Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 Jen Allen Knuth and Jen is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Jen is head of community growth at Lavender. Previously, the chief evangelist at Challenger. My other guests today for this round table discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and increasing your win rates are my friend, Bridget Gleason, who many of you may recognize as my frequent co host on my previous podcast.
Bridget is a multi time successful CRO and head of sales and is currently chief revenue officer at Util. Also joining us is David J. P. Fisher. Or D fish as he goes by and David is sales author and sales advisor and currently global social selling lead senior sales enablement program manager at SAS. A few quick items of business before we jump into today's discussion.
First, if you're interested in getting even more actionable ideas about how to elevate your sales effectiveness, then please subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's called win rate Wednesday, and each week you'll join more than 50, 000 top sellers who receive one actionable tip to accelerate their win rates.
To subscribe, simply go to my website, Andypaul. com. And second, enrollment's now open for the next session of my Buyer Experience Bootcamp starting September 12th. Now, this Bootcamp is my 5 week group coaching program that teaches sellers how to elevate their win rates through a human first approach to selling that delivers the differentiated buying experience that stands out in the minds of buyers.
How you sell is how you win. For more information and to grab your seat in this class, go to andypaul. com slash bootcamp. andypaul. com slash bootcamp 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 you for taking the time to listen. I am so grateful for your support of this program. And I want to thank my guests, Jen Allen Knuth, Bridget Gleason, and David J. P. Fisher 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. Also, don't forget to subscribe to my weekly newsletter. That's win rate Wednesday. Each week on Wednesday, you'll receive an actionable tip that you can put to use in your selling to become a more effective seller and to accelerate your win rates.
So again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone.
Welcome everyone to this next episode of the win rate podcast. And gosh, I'm so excited by how I say that every week. And I say every week that I'm so excited. And then I also say, I say that every week. So anyway, I'm just repeating myself. I have three friends on the show today. Bridget Gleason, David Fisher, D fish as I call them.
And I think others do. And Jen Allen, who I have to add the new phone now, right? So
actually, Knuth, I pronounced it Knuth for like the first six months I dated my husband. Oh, okay.
So when did you get married? I got married in March. Wow.
Congratulations.
Thank you all
so much. Congratulations. I'm sorry.
Yeah. I was watching a cop show the other day and somebody, standing up to give a toast and at a wedding and saying, this is the best life sentence you can get. So, right. For those of us who have married more than once, we're practicing at that. So, so anyway, I just want to spend a few minutes, have people quickly introduce themselves.
Jen, we'll start with you.
Yeah. Jen Allen Knuth. I recently back in December left my 18 year career with CED Gartner challenger sales company. And I moved to the dark side. I went from sales to marketing. So I'm heading up community growth at a company called Lavender, which is an AI email coaching
tool.
Yeah, I think a Bridget.
So I'm Bridget Gleason. I'm a CRO at a company called Util and as Andy, anybody who's listened to Andy has probably heard me at some point because how many have I been on now? 130,
something like that. Yeah,
130. So you may get some repeats, but I really love the early stage startups getting them off the ground and all the messiness.
That's associated. And somebody said to me recently, any startup is somewhere between a hot mess and a dumpster fire. And you just always want to make sure you're closer to the hot mess than that's about true. So you know, win rates and effectiveness are things that you just have to continually strive for and work on, but it's a lot of fun.
So how many companies have you been sales leader
at? More than I can count on one
hand, maybe more than two heads, right?
No, I don't think more than two hands. I don't think more than two hands. Okay. It's been a lot. I mean, I can go look at my LinkedIn profile, but
yeah,
you keep it updated.
Yes. Okay. I do. That's how she gets the next one.
That's how she goes.
Well, no, it's just, yeah, she's, I think she's,
nobody wants nobody. Nobody wants the job. It's nobody wants the job at the early stage. It's messy. It's hard. You can't really lay the tracks, you'd lay breadcrumbs and you just hope you don't blow away before you start
following them.
Yeah. How many times have we had the conversation that this, how many times have we had the conversation that this one is your last one?
That's been a number of times too.
And the good news and the bad news is I... Love what I do. I love it. I love working. I love it. So it's hard for me to, it's hard. It's hard for me to give it up. As long as somebody will hire me, I think, and, just keep having the conversations and the number will just keep rising.
Well,
it's a similar conversation that I have with my wife about retirement as well, which has been going on for a long time. She
doesn't want to retire. Does she?
I'm not encouraging it to her. She just keeps talking about I've had it. It's like. Okay.
No just, I know we say that we don't really mean it.
We don't mean it. We mean it. We'll just do it.
I'm up. Yeah. David Fisher and all my friends call me D fish is a nickname I picked up while playing in a band for many years. And if you're listening in today you're my friend. So feel free to call me D fish. For 17 years I ran a sales consultancy called rockstar consulting. Coaching, training, developing sales programs.
I wrote 12 books, was on many podcasts, including some with Andy, where we just philosophized about sales and the the ups and downs of the of the profession and recently also, I don't know if I call it the dark side as Jen would, but took my first real gig in 17 years and I'm now running the global social selling program for SAS.
S. A. S. Not S. A. S. So, right,
all of that.
I'm responsible
for. You're welcome. And so what's that like?
What's well, let me put myself on the couch. Let's see. It was actually a great transition. It's in case they're listening. Great company, great people, great product, great solutions.
But for me it's actually been really fun to Be on the outside as long as I was where I was trying to convince people to let me come in and fix a little something. And as that's hard to, for example, create change like in a sales organization with a one hour training. And so it's kind of a nice being in a place where they're like, okay, we hired you make some changes and having the mandate to do that.
So, we're hopefully not on the dumpster fire end of things with our sales program there, but. We're doing all right. Not a startup. Yeah. We're not
a startup. I don't think you could. Yeah. You can't consider.
After 50 years, they don't get to be a,
You can't claim that anymore.
We'd say it's probably
nice as well.
You get other excuses for things not working, but not being a startup. Yeah.
Exactly.
We're going to dive into this. Jen, we're going to start with you. So cause you've really, you said you've been on both sides, you're 18 years, Gartner CB. Yeah, advising companies of all sizes, but I would say more sort of down funnel than top of funnel perhaps.
And then now you're specifically working more top of company, at least it's focused on top of funnel. So yeah, we read the stats and obviously part of the motivation with this podcast is, address this issue of sales effectiveness at win rates and we see all sorts of data points, but yeah, certainly the falling quota attainment, falling win rates over the years.
So as one of the issues, I just wonder. That if you're in an environment, we've certainly seen the success of sort of low win rates across the board and many of the companies is issue. There's just too many sales leads and people talk about not enough leads. But I would contend that if your win rates are 20% or 25% quantity of leads is not the problem.
Maybe you have too many.
It's an interesting take on it that I candidly had not thought of. I think for me, And this is my first time actually working in SAS, right? So I sold to SAS at Challenger. Now that I'm in it, Bridget, your comment about dumpster fire, hot mess, like, I feel that every day. To me, it's more of an issue of what we do with the leads.
So one of the things, as I've gotten closer into the SAS space that I've noticed, is we're still really tightly held, holding on to the show and tell motion. And I can't say that I fault people for it, right? It worked really well in 2021 when everybody had money to spend and things were shiny new objects.
But I think as we've seen the market shift, the show and tell motion feels like we're getting great signals. Like people lean in and say, that's really cool. That would be better than what we're doing. That's interesting. And I think it gives these false signs of confidence. But when I look at it, right, you get this volume of leads.
Like leads are not a problem at our company right now. We've got a really high volume, a really good spot for that. But even within our own business, sometimes I worry that because people get so excited about the technology and the tool, we match that excitement, right? And we fail to step back and say, maybe I need to understand a little bit better.
Is this a true buyer? Is this someone who has enough pain to necessitate making a change and going through the hardships of buying? And so for me, it's less about the number of leads, and it's more about what we're doing when we have them and some of the mistakes that we're holding onto from years where we're just running around in better conditions.
So are you creating more rigorous acceptance criteria?
I wouldn't say we're creating more rigorous acceptance criteria. Like one of the interesting things we're doing here is we're not doing any MQLs. And I'm not saying like that makes sense for every business. But if someone, all of our content is ungated because when someone comes in, we want it to be because they've truly raised their hand and said, I want to take a closer look at this.
Even still, though, you get people who are just curiosity shoppers and they're like, I've seen you everywhere and I just want to take a poke around. So I think part of what we are still trying to figure out is interrupting that a bit to make sure that because we have one AE right now, you need to hire for more, but we've got one, how he spends his time is of utmost importance to our business.
And so we've still got to think through a different way of fixing that.
So what are you experiencing in that regard, Bridget?
Well, first of all, I want to ask Andy. All the time. I've known you. Yes. Okay, here it comes. I've never heard you say that the trend is going up. Is the trend ever up or are we just like spiraling downward to eventually there will be no win rates?
Like there will be zero because I never heard you say go up. It's always going down. Well, in the
last,
For what the data points we have out there, admittedly in sales, our data points are not as good as they should be, but Yeah, for instance, the authors of the book, strikingly different selling part of the Franklin Covey organization commissioned a study of win rates.
I think it was a third party did. I think it's 4500 companies. They surveyed around the world, multiple industry segments and average win rate on contract value is 100 K and higher, which again, I contend 100 K is fairly modest size contract these days. 17%.
So you tell me. See, I don't think we know, right? I mean, just statistics like we've, made it made a lot of assumptions with organizations that like, Oh, our win rate should be 45%. I mean, you have actually had the conversations not with me, but with others about how quotas are actually determined.
Right? So if you're saying that we're not hitting quota you basically picked an arbitrary number based on, often how much revenue the company has. Sure. Been tasked with creating, and by the way, I don't know, 17% might be abysmal, but I would almost challenge other people to tell me why it's not like, I think we just take these numbers as facts of faith in the industry.
Let's look
at it though. I think it's a great question to push back on this is, yeah, if you're an AE and you win, let's say one out of five of your most qualified opportunities in a period. Is that good?
What makes a good, what makes a qualified opportunity? I mean I'm it's somebody that goes to somebody who knows gels, But there's no
somebody that goes to it your calculant somebody goes to it opportunity goes to a close, right?
So if you have you're working 10 opportunities in a period 10 clothes you lose 8 to you win
I would say that's I don't know what you're saying I say that would be low at that point if you're taking somebody through an entire process if you have not windowed out, how you want to call it, disqualified through discovery.
Like, if you're going to take somebody, if you're going to take somebody down the, to the altar and only two of them want to marry you at that point, you're probably doing something wrong.
I think , I don't think we have a standard way that we measure. We don't have standard criteria around what gets accepted.
And what is considered qualified, that can be very different. And sometimes AEs are pushed to convert something to a qualified lead based on criteria that they may or may not believe is qualified. So, I think there's That's why I
asked Jen that question. Excuse me? I'm sorry, that's why I asked Jen that question about acceptance criteria.
Yeah. So that's,
I mean, that's a really good one. The one that I typically look at and I've always, except for one time in a very technical sale is by the time when I get to a trial or a POC or whatever, if I let somebody through that gate, then I need at least 80% that are going to convert.
That you're gonna win. Yeah. Yeah. But I push that. That's the number I focus on because a lot happens here. There's a lot. Sometimes I'll let stuff in and allow it to be qualified because I, and again, I'm an early stage. Okay. Hotness to dumpster fire. There's a lot I need to learn. And the only way we learn them is we have conversations and I know I'm not going to win a lot of them, but I need the conversations.
I need the information. I need to understand how things are changing. I need to understand the edge cases to inform. So at different points in time, I will loosen criteria or tighten it depending on what I'm trying to achieve at that particular time. So I don't worry so much about the early but if we're starting to take when you get to that POC or trial, It's got to be 80% or don't let him through that gate that I feel and I think the other We touched on a little bit and again because I've been in technical sales There's a technical win and there's a business win.
And people get enamored with the technical and you can have an amazing product and Check. You can get the technical win. Not enough pain to buy anything. And so it sits. And so the other thing I say is, I, you get the business win first, and then we'll worry about the technical win.
You find out if there's a pain, then we'll go talk about how it's done. Don't do it the other way. Because otherwise, we waste a lot of time on science experiments. And I am not a science teacher. And I'm not an education. And I'm not an academic. And I don't like to educate for free. Right.
In case anyone's is,
well, genuinely a comment.
No,
I think that's really fair. I think in a world where there is so much shiny objects, or there are so much shiny objects, I don't know that enough organizations, Bridget are thinking the way that you are, which is we can make our pipelines look really fat and we can have green everywhere and say, look at all the interests, but if we are just doing all that work, just so we can lose weight.
We're destroying productivity, right? So I would rather lose early, get sellers to seek out the business criteria, make sure that there's enough pain so that instead of doing demos for people that never buy, we can repurpose that time in our outbound efforts or somewhere, any literally anywhere else that isn't just lighting time on fire.
Yeah, I
agree. And I certainly agree with Bridget is that you, yeah, you change the odds as you, hopefully as you move them through the funnel. But yeah, again, look at the data. Jen, you've obviously talked to hundreds and thousands of companies in your work. I've talked a lot in what I do. Most don't seem to be doing that.
It seems, I like to say sort of collective, at least in the SaaS business up until 2022 is, yeah, we're low win rates. We're just sort of playing the odds, right? We've got big fat pipelines. Yeah. We know for, okay, we're going to win 20% of them, and if, depending on the size of the pipeline, that could be enough.
And why do we worry about that? Effective selling, because, we can sort of collect these customers.
You know what else I don't like about like the wind rate, whatever effective ineffective selling is if we're not selling effectively, the sales rep that's involved in that is probably not giving the customer a very good experience.
And I just hate that. I think that to me is what really gets me in the gut. Because I've been through sales experiences that are horrible and it's terrible. It's offensive. I get angry on the inside, sometimes on the outside, but typically on the inside. But I don't want to, I don't want to put our, everybody's time is so precious, and I think we just owe it.
It's a sign for me. It's a sign of respect. That you run a good process and that if it's not a good fit, you screen them out early. Like, I think that's, it's just, it's our obligation and it's also just a sign of respect for the person you're working with on the other side. So. If we want sales to be a profession that people want to be in and hold up, then we've got to make sure that our sellers are trained and encouraged to operate in that manner.
But isn't one of the, yeah, Jen's, which I, you read my book, obviously I agree with that. But isn't the issue still sort of that most sellers go into the market thinking they're pushing a product as opposed to Being focused on helping create this experience to help someone make a decision. I mean, even I think Gartner at the meeting, unfortunately I wasn't able to go to Vegas, but seeing some slides that came out of it recently, on the number one, if not the number one criteria for influencing the order, ultimate order, had nothing to do with product or price.
It was the experience. And there's, other data, other researchers, Trinity Perspectives out of Australia does wind loss analysis. Summarize thousands of interviews they've done over a dozen plus years, the nine primary reasons why you win deals based on these thousands of interviews with enterprise buyers and nine reasons why you lose.
None of it had to do with product. It was all the experience. Well, the product
is table stakes. That's what I think too. It's table stakes. Like, can you solve their problem and just make it, a seamless experience for them as much
as possible? Well, I think that idea of seamless experience, I mean, that's an interesting...
Way to say it, because I don't think most organizations approach the customer experience from the customer's perspective, right? There's a lot of lip service for buyer centric or customer centric selling and marketing, but it's not. It's, hey, what works great for our sales organization? What's going to be the best sales process if they have one that we're going to implement?
And then, hey, we're going to market it in whatever way we think we can get the most leads. Very rarely do people go, Okay, what would a great customer experience from prospects through end customer? Then what are the touch points? And I think one of the other things that really confounds the opportunity to do that is misalignment of incentives.
And that kind of brings us all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. All of what we're saying, it makes tons of sense, but a lot of times marketers are like, Hey, I'm being tasked to hit a number of whether they're MQLs or however you want to call it. Like, I just need to get that number. I don't care if they're garbage or not, right?
And the sellers are going, Hey, I'm lucky to get to 17% because I've got George Washington as the lead name here. So I don't think he's probably even real, but somehow that got passed, through, through to me. Like that's where I think, how you create that alignment and then make that alignment actually in service to an end customer.
It's, it sounds great. And very few organizations actually, put their money where their mouth is.
So Why?
I know this is kind of a butthead thing to say, but I feel it's weak leadership. In my opinion, it is appeasing the dashboard instead of appeasing the buyer, right? If we look at everything that we've seen in terms of how customers want to be, to buy and how they want to be sold to. I mean, I don't care if it's McKinsey or Gartner, whomever, everything is just saying, keep the seller so far away from me because we have incentivized people to be a nuisance to buyers.
Right? When I shifted from the A. E. role to the evangelist role, it was because I realized that when I just shut up about our product, stopped talking about how great challenger was, and instead shifted to saying, Hey, it's really difficult to take someone who's never sold before. And teach them how to sell.
And here's all the problems that manifest when you're trying to do that. And I just never talked about our solution. And it was like my DMS were flooded with sales leaders who said, gosh, it feels like you were sitting in our team meeting. That was the exact conversation we have. And so I think over time as buyers have changed, I just I wish more organizations said, if you do the right things early, if you help buyers learn.
You will get that first opportunity to help them buy, but you've got to serve the first need before you start shoving your solution, your product down their neck. I just think there's a fear of, I mean, we see it everywhere, right? Like there's a fear of change. If I stop talking about our solution, maybe people won't buy it.
Maybe they will.
actually. Sorry to be surprised. Well, but it's, that is such a huge issue though, is how do we sort of address this pervasive culture in sales that it's all about the product. I mean, I, if Don Dieter Schmelzer runs the, undergraduate selling program at Kansas State University, which is one of the bigger programs, one of the first programs.
And she was on the show, my previous podcast last year. And we were talking, she was talking about her introduction to professional selling class or, freshmen and sophomore, 18 years old, 19 years old, no exposure to sales. And she said, as she's so struck, she said is that when they did role plays, all the students in the seller role defaulted to being really salesy.
And it's like, they have no exposure to this. Where does this come from? But then we just seem to not try to discourage it. We see ourselves consciously or unconsciously seem to support it going forward to your point, Jim. How
do we change that culture? Well, I think the culture is that it's beyond just the sales culture.
How does an 18 year old know how to do that? Because they've grown up with pop culture and depictions of what sales is. Yeah, I'm not talking about changing that. Right. But my point is we, if we're going to change the culture, we have to acknowledge that's the bedrock. I actually think that one of the hardest things.
to drive this change is to fight the human instinct to want to see direct results. Oh, good. I mean, I I will be the only one who says, I've got the gray hair. I started selling when I was making phone calls and on three by five cards, no caller ID, no email, none of that stuff.
But it was really cool because I knew if I made 10 phone calls with what I was doing, I would set up one meeting. Like, I literally, like, I don't know how it worked. I might make 30 and it was just the last three. The human brain is wired for that and we'd like that. So to Jen's, your point to tell somebody, I call it the Maverick effect.
The beginning of the movie Maverick, where he says, I'm not going to win for the first hour of playing poker. I'll let you, you win. And he then learns all their towels and he cleans up, like to tell not only a seller to do that, but then to tell the sales leader and the CRO, Hey, we got to hire these people and then just give them some time.
That's a really scary thing. I agree with Jen. It's a lack of strong leadership, but I think that's what we're fighting. If we really look at the change management process,
so you see that if we gave people more time when we were onboarding them in order to,
well, more time doing the right things, right?
And that's where I think that training piece comes in. It's not more time to make more, calls like, and Jen, you'll have strong opinions on this, but it's like, it's not more time to give, them AI to figure out how to like email the person 80 times, as opposed to just 40.
Cause that'll double your
rates. No, I still want more time to come acclimated to a sales environment. We bring young people into this. I mean, we all joined, but at least I did. I was 21, my first sales job. I didn't know anything about it. Right. But I was coming into the industry at a time when, we didn't have this quote unquote 90 day pressure or whatever to onboard and get up to speed.
And, we had managers that said, Oh, everybody sort of develops at a different rate. And we have a little patience. And yes, we did hire you. Do we expect you to perform within a certain period of time? But it wasn't 90 days.
Well, Bridget said it really well. Sorry. I would say Bridget said it really well where she's like, it's not the product case.
It's the. Or the technical case. It's the business case, and especially if you're going into an industry that has any level of complexity, just going, Hey, you're brand new. You've been here two weeks. Do you understand the industry? Now you make a compelling case to a CMO or a COO about why they should change.
But that's kind of sometimes what it seems like we expect of people in sales,
just
pick it
up like this. It's so rare that you see anything that isn't that right. It's wild. If we sit down and think when I started sales, I didn't know what B2B meant, the most basic of terms I didn't understand.
And then I get immersed in product training and then I go off and make a hundred calls of what am I going to talk about the thing that I'm confident on, which is my product. And then we beat sellers over the head and say, why are you talking about the product? In my opinion, I think it is the single most destructive thing ever.
Like I had a manager that was so hard on me, but it was the best experience because I was not allowed to bring a deal to review unless I could tell him what did that company sell, how did they sell it and who did they sell it to? If I couldn't give him that, he said, you don't know enough about the customer to be even in a deal process.
And that rigor was one of the single best things that helped me as a salesperson. I knew I wasn't going to be able to get away with skimming by on that. And I just don't know that. We apply that much rigor to the customer. We apply it to what does our product do? How does our product do it? Why is it better than everybody else?
Yeah. I had that
with a manager that was those questions. Plus how does the customer make money? That was his key question. So how do they make money?
Yeah it's
pretty basic. But unknown by so many sellers,
right? It's like they're in ed tech. Like, I know they're in ed tech. Like, how do they make money? What do they have to do in order? And it's just you quickly realize the surface level understanding of the buyer, which explains why people talk about what they know.
Yeah. We just sort of seem to be in this. It's like we recreate the wheel every time there's a new cohort of sellers coming into sales, right? Is, and we don't seem to be getting better at it. I mean, it's, I read. Widely about management talk. I think one of the great models for what to do in sales is actually often isn't sports management, not a sports cliches, but you know, you look at sports are really technically advanced in terms of the management techniques, like soccer is one everybody knows I'm a huge soccer fan and, hear coaches say, well, we're investing a lot in bringing this new player onto the team.
So what we do is we first. Help them become a better person before we start teaching them how to play soccer. Think about that. They got these hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars at stake and they say, well, the first thing I do is just help this person, become a better person first.
And I think about it in the context of sales, culture change and so on is, yeah, we can bring all these younger people, newer people into the sales, whereas they were a throw you on the phone these days, how much time they ever spend on a phone. Growing up. Right. I mean, the so used to asynchronous messaging and so on.
And it's like, we know, I mean, the Gartner data talked about it. Other, when less analysis, Dave talks about it, it's still important to be able to form a relationship with someone virtually. Right. Do we spend any time coaching people on that? Or we say, no, here's the product, here's our process. And then we expect different results.
Bridget. Andy. Jump in here. Yes,
quite observing. No, I, because I'm, I agree. Yes, I agree. I don't think it's those strictly a sales problem. So I think the pressure starts. At the top, and there isn't an understanding at the sea level of what this looks like. And so there's this push downward to show the spreadsheet, and there's just not an understanding there either.
And I think there's an education that needs to happen there if we think anything systemically is really going to change.
Bridget, do you, what do you see like with peer groups like startups? Other startups, like how do the good sales organizations or revenue organizations form? But you're talking about like, right at the very beginning, like, are there things that are done right or wrong?
Like, it's one thing to be in a very established sales culture and you're trying to like move a ship, right? Those move slow. But what about like kind of those more agile, nimble, right at the beginning? Is there a hope there, I guess, is the question I'm
asking. I think maybe why I gravitate to startups is because I think there is more flexibility there.
And oftentimes, the CEOs, they don't know what they're doing and they know they don't know what they're doing. And so they're willing to let me do it my way. Are you sensing a control freak speaking right
now? Okay.
So, so there's a little bit more flexibility there and a little bit more. No, we're not doing it that way. And no, we're going to take our time, so there probably is to your point, you do have a little bit more flexibility to do it a certain way and you're not trying to do it at scale. Cause it's a lot easier to do it.
When I can have a smaller team that maybe I can't be, I can never be on everybody's calls, but I can listen to Gong. I can, they can be on some of my calls and they can observe how it's done. So I probably have it easier because I'm not trying to do it at scale. I think doing it at scale, then it just gets more challenging.
What I hope is though. It's like a, it's like a small group classroom and it's very personalized and I hope that then these sellers are going to go out and go to other places and then bring that with them because as you said, You can't put somebody in a one day or three day training and expect it to stick.
It doesn't. And, the thing about so early on at Xerox, which had, in the day, this was like a hundred years ago. They, an amazing sales program. Not quite. No, it wasn't a hundred. Okay, I exaggerate. Eighty, eighty, eighty, maybe.
It wasn't a
hundred, but it was up there. What they said about, and we had tons of, we had months of training before we could talk to anybody on not just the product.
There was some on the product, but it's the context and the customer and the environment. But they said the effectiveness when they studied it, the reason it was so effective is because when you went back. It was continually reinforced. It was good. And my, Andy, I've told the story before it was at Xerox, my first potential deal.
My first, like I'm the bright scrub sales rep. It was Ford Aerospace, Lou Espinoza. I brought him the proposal and we had developed this relationship. And he said, that looks good, Bridget. Let me show you that the proposal that I got from IBM. And I understood. His budget and what he was trying to accomplish and the strength, blah, blah, blah.
And I looked at the IBM proposal and I said, if I were you, I would buy IBM. I would buy that one. Okay. He's like, okay, great. And he did. And I went back to the office and I told my manager, this is what happened. And this is why I told him that. And he said, that was the right thing to do. Get out of my office.
Cause you're. You still have the same quote of your quote.
There are no moral credit points for that. Yes,
that was the right thing to do because that's our ethos issue. You really, they became Ford Aerospace became my number one customer because anytime at Ford when there was anything even remotely that I could respond to, he would say, call Bridget Gleason.
She'll be honest. She'll be. They were my biggest customer by far. And so it's sort of to your point about developing relationships that I was taught very early how to do it at scale. And there was a lot of reinforcement. So I guess I try to bring that to the teams and hope that they will then go and provide that example somewhere else.
It's not like. It's not going to scale in a big way in my lifetime, but again, I think I've got the advantage that I've got smaller teams to work with. So I have it easier when the hot mess and the dumpster fire is small, they're easier to contain, like the fire extinguisher, as opposed to needing like a squad,
just a little.
Well, it's interesting about your story, though, is you knew why you were winning the business there. Yeah. There's data that came out of the folks that closed or sponsor of this program. And this study found that when sellers enter their, reason for losing a deal into the CRM, they're only right 15% of the time.
They went and did a study. They looked at the reasons going to sellers. They went and talked to the buyers, compared the answers. So it's like salespeople. Yeah, go ahead.
I think the other thing about that is. I was very clear, I knew why I told Lou Espinoza to go with IBM, I knew, and it was unambiguous and there was no, there was no hesitation.
Well there was a little hesitation to tell him that, and it's because I, that's how I would want to be treated on the other side, is I would want that person to be an honest broker. And tell me because they knew more and that's what I would want. And I thought I, and we learned that is I want someone to treat me and tell me the way that I want to be treated.
And so for me, it was very clear that I really didn't have a choice that if I'm always going to try to do right by the customer, then I have to be that honest broker and really try to see it from their perspective. Regardless, if I've got to go find a replacement for that deal that I just lost.
Raised an interesting question, because there's this sort of body of quote unquote thought leaders or whatever on LinkedIn that say, Relationships? Nah. Buyers don't have time for relationships. They don't want relationships. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's gone out of style. In fact, I think the data shows that's why people are buying from you.
I mean, I think that's the one, the number one misconception about challenger. We all know like challenger was picked as the title because it was provocative. Right. And when we said relationship builders lose, right, it wasn't that building relationship is a losing strategy. It's just, I think far too many sellers, myself included, because that was my profile before I learned about challenger interpret.
I have to build a relationship to win a deal. The thing that I heard that I, that really resonated with me is a relationship is an outcome of doing the right things with the buyer. Right. It's not the entry point. It is something you earn through doing the things that Bridget described. And I think, if we taught that mindset, Bridget, that you just walk people through, and we gave hundreds of examples of when you play the long game, it actually ends up being the short game and you win more.
I think teaching the mindset is so much more important than teaching discovery and negotiation and all these tiny skills, right? Because everything we do in pursuit of executing those skills should be guided by the mindset.
Oh, I agree. That's sort of my beliefs. Yeah. Yeah. We're pretty adept at training humans how to be sellers, but we're really lousy at training sellers how to be human.
And this is, we don't even make an effort in most cases. Right. And yet Again, there's starting with Gartner and, they even talked about the challenger sale, but so on as the single biggest individual deciding factor and the customer's decision making is their experience with you as a seller because the products are table stakes to Bridget's point, a good product, a decent price, best table stakes.
And if everything else is, if everything else is equal, what makes the difference? It's you.
Isn't relationship another way of saying experience? Right. I mean, you're kind of talking about the same thing. I mean, I, you know that I'm very biased towards the relationship sale. I wrote a book, some books on it.
But the idea that I, I think the biggest mistake and I know some of the LinkedIn thought leaders that you speak of I, I think the mistake that gets made a lot is the difference between relationship and friendship. Like a lot of people hear, Oh, I've got to be my My buyer's best friend and, we go back to this old school idea.
I'm going to take him out for a round of golf and we're gonna have dinner together. And by the way, there's still some sales roles where that level of relationship slash friendship is critical. And that is actually a big piece of it. But for most of us, it's not that we have to be somebody's best friend, but they have to trust us, right?
So again, the experience and, Bridget, you said it so well, it's like they, that buyer knew that you were going to tell him the truth. In that moment, not be like, Oh, don't pay attention to that part of you're like, Yep, this is a better deal for you. I can see why you're going to do it because that person that knows you're going to tell them the truth the next time if what you say is, Hey, you should buy from me.
And here's why. I mean, I remember, I got my start. It's not so glamorous. Emilio. This was not for an arrow star. This was selling knives in people's kitchens. Cutco knives. Cutco. I love
Cutco. I should go
get my collection. Yeah. By the way. my contract. I still sell. Just, here and there. They're amazing. Coming at you. Right. Good. By the way that's a case where the product does sell. So we don't get to cut pennies that much on our sales demos, but I, through circumstance or fortune, my manager kind of taught me the right way.
Kind of this idea of always. And it was transactional. We weren't, I wasn't becoming best friends with people, but I always walked in going, take care of the customer. My close range was 91% and I still remember that because it was really high. But sometimes it was just like one knife or like the pizza cutter.
They are. But I've had my set now since 1997 so they're cheap. They're
cheap. I've had mine longer. I've had mine longer than that. I think I have. I've got, and I love my Cutco knives, like I've got a lot of them. My sister sold them stuff. Your now
commercial. Everybody message me, I'll sell them to you. I'll get you a deal.
They are fantastic. They're fantastic. But the sales point I'm making, and the closing point is, was very much like I knew personally in my, like I didn't sell stuff to somebody they didn't need because, and I actually remember this husband, and I forget his name, but looked at me and he goes, are these really worth it?
And I could look at 'em and say, Yeah. Like I've met people who've had these since 1951. That was my record. I've met a woman that in 1950. Yes. He's like, cool. Brought me a big check. But that's
Richard, wasn't that when you were 50 years old in 1951?
Exactly. Exactly. I thought I was negative 50 years old in 1951.
I think. Yeah.
I just color my hair so you don't
see it. Yep. Yep. But yeah it's that trust piece. And imagine a sales onboarding process. I think an ideal one would be like our number one job. From start to finish is to build trust with our customers. I like, not that I talk about a lot.
I like that the owner of Sass, S A S, not S A S, in our sales kickoff was like, we are in the business of trust, and then you're like, Oh, cool. That is a message I can get behind. That is not, I think, something that you hear from every sales organization and sales leader.
So unfortunately not. No.
All right. Well, unfortunately, we're sort of reached the end of time, but well, not time, that sense, but then there's a hard time here
together before the apocalypse.
Yeah, very apocalyptic here. I want to thank everyone for joining us. Jen Bridget. I have a nickname for Bridget. Her nickname is captain.
Fantastic. She was
obvious.
Obvious why now after she's been on the show. And Dfish, thank you. I look forward to having you guys come back at any time, because we've got lots of good conversation to have. So, thank you.