Your salespeople should be selling, not spending half their week building proposals, updating the CRM, and scheduling appointments.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down how Alarm Masters is simplifying the sales role so reps can spend more time face-to-face with customers.
They share how they're using international employees and AI to handle proposals, prospecting, appointment setting, and follow-up; and why removing these tasks can create a more consistent pipeline.
In this episode:
→ Why salespeople are wasting up to half their day
→ The tasks Alarm Masters removes from its sales reps
→ Using AI and international employees to support sales
→ Why they target 25–30 meetings per rep each week
→ The first two sales tasks they'd delegate
Connect:
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
The industry is characterized by asking the salesperson to do everything.
In a lot of other disciplines or other roles, we don't really do this. That's right.
How do you get everything off of your salesperson's plate except the thing that they and only they can do?
Some sales guys want to do the proposal. That's right. They want the control or some people just geek out. I'll call it the 10%.
Like they they like it. Yeah. And it's a lot of like random things. It's not just like one structured task that you could just like AI out of it.
I think we should have our AI employees listen to our podcast and send us feedback. I agree.
Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven, and I have my co-host and business partner Colin with me. And today we're talking about why your salespeople are wasting up to half their day. Complete waste.
Yeah. This is relevant for us because we just had a sales meeting today and talked about this very topic. And I think that in this industry, you've heard us say a lot that the industry is characterized by asking the salesperson to do everything. Asking them to find their own leads, run their cycles, do the sidewalks, do the design, do the proposals, hand off to ops, kind of project manage a little bit from a like customer expectation perspective. And uh you also probably have them in the sales cycle doing stuff like following up with their prospects and um setting their own appointments and um you know all that stuff, right? CRM management. Um and so we take an approach to say this is this is the whole point of the episode. This is we're gonna give it away right here. The whole point of the episode is how do you get everything off of your salesperson's plate except the thing that they and only they can do. And in our mind, and the way that it fits at Alarm Masters is the thing that only our salespeople can do is be face to face with the customer. And uh everything else can be um handed off to an international employee, can be handed off to uh AI, can be handed off to someone else on the team that is doing only that specific thing, right? And so uh we find it a lot of sales in this industry is extremely cyclical because you get a lot of inbound leads. Maybe in the spring, you're slammed all summer, nobody's prospecting anything, they fill no pipeline, the they close everything out at the end of the summer, and they're left saying, Oh no, how am I negative to my number at the end of the year? I don't have a lot left in my pipe. I gotta prospect really, really, really hard, and then you're at a sprint to try to close something the second half of the year, and it's it's hard, it's scary. That's a hard thing to do. And um I think that the most important thing that you could do is really step back and say, what all take an inventory of what all is on your salesperson's plate.
It's one of the most classic issues in what I will say is kind of like sweaty blue-collar contractor world. Like the way that we are running sales is abnormal for our industry, but even more holistically, and so it's um it is kind of commonly accepted. And the other thing I'll point out is in a lot of other disciplines or other roles, we don't really do this to our team members. But this area, for some reason, well, I I think I know some of the reasons, but this area of business um gets kind of unfair treatment. And I experienced this myself. Like I was in a sales role in my past in my 20s, soup to nuts, including backside doing all the training. I mean, it was every single nook and cranny of that entire process, everything touching the customer, and I would get involved in support after the fact, too. So um it's not uncommon, it's actually more common that this is what people are doing or what they're expecting of their salespeople. And then as a manager and owner, you're going, what do you do? Yeah, you know why and it's unrealistic though. Yeah.
So so let's let's talk about uh in a little more detail um how when we take things off their plate, like what are some things that we've taken off of our salespeople's plates and how?
Yeah. Or let's start with the let's start with the order of operations of which we've taken stuff off their plate. How about that? Yeah. Uh and I think it's important to delineate the things we've taken off from international versus AI. And so I think we should talk through sort of our journey to a segmented sales. We're gonna summarize a lot and we're gonna consolidate a lot because we don't want to go too deep onto this topic, uh, because we should stick around. Um, but I would say the very first thing is we hired a sales guy and we said, Hey man, you need to be prospecting. He said, Man, I would love to. I am slammed with uh creating proposals. It takes forever. Uh, and so the first thing we did is we hired an international employee that uh their job exclusively was to work with the salesperson to collect the information and generate the proposals and follow an estimation playbook where they would notice trends from the ops department. So they would say, Hey, um, how did we do on hours here? And the ops team would say, You were way under hours. It's like, okay, why? And so they would start to learn the nuances of that. And then it was like, oh, you were under hours. Like, great. So we have a little bit of wiggle room on the next proposal that's similar to this. So creating some of that knowledge and documenting it in such a way that we can be more competitive. A salesperson does not have the bandwidth to do that. They do not, even if they're in a post-mortem, they're not exclusively focused on how do I create the most competitive, accurate quotes possible. They're figuring out how do I do this as fast as possible. It's 7:30. Uh, I'm on season three of Silo, and I only have two episodes left, and I want to go to bed. And that's what they're doing with their quotes. Um, and so what we started with was hiring an international employee who was doing that for us, and he he crushed it. Shout out Felix. He's now a supervisor for our inside sales group. Um, and he managed that, and that took a massive load off of our salesperson's plate. So that was the first thing we did.
We actually doubled down on that as our next sort of iteration because we found that Felix was getting overwhelmed as we started to scale the team. We're like, man, one guy can't support three people. And so uh we ended up building an AI agent that using natural language and looking up historical quotes will actually build the full proposal for you and then drop it into Salesforce with the markups, scope of work, exclusions, subscriptions, every everything written in there. And it just takes time for the salesperson and Felix to just review to make sure it's all kosher. Um, so that was the first big bucket, right? Is like getting estimation proposal generation off of the plate of the salesperson and into the hands of an international employee, and then it was international plus AI, and it'll always be that way. We're gonna always have Felix involved. He is the keeper of the keys for our proposal and design generation stuff. Even now, our reps, even though now our reps are doing some proposals just straight into Eddie, our estimation agent. Felix is still laying eyes on pretty much everything that's being generated, and it's gonna be like that. Uh, because we're gonna be making tweaks, we're gonna be making adjustments. Um, so that would be stop the first stop.
These types of things you ingratiate yourselves to your as manager, managers or owners to your sales team by saying, We're going to invest time, we're gonna help you. Like, what are the things that it's not your highest and best use? Like, and so I think just being proactive to ask those questions, like there can be turnover in this industry, like, and we always done a battle against that. So, this is one of the ways to specifically combat churn and sales roles is to not make them do every freaking thing and to help them, right? And to lean in on that, there's two scenarios that I would identify. You may have a third, so feel free to chime in. When you do this, some sales guys want to do the proposals, right? Because um they they want the control or some people just geek out, I'll call it the 10%. Like they they like it, yeah. Um and and so uh maybe they have like a technical background and now they're in a sales role and they just kind of like doing it. Um I don't I don't care. That's neat. Yeah, um, that's not good business. So you're gonna take it, no, you're gonna take it away from them, even if they are kicking fighting and say, I'm doing this because I care about you, yeah, and because we want to grow our business. Right. This is not good. Yeah. Um, and then the other, the the other version of that is they're gonna celebrate and be like, oh man, like I can think of somebody specifically right now. It's like, oh gosh, thank you so much, you know. So um, anyways, that's I don't know if there's any other scenarios you'd add to that, but that's just a comment.
Yeah,
I the second biggest category universally is okay, so we've gotten that off our plate. Now, now we need help filling the calendar with face-to-face meetings, right? So if if uh if we're dialed in on face-to-face meetings is the most important thing that we want our team focused on as much as possible, uh, how do we dial that in? And what is the kind of north star for the number of meetings? In our in our world, 25 to 30 meetings a week is sort of the top end of the meetings you're gonna have. And that's it flexes a little bit based on sales cycle meetings. Like if we're in the middle of trying to close a really big deal.
You mean per rep per rep.
Per rep per week, 25 to 30 per rep per week. Um, and it again, it depends. If we are in a very heavy cycle, it may be 15 to 20 because they're having to do multiple like planning sessions, stuff in the office to do a big design, they're having to work with Felix. I mean, that's just inevitable. Bigger deals can take a little bit more time, and that's okay. Um, for weeks that are lower on cell cycle, we may have more 35 appointments. We may have a lot more depending on what we're doing. We may do a drop-in day where it's like 10 appointments in a single day, all dropping in, right? So um that was so so then it's like, how do you fill the calendar? So then we hired an international employee to help us schedule coffee drops. We talk about that all the time. Uh, we ran through, uh, we had about a thousand target commercial accounts that fit sort of the buy box we were looking for. We went through that in about six months. So we hit every single one. Um and found a lot of pipeline. And then we started to pick up our head and say, okay, now we're kind of creeping outside of our buy box a little bit on coffee drops. Where what do we want to do now? And like what's a trend? So we started going towards a new logo. Um, and so that's where the AI agent stuff came in is okay, now we need a new logo accounts, and we need, and and I think this is an important distinction. I'm glad we're kind of talking about this because I think when you're trying to find new logos, there's a difference between a prospect and a lead. A prospect is um, I think that this business could be a good fit for me because of the size of who they are, but I don't know who is there, and I don't think there's any compelling event for why they would want to buy from me right now. So that's a prospect. And and a lot of companies will call those like marketing qualified leads, where it's like, hey, this is not even a sales lead yet. It's truly a marketing lead. And like at SaaS companies, they use prospects as like they're owned by the marketing department. And then once they get contact information and there's some compelling event, then it becomes a lead for the sales department. Uh, we don't have that distinction, but what we do have is a prospect. And so we really like, you know, if I'll just take this as an example, senior living. We created an AI agent that goes and scrapes publicly available data to uh Stu, is his name. Um thanks, Stu. Shout out Stu. Shout out, Stu, um, to find uh publicly available data, to find compelling events and triggers to find prospects. So we would go, okay, so we want senior living, that's our ideal customer profile. We want to find a reason to call on them, not just show up. So we started scraping public data about uh staff changes, fire citations, OSHA citations, et cetera. Okay, so now we've got we've got an ideal client profile, we we've got a prospect, we know in a compelling event, but we don't have the contact information. So then we built the side agent on top of Stu, Stu B, that basically goes and enriches it, uses both Apollo, which is an API service, and it also just does a massive waterfall scraping the internet to find more leads.
Um and then it surfaces it uses some inference, doesn't it, too? Like it's got some intelligence.
Yeah, so it'll it'll uh use inference to find emails. Like so if it finds, if it knows the executive director's name is Becky Smith, and it can't find Becky Smith's email online, but it does know that Frank Albertson is the janitor and his email is out there, and it's F Albertson at whatever, it'll say, okay, well then maybe B Smith at, and then it'll actually use a little SMTP server to ping the email address to see if it's kicking back, like returning, hey, this is not a valid email address. Then what's really cool about that, so it creates the lead, and then what it actually does is it layers on a point of view. So it says, hey, here's who you're talking to, here's their role, here's the facility, here's the general size of facility. It's 450 beds, it's an independent living facility, it's just it got freshly renovated, it got recently acquired. You're talking to the executive director, and it presents that information so that the salesperson has that we call it a POV point of view, going into the customer. And so then we will actually just have them do drop-ins on that, but also simultaneously, our international SDR is making phone calls on that to set booked appointments. Um, and so that was the first fill the calendar is fill it with booked appointments and drop-ins um to be able to get in front of customers more often.
And so now you've taken off at this point the estimation appointment booking, and you're starting to make their world smaller. Yeah. Right? Like you're starting to make the salesperson's role tighter and you know, gives them clarity, frankly, like brain space. Like I just think you're gonna close at a little bit higher rate when you're not as distracted, you're not like squirrel, right, you know, all the time. Yeah. So I I so that's first first couple things. Anything else that you want to highlight or things that we're thinking about doing next?
Yeah, this is a little aside that I'm I haven't even told you this is something that I'm gonna start building when I get some more capacity. Is uh for the drop-ins, I'm gonna start having, I've already told them to start doing this, to start taking pictures of themselves in the lobby of wherever they're at, put it into the Slack channel, and then I'm gonna have the AI agent take that picture and email it to the executive director to say, Hey, sorry I missed you while I was here. I'd love to come back and make a picture of the two of us next week.
Okay, so I love that. And I thought what you were gonna go was one of two ways. I thought you were gonna superimpose the executive director with them. Like, great to see you. Yeah, that is funny. Like, wait, when did we meet? Yeah, or or like actually use a direct mail API and like send a photo of you there. Yeah, that both of those, anyways, we can play with that. Yeah, by the way, little little sidebar. Um, I think we should have our AI employees listen to our podcast and send us feedback. I agree. Um I and and then they can they have emails, yeah, so they can subscribe. Yeah, and and if you aren't subscribed, that's a great point. You should be like our AI employees, you should subscribe to our newsletter, to our channel, give us a like, a comment, tell your mom, tell a friend. Yeah, and because Stu and Kevin and Chase and all of them, all of our AI friends are going to as well. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But we're not bringing any terms of service, you know what I mean? This is just like uh things not talking in between friends here. Of course not. Yeah, yeah,
no. Um, the last thing I'll add is so so we've really made their world smaller, and this is the conversation we had today is my team is like, hey, we have a whole day blocked. So Wednesdays is our like sales meeting days, we go through pipeline prospecting and just like go through general deals, we do our operational handoffs. So that day's basically blocked every day. They also had a full other day blocked just for follow-ups. Like just, okay, I went and visited 20 people last week. Now I've got to do some emails, do some follow-ups, you know, uh go to my update my CRM, all the things that are associated with that. And that that was a whole day. So that means you know, two out of their five days available were completely blocked. And generally, people don't want to meet first thing on Monday mornings and they don't want to meet last thing on Friday. So that's basically two half days. So you're really left with like two days basically to just prospect, which is just not enough time. So now we're talking about how do we speed that up. So we're literally at today we were meeting on how do I build some things and how do we use our international team to like get the information in the notes from the sales team so that like the follow-ups and the appointment setting and all that is all handled by them. And again, the reps just free that block of time up so that they can get out into the field uh more often. And and that's sort of the like uh I would call the final boss that's like you've got a ton of manual work that needs to be done, and it's a lot of like random things, it's not just like one structured task that you could just like AI out of it. It's like, hey, you've got to like mix it up. There's some automations, there's some international team. You kind of got and and that and that doesn't move the needle as much as you know, doing proposals and prospecting. So if I were if I were sitting in somebody's shoes listening to this and you're saying, hey, where do I get started? The first thing I would do is hire somebody to do your proposals for you. That's like the easiest low-hanging fruit to get off of the salespeople's plate.
And it's gonna it's gonna be the the biggest impact.
Biggest impact, biggest bang for your buck. And then I would say from there, you would want to go find a prospecting SDR who can set appointments for you. Um but you got to equip them, you gotta know who, and you can't just say Google it. Like you got to have a little bit of a direction for them. So, so yeah, I would say I don't have anything else to add on this, but I and I want to see if you do, because I think that that kind of summarizes our journey to like where we are today.
Yeah, no, it does, and we'll keep sharing as we come up with that's the fun thing, right? As we've come up with new ideas and we test and try and tweak and keep going, and we're getting good feedback from the team. And so we'll just keep sharing more as we keep building more, technically.
Yeah, no doubt. Well, we appreciate y'all listening. Hope you have a great week.
