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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Jonathan Spire. And Jonathan is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Jonathan Spire is the CEO of Rev. My other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving your win rates are Lee Sahls.
Lee is a self described sales contrarian and the author of several bestselling books, including Sell Different and Sales Differentiation. And also joining me is my friend, Lahatz V. LeHat is the CEO of the FeeSoft Groups. One listener note before we jump into today's discussion. If you enjoy the show, please do me a favor.
Take a second now before we begin to rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts, it helps us get discovered by even more professional sellers who are looking to take their careers to the next level, just like you. So thank you for your help with that. Okay. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, lots of E Jonathan Spire and Lee saws for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the wind rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today.
Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul, good selling everyone.
Hello, welcome to the win rate podcast here with another all star panel or panel of all stars, one of the two. Certainly we've got some record breakers in this panel, Lee Saul's you're gonna have to tell us about your record that you're going to break, but I'll give everybody just a minute to introduce yourself.
We'll start with you, Lee,
Okay, I'm Lee Salls. You may know my two most recent books, Sales Differentiation and Sell Different. And I work with clients to help them win more deals at the prices you want.
and tell us about the record. Yeah,
so I'm getting ready to compete in the bench press. It's my little hobby is power lifting and next month I'm going to Wisconsin to set a new state record for age and weight. I don't want to jinx anything. We'll just say that's the game plan. Well,
Okay. Sorry. I thought it was your age. You didn't want to jinx.
that's a whole other story. I'm stuck with that.
Yeah. All right. 55 years old, 325 pounds. Holy cow. Good luck next week on that.
Thank you.
In my home state. Hopefully they treat you well.
A lot.
Yeah. I'm a hard time from Israel. I'm a consulted working with companies. Most of them are over here is the biggest companies in Israel and some companies from the fortune 500 companies working for a, my company is for 21 years from now. Yeah. And I, for years, say for 30 years in sales and looking forward for this episode,
30 years in sales. You can't be that old.
I am 51. Yeah.
We don't have to reveal all of our ages on this.
Yeah.
We don't usually talk about ages,
especially me. Jonathan. Jonathan. Jonathan.
Yeah I'm Jonathan Spier and I'm just you know, I'm troubled, Andy, that you had us all a lot and myself introduce ourselves after Lee, because there's just no way to follow up that whole record thing. That's just tough on us. I have no records to my name. All I've done is run startups for the past 20 plus years.
So I'm on my third stint as a venture backed startup CEO. I have always in that role building companies from zero. Been responsible for sales efforts and I am a sales geek through and through. And so had the opportunity on this latest company to jump in with a company that's helping companies do sales changing the way people do targeting that it was just a perfect fit of what I love.
And and so I'm running a company called Rev now. And that's what I'm all about.
Yeah, well, we're going to, well, just take a second, tell us what Rev does so that people, we're gonna get back to it, but
You know, we are an AI company which, you know, you'll never hear anywhere today. You'll never hear anyone talk about AI. We like
let's, yeah, what's that stand
Yeah. Right now we've actually the crazy thing we've been building our AI for 10 years now, and it's, we'd like to save doing AI since before it was cool and we use AI to help companies figure out who they ought to be selling to in the first place.
So building ICPs in an automated fashion to help with targeting. That's the kind of one sentence.
Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right. So, as we oftentimes talk about on this program is this idea of reinventing sales, reimagining sales, reinventing sales. And I love talking about it because basically, I think we're stuck in many respects. We're basically doing the same stuff we've been doing for 50 years, except now we've automated a lot of it.
Now we can do, as I said, we can do more, more bad things than we could before. And it doesn't really seem to be working for lots of the stakeholders. As buyers report, massive dissatisfaction with sellers. We got low quota attainment, low win rates, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'd like to say it's time to blow some shit up and start all over.
And we're gonna talk about today is give everybody sort of chances to pick one thing in sales that I think could just reinvent it to start from scratch and what it would be and why and so on. We'll dig into it. So. Lee, we'll start with you, Mr. Record Setter. There's just one, one thing about the way we're currently doing sales. What would you change, and why? Oh,
I want to blow up discovery.
unprompted, by the way.
I'm just, I didn't know about the new
blow up discovery. I want to eradicate the word discovery from the sales language. The reason is the mindset that sales people have with discovery is what they're going to get out of the meeting.
It's an egocentric approach, and I'm not going to say I've come up with this word, but I've embraced this word, and it's consultation. That first meeting is a consultation. And if you think about if you've ever been in a medical situation, like I injured my neck a couple of months ago, I went to the doctor.
Why did I go to the doctor? To become wiser about my circumstances and understand the potential remedies. Now, if we had that same mindset, when we approach sales calls, We'd have a totally different experience in that first meeting, you know, prospecting salespeople always talk about how hard it is to prospect, you know why it's so hard because we've conditioned the general public to believe that if today you don't recognize that you have a need for something.
There's no reason to meet with the salesperson because the sole purpose of that meeting is for them. But if we embrace this idea, this concept of a consultation, we're saying the person that I'm interacting with, they have to get meaningful value from that as well. So that's my mission, Andy. I want to get rid of the word discovery and get salespeople embracing consultation.
It's a totally different mindset. Is that a good start for you?
It is. Cause yeah I, that's one of the things I was going to share about, I want
to
saw your answer.
No, I'm not really. Cause I agree. And I've, but also a little bit different spin on it, but yeah, I interested. Everybody thinks on this is I think one of the real problems with discovery.
Has become is that sellers basically use it not to discover anything, but to see whether the buyers are fit for their product. And for me, discovery, to your point, Lee, discovery is about ideas. It's not about product. And so I'm trying to Not just uncover perhaps what the buyer thinks are their challenges, but I'm also trying to, in some respects to the questions I ask, I may help them think differently about that problem, that
challenged. And so it just seems to be to serve. And I don't think it's helped by medic and med pick and so on is check the boxes. Are you a fit for what I'm trying to sell? Certainly qualification, disqualification, hugely important, but. Learn something with the buyer when you
Yeah. And so, Andy, along those lines, I love asking salespeople. I say, okay, so someone agrees to a discovery meeting with you, which now we're going to go with consultation, someone agrees to that. What do they get out of that interaction with you? And the most common response? Silence because they have to think about it.
You shouldn't have to think about it. You should have a game plan It's not just this egocentric. I've got to ask some questions I got to qualify them see if they fit what i'm selling and I got to tell them about our stuff There has to be value and that's always been one of my goals in selling when i'm having that initial meeting That at the end of the meeting they say to me unprompted, you know, this was time well spent That's how I know I provided value in that interaction
Yeah. Or they were they got value from you, but you didn't provide it. Right. It was worth their time
more. That's to me. That's the basic metric you're gonna use a lot. You're gonna say something.
So, regarding to what Lee said, I go with the preparation. You must have the game plan for your meeting.
Absolutely.
Otherwise, don't do it. Don't go to the meeting.
Oh, a hundred percent.
Yeah.
You mean you can't say what is it you do around here?
And it's very depends. You know, when you go for a meeting, so there is 2 types of meetings. So, if the customers have anything to call you, so this is different strategy, but if you will. Okay. You go for a meeting that you're trying to create the needs or you have to find the needs to discover the needs.
It's much different strategy. And unfortunately we don't have a lot of opportunities right now. And salespeople really try to say, all right, I will go to the meeting and I will flow with it. It will be okay. I go with my instinct, but it's not going to work because unfortunately, if you don't nail it, if you don't have any value for the meeting, your next opportunity will be more two, three years.
Or not
Or not. Yeah.
Yeah. So we don't have so much choice. You must go prepared and you must to have a game plan in order to win the sales and help your customers.
Right. Well, I think there's sort of a, you know, precursor to that, which is, you know, I challenged sellers with this. I said, okay, we all see the data, the buyers, you know, 75 percent buyers report. They don't want to talk to salespeople. As I like to say, the number is actually a hundred percent, but is so, cool. If a buyer doesn't want to talk to you, if you're having a conversation for a buyer, why, what's, what, why are they talking to you? It's because they need to talk to you, right? They don't want to talk to you, but they are talking to it because they need to, what did they need help doing? Right. And I think discovery to Lee's point. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's not unusual for companies. To hire outside consulting firms to help them sort of understand the business challenge I have and sort of help them determine a path forward. Well, in this case, that outside resource just happens to be a salesperson, not a consulting company. Jonathan.
Lee, I think it's a terrific point you're making about the mindset shift because, you know, for a lot of us these days, we're also selling an ongoing relationship in the world of SAS. It's, you know, the days of selling some big enterprise deal for, you know, 2 million, and then you can walk away for 10 years.
Most of us don't live in that era anymore. And the the only way to start a relationship and to grow with an account. Is to be consultative from the beginning. I think that's a terrific distinction you're making, bringing that all the way into what people have called, and I will no longer call, the discovery step.
Alright. I've got a convert today.
Well, yeah, it's really, it's, in my mind, it's really, it's a definition stage. Yeah. That's what I like to call it. It's a definition stage is the buyer just by virtue of like, they're willing to invite you in to have this conversation. It's an acknowledgement that they, you know, think there's something you can do to help them in their process.
And yeah, I think what it's doing is defining, helping them through your questions, better understand the challenges they face and the opportunities they have relative to the outcomes they want to achieve, right? Because. I really get bugged by, you know, you see this data that comes out as, you know, buyers are 80 percent of the way through their buying process before they talk to sellers for the first time.
And there was this report I'd read. And the conclusion was because that's the case sellers, you should no longer try to influence the buyer because they're, they've got it nailed. They know what they want. They know what they need. They know. And I'm like, really, what we're doing
is
should all go home. We don't need sales people if that's true.
Well, I think that's part of the agenda of the people that push that forward, but also think that it's like, okay, so what you're saying is selling is just about product and price at this point, then you have, there's no chance to influence the buyer. Well, ironically is all the reports and research shows that things that influence buyers decisions are not the product are not the price they assume that's competitive.
It's an experience with the sellers, with the vendor.
That's right.
That relationship that Jonathan was talking about.
Right, and it's all connected. They've been accustomed to not getting any value out of the interaction with the salesperson, right? Salesperson just trying to push product on them as opposed to bringing value to the table. So why would I want to have a meeting with someone that I have a perception won't bring any value to me?
Of course, I'm going to try to make the decision on my own because they're not helping me.
Yeah. Well, I agree. Yeah. Buyers don't want to talk to salesy salespeople. But you know, it's a given. But, I think there's this trend to try to sort of stack the deck against sellers and say, Look, there was another one, you know, some slides I saw online this week, which is this. Not the first time I'd seen this data, you know, people obsessing about what percentage of the buyer's journey, the buyers, what percent of their time they spend with sellers.
And this one was like, the sky is falling. Buyers only spent 17 percent of their time with the sellers. I'm like, so is that a lot? Is that a little, compared to 20, 30 years ago, is it the same? I. 17 percent seems like a lot. I was selling stuff that took a year or more to sell. I don't know.
Maybe I got eight hours of the buyer's time in person over that time. It's like, it's just completely without context. And it's
like,
it.
are we,
bring up a great point, Andy, anytime. And I tell salespeople this, if you're ever going to put out a data point, like that percentage and you leave it out there for the other person, decide how they feel about it. You're probably going to lose. Cause they're not going to make a decision that helps your case.
So if you put the data out there and give it context, now you get to shape the decision making process.
And 17 percent sounds like a lot to me. Give me 17 percent of the buyer's time all the time. Right.
Well, considering there isn't an executive that's ever been hired with the job of meeting with salespeople every hour on the hour, that seems like a pretty big percentage.
That's right. It sure does to me, but
it's being
raised before, Andy? That the question is, what do you get done in that hour? And how do you make sure that hour has real impact?
That's right.
whole thing. Right. Right. And that's the part that seems to be missing is that, yeah, we're still counting activities when it's, and I'd post about this on LinkedIn last week. It's not about the number of meetings you have.
It's what you do with the meetings you get, right. It's not about the, how much time you have with the buyer. It's what you do with the time you have. And that's, doesn't seem to be the focus. And so, you know, there's all this sort of, like I said, subtle or unsubtle positioning saying, Oh, sellers, there's not really an opportunity to influence, influence buyers.
And it's like, I'm with Lee. I think you start that influence from the first moment you speak with them.
And they only speak with you because they're open to being influenced. FYI.
Right.
And I might say, I think salespeople bring bad experience to those meetings. Maybe that's. Maybe this is one of the problem that happened to us. But right now we're talking about active pain. And if there's an active pain, so the customer's trying to understand exactly what they should do, you learn about it and everything.
And I think the bad experience that we have for sellers is because we, maybe we try to influence too early in the process and they are feeling this pressure, but when we talk about latent Spain. So this is a different game, and I'm, when we go for B2B, I don't know what the right number or the percentage.
How many of those meetings we are going for active pain that the customers call us and ask them for a meeting, and how much percentage is for latent pain that we are trying to create the opportunity for them or to show them what they can do. So I don't know, but anyhow, I think those people bring bad experience, unfortunately.
The customers don't want to spend their time.
Yeah, well, we, yeah, yes, between active and latent. I think that runs throughout the entire breadth of sales training, which just look at the way they talk about handling objections. It's the presumption is if somebody's on your list and you're talking to the persona of somebody who's on your list, they must have a need. And the way we train sellers is, you know, we have to overcome their objections, quote unquote. When it's just not the right time, not the right place. And how much time do we spend talking to prospects that we're never going to buy? It was sort of the flip side of discovery is qualifications. We're not never, but not at that point in time, right?
There was nothing you had to do at that point in time to make them an active prospect and
yet,
we talk about I'm sorry, Andy. Go ahead.
but there's sort of this machismo in sales that says, why can't. Never take no, right? It's like, never take no. It's like, Hey, sometimes no is no. And that's okay. Yeah. I
Yeah.
my very first sales job coming in back to the office, feeling very defeated one day out in the field, making calls and going to my boss and saying, no one's interested. He said, well, that's simple. Go find someone who is. And it always stuck with me because that's, that is the answer, right? Because I can spend a bunch of time trying to convince somebody who's not really interested or I can go find somebody who is, to LaHat's
a really good point,
Yeah.
we can come back to what I was just talking about. You know, this whole notion of pain and one of the things that I found is we preach to salespeople. You got to find the pain, but we haven't explained to them that they need to take the conversation deeper.
To understand if the pain they've heard is an inconvenience or a problem. We complain about a lot of things. We don't necessarily do anything about those things, but we'll complain about them. Only when an issue elevates to a level of a problem, are we ready to invest time, resources, and dollars to address it.
And so that's one of the things when we look at pain, we're often tricked, not intentionally, but we'll hear somebody complaining about an issue. But if we ask further questions, deeper questions, we'd find, yeah, but I'm not willing to do something about that. Okay, then, you know, the salesperson heard pain.
They're salivating there. Let me forecast this deal. This is going to happen. The reality is they're not really motivated to do anything about it.
So,
natural happy ears we all get in selling when we hear someone say, you know. Something sounds like vitamins when we really need, we need to be selling painkillers, not vitamins.
Exactly. So I turned pain into an acronym problem, action, inconvenience, neutral. If it's a problem, they're going to do something about it. If it's an inconvenience, it can come back 10 years later. It'll still be exactly the same unless it's now turned into a problem. Then there be willing to do something with it.
okay, so you'll not like this part then, Lee, is, so one of my things that I had reimagined and reinvented myself is I would ban the word pain. From our vocabularies
because
it.
yeah, I've, my selling career personally closed two thirds of a billion dollars worth of orders. Never once asked a buyer about their pain points.
All right, that's nails on a chalkboard. You say, by the way, what pain do you have today? What are your pain points?
they never, it was for the buyers. I was selling to, and I think for buyers in general, it's about the opportunity. Right. And we've got this whole school of thought that you see, like on LinkedIn, other places, it's all about, you know, buyers, you got to appeal to their thoughts about loss aversion. And that's like, I've never had any customer in, I won't say how many decades of selling that ever bought to avoid a loss.
Andy, that's not fair. You got us all called out on age. How many decades selling?
I've been selling about as long as Jonathan's been alive. So,
Ouch.
And so, it just, you know, they invested for the opportunity, right? They see an upside. There's a business case, the business case, look, we're going to generate more cash or we're going to start, you know, maybe with market share.
It's going to help us generate more cash. We will make more effective use of this capital that we have. It wasn't about pain. It's like say pain points are preparing dinner and I sliced my finger with a knife and I put a bandaid on it, that's a pain point, right? When we talk about pain, we make sales small, right?
I'm fixing that. No, I'm not fixing them. They want to do something with their business. These are people, they're spending their time to say, look, we've got choice how we're going to spend this, these capital resources. We have, why should I do that with you? It's not to fix the pain. It's, yeah, there's a problem perhaps underlies or a challenge or roadblock to getting their desired outcome. But we talk about it in such small, narrow terms that I think it's really self
defeating. I'm interested in your perspective on
an excellent point.
And unfortunately, I think we are using for many years in wrong terms. For example, find the pain. It's not about finding the pain. It's about exposing the needs. It's not handling objections. It's the concerns. So there's many of terms. We're using or used to use for many years. And unfortunately, salespeople keep with that.
And this in the, in their mind, how I keep the pain or find the pain. It's not about finding the pain. You are definitely right Andy.
Yeah. It's finding the opportunity.
it's about the business case, about the opportunities. And maybe we go for the pain. When we say the pain, it's just expose the needs.
And I think the bigger problem with this is the point you're making a lot is that, you know, words are important and the way we say things dictates. And so objections is one of those. I ban objections as well.
Amen.
It's like, no one objects to your pricing. They don't object to your pricing. It's not that important to them.
It's like, yeah, they may have questions about your pricing. They may not like your pricing, but they don't have objections. It's not like a courtroom drama. Your Honor, I object to your pricing. It's like, nah, it doesn't rise
And you know what? You know what? I call it. I call it constructive criticism. What they've said is the price you put in front of them is not commensurate with the value you demonstrated. That's all it is. Not an objection. There's no fight here. It's constructive criticism. And if you're hearing that enough means you need to retool your approach.
That's all.
Well, they have a question, right? To me,
Or a question. Yeah,
You didn't make the cases you're talking about. You didn't connect the two. So if we said, look, let's get rid of objections. The customer has questions.
Mm-Hmm.
is the question that they're, when they say your price is too high and you've let's say it's, you know, you've been engaged with them and that's all they don't unwrap that thing about.
You shouldn't get a price objections. But anyway is if you get that price objection, yeah, it's a question.
Pulls you all the way back to a consultative approach. It's the same approach for discovery is what flows through. We talk about, you know, solution presentation and talk about pricing. It's
Right,
build the relationship, be a consultant.
right. So put these together. If you take what Jonathan just said and what Andy just said. So we're saying we build relationships and overcome objections, right? So we're going to duke this out. You're buying or you're crying, right?
have objections. We answer questions.
What I'm saying, if you're overcoming objections, if that's your mindset, don't expect to build a relationship.
That's just not going to happen.
Yeah. Okay. Great point. Great point. Yeah I got taken to task years ago. I thought it was so humorous. So it's, is that written a post on LinkedIn about, I said, yeah, I'm a small business owner and if I get approached by a salesperson and they say, yeah, they pitched me something. I say, I'm not interested. What it really means is. I'm not interested. And so go find someone else to talk to. Right. Oh, and these comments are as low to the people. It's like, no, that's when you double down. That's when you Oh, this is the problem. Isn't it? Right. Is these words and these mindsets we use discovery being one of them.
I think. I think we know we'd be making progress, even though we might change the words on the title, but we know we're making progress on sales if we have instead of, you know, the big conferences each year being inbound and outbound, it's discovery and qualification 2024. Right.
Yeah. Yep.
then we know the emphasis is on the right spot.
I don't know about you guys, but it's my. Feeling is my belief is very strongly I've had for quite a long time is as a profession, we spend disproportionately too much time focused on top of funnel and not enough on actual selling. Maybe I'll say that same feeling.
Yeah. You know, you mentioned a moment ago, name me a conference around qualification. I have a guaranteed way to increase any salesperson's conversion rate works every single time and I was like really tell me where you have these magical words. I'm like, yeah, cut down the number of proposals.
You're putting out. It's not the lottery. We got to be in it to win it. It's earned because they'll say, it's not a request. This is the thing. Salesforce said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put together a proposal and dah. They go, okay. They're not committed to do anything. They don't have any work.
You have all the work. And then what do you mean? They said no, or they put it off into the future. Cut down the number of proposals. Conversion ratio goes up. Works every time.
I had a conversation like I several months ago is bragging about they had a 50 percent win rate off their proposals. I said, Well, it should be 100. He's like, what? I was like, well, you don't get proposals to people except, you know, they're a confirmation document. You give her a proposal. Somebody has told you they're going to buy from you.
No, there's new information proposal. You're dead. Yeah, but it's, I was like, the guy was like sort of wide eyed. It's like, he thought he had really trumped me on that one. It's like, no.
So this all ties to what I.
You talk about re imagining. So I'm so amazed here about the number of salespeople that still email proposals over. Sure. It's easy to hit a send button, but oh my gosh, you know what they're going to do. They're going to flip to the last page and they're going to look at the price and they don't love the price.
You'll never hear from them again. No opportunity to talk through the value how this works get a reaction I'm, just amazed to me that sales 101. I you know, we talked about this being reimagining sales I don't know how that ever became a practice other than it's just too easy to hit the send button
Yeah. So what you're saying instead is set up an appointment, go through it with them.
Correct
Right.
in person or virtually This way you get to put on screen if it's virtual, you know, let's talk through this. Let's talk to that Let's make sure I have the scope, right? Come to me. It's common sense
I was giving you a hard time about the in person thing. It's like,
Oh.
if you're, if your deal is large enough and you're not getting on an airplane, I'm sorry you're crazy. I gave a presentation to this group in New York. I don't know. Roughly a hundred people there. And I asked questions, all sales leaders and sales managers.
I said, you know, raise your hand. If you have, it's SAS companies, I said, you know, raise your hand. If you have ACV over a hundred K yeah. A lot of the hands shoot up. I said, great. So how many of you will actually go travel to close the deal? Visit the prospect in person, like two hands go up and I was like, be lucky.
I'm not competing against you. Cause I'd be on the plane. And I'd go meet him and I'd win all those deals.
Relationship to win.
Isn't it time for people to get back on airplanes more than they are? I know it's coming and we see it and so on, but it seems like it's past time.
Well, it's been an interesting evolution, right? Because virtue selling was a requirement because we couldn't visit in person. Then it became, okay, we're going to be strategic about this and identify which cases we need to get on a plane and which cases we're going to handle virtually. And now it almost seems like everybody's gotten so comfortable.
Now we get lazy. Oh, I could just do this on a zoom and be done with it. To your
Yeah, well,
getting on the plane. Right.
coming up through startups that were oftentimes thinly funded or bootstrapped is we had the constraint to fund. So we couldn't hop on a plane willy nilly. If we're going to get on a plane, it had to serve a purpose. And so we were selling virtually. I'd like to say who invented virtual selling Alexander Graham Bell.
So,
True.
and
so. Yeah. You know, even virtual selling forever and I was selling multimillion dollar systems with one visit to a customer and all the rest on phone calls. But yeah, we sort of gotten away from that. I think to your point, Leah is like, yeah, get out there. Yeah. I, this client I was talking to is you I've actually several clients I've suggested this to is they're selling a software product.
And that's a product that, you know, midsize and enterprise companies would And the company's headquartered in a major metropolitan area. And they're looking at their sales plan and they're going, you know, we're talking to customers all over. I said, well, let's try something different this year. We're only going to sell to customers within driving distance. Major problem, they could have hit their number easily. The TAM existed within that metropolitan area only that they need to just sell within 50 miles of this, you know, you had 10 million people there. Why do you need to sell people around the world and around the country? Go visit them. They're right there.
And you start asking what we would change in the world of sales
yeah, we'll give you a shot. Sorry.
well, my answer ties right to that, which is, I think we're getting what we've measured. You know, we've told people you know, it's about how many emails you send per week, which is then, you know, a certain number of connects, a certain number of meetings per day, a certain number of proposals per month.
And we wonder why they dash off a proposal by email, right? And why you can't take the hour to go see someone by car. We're not looking at the productive time. We're looking at the wrong metric of scale. And if you ladder up one more view from that, well, you know, you get to a model, well, how many SDRs do I need?
How many reps do I need? Therefore the model all works at scale. Well, well, guess what? I'm not sure it ever worked that well. It was never that efficient.
No,
But it, in this era, when now, you know, cost of capital is higher, interest rates are higher, venture capital is less available. And truly, it is harder to sell now than it was two years ago because some companies are just not in the market for anything, or they're cutting costs, or there's turmoil a little bit out there.
And the math on that stuff just doesn't add up anymore.
Yeah.
I change, I think the opportunity here is you know, in a sense, it's like a money ball moment for sales of looking at what actually works. There's no reason close rates need to be to your point from proposal to acceptance needs to be 50%.
That can be a hundred. There's also. No reason. Your overall conversion rate needs to be 10 or eight or 15%. That can be 30 or 40 if you're targeting wisely to begin with. If you're doing the research ahead of time, if you're building relationship.
Exactly. Exactly.
You know, me, John, we've talked about this is, you know, I think the minimum standard win rate for a seller should be, they win more than they lose.
Right.
Right. That you make the choices about who you're going to sell to and it can be done. There's a reason, you know, the top sellers actually have win rates far in excess of that.
Because they're very good about discovery, qualification, selling to people that are actually going to make a decision, people that fit their ICP you know, are more narrowly focused to the point of Rev and what Rev does, than the people who aren't hitting their number.
Well, you know, we're big believers in ICP. We see, you know, we help a lot of companies with ICP and we see differences. If you're talking to someone in ICP versus out of ICP, the difference is two to five times in the close rate. I can tell you in my current company right now. It's a 5. 2 times different.
Right.
Wow.
to someone out of ICP, the close rate is terrible. If it's inside ICP, it's really quite good. But you blend it all together, and we're all happy with that 12 15%. Boy, we're looking at it the wrong way if we're thinking about it that way.
Yeah.
And the worst pain is, Jonathan, building off what you were just saying, you take one of those deals that's outside that scope, and you don't really lose it. You were never in the game. There was no alignment there. You shouldn't have been there. And you look at all the dollars and resources that got wasted, not to mention the time you could have been spent going after someone that fell within the profile.
You got it right. Those are the deals that, those are the deals that just sit there. They sit there in the pipe. They have, you know, they're, you are talking, you know, I, now I'm not sure what word to use. It's the, whatever, not objections. They're questions. Their questions are outlandish. They're outside the scope of what you really want to talk about.
And then you're pulling in internal research. Hey, like quick, let's get an engineer on the phone and help them answer this crazy question. When the reality is they're not a good fit to begin with, and it's knowable. It's knowable before you ever take the phone call. So what are you doing with all that time and company resource?
yeah. And it's, but you have this mindset out there. I think Jonathan, you might've talked about this before is, you know, I get pushback from people and I say, you know, minimum win rate should be 50. 1 percent the pushback that comes, that's usually from the SAS world is, Oh, I'm sort of suspicious of high win rates because it means you're not having enough conversations. My pushback is if you're dialed in, if you've gone through your learning curve, when you go to market and you've dialed in on your ICP until you own 100 percent of that market, why are you talking to people outside that? Why are you talking to people outside your ICP? There's no reason to be talking to people in adjacent markets yet. And
all of this comes back to that foundation expression That's been preached to sales leaders that are in their seats today. And of course, down to salespeople is that sales is nothing but a numbers game. And as long as they have that mindset, they're missing out on so many opportunities. We talked about the consultation before.
They don't make people feel special. They make them feel like the number of the day. And then they worry about, I've got to have this number of meetings. I got to get this number of proposals. Where's the quality aspect of it. It's not just quantitative. You have to have the qualitative as well. I remember, Many years ago.
I got hired vp of sales of the company and I took a month off in between starting And I asked the ceo to send me Just any reports anything to get up to speed before I got there And I had this one person on the team that I was inheriting And it says accomplishments 30 proposals. This is on a monthly basis 30 proposals Never a win.
I kid you not it was six months of these reports of about 30 a month and over 30 So my first question on opening day for the CEO, I said so tell me about this one saleswoman Says, what do you mean? I'm like, I keep looking at this accomplishment 30 proposals submitted and we don't have any wins He goes it's actually worse than that.
I'm like, what do you mean? He goes we hired a halftime Employee to help create these proposals That we're over! So that got changed on opening day.
As it should.
guys, let me point, let me make a short shifting because we are right now blaming the salespeople and I like to talk about the leadership.
Oh I'm with you. It's
yeah, I'm with
All right. Because I'm thinking Andy, you wrote, I don't know, two months ago, maybe a great article about it, about the closing ratio. And unfortunately, right now we are living with the number of 12 percent or 50 percent and this is acceptable.
For managers and unfortunately it come from the SaaS war. I remember all right, so when I was young if I came with 15 percent of the or 20 percent of closing ratio I will have a big problem with my managers, but right now it looks like for management It's okay to be in this range or 50 percent of 12 percent.
That's okay If you go for 20 percent everyone claps their hands And the problem, it's the real problem, is go directly to Jonathan for the ICP and what you wrote about it, and what Lee said, it's, I think, part of the problem is our leadership that accept those numbers and lowering the standards. And we live with that
100%. 100,
issue with, I was with you for everything you said except for one thing when you said when you were young. You are young, my friend.
listen, we don't have like a big gap between us.
and I think that, Yeah. One of my favorite quotes about this is from our Edward Deming, who's this, you know, guru of quality control and so on, the people know him for it. But he has this great saying, he says, you know, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And to Lott's point is yeah, this is the system that they've set up, the leadership set up, and this is the results they're getting. And I think, yeah, this acceptance of. I think this is most acute in the SAS world. This acceptance of what really is very low performance and it, yeah, it stems from leadership and everything sort of flows from that. And yeah, I think that's a challenge. How do we get the leadership to look differently at it?
And it's, you know, you see it all the time. You're like, you know, somebody posted, you know, you want to grow your way out of a tough time is give all your leads to your best sales reps. It's like, why would you do that? Right. So what you're saying is, yeah, we're just going to forget about everybody else. You're not going to abdicate your responsibility of developing your team and developing everybody else to be able to handle these types of leads. And then in the same post it says, and you know, your top sellers, they've got 30 percent win rates. It's like, well, that's not a top seller,
right?
absolutely.
If I had,
go
the way, I'm very curious to hear from Jonathan, because right now, as you mentioned, you're helping your customers to create the right ICP. So when you create it, do you see the difference in the results when they are calling only to the right ICP?
Incredible difference. So the first thing we're trying to do is really put a measure. We call it AIM. what it assesses is the percent of their pipeline that's actually in ICP. And we're seeing numbers when we start with companies, a lot of them it's around 18%. In other words, only one in five are there actual pipeline deals, the deals that the reps are coming in.
I'm not blaming the reps, by the way, I think it's a system wide issue, but just the result of the system, the way we measure, the way we encourage volume instead of quality and transactional thinking. But the result is The pipeline is only one in five actually match it ICP or less.
Right.
And when we fix that,
by
the way tracks, the industry data that shows that average win rates and B2B is 17%. That's not a coincidence.
Yeah.
not a coincidence at all because, you know, what we see when you improve that we've seen you know, first of all, there's a theoretical max. You can improve it to about 70 80 percent right? There's always going to be some in that don't fit pipe because you've got some inbounds.
You're gonna meet someone at a show. There's always things new segment edges of segments. what we've seen it sort of max efficiency. We've seen close rates go up between two and five times. And that is overall close rate. Start to finish on transactions. You are doubling, tripling or more your overall close rate
And
at the same.
you explain It makes sense that would be an expectation based on what you're doing Right with having that level of focus having that clarity If you're i'd have an issue if you're not being that successful, right? If you say this is who we should be selling to and we're not winning at a high rate.
We got a real problem
Well, that's really what we do. It's almost obvious, but it's just, people aren't doing it because there hasn't been a way to do it easily. But if I ask you, what are the attributes of your really good customers now, you know, some companies don't know where they'll say, well, it's, you know, Anyone with more than 10 and less than, you know, 25, 000 employees.
Well, that's just too much. But, you know, someone thinking about it, right. You know, AWS in the early days they figured out, and we know this from several people on our advisory board, like the great Sid Kumar over at HubSpot who worked there. Figured out that if a CIO was on the job for less than a year, then they were a terrific target for AWS.
More than a year, their close rate dropped through the floor. Why? Well, it's obvious first year, you know, that person's getting their feet wet. They're discovering their operating strategy. They're rolling out new ideas. They're in the market by definition. After that point, they've made their decisions.
They've moved on to other things. Now, if I ask a company, I say, what's your attribute that matters to you? And they say CIO on the job for less than a year. Well, then it's pretty easy. Look at their pipeline. what you'll see is it's 18 percent or less actually have that attribute. And then to your all's point, it's obvious that improving that makes a huge difference. So the hot to.
jonathan that would probably prove out not just with cio really any executive right when they first come in the door that first year They're looking to rip it up
Any executive, any attribute, you know, we see people wanting to target functional complexity, you know, I want to sell to really sophisticated marketing functions or the opposite. I want to sell it to kind of basic marketers sales organizations, you know, certain kinds of DNA it's whatever the attributes are.
You know, the very best reps actually already know them. The very best reps are often the best because they have this intrinsic sense of what a really good ICP fit is, and they just laser in on those kind of companies. What it's about is we sort of, as organizations, and it is a leadership question to a hot point, is we lose sight of that when we drive them, just get more meetings, just submit more proposals.
And most people aren't doing that and they need to cover the whole country instead of, you know, 10 miles from home, you know, to Andy's point about about going and seeing people,
Absolutely.
the answer, the hot we see two to two to five X conversion rate, 25 to 30 percent ASP increase. Up to 33 percent faster deal cycle time, and we're still trying to measure churn.
We don't have a great churn metric yet, but we've seen kind of various. It's all anecdotal on churn so far, but we're trying to get that one really cleanly measured. But the amazing thing is it's happening all at once. It's not one of those benefits. It's the whole thing gets better. If you're doing a better job with your aim,
and I'm willing to bet that customers you bring on board from high win rate sellers churn less than the opposite. That's again, anecdotal. That's just my belief based on what I've seen so
we're going to prove it and circle back to you. Cause now we've got this stuff instrumented. We can actually measure it, which is the first step. But you have to be right because we all, that's just, again, it's just the way it works. We know where we win. So do more of that and it shouldn't. Yeah,
logical, isn't it?
focus.
Good.
Well, hey, unfortunately, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
I said, it's about efficiency and focus. And I just thought when Jonathan presented, I thought to myself, if I'm going to ask, I don't know, for example, 10 customers of mine, please present the ideal customers of you. I truly believe I didn't do that, but I think 80 percent of them will say kind of the industry, the role, but it didn't go for the example that he said, for example, one year in the role, because this is the time, the timeframe that he will like to make some change.
So if the managers or the salespeople or like people like Jonathan in his company, try to have them focus to be narrowing. Just go narrow, and then your results goes up. Unfortunately, people try to go over wild, and then they fail. So
People
get
about efficiency and focus, and this is part of the job of the managers, of the leadership.
And let's face it. We all, you're exactly right. If you ask people, they'll say an industry, they'll say a size and they'll say a geography.
that's
that's not because they've put good thought into ICP. The fact is that's the filters you can use in the large commercial bulk data systems. That's why, because that's the list you can pull.
So
to market learning curve is being Yeah, you want to have conversations, but you want to narrow in on those three. You're winning find out why you're winning Talk to the customers, you know rinse and repeat narrow focus. Okay, we've run out of time This is a great conversation guys
Well, it's
that's it, really. That was really fast. Yeah.
So, I'm just gonna assume if people want to connect with you, they can all do that on LinkedIn and I know cause I've seen you all on LinkedIn and yeah, love to have you all back at some point. .
Sounds great. Thank you so much.
Thank you,
you so much for including us, Andy. Terrific. Nice to meet you, Lee and Lahat.
too. Lot be well.