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Welcome to the Sales Transformation Podcast, the definitive stop for leaders driving change in the sales world. Hosted by Kevin Warner, we dive deep into the minds of Founders, CEOs, VPs of Sales, and Sales Development Leaders from trailblazing startups to industry-leading public companies.
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All right. Welcome back to another episode of Sales Transformation brought
to you by Ledium. I'm your host, Collin Mitchell. And today
I've got Carl J. Cox on. He's the author of
Stuck at CEO. He's also the CEO of Forty Strategy. We
recently had Carl on the show where we talked about what KPI you
should focus on. Lots of good nuggets there. Definitely recommend
you checking it out. We'll drop the link in the show notes. Yeah,
I mean, I think the most important thing here is the
experience, the entire experience, whatever that looks like, which is
different for every organization, like you said, but it's the experience
between the buyer and the seller. And so how do you measure
that? How do you measure the experience? How do you make sure they're getting a
world class experience versus a
Well, this is where you got to measure, right? You know, this is actually data, this
is where people you have to measure those different parts around that. So that's, that's number one,
right, you're gonna have some real clear data around it. Two, there has to be self reflection.
after doing these things. Like we know when we've given our
best. Like we know when we've crushed it versus when we know when we've just
showed up. Right. And so that has to be
a self-measurement behind it. Three, when
you're fortunate and they're actually ever willing to respond, it's best
if they can tell you. Right. And what's even best is
follow up the people who didn't end up buying your product or service and say, why didn't you buy a
product or service? Yeah. They're going to probably tell you why they
never didn't buy from you. Right. They're going to say, well, this person
didn't call me back for three weeks. And my two other competitors
followed up two hours later. You know, what did they say?
It's if somebody connects with you online, if
you do it within the first, like, what is it, 45 minutes, you have about a 70% chance
of increasing the sale. It's funny. I'll admit
with this, Colin, this is a problem I had recently. A well-known
Fortune 500 company reached out related to our StrengthsFinder Gallup
thing. I didn't know it was sent out to everybody. It was like a Friday afternoon. Our
team didn't respond to it right away. We responded on
Monday. By Wednesday, we get this email saying, oh,
thank you for the million people responded back. We already had a conversation with them on a Friday, deal
is done. Oops, right? Like, I
mean, we lost that because we didn't respond when
And there's some interesting data out there. I mean, I've
seen a lot of it, even specifically around like tech and SaaS companies
of people requesting a demo, you know, and
it taking 48, 72, even up to a week for people to even get in
touch with them, which is mind boggling. You
know, that they say, you know, I mean, if
you're the first one in, a lot of times you win, you can
kind of set the tone for what the narrative of, you know, how
we're going to solve this problem looks like. There's a lot of benefits. I
mean, best practices is responding to leads within five minutes. You
know, and but I want to go back to something else
you mentioned, because I think it's a really important point. I talk about it a lot, actually, is
that feedback from closed loss deals. So valuable. It's
the one piece that is a little bit hard to track because
no salesperson wants to report that they were the reason why the deal got lost.
So that's one area where the data can be a little bit flawed. The
other area where it can get a little bit tricky is a lot of times people
you know, the buyers aren't always like, completely
honest with you of why they didn't go with you, right? You know, I say price or
budget, right, which are kind of the easy go tos, and they might not
give you the real reason of like, hey, Carl, it just wasn't a world class experience
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things we
like to say in strategy is strategic planning is a hypothesis, not a
fact. And we say that because we
want to be learners. We have to recognize that a plan we went in
with, we have to change and be nimble and react appropriately based
on the data that we have in front of us. So the same thing happens in the sales
process. We have to be aware that sometimes the
thing that we thought was going to work, we have to adapt and
change and learn. And so I think one of the biggest challenges, right, is in sales,
it's, we all know, it's tough, right? It's tough, because we're gonna have failures, right?
So just like you said, baseball, you know, it worked in the previous episode, you know,
if you're heading down a 200 Mendoza line, you know, it's like, you're not going to keep your
job. And in baseball was same thing is going to happen potentially
as a salesperson. So it's hard. But,
you know, where does strategy come from? It came from the military, right?
Sun Tzu, Art of War, many, you know, thousands of years ago, that book was
written. Some of the great books today is,
once again, all military training. Why do they care so much? Because people die, right?
You know, people die, you know, we get a sale, we just, we don't put food
on the table, we don't get to buy that extra thing or have that extra bonus. Right?
You know, but, but at the end of the day, they are one of
the best at after action reports. Like the SEALs
are known, notorious for being
very critical and learning, even when they have a successful mission,
because what can they do better the next time? When you could create a
sales organization that is a learning organization rather than a
gotcha organization, you're going to have much
more success to crush it. And then you're going to really learn your
campus visit and, you know, keep on doing a
Absolutely. Carl, it's been awesome having you on again. If
you missed the first episode, we'll drop the link in the show notes to make it
easy for you. Any final thoughts? Where's
the best place for people to pick up the book and get in touch with
Yeah, so you could pick up Lost at CEO at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com,
we also have an audible version as well. So feel free to go out and
catch it on that. You could find us on LinkedIn, we put a fair amount of content
out there consistently at Carl J. Cox. And then also, of course,
our website at 40 strategy.com. If you have any questions or thoughts,
love to hear from you. And also to your guests, Colin, we're
actually getting ready to close this out here soon. But if they talk
to us, and they say we heard on your podcast, you
could do this for the first and second, by the way. So, you know, if we didn't catch beforehand, we
will actually provide a free, free copy of the book. Um,
and so send, send an email, Carl J Cox at 40 strategy.com.
We'll send you a free copy of the book and hope you enjoy that. Otherwise you can go
Awesome. There you go. Make sure you take them up on that. If you enjoyed today's episode,
please write us a review, share the show with your friends so
we can reach more sellers and sales leaders to transform the way