Dean Curtis is the CEO of Ingage, a sales enablement platform designed to help sales teams deliver consistent, engaging presentations and improve sales execution. Throughout his career, Dean has held leadership roles at Apple, Palm, and Oracle, and while at Apple, he helped define and execute the strategy for iPhone and iPad adoption across Fortune 500 companies. Today, he combines his experience in technology, sales, and business leadership to help companies improve how their sales teams prepare, present, and perform.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [01:50] Why salespeople often struggle to consistently execute what they learned during training once they're in front of a customer.
- [04:10] How visuals, content, and a clearly defined sales process can educate buyers and help salespeople communicate more effectively.
- [07:30] Why a successful sales presentation isn't about saying everything you know, but saying the right things in the right order.
- [14:05] How Dean evaluates AI and other technology based on ROI and measurable KPIs instead of chasing the latest technology.
- [18:50] Why implementing technology requires the same attention to onboarding, training, performance metrics, and accountability as hiring an employee.
In this episode:
A sales process only creates value when your salespeople actually use it.
In this episode, Adi Klevit interviews Dean Curtis about the intersection of sales processes, technology, and consistent execution. Dean explains that many organizations train salespeople on a particular approach but have very little visibility into what happens once those reps are sitting in front of customers. Ingage helps bridge that gap by giving salespeople consistent content while providing leadership with insight into how that content is actually being used.
Dean and Adi explore what makes a strong sales process work in practice. Dean views selling as educating the buyer, which means salespeople need the right visuals, information, and supporting content available at the right point in the conversation. Rather than overwhelming prospects with everything they know, successful salespeople need to understand what matters to that particular buyer and communicate the right information in the right sequence.
The conversation also turns to AI and technology adoption. Dean emphasizes that businesses shouldn't implement technology simply because it's new or exciting. Instead, leaders should identify the desired outcome, determine which KPI the technology should improve, and make sure the underlying process works before automating it. As Adi and Dean discuss, technology can amplify a strong process, but automating a broken process simply leaves you with a broken process that operates faster.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable Moments:
- “Sales, I've been in sales for years, is really an education of the buyer.”
- “It's super important to have that sales process well defined, but it's not just well-defined. It's also executed every single time.”
- “You don't need to tell them everything you know.”
- “What you have to do is be really smart about saying the right things in the right order so that you can get the win.”
- “If I automate a broken process, it's still a broken process.”
- “I always think of any technology purchase in terms of the return I get from that purchase."
Action Steps:
- Define your sales process. Identify the key steps, questions, objections, content, and information that should guide a successful sales conversation.
- Make the process easy to execute. Don't expect salespeople to remember everything from training. Give them tools and content that reinforce the process while they're actually selling.
- Use visuals strategically. Support the sales conversation with visuals that educate the buyer and make complex information easier to understand.
- Measure execution, not just results. Look beyond closing rates and determine whether salespeople are consistently following the process that is expected to produce those results.
- Evaluate technology based on ROI. Before adding another platform or AI tool, identify the outcome you expect and the KPI you want it to improve.
- Fix the process before automating it. Map and understand the workflow first. Then determine where AI or technology can improve efficiency, throughput, or scalability.
Sponsor for this episode:
This episode is brought to you by Business Success Consulting Group.
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