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Hi friends, welcome to another episode of the WinRate podcast. We were just talking about my guests who suggested that I need to shave my head before we have this conversation because I am the only one with a head of hair out of my illustrious panel here, Ralph Barsi, Richard Harris, and Mitchell Kastersek.
So, everybody take a second, introduce yourself. Ralph, we'll start with you.
with you.
Hello everybody. I think a hair is overrated. Number one. So couldn't agree more than Andy needs to shave that head. Ralph Barsi, vice president of sales at Kahua. We are in the construction management space. We offer construction owners, a project management platform. I've been on the show before, always honored and blessed to be back and love being here with Mitchell and Richard
Richard.
you're next.
next. Yeah thank you so much and I'm going to say the quiet part out loud that I think the three of us are a little jealous of Andy's hair. So, you know, I'll just, I'll,
And
but yeah. But I am Richard Harris. Sales trainer and go to market strategist. I teach reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask and when to ask them.
I've known Andy
Sounds like you've said that before.
Yeah it's my, you know, it's my shtick. I've known Andy and Ralph for years and always loved being with them. And Mitchell, I'm glad to connect with you and learn to work with you a little bit and get to know you offline after this is over a little bit too.
All right, Mitch. It's up to you.
to you.
And I'm Mitchell VP of sales at Compile. We're a SaaS platform for organizations to better manage and mitigate their risks. And as for the hair, yeah, I'm definitely jealous of Andy's look today, but they say grass doesn't
doesn't
every day, they say grass doesn't grow on a busy street. So
Andy get a new sponsor, maybe hair club for men or,
Brian or lacquer yeah, whatever restore,
don't know, Richard, we're gonna ask
So this is, I don't know, Richard. We're going to ask you about, you know, are you musical?
I'm musically challenged.
Yeah.
I have, I dabble with guitar a little bit. Not well, I would never perform in public. But I think it's a symptom of my ADHD that it's hard for me to sit down and focus on it as much as I wish I could. But I enjoy music. I love music. I love going to concerts and shows.
Why ask? Because I think people have listened to the show before and know that Ralph is a rock and roll drummer of many years, right? still in a
years. Many years. Yes. Love to play music.
Mitchell's
an opera singer.
Wow. Yeah, that's not me. I'll book the shows.
all
I'll
That's
There you go.
So
the contracts.
Yes.
I want my 15 percent management fee.
50, that's pretty expensive for management fees. I thought it was a 10%. So, Mitchell, did you study singing?
Yes, which is just in today's world, knowing that I'm not doing it, I could look back and say, what was I thinking, but I've learned a lot from that experience and doing it a little bit in the United States and Europe and
So you toured? Just
yeah.
But I wouldn't say I was like, I didn't have any, you know,
Groupies or anything like that.
Nothing fun that you would assume would come along with a tour.
Well, you found your wife, right?
right? Right.
It's not a groupie.
Yeah.
No, but she was an opera singer as well, right? Or classical singer.
Yes, she, yeah, still does. Yep.
yeah, still
Very cool. So where was the coolest concert you did?
you did?
Performance.
Believe it or not, actually in the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, in the NBC building. Yeah, that, that was really
Rockefeller Center.
Center? Yeah.
So what was the occasion?
the occasion? The
It was actually like a business conference and they wanted singers for the event and I got to put on an entire kind of program with her and a pianist and it was pretty cool.
Oh, we're going to
Oh, we're gonna have a, we're gonna have an episode where he sings for us at one point.
one
Why not right now?
here?
You want him
I'll compose it. No, that's okay. I'll compose
bars.
that's right. I haven't warmed up, he said.
I
fair.
So, and what's,
to earn. I have to earn the right to ask him to sing. I think
that's right. According to
de risk it for me. De risk it for me. It'll never go
number of people you've performed in front of?
That's a really good question. It would definitely be upper hundreds, thousands, maybe.
Ralph, how about you with your rock and roll?
Not thousands. We're hundreds. We've done a couple festivals which have helped the attendance rate. But yeah. For the most part, we're probably playing in front of 150, maybe 200 people.
And tell people the name of your band again?
again?
We're called Segway. Not to be mistaken for the scooters you ride around the city. This is a transition from one song to the next seamlessly. So, yeah. At least that's the aim. And so it's S E G U E. We started in 1994. We've got a couple records out on all the famous platforms and yeah, we all had full heads of hair when we started that
that
venture but that was many years ago.
And if you're interested, you go on YouTube, you're going to find Segway videos and you'll find videos of Mitchell as well.
well.
I'm
Andy, you should be our, you should be our agent. You're really trying to help us out today.
Well, hey,
you know, I just want to show that, you know, Salespeople are interesting outside of the work.
Well, you know, I didn't know Richard was going to be on this panel, and I'm thrilled that he is. And one of my favorite sales quotes that I heard Richard say many years ago that pertains to music is, sales is like jazz. I don't know if you remember saying that, Richard
that one resonated big time with me and I couldn't agree with you more.
It's chaotic.
isn't that part of the problem though, that in my mind,
Good
isn't that it's like jazz. The problem is that not enough people recognize that it's like jazz and everybody wants to make it like playing your scales over and over again,
Exactly.
instead of understanding that it is from start to finish improvisational.
Yeah, that's the whole point is that, you know, When you get a really good group of musicians, not just jazz musicians, I just, I've just seen it more that way. They can all do things their own way and feel where it's headed, which is a lot of times what happens in sales, right? Like we, you know, everybody's doing it their own way.
Nobody's following the process. Nobody's following, you know, a strong way. But then when you do get them to do it. It just becomes beautiful, right? And I would say that about rock and roll jam sessions. I would say that about operatic singers. Like there's this connection of when musicians get together and magic happens.
And the same thing can happen in sales. Like that's sort of in my mind where that quote kind of came from.
Right. And my comment was based on this Observations I've had increasingly over the last 10, 15, 20 years is that you know, there's a whole Generation of sales leaders now that just are really uncomfortable with the improvisational aspect of it is hey We've got our stages laid out. I want you to follow the stages.
I want you to follow the process to the point where As I've talked about in this program Sellers that
are
are hitting quota are being fired for not following the process.
, yes, I would agree. I've seen I literally talked to someone yesterday who got laid off because she, younger generation, they have, you know, PTO, they don't have sick time. It's just PTO and she didn't fit request the paid time off the right way.
And she was accused of being on her phone. Meanwhile, her bosses were checking their fantasy score. Like, you know, just like it's gotten so petty, right? And there's a lack of coaching. I think part of it, Andy, too, is that, you know, I think that the four of us get it and we grew into understanding this, but I still run into so many sales leaders where it's.
It's just this historical I don't know, inheritance of, well, that's how I was taught to do it. So I'm going to let someone else figure it out, too, because nobody taught me anything. Right. And I think the, that still is there in the majority. The good news is we're getting better at it, at least I think.
But I don't know. Let
Well, let me ask a question. Let me ask Ralph and Mitch since they're, you know, sort of active in roles right now in leadership. So, you know, I had this instance. I post about it in May on LinkedIn. A long time client senior level seller selling complex software products to the enterprise. Said, out of the blue,
of the blue, I
was just terminated.
I said, well, what? He said yeah, made club last year,
I had, he
I had,
140 percent
percent of his total 2024 number.
2024 number?
But he'd been put on a pip and let go because he wasn't quote unquote, setting enough meetings.
And it's like,
no, the thing was, this was. The second person within 30 days of that
of that got
in a client that had happened to.
The first one that happened to was not quite a senior, but somebody who was still more than hitting their number.
number.
And I'm like,
I'm like
this is just insanity. And so I posted about it.
about it.
You know, got a huge reaction. Probably I'd say at least half of their action was, oh, that couldn't possibly have happened. And then my LinkedIn inbox is full of messages from people, literally two dozen people within a week, that the same thing had happened to.
So managers saying, look, the process, we're going to use the process to override your judgment of what you think works. Right, and what your track record's saying works. And, because you're not doing the process. Ralph, could you ever envision doing something like that?
No, it just doesn't seem rational or logical to me. They're there. At face value, it feels like there's a missing component to this puzzle. I don't know what this person's attitude and disposition is like in the workplace, let alone in front of prospects and customers. Maybe that's a factor, but just based on. Based on what you just listed as the reasoning, I'm a bit puzzled. I don't get it.
don't get
feel like from my perspective
perspective
We think about
about the
the right activities that produce the right outcomes. And obviously setting meetings, great thing to do. Every salesperson needs to do it. But I wonder in this specific case, when you have someone hitting their number, I feel like leaders, good leaders recognize, you know, setting meetings is not, you know, probably the metric, the right metric to track in terms of if people are being effective in their jobs, if they're producing.
But,
is the person who's able to hit their number without following the process? How does that affect all the others who aren't hitting their number who are following the process? Sometimes there's this Hey, but he's not following the process and he hit his number. Why do I need to follow the process?
And I feel like an insecure leader is they don't want to be questioned about the process they've put in place. What do you
Well, but, isn't that sort of the problem? Yeah, I think the people that, the leadership that fired these two individuals that I know of firsthand is like,
yeah, just insecurity.
Yeah.
It's like, they don't know enough about what they're doing, so they have to rely on these metrics instead of doing, which they should do, is say, hey, this person's doing a great job, maybe they only need half the meetings set in order to crush their numbers.
What can I learn from them that I can use to coach my other people?
Maybe they should have had their other people watching videos of this rep and figured out how can more of them work like him.
them? I would also turn it around to the, to those other reps. Like, you know who I want to go to lunch with? I'm going to go to lunch with the guys hitting 140%. Right? Like, like it's there's this Continual lack of accountability. Right. And again, like, again, I don't, I'm like Ralph, I'm like Ralph and Mitchell that like, there's gotta be some extenuating circumstance. We're not aware of attitude, personality. Maybe it was a bluebird, right? Maybe it was like the one deal, right? Like, I don't know.
I know the logos he was selling to and
yeah. You know, on the, on, , so I feel like , where's the accountability for everybody?
Right. And I've started to write about this that, you know, you cannot hold your team accountable if you're not holding yourself accountable to your team. Right. So if I'm going to ask my team to do something that I need to meet with them on a certain Appropriate cadence to make sure that I'm holding them accountable and they're holding me accountable as for the guy who, or a woman who, who was laid off, I'm like, like, please hire me and fire me when I do that.
Cause boy, that, that's not going to go well for the other person. I can assure you on multiple levels. And again, You know, perhaps it was also the right signal for this person that it's time to go find a better culture. It's time to go find a better job. He, this person hopefully has a little bit of a nest egg to go solve that problem and you know, not run through their savings or any of that kind of stuff.
No, barely
I just can't imagine that, yeah, I can't imagine it took that person very long to get some interviews in the new job, hopefully at a better place that treats him with a little bit more humanity.
Do you know, Andy, did that person land somewhere else?
Oh yeah. Yeah. That's it. Barely got outside the door before I had another new
Yeah, I was gonna say Ralph and Mitchell are really upset. Andy that she didn't introduce this person to
what are you doing? You've got my number.
I
Come on.
much feeling is
I can I just want to emphasize what Richard said about holding the leaders accountable just as much the feeling is mutual and it all comes down to leadership. By example, you've got to be able to walk that talk and then going back to.
Some of the metrics, you know, I am not a huge fan of tracking activity. In fact, I feel it's one of the last metrics we should look at. But I do feel if, you know, regardless of last year being successful. You know, in sales, we all know we have to press the reset button. We're back at zero at the beginning of the fiscal year.
But I think leading indicators that have a little more meat to them would include, well, what's your pipeline coverage to quota? If you drill into that, what's the late stage pipeline coverage to quota? Because if there's no late stage pipeline and you know what your sales cycle looks like, then those are some indicators that things are going well.
But I would also. Finish with the whole culture aspect of it that Richard brought up. You know, if you're not surfacing some of the concerns and, you know, conversations preemptively before it's like, Hey, there's the door. See then you've got major issues going on at your workplace.
And when we talk about culture, I feel like where you're going to run into challenges like the one you're discussing, Andy, is where leadership has not fostered a culture of curiosity within the team. Because this is a great example. If they were truly curious, they'd want to know why is this person excelling and really digging into that and figuring out how they could extrapolate that across the team.
But it's so easy to just, this is the way we do things. And if you fall out of compliance, you got to go.
I think that attitude at Chobo Mitchell is really a fear-based attitude, right? Because if I'm insecure about my own abilities and knowledge to be able to help the people that are working for me, then I'm gonna fall back on the process and the numbers
Yeah, it's interesting, the whole PIP thing.
I, as I interpreted what Mitchell was saying is that I think leaders, and I think, you know, we see it a little bit more on startups because they're just young and I don't mean by age, but they're just earlier in their careers and their life cycle as an organization. I think sometimes people think they're trying to hold people accountable.
When, as you said, fear, they think that blaming people is holding someone accountable. Right. And blame is not accountability, right? In that aspect, I do want to ask Mitchell and Ralph, a question around particularly for those who are listening. How do you hold, what examples would you give of like, as I'm a manager, I'm a leader.
Here's how I hold myself accountable in a healthy way. To hold my team accountable in a healthy way. Like I have my ideas, but I'm not on the front lines. I'm not as close to the front lines as y'all are. So I'm just curious, like what's happening in 2024 and even maybe a hangover from 2023. As we've gone through this economic situation, particularly in the startup world.
Like, how do you, what's y'all's definition of that?
I think it's really not easy. Of course, we want to lead by example and be clear in the kind of directive and non directive coaching we, we give, but one of the things that I've noticed has been helpful lately is just one on one conversations with individual stakeholders where you share. We all as an organization have X goal.
This goal within that goal is my goal. This is what I'm accountable for. And these are some of the things I'm doing in order to make sure that I'm successful. And then asking them,
asking them,
what do you want to be accountable for when we're, you know, you know, ringing the bell on December 31st, 2024. to ensure that we succeeded as a group.
And then hearing the mountain I can't remember who I heard it from. Maybe it was like Marshall Goldsmith talking about, it's so easy for leaders to want to give your people the idea of how to succeed instead of really just asking them, what do you think would be the best way to, hit X goal and letting them own that process.
Even if we want to give that feedback and say, actually, I think it could be, you know, you could get there a lot faster doing this or that, but really, you know, asking questions and being curious and letting them come up with the answer and get that buy in I've noticed has been something
Yeah. And I think that what you're talking about is giving people agency over the choices they make. Right? And there's. Been substantial amount of research done into this. Multiple examples about the power of agency. One my favorites is, you know, talking about people living in senior living homes and so on is their happiness and their longevity they find actually connected to the more agency they're given all the choices about their life.
Right? And I think, and there's another example in a book, in a Charles Duhigg book that talks about this, how the U. S. Marines train this
And
you know, when time comes to make a decision, they're able to make better decisions because they have this accountability. Ralph?
Yeah. I'm just going to be dovetailing
dovetailing what
what everybody's saying. It's a combination of a number of things. It's you know, providing that, that environment where the individual contributor has that agency, has that dignity preserved is respected and it's given the benefit of the doubt.
I'm going to presume as well that the leader was the recruiter in the process and brought this person on board. So obviously recognized, you know, their strengths early in the process. And I've. Tried to hold myself accountable to this vision, if you will, for many years in my career.
And that is just inverting the org chart so that I am on the bottom of the org chart serving up and into the organization versus up above everybody casting down what the best practices are. And you know, I've always tried to serve up and into the organization, removing obstacles from the paths of each individual contributor and each leader.
That I've worked with. And also to Mitchell's point about communicating one on one in those scenarios, I do my very best to be an active listener. Number one, try to, you know, seek first to understand. And then secondly, where I can shed light or intervene in a positive way. I try to add some context, you know, about, Hey, this is the mission.
This is here are a couple of paths we can take to accomplish the mission. Here's what I have seen working well. It's A, B, C, D. Do you have anything to lend to that? Because if you don't, I would prescribe you go option B. You know what I mean? So that kind of context has helped people get their guard down and start really opening up about what they're thinking about the mission and how they see themselves as a contributor.
And that's worked well for me. It's not the way everybody approaches it, of course, but I, it is proven.
Yeah. One
I'm at one of the great learning examples I had in my career was with the CEO at this startup I was working for. We were a little past startup stage. And I had, there was a guy that worked for me that really wanted to use this one strategy with this one account. And sort of strategic account.
And I was uncertain about that. And I thought, well, let's talk to the CEO about it and see what, get his opinion. And I was uncertain because I.
because I
Honestly, I thought the salesperson was wrong. And, but I wasn't willing to overrule him, right? Cause he has got an agency by going to CEO and the CEO listens, asking a bunch of questions, detailed questions, doesn't make a suggestion or recommendation.
He said, okay, good luck.
good luck.
And
And I was like,
was like,
what a great lesson. Cause he, He knew it was going to go badly. But he thought it was more important for that person to learn firsthand based on the decisions that they made and the choices they had made rather than going and executing somebody else's choices and doing it badly as they would learn, right?
This is why I came up with this approach. Oh, yeah, it didn't work. What are the lessons they're going to take away from it?
from it?
And it sounds like
like he was
self aware. I think when you think about good leaders, you have to really. Know where you are strong and where you have certain weaknesses and it's so easy. I think at least I've noticed for myself.
myself stepping
Stepping into leadership, wanting to be a control freak because you feel like I, I have the answer and I'm just going to go do it myself and I'm just going to get it done.
And it's it's a real learning lesson to actually stand back and.
talk 20 percent
Talk 20 percent of the time and just keep asking, you know, what else can we do? What else should we do here? And just letting your people contribute and not, you know, feel like you have to be the hero. I think that's a big part of it too.
The insecurity is just being the hero as we kind of grow in our career.
just being the hero as we kind of grow in our career. Right.
I'm a millennial, but I'm bald, so I look old.
right. So for those of
Gen Z.
right. So for those of us who are Gen X, let me explain this to people in the listening audience, that means we've all been selling since the 1900s. And in Gen X, you know, one of our greatest strengths was this ability to figure stuff out.
Right? I was a latchkey kid. I was walking home by myself starting in first grade. You know, I didn't have a cell phone. I wasn't tracked. I called my parents when I got home, you know, so we grew up with that mentality and that I think leaked into so we were just told to figure it out. And there was nobody there to help us.
So when we got into leadership positions, you know, it felt like, well, I just got to figure it out and I'll just do it my way. Cause that's how I've done it all my life. And now comes, you know, the millennials in Gen Z who want more coaching and advice, which as a gen and I'm generalizing a lot, so I get it.
But as Gen X, you know, What Millennials and Gen Z want as coaching and advice I, and I think a ton of people would have thought was micromanaging, right? I would never want to hear that stuff. I would never want someone to sit next to me and call, listen to me, call and coach. God how dare you?
Right? Like, I know what I'm
Absolutely not. Yes.
right? And so, and so, so now, you know, I've flipped that, which I like Ralph's sort of flipped the org chart thing. I think a lot of it is Gen X is jealous. Of the level of coaching and learning that millennials and Gen Z can get. Because it really wasn't at our disposal, right?
Like we didn't have this technology, right? I've, you know, and again, because it's the 1900s, I've explained to several millennials and Gen Z what it meant to go to the library and look at microfiche of, you know, newspaper articles for research study. And they're like, what the heck is that? I'm like,
so
I would,
I had this revelation this week, which stunned me because I hadn't thought about it for a long time is when I got started selling in my first couple of years,
of
I had big wins with companies. This was in the Bay area, in Oakland, but one in Oakland, one in Vallejo.
Two big wins. The companies were, you know, mid sized businesses that were owned and run by gentlemen in their 80s. These gentlemen had been born in the 19th century. And now I've got clients that were born after the year 2000.
2000. Crazy, right?
clients that are born more than a hundred years apart. You know, I'm
that's a book. Andy, you got to write that book that would be fascinating.
And what's Yeah, well, but I was,
by Andy
right, but as I was thinking about it, and I was reflecting on it, it's like, well, other than some maturity, am I selling differently to those different sets of people? And the answer is in a lot of ways, no. Right? Because people are still people.
Look, nothing in sales has changed since Mesopotamia.
right. And I would also say to what Richard was talking about with the generations being a millennial, I think
I'm
I'm definitely really grateful for all the different ways I can learn how to be better at my craft, but when I look around, what I've noticed with others in my generation is. People love being helped. People love a good idea. But people are not going out to figure it out themselves. Some, of course, still overgeneralizing. There are plenty of people who are really curious and voracious learners. But when I've always looked around, I've noticed in my career, working with a lot of people my age and younger. Oh, thank you so much. That's such a great idea. I'm going to incorporate that, but the day later, they're not going out and trying to learn. I'm just watching and I'm thinking, okay,
Same applies when they're asking you for a good book recommendation,
right. I've bought people lots of books
I'll go
how did you like it? Oh,
out the seller's journey from Richard Harris. You know, he's going to talk to you about a different approach and different perspective. Oh man, that sounds awesome. And then you circle back with them a month later.
So what do you think of the book? Oh, haven't haven't gotten it yet. Haven't read it yet. So, yeah, I see it all the time. It kind of breaks my heart, actually.
And it comes back to, like, desire. I just wonder, like, if it's a culture issue, or if it's the way people are parented, or
That's my thing. But I, well, I think that, you know, there's more and more being written about what's, you know, it's phenomenal. They're calling attention fracking.
You know, this is what the social media companies, you know, have deliberately engineered is this idea of, you know, how do we distract and extract, you know, the last little bit of attention out of the people?
And what are the impacts?
and,
You know, it's,
it's,
of our opinions on that, but it's, yeah, I think that's part of it. You know,
Sounds like it might be a good idea to ban fracking. Attention fracking, that is.
Well, think about this is, gosh, this was,
don't know,
I don't know, almost eight years ago at this point, I was giving a seminar to a workshop to a company that had about a hundred inside sellers. And I asked the question, said, how many of you keep your. Personal phones on your desk when you're making calls. They all did.
did. I
I said, how many, if you were to get a notification, you know, LinkedIn or Facebook notification or Instagram or whatever, while you're on a call, will you look at it?
at it?
Almost all of them said, yeah. And it's like, I was thinking, okay. The thing about this recently, because I was listening to reports on the radio about increasingly schools You know, asking and demanding kids put their phones on a, you know, one of the secure folders, envelopes for school.
Are we interested in doing that at work?
I think the Gen A team, right, that's coming out, they'll be way more coachable to that because they'll realize it, right? Like my kids are just starting to go that out. You know, I'm in the Bay area in California and the school this year, some of the teachers are doing that.
In fact, one of my, my, one of my son's English teacher to this attention fracking thing, he has. Any in-class activities, any in-class writing has to be done by hand. They cannot have laptops.
by hand.
Yeah. So old school, which, you know, of course is now generating this thing of like, wow, look at the penmanship or spelling right, because the spelling's atrocious.
Right. But I think we, yeah, we all know that like. We remember stuff when we write stuff down better. I think we've all been to sales trainings and training and coaching sessions or led them and, you know, encourage that. And and for my son, who's like me and has ADHD, we were kind of struggling with like, is this really going to help Bodhi because He needs, his brain thinks so fast.
He's like in a race car all the time. And you know, we're super lucky that neither Bodhi and I have it at a severe level. We understand what that's like and he actually embraced it. He gets it. And you know, we talked to the teacher about it. We talked to Bodhi about it and Bodhi's like, I'll give this a shot.
I'll try it. And it's working for him. So I agree. We're having to sort of slow things down to speed things up again.
Yeah. And I think that it plays into this whole aspect about figuring things out. You know, Ralph was talking about the fact that people aren't reading the books, but. It's, to me it's the same issue, which is, I'm so distracted by other things, I'm not devoting the time to figuring things out, so give me the recipe for it.
And I see this in spades, this is my example of it is when we see all the, you know, sort of frantic discussion on LinkedIn about, oh, we just can't get through to anybody anymore, right? Yeah, no one answers phone calls, no one's responding to emails.
That's attention fractioning.
and it's like, well, figure it out, right?
I'd like to say that, you know, when I was at their stage of my career, no one, a hundred percent of people did not return my emails. Because we didn't have email.
email.
Right.
I wasn't sending any. So 100 percent of them didn't
I was around where we didn't count
And you know, 100 percent of people did not answer my phone calls because you could not dial people directly.
Everything had to go through a switchboard to an admin or secretary to talk to. So we had to figure out some, a different way. to be able to connect with these people and it required some innovation and creative thought.
thought.
And, hey, sometimes I just, you know, which people don't do as much today, but I just went and sat in somebody's car in the parking lot until they showed up after work.
car in the parking lot until they showed up at
It wasn't scalable.
scalable. Yeah.
But, on the other hand, you had to do something different. And this is what I see as missing is just figure out, stop complaining about it, go figure out something that's going to be unique and innovative that will work for you.
you.
I think there's some bit of, like, obviously, this is all contextual, but in the Sass VC backed world, You see frantic everywhere because there's so much pressure to hit certain numbers that aren't always born out of realistic expectations and then we
does Ralph look like he's ever had stress?
Yeah
and I think
For good
sales, you know, sales is a game of inches for, you know, For us to have good outcomes with buyers, there needs to be psychological safety, both on the seller's part and the buyer's part.
If there's not, We're not going to think clearly. We're not going to be there with the right intent to help them, whether it's solve a problem or unlock an opportunity in their work.
And you just see this top down fear and frantic rushing around. How can we do more do more bad things faster often is the case.
Well, we just thought we'd do, we'd build that into our tech stack.
And then we talk about A. I. And A. I. Is fantastic. I use it every day.
But it's
it's only as good as you are in the quality of your thinking and how you interact with the prompts. And I was at an AI conference last week and they were talking about prompt engineering and you know, that's going to be a career path for people growing up today.
But of course right now, most people are probably just you know, I was going to write a followup email and be thoughtful about it, but.
it, but.
I'm just going to tell, you know, ChattyPT, write me a follow up email to this person's name at this company and it's going to be generic and it's not it's ultimately not helping as much as it, it could.
Yeah. Well, I'm also willing to bet that we think today we think prompt engineering will be a career, but let's look again in two or three years. And I
Yeah. Then the AI is going to do that
AI will be able to figure out a way to do it and you're not, it's not going to be a career. So, yeah.
I actually used, I wrote a blog post this week on sales plan versus sales strategy. And I prompted chat GPT and Claude to write the exact same thing. Claude blew it away.
Oh, Claude, way better.
way better. Like, you know, and I think people don't understand that either. Again, it's sort of, We are mindless zombies to follow the leader of what everybody else is doing.
Right. Which is good in an innovative way. Like that's the value of all these new tools that have always come out over time in the sales world. Right. We've all done it. Now we're hitting a different type of plateau. It feels like, where it's like, well, wait a minute, just because everybody's using that tool, hold on.
I need to go try this other tool. Right. And
We're using that tool that way. Right. And I think this plays to the point we've been talking about, which is instead of figuring out yourself, what's going to be the best way for you to use it. I'm just going to use it the way everybody else is using it.
that's the piece that, you know, having used all the AI, what I've finally realized for me, to your point, Andy is I probably spend maybe 80 percent of my time doing something. When I use AI versus a hundred percent of my time, right?
So I save a little bit of time. However, that 80 percent is using my creative brain. not in this place where I'm trying to self edit or capture all my thoughts really quickly before I forget him. Right? Like, and so it saves you a little bit of time,
growing challenge as we get older.
right? You know, but to your attention fracking
the ideas.
All my good ideas come in the shower. It's like, Oh my God, I get out of here and get to my phone and
know what? Ralph says he will invest a million dollars in that startup for you, Andy. You know, at least you get to stay in the shower longer, five minutes longer because you get to wash your hair, right? And condition your hair, right? So, but but it's AI is helping But I think people are misinterpreting it in the sense of that.
It's going to do everything as opposed to It's can make you better because it allows you to use a more creative part of your brain to figure things out Right, and that's my hypothesis at this stage and you know, september 2024
Right. But I think the assumption is, well, then Ralph, go to you is that we assume that people, because we just got through talking about how people don't want to figure things out, right?
Yeah. So
enabling them to use the creative part of their brain, is that really going to work? Because they're not using it now.
not
Yeah. And I forget which of you said it, but I was also agreeing with the fact
it was really stupid, I didn't say it.
no, it was, regardless of you know, when you take a look at a tech stack, you know, each component, as we all know, is and should be an extension of us. So the output is all about the input. You know, if we're engineering whack prompts into a, an AI engine, for example, we're going to whack outputs. And so that's something I took note of.
Another one was that more is not better, but better is better.
Exactly.
You know, you got to make sure that you are investing in yourself, too, at the end of the day, because you want to move from A to B in your own skill set and your own proficiency level and, you know, to be a stronger, better person in life, you want to be a student.
And if you're not a student, and you're just kind of, you know, writing it off to let an AI engine do all this work for you, then you are certainly not going to grow in the process, let alone be a viable contributor to what we're trying to do. In our profession.
Right.
And
where I think AI can be super valuable, but where I don't hear this being discussed in the sales space is adding value throughout the sales process beyond just your product and solution knowledge.
my God.
because we talk about, Oh, AI can make me better in service of what
Good for you. Yep.
Yeah, I see the same thing in, you know, all the new coaching tools, right? Where you can role play and everybody's trying to role play the cold call, which is fantastic. What they're not doing, and I'll have another AI example to what they're not doing is role playing the conversation with procurement
Oh,
playing the conversation with the info sec or the security team that you understand, right?
Like that's, what's missing. Here's the other part that's missing in the AI world is We now create all this a I to look at our emails and our calls and our text messages to tell us where this deal is in viability, right? I'm gonna ask Ralph and Mitch question. When was the last time you recorded your internal conversations with the rep?
with maybe the I. T. Team who's gonna have to help implement this or customer success. When was the last time you recorded that part of the internal conversation and put that into your C. R. M. to get you, well, where are we really with this deal? Because right now we're only having the external conversation.
We're not having this internal conversation where it's like, if Ralph is like, Hey, I know you want to get this deal over the finish line, by the way, to do that, we've got to make these changes in our backend system. And to do that, it's going to take this amount of time, right? So that could affect your timeline that you've discussed with your sales, you know, with your prospect, right?
And. That's an easy solution. How many of our meetings in general internally are already on Zoom? How easy is it to do that? Not to mention what you're, you know, working with just in the one on one or your pipeline review, not your one on one, but your pipeline review meeting, right? Like that's a piece where I feel like, I don't know, you guys tell me if I'm wrong, but it's like, would that be helpful with a good use of AI to help you on your, you know, forecasting?
For me,
I, yes. So we're doing the first part of that, Richard. You know, and that's only because our company's at a certain phase of growth where we need to start, Operating at scale and thinking like that. So a lot of recording is happening, you know, to the first part of you know, recording internal discussions.
But that second piece is missing for us where we actually embed it or sprinkle it somehow into the CRM environment to get some real gauges on the viability of an opportunity and what stage it's at. That, I think that's the, that's where the rubber meets the road.
Yeah
I think also I would agree with Ralph. I think there is value in that. And I always just try to think
following up on
Any opportunity kind of what Andy always talks about for the buyer what little bit of progress, what value do they need to move closer to making a decision?
And then at the product of receiving that. And you'll say it better than me. I'm
No, you're doing great. Go
mental block.
What
are they going to take
Well, yeah,
after receiving that? able to capture that.
that.
capture that. Yeah, but there's problems with capturing it, right? So, you know, people are already writing about this. Well, you know, one of the, and I,
one thing
thing that concerned me, or concerns I have about, you know, how we're using the AI is that, is it's learning from It's own output, which is based on lessons.
It's learning from you, which is not always
garbage in, garbage out still,
right? And so in sales, it just came back to me with the theme of this podcast. Cause people know that I'm hyper focused on the importance of win rates. If you're recording your internal AI is learning on those and your company that's averaging 20 percent win rates, you are basically teaching your sellers bad practices and you're perpetuating it.
And until we break the cycle on that and people start saying, look, what we need to do is really be focused on how we're going to improve our performance. And our systems, AI systems, you know, both internally and externally that, you know, Ralph, we talked about, they're going to start learning on better output.
So what we're going to get from them is more wise and more helpful to us and to our buyers. But until there's that commitment made to say, like, we're going to fundamentally change how we're executing and how we're performing. My fear is that, yeah, we're just going to continue to perpetuate bad practices and bad outputs,
Just because I can hit my driver 230 yards doesn't mean I'm going to hit it there every time.
Right. Like it's, you know, if my average of my five iron is one 60 and, but my crappy is one 40, do I need to hit my six iron or my five iron? But I have, right, exactly. Yeah. Go longer.
Cause I know it's going to go 115, 160 yards. I'll be straight
Great.
Higher probability, yeah.
higher probability. That's exactly. I play the odds. Just like people should be doing in sales.
I have a question again for any of you. But I sort of refer to our two people who are really doing real jobs.
Opposed to me and you, Andy, who, you know, are lazy. But can you Is the AI tool like at what point do we think these AI tools will be able to say for either of you to say, you know what, these are the 10, 10 deals, 20 deals in the last six months that moved at the faster sales cycle, right? That moved at this level, you know, certain pieces that indicate these leading into, and how do you then get the AI to say, now build me something that helps me coach my team to do that, right?
And I don't even, I assume the AI Could do it. I don't know if the tools that we're using yet. Do it. But that to me feels like to Andy's point. Well, we got to make sure we're asking the right questions on the right information. Otherwise, we're just playing to the average.
I think that's a cool use case. I've been, and I was actually talking with Andy about this part of the show. I've been thinking lately. We always talk about velocity and sales. And a lot of that is in, in terms of hours and how many meetings we have to, to ultimately close an opportunity and I've been thinking, how do we create more?
Oh, wow. Like, oh, wow. Moments. And how do we do it earlier in the sales cycle? And I think if AI can be a part of that, please tell me how because right now I think where we are seeing. Some of that is being able to go to recording and look at the deals that have one where we're kind of those inflection points where they knew essentially we win the sale before we win the order.
When did we know this buyer trusted us that we were uniquely qualified to help them better than anybody else? And how can we put some simple things into our process to replicate that more often?
I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn recalling a time I was Presenting to a panel of leaders at ServiceNow and one of them at the end of my presentation said, Hey, thanks so much, Ralph, but moving forward, we don't want you to report the weather anymore. We want you to predict the weather. And that was a pivotal moment for me because I was touting the successes of our team, how well we had done in area ABC over the last quarter.
But wasn't doing a great job of saying, well, based on that experience, this is what we're anticipating coming down the pike. And this is specifically how we're handling it, how we're mitigating the risk, how we're taking a comprehensive look at it. And I think that kind of goes back to what Richard was asking.
If we have the power of AI learning our systems, learning our processes, learning when those inflection points are, and then helping us predict by way of prescribing, Hey, at this stage, now that we're seeing this change, you need to be asking these specific types of questions and need to be, you know, moving the needle in these areas in order to move everything forward.
That's going to be a game changer when we can get to that level, but there, we could talk about that all day long because it goes down to the proficiency
but we shouldn't be that far away from being able to do that
No, I don't think we it's probably in existence. I'm just unaware.
just unaware.
but I've talked about this for a number of years, as bringing my, you know, soccer fan background into it, is, , soccer has been deluged with data and using data, but they have some , very specific metrics, one called expected goals, which, you know, is a way to predict
the chances of scoring based on the type of shot that's taken from where on the field, the angle, with left foot, right, blah, blah, blah, all these factors they've tracked. And so they can then start to incorporate this into their strategy, right? Because we know if we put the ball against this team, put the ball into play at this point, we do more crosses to the far post.
Our expected goals are, you know, two versus, 0. 5 or whatever. And I think in sales, the equivalent thing is, This is, yeah, what we think the buyer needs from us now at this point to make progress. Tell me what would be the best way to provide that to them. And have the system say, yeah, you could do it A, and that will increase your probability of winning by 2%.
If you do it B, it will increase your probability of winning by 10%.
of winning by 10%. Let's do
Let's do B.
Yeah,
And then the system continues to learn. And to me that's where I think we want to go, is we're having the machine help us, say, make decisions about.
about
What is the higher, what steps create the higher probability of success?
It's
It's not a given, but it's just, that's what we're playing is probabilities. I think, and I don't see this in interest in Albrey's feedback, and this will certainly be the last question before I have to wrap up, it's just, one of the things I see missing in my conversations with sellers when I do coaching, I do detailed deal coaching with sellers as well, it's like,
is like,
they're not thinking as I always do, so is this gonna increase, this step gonna increase my probability of winning or not?
or not?
Consciously thinking about the things, the actions they're going to take. Are they going to increase the odds of winning or not? And you look at everything through that lens.
It kind of comes back to like the Stephen Covey deposit withdrawal, concept as well. Are we making deposits? Are we making withdrawals as we engage with people
Any
but to be able to answer the question about probability, it's just probability, right? Is
have to
you have to have a deeper level of understanding of the buyer. The things that are driving them and motivating them. And it's, it requires, you know, level of rigor that I just don't see sellers Not all sellers, but I don't see the sort of most sellers are getting into, but it's just the way that I was trained and coached.
That's how we look at it. We're in the business of probabilities. You're like a poker player, right?
right?
I've got these cards. What are we gonna do with these cards?
Right.
It's not all chance. making decisions about what they can do with the cards based on their experience and what's worked in the past, what's won.
And sellers, we are In the probability business, as much as anything else, how we increase in the probability of winning.
by not being salesy?
It's online. I'm
There we go. We'll start there. That's a good one.
you need. You can just watch it.
Alright guys, we've gone a long ways. Thank you.
prefer to
As always, a pleasure to talk with everybody. I'll wear a bald cap the next time. Just so I fit in.
and
better.
But everybody likes my beard though, right?
yeah, I'm definitely growing one.
All right, Ralph, you're gonna start one on your vacation. That's great.
helpful
Next time we'll get four beards going.
Love it.
I bet you'll like it because you're a young son. They like nothing better. Babies and infants pulling beards. Let me tell you, one of the favorite activities. So, all right, everyone. Thanks a lot and look forward to doing again.
and I look forward to doing
Thanks, Andy.
Andy. Thanks Mitchell. Thanks Ralph.