Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now that was Mike Bosworth and Mike is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Mike is a sales philosopher, a speaker trainer, author of one of the all time great sales books, solution selling. And it's always a pleasure whenever he stops by to chat about sales.
Cause I think. He's probably forgotten more about sales than most of us will ever learn. So looking forward to talking with Mike, my other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving win rates are Ted Blosser. Ted's the CEO of WorkRamp and Neeraj Kapoor.
Neeraj is another favorite frequent guest on the show. He's the founder of Everybody Works in Sales, which is a sales and LinkedIn training company. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter. Join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive win rate Wednesday.
Each week on Wednesday, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate and improve your win rates. And a lot of other great sales advice. So you can subscribe by visiting my website, Andy paul. com, or you can also subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. Okay. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay. Friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen as always. I'm so grateful for your support of the show and if you're enjoying this new show. I really appreciate if you can subscribe on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever, listen to podcasts.
And I want to thank my guests, Niraj Kapoor, Ted Blosser and Mike Bosworth for sharing their insights with us today. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today until next time. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
Welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast where we're laughing as we get started because we were just making jokes before we, we started joined another great group of panelists. Really glad they joined me. We're going to go around, have people introduce themselves briefly. So we'll start with Mike Bosworth.
Hi, I'm Mike Bosworth, and I've been around a long time as we've just been discussing. I'm mainly a career sales trainer. I guess my training claim to fame was in the mid nineties. My organization trained 15, 000 IBM salespeople. My latest thing I'm working on is a private AI. I've been putting all my books and papers and videos into a private AI that you can dial it in and ask any question you'd ask me when I test it.
It's like talking to myself. It's pretty cool.
Oh, very cool. Yeah, definitely. We're going to learn more about that. Neeraj.
Hi, everybody. I'm there. Raj. I'm a LinkedIn top voice and LinkedIn trainer and sales trainer. To, to those of you who are listening, yes, I've got an Indian name, but I got an Irish accent cause I grew up here and I was lucky to spend 30 years working in London and traveling around the world doing sales.
Oh, I never really became good at sales until I became a sales manager. Then I really learned how to become good at sales. And I spent my days helping people with soft skills, with LinkedIn with closing more deals.
Okay. We're going to, that's going to be the first question. I'm gonna come back to you as soon as we talk to Ted. Ted.
Neeraj, you're going to have to give me the secret. How do I become a top voice? I've been trying to become a top voice, but. Unsuccessfully. So you have to give us the secrets there on LinkedIn. But for some background, I'm Teb Losser. I'm the co founder and CEO of WorkRamp. I actually came from a sales background back at Cisco in the day, and then worked at Box as a sales rep and then moved into product and into founding a company.
And WorkRamp is an all in one LMS. For companies, employees, customers and partners. But we heavily focus on the sales enablement use case and enabling sales teams to be as effective as possible. So excited to join this conversation, Andy.
Yeah. Well, glad you could join us. So we're gonna take a step back, go to you. Interesting point you made. You didn't learn how to sell until he became a sales manager. So tell us about that.
you become a sales manager, I'm talking about a good sales manager,
No, well, that narrows it down pretty much.
because there's a difference.
I didn't know you're qualifying it like that, but yeah, go ahead.
Oh, it's important to qualify because when I became a sales manager at the beginning, it was like a lot of people. I was good at sales. You want a pay rise. So you're given a title of sales manager. And I had no idea how to manage. Nobody taught me. And I'm like, guys, just copy what I do.
It's not difficult. Just do it. And of course, that's a terrible way to manage. And my boss said, look, you're a good guy. I've got a good heart, but you're just a terrible manager. So he actually coached me, put me on courses, did mentoring with me every week. He was fantastic. And as a result, I learned the importance of, if you want to be successful, have a successful team and coach them every single Monday.
One to one and then every Wednesday as a group, listen to their calls, go on presentations, don't do the work for them, but support them and coach them and help them through the process. And within six months, I became a good manager. And within a year I became a great manager.
But how did that teach you how to sell?
Because when you have to coach other people, you have to know so much. You ask questions, listen to what they say, And then when you're not sure, keep pushing, and if you're still not sure, then you have to know the answers and be able to support them.
And while I was going to all these sort of conferences I was being sent on and being coached by my boss, he also said, look, you have to read. And I said, come on, I haven't read for 20 years. I don't want to start now. He says, no, just read a book a month, see how it goes. And he got me books on people, you know, Jeb Blount and Anthony Annarino and Jeffrey Gittemer.
And that's how I started Zig Ziglar. And it was a world opened up to me that I never knew existed before. I realized that even though I thought I knew a lot, I knew very little.
most most salespeople are unconscious competence and they don't even care. Think about becoming conscious of the process until they're promoted to management than they have to because you can't coach something you do intuitively.
right. You have to think about what did you, what you're doing and why. Right. Yeah. No, it's interesting. Is our most sellers unconsciously competent or unconsciously incompetent and not
The top 20 percent are unconsciously competent and they're usually the ones that get promoted to manager because they sell the most.
Well, let's have a new topic that I'd mentioned we're going to talk about before we jumped on the recording, which is yeah, All been in the sales game for varying lengths of time. Ted, even you've been in it for a while, even though you're many years, our junior here. Yeah, I'm curious.
Cause you like, you're talking about you tired of reading what all the stuff on LinkedIn, what's sort of the single biggest myth that you see sort of perpetuated on LinkedIn about selling that you wish would just go away.
The ads, when I get approached, they presume I'm interested.
When I'm not.
Yeah. Well, I was
Highly presumptuous.
Yeah. And I was talking less about the outreach and more about the content, you know, the advice that people put on LinkedIn. What do you, what are you reading there? That's just like, and you see constantly, it's like strikes you. It's like, oh my gosh, stop, please. Go
in this, but I really want to hear what Ted has to say.
Yeah. So I was actually, so Andy, while you were just asking that question, I was pulling up my LinkedIn feed just to see I think just to see a few examples of things that you probably want to. Stop hearing, I think the thing that we probably hear too much of is that probably drives me nuts is the tips on outreach
Yes.
outbound outreach and this could range from something like, hey, try this tactic.
And it will increase your results by X percent all the way to the hot takes on like, Hey, look, you need, I think I read one two days ago, that's like, I think a thousand touches per one op created. Right. And so I think there's, I think at the end of the day. It just takes a ton of time and effort and creativity and you will get the, you will get the results from there, but there's a little too much dark magic heading into the outbound outreach tips from there.
And I think along with that, I agree a hundred percent. And I think. I think the other thing that, that sort of drives me a little bit crazy about that is at least that's sort of narrow to the sass world a little bit, which is, , fairly predominant on linkedin is just with, there's this infatuation with pipeline and, , if you read the content on linkedin and said, you know, you're going to size it, you would say, okay, well, the content about, Outreach, let's say as the size of a basketball and the content on actual selling is the size of a golf ball. Right. And it's that disproportionate. It's like, Hey, with win rates in the basement, as they are for so many companies, the problem is not enough pipeline. You've got the pipeline. You just don't know how to sell it. So I'm with
the phrase that I see too much on LinkedIn is the phrase, you need. Andy, you need a way to do such and such. Neeraj, you need a way to do such and such. Soon as I hear you need I'm done.
Well, yeah.
been told on many occasions to people who spam me because it's getting so bad now. I'm like, okay, someone's giving somebody bad advice. And most of the reps who give me, who sells me very badly, most often don't reply, I hope out of shame, but the ones who do reply, tell me when my boss told me to say that, I'm like, Or the marketing department, even worse, told me to say that.
I'm like, really? Okay. Do you mind if I ask, have you not read any sales books or listened to sales podcasts? Majority of the time they say no. I said, okay. You know, I think we really great. We sit down with your boss or your marketing department and we have a chat. Oh no. And they start getting really defensive.
And sometimes they'll reach out to the boss directly to say, look, I've had a really bad copy and paste email here. Okay. Full of features, zero benefits. If we can spend a bit of time, just, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I will share some best practices on outreach. And just in terms of email writing is email writing and LinkedIn DMS are quite similar, but also to find out a bit more about what you want, because I cannot sell you anything unless I know what you want.
And I'm surprised how many managers just go, no, I know what I'm doing. Or even worse, business owners who are very successful, who've had success, maybe three or four years ago and think, well, what I did three or four years ago works absolutely fine now. Thank you very much.
Yeah, and I think that comes down to another thing that's sort of, you know, one of the pet peeves for me is this idea that process will win. As opposed to people win, right? And so it's just like, Hey, follow the process, right? And this is sort of line, I think of what Ted's talking about is all of these experts on LinkedIn talking about, here's this process for outbound.
Here's the sequences you use. Here's the touch points, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, but let's look at the end result. End result is really shitty win rates across three companies. So. This isn't productive, what you're doing.
And Andy, I can give you a good case study on ourselves at work ramp. So we're a little, we're a little over a hundred people. And if you think about our current fiscal year, which we're about to close out here. This whole year has been a lot of focus on pipeline creation, but as we set Our goals for next year, we're changing the OKR into win rate improvement.
And that was the big thing we saw is that, Hey,
Good. We're going to, we're going to talk after this, by the way, but yeah, go ahead.
but that's exactly what it is I asked the team, like, Hey, let's actually diagnose. Why? Because it's interesting. Actually, we've been having our competitors exit the market. For example, one of our closest competitors got bought by seismic. This is a company called lessonly. We've seen another competitor like North basket bought by gain site.
We, in theory, thought our wind rate would be shooting through the roof, but it's actually slowly declining in this market. And even as our products even getting better. And so our new thing next year is, all right, how do we systematically improve our win rate quarter over quarter? Cause we've actually solved that on the pipeline side.
Now we now know the formula to systematically improve pipeline every quarter, but we haven't solved that on the cloak win rate side. And I think the other thing founders probably get wrong is they think products solve that. And I actually think it's a. It's yes, you have to keep improving your product, but it's actually a big go to market improvement as well.
Yeah. So let me ask you a question because this is, it's funny how we're playing into it. Cause that's just the way I lined it up in my prep is yeah, another myth that's out there that I've not a day goes by that I don't hear somebody talking about it. Oh my gosh. In a slow market. A down market. Win rates fall.
I don't think they do. I don't think they
Not Not for the good ones.
Not for the good ones. Just because you're in a slow market if you're a good seller with a good win rate doesn't mean you get bad at selling all of a sudden.
right.
It's and this part just, you know, makes my head explode when I hear people say this because suddenly they're giving excuses to everybody.
Oh, it's a bad market? Yeah, your win rates are going to fall. It's like, bullshit. Yeah.
No, look at real estate. What happens in real estate? Whenever there's a downturn all the part time, you know, people who just, you know, kind of do it as a lifestyle business. They're gone.
Yeah. You don't, good sellers don't become less effective. You have fewer opportunities to work on in a down market, but your decision process about which deals you're gonna work on, where you're gonna invest your time, how you're gonna work those deals, that's not going to change. And so this is one of these myths you see perpetrated out on LinkedIn is, and from very prominent people that should just know better.
There's no reason your win rates should go down just because the market slows down.
I agree. I'm currently having my, all my competition asking me why I'm doing well, just to be clear. When I say do well, I don't earn seven figures a year, but I say do well, we're talking low six, but why are you doing well? Cause in Ireland and in Europe, a lot of people are struggling right now.
Making as many deals or not converting as many deals and they're not winning as much as they should be.
And I always say it's got to do with the fact that I pick up the phone and most of my competition still do not pick up the phone. A lot of it's got to do with the quality of my connections
I have with them. But the third thing is also mindset. You know, I don't watch the news. I don't get involved in gossip.
I don't criticize or put others down. I have an amazing mindset. And I think when you have those three, it puts you at a massive advantage compared to other people.
Well, let's dive into the mindset. Cause I think this is one of the issues in my mind, not to be redundant there. That's really hampering sellers. And I think it's something that's changed a lot over the last couple of decades, which is that, yeah, people. You know, here, this expression on LinkedIn, you know, selling is helping.
And I'm like, no, actually helping is helping selling a
Helping is Heh.
And so people sell, but they're not helping the buyers. Yeah. And I, when I'm coaching sellers, it's like, if you feel like you're selling, you're not helping. And what the buyer's looking for is they're looking for your help to help them make a decision to make a change in their business, to They need your help to do that.
And I posted a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn about sort of this idea is that, you know, buyers don't want to talk to salespeople. All the studies say that, but they need to, if they're talking to you, it's not because they want to talk to you. It's because they need your help on something. Otherwise they would just ignore you.
And this mindset just seems impossible to pound into people to get them to understand. It's really that simple. Mike. You're saying,
no change.
Yeah, but you have to go help people. That's, that should be the motion that you're focusing on,
Well, you know, I did a white paper a month ago and I said, if you hire a plumber or an electrician or a financial planner, you're looking for situation specific solution expertise. And when you sell B2B in the enterprise, that solution expertise is a little harder to manage because you've got multiple buyers and multiple functional departments and things like that.
But you're right. If they denote, if the buyer senses that you can help them Solve a problem or achieve a goal, then, you know, you're going to have a great relationship.
Yeah. And that
if you're telling them what they need to do,
exactly,
the,
that's where I was going, right? Yeah. This is what you need to do. Hey, we've worked with hundreds of companies just like yours. And this is what they do.
And we typically say them at least 30 percent and dah. dah. Oh God,
And the buyers just turned you off immediately because it's like, no, they don't, they're not trying to understand me because my situation is unique, right? This is the other part. I think for sellers, it's so hard that they miss is this idea is that we train them and here's your ICP and here's your persona.
And this is what they're concerned about. And the fact is that everybody in the world is unique and has their own perspective on their solution, their problems, the things they want to achieve in their life, their business. Now from outward, it may look exactly like everybody else. But they perceive it as being unique and unless you understand their unique perspective, you're not gonna make it happen.
Can I ask Neeraj a question? He mentioned something that's pretty meta in the sense that because he was talking a lot about mindset in terms of the negative influences of the new cycle and the down economy. And even down to unplugging. And I've seen that affect sellers pretty drastically, but it's not something that traditional sales coaches even talk about or even sales managers.
Nearest, what are you seeing? Have you actually unplugged? Like, like what is the unplugging for you right now? And have you seen a change, a true change in mindset from that? Maybe dig into that comment you're talking about earlier.
I'm having more, my business really is helping business owners succeed with sales and LinkedIn. I tend to avoid salespeople a lot because most often Just don't want to invest themselves or in some cases they agree to coaching and believe it or not don't turn up, which is actually quite shocking.
It's a big problem in England. And no, it's a big problem. And so I tend to go through salespeople only through their managers in the last four months, things have shifted. And I'm having salespeople call me because they're struggling with overwhelm and they're struggling with what they call mental health.
And people aren't sure what's happening. They use mental health as a generic term. But what that often is they often have, say, 15 browsers open at once. They're often using several apps on their phone. They often using several documents because they have all these different reporting systems they have to use.
Then on top of that, some are on dating websites. And on top of that, they're on social media platforms and there's no break from technology. And this is damaging and this is dangerous. So I say to everybody, look, I have struggled with mental health and overwhelm. When I got divorced and I went through lockdown and I spent so much time learning about it.
And the smartest thing you can do when you wake up in the morning is spend time in gratitude, get your body moving. And for the first 60 minutes, do not check your phone. Okay, please. And then at lunchtime and actually they find people find that, Oh, people are actually 20 minutes, half an hour, 60 minutes.
The second part is tougher. I say to people at lunchtime, you get one hour for lunch for the first 20 minutes. Do not immediately look at your phone like everybody else. Have lunch with a colleague. Or have lunch in peace and quiet, or listen to some comedy, or just do something that has nothing to do with your screen.
Give your senses a break. Okay, have a nap for 20 minutes, go out for a walk, whatever you have to do. Spend time with a cat, or a family member, or somebody, but just don't look at your phone. Because when you stare at your screen all day, it is mentally draining. And it is exhausting. And this is what people are struggling with.
They call it mental health, but it's really staring at your screen all day. And I guess the third thing is a boss constantly saying, what's happening? Have you converted? What's happening? Make more calls, spam more people, use automation more, which doesn't help either.
No. Yeah, I would add to that is, and I agree. I think there's this, and I see it in people, the doom scrolling, if you will, or the super checking depending on what you know, term you're gonna use. I think there's a lot of value and I agree. Get up, get your body moving, exercise, whatever.
First thing in the morning, but I think there's a lot of value in, in understanding what's going on in the world because you're talking to people who live in the world, right? So you need to be able to empathize with their situation. So budget some time to scan the news, right? Because I found throughout my entire career that's helped differentiate me from other people.
I'm aware of what's going on. I'm able to contextualize when I'm talking to somebody, how these events might be affecting them. I'm able to have empathy for people and the things that they're encountering. So, but there's a limit to your point, Neeraj, is just endlessly scrolling your phone and being on it constantly, you know, like people at dinner, you know, I'm always going to laugh and I don't want to sound like, you know, an old guy, but my wife and I go out to dinner and we see couples at dinner and they're both on their phones, the entire time.
across from each other, each on their phone.
Yeah and I wish I could say that it's, you know, Hey, it's one generation or another, but it's not right. It's people of all ages are doing this. And that's, I think, symptomatic what you're talking about in your office is when you're so focused on that, how can you really focus on. Cause I think in my own situation, it might get interesting, your feedback on this, cause I think you're probably very similar is I talk, tell sellers the way you win deals, you know, you win Is by just keeping it in the back of your mind, right?
It's just sort of floating there and you're semi ruminating on it. Right. Because then you get that inspiration when you're in the shower or you're driving down the street or, , you suddenly have this idea you know, connect two ends and you get this vision, well, if you're constantly filling your mind with all this other crap, you're not giving it space
do it.
to do that.
And this rumination, and it's not, you're not, maybe rumination is the wrong term, because it's, you know, people's anxieties are connected with that, right? But it's just, they're knocking around. And I think the great sellers that I've worked with always have everything in their mind, right?
And I think one of the shifts I've seen in the last 20 years is people taking everything they know and locking it away in Salesforce. Transcribed by https: otter. ai And then they start to turn it off and they're not thinking about it all the time. And I think that has a huge impact on your ability to win business.
Mike, go ahead.
Well, if I could speak to Niraj for a minute. You know, I've done multiple day sales workshops for 40 years. And when I'm doing a private workshop, there's typically a point late in the second day, early in the third day where I finally get to myself, Oh, I know how I'd sell this offering. And once I get how I would sell it, boy, my teaching went way up.
Yep.
Right. But it's it takes a while, you know, to find me figure out, you know, What specific solutions, specific information you would really need about buyers in order to be able to sell that product. And there's a learning curve.
And you need to allow yourself to have the brain space. That's why Neeraj is making, I think such a great point is, and I've written about this too is this idea, then sort of the title of the blog post was, you know, consuming too much sales advice makes you stupid. And the fact is it does because you start getting this, I forget the exact term that they use psychologists use, but it's like the NBA player that gets on the free throw line at a tense moment and air balls the free throw attempt, right?
It's like they're thinking too much. Yeah, it's the observer effect. That's right. The conscious. And you're going to do that in sales. You just. You know, give yourself a chance to consume stuff and then think about it. Right. If you're constantly moving piece of advice to a piece of advice, you're never going to internalize it and make it something that you can use.
And if you're in your left brain trying to follow the steps, you can't fully connect. It's just, you can see it on newscasters. Yeah. When they're reading a teleprompter, there's a little deadness. They're not connecting because their left brain is processing that teleprompter, and they're trying to deliver it perfectly, but they're, they lose that the EQ goes down.
Yeah. Well, especially because they have a producer talking in the ear while they're doing it.
Yeah,
Yeah.
I've changed how I do business now, Andy, as a result of people's attention spans, because it's interesting. Last year, 90 minutes, 90 second video, sorry, worked brilliantly on LinkedIn. In 2023, it's 58 seconds. And next year they think it might go down to 45 seconds because people's attention spans are getting worse because of overwhelming too much information.
And what you said about too much information, I absolutely agree on. I rarely do full day of sales training anymore or full day of LinkedIn training. What I do is I break it down into two half days, or if possible, I try to coach people every hour on a regular basis. And I find if I coach you over eight weeks or four weeks, you will learn way more than what you ever will.
Doing a half day with me because you're learning in bite sized chunks, like one hour at a time, I keep you accountable in between. You have time to take action, which is very important. And that is absolutely vital. So that's one way I've had to sort of adapt or change how I've had to sell in the world, because what I really care about is just the people I work with progressing and getting results.
Neeraj. You spend one hour with a week with them and then give them homework. That's what therapists do. They spend one hour a week and say, between now and next Thursday, here's what I want you to do.
Well, I says, Ted, I'm on your platform. What are you seeing in terms of. Length of a course or piece of, you know, directional content and so on. What's, what are the trends?
Yeah, for sure. And near as I was actually going to say you're exactly correct. I track I've been really into getting into your category a little bit more tracking my engagement on like my LinkedIn posts and I have significantly lower engagement on my longer form videos, even they're only 45 seconds and much higher engagement on my short ribbon content, which is super interesting.
But I do think it goes and validates the point you just mentioned on LinkedIn as it pertains to what's called enablement. So, you know, our platform, you can put on long form courses that could be 30 minutes an hour. It could be recording all the way down to short form courses as well. We did this.
So the overarching. Thesis we have now and we build this into our product is to push micro training out to your sales reps because they want this quick digestible content, like a competitive training should be a couple minute hit as an example, then we commissioned a study on our own data.
And we said across our user base, I think we did a study of about 4 million assignments assignments, like a sales rep gets assigned something over the last year. And the average number of what we call topics within a course was seven. And so it's like seven pages essentially. So like seven quick pieces of information.
In a course, whereas traditionally you would have, and that could be done in about five to 10 minutes, whereas traditionally those were much longer form courses for sales reps or when you're going through sales training as well. So I think it validates everyone's point here is that we want to continue pushing.
Micro learning and bite size information out to our reps because of their attention span. And Andy, I want to also close this portion with a comment you mentioned in terms of visualizing. Wins before I forget it too. It reminded me of Estee Lauder. I was reading a biography on Estee Lauder and she, her number one thing was she would visualize herself closing department stores like for years.
Like she's like, I wanted to close Bloomingdale's right. And she would visualize that day. She closed Bloomingdale's and she kept getting rejected and finally closed them. But that's, that reminded me of that story of like, Hey, we need to continue visualizing. But I also want to come back and reinforce.
The point that, Hey, we do all have short attention spans here and we need to make sure we adjust our sales training accordingly, but even the way we engage with clients, you want to adjust that accordingly as well.
well, but let me ask the question cause this is we all have sort of accept this as a given, but yeah, the factors for human beings. Our brain hasn't, you know, physically evolved in the last 20, 30 years since the advent of the internet and, you know, increases in the number of sources of information that are vying for our attention.
So Do I don't think we really have shorter attention spans. What is it really, right? What's driving this changes in habit that we're seeing? Cause I think that's really what it is. I think it's a habitual change.
I think it's the volume of content. It gets so overwhelming that we have to try to divide it up into bite sized chunks just so we can handle the volume. Right.
paper and before the internet, obviously it was just a gleam and Al Gore's I, and. Yeah, supposed to get a laugh there. So Mike left. And what he found is that, that in his studies is that when people, you know, confronted, he forecasted this day of, you know, people get overwhelmed with sources of information, what he called it all vying for a slice of our attention.
And so his study was, well, how do people make a decision about where to allocate slices of their attention? And his conclusion was largely economic, right? The people make that decision based on, you know, the return they're going to get on that investment of their time, but it's hard to make an argument.
People are getting a return unless it's just a psychic return.
Think it's, that's an unconscious decision for most people, I think. They're not consciously. You know, looking at it as an investment.
Right. So then my ultimate question on this, and we're like, we'll start with Ted. Maybe on this is so yeah, it's not, yeah. Is this really the most effective way for people to learn? It's just, I know it's sort of our default position to point Neeraj's point before about, you know, average length of video getting shorter and shorter, but, and we all sort of assume, yeah, people like learning in three minute bites, which I think is somewhat true, but.
It sounds like we're going too far. One direction is, are we not serving people appropriately by completely abandoning longer form content?
Yeah, I think. You know, I was listening last night to Walter Isaacson, the author, Walter Isaacson, talk about Elon Musk and he's promoting his new Elon Musk book, which I'm like halfway through now. And he made this really good point. He said, look, a lot of people think because Elon has six or seven companies now and they think he's a billionaire.
Really good multitasker. And he clarifies that he's actually not a multitasker. He's a serial tasker, and he's the best he's ever seen that he could go work on SpaceX for an hour, Tesla for an hour, and then Twitter for an hour. And I think you bring up a really good point is I do think there's space and organizations, as an example, where you need to do non interrupt driven mandatory trainings.
And even have, and when you're in a remote world, like we are at our company is like, is really a highly encouraged camera on as well and fully paying attention to that intermixed with, Hey, what can you do asynchronously on demand as well, our most effective training internally at work ramp is this one hour training led by our solutions engineering manager.
She runs it on work ramp and it's just so effective because we're all in there for an hour. She just packs our brain with a ton of information. I turn everything else off. She even says, I don't even want you chatting in the zoom chat because I want you listening to me. That is like the best piece of enablement we do at work ramp.
But I do think it's a combination of that plus these micro trainings that are bite size that we can take in our own time that could go crank out on a Saturday afternoon while I'm catching up on email. That's really helpful as well too. But I do think you have a really good point there, Andy.
My preference is that if you can get rid of your bad habits is serial tasking is probably the most effective way for us to actually get a meaningful amount of work done.
Yeah. I like that. That phrase. Yeah. Cause yeah. Multitasking does not work.
No, it doesn't. Yeah.
Yeah. And you still stay focused not get distracted during that time. Right.
I think for a lot of people as well, it's about having the awareness that you have to learn, which a lot of sales reps do not have. And also it's about how managers react to sales reps who do not want to change. So when people are going through challenging times, They often default to bad decisions and doing what they've always done.
And I was working with a company in London and really the managers are great, but the staff refused to call themselves salespeople. And so what do you guys do? So, well, we do upselling, we do prospecting, we sell to customers. That's selling. No, it's not. No, we're not. We're account managers. We are not salespeople.
It's a dirty word.
unbelievable. And when I talked to him about the importance of picking up the phone, they all freaked out. Two people complained. To the boss that
I said they had to make local and just to be clear, it was five call calls a day to start off with five, not 55 and they couldn't do it. They were terrified.
So I think it's very important to understand that, you know, you mentioned earlier, but so many things, mindset, but a lot of people in sales don't seem to realize it's not just learning about sales and learning about mindset. It's learning about psychology. Psychology is understanding human triggers. It's being self aware.
It's, you know, there's so many skills you need to have right now and sales, all of which are very important. Emotional intelligence is huge right now because it's so easy to get triggered by people. I got triggered two days ago by a LinkedIn trainer who was trying to sell me LinkedIn training and I messaged him a month.
Andy, please remove my details. This is embarrassing. And he spammed me two days ago, like, dude, seriously, what's the matter with you? I realized I was getting triggered and wasting my time lecturing this guy who didn't care because he was using some kind of automation,
but it's still, it's so easy to get triggered.
And people nowadays have to understand that in sales, it's understanding emotional intelligence, self awareness, mindset, psychology, all these things are very important. And it's not just, it's not good enough to say. To improve our win rate, we have to close more. That's very generic. And I think we need to do a bit better than that.
let me point out. I went on to regular chat GPT a couple of months ago, and I asked. What percentage of American adults have high EQ? 17 to 21 percent. So the fact is the majority of the sales forces we train, the majority of teachers, politicians, lawyers, senior executives don't have high EQ.
Yeah.
they, and if you don't have high EQ, We've got to help them put some organization around some steps that will help them connect and build trust, even though it's not their nature.
Right. Well, to a point Niraj made though, and to the point you're making Mike is yeah, Niraj saying you need to have these things today. Right. Yeah. And the fact is, you've always needed those things. And what
a minority of people have it.
Right. And so what happened is, I think this point made earlier about sales. This is, has been this belief in the primacy of the process over the people, the process, follow the process, you're gonna win deals.
And I remember getting into an argument with, yeah, one on thought leader a couple of years ago, cause I called him out on a post. He said, you know, if you don't have a well defined process, you don't know when to close the deal.
Oh,
And I'm sitting there going excuse me. If you're counting on the process to tell you when it's time to close the deal, then you're completely lost, right?
and the best salespeople really have to close. The really superior salespeople don't close. They're patient enough to facilitate the buy process to where the buyer says, So, what do we have to do to get this thing going? They close themselves.
But this is, I think this is just representative of where so many people have become. You know, I think, Just because it's sort of a natural upgrowth, I think of this really quote unquote, golden age of sales technology and sales automation and marketing automation is where for all of its benefits and value, I think the downside has been as people said, well, let's maybe I don't need to become, be as human as I like to talk about as I was, or they had to be in the past.
Cause I've got this process and this technology and my buyers are adopting it, but the fact is that. If you look at a typical tech stack for a sales organization, what tool in there is specifically designed to help the buyer make their decision? They're all about the sellers, right? They're all about, you know, this bifurcation we talked before between selling and helping.
They're all about selling. They're not about helping. And this is, this, go ahead.
It's interesting. I want to call it a counterpoint to your comment, but it's interesting. Data point is. When we were interviewing reps early on, and some of our early on reps that we had is we had this dilemma. We had either very charismatic salespeople that couldn't follow processes or people who could follow processes.
And we're kind of suspect on how charismatic or how high their was. So we always debate like, Hey, what do we anchor towards? And what we realize is in our products, a hard product to sell. You kind of have to know what you're doing to sell it. Is that people who are charismatic, high IQ, just good natural sellers that couldn't follow process.
They always fail. And we saw the people who could follow a process and then add in as a nice to have all of the additional layers of being a great salesperson. Those were the most successful. And so what that led us to do in our recruiting process is we fully screen for people who had sales processes, or at least had a philosophy and can walk us through it.
And that was a must have for us. And then the charisma and the ability to sell Was the nice to have or put them over the
frosting. Yeah.
that's that's really what I was saying though, is would you use the word philosophy, right? If someone has the philosophy of how they're going to sell, that's not a process, right?
Yep.
Yes, it comes across, but it's not this. Yeah, I can't go on LinkedIn and I won't name names, these fancy consulting firms that, you know, here's our revenue architecture and we've got it laid out and it's like, Oh, great.
You know, everybody's implemented it, but they all got 25 percent win rate. So yeah. How's this really helping? Right. So, yeah, I agree. I think people that are these charismatic natural sellers in my experience, as someone who's more of an introvert, because I've always sort of looked at that, especially in early, my career is like, Oh my gosh, I sort of wish I could be like that.
Right. Because easy to meet people and so on. No, it was very
a place for the pure charisma salespeople. It's in funeral homes selling highly emotional one call closes. If you're selling something that can be closed in one call and it's emotional, that's where those pure charisma guys should
Absolutely. I'm laughing at your funeral home example, but yes because you generally don't think about funeral home directors and charisma on the same sentence. But,
but yeah.
But, yeah, and I think you're doing the right thing. I think, you know, for me, I look at myself, I'm not starting my career.
Yeah. I knew nothing about business. Yeah. The people are probably tired of me hearing the story, but yeah, I was 21. I look 16, I was selling into the construction industry in the Bay area, East Bay was my territory, selling computer systems to companies that oftentimes was their first foray into computerization, talking to founders and CEOs, I knew nothing, but I was curious.
Right. And I asked questions and I asked since I showed up as my authentic self and yeah, I got given time by these people cause, Oh my gosh, somebody showed up. It's actually interested in learning about me as opposed to just pitching their product. So, yeah, definitely not the definition of charisma at that point.
So I,
sincere curiosity goes a long way.
It does yeah, and so yeah, the fact you're not indexing toward charisma, I think is a great thing because it's Yeah, the valley in particular is full of it's like said Charismatic sellers with the gold bracelets, right? Yeah
Yeah.
Without name checking certain companies. They all came out at one point time.
They all came from certain company and They're a company that, hey, went through a phase where they all were at that company where you could just show up in the morning and sell something, right? Because it was a hot time. Right.
one of your biggest wins and let's talk through each big portion, but the funniest one was I did one of the candidates who did the hire, we walked through the whole thing for like 30, 40 minutes and we And the punchline at the end is like, Oh, I, and I didn't win this deal, which is really fun.
It's like of all the deals you chose a deal you lost, is really, which I thought was hilarious. I was like wait. We just spent 30, 40 minutes going over a close lost close loss opportunity,
I hope you didn't hire him.
funny. I, we did it, we did a higher, but it was a pretty funny punchline at the end.
I ask a LinkedIn question since we have an expert here?
Sure.
I noticed that LinkedIn laid off 700 people this week. So if you were the CEO of LinkedIn, Raj, what fundamental changes would you do to their business model?
The big thing LinkedIn don't do is spend enough reaching out to people like me who actually use LinkedIn every single day. And that's the biggest complaint that me and other LinkedIn top voices and creators have, we know how people feel about LinkedIn, but yet LinkedIn, I was at headquarters last month in London and I asked them, what are you focusing on right now?
And their biggest goal is pushing AI and pushing LinkedIn sales navigator licenses. Notice I didn't say it's involved in helping people. It doesn't involve in improving the customer
it is pushing.
You know, the stuff you should be doing is you can improve a customer experience with me. I'm going to invest more with you, but no, it's all revenue because don't forget they are owned by Microsoft and they have a lot of competition from TikTok to a certain extent and threads and I chat GPT and there's all, there's always competition, but they are a Microsoft owned business.
So they're all about profit. And what they should be doing is reaching out to people like me to say, how can we make the user experience better? Because when you have a great user experience, More people will come on the platform. And when you do that's better than just forcing or pushing LinkedIn navigator licenses to people.
What would
user interface sucks, too. Anything Microsoft owns, their user interface sucks.
Yeah,
Neeraj, what would you change? What's like the number one thing that you would do to improve the experience itself?
Are you asking me? Oh, yeah,
don't ask me. Heh heh. Heh.
in people's feeds right now, I would definitely improve people's feeds because I am inundated in my feed with every woman, every man and their pets who are now LinkedIn expert, LinkedIn strategist, LinkedIn advisor. And many of them, it's like they've left university. They spent six months. Part time in retail and all of a sudden they're an expert and there should be some kind of qualification to make you an expert No, you asked about the importance in our pre chat, but how do you become a top voice when I got the award from LinkedIn?
It was done by LinkedIn headquarters And it really meant something right now a year and a half later LinkedIn are giving out awards left right and center like sweets Sorry, not sweets like candy as we call America like candy,
I think we understood. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, you collaborate to a collaborative article for four weeks in a row.
All of a sudden you're a social media top voice. You're a top management voice. You're a top consultant voice. You're a top voice and not everybody is becoming one just because they're collaborating into articles, which don't really mean much. And LinkedIn have a habit of introducing things like collaborative articles, which don't generate any ROI, don't generate leads.
Yeah, I've never
awards so you'll participate in them and they should be doing more things like I've said to them so many times Why don't we have a LinkedIn conference like Dreamforce in London? Thousands of people will turn up you can get people's opinions you can do surveys you can interview talk to people face to face Rather than the board of directors making decisions without our involvement
Yeah, the
Well, Microsoft.
Right. The experience is still so opaque, right? I don't know, three, four months ago, yeah, I got shut out and it was like, why, you know, I'm not sending out invitations to connect with people. I don't do anything proactively, but, and, but that was the reason they were giving, it's like too many invitations.
So I said, I don't do that. Right. But there was no one you could talk to, to find out that's the hard It's virtually impossible. And then, so you just do nothing for 24 or 48 hours and suddenly you're back. So that lack of transparency is the other thing. I think the other thing they should do is just get over it, turn it into a CRM system for Christ's sake, right?
The fact you still have no control over it is, you know, you've got people spending all this time building their mail lists because they know their connections on LinkedIn could go away in a heartbeat. Why are you forcing people to do that? Turn it into a tool so people own their contacts, have control over them, can use them in a way more similar to a CRM system rather than just, you know, having these dual platforms that you're going through.
It's just insane. Yeah, I
get a pop up and the pop up says, have you researched this person? Do you know this person? And is your message got any benefits and value to them? Which I thought was genius idea. Nobody took me up on it.
Their AI
Is coming close.
predictable problem might this buyer have that we could help them with?
Yeah. Not you need what predictable problem exactly.
mean, it is the height of irony that on DM on LinkedIn, when people DM you, and I had this conversation with somebody, this was a couple of years ago, who would DM me and I was still doing my previous podcast, which, you know, 1200 plus episodes of, and they said, you know, Andy, we've looked at your profile and we think you'd be the ideal candidate to start a podcast. And I said, and I'm like, you know, Raj, I rarely respond, but in this case I had to respond. And I said, well, clearly it didn't look at my profile because if you did, you wouldn't notice. Like, you know, I've been doing this podcast thing for quite a while. And I said, you know, you're on the pod. It could have taken 10 seconds on this platform that you sent me the message on to do it.
And the response was, yeah, I don't have time.
yeah,
Don't have time. So, yeah, we're not gonna solve that problem. I think anytime soon. So, all right. Well, we said, unfortunately, so we're running out of time. I wish we could do another hour. Cause I didn't even get to have my questions for all you guys. So I'll have to have everybody back again.
Yeah. So I presume LinkedIn is the best place everybody can be reached. Anybody else want to add anything to that?
You've got my email.
Yeah, I got your email. Yes. Okay. Well,
I'd love to have Neeraja's and Ted's emails,
All right. Well.
wouldn't mind
We'll do that we'll do that offline in case they don't want
Yeah.
the universe to have it. All right. Well, gentlemen,
That's what I meant. Yeah,
yeah, look forward to having you all back. Open invitation. Come back anytime you want.