If you missed episode 141, check it out here: PODCAST 141: How to Build an Achievable Revenue Plan with Mary Grothe
This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Mike McNary, VP of Acquisition at Mimeo, a company that helps people print and deliver documents.
Mike is a 20-year sales veteran, the last 12 of which have been at a Mimeo, where he oversees all of the new business acquisition or new customer onboarding throughout the company for their B2B segment. Mimeo has been on a journey to reform and restructure its sales team, customer success, and employee experience in order to drive significant growth.
What You’ll Learn
- Search for creative solutions to keep your people
- Scrapping verticals for a complete restructuring
- Why CX grows out of EX (employee experience)
- Specialization, structure, and segment
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Show Agenda and Timestamps
- Show Introduction [00:09]
- About Mike McNary & Mimeo [2:30]
- Sales leadership & human leadership insights [9:27]
- Identifying the need for transformation [14:16]
- Implementing change [20:25]
- Being a People-First Org [29:26]
- Sam’s Corner [34:16]
Show Introduction [00:09]
Sam Jacobs: Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast. This week we’ve got Mike McNary, VP of Acquisition at Mimeo, a company that helps people print and deliver documents. They’ve been on a journey as they reformed and restructured their sales team in order to drive significant growth. So the conversation is a good one.
Now, before we bring you this conversation, we want to thank our sponsors. The first is Revenue Grid. What’s your sales organization’s biggest challenge right now? Is it remote work? Buyers tightening their budgets? Guided selling with Revenue Grid allows you to guide reps step by step through every deal, reducing guesswork and increasing consistency so your teams have the best odds with every opportunity in the pipeline. See how you can put your sales teams in the best position to win now at revenuegrid.com/saleshacker.
Our second sponsor is Outreach, the sales engagement platform for the modern sales organization. Chris Pearce, the VP of Sales at Tableau, says they run their entire business from Outreach. Nicolette Mullenix, Snowflake’s Enterprise Sales Director, says Outreach is the pillar that supports their ability to scale. Want to see the number one sales engagement platform and what it can do for your business? Get an inside view of how Outreach brings efficiency, visibility, and versatility to modern sales teams. For a four-minute sneak peek or to request a demo, check out outreach.io/saleshacker.
Now, without further ado, let’s listen to this interview with Mike McNary.
About Mike McNary & Mimeo [2:30]
Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs. Mike is a 20-year sales veteran, but the last 12 have been at a company called Mimeo, where he is the VP of Sales and VP of Acquisition. We like to start with the baseball card. We know your name is Mike McNary. Give us your official title in Mimeo land.
Mike McNary: Sure. I’m currently the Vice President of Acquisition at Mimeo. I oversee all of the new business acquisition or new customer onboarding throughout the company. Now, we have a number of different divisions. I primarily work in the B2B segment.
Sam Jacobs: Awesome. And what does Mimeo do? Tell us about the company.
Mike McNary: Mimeo is a technology company, first and foremost. Our mission is to give our customers back time by providing an easy, fast, and reliable way to print their documents and get them delivered globally. So most of our businesses are a B2B play in that we’re supporting the enterprise segment, all the way down to small businesses, to deliver business docs.
We also have a pretty quickly growing segment of our business called Mimeo Photos, which is a B2C tool that we offer. It’s very similar to the old Apple photos application, but we built photo books, wall art, things of that nature. And it’s been a big hit since we released it a couple of years ago. So we’re in the B2B and B2C segments now.
The premise was, “Hey, let’s put this online. Let’s make it easy for people from their desks to upload what’s important to them and their audiences, customize it.” The idea is you have a file. You upload it to our tool. You get real-time proof. You can customize it quickly. Within a minute or so you’re done building a complex document. And then you say, “Hey, Mimeo print it and ship it to this location.” And you can wash your hands of it from there.
Sam Jacobs: Are you able to ship to multiple locations?
Mike McNary: Yeah. It’s a big selling point. Pre COVID and now, you hit the nail on the head. We do a lot of dropshipping to homes now. Say you have a book that you need to get to 50 people. You could use our platform to order that one book, put in the 50 addresses, and within five minutes, you’ve got all those books going across the globe
Sales leadership & human leadership insights [9:27]
Sam Jacobs: What have you learned as a leader, both as a sales leader and just generally as a human leader, that you can share with the rest of us?
Mike McNary: First, there’s only so much you can control. I would like to think that a compassionate and good leader has a tie to their people in a way that when there’s some sort of departure, either a selection on the employer end or employee end, something felt there and there’s a responsibility or some introspection about, “Hey, what could I have done better either for that person or for the organization,” take some ownership and accountability over however that outcome came about. From a leadership perspective, try to always figure out what you could do better in a scenario to have improved the outcome… but you’ve got to give yourself a break a little bit.
Two is, if I’m looking at the bright side of a gloomy period, the typical move, it’s not always the best move. By trying to find creative solutions to difficult problems, you can come up with some good stuff that’s both employee-centric, as well as company-centric. For us, that meant looking at our employee base, folks with a lot of tenure and skill and we’ll call historical contribution and saying, is there a role maybe that they could play in this interim period that means that we don’t have to part ways with them, but that they still remain employed and can contribute to the overall mission. Find creative solutions if you can.
Finally, you’re talking about that vision. What do you do to convey to the troops, to the team that the future is going to be better? Now, we were benefited by an improvement in our fate from a business perspective. We have seen an upswing. But the key is telling that story and justifying it. Why are we good now? What is our plan? Just to say that things are going to get better and that on the other side of this there’s going to be an opportunity for everyone is great, but I don’t think you’d get that lasting trust and buy-in and engagement unless you go the extra lengths of being completely clear, honest, transparent. “This is what we’re planning on doing. This is the reason for it.”
Identifying the need for transformation [14:16]
Sam Jacobs: One of the things that you’ve done at Mimeo is to transform the sales organization. You grew new business 40% year over year recently and you employed some tactics and tricks and strategies and methods that we talk about a lot, but don’t emphasize enough. What were some of the changes that you implemented?
Mike McNary: We had some real growth in the last fiscal year, and your 40% number is right on. The headline is that we went as a sales organization from a full sales cycle, hunter/farmer model, to a truly segmented and specialized model that went all in on predictable revenue.
If we’re looking in the last two years rewind, we were organized based on verticals, composed predominantly of AEs or ESEs [enterprise sales executives]. They were revenue owners with a new business and a growth expectation and their comp and role responsibility description. Ultimately their job was to bring back growth on that aggregate number by employing good retention of their existing accounts, growth in opportunities that they identified within their territory, and then also fielding new business opportunities and generating new business opportunities.
We didn’t have visibility into what we were doing great within a large swath of our territory. Let’s be real. We have a great revenue operations team that gives us visibility into where we’re getting our dollars. But to get granular rep by rep and understand, a) where they’re spending their time and b) where their returns are coming from, somebody could have a great account that’s showing that they’re incredibly good at retaining big business, but would they be better spending a lot more time on the new business opportunities?
If you take a close look at each territory, you can at any given time figure out what’s going on. But, as it’s a cycle that goes every day, it changes based on what pipelines come in. It’s incredibly difficult to figure out which levers to pull to accelerate your business. You have people who are going to lean back on what’s most prominently featured in their inbox, or what they like to do most. And what they like to do isn’t necessarily best for the business.
Implementing change [20:25]
Sam Jacobs: Tell us about that journey.
Mike McNary: We were hesitant to go all in. The two things we wanted to look at were, “Hey, how do we get more specialization? And how should we go about attacking our business? Should it be in this way of verticals that we had done historically? Or should we maybe look at it from the standpoint of company size?”
So the major transition was this. We took what was a full sales cycle rep model and basically segmented it out. We built a world-class customer success organization, and that was the key. Having a place that we could hand off this existing business and this legacy revenue where we knew it was going to be in good hands and grow. We went based on company size versus verticals. Then we had sales development look at our top of the funnel as being the most important part of the business to work on, generate high quality and high quantity top of funnel opportunities that were a good fit for our business. In tandem, we developed that customer success organization. By putting people in seats that align with their skillset and allow them to specialize and focus on a mission, in a very focused and clear mission, it impacted us all the way internally, all the way to the customer journey.
The real big takeaways for me is as a leader first, knowing where to put your resources, and being able to hone in on how you are performing at every step of the sales process. From the top of the funnel to close it’s incredibly enlightening, but it’s also empowering. That clarity has been just something that has given us a lot of ROI. It’s a happier team. That specialization and that pride and a more focused role, it’s helped us reduce churn in the attrition of our talent. You get a more mission-centric team when you have a happier team.
Sam Jacobs: Regardless of the fact that it’s not “in your department,” it does feel like an incentive-driven culture where you’re trying to make sure that you’re growing it and that you’re engaging with it.
Mike McNary: It’s a good point. One of the interesting things about our product and our offering, Sam, is that we can sell into the same organization over and over and over again. We have a product that when it comes to producing and distributing business documents, we have a value proposition that’s incredibly enticing to many different departments within organizations. Now, this is much more likely to happen on the enterprise side, where we have multi-departmental global works. But we print for proposals. We print for sales enablement. We print for training. I can continue to go on and on. So there is a real incentive for Mimeo to entice and reward, not only their sales team but also our success team to continue to find net new opportunities for revenue realization at these customers.
Being a People-First Org [29:26]
Sam Jacobs: You’ve written that in order to be a customer-first organization, you have to truly be a people-first organization with respect to your teams. Tell us what you mean by that.
Mike McNary: We have a few company tenets here. One of them is to enjoy the ride, drive customer success, and act like an owner. But if you think about the cycle in which we’re able to deliver those mission statements, we want to have a customer-centric organization. Everything now has to be a great experience beyond being a great deliverable, whether it’s a product, service, platform, whatever it might be.
Customer-first for a million reasons. It is truly the way for us to have scalable growth into the future.
Looking at it from enjoying the ride or the employee perspective, I’ve noticed that since we’ve had this more specialized team, we’ve reduced attrition. I believe Mimeo’s always been a great and fun place to work. But in the last year or so, it’s been even better on the sales side and on the customer success side. And what that means too is a happier, more fulfilled, and people who have a more professional respect and feeling of success and pride. If you can drive those things in your organization, people that are proud of what they do, people that are rewarded for what they do, people that are recognized for what they do, that bleeds over more than anything else into how our customers are engaged with.
If people don’t truly enjoy what they’re doing, those customer engagements are not going to be nearly as fulfilling or fruitful for the customer. Making sure that you have a healthy, happy, and truly invigorated and proud sales organization as a whole leads to great customer interactions. They know they’re working with somebody who loves their job.
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn or by email.
Sam’s Corner [34:16]
Sam Jacobs: Hi everyone. It’s Sam’s corner. What a great conversation with Mike McNary! When you talk to leaders that care about people, that comes through. I took away two things. One of them is that if you haven’t done it by now, specialization is the key. And if you want to drive growth, you need to structure and segment.
A couple of other things that Mike said. The first is that getting people in the right role is important. Employee experience relates to customer experience. I don’t think we talk about that enough. If people love working at your company, that will come through in the way that they treat other people.
Don’t miss episode 143!
I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump in and start a discussion with more than 10,000 sales professionals at saleshacker.com. Before we go, let’s thank our sponsors. One of them is Revenue Grid. Guided selling with Revenue Grid gives reps step-by-step guides and help through every deal. Our second sponsor is Outreach, the leading sales engagement platform.
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As always, thanks so much for listening, I’ll talk to you next time.
