Elevating CRM Effectiveness with Tanner Mackenthun, Agiliti

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What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?

Brand?

Product?

Customers?

Employees?

Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Today is another special serum spotlight edition of the podcast from the SugarCRM Adoption Roadshow workshop in the beautiful Amazon Web Services offices in Austin, Texas. Just like in our other CRM Spotlight editions, we're going to dig into the topic of successfully deploying a customer relationship management project and driving adoption and usage. My guest today is Tanner Mackenthun, CRM Sales Enablement Manager for Agiliti based in Eden, Prairie, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. Agiliti Health provides medical equipment rental and maintenance services to health care providers. They offer on demand equipment rental, repair and clinical engineering services to ensure hospitals have access to high quality and well-functioning medical devices. Welcome Tanner!

Glad to be here!

Well, let's kick off here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do at agility and what brought you to the company?

So I have been with agility for four years. My background out of college was in chemical engineering, and I worked as an inside sales engineer for a large industrial automation company for a few years before being tapped on the shoulder. Say, "Hey, you might be a good fit to run our CRM program". Like, okay, sure, that's a big change for what I was doing, I took that in stride, and I haven't looked back.

That data centered mindset.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was just an even keel approach to project management, having a good insight to data, and being able to kind of see the processes that we've got going into the business, and figuring out ways to work.

So, your background and training are on the engineering side, and you jumped right into the sales side of the business.

I was really interested in finding an organization that was going to be agile, right? And Agiliti, funny enough with the name, but they move quickly. They make changes. They make decisions that impact your organization. We move quickly through change. It's not a slow-moving kind of giant? It's quick actions. It's being able to implement change in the business without having to go through some of the larger, I want to say, bureaucracy, but the process is that can sometime slow down a larger company. It's nice to be able to have a business need, understand the impact and go and make a change.

You bet. I think we all appreciate moving quickly and getting things done. So, Agiliti, you know, by the way, fair warning here, I've known Agiliti for a while now. They've been learning like customers for over 10 years. You joined four years ago. Tell us a little bit more about Agility. Or when I first knew them as Agiliti Health, they since dropped the health part of the name, and now just going by Agility, right?

Sure. Yes, Agiliti. Like you said in the intro, we are a medical device rental company, a servicing company. We have lots of offices really close by to most hospitals and surgery centers across the US. We're able to service our customers and provide rental these equipments at a moment's notice. We pride ourselves in being there in the time of need for our customers, patients, family members, whoever that may be, being able to provide a device that's maintained well, that's up to all the standards, and it's able to go whenever the customer or the patient needs it. We have also been acquiring companies over the past few years, even while I've been here and we're now a manufacturer. We acquired a company called Size Wise a few years ago, and we are now a manufacturer of specialty beds and surfaces and frames. We have that part of the business now. We're not only a rental and servicing company and managing movable medical equipment. We now have shifted into some manufacturing as well with our acquisition. So that adds another layer into the dynamics of what I do managing the CRM program, but just as a business, what we see when we talk through managing, apply and demand with our opportunities in CRM.

Tell us a little bit more about some of the recent changes at Agiliti. I know you guys have gone through quite a growth phase over the last few years.

Our revenue has significantly increased over the past decade or so. Our CEO has seen a lot of growth in his time here at Agiliti, and we're continued to see growth in the business a strong customer base with lots of hospitals and clinics and services relying on our people and our products as their source for the equipment that serves them.

You guys played a pretty special role during the COVID pandemic. Tell me a little bit about that.

We have movable medical equipment, so infusion pumps, respirators, things like that. We're in a really high demand. During the COVID pandemic, and we had the largest fleet in the country of that equipment. And not only did we service 1000s and 1000s of patients to be able to provide that equipment, but also the federal government worked with us to provide that for them as well. And Strategic National Stockpile as part of the work that Agiliti did during the COVID pandemic.

So not just doing well as a business, but doing good for your company, saving lives.

Our motto is "Every interaction has the power to change your life." When you see Agiliti name tags on some of the equipment, you know that it's up to the highest standards in terms of quality, care, preventative maintenance.

So, let's take that mindset. Let's take that mindset of process oriented and delivering the best services possible, and focus on quality. And let's turn it inside the business on what you're doing, so you're tell us a little bit more about the program that you're running at Agiliti and kind of your approach to that.

My role sits in the middle all these different functions. I do primarily focus on our sales and our operations team, but I sit then. I think it's true with probably a lot of different CRM programs. You get passed and worked with every function that may interact with a customer. We have marketing and our solutions team, we have customer care, we have our service and operations team, we have sales and CRM can sit in the middle of all that. So not only do I serve my users right, our primary people that are in the tool every day, but thinking more broadly and more holistically around the strategy and the business needs that are coming from all these different groups. May not be the most impactful from a number of user perspective, but it's always my thought. That's going on that changes that I can make in one area of the tool may impact processes that are going on with those other groups. So, it's just always having that, that full view of what's going on with the business to make sure that you're strategizing correctly.

It's got a neat part of your job is you get to interact with every one of those teams and pull them all together that get bring that one plus one equals three effect.

Absolutely! And that's one of the things that I've learned right over the past 10 years of kind of managing CRM systems is that if you aren't paying attention to all of the other aspects, right, you're going to get blindsided by either an unintended change, right, or just something that may not have impacted your group the way that you thought it was going to, right? So being really collaborative, making sure your stakeholders are always in the know of what, what I'm doing, what the direction is, and just making sure that there's just constant communication.

I love that you're thinking about just as much as you're thinking about the tools and technology. You're thinking about the people and the processes and the change and change management, and how you approach all that.

Absolutely! I was talking earlier about how we can make changes quick, right? And we're really agile company too, but you don't just go and implement. You still need to communicate. You need to be able to have training materials, you know, you can't just make a change and then be going on to the next one, right? All about viewing the changes that you're making, is it the right thing? Is the adoption where we need it to be, and depending on the change, the adoption and utilization of that is going to differ in what you're kind of trying to inspect and not so there's a lot that goes into the follow up after the change as well, versus just, hey, I got my ticket, or I got a change request, or I've got, a story that I'm developing, closing it out and then moving on the next one. My role is about the full life cycle too. Right from start, concept, building those requirements, working with our partners and our developers, or configuration, implementing the change, testing, all that sort of stuff, all the way through, training, follow through and adoption, reports, analytics, all that sort of stuff.

So, let's dig into the tech park for a minute. That's, you know, I'm a techie guy. I like the tech side of things, no doubt. Tell us about your CRM tech stack. What are the tools that you work with?

We leverage Sugar Premier, SugarCRM, that is our central hub for all of our customer interactions, our pipeline, our forecasting, our what we call territory planning, where we give our reps a module that they focus really holistically, high level around their territory. Think critically about it. That is our in our central hub, we use HubSpot as our marketing automation platform, lead nurturing. We use another tool called Qualtrics to be more of our customer feedback survey tool, and we've got a variety of ERPs as well that either have come through acquisitions or legacy tools that have been with Agiliti for a long time. All of those sort of edge applications is integrated into sugar in one way, shape or form. The goal is, if there's a customer touch point happening that data should be visible in CRM. Now it's not always the easiest or it's not always the most apparent how to get that into CRM, but that's the goal. If there's customer interactions, they need to be visible or documented or accessible to our CRM team, sales people, operations, what have you that needs to be visible so they can understand the trends, the things that are happening with that customer. So, going into the feedback side of it. We're getting great feedback from our customers that we're incorporating back into an overall health.

So, your account managers can directly see the feedback coming from their customers.

Sometimes they're even the ones entering it right, and then we kind of circle it back in right. But we survey our customers frequently with spot surveys and these annual things, and that data right back in to CRM so that it's visible. So, you know who filled it out? What were their thoughts on our products, our services? You know, do they recommend us? All these things can aggregate up to provide an overall health of our relationship with our customers.

You talked about the multiple lines of business that you have. You've got selling products from the from the medical, the beds and such that you from the company you just recently bought. You've got the service line of business. Yeah, you've got the rental line of business. How are your sales teams organized? Is that, is everybody doing everything, or do people specialize?

We've got a matrix and kind of hybrid sales strategy, where we've got sales people that are more localized to what we call a district, more of like an office, right? That would maybe support a large city. They would have responsibility to be boots on the ground, visiting these facilities, understanding where our products are being used, what products are being used. Are these the right ones for this customer at this time? So, we've got a large group of sales people that are focused What do you call that role?

Is it an account manager?

We call them our territory executives, account managers as well, that kind of manage, you know, more locally. And then we've got a group of our specialty sales team, which is more of our almost, consider them hunters. They're looking for new business. The big incremental growth around our different specialty solution offerings.

So, you mentioned is the territory manager. Bring in the special. Absolutely

It's very collaborative. You know, they the specialty sales teams cover a bit more ground, right? So, they may have, let's just say, a state or two, right? So, they're being really strategic and looking at our data to understand where we have white space for their specialty, where the customer may be having a contract expiring soon with a competitor to start the process getting meetings in there, sharing collateral right. Maybe we sell rental to this customer right, and they've had a good experience with us, just getting the transactional kind of business. Well, maybe we can elevate that up more to one of our services that are more elevated. Or maybe we manage their medical equipment for them, we can take over parts of a hospital with agility employees at a, you know, a reduced rate compared to what they have to do. And that's an elevated sales process. It's not necessarily one that's going to turn over quickly. That's one that takes significant time and investment, lots of meetings with lots of different stakeholders on both sides to get something like that across right. So, it's a completely different strategy and sales process depending on what we're selling.

I'm sure the top-level goal is just to be tracking all those interactions inside of your CRM system, so that leadership has insight into what's going on and helping people keep themselves organized. But you know, sometimes it's hard to get sales reps to think about doing their paperwork inside of the CRM system. How do you approach making sure that your different sales teams are getting full value out of the CRM and at the same time doing the work that they need to be doing with sales rep, with their customers?

Yes, of course. I mean, it's a balance. There's always the demand from leadership, not just sales leadership, but executive leadership, to understand what are our sales teams doing, where they're spending their time. Where customers are. They're seeing what are they talking about. We document all that stuff in our CRM, and we did recently roll out sugar connect to our sales team, so they've been able to take advantage of the integration, email integration, right, integration with Outlook, to be able to take their meetings that they have with customers that are already in their outlook and get those automatically created in sugar so that they have to just go in and update a few things, right? Go update the action items, or go update a few of our key unique fields. Saves a ton of time. For them, they don't have to go in and find the customers, or have to search for all their names, all that sort of stuff. It does a lot of that work for them. So, my strategy around this has always been trying to find ways to increase our sales effectiveness. And I define sales effectiveness as either helping our teams win more. In alignment to our sales strategy, or being more efficient at what they do, to give them more time to spend with customers, to be more strategic, more thoughtful around their customers, you know, their key pursuits. So, if I can do one of those two things right, I'm helping them be more effective at their jobs. So, as we ask them to do more. A lot of the times it feels like we ask our sales teams to go and hey, just go and fill out this field. Or go and document this campaign around this strategy, right? I try to find ways to help bring that all together, right? Say, “Hey, you're going to be doing this with the result, hopefully, of winning more business.” For this strategic initiative, for this high-revenue impact.

But you can't put the carrot in front of them. Here's the value, right? This is why you want to do it. And really kind of explains that all the time.

That's my hope, right? It doesn't always work that way, right? But that story that I try to approach it.

In there, you kind of touched on this a little bit, but maybe go a little bit more. You're bringing together people, process and technology into your CRM processes when you go to them and you say, here's the value of it. Do you have some, some key things that you come back to as examples? Do you have maybe some, some things that others have done well in the organization? How do you really just kind of get the hook set, if you will.

I mean, the thing that the most important role in, I think, any successful implementation of a change or a program, is the direct manager. So, my goal is always to get their buy in, not just with the change, to say, Hey, this is what we're asking. But why? Then you set up the program. You set up reporting, analytics dashboards, whatever it is, to make sure that they understand what their teams are doing with the process or the change that we're implementing, so that they can coach to it right, and understand where they may have team members that are adopting if there isn't that direct manager presence, you're ever now really hard time, especially in my role, to make something successful. So having direct manager and of course, executive leadership is always great to have, and I've always had really strong executive leadership with what I do and the changes that we're trying to make. But that direct line manager, sales manager, focus on that.

Sales Manager: make them effective, give them the reports and the tools and the dashboards that they need, and then they'll, they'll push it into their team.

That's right. They have their one on ones, their pipeline reviews, their cadence, whatever that is, if we just throw on another report, another dash out in their dashboard, right? They say, “Oh, yeah, let's talk about this”, right? We rolled this out. This is your campaign. We're trying to find, you know, this niche product or this customer, right? How you doing with that? Give them the tools that they can be successful too.

That's, that's a great insight. That's, I completely agree with that. So, as you think about all the things you've done over these last four years, and even before that, because you've been focusing on the CRM and project specifically here at a Julian last four years, tell me about your top three mistakes or successes. What are the three kind of key takeaways that stand out in your mind?

Don't move too fast. There's only so much change in processes or tools and technology, right, that the people can manage, right? So, we do this a lot, right? And it's one of the things that I've really been working hard at the last few years. Is again, mentioning that I'm kind of sitting in the in the center of all these things, but really listening around, hey, our training team is rolling out this to at this point in time, making sure that I am not coming through with a change request, or, something different at the same time for a different initiative, right? There's only so much change management that some someone can understand and someone can fully adopt in a certain amount of time, and that's just, again, kind of what I've seen is that if you throw too much stuff out at the same time across an organization, it's not all going to stick and it's not all going to get adopted, right? And that's something that I've really tried to make sure that we all understand, is that sales, people's time is precious, right? We want to make sure that they're out selling, they're with customers, they're, you know, solutioning things with our products and services, and if we are, you know, throwing constant meetings at them where we're doing internal changes or all these things, it's harder for them to focus and get that fully adopted, right? And it's just, and they don't adopt and learn something until they do it. So, if you're asking them, you're training them to do something, be ready for them to take that on right away. And the best way is making sure that they've got the, the mental bandwidth in that moment of time to comprehend the why, the how and what do they need to do, and be able to take it after the call and start running with it, if they've got a several detours throughout that day. It may not be an effective process change.

I'm hearing the measure that be thoughtful and measured in rolling out that change, yeah, explain it clearly, yeah.

You know, training is, is a huge part of what makes CRM successful, yeah, and having a training team well aligned with my team. What I do is extremely important, right? If you don't have a partnership with that, it's going to be an uphill battle. Absolutely. You know, another sort of thing that we've been successful with recently is just your sugar. We've come up with a lot of crate enhancements over the past few years that we've been able to take advantage of, we had a challenge with adherence to our sales process. And we had certain deals would move through at stages that didn't necessarily align with where the customer thought we were at, or maybe we thought we were at.

A classic challenge in any sales engagement, the rep thinks it's at one place, then the customer doesn't.

Yeah, absolutely right. And you know, we managed last year we rolled out a sugar automate change where our sales process. That's the workflow tool inside of Sugar, it's got processes for each of our mentioned earlier around how our solution lines behave differently. They have different sales processes, different key customer touch points, different milestones that we've been able to create within our Smart Guides within sugar automate to say, “Hey, we're selling this business to this customer”, or trying to. This is what you should be talking about. This is what so guided selling approach. But it also has some really key internal milestones as well that help us collaborate, not help it forces collaboration between our different groups within agility to make sure everyone is aligned as we're moving it through. And in some cases, it's a little bit of a good healthy rub between different groups. And there's good dialog that comes out of the collaboration that we have so being, again, sitting in the middle of all these groups. That that brings together the different concepts and using the technology that we have to fit our processes. So, it's not always the people in the process driving the technology. When we get these new technology aspects from you guys, it's, it's helping us change our processes, and building that loop, that constant feedback.

You need that feedback to make sure you're doing the right thing, especially as you're standardizing best practices, you know, making sure that you're listening to the to the people that are using it and adjusting along the way. All right? So, we got two there so far.

My last thing has got to be just data, right? It's really tough to do anything in the space without data. And agility has grown significantly over the past decade, lots of acquisitions and getting that data aligned and integrated in a way that our sales team can manage. Our IT teams, our reporting, our finance teams can always leverage. It has been a real struggle. But we've made some really good grounds in getting why was it a struggle? Well, it's just we move fast and we acquired and we integrated, and it's a lot of work. I don't know who would say Master Data Management is an easy project. And when you don't have a dedicated set of resources that own customer data internally, it's a big challenge. So that is one of the things that you know we've really focused on the past few years, is having a core team that manages that data to allow us. They own data quality. It's their job to make sure that the reports absolutely right. And as you're growing, you need a team that owns that process, that finds the gaps in your data, that links all the account numbers together. You know, we've got internal sources, we've got external sources, and trying to build those maps of data, it's a, it's a full-time job, right? And as we're, you know, growing and expanding. You need someone that's able to find data that exists in one tool and say, hey, it's over here too. And we've got it all linked together. And once you have that it really does open up the door for a lot of different reports, analytics, insights, customer the things that we can do now with AI and summaries as well. If you don't have good summarizing data that says, “Hey, this customer has all these different service lines, have these dinner different interactions.” That all builds together to build true picture. But if they're all segmented out in their different spots, you can't make those connections. You can't draw those conclusions as easily you got to be hunting, pecking and finding all these different things, whereas the tool aggregates for us, and now we really give our sales teams, an opportunity to be successful.

Okay, I love it there. The recap those three is is first, don't roll out change too quickly. Second, take your best practices and standardize them in the software so everybody's following those best practices. And third, focus on that data and that data quality. You'd have people whose job it is to make sure the data quality is high.

Yeah, absolutely. Well said, good stuff. All right.

Well, Tanner, thank you for sharing your story and the agility story with us today. Really. Today. Really appreciate it to best of luck in your future endeavors here. And sounds like you've got a great career ahead of you in the CRM space and looking forward to seeing great things from you.

Thanks, Clint!

All right. You have a great day.