In this episode, we meet with guest Ryan Robinett of Multiply, Inc, a Tech-enabled services firm. Ryan considers himself a career Consultant and explains how his Consulting start led him to create his company, Multiply. He shares his ideas about creating a repeatable Process for Sales Teams to adopt and how Customers prefer “simplicity” when it comes to being sold.

You can check out our guest on these channels:

Website: https://askmultiply.mysandboxwebsites.com/
LinkedIn: AskMultiply

Birmingham-based Ryan Robinett was a leader in IT professional-services firms for 18 years before starting Multiply in 2018. The goal? To help other companies succeed through rocking their sales. We caught up with Ryan to find out how it’s going, two years in, and to learn more about the new app Multiply has created to support sales teams everywhere.

When he’s not out fishing, Ryan Robinett’s busy figuring out ways to translate his hard-won sales expertise into systems that help companies scale.

Born and raised in Mountain Brook, Robinett is both an Auburn grad and a UAB grad. And, he’s married to Ashley and is the father of two kids.

• Favorite place: in the woods of Greene County
• Favorite watering hole: Local 39
• Annual trip: camping and fishing trips in the swamps of Louisiana
• Favorite quarantine activity: fishing. He also tolerates playing multiple rounds of Phase 10 with his family.

Multiply is a Birmingham-based startup that was born out of Robinett’s nearly two decades’ worth of experiences as an IT consultant where he discovered that things that are sold well generally end well. As a leader, Robinett learned that the process of scaling a business meant preparing people to sell well. 

The premise: Good salespeople (and teams) are made, not born.

Multiply: what it is

Multiply is an approach to sales that’s built on the premise that sales don’t just happen and that the “best” salesperson won’t magically walk through the door. Every salesperson, regardless of their background and experience, needs to learn a set of teachable skills from their company. In other words, when a company understands why someone buys from them, they can then help their sales team succeed.

Multiply has had great success as a services firm working with the largest companies in Alabama, as well as with some of the smallest stretching west to Colorado and east to North Carolina.  

When Robinett left the IT consulting world, he never intended to get back into IT.  But he couldn’t escape his IT mindset. So when he saw a gap in the market, he identified new ways to engage with clients and. With the help of IT consultants, he built the Multiply Application and released it in January 2021.  

The Multiply App: what it is

The application provides an easy way for Multiply to deliver services. It gives clients a lightweight, business-oriented, and inexpensive framework to set up and evolve their messaging. And, it allows clients to manage and measure the performance of their sales team.  

The Multiply App: what it’s not

The Multiply application is not a rehash of CRM (customer relationship management). 

There are plenty of tools that track sales activity. This is not one of them. Instead, Multiply complements existing CRM tools.

The Multiply application takes the guesswork out of how the sales team members will perform when they have the encounters that are tracked using CRM. 

Who should use Multiply

Multiply is for large and small companies that are looking to stand up a sales team or get more out of the team that they have. 

Check out case study summaries showing how Multiply’s approach works with companies of all sizes. These include research institutions, web-based publishers, general contractors and SaaS-based startups. 

Why it matters

“All too often, companies ‘hire and hope’ that their sales team members will work out successfully. Then they become frustrated when some perform well and others don’t.

Multiply eliminates the common assumption that ‘we hired the best sales person, so they should know what to say, when to say it and how to say it.’

”Ryan Robinett, Founder, Multiply

If you want to invest in your sales team, you can engage Multiply through their services or you can sign up for the Multiply app for $15/month per user. 

A self-described “builder and believer in the Alabama market,” Ryan Robinett channeled his enthusiasm for putting people in positions for success when he founded Multiply, Inc. in 2018.

Calling on his years of experience at a highly successful IT services firm, Robinett created Multiply around a set of core principles to which he has adhered throughout his career.

“The ability to put people in a position to be successful, equip people to be successful and see them achieve personal results that create corporate gains, that’s what I have always enjoyed most about my work,” he explained.

The universal nature of those principles has allowed Robinett to apply them to the sales industry and has resulted in substantial growth for his own company.

What began as a services firm helping some of Alabama’s largest companies expand the capabilities of their business development teams has now expanded into a multi-dimensional company helping some of Alabama’s smallest businesses create a sales process from scratch.

During its first two years of operation, Multiply’s clients have included Alabama Power, UAB, Brasfield & Gorrie and ServisFirst. Robinett has adapted his model for small businesses, as well. The company’s client base stretches up to Charlotte, North Carolina, and as far west as Colorado.

The firm hit a turning point at the start of 2021 when it added a software component to its offerings.

“I started seeing a gap in the market when I went in to deal with small and medium-sized companies, and even large companies for that matter. A lot of times there was this concept of ‘I know exactly what you are talking about, but budgets don’t allow for the services,’” recalled Robinett. “Or the companies felt it was culturally challenging to bring a consultant in. That was one impetus. The other impetus was I was looking for some way to stop simply building documents that would grow stale if not maintained by the company.  To give companies a way to easily maintain sales messaging and the necessary areas of HR in a frequently evolving environment. I went out and looked for a tool to partner with, surprisingly to no avail.”

The resulting effort has made Multiply a tech-enabled company which has increased the breadth and depth of its capacity to support clients.

“I decided to build a technology product that tightly couples with the Multiply services,” said Robinett. “Now, basically starting in 2021, I have a tech-enabled services firm that goes into companies large and small and not only provides services but also stands up a system that allows the company to continue with or without Multiply.”

Whether through that technology product or its consulting services, or both, Multiply can solve one of the most common problems in business development.

“There’s a huge gap of people doing what I call ‘hiring and hoping’ a sales team,” stated Robinett. “They forget the operational principles that we apply in other job functions. It is fraught with frustration for everybody involved.”

Robinett is quick to point out that his firm’s process fits easily for a company of any size because it is a sales management concept not tied to size of sales force or company.

“The massive assumption is that the salesperson knows what to say, when to say it and how to say it,” he outlined. “The Multiply process, every single thing through services or the tool, is to eliminate that assumption.”

The secret for any company, he says, is to turn a well-educated, new member of the workforce into a contributor quickly.

And that’s where Multiply comes in.

“It’s all teachable,” explained Robinett. “Take the mystique out of the sales process and create a repeatable pattern. When you have a repeatable pattern, you can plug people into a repeatable pattern and that creates scale.”

Under the Multiply model, clients benefit from a trained sales team that knows how to deliver the same pattern of information in any variety of situations. Robinett says his company does not create messages for companies but rather helps his clients understand why someone buys from them and then builds the information pattern that can be easily taught to the sales team.

“It is applicable in all walks, but the question is ‘how do companies turn people into relevant professional contributors quicker instead of saying I have to go hire someone with 5 to 7 years’ experience when that’s just as risky because there are no guarantees that the person is going to work out anyway?’” he offered.

In what has been viewed as disruptive to traditional sales management methodologies, Multiply offers a ROI calculation to help sales team members see the value they are providing to the company and help the companies understand the value their sales teams are bringing as a whole.   

As for what’s next for Multiply, Robinett looks forward to building off of the company’s newly-acquired capabilities.

“Covid will eventually abate, and a new normalcy will evolve, so I think it’s more important than ever for companies to have a finely-tuned sales force ready to contribute to their success,” Robinett concluded.

(Contact Ryan at info@askmultiply.com or give him a call 205.677.6087)