Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Matt Darrow and Matt is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Matt is the CEO at Viven. My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving win rates are Carlos Noche.
Carlos is a vice president at Visualize Inc. And also joining us is John Westman. John is an instructor, professional selling and sales management at Harvard, and he is also vice president of project management at Sidious Pharmaceuticals. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, as always, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter, a weekly newsletter called WinRate Wednesday.
Every Wednesday, you'll see one actionable tip. To accelerate your win rates and you'll get some other great sales advice as well. So you can subscribe by visiting my website andypaul. com or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. So 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, Matt Darrow. Carl's Noche and John Westman 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 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 everyone. Welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast joined by a special group of guests and all star cast as always week after week and give people a little bit of time to introduce themselves. So we'll start with you, John Westman.
Hey, thanks, Andy. John Westman. Happy to be here. I am a student and teacher of professional selling and sales management at Boston College and Harvard, and my focus is really top 1 percent sales beliefs and behaviors. It's great to be here, Andy. Appreciate what you're doing.
Thank you. And I love that humble approach. I'm a student and a teacher. There we go. That's the attitude we want to have. We all want to have that. Matt Darrow.
to Andy, Matt Darum, the co founder and CEO of Vivint, our missions to unlock the power of sales engineering for every B2B company out there. I've spent the last 15 years in B2B enterprise selling startups from big machines that was acquired by Oracle to Zora that became the publicly traded company and subscription billing platform and the founder of Vivint.
These
Excellent. So sales engineers.
Nice.
The
the technical folks that take two to tango to drive revenue. You got it.
yeah, why I, in my previous podcast, I interviewed several people from the sales engineering space. And basically the attitude was, well, the ones that actually do the selling, so
I'll take that strong belief on that as well, too. And
there we go. Okay. I just wanted to surface that Carlos,
Hi, everyone. Hey, I'm Carlos Noche. I'm a, I'm one of the leaders or partners at Visualize where we represent the value selling framework. It's our sales methodology that I've been actively selling and using for the last 15 years and for almost 20 years before that, I did sales and Matt, I started out as a sales engineer and became a worldwide VP.
So somewhere along the line, it worked out for me. I'm really looking forward to the podcast and just sharing best practices and ideas. I'm always looking to learn new things.
well, let's, before we get onto the main topic let's sort of pursue that thread that is there about you know, growing up into a VP of sales or, , head of worldwide sales, starting for sales engineering. Is that a path more people should take?
Andy, it's a good question. Are you asking me?
Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask him everybody, but you're welcome to start on that one.
you know, I hesitate cause I just had to think about it for a second. I don't think my path was the usual one or. The obvious one, but in hindsight, it gave me a lot of insight. So I've always had sales engineering report to me. It gave me great insights on the technical side. Although I always tell people, Hey, I just play one on TV.
And and then I came from financial background before that. So it all kind of pieced itself together. If you think yourself about being a leader, you got to understand the products. You got to understand your people and you really got to understand the financial behind it, especially if you think about CROs today and managing revenue from multiple directions.
Yeah, Matt.
I would actually say that's a pretty logical career progression for a sales engineer. And it's awesome to be in your collective company to Carlos, that she went through that journey. Because I look at the sales engineering function and you're at the center point of the organization that you're kind of part marketing, part sales, part product, or you got your hands in all these different things.
And those are normally the routes that we see SEs take and SE becomes sort of a lifelong sales engineering leader. They'll go into sales and sales leadership. They could potentially go into marketing through product marketing. Or even my route is I came up through the ranks in sales engineering and then went to product.
And that was a phenomenal route to then become a founder because you have all this great experience in terms of working with deals and doing and working with engineering. Then you can parlay that into actually getting companies off the ground too. So that's just some other routes and avenues that we see them take.
Yeah. Well, so here's the question. And this is actually gonna lead into what was the unexpectedly, the main topic that I planned for today, which was about, you know, how do we improve or change the reputation of sellers is. Yeah, I made sort of a career out of bringing people out of engineering into sales as sales engineers and as actually as salespeople as well as AEs.
And the first response I always got when I asked an engineer, I said, I think you should consider this to be something I think you'd be really good at. They said, Oh no, I can't do that. Cause you know, I said, why? He said, well, I can't persuade people to buy something they don't want. I said, well, that's perfect because that's not the job of a salesperson.
The job of a salesperson is to be a problem solver, you know, to help the buyer achieve something they want to achieve. And that seems like something you do every day as an engineer. And it's like, oh, and the people, I have very high success rate of people that came over from engineering into being sellers. And part of what I think was because they approached the buyers differently than salespeople Which was Yeah, I'm not comfortable being that, you know, prototypical, stereotypical salesperson. I'm sorry, here to help. So, , the biggest topic we want to talk about today, it was, yeah, how do we reinvent the image of the professional salesperson?
So, you know, John let's start with you. Cause this is a topic you'd want to talk about as well.
Yeah, you bet. I love your question. I think it's brilliant. I, my view is that it starts with the buyers and what the buyers want. And so, you know, how do we reinvent it? I'd say in your market, go to your five, 10 top buyers in your high value institutions and say, what is it you want? How do you want us to behave?
What do you want us to do? And the top selling organizations always have their customers and clients help train their sales team. Unfortunately, it's not a high percent of people who are doing it. But that's where I would start. And then I love, I think it's like how to in the domain area we're talking about.
What is your dream? And how can I work to help make your dream come true? So that's kind of what I think. And I do believe that sales is already incredibly honorable and trusted being done by so many people. It's just one of those professions that gets marred and tainted by its worst actors. When in fact, much of these really good behaviors are already going on.
Back to you, Andy. It's all about helping people solve their problems, make their lives even more successful. And ultimately, my research has shown befriending, your clients befriend you as a salesperson, and you often make lifelong friends when you're in the top echelon of sales because of the relationship, because of how much you've helped each other.
Right. But I think there are some really, , in my belief, there's some real structural issues that exist to create this perception of sellers. I mean, we do it. It's not like it's unfair. I mean, to your point, John, sure. There are bad actors out there, but I wouldn't even put it as bad actors.
Right. And I think it's part of it is what we do is how we set the expectations of the people who are selling as to what their job is. Right. And.
So I think that's true. I'm really focused. So I come from medical sales, not sass, not technical. You must be trustworthy. , there are certain requirements that happen there and you get bumped out pretty quickly if you're not playing by those rules. , so I do agree with you.
There's a lot of, you know, pressure put on salespeople to get numbers, metrics, whatever. However. Let's not forget all the wonderful, you know, things being done by salespeople that, that is factual and honest today. That's where my focus is. How do we get that recognized that these good behaviors are happening, demonstrated, adding value to the clients, to the companies, to the economy, and then how do we spread that to anywhere it's not happening.
Right. But I was sort of driving a different point, which I think is, unfortunately, is the perception of most salespeople by buyers is negative. Right? Yes. Undoubtedly, there are people doing it well. We want to celebrate those people, but we have the bigger issue, which is, Yeah you know, Gartner service, 75 percent of buyers don't want to talk to sellers right in the B2B space.
Yeah, so we can dive in what the reason for that is Gartner, or so Forrester had another study, you know, 80 percent of C level executives find no value in their interactions with sellers. Book that research done by Dr. Steven Timmy, a book that said, you know, 77 percent of buyers say that sellers are only prepared to talk about their product and not their problems.
So when you actually, when you talk to buyers, what they're saying is you know, this isn't, doesn't seem to be just an instance of or example of isolated cases. This seems to be a fairly widespread perception based on experience. When we start saying, okay let's, if we were to blow up this whole idea of the bad perception of professional sellers and start to change, the first thing that comes to my mind is that leadership in organizations and sales organizations clearly must think this isn't an issue because nothing's being done to change it.
Well, I and if I could pile onto some of your Gartner stats as well, I mean, they did a study. About 12 months ago, too, where they interviewed buyers and they said, well, what's the number one thing that the buyer wants? And it wasn't the marketing event. It wasn't the partner conversation.
It actually wasn't even the product access to be left alone in a free trial. It wasn't the seller. And it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. It was the technical expert, the sales engineer. This is actually the top of the stack. It was like 56 percent of buyers, like this is the main thing that they wanted to do.
And I go back to your question on like the perception of the professional seller and some of the things that john was mentioning. I don't think I feel like even from my own experience that I don't know if sellers have like an integrity challenge. I don't think that seems to be the issue where there's misinformation or there's some, you know, nefarious things going on the deal
I agree.
I think the tough is that Like the buyers are frustrated because the sellers are sort of getting in their way and they're slowing them down Because instead of uncovering the problem and their fastest path solution to that problem We're too busy with medic qualification And the six steps before we actually get to see the product in the example and when I would go back to my own I was my time by time at Zora phenomenal sales team, especially in the early days as well very sort of PTC led influence.
And it was a nearly a fireable offense. If the customer and the prospect got hands on with the product before they signed the deal. And I think that alone kind of speaks volumes to the change in the behavior as well, and the older mentality of sales process and practices, which is about.
Me, my qualification, my quota, my success, my product, and then having the gates up to what the buyer wants now, which is just extreme transparency, hands on access to products and services and getting down to business with the experts as soon as humanly possible. And that changes their experience for the better.
Yeah. So back to my point, the top management and organizations doesn't think this is a problem because it's not being addressed. So let's start there. How do we change? Go ahead, Carlos.
sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you. So Matt, I gotta go back to your thing. So medic, for example, great internally facing deal inspection, kind of, you know, acronym. Reality is no customer wants to be deal inspected. But the content behind it, I don't argue with because you know, our formula tries to get to the content behind it before it.
So I think first off, you gotta have a perception change. So John, to your point I, there's not a single person out there, including salespeople that want to be sold to, but everyone would love to buy. So we really, our process should be in a process of helping customers through a buying process. Now, if Matt, to show them the product.
If the product sold itself, great. Let's just put a demo online and get them to see it because it's awesome. Unfortunately, for a lot of our more technical products, we all know it doesn't sell itself and customers don't even know what they're looking for. Right. They don't even know their solutions to processes that they know that are broken, so they need some sort of guidance.
So I go back to selling should be about helping a buyer through a buyer process, and it does require interaction and questions early on. If the customer is willing to talk about their business, their challenges and what's going on today. So that we can lead them to, Hey, I think we can help you with these types of features, functions, services that help address it.
So we kind of earned the right to kind of actually show the product the way we want to show the product. Right. So it's kind of, it's almost like, well, cross that's so simplistic, but it's just a little pivot point. We really need to help buyers by not beat them over the head. They fill out a formula to go sell.
So I'm going to not to beat a dead horse, but it's down belief that change only starts at the top. And I think that I could point to almost every sales problem we have. From performance, blah, blah, blah, starts at the top. Somebody's got to be committed to saying, Look, I care about how we're perceived when we go on the market.
And our sellers are. And I don't see that level of commitment. So I, first question I just want to deal with is, Yeah, how do we get the most senior executives and the leadership of sales organizations sensitized to this issue that, I don't know. And maybe I'm completely off base here, but I think there is an impact on results given the fact this perception exists.
So how do we get them sensitized to the issue to say, look, yeah, we need to change this. And this is worth, this is a problem worth addressing.
Can I jump in there real quick? It's. I think it's making our sales culture, our sales DNA, who we are and how we engage with our people, a priority at that senior leadership side of it. So a lot of times you go, Carlson, this is it. They got to do this. Go tell the people, go tell them to do that. And then get me the report.
We'll see if we got our, you know, more revenue. And I go no, this isn't like an, you got to participate. As a sales leader you're the tip of the spear. When you engage with buyers, you got to be lead by example, not by spreadsheet. So Andy, I would start with, they need to make this part of running a sales culture, not just running numbers.
And we make, when we make it about running numbers, they go back to their comfort zone, which was, Hey, I used to use some sort of formula or metric to, you know, qualify stuff. So I'm going to make everybody else do the same thing. And they fall into the same behaviors. That's my two cents.
Okay. John
so I don't know. I mean, there are definitely all kinds of CEOs who are into it and have sales cultures and are wildly successful. And then in cultures that aren't wildly successful, there are elements of examples of extreme success. You know, there are top 1 percent of those people everywhere.
And so a lot of those folks will get trained in a way that pushes them away from trustworthy behaviors. So I think Matt or Carlos or Andy mentioned about internal focus, totally agree. Make the pipeline based on client based milestones, not on internal driven milestones. And so, you know, I think I'm excited about the 200 universities teaching sales.
I'm excited about so many high performing sales trainers and whatnot, Andy, and I do think it starts on the top, but I'm not, no human changes their mind unless they decide to a lot of the data, you know, Carlos, you want the A B test on your sales people, how we design them versus other people.
Nobody's doing that. You know, it's more the The folks are super successful in sales are doing everything we would want them to do. And one, one comment about I think the other thing is more deep questioning. And it's not discovery. Really, it's exploring for mutual opportunities. That's the area where the top sellers stand out because they continue that process of asking questions.
So that the problem can be defined more you know, precisely, and then brainstorming, co creating and the solutions can happen in the context of that company, making that one buyer more successful and the company more successful. So I'm not really answering your question, except to say we can continue to promote the behaviors that we know are not only the most successful behaviors, but good human behaviors.
And that to me is the, what inspires me every day. You know, getting after somebody who doesn't want to change your mind, I mean, Matt, it's up to you to tell us.
Well, I'll. I'll try to do so and hit Andy's question spot on as well around change starts at the top. But why aren't people changing? I think it just has to do with these are all businesses. And is there a tried and true formula where you get better results? And I think about the technology space that I've been in for so long.
Salesforce. com really chartered the playbook that so many people still run. And that's a very sales led focus playbook that has the same steps and qualification experience that we're all used to. And it has the same types of go to market models as well around for every four sales reps, you have. One sales engineer for every X million dollars of ARR.
You have, you know, Y CSMs. And I think the folks that I see changing are the ones that their go to market is precluding them to change because they can get a better result. And my example of this is consumption companies. So if you look at a Databricks or a Snowflake or a Cloudera, Or HashiCorp that Salesforce model doesn't work and they're running very different ways to interface with their buyers where the product is very accessible early on.
And that changes their entire dynamic. They're decommissioning CSM teams because they're no longer relevant. They're changing their ratios where they, for every one sales rep, they have one sales engineer. Sometimes that's inverted where they have more sales engineers to sales reps. The reason that they drove the change.
Was their business model precluded it because they got better results. I think that's ultimately, you know, I would see that playing out, Andy, which is unlike the PLG product led folks, the consumption folks, they just feel it more acutely that they can get a better cost of sale. They can get deals done faster.
They have better customer retention by running a different go to market. That's more focused on how they staff to drive the buyer journey forward that the traditional models necessarily didn't account for. I think what we see is like, well, when do those sales led companies start to change? And what do they do to do things differently?
And I think if they could take some hints from some of these other clients as well, to have some success in very new ways to
Yeah. I mean, I think, yes, I'm so curious. This is, I don't get sidetracked by PLG cause we'll do a whole nother show on that because. Yeah, really for 15, 20 years, we've embraced, I would call new models of selling, but I'm saying new, somewhat new models, but also new use of automation and technology.
And again, you look at the data from the results in terms of win rates and quota attainment, which is multifactorial. And that's going to blame it purely on sellers, but Hey, they're all in the crapper, right? Not with saying the fact we've had companies that had great success, but in the main, you know, I just received a.
book that an author had just published, a, you know, well known company, you know, lots of clients, you know, in the SaaS world, you know, structure your, you know, revenue organizations these ways. But I know their clients have low win rates across the board. So, you know, sure, there's a value in some of this, but at the end of the day, it's not connecting with the buyers and what we want them to.
So we still have this, we still have this gap. I agree with John that we have to start with the buyer if we're going to change and really understand what the buyer wants sellers to be.
And you know, when Andy, they tell you, I just did
I know,
we do the two day things. Yeah. You do know, just encourage everybody. We do these two things. 36 people were in the course, brought up the idea. It was over four weeks. One of the people implemented it right away and was like, Oh my God, this is magic. Our client told us what to do.
I said, did your sellers is a sales manager, you know, 15 sellers, do your sellers learn anything? Yeah. They learned something. I learned a ton too. We're going to bring them in all the time now. So I really feel like. That, you know, you get your CEOs involved with hearing directly from the customer.
I have countless examples of doing that where the CEO was quite upset that we were planning this and then we did it and it worked great. And then the CEO would take credit for it. So, yeah, of course. So, it's really. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, he did take credit because he supported it. Well, afterwards, he supported it wholeheartedly.
The point is, it's like all these things are waiting for us to learn and get better at, and we can do it. I can't argue against any of the statistics because it's all, that's what it's showing. It just surprises me that more people aren't doing what Matt said, which is experimenting with another way.
And certainly you mentioned businesses that have found a better way for their business model, and it all comes down to really just are you doing with that one buyer and then the 11 other buyers, are you doing what makes them the most happy with giving them expertise and insights that they couldn't get anywhere else because of your experience back to Matt, your engineer, your problem solving.
So I agree with all that mixed together, but this is getting me jazzed to continue the work we're doing.
Yeah. Well, let's look at one fundamental issue, which is buyers, we're at sellers. Perceive their job to be. I mean, to me, it start at the top. That's one, but the other angle, which for me is so persistent is in my work, I talked a lot of sellers and fundamentally if I were to summarize what they tell me when I asked them what your job is my job is to persuade somebody to buy my product. And I think if you take that approach as a salesperson, The defenses go up, right, when you start talking to buyers, because they sense very automatically or quickly that, Hey, this person's really here about themselves, not about me.
So Andy, so one thing there is I agree with you. Most sellers are focused on that initial close. And when and rightly or wrongly throughout my career you know, a lot of my sellers have become my close friends. And part of the reason is I've always had this concept of creating raving fans out of my customers.
So I, you know, even when I sold technology, it's not about getting him to buy it once. It's about getting him to buy it. Renew and recommended to 10 other people because that's how my brand would grow. And I would, you know, get my next 10 customers. So, but you gotta have that perspective going into it. So one of the things we make, you know, folks fill out is, Hey, along this process, it ain't about filling out a qualification sheet.
It's about filling out a mutual success plan with. Your buyer and mutual success for them isn't I'm going to sign your multi million dollar Contract and pour champagne all over my head. It's that is one scary little step I'm gonna take in the middle and then we're gonna go through implementation and then we're gonna go through go live Which is not the end and then we're gonna start using the product and then we're gonna actually get to those Outcomes that you promised me at the beginning, right?
So if you make it all about achieving those outcomes that value at the end of the day You And you can create a path to that with steps to evaluate it with sales engineers being a key part of it to kind of not only prove out the technology, but let's make sure legal, finance, security, the users, everybody else is on board.
And by the way, you know, it usually goes once you sign the deal, it's usually a different. Team or individuals that get involved to implement the technology. So you want to make sure you kind of, as if a sales rep was responsible for all that, and if we paid them on success, not on closure, you'd have a completely different mindset.
And I have a couple of clients that are starting to do that. Hey I'm going to pay on this thing, being successful and actually achieving outcomes, not on getting that initial signature.
And how are they measuring the outcomes?
So for one of our clients, it's usage. They don't get paid until the customer starts using their product. So that's when their revenue starts coming in.
So that's when the sales reps revenue starts coming in. So they'll pay them a little bit at closure and then they get a longer tail as that revenue starts coming in. So they got more buy in. To be a part of that longer tail or sales cycle. I mean, in a way, I wish we didn't call it sales because Andy, I'm with you.
And I do this little game of our workshop. I asked salespeople and marketing and executives close your eyes, and I'm going to share two words with you, and then I want you to open your eyes and tell me what's the first picture that came to mind. And I say, salespeople. And guess what? Majority of time it's that sleazy used car salesperson.
So like it or not, that is the perception that term kind of generates for folks. So I wish we could make it all about driving success for folks and almost get rid of the sales part of it, because that's really the business that we should be in.
The the point on Carl's just a piggyback on your point on the outcome. I actually really liked, and it went back to. You know, when I brought up like Databricks snowflake, some of these others, they have a different go to market model because that's exactly how they think and they operate. And that's how compensation gets determined and paid.
And you said that, you know, the job of the salesperson is to drive the outcome. And then Andy, your point around, well, salespeople should solve problems. I also, the way that I would think about it too, is I love the B2B space over B2C just because of how highly It is, it's not just a bunch of numbers and data and levers that you pull to try to get, you know, a database outcome.
Like we're dealing with humans that have personal goals and challenges and issues in politics, and it makes it fascinating. And I often found like the job of the salesperson should be to get your champion promoted because that in, in that realm, like. Well, you know that you're solving the problem, but it's more than that, because this person on the other side, that's going to sign up for this project, that's going to stick their neck out to do the deal.
That's going to say that we're going to go drive an initiative internally. Yeah. That hopefully the business gets the outcome, but people come and go all the time. And I think what gets deals done and Carlos, your point of like, why sellers are like, why you build these great relationships is because you're propelling people's lives forward and careers forward.
And if the salespeople. Like sort of think that is what they're trying to help them achieve versus I sell you something, Carlos, it doesn't work. You get fired that's like the opposite of what we're trying to do in sales.
But I'd say, I think the, yes, I agree. I mean, I, so I'm put a different little spin on it. I think the perception of salespeople by customers is not shaped by the salespeople that customers buy from. It's shaped by the salespeople they don't buy from. And that's the majority of who they're selling. They're encountering. Right. So I think that's really our challenge is not. You know, we're not worried about the top performers, not worried with the people serve being, having some level of success because in general buyers are buying from them because their buying experience is positive and is leading.
But the perception of all sellers is shaped by the sellers that buyers don't buy from. And I think that sort of becomes the challenge in some respects because, Hey, yeah, we're not running sales organizations for the benefit of the 10 percent at the top of the pie pack. We want everybody to have some level of success.
At least I did as a manager, right? So I think that's sort of an issue or a frame for us to look at. This is, yeah. And I wonder, you know, how some of that, especially, I think it's become more acute in more recent years is part of the way that we're training sort of implicitly training salespeople, how to interact with buyers is based upon how their managers interact with them. And so I like to say that, you know, the job of a salesperson is to listen, to truly understand what's most important to the buyer and then help them get that. I think that's the job of a manager, right? Your frontline manager is to listen to your sellers, understand things that are truly most important to them in terms of what they achieve with a career and their life, and then help them get that.
But instead, what they get is, have you made your calls, right? Have you made this many calls? You know, it's all this activity driven you know, sort of mechanized Control of sales that I think contributes in large part to the high churn we have in sellers. But also I think that's the behavior sort of the sellers mirror with their buyers interest in people's perspective on that.
So I love what you're saying, Andy. I love what everybody said. And Carlos, in terms of selling, I've stopped using the word. It's helping. And I have, it's always, and I'm back to Zig Ziglar, back to, I mean, Andy Paul, back to all these folks. We're helping making our buyers even more successful. That's it. And it's a privilege and it's an honor to get this opportunity.
And I do have to come back to the top performers saying that's what we have to spread. I get that organizations aren't getting that performance everywhere. They still can look at what's working and do their best to spread it. And anybody who is other, I think the big thing is trust. And a lot of the organizations, a lot of companies that work on stuff that cause sellers to do behaviors that don't look other oriented.
And then that's automatically reducing trust. And we all can tell when somebody is in it for themself instead of in it for us. You know, just animalistically we're wired that way. So, you know, as painful as it can be, sometimes you're going to not get the sale. And that's, if that's in the best interest of the client, I have countless examples of salespeople who recommend that against their own self interest.
They forego commissions and all this. A lot of it doesn't get told back to the organization. Now to your sales managers, a hundred percent, their customers. Other direct reports. And when they don't understand that, they miss out on optimal performance. And so, and then also, so are their peers, and so are their so are their bosses.
It's like, it's actually a universal approach that's most successful when you're helping other people become more successful. Is that just my opinion that I'm living by as much as I can? I don't know. What do you guys
Well, but in an effort to sort of propagate throughout an organization, the behaviors of top performers, my fears from what I see is that what we're trying to do is create systems that are a little too rigid, right? We've taken the autonomy away from sellers To say look listen to John's calls and everybody be like John, right?
Well, the thing is, nobody else can be John except for John. John can be John. And the reason John works with buyers and so on is not just the things he says, it's who he is and how he says it, right? I'm a huge believer that it's not the message, it's the messenger. And so it's hard to replicate that. But we seem to rob people of the autonomy To become the best version of themselves, become the best messenger, because we want them to comply to this playbook and this process.
And it's like, frameworks are great. We need frameworks, but unless the managers are investing to really understand their people, how can we help them become the best version of themselves?
So gentlemen, I think this is a hot topic for me these days. I call it, you know, we call it coaching, but when we get deal with leaders, I focus a lot on two things. I go, look, as a leader, part of your job is to manage a number. And the other part of your job is to coach your people. Your job is to make the better you to replace you.
So you can move on to your next, whatever that wonderful role is. And it takes ownership and accountability behind it. I was talking to some young leaders, like, Oh my God, Carlos, they're not even working on Fridays and they're not doing this. And, Oh, and they're so lazy. I go, you do realize that means you're lazy.
I mean, they represent you. Their results are your results. You got to own it. And if they're not doing it or whatever that it is, you got to go figure that out. And Andy, going back to your point. You also got to realize every individual on your team is different. So you got to sit down with them, understand them better.
Now let's face it, frontline managers, who do we usually promote? Our best salesperson. So what do they do? They become a super rep with five people underneath them and they basically close the deals through them. Why do I know that? Cause that's what I did my first year. And love him to death, a mentor of mine still today, Brett Cain was my manager at the time.
I hit my number, I had my rooster feathers out. I'm sitting in his office in San Jose, California. And he says to me, Hey, Carlos. How about next year you try to become the manager? Like what the? And then he explained it to me and I took it to heart and I literally sat down with each of my five direct reports, tried to understand them a little bit better, explained what our goal was, focused more time on making them better at what they did than me taking it over and doing it for them.
And surprise, the snowball started going and I became a director and a VP and all that good stuff. But I owe it to Brett that really, you know, shook me and said, Hey you gotta be a leader now. Not an indi, a great individual contributor. And Andy, going back to your point, leaders need to accept the fact that they're now, they have a new role, they need to create the 10 of what they were before and hopefully even better than they were.
Yeah, I agree.
Leaders oftentimes manage through spreadsheet to Andy's point around. It takes some of the humanity out of sales, where if we truly believe sales is math, and that if I just make certain phone calls and emails that I'll get the result, I think that's probably what turns off buyers as well, because they know the machine that they're caught up in.
And I think that's leading to some of the perception, Andy, of you experienced the bad sales that you're a part of, and it's the same canned message, the same canned speech. It sort of amplifies the opposite of the point that John made on the human side of bringing new knowledge to the table, trying to innately solve the problem.
And and I think some of the tech out there is almost dehumanize the sales process to a point that it's not great for the buyer too.
I think that's without question. I believe that the data shows that the true productivity of sellers. And I measured that as dollars of revenue generated per hour of selling time has fallen in the last 15, 20 years at the same time that we've had this incredible explosion of all this great sales tech and our tech and so on is that arguably we're becoming worse.
This thing that we should be getting better at. No, my great fear is about AI. It's not, I'm not fear AI. I think AI is a great tool. Fear of the usage of it is that we sit here 10, 15 years from now and look back and think, yeah, we're still doing the same shitty things we did 10, 15 years ago and we haven't gotten any better.
So I think Matt hit it. It's human to human helping, making people more successful. It always has been, it always will be. I think the tech world in particular, hearing all you guys talk and the people I work with, you know, through the courses, it's like, yeah, I think it's even more pressured to make it like a forward assembly line process.
We're going to engineer the heck out of, or, you know, we're going to systematize the heck out of this sales thing. And in doing so, a lot of the humanity has been gone. Other segments of the world have not had that. To the same degree, and they've always known and stuck with the human to human helping and so making.
And so I think there's, I still, I get what you're saying that, you know, the, I don't think there's a broad brush to say sales is honorable and trustworthy all the time, but I do think you can say enterprise sales, as we've talked about you know, it is an honorable and trusted profession The I'd struggle with the people who are doing behaviors that the buyer says, well, they're not honorable or trustworthy because they're those people exist to.
That's not the point. It's like, lawyers are not made to be. Dishonorable and untrustworthy, neither are doctors and. And I don't know the percents across the board. I hear you saying it's less effective Andy, which says probably that's more. Not great behaviors. I still think that, it's not about changing the perception across everybody.
Broad brush. It's about human to human, one at a time, and it's really Mother Teresa said, do not wait for leaders. Do it yourself. Person to person, and so that's a long slog to get the whole profession respected. But with Matt, Carlos, you, Andy and many others, you know, we can chip away, you know, day to day.
Because we know what makes them more successful. We know the numbers are better for the company.
Yeah. I think one of the things that's really important is to serve fundamental mindset. John, you and I have talked about this in the past. And yeah, I'm guilty of using this phrase in the past, but I've since stopped. Is this idea that, you know, you hear people say, well, selling is helping. And I don't think that's the case.
I think selling is selling, helping is helping. And there's a difference between the two. And there's things we need to do as sellers that are selling, right? We need to understand the buyer. You know, we need to certain things that we have to go through from a process standpoint. But those have tended to overtake helping, which
Yeah, well,
is every time we interact with a buyer, there should be a reason we're doing it because we're there to help them make progress toward making their decision.
so, so extend it. So don't stop at helping. I agree with you. It's not just helping just like with friends and stuff. We're not just okay. But when you say selling is helping the buyer become even more successful, that does it for me. Sure. On the back end, you got stuff to do if that's your frame. And if that's your focus, these are the people who make lifelong friends who started out as business contacts.
These are the people who are expanding the ripple of goodness. Happening that so so I, I'd like to propose it. Let's not stop it. Selling is helping because you can destroy it like you just did handy.
Yeah. Well,
it's helping the buyer become even more successful. They can possibly be without us in the picture.
And it creates John, to your point, it creates this win scenario. So, you know, for example, I I'll just call him Steve. He's a CRO I've worked with four times over and he's, you know, he's about to start his fifth place. And if he can, I know he'll call me in to work with him. Now I'll be honest with you.
He doesn't call me because we've been fishing and he doesn't call me because he just likes my jokes. I'm really not that funny. He calls me in because I install this process that he believes in and it gets us the results that he wants. And that's why, hey, we're helping each other out here. I, and I'll go the extra mile to do it.
Right. So when he's got a rep that's like, hey, Joe's not getting it. Hey, I'll set up a call with him. Hey, I'm going to be in Atlanta this day. Maybe you can come out. I'll go with him on a sales call. I'll go the extra mile because I really want him to get that outcome at the end of the day, which is positive.
So, that's what I'm getting at. It's business friends, help business friends. How they don't help one business friends and Carlos, like Matt, maybe just as capable of doing everything Carlos can do. Maybe the fact that Carlos already has this trusted relationship makes. The person you talked about immediately go to Carlos.
Don't need to waste my time with Matt or John or anybody else. That's the point. And then extending it more is friends help friends. This is the way the world works. Yeah. And friends help do things for friends that they don't do for non friends. That's why I come back to this softer language. And that's why I think sell it's just too fraught.
One of the definitions of selling is to con someone it's to, you know, so even in the definition It's inappropriate for what we're hoping to do and doing.
yeah. And that's why I want people. And actually I'm writing about this in a new book is understand that there's really two separate actions as a seller. They're not the same. They're selling there's helping. And don't want to give away too much before I publish the book, but that's the direction we're heading.
I think in giving people a very stark contrast between the two and understand there's times to do one and times to do the other that hopefully will make it more clear for sellers what their job is. So, all right. Fantastic discussion. Unfortunately, we certainly need to start wrapping it up. Yeah.
Thank you everybody for joining me. I would ask you how people can contact you, but just go on LinkedIn. You'll find everybody. Yeah, I spent a thousand episodes in my last podcast asking that question. I find it's like, why am I doing this? It's just go to LinkedIn, find all these people, find me. So I appreciate it.
And Hey, we'll continue this conversation. We'll have everybody back. We'll do it again sometime.