Simplicity Is Clarity - Mike Adkins - The Revenue Maze - Episode #022

Today’s guest sees the importance of making a process clear and concise. He is an avid Jayhawks fan and also enjoys playing the guitar. Mike Adkins is the Vice President of Sales at WarehouseQuote. Mike joins the host Valerie Cobb to share some of his tips for how companies can increase their revenue.

Takeaways:

  • One way to increase the revenue for your company is to have clarity on what you are doing. Sometimes it helps to take a step back and think about what you are doing at a very base level.
  • There are plenty of books out there that claim to have the secret revenue growth or revenue ops, but you don’t need to read all those. Instead, take a step back and write down a list of the process you want and think about your ultimate objective.
  • When you are trying to make a clear process for your company, you want to try to simplify it. Simplicity can help make the process clear to others.
  • Indecision is a decision. If you are not clear about why you are the right decision for a customer, then you have already killed the deal and the client won’t want to work with you.
  • Every day you want to think about the value you are bringing to your clients and make sure you are meeting their needs.
  • Use your time to improve your knowledge and skillset about your profession rather than spending time on social media.
  • Don’t be afraid to stick your neck out a little bit. You can learn a lot from an opportunity that didn’t work out and use those lessons on your next journey.

Quote of the Show:

7:40 “simplicity is one of the keys to clarity.”

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Simplicity Is Clarity – Mike Adkins – The Revenue Maze

I have a wonderful guest. His sense of humor is a little bit dry but very fun. He has four kids. He is a guitar-playing Kansas Jayhawks fan. His hobby is golf, but his wife whoops his butt, as that’s what he says. We’ll talk about that a little bit. He loves to give back to the community. He’s an innovative industry leader and a VP of Sales at WarehouseQuote. Welcome, Mike Adkins.

Thanks, Valerie. Thanks for having me on.

I’m super excited about this dialogue. We’ve had a lot of great chats before. People want to hear a lot about you. First of all, we always ask the same silly question. What is one thing that you can tell the audience that will help them get out of the revenue maze?

We talked about this a little bit before. There’s so much in starting a business and getting the revenue wheel turning. For us and me personally, what was important was the clarity around what we were doing. We had stop gaps in each phase of our growth and development, and maturing the sales process. There are points where you have to step back and say, “What are we doing very simply? What’s important this month, this quarter, this year?” if you’re looking out that far.

It’s focusing on that clarity and all that you do, whether it’s messaging, reporting in terms of success, or discussing what you do with customers. If you can’t be clear about where you’re going, it’s hard to get there. It’s easy to deviate off the path. I was beating a drum in many cases, especially early, as we were trying to find our niche and our message.

You hear a lot about, “Be clear,” but it’s very difficult. Sometimes you think you are being clear, first of all. I always use the term, “I’m the hero in my own mind,” as a joke. A lot of times, I’m being very clear, and then you find out later it wasn’t very clear. Give us a couple of pointers on how you’ve done that throughout your career.

Specifically, it’s with WarehouseQuote. I left the big, safe consulting world a few years ago. I had a pretty position where I had to keep marching, waiting, and looking at a potential partnership at a pretty large firm. I was sitting around when I got introduced to Ben Hagedorn, our CEO, and Jordan Brunk, my CMO.

I was taken off guard by their vision and clarity in what they wanted to do very early. It was incredibly important in recruiting me to come over and help build the sales team. At that point in my life, my vision and clarity on my personal goals weren’t incredibly clear. I wasn’t 100% bought in that the big firm consulting partnership and the golden handcuffs that come along with that were what I wanted at this point in my life.

I had to sit down and look at, personally, what I want to do over the next 3 to 5 years. I’ve always enjoyed being around growth. I love building something. I previously built several practices and handed them off. The opportunity to come, build, and potentially change lives that the folks were working around and build something of value was incredibly intriguing to me.

In terms of WarehouseQuote and where we’re at, that moment of clarity when I wrote down what I wanted to do, I distilled that into the top 3 to 5 things I wanted to achieve over the course of the near and intermediate future. That helped me make one of the better decisions I’ve ever made in coming over to WarehouseQuote.

It’s interesting because you brought up a couple of things. First of all, it started with yourself, the clarity, defining your personal vision and mission statements, and things like that. There’s a lot of self-help out there that all say that that’s what you need to know. You need to know where you want to be and what you want to do.

It’s back in the college days when you were trying to decide your major or where you were going to go. It can be gut-wrenching a little bit, but it’s what I call 101. You’ve got to know what it is you want and go after it because then you’re going to have all these other things that get in the way, but you can pivot around those. Why don’t more businesses understand that? I’m just curious.

There’s a lot of noise out there. You mentioned I don’t know how many thousands of self-help books. Between the both of us, I’m sure we have a bookshelf full of books around sales, revenue management, and rev op, and all these different schools have thought about the way to do it, the ticket punching process, or add to your team, or how to hire.

There are all these noises and all these different directions you can be pulled if you really dive in. To step back and simplify, I’m big on lists. If it’s not on the list, it’s probably not happening. I carry a little tiny notebook around with me to track all the things I got to do. I get a little bit overwhelmed with this approach versus this approach. We want to have this particular sales process as opposed to this, and we want to track it this way or that way.

It’s stepping back and saying, “What’s my objective here? What do we want to be able to do?” If we get that into max 2 to 3 bullet points, options start falling off very quickly. Simplicity is one of the keys to clarity, at least in my experience. If you don’t spend time to simplify your decision-making process, you have a lot of input from which you’re trying to get an output. Distilling what’s important, ranking, prioritizing, and getting to that top 2 to 3 are one of the most important things you can do in achieving some clarity around whatever’s on your plate at the time.

Simplicity is one of the keys to clarity.

I love that. There is a lot of noise. There are different groups that are even talking about indecision being a decision these days because of the noise. I struggle with that as well. We all do. I have an eclectic personality, so my home is a bit eclectic. My daughters are like, “Maybe if we got rid of this.” If anybody’s asking, I’m not a hoarder, but they’re all my little treasures. I am a little bit curious about how you’ve been able to simplify it down to the top three, for instance. I’m sure others welcome that advice because that is hard. You’re going, “That’s a shiny object. This is a shiny object. This is my treasure.”

You mentioned that indecision is a decision. Back to sales, if you’re not clear about why you’re the right decision for a customer, that’s exactly where it leads to an indecision decision. We all say that time kills all deals. In my experience, especially in the industry we’re in, it certainly is true. If you can’t clarify why it is that you are the best option for the moment and make it ideally long-term with customers, it becomes a tough thing to do.

It’s the concept of needs, wants, and wishlists. I need to simplify things in my head so I can get my head around them. When you take a look at the list of things that are important and try to distill that, depending on where you’re at, you might not have time for the wants or the wishes. Everybody wants to be in high growth mode and have automation all over the place.

Sometimes what you need is a customer’s story. It’s to go get that one deal and identify that one customer to bring in and start building a process you know works. Classify it in simple ways, “What do I need right now? What does my team need? What does my lieutenant need?” If you focus on what the necessity is, you get to point of clarity pretty quickly, and say, “All this stuff is fluff.” We can’t do without X, Y, and Z. The list becomes pretty short pretty fast.

TRM 22 | Simplicity Is Clarity

Simplicity Is Clarity: If you focus on what the necessity is, you get to a point of clarity pretty quickly.

That’s sage advice. In my own practice, that has been a challenge with all the competing priorities, taking that step back to say, “For the moment, what is needed?” Especially from a Chief Revenue Officer standpoint, I’m always looking five years out at what the plan could be, testing it, and then standing that up. As I stand that up, then I have to go year by year what is needed by then.

My mind is constantly churning at what’s next. You’re completely right. I was talking to a client. He’s like, “Now, this is what we need. We’ll worry about the year out next.” It’s a great reminder because we all get in that mode. People are talking about the recession, and they’re like, “What do I do?” That almost is counter to what they should be doing.

Especially, in the early stages, it’s very hard to predict where exactly you’re going to be in eighteen months when you’re opening the doors to a new venture. You can make so many assumptions. You can get very easily into a rut of almost pre-playing the tape like, “This is how it’s all going to go.” It’s all based on assumptions.

What I fabricated in my mind is, “What’s going to happen in the next six months?” For us, it was, “In the next 30 days, we’re going to refine the message. We’re going to get it out in the field. We’re going to get feedback. We’re going to take this down and distill it down to the simplest points we can, and communicate what we need to customers.”

Now, we got our message. How do we measure the progression of the customer journey through a pursuit? How do we keep them moving along the lines to eventually a deal? What’s important? Where are we falling short from a progression perspective? How do we narrow in on that one piece of the puzzle? I had a mentor who once said, “Mike, don’t boil the ocean.”

She was from Iowa. That’s a pretty common saying in those parts, which is funny because there are no oceans around, but everybody says it for some reason. In a lot of things, when things get complicated, we have a tendency of trying to fix it all, or a shotgun approach to saying, “We’ll see what gets fixed first.” Again, it’s stepping back and saying, “What’s really broken here? What if we improve it as it’s going to impact us the most in the next 2 weeks, 30 days, etc.?” and just hyper-focusing on some of those things.

If you break it out, you can feel the momentum, which is important to me. Progress is important. The status quo, I’ll get bored and frustrated with. I’m a results person, as many sales folks are and many leaders of companies as well. It’s all about getting to the next objective. If the objectives are a little smaller and a little bit easier to attain, and you’re celebrating the small wins, it’s a lot easier to make progress pretty quickly.

TRM 22 | Simplicity Is Clarity

Simplicity Is Clarity: When objectives are a little smaller and easier to attain, it’s a lot easier to make progress pretty quickly.

That brings me a little bit back to you. You started this new venture with WarehouseQuote. How did that come about? You alluded to that a little bit.

It was an interesting progression because I took a left turn compared to most of my colleagues. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, so April 2020. Previously, I was working at RSM, which was a large consultancy. I led a technology service line and Microsoft practice there. I was in the tech space in professional services. I got to a point where I wasn’t sure about the road I had been traveling for eight years, which was a very strange realization.

In a partner model, the goal every day, at least from my perspective, was to get a little bit closer to being invited into the circle. One day, it eventually became a clarity, where it’s just, “This isn’t maybe what I want to do for the next years.” It’s a long-term commitment. I wasn’t sure that I had quite found my calling. Additionally, we benefited from a lot of growth, and the company got really big.

You probably noticed this from the few conversations we’ve had because I’m just not a red tape guy. I need to run a little bit. Talking with Ben and Jordan, that opportunity presented itself. I felt like they were bringing a unique solution specific to the industry. It was very similar to the managed IT offering that many companies out there provide.

It was applied to warehousing and distribution, which, in and on itself, that model in that space was pretty unique. There’s the unit economics of recurring revenue and fairly sticky business, etc. All those things were exciting, and so was the prospect of growing it. After I’d gone through all the list and distilled it down, my moment of clarity in deciding to move forward was, “The world is ending,” and still considering this move.

In normal circumstances, I would’ve done it immediately. At that moment, I said, “This got to be the right thing for me to follow.” I made the jump. The day I said yes, I was on a plane for my current employer. I was at Detroit Airport. It was shut down. There was nothing in there. I was supposed to go to a Sixers game in Philadelphia. I was told to turn around. That day, the NBA shut down. The world was literally confusing. I called Ben when I got home and said, “I’m in.” The rest is history.

How did WarehouseQuote work through your clarity model for revenue?

I’m not saying I was oversold with the progressions that had been made, but it was definitely a blank sheet of paper when I came in. Everything needed to be stood up from, “What are the stage gates in our sales process?” We don’t have a deck to even pull up. We had to work through some of that. For me, coming from out of the industry, it was very important to get my brain around simplicity like, “What are we doing?” I’ve always been big on clarity.

We had three components we were bringing to the market, and that was a network of warehouses. You provide scalable and flexible solutions for distribution. That’s the technology that brings all of that stuff together, gives you insights to run your business, and supports you because the supply chain is hard. Things happen. Very few folks out there, I realized, truly want to be accountable for handling the issues. Those were our three things. Those became, for a period of time, our three unique is what we call them.

In almost every meeting, it’s all hands. We were hammering this home. It was the corporate vernacular of what we did. It was natural for us to talk about it. Customers and prospects are very keen on sniffing out when you’re not on board with something. It’s hard to sell something you’re not sold on. For us, it was getting really comfortable with what we do every day for our customers and what value we are bringing them.

Customers and prospects are very keen on sniffing out when you’re not on board with something. It’s hard to sell something you’re not sold on.

We marched with those discussion points around those three uniques for months, every day. We could still ask anybody in the company what our three uniques are. They’d be able to rattle them off pretty quickly. “What do we do very basically? What are the three things we bring to the table?” That was really effective in getting our messages put together.

I had Catherine Brown on recently, and we were talking. I don’t know if you’ve read her book, but it’s How Good Humans Sell. One of the key points that we were talking about was making it easy on customers to buy. One of the challenges that quite often you run into is a founder or owner is passionate about what they’re doing. They believe in it.

You have to scale. You have to be able to get others in your company to have that same passion because the customer sniffs if something isn’t quite there. That person doesn’t believe in it. I was talking to Mel over at Omicle. It was the same thing. She had said quite emphatically, “Make it easy,” yet we all, as humans, seem to want to overcomplicate that.

You have these two founders that you align with completely. Now, you’re building this team, and they now know they’re three differentiators. You call them three uniques. That’s huge. That’s very important because then people can get behind it. They can understand it. You said at all hands, all of these things. How are you going to work those three through your scaling? You guys are in a fast growth mode.

Yes, we are. Ben, our CEO, we leave the all-hands. He has this thing where he does some questions upfront, like facts about the company or some of the individuals’ hidden talents, those types of things. He has a bag of candy and he’ll throw it out when somebody gets it right. Every single one, he asks what our three uniques are. It was coming from the top, from Ben. He was big on clarity within our sales process.

We have a particular opportunity to rank our three uniques against what the customer needs at that point. In every sales cycle, in order for things to move forward, we are requiring our sales personnel to understand where exactly we align with the customer at a very simple level. Before all the major scoping and technology, how are we aligning with what they need with what we can provide?

The higher that alignment, the higher propensity to close a deal. It was in everything that we were doing. I created laminated cards, 8×11, that had triggers. They’re all aligned with our three uniques. Everything that our folks were seeing in the processes that they were continuing to develop somehow hinged off of what those three uniques were.

TRM 22 | Simplicity Is Clarity

Simplicity Is Clarity: The higher that alignment, the higher propensity to close a deal.

It was embedded in everything. When you find something real, you feel it is important. It’s to have a little bit of that in everything you’re doing, some way or another. To be a tether back to why we’re here is incredibly effective and pervasive. It gets into everything. There’s no escaping it. If we wanted to change it to the four pillars, we would have trouble probably doing it. It is as simple as everything that we do. It’s everywhere.

That is commitment. It’s not throwing it up on a wall and letting it sit there. You got to challenge as your people are coming up with new processes, ways to work, and interactions with customers or each other. It’s important. “How does it relate to X, Y, and Z?” Those were often the questions and critical challenges, as we were having strategy meetings, “How does this align to our three uniques?” and being able to tie it off and being very intentional about tying something to something simple. It’s something we felt we have put together a clear understanding internally around.

That is cool listening to that story. It’s about being very intentional because we can end up very much. At the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned something that gets us off through North if we don’t. We have our guiding star. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in the wrong country because we went off that guiding star. That’s very compelling. I’ll change this up. You’ve got four kids. If you could go back to your younger, wiser self, what advice would you give them?

Being aware of the noises is probably one of the biggest ones. I’ve weaned myself off of, for the most part, social media. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I know I’m the type of guy that will dive in. I’ll go down the rabbit hole.

I do, too.

It’s like when I spent going through Instagram pages or whatever if my goal is to become a better sales leader, pitchman, or inside sales rep, and prospecting. To me, replacing that time and the noise with productive things around improving your skillset and knowledge, and becoming a better professional is a much better use of the time.

It pays out far more than the immediate gratification I get on jumping down the social media pages. This is one example of noise. It’s when we have goals and set things that aren’t that important aside. Maybe, financially you’re trying to get somewhere and saying, “The vacation, that’s a want or a wish this year,” or, “My goal is to pay off my car in the next twelve months.”

The world doesn’t work in being able to do everything at once. It’s like separating out some of the noise because my buddy wants to go on a golf trip, or whatever, and say, “Maybe I should probably stick to my goals.” It’s understanding and tuning your ears to what the noise really is and being conscious that it’s always out there. When I remove it, things become easier, for me personally.

Distraction is very much out there. Time is the only thing that we own. It’s what we do with our time.

What goes along with that is to do what you want and what drives you. I realize that the title of partner at the previous firm wasn’t the thing that drove me. I liked being around the growth. The opportunity to start a company at X ends up in Y, and we’ve got some big goals, some life-changing stuff. The potential to impact the people we’re working with every day and provide a completely new path for them is incredibly exciting to me.

Do what you want and what drives you.

It’s to be able to impact in a positive way the people we’re working with every day. I found out that’s what motivated me. Don’t be afraid to run after it. Show no fear. It will happen. To advise, I wish I would’ve taken a few more risks probably earlier on. My 22-year-old brain did not comprehend that when I was 33 with 3 and a half kids. I had a lot more to worry about from a risk perspective. That’s the time to go after it. Retrospectively, I probably wish I would’ve done a little bit more of that and stuck my neck out there a little bit further early on. No regrets. We’re here.

As you came, that’s where you’ve come to. That’s our learning and growth in life. I hate to tell you this because I’m a little bit older than you. It will probably change again once in a while.

At some point, you need a new moment of clarity.

Exactly. It keeps life super exciting.

I can tell you, mine’s never dull.

Not with four kids. Do you ever get to sleep?

We were joking a little bit earlier. Clarity, for me, every day is starting with four kids and ends with four kids. That’s the goal. Everything else is icing on the cake.

That would be in that mode. Mike, the audience also likes to learn more about you. We talked about golf. Obviously, your wife kicks your butt in golf. You already said that. What are some of the fun things that you do with these four kids and your me-time?

One of my favorite things I like to do is rotate them out taking them out one at a time. It’s funny how different they are even when you separate them together. I spend a little time with them and run into maybe a local event in town. I went to a monster truck rally, which I had never been to one. It was a new experience for me.

It’s something I probably would’ve never done on my own, but I have young boys, so you couldn’t get cooler than monster trucks flying through the air. Those types of things are a lot of fun. You mentioned time as being the one thing we don’t have a whole lot of, or at least it’s the most limited resource we have. I take a little bit more time than I used to in slowing down a little bit, taking the weekend, heading out for a weekend trip, or jumping right into an event that my kids want to go to. Not having everything so planned out and living in the moment a little is where I probably get the most fun and where the most fun things happen. That’s when it’s shaken up.

TRM 22 | Simplicity Is Clarity

Simplicity Is Clarity: Time is the one thing we don’t have a whole lot of. It’s the most limited resource we have.

Like you mentioned, for fun, I’m trying to catch my wife on the golf course. It’s been a humbling existence. We’ve been married for several years and together for a couple of years. When I met her, the first time I saw her swinging in the golf club, I said, “I’m in for a long flight here.” We do that together. That’s our time out alone. When we can, we spend a couple of hours away from the kids and get into the quiet. We might not say anything for four hours, and that might just be fine, depending on what’s going on that day.

It’s about taking the time. It’s easy to work. For me, you could classify me probably as a workaholic, probably a lot of your audience and yourself. You always go to be doing something. I have enjoyed the last years taking a little time out. The time spent over here is just as important as the 80-hour week, or whatever might be on the table.

Do I have this right? You married your wife for her golf swing, or is that when she won your heart?

We were dating. She’s a great scramble partner. After that, it was history. History was already written. She’s a fabulous golfer and probably a better human than me. It’s been good for me to have her around.

That’s so funny. My husband says that he married me because I ate a pint of ice cream in about ten minutes and put him under the table when we first met each other. I don’t have the claim to the golf swing.

My wife has shown some pretty good dance moves, especially back in our college days. That’s probably when, whether I knew it or not, I decided, I said, “I’ll take the one dancing on the table.”

She sounds like a blast. That’s amazing.

She’s a lot of fun.

Mike, this has been such a fun episode on clarity, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. The three uniques, I’m going to remember that, left and right. “What are your three uniques?” That’s going to definitely help me. Where can the readers get a hold of you?

Probably the best way is LinkedIn. All the social media is still left on my phone. The app is still left on my phone. That’s probably the one I’m most active on.

If you’re active on social media.

I’m open to connections there, so I’m always happy to connect. Whether it’s leveraging my network to help out, a quick conversation, or a call, I always enjoy doing that. It’s probably the quickest way. If any of those who rather do email or something like that, it’s MAdkins@WarehouseQuote.com.

There you all have it. It’s another great episode. I have had an amazing guest. I want to thank everybody for reading. If you liked it, share it, and love it, give Mike a shout-out. We certainly appreciate his time for all the audience. Thank you so much, Mike.

Thank you for having me. It’s been a blast. It’s great to get to know you a little bit more during this conversation.

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About The Author : Valerie Cobb

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