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Welcome to Selling What's Possible, the podcast that's pushing the boundaries of modern account sales. I'm your host, David Irwin, CEO of Polaris I/O and a veteran with 30 years of experience in successful account sales programs.
In each episode, we'll dive deep into the world of strategic account development, uncovering innovative approaches and fresh perspectives that you may not have considered before. We'll be joined by top sales professionals, revenue leaders, and dynamic innovators who are reshaping the landscape of account sales.
Whether you're navigating the complexities of key accounts or seeking to expand value-driven outcomes for your customers, this podcast is your guide to consistently growing your strategic account relationships.
Get ready to challenge conventional wisdom, explore new methodologies, and unlock the full potential of your account sales strategies. This is Selling What's Possible - where we turn potential into reality.
Dave Irwin (00:00)
the headline that we're talking about today, stop waiting for your customer, tease off just a great conversation. And why don't we start with the current state? What is holding teams back from successfully engaging with customers? What are they doing that isn't working? And then we'll sort of get into, obviously,
Dave Brock (00:04)
you
Dave Irwin (00:22)
what you see and how you help companies and account teams that work for them improve.
Dave Brock (00:27)
So here a little bit by background, if you look at a lot of the research, one is over 80 % of buyers say we want a rep free buying environment. What they're saying is salespeople bring no value.
into our buying process. So we want to get along without it. So they're doing digital engagement. They're talking to other people and so on and so forth, but they're not using salespeople. So that's one thing. The other thing the research shows us is we are getting involved later and later and later in customers' buying cycles. So typically customers are going through maybe the first, you know,
75, 80 % of the buying cycle by themselves figuring it out. And then when they're starting to get to solution selection, they've narrowed it down to their three top players. At that point, they start getting people involved. So it's very, very, very late in the sales process or in the buying process.
Dave Irwin (01:41)
Yeah.
Dave Brock (01:43)
Our customers don't want to see us because we aren't creating value. And our customers are starting these change efforts and they're failing. So there's something in that equation that says what we're doing isn't working and bringing value to the customers. What our customers are doing isn't working and bringing the value they want. And so there's billions of dollars of opportunity cost on
the customer side and on our side because we're not doing things. And so the simple thing we start looking at is say, where do customers struggle? And it's not in solution selection. It's earlier in the buying process. It's things like it's recognizing that there's an opportunity to change and grow and improve, or it's things as simple as
How do we define our problem? How do we learn more about the problem? How do we start looking at root causes? Who should we be involving? My good friend, Hank Barnes at Gartner just published something where customers are getting more and more people involved in their organizations buying process.
Part to spread the risk, but part to say, we're seeing that these problems have ripple effects into the rest of the organization.
but we just have to get involved much earlier in the process where we can have a much greater impact.
Dave Irwin (03:16)
Yeah, what you're really talking about is pre intent, the origination of where do funded initiatives start, right? And they really start with a problem or a challenge or an objective that occurs. And there's a lot of these situations in global enterprise accounts and being there when, when it's starting.
Dave Brock (03:16)
Thank you.
Dave Irwin (03:39)
And that's what you're advocating here and works. And we've seen that work as well, because teams tend to be either good at it or not good at it. You know, there's something about, a group that's able to do it incredibly well. And that's how they get to these, these big accounts. And then we see like a big drop off and how do you turn these other accounts? What's the secret sauce and.
Dave Brock (03:40)
Thank
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (03:59)
So let's talk about the buyer journey then. these challenges, goals, objectives, problems, they're really originating around something the client wants to, they want to change something, they need to do something. So talk a little bit about that.
Dave Brock (04:12)
Yeah.
Well, so I'll address that, but I think there's a different point of view where it can come from the seller side as well. basically, buyers don't wake up and say, I need a new CRM solution. I need a new ERP solution. I need to get this call intelligence solution. They don't wake up wanting to
by a solution, they wake up and say, we have a problem.
And they start saying, you know, what is that problem? How is it impacting us? It has nothing to do with the solution, but they're trying to say, we have a sales performance problem or we have a manufacturing productivity problem or we have a product development problem or those kinds of things.
Or they might wake up and say, we have an opportunity to address a major new market or something like that. And so they're talking really about their business and their problem So that's where they get started with that in kind of a change initiative, a problem solving initiative, a business expansion or growth initiative. And they characterize it in terms of problems, opportunities, challenges.
within the organization. And so what they're doing initially is trying to figure out how do we define it? How do we structure a process or I call them project plans, a project plan that allows us to move from recognizing that we have a transformation opportunity to putting something in place.
to achieve the goals of that thing. and we as sellers are only working with them on this teensy tiny piece. where they're kind of going through this whole thing. We have the opportunity to intercept them somewhere in this space and help guide them because guess what?
Dave Irwin (06:06)
Yeah.
Dave Brock (06:16)
We deal with hundreds and thousands of people that are doing the same thing. They won't do it exactly in the same way, but the same major steps and the experience that we can bring in helping them think about it is really stunning.
Dave Irwin (06:31)
Yeah, and clients, stakeholders, and there's many of them, they really do embrace sellers' resources when you communicate with them and bring a point of view about the problem and awareness about the problem and other examples of where that's been experienced before.
Dave Brock (06:51)
So here's the thing is, if what we do is we try and change the way we engage people we have this program that we work with clients on called business focused selling. And the premise of it is how do I, as a seller go in intercepting a customer much earlier in their process?
And how do I start talking to them about the problem? And we say, the ground rule is you can never talk about your product, even if they ask you about the product. And for salespeople, mean, that's all we want to do is have the customer say, me about your product, and we do a dump and schedule a demo. But what we want to do is we want to say, it's not time yet. Let me help.
Dave Irwin (07:28)
personally.
Dave Brock (07:39)
Let me understand your problem. Let me help you understand your problem. And let's start looking at what you're trying to deal with. And what you do in that process is one is you're building big trust and big confidence. Two is you're deepening their understanding of the problem and your understanding of the problem. So you're kind of going along building this relationship together. And then at some point they say, how can you help?
And there you start looking at saying, here are the things that we can bring you to help. So what happens in that process? You're building trust with them. You're building confidence with them in the process that they're going through. So we see at least three major outcomes. One is we see a minimum of doubling of win rates. And it stands to reason is they really trust you. They're already biased to you. So win rates skyrocket with that.
Two is we see a reduction in no decision made. And frankly, we've only started measuring that in the last couple of years. And it was maybe after Matt and Ted wrote the Jolt Effect, I started becoming really aware of that. So we started measuring no decision made. That's reduced by 25%. At least so far, we're seeing 25%.
The third thing that happens that's really remarkable is buying cycles go down by 30 to 40%.
So now you look at we've done three just by doing this thing. We've more than doubled our probability of winning. We've reduced the number of no decision made. And we've reduced the buying cycle. And those all together just have profound results.
Dave Irwin (09:29)
Yeah, mean, the accumulation of results like that over time on an enterprise account would just be explosive. Are you surprised at the success rates you're seeing given, you know, it's logical that that would happen, but it's really remarkable results.
Dave Brock (09:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
what surprises me is that so many others don't see this. if I engage the customer about what's important to them and what they want to accomplish.
they and I are going to be more successful versus traditionally what we do as sellers. And when I was growing up as a young seller, we were a little bit like this, but not quite the way we are today is I was focused on buy my product.
And I never got, I may have understood my product helps improve sales productivity. My product helps improve financial reporting. You know, I may have understood at some abstract level what my product does, but I couldn't connect that deeply. You know, I just focus on here's my product features, functions, feeds and speeds. And to some degree we revel in
the fact that customers don't want to get us involved to all they want to know is features, functions, speeds, and speed. So you create this kind of reinforcing loop that's really destructive to what customers are trying to do and to our results.
Dave Irwin (11:06)
Yeah, I think we've been talking
about this topic, but what causes that? know, management, blind spots, sales cultures reinforce the product mentality quotas, all these things sort of lead sales down a path of, you know, product behavior by design. And then they got to shift out of that and sort of operate in spite of that or independently almost in a problem solving mindset.
and sort of try to ignore all those influencing forces. you see that being the primary cause, sales culture?
Dave Brock (11:41)
So
it is kind of the mindset that we're trapped into and all that. So we, you you have to kind of get people out of that mindset and get them to think differently. And when you do, start seeing, you know, time to results is actually phenomenal on these things. When people start changing their behaviors, the time to results, it's not something that
You know, we're going through a sales transformation that'll take us two years to do. We start seeing results in three to six months That really you start creating this snowball effect and you see people moving very, very quickly, but it is breaking them from that. I've been trained to pitch my product versus I've been trained to help customers solve their problems.
Dave Irwin (12:30)
Right.
Do you see two different cultures? So there's often a there's a sales team and separately there's account teams. And sometimes there's multiple account teams. In other words, groups of them, elite counts, diamond accounts, strategic account group.
Dave Brock (12:39)
Thank
Mm-hmm.
The problem I see on big accounts and this will probably be heresy is the skills we put in to manage our big accounts are farmers.
We want to keep our customers happy. We want to support them. We want to get that renewal. We may want to get a little bit of expansion. So we have people that are there to maintain the relationship and to grow it. And it's that farming mindset. I believe everybody in an enterprise account needs to be a hunter.
And the concept I have, when I first started selling, I had one account. I was in the middle of New York City. And at the time, was Chase Manhattan Bank was my account. I had a $27 million quota versus I had a friend who was in covered North and South Dakota.
She sold the very same products that I sold, but she had 1,000 customers in her territory selling those products. And so she was prospecting in those 1,000 customers. I was prospecting in that one account. I knew on one Monday morning, I would start in the basement of one Chase Plaza and work my way up floor by floor to the very top of Chase Plaza.
meeting people, understanding what they were doing, seeing if they had a problem I solved. And then the next Monday, I'd go to one New York Plaza, start in the basement of one New York Plaza and work my way up to the top floor of one New York Plaza doing the same thing.
I was trained that it is my God-given right to 100 % share of customer, but it's my job to figure it out. I was doing the exact same thing my friend in North South Dakota was doing, but I was doing it in one account. was hunting and hunting and hunting and trying to find new opportunity.
Dave Irwin (15:12)
And, and how did that, you know, when you, I I've had experiences where we had a person doing the same thing, and it's big telecommunications company and they over the course of four years outperformed a sales team of 15, five to one in terms of pulling out more contract value, more.
Dave Brock (15:14)
Thank
Do it.
Dave Irwin (15:39)
more statements of work, bigger deal sizes, higher close rates. we almost became overwhelmed by this one accounts continuous add-ons to contracts and increases. And I was struck by, why don't we just take the team over here and have them do that each on one account and replicate these results because they're so extraordinary. And it was easy to say, but it's hard to do, which...
Dave Brock (16:03)
It's.
Well,
if you kind of think about it, you're creating this flywheel effect in there is that I may start in one division or one location or one business unit, and I support those customers very well. But then in that, start to get to know the organization a little bit better so I can start finding other things. They get to know us a little better. They're starting to refer us to other things. So you start creating this flywheel where
People start to get to know you within the enterprise, I get to know the customer. I get to know how they work. I get to know their language. mean, a lot of times, when I was
traveling in Chase Manhattan Bank because I traveled around so much, I could say, hey, did you know this is happening in this division and they're doing these things? I was kind of their local newspaper about their business. And so I can help keep them up. But what happened over that time is you starting in one place and expanding, you grew a relationship where
You got referrals into other things. And you also grew a presence where they started coming to you and saying, you know, I'd have a lot of people saying, hey, Dave, you've been working with these business units. We're thinking of this. Would you mind spending an hour with us? So the thing I think people have in enterprise accounts is you have the opportunity to create this flywheel effect that is very difficult.
if I have a territory of a thousand accounts.
Dave Irwin (17:48)
It's
a very different animal. And I think it's what you're basically saying is they start coming to you and asking you to solve the problem or help them address it without even having to have that preliminary conversation. It's almost like they just become used to you because of the trust. And that seems to come from knowledge, right? Knowledge and relevance.
Dave Brock (17:51)
Right.
Thanks for watching.
Well, and
see, that's it. They come to me because I understand them and their business, and I talk to them about their problems. They don't come to me because I happen to sell this product.
Dave Irwin (18:23)
Right, they want your advice, guidance, input, and it's a very human relationship. I've had account executives say, sometimes account executives have to keep people from their company out of their account. They play like a goalie, and they say it's because they can't talk to my customer like they're a person. just blast products at them, and it's so annoying to the customer, they basically have to prevent.
Dave Brock (18:30)
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (18:53)
people from.
Dave Brock (18:54)
Well, and I see that so many times. And I mean, to be realistic, I mean, in some of the large accounts, sometimes I've had people call me and say, hey, Dave, I'd like to talk to you about this. And at the end of it, I'd say, wow, fascinating conversation. I can't help you. And if you can, you point them to somebody else's, oh, there's somebody that sells these products. You might talk to them and so on.
You know, I'm glad that they called me up because I want to be that first call, regardless of whether I can help them or not.
Dave Irwin (19:28)
You also talk about innovation. What are the things that, that a great problem solver does when they're
engaging the client and really looking at the problem, what should they be thinking about doing in that conversation?
Dave Brock (19:42)
I think, well, first you have to look at innovation. There's innovation that could be continuous improvement, which is how do we get better at doing something and so on. that is, that's kind of what we can do naturally is can help continue to help them get better with say that certain function that they're doing.
there is what's called disruptive innovation, which is kind of new to the world stuff. And there's all this stuff in between. So there are a huge number of innovation opportunities. So on the lower end of the spectrum, the continuous improvement, new ideas and things like that, we can help our customers innovate as account executives. But the way we do that is we look at
what other account executives in our organization are doing or what other people in our organization are doing. So you might say, you know, you might talk to an account executive in this account and say, we're doing these things, we're looking at these opportunities and so on. And the account executive in this account says, I hadn't thought of that. I can go to my customer with those ideas. So I think you have to have a structure within the organization.
that allows sellers and account executives and others to share ideas that you can then take and walk into your customer and help them innovate.
Dave Irwin (21:14)
Yeah, that's a great point. see often account teams, you know, are basically made up of people that are assigned to the account from different departments, but they're often sort of siloed from each other. The account executives trying, there's lots of meetings to share information. Everything's traffic back and forth and email, but there's not like a central collaboration zone, so to speak, where people see the same information, can weigh in with ideas.
Dave Brock (21:23)
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (21:41)
And that seems to be something that's a major constraint. And you're sort of getting at that, which is how do you open up sort of the idea factory? And cause clients love to hear those kinds of stories and situations from their peers, you know.
Dave Brock (21:54)
And
it's hard as an account executive to do that yourself. So this is where I think the organization, whether it's sales enablement or whether it's marketing or even product management, can help you start saying, here's some things that we may be doing in account A that might apply to account B, C, and D.
that are really innovative type things or here's some new trends and practices that we're seeing so that they equip the account executive to go in and help the customer think differently and maybe even incite them to do something differently.
Dave Irwin (22:39)
in essence, mean, getting in early, seeing the problem, breaking down where are you trying to get to and let me be involved in helping you in that process,
it just works a lot of the time.
That's what it sounds like.
Dave Brock (22:53)
But if
you look at it, the common denominator under all this is we aren't talking about a product. We're talking about helping the customer and helping them improve and get better.
And, by the way, we sell a product.
Dave Irwin (23:13)
There you go, right. That's the how at the end of the value chain. Well, it's remarkable. It sounds like you are getting, I mean, there's just tremendous success when good teams do it right, when sellers do it right. I'm curious, there's obviously a mindset side to this, but there's also just business knowledge, business acumen, understanding the customer.
Dave Brock (23:14)
So, yeah. Yeah.
you
Dave Irwin (23:41)
understanding the roles. You know, we see a big gap in what you should know and what you do know. And it surfaces very quickly in front of the customer because they just assume you should know a lot more in a lot of cases than a seller might know. because we've been training them on the wrong things, right? They're not on the customer's business.
Dave Brock (24:01)
a number of years ago, I was doing an SKO with a large software company in Silicon Valley.
And I had about 200 salespeople in front of me. And I said, well, gee, you sell software to CIOs. What does a CIO do? And they look at me and say, gee, you got white hair. You must really don't get it. And I said, what's a CIO do? Well, they manage the IT organization, IT budgets, projects, things like that. And I said, cool.
And I started drawing down to saying, does a CIO do? Once you got down about three levels, they had no idea what the CIO did. They have no idea about the metrics. They had no idea about how a CIO spent their week. They had no idea of who the CIO depended on to do the CIO's job and who depended on the CIO to do their job and all the workflows kind of stuff. And they had absolutely no idea to do that.
The next day I have the same group and I invited their CIO in to sit down with me and I said, tell me about what you do. You know, tell me about what your week looks like. Tell me about workflow in your organization. Tell me about your metrics and all those things. And what the audience was suddenly discovering is
what the CIO's job was, what their work looked like, and they could better connect with them on their terms with that kind of thing. And they went off and started doing just those interviews, and they got interesting feedback. One of the things was customers were telling them, nobody ever asked me about this before.
And so they really appreciated it. The sellers came back learning a lot, and they established much better connection. And in this process, all they wanted to do was learn about the customers. They didn't have a product to pitch or a solution and all that kind of thing. So over the years we've done that, we've created a tool I'd called, it's modeled after
Dave Irwin (25:48)
Yeah.
Dave Brock (26:13)
the Stephen Colbert questionnaire. It's a comedy routine he does on the show where he says, I have 15 questions for you that once you answer those questions, we know you deeply. And the first question is, what's your favorite sandwich? And it's a bit of a comedy routine, but it's interesting as you go through that you get to know the individual real well.
And you start collecting this and you don't have to...
do this with everybody, but now I start getting some patterns. I get a better idea of what a CIO's work is. The next thing we did is the problem we found is they knew what their customers did, but they didn't have any problem expertise.
And so we created this thing that are 15 questions that allow me to go in and really understand that problem. So I can go and talk to some of our past customers.
about the problem, not about the product we sold them, but about the problem. How did you determine whether it was a problem? How did you look at root causes? How did you understand the impact? And so we start understanding the problem.
so we know how to talk to them about their problems. So we can get very deep, very quickly.
Dave Irwin (27:27)
Yeah, that's fascinating. it's really identify a problem early and then ask a lot of questions about it so you deeply understand the problem. But doing that, you're building trust and confidence and you're coming up with innovative approaches to stage in recommendations and.
Dave Brock (27:33)
All
Well,
in the process to learn about customers, the process to learn about problems is really a business. It's an accelerated business acumen kind of curriculum. So, yeah.
Dave Irwin (27:54)
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's fascinating.
think the results are so amazing. mean, for our audience, mean, think about, so you're talking about win rates, first of all, when you do this well, focusing on the problem, problem solving, you're talking about doubling win rates, you're talking about reducing decision by 60%, you're talking about higher close rates, but also we're seeing bigger deal sizes as well because
Dave Brock (28:12)
Yeah.
Dave Irwin (28:23)
It comes out of not engineering a product discussion, but letting the solution to a problem surface on its own.
Dave Brock (28:33)
So I'll give
one more story to kind of illustrate this thing of how do we become important to the customer? So I work with a client, a large technology company in Europe, salespeople are really good. They had over 50 % win rates. Their average deal value was $10,000, and they were just busy.
Most of them had about 1,000 accounts that they were working with. We took all that transactional business away from them and gave them it to another part of the organization. And we said, rather than 1,000 accounts, you have 10 to 15 accounts. But your quotas are going to stay the same.
And they looked at who is this consultant doing these things. And so what they started doing is they started discovering they were so busy doing transactions, there were these bigger opportunities that they were completely missing. So within nine months, they were up to average deal size of 190k from 10,000 to 190k. So they started doing that really well.
Dave Irwin (29:14)
That's crazy, right?
Dave Brock (29:42)
Then over time, they started improving. And today, their average deal size is $1.5 million. Their win rate is around 82%. And what they've done is they've transformed the relationship because they've become so deeply involved with the customer and so knowledgeable of the business, they've become a strategic partner.
The reason their win rates are so high is not so much because they have great solutions. They do have great solutions, but competitors have great solutions. But these people have such an intimate knowledge of the business that the customers come to them and say, we're struggling with this issue. We think you can help us with this.
And so that's how you become important to the customers when they say, need your help and your thinking to help us achieve our goals.
Dave Irwin (30:34)
That's amazing.
No,
fantastic. Well, in the few minutes we have left, David's been amazing to hear the results and how fast they can be achieved. What would you recommend just to account executives? We just started 2025. People have big quotas in gold. They're finishing plans. Any thoughts just out there on how to of shift into this problem-solving mode in a practical way quickly?
Dave Brock (31:16)
So first I'd start saying in your accounts.
If normally you walk in the front door of your account, and I'm doing this figuratively, if normally you walk in the front door of your account and you turn right to go see the customers you always go see, every once in a while turn left.
and start exploring and start talking to people.
You know, I've seen so many times where I talk to this person in this cubicle and you never talk to the person in the next cubicle who is on a different project has a different problem, but it's probably you can solve. just, you know, make a habit of getting to know more people and your customers. Not because, you know, can I sell you something? But, you know, they're interesting people and you know, you'll start doing things. So one, do that.
Dave Irwin (32:09)
Here it is.
Dave Brock (32:13)
Two is start exercising your curiosity, your critical thinking, and your problem solving abilities. Get some training on that. And there's a lot of online courses you can do to start doing that kind of thing. If the people listening to this are interested, I'm glad to give them.
the customer focus questionnaire and the problem focus questionnaire, which are 15 questions that you can go in and start better understanding your customer, And then another set of 15 questions that you can go in and better understand a problem.
And so that helps you build your business acumen
Dave Irwin (32:56)
Well, that's great guidance, Dave. I think the audience, those results speak for themselves and it works when it's done well. so I think in some cases, there's a message of try to resist the sales culture a bit and become a great problem solver and look what you can do with your accounts and management's gonna love you for the results.
more than anything.
Dave Brock (33:22)
great problem solvers
always beat quotas.
Dave Irwin (33:26)
That's right.
Exactly.
Terrific. Well, thanks again, Dave. We really appreciate you having you on and giving your guidance and stories and advice.