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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 Richard Brasser and Richard is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Richard is the Managing Director of Carlton Richards and Chairman of CR Intelligent Labs. My other guests today for this discussion about elevating your sales effectiveness and improving your win rates are Mor Assouline.
Mor is the founder of FDTC, SaaS Sales Consulting and Training. The FDTC stands for From Demo to Close. Also joining us is Eric Shaver. Eric is the Managing Partner at Kensei Partners. Now, if you enjoyed the show, please do me a quick favor. If you could just take a second before you begin listening to the rest of the episode, to jump over to Apple podcasts and rate and review this show, this podcast, win rate podcast with Andy Paul.
If you could do so, it really helps us get discovered by even more professional sellers who are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. And if you're back and you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the wind rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guest Richard Brasser, Maura Assouline, and Eric Shaver 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.
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 win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul and joining me every week. It seems like we have a all star cast of panelists participating in the conversation. I'm going to give everybody just a few seconds to introduce themselves. Eric Shaver, we'll start with you.
Hey Andy, thanks for having me. So let's see short version career seller 15 years ago decided I needed to. Teach all the things that I wish I had learned in B2B sales. So been going all over the globe focused on capital allocation based selling versus budgets named executive officer selling versus L three, which masquerades at that sometimes L two and focusing on the part of our addressable markets in any given fiscal year.
That's not actively in the market.
Got it. Love it. Concise Richard.
Let's see spend about 25 years, 20 years in enterprise SaaS technology, both as a salesperson, sales leader, CEO, founder went on to found a consulting firm that focused on. Helping enterprise companies leverage emerging technology around sales and marketing, and then took a position at Boston Consulting Group where I led our next gen sales group globally and spent I guess about five years as a partner at BCG really focused on topics around all go to market topics, all B2B, but really created the program around a lot of our practice for private equity and helping portcos grow efficiently and effectively.
And now I have just recently started my own firm, Carlton Richards, and really focusing on the same thing. So private equity, helping portcos grow really around the topics of leveraging AI in the sales process and getting a good win leveraging technology.
Okay. Well, we're going to talk a little bit about that today. And Carlton Richards, you know, the building I live in New York is the Carlton Regency. So it's very easy to remember your company name. Mor.
How do I follow up to those two resumes? Oh my gosh.
We're just older, man.
glad they're letting
I doing here? Do you want me to host this instead? Yeah. So, quick background. Love was copywriting marketing. That's what I studied. That's what I did. Zimmerman advertising. Then I got into sales, quit the first day cause I was scared of sales, found myself back in sales as a really early stage, first employee at a company called practice Panther became VP of sales that got acquired four and a half years later, did that a few times for other B2B SaaS startups, that sort of like.
And then about two and a half years ago, I went solo to do consulting for B2B SaaS startups, coaching, sales, consulting, et cetera. And then there is a B2C leg where I teach account executives in B2B SaaS startups, how to close more, how to level up. So there's like course components, there is a community, et cetera.
But yeah, I didn't, I definitely wasn't partner at Boston Consulting Group. Yeah.
my story is like, you're more, who didn't want to quit on the first day of sales? I literally like first day, first job boss sends me out in the field, right. You know, selling mini computers. I hadn't been trained on it. Knew nothing about it. But Yeah, go out and make cold calls.
It's like, okay.
Good, good onboarding
That's why Tommy Boy's over my left shoulder.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll just talk about that. You've got Tommy boy over your left shoulder. You've got Michael Corleone over your right. So tell us again the significance of this.
So the Tommy Boy piece, and this is all meant to provoke anybody I'm training and teaching, which is mainly sales teams, is everybody. And Andy, you just made this point. Everybody starts in B2B sales as Tommy Boy. Everyone, no one knows what they're doing. We're, and we're given very little training.
That's certainly not enough to actually execute at any level of competency. And we proceed to, you know, make a mess of it until we've done it enough times and made enough mistakes until we finally get some. Semblance of competency. So it's, to me, that's the humbling component of knowing that we all, you know, we're the only, still, I can say this with a fairly high degree of certainty, we're the only profession that has no educational credentials in the B2B world, right?
It's starting to catch up a little bit. There's no degree in sales, right? We don't have any credentials.
well, there's 120 universities that do offer a degree in sales now,
It started out of how many 7, 000 or something like this.
or so. Yeah. Right.
I remember that from my kids applied to colleges. So it's slowly getting there. And who's teaching it, right? Who's teaching it? Does it got a professor or is it coming from people who did it? You know, that's the other question.
Well, yeah, that is a question. And yeah, it's mostly adjuncts, right? So,
and look, most, I spent a lot of time railing against the 30 to 40 year old sales orthodoxy, which hasn't really changed. Process, qualification regimes, et cetera. So that's a whole other discussion,
well, we're going to get into that a little bit because that's, yeah. I use that term as well. The sales orthodoxy, which I don't think has served us very well, but I wanted to sort of follow up on something you had talked about because sort of the overall theme of this episode is. Yeah. I run a running a series of episodes that are all about reinventing selling.
So if we had to, to your point, sales orthodoxy, we had to blow shit up and start all over again. What would we do differently? And I sort of want to start with you, Eric, on this, because yeah, you're talking about Cal capital allocation based selling and so on, if you have really the importance of financial acumen, business acumen and sales. is what if we just didn't train sellers and selling and train them on business acumen, financial acumen, and that, that was it, right? We didn't give them any guidance on how to have these conversations, how to go out It's just, they had this business knowledge as a foundation. Cause it seems to me it's and yeah, Richard, you can tell me if this is the case or not, like BCG is it's not like you're out necessarily pushing a product.
You're out trying to help clients solve problems or achieve certain things, business opportunities in their business. it seems like you sort of go out as with sort of an open book is how you might be able to help them. So it's just sort of general theme is like, God, maybe one of the ways we break the sales orthodoxy.
It's just. Stop training sellers on selling and train them on the business side.
It's so this I have this argument discussion debate every day that sales process sales models sales every bit of a sales process is an internal construct to event to a vendor to operationalize revenue acquisition to a fiscal year. That is what it's for. It's more for business ops. It's more for sales ops.
It's more for the business to be able to get any form of linearity and consistency out of the fiction that is the majority of most sales pipelines. Right. And no one outside of the four walls of the vendor cares at all, not even a little about your qualification regime, your discovery process, your entry and exit criteria to your sales process.
Nobody cares, right? It's wrong
Yeah. Talk about fiction. Anyway. Yeah.
It's well, it's 100 percent vendor focused and I joke that salespeople were taught the first half of their jobs. We were taught the operationalizing of revenue acquisition, the internal requirements, and we were all taught a nomenclature and a language, a dialect that is a sales dialect.
It is vendor dialect, sales dialect. And as soon as you leave your four walls with a vendor or sales centric dialect, you are asynchronous from the rest of the world. Nobody cares. Right? Business speaks in a business dialect. If we're buying B2B, SaaS, or on prem assets, as an example, Assets that we're probably going to commit to for multiple years, which means and the likelihood of a salesperson net new or share of wallet based on a February 22nd point of view.
My wife's birthday. Bumping into. Prospector customer who has you in their operating plan for that fiscal year is extremely unlikely, which means no budget allocated if you're not in their operating plan, which means budgetary selling, which everyone is taught is useless and it just creates false positives and confirmation bias.
And it's ridiculous. If we, if I would tear it all down, if I could tear it all down, we should have been taught in our first quarter and I'll shut up. Our first quarter of selling, we should have been taught how do our assets convert to cash flow, right? What cash flows do our assets create that would make a B2B buyer consider them versus all the alternative uses of the capital they have to put to use.
And I would have certified every single salesperson as a project or program manager. Because your ability to scope and engagement scope towards business outcomes, establish a work breakdown structure based on that require a racy to even commit to an engagement is all business skills. And yet we're taught none of that.
And it's insanity. It's absolute insanity.
All right, Richard, we're going to go to you. Cause gosh, probably I would imagine BCG that, you know, sellers are of higher order perhaps in terms of having more of a perspective like Eric talks about, but yeah, respond to that.
So yeah, besides the fact that BCG literally put me through a program on how not to sell,
no wait. Before we move on, tell us, so what was that program?
so they're in a very fortunate position of not needing to to really sell. The whole point was that we help our clients solve problems and create value. But I think that the, one of the lessons from that is It really aligns, I think, with what, you know, Eric was saying and some of the trends in the market, you know, we've seen these different kind of wouldn't be dramatic enough to say, like, you know, seismic changes, but we've seen how technology, first of all, helped create more volume.
Right. We could do things faster with dialers and all of this. And it became, how many more dials can you make? How many more people can you talk to? How many people can you evaluate quicker? And then as SaaS release started to be born, what we started to understand is that somebody could make the decision to not be your customer every month or every day.
And so we really had to understand how to deliver value. And that's where customer success really started to gain a lot of traction. And I think what we're in right now is one of the most exciting and positive phases for me, which is a real focus on value. And so, you know, a lot of the projects that we did BCG, we're helping sales teams understand.
Instead of understanding instead of thinking that the customer doesn't care about your process, how about your entire process kind of angles around? How does your customer drive value from your products and services? How do they really realize that value? What kinds of customers get the most value? Stay longest, spend the most money, renew the most, refer the most customers, etcetera.
And then hone all of that so that your target marketing, your ICP, your segmentation, your coverage model, your process, everything about it aligns with the absolute, at the absolute core, how your customers realize value. And if you do that, I think a lot of things start to change in your sales organization.
So, you know, I w I would put value first and design both your sales org model, your communication model, your messaging, and all of that. To align with that as your North Star.
Okay. More let's hear from you and then we'll go back and talk about some of these things.
if I can strip down, strip it down and then rebuild it I think it would depend. So, like, the 3 areas that I think, and again, it's nuanced based on this and even market enterprise strategic. I think Eric and Richard, you have more like. Enterprise high, 6 figures, 7 figure. Experience deals on more call it lower enterprise, mid market, but if I can rebuild it, I think I categorize it in like, 3 sections, onboarding pipeline outbound for onboarding.
I think sales reps need to be taught what it's like to be a buyer, not what it's like to be the seller. So, for example, every company that I've consulted for, or I've worked in that, the. The salesperson used to be that buyer. And is now selling to that buyer has the highest conversion rate because they understand their language.
They understand their world. Just way more experience there. So, for onboarding, teach the rep, how to think like a buyer, be a buyer, what they're going through for a pipeline. I find it interesting. I think I don't know if it was Eric that mentioned it. But, like, the nomenclature, I think the other problem is the sales stages now in CRM is based on what.
The company wants the buyer to go through, but that doesn't align with what the buyer actually goes through. I would love to see sales stages that are represented by what the buyer stages is, right? Like internal communicate, whatever the buyer stages is in their world, create a sales, a CRM that has buying stages, not sales stages.
And the last bit would be for, let's just say outbound. Since I got into sales, the whole idea of is it's a volume game. I think that's going to that's changing. It's getting more noisy. It's harder to cut through the noise. At least in my experience, the way I am able to prospect successfully is I it's much easier.
For example, right now, we all had. Well, we all sort of know each other sort of right? Not even that well, I don't even know, like, you know, I don't know where you're based out of Eric or Richard, but I can guarantee you that if I called email Eric or Richard tomorrow, they're more likely to open my email and reply because we're now familiar with each other.
So salespeople need to build out. I think what I'd like to see is companies teach salespeople to build familiarity. First, that could be creating content of some sorts, newsletter, just give them value first for. Period of time, a few months, whatever it may be, then cold prospect to them because it's much easier to reply to somebody if you know them for both the seller and the buyer.
So those are the 3 areas I'd probably change.
last part, it's always been the case. Right. Not to date myself unnecessarily, but I'm certainly older and everybody on this call is yeah, that's, yeah, once I got over being thrown into the deep end and actually started learning what I was doing, that was the key to. Building a prospect and building a pipeline was familiarity based, not, Hey, I'm cold calling you.
And on the first time we're going to convert especially as it moved into larger enterprise sales. That was how you did it. You know, we used to, I don't know, again, we used to get on planes and just go, you know, spend time knocking on doors and other cities and meeting people and getting within accounts.
We have, you know, target account lists and so on. But Yeah. A lot of work
I think that's
of work that wasn't with an agenda, but other than building a connection or relationship that could bear fruit at some point in the future.
Yeah, I think number 1, I think it's changed for a lot of companies. I don't think they're flying out as much as they should be, for example. And I think it's also, you can build familiarity. What was the last product you bought online? That you didn't try out. For example, I don't know. I bought a charger or I bought a the oak shoes or whatever it was.
I was retargeted. I kept seeing their ads. I saw content from it. I subscribed and I eventually, but I was nurtured. I think what reps need to do is nurture outside of just flying out to the prospect again, maybe for more enterprise strategic. It's a different story because the deal size is
No, I absolutely agree. A hundred percent. You know, if you follow me at all, you know, that's his case, but yeah, no, it has to be, you know, a modern approach to it that encompasses multi channels, but it's still that same idea is to your point as you're building familiarity first.
Yeah. But I think a lot of sales for when, at least for talking about prospecting, they're all and for companies. And again, I'm speaking to SaaS specific. It's all about scale volume. Let's send out as many emails as we can. So we can get as much as we can from top of funnel. But it doesn't work that way.
Not anymore. At least.
Well, but I'm interested in everybody's opinion on this because everybody's in this business is my perspective is that, well, I guess counter perhaps to what you're saying more is that I'm not seeing any less emphasis on volume. There's some noise about it. I was, it's like, yeah, let's give lip service this idea, but is anyone under an illusion that's not how AI is going to be used is to just do more?
I would, I'll jump in there and say I hope not.
Well, I know we hope not as well, but it, yeah,
I think one of the biggest mistakes that we see Especially from a sales strategy standpoint is what a lot of founder led companies run into, which is they sell to anybody that has money and wants to buy your product.
Now, it's different in B2C and B2B but especially in B2B that causes a myriad of problems where you acquire customers, whether it's through, you know, retargeting them a million times. Or just, you know, getting them until they give up and give you a, the contract or convincing them or manipulating them, whatever it is.
All of those things are bad, right? And they, and you end up owning a customer owning in a, you know, in a good way that may not be right for your company. They may want customizations to your product. They may be, you know, super unhappy with the level of service you can provide. You know, they cost more to sell.
They don't stay as long. They churn at a higher rate, like all, I hate to go back to it, but the level, the value of true AI, not the BS, write my sales email AI, you know, real deep learning and analytics and understanding who are your best customers and who should you go after that aligns all of a sudden the sales organization and the buyer.
Right. We know, why do you buy from us? Why do you need our product? How do you buy, how do you need to be serviced? What size company, all of this. And when you do that now, all of a sudden you're working with a customer, a potential customer and you're really building a long term relationship.
And so that is possible with AI. AI then filters all the way through, even in your forecasting, you know, more talked about sales stages and things like that. You know, in modern organizations that, that we go in and get to redesign things the way we want. One of the things that goes away, our sales stages.
Because there's no reason sales stages is an artificial forcing mechanism to put people in a percentage of closed assumption, which is a ridiculous way of doing it with AI and especially with huge models of data. You can put true odds percentage. So leveraging, you know, there's commercial tools, there's also an internal, but being able to say, what is the likelihood of a person buying and have that be a win rate number, a percentage number, an odds number, and it changes, you know, if Israel attacks Gaza, the number changes, like it takes geopolitical things into account even.
So, you know, I think we're moving past some of the Structures we put in place, which was the best guess of how to manage things. And we're using intelligence, at least at the kind of, you know, I wouldn't say bleeding edge, but maybe bleeding edge leading edge. Yeah.
since a big soccer fan, but you know, the, big statistics and primary statistics that they use and in soccer is this thing called expected goals, right?
Is so every time there's a shot and our attempt made on goal it's basically scored and saying that based on that shot, that should have scored, you know, X percent of the time, you know, generally it's a fraction of one, right? But it's based on, you know, distance from the gold angle to the goal, left foot, right foot.
Yeah. All these factors. And so when they're game planning is, you know, obviously they're trying to get the ball into the position with the player who has the best expected goals, right? So maximize their opportunities. But it seems like we can do something similar in sales, which say, look, at this stage we can do, we have a choice of doing one of two or three things.
And the system's going to tell us. Based on deep learning is, yeah, this, we do A, yeah, odds of ultimately winning the deal are X or probability, you know, if we do B, it's this and so on and so forth. And it seems like we have that within reach almost to be able to help sellers in sort of real time to say, what's the value of the next step that you can take to help the buyer?
But ultimately, AI is. if the AI being applied to a sales process is ultimately being applied to a flawed process,
Well, yes, it's still
Which it is, right? The almost every sales model, almost every sales process is demand centric. It requires demand to function. No one's going to want to tolerate your qualifying questions unless they're in the market.
No one's going to want to go through discovery with you unless they have a business reason for doing so. No one's going to follow a sales person's guidance down a pipeline unless it just magically aligns with what they were already doing. And so the waste. The waste of SG& A investment in go to market teams is absolutely fiduciarily irresponsible because everyone's still working the same flawed model, right?
Sales processes are demand centric, which is fine for the portion of, for the part of your addressable market that is in market this fiscal year. Then it can be applied, but even then it's flawed because it usually means someone found you if they were in the market. Most prospecting isn't prospecting at all.
Back in the day, and Andy, I may challenge you on the age front, back in the day when we were given index
going to lose the night one, but yeah, go ahead.
Here's your territory. We had index cards. We didn't have the internet. You actually had to go fake like marketing. Marketing isn't prospecting. Marketing, you know, operates with a bomber sales operates with a stiletto.
We're one to one. They're one to many, a one to many message when you're one to one is effectively useless unless you get lucky. You touch enough people to someone says good timing, we're in the market or good timing. We just had a meeting about this. You've got ahead of everybody else. But the percentage of outreach to actual conversion at that rate is what?
Less than 1%? It's a volume play. And has prospect all outreach did was industrialize, right? It was like the advent of the machine gun in World War I. It's like, Oh, wait a minute, right? Look how many, look how effective this is. And it's the same flawed process. It's and Richard, what you talked about is something I really get into, which is the word value has become so bastardized that it doesn't mean anything in sales anymore, right?
Value is very simple in B2B and more even to your points. I work a lot with mid market teams, right? Who are still selling strategic assets. If it's SAP or it's, you know, these companies who are selling a strategic asset, which is a five year commit, typically, because you're touching business processes, regardless of what part of the market you're touching, they're committing capital, right?
Whether it's operating money in a cloud asset or a capital budget, capital funds into a on prem asset, they're looking to apply something to the business where they expect a certain internal rate of return. To be yielded from those assets and value is measured really simply. Positive net cash flow is how value is measured in B2B with an asset that's expected to produce cash flow, which is most B2B assets, unless it's compliance based and value is very simple.
What are your net cash flows from this asset versus all the other assets? We can spend that dollar, that euro, that pound on. Because that's how the CFO and that's how the business has to make their decisions. And salespeople aren't taught any of that. We're not taught how to, we're not taught how to do guidance based, like, selling.
Look, this is why your peers invest in these assets versus alternatives on its, on these financials. Like, if you can't get that right, then we're just selling products and hoping we win against, you know, Other products who do very similar stuff. And it's a commoditized battle to the to, you know, to, to the lowest common denominator.
Are we really selling or are we harvesting demand and hoping that our logo beats their logo? And I see that every day. Sorry, that's a bit of downer on things, but if you apply AI to that, it's like it's, it can help, but it's based on a flawed premise. And that's the, that's one of the big problems.
Well, yeah. What's yeah. I was going to ask Richard this cause you know, you're involved in this, but yeah, that's sort of been my thought too is just saying, okay, well, what is AI learning on? And over the last, you know, 20 years, arguably look at the data, you know, we've sales performance in general has been pretty poor, right?
Low wind rates. And so is what's it learning from that's going to make it smart.
I think that's critical, right? And so I think the big inflection point for me and where I draw a pretty harsh line between what some companies call analytics is really they're looking at historical data. And so if you have company A and you say, give me all of your purchasing data, your customers, your history.
Et cetera. And I analyzed that and I apply AI the best I could ever be is as good as you've ever been. And it has no perspective to, to be broader than that. And so I think that the solutions where you're really analyzing that a particular bespoke company's information, I don't think has that much value now.
Can it refine? Sure. But it can only refine for you to be as good as you are true AI models that have. You know, a much, much bigger data set and can, and really understand how does everybody buy and then can hone in on how does somebody buy this product that it knows, how did this particular person purchase their last 12 pieces of software?
And you understand from the pattern recognition in that's powerful, like that's the difference between a map and Google maps. Right. You're taking
that point though, but a question to that point is, you know, when you look at wind loss analysis data is you say, okay, this is the way they've bought. But sort of the underlying message from a lot of wind loss data is the buyers bought in spite of the sellers, not because of the seller,
Oh you know, that's a probably a whole podcast, right?
but but that's, that is one of the issues that exist. You look at, you know, several companies has done this and, you know, one particular guest, a training prospect is out of Australia. Hey, then they sort of summarize thousands of interviews with in person interviews with, you know, enterprise buyers over the years.
And yeah, the reasons they buy and the reasons they don't buy is, you know, there's nothing to do with the product. There's nothing to do with the price that it's like to a point Eric made before is there sort of assumption that the buyers is that. Yeah. Competitive product, the competitive prices are table stakes and we're making this decision based on other criteria.
Well, Andy, the question also is who's doing the buying right in tech, especially in SaaS and tech. It's mainly the buying center is it or the buying center is a functional area. Look at the massive, you know, technical debt that companies have taken on because I can just buy this as a service.
I can bypass it. There's no federation. There's no. strategy. And if you look at how a lot of enterprise assets are bought, they're not bought to realize the full value or the full shareholder value or stakeholder value or business value that they were designed to create, right? They're bought as products, right?
And I do this with companies that sell ERP. It's like if you're selling ERP to the CEO, You're selling free cash flow, which means you're selling total shareholder return, right? Because that's what these assets are designed to do. You know, any, an asset that is one of its primary things that it accomplishes is optimizing working capital, especially in the current economy last year and this year, right?
Where cost of capital has gone up, return on invested capital, therefore goes down. It's just an inverse relationship. And you're looking for assets that produce greater returns. Right? The idea is we're buying this as a means and not even a near term means of changing that, right? By the time the decision gets made and the due diligence is done, by the time the GSIs or the VARs come in and operationalize it, by the time you hit your payback periods, your cash flow positive, you're two and a half years out, right?
You're buying this just the way Jamie Dimon took the entire bank into the cloud two years ago was for the intermediate to long term because these are strategic assets. Right? But they're being bought as tactical assets. And so you're having these little proof of concept sales where you're under realizing the value of these were designed to create at scale and you get this circular problem.
And it's the point that it's not because salespeople are bad at their jobs. It's because we're still using antiquated demand based models to try to make sense of what's going on. Of the revenue we're trying to bring in and the absolute worst person to forecast a deal Is the salesperson who's working it who's got 50 pay at risk Who's got confirmation bias all over the place and has been your forex pipeline pressure every week You know, you'll sell your grandmother for knitting services if you can help hit your pipeline multiple like quality be damned enter the spray prospecting regimes that are out there just to put something in the top of the funnel And the waste is just insane.
Well, so to that point, more, you talked about noise earlier. This is how do you address the issue that Eric is talking about? Because it seems like we're in this vicious cycle, I believe. And I my fear, as I mentioned before, I think that much as most sales technology has been used to build pipeline and not to help the buyers make decisions at all.
And so we've run into the situation where we've got these high pipeline multiples required, incredibly low wind rates, very ineffective selling and efficient selling as well going on. How do we break that cycle?
I'm going to defer to my colleague my, my other people here. Cause I can go on and on around this one. I
hard of a question.
Are you there? So he's gonna have to come back. Yeah,
interested in, I tell every salesperson that if you're with a brand that especially that is acknowledged as a leading brand, that you should take a BCG McKinsey Bain approach. relative to your assets. You should be guiding executives on the cash flows and the business value your assets create, because if they're in oil and gas, they're in consumer packaged goods.
They would have no idea how your assets can be put to use in the business as a cashflow positive generating asset, unless you tell them. And to me, you know, it's that salespeople, and to your point, salespeople weren't taught. You don't have the business conversation at the end. You have it at the beginning. And the only way to have that is not it. But then we go, Okay, well, we'll do a discovery based call with an executive. No, that is absolutely wrong. You bring to the point where you were going, I think, is Look, you should be an expert in the cash flows that your assets create for your existing customers.
You should be experts in how you create business value. That shouldn't be hard to do. Customer success is not done by value engineers who are assessing cash flow realization. It's being done by people looking to see if net promoter scores can be achieved. You've got the wrong people doing it. You should have a, you should be bringing a cash flow model into your business.
Right, a five year, if it's a five year operational commit, a five year discounted cash flow model that is directionally validated by a peer should be someone who maps to the ICP, that's why we come up with ICPs, and say, I just did a, I did a LinkedIn post on this, the myth that we think we have to understand their financials before we can have a financial conversation just shows you how much Lack of knowledge there is in the selling space about how to have an actual business discussion first and BCG and Bain and McKinsey.
Well, you don't have sale. Big, last I checked McKinsey doesn't have salespeople, right? Their partners sell McKinsey, not some dude who used to work at Oracle.
But I think that, I think your point of start with the hypothesis, right. Start with an understanding of the business and it even, I think goes a level deeper or two or three levels deeper, which is. What is the equation for each functional unit, right? You talked about the CEO, they may have a very particular value.
They're going to get out of a, especially a strategic asset, right? But even below that you have operational people. How are you, how is your product going to save their day to day or, you know, make their day to day headache better. The financial buyer, how, you know, they're purely looking at the numbers.
That's all they care about. How are you. Going to increase cost of sales, whatever your product does. And so understanding what that conversation is for all the different people that may be influencers, they may not necessarily be buyers. But be able to go in with a hypothesis driven approach and say, here's what we think.
And now let's have a conversation about how are you different? How can we adjust this? But you're starting with a very positive kind of a knowledgeable approach. Now, yes, that's enterprise. It's harder to do on like turn and burn, you know, you're selling a thousand widgets. But sometimes the technology can give you a little bit of a headstart in that aspect, right?
It's like the heads up display in the jet, you know, the computers can tell you an awful lot that you don't need a sophisticated approach and really understand how to do it more. Sorry, we lost you.
Yeah. Sorry. We've lost you more than ever admit.
Out on me.
yeah, well, Eric, I wanted to follow up with something you said, cause this is something that I've done throughout my career, selling large deals. This is. You, I think you sort of allude to the fact that people often look at, sellers look at doing the business case toward the end of the process.
And I always consider part of the qualification, right? Is that if we didn't have agreement on the, at least on a rough order magnitude basis, business case, where they gave them the ability to commit to saying, yeah, if this pans out, we're going to make this decision to proceed. If they couldn't commit to that, I didn't want to invest my time with them.
And that's exactly right. I, again I may have mentioned this in the last podcast. If I was running the zoo. I would remove the word budget from every sales person's vocabulary. It wouldn't exist. It wouldn't exist. It doesn't matter if they have budget. Companies spend unbudgeted capital all the time if the business has a need, and that comes from their cash position or their free cash flow, right?
And they have that for one. Free cash flow is primarily to pay down debt, pay for capital assets, and grow the company, right? And a lot of these, you know, you're either selling assets that are made to grow. Right? The company or drive greater operational efficiency to free up more cash that can allow you to grow the company.
It's, that's the piece, Andy, that it's mind boggling that it's 2024 and we still aren't being taught this.
right. And there was a study that came out 10 years ago, maybe roughly 10. It could have been 11 years ago or so but it was, you know, enterprise buyers, I forget the exact title, but it said that only 21 percent of sort of purchase and major purchases were budgeted at the start of fiscal year and to your point precisely, right, is show up with a business case and a good, you know, something that's going to generate cashflow as you talked about. You have an opportunity to have a deal done. Yeah,
for doing just that thing.
yeah,
It's called their cash position on their balance sheet. That money is sitting there waiting. Scared money don't make no money. They got to put it to use.
right.
one qualifier, right? Which is, there's an investment you know, kind of version of money and there's an absolute dollar, right? And so there, there are people on maybe, you know, the more transactional side of the market. There, you know, if you show up and you say, look for every dollar you put in this little box, you get a 20 out.
How many do you want to put in? Like, I want to put all that I have in, I don't need a budget for that. Right. But if you say, Hey, if you put 500 grand in this box, you'll get 6 million out. And you go, how much would you like to put in? If they have 50 grand, they can't use the, they can't use it. So there is an absolute dollar problem when you get, I think, in the lower segments, but I think Eric your point is exactly right.
Which is, I think it's a cop out. If you say there's not budget. And you're in, you know, a slightly larger segment, maybe enterprise or not even strategic accounts. It, if you say they're not buying because of budget, then you haven't done the process right. Or your product doesn't produce the right kind of return.
That's a possibility.
salespeople don't even know. If I, if you ask the average salesperson, okay, what companies are you targeting? What industries have you proven value in? And they said, well, this, and this is why we're targeting. Great. What is the typical internal rate of return that your existing customer there are realizing with your assets?
They wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about.
Right.
Whatever I believe in it.
Andy. That's your point. Start in, in Eric, start with the business case that we, and then validate it as you're pulling some data. And, you know, but that's like, that's the process. That's the way the process should work.
right. And
look, you must, unless you're really different for a hundred grand spend, you're going to realize X and here's how you're going to do it.
And now we're going to figure out how you're a little bit different.
so here's what I think is one of the problems that, that sort of contributes this, and then this is not to pick on you more, but it's, this is a bigger thing is, and it just sort of trigger. Cause you know, you have this piece of content, you published about, you know, 26 questions to quantify pain. I think the fact that we train sellers to look about pain, Think about pain as opposed to opportunity is very problematic, right? Is the surf assumption going into a lot of sales is that the driving force for purchase decisions is risk aversion or not risk aversion, loss aversion, as opposed to opportunity gain. And I just know from my own experience selling six, seven, eight, nine figure deals. Yeah, I never once asked a customer about what their pain points were. Cause we're dealing as what is the opportunity that exists for them from a financial standpoint, utilizing the products and services we were selling.
And I just wonder whether, you know, we really do a disservice to sellers and we sort of create some of this problem by saying, look, what you're trying to do is you're trying to find pain points. And to me, pain points are small, right? Or the opportunities are big. And I don't, first of all, I don't think.
I don't believe loss aversion exists. It's been sort of discredited recently in the whole research, academic research. And it's interesting people's thoughts on that. Cause I think when sellers go out thinking, Oh, I'm trying to solve a pain or find a pain point, I'm going to fix that as opposed to here's an opportunity we can work on with the buyer to achieve something, that's a whole different mindset.
Yeah, I think there are two types of leverage. You can pull or two types of prospects that come through the door. One, they have a problem that they want to solve too. They don't really have a problem. And They're sort of looking around and they're wanting to improve. A lot of times you'll ask them, like, what's what prompted you, whatever it is, like, oh, well, things are going well.
I want to see what we can do better. So going to your pain comment. I have right now, I have this ergonomic chair prior to this. I had one of those, like, cheap, you know, like. Foldable chairs, you get, you know, you, you go to an event, they have like this cheap vertical chairs. I sat on that for 12 hours a day since I started my business for two and a half years.
And the first year was, I was uncomfortable. It's like, eh, it's not comfortable. It's not, I'm not willing to go buy 300, 400 chair. I'll deal with it. This year. To the point where every time I sat down, I couldn't sit down at to stop working or move, sit on the couch, whatever it was that pain existed.
It just, it compounded. And at that point, I was like, I need to invest in a 400, 600 chair. So to find pain is just 1 piece of the equation. How big is that pain? How big is that pain? How long has it been happening? Who's that problem affecting? Is it just you? Is it other departments? That's one part of the equation of discovery.
Then it's like, all right, well, here's what you're dealing with today. Where do you want to be? Why aren't you there? What's the Delta? So part of discovery isn't just finding out the pain, good discovery. It's about finding the size of the pain, who it's impacting, and then what would success look like if they were to solve that pain, if we were to solve that pain, what would success look like to the business, to the departments, to the individual users, et cetera, and what do we need to do to get there?
So. So pain, I think the higher, the pain, the more likely they are motivated to, to go with your solution and they're willing to pay a premium to solve it. You'll I pay a premium to have peace of mind. The less pain I have, the less likely I'm going to pay premium. I'll buy on a discount. I'm more loyal to the discounts, the dollar savings that I'm getting
Well, mine was, I get that. Mine was a little bit bigger question. I'm just curious, you know, with everybody here, as you know, Richard and Eric as well, just, again, my experience, selling large enterprise deals around the world, pain wasn't the issue, it was the business opportunity. If I sold to pain, I always felt like I was making myself small.
But when I sell the opportunity, then it's, it opens up something. And I just think this as a mindset is, you know, an issue for sellers.
And I think it relates to, and this may be a strange analogy, but there's a psychological principle, which is. You know, if you're having trouble and you're, you know, kind of unhappy is the way to fix it to think more positive thoughts or eliminate negative thoughts and it's not even close.
It's fill the bucket with more positive thoughts. So I think pain and opportunity. Or the exact same thing. It just depends on how you frame it. Right. And so I could frame it as, does your butt hurt more not more as in excessively, but the opportunity is, yeah. would, you know,
an E on the end,
right, right, right. Can you sit, you know, can you sit there longer?
Can you be more productive? Can you be happier? So it's, I think it's the same thing. It's just different side of the coin. And Andy, I'd love kind of your perspective, and it's probably why you've been very successful, which is when you focus on the positive side of the coin. It opens up a lot more avenues for you to paint a particular picture of success and value and reasons to buy.
You know, just and if you pick the pain, you're kind of pigeon your, pigeonholing yourself on what the problem is, right? And so, you know, you can have lots of, you can describe lots of different ways. That there's an opportunity and it's different for different people. But if you say the pain, it's like, Oh man, we're going to miss our number this quarter.
And if you don't buy my thing, then that's the problem. Well, there might be lots of ways to solve that problem. So
Well, and pain is relevant relative to the person you're selling to, right? If I want to go, I can easily go to a CEO or the other named executive officers in a big public company and I can go look at how they're trailing 12 months performance against revenue growth, against EBITDA margin, against free cash flow generation, against total shareholder return.
One of those is going to be underperforming. Those are the core measures of the business and I can focus on one and say, Hey, we can help alleviate your EBITDA margin, you know, underperformance relative to your peers. You know, you can always find a pain, but with the pain, that level of pain point is okay.
Now let's talk about how we do that. And that is a very big, you know, ideally a much bigger solution set. Then let's go to a department level or a functional area level piece of pain. So, you know, it's, but you're right. Richard, I, it's industry looking at it, right. Is let's look at the other side of the same coin, but I think the biggest limit limiting factor is sales.
People are still in the business of asking for a commitment of capital. Right. We are in the business of asking companies to give us money and everyone knows it and they tell as soon as you show up, you look like Jack Sparrow, you know, coming to their door. You're here to take something from me and people immediately get defensive because they're not expecting us to take a guidance based approach.
They're expecting us to take an extractive based approach. I need discovery. I need qualification. I need to know more about you before I can really help you. And they're like, I didn't ask. Okay. I didn't ask and I got plenty of things. And a multiply that all the salespeople saying I can help.
It's like, that's lovely. I'm sure you can, but you're not in my operating plan for the year and you're not saying anything that's making me want to add you to my operating plan for the year. Oh, and by the way, the human assets that you're going to ask us to engage in the due diligence, your sales process are fully committed.
All you're going to do is potentially mess with our ability to hit the KPIs we're currently being measured. The way to get around that problem isn't, oh, great idea. It's not about you had a great idea. It's you've given me a financial reason that I now can't ignore because now you're hitting our KPIs.
Not our near term, right? Financial requirements, intermediate to long term, which is most B2B selling. Most B2B selling isn't selling a tactical asset that you only fund for one fiscal period with some operating money and go, ah, we'll decide next year if we still want to do it again, right?
Well, I think you touched on something that's important. And so I would align pain less with conversion rate. Okay. And more with timing, right? And so, you know, especially when you're in more transactional or lower segments, the pain relates to when are you going to buy, right? More if your chair had nails in it, you're going to buy a different chair faster.
So if it's like, you know, it's not that bad, but I kind of deserve one of those fancy chairs. It could be a while, right? And so, you know, your pain can be a motivating factor to transact a little bit quicker. And, you know, obviously there's, you know, depends on the size of the deal.
pain drives expediency.
Right.
We just want to deal with the pain and we want to move on as opposed to, most companies are trying to sell what they sell strategically. We want to, you know, and the assets usually tend to, cause more to your point, cause I've dealt a lot with the mid market to CEO of a mid market company.
They're not like, Oh, well, we're children of a lesser God compared to the enterprise. Their world is that is its entirety and its
That's right.
right? And they're like, we want strategic things too. And it's harder for us to source capital. We're not public. So we don't have this big pile of cash from going public.
It's harder for us maybe to issue a bond. So generating free cash flow is more of an imperative because that's one of their main control paths. For funding their growth and so they almost need these assets more because they don't have as much dumb money as these other companies who are larger and we think, oh, they're smaller and it's but they got the same problems just at a different scale because they're trying to grow.
They're trying to, you know, drive incrementality the same way the big companies are. We just know, well, yeah, they don't have as much dumb money. So we'll let partners sell to them. Brilliant. Right.
That's a
Well, Andy, maybe that's why, in your example, the deals that you've closed, the 6, 7, 8 figure deals, those are public companies.
Not always, no, but largely,
So, to Eric's point, like, they have more money to spend. I feel like maybe I'm wrong because I've never sold 7, 8 figure deals, but maybe these larger companies think more opportunistically versus I need to solve the problem. They're thinking bigger.
but I, well, it's, yeah, it's part of that, but so I spent a good chunk of time selling products that didn't exist. So I had a bucket of technologies that, you know, I had a charter to go out and find customers who wanted us to design and build products for them. And so I was having conversations with people that. Had no idea about that. They had a pain or perhaps even didn't know about a potential opportunity until we started having conversations about it. And I didn't know what the out, you know, end product was going to be either. And so I've always sort of envisioned that sort of like, yeah, maybe selling for a BCG or a large consulting company.
It's like, you know, I don't, we really don't know, you know, how we can help you yet. And I don't know how, whether you need help, but. Hey, let's have a conversation. And over time, perhaps we might come up with something and yeah, which it was oftentimes found is, yeah, well, we really, we thought about entering this market and you know, wanting to capture this market share and going to the brand new geographic market or whatever, Hey, that'd be something potential that we could help them with.
And so yeah, it was opportunity based oftentimes. So anyway, yeah,
Richard, all I know is this. If you call somebody up and say, hi, it's me. Someone you don't know name, you don't recognize from BCG Bain or McKinsey. And you call an executive, they'll say, go on, right? Cause you're a brand that I want something from someone to pay for it. If I say I'm calling from Oracle SAP or nondescript software company I've never heard from.
I know one thing really quickly. I don't get my ideas from companies like yours. And the one thing that is absolutely true, the one thing you always know, executives are always in the market for actionable business ideas or assets they can find to drive growth or drive operational efficiency. And almost every B2B company that gets past.
The chasm, right, is obviously giving some addressable market, so enough business value to be funding off of their own profitability versus investor money. And most companies, the marketing teams don't do it. The sales teams don't do it. They don't know what business idea are we selling first. What business outcome that can, outcomes that are measured in a spreadsheet, on a discounted cash flow analysis, not value as a word that is undefined.
And that's what's not happening. And it's ridiculous because everyone has a story to tell on that front, if they're a viable company.
right. Well, great point to end up on. Unfortunately, we're running out of time here. Thank you everyone. Great conversation. I presume people can find you on LinkedIn. I used to ask how people would find you, but now I just say people can find you on LinkedIn, don't even have to ask that question anymore.
Eric, thank you, Richard. Thank you more. Thank you. And look forward to everybody back again at some point.
Great
Always fun, Andy. Thank you.
Thanks, Andy.