Sales Wisdom Series

Why Kyle Vamvouris Says You’re Over-Complicating Your Sales Process – And It’s Holding You Back

Michaela Mendes

Head of Content & Strategy

Table of contents:

Kyle Vamvouris isn’t afraid to tell you the truth about the state of modern sales, and here’s what he has to say: it’s too complicated.

Everyone wants to try a new set of tactics. Few want to focus. Even fewer want to deeply understand the metrics behind each channel (and the “why” behind the metrics).

But Kyle keeps reminding his ever-growing LinkedIn audience that it’s all about tracking and looking at your sales data.

And after helping over 60 companies close over $100 million dollars and sales and raise over $280 million in capital through his consultancy Vouris, I think he might know a thing or two about how to build an effective sales process.

I interviewed Kyle about how sales teams can win more this year, what most people are getting wrong about sales today, and how he’s changed his perspective on career growth over the years. Here’s what he had to say:

What does every revenue professional need to know to win more this year?

To win more this year, revenue leaders need to know what is working for them for real, and what isn’t. They also need to know why things are working. When you understand the why, you can replicate it.

Let me dive a little bit deeper into this. Right now what we're seeing is things are getting a lot more difficult in sales, and what was somewhat effective is now not effective. Since churn is increasing, it's putting more pressure on your customer acquisition costs.

The better your churn, the less you care about customer acquisition costs. If you look at a lot of B2B SaaS companies, they almost don't care what they pay to acquire customers because they have a 120% net revenue retention.

That means every single year their customer base is growing by 20% year over year. You'll pay almost anything to acquire customers at that point, within reason.

But what happens when annual churn drops to 90%? So now, every year you're actually losing revenue, right?

Now you’re looking at how much you're paying to acquire. Why do I bring this up? Too many tactics exist on the internet and I run into companies that spend time and money trying to do all of them. They’re saying, “I need sequences that use phone, email, Linkedin, etc.” and it’s extremely complicated.

But in the case of sequences, if you're not having success with your SDR team right now, then you need to get them only focused on one channel. For example, just focus on cold calling. Once you get it working, you can understand what your metrics are with cold calling. Then add email. Then add social.

If we can't get one channel to work, we don't need to do all of them.

Figure out what actually works for you, why it works and then double down on that. Stop trying a whole bunch of different things at once. Get clarity, get some focus, and then start improving things over time.

What do most people believe about sales that you disagree with?

I encounter folks who believe that sales is not a numbers game – that it's about quality over quantity.

I do not agree with that. I think sales 100% is a numbers game and rejecting that causes a lot more harm than good.

When I say sales is a numbers game, I mean every activity that a sales person does is trackable and it has an effectiveness rate. In my opinion, saying sales is a numbers game means understanding your metrics and knowing what you have to do in order to achieve certain results.

Quality does not exist without quantity. I don't care what company it is. There are always outliers, and I’m sure there are some out there, but I have yet to see an organization that has only ever followed a “quality approach” that is able to consistently schedule appointments.

What I do see are people who took a quantity approach, figured out what worked, found the quality within the quantity and the operational opportunity, and then had incredible results.

So the way I think about it is this: we need the quantity to learn about our messaging, to learn about our tactics, to learn our own conversion rates. Then we can use that information to double down on what works.

How has your mindset towards work changed as you've grown your career?

The biggest thing that has changed in my perspective is on how other people work. So when I was early in my career, I was very driven and I was the first one in and last to leave.

I made a lot of personal sacrifices and prioritized work heavily. I still do that a lot to this day. So maybe personally that hasn't changed. It’s how I like to operate.

But I also had the expectations that other people should be like that too. And that's where I ran into problems.

I used to get irritated when people weren't in the office when I was, especially when I started leading teams. And really where I learned that I need to calm down is after reading Kim Scott's book “Radical Candor.” She does a great job breaking this down.

People are at different points in their career. They also work differently. And just because someone doesn't work like you, doesn't mean that they're less effective than you. And actually, in a lot of cases, I feel like they're more effective than me.