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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. Now that was Ralph Barsi and Ralph is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Ralph Barsi is the vice president of sales at Kahua. My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving your win rates are Dave Brock.
Dave is the founder and CEO of Partners in Excellence, a global sales consulting firm. And he's a frequent contributor and collaborator on this show. Also joining me is David Krieger. David is the founder and president of Sales Roads. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, If you enjoy this podcast, if you enjoy the show, please really appreciate it.
Do me a favor, take a quick second before I welcome today's guests to rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts. Now this helps us get discovered by an even larger audience of sales professionals who are looking to take their careers and their win rates to the next level. So I really appreciate that.
And thank you for help. All right. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the Winrate Podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Ralph Barsi, David Brock, and David Krieger for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the Winrate Podcast, with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
So again, as always, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. And gosh, as always, just look at the brilliance of the people that are joining me here starting with, you know, the rock and roll star that is Ralph Barsi. Ralph, how are you doing?
Wonderful. Great to be here, Andy.
Now, when people talk about rock stars and sales, they usually think, Oh, top performers, but Ralph is right.
A recording musician, right? You're in a band. You are, you're still recording records. You're still tour.
not touring so much. We do hit the studio as often as we can. And I've played drums now for too long to record. I don't know. It's close to 50 years.
Wow. So you started like you were two or something,
Yeah. I was three years old when I started formal lessons. And I haven't looked back.
if you want to see Ralph in action, you can find your group. You find videos on YouTube, right?
You you can, yeah. Our band is called Segway S E G U E and we've been together since 1994. We've released three records since then, which you could find on all the all the hot channels out there. And yeah, it's it definitely keeps them pep in our step. That's for sure.
Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to watch the video and watch Ralph rocking out, leading the charge. So, welcome Ralph as always David Krieger. Thank you for coming back. Dave Brock,
the beer.
also gosh, almost feels like you're a co host sometimes a number of times we talk. So, Yeah, really? I get give everybody just a few minutes to introduce or a few seconds to introduce ourselves.
Cause I sort of was going to plunge ahead thinking, I know you guys, but not everybody may be. So David Krieger, tell us what you do.
Yeah. So I'm president of sales roads. So we are a SDR outsourcing company. So helping our clients with prospecting, generating appointments for their AEs. And if they want to outsource that whole department to us, we look at it that way. So we really partner with our clients and we become part of their organization to be able to develop that, that SDR capability for them.
Cool. Not a question for you on that. So who hires you marketing or sales? Okay.
a mixture, but we more, more sales but we do have some marketing leaders who, who do. Step in and leave the charge and bring us in.
All right. Dave Brock
I'm Dave Brock author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide. I run a company, a consulting company called Partners in Excellence. We're more of a general management consulting company for larger global corporations but with a real heavy sales and go to market type focus.
and Ralph. Tell us about the work side of Ralph.
VP of sales at a company called Kahua. We are in the construction management space and we provide construction owners and developers with a project management platform to help streamline their construction projects.
Got it. Very cool. All right. So, I thought this episode, we'd sort of dive into, there was a report that was published recently produced by Pavilion and EBSTA called B2B Sales Benchmarks. And I thought, well, okay, the title itself for me was a little problematic to start with because there's this assumption that SAS is B2B.
Encompasses all of B2B, which is, it's a part of it. So, all right, a little hubris there in terms of naming it B2B Sales Benchmarks. So it's really SAS benchmarks, but, yeah, I wanted to look at some of the findings because I, when I looked through the analysis and so on, it served to me, I don't know, betrayed a little bit of perhaps a lack of understanding what's really happening and cause and effect and so on.
So, you know, one of the first things they highlight in the report is saying, hey, you know, The economic environment is tough in 2023 and before. And the comment made is made that as budgets tighten, win rates fall. And that's never been my experience. And I've sold through more recessions like here to count.
Certainly a number of opportunities you're working on falls, but personally, I've never either myself personally, or the people I've teams I've managed, never experienced a fall in win rates when budgets tighten. So, I don't see the correlation. Do you guys? Dave Krieger, you look most puzzled. Why don't you why don't you why don't you take the lead and respond?
Sure. So we at sales rose didn't see that last year. Think there were a lot of other outstanding reasons for that and other things we did to invest in a few capabilities that, that that allowed us to maintain Our win rates, and we also revamped some of our processes, but I would just say generally as we looked at some of the work that our clients did and the throughput of some of the appointments that we booked, I'll be honest.
We did see harder win rates last year. And so. You know, I don't know. And just taking a mini step back you know, I think that it does make sense. I think people take longer when the economic Environment is a little bit more challenging, especially if we're talking about SAS and venture backed companies, I think there was a lot of pressure you know, from other companies and other SAS companies when they're making investments to really scrutinize the investments and they needed to maybe check, you know, a few more boxes and get a little bit more input from different people within the organization.
And so we saw that it did take longer for companies to close and their sales cycles extended and when rates did fall a bit. And so, you know, I'm not sure I'm curious to hear your thoughts on why, you know, it hasn't been that way but, , what we found is that a lot of times companies will increase the number of leads that they're looking for to make up for some of that.
And it is a more challenging sales environment and you have to refine your processes to try to overcome it. But from a macro standpoint, it is more challenging and you can, you will see. When rates decrease.
Dave Brock. Before I
Well, I can see how You could do some research and see when rates have fallen but not for good reasons and on what i've seen a lot in kind of The decline in the economy is sales managers sales executives and sales people panic So they start casting wider and wider nets trying to find whatever business they can And by doing that, you know, their win rates are going to plummet And I, and, you know, the things, you, at least I know you and I, Andy, have been through at least several of these kind of downturns.
And what you learn in these kinds of things is you have to actually sharpen and narrow your focus. And if you sharpen and narrow your focus, you should be able to maintain or actually increase your win rates. And all, but I think you know that, I think what I saw in some of our clients is a panic reaction.
And that panic reaction causes you to redo you know, cast a wider net. And so that in, in that sense, I could see win rates going down.
Yeah I would re, reframe that as terms of casting white nets as losing discipline.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And yeah, so Ralph
and see in, in, in bad economic term, in bad economies. You have to tighten your discipline.
Right. Ralph.
I agree. I think you do have to tighten discipline and frankly, raise standards in general, despite what's going on in the economy. And I think David was spot on when he talked about just the refinement of your processes to accommodate this. Downturn albeit a temporary one. It always is right.
So it sometimes feels eternal when you're in the moment, but it is temporary. And so if you're raising the standards, you were finding your processes and you know, you're sticking to the fundamentals of building the rapport and credibility that's required. Really getting an understanding of what the prospects problems are, and maybe what a prescriptive solution might be down the line the win rates shouldn't be too impacted, at least shouldn't be as negatively impacted as this study makes it sound.
Yeah, I agree. So obviously I tip my hand, my perspective, but I was is yeah, I may have fewer opportunities that fit my criteria as a seller that I will want to invest my time in that I will, but I think it's important as a salesperson in tough times is you not relax your standards, right?
You're not relaxed your discipline. And to your point, Ralph is perhaps double down on some of it. Because yeah, okay. There may be an impact of top line results, but that's a conversation the company needs to have with board and whomever, because, you know, the next big statistic in this report was 69 percent of reps misquota in 2023. And the reasons why, but I could still ask why, because it's just lunacy that, that's the case, right? Because you know, what's happened is people know full well, we're in the midst of a downturn, certainly in the SaaS world, and yet, you know, quotas were increased, right? There was no acceptance of reality, but quotas, hey.
We're going to, we're gonna make sure we grow our 10, 15 or whatever percent this year. So why did they do that? Right. But the implications report is yeah, somehow the sellers are at fault for this. And I don't think that's the case at all, David.
Yeah. I think that sometimes sales managers, and it's really coming from above that it's management by Excel spreadsheet and you want the, you know, you've got certain close rates that you need, and you have got certain sales that you need. And if you put it in the spreadsheet, then that becomes the reality.
And that's the number you need to hit to get the next round of funding or to hit the numbers that were set out. But really, I think one of the most important jobs of a sales leader is speaking truth to power, not to over emphasize, but you know, and Really being real about it and saying, listen, these, you know, this is the economic conditions.
This is the budget you're giving me, which is probably shrinking at the same time. Right. And this is what I really can do. And, but people are afraid to do that because we know what the lifespan of CRO is, right. And people they you know, can just get discarded for those things. But I think the best sales leaders are the ones that can legitimately look at those numbers, explain to the people who want them, what is real and what isn't real.
And be able to make that case because at the end of the day, when you create those unrealistic expectations for your reps, it actually, I think we all know, has the opposite effect because it's demotivating when you have a number you can't really hit. It's not like it's always a stretch goal, and that's that magic to hit it.
And so I think it really lies with that, that sales leader.
Yeah. It's in the same report again, there was sort of this air of mystery on the fact that, oh, well, rep turnover increased from 22 percent to 36%. It's like, well, but nowhere in the report did they tie it to quotas and the way the quotas are set. like, come on, let's give the whole picture here, right?
There's a cause and effect here. Dave.
Well, you know what I'm going to say on this is, you know, is that the, you know, there's been, I think, huge irrationality in the way we set quotas. And we set quotas not based on, you know, I've always said quotas as stretch goals, but they've come from kind of an analysis of, you know, What's realistic, what's possible, not what's outrageous, or what's driven by our investors, or driven by our expectations for growth, and so on.
And expectations for growth should go down when we're in tough economic terms. So it's not surprising that more people miss their quota. And you look at kind of the dynamics of how everything happens as you look at. You know, shortening 10 years, so more and more people are inexperienced, and they're going to be missing their quotas.
You look at, you know, declining, Andy, you and I are broken records on declining win rates, and they're declining even
know I am.
You know, it's all, I'm also telling you how old I am by using the term broken records. But but
is. You're okay, Dave.
It's you know, so we see all these compounding effects that make it worse.
And what disturbed me about the report is, and maybe I'm jumping ahead in the conversation, is this is the way things are. We've got to suck it up and learn how to work in this environment. And I don't see executives challenging why are they this way and how do we start changing things. You did something the other day about why do we accept these low win rates and adjust our pipeline coverage.
for those win rates. Why don't we ask ourselves the questions of how do we increase the win rates and going back to, you know, missing quota is why are people missing quota? Are we setting quotas reasonably? Are there some other effects and so on? And people aren't drilling into, they're looking at the numbers and not what drives the numbers and how we can influence those things that drive the numbers.
Ralph, you're shaking your head. Or nodding your head, actually. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I agree. I agree with a lot of what Dave's saying. So, so my disclaimer here is I haven't read the study.
Yeah, I know.
Sharing, I'm just sharing my opinions and my insights based on literally this discussion in the moment. But as a sales leader, I'm not going to I'm not going to decrease quotas.
It's just not going to happen. But at the same time, I think we really need to listen to what Dave just said about and what David said even earlier about the refining of the processes and getting to the mechanics of the individuals that comprise the sales team on making sure that if you were not if you but when you raise the quotas.
It should be implied that you're marrying that with enablement, that you're enabling that with that you're allowing those reps to be trained, certified clear on the mission. And when I talk about enablement and certification, I don't necessarily mean about the given product that they're going to market with, but it's about the problems in the market that your product ultimately Resolves.
It's about communicating with you know, a number of stakeholders. It's about managing expectations up and down the chain of command. You know, we were just talking a few minutes ago about making sure that you're talking in proper context when it comes to the number and the actuals versus the plan, all of that kind of goes into that enablement umbrella but I don't see myself or any sales leader for that matter ever Decreasing quota.
If they do, I'd love to meet them.
would you, if you could
I don't know. I'm personally, I'm a big fan of expanding versus contracting and growing and continuing on the trajectory, you know, and you know, the rising tide, lifting all boats, but I'm also very mindful of, you know, the mechanics of what has to raise the number. It's not just for the sake of raising the number.
yeah, no I appreciate that. But isn't there a servant element is, you know, rising tide lifts all boats to say, look, yeah, rather than have 70 percent of our reps, not hit quota, which has to create, and I've seen it, it creates this confidence gap in sellers. Right. Because I've been in sales.
They're telling themselves, Hey, I've been doing this for years and every year I'm coming up short. Right? Because, you know, year over year, we're seeing, you know, more than 50 percent of reps not hitting their quotas.
Yeah.
Right.
just from a human psychology standpoint, I've always believed in the way I've operated is I've made sure as many of my reps could hit quota as possible because they got confidence from hitting the number.
Even if it was a different number than somebody else had. But once somebody has gotten in the habit of hitting a number, what do they want to do above all else? They want to keep hitting the number. Once they experience success, they want to keep having success. And we seem to just have ignored this just basic lesson of human psychology in sales in favor of let's just keep pressing forward.
And Oh, if we only have, you know, 20, 30 percent of reps to make quota, that's okay. And I just think that's a really flawed worldview. And one of the things I take inspiration from, I brought this up on the show before is in, I've read this article several years ago about the Chicago public school district, high schools, you know, one of the most troubled school districts in the country.
And they knew that if they get kids to graduate high school that we know that has the knock on effect from terms of lifetime income potential is huge, right? So they started this program. Those determined not to let kids fail. They call it a freshman on target. And so you're a freshman, you got extra support because you hit the goals that were set for freshmen.
Cause I know if they got you through freshman year, you're higher likelihood of going and keeping in school for all four years and graduating. Because success breeds confidence and confidence breeds desire to keep succeeding. We seem to have missed that lesson in the sales world. It's, to me, it's just, this is, I don't know, we all know the words, really short sighted. And then, but then go ahead, Dave.
Yeah, and it changes the way that they. Look at themselves. I am somebody who hits quota. I am somebody who passes my classes versus I'm somebody who always doesn't hit quota and that perception of yourself becomes reality.
Yeah. And yet we seem to be content to let that happen.
Some
And, you know, this report shows the lowest number of people I've seen hitting quota. It's 31 percent of people hit or implicitly 31 percent hit or exceeded their quota. And for the last few years, we've seen that somewhere in the range of 40%. And, you know, there's this whole mindset around, huge amounts of over assignment of quota, perhaps irrational assignment of quota.
There's this huge mindset of, you know, I can make my numbers with 20 percent of my people do hitting or exceeding my quota. I've always been an aggressive quota setter and all, but I'd kind of designed my plan so that somewhere 75, 80 percent of my team will, is expected to hit quota. Hit or exceed quota and there I think you, you start getting back to some of the underlying people issues, David, that you just mentioned, and Andy, that you mentioned about how do you build confidence, how do you build morale how do you build skill and capability, you know, one of the things we see the, this revolving door in short tenures is, You know, people want to be successful, and if they can't be successful in one organization, they go to the other organization, and the other organization, and the other organization, and guess what?
They never achieve success in any organization. And also, there are a whole bunch of things broken, and and we could and should be doing so much better, and could and should be performing so much better.
Well, let me ask the question. I'm going to start with you, Ralph, because this is in response to this report. Somebody had posted on LinkedIn, well, go nameless said, look, the solution to all this. The good news is there's solution is basically the way it's phrased and the solution is give all your best leads to your best reps.
boy.
And that is, I'll just tell you, I think this is so incredibly short sighted and wrong headed that it makes my blood boil when I hear that, cause it doesn't work. It is self defeating ultimately. Tell me if I'm wrong. Is that what somebody should be doing instead of, you know, I, my belief is you've got reps, you don't trust to handle leads, you either coach them to get better or you coach them to go work somewhere else.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I have a lot of different thoughts on this. So first of all you said, tell me you're wrong. You're not wrong. I agree with you on that point. And I also have seen firsthand as I know you gentlemen have as well when people go from organizational organization. And I don't always, in fact, Often I don't blame the organization more than I blame the individual.
I do think some of the lower performers that don't do well in an organization and go from lily pad to lily pad. Essentially, they're just, they're bringing their mediocre practices from organization. In a lot of respects, and they're not holding themselves accountable for improving you know, those a players that are being told to give the leads to the mediocre reps aren't modeling the success and the best practices that they're seeing from those a players.
And they're kind of hoping it all works out. They're arriving at a new organization, just kind of waiting for that organization to train them up versus taking the initiative, being proactive, talking about what their plan might look like, providing some context, et cetera, et cetera. So I think in large part, I probably find myself blaming the individual more than the organization.
Sure. I think there's certain strata of individuals. Yes. That probably don't belong in sales as a career and that's fine. It doesn't make them bad people. It's just not the right fit. Right.
Sure they need to be encouraged to, to find something that's the right
And I'd include, pardon the interruption Andy, I'd include some of the sales leaders in that mix
yeah, it
too are in the wrong role.
Right. But I,
Andy, I think you called that post out to me and I ended up, you know, with a knee jerk long diatribe blog post on it. But let's say we implement that strategy. So, so we know our A players are just sitting around twitting their thumbs, trying to find things to do with their time.
You know, because they just aren't busy enough chasing opportunities and all that, so they have plenty of capacity to absorb all those really good leads. And so the first, you start seeing the first bond in this thinking is that our top players are filling every moment they can, chasing business that they can, so we put more stuff on them.
And that's going to drive their performance down as they try and manage all that. So their win rates go down. Then what happens is the leads that are left over are lower quality leads. So those go to our B players. And so their performance goes down because they're lower quality leads and all that kind of thing.
So this whole philosophy is absolutely insane is what we're doing. With that, give the best leads to the A players, is we're lowering their performance because we're overloading them. We're lowering the performance of our B players because we're giving them crap. And you just start playing that forward and it's kind of insane.
You know, one of the things, and I go back to my days when I ran fairly large organizations, what I gave to my A players was my toughest leads, because they were going to win them. And I, you know, rather than give them to a B player or a C player, but I'd also try and develop B players capabilities of doing that thing.
But, you know, there's not a lot of real coherent thinking when you start reading things like, give my best leads to the A players.
David,
Yeah, and I think this shows fundamentally what is broken about the wholesale's infrastructure when we look at it, because I think that great sales teams and great sales leaders look at the system and Ralph, I think you were touching on this and in the methodologies, not necessarily the individuals. Now they coach individuals, all those things, but they're not just like I need to like send leads to this person or, you know, this person's failing.
I'm a swoop in on this deal and things like that. That's not sustainable. And you're not going to create overall sales success where you're continually hitting quota. What you've got to be looking at is the system that will continually work over time and not just this month or this quarter or this year.
And if you start just doing things like that, that you're describing, giving the best sales leads to the best people, Might help you in this month or this quarter, but it undermines the system because where are your eight players going to come? How do you develop the eight players? And when those eight players get promoted or get poached, all of a sudden you're going to be short chain and you're going to be.
You know, creating the system of catch up. So I think we, and I get it right. We're all under pressure to hit our numbers that month, that quarter and things like that. But again, the best sales leaders I've seen take that step back and they focus on the system, the processes, irregardless of the people. Now they're people, and they know how to coach them.
So I'm not saying that, but they're focusing on making the system work. And that's just one great example of making the system not work.
Because as a leader, you know, take Ralph for instance, great leader. Rob, what Ralph's going to do is say, look, want to be able to teach my B players how to handle the A leads. And the only way I'm not gonna be able to, you know, just, Hey, go shadow and a player. No, they need to work it. Right. And so I need to be there to coach them and help them learn how to handle.
And once they've learned what good looks like, then, Hey, they want to go out and do more good. Right. And it's just like, if you always, I can't remember how many times it's like a consultant and a fractional leader, you come into a company and their growth is stalled out in terms of new business acquisition. And this is the problem. This is exactly the problem. They're feeding all the good leads to like the first person in the door. And the first person in the door or the first couple had the benefit of learning side by side with the founder how to sell these types of deals, right? And so I had this institutional knowledge and then became closely held and they reinforced it.
And so when I'd come into these situations, I'd say, Oh, the only personal tenure Was that first person in the door? And this has been endless cycle of other people coming in and out because they were starved of opportunities because they didn't know what good was and not they were completely dependent on inbound, but Still, we all know these opportunities come in and this idea that you're just going to focus them all rather than being a proactive coach and leader and help as many of your people as possible.
Those are willing to put in the work as Ralph talked about to learn how to work those types of opportunities. That's just laziness.
But we have this kind of systemic thing that's been happening in accelerating over several years, and both David and Ralph really hit on it, is that as we start having these shorter and shorter tenures, rather than looking at things over time and look at how do we design the process and sustain and improve the process over time, we have people coming in, depending on the data you read, Average tenure for a reader is somewhere between 11 and 18 months.
So they come in with the mindset of, Yeah, how many months has it been? No, but the average
it's been 10 Dave.
Oh, so you have at least another month to go,
Yeah. I'm just embarking on the left end of the range there.
Right but, so the average tenure is 11 to 18 months. And so they come in with the mindset, What can I do in that time? And so we have these kind of very short sighted, and you understand why they do that. I don't know that I agree with that, but they come in and say, What can I accomplish in this time period?
And they do what they can, but what that drives is very, is the opposite of what David said. Is it doesn't drive a systematic, Process based, how do we improve month over month, quarter over time? Because , if a month later we'll call Ralph up and say, Who are you working for now?
Cause he's gonna go and try to do it.
poor Ralph. Yeah.
Yeah.
Ralph probably is getting exposed to my perverse sense of humor, but But it is, you know, but that's kind of, we've designed that into the system so people have that mindset of, I'm not going to look over the long term. I'm not going to look over sustained performance improvement.
I'm going to do what I can right now that is very short term thinking. As long as I can, then I'll go do the same thing someplace else and someplace else, but, and so what we see, and again, Andy, you and I have talked about this, is we actually see, even though we're hitting our numbers, we're underperforming our potential.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. So another interesting moving on and with the report that was interesting is well, actually there were several is one is saying that 44 percent of deals were reported as being pushed in a timeframe. Was elongated. We started touching that earlier, but I guess my question is, does that have to be a given in this type of environment?
That, you know,
deals push the
40 to 50, you'll push,
Yeah.
I think, you know, it's natural to anticipate those types of rates with pushing. That's just, I think that's just realistic, but planning for it as well. Yeah. Cool.
Well, I just wonder whether that's really new.
That was really my question isn't that just sort of always the case? The,
normal.
yeah, they're sort of making a, Hey, this is an artifact of what's going on. But for me, it's like, I don't think sellers are very good at, and this is not meant to be a criticism.
I think it's hard. It's hard when you're in a, an opportunity to really say, look, here's a firm here's a firm close date and, you know, yeah, we're gonna try our best to get at that point. But. You know, shit happens and you have sort of minimal control over that, but I don't see that as an artifact of time slowing down necessarily.
think it's. Oh, go ahead, Ralph.
No, please.
I think I agree that it's always there and it's obviously a big part of sales and trying to figure out proactively where the blockers are going to be and who are the people within the, you know, the team that's going to be. Making the final decisions, who are going to be our advocates and who aren't and making sure you're proactive and the best salespeople do that.
So I think that's regardless of slower times. I think there are, and maybe better salespeople can anticipate it. There are more surprises during times when budgets are leaner. You know, if you go back to 2021 or, you know, when money's just flowing and, you know, the cost of capital is low, the CFOs and different people have less of a propensity to put on the brakes or ask more questions.
The better ones still should have right where they are. A lot of mistakes made. But I think just human nature, it's. It's easier to buy things as an organization when it feels like capital isn't so constrained. And so I can see it being elongated. I, again I, as I said at the beginning I saw it with some of our clients that it was longer sales cycles than they anticipated.
And I don't think that undermines, I think the, you know the point you're making Andy, and which you know, Dave, you said at the beginning too, is that you do just have to sharpen your. You know, your tools and you've got to know that those surprises might come. You've got to be good and double down on thinking through all the different constituents you're going to have to win over and try to be proactive and try to counteract it.
But I do think there's headwinds and that doesn't mean good sales people don't try to figure out ways to overcome the headwinds. And so that's.
Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that this brings up for, at least for me is, cause as I've read through the report and so on, and again my experience is more on larger deals, but you know, we see a lot of, and you see a lot of stuff, right. But, you know, presenting business cases and so on.
Is that in this report sort of alludes to it is that people are using sellers typically use business cases toward the end of the deal. Right. To justify the purchases was saying for me, I always did at the beginning.
Right.
Right. As part of qualification,
If I couldn't put together, I always call it a rough order of magnitude business case because things could change subsequent to that.
But based on Really defining what the customer wanted to achieve. You have rough order of magnitude pricing. Look at, do the calculation of the need where there's a payback period, ROI, return on invested capital, whatever it was, then say, well, based on this, is this enough to say, yeah, if this holds true, we're going to make a decision. Not necessarily by me, but they're going to make a decision. And if we couldn't get to that, then I'd say, well, okay, maybe now's not the right time.
Right. And also, you know, at that phase, Andy, it's also bringing up, you know, here's what we think might be in our way throughout this process. Validate if we're accurate or not. And also, it's almost like the it's almost like a U shape, you know, at the beginning Of the cycle whether that's a buying cycle or a selling cycle, that's up to you, that's not only when you introduce the business case at the beginning and at the end, I would argue, but it's also when I've seen leadership be the most impactful is when they're introduced at the beginning and at the end of that big you,
Mhm. You're trying to leadership on the sales side.
That's right. That's right. That's what I mean.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Interested in other people. Like, cause I, Yeah. Oftentimes when I was leading teams, yeah, we were, yeah, I said, it's our first person and beyond the founder. And so, yeah, I wanted to get that person cause I was selling highly complex technical stuff that I was really over my head on for the most part.
So it was really important for me to have the leadership and the founder there near the beginning to help set the tone and
Andy, one of the things I think the report is co mingling and confusing, conflating issues that can't be conflated is one and as David mentioned, in tough economies, it's natural that buying cycles are longer. You know, customers are much more cautious about what they're doing and that kind of thing.
But a longer buying cycle. is different from a push. A push has to do, a push has to do with our accuracy in forecasting. When's the customer need to have this solution in place? And we've had push problems. The push problem is. is virtually independent of the economy. It's how well aligned am I with what the customer's trying to achieve when they need to achieve it and so on.
So I'll have longer sales cycles here, but that shouldn't impact my ability to be, you know, roughly in the right range of the target close date. And you know, one of my, you know, whenever I go into a client, you know, one of the, my favorite things is I say, show me this data from Salesforce or whatever it is.
One of my favorite fields is the number of times the target close date has changed. And you know, I remember, A few years ago, I was sitting down and we were sitting down doing, you know, the quarterly forecast and one of the guys, one of the largest deals I'd seen that they had, and it was critical for them to make the number.
The rep came in, did a deal review, said, trust me, it's going to come in. It's going to come in right when I say it. And I said, well, let me understand this. The target close date has a slipped 11 times in the last 15 months.
Checks in the mail.
I believe you this time?
Yeah. Right.
And so it's, you know, the fact that we aren't well aligned with our customer and their buying process and helping them understand, you know, when do you need to have a decision made in a decision put in place? And then how do we align what we do to keep that as. You know, they'll slip a little bit, but how do we keep that as solid as we can?
Another quick story is a number of years ago. I was working with a client. They were selling to custom packaging machinery to a chocolate company And it put these little wrappers on the chocolate which happens to be a very complex thing And it turns out the big chocolate buying season is September through December
Right.
You need to understand.
So that meant they had to have these manufacturing lines in place by a certain period of time to test the manufacturing lines and start making chocolates so that they could have them in the stores from September through December. And so you start walking back, and you go to the customer and say, You need to make a decision.
It takes us so much to build this machine, so you need to make a decision by this date. And they could hold that date really firm with the customer because they go to the customer and say, if you miss this date, will lose 400 million in revenue.
Yeah.
And yeah, and so that's how, and so did they establish that as the target close date? They made it within a couple of weeks.
I'm sure they did.
And so on, but you know, I keep seeing these pushes and pushes, and that's bad sales execution, not an issue around the economy.
But it's a
That's an issue around the economy.
Isn't that really, in my opinion, you guys correct me if I'm wrong, but I really think this is a management, a coaching issue. Right. Is to help people develop. Because. Yeah, I was, like, referring to a study that folks at Closed did I think about a year ago, which was you know, they asked, they looked in the CRM system, see what the reason for win loss was that was put into Salesforce.
And then they went back to the buyers and asked them. And the reps are only right 15 percent of the time. And so my thinking is that, well, if the sellers themselves are only right about that 15 percent of the time, then they have no idea when the deal is going to close, in general. But to me, that's, sure, you could say that's a sales issue, but it's really a sales leadership issue, a management issue, is how are you working with your sellers to help them learn how to work opportunities and understand, get to a level of understanding with the buyers, you know, what's going to drive the decision, as Dave did, at what time frame, and so on.
And clearly that's not happening.
and what else, if they didn't know that, what else did they not understand about the prospect, their issues, and what they were trying to help them with? So there's a high correlation, I think, between the two, losing that deal and and
Well, one of my, one of my favorite stories, which I wrote about in one of my books, since I was on a train in Penn station, I was heading up to Boston, you know, it was the last day of the month and some young guy in a suit comes in and sits in the chair in front of me in the seat in front of me on a cell Xcella and pulls out his phone and he's clearly talking to his boss and the boss is clearly saying, What the hell happened, right?
With this deal. And he's just, and the seller's humming and hawing and was this and that and so on. And then finally these breaks out the classic. He goes, well, the buyers are just liars. They're laughing out loud and seat behind me. He doesn't know I'm laughing at him, but it's just like, Oh my God, dude, you committed to something happening and you had no idea.
Clearly. What it was going to take to make it happen or what was going to make it happen in the timeframe that you committed to. And it's brutal for sellers. But again, I think this is the job of certainly the frontline managers to help sellers with this. There was another stat in the report.
They were saying that of all deals lost, 61 percent were reported by the reps to be lost due to quote unquote, indecision. Now. Oh, you see a little artifact. I raised my hand for the viewers. It's celebrated that, um, is deals aren't lost in decision. It's not like a buyer saying, oh, we don't know to buy a or B.
So we're going to do nothing.
Yeah,
In fact, if they meant, and I'm referring to the house, they meant about lost to no decision is yeah. I think one of the great Misconceptions in sales is the fact that no decision is not a decision. No decision is a decision.
absolutely.
buying from you. And that's the decision,
And we're happy with status quo
yeah. Well,
or happier than
Going with
you didn't give us the, you didn't give a reason to change, right? The decision customers ultimately make is not a decision to buy a product. It's a decision to make a change.
that's right.
You didn't give us a reason to make a change.
That's right.
So it's not 62% lost in decision, but we already know from the closed study that 85% of the reasons the sellers give a wrong anyway.
So clearly that one's not correct.
On that note I'm a huge proponent. I don't know how you all feel about this, but I'm a big fan of wind reports and loss reports and circulating those across the organization, actually meeting on the wind reports. For example, our organization, not to be partial, but we hold a monthly loss review call and account executives get on the call and they walk us through.
What change they thought was occurring what response they thought the prospect was giving to the given change and why we lost the deal and, you know, surprisingly, yes there's a percentage that they don't include themselves. The reps that is on the excuse list. But a majority of them fortunately,
I wanna see that in Salesforce. Ralph is I screwed up. That was one, that one reason I screwed up.
Yeah, they're not that's not on one of the dropdown menus, I guess, in Salesforce.
But the thing, oh,
lot of benefit from those types of calls is my point.
Absolutely.
But I think what Ralph's doing is saying here is so important and I so seldom see it done is it's, you know, we look at Salesforce and do the drop down box and, you know, it's always won because of sales superiority. It's always lost because of price or features or something like that. But, you know, sitting down and doing the reviews and going the one step further to say, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?
How would you have changed your approach because now you start helping people think so I don't replicate the same mistake over and over again I try and learn from those losses and grow from them and in that kind of thing and you know the type of people that do what Ralph is suggesting the number of people you know I can probably count on both hands
It's yeah, it's unfortunate. It's pretty small. When you talk to the wind loss vendors, like closed is it tends to be purchased by like product marketing, right? They get that wind loss analysis and they're saying, okay, well, we want to tune our offering or change our pricing. And it's infrequent that you then see it that information on sort of this day to day, week to week, month to month basis, Ralph talk used by sales to really analyze what's happening at the seller level, as opposed to a more strategic level. David.
Yeah. And I think I get it. There's a lot of egos out there, but I think some of the best salespeople I have seen do not fess up, but say, listen, this is where I messed up and they're, they have you know, they're self reflective and they think about things and that's how they grow and they learn.
And so. You know, I get it. And again, it's the whole sort of a theme over the course here, both for leaders and salespeople. It's, there's a short term feeling like you're worried, right? If you don't hit your quota, you might get fired, all those things. But when you take the longer term perspective and you say, listen, I'm going to say, this is where I messed up and ask your manager for advice or the team for advice.
You're going to grow. You're going to become a better salesperson. And you're going to be more likely to hit your quota in months and quarters and years to come. And so it's a shame that people do feel that they can't do it. I think some of it's the personality, right? Cause you know, everyone has egos, but it's also the culture.
And if you can create a culture of. You know, salespeople, and that starts again with the leader. If they can show that they made a mistake and show that in front of their team and show that vulnerability or whatever you want to call it you can create a culture where people do self reflect more and then you've created a system of learning.
Well, let me ask last question, sort of breaking outside of this report, but it's, it was raised by another post that I saw actually Dave initially shared with me because our inboxes are lousy with sharing stuff. We see on LinkedIn that we think is, and and this one was somebody saying, look, you know, everybody, you know, at an executive level.
And in sales needs to have a side hustle, right? Is
needs to have one.
needs to happen. The basic thing is, look, this is, you know, your form of self protection against an uncertain future is that you need to have something else going. And I just thought about that. And it's like, I understand, sure.
People have some side hustles going. So, but as a form of self protection and sales. I never, this is just me. I lost a job in sales. I got laid off. I, we've all been through the ringer, but I never operate on day to day basis, worried about losing my job because I was pretty confident that I had a track record and I was going to be able to find work.
Right. And I think that's been what I've seen over my course of my career, which except for me, Dave, as longer than everybody else is like, you know, you know,
Be careful there,
go easy on them, well, I know we're the same age. We're this, gosh, I may be older, but anyway, is, you know, you just, I just, my fear is that people operate in such a level of fear.
They're going to get so distracted by thinking they need to protect themselves, having something else going that they're not going to have the bandwidth to focus on what the primary task is.
I see both sides of it. I really do. I see the pros and the cons. The cons are, look, if you're chasing two rabbits, they're both going to escape. You know what I mean? And you're going to end up, you're going to end up being the loser. The pro side of having the side hustle is, you know, when you've got a website, Called layoffs dot f Y I showing you pretty much on a daily or weekly basis, all the layoffs that are happening across high tech.
It's pretty daunting. And you start to realize as an individual contributor that wait a minute, maybe it's not me. And I actually am pretty good at what I do and it still doesn't ensure my future at this specific company. And so that I understand where you might want to peek over the fence a little bit because you got to put food on the table at the end of the day.
So I do see both sides of it. I don't know if I feel strongly about one or the other
Well, peeking over the fence and looking and having some opportunities perhaps on deck is different from a side hustle.
depends on what the side hustle is.
Okay.
yeah, that's
Yes.
well.
Great example
example, but that's different than operating a full fledged business as
for sure.
is basically personally advocating was, you know, have a business and it's like, yeah, but again, are you so fearful, right. And have such lack of confidence in it.
And to your point about layoffs, yes, you look at the layoffs, Tons of layoffs, but there was this arc on the wall street journal today. It's like, Oh, you know, this never used to happen in tech. Hey, I've been in tech. I don't want to say till when, but always been there and in big numbers. And this is not a new artifact, but the protection for me is to say, look, not to.
Have a full fledged business on the side. It's to get really good at what you do. Your primary profession.
Go deep.
But
best protection against the uncertainty that exists. You just be really good at what you do.
think, Andy, what you're alluding to and you've kind of mentioned a couple of times here Is there's this kind of undercurrent of culture of fear and uncertainty and hedging your bets and not being all in and it tends to kind of snowball on itself is in this kind of lack of trust in each other in the organization that I think is really toxic to people, to organizations and to our overall performance and I have my suspicions about how it's generated and how it's been reinforced over the years.
And it's, you know, until we start changing some of these things. It's interesting, is when we do projects right now, one of my biggest qualifying questions is what's average tenure of your management team and what's average tenure of your sales people? The interesting thing, and I've been doing a lot of research for the new book, is when you look at the very top performers in a segment, their average tenures are significantly longer than everybody else.
Top performers at a company level within the company.
a company, if you look at within a market segment, the top, the consistent top performers have. Much longer average 10 years and there's all the you look at it We build the experience where we enforce it. We grow our people blah blah blah and I'll but what we've seen is this whole culture of churning and lack of trust and lack of loyalty of people to the company to the people And again that causes us to actually perform lower than we really could and should be performing it
David.
Yeah. I think being a great salesperson is really hard and takes everything you've got to be great at it. Starting a business or, you know, even if it's a solopreneurship, I know that's the big buzzword. It's really hard. We see a lot of influencers out there that make it seem easier, but it's not, it is really hard.
Really hard. And so I think, you know, the analogy about bunnies that Ralph brought up is the right one, right? You know, you can't be good at both. And you need to at least know what your focus is. Now, if you have a passion, you know, like music for Ralph, you know, and that's your side hustle or something else.
And that's fun. And that's a relief. And you want to have it, then that's something different. But if you're doing it as a backup, and you're doing that as fear, Yeah. You're going to, you're going to fail at both. Now, if you want to start your own company and, you know, you need a, you know, and that's going to be your focus, I would say focus, get out of it.
First of all, it's not fair to the company, but also, you know, for you to really be successful, you've got to focus as quickly as possible, try to get funding or cut your expenses or whatnot, because to start a company, it's all, when I started sales roads, I was working around the clock you know, into the wee hours of the morning, all And so both are really hard.
And so just pick what you want to be great at, because it's very hard. Look at Michael Jordan. He wasn't great at baseball. Right?
But see, what I love about what you're saying, David, is you're doing this as a purposeful strategy of where you want to go, as opposed to the way this post presented it was a hedging strategy, which is chasing the two rabbits. And also, so, and I think all of us, when we, when I started the business, You know, I was C.
O. of a company, and, you know, I had actually told the board is I'm going to be leaving in, in a few months, but I did some, you know, over that period, I started ramping up my new business, making sure I had somebody to replace me, and so on and driving that. But that was because it was my purpose and my goal to go that direction.
And I, and that I really get. That that's so powerful but again, this, you know, as a hedging our bet kind of philosophy, that's so toxic.
Yeah. So I'm sure this has probably been said, but just sort of sprung to mind. It's like, yeah, if you try to hedge against failure, you're hedging against success.
Yep.
absolutely.
Wow. I'll have to write that one down. Okay. All right. With that, we've run out of time. Thank you everyone for such a great conversation. I'm presuming people can find you all on LinkedIn, right?
You got it.
You got it. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Look forward to having everyone back again.