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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 Vince Bisi. And Vince is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Vince is founder and CEO at sales at scale, which is a B2B sales consultancy, accelerating revenue growth for venture capital backed startups.
My other guests today for this really interesting discussion about sales effectiveness. The buyer experience and increasing win rates are Luigi Preston Enzi. Luigi is the founder of the Growth Forum and More Better HQ, and he's co host of his own podcast titled Scalable Growth, and lastly, joining us as Kyle Williams, Kyle is the founder and CEO at Brickstack and Kyle's also a frequent contributor to this podcast.
Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I love to answer your questions about sales and sales effectiveness and win rate. So if you have any questions at all about B2B selling and how to increase your win rates that you'd like answered either by me or one of the guests on the show, then please submit those to me.
You can do that via email at winratepodcast at gmail. com or you can DM me Andy Paul on LinkedIn. Love to hear from you and hear your question. 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 you for taking the time to listen as always. I'm so grateful for your support of the show. Now, if you're enjoying this new podcast, could you leave a quick rate and we're still new, we're only about 20 episodes into it.
So if you could do me a favor, leave a quick rating review for the show on Apple podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Because receiving this feedback is very important, and I really appreciate your help with this. Also, I want to thank my guests today, Kyle Williams, Luigi Preston Enzi, and Vince Vesey, for sharing their insights with us today.
If you enjoyed this episode, excuse me, 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. Also, lastly, before you go, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. Over 50, 000 sellers and sales leaders subscribe to receive my weekly newsletter, and perhaps you should too.
It's called the Win Rate Wednesday. Each week, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and a bunch of other great sales advice as well. So to subscribe, visit my website, andypaul. com. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul.
Good selling, everyone.
Welcome everyone to this episode of the win rate podcast. I'm so excited. Everybody's joining me today, especially a guest from Australia. Who's woke up very early on a Saturday morning to join us, Luigi Preston Enzi. So, if everybody would just take 30 seconds, a minute, just introduce yourself a little bit.
Luigi, we'll start with you.
Yeah. So, thanks for having me on your show, Andy. I was a big fan of your other, of your last podcast. So it's great to be one of the early guests. I'm a sales, yeah a bit about me. I'm a sales practitioner, obviously from Australia. Been working in sales pretty much my whole career. I'm running teams and also helping teams optimize their sales process.
But everything I work on, I do myself or I try to do myself. So, I'm learning in the trenches. So again, thanks for having me on your show. Well,
Slobs that are on camera here today. VInce, you're
On that note well, great to be back. Andy, Vince Beasy here. Like my career has mostly been at startups for the last 23 years and various different executive roles, but always focusing on revenue. And today I'm helping early stage and other growth companies with go to market execution with my firm called sales at scale.
excellent. Excellent. And Kyle.
Thanks for having me on again, Andy. Great to
Yeah. You're almost like a cohost now,
we'll fly on the wall. Yeah. I'm Kyle Williams sales leader, learned how to code worked everywhere from Google to Sequoia back startups to running my own firms to now I run a company called Brickstack where we help companies win by playing where they can win.
And so a lot of that is where you point your team and your target market and exercises around understanding that and pointing that in a bespoke way.
Excellent. All right. So a question for everybody here to start with is. What's one thing you think, about selling that sort of like a unique perspective you have that you think if everybody sort of shared this perspective, they could succeed at sales. Vince, let's start with you.
You can't do that. I think the one thing, if it's kind of like a superpower, I was always able to see through the BSS of a deal and really understand if it's real or not. From early stages through late. I'm very good instinctually and understanding the deal. So I'd say that I guess it comes down to being very honest.
I'm not afraid to lose. I'm not afraid to win, right? So being very honest about the opportunity. So I think that would be the thing that I really understood about is like, you don't have to win every opportunity. You just have to win the opportunities that you have to win that makes sense that are winnable, right?
So we're going to get back to this topic actually later. Essentially you brought that up, but so how do you teach that? Cause for each of these things, I'm going to ask you, how do we teach other people this, right? And you said some of it's instinctual and obviously some experience, but.
Mostly something in there we could teach people is, how do they become more discriminating, if you will, about what they're deciding to work on?
Yeah, I'm instinctual about these deals because I ask the right questions. I'm inquisitive. So if you ask the right questions, if you're a curious person, you will get the answers that you need to understand if it is real, if it's a mutual fit for both parties, right? So I think it's that being inquisitive and asking the right questions and taking the time to dig a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper to see what the opportunity might be or the pain might be, right?
Yeah, it's a matter of, not to try to pin it down too much, but curiosity, just willing to be curious and, stray off script. You use the term the right questions, but, the right questions can vary from situation to situation. But if you have, if you're curious about the people and what they're trying to achieve and how you might be able to help them, then you begin to find what the right questions for that situation, right?
Yeah, I look, I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to waste their time, right? So I want to ask the right questions to see if we should work together or not. I'm not looking for every lead to turn into an opportunity. I'm looking for the opposite. I'm looking for the right leads to work to turn into opportunities.
And I think if you're that type of person that's looking for the truth. then I think you will find the answers. And again, and if you've done this long enough, like us old guys, you start being able to tell the difference between someone that's being forthright, not forthright. And if it's real or not, right?
Yeah,
conversation with some sales leader the other day. It's like, you should, if something's good, if you're going to start investing in a deal, an opportunity, you should have a sense why you're going to win. Right. I, from having asked the question, it's not just, Oh, it's open competition.
Cause they're going to buy. It's like, Oh no, why are you going to win? Right. You have to have some indication of that before you decide to invest your time and effort in it. Everybody's nodding their heads. If you can't see, if you're
well, it's interesting, Andy. I think that goes down to the, some of the foundational stuff of selling that's really important and knowing where to spend your time, like who to actually focus your attention on. So as long as you've got a clear ICP or ideal customer profile or ideal account profile, and you're really clear on this is where we need to play because, that X amount of, this part of the market, potentially has this problem that we can solve, then that's increasing your chances of winning because you're at least dealing with people that have a better fit for what you sell, right?
I think that's also important. I think the other thing, and it's not a unique perspective because it's been spoken about for, such a long time in the world of selling and personal development. But, um, I think it's the importance of giving and nurturing and educating because you're not always looking to close the deal.
And it's just a very short story. But I was interviewing an enablement lady yesterday who's actually looking to purchase an intent data platform speaking to two different providers. One provider has primarily been trying to close the deal, where the other provider has been encouraging her to engage with other people in the buying committee, because the product and solution impacts other people, and has been giving information about how it impacts and bringing them into the sales cycle, right?
And the other provider's doubled the price, yeah? And so now they are moving forward with the other provider. So completely different mindset shift, instead of just trying to close the deal. They're actually trying to nurture, deliver insights, do all the, some of the foundational stuff that we sometimes forget is absolutely critical in, in the sales process.
Yeah. Helping versus selling.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree. I think this is, to me, this is sort of the fundamental mindset shift that, and let's plan, hopefully we're going to talk about this more later is that sellers have to begin to embrace and some do already, but if we're trying to ever get to the point where people's default mode coming into sales is not super salesy, then, yeah, we have to have something for them to gravitate to that's different.
And I think the point you're making, it's about helping. If we help somebody to make a decision, then we're likely to be rewarded than if we just show up and try to close them. Kyle,
I would add. Yeah, I think, curiosity is what I was going to lead with. And I think it ties into what I hear. We're all talking about this, having a sense of when a deal is good or not. But how do you, if I think about the rep who doesn't have that heuristic yet, they don't have the 6th sense.
They don't have the tacit knowledge. How do Get there and the skill, if I could share it with everyone that I think would improve sales is knowing how how to turn failure mode into a success, meaning you're always learning, even if I'm not progressing this deal, being able to drop some of the pretense.
I think a lot of times. The reps who are working to make that transition from the conscious competence to unconscious competence, which is really when you can build that 6th sense, um, is there's a big barrier internally to say, I don't want to look dumb. I don't want to look like I don't have the answer and that is a barrier to curiosity.
So being able to reduce that to be able to sometimes even, there's parts of the industry you're in where you can learn that from your prospects, some of the best. Aspects of, when I think back when I was at Google and we're selling to folks who had different flavors of exchange and they're running all of these, I, there's no way they could teach us all the it expertise.
But if I ask my prospects one, I'm learning from them. That curiosity has helped me to understand their situation to be more helpful. And then that builds the unconscious competence to be able to have the sixth sense for the next call. When someone says, exchange 5.3, I know exactly what that means and we can just jump to that part of the conversation.
So I think that curiosity as a mechanism for learning for yourself as much as it is for helping the prospect and building those instincts.
You said something really interesting that triggered a thought. You were saying that, sellers don't like to appear to be dumb or uninformed or whatever. And that, by the same token, it seems like sellers don't have that same reluctance to show up as being super salesy and unhelpful. Right, it's based on customer, customer survey feed
that's just a mask, right? That's just the masking their lack of product or service understanding. And so I'll go back to what Kyle said. I think if you don't want to seem stupid in a conversation, Then take the time to really understand your product, your service or whatever you're selling. Become the expert in the solution that you're selling.
And if you are the, an expert in the solution that you're selling, you'll never feel as though I'm going to sound stupid by asking the next question. And that's the thing that, enterprise sellers, you have to learn, well, you should be learning about the product before you make your first call or send your first email.
You should take the time to really ingrain yourself with that. And that's. I think that's vital. And I think that's, I think it's gotten better over time. When I first got into startups, it used to be day one, you'd be here you go. Here's your computer. Here's the email. Go ahead and start sending email.
You didn't know anything. You'd start reaching out to people. You get no training, at least sales enablements become a lot better, even at early stage startups over the years.
Right. We still have the same issue though, that, buyers first impression of sellers is negative, overwhelmingly negative because they show up and pitch before they make an effort to really understand anything. So, and again, that doesn't seem to. embarrass, or mortify sellers the same way it would that they've show up not knowing what they're talking about or that someone exposes them for not knowing what they're talking about.
Why can't we help them start with that first part? Cause then we'd ease the path into being able to ask the questions that need to be asked.
you've got to have the will. You've got to have the will to develop the skill. That's the first thing. Right. And I think a lot of and. As a salesperson myself, I don't take this comment lightly, but I think there's a lot of sellers out there that just are looking for the easiest path to an outcome, right?
It's easy to jam a hundred prospects into a sequencing tool and come up with one message for a hundred people. Like that's easy. And unfortunately, there's a lot, there's a, what I see. There's actually a lot of lazy people out there, right? And we're humans, right? We try to do what's easiest. But, unfortunately, that makes it harder for you.
Right? Because you start to burn your tam and all that sort of stuff. So I think how do you change that? Yes, enablement's gotten better and it's great to teach him about product sales, et cetera, but I think this is where we need to get that foundational stuff in place. And this is where I think sometimes less tech is more is better,
meaning
Well, sequencing
the phone and call somebody, right?
Yeah. Yeah. All
I mean I was, talking to two different sales leaders in the last week who talk about how they're getting on the plane more. They're going to visit customers again and enough with video calls. Let's go see somebody in person. Is this something you're seeing as well? Trends with the companies you're working with?
the time. I'm doing it more. I'm spending more time on the plan now. I think that whole. COVID, especially in Australia, killed travel for a couple of years. Most locked down place in the world, but now it's just back. And I think people, more people want in person. I was at a conference in Orlando.
It was like 1500 CFOs. They loved it. Like you could see people were just wanted to be in the same room. They wanted to go to the happy hours. They were looking for human interaction versus teams and zoom and Google Hangouts and all that sort of stuff. Right? So I think, people talk about the old school sales model is dead.
I actually think the whole going out to see clients, face to face, going out for a beer, like, those things are critical. Yeah, people buy from people.
I, I feel like, you said that, some people are lazy and I think that extends to a lot of the Go-to-market motion is the, there's, we've kind of gotten drunk off of removing. The stakes from go to market, so we're gonna put it in the sequencer. We're gonna pump the ads. We're going to use AI to write the thing.
And as someone who spends a lot of time in code, very pro technology and the advancements that happen there. But I think when we, when you remove the stakes, eventually, you remove the thing that made it work in the 1st place in biology. I just recently learned about this concept called costly signaling.
Which is, why does the peacock have this big giant tail that serves no purpose beyond a, hey, look at me is it's the same principle of if you saw 2 people running and they're running at the same pace. And 1 of them's wearing a 60 pound pack on the back on their back. You'd say, well, that 2nd person is probably more healthy.
They can do that. It's the same as. Yeah, and the peacock is sort of signaling, I can have this big, giant, useless thing on my back and still get away from predators, right? So I'm the healthier specimen, but we've removed all the stakes from our go to market, right? We're hiding behind the technology.
We're hiding behind the sales in this mask. Like you talked about events and there's nothing for us, as a prospect, it's hard to figure out who really has a solution here when it's all these low stakes masks
Well, that's a great perspective. I like that. Vince you're
and that's why I think that it's, this is the best time in the history of mankind to be a salesperson because it's so easy to distinguish yourself versus the average sellers out there because they're all hiding behind their computers, their zoom, their everything, and like phone calls, voice calls, like not even video voice calls and face to face, you got to know how to communicate that way, not through a video, not through a presentation, not through AI.
Right. It's going to come back to, boy, do you know how to relate to people anymore? Because, Luigi, like you, I was in a conference recently in Orlando as well. Same vibe. Like, oh my god, people were like, even though it was 3, 000 degrees outside inside the conference center, it was nice and cool. But everybody just wanted to network.
Everybody wanted to talk to a human being face to face. And I'm finding, like everybody else is seeing that I'm forcing myself, instead of sending that next email, I'm actually picking up the phone. And starting at least to use my phone more. And so I'm starting to see that trend, and I'm seeing to see way better results by just using my phone and trying to have a more personal level of dialogue.
And that's setting me apart, for
Yeah, there was this, and to that point about the phone, there was this study that came out, I think it's like in the first year of the pandemic, but people have been studying zoom even before the pandemic. And what they found is that actually you could communicate more effectively in terms of connecting with the person on the other end.
And communicate more nuance through the phone than through the video call. Because what happens is people are so focused on looking at you, that they're not listening to the same degree.
Yeah.
so this recommendation was from this, I forget what the researcher, article saved somewhere, but is that, to your point Vince, yeah.
Pick up the phone, call somebody, have a phone call.
That's a differentiator. I swear to God, like, you calling is different than the 20 other reps that are sending emails right now, right?
Yeah, if 20, right?
Yeah. And I also think to some extent, like we've been a little bit misguided, right? Because there's a lot of data from Gartner to say the buyer wants less interaction with sellers and we need to remove the friction and that all sounds great. Right. But when you're buying a very transactional product, very simple product that can be quite easy to remove the friction.
Yeah. You can make it a non human interaction. But the reality is, and we see the data all the time, what is it, 40 to 60 percent of deals end up in no decision because it's difficult to get the entire buying committee to agree to get consensus. That requires scoping, that requires the ability to gain alignment, to get agreement on the problems that they're trying to solve and how it is impacted.
And I spoke to a CFO yesterday that we were interviewing of a very large organization. And some of the things that he said, like some of the questions that he said he needs to ask when somebody brings a business case to him for money, he's saying what's the incremental benefit? And he asks, he's asking key questions and he says, because if I've got to give you money that I haven't budgeted for, I'm taking it from somewhere else.
And that can create an anti sponsor somewhere else. That can create somebody to say, Hey, I'm not agreeing with this because that's my budget, right? You're taking it from me. So there's going to be internal debate, right? You need a person to help facilitate all of that, right? So, and I think this is where we need to just sort of put a line in the sand to say, Sure, technology can create a frictionless sales process.
But there are certain situations it can't. And this is where sales people, sales professionals need to have those critical skills to be able to facilitate conversations, know when to stop selling and start to go, we need to get buying, right? We need to put an action plan. I need to be that trusted advisor to be able to come into the boardroom and present and actually challenge everybody's thinking here to get the robust conversation up on the table. So that's just to your point, Kyle, about, We try to hide behind technology. Sometimes you can't.
feels like to your point of, that's a lot of calories to go spend to help an organization navigate. Right. Sponsor and the anti sponsor and we don't have unlimited calories to spend in the day. I do think that's where technology can assist, right? To help and Andy, we talked, we've talked about this at length to help you assess sort of where.
Can you win and then help to know where to focus your time as you're building those heuristics to do it yourself. Whereas today's go to market feels more like we're just panning for gold or just shove as much dirt in there and shake it as hard as you can. And hopefully some flakes fall out. And now we have, a large portion of salespeople that have been trained how to treat inbound and any lead that's not served up, with the right, why it's almost, I use the analogy of.
When you're hiring an active versus a passive candidate and we're treating, anyone who's not inbound, like they're inbound. And it's like asking a passive candidate, why would you leave your job? I don't know. You called me and we don't know how to navigate that conversation partially because we don't know where to spend the calories and partially because we're sifting a lot of dirt.
Yeah, well, there's, that sort of leads to a question, actually a listener question that somebody submitted recording this after only a few episodes of air. And so early user listener or a listener question, but it's talking about they were acting out for which conversation they were active with saying the one, some help, which is, yeah, how do we create.
Oilarson sounds cross cultural on the one hand and people think that consumer goods, other people think they're drugs. That's thought is, they should be cyed back into human well, essentially, not into human terms, but they should feel like they're being shown this way, or like, you're
Well, I think it starts with what Luigi was talking about before is like number one is what's your ICP, right? There's characteristics of the leads or accounts that have come inbound that just on the surface look like potentially be a good fit. So that's number one, right? And then it's the criteria questions that you have to ask to figure out if there's mutual fit, right?
That's what I'm always looking for. Like on a. Intro call or just trying to figure out what's what here, right? So I think that's up to the sales leader to put a process in place and make it uniform. So we understand what's the difference between a qualified lead and a qualified opportunity. It's pretty simple, right?
Like if I have a first call and you ask these questions and these are answers that come out of it, it's a lead. If not, keep exploring or if not, say no and move on. That's easy. If you have a sales leader that's put Even a little bit of process into it, right? It's not that complicated.
Sellers that they have to maintain certain, pipeline coverage ratios. And there's this reluctance to stand up to a boss and say no and saying, look, I'm operating with lower pipeline coverage. That's okay. Cause I'm going to deliver and yeah. How do I have that conversation with the boss to say back up?
Well, I don't, gosh, this is a whole, I could go off on this one. Like, yeah,
Go ahead
what you, I don't really care about coverage. I care about when you accepted an opportunity. Do we have a fighting chance at winning this? And are we doing everything we can to win? I don't care if you have 4x or 5x or 6x your coverage.
That comes from the leader stating the expectation of the sales team. So I'd say the sales person, if they feel that way, it's because the leader is putting that expectation on them. So it starts with the sales
Yeah,
I want to alleviate my team of the expectation. What I'm expecting from my team is that you will work hard, you will train, you will continue to learn, will continue to get better and will win more than we lose because we're doing the right things that we've been trained and we agreed to, right?
That's my expectation, right? I don't want them to feel extra pressure. I want them to do the right thing for the company and for the opportunity.
But you alluded to it. You had, three or four things, questions you needed certain types of answers to in order to progress. So that's sort of your acceptance criteria you had. Okay,
Yeah. Yeah.
or Luigi, excuse me.
I think it's an interesting one, right? Because that whole pipeline coverage, if you look at what a leaders, what organizations looking at, they're looking at certain metrics and this can actually create. Some really, I wouldn't say bad behaviors, but sales reps can start to fill their pipeline just with stuff to meet, their pipeline coverage targets and then companies bring in medic or other qualification criterias because they want to make sure that there's the right type of accounts in the pipeline, et cetera.
But I think this can potentially lead to the wrong behaviors. Because you're creating a level of pressure on people to say, yes, we need to create this volume of pipeline, right? foR me, it goes back to some of the basic foundations. I've just got to have the right conversations with the right type of prospects and people, right?
And I think, again, this is where that whole inbound versus outbound, and this constantly comes up, right? Constantly comes up in conversation. The buyers inbound's a new way, demand generation. That's all good and proper, but unfortunately, Inbound just doesn't create enough qualified pipeline for sellers, right?
They have to be able to go out there. Now, again, this is where If you think about networking events there are multiple ways in which we can go and create pipeline, not just cold calling. There are absolutely multiple ways that we can do it. And this comes back to that foundational stuff. So, I think there's, it's a healthy balance, right?
Yes. We've got to manage up, but we've also got to manage our own pipeline and be able to have the skills to go out there and create it.
Right. So this is a topic that's come up a couple of times in the podcast recently is this idea of the full cycle seller. Is this the time when this is going to start
is a full cycle seller?
Should never have changed. Like for, if you, I don't get this concept.
What? It says what
Haha. Yeah.
bring that topic up? You mean I'm going to actually start from the beginning, create a relationship and see it all the way through? What are you talking about? This is madness.
way that's it? This is panicking, panic inducing in some segment of the AEs out there, cause it's like, you want me to prospect,
to put the customer on a conveyor belt and every step along the way, they get to talk to a different person.
Yeah. It's, many haven't been in that position where they've had to go do that. It wasn't expected of them, but it's seemingly, yeah. I hear more and more sales leaders and some case, some embracing it, but yeah, higher fractions are tiptoeing toward that line, Kyle and I work on a bunch of data with companies.
We look at it and it's like, well, because we're doing deep dives in the company's win rate sounds like. Yeah, this segment that self source leads and performs at much higher levels. And yeah, AEs aren't drunk on the prospect of all these quantity of leads coming in, though they're not very good leads.
Yeah, look, I think the assembly line model absolutely is a valid go to market model, right? Let's not, say it's completely wrong. I think it's absolutely has a, it was never meant to, in my opinion, to say AE shouldn't be self sourcing. Right? Because as an AE, you have, you can create a better point of view to be able to self source because you're dealing with people and fixing these problems all the time, more so than an STR or a BDR.
I just think, again, especially the tech sector, this is actually a major problem for the tech sector. A lot of other industries don't have this problem, real estate they're hunting and killing, right? Like a lot of other industries. Are going out, they're still doing the traditional, sourcing, closing, right?
I think the tech sector got very focused because they could on creating these assembly line models. But a lot of other industries, are called old school sales models. But they can still prospect.
Sure. But, even in the thin tech space, in the SaaS world, how bad do win rates have to get before you begin to think, yeah, maybe this isn't working? But,
When you lose your job.
seriously though, seeing lots of data from companies that outwardly look healthy, but you look at what's really happening under the covers, and it's like, This is not going to be sustainable in the long run.
I think it's also, in addition to reflecting and really doing a deep dive on the win rates, it's. With this notion of full cycle sales, it's, we haven't said anything about the buyer experience. It's not a great buyer experience to go through on the conveyor belt, right? So I bet you, if you guys, when you do your analysis, if you actually spoke to the other side, the buyer, they prefer to speak to one person throughout the process, however long that lasts.
And so, to me, I think that's one of the reasons why you're probably also seeing higher success with the full cycle salesperson is because there's a lot of good continuity. They're building the relationship, they're building the trust through one person, as opposed to keep getting handed off to the next person.
On the, the beltline. So
Yeah. If they have the capabilities.
we Should all be taking consideration of like, it could work. I agree with Luigi. It can work in a lot of cases where you have handoffs. But I think we should always consider what's best for the customer. What does the customer want?
The buyer, right?
And I don't think that's been considered at all relative in most of the SAS world.
I think some of the buyer experience is reflective of the process that we put the buyer through as well. Right? If you look at when does an executive get involved on the buyer side and the sales process. I think it's typically 1 call at the end for about 15 minutes. Whereas, if you talk to the executive about the actual decision that's being made, it's usually rooted in some strategic question.
That they had, like, I was talking to an executive recently, who's a VP of customer success. And he was trying to answer the question of, I want our customers to be more engaged with us. That is the problem statement. And I've heard that it can be good to certify them on our products. So we do a learning management system, or maybe we start a community so they can connect with each other more.
At this point, he's not entering a buy cycle for either one. The problem is. I want my customers to be more engaged. And what he'd love to do is talk to some senior folks at companies that are in those categories and get their perspective philosophically about how it helps solve that problem. But he can't do that because what's the process I have to go to your site.
I click a button three days later, I get a message from an SDR scheduling a call five days out to then ask me five questions that I already know the answer to then five days later, talk to an AE who's going to ask me the same five questions, maybe show me a small bit of a demo and then say, Oh, I got to get the sales engineer on to actually answer your questions.
And then now we're two months out to know if they're entering a sales cycle at all. And yet now you are forever going to be hounded by that company. Before you've been able to answer the question because of the buyer experience. Has dictated that's not what the executive does. What they do is they say, I'm trying to figure out if these are going to help us solve our problems.
And then they pick someone on their team and say, you go have the conversation. And at that point you, as the selling side don't know truly what's driving this decision. aNd I think because of the process that we've created for the buyer, that's how they've responded. They don't enter the cycle at the strategic level intentionally.
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's like, there's a shifting and well, I think Luigi brought up, but yeah, percentage of buyers say a report that they don't want to prefer not to deal with sellers. Whatever that number is, 75 percent or whatever, I actually like to say I think the number is actually 100 percent that don't want to, don't want to deal with sellers, with salespeople, but understand they need to for the reasons
Yeah, you have to.
right?
If it's the right person, I think buyers have time for the right seller who shows up with the right,
Yeah.
In the right way, asks the right questions. Vince talks about four, engages, starts building a level of trust. And demonstrates to the buyer that they can help them with this process they're going through of, making a decision and make some substantive change in their business.
So Andy, this is a question I posed to a whole bunch of CFOs, like only a few weeks ago at this conference CFOs of pretty large businesses and also chief business officers. And I said this, I said, , do you like to hear from salespeople? And they said, we don't, what they said is, we don't like to hear, like, to get all these pitches and, these sequences, they actually talk, like, they're very educated now, they know when they're on a sequencing email, right, , they said, we don't have all the answers. We're actually facing challenges that we haven't faced before. We, we've come out of the post COVID era. We want education. We want somebody to share how others are fixing certain problems or tackling, not even fixing, just tackling certain problems.
We want to hear insight and educate. This is exactly what they said, and it was validated by so many different people. So it's not that they don't want to hear from salespeople or vendors. They just don't want to be sold to early in the process. They want that education. They want that insight. And for me, I was so encouraged by that.
And I asked him like, especially with cold emails, I said, do you look at cold emails? I said, yes. But if the first line and the last line if we, see the first line, it's generic, we'll just delete it. We've got time for it. Right? So that way, again, really encouraging for me.
Because that's just saying, you know what? They want to hear from people, but they want to hear from people that are prepared to do the research, prepared to take the time to actually say, here's a point of view that I think's really important for where you're at in your business, and in your journey, and in your industry.
Right? And this, I don't believe you can scale that at, personalization at scale and all that stuff. Like, this is a one to one. This is me reaching out to you, Andy, because of ABC.
Yeah, I, like, I think mass personalization at scale is an oxymoron, but Yeah I got one of my favorite cold emails ever, just two days ago. And it's this digital marketing agency. aPparently had sent me an email before I hadn't seen it. They said, Andy, reaching out, apparently you hadn't seen previous email.
Hey, we still pretty confident that we can really help a restaurant like yours.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
It's like,
ha.
Yeah. What about sell without selling out? Cause he was referring to the title of my book LinkedIn page. It obviously it's scraped. That's like, yeah. What about sell without selling out? Says I'm a restaurant.
Well, I keep getting the franchise emails. Right? And I'm like, boy, that they just targeting based on age. And that's it. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
on LinkedIn, like two or three times a day by the broker ones on that. And then they and then the other, like, like others, I have different things I do. Like, I'm a member of pavilion, right?
And they assume I work at pavilion. How are things going at pavilion? How can we help pavilion grow? I'm like, I don't know. Why don't you contact Sam? Like, It's like, did you even just take the time to read my bio? Like, it's just ridiculous
Just like some of that is Oh, go ahead, Andy
well, I was just gonna say the last, my last story on that. There's one of my favorites of my absolute favorite story is like a year ago, a little over a year ago, guy messes with me on LinkedIn. He had a direct message on LinkedIn says, Hey, yeah, Andy is, I was just looking at your profile and. I think you'd be an ideal candidate to start a podcast.
ha. Ha.
and they weren't wrong.
And I almost never respond to those. And I did to this person, I went back and I said, yeah, you're on the platform. You, at least you say you are. If you actually looked at my profile, you'd see that, yeah, actually I have a podcast, let alone, yeah, over a thousand episodes, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, You're on the platform. Didn't you do any research? And his response, a quote, we don't have time for that.
too.
he was honest.
shaking this dirt.
Yeah. At least he's honest, right?
Right?
We don't have time for research.
then that's why my opinion, right? This is why there's two camps, and. Unfortunately, there's some industries like, I don't want to deal with the salesperson. I recently was, in the process of purchasing a house and I can tell you all the, all the stereotypical sales behaviors were being exhibited. There's another buyer and, oh they want to do this price and changing the terms and everything that we've come to hate about. So it's still there. I wish I didn't have to deal with that salesperson. I wish it was completely frictionless that I could just jump online and do everything online, but I couldn't.
Right. However, that's also what creates that negative stigma because our buyers, whether they're C levels, they're also engaging with sellers that are doing that sort of stuff. So already there's that imaginary wall. So when we're reaching out to someone and we're exhibiting those behaviors, Andy, by not doing our research, et cetera, our buyers already have this imaginary barrier up, right?
Because they're dealing with so many people that are just trying to cut corners and they're exhibiting the wrong behaviors. And again, this is where I'm really confident. And I think like you, Vince, there's never a better time to be in sales than today. Because our ability to differentiate is actually really easy. just going to get the basics really good. Do the basics well, show up, be professional, be someone worth, showing up to say, I've got something of value to provide. I've got a bit of education. I've got a bit of insight and I've done some research. You know what? That is the foundational stuff of selling.
So we can just do that. We're actually differentiating, right?
We'll be more interested in them and what they need than what you need. Yeah.
You talk about this in your book, Andy. It's all the, this, everything we're talking about today is pretty much in your book. This is what I love about your little guide there, right? Cause it talks about those foundational elements that so many sellers have actually forgotten.
Maybe it's not even, they're forgotten. They just haven't been taught as entering these new orgs, right? Especially in the startup land.
Well, and so along those lines, Go ahead, Kyle.
Oh, I was gonna say systemically. I think some of this, the symptoms of, I don't have time to not look up if you have a podcast when I'm trying to tell you should do a podcast is, and we talked about this on a prior episode or maybe it was in a rerecord, I see really good go to market as a function of three simple things. Relevance, resonance, and reach. So relevance is this person either actively or passively in a state where there is value to be created. Resonance, do I have the ability to set myself apart or resonate with the fact they're in that relevant state? And then reach, can I do it an appropriate like amount of calorie spend or bandwidth that I can hit my number or the company can hit their number at the right, cost of acquisition, et cetera. And the problem I see is the market said reach is the most important thing. And then the next two, but if whichever one you pick first, you sacrifice the next ones. And so in an ideal world, you would start with. Who is relevant then? How do I resonate with that? Then? How do I expand the reach? That person's telling you I can't.
And that's part of the problem is like you asked early Andy. How bad do win rates need to get before we change? Right? And the problem is we're all looking at each other and everyone else's win rates are down. And so then what's the response? Well, when rates are down as an accepted fact Versus something you can control because we can look at each other and say that and I've spent a lot of my career, go to market a lot in outbound and people say, how many touches should I have in a sequence? the answer is two more than last year, because if everyone's doing it, it's going to be less effective than it was because the real answer is as many as you have something to say,
that's a great, I like that, Cole, that's fantastic,
Yeah, as long as you're relevant and resonant. Yeah. Well, this brings up another question. Is... As I see this behavior in Vince, you're talking, you're working with a bunch of startups right now. And I've also worked with a number of them. Is that they try to scale before they learn how to sell the product they have. Right. Is, and I was having this conversation with a potential client just this week, it's like, yeah, they're gung ho to hire people, but the win rates are on the high teens They had this really great market. They could sell to that's very tightly defined ICP. It's like, yeah, let's not add people to actually learn how to sell this. Reliably and consistently at the level we want, right? That, we should win more than we lose at the stage. And then we can start adding people to the mix, but I see it backwards all the time, whether it's because they've just raised money or whatever.
And they have pressure on the board to go spend money, what have you, but it seems like that contributes to a lot of the problems, just learn how to sell it first before you scale.
well, one question of I should love to pose, right? Because I think everybody's talking about how the economy is making it harder to sell. Like it's, slowing down the sales cycle, people are spending less, win rates are down. Is it the economy that's impacting that? Or is it the way in which we go to market and the way in which we sell?
That is impacting sales cycle, length to buy, win rates down, because are people still spending money? Because that's what I heard. I heard people say, look, yeah, the economy is down, but we're still spending money. We're just be, we're doing more due diligence. We're looking at how do we can extract more from existing partners.
Like they're still spending money. There is still trillions of dollars being spent in the economy every day.
Yeah, well, you look at the, I'm not an economist, that's, here's my disclosure, a disclaimer, but our economy is not shrinking. We haven't entered recession. There's still economic GDP growth going, at least in the United States. Yeah, I think at least as in sectors of the tech space, people talk themselves into thinking that it was bad.
I think the velocity of VC money transferring from one startup to another has slowed down the amount of like startups just selling to each other, I think has reduced. And so that crunch I think is legitimate and then
It's legitimate.
Yeah. So that makes it harder to with it. And then it comes down to your sales scale, right?
Because we're not pumping the ads. We're not pumping,
Well,
hundred
it gets back to what I was just saying, though, is that if they actually learned how to sell the product to someone other than another venture funded startup, then they would be in better position.
yeah, a couple of things going on here. One, I think the sales cycles, if people are seeing longer sales cycles or reduction in win rates it's. Quite frankly, it's an effect of their environment that we're putting in place, right? Because I agree with you. I think to use the excuse of the economy or this or that, it's go back to the basics again.
What's a qualified lead? What's a qualified opportunity? If you have something sitting in your pipeline for 180 days, it historically should be 35 days. Well, guess what? Like, that's not that's the that's a process mishap. That's training. That's leadership. Like, why would you ever allow something? To sit in there for it's not an opportunity.
Right? And then you were bringing up, scale at an early stage companies or even growth companies. I don't even think they defined what scale means, right? They're just told go add 20 sales bodies because we had 20 sales bodies and 60 percent of them have somewhat success. We're gonna hit our numbers, right?
Like, the first thing I always do when I join a startup in a consulting type of capacity is I stay lit. Let's take a time out on hiring. Let me see what's let's take a look at what's going on here. Let's look at what success looks like and what success should look like. And why are some having success and when and it always comes down to, it always goes back To the basics 100 percent of the time, right?
And then once we slow down and we define some things with scale is and why would I scale and when should I scale and what the scale look like and put some rules behind that? It then translates into a more efficient process, right?
I agree.
But when you're moving at a pace, a certain pace and back in the glory days, when these users are just throwing money out, right, no one what scale meant was like, we just raised 40 million that's scale. No, that's not scale. That's funding dummy. Like you haven't figured out how to go from a founder sales to a sales led sales.
Right.
That was to my point.
that out first and translate that and then transfer it over and put a process in place. And then we'll figure out what a real cycle looks like. And then we'll figure out what a real pipeline should look like and velocity. Right.
Yep. I agree. I agree. All right. Well, gents, we're starting to run out of time here, but yeah, thank you for joining me. It's been great. Luigi, thank you for, again, waking up so early on a Saturday morning. And Vince and Kyle and as always, you're always welcome to come back and join us as often and as frequently as you'd like.
So, if people want to reach out for you and connect with you, Luigi, where's the best place to do that?
So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Look, there's not a, there's not a lot of Luigi Prestonensis out in the world. So you should be able to find me or check me out at growthforum. io. It's where I share a lot of content around sales and go to market related activity.
Perfect. And Luigi and I are both in a good mood today because as we record this is the first day of the Premier League season. So the
it just end?
slash football drought is over. We can start indulging once again. Go Liverpool. Okay. Vince.
Yeah. LinkedIn best way. Vince BZ like Luigi's pretty new name. So I don't think you have a hard time finding me.
And Kyle
I'm on LinkedIn as well. Kyle Williams, a little bit more generic. So if you need it, Kyle at brick stack. com as well.
I'm going to stop asking this question at some point, but I feel like obligated to ask. And it's always the same answer. Just go look on LinkedIn. Everybody's there these days. If they're not, well, that's a clue for you in one way or another. So, all right. Thank you everyone. And I look forward to talking to you next time.