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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 Andrew Sykes and Andrew is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Andrew Sykes is the CEO of Habits at Work. My other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving your win rates.
Are Ian Campbell. Ian is author of the Best Wall Street Journal bestseller, the Value Sale, as well as CEO of Nucleus Research. Also joining is my friend Amy Ek. Amy is an experienced enablement leader. She's currently director of Enablement at the Crop Organization, CROP. You wanna check that out? It's a very worthwhile cause.
She's also a host of her own podcast, the Revenue Real podcast, as well as being a frequent collaborator on the show. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter. Join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive WinRate Wednesday.
Each week on Wednesday, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and a bunch of other great sales advice as well. So you can subscribe by visiting my website, AndyPaul. com, or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. Okay, if you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Andrew Sykes, Ian Campbell, and Amy Rahovcik for sharing the 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.
Again, 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 another episode of the Winrate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul, joined by another stellar cast of panelists here today. I'm going to give them each a few seconds to introduce themselves. Ian, we'll start with you.
Yeah, thanks, Andy. I'm Ian Campbell, chief executive officer at Nucleus Research and recently author of The Value Sale. We look at what is value and how to prove value in the sales process and how to justify decisions.
We're going to talk about that. Andrew.
Hi, my name is Andrew and I'm a recovering actuary, which is why I never get invited to parties. But today I'm a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management, part of the Kellogg Sales Institute. And I run a business called Habits at Work, dedicated to helping salespeople be the most trustworthy profession on the planet.
I'm
Look at that. We're celebrating that
That's a lifetime of work right there.
not kidding, a couple of our friends.
That's right.
Mine, I'm Amy. I, a long time seller, I sold into the legal sector for 15 years, C level at a startup, also in the same place it was acquired, pivoted to sales enablement. Currently, I'm actually building out a sales program for the Justice Impacted. So getting to really experiment with lots of new ways to sell and show up, but also to embed these skills into the next round of innovators, let's say.
And I also, I host a podcast as well, The Revenue Reel. And so happy to be here, Andy. Thank you. And nice to meet everyone.
Yeah. Always a pleasure. So, well, we're gonna start with something Andrew was, we're going to improvise here with the topic you brought up right before we started recording. So jump into that. Cause I think an interesting question to get into.
I call the responsible promise habit, and it really has to do with this idea that in sales, we often make promises. We tend to make them badly in a number of ways, some of which are we make big promises early on, and they're unbelievable because people have just met us and we haven't built the trust bank account yet to match the size of the promise.
But the one that I'm really inspired by is this idea that even when you tell the truth. And you have good intentions and you keep your word you meet your promises It's not enough to be trustworthy from other people's points of view And the reason is we all have expectations often unvoiced That we will use to judge people when they deliver for us And so someone may say i'll do x for you by friday morning They deliver x by friday morning and we expect it to be double spaced or formatted a certain way or we needed an update Whoa Yeah, and then we're mad about it and we feel like they broke our trust and what we miss is we had this expectation We didn't voice it, but we judged people for it and our expectations change over time So a clean promise is saying what you'll do why you'll do it How you'll do it by when and maybe even who will do the pieces of work?
But a responsible promise is that habit of just adding at the end of a promise this question Yeah Andy, what else do you trust me to do or what else do you expect me to do? And you'll either say nothing andrew or you'll say a little bit of this or a little bit of that and some of these things And at least then I can say yes to the first half of the second a flat no to the third And what it affords us is this opportunity to take your expectations And my stated promise and just bring them together for the first time.
And I think it's the secret weapon that allows us to be the most trustworthy person in every room. Because if you have the courage or just the memory to ask, what else do you trust me to do? And you keep doing that, knowing that expectations change, then at least you have a shot of delivering on what people expect and will guide you for rather than what you've promised.
And I got to tell you, when I first realized this, I was indignant and pissed off about it. I'm like, it should be enough that I just do what I said I'm going to do. And then I realized, wow, what an opportunity. If I'm the only person in the sales process that asks my customer, what else do you expect? And they give me a gem and I deliver on that.
What a competitive advantage
now. I like that. Ian, you're about to say something,
Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. It's really what does the customer want as opposed to what are you telling them? So, you know, we say that when we build a game. business case, not here's what we think the number might be, but what do you think the number could be? How can I work with your perceptions and your understanding as opposed to me tell you what I think, but you tell me what you think and then I'll try to match that or I'll try to help you achieve that.
So yeah, it's really about getting the customer to tell you what they want and turning that conversation around.
but I think this is part of a bigger issue that exists in sales and I think this is going to come to the forum with like AI, for instance, is that we, yeah, we've gotten so far down this road with personas. Okay. Here's our ICP. Here's our target customer. Here's the persona. When you ask these questions of them, this is sort of the range of answers you're going to get.
And what we've done is we've tried to make everybody sort of the same. And instead of acknowledging that, yeah, you may look like somebody else, your business may look like somebody else, you're in the same business as somebody we've done business with before, but your perception of it, and what you do, and your perception of your business, and your perception of how you operate, It's different.
And we don't take it to that level to really understand the unique perspective of the buyer. I think that's really what Andrew is getting at with these expectations is sure, it should be good enough to make this promise, but no what do they think about it? Amy? Well, I think when you,
I mean, I agree with every word, yes, and, but I'm also, I remember as a salesperson how difficult it is to compete with the organization's desire to be predictable and forecastable. And so it's been many years in the making where we have benefited off of creating these sales robots and trying to control the conversation down to the day and the task.
And it. Does predict right. Our 17% win as an organization, which is comical at this point. And so, yeah, it's, to Andrew's initial point, it's not difficult to differentiate at all right now when you show up differently and when you lean into your humanity.
And when you take this extra step to understand the buyer's unique perspective, you know, it's just brought home to me. Really early in my career by a customer where I made this mistake. And. just assumed that they were sort of like everybody else, their concerns were the same and not really digging down to that level.
But it was brought home again more recently. I was reading this summary of a study that had been done using an AI medical decision assist system. And you know, everybody acknowledges that, you know, within a certain range of answers, it's probably more accurate than talking to a human doctor and so on.
But They noticed a sort of trend with patients that they started losing trust in the system. And when they asked why they said the answer was, well, yes, I may have cancer and maybe the same cancer that 100, 000 other people have, but no one experiences the pain the way I do. No one's suffering from it the way I am.
And it's the ability to recognize that people have this, their own perspective on it
Is hugely valuable. Only to you as a seller, but to them to be able to acknowledge that, I think that really plays off the point Andrew is making with this promises is what's their expectation. What's their perspective.
And Amy hit the nail on the head with that word, humanity. We can have a box for an ICP with all the social demographic variables in place. But I've noticed that when I asked that question, what else do you trust me to do? Sometimes the answers sound so tiny
And I've dismissed a bunch of them. And then what I noticed is if I meet a little quirky expectation, like you want the report, I don't know, with a cupcake.
Okay. And I say that tongue in cheek, but I have seen a 400, 000 deal go one way versus the other over the issue of a cookie, no kidding.
through the I.
And what I've realized is like, if you dig into someone's humanity and you find the quirkiness that their life lens brings to that question, what do you trust me to do, and you can deliver on this little thing that's special to them.
It has an outsized impact. I mean, I just don't think there is any more powerful. Competitive advantage than what Amy said, the ability to connect with someone's humanity. Yeah.
I think it starts with, and this goes to trust too, like reality, humanity is messy. It's uncertain and it's vulnerable. And. I think one of the biggest benefits that salespeople or sellers can bring to the buying conversation is to essentially go first on showing that vulnerability, showing their own humanity.
And that, I mean, people match that. We talk about matching all the time or the reciprocal nature of the buy sell relationship, but yeah. So I also think it's on sellers to not only bring Create a safe space to be vulnerable, but to be vulnerable first. And it's amazing what happens in those sales calls.
And to be authentic about it as well. So, not to be patterned if you will, but to actually care about how the customers interact, how you're interacting with the customer and what their expectations are, but authentic, I guess, you know, there are categories of customers and within those categories, there are millions of subcategories because everybody's unique.
But the reality is there's an organization we all have to come up with. The basic categories we work with, but then have the flexibility to say within each one, everybody has a unique different set of requirements or demands. And we have to be sensitive to that, but authentic. I think people can see right through it when you're not being authentic about it.
Yeah. One, I think that to me, it does give back this idea about, you know, The unique perspective, right? There's always, yes, we look 90 percent we're like everybody else, but what's the final five to 10%. I think this gets to what Andrew was talking about originally is, and I wrote with this and wrote about this in my last book is like when you're summarizing, it's very similar to your question.
Summarize your understanding of the buyer and the things that are most important to them and what you're trying to help them to do. To me, the most powerful question you always ask is, so what are we missing? Right. Just when you think you've got it all, you've nailed the understanding is you put it back to him.
So what are we missing? And you get that. Well, yeah, I'd like a cookie with that. No you, you get the, you get that final 2%, 1%, you know, something that's I said is unique to them, and if you have that, No one else does in most cases, cause they don't go to that level of effort of on making sure you really understand.
And unfortunately, I think we train sellers these, not these days in general, but I think it's become worse in the last 10, 15 years,
We've automated it.
is there a bit, well automate, but we also, you know, we get so carried away with this idea of social proof, right? So we're going to come in. We're gonna tell you, look, we've worked with dozens of companies, just like yours. And what the buyer hears is. Yeah, they're not really listening to me. Right? Cause I'm not exactly like everybody else.
I do like that closing question, Andy, and what I often add, and I have to admit, I don't often get a good answer to it, but I'm not sure that I'm after the answer as much as I'm after the gift of having asked it, which is what else should I have asked you that I didn't? And it's actually a really hard question to answer.
And sometimes people just want to say like, you really should have asked about this. And then I'll say, well, tell me about this and I get some gems, but in the asking of it, it's an opportunity for people to sort of reflect on, did you cover everything? And if they have no answer, I think what they're telling themselves is this was a complete conversation.
You didn't miss anything. It wasn't anything you should have asked me. And there's a sort of psychic satisfaction that comes from that.
And sometimes I'll ask in a different way and I'll say if six months from now we're still working together, what would you, what would have delighted you, what would be the perfect outcome to six months later, because they might not know what they're missing, but they could sketch out, well, here's the perfect world six months later.
Here's what I would have liked to have accomplished. And in that big picture, I can give you some of the little things you still need to do to accomplish success, which is not just selling, but having a customer that Is a positive about that encounter.
Yeah, and I agree, and I think to a point both Amy and Bella, you all made actually, was, it's the asking of that question that is the vulnerability. Right. You know, Amy talked about vulnerability at this, I think too often sellers, especially perhaps the ones, you know, more recent into the career tend to interpret this vulnerability as, you know, I need to tell a deeply affecting personal story or something as when it really, the vulnerability is I'm going to take a risk and ask you something You know, it could be off putting perhaps to you. Right. Yeah, it could be a perspective that you hadn't really thought about. I'm sort of challenging you. So sort of the, not the prototypical challenge, but sort of, but you know, the question you ask Andrew, it's like, yeah, there's vulnerability when you take the risk to ask that, cause it could go sideways at that point.
I think to the, to this going sideways that you speak of Andy, I think it's important to acknowledge that we're in 2024 and that people outside of even just like the business to business, interpersonal relationships I like we're many people are out of practice. Many people have never done it before, like this.
Connecting, connecting in person and I don't know, I just, I think that there's something to this idea that for some of us we're relearning and for others, you know, learning and experiencing for the first time. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is more grace, right? More grace for the unvoiced expectations or maybe more expecting of the unvoiced expectations and, you know, just creating a safe place where people also feel okay.
Yeah. I sold to lawyers, right? Lawyers are really afraid of not being the smartest person in the room. So where they're also okay to not be right as well. And that's what I'll say about that.
And Amy, you know, on this responsible promise habit, I often say the responsibility goes both ways. And if you're a sales manager or sales leader, and one of your team makes you a promise about what they'll do this week, and you've got unmet or unsaid expectations, that is an uncool move to sit on them and then punish it for them later, have the grace to say, as your manager, letting you know, I also have this expectation, can you meet it?
Or can we negotiate? Yeah,
that you work with. Work with. In fact,
like most of these things, I learned them working with my kids more than working with customers or teammates.
Well, it's interesting. Yeah. Amy, the point you just brought up about, you know, having to relearn this is as reading a post this morning on LinkedIn and the other person was the CEO of a company and, or CRO of a company and was talking about how they've really leaned into asynchronous selling and then I read another post this time from actually from Jeb Blount, who's a friend of mine, who's.
It says, you know, our business in 2024 is just taking off and what we're mostly doing sales training is teaching people to have real conversations. So on one hand, you've got somebody saying, Oh, the future is all about async selling, and then you've got, you know, someone who's got a fairly large training business saying
But they can put, they're not
demand is through the roof to come in and train people, have actual conversations.
mutually exclusive though, Andy, because you can bring the, your personality and your tonality into the videos that you're sending to wrap up your. I don't know, discovery conversation or to open up opportunities. And so I don't know, I think, I don't think there is black and white
No, but I think the reason that async appeals to people so much, especially again, people in the first may five, 10 years of sales career is then they say, I don't
They still don't have to. Yeah. They can avoid it. Fair point. Well made.
I mean, you're right. It's not either or, but I got to say my first reaction to the term asynchronous selling is it's an oxymoron because how can you sell it? I live by the maxim that to sell is to help another human being make progress in their lives, not sell them a product, not actually even solve their problem, but get them from A to B from the current, right?
Situation they into some future
Future state. Right.
yeah, I mean, isn't asynchronous selling really sorry about creating a template or a pattern to make it easier for folks to sell as opposed to have that conversation, which takes more effort to do.
it may take more effort, but it
using in the context of, Hey, you know, I'm going to send you a summary of what we just did as a
Yeah, it's a one way, asynchronous.
you know, videos really assumed to be a part of it these days. And I think absolutely there's a role for it. I don't see it as an effective strategy to lead with.
Well talking of effective strategies, has anyone seen the new report that LinkedIn came out with on deep selling? Talking all about specifically what's working right now?
No, I haven't seen the details
Oh my goodness. Well, one, it's very worth checking out, but Andy, it's everything that you speak about. And really bringing, I, I had the report pulled up, but there were The three big takeaways.
The reps that are winning right now prioritize high potential accounts, identify and build key relationships, and they find hidden allies for so that they're able to identify relevant timing components for outreach. But again it all had to do with deepening the relationship that you're forming with a select few accounts, right?
So less asynchronous, less throwing, you know what, against the wall. Just, en masse. But yeah,
Yeah.
Yeah, and just because something's easy doesn't mean it's effective. You know email is a great example my colleague at Kellogg did some research that showed Asynchronous communication takes 15 times longer to complete Then picking up the phone and calling someone. So why do we do it all the time? Cause it's easy to start.
You know, I send you an email, forget about it. And I don't notice that it takes you three days to get over the offense you felt because you added the tone that wasn't there. And then you send a response three weeks later, we resolve it. And I could have just picked up the phone and be done in five minutes.
But I do have empathy for the fact that if you grew up on text, You may not have the skills to or the courage to call someone and just have a conversation and maybe they won't
never done it. They've never done it. You can count how many minutes they've spent on the phone on like all appendages, you know, all 20 of them. For like their
of our selling is so much of our selling today is through email and not non phone conversations, unless it's a scheduled call in some way. I think most of ours at our company is really email communication. So it is it is, there's a delay in all of the communication. It's not real time.
Yeah. Yeah. We sort of build that into what we're doing and what's happening. And it's.
I think it plays into what we've seen in terms of say overall sales performance and you know, buyer dissatisfaction. You know, I find it sort of the height of irony, if you will, that, you know, in the last 15, 20 years of experiences, I call it the golden age of innovation and sales technology.
And yet during that same time, we've seen an increase or at least a reported increase. Buyer dissatisfaction with their interactions with sellers.
And it's also brings to the fore this idea of like when someone wants to do something as a buyer. I don't know that I've had many problems in my business that I've wanted to solve 18 months from now. So how come most deals take 18 months to do complex enterprise deals? And the answer must be there's a bunch of wasted time along the process building trust, which I think the greatest myth of all that sellers tell ourselves is that trust takes time to build.
But a lot of it is, I think, the consequence of relying on these async methods of communication. You know, you get off a meeting and you haven't set up the next meeting. It can take you two weeks before you get it done versus just having the discipline to say, Andy, when can we meet next? Take out your calendar and doing the simple human things that you would do with a friend if you were planning the next time you're getting together, but somehow feels weird talking to a customer.
And then we look a lot at value and that's what we spend a lot of our time doing and when we see sales start to stall, it's usually around a value message. I haven't given you a reason to have that conversation with me 30 days from now. I haven't given you a motivation that says, here's the return I'm going to give you on your investment in us.
Here's the value for you, which gives you a reason to continue to go forward. And I use an example in my book, I say if. you could make money raising baby alligators in your bathtub, would you do it? you go through a circle, but eventually you say, how much money am I going to make? And if I said, well, it's 10 million a year, you're doing it.
You're closing every bathroom and you tell your spouse, don't go in there. And that's that. And you're buying all these. And in fact, you're probably going to come back to me a couple of times and say, I've rented a few more homes. Can I buy some more baby alligators from you? So, you know, I haven't told you anything about the product.
And, you know, often when we see sales, people sort of start to go astray, they fall into that. Let me tell you about the features of what we do. Let me fall back into looking for a pain point, which, you know, very few customers today are in pain in some way. Man, CRM selling. You've got something, you don't know what's bad.
You just don't know. It's great because there's no. Visible pain until I show you something's better. So it's that value that turns the sale from me pushing you through the deal to you saying, Oh, I understand why I should raise baby alligators because I'm going to make a lot of money. Sell me as many as you can.
I'll buy as much as you've got. So it's that sales rep saying, not just, you know, can I build that trust? But now can I really understand how I can help you? What are the things that I can do to turn those levers and get you to start to move forward? And that's what makes the deal so valuable. You know, really more of a, how do I guide the customer to that end path?
As opposed to how do I push them to the next stage in the funnel?
And I think that you've nailed it is, and I've not popular when I make this contention is that, you know, we've become fixated on pain in sales and I believe that You know, a pain point is, Oh, I cut my hand while I was chopping carrots. I'm gonna put a bandaid on it. Right. So when I have pain, I put a bandaid on it and in my experience, and I've admittedly spent a lot of time selling very large, complex systems, you know, seven, eight, nine figure deals, no one was solving pain. They were looking at
Outcomes. Yeah.
They were looking at an opportunity. I, those are things that we want to achieve and yeah, as we get down and build the business case, yeah, these are alternatives we have for how we're going to deploy our capital to earn a certain return, but it wasn't about pain. I think this whole fixation on pain has made sales small, right?
And maybe what salespeople are missing is that the biggest pain that customers have is the pain of the experience of working with you.
But I knew you,
Perfect.
Hey, Auntie, I think it was your show originally where I heard, so if I'm like quoting you back to yourself just know that's where we're at today.
And we're just fine. You can say, quote me all you want. Go ahead.
No, you know what else we like, there's a, this myth out there that we as salespeople can actually create urgency, like we can manufacture it. And that I think is pure fiction. And so I. I don't want to push back, Andrew, on what you were saying on the total length of time for the deal, because there's just so many factors.
But I think when a seller can get really good at qualifying it or more specifically disqualifying the opportunity by the level of priority. That outcome currently has with their executive team, like that makes all the difference with the knowledge that at some point that team is going to need to take on this business problem and that outcome.
And as long as you're the first person they think of to call, like you're, that's still a win. Yeah. And I think that's a huge part of it.
Amy, one of the things that I would add, I think you're absolutely right, is when you look at your champion, the person who is going to be turning around and lobbying internally for your solution, that's your salesperson. You're selling to them. They're selling internally. It's really judging that person to say how well can that person make the business case for making the decision for us?
Because you're, you know, you like to say, I talked to the C suite, but you don't. Usually you talk to a champion, that champion talks to the buyer, that buyer decides, and the buyer is a no person, you know, the buyer, their instinctive answer to everything is going to be no. And to get them to be a yes, you've got to arm your champion with something that really.
Crystalizes for that person. So we're going to save 100, 000 a year that works. You know, it has these five features that doesn't work, but how well can your champion then be an internal salesperson for you? And, you know, that can either make or break the case. They could really want it, but if your champion doesn't have the weight to be able to do it, it's not going to happen, or they can not care about your solution.
But if the champion has enough ability to sell it, it's going to work. So, you know, you as a salesperson are selling to someone who is then almost Your employee, if you will, who's going to turn around and sell your product internally and how well can you arm that person to do that?
Asynchronous videos, anyone?
get your perspective on this issue of creating urgency because I'm with you. I don't think we can create it. We can certainly try. And I'm of the view that feeling rushed is a pain in and of itself that usually creates the response. Slow down. But I do think that most customers show up and say, you know, I'm really interested in this product.
And sellers get excited when they say, when do you want to implement? And they say three months from now. And then the deal takes 18 months. So what's going on? I think most sellers show up, sorry, most customers buy, show up with some level of urgency already built in.
Well, it's your soup. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Finish your thought.
I was going to say, so why does it take so much longer?
And why do we have so many? Pipeline analysis, which so, you know, the customer said that we're going to close in Q1 and here we are in Q3 and we still haven't got it done. Now, sell it, go out there and create some urgency so we get it done before the end of the quarter.
Well, yeah, go out
Discounts. Yeah. Jinx.
And I think part of the problem is, as you say, we've been trying to create urgency instead of realizing there are only two types of customers, shoppers who weren't going to buy from you in the first place, cause they just shopping in which case qualify them and move on or buyers who probably have enough urgency.
To meet your timeline. And then some, how do you shepherd that rather than try and force it?
I think that the first big thing is to recognize that there's a buyer's journey, right? That is, it trumps your sales process. And the buyer's journey, it completely depends on where the buyer is at in their journey, right? So starting out with awareness phase, this is where they're turning to dark social.
This is where they're turning to their peer networks. This is where they're investigating the nature of their problem and their options is for, is this a technology purchase? Is this a fractional sales enablement, you know, whatever whatever. Awareness phase, but I think. And there's a lot of reasons for why this takes place.
Like the majority of inbounds as we know them to be are based on buying intent that is far further down in the journey, right? So now they're at consideration phase in particular, where you've got another sales rep either that as Andy likes to say, he's the first person in there that has shaped the nature of that, that buy and their understanding of the problem.
And so. They're going to win it anyway, or they're just lost in the quagmire of all these hundreds of options. And let's be real, like the number of technology purchases or options on the table right now has grown exponentially and will only increase to do so, so the, just two thoughts on that scenario you speak of, sorry.
Right. Right.
I think sometimes customers don't do themselves any favors by not noticing their psychology of choice. Like when you got three choices, choice is easy. When you got a hundred choices, the FOMO of getting it wrong just feels overwhelming and paralyzing.
Yeah, three is easy, but 15 is not, because then it becomes a real battle. And yeah, the fewer you can, the more you can focus, the better off the customer is.
Yeah, but I think there's, yes, to me, one of the real issues with sort of this issue we're talking about is that there's just a complete disconnect between buyers and sellers in terms of, you know, we still insist in sales that selling is the sequential step based process. And from the buyer's perspective, if you just use an example, like the Gartner spaghetti diagram from the 19 or 2018 buyer enablement study, it's anything but linear, right?
And I have to admit, I've, I haven't heard one sales or it must be one out there, but I haven't heard of one sales organization that has changed the way they look at selling as a result of the research that Gartner did. That said, look. This is what you're doing is completely orthogonal to what buyers are going through.
And,
, I think from, in my perspective, you know, my career, what I always looked at, , buyers really, it's sort of the sequential decision making process. They have sort of three steps and, you know, this has been written about extensively, Paul Nutt and others have written about it, is buyers basically go through three steps.
What's the challenge and what's the opportunity that exists? How are we going to do it? Who are you gonna do it with? And that's the way sellers should orient themselves. You know, sales managers should be able to say, well, where are we with the buyer? Well, you know, they're still figuring out they're what, because what we do is we'll go into sellers and we're pitching to the buyer before we understand them or what they want to accomplish or things that are most important for them to accomplish.
And so again, we're just cross purposes and we start creating this, you know, negative impression, negative trust going to a trusted debt, let's say at that point,
Yeah, trust hole.
trust whole, and we just, yeah, it's, we continue to persist and yet the data has been very clear for some time now is that's not what buyers are doing and why is it so difficult to get sellers to align to that?
I know this is a hobby, sort of a soapbox issue of mine, and it clearly makes me a dinosaur. But I'm of the view that CRMs and other sales tech has put us into this mode of working because We're being asked by our sales manager, where are they in our process, in our steps, and it's almost forced sellers to play by the rules.
You know, but the worst example of it for me is an SDR does all this work to get a meeting with a customer, hands them off to an AE on the promise of a demo, and you're an account executive coming into that, wanting to do the right thing and spend the golden hour just building trust based on that maxim, I believe that first customers decide that they want to buy from you.
Before they decide if or what they want to buy from your company and then they're forced into a demo Like how are you supposed to connect with another human being when it's like hi? Let me show you some features Unrelated to anything I know about
And that's what we're insisting that they do. Like, we're removing all choice, and then we wonder why burnout and, like, lack of creativity is just,
Yeah, Andrew, I would say you hit the nail on the head, which is the reporting in CRM right now. That's, managers have the reporting. We know what stage you're at. We go back to each salesperson and say, why is it taking so long to move somebody from one stage to another? It's all that great reporting we get from CRM that has forced everybody into, you know, A pattern and to fall back to that pattern.
So, you know, we're almost teaching salesman's bad habits.
Well, we're reinforcing bad habits, right?
it,
I said
least that's my contention,
Imagine going to an audition and you walk onto stage and the director says show me what you got And you just sing this amazing song for them and they say you realize this was a ballet audition
Yeah. Yeah.
No one would do that. You want to find out what the role is and what my lines are what the talent is You would never just Perform without clarity,
but it is an interesting, it's an interesting point to bring up. And I've thought about this and yeah, I think maybe we should write something about this together is. It is an audition. This is an audition because, and I wrote about this and say, I'll sell without selling out is the first question.
The buyer ants asks that you need to answer is why you not you, the company, why you, right? Why should I invest my time in you? Why should I trust you? And that's your auditioning to answer that question.
who are you and what do you want? And you know, the reason my life mission is to make sales the most trustworthy profession is right now we're at the bottom of every survey about trust by profession. So if you're walking in as a salesperson and you're naive enough to think that your customer doesn't distrust you just because you're a salesperson, good luck with your career.
And we,
was laughing at it. HubSpot had the survey about trustworthiness and various professions. Yeah. And sales was at the bottom and like rock musicians were above. And I'm going like. You mean Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and R. Kelly are more trustworthy than sellers?
Politicians are more trustworthy than salespeople. I mean, that's for me mind blowing.
is it though? Like I, that doesn't blow my mind. We've earned that reputation as far as I'm concerned. And when I think as far as like root cause problems go the entire profession, like even our workplaces, it's not just sales, but it's built off of this command and control communication style that doesn't work anymore.
Right. And, or at least there's a lot more there's a lot. of voices that are able to weigh in and say that this isn't working for us anymore. And I think when we really get back to why are we trying to persuade our buyers? Like that's even a thing. Why are we trying to push them through our sales process that serves the company?
Not me, the seller, and certainly not the buyer. And I think it's, Is a key piece of it that for those teams that are trying to do something differently or trying to even understand the nature of their problem, looking at that and the origins of that and starting to experiment and iterate and test with different ways of approaching the market have different teams run different things with different sets of buyers.
Those are the core organizations that we're going to see really starting to pull ahead and the rest as Taylor Swift said, we're going to take themselves out.
Yes.
a Taylor Swift reference.
to get it in there.
My day is complete
Nice work.
And I agree with you that we've certainly done a lot of things as a profession to earn the reputation But i'm not sure that it's all just because of how we've behaved in the past I also think it's this sort of higher order problem, which is Salespeople smell
Okay.
of motive because everyone knows salespeople are paid commission.
So why do we trust doctors who make more money than salespeople? Because we think they do it
They're altruistic
to help
Yeah.
And we assume salespeople. And by the way, I say this to leaders when I teach at Kellogg, if you think you're immune from this, cause you're not a bag carrying sales person titled professional, as soon as someone suspects that you've got a hidden agenda, especially a financial one, they're asking who are you and what do you want?
And they don't wait for you to give an answer. They answer for themselves. Oh, you're a salesperson Trying to sell me something. I don't want at a price. I can't afford on a time frame. I don't need thanks But no and they stick you in a trust hole and you may behave very well from that point on but everything that You do will be a sense assessed through this lens of course.
Amy would say that she's trying to convince me of something and
It's a great
Yeah, and that's been there. A lot of the history that these customers have had has been that over the last 10 or 15 years. I mean certainly over the last 10 years as we've had easier budgets, salespeople have been able to be forceful and control the conversation, as you point out Amy, and just sort of push it through.
So a lot of customers woke up and said should I have really bought that product? Did the salesperson really work in my best interest when they sold me something? Have I ever heard from them again is maybe another thing. How many salespeople sell and then just, you don't hear from, they get thrown over to some customer service group and there's never a followup.
So, you know, there's sort of a built in history there that every sales rep now has to overcome because the last person that was in that deal. Didn't do the right thing, which means your ex, but you're already starting from a deficit before you even open your mouth.
point.
yeah. And I think this is one of the real issues that we have, you know, now we're past sort of, at least temporarily, the easy money phase, right. To the point you made before Ian. Is did anyone ever ask buyers whether they want to buy this way? So we're gonna do is have a junior person call you.
We're gonna hand you off to another person who is gonna, you know, an AE who's going
repeat
you have no idea who they are and they're going to take, they're going to take you to a certain point and then we're going to hand you off to yet another person. And it's like, well,
is i'm going to I as the vendor i'm going to spend the least amount Possible to try to service you as a customer. How does that set the stage for a positive interaction in a deal? It doesn't work It almost doesn't.
And you know, the experience is not dissimilar in healthcare. How many times have you been to a doctor's office? You get screened by a nurse and he takes your medical history and then the doctor comes in and does the same thing over and you're like, do you people even speak to each other? Now you take that and you multiply it by 10 salespeople who all have SDRs and AEs.
I mean, at the end of it, I would just be an exhausted customer.
you want to hear my rule of thumb
Oh, this is a good
This has been proven out.
Quotable quote.
Is, you know, your odds of winning a deal sit in inverse proportion to the number of times you make the customer tell you their story.
I'll buy that.
And it's absolutely true because, you know, in my career, I was experiencing it was like, cause I got large deals and when I was first getting into it, you know, I would go and do discovery with the customer and then the sales engineer would do discovery with the customer. And then, you know, my boss wanted to come in and talk, they'd do discovery with the customer.
And then the VP or the CEO would come in and they would ask, it's like, And from the buyer's perspective, it's like, well, I'm going to stop talking to the salesperson because clearly the only one that counts is the top guy, because they don't trust anything the salesperson must've told them because they're asking me the same questions again.
mmhmm
stopped calling it discovery for what it's worth. I call it reconnaissance now only because I think discovery has become something that we do to customers, not that indistinguishable from waterboarding or at least like a bright light in your face while we interrogate you multiple times over when really it should be a side by side conversation.
Like let's look at you and your life together
And , the cynical customer knows that's part of the sales process. So they're saying in the back of their mind, oh right, we're this discovery phase. Got it, let me keep talking through that. When are we going to get to the next phase in the sales process? So they know what the sales funnel is, they've experienced it a bunch of times.
So you're not fooling them. You
me, the big issue with discovery is it's become all about, are you a fit for my products? As opposed to let me discover. And try to understand you and the things that are important to you. I'm just trying to discover whether you're a fit for my product. And yeah, that doesn't help anybody.
Certainly don't help the buyer.
to the selfishness that is just really prevalent. And we can call it commission breath. We can call it not being able to silence an agenda. We can call it, you know, operating in 2024. Right. Cause I don't think that this is just a sales problem. But that's why I think, Andy, the power of your understanding pillar from Sell Without Selling Out is what it is, right?
Because when you ask someone, and I do this in training often, like, when was the last time that you felt understood?
Yeah.
in any domain of
Yeah. Well, starting with, or even like, what does it feel like to be understood? Let's take a moment and think about that because it happens so rarely. And then when was the last time that you happened? And if that's the type of seller that you aspire to be, to show up with that level of intention? Is it really?
A question as to why you're able to differentiate and create these experiences that do move
Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, and this is an example that. You know, I've given more than one occasion is, you know, the best sale. And I'm not the only one that said this recently, the best sales experiences I've had as a consumer in terms of a large ticket item in the last six or seven years, I was in leasing a car far and away.
I mean, we went from, you know, we've used to think about auto salesman and car, so the worst. Their professionalism. My last three experiences far outshone any tech, not any tech sellers, but the majority of tech sellers and they were just professional they, you know, got down to ask great questions. I understand what we're really looking for. They weren't pushy. It was a good professional sales experience and buying experience on my part. And. Yeah, I've gone back to the same person multiple times because they did such a good job on it.
Yeah. The last time I went to him, I was like, okay, we're ready to do it. I have to be in and out of the auto dealership in less than an hour to try to do that. And he did it right. Because we had built that level of trust at the paperwork already. And so on, but And I've asked, this is again, not just me, but multiple people on the show I've asked.
It's like, yeah, their best experience has been with buying a car, buying or leasing a car. So think about that. I think that to me, I'm optimistic about that because that says, look, there's a future where we can change the perception of B2B sellers as well.
We'll just call you Obama.
can almost argue that because they have such a relatively quick turnaround, they're learning themselves that being nicer, being more authentic, being genuine with the customer turns into greater sales. They're a month to month kind of business. So they can quickly adjust their patterns as opposed to those of us in tech sales where it could be a six month or 18 month even period.
So it takes me takes them a longer time to get that feedback that, oh, that didn't work being, you know, not authentic
I don't know. We
But I think the issues, I think the issues we've talked about today, everybody gets this feedback, right? I mean, it's not, it's like we, we need to do a better job and unfortunately we got to end here in just a minute, but we need to do a better job of, you know, teaching people as they come into the profession that, yeah, this isn't the way we do it.
We do and that's, yeah, Andrew's life mission. That's what's going to keep him employed. Hopefully not as long as he
to come.
yeah, well, hopefully not. I mean, cause again, I think there actually has been a sea change, at least my limited data set in the auto profession. We can see it in, in B2B as well.
either that or we're all, I'm leaving the sector. There's gotta be a greener grass that appreciates human beings like more so than a place that calls their customer base users. Yeah, maybe car sales. There's a future in car sales.
mean,
All right, everyone. Thank you very much. I know our guests if anyone wants to reach out to our guests, I'm going to direct them to their LinkedIn profile, probably the best way to get hold of them. And yeah, thank you. I look forward to having you all come back on the show.