Building Momentum: Leadership and Growth with Reese Gomez

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.
Joshua Kornitsky: Welcome back to High Velocity Radio. I’m your host, professional EOS implementer Joshua Kornitsky. And today I am joined by Reese Gomez. Reese is the CEO and founder of SalesSparx. He’s also the author of Light Your Sales Fuze, a book that provides a playbook using their proprietary approach to accelerate your company’s go to market maturity and sales. Reese is a recognized expert in the healthcare go to market space, and was part of a leadership team that took a company from 50 to $250 million in just three years. Welcome, Reese. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Reese Gomez: Hey, Josh, great to be here as well. I really appreciate you taking the time. I’m excited about the opportunity to interact today.
Joshua Kornitsky: Well, I really want to learn more about who sells sparks helps and how you help them. So let’s just jump right in and let me ask you when when companies come to you, what is it that they’re coming to you to to get help with what is what are the, um, the the items they’re struggling with?
Reese Gomez: Uh, it’s a it’s a great question. So the very, um, we only focus on companies that that are selling either, um, services, technology or software to health systems, health, um, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies. So we stay strictly in healthcare. We understand the decision makers, how they think, um, how they buy. Um, so that’s, that’s really our, our big focus. And when organizations come to us, there’s usually three areas that they have concerns in. Um, and some of them are more important than others depending on the, on the client. But the first thing is I’m not getting enough leads. So we call that top of funnel. So I’m just just not getting enough interest. Not enough people are aware. And then when you sort of think about the middle part is well I’m getting the leads, but I’m not closing as many of them as I should. Uh, or the third part is I’ve closed the deal and I’m not getting I’m not getting penetration, so I’m not getting adoption. So it’s it’s really important we call that revenue operations. So it’s not just about closing the deal. It’s actually turning into revenue. So we try to take a holistic look at it. So most of the time organizations that we’re working with of those three areas, they have one of those areas. That’s a common pain point for them. Um, and so I would say, uh, in general, I would say 50% of the organizations are more on the middle part, which is I’m getting leads in, but I’m not closing them. And I would say about 25% and 25% are on. I’m not getting enough leads. And then the other is I’m getting in, but I’m not doing a good job landing and expanding. And I’d like to do better, but it’s it’s one big cycle and that’s something that we always educate people on is that that has to you sort of have to have an integrated approach to marketing, sales and customer success and think about it as a process.
Joshua Kornitsky: So what are I mean, if that commonality excuse me, commonality exists across most healthcare firms, right. Uh, obviously you’re bringing a tailored solution. It’s not a one size fits all. But what are some of the keys to to helping them succeed? What is it you you need to help them better understand and operate on?
Reese Gomez: Well, I think a lot of the organizations that we work with, um, they’re well, they’ll range from 5 million to 500 million. And so, you know, depending on where they are in their lifecycle, they have different kinds of needs. But I would say a common theme is, um, what we call heroic selling. And so even I mean, we believe it or not, we’re working with a company that’s very large, $500 million, owned by brand name private equity firms. And most of their sales have been driven by 3 or 4 people.
Joshua Kornitsky: Really? That just seems shocking at that scale.
Reese Gomez: It’s it’s well, what it usually means when you have an organization that’s that successful with that kind of a sales model, it means they have a heck of a product. You know, it’s a it’s like basically if you think about a kid that likes ice cream, that’s how good their product is. You know, you know, it’s like good analogy. Yeah. So so that’s how you so that’s how we usually, um, you know, so what’s happened with these organizations is they’ve got, um, most of their sales are being driven by a small percentage of people, uh, and often they have high revenue concentration with 1 or 2 customers. So if you look at organizations, you know, more than 50%, it’s coming from one customer. And so what you’ve got to be able to do is to be able to take this heroic mindset and heroic capabilities because it’s amazing, right? I mean, people who know how to do that, they have all this amazing information in their head. How do you get it out of their head and put it into a system? And that’s fundamentally what we’re really good at, is helping organizations to understand how to put those systems together so they can replicate that founders success through a team and scale as a team, as opposed to being dependent on, you know, just a few founders to other founders to make rain for them.
Joshua Kornitsky: That’s incredible. Now, does that tie into your, your proprietary fuze, uh, approach?
Reese Gomez: Absolutely. So when we first started the company. So we started the company about ten years ago. And, um, my partners and I, when we decided to it was really on a big question. Right. Why do why do some companies scale? Uh, you know, so yeah, we look at two, two, two parts of the business life cycle. One is we call it the nail it phase, which is I’m finding product market fit. Somebody actually wants what I, what I, what I sell. Um, and then once you’ve nailed it, how do you scale it? And when you, when you think about the nail it phase almost there’s a lot of, of, um, work that’s been done. You know, the Lean Startup and there’s a bunch of a bunch of organizations that kind of help you go from 0 to 1 or a lot of content, but that going from 1 to 100, there’s not a lot of great, especially industry specific. There’s not a lot of, um, guidance on how to do that. So what we saw was there was a lot of variance. Once somebody made product market fit, we saw a lot of innovation in the healthcare market that wasn’t getting to market, because the founders didn’t know how to scale from that 0 to 1, from one to.
Reese Gomez: So how do we go from 5 million to 50, or how do we go from 10 to 100, or from 50 to 250 million? So what we did is we did about 10,000 hours of research to understand how organizations go from that nail it phase and successfully through the scale phase. And so what we what we did, what we did is we created a framework where within less than 30 days, we could actually diagnose what an organization is doing really well across those best practices and and what they need to do better. And then we help them develop a plan. So so sort of think about it. It’s not a one size. Even though our approach, our methodology is is very consistent, we apply it depending on where someone is. We we look at exactly where they are and where their points are of strength that they need to work on to be able to get to that point where they can successfully scale. And and then we work a lot with them, not just developing the plan, but actually being with them to actually execute, learn along the way and then help them scale to get to the next level.
Joshua Kornitsky: So even when it’s in motion, it requires. I don’t want to say course correction, but it requires monitoring. And and truthfully, all good systems do very, very few things in the universe. Do you build it once, set it free, and never have to look at it again? Um.
Reese Gomez: Exactly. Right. And and especially especially that’s probably the biggest, uh, area when you go to execute is we there’s a lot of excitement and enthusiasm at the end of the plan, right. Like, wow, we got a plan. We know exactly what we need to do. Uh, and then when you go to execute on it, you know, the, the, the day to day of what you’re trying to do now you’ve got that momentum and that those demands and now you’re trying to change. And so one of the things that we’ve learned a lot about is the change management process and how important that is. And uh, we follow, um, a methodology, it’s called prosci. But within that the easiest thing to talk about is what we call Adkar. So Adkar is an acronym. It says are you aware, do you have the desire? Do you have the knowledge? Do you have the aptitude? And you have reinforcement. And if all five of those areas have been addressed, then you’re going to have rapid change. If just 1 or 2 of the areas are being addressed and the rest are not being really like, for example, reinforcement is a common thing, right? You go in, you train everybody, everybody gets excited. And then 30 days later they don’t remember what they just learned. So you have to have the reinforcement to be able to go along with it. So that change management process, Josh is the most important thing and we can go in and develop a great plan. But if at the end of the day you don’t hit your outcomes, you know everyone’s wasting their time.
Joshua Kornitsky: And from my perspective with how I spend my days, I can tell you that change management is everything. And and the innate fear of tools, technology, concepts, and even training is probably one of the biggest impediments to the scaling of any organization at any size. But it’s human nature. So how do you help them get past that.
Reese Gomez: So, um, a lot of the, a lot of it is, uh, making sure that, you know, if you think about the acronym, is everyone aware? Did they even know? So the big thing there is why are we changing?
Joshua Kornitsky: Right.
Reese Gomez: Why. Right. That’s always the big thing is like why? Um, and so when we when like even in our sales process we call it shared vision selling. So fuze is our our framework and shared vision selling is the way that we sell within that framework. And it’s always about the three wise. Why change. Why now and then? Why your company. So when you’re when you’re developing a change management approach, you have to get everybody to understand and be aware of the why. But then you have to make sure that they have the desire. Does everyone want to be part of this? Right? And then do they have the knowledge or do they have the aptitude? They may have the they may have the desire, but if they don’t have the aptitude, it’s going to be really hard for them to be successful. And do you have the reinforcement you have to monitor to make sure that that that you’re along those points that you’ve that you’ve addressed each one of those points and the other. The other big component of this, Josh, is leveraging what we call an agile approach to project management. So we create scrums. And so what happens is you basically implement in sprints. So you say, hey, um, what are we going to get done over the next 2 to 4 weeks within the context of what has to happen over the next year. And then that way you get a lot of little wins along the way. Right? Oh, we got this. We got that done. Um, you know, as they say, you know, the the journey of a thousand miles begins in the first, you know, few with a few first steps. And that’s what we’re trying to do is get people the little wins along the way and start to see the benefits. And the quick wins are really important because that creates a lot of buy in up front.
Joshua Kornitsky: It does, and it creates the momentum that gets people excited. I have to imagine.
Reese Gomez: Well, you know, one of the big things that we do in these organizations, um, in especially when you when you move, when you’re working with founder based organizations that have had a lot of success, right? They’re like, okay, well, we’ve been really successful up to this point, and they they wouldn’t have us working with them if they hadn’t hit a ceiling that they could get through on their own. Right. So we’re trying to work with them to, to make to make, make a difference. One of the things you really want to look for is some really good examples of what good looks like. And even if you have to go back retrospectively. Oh, so tell me what your best deals were that you got. How did you get that done? And let’s learn from that. Let’s get that, um, uh, turned into a system and then you get a lot of buy in because. Oh yeah, XYZ client that went really well. We did everything right. And we call that moving from unconscious competence to conscious competence. Right. So you know what you need to do, right? If you’ve been successful up to this point, you just can’t necessarily explain it. It hasn’t been documented. Um, it hasn’t been put into a framework. And so and this isn’t just about kind of, um, you know, a documentation project. This is really about how do you really drive change? How do you put this in a framework that’s scalable?
Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and that begs the question in my mind, you know, I know that every experience is going to be different, but what what is the time frame look like to affect this type of change?
Reese Gomez: Um, so, so a lot of it depends. Sometimes organizations, it depends on how aggressive they want to be in their in their goal setting. Um, most organizations that come to us want to achieve at least 20% growth. You know, they might have been achieving, uh, 5%, 10%. So they want to double that. So, um, you know, we’ve had organizations come to us. We have one now that we’re working with that wants to go from, um, you know, 24 million to 48 million. We have another one that wants to go from 20 million to 100 million. And obviously that’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen in, uh, in, uh, but but what you have to be able to do is you have to be able to understand what are the things you almost have to work from the goal backwards and say what things that we have to be doing now to be able to be prepared for that future.
Joshua Kornitsky: Well, it sounds like engaging with sales parks is much more of a collaborative partnership than just a simple agreement to go from A to B.
Reese Gomez: Well, that that’s where we pride ourselves. We pride ourselves in that, in that collaboration. So when you think about, for example, our concept that we call shared vision selling, shared vision selling is all about understanding where the customer wants to go and then how do we collaborate through the process? We call it selling with the customer instead of selling to them, so that by the time you’re giving them a proposal, it’s as much their proposal is your proposal. And you can imagine. Exactly. So we see about 70% acceptance rate of proposals when that process is followed. Because you think about it, if you’re going to engage in the time to do that and you’re going to, um, uh, co-create that and refine that solution together. You’re going to probably be highly likely to take to take that investment and want to want to be able to move forward and working with somebody that you collaborated with to make it happen.
Joshua Kornitsky: And that concept of co-creation. I’ve literally been exposed to dozens of different forms of sales acceleration, and that’s the first time I’ve heard that term. But with a background myself in experiential learning, I know what an unbelievable difference that must make.
Reese Gomez: It would. It does. And the thing that I always try to, uh, be careful of is we’re not saying that every solution is custom. Right? So if you go in and, and you’ve got a particular, um, offering that helps in healthcare to say, reduce costs or improve revenue, we’re not saying that you have to, you know, develop every solution that’s custom. How does this solution fit in your environment? Right. Every every organization has a little different IT infrastructure. They have a different profile for size, maybe different types of customers. So how are we going to fit our solution into your environment in a way that’s going to create success. And um, and what you find is that you build trust and confidence through that interaction. And, and then what it does, uh, Josh, is when you do that, you sell a deal and then, um, because the expectations have been set appropriately, you then have a much higher likelihood that the customer is going to be delighted, they’re going to buy more from you. And, uh, and then they’re going to refer you. So you kind of start to get this flywheel going.
Joshua Kornitsky: Sure.
Reese Gomez: When, when you do it right.
Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and from the outside of the healthcare industry, which is where I find myself, right? I, I have always made the, the leap that doing business in such a tightly regulated space is is akin to juggling balls of fire while riding a unicycle through a hoop, right? So how much does your past healthcare experience come into play in kind of cutting through that red tape.
Reese Gomez: As a really great question. And that’s that’s why we focus on healthcare, because it really is. Um, it really is very different. And I’ll tell you why. There’s, there’s sort of three, three things that make healthcare different than anything else. Right? It’s there’s I was industrial engineer by training. Right. And when we went, one of the big things that we learned is reduce variance. Like the if you go into a situation and it’s always done differently, the chances of a quality outcome are much lower because you know you’re not doing it in a repeatable way. Well, healthcare is the most horrible place to control variance. In fact, when I was getting out of school, my professor said, don’t go into healthcare. You can’t control variance because you have you have variance at three levels. The patient. Right. So you and I have different genetic profiles. So how I might respond to a medication or a treatment because of our genetics is going to be could be much different. Right. So that’s one thing. So you got all the patient variants. You got physician and trainer variants where they got trained, what part of the world they came from, where they had different experiences that that allowed them to make the diet that, that that influence the way they diagnose and treat patients. You got a lot of variants there. And then, you know, you go into a hospital or a clinic and yeah, there’s some similar things about like where you check in where you check out, but most of them are very different, you know? So what ends up happening is you walk into a healthcare organization and yes, there’s some similarities, but they’re very different in the way that they the community that they treat their their culture. And so because there’s so much variance as opposed to a bank, right. If you walk in a Bank of America versus TD Bank or whatever, an ATM transaction is going to be handled the same across the world?
Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah.
Reese Gomez: Pretty much. But how you think about diagnosing and treating a patient, someone might have a surgical focus. One might have more of a medical focus. One might say, hey, I’m more of a pediatrics. One might say. So if you don’t understand those nuances when you’re bringing your solution in, it’s very difficult to hit the mark in terms of what the outcomes are. So you almost are our approach, even though it could be used across any industry where you sell complex solutions. We just do B2B complex solutions, healthcare. It’s more important than than any other industry that you know, that I’ve been exposed to.
Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and there is great truth to sticking to the area that you know well and do best in because, you know, if they don’t want you to paint their house offering to wash their cars, great as an ancillary service. But those are two very different skill sets. Stick with what you’re best at in order to succeed more deeply and more widely, for sure. Um, but you had mentioned something before and it put a light on for me. You were talking about technology. So, you know, these days I find myself in a lot of conversations where there’s this sort of elephant in the room, and the elephant is AI and and whether it’s from a perspective of productivity or interacting with customers or in a thousand other ways. How does AI impact what you do and how you help your clients?
Reese Gomez: Well, it’s been um, for us for as a company, we we tripled last year over the year before. And I credit a lot of it to AI. Um, what I’ve found with AI is that you you really there’s two words that I think are most important is context and nuance. Okay. Did you give enough context to the AI about the problem you’re trying to solve, or the question that you’re asking it so that it can actually give you something that’s relevant? So that means that you have to have a lot of experience. You have to have a lot of, um, knowledge. And so because I see a lot of people saying that, you know, AI is going to, um, replace certain kinds of, of thinking and certain types of jobs, and I think it will. But I do think that that is going to get offset by a whole nother set of opportunities. And so our view is that the first thing you have to do is you have to provide the context to the AI. And then when it gives you the answer, you have to be able to look at it with a lot of with a nuanced eye and understand how to take that and make it relevant and, and, and connect it to the problem that you’re trying to solve. And so there’s there’s two areas that we’ve seen AI, uh, impact for our customers. One is how do you make a salesperson more productive. And the second is how does it impact the way that we’re interacting with our customers? How can we create a better customer experience? And, um, there’s just a lot of a lot going on. And no matter what though within that with. So I’ll give you an example on the, on the sales side when I talk about context, you can you can have a you can have a meeting with a customer and download the transcript in the ChatGPT and say, hey, how could I have done better? And ChatGPT will give you some generic advice about, um, you know what? What you could have done differently, uh, based on its expertise in from a sales perspective.
Joshua Kornitsky: Right. But with no real context, just cold analysis of of words.
Reese Gomez: Exactly. So now picture the analysis of what you did, knowing whether it’s a new customer or existing customer, what solutions they are interested in, what are they aren’t what stage they are in the sales process. How many meetings you’ve had with them in the past. That’s where the and that’s why that’s why we see a lot of AI projects be disappointed. Uh, there’s a lot of disappointment right now and a lot of AI projects because the context is not there. So someone a seller, a sales leader, uh, buys a generic product, they download the transcript and they get generic advice.
Joshua Kornitsky: Right?
Reese Gomez: So what? You. So what this means is you’ve got to be able to set up a process that allows for the context, and then it has to come back to the seller, who then looks at it with an experienced eye and refines that. So think about it. Think about a sales process. Well, how can I use AI to prepare for the call? Well, it has the context. This is a new versus existing customer. These are the these are the meetings that we’ve had. Here’s how I should prepare. Right. And then it sits on the call and evaluates how you did and what you could have been done differently, what you did well. And then it does the follow up. Each one of those with the proper context and nuance can take us a seller. You know, they can improve their productivity by 50% or more.
Joshua Kornitsky: And is that something you help your clients with? Because that I think that’s a giant missing component out of the whole AI thing. Uh, because, you know, it’s the it’s the new magic pill, right? It solves all problems. But does it really? Because whether I have a headache or a backache or my leg is bleeding, one pill is not going to fix all three.
Reese Gomez: Exactly. It’s like, uh, it’s like you’re trying to take an Advil when you’re, uh, when you’ve got a bloody nose. It’s not going to help. You know? So, so so what? We, um. Yeah. So that’s that’s what we do. We help organizations, uh, leverage AI, but so, so, but the thing is, a lot of organizations aren’t ready for it. So what we do is we help them to understand the readiness. And one of the key components of readiness is, um, have you do can you provide the context to the AI? Are you using a disciplined sales process? Are your sellers, um, documenting or gathering information and putting it into the CRM? Right. So if all this information isn’t being collected and, and there’s a lot of ways to do it without harming, uh, productivity in the sales team, you can you can do a lot of these things. So it happens as a, as a passive, um, uh, uh, activity as a part of the sales process. Right. So if you, if you do it right, but if you don’t have the processes defined, you don’t have the right technology infrastructure, just lay an AI on top of your list isn’t going to solve any problems at all.
Joshua Kornitsky: You mean like the refrigerators that now come with AI to let you know you’re low on milk? Sure, it’s got AI, but is it really useful?
Reese Gomez: Exactly.
Joshua Kornitsky: Um, and I have to tell you, it amazes me, uh, how much it always seems to come back to sales process. Right? And, and, and in your case, you’re not directly speaking to it, but the absence thereof proves that we’re going to have failure down the road because we don’t. Going back to your first principles, we’re not executing consistently. And if we’re not executing consistently, that’s it falls apart pretty early in the process. It sounds like.
Reese Gomez: Yeah. You brought up a great point about sales process. And and that’s really an important distinction and a nuance because, um, there’s a difference between sales methodology and sales process. So you may have heard of um, there’s a lot of great tools out there. So you may have heard of challenger.
Joshua Kornitsky: Oh yeah, I’ve read it. Went through the training.
Reese Gomez: It’s a great it’s a great, um, methodology. Um, Miller. Heiman. Um, that was one of the first ones that came out. Blue sheets fill out fill out a blue sheet about an account and a sales opportunity. Uh, there’s another one called medic. It stands for medic, and it has a bunch of acronyms about the key things that you have to worry about in a sales process. Those are all in a sales situation. Those are all methodologies. But what happens is that they they they don’t get applied because there’s a big there’s a lot of work to go from that into. How does that apply, um, to what the seller does on a day to day basis? Right. And so what we did is when we did our research, we took the best of those methodologies and we put it into a sales process. So now, um, when a seller comes through our training, they’ve learned industry best practices. But then the next day they know how to apply it. And that’s what’s really exciting about what we do is when someone goes through our training, like, in fact, we just recently did one, we we did an on site role play, and they had just gone through our training and they were now, you know, they had gone through and seen how to apply it. And so one of the sellers came and said, wow, this is amazing. What we talked about this morning, I just applied it, um, in a call this afternoon. And so what they were able to do was connect all the dots between all of these things that you should do that are really best practice. And what I have to do as I progress through the sales cycle with a, with a customer. So that’s what we’ve done is we’ve defined that sales process and infused it with best practice around how you actually interact with a client and how you, um, you know, leverage, uh, areas like challenger and some of the others that exist out there.
Joshua Kornitsky: I mean, it sounds like it’s a pretty solid solution because you’re able to work with those different methodologies and still get the effectiveness.
Reese Gomez: Well, it’s a it’s a great point because people will come to us and say, hey, well, you know, I’ve already I don’t really need to look at what you guys are doing. I’ve already implemented the challenger medic. And I say, hey, that’s great. In fact, that’s a great foundation for us to build on this. This isn’t, um, it’s not mutually exclusive. What we would do is build on top of that.
Joshua Kornitsky: And I think that that’s a fantastic recipe that clearly is paying dividends, because from that perspective, it it it’s the landed cost fallacy. I’ve already invested in X. I don’t want to invest in Y, because then I’ll lose my investment in X. And and you’re able to stand there and say no, no, no, X is great. Let’s let’s apply Y to it and bring it to the next level, which is really a great amplification. Or some might even say sales acceleration. So reset it. It sounds like what you’re able to offer really goes a long way to to that concept of collaboration. You really you meet your your customers where they’re at. You amplify a lot of the work that they’ve already put in, in the investment that they’ve made, and you help them overcome what sounds to me to be a fairly common but ornery concept of getting the real return on all of those investments.
Reese Gomez: Well, you know, we we really try. It’s a great it’s a great summary. And we really try to really focus on some key key, some key performance indicators that really, um, allow everyone to sort of like what’s, what’s my dashboard here that I really have to measure against? And how am I going to make sure that I’m making progress? And so we try to look at it from a leading indicators perspective as well as trailing. So now you always have a good dashboard of things that you need to really stay on top of to ensure that you’re making. You know that you’re performing.
Joshua Kornitsky: That sounds like great guidance. Well, let me ask you, what’s the best way for people to get Ahold of you and and or SalesSparx?
Reese Gomez: Well, um, our, um, our our website is w w. E as two S’s in the middle. So SSP comm, um, and just I would say just get onto the website and, uh, you know, peruse through there and then you can contact us. There’s any number of ways to contact us through through the website.
Joshua Kornitsky: Wonderful. And when we publish the interview, we’ll publish it with that link so everybody will know how to get Ahold of you. Um, great. My guest today has been Reese Gomez, CEO and founder of SalesSparx, also author of Light Your Sales views, which will help provide a playbook for how to take their proprietary approach and accelerate your company’s go to market maturity in sales. Reis is a recognized expert in the healthcare go to market space, and he was part of a leadership team that took a company from 50 to $250 million in three years. And his book, Light Your Sales Views, is available on Amazon to order now. Thank you again, Reis. I appreciate you being here.
Reese Gomez: It was great. Great to talk with you, Josh. Great questions and I really enjoyed the interaction. Thanks for your time.
Joshua Kornitsky: My pleasure. So I am your host professional EOS implementer Joshua Kornitsky and this has been another exciting episode of High Velocity Radio. Please join us again next time.