How boutiques can outpace larger firms with the right tech stack - #62

Ben: Welcome to the Consulting Pulse, a podcast by cemap. CEMAP is an operations and intelligence platform purpose built for consulting firms. Let's dive into today's episode. Really excited for this session. Steve, if you give us an intro for the audience, that'd be a great start.

Steve Haft: Yeah, thank you, Ben. My name is Steve Haft. I'm with Pivotal Advisors. Uh, Pivotal Advisors, we've been a firm, we've been around for almost 18 years. Coming up in, uh, August. Uh, it was originally founded by, uh, my partners, Mike and Gary Braun, two brothers that, uh, had been in the corporate world and had spent a lot of money in the world of sales training, hiring sales, uh, trainers, some of the best speakers in the country to come and train their people. And what happened was every time those trainers would leave or the methodology would leave, they would have what's called the illusion of adoption. And, uh, they thought, okay, how do we make this real? So, uh, the origin story of kind of Pivotal is, um, Mike and Gary Braun, two brothers that used to play golf together every Thursday night for league. And Mike had a consultancy firm and did a lot of great things before. And his brother was at a company that was probably around a million dollars when he started. And we got up to about 400 million. And every time, uh, Gary would come in to the Thursday night golf league, he'd be coming in hot with all these sales challenges. And Mike would just ask him questions and he kind of jokes about it. He said, I would always ask Gary questions about his work so I could get him to calm down so he'd play golf well. And then they said, you know, as older brothers, like, how do we one day just work together? And in 2008, when it was just a phenomenal time to start a business, they decided, we're going to start pivotal, uh, advisors. And they decided that because they felt in the marketplace there was no one really catering to what we call the sales leader. Everyone is training the salespeople, but no one is developing great systems for the sales leader to have an operating system. So if you take like an organization, like a big one up in Minneapolis here, uh, uh, a General Mills, they have a senior VP that probably comes up with their strategy. They probably have an HR department that has, does their selection and onboarding, and it's very robust. And then when it comes to, like, processes, they have like, chief, uh, operations officer or a sales officer, uh, sales enablement. So they're doing building processes out. And then, you know, as far as measurements, they have like a CTO that's putting in systems and gathering all the measurements. And then they have like a compensation specialist and then they have unit leaders, like directors and managers of each unit that are doing that. Well, if you take a small business, the space that we're in, small to medium sized businesses, companies that are, you know, $5 million, $20 million and probably up to $100 million in a rare occurrence where in this $500 million space where they're unsophisticated, they don't have all those people. Right? So sitting in the middle of that operating system is leadership. And that leadership could be a small business owner, it could be a salesperson that got promoted to being a sales leader. And they have no sales leader skills. So it's a new skilling up. So we really found our way into this niche market of working with sales leaders and developing these operating systems around them. So the way we've gone to market since that time is we started out and it's really funny because Mike and Gary said, some of our first people we talked to, we said, here's what we can do. And then they said yes. And they're like, what do we do? Right? Like we actually have to go and deliver on this. So, uh, that started out as our traditional consulting model where we worked specifically with the sales leader. And what happened out of that is a sales leader might leave or companies would call us and say, you know, we don't have a sales leader right now. Do you have an interim or a fractional sales leader? So back in 2008, that was kind of a, that was a taboo term like have a fractional sales leader that just, that wasn't in existence. So they started a fractional sales department. So we went out and did fractional sales leadership. And as a byproduct, we found that a number of leaders wanted just like really good peer association peer groups. And we started a peer group of sales leaders. So now we go to market with those three offerings. The traditional consulting which is called our, our sales advisory program, our fractional sales management program. And then what we have is our peak association where we're basically, it's a peer group of sales leaders that get together, uh, bimonthly, monthly and learn some of the best practices in the world, uh, when it comes to sales. So that's a little bit about pivotal advisors. Um, I don't know if you have any other further questions on AD Bet. I can go further if you'd like.

Ben: So what's your involvement in the business now?

Steve Haft: Yeah, so almost a year ago Ironically, like in a couple of days, it doesn't feel real. Um, uh, Mike and Gary, when they started it, they um, they wanted to have a boutique professional services firm and really not fly and travel anymore. And it was, uh, they did great work in the Minneapolis Twin Cities area. And I would say we got to a, probably about five, six different states at that time. And in uh, in 2020 when uh, Covid happened and everything became virtual, uh, we were already using some teams formats. But what happened is it really took us nationwide really quickly. It actually took us worldwide. In some cases we were able to do fractional work via a uh, teams meeting, which was unheard of. So that really expanded our business. And as that happened, uh, Mike and Gary still accomplished their goals by not being on airplanes and traveling all over the world and consulting. But as there's a couple, you know, a generational gap between uh, Mike and myself, uh, and Gary, I have another partner named Elizabeth. And we thought, okay, we're, we're, you know, there's a, there's a gap between our ages, the energy levels of what they want to do with their lives at this point and what we want to do are different. Uh, I've got four young kids and I wanted to you know, build uh, something. So we decided over the last few years to figure out a transition plan. So we executed that transition plan last year, uh, March, uh, 31st, uh, 2025. So now we've, Elizabeth, uh, and I are the drivers of the organization. Mike and Gary are still involved. Uh, Mike is, you know, a much lesser role. He's still consulting and advising with us. Gary is still very active in the business, doing the business development, will be with us for quite some time working. And it's just been a phenomenal transition. But that's a little bit of the transition behind the scenes is uh, right now Tip, I'm the managing partner, um, and lead all the delivery and make sure our team is executed well in the field. And then Elizabeth handles everything else, which is amazing. She's ah, uh, a very special and unique individual with her abilities. So we make a pretty good team and we got some really great advisors and help with my Mike and Gary in the backdrop, still helping and helping us transition this business.

Ben: So you and Elizabeth already sort of embedded in the firm and it was that ambition and succession that then enabled you to take the reins.

Steve Haft: Yeah, we were minority partners for a number of years. Uh, you know, it's interesting when you think about having a small business or buying a business or something like that. I Learned a lot. I learned a tremendous amount during that whole process. And it took a couple of years to really kind of work through all the details, um, and figure out what was gonna be best for all parties. And the, the bank that ended up, um, working with us, you know, it was really first time I kind of ever heard that they said, we see a lot of deals and we see a lot of deals come across our desk. And oftentimes it's someone from the outside trying to buy a business or they've been in that business for like a year or two. And it's really hard, especially at a professional services firm to, you know, finance someone that's gonna buy a business. Cause, you know, you're your customers, you don't have, sometimes you don't have like long term contracts. Even if you do, you know, there's a lot of things as, uh, a traditional bank would look at and have issues with. They told us that we were a really safe bet. Now I believe it was a safe bet. We were betting on ourselves. But I think the biggest thing was, is they said, you guys have, you know, 17 some years of knowledge in this business. There's gonna be no stones that are unturned that are surprising. And that's been the case. Right. There's been no, no issues that have come up or anything that's come up where we're like, gosh, what do we get ourselves into? Um, so it's been, it's been awesome. The transition has been fantastic. So her and I have just been, you know, full speed ahead and, and probably as majority owners now, um, you know, you look at things differently than when you did as a minority owner, and I hate to admit that, but it's true.

Ben: What are some of those things? And that's really intriguing.

Steve Haft: You know, I spent so much time on a delivery making sure that our team was just doing a really phenomenal job with our clients. Um, Mike and Gary are phenomenal math wizards and looking at the finances all the time. They can look at a spreadsheet in numbers and like, they can, I always say I can get there with the math the same way you guys do. I just need like four calculators, right? So they were able to, like, when it comes to the finance and the business, making sure we have lines of credit, making sure we got the right insurance, the right amount of insurance for our team. Like, what are the benefits packages? What are the things that are going to, you know, bring people on? So they're, you know, we get a lot of advisors on Your last career, they're in a five to ten year window of being done. Right. So that, that market of advisors is different. So knowing all the ancillary things about business, I just, I just didn't dig into those things as much as I do now as an owner. Right. Because now it's like, it's my, it's more of my money, if you will, um, and more of my responsibility. And so that's, you know, that's just one area that it changed a lot for me, where every detail, I really take a lot of time and read them now where I just had a lot of high trust with Mike and Gary. Um, and we have them having a lot of oversight still just to look at things. But the final decision is kind of weird, right? Like, I remember when we did the transition, Ben, um, we were in a meeting a week after the transition. It was a leadership meeting. And uh, Gary said to me, he said, steve, uh, how do you want to run this meeting? And I was like, same way we've been doing it. Let's go.

Ben: Did that work? Was that a successful approach?

Steve Haft: Yeah, it has. And I am very progressive in my thinking. Um, were in the stages of life, they would both be in the same progressive thinking that I would be. They're just at a different phase. Right. Um, day one, I wanted to set the tone with the team and I wanted to start messaging change about what was coming with the tsunami of AI. I've been following it for years. I love technology. I've always had a side eye to what technology is. And I would say we had a tech stack deficit when we came in and really by design by the agency, like it worked for us. Right. But I just had this, this really strong inkling that we needed to make some severe changes with our tech stack and our technology and how we go to market with technology. So day one, that was the one thing that I started messaging. I started talking about the change, I started talking about what was going to happen in AI. I started talking about things, uh, I've always had this ability to probably see trends, understand where they, they'll potentially go and try, you know, be out in front of those as much as I can. I, I, I've just been able to see that in the, in the past. And I saw this pretty clearly with AI even before, you know, launching this. But I wasn't in a, I wasn't in a position to drive that because as you're trying to transition to business, I can't be messing that change because if we don't if we don't transition to business and we don't make the change, then you know, what are we doing?

Ben: And if you, any learnings that uh, you'd be able to share there because lots of people talk about AI and obviously are trying to implement it both within their firm, um, and also maybe use it as a service offering. Um, if you've got a couple of examples for either or even both of those situations, that would be great to hear about.

Steve Haft: Yeah. Ah, a couple, a couple things that we, that we did. I am not the guy that comes up with, you give me a clean sheet of paper and I sometimes just look into the white sheet of paper and go, what am I doing? I am more of like basf. Like I take an idea, someone else's idea and I just make it better. I've always been that way. I need something to work with to begin with as a member of C54, as a C. And Jeff Coleman and um, Greg Alexander, Matt Alexander, people like you, Ben. Being in peer groups and listening to some of the things you guys are doing, I can hear like the first three words of a sentence or a paragraph that you guys are saying and I can draw the conclusion of what it looks like in the future. So early on we started just, I started messaging into our team about what could potentially be coming. I didn't try to scare them, I just tried to share with um, them what could potentially be coming. And then what I started to do is I started having all these one off conversations and every one on one in every conversation I just started asking people what do you see and what are you hearing? What are you feeling like what's the market saying around AI? And I knew like where I wanted to go. But in an organization had been doing things a certain way for so many years. We have a lot of very loyal people who are phenomenal. Love them, they're amazing. For our team, there's a change that's going to need to happen. So really spending a lot of time working on that, on that change. And then Elizabeth and I did a really, really deep dive on our tech stack and talking to everyone we could about what technology is out there, what, what's the prioritization of that technology, what's going to make the most because you can't change it all overnight. It's so, it's, it's nearly impossible. So we, we just started like laying out everything we could and we started using AI as much as we could to go what are we not thinking of? Here's A tech stack we have, here's the firm where we want to take it. What are we not thinking of if we were going to implement uh, a different CRM system, if we're going to implement a different billing system, if we're going to implement uh, a go to market like tool, what, in what order would we do that? So I helped assist us in that thinking but then also talking to other really brilliant people in this kind uh, of pro serve space helped us with that as well. And I'd say fast forward. We had our company launch right um, around the first part of February this year and we talked about all the initiatives we're going to launch. So we took like you know, nine months to really put that tech stack together. Some would argue we could have gone faster. But I always say we're going to get to a finish line and we're going to bring our team. We're not going to just rush a finish line and leave a smoldering dust of like uh, people behind us. Like we got to take the team with us because the institutional knowledge and the wisdom that my team has is unparalleled. It's amazing. So that change, when we rolled it out, I had messaged it so much that one of the employees said that's it, that's, that's it. And I'm like yes, that's it. And now we're in the middle of implementing a number of uh, technologies right now that we feel are like the best in the best alignment for our customers and kind of our go to market. And also internally the things we just got to clean up, there's just, there was such a deficit that it's a, uh, we're building, we're kind of relaying that foundation if you will.

Ben: That's nice, that sort of response because it shows that you've almost worked into their daily lives and the workflow and it's not a big bang type approach that probably will stand you in good stead over the mid to longer term.

Steve Haft: I hope so. I mean we're in the midst of a couple implementations uh, of tools right now. We got one that's really, we're super excited about front end business development that we're doing ourselves. We're going to take it to our clients. Uh, we've got um, a piece of software we're going to be launching that really helps us interact with our clients. Like when we talk to our clients m. It's kind of like an appraisal up front to their business and then we're able to capture all the meeting notes. It's a learning management system built into it, um, that we can. So it's really unique in that way. We haven't been able to figure out the billing aspect yet that's coming. Um, and then we have another one where we got to look at CRM, where we got to bite the bullet and probably change CRMs because the one we had was just one way too robust for our team and it doesn't have enough APIs and connections. So we're going to have to make a migration error which is a big undertaking. We've hired a couple of uh, what I consider really brilliant consultants that are really scrappy. They're not a big firm but they're right for us, that can come in and help us kind of project manage as well as just can be the technology expert as well as get in and turn the knobs if you will. So I've been super fortunate uh, to have a couple of those people join us recently. And that just takes the load off the regular day to day work where I got someone else kind of project managing it from the outside.

Ben: Nice move. It's great to see consulting firms using other consultancies. It's kind of like why the power of the niche is um, on so many people's sales decks. Because you know, uh, going deep and narrow and having that level of expertise is where you're going to shine. You touched on the fact that you're doing things for your clients as well. And being in the commercial world, sales marketing, myself, I have seen how AI is impacting um, uh, our space. Whether it be driving new business. You're more around the operational piece but that as well. So what's your perspective on that pace of change um, and what you're doing more for the fact that your business is focused on um, sales and that aspect of the world.

Steve Haft: Yeah. So when we go to market we specifically really specialize in trying to help that sales leader be more effective. And I want to paint a picture of what that sales leader faces. Uh, they're facing the weight of the world. They're a top salesperson. They get promoted into a, you know, small to medium sized business. They get promoted in a sales leader. They don't have the skill set, uh, of a sales leader. They have the skill set of a really top salesperson. So what they, what we call them is, is they become like a super rep. They just become, they're the ones that someone else finds a deal, gets into it almost close, the super rep comes in Helps close it. And they're like, they set up comp plans nearly almost identical to what they had. Um, they don't have like a systemized approach. They usually have like, here's what I've done and it's on a scratch piece of paper and people should just do it and follow it. They don't know how to change behavior, they don't know change management. So what happens is we come in and embed with that sales leader, right? And as we embed with them and we get, we're working shoulder to shoulder with them, um, we're trying to figure out as you're working 50, 60 hours, 70 hours a week as a new sales leader and you're making less money than what you did before as a phenomenal, just individual contributors salesperson, what are the tools and systems that you can implement that are the best? So we have to vet those processes and systems. So when we give a recommendation of like I always say we're in the options business, our answer is always yes. And we say yes to the conversation. So you want to get front end business development, then we've got a tool or two tools, maybe three that we can recommend, but we're not going to come at you with like 75 different tools and throw everything at you. When it comes to client retention, there's a tool or two that we're going to recommend that they do and they implement so we can drive it to adoption and they can have success versus here's 25 tools you could try and let's try this, try this, try this. So when we speak, we make sure that people really listen and take heed to it. But most importantly, we want to embed with them to the point where they get the tool to adoption and really get real world success. Um, without that, you know, we're just like any other kind of consultancy where we throw things over the fence and be like, hey, how's that working for you?

Ben: Do you work with pro surf foams at all?

Steve Haft: Yeah, we do, we do. We have a, we have a number of them that we've, that we've worked with over the years.

Ben: So what are some of the classic gotchas that you're seeing with pro surveys when it comes to their focus on sales at the moment, the majority of

Steve Haft: the time they have not figured out the sales leader position and other times they don't have dedicated salespeople. So we go in there and they've got, let's just say their accountants, their lawyers, they're um, they're you know, like it specialists, they don't have like maybe it's founder led. The founder is a sales leader and they just don't have like the right, they're not dedicating the right amount of time to do a good sales leadership looks like and they're really using like management and leadership experience. But when the sales, when the, when the team comes to them with an opportunity, they're not really giving them like really what I call clean sales advice. They're giving them like practical advice which is good, but it doesn't scale. So the prosource firms don't have a sales leader. So it's really hard to duplicate the best practices. They don't have dedicated salespeople. So the go to market and the business what happens is they get very flat. So they get a lot of referrals. The business goes up next year as they're working the referrals because they just got them. The business goes flat, the next year it goes down because there's no new business coming in. So in the proserve firms we find ourselves really a lot of times standing up a sales team which, it's a massive culture change. It's okay for us because in the first couple of years of Pivotal's existence, uh, in 2008 through about 2010, we were contracted and Mike and Gary and some of our team was contracted with one of the largest channels change management behavior, uh, change organizations in the world. So we subcontracted and learned a tremendous amount then we've taken a lot of those practices and we don't advertise as a uh, change management firm but that's really what we do extremely well and we understand uh, the science behind that. So our team worked with some of the most brilliant scientists in the world on change management. And so when we go into an organization, when we're going to implement something, we're looking at it from a point of change management. Let's go back to the story I just shared with you. It took us 7, 8, 9 months to launch some of our initiatives with our tech stack. We could have launched a lot of those things on day one. The team would have refuted that and been like, what are you doing? You guys are new owners. This is crazy like, and I wouldn't have blamed them, but it's a change management structure we put in place that we talked about it. Uh, we got people involved, we got them bought in. So we take that to our clients and really focus on the change management and setting that up. We ask people do you want the tool or do you want a better end result? Well, we want both. Okay. We're going to have to do things a little bit differently than what you've

Ben: done in the past for lots of pro surfs, particularly in the space we're in, which is predominantly going to be consultancies that if it's not founder led, it's partner led and maybe they've got a portfolio of accounts or there's more of an expectation that people are doing delivery will also do some sales, um, which you know is effective, no doubt in lots of organizations. Is your recommend, like do you have some clients who still stick with that and succeed with additional sales leadership training? Or is your approach actually you need like an embedded sales function and a leader to drive that and maybe responsibility for top line revenue growth, cross sales.

Steve Haft: We're very pragmatic. Uh, one of our core values is um, do what you do. If this is your business. It's very, it'd be very easy for the pivotal advisors team to come into the ivory tower and be like, here's the only way you can grow your business. There's way too many circumstances that are affecting what's going on in that organization to make up, know, make a one recommendation. I've seen it work in a lot of different ways. I've got a client right now I've been working with since, I don't know, 2019 and they've had tremendous growth year over year. They don't have a dedicated sales leader, however, what they have created is a training and reinforcement mindset. So I am the de facto leader that comes in monthly and works with a lot of their, a lot of their team members. And we do deal coaching, we do scenarios, um, we do retraining on different things and over the course of time they just stack up brand new business. We've went into other organizations and said, okay, you know, hypothetically, you're an engineering firm and you've never had a sales leader or sales department. They really want that. So we go in and be like, okay, we set the expectations for how long this is going to take. We set up the change and the people that'd be involved in how much of a culture shift this is. And then we start going down the path of, you know, maybe being a fractional for a period of time to show them what good looks like, build the playbook and then we like to hire someone that comes in and then runs that playbook and runs that system after we've, we've left and we continue to coach them. So we've seen it a lot of different ways, and there's lots of ways to get to success. A lot of times it comes part of the DNA culture that you're going into, that you got to be very pragmatic and meet them where they're at.

Ben: Another one that I want to put to you, given you've probably got where you will have great. But the one I hear is you can't hire great salespeople from, let's say, SAS and put them into pro serve. Uh, you've got to sort of like grow them up through your pro serve. Um, what's your perspective on, on that? And also, have you. Is that a myth that should be debunked? Or actually, is there good amount of evidence that, uh, should be fairly common practice?

Steve Haft: So it's really hard for me to say, well, that's a myth that can't happen, because it can in some ways. Here's what I would tell you. When an organization comes to us and they say, I want to hire this person from sas, we say, great. What position are we hiring them for? What are they going to be selling? How is this the sales function? How is it aligned with the strategy? What we're doing? Are we going to have, you know, we're going to be selling a, uh, uh, an idea, a concept when it's a pro serve, right. It's not a tangible item. Uh, software is in some ways like that. But it's also, you can see it, you can see it work. So what we do is we try to figure out the strategy of the organization and, and then we look at the job profile of what it would take to execute on that strategy and for that role. And then we go to the market and find who are those people that have some level of pro serve experience that. That's one criteria. We have a thing called Redbox. It has about 120 different factors. Had they sold direct, had they sold through distribution, have they sold, um, uh, business to business? Is it a business consumer? Um, do they, do they. Are they autonomously managed or do they need to be managed closely? Are they going to work in an office environment or are they going to be remote? So, I mean, I could go on and on and on. And it's just one. That that whole, like, if they sold software is just one factor in it. And that's where we see most people screw up. They go, well, I can't hire anybody in SaaS because they don't know proserve, uh, do they? So I Break it down. I try to make things super simple and then take the complex. So the first thing I like to do is like does this person really understand a sales methodology and do they know how to do a consultative approach? Okay, that's, that's key number two. Do they, you know, do they understand what they're selling? Do they really understand the intricacies? And can they be taught and can the company that, that um, I'm, you know, the company that you're hiring them into, can you actually teach them all the things you do or you're going to put them in a corner and just tell them to learn this or you're going to have them shadow someone or you're going to have like a robust onboarding program where you can actually train them on the intricacies of your business. And then the third thing is I want that salesperson to really understand the competition. So if someone's coming from SaaS and they're coming in proserve, let's just say they know how to sell 1. Great. They know how to sell 2. Do they really know like the intricacies of your accounting software or um, your, you know, as a lawyer, like whatever pro serve they're coming into, do they really know the intricacies of that? That might be a high learning curve. Do we have the right onboarding for them to get them up to that? Maybe the third thing they're coming in probably a deficit. They're not going to know the competition and you're not going to know how to differentiate in a key way against competition. So they're going to go out and they're going to get the easiest opportunities, but when they have to differentiate they're going to get clock cleaned. So can we really teach them differentiation in the competition? Excuse me, that comes back to the environment you're bringing them into. So short answer, give me someone that can really sell and understands a consultative approach or has a methodology and if that lines up then that's just one factor. I can look at them and maybe bring them in. So we don't like say no to anyone. We look at it through a system of red box. Does that make sense?

Ben: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I like the fact that there's even just thinking it's ah, one of 120 things that influence it. And I guess if you go through a painful process having hired somebody from SAS and it doesn't works out, then that's what gets pointed to as the problem. Whereas actually you probably wouldn't take Enough time to understand was it One of those 119 other things that was the crucial bit to why they didn't work out. It's just easy to look at the different verticals. But I do like in proserve the fact that there is much more building up of high potential people through an organization, Whereas in the SaaS world it is much more about like higher move, change. Um, because there are some unique components of being in a pro serve firm that um, yeah, you need to learn quite quickly I would imagine as a salesperson. So you know. Yeah, so you're not just winning the like tap ins as we call them, the more challenging opportunities where you've got to maybe work a little bit longer. The sales cycle is different. Much more multi stakeholder, multi threading. There's much more to it. Um, here's another one for you. Have you. I'm sure you have. But like talk to me about going into a business and maybe there's somebody who's just been put into that role, um, and they think that they are the sales leader. But actually you uncover maybe through evaluation that they aren't. But you then have to work with them to share some insight as to this is how you need to learn. This is what you should progress. I can imagine that's quite a little bit awkward, a little bit challenging.

Steve Haft: How do you go about that in our space, Ben? The, the buyer, the person that brings us in is usually the CEO, general manager or the owner. It's very rarely the sales leader. I, uh, don't, I don't know. The, I don't know. I got some suspicions on why, but I don't, I can't tell you the exact reason why. The sales, the sales leaders in typical. They're so great for advocating for their sales people and doing sales training because that's the way people have just been taught and it's kind of ingrained. They're not the best advocates for themselves. And so I want to paint a picture of this and I sympathize with the sales leader. You were a top performing salesperson and now you get promoted into being a sales leader. And you were a top performing salesperson, now you're the sales leader. Now all your peers, because they were all calling you before, now they've given you the title. So now that finally rests with you and there's just different skills and, and I don't think people really realize until they do the job for a year to two years the number of new skills they have to learn. And when we present Them, hey, here's the skills you have to learn. Almost all of them go, oh my gosh, that's why this has been so frustrating. I didn't realize these were different skills. I had the job prior because people called me and I gave them advice and I did like deal coaching. But I never really was the person that had to drive accountability. I wasn't the person that had to come up with the strategy. I just took the CEO strategy and just kind of executed on it. I wasn't the person that had to, uh, come up and come up with a detailed comp plan for my bdr, my account executive, my, um, account managers, and the different nuances in each one of those. I didn't know that. I didn't know like what a leading indicator was or what an activity, how to change that. So these skills, they see that and they're like, oh, wow. So at first we call it the dance. They're like, um, I just got promoted. I'm getting paid a lot of money. Now my company is going to spend money on me and spend a whole bunch of money with this consultant to come in and tell me what to do. Like, why do I need their help? And if I really ask for their help and they give it to me, I'm not going to get credit for it. So this sucks too, right? So it's a very challenging dance for them and us, right? Because we're trying to come in and not tell them exactly what to do, but we have to help them. So we try to just share examples of what good looks like. We try to like, say, hey, maybe you've tried things this way and you've tried things this way. Out of those two ways, which one works best? Well, this way worked. What if you tried it a third way? What would that look like? And they go, oh, I never thought of that. Let me try it. Okay, we'll try it for a few weeks. Let me know how it goes. And they see that and they try and they're like, okay, I'm open for more things. So what we really look for when we come in, are they coachable? Do they have a high level of self awareness? Do they realize where their shortcomings are? Are they vulnerable enough to really be coached and taught in, in a way that they haven't been in the past? Are they, Are, do they, how would I say this? Are they, do they have the, the strategic chops and the desire to get better strategically? Because that becomes a very strategic role versus execution, right? So we start looking at some of those things and breaking it down and go, okay, this person here, not self aware, doesn't have the strategy at all, doesn't care for the strategy, just wants to be an executor. Is this the right role for them? Maybe, probably not. If they have those things and they have very little selling like sales leadership skills, they're self aware, they have a high degree of wanting to get better and um, they have like a bend to strategy and a little bit of a vision, we could really help them. They become fire. I mean, I've taken people without even like strong sales backgrounds and made them great sales leaders because of that.

Ben: When you're working again, I know you work with lots of other people that aren't pro serve. Uh, but the benefit of having guests on like yourself who are pro serv and also do work pro surface, it's more multifaceted. So if you can. I also feel like I'm throwing loads of different scenarios at you, but if you'd allow me one more. So another common one that I see is obviously the founder led sales. They've driven the business through their own skills, their network. They probably try and then coach the layers below to have them step up. That, uh, also must be quite a challenge where you're coming in and uh, actually there's somebody in the business, probably the person that's like brought you in, who has been a very, very good salesperson and you might provide some different advice or thoughts that aren't what they did. And how do you deal with that sort of situation?

Steve Haft: In America, we have a team, the New England Patriots. For many years, uh, they won a number of Super Bowls and they had a way and it was called the Patriot Way. So I was also part of the Marine Corps. And the Marine Corps has a certain brand and a way they do things. So I'm going to use these two examples. In most organizations, they don't have a Patriots way. They don't have like a, uh, Acme way. So what they do is they hire someone that was in maybe pro serve before or a different type of company and they go, ah, oh, they know our business. I've known it for 15 years. I'm going to hire them and they're just going to automatically come in and do well. Well, do they really understand like the direction? Probably. But do they have the competencies and the key understanding of your business? No. Someone needs to teach them. So that falls short. Do we give them, is there obstacles or opportunities enough to teach them, um, new skills and give them enough opportunities? To fail and to help see self learnings to get better. We typically don't give them that grace either because we hired them, um, that we've known them for a long time. They come in and they just don't do well. So we don't take that time to give them all the direction. We don't teach them all the new skills to do it acme's way. Right. The patriot way. And then we don't give them enough opportunity. And then they, they're walking around and are not motivated, not excited. And we're like, well, they're just not a motivated person. Uh, I've seen some people that did not do very good work, go to a different company, get in the right environment and become highly motivated. Right. So that's a framework we call dcom. It's a, it's a leadership diagnostic tool. And you can clearly see like we were missing the C on the O for uh, this person. And for example, when I was in the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps is the only branch that if you're in the Air Force, you can't just join the Marine Corps and go to the Fleet Marine Force. You have to go through their boot camp. If I'm a marine, I can then get out of the Marine Corps and just join the army. And I'm in the Army, I don't have to go through boot camp. The trainings like I can just transfer, I can do that in the Air Force. So the organizations that really understand who they are and develop this culture of training people, the really specifics of the job and taking the time and effort to really bring them up to speed and teaching them their way, those are the ones that do the best. Hiring someone to do these roles, it's very evident when we get in there whether they have that system in that culture or not. Does that make sense?

Ben: 100%. And I actually love it because you need to. Every business should have its way, uh, is what I'm hearing. And most businesses I reckon probably wouldn't because they probably think they're too small. Um, and that could be 5 million, it could be 10 million, it could be 50 million revenue. But at what point they probably think, oh, uh, well, I'm not a patriots, I'm not a uh, Marine Corps, I'm not a Pfizer or insert other huge brand here. That does have a way but, but actually you should have a way.

Steve Haft: So let me give an example. I hire, I interview a lot of people for pivotal advisors role to be an advisor with us. And I Always tell them what we do is different. And literally everyone. And I joke with them. I even joke with them after I hire them. I'm like, remember when you. During the interview process, you said, you know, I've done consulting, and I know how you guys work. Well, we pride ourselves in really being, like, embedded and working directly with someone and working through real change. Most consultancies and proserve firms that are in your space, they tell you kind of like what to do, or they do it for you. Very few get into trenches and work with you. So when we hire people, we really look for people that have that capability to get in and really embed and work with someone. We're not someone that gives you a tool, a format, and just go make it up on your own. Uh, that's just not how we operate. So I interview so many people, and they just. They don't have that skill set or desire to change or later in their career, and they'd rather just tell people what to do, because that's what a lot of consultant consulting is. And we're just different. So we. We have what we call the pivotal way. And we're very. We're very adamant and militant on. You got to follow our way, because that's what our clients are buying. Right? And then the CEO calls us and goes, yeah, Um, I met with Steve, and Steve, you know, Steve Haft. I met with Steve Haft, and, you know, gosh, he just kind of threw a lot of stuff at me. M. I didn't really learn anything. You know, when I talked to you, Gary, and you sold it, you said, I was going to learn along the way, I was going to be educated along the way. I have a lot to say, but Steve just kind of talked at me. Well, then Steve gets fired, right?

Ben: Although not anymore, because Steve now owns the business.

Steve Haft: Yeah, Right. I can still get fired. I got to bring my best every single day.

Ben: Yeah, I love it. And what about the future for Pivotool? You know, you've now got a year of ownership under your belt. You've said about how you've made those transitions over that period of time. Sounds like a really good plan that's come into action. Uh, what are you looking at? What are the things that excite you or you see as challenges going forwards?

Steve Haft: I said to my partner the other day, Elizabeth, I said, you know, Mike and Gary started Pivotal Advisors in 2008. Now, it's probably one of the worst times to start a business. Right. Um, if there was a worse time to buy a pro Serve firm in the sales enablement world. It was probably 2024, 2025 with all the new adoptions of AI. The ground underneath us is shaking and moving so much. Well it met us match because I love moving and shaking, I love the challenge. But if we were going to stay static and do nothing, we would just slowly go away. So we're actually really excited about the changes are coming uh, forward. Um, one of the areas as I think about this and when we look in the future, there's a lot of great peer group memberships out there. There's, there's the C54 which is awesome. But as far as like CEO and advisory groups, there's, there's allied executives up here in Minneapolis, there's CEO, uh, roundtable, there's Vistage, and there's all kinds of like local ones that are great. There's very few, if hardly any that have really mastered the peer groups for sales leaders. And um, the amount of change that these sales leaders are going to go through. We're going to invest a tremendous amount of time and our efforts in helping these sales leaders really grow their businesses and try to get them up, educated on um, the cutting edge best practices and with the tech as changing so they can make the changes Also in the space of fractional, that's an area that's going to continue to grow substantially because the cost of bringing someone in and having a sales leader that doesn't know tech or technology enabled with how to do, you know, best practices around sales, there's going to be an alarming gap there as well. So those are two areas in our business that we're investing a tremendous amount of time and effort to grow and to help as many people as we can. And I've just told my team this recently. I had a worldwide brand strategist that worked with us. Phenomenal guy. Just an incredible, incredible human being. Uh, he really hit me upside the head one day. He goes, steve, what's your brand? And I told him and he goes, no, your brand is what your customers say it is. Your customers own your brand and our customers are asking us for different things now. So when your customers are asking for different things and they're leading you down that path, I keep telling my team we gotta get ahead of that and we gotta be anticipating like a, uh, Steve Jobs of what the market needs. So that's where we're heading. We're making a lot of investments to do it. Uh, I really think we're gonna leapfrog a lot of organizations in the Pro serve space and we're gonna have, um, you know, a chance to keep up with them. Um, I never say that we're the best, but we are gonna work harder than almost anyone I can imagine.

Ben: If you have that community, you're just gonna have like loads of slack or teams messages where people are just going, I wish I'd known that six months ago. Type, type insights with each other. And that's the sort of thing that you want to get on the fractional piece. I completely get it. Um, the other thing I'm conscious of and thinking of is you mentioned the sand is moving. Everything is changing beneath your feet. Which actually means that with AI there's a, that you can get generic advice exceptionally quickly and you get that sugar rush of being able to solve the problem that, let's say you ask your favorite LLM. Um, I think that reaches a peak at a certain point of time and then you just get, like, feel like you're just getting bombarded with advice and noise. How it actually impacts you is going to be whether you can take that and then actually implement it. And that is probably, at that point is probably where I do start to sense that some AI may struggle. Because as you touched, you've already got a red box that you said 120 different components that you think not just make the sales leader, but there's so many other elements that are changing in a sales org on a daily basis, um, that you've got to take in as context. You can't just type that in or an agent can get that market context, individual context. There's just so. There's so much more to it than just data and text. I feel like I'm going off m on one here and not really asking you a question.

Steve Haft: Um, I think I could answer your question. It's embedded in there.

Ben: Yeah, go for it.

Steve Haft: Let me give you an example. Uh, we have a client sales leader. All of his answers are, uh, like, I'll just get to AI. I'll use AI. And he's not wrong. He could get a process, he could get an approach, he could get a generic comp plan in almost every area. He could get like the specificity that he wants, which is awesome. God love you. Go do it. The question is, and you said get to implementation. We look at it differently. The way we look at it differently is implementation is called the illusion of adoption. When you have people that implement things, they do things out of compliance, out of fear, out of like, whatever it may be, it's driving to adoption is where you get the change. And then, um, how do you get from adoption to mastery? When it become, when it's plain text and it comes on a screen, you take that process that you just got. It, uh, may be the best process you've ever developed. You go and you hand it to someone, you hand it to a salesperson and you say, follow this process in their mind, in the back of their mind, what are they thinking? I'm not going to follow this process.

Ben: Yeah, just do the bare minimum to get by.

Steve Haft: So I'm going to do bare minimum because compliance.

Ben: Right.

Steve Haft: When you take that process and you know how to build that process and get input from people and maybe I go ask my team, hey, I want you to go and put some ideas in AI and let's come together, let's talk about it. And then let's talk about how do we get this, actual this from implementation to adoption, and what pace would we get to adoption? What measurements would we have along the way? Who's going to be the, who's going to be in charge of the initiatives and all the things that we're going to do. Because we could, we could solve all the world, the world is flat as knowledge. We could put all these AI practices in overnight. Who's going to be the governor to the amount of change that we have? Who's going to have the red pen of what, of, uh, what is the right way, the patriot way, if you will, to do this right. That's where leadership comes in. And we're positioned really well because we're helping the sales leader do that. So managing the change, driving it to adoption to a level of mastery, that's where you get the really big uphill, uh, scaling and growing. Prior to that, you just got a lot of implementation. Two years later, the CEO goes, sales leader. You've implemented a lot of stuff. Nothing stuck. Our numbers suck. You're fired. Right. And what's the new guy do? He comes in because the new AI is better. And he goes, my AI prompts are better than his. So here's what we're going to do. And the cycle just repeats itself.

Ben: We've been there before, but not with AI, but with SaaS and tech, haven't we? Like, what we should be learning from the mistakes of the past 20 years, which is not just sales. Any leader comes in, and if they're just recommending tech out the gate, then, you know, actually like, there might be something missing fundamentally beneath it. Yeah, some great points, Steve. I might steal some of those if I'm Honest, I love the adoption to mastery positioning. I think that's really good.

Steve Haft: And Ben. And who's. Who's to say what is fully mastered? Yeah. Hey, I.

Ben: No, I don't know.

Steve Haft: That's right. So that's where you. That's where you just bring continuous value, a lifetime value. Is. Are you really. So you're. I've never met a grand master of anything. Like a master of anything that was done learning.

Ben: Right?

Steve Haft: So when you get people to adopt that. That mindset of mastery, they never stop. When you talk to them about implementation, there's a clear deadline. When you talk to them about, uh, levels of adoption, there's a clear deadline when you move it to mastery. Right. I think Greg Alexander just recently read this. I read it, like, 50 times. I've read one book a week for how many years? And I was like, that's like 1700 books on professional services that he's still now stopping. That's a grand master. That will never stop. Right? So when we help our clients think of that mastery mindset, right? It never stops. And if we're always bringing value and we got to. We got to bring our level up to a mastery level to help them, then we just bring incredible value to our clients. And AI is going to have a really hard time competing with that. So we're going to compete with AI. We're going to work with it and use it and hopefully teach our clients to use it to get it to a point of mastery, but not as a sole function and sole purpose.

Ben: Very good. Uh, I am conscious of time because I don't want to take up any more than you've really given me, which has been phenomenal. So let me say, I guess, is there anything that I haven't asked that I should have asked, or is there anything, um, that you would like to share with the audience, um, that we can finish on?

Steve Haft: I don't know if I have any, like, great pearls of wisdom that I could finish for the audience, but is

Ben: there anything about your business or your story or, um, what you're seeing in the market, anything that I haven't asked you about that you were like, yeah, this is a nugget that's worth sharing.

Steve Haft: Here's probably my ask of your audience. Um, I find a lot of people in the sales leadership world, and in the sales world, they say this to me and my team all the time. I wish I'd have called you sooner. I wish I would have just, uh, had a conversation and picked up the phone. And I always Tell people, we've been around for almost 18 years, we're going to be around for a lot longer. We're, we're not that type of company that's going to close on you and be like, hard close. And you got to do this. We're very much of give as much advice possible when it makes sense. We're going to be around, you're going to be around. We'll probably do some business at one point. So if you're struggling and you're thinking about something around the world of sales and you got like this kind of weird question and you've asked AI and you just didn't get what you're looking for, give us a call. I'd love to have a conversation with you. And whether that goes somewhere, I don't really care. We just love helping people. And we found that if we help enough people, we add enough value at one point they might do business with us, which is, which is awesome. But I just find that people just don't call enough. They don't call and ask for like, hey, I got this kind of weird idea. Would this even work? Right? And in the world of sales, it's one of those areas that not a lot of people have figured out. They figured out operations, they figured out software, they figured out finance. But in the world of sales, it's like this mystery, but they're scared to ask because they think you're going to sell to them.

Ben: I tell you why. It's because it's always changing. Like, just when you think that, like, you have got, uh, a game plan and a playbook and you got everything all sorted out, something else happens and then you, you're less scratching your head again. So, yeah, agreed with that.

Steve Haft: Ben. I have a senior advisor that joined my team and he's been doing an exceptional job. And he called me up one day, I gave him advice, he called me up the next day and I gave him different advice, he goes, hey, I don't want to be one to argue or disagree with my boss, but what you told me yesterday is in contradiction of today. And I said, you're right. However, the circumstances of that client are different than the client you just presented. And the advice has to be pragmatic enough. There isn't like a one size fits all. So the advice has to be pragmatic for that client. And here's the areas where I see it differently. Do you see it differently? He goes, no, I'm glad I called and I appreciate that I could, that I could disagree with You I'm like, violent disagreement, let's go, man. That's how we get better.

Ben: Uh, and that. So again, so like similar thing I had as well with someone in our team where again, within 24 hours they asked one thing, gave one piece of advice and they probably could have gone to AI to ask that question, but they didn't, they came to me, which was great. And then the next day, because this, because something had changed in the context of what's happening in our market, I did the same thing and I just thought that there is no way that AI can ever do that because the sort of like data points and the self reflection and the insight that you get through observation, it can't do that. So you just need to be asking questions, don't you? I think it's.

Steve Haft: You just stirred something in my mind and maybe this is a new unlocking here today. So when I go to AI and I type in and I get something back and I'm like, wow, that just completed my thinking really, really well. I have an emotional connection to that, but I don't have accountability to that. So if I brainstorm with you and we come up with an idea, I, Steve, ha are going to call Ben you in a couple days and be like, did you implement that idea? And now there's a, there's a human indebtedness that of you feeling, gosh, I didn't do it. It was brilliant the other day. And it's that second nudge. AI does it, it's just text on a screen, you're having a bad day, you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. That was, it probably wasn't a good idea. So there's that level of accountability when you get advice from a real person that they can nudge you and talk to you and then they can in context and in context shift immediately because of a, uh, word you said or in the tone that you said it and give you a different prompt from me as a human than what AI could. So those are the nuances that is going to be really hard to overcome, but it's accountability piece that's going to be really lacking. And when you take that AI advice and you give it to another person, there's no emotional connection. So to them it's just plain text. They're trying to catch up and then they have to go do their prompts to see if it's valid or not. And there's a loss of emotional, that emotional transfer of inertia to get something done.

Ben: Love it. Great stuff Steve, honestly. Really good. I really appreciate your time as ever. Uh, and whilst you've been shouting out people for sharing insights, I'd like to do the same for you and Elizabeth. Always on the front foot in terms of providing of thoughtful and you know, um, high level insights for the rest of us. So yeah, thanks. Back to you too. But yeah, as for now, um, we're going to leave it there. And for anybody listening, no doubt you can connect with Steve. You can go on Pivotal's website as he said, reach out. Um, the invite's there. Don't ah, hold back. Uh, thanks Steve. CEMAP is an operations platform for consulting firms. The solution is used by hundreds of professional services firms to manage everything from pricing and timesheets to resourcing and billing, enabling you to optimize utilization, drive project margin, get a single source of truth across your firm.