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Hi friends, welcome to
Hi, friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now that was Mark Cox. And Mark is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Mark is the founder of In the Funnel Sales Consulting. My other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and how to improve your win rates are Keith Rosen.
Keith is a top global sales coach and is founder of Profit Buildings, and the author of a book titled Sales Leadership. Also joining us is Paul Kleen. Paul is the founder at Pitchit. Now, 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 to get discovered by even more professional sellers like you who are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. And 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, Keith Rosen, Mark Cox, and Paul clean for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on Apple podcast, 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.
another episode of the win rate podcast. I'm joined again today by another all star cast of panelists. I can give everybody a second, more than a second, a minute or two, whatever they want to introduce themselves. We'll start with Mark Cox.
Thanks, Andy. It's great to be here. I'm
Well, it's a pleasure to have you here, Mark.
Well, thank you. I run in the funnel. We're a sales training company. We train sales leaders, sales people, and BDRs our training programs drive results because of the format and structure. I'm also recent author of our first book called Learn to Love Selling.
Yes. Yes. Very nice book as well. Paul clean,
Okay, I'm Paul Klean. I'm the CEO of Pitchit. It's an AI software. We build AI agents that you can train to talk to your leads and qualify them before you spend time in booked meetings with them.
Concise. I like that. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. And Keith.
Keith Rosen, Chief Evolution Officer. And I heard chief every day. No, I
love that title. I love that title.
no, no metaphor on that one working with managers, but I've had the pleasure of working with hundreds of thousands of managers on 75 countries. Helping them transform their culture as well as their effectiveness so they can become coaches and communicate better drive engagement more and ensure consistent, predictable execution of their sales process.
Wow. Okay. So it sounds like the general problem in B2B sales today is just that you, Keith, haven't worked with enough managers to make them effective coaches, because, you know, one of the most biggest common issue that exists in B2B sales is that Managers aren't coaching or aren't coaching
I'm almost ready to retire. There are no managers out there to work with anymore. They're all doing the right thing and they're all great coaches. My sarcasm is translating. I hope for our audience.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's, so other than hiring Keith, which you obviously can't be in all places at all time. What's the big obstacle to making this work? Obviously it's separate starts right at the top. You know, the culture is not being set appropriately by CEOs and CROs and so on.
Because Yeah. You look at the surveys of sellers that say, or managers say, Oh yeah, we do X amount of coaching per week. And then they talk to sellers and they go, we don't get any coaching at all.
That's because they're just going ahead and, Oh, coaching. Check. It's just another box of check on their scorecard. And unfortunately, to your point, what is the root cause of why companies are not hitting quota? It's actually worse this year. I'm sure you guys can expand on that. I think it was like 67 percent of companies are going to hit quota this year.
The level of employee disengagement is at its highest level at 94%. And all roads go back to the leader. All roads go back to the manager. They're the nucleus of every organization. They're the ones that are responsible for building that culture. But unfortunately, because of my friends, managers, and I need to protect them, avalanches roll downhill.
Andy, as you said, it starts from the top, right?
I have a different expression. I think it's called shit rolls downhill, but yeah, go ahead.
Whoa. Hang on. I'm
I'm just trying to be politically correct
pull back on that. I'm Canadian.
to remove my filter, that's a whole other conversation now,
Go ahead. Remove your filter.
but you know what? It comes down to because every organization is so result driven. We're so focused on what's next. We're not focusing on what's now and what's now is the opportunity to make our people and our customers more valuable.
And we're simply not doing that every day. We're living in a culture of fear and inconsistency in this silent quitting, which to me, I don't even know what that means. Quitting to me is quitting. So whether it's loud or silent, it's still leaving the organization. These are all the things that are impacting company's ability to drive revenue and grow.
So at the end of the day, what we're really looking at here is managers need to make a fundamental shift from stop making it about the number, stop making it about them and take a proactive role and take ownership and accountability of each person on their team by shifting the way they engage and communicate by becoming a better coach and better leader.
And most importantly, and this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Stop being the chief problem solver and solving all of your people's problems because you can't scale dependency
All right, Mark. Go
job impossible though, guys? Let's be fair. You taught, is the job impossible? So, so when you think of that sales leadership role, Keith, you've talked about two things there. Hey, they're driving the number and then, you know, issues managing the team. They don't create the number, right? So, so they don't, they're responding.
So when we think of sales leaders today, I actually think it's the hardest job on the executive team. Yeah, let's talk about a medium sized enterprise at this point where they've got the three most demanding stakeholders in business, they've got customers, you know, most important, and they're always in front of clients or should be.
So that's critically important. We've got to put them first. They've got the sales teams themselves that need a lot of time and attention and support and coaching as you aptly point out. And then they've got those executive teams that they report into who are pretty demanding in their view of success is binary.
And the sales leader is the only person around the executive table who score card Is in public domain.
So, so the chief marketing officers, usually it's a bit fluffy head of HR, totally fluffy product, heavens to Betsy it but, you know, there's a big scorecard saying we're either on quota or not. So to a certain extent it does feel like at times this job's impossible.
Well, but so let me ask the question is I have sort of a so what response to that? Because this is nothing new. We all came up in sales. I've run sales organizations, you know, both from a frontline sales manager, all the way to a VP with venture, you know, both public companies, venture funded companies, you know, where the pressure has always been there.
What's different.
I do think it's new I do think this is different now that our versions of the old days might be different But I think what's what is new is the pressure to perform with unrealistic expectations because of the venture capital and the investment So 30 40 percent growth whether the economy is good or bad I think that's a little bit new and then the other thing I think is new is You the short 10 years on salespeople. So, you know, we've all read the same research and reports. We know that sales leader's tenure is like 18 months. It's true for salespeople too. And that certainly wasn't the case when I was growing up. There wasn't that level of churn. So, so, you know, the whole industry is kind of being shaken up here a little bit.
And I think it just really seems to land first On the sales people, because the sales leader not performing typically is going to point to some people on the team and keep churning them out. But eventually it gets pointed at them. And so, in some cases, we don't have the right product market fit. But still, we've got venture capital money in that saying, hey, we're going to grow at 3040 percent as certain times.
They're going to be factors affecting all of us, right? Like a pandemic or these other things that keep. You know, impacting. So, so, you know, pressure in business isn't different. And Keith, to your point, we have to perform. We do have to perform, but it just doesn't seem like we've got a farm system for properly developing the right people into sales leadership.
I still think in many cases, it's the top performer that ends up getting bumped into the sales leadership job. And that's the wrong person to promote.
mean, I, we have a very specific sector that we spend a lot of time with, which is mostly telecom streaming TV. Energy utility sales. And they've, they've experienced tremendous change from American labor being too expensive to be profitable with the uni economics. So they have to find lower skilled labor and remote call centers.
And then those people were too unprofessional to really do the job. And so they ship it over to Pakistan, Nicaragua, Philippines, and five bucks an hour was kind of the solution. And then you'd split the SDR. And the AE role. So you'd have closures in America and then you'd have the openers and qualifiers and developing countries.
And, you know, now you've got AI in here. And so the people we're working with are saying, why did we ever go to Pakistan and the Philippines? Let's use AI to replace this entry level work. And then the American jobs can spend eight to 10 meetings a day closing instead of eight hours a day, cold calling, and we no longer need this Team out of a developing country, right?
Or perhaps they're going to find a new place to plug those people in. But, that's what we experienced in our space is that. Technology is either changed drastically, really quickly, several times in the last two decades. And on top of that, is drastically about to change in the next 12 months.
Probably as much as it has in the last 20 years combined. And so, I don't know how much that breaks into SMBs. But I certainly know with Fortune 500 companies, they're having humongous changes. Mostly because of technology and because the systems that they had in place for 10 years were never really that great.
Right. But you're so let's made distinguished. I think Mark, you don't tend to work with company on Keith. I presume maybe to some degree you as well as Mark, you're not working with companies that are selling transactional products. Like it seems like Paul's are focused on, you know, this cable company, streaming companies, utilities, and so on.
Right. It's one call we either get it done or we don't, or two calls maybe. So.
right.
To something transactional versus something transformational, but let's dig into this AI Topic because everybody wants to chat about it these days and hear about it is You know Paul your PR person serve pitched you at this idea is you know How do we integrate and scale AI into the sales process without losing the human touch?
And so it's an interesting topic to talk about, because you could make the argument, and I oftentimes do, is that certainly what's happened to a certain degree in some elements of B2B selling, and I think it's more in the tech and SaaS world than necessarily the rest of it, though it's caught up some in the rest of it, is that, We sort of lost the human touch anyway in the last, first of all, you look at you know, sales engagement platforms, you look at the crisis that exists and, you know, LinkedIn is, you know, inboxes are flooded no one's answering the phone call.
It's like, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, Hey, that's, that was, you know, a problem of, you know, thinking you could personalize something that was inherently. You're not able to really personalize the way you thought and we've, you know, buyers made the decision, look, we're just not gonna pay attention.
And what I've seen initially so far with a lot of the AI as sales assistants is that, you know, they're sort of adding fuel to the fire in that regard. You know, they're not really doing anything other than making it worse. So how do we use AI in a way, not just at top of the funnel, but throughout the entire funnel to really help sellers do a better job?
Cause despite all the turmoil top of the funnel. In my mind Mark, you're aware of that, anybody that follows me is aware of this. Yeah, the crisis in my mind is at the bottom of the funnel. Is we don't know how to sell, we don't know how to win. You know, we've got average win rates in SaaS at 18 to 20 percent across all ACV segments.
That's, in any dimension, any universe, that's bad, right? That's underperforming. How do we use the technology to help us begin to change that? And, you know, I'll quote Keith, something he wrote recently about, Yeah, you can't how do you do this without, let's see, you got a quote. I had a quote. Oh, you said the important goal and personal connect.
Most important goal is the personal connection, making your customers feel heard, supported, and most importantly, cared for. And my big fear that this is, yeah, this is what's going to happen as we're going to double down on the technology. And, you know, it's like to say, this is a line I have in my new book that's going to be coming out next year.
It's like, Yeah, we had this revolution in sales. Did anybody stop to ask the customer whether that's how they wanted to be sold to? Yeah.
They are not because if we stop and look at the phrase AI Let's be clear what it stands for Artificial intelligence Okay, keyword artificial. I'll be the first to say, do I use it? Absolutely. Does it help me streamline certain things? Most definitely. Will it help the initial stages of any sales process and help that drive certain consistent initial actions?
Most definitely. But the last time I checked, no buyer is buying from a computer. Okay. They're buying from people at the end of the day. That's what they want. If we look at our pandemic and we look at the challenges that we all went through because everyone was going through something. Now we're post pandemic and we have all this great technology being thrown at us.
And companies are scrambling, as you said, trying to figure out which is the best platform to help drive sales. But to your point, Andy, salespeople are the ones that help drive sales. They're the ones that's why we hire them. Otherwise, we should fire them and just hire AI as our sales team, which is not going to be successful.
And I want to build off and wrap up my point, because I'm curious to hear what our other experts here have to say, is you compound the fact that we are now living in a hybrid world. Compound the fact that managers are trying to figure out a way to manage and coach teams remotely, which they struggled with beforehand.
Now there's that highest rate of disengagement. How is a manager going to help engage their entire team and create that buy in and enrollment to leverage technology? When the real issue is you could have the greatest technology in the world, but if your people don't know how to communicate, They're going to lose sales and you'd be shocked that I'm not you guys, but our audience here may be shocked to hear that without naming names, there are globally established companies that I work with that I'm working with certain senior execs.
And their question to me is Keith, how do you do a proper pipeline review?
Oh
did you, how do you do a forecast review? If that's a major gap in organizations today, then we wonder why one of the biggest challenges is pipeline and forecast inaccuracy. And then what happens? And then that pressure falls to the manager.
And unfortunately, that pressure falls to the salespeople because they're not giving them the proper conversation they need. During a deal review, it's not just like, Oh, you're at step two. Well, now you move to, now you need to move to step three. No, it's welcome. Walk me through what happened when you spoke to that customer.
What did the customer say? How did you respond? What's your, what are your ideas to help move forward? We're not having those conversations.
and this is, and Mark, I just, one interjection here before you get started is Yeah. To me, this is one of the huge issues that exist in sales. You really nailed it. Is that the mentality of sellers is, look, I've got these stages that we've laid out, which, by the way, for most people, these stages.
It didn't exist really until CRM systems really came into being. But we've got these stages and in the mind of the seller, it's always what's next. Right. But to your point, Keith, it's not about what's next. It's about what should happen next based on what happened before.
Yes.
Right. You know, get rid of this idea of what the next stage is.
What happens next is based on what happened before.
Yeah. Yeah. And that also bleeds into our, the thinking of. Top champions as leaders and sales leaders is being present when every organization is so result driven, we become result driven and the inner game of sales and leadership is, wait a second, the greatest sales people and leaders I know are really good at being present in the moment.
Most people struggle with that and it's because it's an occupational hazard. And if we're always focused on the future, we can't be engaged in the conversations and develop that relationship and in care that we want to emulate for our clients.
Mark
tough. Yeah. So, so a couple of thoughts. First of all, I you know, just on the AI front, we'll come back to the sales process, but on the AI front, I think the four of us know that nothing's changed with successful salespeople in 30 years, 40 years, they help their clients achieve a meaningful business outcome.
And depending upon the size and scale of what you did, you had to earn the right. To get involved in, you know, a great conversation with a client and then you figure out how to help them and that whole conversation, you build trust and credibility and move forward, but you have to earn the right along every stage.
So, outside of using AI to automate things, I think AI is a magnificent tool to just expand my knowledge. I don't know everything about every business out there. I don't know everything about every role in every business discipline out there. And particularly if I'm graduating college or university today, I know very little about those things. So, so I might be able to understand a little bit if I'm, you know, selling to Paul, and he's a VP of HR, and I've just graduated, you know, from the Harvard of Canada. So, so if I could just come out that's called Western Ontario for those listening.
Oh, okay.
I go into AI and say, give me a job description for a VP of HR.
What are they up to these days? Tell me a little bit about the top five or six trends, offend affecting hard goods manufacturing in the Northeastern United States right now. So, so I think it's magnificent, you know, if we are growth oriented and we want to continue to learn just on the sales process.
I know the sales process, Andy, I love these conversations with you. It gets a bad rap with you, by the way, you, and we've had lots of these conversations About sales process, but I think you have to we just have to you know, a little bit of a guide I don't think is a problem, but keith Pete brought up at the beginning Hey, they're just trying to get to the next stage and this is where we get into You know the outcome we're chasing an outcome Instead of being in the moment with this process and understanding the objective And in a great book I read called sell without selling out You know, a gentleman, a fantastically handsome gentleman named Andy Paul.
Do you like my new beard by the way?
I do like it. It's
You're ageless, Andy. I don't know. I saw you several years ago. You look younger today, so I want your secret.
what? Any hair north of the neck, any hair north of the neck is good in my view. I don't know why, but any hair north of the neck is big. But I think this idea of, in every conversation, making sure we've got some value to provide. And frankly, I think this ties directly into, Keith, your stat about that employee disengagement and sales team disengagement.
I think they're unhappy because so many of them think that I've got to have that next conversation. I got to get a qualified opportunity. I got to close a deal instead of going, I'm gonna reach out to Paul and I've got some value. I'm armed with value and insight that I know I can help Paul and that's my intent. I want to try and help Paul.
So I, and Paul, before you do is, so I guess one of my beliefs is that part of the reason we have this disengagement is we're acting, we're asking sellers to execute these processes. that don't track what the buyer's going through, right? At all. So instead of saying, look, I believe in having frameworks for what you should do, but I think the frameworks have to be buyer centric, right?
What is the buyer trying to do? You know, we say, do a discovery call. Well, buyer's not doing discovery. What, you know, what the buyer needs help with may be trying to figure out what their challenges are. They know that something's wrong. Maybe they don't know the whole scope. It doesn't need help for you to come and help define both the challenge and what the opportunity is in terms of an outcome.
But whose process says, you know, step two is let's have this conversation, define what their challenges are. No, it's let's discover whether they're a fit for what we're selling. Paul.
Yeah, I think, well, I certainly have more to say about how AI can be plugged in to sales processes, at least where we found fit, right? Because we certainly have a lot of people, mostly startups or very small consulting companies that have never really figured out how to scale beyond themselves. The first thing they want to do.
A system like ours to do is train it to do everything. So I don't have to do sales anymore because I don't like sales. And that's never going to work. You, it can't, it's not imaginative. It can't create something. So if you don't have a sales process, if you don't have a playbook, if you don't have case studies, if you don't have good sales people to model a pitch after, it is, it's going to be as, as good as your worst hire you'll ever make in sales.
Because AI is going to look like it was made by a five year old and so I've never seen those work and that's where the most demand is. And it's also where you'll see companies that want to raise money will flock to that. They'll get 100, 000 users that all churn and don't pay anything. And that's, you know, the first 10 emails I mark as spam every morning.
So that's not where we really fit in. And where we found fit is you have these six or seven really critical. That, you know, customers have to get to, and during those six touch points, you've got to capture. Information about their problem, scoping out how big it is, who are the key stakeholders going to be, what their budget would be, what you want to get out of this meeting, what they want to get out of this meeting, when you can start.
Those are all really important things that AI is not going to capture for you, right? Because you cannot get any of that information unless they trust you, and that has to be a human, right? And so it's not going to do that stuff. But what it can do is, form fill came in at 9pm. You're not working, have some intro conversation about who this person is and what they're looking for and route them to the right rep.
So 9 a. m. there's a meeting booked with the right person the next morning, right? That, that, that is very, that's absolutely something AI is excellent at and would not have any problems. And a customer isn't going to be offended By something like that, because they're totally aware that this isn't the meeting.
They're booking. This is just something that has to happen to get them into the pipes, right? And so I have found that those are the edge cases. And some people call this scut works or grunt work, or it's just the things that sales reps. Fine, take two hours out of their day, and they're late at doing them, and they'd rather spend the eight hours doing the meetings.
And if they could do just back to back meetings all day, they would crush it, right? But they can't do back to back meetings all day, because when someone doesn't show up, they gotta do it. Do a process to rebook the meeting when a form fill comes through and they're in a meeting, they have to somehow figure out how to step away from that meeting and on board that new form.
Fill when a meeting goes late, they've got to do all this work to notify the person waiting in the next zoom. Right? And that's something that I should take care of for the reps so that while they're in the meeting with someone, they're just focused on that meeting. Right? And so I think if you're trying to force AI.
Okay. Closer and closer to the bottom of the funnel, that is where you're going to really struggle because that's where a human is really the only thing capable of moving deals further along. If you're pushing it higher up in the funnel, it's probably going to be successful at replacing whatever manual tasks you have there.
And so that's really the one thing that I'll add is people certainly have tried to pitch it for a lot of stuff, but that's the things that have worked.
But a key point that I understood that you made, which I think is, I believe is the case is that what you're saying is, yes, we're not deploying AI to spam inboxes more is what we're deploying AI is when someone actually does respond is then you have this layer, the AI uses it to Everybody's sort of aware that it's an agent, that it's not a human.
Is that we're going to take you to this next step where you actually can engage with a
There's someone.
And I think this is the, for me is the perspective I have on like sales tech in general is it's, I call it a delivery system. It's purpose is deliver you to a human seller.
Exactly.
And if you can do that, that works great as a delivery system, but You know, we sort of followed the water so much with the way we've used the tech that it's lost a lot of value in that regard.
This is Mark. Go ahead.
I was just going to build on Paul's point a little bit, Andy, as well. Paul, you said it doesn't help at the bottom of the funnel, the midpoint of the funnel. I might push back slightly on that. So depending upon who you are and what you sell, and the level of discovery required for that company to figure out if there's an opportunity to improve performance, I like things like, can we get a quick size up on their five competitors?
So let's say we're selling to Citibank's Wealth Management Group. AI is spectacular for doing a size up of their top five competitors, what they grow by last year. How much of it was new logo versus share of wallet, what did they spend on technology? All that public domain information that kind of an MBA would go through to do a size up to say, Hey Citibank, there's a real opportunity for you.
Because what Covey is more efficient than you in these three areas, and that's why this could have an impact on your business. So, you know, there's a few ways. I think we can leverage this for our learning again, just adding value to that client that we're working with on their business case to make whatever solution, you know, we're kind of working with them on concrete.
Yeah. And if I could build off Mark and Paul said To me, the one thing and Andy, you highlighted, but I really want to make sure we really put everyone's line of vision on this is that AI can create something out of nothing. It's based on the data that we put into it. Okay. That can be, it can be creative with that data, but here's the thing.
AI is not creative. Human beings are creative. My definition of selling and coaching is the art of creating new possibilities, not using AI to create possibilities. So I think that's something we really need to hone in on. And the other part and this is Bill's building off the last couple of minutes of our conversation is and this was speaking to Paul's point about how we can scale and leverage certain parts of it We have to realize, and again, looking at some statistics here since the pandemic,
76 percent of companies have changed the way they buy. However, only 16 percent of companies have changed the way they sell. And just to reinforce the fact that it is not, and taking everything we talked about today, it is not us. To decide how we want to sell to our customers. It is up to us to uncover how our customers like to buy.
And you said that earlier, Andy, and I think it is so critical. Because if salespeople are not taking the time to uncover this and as we've touched on the discovery process, but more so asking them, you know, what is your typical buying process? What are the things that you look, you know, that you look to, you know, for within an organization, but it's not only today in the deliverable, it's also in the characteristics who we buy from is more important than ever today.
Because people are thirsty for that human connection. And that's another area where leaders and managers are just dropping the ball and salespeople, and it's not their fault, but what does it even sound like to have a more caring conversation with customers? Or if you're a manager, what does that sound like?
If you're having a more caring conversation with your directs
yeah. It's a fabulous point. To your point about companies not selling or changing how they sell is, what is it? 2019 Gartner came out with their sort of buyer enablement study, this famous, you know, spaghetti diagram that diagrams, you know, the buying process inside most large enterprises or inside enterprises.
And it was this. Absolutely. You know, anything but linear, right? It was, you know, sort of recurring you know, it'd start and stop. And maybe if that new input, it'd start all over again. It's anything but a straight line. And yet name me one company. I'm sure that maybe we have some that have said, well, we're going to change our sales process in response to this is the way that our buyers are buying.
No let's do the stage one, stage two, this linear sequential stage based selling process to people. They're doing something that's circular, right? That makes a lot of sense.
And to me that's actually not our job. It's not the sales person's job to follow that. It's the sales person's job to uncover how the customer wants to be communicated to.
right.
That's the goal. If salespeople could shift their focus away from, I need to use this. I need to focus on this.
I need this sale. I need to hit my quota. And if they could just stop. Shift the focus away from them and what they need and what they want to shifting the focus on the customers and focusing on giving value and stop making it about them. That's a transformational game changer right then and there.
Yeah,
and they do guys. They do.
some do
so yeah they do. So, so I know I know a
But not enough though.
, well, we could debate that we can debate that but let's just go back to the 2018 gardeners spaghetti diagram, which I love too. , so there's no chance of winning a deal unless you respond and react to that spaghetti diagram.
So let's. Andy, let's take your example. Your company with a very tight linear sales process. Hey, I did a pitch. I did a presentation. I did a proposal. They're not buying it and they're going to go back and change your requirements. And they're going to come back again and new people are going to get involved in the buying team and they're going to go up there, take their business case up, but it's going to come back down again.
So whether they want to or not, the sailor, the successful salesperson responding and reacting to the buying process, they have to. And you know, so so that's the only way they got to end game the only way they got to end game The other thing again just taking the other side of the debate, which I think is fun I'll pull that number you pulled out.
I think you pulled this out keith and correct me if i'm wrong But at the beginning you said 67 percent of organizations hit quota. Okay. I don't know where you pulled that one But let's just go with that one. I know they come out all the time and they're
less personally. I bet
well, the numbers in the last 10, 15 years have been 40 percent 40 to 50 percent
I'm going to stay with Keith 67, okay, that was the one that, that legally we put into evidence at the beginning of this podcast, by the way, that's killing it because the quota that gets passed down to the sales leader is not the goal for the business. The CEOs got leeway and breathing space in there.
So I'll just pick funny numbers, but. If the CEO, you know, needs to hit 50k growth in a, you know, per year, they're going to cascade down 75. And so, so this is this shell game of sandbagging that takes place from the board to the executive team to so so, so forth, which drives these unrealistic quotas for, You know, a young Keith Rosen coming into a second job in professional sales.
So I, I think there has to be some tailoring of some of those numbers to a certain extent to go what's reasonable? And by the way, if I wanted to do an assessment of a thousand HR professionals and go, how many of them are actually killing it in terms of their particular goals and objectives on an annual basis?
Believe me, the number would be less than 67%. The reality of it is it's less black and white in terms of, you know, the binary view as to whether they achieved
I love how you unpacked that mark. And I do think we're saying the same thing, just two different ways, because as I'm sure you've seen, and you look at a sales team and the manager will say, Oh yeah, we're hitting our number. And my next question is everyone on the team hitting their number?
Because it sounds to me and I, you know, again, us being in the sales world, How many times have you seen organizations hitting their number? But if there are 10 salespeople out there, it's two of them
Yeah.
that are carrying the team. So you're a hundred. I couldn't agree with you more. It is, that's a subjective number that needs to be broken down even further.
So on the next podcast, I'll have that stat for you. Okay.
okay. Well, we'll do that, but that's why I focus on win rate because when right, it's not subject to the vagaries of management, setting a target, that's unrealistic. This is you, this is the buyers, you know, expression, their vote on what their experience with you was like. And so to me, that's what we should focused on.
And unfortunately it doesn't get much focus. So
focusing on the result. Unfortunately, that managers do go push, rather than realizing you don't coach the result. You coach the process. That's what
I think,
between the A and the C players.
yeah
I think for a lot of time, you know, with the rule of 40 and rule of 30, they didn't care about the win rate because as long as we were throwing bodies at it, as long as the, yeah, The actual real number hit the number was supposed to whether I had 50 people doing it or 35 people doing it They all turned none of them turned.
I didn't really care as the leader. I just i'm just trying to survive It feels like it's a bit of a survival game as a sales leader today tough job.
it is. All right. With that, we unfortunately got to wrap up. We're running out of time. We're a little shorter than usual because of a technical problem at the beginning. But I appreciate everybody joining me and I presume people can find you on LinkedIn. So, guys, thank you very much. I look forward to doing again.