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. I have a bit of confession. If you're noticing the audio is just a little bit different on this intro , I guess it's because, , I was supposed to record this introduction to this week's episode in my studio before I left for vacation, but I had a virus last week and I was completely out of it.
And I just forgot until my producer reminded me yesterday that we had no intro for the show. So I'm recording this on my phone in my hotel room, , in Hawaii, overlooking the beautiful sands of Waikiki. If you're not, my actual conversation with my guests coming up on this episode was recorded the usual way with high quality audio. Okay. Ready?
Hi friends, welcome to the WinRite podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Kian McLaughlin, and Kian is one of my guests on this episode of the WinRate podcast. Kian is the CEO of Trinity Perspectives, based in Sydney, Australia. My other guest today for this really lively discussion about the role of enablement in sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and increasing win rates are Nick Lawrence.
Nick is a curriculum design manager at Snowflake, and Andrew Barry. Andrew is the founder of the Curious Lion. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion. I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter, Winrate Wednesday. Join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive Winrate Wednesday each week on Wednesday, where you receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and a lot of other great sales advice and life advice as well.
Now you can subscribe by visiting AndyPaul. com. That's my website, or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. Okay. Ready? Let's jump into this discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the WinRate Podcast. First of all, I want to thank you as always for taking the time to listen. 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, and I want to thank my guests, Kian McLaughlin, Andrew Barry, and Nick Lawrence for sharing their insights with us today.
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 back to the Winrate podcast. Again, we have another great group of guests here today joining us. I want us to spend a couple of minutes, have people introduce themselves, Nick Lawrence. Let's start with you.
Yeah, sure. Nick Lawrence. I am on the enabling team over at Snowflake.
Great. That's too quick. I wasn't prepared for that. So,
Sorry, I wasn't prepared for the intro, which I guess I
fine. Andrew, the curious lion.
Andrew Barry founder and CEO of Curious Lion. So work with sales teams, sales leaders primarily. I was gonna say, I don't know anything about sales to kind of be controversial, but I think that might destroy my credibility. So I'm going to, I mean, I mean, I just said it, so basically it's out there, but yeah we don't, we're not sales experts.
We are leadership experts. So I come at it from an angle of how do we make. Sales leaders who I think are incredibly under, underdeveloped
Yes. We can all agree on that.
into better leaders. Yeah, it's particularly facing uncertainty.
So origin of curious lion.
Yeah so I'm South African, so the lion is a big part of me and kind of like a spirit animal. I'm also a Leo. I named my son Leo. Like I went all in on the lion thing.
When's your birthday?
August 19.
Oh, mine's 17th. Okay.
Huh. All right. So yeah, so that's the lion thing. And then curious you know, curiosity, I think is the most, one of the most important skills and abilities we have
I agree. A hundred percent. Keon, welcome back.
Thank you. Good to be back, Andy. It's funny. I'm just thinking as you're talking, chorus is my it's my star sign. And I suspect I've been calling bullshit on sales excuses for a decade or more. So maybe there is a correlation there. I'm not quite sure.
Well, I was also going to say to Andrew's comment about not knowing anything about sales. It's like, you know, I've been in sales for 47 years now and yeah, we still don't know anything about sales. So
same.
well, I mean, the other reason is it's changing all the time. So, you know, the stuff that we did know five or 10 years ago isn't actually as relevant to me. These days as it used to be and that's that, you know, that's a perfect segue to who I am and what I do, you know, I've spent 10 plus years helping companies better understand why they win and lose the big deals they pitch for, built a services business, built a software business, wrote a book about it, and still endlessly fascinated by that topic.
Yeah. And that's, I always love having you on and chatting with you either off the show as well about the whole topic is, yeah. Why are people buying? Why are you winning deals? Why are you losing deals? And then, you know, you supplied me a couple of slides a year or so ago that, you know, summarized your findings over yeah, a dozen years talking to thousands of people about why they bought, why they didn't buy.
And I always found so fascinating about that. Tell people about this all the time is these 18 reasons why you win and why you lose. Not one is about your product and not one is about your price.
No. Huge surprise to me. I had lunch yesterday with a guy who was country manager for one of the big cloud computing companies, and we were talking about win loss. And I was asking him what, I always ask people, what's your experience been, you know, in your career? And he said, well, we would often do loss reviews.
And I said, so tell me how you do it. And he said, we'd basically just stand the rep in front of us and berate them. And I was like, okay, interesting strategy. And as we were talking, we got literally halfway through lunch. And then I said to him something about, you know, how we do it. And he's like, but hold on, you don't talk to the customers, do you?
And I said, We only talk to the customers. I don't care about your internal view, because that's just navel gazing. He's like, but how do you, and then it's like, head exploding. He's like, how do you do that? Why do they share? What do they tell you? And this is the thing. There's this huge blind spot in our industry that actually you can do this, and you've earned the right to it if you've done a good sales cycle.
And maybe, just maybe, they'll tell you what actually happened, and then you can throw out all the assumptions. It's crazy.
Ken, I was actually like looking at your website and preparing for this is how I was surprised. Well, actually it's more of a question, like how many companies. Do the level of rigor that you do. Like, it seems like that's your thing is you're going into one specific thing and you go so, so deep in it.
And I'm curious. It sort of occurred to me that a lot of companies are probably just like skimming the surface of this.
100%. That was the reason I embarked on this. I used to work at SAP and it would frustrate the crap out of me when we'd go through a large complex pursuit over three months, six months, nine months, whatever it is. And then we'd get to the end and we would sit around internally in a room kind of effectively debriefing ourselves on what we thought had happened on that opportunity.
And just making shit up basically is, and then I started talking to other folks in, you know, IBM and Oracle and other companies and they were like, Oh yeah, that's how we do it as well. And it might, I just couldn't, I couldn't grasp it. You know, having played, like we were talking about rugby a moment ago.
If you want to be a professional in anything, you watch the game tape back and you look for the 1 percent that you can improve upon. And as an industry, we just weren't doing that. And that was a decade ago or more, still very small subset of B2B companies globally are applying rigor and discipline to how they debrief on their wins and losses.
Yeah,
Yeah,
for a bunch of reasons. So it's improving, particularly now. The last couple of quarters has been really interesting because in times of plenty, you kind of don't need to spend as much time and effort to understand because there's going to be more opportunities. All of a sudden, scrutiny is coming from the board.
Why are we winning and losing? Scrutiny is coming from the C suite and shit rolls downhill. And all of a sudden, if you don't have answers to these questions, you're in the, you're in the crosshairs. So now. Businesses are starting to look at this and say we might have missed a trick here on. So it's an interesting time.
The next 12 to 18 months. I think will be fascinating in this space.
right. But I think I, maybe I'd clarify what you said, put words in your mouth, but you're saying, you know. When time's a plenty, you really don't need to do it.
No, you
really should still
but you definitely need to do it. But
by with,
event is lower because people just move on to the next one and. When there's plenty of pipeline you're under less pressure,
sure. And that's, but that's sort of the problem that we faced, right?
correct?
It's been a problem in sales for a long time, but it's a little more acute now is, Hey, no one's paid attention to it. But yeah, SAS companies in particular operating at these, you know, horribly low win rates. Still growing in some cases because they were, you know, perfected top of funnel. But then if top of funnel starts slowing down and you actually have to learn how to sell something, heaven forbid, then you start having problems.
that's the scary part, right? I think that the scary part of what you're saying is that no one's learned how to do this well, right? Like no one knows how to do it well and now it actually matters. People just don't know what to do. Yeah.
of this program is closed, does similar work in some respects to what Keean does. And, you know, they had a report where they showed a figure that 85 percent of the time the seller was wrong when they put the reason in for why they lost a deal Salesforce, 80, when they checked with the buyer, 85 percent of the time they were wrong. Now, were they just making up shit to protect themselves or did they really not know, you know, still not entirely clear, but yeah, this is this, you know, this absence of rigor that we've been talking about is, it's so critical is that what do you, what are you afraid of? I mean, if you're a revenue leader, if I had access to that when I was leading teams and no one was doing it at the time is I'd want, you know, every month I'd want to know, Hey, in the previous 30 days, the deals we won and lost. Tell me, right. What'd we learn from that in real time? But what you're seeing with that, and Ken, I'm interested in what you're finding is that, cause a lot of companies that are using win loss analysis, it's like the province of marketing, right. And product marketing, sir, is responsible for it. And let's tweak our offer a little bit and let's, you know, but it's like, that's not helping sellers.
for me, for better or worse, and maybe it's because I'm kind of the dumb Irish guy, we've always gone in through sales because they're, it's their problem. They're the ones who are feeling the pain. And the capacity to move the needle starts there. So they've actually got to take some action. And if you're in sales or sales leadership, quite often you have a kind of love hate relationship with marketing anyway.
So if it feels like it's a marketing initiative. I may or may not get, I know that's big news. It's
Shocking.
I'm glad you're sitting down for that one, Andy. Whereas, whereas coming directly to you from your customers without that filter, you kind of, you're kind of obliged to take your medicine, irrespective of whether you like it or not.
If you're seeing trends around buying behaviors that are relatively consistent and somewhat surprising, then you pull the trigger and take some action.
Well, yeah, you have to make use of the data when you get it, right? And that's, yeah, so that sort of transitions a little bit into enablement. It's, you know, one of the things that, and this is, I'm being sort of an overly broad question, but is, you know, I look in the context of, because the show, the win rate podcast, one of the things I focus on with companies working is, you know, win rates, because I think that's the heart of everything.
Do we know whether training enablement is working when win rates are so low across the board? I mean, you know, a study came out a year ago, a little over a year ago at this point, a year and a half I guess at this point. You know, 17 percent average win rate B2B. You know, we know the SaaS world operates in the low 20s for the most part. we're working with, you know, in that ballpark. You know, what's not happening? Is it just because we're not focusing on it?
Yeah, I can comment on that. I mean, so yeah, so like part of the, I think that the struggle too is so much of like what happened in sales, so much sales knowledge, sales behavior is, you know, not to get like nerdy over here. I think Andrew will be the only one to understand when I talk about when I talk about there's like tap, there's explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.
Right, where like explicit knowledge is very easily transferable from, like through, through media or through content or something like that. So like an example would be you know, building, you know, like, like following IKEA directions to build a piece of furniture. Whereas explicit knowledge is very Yeah.
Whereas like explicit knowledge is very it's very difficult to transfer through media or from person A to person B. It relies on so much like insight. It relies on so much intuition and experience and and Akian's point, you know, like probably why those, like the mark, the marketing's version of win loss analysis fall short is because that knowledge you're trying to transfer isn't really.
Isn't this tacit like. Like, here's just easily transferable information over to the sales team. It's insight and intuition and experience that you're trying to transfer. And you just cannot, it's very difficult to do that through content. And it's even very difficult to do it like just through any type of content whether it's a, whether it's a win-loss analysis, like a text base, or it's a course or a video or a webinar or anything. You really have to actually get people together and you start, and you have to, fac you have to facilitate a discussion to really. Gather you know, really share that, that insight.
So it's more, it's like transitioning away from like this, like information transfer that, that many people in enablement and marketing are used to, to with, especially with things like that, with like, why did we win the deal? That is insight transfer and without those deep debriefs that he was talking about, it's really difficult to facilitate that and ensure that insight spreads, you know, throughout the organization or Andrew talks a lot about like creating a learning culture and you have to be able to build a culture in an environment in which that insight can spread, you know, throughout the organization and isn't just like locked into content that is just like hard to make sense of.
Well, but isn't part of that, though, deciding what's important? So, I mean, and this is, you know, a topic we'll love to sort of get into is, you know, like, Nick, you had written something recently about, you know, tying enablement to outputs anchoring training to a work output and you had listed these various work outputs, but, you know, I was sort of curious, you know, you listed seven, then said et cetera, but in your top seven, Win rate wasn't one of them.
See, for me, this is the single most important metric for an individual seller is because they're making choices about how they're going to invest their time, of which they have a limited amount of time. It's the biggest measure of their effectiveness in terms of being able to help the buyer accomplish their job. And yet, and I'm not meaning to pick on you, but in general, I see so few companies that really focus and say, look, this is really important. In fact, you know, there's big voices in the SaaS world that say it's not important, which I think is crazy. So, just curious about your take, isn't it about what you make important?
Absolutely. So I think it comes down to like that the definition and understanding what I mean by what it, what an output is. So you're absolutely right. An output being different from an outcome. So, win rates obviously being an outcome, maybe a, you know, some type of lagging lagging indicator that you're on track to, to be, you know, to achieve, you know, whatever outcomes that, that you're looking for.
Whereas outputs are specific, outputs are like, are these, are specific things that the sales for, that the reps have to produce and deliver. Right, and these are the things, so, if you're trying to influence win rates, which you absolutely should be aligning yourself to the problem, again, that a lot of enablement teams make, or even sales teams make, is they try to connect these like learning or training interventions with out these outcomes like, like win rates, and it's just too big of a jump to make, right, to say this intervention or this training resulted in an increase in win rates.
WinRates is something that is so, it depends on so many different variables that it's so hard to say, you know, to what extent did you influence WinRates? So it's important to, to start with WinRates, of course, but then slowly start working backwards and starting to understand, like, what is it that influences, you know, win rates?
What does win rate depend on? And when you start breaking it down, you start real, you start getting back down to those specific, the outputs. What do, what are the outputs that sales reps have to produce and deliver on the job and to what standard that are going to then influence whether or not win rates are achieved.
Nick, can I jump in on this one quickly? Because I have a perspective which I think aligns quite closely with that. So and I'll use a real world context. We did some work with a company recently and their last reviews were reading like wind reviews. It was really interesting. So right the way through the sort of the responsive to their customers, but a couple of things were cropping up.
One of them was really specific. So it was a ton of last reviews in a short period of time. Yeah. That related to pricing and what we discovered was effectively the market had moved and they hadn't kept up with that movement and as a result, they were getting priced out of the market in a meaningful way, like coming 10th when, you know, when vendors were being reviewed and that kind of thing.
So that was something quite specific that they were able to go away and say, right, we can, we need to change our pricing policy and our margin expectations and a couple of other things. But the other thing which came through and this kind of goes, I think to your point, Nick was, They were rushing the discovery piece.
They were just kind of churning, burning opportunity. You know, tenders were going out, proposals and bids and stuff like that. And that came through quite strongly as well. But their team on the ground were actually doing a pretty good job in the middle phase of the sales cycle. But they were rushing the discovery.
And so to improve their win rate they moved the needle on their pricing policy, which is fine. But the other thing they did across their sales team. Was they really focused in on the quality of the discovery conversations at the start and they carved out more time to allow the reps to do that, which then flowed through into, you know, their wind themes and their documents and a bunch of other stuff and ultimately had a profound impact on their capacity to win.
So. The outcome they were looking for was improving their win rate, but the output they were looking for was better quality discovery, leading to better understanding of the customer, win themes, better documentation, and ultimately. And so that was kind of the correlation. So that was the, from an enablement perspective, and that's where they put the focus.
And they've seen a major swing already, just by kind of moving those
I mean, you don't, there's, yeah, you don't have a,
bit.
to your point, you're not training win rate, right? It is an outcome. But, to, to Nick, to your point, and I'll challenge you on something you said, because I think this is where people get it wrong. Win rate is not a lagging indicator. In the absence of change, it's a leading indicator of what's coming next. And this is the way that you need to think about it. I think people need to think about as enablement and sales managers is that in the absence of change, what's happening now is what's going to happen going forward. Right. So, you know, it gets dismissed by people saying it's lagging indicator. It's like, Nope, leading indicator.
Anyway, go ahead.
It's lagging on some to some activity, but it's also leading future things. And I think you're right. I think that's the biggest thing people need to wake up to right now is that if you know something's up, right? Like the world has changed and people don't have the answers right now. For what that is, right?
And like not many people admitting that they don't know. And it's actually, I think the first step is in admitting, right? That like, we don't know what's going to happen. There's just tons of uncertainty out there. Those win rates are absolutely a sign that if you don't do any, if you don't do anything different now, it's just like a ticket to obscurity, which may take four or five years, right?
Right. But I think it also tells you, and I think it tells you a couple other things, which is, you know, we're working with one company recently and the thing that struck us as we were talking to their. Sales leaders. This is a company that was, you know, win rates to mid twenties. SAS company. Well known.
People know it. Was their sellers, going into deals, not really expecting to win.
I mean, and it's something you think, well, that's kind of a logical conclusion you could draw, cause you know, as a seller. But then you sort of got this hint of a little bit of an attitude, is that this acceptance So I think if you work a deal, if you choose to bring something into your pipeline, and it's as this emotion sellers don't oftentimes do consciously, which they need to, because you decide who you're going to invest your time in.
You do it based on the fact you think you have an understanding of why your company in particular has an opportunity to win and yeah, go ahead.
love this cause I want to go back to the deal review stuff. Cause I find this fascinating because it reminds me of some of the work we do around like in other companies or other functions. It's like after action reviews or retros or right. That whole process. And it typically follows like this, like four step process, I think, which is right.
What actually happened. Right. Oh, sorry. What do we expect to happen? What actually happened, what went wrong and then what can we do better? And what we've found is actually people spend most, we all naturally, and this is, it's like a total normal impulse to spend most of the time on that last step, but that kind of makes the whole exercise a pro forma exercise.
Like we're all going to get in this room and we're going to come out with a list of things that we can do better. And as if that was the goal, right? Whereas the goal is really to understand what happened. Right. And what we should be doing is spending more, most of our time actually in step two, what actually happened.
And this is the other thing which I find blows my mind is that they don't involve everyone that was actually involved, right? It's usually like stays at a leadership level, but leadership is by definition.
there for me. Andrew, just do that again. You dropped out, mate, at the most critical, interesting part.
Shit. Where did I go?
The bit that blows your mind, what blows your mind is So
Oh, is that they don't involve, they don't involve everyone who is present. Right. So it's often stated at a leadership level and it's by definition, leaders are kind of removed from the action. And so, you know, like, I, that's why I can, I'm fascinated in your work because this must be what you do. Like you you're getting people to tell stories, right?
you're like literally preaching to the choir here, Andrew, because I was in my, I was running the channel business SAP and we lost a big deal and we had that kind of internal debrief and being the dumb Irish guy, I was like, can we just go and talk to the customer and get their feedback? And they're like, Oh, man, that's just not how it's done.
It's just, we don't. And I was like, well, okay. So I just went and the customer said, look, is there any chance I could come in and spend an hour with you and reverse engineer the buying journey just went on with us. And they're like, yeah, come in. Okay. So flew up and sat down and in a room and kind of broadly, you know, put some questions together that align to the kind of where did you start and where did we go through?
And then my head exploded because the stuff they told me was so far removed from the assumption we made in the debrief process, like chalk and like no, no overlap, like to Andy's point about, you know, 85 percent of said no overlap at all. And I brought that back and people were like, what? How did you what?
What? Okay. And then we did it again. And then we did it again. And then I was like, you know what, actually, I think as an industry, we've missed a huge trick here. If we do a good job, the professional courtesy, which we've created should allow us to capture some genuine, honest feedback. And actually, in many cases, it's in the customer's best interest because they don't want a monopoly in the market.
They want vendors that will listen to them and take action, even if they didn't buy from you this time around. There's a reasonable chance they could come to market for something else in the future. And if you're prepared to innovate off the back of what they've told you. So, you're 100 percent right. We can't do these debriefs and not have the stakeholders that matter in the room.
Because otherwise, it's just lip service.
well, early in my career, a very senior sales guy, he's, I'm sure long since gone, but his, you know, said this thing always stuck with me to this point, he said, the solution to a sales problem is never found in the office. His point was, you gotta go talk to the customers, right? Gotta go talk to the customers.
You got problems. So things aren't happening the way you want. Start with the customers. That's where the solution is.
Be honest as an industry. This is our dirty secret. We spend vast amounts of time and money every day of the week in sales pursuits. And then we do, at best, a wafer thin internal debrief on how we spent that money and what worked and what didn't. And then we jump straight to the next one.
And reps, like, you know, I was a rep. I picked the path of least resistance in CRM. We got the drop down list of why did you lose. Don't put lost to a competitor, because that's going to lead to a whole lot of other scrutiny and, you know, whatever.
Yeah. It's proforma.
Last do nothing, no further questions, no further scrutiny, move on to the next one.
And there's companies now, there's companies now that are making strategic decisions about how do they improve by looking at all the last data in their CRM system and saying, oh, we have a huge problem here. And not actually scratching the surface to see if that's the easiest path for a rep to take to close out an opportunity.
This is really interesting times.
I I cut out earlier, Andy, I, when you were saying something and I've fixed my internet now, so hopefully that's not gonna happen again. But I feel like you were saying that, like the answers are not in, the answers are out there, right? They're not in the sales room. Right. And I feel like this conversation applies equally to something I think here.
And you mentioned earlier about the discovery process at that one client that Just like very under, like, they didn't emphasize that process that, that phase enough, because that's what like anybody who's had it, you and you guys probably have had this way more than me, but when you've had a good discovery session, it's because you've spent that time listening to the other person's story, right?
Like you've gone really in depth and you, and there's something like almost messy and just amorphous about it. You're just having a conversation, but you leave with so many gold nuggets that. I mean, it's amazing. Like, and I just don't think we do enough of that. I mean, I don't even do enough of that.
Customers,
because discovery has become, well, to your point, Andrew is discovery has just become this proforma exercise. Here's the list of questions we ask. And I think so many salespeople seem so, you know, the operate from position of fear is, you know, am I getting enough calls and making enough activities, I'm going to rush through this.
I'm gonna make sure, you know. I'm going to get answers to these questions, but, you know, as I wrote about my book is I don't understand why those answers are important and how they relate to what the buyer is trying to accomplish, but I got answers to the question. So if I'm following medic or med pick, yep, got the answers.
Check my boxes. I got them.
Yeah.
What? So what?
I'll say the But just on the importance of discovery and giving it the time and attention it deserves, the, we, the previous company I was at very data mature company was able to analyze the engagement data when it was happening and with who throughout the entire like sales process.
And we, before we ran this like discovery workshop and discovery training, we wanted to emphasize how important and critical it was. We just analyzed this data and it was really interesting. The more It was actually like, so people think like I need to get, I need to get moving, right? The deals, right?
So one, one indicator that people you know, outcome people focus on is the length of the sales cycle, right? So it's like, I got to get this momentum, right? I got to get it moving or I got to run through this opportunity checklist as fast as possible so I can get things going. And what was really interesting is the more time.
People the more time people spent in discovery and the more people, the more external and internal people that were engaged during discovery the shorter the sales cycle and the higher the win rate. And it was like by by a large amount. And it was really cool. Cause like, you know, intuitively you're like, well, of course but it was really cool to see that the data, right.
The, you know, the actual
But I, I don't know how intuitive it is at the time. I think that's the key. Like, I think a lot of people fall into the trap of like, Oh, I just need to get through this. So like you pull up the medpick thing, whatever. You just like check the box. Boom. And I got to get 50 calls in today. Right. So like, I, and so it's, I don't think it is intuitive.
And that's the problem. I think.
I think it's a cultural
I also think of the way people
industry at the moment. It's a cultural issue because the pressure comes from the top and then that builds and pressure leads to that sort of sense of anxiety. I must. You know, get my activity up and then that then just flows out in the form of like, show up and throw up meetings and kind of feature function up against the wall and stuff, you know, customers are crying.
I they'll teach you how to sell to them. If you show up with the curiosity that you talk about Andrew, and you listen and you don't come with an agenda, I might not tell you anything, but let's have a, let's have a good interaction here. We, Andy, I think you commented on that post of mine earlier this week.
So we went out and spoke to a bunch of customers and said, like, if you could give one piece of advice to the sellers that operate, interact with you every day of the week, what would it be? And we just, that was the question. And we asked this to a ton of customers and two words came back consistently.
Listen and understand from all of these different customers, from all these different walks of life. They're just frustrated because these people are coming in and it's just this kind of regurgitation of the nonsense that we like. You haven't earned the right to do that yet because you haven't actually had a conversation to, to understand their context.
So,
Exactly,
to invert that.
yeah, and people are frustrated and they've scared, right? No one wants to make a big bet or a big decision, a big financial investment. Right. So everyone's scared, like everyone's reluctance. And so you, you faced with that as well in these sales conversations.
that's a really good point in, in terms of what's happened in the last two quarters. And Andy, I think, is seeing this as well. Risk has jumped to the top of the food chain in terms of decision criteria. And we're hearing this from, in the win loss refuse. So, when something's risky, you absolutely have to stop selling at that point.
That's where, because now any overt selling comes across as concerning and
yeah.
we're going to start moving backwards. That's the point where you've got to be very consultative, where you've got to have conversations around risk, where you've got to speak to proof of culture more so than proof of concept and be the safe pair of hands.
But you can't do that if you're rushing. You can't do that if you haven't got the capacity to ask those questions.
yeah, I think what, where we have to go for is from like a training enablement standpoint and just helping buyer sellers with mindset is there's really two motions involved here. One is selling, but the other is helping.
If you feel like you're selling, you're not helping.
Yeah.
And so, you know, if salespeople approach a meeting and they said, Oh my God, I really feel like I'm selling.
Yeah. You're not helping at that point. Right? You're not engaging the connection, your curiosity, your understanding, you know, trying to help the buyer. You've made it all about you at that point. It doesn't mean there aren't points in time where you want to sell. But those selling actions, you know, are distinct.
You know, discovery you're talking about here is, that's something, that's the way you're helping the buyer. Unfortunately for many sellers, they look at it as, well, again, I'm collecting this information. But for me, the purpose of discovery is I want to cause the buyer to think about the problems that they're encountering or their challenges.
I want them to cause to think about the outcomes they want to achieve. So if I'm just collecting information, I'm just going to ask my rote questions. But if I'm showing up and I'm interested in them and I'm curious about them and I'm trying to help them, then I'm going to provide these questions.
Yeah. I, I.
to, Nick, that goes to your point earlier, the output versus the outcome.
Yeah.
and it's such an important lesson to for enablement teams of where they spend their time and what they are enabling their sales teams to do. There's a phenomenon called, I think it's called the expert effect. Essentially, the more you know about something, the more you know about a given topic the more you tend to gear the conversation towards that, you know, towards that.
So obviously during this podcast. I'm a lot more comfortable talking about enablement and stuff like that. That's where I'm gearing the conversation towards, but just kind of like subconsciously. And so the problem with you know, at Kean, I think you mentioned it before, like the, you know, the biggest impactors, you know, before the conversation, it was like the biggest impactors of winrate had nothing, had very little to do with how much you knew about your product or your price.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's so important because, you know, but like enablement tends to, you know, have this, like they have, everybody's got to be the product expert and you could do that but you run the risk of when they become the product experts, that is where they're going to gear the conversation. And so you're probably, you know, and if you really want them to have that listening and understanding mindset, you really should be gearing their focus and your content and your programs towards who they're talking to, their problems and what they're trying to achieve.
Yeah, I think the most, in my career, one of the most transformative experiences was when I was selling products that didn't exist. Right? When I had a company that had technologies, and we could package these technologies lots of different ways. I just had to find a customer that today it's supposed to go for 10 15hrs.
Now the transcriptic communication is for backup purposes. For example, today there's going to be 16 pro major commands. If you want to be able to do backup, you have to be locked in. If someone could show up that way,
That's so freeing, Andy, that's so freeing for salespeople. Because, and I've
it's so much
with sales teams all over the world, and if you see them, I want you to stop focusing on selling, I want you to start focusing on, as you said, like, the
Learning basically.
Whatever else it is, earning the right to move to the next step, let's call it that.
And you can see them. You can see them. They just go, Oh, okay. And then their real personalities come out and then their intellect, which has been, you know, kind of pushed to one side because I've wrote, learned how to do this according to a manual, you know, their humanity shows up and they do a way better job.
Yeah.
another point I want to bring up. I'm curious, Nick's response to this and as well as Andrew's and yours too. I'm not, Keons, you're not important. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Is cause this came from your report, your mood of the buyer report that I was reading. And to me, the big takeaway from that was one that I love seeing because it substantiates or validates to some degree what I've been saying for.
Years and years and years. Is that one of the real disservices we do with sellers is we train them on this idea that you have to identify pain points. What people are trying to do is solve pain points. And the trouble is when you think about it from that perspective is that it's like, you know, you got a cut on your arm, you put a bandaid on it, it heals, it's back the way it was before.
And that's the implicit assumption amongst pain points. But what your report showed is the vast majority, or the majority of the buyers are saying, look, we're making decisions to achieve something in our business, right? We're looking forward. We're aspiring to something. We're not solving a pain point.
We're trying to achieve something. Market share, revenue growth, you know, whatever. And I think this framing is so important for sellers. That's what I want sellers to have, right? When I work with sellers, we're finding people that have the opportunity that they want to achieve something. And those are people we're going to sell to.
And yeah, if you're always coming and saying, well, what are your pain points? It's like, Oh, you're so you make selling so small at that point.
So let me chime in on this really quickly on you, because one of the questions I always ask when we do win loss reviews all over the world, what was the catalyst for you coming to market? I'm fascinated by that. And you know, we've done that when we've done consulting that reviews. And now we do it, you know, through the platform, big list of all these different ways.
And the one that comes through most frequently is a change in strategic direction in our business. That's not a pain point. That's a, you know, our business is shifting and maybe our landscape is shifting that what I'm looking for is a guide. I'm looking for someone who can see over the hill.
What's coming. I'm looking for someone with. Some domain expertise that can help us, you know, find the promised land to your point. I'm not looking for someone who can give me a bandaid solution for something in the rearview mirror. It's, you know, you want to close big deals. You solve bigger problems and bigger problems are how do we get there?
Yeah. Words matter, right? That's the end of the day. Words matter. And we use these words. I think it's, we make things smaller
Bit of
Anyway, Andrew, go ahead.
yeah. I love that, Andy. I think that's such a great framing shift for people. It reminds me a lot. I'm reading Andy Grove's book called Only the Paranoid Survive, which
No, gosh, classic. Yes.
appropriate for this time, current time as well. And yeah, he took about strategic inflection points, right. And this idea that the, there are these imperceptible shifts that are going on that are people on the outside, right.
There are setters and. And our like customer success people and the people that are on the edges of the organization are aware of way before leadership are aware of. Right. And how do we harness that? Like, how do we, I'm always trying to think of it through, like, how do we create a learning organization so that.
That information can flow out to leadership and leadership can flow down with decisions at light speed, right? Like that's what we need. And I think there's a path to doing that. It's a lot of hard work and effort that goes into that and incredible people that have to go into that. But that's what we're talking about here.
And I love that shift. It's like, it does help those companies not only overcome the sort of force that they're experiencing the market, but get out on the other end, something better.
Well, isn't part of the way to create a learning organization is to actually have management that has an open mind?
Yeah, number one, curiosity,
there.
Growth.
Yeah, because, you know, we look at the way we, if we cut through all the crap about SaaS and so on is fundamentally though. My opinion is we manage salespeople the same way we were managing salespeople a hundred years ago. Right? And there's been all these incredible advances in terms of performance development, performance management, you know, performance improvement.
You know, they would take lessons from, you know, athletics and sports and all these other people that are, you know, cutting edge start applying some of these to this profession that we're in, this business we're in. I mean, you know, one, you know, Nick probably wouldn't like this, but I mean, one of the things that I'm a huge advocate for is, you know, how often do we have to read a survey that says that managers don't have time for coaching? It's like, okay, so the solution is hire a freaking coach, right? Make it part of your sales organization. We know that there's, you know, multiple surveys have been done. The most recent one I saw, which the figure is largely the same, is, you know, a 19 to 20 percent uplift in performance through more effective coaching.
The most basic thing you can do. Well, if managers don't have time, if you can drive a 19 to 20 percent uplift In performance, hire managers into your organization. Oh, no, we can't afford that. Cost of sales will be too high. What do you mean? You're going to drive revenue.
Right?
talk about like linking indicators there, right? Like that's a huge point. I actually even make the argument that it's not about hiring, but about training. So whether, so, so if you asking people to be player managers. I think that's a, I think, I don't think that's fair, right? I think that's like that because then they're not, like you said, having the time to do the coaching, which is the high leverage stuff that an organization needs.
That's the reinforcement and the strengthening of messages, all that kind of stuff. And, but if you've got someone who's having to also, you know, meet a quota, like how do you expect them to do that? Right. So I think that's a fundamental thing, but also then we got to train them. We got to teach managers right now.
absolutely.
spend one to 8 percent of hiring budgets on training leaders, right? One to 8 percent of the budget for hiring them on training them. That's insane. Like we have to invest more in this.
Well,
let me jump in on this just quickly. I had a meeting this week with a guy who I hadn't met before, and he made a comment that just made my head explode because we were talking about his leadership team and how to kind of move the needle. And he's like, Look, we're you know, we're pretty established business moving around for a long time.
Our GM's have been around for a long time. I don't want you to educate them. I want you to agitate them because they're kind of stuck in a rut. They're in a not in a bad way. But he said, like, If we put some training and aim it together, they'll come and they'll, you know, but I want you to come in and I want you to agitate them.
I want them to understand what does best practice look like in businesses that aren't ours? Where should we be aspiring to? How are we just kind of doing what we do? And, you know, kind of phoning it in because they'll have a competitive component to what they do. Just naturally instinctively show them what really great looks like.
Okay. And agitate them in terms of, why aren't you doing that? Really kind of poke the bear a little bit. And that was just in the context of that organization, but it really struck a chord with me because actually, I think you've got to know the individual to know how to move them and education kind of can only get you so far.
Whereas, forcing them
Forcing them to think.
yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
say this for Nick's benefit, because it's like hyperbolic to some degree. But I like to say is, you know, if we took our training budgets, if we, to Andrew's point, you know, if, you know, less than 10 percent of it, Training budgets are spent on training managers, enabling managers. I said, well, what would happen if they, if we flipped the percentage, we spent 90 percent of your sales training budget on training your managers and 10 percent on training your sellers. I think you'd have.
I think that's what you got to do.
the move. What do you
it's also, and yeah, I mean, it's a, it's also just a poor allocation of resources. And like, or tactics. So there are enablement or there are interventions that have much higher leverage than tradition, than others, right? So standalone events, whether that be a course, a webinar, a training, an event, sales kickoff, whatever it is, not only are those very resource intensive, but those are very low.
leverage interventions, right? They struggle to not only make an impact, right? So even if like some knowledge and some skills were acquired, you know, it, usually those don't last. Like, so usually they don't transfer over to the actual like work environment for very long.
And so there's this and another problem is like you're all enablement and in the sales team often is in reactive mode because skills and knowledge gaps and initiatives are always changing. That's why I advocate for like the out, you know, focusing on the outputs. But we have to be, we have to be thoughtful about like where should we be allocating our resources and like, what are, so what do we want people producing, what do we want people doing and you build an environment.
That enables those outputs. That enables the right behavior. So yes, you're still providing them the right information and performance support. Examples of what good looks like. Tools and processes. Everywhere that they can. But you're reallocating those low leverage resources like a, you know, an hour long course or a two hour workshop or something like that.
and you are reallocating those resources, you build the environment, right, make sure that they can do these things, these behaviors and these outputs can be maintained over time because it's in their environment and you allocate your resources to exactly what you're talking about, these high leverage interventions like one on one coaching, right, there's little that can that can compete with you know, with that.
So, but what about addressing the question more directly? I'd ask is like, what have we said? Fine. This is let's take, let's have 90 sales stream, but just 50 percent and apply it just to the managers, because this is to your point is this just doesn't happen. You know, we're sort of stuck. We're still seeing this, you know, repetitive outcomes come out of selling and B2B sales.
And. Yeah, here's high leverage is if managers are better coaches, they know something more about, you know, managing performance that they certainly don't know. We expect them to know it, but we don't train them. So how can we expect them to know it? Is let's invest the actual dollars. Let's shake things up because, you know, I think with the way win rates are in general, let's say in the SaaS world, I'm not sure whether training makes a difference at all.
I mean, if you have a win rate, if your company win rates at 20%,
Yeah.
training your sellers, do you think you'd get a different win rate? I
No, that's a great point.
The other issue with this, Andy, is that like, and I've benefited from this over the years people call it. Hey, can I got a 50 K budget? I need to spend from an admin perspective. Okay, what do you need to do? I don't know. What have you got? I'm like, what would this happen? Not only like, it's we don't know where to target the enablement.
So, so then how do we expect it to move the needle if we're just randomly saying, Let's do some negotiation training. I think we need to do better, you know, kind of storytelling in a meeting context, like all of those things could be valuable. But is that what's actually the problem at the moment? Is that going to move the needle?
I think there's a day of reckoning coming in the next couple of quarters because there's just so much contraction happening in the market. So that idea of flipping it and saying, well, let's put the focus on the leadership to coach the teams. You know, I think there'll be some candidates for that because what they're doing at the moment isn't working and everyone's
exactly. I would,
the next move.
I'd love to, I'd love to advocate for saying that 50 percent of that budget spend it entirely on teaching people adaptive intelligence. Right. Teach them how to learn, how to adapt, react to the environment. These are all trainable skills, right? Like this is, and that is the number one thing.
Cause that takes out the fact that you can't, it, it assumes the fact that you can't predict the future. You don't know what's going to happen. It embraces the uncertainty that's out there, right? Like that's what we've got to be teaching people.
I like
you've got to, Andrew, you've got to correlate that back directly to how, this is to Andy's comment earlier on. How is that going to move the needle? So it's not that it isn't, but people just don't know how it will. So you've got to be
Well, but also, but key into your point is, you know, when Gartner released their data, the nine most important factors that influenced buyer selection back in April, number one was trustworthiness. Number two was. Being able to adapt to sell the way the buyer wants to buy. So this adaptability really becomes pretty critical then at that point, because, Hey, I'm, yeah, instead of saying I'm locked in this process that my manager wants me to comply with, This is what the buyer wants, let me pivot, Because I can get a better outcome if I'm able to do
Yeah. And there's a bunch of components to it. But Ken, I love that call out because you absolutely have to make that clear for people. And I think that conversation we had on deal reviews. Is a big part of this because I think a lot of adaptive intelligence comes from that ability, like your example that you described to me, that's a lot of what you were doing there.
Like you're asking these questions that people are not asking, right? That's a big part of it. Like, and then react, responding to that, you know, and that's adaptive intelligence right there.
Yeah, well, Darwin, as often as misinterpreted, Darwin didn't say, It's the fittest who will survive. He says the adaptable who will survive. So, yeah. All right, gentlemen. Unfortunately, we've reached the the end of this session, but this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. I mean, this was a great conversation.
Nick, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that?
LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn. I try to I think my tagline is elevating sales enablement one post at a time. So if you wanna transition away from a a knowledge and skills based focus via events to a sales performance and output focus via an environment the, those are the things that I, they I post about and the transition I try to advocate for.
It's a good follow. I follow Nick. Andrew.
Yeah I'm really glad we ended up getting adaptive intelligence in there cause we, it just released a free email course on that topic and I spent a lot of time studying it, so I'm excited to kind of share that with people, they can go to curiouslionlearning. com forward slash flip and get access to that course, otherwise on LinkedIn I'm always there having conversations about this, anybody who wants to get better as a leader I'm right there on the journey with them,
Perfect. Kian.
Yeah, I spent a bit of time on LinkedIn, it'd be fair to say. So you can certainly hit me up there. Or you can head to use Trinity. Dot com and get a little bit more insight around how wind loss works. We've got a ton of free assets and things of that nature. So, yeah, like a rising tide lifts all boats.
And I think that's why we're all here today. We're all trying to, you know, give some nuggets that can elevate the profession. That's really important to me. It's tough. It's tough to be a seller out there at the moment. And so, you know, reach out to me if there's anything I can do to kind of to support you on your journey.
Everyone, thank you so much. And look forward to having everyone back.
like Sandy. Sandy.