Shared Sheets to Nowhere (vs Proactive Insights): A Conversation with Mike Murtaugh

I share most of my complex sales articles to LinkedIn, and I read every comment they receive there. I was recently intrigued by one in particular by Mike Murtaugh, Director of Business Development at Cushman & Wakefield. He said he reads my blog every week, and hasn’t yet seen me talk about something critical: Real time versus reporting.

In his experience, he explained, most sales departments are getting a lot of reports out of Salesforce… but they’re not getting real-time insights that enable them to act on critical data.

So, my team caught up with him to talk about that. Here’s how that conversation went.

The Shared Sheet to Nowhere

“At one of the companies I worked for,” says Murtaugh. “Someone would say, hey, we need to talk about this issue. And then they would send out a spreadsheet, something I called the shared sheet to nowhere.”

All the top folks at the company would sit around a table and stare at information about what various accounts were doing last month, and try to make decisions based on the rear-view mirror represented by that data. It’s the opposite, he says, to how successful companies run operations. In any top-tier company, people, process, and consistency of operations are key.

Yet at many of these same companies, those principles aren’t applied to the sales and business development teams. Instead of real-time, everyone’s looking backwards in time, and lagging behind the market, partly because they can’t see sales and business development data in a useful, proactive way.

Change Management Isn’t Once and Done

“Let’s talk about change management,” says Murtaugh. “Everybody wants immediate results, but that’s not realistic. It’s a commitment. That’s why sports teams and military units are good. They drive the message, and they keep on it. But in sales and business development, we just say, ‘okay, we’ll do that,’ but nobody holds us to it.”

One of the problems, he continues, is that most CRMs don’t provide the tools to adapt quickly, nor do they make it possible to reinforce change.  “This is where the rubber meets the road,” he says. 
Salesforce pumps out a ton of reports, but if you want to change your sales process, you have to pay developers to put it in the system. And nobody really uses it for sales enablement, because it’s not easy to do.

Where The Sausage Is Made

“Membrain, from my perspective, is the tool that makes change management possible,” says Murtaigh. “Within each stage of the sales process within Membrain, you have different steps you guide the team through, and that’s where the sausage is made. Membrain shows salespeople to do this, then do that, and when this happens, you attach that document. You can get granular with what you’re doing. People need to know what to do next, and Membrain shows them that.”

Furthermore, Membrain makes it easy to change the process to adapt as you learn more and as the market changes. The interface is easy to customize, and every part of the process and down to the last detail can be changed without specialized coding.

Proactive Information Must be Visible and Relevant

Murtaugh says that inside most CRMs, the information is all over the place. There’s poor visibility, the workflows are terrible, and the information is generally not good. There’s no proactive real-time view of what’s happening on the team or in the industry. And that’s a problem.

“The proactive approach always wins,” he says. “Because it provides realtime views and insights, Membrain is a catalyst toward better results and outcomes for the companies that use it.”
The Future is Bright

Here at Membrain, we’re proud to be working with Murtaugh and his teams at Cushman & Wakefield, and proud that our champions often take us with them from one company to the next, knowing that we are the tool that enables transformative change.

And I’m proud to be connected with people like Murtaugh who ask great questions and get me thinking. So tell me, is your company running off the rear view mirror, or are you agile, proactive, and consistent in sales execution?