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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Rachel Mae and Rachel is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Rachel is general manager of training and licensing at a sales growth company. My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving win rates are Barry Klein, Barry is vice president of success and enablement at Tal Rue and Kyle Williams is joining me again.
Kyle is founder and CEO of. Brick stack. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter. That's called win rate. Wednesday, join more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive this every week on Wednesday, where you get one actual tip to accelerate your win rates and some other great sales advice as well.
You can subscribe by visiting andypaul. com that's my website, or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. So 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 my guests, Rachel Mae, Kyle Williams, and Barry Klein for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Yeah. And thank you so much for investing your time with me today until next time I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast. Joining me again, another stellar cast of panelists Barry Klein, Rachel Mae, Kyle Williams. I'm going to give everybody a quick minute to introduce yourself. We'll start with you, Rachel.
Hi, I'm Rachel Mae. I'm the general manager of training and licensing at a sales growth company. And we are on a mission to change the way the world sells.
Ah, there we go. Like those big missions, Barry.
Good afternoon or good day. Whenever anyone's joining us. My name is Barry Klein. I am the vice president of success at Tel Roo. Tel Roo is a talent marketplace, a talent platform,
Bringing job seekers and employers together via job ads and also through hiring events. And I look after our CST
Got it. Kyle Williams, a familiar face.
Yes. I'm going to mix up the intro here a little bit. So I'm a sales leader who learned how to code did a number of roles across Google cloud, Sequoia startup worked with companies like Stripe and Rippling and Webflow on outbound design. And I'm working on a stealth company to flip outbounds on it, on its head by starting with executives instead of SDRs.
So more to come on that.
Well, it's not a real stealth. I plugged it the last episode that I recorded.
Well, there we go. Has it launched yet?
We, I know, but Adam Robinson, CEO of retention was on the show and he was raving about what he was doing with outbound. And I said, well, we have to give it a plug because that's company is consists of Kyle and my son. So, yeah.
Right.
And they are revolutionizing the world of outbound for sure. Especially in this environment.
How about that for a teaser? All right. So let's jump into, I've been having this running debate with this guy on LinkedIn and he contends along and this, he's not the only one who contends this is that if your win rates are too high, you're not being aggressive enough, you know, he's, you're not talking to enough prospects and.
And when he first brought that up, I respond to, I said, well, Hey, with all due respect, you know, that's a fiction that sales leaders hide behind to justify poor sales performance. Yeah. In any go to market motion, there's a learning curve for sure. But once you've passed through that learning curve and you think you have product market fit. In my mind, there's no excuse for low win rates. And yeah, you know what you're selling. You don't dominate. Yeah. I presume you haven't dominated the market already. I mean, his justification for talking to more people was, Hey, you know, we just need to see what's out there. It's like, well, no, you got product market fit.
You've identified your ICP, who you're going after. If you really have that, you should be harvesting those at a very high rate. So interest owed people think about that. Barry, you're nodding. You start.
well, it's funny, any of the, my first reaction to that anecdote. And that position really goes to what you just said with that. And I couldn't agree more. You know, your ICP, you know, to whom you should be selling. You have your, your go to market strategy buttoned up. My experience has been that when close rates and win rates are too high, you haven't answered those questions yet.
You're selling to the wrong customers. And so while it looks good on paper you have this artificially high win rate and you very likely have a very poor retention rate. And three and six months later, you're going to pay for the short term drug of feeling good about having closed those customers. So that's actually my first reaction to it, which is you're diluting yourself.
If you're, if you, Don't know your ICP and you don't have all those buttons buttoned up as you just mentioned, Andy. You're in for a world of hurt down the down the timeline
Okay. But I'm curious
screen your own
just said. Well, I'm curious before we move on to Rachel and Kyle's is, but you were saying that if your win rates were too high, you're selling to the wrong people
You're selling it to, yeah, it, of course, depending on the nature of the product and I'm actually speaking to this specifically from experience that we had at Tal Rue coming out of the pandemic when everyone and their brother needed Every restaurant was rehiring. Every hospitality business was rehired.
Everyone had lost all their people.
Oh, so you're taking bad business. That wasn't
and we were, and so everyone was fascinated by what we did. You know, and Talreau is a small company. They might not have heard about us. And I say this with no disrespect to our sales team, but the sales calls could be you know, in a truly exaggerated, Oh, you do, you can help me find talent.
Where do I sign? Right. I've never heard of you, but I'm desperate. Can you help me? And of course we want to help and we do talent acquisition and we do that advertising. So yeah, we can help, but we can't help everybody. We're not going to be able to help the typical hospital that's, you know, on the far extreme.
We're not very good at brain surgeons, right? We're very good at warehouse workers, right? We're not very good at brain surgeons.
that speaks to the point that, yeah, to that guy saying, Oh, you're not talking to enough people as well. Sometimes again, if you've got your ICP dialed in, yeah, you don't want to be talking to everybody in the world. Right. So Rachel,
Can we define too high?
well, yeah, I don't think there is such a thing personally. I mean, if you've, this is, yeah, again, for me, if you've established your product market fit, ICP dialed in. I mean, we've had guests on the show that you know, I'm like Brandon Flewharty, who's, you know, very accomplished seller, you know, his career win rate, I think was 72%.
Another one, the show sold for SAP at the highest levels, 82 percent win rate. I think the highest that somebody that's been on the show was a 91%. So I'm not sure there is such a thing.
I'm not sure there is such a thing, but when I hear numbers that high, I do start to be curious about if someone's playing like funny buggers with the math, you know, like, are we talking like, are we talking about opportunity to close, like, I have people give me win rates sometimes, and then when I dig deeper, They're like, yeah, this is our win rate from everyone that has agreed that they want to move forward that we send a contract to right?
Like, that's a very different thing from like your demo to close rate or your opportunity to close rate. And then I'm trying to figure out how you qualify it. So I would just say, in the context of the conversation It could be too high If in fact the way you're measuring it Is cheating But if it is really your win rate and it's high I mean our win rate right now is around 65 I guess some people might say that's too high
No, I'm sure right on.
Yeah, we're just maniacal about making sure, to your point, we are speaking to the right people.
We're drawing the right people to us. we're really great gap sellers. We are great at selling. So that's why our win rate is 65%. I definitely do not feel like that is a big problem as a sales leader that I'm running around trying to figure out what to solve right now. I mean, it's a strange conversation to be having.
well, yeah, it was mystifying to me because especially, you know, if you're, you know, if you have a salesperson who's at, you know, 20 percent of quota and they closed one deal on the year that they talked to only talk, maybe talk to two people and closed one. Yeah. You know, if they're not hitting the number and the win rate's high, then you can be suspicious, but.
If somebody's hit their number and their win rates, yeah, I believe the minimum standard for a salesperson is you win more than you lose. That should be it. Yeah. If you make the decision to bring somebody into your pipeline, then there has to be a reason why you've done that. And you're should, that's it should be able to win more than you lose Kyle.
Yeah, I'd say if if you're talking about someone was talking about their personal life and like, yeah, I get rejected 90 percent of the time, you'd say, well, either you don't know who you like, or you don't know who likes you, or you don't have time when that's true. And I think that'd be true of the business world, right?
Is that, I think that would tell me that you either don't know, you don't know who you're selling to, or you don't know who Has an actual real need. I think the tarot example of just, you know, anybody who can fog a mirror saying I need talent is probably not the requirements we're looking for. Or you're simply so busy with all of these bad fits that you don't have time for the ones that are.
I mean, I think that as sales people interested in your thoughts on this is that I always looked at this way is, and with the teams I run and so on, as you choose to win, right. You choose based on who you're going to invest your time and effort in. And yeah, I like to use the sort of the metaphor is you're as a salesperson, you're the bouncer at the head of the velvet rope that lets people into the club and that club is your pipeline, right?
Who you're going to invest your time and attention in. And you have to be very selective about it. And it's, I get the sense from, you know, people like coach and people that, you know, reach out to me is like sellers feel like they don't have the choice to turn down a lead or turn down something that's presented to them.
Hey, it's a, you know, sales qualified opportunity. You got to handle it. It's like, really just say no, but they don't feel like they can. Very
Yeah. And I think the phrase that comes to mind, Andy, as you described that is and I've heard this too many times in my career. Well, it was worth a shot but how much time resource money gets wasted when you're taking a low probability shot. You know, and that the ability to be discriminating, to have the confidence to say no, to say, you know what, we're not the right fit for you.
And maybe give, you know, in a miracle and 34th street kind of way, say, maybe go down to Gimbel's because Macy's doesn't have what you need. Right. That to me is the best of a consultative sale, right? I understand you have a problem, Mr. Customer, I'm just not the right one, perhaps to solve it. Because, and you don't have to tell them why, you know, it's, it could be a technical fit.
It could be a cultural fit. It could be the price. It could be the complexity in a software solution, but help guide them. But don't necessarily bring them into your pipeline for your company, if it's too long a shot.
Yeah. Yeah. Rachel.
I definitely agree with you, Andy, that reps do not feel empowered at the qualification stage, oftentimes to decide who gets in the club or not. But I think the larger problem that we see is that there's either a . There's no agreement on what our qualifiers are that we know impact, whether we are a good fit for them.
They're a good fit for us and this should be called qualified opportunity. Or they do know what they are and those things are very arbitrary. They are set more to disqualify than qualify, if you will. Things like budget, timing, need, who do you, who the contact is, what their role is. For me, none of these things matter at this stage in the game, at the qualifying stage.
to determine whether this is a qualified opportunity or not. And because of that, we let bad opportunities in, and we actually throw great opportunities out into the trash before we've ever had a chance to go through discovery.
So, all right. So what you're saying is that sometimes the disqualification parameters are set too tight up front.
Absolutely, right? So you, I mean, I guess you don't have a lot of organizations necessarily saying, our qualifying framework is banned. But you do have, I would say the majority of of organizations that we speak to under the guise of things like Medic, actually using budget, timing, need, authority, Right up front at the qualifying stage, when in actuality, these things have nothing to do with whether the prospect potentially has a problem you can solve, whether they admit that they have a problem and whether they're willing to go on the journey to fix it.
And until you know those things, you cannot call an opportunity qualified or unqualified with any kind of certainty. That early in the game.
I agree. I agree. So, to that point then, just following up and then we'll jump to Kyle is, so what in those instances are you using as qualification criteria?
So what we use and , what we implement with our clients is. Do they have a problem that they can solve? Do they admit that they have that problem? Are they willing to go on the journey to fix it? And are they going on the journey to fix it with us? I would say at the qualifying stage You're probably going to have two of those to call it an opportunity and that is they have a problem That we can solve and they admit they have a problem That is what opens the door To say okay This is worth diving in deeper into discovery here all of the other ancillary things budget need timing authority all of those things Will be Anchored to do they have a problem?
How big is that problem? What is the impact of that problem? What is the inaction of not solving that? What is the cost of an action of not solving that problem? Right? All of those things will be anchored to that problem as you go along through the discovery journey. But upfront as a qualifier, they are useless.
We're going to come back to that. Kyle.
I think if I frame that as why don't salespeople feel empowered to control who comes in? I think there's a lot of causes. One of them that stands out is what happens before. Someone shows up at their doorstep in the first place. It feels like a lot of the go to market motion is implicitly designed to try to pluck buyers who are just magically ready to go.
And like you mentioned, Rachel, right? If we're using a band on the first call, then we're we're just, we're filtering for, are you ready to go right out of the gate? And, you know, some of that impact will be, I'm going to filter in Maybe a below the line person who's going to give me happy years because they're going to respond positively to everything that I say.
And then there's not the critical thinking or time for thought to really parse through who is in the right situation or is there a conversation to be had. So I think there's some of that pressure that implicitly we're trying to shove and filter out who's just perfectly ready as opposed to what is the situation someone's in and is there an opportunity to help.
Yeah. I want to dig down a couple of things Rachel brought up is do the second one first is, yeah, I read a post last week and this is not new. Cause what I call the myth of this has been around for a long time is that, Hey, you know, buyers are this case. I said 80 percent of the way through the buying process before they talked to sellers for the first time. And. And I don't believe that I mean, I think some are obviously, I think the more transactional your product is and perhaps the more further you are, but to Rachel's point is, , if you're prepared to have a conversation with a salesperson about, you know, you said your problems and, you know, the impact and, , get into helping them sort of understand what that, that may be, they're not, 80 percent of the way through the buying process at all.
I mean, they first of all, I don't think that you're able to measure how far through their buying the process they are. And actually to me, it's not how far through their process that really matters. It's how far are they in the making the decision, which again, I think is completely unmeasurable. So I think this, it's funny, you know, people have this, you know, narrative that buyers don't have time for sellers. But I think to, again, to Rachel's point is I believe that sure, the data says buyers don't want to talk to salespeople, but if they are talking to you, it's because they need to, right? They need to, they're talking to you for a reason. They're investing their time for a reason. There's something they need from you help.
They need from you. And yeah, if you're dissuaded by budget, yeah. Authority need timeframe, which is data with no context, then yeah, you may walk away from a great opportunity.
Andy, if I may, for the other panelists, a topic, if I may ask Rachel, as you were describing it and Kyle, you were sort of addressing it as well. What have you guys found the balance between the person, their pain, their needs, their job satisfaction, the stress that they're under versus the corporation's goals?
Because. To me, it's always very interesting that if the person who's working the phones and having to talk to the salespeople, if they're not personally motivated you're sort of in trouble. They can be doing their job and checking the boxes, but I think you guys would all agree. We're all in the people business.
And so what's that balance between the person who's on the other side of the phone and their personal pain, their personal anguish, what's going on in their life versus the goals that their boss has given them or the board has given them that balance.
Go ahead, Rachel.
I love in gap selling, this is one of the things I love is how we bifurcate out the technical problem versus the business problem. So that's where you're gonna, like the, probably if you're at the end user level with the person that you're speaking to. And they're the ones that like, Hey, the way we do this today makes it hard for me to do my job.
It's frustrating. It's making me not meet deadlines, right? All of those things. Those things are very important. And those are the things that typically your normal sales rep is very good at getting down into the meat of right in discovery. But of equal importance. And I would say of more importance at the end of the day is how those technical problems are impacting the business, the overall health of the business, right?
What business problems are they causing and how are those business problems impacting the overall health of the business? Because that's where the intrinsic motivation to buy is. And so the, as a salesperson, we need to uncover all three of those, where they are today in their current state and their future state, in order to help That end user help their organization make the right choice, the right two choices.
I would say, should we change and should we change to this company? Right? Should we change first? And then should we change this company? So I think as salespeople, what I always try and do is help salespeople understand, get out of sell mode and get into help mode and help mode means. My job is to help this person make the very best decision for their organization.
And so if the end user knows that all of this yuckiness is going on at the technical problem level, at the end user level, then it's my job to help them put together the other pieces. So that they can champion what they need through until the end. and stand by it, right? So it's all three of those things.
Technical problem, business problem, impact in both the current state and future state. That's my job. And then to lay it all at their feet so that they can make the right choice for the organization. Is that
But I think,
Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.
but Barry, you were sort of talking about a different issue to me. At least it was, is that, yeah, every individual looks at decisions to be taken in two frames. One is what's in it for me, what's in it for the company. Right. And so I think it's a little different spin on that. And that's really important to know, right?
Because again, I think when you Yeah, ideally, if you say, oh, gosh, we've got X number of stakeholders and decision, you really have like X times two, cause everybody's looking at it from two different perspectives. And you need to be able to understand all of those perspectives order to really say, okay, well, how are we going to build a consensus around a decision or, you know, influence the choice with the decision, actual decision makers to go forward, given these various inputs that are coming at these various levels.
And I think sellers aren't as mindful of the, of that, right. And it just, it can be done just takes a little more time, but also requires that you have that connection with somebody so that when you can sort of dig in and get to that level of understanding of that individual, and it's, you know, there's been some science about this.
I think Herbert Simon wrote about this part of his theory of bounded rationality is, you know, people always look at decisions in two times, two and you need to understand both. Kyle.
Yeah, I mean, I would agree. You can't solve it in a vacuum. If I can solve the business's problems, but not the people, then you either have a, At best neutral party or a negative party to getting the deal. And then if you win it, then now you have an adoption problem. And if you only solve people problems and not solving the businesses problems, then you have a potential conflict of issue for the, for your buyer.
But to your point, I think that the magic is in connecting those. And really, you know, oftentimes the big company issues are composed The individual issues in the organization. And it's about weaving and understanding, you know, the nuance of how does this overall issue impact this person often in consulting, , one of the first things I do, you get, you have the subject matter expert who's, they're the one feeling the pain, but they're not responsible for solving it here is ask them, you know, what makes you look good? And whatever they say often aligns with the way that you can help solve the problem. And then now you have a supporter to gain adoption into the solution. So I think to your point, it is necessary, but not sufficient to be on only or overweighted to either degree.
Yeah. Well, here's another question I want to ask. And it triggered by something Rachel had said earlier. Because it's something I've been writing about and thinking a lot about recently, which was, we in sales in general? And sort of philosophically, are we too fixated on this idea of pain points? Right? I mean, my concern is. And I just look at my own career, you know, I've won the better part of a billion dollars in orders, six continents around the world, you know, from, , my career sold, I don't have a women's shoes to, you know, nine figure systems, but I look at it sort of professional career.
It's like, I really can't remember any sizable opportunity that one where someone was trying to fix a pain point. And what they were trying to do is seize an opportunity. Right. They were trying to gain some sort of upside in their business. They saw that between to gain market share to increase revenue or whatever. And it may seem like a, , semantic difference, but I think there's a case where words are really important. You know, I think when we so fixate on pain points and especially I think it's become exacerbated sort of during the SAS era is, you know, we solve small problems. I've got a pain point.
I've got a cut on my hand. So I put a bandaid on my hand. My printers run out of ink. That's a problem. I put a bandaid on, I get new, I buy new ink. The customers I dealt with, I wanted to seize this market. I wanted to be able to go where I hadn't gone before. How can you help me do that? And I think as a seller, if you approach things always, what's the problem?
Let me fix the problem. It becomes very finite and you make selling really small as opposed to what's the opportunity, how can I help? This buyer achieve what they really want to achieve. So I'm curious what y'all think about that? Cause it's, I think it's really essential that sellers start reframing how they look at how they work with the buyers in this up.
It's not to say there aren't some cases where it's just pure pain points, but I think by and large in B2B, you want to be in a position where you're selling to the opportunity they see, why are they motivated to make a change? People are going to be more motivated by, I know people hate to hear this or more motivated by gain, the whole theory of loss aversion has been discredited.
If you read the more recent academic studies, people are motivated by gain. So anyway, my rant, what do y'all think about that Barry?
The way you framed it, Andy, is interesting and does put an interesting spin on it. Because as you were describing that, you would hope that the pain point is solving for the opportunity, right? That's what's bothering us. We don't know how to go forward, right? We don't know or we know how we want to go forward.
Do we have the tools to support the service to do that? Because I think you're quite right. If all I do is solve the immediate pain, have I advanced the goals of the organization to whom I'm selling, you know, okay, they might feel a little better when they come in the morning because they've put some bandaid on some small problem, but they're not fundamentally better than they were a little less annoyed, maybe a little more efficient, maybe, but they haven't really moved the ball forward in terms of their development, their growth.
And there is a patience in the sales cycle that I find is often lacking. And the way that manifests itself that I've seen is after being in the pipeline, after initial discovery, depending on the nature of the product that you're selling or the service that you're selling, My guess is you're probably going to need some internal subject matter experts to address the constituencies beyond your one or two points of contact and start to evolve that full picture of where are we really going with this?
And so a, I think the account executives who feel that they can go it alone. Find themselves pigeonholed into solving the short term problem putting that bandaid on. If you're really going to solve an organizational problem and you haven't opened up the aperture to the entire selling, the entire decision making team and influencers who don't have any say in it, but you know that they're going to be the ones implementing it.
Have we brought them into the fold? Have we gotten everyone's opinion, everyone's viewpoint? You know, it makes me laugh. I think about the, I think Kyle, you mentioned consultants, you know, you, Makes me think of the movie office space, right? And anyone who's sometimes brought in consultants because what they're given free license to do is ask any question they want and they sit and they listen.
Why is that any different than the best of a sales process? Ask these questions. Probe a little bit deeper. Take that artistic and scientific license to keep uncovering more and more. You know, why does that have to be the realm of the consultant? Isn't that really the realm of a consultative Sam?
Yeah. I mean, we'll think about it. I mean, why do companies hire consultants oftentimes? I mean, I've seen it numbers times, numerous times companies say, look, there's something we want to achieve in our business, but we really don't know how to get from here to there. So we're bringing in somebody with a different perspective from what we have internally, a whole different subject to get into.
We bring in people we have weak ties with to be able to give us insights that we don't have ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's not. Solving for a problem we're solving for, unless they assume their problem is we don't know how to achieve this opportunity, but I think the mindset and certainly the mindset I've seen among my customers is yeah, they weren't fixing a problem.
They were leaving that behind. They were reaching for something new. And I think the more you can, when you talk about, you know, how I help customer form vision of what they can achieve vision of success as part of sales process. I don't think that's based on putting a Band Aid on something, but anyway Rachel
I wish I could just declare for like 2024 like pain and the idea of pain and sales is dead It died now It's all gone, right? It's like a holdover from sandler from the 70s. And I think it does a lot of damage as salespeople when we Think that pain is a motivation to buy so if I have A grill and that barbecue grill has six burners and two of those burners are broken And four of them still work And every time I turn it on it's annoying it bothers me I wish the other two worked, but it's not really a big deal because It's not impacting my ability to eat or to do all the things that I want to do with my barbecue.
I just work around it, right? Like, that's what we do as humans. We just work around pain, right? Pain is annoying. Pain is a nuisance, to your point. Until that pain creates a current state that becomes intolerable or untenable. I am having hosting father's day at my house. We are having a barbecue and 60 people are coming over and I need to feed all of those 60 people within a two hour time period and now my broke ass barbecue is no longer going to cut it.
And my mother in law is going to think. You know, I'm a loser because I can't barbecue for the family on Father's Day. And I, you know, can't get my life together because, you know, my grill is broken and she's going to nag at me and
we're really going deep here
at me and I'm going to have to sit on the couch for three months, right?
Like, and so on, guess what I'm doing? I'm going to Lowe's and I'm buying a barbecue. Pain without an impact. Is just annoying and salespeople just chase and chase pain and when they find it, they're like, this is it. They need to buy right. As a sales manager, if you ask a rep in the pipe, you say, why do they need to buy?
Oh, well, you know, they don't have visibility into blah, blah, blah. It takes too long. To do the, what's a McCollett, right? Who gives a shit? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Right? I worked with a very large sales organization that I won't mention the name of several years ago, and it was right before they were going to IPO.
And at the time they were just killing it. Why? Because they were the only kid in the game with the right data. All right, like nobody else has the data so they could sell awfully like a 1985 car dealership, which they did and they still do, and they could, they were meeting the number. They were like, they were the unicorn.
They hit their IPO. This dude did not, in enablement, did not want to hear anything I had to say about the fact That his sales reps were discounting their face off and losing all credibility with their clients in the meantime, and ruining their reputation. Did not give a shit. In fact, he practically cursed me out, right? But guess what now there's a whole lot of kids on the block And they are suffering and people are literally making fun of them Every time you go on linkedin just making fun of them like they're not even there And they're not hitting the targets and that guy's been fired along with half of the other leadership and guess what?
Now they want to talk to me, right? Because they had pain, their shit was messed up, but they were getting the job done, so they didn't care. Right. And so many reps, we find the pain and we go, let me show you how I can fix that. And it's just like, la, total on deaf ears from the people that actually matter to get that opportunity through.
So. You know, we've got to let go of this idea of pain, and we've got to stop, to your point, in a semantics way, we've got to stop confusing pain with problem and impact. They are not the same thing. One is a stubbed toe. One is like, you don't have a leg anymore to run the marathon, right? Like that's how far apart they are. That's my rant over.
Okay. Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, but I would make somewhat the same case with problem and pain though, too, because again it's just, again, talking from my experience, hard to separate them all, but if the vision of the buying people who are really making the decision is, look, we're just trying to fix this problem.
As so it's trying, we're trying to gain this advantage, right. In our business. Yeah. One leads to really big deals. One leads to smaller deals. And I think that's, you know, it's like sellers do themselves a disservice, not just sellers, but up and down sales organization by serve framing makes a difference.
And I think this is. A topic to your point about pain is framing. And I agree with you on that. 100 percent is, but in general for sellers is really how we frame what they're doing. Dictates how it gets done, Kyle.
Yeah, I would say we've covered a lot of great dimensions of pain. I think in terms of where sellers could be more empowered is with lateral thinking of how do you springboard very much. I think what both Rachel and Barry are saying is like that curiosity to understand.
Where you're trying to go, not just where you are and what's annoying about where you are so that we can help craft a better solution. So in the I have a grill with four burners and two don't work and the family's coming over. My mother in law is going to be disappointed in me. The goal is not to have six burners.
The goal is to have this meal that impresses the mother in law in this example. Right. And so, you know, maybe it's, yeah, you could go to Lowe's and get a 500 grill, or maybe you splurge and get the Traeger, but I've never worked with the wood pellets. And so I'd probably want to practice a bunch. So you've got to spend a bunch of time learning how to do it.
And then hopefully you get it right, but you probably got to get up at like 6 00 AM to start smoking. So the meat, so that by the time that everybody gets there, it's ready and then you're exhausted. And then, you know, you're like, You know, your mother in law makes a comment, but you're so tired because you've been cooking all day.
Like you say the wrong thing and then suddenly it blows up anyway, or we have a catering service. And what we do is we sneak in the side door. And so you get to carry all the food out and impress your mother in law, but you're completely rested. Now it does cost 10 times more than buying that grill, but the impact that you're looking for, we're going to, we're going to knock it out of the park for you.
Right. And that lateral thinking of saying, you know, the pain source is two. Grills. And so the immediate pain solution is getting you two extra grills with a brand new one. But what is the actual thing you're driving towards? Is you want to be relaxed and you got to be on your game to have that conversation and have the impressive meal.
Maybe there's a different way to do that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is also revolved around this topic that brought up earlier is like to Rachel's point is, you know, there's a lot of conversation that needs to take place, but we've got these voices out there saying, and this has been going on for years now, you know, there's Yeah. The buyers, you know, if they're anyway, 80 percent of the way through their buying process, when they first talked to you, they've already decided all these things, right?
They just want a price and person. I don't think that's the case at all, but, and I find it really, I said, I think it's not serving sellers. Well, to have the serve mythology floating out there, because what's the first thing a seller says to themselves? And I said, oh my gosh, buyers out there that far. I got focused on just my product and my price and focus on problems goes away because they figured out the problem. There's a lot of price for me. Rachel, you're nodding. Go ahead.
I think that stance takes all the accountability away from us as sellers of number one, like why do buyers find us useless and they don't want to speak to us and they will avoid speaking to us at all costs, but I do see often. That the buyer believes are 80 percent through their buying process by the time they get to me.
And that, when that happens, My job as a seller is to slow them down and back them up. So, you know, that takes a ton of skill and art in execution. And that skill and art is not being taught right now. In anywhere that I'm seeing instead, it's just give, no, we need to just give the buyers what they want.
They want to see the demo, give them the demo. They want the price given the rights. If you don't give them what you want, you're just frustrating them. Well, sure. If you're showing up without the capacity, skill, business acumen, et cetera, to actually help them understand. Why slowing down and backing up is to their benefit.
So I have a buyer that I've been going through this with right now for months. I just, he goes too far. I got to back him up. He goes too far. I got to back him up. And the danger in that for the buyer is that. They have misdiagnosed themselves, and therefore they are in danger of making the wrong choice.
And so, when they come to me and they believe they're 80 percent through, I need to go, I need to find out. What does that mean? 80 percent through what have they already done? How are they thinking about the problem? How have they diagnosed themselves? What evidence is there to support that diagnosis? What have they missed?
And then what do I need to do? To get them back on track so that I make sure that they don't make the wrong choice for their organization. So I do agree that a lot of times they think they're way farther through than they should be.
So what's the question you asked them to get them to slow down?
So I ask a lot of questions around the problem,
We'll start with one
impacts and root causes.
No, I was just saying, what's the first question? The one that's going to get them to say, look, I'm going to give Rachel some of my time, right? Because if it's your point, they're convinced they got it wired already, but you have to disrupt that. That's your job. Do you can't, they're not gonna agree to give you more time unless you disrupt it.
Do you have an example of a question you'd like to use that disrupts their thinking?
So I would say that's going to be different depending
Oh, sure.
prospect
But if you have an
what you sell, but it should be a provoking question for sure. So you know, I might ask a question around, can you walk me through how you diagnose the problem that you're looking to fix? and the root causes of that problem. Can you share with me what evidence you used to support that diagnosis? And then they're going to tell me all the wrong things and it's going to open it up for me to say, have you considered XYZ? And in that moment I've got instant credibility.
Okay. I like it. Barry.
Yeah, it's as Rachel was describing that I think of. You know, one of the most instructive things that so many salespeople don't have is being on the other side when you're the buyer and Rachel used a great word to ask provocative questions to get the attention of that buyer who thinks they're farther along down the path than they are.
Because the antithesis of that are the inane questions that just bother the crap out of the buyer. They've been asked these same questions over and over again. You're not being provocative. You're not changing my mindset. How about if you came in that, you know, someone who thinks they're farther down the line.
You want to be provocative. Well, I understand where you might be Mr. Or Ms. Customer, but from my experience and with our customers, we've learned this. Now I've got your attention because I am in fact. consulting with you. I do in fact show some subject matter expertise and I actually can add value to your life.
But so many of the times it's, Oh, thank you for calling us. So let me ask, what are your pain points? You know, and you just, I don't want to go through it again. I don't want, and then they're going to bring in a sales engineer who's going to ask me the same questions. And then they're going to bring in, you know, then when we do onboarding, they're going to ask me the same questions.
And I want to say, does anyone there talk to each other? Or we just ask the same inane questions all the time. I've been trying to tell you folks what we're trying to do, but if you can bring in that credibility that says from our experience dot, here's what you're not considering. That to Rachel's word, that is provocative.
Yeah. Or from our experience, have you considered, right? Yeah. Kyle.
Yeah. I think this is, we're talking about the tech support. You have the X, Y problem, right? Like, Hey, I need a new monitor. And then you spend all this time sitting with a new monitor. What was wrong with the old one? Well, it didn't work. Was the grid light on? Yeah, the light was on. Was it plugged into the computer?
Oh no. So, you know, we hit, we're trying to solve new monitor problem, but it just wasn't plugged in. And oftentimes in sales, that's the perspective we're coming in. It's like the buyer has. gone down this path and they're coming in with X, but it's probably Y and I have some instinct for that. But it can also be frustrating.
If you've ever called tech support and you go, all right, my screen is cracked. And they start telling you, well, did you try turning it off and turning it back on? And I'm like, it's cracked. So we're in a low context environment. And so I think if we could listen to everything that Rachel said on the first half is that understanding, like we don't.
Need to just pander, but also make sure there's this high context, high credibility. I think the stat that buyers, and I like that framing buyers feel they are 80 percent of the way down the sales process by the time they show up at your doorstep. But I don't think that's just something we react to. I think it is a reaction to The sales process, like you highlighted, Barry, right?
Is I'm going to show up and again, I'm going to get the equivalent of, have you turned your cracked phone off and on when I'm going to be asked these really basic questions. And oftentimes when I talk to executives, you know, they're looking for informed perspective. But to get to informed perspective, I have to do the first call where I get the five questions I already know the answer to.
And then I get passed over the AE and they asked me the same five questions and they go, Oh yeah, that's a great question. Let me get the SE. They can come out in two weeks. And then in two weeks I finally get the answer and I go, Oh, well that's helpful. I'm not in the market for your product, but I'm a stage three op now.
So you're going to hound me for the rest of my life. Right. And so then I'm just not going to show up in your sales process in the first place. And so I think there's some of this, you know, having the. You know, perspective that says, you know, perhaps this person, you know, is in the middle of an X, Y problem, but having the empathy to say, how do we create this high context environment for them, I think is hypercritical.
Yeah. And I think the thing that's missing in that consideration about to Rachel's point, yeah, they feel like they're 80 percent of the way through, or, you know, we as a sales profession, sales industry thing. Yeah. Buyers are 80 percent of the way through. We'll see. We know there's a 40, at least a 40 percent no decision rate on opportunities.
So of that 80 percent of those who think they're 80%, how many are actually going to end up buying anything? Actually a relatively small percentage. And so the need as Rachel explained is, yeah, how do we break through to get them to slow down and consider and so on, well, it really becomes vital, right?
Cause yeah, a lot of those would go down the path. They're not gonna make a decision anyway. They're not really a lost opportunity. They're lost in time. So yeah, it's really becomes critical. Yeah. How do you sort of stop the train? And I think, yeah, provocative question. I like to call them, I call them insight questions.
You know what? I like, for example, you gave Barry, the ones I like to use are ones that, you know, you ask the buyer something about their business that they should reasonably expect to know, but probably don't. And it sort of says, Oh, well, gosh, maybe we hadn't considered all these things we need to consider.
Why is that important? And if you do that, then yes, you can open the conversation. Okay.
of the things that I found is hard to really get the account executives to often understand is you may not believe it, but you probably know this business better than the person you're speaking to right here. You can be easily intimidated to think, well, they do this every day. They must know more than me.
Yeah, but they don't have the breadth of experience. They don't have the breadth of the people you've talked to the company's work. But you're probably better than you think you are. And to carry that out. Yeah.
I mean, especially if you can combine that with some sort of knowledge about the customer's business, right? Because again, we've, you know, we've talked about solving problems. We've talked about, you know, opportunities and so on, but the ability to help the buyer with those. Really depend on level of specialization that doesn't really exist as much in sales as it needs to, right?
As you know, that conversation was only not that long ago about yeah, they wanted advice on how they organize themselves to improve their win rates. And we're talking about specialization in it. It's like, okay, within your ICP, what's something you can specialize in? What's the segment that you can make call yours where you have, that's where your customers are.
And you have, you know, deep knowledge of the customer that you're selling to their customers, their business, their markets, their products, and so on. And you just don't, I mean, that's how I was brought up in sales. We were vertically oriented from day one. I always took that and said, yo, that's the way you succeed. I'm wondering why we don't see that more these days in selling because it is, you know, it's not the easy button, but it is something that works to your advantage. Any thoughts why we don't see it enough? Barry?
fear is the word that comes to mind.
Here. Yeah.
lack of confidence, fear. And at least I can accept that more than folks. Candidly, Andy, who don't think the way you just described, if you think you can get away, you know, sometimes what you're selling and how involved to be to understand it.
But depending on the nature of the solution that you're presenting to your buyer if you're afraid, at least step out and try to learn something. If you disavow the importance of it, you're probably doomed because in this world of specialization and when we look at having credibility for as whether they be BDRs or account executives or later on when the sales engineer gets involved I think we owe it to the buyer to show that we know something about what's going on.
What they're doing and how they do it. And if you disavow that importance, you're probably doomed. If you're a little afraid, you don't want to ask questions. Well, we can probably help you get past that. And you know, with good training and good management, but you at least have to acknowledge that when you're selling into a niche and you have a vertical, you really, your responsibility is to know it, and that doesn't come overnight.
I mean, if I have a medical issue, yeah. Regular heartbeats number of years ago. Yeah. I can see my GP. Sure. But it's not a cardiologist, right? Because they see that all the time. And yeah. He was much more quickly to get to the nut of the matter and understand what the problem was and help diagnose it and treat it. Well, we should want to do the same things, you know, with our selling. So, alright. We sort of reached the end of the road. And I want to thank everyone for joining me today. Barry, Kyle, Rachel, and yeah, you're welcome to come back again. That was a great conversation. Thank you.