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Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Jake Dunlap. And Jake is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Jake Dunlap is CEO at Scaled Consulting. My other guest today for this discussion about the use of AI in sales to improve sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improve win rates are Andrew Levy.
Andrew is co founder and CEO at AirCover and also joining us, my friend, Dave Brock. Dave is the CEO of Partners in Excellence. Now one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter. I want to join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive win rate Wednesday So each week or nearly each week on Wednesday You'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and you'll get a bunch of other great sales advice as well So you can subscribe by visiting my website andypaul.
com or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile Okay, if you're ready, let's jump into the discussion
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I thank my guests, Jake Dunlap, Andrew Levy, and Dave Brock for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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 this episode of the win rate podcast as always all star lineup of panelists joining me here today. And just give them each a little bit of time to introduce themselves. Jake, we'll start with you.
Yeah, great. Well, amazing to be here. Like I said, Andy, we've caught up now multiple times, whether on your podcast or others. I'm Dick Dunlap. I'm the CEO of Scaled. We are a revenue productivity and sales performance firm. Really what that means is we are 30 plus people who are dedicated to helping companies optimize and figure out how to scale their both revenue technology stack and their sales processes.
So our team does hundreds of sales technology deployments and hundreds of different overhaul and playbook packages every year. So when companies are trying to solve, you know, scaling challenges, we really are able to tackle it from both the enablement operations and strategy front and help to get things done.
Well, didn't realize you had grown so big, 30 people. Wow. Congratulations.
Thank you.
So, Andrew,
Yeah. I'm Andrew Levy, the co founder CEO of aircover. ai. We are a real time sales AI for live conversation. So what that means is imagine bringing your best seller, sales leader, SE with you onto every call. And as you're having a conversation, being able to surface the right content at the right time to help, you know, guide your sales reps through the ideal sales process and drive consistency in your messaging and positioning.
So gap, great to be here, Andy. And thanks for having me on.
yeah, my pleasure. So we did beauty for age. Dave, it's you,
I'm Dave Brock. I am CEO of
we're friends. I can say that to him. So
and you'll know, I'll get even. So, but I'm CEO of Partners in Excellence. We're a management consulting company, about 15 of us around the world, focusing primarily on business strategy, go to market strategies. And primarily for kind of global 500 corporations.
got it. All right. So, this episode is part of series. We're doing that's really focused on, you know, ways we're reinventing sales and I've got some good people here. Good subject matter experts. So we talk about that. And so. Sorry, ask a general question, which I'm just jokingly asking it. So does anybody have any opinions about AI and sales?
Yeah, so I'll leave it off the question as is last week. I saw a post about, I actually just guess a couple of weeks ago, post about AI and top of the funnel. And it was a post about how to write prompts to write a compelling email. And yeah, I've also seen some demos of. Tools and AI powered tools that use AI to engage and set, you know, write emails based on the tone and the personality of the Recipients and so on.
All it's kind of cool stuff. So, but the question that sort of came to mind as a reading this post last week, I was like, okay, that's very cool, but how does it solve or not solve or address the basic problem, which is, you know, the channel to buyers is just too noisy and too much crap being sent and buyers are tuning out.
So how do we, how are we using AI to address that? And I know Jake, you've thought about this a lot, so I'll start with you.
Yeah. Well, I think , that has been very much. Up until today, I think how people have thought about like AI is like, there's been a lot of these tools that have come up that are, you know, better messaging. And I can write this based on your disc profile. And the funny part is like, you know what people really care about?
Do you know what my company actually does? And do you know what my job title within that industry within my company does? And where generative AI chat, GBT in particular can come in is not to write the email for you. I mean, we have literally. We have tested all of them. We have built our own custom GPTs, chat GPT, and these tools is not great at writing really good emails.
It's great at snippets and it's great at research. And what I mean by that is like the best use cases are condensing a large amount of information. Into something that you can use that is hyper relevant. And to get me as a seller up to speed on the industry, you know, the people within the industry and how, and then, you know, also how our product connects those dots for them.
And so a lot of the work that we're talking to companies about isn't. How to write a better email is how can your reps use the tool to quickly say, Hey I want you to look at this company's press release page, their blog post page. I've copied and pasted in their last 12 linkedin posts. Here's the product that I sell.
What are the top 3 trends they're talking about? That would be make great talking points for me to have a conversation. And so it's the ability to then say, you know, summarize that data. And then if I'm a rep too, and maybe I don't know what a VP of operations and industrial manufacturing does, I can understand that.
What are the top trends in industrial manufacturing? What about for VP of operations? So in my opinion, it's raising the quality of the, our ability to do outbound by kind of going back to the basics, which is getting to know our buyer and the industries that they serve, et cetera. So those, that, that is.
The big win that we're seeing, not its ability to write an automated email.
And in those examples, I agree with you. I mean, those examples you gave though, is that. It seems more AE focused than SDR focused necessarily.
no, it could be for like your outreach messaging. Like, let's say you've got a template and I'm reaching out to, you know, Adam. And I'm like, Hey, I'm trying to set a meeting with the CEO of a sales tech. You know, it's the sales technology company who does ABNC. What are the top three trends I could highlight that would pique his interest.
And then you can copy and paste in those trends. Versus, you know, having to write a whole email. So, you know, they're very much, there's this kind of prep and research that can be used for highlighting something specific to the individual and trends in their industry. And that is what we're seeing is cutting through the noise.
Okay. Andrew, what are you seeing?
Yeah, no, I think that's right. You need that higher level personalization. I, you know, I think in a lot of the conversation is around you know, generating. Emails or even automating phone calls fully with taking humans out of the loop. But I think what's not being talked about enough and actually if any of you get Tomas's news, SAS newsletter, he mentioned this recently around the 10 X salesperson, I think that needs to be talked about more, which is, you know, rather than focus on removing humans completely, how can we supercharge them?
Help them You know, throughout that entire life cycle while they're talking to a customer after the meeting is over and then to Jake's point to drive some of that more personalization, being able to connect, you know, what are the resources they need, the content they need for that ideal follow up you know, not just completely generating the email, but actually figuring out what You know, when you're taking that consultative value driven approach, you know, what can I give them and respond with that is contextually relevant to, , driving that account forward.
So I think you know, and obviously we're a little biased because we focus on a lot on in meeting, but that's a relatively new area that it just wasn't possible even a few years ago. And now that we've had these advancements with LLMs. And AI were able to really empower the sales reps with the full knowledge of the organization where previously it was very expensive.
You know, you had to take reps out of the field for a month at a time, get them in training, you know, and hope that they retain a percentage of that going forward. Whereas now you can really enable them at the point of need, whether that point of need is, you know, in a meeting or sending a follow up email or any of the other different activities that they're.
Yeah, they're pursuing with a customer.
So tell us about the 10 X email. I'm always fascinated by, you know, it's a trigger for me, but going back to Grant Cardone days. So,
There you go.
You believe it or don't believe it.
so what was the, you know, the tenor of that or the thrust of that?
It's just leveraging AI tools to get more scale and leverage for your team. You know, better sales effectiveness , maybe it's the classic , getting more from less, but it's, yeah, it's really about just streamlining productivity and effectiveness by leveraging these new tools to you know, kind of increase their throughput, but also make it more.
Cater towards , the accounts needs, their pain points, their objectives at scale, you know, versus You know, having kind of, like low touch or I'd say more, more general, like low touch approach that, , you apply some single buyer journey across everyone. You know, now it's much more personalized, but it's also scalable.
Dave, what do you think?
It's well, first, I think there are a couple of things we need to kind of separate you know, because we use AI for this kind of broad brush, Everything in what most of us tend to be when we talk about AI, we're talking about large language models and generative tools, but AI has all sorts of other applications.
And I think those applications in the utility in driving. Sales performance in the ability to connect effectively with customers or are underestimated. And those tools have been in place for a long time. Analytic type tools that can bring us insights about what are happening with our customers what are happening with our industries tools that can help us say when and who and how should I intervene?
With a customer that may be facing something at a certain point in time, and I think I don't see enough attention being paid in at least my feeds to that aspect of AI, because, you know, the generative language models are, you know, hot and sexy and cool. The mistakes I think I, well, too much of the trend I see and what.
Andrew was saying that really resonated with me is we've been focused on efficiency and underneath that we've been focused on volume and velocity and what Andrew is talking about is kind of the effectiveness and getting closer to that human touch. In that human connection. So, you know, what I'd like to start seeing us talking about much more is human connection, human connected AI.
So how do we help salespeople connect as human beings much more effectively with customers? And then much more contextually relevant way, much more situationally relevant way in a much more, you know, maybe persona or behavioral style relevant way and I can get us up to, you know, I call it the last mile problem and I can get us up to that last mile.
But it's the human the ability of the salesperson to take that and engage in a really high impact and meaningful conversation with the customer. And I don't see us, I was really pleased to see Andrew focusing on that because I don't see much conversation around that.
Yeah. Any feedback on that? Jake, Andrew?
Well, that, I mean, that, that's my, I think from my example, that's exactly the goal is that if I can get reps up to speed on, you know, really empathy, which is like, I know what this person's going through. It's going to dramatically increase the quality of my conversation. And I think with generative AI in particular, I can role play with a CFO of an industrial manufacturing company who's very difficult and ROI focused.
And I can learn what that person might care about. And then I can role play with a VP of operations for that same one and see what they might care about. So. In my opinion, I think I was talking to a sales leader this morning and, you know, most of these sales tools have been about either efficiency or quality gains and generative AI in particular is both.
And so it should help. It will not should it is it will and is helping reps actually to have better conversations because it's, they can get up to speed faster on what their buyers are going through to then translate that either to booking a meeting or the quality of the conversation.
Yeah, I think that's right. And there's I think there's two parts to what Dave was saying. I'll start with the latter, which is more around human connection. I think part of, and it relates to what Jake was mentioning. Part of what the reps have struggled with in the past is really building in, especially for large enterprises, building in the pattern matching to, to be able to identify what is the right sales motion and path they should be taking, and then helping them go deep, you know, not just kind of ask the one on one level of questions, but two, one through one to really understand the needs on the other end.
A lot of the reps, you know, they're comfortable with the core motion. But as they're adding additional products and services, , the attach becomes an issue. And what also becomes an issue then is, , when you are having customer conversation, making sure it is relevant to what the customer needs on the other end, versus just focusing on, you know, the core of what, you know, maybe that business grew up with or what you're comfortable selling.
So it's that, you know, it helps build that, your credibility. It helps you have a better conversation. By leveraging AI to, , fill in those gaps and to, you know, really point them in the right direction. And then I think Dave, the other thing you were mentioning was you know, LLMs have taken a lot of the You know, the space in conversation, but yes, you're right.
There's other tools throughout sales lifecycle, whether it's, you know, gathering a better top of funnel intent type data, , there's forecasting, leveraging AI for forecasting and whatnot to better understand your funnel. You know, and NLP broadly has been around for a long time. I think part of the changes have really just been, you know, Rather than just be reactive, , to some of these things, I think some of the latest advancements help us be a little bit more proactive.
So an example being, you know, rather than just rely on re you know, relistening to recording later and wondering what went wrong and trying to not make the mistake for next time. And then doing one on one coaching, , how do we be proactive, you know, get ahead of those issues and then scale that broadly to the entire team.
Right. And that's what. New tools today enable. So it's you know, a little bit of better, you know, improvements on the previous AI tools, the last generation that we were using, but also just unlocking a new approach. That wasn't possible before.
So how do we avoid a situation or a scenario where, you know, my, my belief and my contention is that, you know, what we've seen from sales tools and sales tech over the last 10, 15 years, hasn't fundamentally changed sales effectiveness, the results we're seeing. I mean, it's, are you make the case, obviously the results of perhaps gotten worse because the tools were used to.
Basically automate previously bad sales behaviors about fundamentally changing things. So how do we avoid that? You know, Jake and I have sort of touched on this once before, how do we avoid that now so that, you know, we're not having this conversation 10 years from now looking back and thinking, Oh God, we really missed an opportunity there.
Cause we're still doing the same crap, but we're just using AI to help us do that same crap we're doing before. And well, anyway, I'll pause there.
I mean, for me I think the good news or scary news, maybe for some is that buyer behavior will, is going to dictate it. And what I mean by that is that if you look at just how much our B2C buying habits have changed in the last 10 years, you know, in 2014 we weren't, you know, there we weren't order things on Amazon Prime and they showed up the next day.
You know, we didn't have 55 streaming services. We didn't have, you know, everybody had the speed at which us, you know, as a consumer has now learned to make decisions, get access to information, self guide all of those trends will, they, it's just, it always happens. They come to B2B. And so company's ability to have, if a if a human, you know, you talk about human connection, if a human is going to be in the loop, they better add value.
So it's really very binary that these behaviors and people expecting customized sales journeys, people expecting when humans are in the loop, that they're adding a tremendous amount of value. You know, if you think about what's helping to happen to home buying and these other massive purchases, McKinsey's got a study out about, you know, people are right now ready to sell service at 40 plus thousand dollars purchases I think the behaviors will force us to say, look, how are we going to interject humans at the right parts of the process based on where people are?
And then we got to make sure that when we do interject that they are, you know, trained, they understand, you know, how to guide people through the process. They understand what their buyers going through or the buyer of tomorrow in the next 5 years is going to say, why am I talking to you? I already know more than you, I've already talked to your two competitors.
I have pricing. I've talked to my private Slack group about, you know, you all and how you stack up. I'm already at step five. And so I think we're just ready for this next iteration of sales and moving away from this one size fits all sales process that we run people through today. And I think, you know, the B2C behavior will force salespeople to either add value or be replaced.
Yeah I fundamentally agree. I'm, I think giving up a look at today is why are buyers talking to sellers? You know, there's this massive dissatisfaction that we see the surveys about, you know, buyers and sellers, B2B sellers and buyers. So
Well, buyers aren't talking to sellers right now.
well, no, but when they
is we see that we see the data that says 80 plus percent of buyers prefer a rip free buying process. And the problem with our volume and velocity kind of strategy right now is we're reaching out and nobody wants to talk to us.
So somehow, I think as Jake says, there are some things that should be fully automated that, you know, my buying bot will talk to your buying bot and we'll solve the problem. And that's great, but when we look at Truly complex B2B problem solving change management in buying processes, those are still very human centric but somehow we sellers are driving buyers to other alternatives because we aren't filling the gap that they need.
And I think, you know, where I see us. Where I see the tremendous opportunity with AI is being able to start filling that gap with deep meaning and deep relevance. Preparing the salesperson to do that, unfortunately most of the current application of AI. AI is really around dumbing the salesperson down,
explain that.
but it's again, it's all a strategy around volume and philosophy. So you look at, I was involved in, I had some controversial points of view, I think in a LinkedIn stream a few weeks ago is somebody, I think Pablo Dominguez was saying, you know, five years ago, the number of touches to get an engagement was two to 400.
Today, it's 1000 to 1400. And as we look at the numbers, they're skyrocketing. But the good news is AI automates all that. And, you know, I'm starting to look at that and say, we're going the wrong direction. Is anybody asking the question, What does it take for me to get back to, I mean, in our organization it takes 50 to 75 touches. What does it take to get back to some of those better numbers? And I think the tool, I think AI has some capability that we aren't exploiting because we're still on this volume velocity kind of, mission where we're not asking the right questions to say, Why should it take 1, 000 to 1, 400 touches right now to get a conversation?
What do I have to change about my engagement strategy, and how can I leverage AI to get it down to 500, to get it down to 100, and those things. So we're asking ourselves the wrong question, and that causes us to leverage AI in probably its least effective ways.
that's the big fear, right? That we're going to use AI tools the same way we use sales engagement tools is to flood people's inboxes
Yeah, but AI is only as smart as the people prompting and directing it.
When I think with the spam changes that. Google's made recently I think Microsoft may have made
yeah, they did as well. Yeah.
You know, I think it's even more imperative that we companies take a different approach. You know, if they're if they're doing what Dave continues to what Dave says, they continue doing that.
Yeah, they're going to have serious problems with their outbound campaigns. So I think, you know, as we're talking about earlier, getting better data on it. You know, who that buying group should be making that a bit more personalized, you know, not just leveraging Jenny. I had a spam as much as you can is it's definitely a better approach.
I think the other thing that I think hasn't been fully evolved yet, which I think will you know, I'm interested to see how this will develop is, you know, getting just very highly personalized. But automated ad campaigns down to like basically automated ABM campaigns that are highly personalized from a creative standpoint.
The problem with that is obviously if everything is personalized and nothing will be, you know, you'll start to companies will start to get used to seeing very specific ads and the creatives around them being catered towards them. But as companies start to generate that. You know, how do you then get their attention when, you know, it's it all kind of fade back to the noise.
I think there is a window, though, where, you know, now that could be effective. But no, I agree with what Jake and Dave are saying, you know, it's it's kind of the old garbage in garbage out, you know, analogy.
Yeah. But I think it raises sort of the, to me, sort of the critical point, which is, and this is, you know, irrespective of AI, but for sales in general, and you sort of touched on it with your reference to the Thomas 10 X email is. Yeah, I, you know, sample size of, you know, or example from a client and I've had this conversation several times with clients and people online is, look, we've done this deal and they document this deal and it was, you know, Multi year, three year, 400, 000 type deal, biggest deal in the company's history.
And they, I said, they did a great job documenting all the interactions I had and the touches and demos. I looked at it and went to the CEO. I said, yeah, good news, bad news. Congratulations. That's the good news. Bad news is you can't do another deal like that this year because it took too much time. From your sellers to make it happen too many touches, too many demos.
You just couldn't do it. And for me that really is, you know, a lot going with Dave's previous point about, you know, too many touches. How do we get back to what they were before us? Yeah. How do we use the tool to the technology more broadly as say, yeah. Why do we have to do that in 20 touches? Our goal should be we get this done in five interactions or six or, you know, whatever. And again, I don't see enough thinking about that. And I think that is really the golden opportunity.
Andy I'll take a crack, which is I think there's a few reasons why you don't see, I guess, like more solutions there. One, if you think about the mentality of most sales leaders how we were brought up is hop on a call. You know, you don't give information. You got to hop on a call and we were all right.
I mean, look, I mean, you know, we're laughing at like, that's what you were taught. You don't give pricing. You hop on a call, you know, I've documented my experience with trying to like self service by Salesforce and this, the ridiculousness I had to go through. And so there's this mindset of, this is what I know that works.
And there's fear of going against that. The other fear, and this is the bigger elephant in the room, a sales leader's worth is judged by the size of his team. And look, I'm not saying it's indicative. Of their, like their effectiveness, but I'm saying sales leaders in terms of their compensation in terms of, you know, Hey, Jake, you know what we want to do?
We want to build these digital channels where we digitally nurture them here. We've got demos online. This happens. And now my team does this. I, there is a, I am not incentivized as a sales leader to embrace that I am incentivized because guess what? If I want to go make a half million dollars at my next job, I ran a team of 80 people.
And now I want to make seven 50, I ran a team of 200 people and now and although this person scaled to a hundred million with 30 people, and this person scaled to a hundred million with 85 people in the public eye, you're like, Oh, this person scaled more. So right now, Andy, you have people that are in positions of sales leadership power that have no incentive to want to change from having a world where the salesperson is more in the loop than they need to be.
Because it's indicative of my earnings and it's indicative of how I'm viewed in the market as the quality of sales leader that I am. And like I said, it doesn't really matter. Like the behaviors will sweep this for at some point, but that is the real elephant in the room that there's no incentive for sales leaders to do this.
Yeah. Yeah. And the numbers out there are pretty abysmal on that front. I think the survey I saw something like if you looked at the SAS magic number of kind of your sales and marketing to net new ARR ratios, it was something like, I don't know, 38 cents for every dollar was the average, which is abysmal, like it should be, I mean, for a high growth company.
Yeah. I don't think you want to go below 50 cents. You know, maybe 75 cents. So it was. Companies are spending way too much probably because also the market is, it's just not easy out there. So they're, you know, spending as much as they can to keep up with growth. But as Jake was saying, also the incentives are a bit misaligned.
Hopefully now that maybe at least the public markets and even the private markets from evaluations at one are valuing you know, their margin and profit a little bit higher than in the past that, you know, we'll get back to some level of sanity there. But yeah, it's Companies are not being efficient with how they are building out those teams.
And I've been guilty of this in the past too. I had a previous startup. We ended up selling that to VMware, but we were a you know, we built out a large enterprise sales team when in reality, probably we probably could have been good with a high velocity inside sales team versus one that can, you know, take you out to golf.
So yeah I've been there and done that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, as you said, yeah, this incentive, how do we change this incentive? I mean, I, gosh, thinking back when I was growing startups and scaling from. Zero to close to a hundred million with three salespeople. We're selling different stuff. We weren't selling SAS. We're selling, you know, big hardware stuff, but nonetheless, I mean, it's, you always want to say, look, we want to learn how to really dial in how we know how to sell this thing at, you know, very high level.
Predictable level, you know, high win rates before we start scaling people. But are we just,
faster growth, faster,
got to have growth faster, right? We don't care about knowing what we're doing. Let's just go.
Here's the money we just raised or whatever. Go hire 40 people. And as a leader that, I mean, that's why the average tenure, right. Of sales and marketing leaders is so short because, you know, you got it. You there's no, there's, it's a lose.
It's impossible.
in most of these scenarios where if you do scale successfully, they go, great job. Now we need the guy or woman who scaled to 200 people. And so see you later. So like, it's, that's why I quit the race 10 years ago. As soon as I did it twice, I'm like, I see what's happening here. I'm going to just support those people.
And so, but I don't know, I mean, I think, look, part of this goes down to the education of sales leaders. Sales leaders are so used to flying the plane, you know, doing that sales leaders right now and VPs of sales and CRS in particular, you have to start to dedicate time to your own professional development.
You, they have outsourced their knowledge of sales technology and operations for too long. And generative is a perfect example of this. Every sales leader needs to fire themselves from their job for at least three weeks next this year and go learn what is like, because right now, the only way they know how to hit the number Andy is to.
Is by here's my bottoms up forecast of reps minus churn of reps with quotas minus haircut of quotas by team equals 70 million in revenue. That's the only way they know. And so when you say, great, I'm going to give you 30 percent less head count. They have not taken the, you know, we all get to that age.
It's like our early to mid thirties where you're well, I've mastered what I need to master. And we kind of are learning trickles off. And I just, I cannot stress, if you are a sales leader right now, and you are in your thirties, your forties, your fifties, you, the world is changing around you.
And if you do not invest time, the world is going to leave you behind because you will not know how Andy, they don't know how to scale a sales team. They don't understand how to use these tools other than for the more button. That isn't working. They already tried to use it the way that they use other tools and it broke.
And so there, there's a massive knowledge gap at the CRO and VP of sales level in terms of how to build teams productively verse headcount. And it just, that is the symptom that, or that is the issue, not the symptom.
Yeah. And I think on top of it, there was sort of an irony here too, and what you're describing in that you know, you've described, and I agree with you that, and Dave, as well as, and Andrews, you know, we can use. The tools, AI driven tools to be more deeply relevant, more deeply contextual, more quickly in terms of having better conversations. So we're talking about actually sellers becoming more effective, but the people are leading the teams are people that don't know how to be more effective because they grew up in an age where we could just be kind of shitty. But if we had enough stuff coming in the top of the funnel, we could grow.
Well, the funny part is Andy, guess what? We probably all grew up when you had to learn your buyer and all the calls and emails had to be personalized because there were no tools. The funny part is we grew up knowing how to do this. Like you had to I, you know, I worked at a company called career builder and we were regionally territory.
So my sales team was calling on a Aerospace company, and then a pest control and then a fortune, you know? And so we had to learn the buyer personas. We had to learn this stuff to like hit numbers. So the irony of this to me is like, we already know what made how this works. It worked then these tools were actually meant to not automate.
They were meant to scale and scale does not equal automation. They there, there's no equal sign between those two words. And that, that to me is the irony of this is like in the 2000s. You know, I kind of grew up in sales leadership. Like we already knew how to do these things, but now we've like regressed more than anything,
Yeah, because we get into discussions, Dave and I have had this discussion about yeah, win rates, you know, subject of this show is What people write about on LinkedIn is our top reps, you know, 30 percent and Dave and I look back when we were starting. It's like, well, we used to fire those people that could only hit 30 percent win rates.
right?
You know, they were taking up space that we couldn't afford. And, you know, if we couldn't coach him to a higher performance and feel free to jump in here, Dan.
Yeah, well, you know, we get, and I don't know what's caused us to get here. Is we get in these crazy cycles, you know, it seems the predominant cycle where we get into is one of do more. So we look at what are the tools, what are the things that we do to do more? And it's a volume velocity kind of game.
Every once in a while, somebody comes in and says gee, could we do better? Could we, for instance, take our win rates from 15 to 20 percent up to 30 percent or up to 50 percent or whatever? And so there's a little bit of cycle of how do we do better, but then it's, it starts getting into how do we do more of that?
And that makes a lot of sense. What you don't see people offering, asking enough of is how do we do different? And that's where the real innovation comes in and frankly you know, is, I mean, you and I are kind of the old farts of it, of the crew and
Wait, are you talking to me?
But, you know, is, I think in a lot of our career.
What we've gone through since we've gone through numerous cycles of this is, you know, we constantly look at how do we innovate in our go to market and our go to customer strategies. And I don't see very many people asking those questions, and it's interesting when you start looking at the characteristic.
of the companies that do ask those questions. They're very different and characteristic than what we see in a lot of the particularly the SAS technology companies.
So you're saying your client base, he says more fortune 100 type clients are actually being more innovative than what you're seeing in the
Yeah,
And give an example.
cycle that I see right now, and I think, I don't know whether it was Jake or Andrew mentioned it, is look at average 10 years right now. You know, average 10 years of salespeople is somewhere around 11 months. Average 10 years of managers is around 11 months. And so one, you start thinking, how do I ever accomplish anything with that?
You know, if I have onboarding cycles of, if I have a moderately complex set of solutions in a moderately complex buyer environment. And it probably takes me 6 months to 9 months to, in a lot of our customers, it takes them 12 to 15 months to ramp up. Then they start developing pipeline and then they start closing deals.
So they start, and you start seeing most of our customers have sales cycles of 12 to 24 to sometimes 30 months. And so now all of a sudden you start running the math. Wait a second. I have a guy that comes in here. He's working only for 11 months, but it takes me 9 months to onboard him. It takes him 12 months to go through his sales cycle.
Somehow something's not working. Then overlay on top of that, management tenure of 11 months. So I come in, I spend a few months looking at what we need to do to change and drive the organization. I put in place a change initiative before we even start getting results. I'm gone off to the other place.
So I'm starting to see huge cycles of organizations. The way they innovate is they change the management, but they never complete that innovation because that manager has gone. before they've been able to test and do that. So one of the tests, it's interesting, the most innovative companies I see are ones that for whatever reasons they have tenure.
So one of the things that we do, you know, is so most of our work is around innovation and transformation. So one of the things that we do is a screen for who we might work with is I ask a tenure question. Now, what's the average tenure of your people? What's the average tenure of management? It's interesting.
The highest performing and most innovative companies actually have the longest tenures.
Yeah. Yeah.
of these other things is we have the, we have great people, we have the opportunity to do things that are really exciting and different. But there's something about the culture of the company, something about the mechanism of how we work. that prevents us from doing what we could do and what we could do to achieve our full potential.
And so that's why I see so many organizations, they scale and scale and make their numbers and, you know, make their investors happy. They bring me in to do an analysis and I said, cool stuff. You're hitting your numbers. You're scaling like crazy. You're underperforming your potential. Do you know?
that's
Excuse me, one more moment. So look at the data right now. Average, you know, close rates of 15 to 20%, as you and I talked about a lot of time, you know, and you see all these companies proud for hitting their numbers and proud for growth. They're competing for these things and they're losing. 80 to 85 percent of them.
Where are people asking the question? How do I double that? And so I go into their investors. I go into their boards and I'd say, you know, I'm sure glad I don't have any money in this company. Because you're so underperforming your potential.
Andrew.
yeah, no, I was just going to agree with what Dave is saying. It's it's interesting because I'm still hearing what I'm sure you all have heard forever, which is that I mean, it's not just the CRS and VPS and sales as Jake was saying, it flows down to the entire organization where there's not a, Great coaching culture built into those managers.
You know, they almost act as super reps, you know, tactically going from one deal to the next site. I believe this has been a problem for a long time. It's not just, you know, something that's happening now, but I also think it relates to what Dave is saying with tenure. You know, if you're spending a ton of time to onboard, we're not just on board to recruit, you know, your sales reps and then get them fully up to speed and onboarding.
Just like any other role in the organization, if they don't feel like you're investing in their success, if they don't feel supported, they don't feel comfortable, you know, selling the product in the timeframe, especially that they need to, they're going to turn out, even if they start to hit some of their numbers if they don't feel like they're set up for long term success you know, they will leave the company.
And we, we see that the other kind of interesting thing that we see when we talk to. Sales leaders today to your point on tenure is that oftentimes they They'll have a playbook that the previous sales leader put in place, right? So they're saying, Oh, you know, we we have this, we kind of, we're thinking about, we want to still make it successful, you know, it's not, you know, we inherited this and, you know, we're not engaged, some of the times they'll have engaged with a consulting firm to build it, they're not engaged with those firms anymore.
And they're wondering, you know, how can they be successful going forward? And I'm sure Jake, you probably have some thoughts on this and Dave, but yeah, that is, that's definitely something we've seen at more than one company.
I think it's a great insight on Dave's part though, is for us to think what we think about, you know, the most innovative, perhaps one of the more innovative things we could do to improve sales performance is to use Is to make sure people stick around, right. Is to change the incentives at all levels within the organization to encourage people to stay.
I mean, I agree. I think continuity. And I think Andrew, you're touching on the point is, you know, if you're hired as a CRO VP of sales at a startup and you replace somebody who was there 12 to 18 months and they replace somebody who was there 12 to 18 months, no mystery how much time you think you have, what are you going to feel empowered to actually do in terms of making changes? If you think that, I mean, you've only got 12 months to do it. You're not going to do it. You're going to do is, as you said, you're going to take the other person's playbook and try to incrementally improve it. And then the cycle just continues.
It's interesting. Andrew mentioned it and it's something that. You know, we have all this stuff that should be able to make us perform at such higher levels, but somehow we aren't doing that. And it gets down to kind of culture and value systems within these organizations. I was asked to sit in this meeting of, it was about 25 CEOs of very well known kind of CDE stage companies.
And what was distressing about it was people are fungible. We can just turn people and find people and keep changing our requirements and we have no loyalty to our people. So how do I build consistency in my execution? How do I build and grow when I have this disposable mentality around people?
Right.
How do I start building an experience base and growing from that experience base?
How do I start attracting the right talent and retaining that talent, whether it's at the individual contributor level or the manager level, and so there's somehow, and I don't know what's caused it, there's this mindset that is one. We talk about the human to human bringing back the human to human connection in working with customers, but we've lost the human to human connection within our organizations too, and so that creates kind of this ripple effect of what we see in our organizations we see manifested in our engagement with customers.
Right. And I think we could, I mean, I think if we're willing to innovate, I just have one small example I'd throw out or proposal, let's say, because, you know, this idea of, are we really invested in the success of our people? Do we really want them to stay? Yeah. Are we building a group of sellers who are confident in their abilities?
And so let's just take this whole idea of, you know, we see that the news all the time, multiple times a year, yeah. 40 percent or fewer of sellers are hitting quota. And we know it's a multifactorial thing, you know, the way the quotas are set and so on. But I mean, just bear with me for a second, because I've brought this up here on the show before us. I think that if we wanted to start making a change and it's just a small part of the equation, but as we take, okay, frontline managers, the way you get paid, Your variable comp, if you have 10 sellers, we're going to divide that variable comp package into 10 parts and you get paid a flat fee for each of your sellers that hits their quota. You know, your variable is not based on your total sales. You're paid on getting your people across the finish line. So if you're a seller and you knew that your manager's pay was based on you succeeding, personally succeeding. I think things would change. I think the conversations they would have about setting quotas would change if you were paying managers based on the quantity of sellers that hit the number, not the quantity of dollars they're producing.
Just an example, I think of
I'll tell you, I think I'll take an anti, I'll take an opposite stance that Andy, I think what would happen is
Sure.
it would focus it more on short term is right now that the number one problem with sales leadership. And again, it goes back to this whole. The amount of companies that have a leadership development program for frontline leaders is laughable.
I mean, we'd put in place one for a company. I won't, you know, we, it's a year long engagement. The company is, you know, 70 leaders, if that tells you, and they didn't have a sales leadership development program. Most sales leaders are what we call hero leaders, which means they'll jump in and save the deals.
And they don't actually then coach to the long term performance and skill development of reps. So then they create this cycle of heroship. And so I think what that might do is create more heroes that you would potentially get there, but man, you would be writing. It would be that, you know, as opposed to like, does your team get there in six months, you know, like, and that is what my quota is based on because then I can do skill development and I can invest in their longterm, but most reps, a lot of leaders just aren't being taught how to coach versus jumping and save a deal.
Yeah, a hundred percent. Agree. Andrew.
Andy, I think your head's in the right spot. I don't know what, I don't claim to know the answer here, which is, you know, it's that old Charlie Munger quote of like, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. I think you know, there is a way to get there. I just, yeah, I don't, I haven't seen an example where a company has 100 percent figured it out.
No, and that's my whole point at this idea. It's not just the right idea, but it's something different. Try something different because what we're doing now isn't working. So, all right. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me. We run out of time, but I'll save you the time of telling people where they should find you because they just go on LinkedIn, they find everybody.
And yeah, appreciate you coming. Look forward to doing it again.