Hi friends. Welcome to the Winrate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Gail Agar. And Gail is one of my guests on this episode of the Winrate podcast. Gail is the CEO at Aligned. My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and improving win rates are David Fisher.
David is the principal sales enablement manager and global social selling lead at SAS. And also joining me is Vince Beese. Vince is the founder at Sales HQ. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion. If you enjoy this program, please do me a favor. Take a second now before we begin the show to rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts.
If you could do that, it really helps us get discovered by even more sales professionals, just like you who are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. Really appreciate you taking the time to do that. All right, if you're ready, let's jump into the show.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of The Winrate Podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Gal Agha, Vince Beese, and David Fisher, for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, The Winrate Podcast with Andy Paul, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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!
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. And gosh, another stellar cast of panelists here today that I'm really excited to talk to. Could give everybody a minute or two to talk about themselves. Gal, we'll start with you.
Thank you so much. Yeah. Excited to be here. I have one. So gal, I'm a co founder CEO of a company called aligned being in which is which is a sales tech company and being in sales my entire career and stayed in sales as a founder. So I've been 15 years in sales tech build three sales organizations or four thing by now as VP sales, CRO.
Had been fortunate to go through the different journeys, one to 10 million ARR 20 to 100 million ARR, and experienced a lot of challenges and then had, you know, more fortunate to go and build a startup to solve a lot of these challenges so really quickly align is basically a customer facing collaboration platform, a deal room that helps leaders go and standardize the perfect sales process.
It's like one place for CS and sales teams to go and provide a better experience to their customers and run the entire process, mutual action plan, champion building, multi threading that helps with a lot of that and just, yeah, influence core metrics, swing rate, deal velocity leaving the startup dream.
Yeah.
for having me back, Andy. Look forward to the conversation, Vince Beasy. I run two entities today that are related. I just started a new endeavor called sales HQ, which is the first ever co selling community for high performing sellers and sales teams. Our first location is here where I am in the Raleigh, Durham area in North Carolina.
And inside of sales HQ, I run something called sales at scale. So you can see I'm very involved in sales. Just I named my company sales. So it makes it look like I know what I'm talking about in regards to sales, but
It works.
sales at scales is a B2B sales consultancy for. Early stage venture backed companies with helping them with their GTM.
And so, yeah, I've do both those things after a 25 year career of a sales leadership at various different venture backed companies some of which recently were purchased by our friends at Metta, so I left customer most recently before starting this endeavor and decided to be an entrepreneur late in my career and lower my stress level, you know, so.
Yeah. Yeah. Just when you had kids going into college.
Right, Gal? Like, isn't it, the stress level is really low when you start your own company, isn't it? Recommend it for everybody.
bye. Sells, though, prepares you the best for it, I think,
that's right. Gal's got all that gray in his beard. He's only 28 years old. So
That and daily therapy helps a lot, so.
and a half.
27 and a half. Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to.
No, reaching 40 is here, actually.
Turning 40 this year?
Yeah. Yeah.
my
Ah, yes, David Fisher. But I go by the moniker of D fish for a little over 17 years. I ran a sales consultancy rockstar consulting. Doing everything from individual sales coaching for high level salespeople to founders and entrepreneurs, all the way to developing sales programs, sales, playbooks, sales training Vince, everything that had sales in the. I would be involved in, but I also got into writing books at a certain point and have written, I think I'm at 12 now. I kind of, kind of lost track. I didn't say all of them were good. All
I feel very inadequate when you say that.
Yeah. You've probably sold more books than I have told though, Annie.
So you're doing okay. I got yours right over there. I'm a big fan. But also was an early adopter of LinkedIn actually for sales. And a lot of my work kind of would be lumped into the social selling world. And in fact a couple of years ago went in house. So went the other way to to create stress instead of doing a startup, went to work for a big company.
And I run their global social selling program for our thousands of customer facing reps around the world.
And yeah, you can identify the company.
SAS. Yeah. SAS. That's yeah. S A S not S A
Hey,
that, they're my backyard. I live in Cary.
Yep. Oh, you live here. You're right down the road from us. Yep.
You'll have to tell me when you come to town.
100 percent as long as we can go get some barbecue.
We could do
Yeah. And take you to the ballpark. It's such a cool ballpark there in Durham. All right. So, Gal, we're starting to make you a little bit of the star of the show here is cause riffing off a LinkedIn post that you'd written a, I don't know, a month or so ago, you'd posted that B2B buyers don't want to talk to salespeople.
Gartner shows this trend is getting worse. So. Is the trend actually getting worse or believe that buyers have never wanted to talk to salespeople, but yeah, it's hard to, if you've a hundred percent of buyers don't want to talk to salespeople, then how can the trend get any worse? Go ahead.
Thoughts. are we seeing out there?
Yeah, I can jump in as the one driving the topic here. Yeah, I feel like there are multiple things that are happening. I think that, yes, like buyers just want to solve a problem, right? You don't want to talk to the salesperson, but I think that , there is a shift where buying is just getting more complex.
There are a few things that are happening, I think, that we're seeing. If you look at the last decade, there are just double stakeholders. That's a fact. There are twice as many stakeholders involved in deals. Budget scrutiny is just greater than ever. Not only the economy is the reason, but I feel like if you look at the number of categories that right now we have going around the last two years, that increased also by 20 percent.
Not vendors. Categories increased by 20 percent. Which, you know, just buyers are just more overwhelmed. And I think another thing that is that is happening, so you have more categories, you have more stakeholders, you have more scrutiny on making decisions. I think another thing is that behavior, right?
We shifted from into Gen Y buyers and we shifted into into more, you know, digital oriented self service tools that are driving the expectations of, , Hey, I want to just try this tool and try something out. And I think a lot of years also of, you know, demo, SDR and all of that process that change expectations.
And when I'm talking about this a lot because, you know, that relates a lot to the narrative of what we do and the conclusions that we've gotten to, why we're building our company. But but there are also stats from a. From Gartner and Forster, , they do a lot of work in this area, and Gartner say that today 95 percent of the buying journey is not spent with the seller.
Okay, in a competitive scenario, it's 85, 87%, something like that, in a non competitive scenario. And the second quote that they bring up a lot, eh, is two years ago, they ran a survey and they found that 43 percent of buyers prefer a solid free experience, not to speak of salespeople. And now they've redone that survey, and it's 75%,
Yeah.
So that's, I think, the last thing that really shows that there is some kind of a trend. And yes, I think if it's going to become if just buying is becoming more complex and we're more used to self serve and then yes, , there is a trend here.
Yeah. I think there's certainly a trend in terms of there's a greater number of products can be purchased self service. I think that's, that started with the advent of the internet really, but even started before that with, you know, EDI and electronic data interchange and so on as you know, supply chains, you could order reorder without salesperson being involved and the number of products undoubtedly that sort of fall into that category is becoming every day. What do you think Vince?
I agree. I, with you, your comment was initially Andy, I don't think it's getting worse. I think it's the same at worst of the buyers wanting to speak to salespeople. I do hear what Gail's saying about the amount of categories and products within these categories. Over the last 18 months, it just exploded.
And before, before that period of time, I thought it was outrageous how many products there were. So I think it is the inundation of the amount of calls and emails and contacts we're getting. Is really the issue. I don't think it's, they're not talking to sales any more, any less. I just think they're continue to be bombarded numerous ways by products that look very similar that do similar things or new products that are shiny.
Right. That are out there as well. So I think it's I think it's more challenging now than ever for buyers. And I think one last point is I still don't think. That the selling teams are mapping to the buyer journey, right? I think they're mapping to their journey and what they would like it to be. And that's the bigger challenge out of all this.
I agree a hundred percent on that, David.
yeah, I would almost ask the question now that this has an easy answer of what is a seller doing during that exchange with. With a buyer, do buyers want to be sold more? No, they don't want more emails. They don't want more promises to go on this webinar. So you can learn about this new platform that really is doing something that you already have in house, but we want a chance to sell you this. I would almost say though, I think the flip side of this or the flip side of the opportunity is. As the process is getting more complicated, as there's more categories, as there's more stakeholders involved, you know, I made this comment the other day, you know, I do work for a large organization. If I wanted to buy something, how many people would be in on that decision?
It's not two, right? It's a sizable number. I think that this actually is where a good salesperson to Vince, what you just said about mapping to the buyer's needs. There's a real place for the consultative, you know, relationship, whatever you want to call it, but yeah I call it being a sales Sherpa.
That's what I wrote about in one of my books. Like you've got to position yourself as that guide for the buyer and not the buyer. It's the buying committee, right? Like if you acknowledge there's going to be a couple of key decision makers, a couple of financial decision makers, a couple of users. A couple you know, adjacent influencers, if there's nobody quarterbacking that process, it's probably not going to move anywhere because the status quo is always who you're going to lose to more often than not.
Yeah. Well, there's a lot in there to unpack. First I'm gonna go back to a couple of things Gal said is yeah, here, the statistic, you know, buyers only spend 5 percent of their buying journey with salespeople. Yeah. That's like, so what, right. Who cares? Cause that number probably 40 years.
I'd be willing to challenge, you know, we get this data in isolation. Buyers don't spend a lot of their time with salespeople. They never really have. And I think this is, yeah, data like that to me, it doesn't serve any purpose putting out there because I don't, there's no context for it. Right. It frightens people.
It's like, you know, this whole mythology about buyers are 80 percent of the way through their buying process, where they talk to sellers first time, as if they've closed the door to being influenced by a seller. And yeah, obviously it depends on the product and so on. But again, I think that's sort of mythology.
Cause I like that's quite good.
I think there's an important point here and I'd be interested in what you guys think about this. I agree with the statement you just made. But what I think has shifted is that 20, let's say 30 or 40 years ago, if you wanted information as a buyer, there was a high likelihood that the seller was actually the conduit to it.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
and so what happened is the sellers. Could be not as good at being a seller because quite literally they're the one that brought the brochure, right? You want to find this information out about next year's machine or widget, whatever, okay, well, I'm going to bring you the specs. And so I don't have to be a good salesperson.
I just literally have to be a breathing body that can get there. Now the fact that, you know, and Gal, you said, you know, the Gen Y buyer
They're, they are more comfortable going to get that information on their own. Now they might not really know what to do with it, but sellers, I do think have lost.
This very easy way to get in to a buyer's or to get on their radar.
Well, I think that's true. That's changed. I think it
Oh, that's all I wanted.
Okay, so.
Changed. I think
I think we've learned that it's changed that's the heart of it, right? That's the heart of it, right? Like if we go to the traveling salesman that, you know, there has been changes, right? We B2B 10 years ago, people were talking about field sales and inside sales. There's no such term, like I don't hear anyone saying inside, what's inside sales?
There's sales. You do it, and most of the time you just do it. In zoom. And if you're running six, high six figure seven figure deals, you do it face to face a little bit, right? And there's no, almost, I don't, I almost don't know sales processes right now. Sales teams. I'm not speaking with VPs of sales daily.
We have thousands of users and we're speaking with them all the time that are doing, you know, that old fashioned Hey, in that step of the process, we're traveling, maybe, you know, the SAPs, the very big for extract deals. So things have changed, right? And they have changed from a point of view where we were visiting and making a peach and building on RFPs and RFIs and RFQs and software sales, IBM, right, band.
Things are changing and things are changing all the time. So I think that's a difference. And I think that the. The average selling experience today is just breaking and it's not help, it's not helpful for the majority of the buyers. And if we have more stakeholders involved in even S& B deals, which we do, okay, that's stats.
We can't, like, that's actual stats from the reality. And if S& B deals right now needs to be, a seller needs to multithread, And a seller needs to help an SMB even deal, build a champion and build a business case, right? Then that means that seller needs to do a much better job at enabling a buyer and supporting things internally.
But the majority of sellers don't know how to do that. So I think that the result is that what we're seeing is that's why, you know, there's Google spam policy and the sequences right now. are not working the same way as before, there are things right now in the market that are not working the same as they used to because of these changes, because the average sales experience, I think it's just not enough and things are more complex and we need to do much, much better than before.
Yeah, so my impression is that we overstate the complexity
Okay.
And there's, even, you know, when I hear the talk about more and more stakeholders involved in deals, in some cases you think, well, geez, if I extrapolate the numbers and every virtually every employee in the company as a stakeholder, because, you know, And I just don't think that's, that is the case.
We've served, you listen to the discussion, almost like, gosh, we've invented multi threading recently. And I just look back at my own experience. I've been in sales quite a long time selling large deals and yeah, we've multi threaded forever. You've always had to, this is not a new phenomenon.
There's always been, I look deals. I did, you know, seven, eight, nine figure deals that literally had dozens of stakeholders.
to ride a horse to your appointments, didn't you? Back in the day.
Well, it's uphill both ways. Before airplanes were invented.
Have shoes.
Kids always tell me. You know, we had to walk to school both ways, uphill in the snow. But, I don't, it's, yes, there's changes and there's differences, but I think we overstate them.
I'm not sure what the agenda is to overstate it. It's always been a complex. feature. Now, there are more choices, but there's even been studies done, you know, on B2C buying where there's, you know, a huge amount of choice. And it was a book by Simonson and somebody, I forget the exact name, when they did research, it showed that actually, you know, people are pretty adept at navigating through all the, you know, hundreds of vendors to make choices for things. It's like, there's part of me just thinks like. There's this, you know, agenda to some degree to say, make the seam. Oh, too complex. It's like, yeah, it's complex. So let's just deal with it, right? It's like, I don't understand why we're trying to make it more than it's all right. It's like, you know, sellers always say, Oh, selling so hard today. It's like, well, selling is always hard. Right? It's always been
I don't, I disagree with that. I think the problem is that selling has been easy up until a year ago or so.
Well, no, you're talking about in SAS, you know, we're talking to segment of the business, you know, SAS sales, but in B2B in general, so I'm my own
Selling big complex deals has always been challenging. It's not for everybody, right? It's a grownup sport and you either got thick skin and you can do it, Or you don't, right? But like there has been a lot of sellers that have been very spoiled over the last five to seven years that sales has been really easy and they're hitting these big numbers and getting big paychecks.
And guess what? That all disappeared. And now this is why we're having this conversation. I grew up. It was hard as shit. You know, it wasn't everybody didn't make quota, not because we weren't doing the right things and so on. It's just the cream always rose to the top. Every company I was ever at, right?
Yeah. And so I think we're back to it, honestly, a normal state. This is what it should be like, honestly.
Yeah. I guess that's sort of the point I was making is that's fairly normal.
Yeah. I just articulated it better, you know,
You did. Thank you very much.
Yeah.
You'll be the co host next week on the show.
Thanks. It doesn't pay well enough.
Oh yeah, really?
Well, we could talk on the side.
All right. We'll talk on the side. But I, yeah, I question. I like to ask people, so, okay, we've all agreed. Buyers don't want to talk to salespeople.
So when they do talk to salespeople, why are they? Yeah.
Why are they talking to salespeople?
Yeah. If they don't want to, if they end up, if they do, if you end up here at seller talking to a buyer, why are they talking to you?
I think they're talking to some of the salespeople because they've. Appreciate the way they've approached them and built a relationship and how they've. Educated them and showed them the benefits, right? As opposed to trying to sell them something. They're honestly and authentically trying to solve problems.
And when you're honestly and authentically trying to solve problems, I think you're willing to take the time to go a level deeper and figure out if it truly is a right fit for your company at this time.
What do you think, David?
agree with that. I think buy, buying is something that, or rather selling is something that we as a seller do every day. Buying is often something they do once. Right. So they're on this path. They don't necessarily know the questions to ask, the possible pitfalls. If we think of ourselves, you know, in, in our personal lives, any big purchase you buy, like, wait, is it, whether it's a car or a house, you know, am I asking the right questions?
Should I? Should I have this inspected? You know, do I need somebody to look at this contract? Now extrapolate that to a six, seven, you know, eight, nine figure deal. The, there's a lot of risk involved in that. And I think that buyers want what Vincent said there, like relationship trust. We go back to the old school, right?
No, like, and trust, you know, I always think it's funny when modern sellers are like, Oh, that's not important. BS, right? Like I need to be able to trust you. And you don't have to pretend that you're my best friend, but I have to know that your incentives are aligned with my incentives as a buyer. And Hey, walk me through this process.
You know, there might not be everybody as a stakeholder, but there's probably going to be a lot. So like gals saying, like, even just trying to align, Hey, you're going to be the decision maker, but your CFO is going to come in here. And these are the questions that the CFO is going to ask. And if we don't have the ducks in a line, you know, or, you know, answers in a row, whatever metaphor you want, right.
That's, there's a lot that the, a good seller can bring. And I think to Vince's point, what we're seeing is, yeah, you can't just. Take a 24 year old kid and by the way, I love 24 year old kids not bashing the youngsters, right? But, and just say, oh, you know, here's a list of people go sell them and expect success. And that's kind of what I think we had gotten to for a while. So
So, Gal, I'll ask you the same question. So, if a buyer's actually talking to a salesperson or a salesperson is actually talking to a buyer, why?
Yeah, I think all of these are great points. Not much to add. I think they're buying if they do feel that they're going to be understanding them and supporting their needs. And they feel that they can add more than what they can learn on the, by themselves. And, you know, sometimes there's also the level of talking, right?
You have to, if you have to in this process, have a demo and go through, the SDR and go from the AE, and then, and you have to do that, then you keep that talking to a minimum. So, you know, when I talk about you know, when we say, right, buyers don't want to speak with sellers, I think these kind of surveys talk about the sellers that are not adding value.
I think that's kind of the emphasis there. I think there's another research that like, I'm deep into these things, right? It's a lot of, it's a lot of what we do. And so, Forrester say that 34 percent of buyers don't feel that the sellers add value. And I think that's a big part of this.
33.
that sounds low.
Yeah. Compared to most, there was a study done in a book by Dr. Steven Timmy out of Georgia Tech that was like 75 percent of buyers think that sellers don't add value, but yeah.
Sorry. 34. Add value, things that buyer add
All right. All right. That's better. Okay.
that upside down.
Exactly yeah, so if you think about that, then yeah, if the average if the average seller or most sellers or however you say it, that's how the buyer feels, then there's, yeah, I have to talk with that seller, but what am I going to do?
Am I going to just. Hey, yeah, thank you. Okay, great. Show me the demo. Okay, what does it do? Trying to, you know, skip the questions, get to the bottom line, get to the price, and then get back to them if I need anything else, and then get back to them to give them a yes, if it's a yes, and just ghost them if it's a no.
I think that's what a lot of sellers, right, that's what they feel. And I think the ones, so they have to stop to speak with them. I think the ones that say that they don't want to speak with a seller is in the situation where the seller is really not understanding you. It's not supporting you. It's not focused on your business.
You don't feel that the seller could guide you through the process and add more value than what you can do on your own. You would speak with a seller and not only speak with a seller, you would introduce your seller to your colleagues and to your, and you would put that seller in front of a C level executive if you feel that seller really is focused on you and adding value and contributing, right?
I think that's the difference and that's what's behind the stats.
What? Yeah. I was going to suggest that I try to keep things simple is, you know, if sellers could go all the way through without talking to, or buyers go all the way through the process and make decision without talking to sellers, they would. So I think if you're a seller and you're talking to a buyer, it's because the buyer needs to talk to you. And that really becomes, I think, a mindset so many sellers miss, which is, Hey, I'm just going to show up and pitch, and so on. As opposed to thinking, ah, this person actually has given me some of their time because they actually, they need something, right? Otherwise they'd be doing it on their own.
So my job is to really begin to start with, okay, what do they need? And that, you know, if you can approach from that perspective as a seller, Which means you lead with questions as opposed to a pitch, for instance, you know, you focus on the relationship and the connection of what the other person is, as David talked about, then, yeah, you have an opportunity to demonstrate to the buyer that you can be a source of some value to them. But yeah, the way we sort of train sellers now is go in, talk about your product, tell them how many companies just like theirs we've worked with. And of course they'll be blown away and open the doors. And. I sort of find it interesting that in this period of last 15, 20 years, we've had this explosion of sales technology that the buyer's dissatisfaction with sellers and sales experience has skyrocketed.
Say that again. What was that last statement you made?
That the, you know, look at survey results. What buyers dissatisfaction with sellers has skyrocketed during this period.
It's skyrocketed.
Well, I think so. It's 75 percent the buyer saying that they prefer not to talk to
see. I see. I yeah. Okay. And again, I think
isn't it a little bit ironic that, you know, the sales tech business has seemingly helped create a problem that, you know, they're not really geared to solve for the most part.
to me, it goes back to,
I wonder if that's also industry centric you talked a little bit about the creation of a problem. Right. You know, I start, I got my start in sales, like really old school. It wasn't door to door, but it was sitting in people's kitchens. Right. You know, I started selling
go knives.
Cutco knives and. So
A great product, by the way. So anyway, go
hundred percent I got my set 25 years old. Anybody who's watching this, if you need some knives, I still got, I got my contract happy to sell you some, they're great. But I bring that up because, yeah, right. Because got my start in sales, not understanding that there was anything less than a full cycle sales rep. So when you look at the early 2000s you know, and the explosion, very much in the SAS world, we're going to have the SDR, the predictive revenue model, which I think Vince, you might even be touching on the fact that is in Gallaud that's changing dramatically. But you know, when somebody says, I don't want to talk to a salesperson, I think depending on the survey, what a lot of them are saying is I don't want to be a hounded by that person who's emailing me and call it like that's what they think a salesperson is, right. Versus the people that we've built relationships with and not based, it doesn't matter what your title is, what your role is, but the people that are in the industry that have learned the expertise. That have built the relationships, you know, one as an outside sales consultant, you know, going and speaking at conferences and whatnot.
I saw so many deals happen. Whatever you want to think of a deal happen, like at the cocktail reception after, you know, the conference, because it was person A and person B who had known each other for 20 years, they weren't sitting there like, Hey, I'm going to email you to get a demo.
It was, Hey Bill, I heard that, you know, this problem was happening in your org. Can we have a conversation about that? Right? And so I think that also, we put everything in this term sales, where really we have to kind of maybe chop it up a little bit or, you know, look at that bifurcation between the prospecting side and the actual cultivation relationship, solution selling, et cetera.
So.
Yeah, I think that sales, right, is the peach push, spray and pray type of thing. That's right. That's, they don't want, they don't want sellers. That's the sellers. And I think that, you know, it is, the answer is different is, you know, if we're talking about sellers that are enabling and there are supporting and there are listening and are You know, driving, designing an experience for the buyer, making things easy for the buyer to buy, building a relationship, right?
So I think like, don't want to talk to sellers like, it's that typecast, right? That kind of behavior. That's just yeah, that's just slowly, I think, and I think because today there are just more options. Okay. They can, again, like. David, you talked about this earlier about things shifting from a perspective of a few years ago, they had to speak with a seller to get information.
And today you can get much more information online. Okay. And buyers are more digital on being Gen Y decision makers. And there are more self service journeys. Like things are just much more. POG is like almost every company today has some kind of a POG motion. So that means that, that, and that's part of the trend going back to the original question, Andy, that means that we're going to see more POG and more automation and more buyer empowered to not speak with that seller and if in the buyer's mind, seller is that person pushing, pitching, right, then yes, I have a much higher bar as someone that's not doing that.
To go and earn that time, right?
When I think that in my mind is one of the things we have to help sellers with is, you know, there's phrase that, you know, selling is helping. Yeah. And I actually think that selling is not helping. I think selling is selling and helping is helping. if sellers thought that their job was actually to help the buyer make a decision, right, as opposed to sell them to get to go from one stage of the sales process to the next, that's a completely different way of approaching it.
And buyers would be much more receptive to that because you are here to help me. I've got, you know, I've got to sort of make sure I really understand what my problem is, the challenges I'm trying to face. You need to help me understand what can we possibly achieve by addressing it, by investing your product.
You have to help me understand how we're going to do that. You have to help me understand why I should buy from you. And so somebody else, there's a lot of things they need help with, but instead we go in and say, train sellers to go in and say, okay, you know, you Pitch, discover, demo, so on, which, how's that helping the buyer? Not at all. Vince deep, heavy side.
I don't know. I think I might just be smarter than you. All you guys. I think sales is pretty simple. And it hasn't changed. And I think if you're in an industry or if you're selling a product that you absolutely can build your sales organization to be full cycle sale. And I'm talking about, you know, prospecting to close and then own that piece of business.
That's the type of business I would like to organization. I'd like to run because it's going to do a couple of things. It's going to shrink your pipeline, but your close rates going to explode in a positive way. And then once you do land a customer, the retention rate is going to skyrocket as well.
But now I get that doesn't work for every industry and everything. But if I was starting that sort of business, man, I would almost focus on, can I get away with a full cycle sales team and organization? Because it would do what we're trying to express here, which is More buyers would want to speak to the salesperson because they're more of a product expert that truly is engaged and owns the relationship because they're their first touch and they're on with them after they close the deal.
So they're invested in this relationship, right? And I would that's what I'd love to see. If you can get away with it, go back to full cycle handoff of like, Here's this person that's going to start the conversation. Okay. The conversation started. This person's going to come in and set the meeting. Okay.
The meeting said, this person's going to come in and do the discovery. And then this person is going to be the demo. And then the VP ultimately comes in and closes the deal. That is a shitty customer experience. It was 10 years ago and it is today and it needs to change. And that is the problem. How many people at your company need to bombard me with emails and I have to speak to, to get to the point where I'm ready to buy 50.
100? Like, come on, man.
Well, he brought a smile to my face cause I was reading an article on LinkedIn this morning and it's not the first time I've read this has been an
Was it a bot or was it a real article?
no, it's a real one. And it's basically the theme is sales is killing the market. Net revenue retention. So sales is killing net revenue retention, meaning too many new deals are bought, brought in that don't fit our ideal client profile.
And, you know, this person was arguing that, you know, CROs are so intent on hitting their numbers. They're selling to anybody, right? And I think this is sort of an artifact. What you were talking about Vince is instead of being. Really dialed in on an ICP and being dialed in on the type of customer you should be selling to and dominating that segment is, you know, certainly you see it in seemingly more in SaaS.
Oh no, you need to go out and have lots of conversations with lots of people. Yeah, a guy pushing back on me and I brought this up in the show before about you know, I talk about what I think minimum win rate should be say, Oh no. I get really suspicious of that happens. Cause it means we're not having enough conversations.
I'm like, dude, you want to be dialed in on your ICP and who your actual customer is, you don't have any more conversations. You don't have fewer, better conversations that you're going to win at a higher rate, but then turn into type of customers are going to stick around, right? They're gonna find value from your product.
And grow 20 percent year over year, right? That's what you
yeah. Yeah.
But so many
in garbage out,
well, last couple of decades, though, companies have been growth oriented, not long term success oriented. And I actually think those are two different things, right? So if you just tell your CRO, we want to grow, I just need a number. I don't think it's a CRO's fault.
They're following their marching orders. They, their job was to bring in R period. It doesn't matter what the R was in five years. Cause they probably weren't going to be there anyways. Right.
18 months
so that's just my interjection there. Yeah. I think if you want to have a healthy long term business, it makes sense. To do exactly what Vin said, whether it's full cycle or the less points of contact, the better, because you didn't even talk about it. It's about now the customer success and the implementation, which often they, you need it. That's gonna be different than sales. But yeah, why put more into the sales half
And I went on this tangent because yesterday at SalesHQ, I had this conversation with a potential member at SalesHQ, and he's in the service business, and I got so jealous. He was talking about, I was talking, he was talking about a sales organization. He's like, I said, do you have SDRs? Do you have this?
He goes, no, we have sale. We have sellers. I go, what do you mean? He goes, well, they have 10 accounts. We start with 10 accounts. They go after these 10 accounts because there are RICP and they prospect them, start the relationships and then they close it. And then they keep that business and grow that business.
I'm like, I was like wait a minute. What year is this? 1999. He goes and it's a, now it's a small business. It's probably like a 10 million ROR business, but it's a, You know, a founder led business that didn't, wasn't backed by VCs to serve his business. But I'm like, I was so jealous of him, absolute control over the entire process and how well it worked at orchestrated.
It was right. Like, Oh my gosh, you're doing it right. Whatever that whatever amount of revenue adding that's really strong revenue and really high retention rate, right? And really predictable. And I didn't ask him, Andy, I should have shame on me what his win rate is, but I bet you his win rates probably 50 to 60%.
I'm sure it's very
Which isn't that really what matters is the win percentage, right? It's kind of
No, I'm sure the win rate, you know, the more focused you can be, the more focused you can be as sellers. And I, you know, you're not the first one brought this up, but increasingly in my conversations with sales leaders, you're seeing this, you know, just a emerging trend let we'll call it, not even a big trend yet of yeah, more focused A little bit old school, a little bit full cycle to some degree.
But here's your assigned list of accounts and you as an AE, you're gonna be responsible for developing the opportunities. You're not going to rely, you might partner with an SDR, but you're going to be in charge of doing that. And yeah, you're going to own those accounts and get to know them and build the relationships, understand the industry.
This is another thing that, that I don't see enough is seller specializing or managers encouraging or mandating that sellers specialize in a vertical market. So I developed the expertise really understand the customers. And there seems to always be this fear of. Yeah. To your point, 10 accounts, right?
I worked in industries where if I had a hundred prospects worldwide, that was a lot. Right? Just, you know, your business, you know what your can do, you know what people are willing to pay you to do and keep paying you to do focus on that,
and imagine if you curated truly curated those 10 accounts, right? It wasn't just we're guessing like I think it's these 10 It's like we did the work To identify these 10 and why right? I mean that you're setting yourself up for success as opposed to again It's just a volume game who cares we need more and more I'd like to hope that we're going the opposite direction now, and I hope again We're going to a normal state where Less is better, right?
Well, let's ask Gal that question, because I know you're using a PLG motion for part of your go to market. It seems like one of the dangers, perhaps, of PLG is just what this person was writing about on LinkedIn this morning is, you know, if it's PLG, you don't have as much filter on the types of customers that are coming across the transom.
Yeah, no, that, that's definitely the extreme opposite of going and having a salesperson and targeting only 10 accounts.
So what is, what would you do to specifically the question? So like,
Well, it's
this is working and it's revenue, right?
well, the question was based on this post I wrote this morning is this person complaining that, you know, new logo acquisition was killing net revenue retention
Okay.
because they weren't very focused and the thought is, well, geez, how focused can you really be in a PLG motion? Cause basically.
Anybody could sign up.
Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. Look, PLG when done right is a machine where the focus comes from measuring the hell out of everything. It's a data machine. And in that data machine, we know right now. Yeah. What are the customer acquisition channels that we're driving? And we can measure from LinkedIn posts, even we know to predict from even posts and campaigns what potentially we're going to get in terms of signups to the product.
And we know the conversion rate, the activation rate, the retention rate, and the expansion potential for these different channels, right? And the more you do this over time, we know to predict. If you do that kind of SEO investment and ads and, you know, we do a lot of everything, everything we do today is organic social media.
We don't do ads, everything is just driving the demand. So we know what kind of target audience we're getting. Yes, a big part of it is not activating. That's the nature of POG. So there's a natural filter. And the ones that do buy the ones that are smaller entry plan. Packages are not retaining as well as the ones that are paying the higher fee, but they're going through the journey themselves.
And we know with data again, data driven decisions and how we're targeting them. That we're driving the right customers and they're retaining our NRR actually is 100 above 160 percent and. Gross retention is 97 percent and the driving is a big driver of all of that. And. And another big portion is that expansions are coming from the product virality.
So we know that we have a seller selling to a buyer and that buyer says, Oh, wow. And then they're calling the, they're telling the VP at their company, Hey, you've got to check this out. Or there may be a seller selling to a seller. Then we have that kind of virality also kicking in. So that's driving the same ICP.
So. Long story short, yeah when done right, it's definitely can drive really healthy expansion in our R and all of that.
Okay. Yeah, I was just, my question is like, yeah, so this person's complaining that the wrong type of customers are being sold is just, how do you proactively go filter out? Do you actually cancel customers that aren't a right fit in order to
Yeah. With PLG. So the PLG is not self service is right, is beyond self service. So we have customers that are buying no touch and we have customers that are starting no touch.
For example are customers of ours and started with individual users and then from there expanded. So, so we have some of these and we have one man shows consultants and a lot of others buying. So we don't talk to them, the smaller ones, we don't talk to them at all. There's support. It's only chat. So yeah, we won't proactively go in and cancel something. But the larger, the bigger potential, what's interesting about PLG actually, that it's the cell cycle is half.
So if we do a cell lead, okay, process that's driven by bottom up, someone else, someone signing up, the deal velocity is is, you know, twice the speed, right? Cell cycle is half. And and the win rate is more than double. Losing versus a sales leader coming and asking for a demo. If we get a few users signing up and then they're bringing on their team or outbound, we're not doing cold outbound at all.
There's no cold outbound anymore. We're only doing outbound to the free user pool. And even users that just check this out and not used, it's a much, much stronger trigger. And it's a much better path for us to go and activate end users, get them to unlock value. It's all about, it's not about selling, it's about an SDR, and it's an SDR approaching end users, trying to drive product value activation.
And then they're making the ask, Hey, you can unlock more value and more features if you get your entire team on this, if you get the higher plan. And then. They're getting from them an introduction to the end, or to the manager, or they're reaching out directly to the manager, quoting them, showing what they wrote to them in an email, or taking a picture of what they're doing in the system.
When a sales process starts at that point, then you have evaluation. It's flipped. The script is flipped. Evaluation already took place, right? And you have a push from the bottom, from end users, that really already want the product. The proof is behind you. So it's now just about tying this into strategic priorities, navigating a buying process, accessing more stakeholders, creating a business case, procurement negotiation, it's all that, but the proof is really behind it.
That's yeah, so PLG is really driving a lot of efficiency even to a regular sales process.
cool. All right. Well, that's, I like that. That's
Maybe I'll stop.
yeah, no, it's a great explanation At that point, then the sales is not about the product or the price. It's just about these sets or activation, which yeah, it can count on a little, obviously got your internal sellers helping with that. Cool. All right. Well, unfortunately it was run out of time. Great conversation. Appreciate everybody joining in. People can find you on LinkedIn.
What LinkedIn,
is that? Is that a new
Yeah. What's that? Yeah.
should we check that out?
I see. You can't hide. I see all of
got my MySpace page. They can hit me up there.
Okay. You're my face
All right. Find me on friend.
I know. I was trying to give you a hard time on that. Yeah. All right. Well, let's check out the Vince BC on my, one of the legacy customers still on it. And do you want to say sales HQ again before we sign off? Yeah,
it, Andy. Come on, I'm not that type
I'll do it. Sales HQ. Check it out. Check out sales
that's right.
co, by the way. It's not com, it's co.
Oh, not my problem. Okay. There we go. All right. You can pay me afterwards. Yeah. Now our sponsor, our program. So, all right, everyone, thank you very much. And we'll talk to you soon.
Awesome. Thank you
guys.
Bye.