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Mental Selling: The Sales Performance Podcast is a show for motivated problem solvers in sales, leadership and customer service. Each episode features a conversation with sales leaders and industry experts who understand the importance of the mindset and skill set needed to be exceptional at building trusted customer relationships. In this podcast, we get below the surface, tapping into the emotional and psychological drivers of lasting sales and service success. You’ll hear stories and insights about overcoming the self-limiting beliefs that hold salespeople back, how to unlock the full potential in every salesperson, the complexities of today’s B2B buying cycles, and the rise of today’s virtual selling environment. We help you understand the mental and emotional aspects of sales performance that will empower you to deliver amazing customer experiences and get the results you want.
Welcome to Mental Selling!
[00:00:00] Garin Hess: We need to let go of the need to make a sale. And if we can, it's very difficult, but put ourselves to the side and try to focus just on where the buyer is coming from. You need to anticipate and help them prevent running into all the problems that most of the buyers typically run into. So you need this mindset of put yourself in the buyer's shoes, put the buyer's needs ahead of your own.
[00:00:26] Hayley Parr: This is Mental Selling, the sales podcast for people who are dedicated to making a difference in customer's lives. We're here to help you unlock sales talent, win more relationships, and transform your business with integrity. I'm your host, Hayley Parr. Let's get right into it. Welcome to the Mental Selling Podcast, brought to you by Integrity Solutions, where we explore what it really takes to win in today's complex purpose-driven sales world. I'm your host, Hayley Parr, and today we're diving into a challenge every sales team faces, but few truly solve, making it easier for people to buy. Our guest today is Garin Hess, founder of Consensus and the author of the book Selling is Hard, Buying is Harder. Garin's on a Mission to solve a problem. Most sales teams overlook the painful, confusing experience of B2B buying. In this episode, we cover why the biggest deal killer isn't competition, it's confusion what buyer enablement really means and why it matters, and how great sellers think more like buying coaches than closers. Plus Garin shares insights from his book, lessons from his l and d background and a memorable sales story you won't want to miss. Let's get into it. Garin, welcome. Thank you for joining the Mental Selling Podcast. How are you?
[00:01:52] Garin Hess: Thanks Hayley. It's great to be here. Appreciate the opportunity to talk through this today.
[00:01:56] Hayley Parr: Appreciate having you on. I have been thinking a lot about our initial conversations and how much alignment there is between the concepts in your book and exactly everything that we talk about and do and just our ethos at Integrity Solutions. So this is a conversation we've been anticipating for a while. Let's jump right in. I'd love to start with just the human side of who you are. What's maybe something unexpected about your background that influences how you lead today?
[00:02:27] Garin Hess: Well, it's an interesting question and I would say the defining part of my life that doesn't come out in openly in business settings very often is that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. And the way that this influences how I lead is growing up here in the state of Utah where the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is pretty prevalent. It's a wonderful environment, very family oriented, a lot of really good values and so on. Great place to raise your kids. But there's kind of an interesting downside to an area where there's a very strong cultural draw towards niceness. So in terms of just general leadership, and this actually applies to fire enablement as well, there's a danger in leadership of being too nice where you're focused on trying to be kind, but what you're really doing is thwarting the objectives of the organization or the objectives of your mission.
[00:03:30] Garin Hess: And this really became clear to me when I was the CEO at Consensus and it was trying to work through a lot of leadership challenges. And I used to read all kinds of leadership books and different things, trying to be the best leader I could be blogs, blah, blah, blah. And one time I read a book called The Failure of Nerve, which is a really interesting exploration of you might say, having a backbone as a leader, which I think is often missing in our business leadership in many settings today because there's so much desire to make everyone feel good and don't offend anybody and yada yada. And in that book he describes this principle of peace monering, which was a phrase I thought was kind of funny and also compelling. And he essentially defines peace monering as anytime that you put the interests of making people feel good ahead of the leadership objective. And I realized that not only had I done this a lot, but that it was sort of an Achilles heel for me, but also that I had hired a lot of other leaders that were like that.
[00:04:39] Garin Hess: Implemented one of the values in our company at the time as no peace mongering because we are in danger of hiring too many overly nice people. And it reminds me of this quote in the Broadway musical Into The Woods where Little Red Riding Hood learns. After her experience with the Wolf, she sings a song and part of it she says, isn't it great to learn all of these things? One thing I learned is she says, nice is different than good. Anyway, so that's maybe something a little unexpected about my background that affects how I lead all the time now because it's something I work very conscientiously about
[00:05:12] Hayley Parr: That is unexpected. I did not know that about you. I did know that you do have some experience in the learning and development space, and I'd love to just tap in before we dive into your book, because I want to go there a little bit about how the learning and development space has shaped your understanding of how people absorb complex information and how that parlays into your work in sales and buyer enablement.
[00:05:43] Garin Hess: It's a really insightful question and I've never had anyone who knows my background ask me about that, but it's spot on because my previous startup before Consensus was focused on using technology to make it easier to build interactive learning experiences for corporate training. And when I exited that company many years ago and was looking for a new project, I was thinking about all the problems we had had in our sales processes and sales approach and B2B sales and not in the company that I had just wrapped up. And I started realizing that in the learning and development world in corporate training instructional design, one of the big efforts there is to try to personalize the learning experience. And it's hard to do at scale
[00:06:29] Garin Hess: Because whether you're in a classroom in front of a group, it's difficult because of different learning backgrounds and levels of experience. And whether you're doing it in mass online, it can be challenging if the technology is not adaptive to what the learner already knows. And so that emphasis on personalizing the learning experience, which was one of our key points of emphasis in my previous company, really did influence how I thought about how do we address automating product demonstrations and learning about product features, benefits, and all of that, and addressing all the different needs of different stakeholders in the buying group who have different reasons for wanting a solution in their company. And realizing that as you do these demos, one demo after another for all the different stakeholders in the buying group as you train to sell, say enterprise software, that you had to personalize it to each one on the fly. Well, how do you do that in mass using technology? So that definitely influenced my thinking there from the learning and development world.
[00:07:38] Hayley Parr: Yeah, personalization at scale. It's ironic, right? But it really illustrates your focus on the needs of the buying group versus the needs of the seller. And correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a big insight that inspired your book. Selling is hard, buying is harder.
[00:08:02] Garin Hess: Well, the buying group is central definitely to the whole process of buyer enablement. And I'll share just one experience about how this came to light for me at the very beginning of my journey at Consensus. So consensus is demo automation for product education in the sales environment. And when we first got out of beta in 2014, we had just released a version out in the marketplace. We had just a handful of customers we had acquired during the beta. At the time there were only three of us in the company and I was the CEO on the SDR and the sales person. So I was making all these calls seeing if I could get some appointments set up, and I got a company on the line that wanted an appointment on a Wednesday, and this was on a Monday. So Monday afternoon we set this appointment, and at the time I didn't even know how to use our own technology yet, but I was just guessing.
[00:08:54] Garin Hess: And I said, Hey, before the appointment Wednesday, would you be interested in watching a personalized video demo of a demo platform? And he said, sure, send it along. So I sent him the link and a half an hour later, I got this message, so-and-so watched your demo. And I said, yeah, that's cool. He watched it another hour later, so-and-so shared your demo with somebody else. And anyway, over the course of 24 hours, the demo had been watched and shared with 12 different people, and I had only been thinking about my champion. And when I realized that the demo was shared with all these different people, it was totally jazzing me up because I thought, this is a strong buying signal. There's a lot of interest going on. And this was even before the first meeting. And then what really got to me was on that Wednesday, I got on the call and all 12 of them came to the call. Oh wow. 12 members of the buying group, which turns out was all of them come on the call and they had all seen my demo and I had no idea what to do. I got on the sales call and I just said, so great, thanks for being here. You all watched the demo. What do you want to do now?
[00:10:05] Hayley Parr: Now I have to ask as a marketer, were the folks that joined on your radar, were they part of the ICP you had in mind, or was it like, oh, I know they watched the demo because I can see their name and now it turns out I've got to go after the head of HR or whatever it is. Was it a surprise or complete
[00:10:25] Garin Hess: Surprise. So we were targeting our main persona. We were targeting the head of sales, but we had everybody from the head of marketing to the CEO and all these different people that joined and they had all watched the demo and I was shocked. And I just said, what do you want to do now? And the CEO said, well, let’s talk about pricing. And I just thought, this is different. This is really different. Now, why did that go so fast? The whole experience compressed the sales cycle down all of a sudden. And I really got my brain going, and in fact, I was confused about what I should do because I got off that call and that night I called an entrepreneurship friend of mine named Josh, and I said, Hey Josh, I don’t know if I just built something that is about demos or something that’s about all these people that get involved to make a purchase because this just happened. So that got my mind going and that and a few other experiences put me on this journey of trying to understand, well, who are all these people who get involved? And can you create a system and a methodology and approach to effectively personalize the experience and make it easy to buy for not only your champion, but for every single stakeholder in that buying group.
[00:11:40] Hayley Parr: Making it easy to prevent confusion because you describe buyer confusion as one of the biggest deal killers, correct? In your book.
[00:11:52] Garin Hess: Confusion, you might say dysfunction. So you get a group together. First of all, it’s confusing to the buyer, the champion. The champion is very enthusiastic. And maybe it’s because I’ve been helping my daughter babysit toddlers all week because she broke her leg a few weeks ago. But champions are like toddlers. They’re very enthusiastic, they’re inexperienced.
[00:12:16] Garin Hess: And they’ll go and be very excited about your product or solution, but they don’t know the best way to go sell it internally. Another analogy, they’re kind of like a mouse in a maze. They have to get to the end where they want everybody to agree on the purchase, but they don’t know how to get there. And that’s where that confusion sets in because they go and if they try on their own, they’re just running around trying different things and it’s not working and it’s causing problems inside the organization, even political issues and things. And they get blindsided because of their inexperience. And so that confusion leads them not only to cause the buying cycle to stretch out, but also it causes the overall challenge with the larger group is that it causes dysfunction because buying groups when they get together end up the majority of the time either deciding not to make a change, which is usually not in the best interest of the organization, or to make a change that is the least offensive to everyone rather than the best thing for the organization. Speaking of peace mongering.
[00:13:19] Hayley Parr: So how can sellers reduce that confusion, that dysfunction?
[00:13:25] Garin Hess: And this is at the core, there’s essentially two main things that have to happen. You need a certain mindset. We need to let go of the need to make a sale and completely, if we can, it’s very difficult, but put ourselves to the side and try to focus just on where the buyer is coming from. And you start with the champion of course, and what’s driving their reasons to buy and what is really going to get in the way. This is the other thing is you need to, with your experience guiding people through the buying process, you need to anticipate and help them prevent running into all the problems that most of the buyers typically run into. And that’s where the methodology comes in. So you need this mindset of put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, put the buyer’s needs ahead of your own. And it feels a bit paradoxical because you think, oh, if I don’t think about how am I going to get this deal closed?
[00:14:20] Garin Hess: I might not close this deal. But you just find that when you do that, you close more deals anyway because you’re helping the buyer. And the more you help them, the more they’re going to close. So ultimately what you’re trying to do is equip the buyer to go and do the selling for you inside the organization and coach them through that process. And as you do that, they can personalize the approach as they approach every different stakeholder function or persona in the buying group. And as long as you’ve prepared the things they need and you’ve coached them in the right way, this dramatically shortens a sales cycle or buying cycle. And I’ll give you just one example. The typical thing when you’re selling technology is near the end of the buying process, you run into an IT team that sends you a 400-question questionnaire to ask you about everything from password lengths to all kinds of security prevention protocols and functions.
[00:15:19] Garin Hess: And so this usually takes three to six weeks to get through both to provide the information, resolve any concerns they have and so on. And this is another thing that led me to think about buyer enablement, even though I didn’t realize I was thinking about it in this way yet, but in my previous company I saw that this was stretching out the sales cycle as much as a month every time we’d run into this. So I thought, well, what can we do to make this easier? I mean, how can we prevent this? And so we created our own set of questions and our own information that they usually ask about, and I would try to preempt that and say, Hey, champion, at this point in the sales process, the IT department is going to ask us to fill out this super long questionnaire that they’re going to give us.
[00:16:01] Garin Hess: How about if you take what we’ve already provided and go and see if they will accept that as sufficient for what they need? And it turns out that by doing that, we reduced more than a third of our deals. They were able to skip over that particular thing altogether and more than a third of the deals at that point, the IT department just said, what you sent is more than adequate. And one way to think about buyer enablement is to think about where are the friction points in the buying process, whether it’s with a certain persona like in that case with IT, or if it’s just in general stages of the buying process, say, where’s that friction and what is causing that friction? And then how do we equip and coach the buyer through that part of the process to make it easier? In a summary sense, what you’re doing is you have the mentality of putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes and then you’ve got to take your experience and try to help them prevent running into those roadblocks that happen over and over in almost every buying process for your particular solution.
[00:17:06] Hayley Parr: Hi there. If you’re listening to this show, it means you believe in making a difference in your customer’s lives and are looking for tools to grow in your career. At the same time, at Integrity Solutions, we’re changing the stereotypes about sales training in ways your customers will feel and experience every day. If you want to learn more about how we could help you and your team go to integritysolutions.com. So how do you see that differing from the traditional sense of pre-call planning in a sales process?
[00:17:40] Garin Hess: So in traditional selling, what often happens is there’s just a myopic focus on the champion themselves. And even though you are aware that there are other stakeholders, you don’t have a very specific plan about how to engage them, how to equip the champion to go sell to each one of them. And that’s really one of the main ways that you apply buyer enablement is you map out the buying group and this buying group is the same across the same product line in the same segment. You’re going to have the same personas that are involved in the purchase every time. And so you need to map out all the different people in the buying group, when they get involved, and then what it is that they typically have questions or needs about and tasks that they need to accomplish. And then you just ask yourself, how do I help the buyer accomplish that?
[00:18:37] Garin Hess: So when you’re mapping out for a specific call, usually this is if you’re going to talk buyer enablement, you are thinking about what do we need to do with which stakeholder at this point in the buying process, when I get on the call with my champion, what is the thing I’m going to ask them to commit to doing for me so that they can sell more effectively to that particular persona that needs help at that stage of the buying process? So I would say some sellers already do this naturally, but the research suggests it’s less than 10%. So nine out of 10, it’s actually 7.7% of the research shows that only 7.7% of sales reps know how to personalize the value proposition to different stakeholders. And so that means basically nine out of 10 reps in an organization don’t know how to do that and are not thinking about that. And they often will ask the champion, what do you think we ought to do next to get this to move forward? That’s just not a great question to ask because the buyer doesn’t really know. They’ve never purchased your solution before. It’s really about deeply understanding each role in the buying group and being prepared to help the champion go sell to them at the appropriate time in the buying cycle.
[00:19:57] Hayley Parr: So obviously proactively planning for that whole buying group enablement has resulted in really tangible ROI, shorter sales cycles. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written a book about it.
[00:20:12] Garin Hess: Or built a company around it. Yeah.
[00:20:14] Hayley Parr: Company around it. What other metrics, outcomes, maybe even an emotional ROI have you seen as a result of this methodology?
[00:20:23] Garin Hess: Yeah, you mentioned emotional ROI, which is a chapter in my book. And this is an area that in B2B we don’t often think about very openly or talk about openly, but all purchasing is based on emotion, even in business purchasing. In retail, it’s thought about and focused on a lot. But in B2B buying, it’s sort of a vaguely understood concept, but there is this emotional mathematical calculation going on in the back of the buyer’s mind, the champion in particular, who is basically thinking, oh, let’s see. I’ve got to put all this effort in to go sell this inside the organization. I’ve got to put my job at risk, or at least my political capital at risk by promoting this solution inside the organization. And then I’ve got to somehow implement this solution inside the organization. Are the returns for me emotionally going to be worth it?
[00:21:17] Garin Hess: I might have family or personal challenges. I might have health issues besides all just the internal business, sort of personal career emotions that are driving the desire for upward mobility or improved political capital inside the organization. And this is going on sort of subconsciously in the back of a buyer’s mind. And so it’s important to bring that out to the surface and try to help understand that from your perspective as a seller, but also for the buyer to understand a lot of that more openly. And so when you ask about metrics and how do we measure that on the emotional side, one of the things that’s been most satisfying is to see people that implement Consensus. For example, I’ll give an example. You sell Consensus inside to a sales engineering leader and they have success and then they’re promoted inside their organization as they try to promote buyer enablement throughout their organization.
[00:22:19] Garin Hess: So one primary example of this, which was really interesting to me, was a guy named Adam Freeman who now works for Consensus, but he used to be the head of pre-sales at one of the larger software companies in the UK called the Access Group, and he was a sales engineering leader, but then got promoted to basically worldwide buyer enablement leader inside his organization because he was able to be effective at deploying buyer enablement on his own team, and that helped lead to his upward mobility. So we’ve seen a lot of our customers be upwardly mobile as they adopt buyer enablement because it helps the entire organization be more effective.
[00:23:05] Hayley Parr: That’s incredible. We could go on and on and on, but as we start to wrap, I want to bring this home around the human side of selling, which really is at the root of why this conversation was so exciting for me, and there were so many ties between what you’ve done at Consensus and with your book and what we’re all about at Integrity Solutions. So I’d love to hear, looking ahead, how do you see the roles of things like purpose and trust and values shaping the future of B2B sales?
[00:23:38] Garin Hess: Well, at the core of this challenge to make buying easier is really the effort to make it less complex, more enjoyable, less painful. So not only are you helping the buyer to have a more enjoyable purpose-filled experience rather than just continual frustration, but when you employ methodologies and technologies that make things more efficient outside of the phone calls, so there’s evidence that buyers’ research shows buyers spend 83% of their buying activity time not on a call with you as a vendor. So when you use these methodologies to help them during that time, when you engage on those calls, they’re much more meaningful. A lot of people are concerned that if you deploy something like demo automation, that somehow it makes the experience less personal, which is the complete opposite. The least personal thing that can happen is to get on a call where somebody gives you a demo that is just a boring repetition of what they’ve been doing all day long or with every other stakeholder.
[00:24:43] Garin Hess: Why don’t we let technology do that kind of work so that our in-person interactions are more meaningful? That’s the use of technology in buyer enablement that can help with that, but that could be applied to the other aspects of it as well. And so when you apply these kinds of principles, you build trust and you engage the buyer in a way that is more meaningful rather than just doing repetitive kinds of things or getting stuck in the side eddies of the buying process. You’re making meaningful progress every time you meet. And it’s quite satisfying, I think, for both sides.
[00:25:19] Hayley Parr: I could not agree more. I was thinking about you earlier this week when I took a video, it wasn’t a video demo, it was just a digital demo for a SaaS product that I was evaluating. And it was a terrible experience. Not that I thought about you because it was a terrible experience, but because I know it can be done better. There were bugs, the chatbot wasn’t working. And then when I went to go email support, I got an undeliverable message. So there was no human element to be found, and I knew there was a better way. So to show a little thought into the end user experience goes a long way.
[00:25:59] Garin Hess: And I like that you mentioned the human element because this is what was true in the learning and development world too. Everybody said, oh, e-learning, self-directed training is going to be the end all. And really the best experience is a combination of really well-designed, personally adaptive, self-directed training and either in-person or live online kinds of experiences. And it’s similar in the sales world. If you can combine the best of the self-directed digital world and combine it intentionally with the expert help coming from the sales team, that is really, I think, the best buying experience, which it didn’t sound like you got in that one.
[00:26:37] Hayley Parr: So I’m trying out a new bit. It’s sales war stories. So if you have one, what’s an unforgettable moment that either taught you something profound or was just hilariously painful in your experience?
[00:26:53] Garin Hess: Yeah, this one was painful. I don’t know if it was very hilarious, but when you’re the founder and CEO of a company, the most important thing you can sell is your company. The biggest deal you’ll ever do is your company. And that happens over and over when you’re raising investment capital. Clear back in, I think 2015, we were raising our Series A round and we had about three weeks of cash left when we had a signed term sheet with an investment company in LA, and we were literally three days away from closing. We’re down to redlines on the agreement. I was in Vegas getting ready to go on stage to present about our company and things. And I get this text from our main contact over there that said that they were backing out literally three days before the investment round was going to close, and of course heartfelt in my stomach.
[00:27:48] Garin Hess: And so I called him up, I said, what in the heck is going on? I mean, we’re literally on the final dots and Ts of the agreement. We’re just redlining and you’re backing out. And he said, yeah, we had one investment committee member that just barely got back into town, doesn’t like the deal, and we’re not doing it. And I said, you told me it got through the investment committee before we even signed the term sheet. He said, yeah, but this guy wasn’t around. And it turns out that he was their main investor, his own investment funds made up more than half of their total fund, and I could not persuade them to come in. And that was one of those painful moments where I realized I did not know all the right people in the buying group.
[00:28:30] Hayley Parr: Buying group.
[00:28:32] Garin Hess: I didn’t understand that particular buying process well enough. And we almost ran out of money and died as a company before we ever really got going. And that was 10 years ago. Thankfully, we got another great venture firm here in Utah to pick us up, and it all turned out well. But that was one of those moments where it really slapped me up the side of the face there.
[00:28:55] Hayley Parr: Oh my goodness. What painful irony. But so glad to hear you turned it around and now we can have these conversations. Garin, this was an absolute delight. Any final thoughts or plugs or words of wisdom for the Mental Selling listeners?
[00:29:10] Garin Hess: Well, thanks for having me. It’s been a real pleasure. There is a URL called buyerenablement.io where your listeners can go out and download free templates and tools that are referenced at the end of the book, but you’re welcome to use them whether you get the book or not. So that would be my plug. I think you’ll find some useful things out there.
[00:29:30] Hayley Parr: Fantastic. I’ll check them out myself. This was awesome. Thank you so much for joining, and have a great rest of your day.
[00:29:37] Garin Hess: Alright, thank you Hayley. You too.
[00:29:38] Hayley Parr: Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us on Mental Selling. If today’s conversation resonated with you, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. For more insights on how to go beyond winning deals and build real customer relationships, visit integritysolutions.com. See you next time.