change from on-premise systems to cloud systems, and I decided to move back to India, start my company.
00:18:04.270 --> 00:18:06.650 Anil Shah: I also have a company in the US, …
00:18:06.780 --> 00:18:14.330 Anil Shah: And, I've been helping customers in the Microsoft ecosystem get the most value out of their business systems deployments.
00:18:14.570 --> 00:18:22.609 Anil Shah: And now it looks like my next journey will be taking that further by connecting their systems and getting their data ready for AI adoption.
00:18:23.890 --> 00:18:37.249 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Right, so that speaks to the, what I was talking about during the preview there that you're listening to about the data integrity and things like that. So just talk for a moment about how important that is and how you're helping your clients.
00:18:38.440 --> 00:18:47.679 Anil Shah: So, look, you know, agents, agentic AI, all of that, hallucinations, you know, it's a word we've known since kids, but now we have a different context for that word.
00:18:48.230 --> 00:18:52.829 Anil Shah: But we know that enterprise organizations want to get
00:18:52.980 --> 00:18:59.740 Anil Shah: Travel that journey to, let's say, prescriptive analytics and automated decision-making, or some of the mundane things.
00:19:00.060 --> 00:19:06.569 Anil Shah: The foundation of that, as per the data and AI maturity curve, is clean data.
00:19:07.590 --> 00:19:19.219 Anil Shah: Clean data means data integrity, data security, data reliability, you know, simple things like the duplication of data. But all of this gives rise to data that's reliable for me to perform
00:19:19.370 --> 00:19:25.730 Anil Shah: All the way to automated decision making. To Travis that journey, you need your data to be reliable, and that's…
00:19:25.880 --> 00:19:28.750 Anil Shah: I define that as sort of the data integrity question.
00:19:29.030 --> 00:19:31.949 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yep, gigo, right? Garbage in, garbage out.
00:19:31.950 --> 00:19:33.680 Anil Shah: Garbage in, garbage out, right?
00:19:33.730 --> 00:19:40.259 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I remember that from decades ago, when we were implementing relational databases and things. It's like, it's all about the data.
00:19:40.330 --> 00:19:58.509 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, just to preview a little bit as we move into how you helped me, and then how what you learned helped you, the way we met, actually, and I'll go into this a little bit further in my final segment as well, but the way we met was because in 2016,
00:19:58.590 --> 00:20:05.690 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I was asked by Peter… I know, can you believe it? I was asked by Peter Comey, is that 9 years ago? How's that possible?
00:20:05.850 --> 00:20:25.739 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I know, I know. I was asked by Peter Cohan, who is the author of Great Demo, to become a certified Great Demo Partner. And coincidentally enough, Peter had told me that there was a company in New York City called AKA who was potentially wanting to talk with me about doing some Great Demo stuff.
00:20:25.820 --> 00:20:32.280 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, as I did my research on them, I found out that AKA did Dynamics 365 stuff.
00:20:32.370 --> 00:20:37.719 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And coincidentally, at the same time, I was looking for somebody to develop an app
00:20:37.920 --> 00:20:40.980 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: For the sales opportunity snapshot methodology.
00:20:41.240 --> 00:20:51.629 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: on Dynamics 365. I mean, this all happened within, like, 2 months of each other. So, instead of me, you know, having potentially that
00:20:51.680 --> 00:21:03.320 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: company as a client, I wound up becoming your client. So what was the connection between you, you and AKA, and how did I wind up with you? And then we can talk more about the rest of the journey from there.
00:21:04.410 --> 00:21:13.690 Anil Shah: It's funny how things connect in life, the degrees of separation we have. But AKA was… I worked with AKA as my last job in New York City. I worked with them for many years.
00:21:13.860 --> 00:21:19.299 Anil Shah: I kind of build out their CRM practice, while Microsoft was transitioning from on-premise to cloud.
00:21:19.390 --> 00:21:34.570 Anil Shah: Then I moved back, but I did keep in touch with them. I was still doing some projects with them, and then what happened is, I think when you reached out to them for app development, they said, you know what, Neil's company will be ideal for app development, because it's one of their focus on dynamics, especially in the cloud.
00:21:34.930 --> 00:21:39.250 Anil Shah: And that led to your introduction, and I guess the rest is history.
00:21:39.660 --> 00:21:40.720 Anil Shah: Yes.
00:21:40.720 --> 00:21:48.209 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, what Anil helped do was turn what used to be a Excel spreadsheet that implemented the SOS methodology that we
00:21:48.780 --> 00:22:04.659 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: districts about, and put it inside the CRM system, to allow salespeople to be in the CRM, to be using something that actually helped them to sell, because SOS is a proven methodology, you know, for whatever
00:22:04.840 --> 00:22:13.590 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: 12 years prior to that. And then now, the good news is, the tool they were using was in the CRM, so that it allowed them, and again, back to data integrity.
00:22:13.590 --> 00:22:27.459 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: It's real data, it's live data, it's objective data based on the methodology, and now it's embedded into the environment. So that's what the app did. Describe with me briefly, describe with everybody that's listening briefly.
00:22:27.460 --> 00:22:42.200 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: what your process is around, you know, what we went through and what you go through today with helping people implement AI that allows you to, you know, achieve the results that we're able to get, and maybe some of those results that you get for your clients. What does that look like?
00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:50.750 Anil Shah: … I'll go back a little bit around, you know, this… sales SOS and Great Demo.
00:22:50.860 --> 00:22:53.610 Anil Shah: they became the foundation of how I… I…
00:22:53.940 --> 00:23:01.290 Anil Shah: figured out how to put customer first and how to sell. And today, with, let's say, adoption of AI,
00:23:01.480 --> 00:23:16.109 Anil Shah: customers don't want you to teach them a lot of stuff. It seems that people are doing their research and then coming to you, and so your first call is, like, maybe your fourth call otherwise, in a traditional sales mindset.
00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:33.770 Anil Shah: So we're getting onto these first calls with a lot of knowledge from the customer side. It's just… it already happened in B2C sales, where we all do our research from the phones we want to buy, for the laptops we want to buy at home, and then we go to the shop to, you know, to finish that journey, or we might go to Amazon or something.
00:23:33.910 --> 00:23:46.489 Anil Shah: But it's happening in B2B sales as well, so if they're coming for AI, they want that first call to be, like, that fourth or fifth call, so they want sales and pre-sales to be ready, they want us to have done their research, and so…
00:23:46.720 --> 00:24:00.379 Anil Shah: if we really know our stuff, then if we know our value prop, then we're getting on those calls, ready with all of that information, and so it allows them to see if we can really help them. Otherwise, you, to be honest.
00:24:00.610 --> 00:24:02.189 Anil Shah: Might not get the second call.
00:24:02.580 --> 00:24:21.240 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yeah, exactly. So, what's… is there a very quick example? I know you probably can't mention client names, but what would it… what's a use case, sort of, for how you help your clients and, you know, finding out the requirements, and then what… what do they benefit out of the solutions that you're providing to them?
00:24:21.410 --> 00:24:33.320 Anil Shah: So, you know, we're deploying Microsoft Business Solutions, we are connecting systems, and getting their data ready now. That's the new journey for AI. So these are the three parts of our journey, but
00:24:33.590 --> 00:24:47.440 Anil Shah: Up until now, up until AI, this was all deploying business solutions and connecting systems, the two main things we do for our customers. Now, we have customers in mid-market, small customers, mid-market customers in manufacturing, services, financial services.
00:24:47.580 --> 00:24:56.979 Anil Shah: And for all these customers, they want to implement their business solutions on top of the systems, whether it's sales, whether it's customer service, whether it is ERP, you know.
00:24:57.350 --> 00:25:02.519 Anil Shah: Manufacturing, supply chain, and they want all of this data to talk to each other.
00:25:02.610 --> 00:25:21.870 Anil Shah: So that their people have the right information to do their jobs. You mentioned 2016 is when we met each other. I know a customer in 2016 who's still a customer today, so it's been a decade with them. When we were starting to implement some of the systems, literally their service manager would get a printout of the service order and walk over to the desk of the
00:25:21.980 --> 00:25:27.579 Anil Shah: purchasing payments, and then they would enter it in the ERP system, and today it's all connected.
00:25:27.720 --> 00:25:29.450 Anil Shah: So thank you, so….
00:25:29.610 --> 00:25:35.790 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Many customers probably had, like, many of those systems that they were looking around at and things like that.
00:25:36.260 --> 00:25:37.560 Anil Shah: They did, yeah?
00:25:37.560 --> 00:25:43.319 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Very difficult. And so, when they do that, what types of benefits do they get out of it when you help them with
00:25:43.880 --> 00:25:45.570 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Implementing these systems.
00:25:47.000 --> 00:26:06.320 Anil Shah: Number one is just efficiencies. If I have access to the data I need, you are in some other department, but I need the data from your department to come onto my department, then I can actually… I don't have to wait to do my job. So it… the organization can move that much faster, whether it is when you receive a customer order, or when you want to ship out something.
00:26:06.500 --> 00:26:11.560 Anil Shah: These connective systems then allow them to get access to that info …
00:26:12.440 --> 00:26:19.189 Anil Shah: And it is not dependent on some other person, or some of the team member who might not be there, or who might be busy with something else.
00:26:19.380 --> 00:26:35.539 Anil Shah: Allows your organization to move faster, allows your organization then to have these systems as the foundation of how they… they would then grow their enterprise, or if they have a change in manpower, they have a change in growth, they might… anything else they do, this becomes the foundation of that growth.
00:26:35.680 --> 00:26:42.540 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Okay, and then you're helping to put the agentic AI, potentially, on top of parts of that, is that right?
00:26:42.540 --> 00:26:45.009 Anil Shah: So that, conversations are starting now.
00:26:45.210 --> 00:26:50.370 Anil Shah: One of our manufacturing customers in Pennsylvania, actually. I see you're in Pittsburgh.
00:26:50.460 --> 00:27:02.209 Anil Shah: One of our manufacturing customers has all of this, you know, infrastructure in the cloud. All of their systems are connected, they have manufacturing operations in Pennsylvania, in the UK, India, in China, you know, mid-market company.
00:27:02.240 --> 00:27:11.389 Anil Shah: But today, because their systems are connected, they're talking to us about some of these agentic AI, or AI use cases. For example, they want salespeople to talk to an agent.
00:27:11.400 --> 00:27:24.510 Anil Shah: AI agent, and say, hey, what's the status of this particular purchase or sales order? And it would go into the system, check it, and then say, hey, by the way, it looks like the production is delayed, and it looks like the parts were not placed and ordered, the raw materials, so…
00:27:24.580 --> 00:27:27.350 Anil Shah: It looks like it's gonna be delayed, why don't you talk to the customer?
00:27:27.580 --> 00:27:28.779 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Mmm, okay.
00:27:28.780 --> 00:27:39.669 Anil Shah: And … or it's when you're getting onto a sales cycle, it's actually telling you, hey, this order, typical time frames are 30 days, but it looks like our production is behind schedule. It's gonna take you 45 days, so don't commit to 30 days.
00:27:40.440 --> 00:27:51.209 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Okay, so not only using it for potentially serving information to a client through some demo automation or other type of systems which are using some of that, but then definitely inside.
00:27:51.470 --> 00:27:52.170 Anil Shah: Inside the system.
00:27:52.170 --> 00:28:02.129 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: That agent becomes an agent to the salesperson to help them with what they're doing, and sort through the data, right? Instead of them trying to sort through it and see things they couldn't even see.
00:28:02.420 --> 00:28:09.950 Anil Shah: Correct, and what we see happening… so this is sales. It can… it can happen to… in my company, it happens to developers, so they have this agent next to them.
00:28:10.070 --> 00:28:12.610 Anil Shah: Who can actually guide them on best practices.
00:28:12.790 --> 00:28:24.679 Anil Shah: So it's your co-pilot, it's your agent next to you. So I can see how this would proliferate, and you… just like how we chat with each other, you might end up chatting with agents more than actually going inside the system and doing a lot of stuff.
00:28:24.920 --> 00:28:30.229 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Got it. And it's interesting you use the word co-pilot, because that's what Microsoft calls it, right?
00:28:30.440 --> 00:28:31.360 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: It took me some time.
00:28:31.360 --> 00:28:33.599 Anil Shah: to figure out that Copilot is the
00:28:33.850 --> 00:28:35.279 Anil Shah: The pilot next to the pilot.
00:28:35.550 --> 00:28:48.519 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: There you go. So, as we get ready to come up to the commercial break, and after the break, we'll get into this a little more. For me, the result working with you, Anil, was an amazing and beautiful SOS for D365 app.
00:28:48.520 --> 00:28:59.340 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: They completely mimicked and represented the same thing the sales teams that I had been working with had been doing in the Excel spreadsheet. They were able to immediately go over, but now it's embedded in the CRM.
00:28:59.340 --> 00:29:13.320 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And in fact, when you saw it, and we'll talk more about this after the break, you dubbed it the missing link of CRM. So maybe after the break, we can talk a little more about that, because you, as I said, are helping companies with their sales, but using
00:29:14.080 --> 00:29:21.640 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And so what we'll dig into after the break is the way you use some of these methods to help you with the way you sold, and then even.
00:29:21.640 --> 00:29:22.750 Anil Shah: 100%.
00:29:22.750 --> 00:29:29.720 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And things like that. So, we will be back in a couple minutes, and we'll continue with our discussion with Anil Shah.
00:29:30.070 --> 00:29:31.400 Anil Shah: Alright, talk to you in a minute.
00:31:38.010 --> 00:31:45.410 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Alright, everybody, welcome back. We're talking with Anil Shah of CloudFronts, who was instrumental.
00:31:45.520 --> 00:31:59.060 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: in helping me to develop, well, they developed it for me, the app, which has now been in production since 2017, and utilizes and implements the Sales Opportunity Snapshot methodology.
00:31:59.170 --> 00:32:13.939 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Now, as part of… we were just talking about the fact, Neil, that, you know, with all the things you do, and how you help all your clients and all that with their sales stuff and with their CRMs, you also use sales methodologies, and you sell, and…
00:32:14.010 --> 00:32:22.370 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: you know, especially the nature of what you do, I'm sure that there's a lot of technical detail involved, and also, of course, the business outcomes, and…
00:32:22.540 --> 00:32:28.679 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: like all of us, the goal is client success, so that you have people coming back for more. So…
00:32:29.050 --> 00:32:40.049 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Can you just describe for us briefly what were some of the challenges, maybe, as you were building the business, that your team faced when it came to sales? And then we'll talk a little bit about the way that
00:32:40.050 --> 00:32:49.300 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Perhaps SOS and Gray Demo helped with that, but initially, what set up the problem statement for us of some of the challenges that you ran into that you were trying to solve yourself?
00:32:50.150 --> 00:32:50.850 Anil Shah: …
00:32:51.080 --> 00:32:55.700 Anil Shah: Well, first I'll say that I've been doing this for, what, 10, 12 years now, running my own business.
00:32:55.980 --> 00:33:01.220 Anil Shah: And, sales is just as hard today as it used to be when I started.
00:33:01.570 --> 00:33:07.490 Anil Shah: … And, … When you start your company, you…
00:33:07.830 --> 00:33:09.480 Anil Shah: Your job is to win deals.
00:33:09.820 --> 00:33:13.739 Anil Shah: But you don't have a process, you don't have a methodology to do it.
00:33:14.880 --> 00:33:24.610 Anil Shah: You just try everything you can, and you don't know what to focus on, you don't know what's a good opportunity, you don't know how to qualify, you don't know what's your value prop.
00:33:24.850 --> 00:33:37.359 Anil Shah: you don't know a lot of these things. You don't know why somebody wants to buy from you. Do they really need that thing, or do they nearly need your solution? You know, which is not cheap, so it's expensive solutions.
00:33:37.500 --> 00:33:40.270 Anil Shah: And you don't know a lot of these things, so you…
00:33:40.510 --> 00:33:43.879 Anil Shah: And yet, you just don't know which question to ask.
00:33:44.230 --> 00:33:48.789 Anil Shah: And, you learn over time, but, …
00:33:49.180 --> 00:33:52.799 Anil Shah: It would help to have some process.
00:33:53.050 --> 00:34:04.249 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yeah, because you have great solutions, you have amazing things you could do, and the tendency is to, like, show what you have, because you believe on the strength of your offer.
00:34:04.250 --> 00:34:13.549 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Why wouldn't people want to sign up for it? Correct, correct. And then you can wind up chasing after a bunch of things that aren't necessarily as well aligned as you thought that they were.
00:34:13.770 --> 00:34:33.150 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, when it comes to the, you know, once we got together and, you know, you saw the sales opportunity snapshot, as I mentioned before the break, you mentioned that that seemed to be, like, the missing link of CRM. What was it about SOS that seemed to be the missing link of CRM, and then
00:34:33.150 --> 00:34:40.660 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: what are some things that, maybe for you, we'll start out with you. How did implementing some of that and the gray demo pieces
00:34:40.719 --> 00:34:46.940 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Help you and your team to overcome some of these tendencies that, you know, and challenges that you are facing.
00:34:49.350 --> 00:34:56.889 Anil Shah: to be honest, SOS is everything that a CRM sales module needs to be.
00:34:57.520 --> 00:35:00.749 Anil Shah: Without it, traditional CRM systems.
00:35:01.010 --> 00:35:02.930 Anil Shah: I just stayed at repositories.
00:35:03.590 --> 00:35:06.720 Anil Shah: Salespeople are entering data, tracking some notes.
00:35:07.200 --> 00:35:13.580 Anil Shah: And that's really it. And so, then you're talking every Tuesday, or every Monday, or whenever you have your sales meeting, and it's all…
00:35:13.720 --> 00:35:15.070 Anil Shah: Subjective data.
00:35:15.990 --> 00:35:22.170 Anil Shah: You don't know what to qualify. You could have 100 opportunities. Which ones… which ones to focus on? Should you hire 100 salespeople?
00:35:22.640 --> 00:35:33.180 Anil Shah: Because you know not everything's gonna close at the same time, so what to focus on, what not to focus on, how to qualify. A CRM system misses that… is… has that missing link.
00:35:33.570 --> 00:35:38.490 Anil Shah: which is… which is filled by… SOS.
00:35:38.930 --> 00:35:44.510 Anil Shah: I'm very grateful, actually, for that particular solution or methodology to be inside of Dynamics today.
00:35:44.900 --> 00:35:49.959 Anil Shah: … And, you know, one of these… this concentric circles.
00:35:50.250 --> 00:35:54.390 Anil Shah: of SOS, right? And one of the main questions, for example.
00:35:55.230 --> 00:35:58.870 Anil Shah: what's the driving reason for change? What's our specific value prop?
00:35:59.130 --> 00:36:02.179 Anil Shah: You know, are we connected to the right or relevant executive?
00:36:02.320 --> 00:36:06.009 Anil Shah: You see, you… you bring, you operationalize sales.
00:36:06.390 --> 00:36:08.669 Anil Shah: And you bring a methodology to the madness.
00:36:08.930 --> 00:36:12.330 Anil Shah: … And I think it puts you in a very different league.
00:36:12.540 --> 00:36:14.900 Anil Shah: You improve your win rate.
00:36:16.630 --> 00:36:19.099 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yeah, and because the thing is with
00:36:19.500 --> 00:36:31.629 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: CRM systems, and by the way, on one of my future shows, and I have Chris Smith now, who wrote… who is the methodology, this black book that I have over here, it says CRMs… your CRM shouldn't suck.
00:36:31.630 --> 00:36:32.909 Anil Shah: Yeah, I'm stuck, that is correct.
00:36:33.640 --> 00:36:35.219 Anil Shah: People hate CRM systems, correct.
00:36:35.220 --> 00:36:41.579 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: They hate CRM systems, but it's supposed to help them. The reason they hate it, usually, is because it's mainly for the purpose of management to.
00:36:41.580 --> 00:36:42.320 Anil Shah: Yes.
00:36:42.320 --> 00:36:52.230 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: do the forecasting and stuff like that, so they sort of force salespeople to put the stuff in there. Salespeople resent that, it's not accurate, like you said, and a lot of times it's last minute.
00:36:52.280 --> 00:37:10.240 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So the fact that it's embedded in there is a key aspect of it, and it would help you to do the proper qualification and things like that. So I love that you said that it's the missing link of CRM, and believe me, I've used that many times and attributed it back to you.
00:37:10.240 --> 00:37:25.019 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I think very closely related to that, too, and there's so many things that are so closely related. That's part of why I wrote the book, was to, you know, Steve, Steve Bistress's SOS parts are in there, and, you know, Peter Cohan.
00:37:25.120 --> 00:37:39.919 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Great demo parts are in there, and John Kerr, Mastering Technical Sales, and then some of my methodology, because it's really the best of all blends together, and this is where the concept of seamless sales comes in. And you were one of the very first people, Anil, to…
00:37:39.930 --> 00:37:52.339 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: confirm that the idea of the SE and the AM working together seamlessly and seamless sales. We talked about that when we met in Las Vegas in 19… er, yeah, 19, in 2018.
00:37:52.500 --> 00:38:04.349 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Not long after we met, and we went together, and we presented together, and you said, yeah, seamless sales, that has a real ring to it, and I want to thank you for that, because it has been a big theme, and it's very important.
00:38:04.530 --> 00:38:12.100 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So what do you think for your clients, how does the… when you're doing this approach, and when you're using
00:38:12.170 --> 00:38:28.129 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: some of these methods, and also all the goodness. I mean, I'm not taking credit for your business by any means, because it's just an enabler for you, but what are you seeing for your clients and for you in terms of the success that you need to get out of them, you know, that you want to help them with?
00:38:28.230 --> 00:38:30.040 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: How are these things helping with that?
00:38:30.840 --> 00:38:38.309 Anil Shah: Look, I'm an engineer by education, and so this brings… oh, you are good. This brings….
00:38:38.310 --> 00:38:40.979 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I like to say a recovering… recovering engineer, you know?
00:38:41.780 --> 00:38:46.089 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I keep it in the box, but when I need to, I get it out of the box.
00:38:46.500 --> 00:38:55.579 Anil Shah: And… and we like to look… we look at things in kind of a process mindset, and this allows this to really happen.
00:38:55.790 --> 00:38:59.330 Anil Shah: For our customers in our own sales cycle. …
00:39:00.450 --> 00:39:05.250 Anil Shah: every Tuesday, we still run our sales cycle, and the very first question of all the opportunities is.
00:39:05.500 --> 00:39:16.290 Anil Shah: what's the driving reason for change? We always talk about that first. Are we connected to the right people, the influence map, and all the good stuff. In terms of us selling to our customers,
00:39:16.480 --> 00:39:21.580 Anil Shah: We… you said Peter Cohen's Great Demo. We used the Great Demo Situation Slide.
00:39:21.990 --> 00:39:38.029 Anil Shah: is something we live by. It has actually gone further into the organization, so if you have a project management conflict, we say, let's start with the situation slide. Everything starts with a situation slide now. So it actually has roots in different parts of my company, and
00:39:38.180 --> 00:39:49.919 Anil Shah: our clients see us working in this manner, and I know customers who've actually implemented a lot of our sales and other processes into their, sort of, you know, small and mid-market organizations, because they realize.
00:39:49.920 --> 00:39:53.150 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: It brings this kind of visibility into what's happening.
00:39:53.150 --> 00:40:01.000 Anil Shah: within the organization, from the time somebody comes… a lead or a prospect walks in to… to when they build their customer, so we find that it's actually…
00:40:01.200 --> 00:40:05.840 Anil Shah: … Becomes… they see their businesses becoming seamless.
00:40:06.610 --> 00:40:24.640 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Yeah, well, and this, you know, really this gets back to data again, doesn't it? Because if the data that we're using in a sales engagement is not properly vetted and understood in discovery, and then you mentioned the situation slide, which is the summary of discovery, and it's also the kickoff
00:40:24.980 --> 00:40:35.469 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: for when you meet with a client. How do you think that that helps with you confirming the data and the way that that benefits both you and the customer as that sort of
00:40:35.780 --> 00:40:39.679 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: starting point for your presentation and the summary of discovery.
00:40:40.350 --> 00:40:48.140 Anil Shah: Look, when we're getting on these calls, to… to either demo or to do our discovery, or we've done our discovery and get to a demo.
00:40:48.510 --> 00:40:53.400 Anil Shah: You're meeting usually with senior executives, who have a limited amount of time.
00:40:53.740 --> 00:40:58.460 Anil Shah: That particular slide, the situation slide as we call it, which basically…
00:40:58.820 --> 00:41:04.199 Anil Shah: What's the current issue, what's the goal, and what's gonna happen once you're, you know, done with all of this?
00:41:04.630 --> 00:41:10.470 Anil Shah: We get everybody's agreement on that slide, and it actually brings everybody's attention to, yup, they got it.
00:41:10.970 --> 00:41:17.380 Anil Shah: And then, Great Demo has another thing that says, Do the last thing first.
00:41:18.630 --> 00:41:30.119 Anil Shah: And… which means you've… executives have limited time, you got their attention, focus on what really matters, and that's also part of that methodology. And by doing that, we actually improve our win rates.
00:41:30.350 --> 00:41:37.479 Anil Shah: And we get that feedback consistently. That the questions you guys ask, and eventually what you show to us.
00:41:37.770 --> 00:41:39.020 Anil Shah: is…
00:41:39.890 --> 00:41:46.689 Anil Shah: Very few or no company does that with us in our… in sort of the, you know, the companies we work with in the partner ecosystem, and…
00:41:46.940 --> 00:41:49.430 Anil Shah: That we find, …
00:41:49.600 --> 00:41:54.829 Anil Shah: kind of a validation or a QA check, yep, we're on the right track. And I just want to say something very important here.
00:41:55.120 --> 00:41:57.399 Anil Shah: There's another word called the march…
00:41:58.170 --> 00:42:01.909 Anil Shah: the click march of death or something, by doing a great demo.
00:42:02.110 --> 00:42:11.490 Anil Shah: We don't do the clicks and whatnots and the screen loadings and whatnot, and that process really flows smoothly. And I have not had anybody tell me, hey, can we go look at a live system?
00:42:12.420 --> 00:42:16.300 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Wow. Yeah, so they… you brought it to life for them in that.
00:42:16.740 --> 00:42:18.250 Anil Shah: Yes. Yes.
00:42:18.570 --> 00:42:23.160 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And again, the tendency might be to want to deep dive …
00:42:23.840 --> 00:42:29.420 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: What this, you know, being on… knowing that they know that you are on their page.
00:42:29.560 --> 00:42:33.180 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So that they know that what you're showing really is what they care about.
00:42:33.180 --> 00:42:33.850 Anil Shah: Yes.
00:42:34.530 --> 00:42:47.269 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: As opposed to the person that walks up to you in the store and starts to point out, well, we have this, we have this, we have this, we have this. It's like, well, I don't want any of that stuff. This is the thing I want, so let's start with what I'm trying to do, and then we can talk about where we go from there.
00:42:47.470 --> 00:42:48.340 Anil Shah: Awesome.
00:42:48.590 --> 00:42:49.300 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: …
00:42:49.400 --> 00:43:05.960 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, just finishing up here, kind of putting a wrap around this, and thanks so much again for being here. It's been an absolute joy, and so great for you to share, you know, how you can help others and things like that. Just one more minute of your thoughts for the vision.
00:43:05.960 --> 00:43:12.100 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: For the future of sales working together seamlessly, especially in light of agentic AI and
00:43:12.100 --> 00:43:15.380 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: the way that you're positioned as a Microsoft and Databricks partner.
00:43:15.410 --> 00:43:18.050 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: What are your thoughts on that as we finish off?
00:43:18.530 --> 00:43:23.160 Anil Shah: You know, you said something important, that the human element is very essential.
00:43:23.530 --> 00:43:26.229 Anil Shah: In, in our sales cycle.
00:43:27.410 --> 00:43:35.959 Anil Shah: we can use Agentic AI as sort of, you know, something that adds to your sales cycle. You can get some of the demo stuff, et cetera, ready earlier, and whatnot.
00:43:36.100 --> 00:43:39.059 Anil Shah: But you do need this methodology, and
00:43:39.240 --> 00:43:48.989 Anil Shah: By having the sales and pre-sales work together, you get to that first conversation that the customer wants to… you to get to faster.
00:43:49.820 --> 00:43:53.929 Anil Shah: They don't want you to waste time in… it seems there's a trend now.
00:43:54.170 --> 00:44:03.100 Anil Shah: customers don't want you to waste a lot of time doing discovery. They need you to know their industry, they need you to know some of the stuff that they want early on before you get on a call, which means…
00:44:03.230 --> 00:44:07.450 Anil Shah: Aligning AE and the account manager and your pre-sales together
00:44:07.690 --> 00:44:10.519 Anil Shah: Or maybe this rolls merge, we never know.
00:44:10.800 --> 00:44:12.849 Anil Shah: It's gonna be essential.
00:44:13.110 --> 00:44:17.910 Anil Shah: And these tools help you stay with your win rates.
00:44:18.190 --> 00:44:20.450 Anil Shah: Otherwise, you might see things keep dropping.
00:44:21.260 --> 00:44:26.849 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Awesome. Well, thanks again. Really quickly, how can anybody contact you to learn more about your services?
00:44:27.320 --> 00:44:33.780 Anil Shah: Definitely, you can… my company's CloudFronts, and you can reach out, to me at asha at cloudfronts.com.
00:44:33.890 --> 00:44:39.759 Anil Shah: Or transform at cloudfunds.com, or go to our website, www.cloudfronts.com.
00:44:40.240 --> 00:44:53.280 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Alright, thank you so much, Anil. Really appreciate it, and everybody, tons of takeaways there for how you can model what's going on, and also look at ways to improve your environment. So, thank you so much.
00:44:53.430 --> 00:44:55.239 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And, looking forward.
00:44:55.240 --> 00:44:55.630 Anil Shah: Pleasure.
00:44:55.630 --> 00:44:56.930 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: to work together.
00:44:57.400 --> 00:44:58.750 Anil Shah: Pleasure, sir. Take care.
00:46:49.250 --> 00:47:05.149 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: All right, welcome back, everybody. So great to have Anil share with us, the ways that he's helping with the next generation of development for sales teams, for organizations all across different verticals.
00:47:06.590 --> 00:47:17.459 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I want to shift now to the… what I had been calling the Dear Artie segment, which is patterned after the Dear Abby, if anybody's familiar with the
00:47:17.810 --> 00:47:25.319 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Columnist who used to take You know, life problems that people were having, and they would ask this person.
00:47:25.540 --> 00:47:45.060 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Dear Abby, so the Dear Artie is about bringing your sales situations, and I'm very open to hearing what you have. You can go to the Teamsalesdevelopment.com website, and go to the contact page, and just put in there a sales situation if you need some help with it, and I'd be glad to, of course, anonymously, if you so choose.
00:47:45.060 --> 00:47:53.269 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: cover that on a future show. Also, you can always reach out to me directly so that I can help you with situations that you're in.
00:47:53.380 --> 00:48:01.329 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: The… today, I wanted to just pivot off of what Anil and I were talking about with the way that we met
00:48:01.660 --> 00:48:04.690 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: through the fact that initially I thought.
00:48:04.850 --> 00:48:15.039 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: you know, where he used to work was going to be my great demo client, and then I… because I was looking for Dynamics 365 development, they pointed me to Anil, and then…
00:48:15.040 --> 00:48:28.270 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: you know, starting in 2017, I was able to put this app into production, but I want to back up a little bit and tell you the situation leading up to the need for me to develop the app, and I think this is a case study in
00:48:28.270 --> 00:48:39.699 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: how to apply some of the concepts, such as Sales Opportunity Snapshot and some of the great demo concepts as well. So, what happened was that I had a long-time client
00:48:39.770 --> 00:48:42.100 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Who, in 2015,
00:48:42.530 --> 00:48:59.939 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So I had had them as a client for 10 years already, in 2015, and at that time, there was a wholesale management change from the CEO right through the VP of Sales, and my main contact was the VP of Sales, although previously I had, from the very beginning.
00:48:59.940 --> 00:49:16.409 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: contact with the CEO, because he had really started the whole implementation. And the implementation was primarily all of the pieces of my consultative sales curriculum. So it was the sales opportunity snapshot, selling to executives, and Steve and I talked about that a few shows ago.
00:49:16.410 --> 00:49:26.810 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: on episode… on episode 2. Also, my customer buying process workshop, and a financial selling workshop, so that was kind of the four things that they were going through.
00:49:26.810 --> 00:49:45.250 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: For 10 years, and they knew that it improved their win rate by 16 points, and it initially, in the first 2 years, increased their bookings by 22%, so they knew it was a really, really strong system, and that's why they continued to engage me for 10 years, continuing to train their salespeople in all these different programs.
00:49:45.250 --> 00:49:47.610 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Unfortunately, in 2015,
00:49:47.810 --> 00:49:56.989 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: new management came in and essentially put the whole program on hold. And it was because of their philosophy that
00:49:57.320 --> 00:50:10.300 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: sales management should be doing the training, not an outside third party. So I was kind of on the outs. The sales management now was put on the hot seat to try to implement. And by the way, next week's show.
00:50:10.420 --> 00:50:21.489 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: is on September 11th, is gonna be with Brian Conway, and Brian talks about sales management, and he trains sales management, so we're going to talk about that on next week's show.
00:50:21.490 --> 00:50:34.209 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: Anyway, all the methods that were being successful used were basically shelved, because nobody wanted to go against the new management, and my supporters internally were just devastated. In fact, I think one got laid off, and, you know, it was a really bad time.
00:50:34.210 --> 00:50:44.530 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: But we both agreed that it can't last. They rely on this, they've been using it, it was very successful, got them to where they were after 10 years, and it really couldn't last.
00:50:44.840 --> 00:51:01.629 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, this is where the other part of the story comes into play. In 2016, Peter Cohan had asked me to be a great demo partner that I added to my portfolio, and so I learned the Great Demo approach, which was really to ensure that
00:51:02.090 --> 00:51:05.339 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: You can get executive buy-in during
00:51:05.460 --> 00:51:16.610 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: a very short period of time, if you've done your discovery, if you've got the situation slide that Anil talked about, if you are making sure they know you are aligned with what they're trying to do.
00:51:16.770 --> 00:51:30.380 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So I knew all that stuff, I knew the way to start a presentation off, and the way to show the value of the solution, and the next steps. So, at the same time as Peter Cohan got me going with Great Demo, and I…
00:51:30.670 --> 00:51:42.559 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: was getting reintroduced to this long-time customer as a potential for coming back, because what happened was, in 2016, after about a year and a half of this new management, things weren't working out.
00:51:42.750 --> 00:51:47.630 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: My client, you know, was experiencing things that they had already fixed previously, like…
00:51:47.800 --> 00:51:54.129 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: win rates weren't as high. There was too much quotes going out for deals that weren't fully qualified.
00:51:54.240 --> 00:52:13.899 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: They were spending a lot of time on deals that didn't go anywhere, so they ended up in a do-nothing situation, and they didn't win deals, and they lost to no competitor but, you know, status quo. So, my team started to contact me behind the scenes. Now, this is before I met Anil or anything, because I really didn't necessarily
00:52:13.900 --> 00:52:20.870 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: know that I needed that quite yet, but my team started contacting me, and they told me that during the time that I had been away.
00:52:20.870 --> 00:52:37.760 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: they had implemented, my client had implemented Dynamics 365. So I thought, well, this is great, because if I can get back in there, and we can continue with SOS, which was using an Excel spreadsheet that was a standalone spreadsheet that looked wonderful, by the way, it looks exactly the same as the app.
00:52:37.980 --> 00:52:48.319 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: But that spreadsheet didn't allow me to stay engaged, it was independent information on different people's laptops. If I could implement a Dynamics 365 app.
00:52:48.710 --> 00:52:56.010 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: and get SOS back in there again, then I think that'd be a winning combination for everybody. So…
00:52:56.020 --> 00:53:06.010 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I, you know, did research with the team. They had gotten information from the management of what the issues were. We came up with a situation slide that outlined
00:53:06.010 --> 00:53:19.230 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: you know, as the VP of Sales, you're trying to hit quota. The reasons you're not hitting quota is because unqualified deals, too many people are putting things through that shouldn't be, you know, put through. There's not enough
00:53:19.230 --> 00:53:37.179 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: information about it, you're losing deals, and a lot of that is because of the fact that there's not really something that's being used that's inside the CRM system. The VP also wanted to make sure that their sales managers could understand where the deals were, and that wasn't, you know.
00:53:37.180 --> 00:53:48.169 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: being used at the time. And then also, they needed to do it quickly because he was really getting a lot of pressure due to a downward trend in their numbers. So, I…
00:53:48.220 --> 00:53:57.890 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: confluenced all this together, and literally the same time I was finding this out for my client about what the potential needs were, and they were going to set up a call with the VP of Sales.
00:53:57.950 --> 00:54:04.629 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: At the same time, I started to have this potential of AKA as a client for Great Demo.
00:54:04.780 --> 00:54:12.390 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, I don't remember the exact order, what happened when, but suffice to say, I wound up with a 30-minute call.
00:54:12.770 --> 00:54:18.769 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: that the team I had been working with in my client set up with this new VP of Sales, which I had never met before.
00:54:19.030 --> 00:54:24.280 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And I used the Great Demo Methodology. Oh, by the way, it was 30 minutes, but
00:54:24.700 --> 00:54:40.680 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: he didn't, you know, he showed up 15 minutes late, so now we're down to 15 minutes. We were on WebEx at the time, because I was doing a virtual, and we had issues with WebEx, so now I'm down to 10 minutes, and I get the VP of Sales on, we do some quick introductions, the team introduces me.
00:54:41.180 --> 00:54:48.769 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And I started out with the situation slide that my support team, who I'd been working with for 10 years, helped me to create.
00:54:48.770 --> 00:55:03.800 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And I said, here's what I understand you're doing, you know, what I want to do is review what I hear that you're trying to do, some of the challenges, show you what I have in mind, and then if you like that, we can see how we proceed. He said, great, I'm really kind of desperate here to get something done.
00:55:03.880 --> 00:55:07.520 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So I reviewed what I knew, Took him through it.
00:55:07.700 --> 00:55:08.480 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I…
00:55:08.600 --> 00:55:22.889 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: covered all the points, and at the end of it, I asked him, is this, you know, does this describe your situation? Is my understanding correct? And he said, yes, and he said, I really want to dig in on this part right here, where I have stuff in the CRM system.
00:55:22.890 --> 00:55:31.719 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: that allows me to manage that, and the salespeople are really using the CRM system to the full capability, because he knew the CRM system by itself wasn't cutting it.
00:55:32.260 --> 00:55:43.840 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So I said, great. I said, with that in mind, let me show you the solution. So what I had done is taken the Excel spreadsheet, the pictures of that, the graphical representations that are on there for SOS,
00:55:43.840 --> 00:55:54.120 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And I showed it inside the CRM system in what would have been the opportunity management part of it. I explained to him exactly, you know, the high level, here's gonna help you qualify the deals.
00:55:54.120 --> 00:56:13.029 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: This is gonna allow you to make sure that you're focused on things that are gonna help you win. It's gonna allow you to have your manager, since it's embedded in the CRM, to see the things and all that. I said, it's gonna allow you to increase your win rate, achieve your quota, and your morale and everything will go back up again, all the things he wanted to do.
00:56:13.210 --> 00:56:32.900 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: With that, I said, is this what you had in mind? And he said, yes, exactly, and now make it work with the team. Go work with the team and make it happen. And after a year and a half of being out of this client that I had for 10 years, I was back in again. That's when AKA and Anil came into the picture. I worked with Anil to create the app.
00:56:32.960 --> 00:56:45.719 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: put it inside the CRM, and they implemented it in 2017 to great success. That sales manager, who had essentially been part of the team that kicked me out a year and a half earlier, became my biggest supporter.
00:56:45.720 --> 00:57:02.880 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: And really drove that, very, very, drove that very successfully. And I'm very humble and proud to say I still have that client to this day here as we're approaching, you know, the end of 2005, so… or 2025, because I started with them in 2005.
00:57:02.910 --> 00:57:20.229 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So, the bottom line is, using, you know, the great demo methodology, implementing the SOS system in the CRM system allowed them to achieve their goals, and I couldn't have done it without Anil and without his team. And they made sure that they had a success for me.
00:57:20.340 --> 00:57:29.880 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: So now my client is once again seeing that win rate improvement, booking more deals, and I've actually had two spin-off clients since then that
00:57:29.880 --> 00:57:44.240 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: the SOS tool is being used by them as well. So, all that thanks to CloudFronts. So, big shout out to Steve Bistrets with SOS, Peter Cohan with Great Demo, Anil, and the team at CloudFronts.
00:57:44.270 --> 00:57:48.290 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: I'd like you to join me next week as Brian Conway.
00:57:48.500 --> 00:58:05.989 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: comes on to talk about the way that he helps sales management with implementation, and especially pre-sales and sales, how they can work together better. Learn how to use these methods to improve your team, increase win rate, bookings, margins, and client success. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
00:58:05.990 --> 00:58:17.649 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: go to my website, teamsalesdevelopment.com, and I'll be happy to help you with your needs, discuss what you're looking to do, how I can help with workshops, keynotes, sessions, or your sales kickoff content.
00:58:17.710 --> 00:58:23.739 Art Fromm - Team Sales Development: or event. So, thank you everybody. See you next week, and take care. All the best.
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