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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Matt Mellamuka and Matt is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Matt Malamuca is co founder and managing partner at Peakspan Capital. And my other guests today for this really interesting conversation about sales effectiveness include James Isolay, James is CEO of Cognizant and Kyle Williams is a frequent contributor here on the Winrate podcast, and he is the founder and CEO of Brickstack.
Now, before we jump into today's discussion. A couple of items for you, a business. , first, if you have any questions about B2B selling sales effectiveness or questions about how to increase your win rate that you'd like to have addressed by either me or any of my guests on my program, please submit your questions to me via email at winratepodcastatgmail.
com or you can DM me Andy Paul on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your questions. Second, over 50, 000 sellers and sales leaders subscribe to receive my weekly newsletter. Perhaps you should too. It's called WinRate Wednesday and each week receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates And a bunch of other great sales advice as well.
So subscribe just visit my website at andypaul. com All right, if you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay friends. That's it for this episode of the WinRate podcast. First of all I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. I am so grateful for your support of the show. And I want to thank my guests, Matt Malamuca, Jay Misolea, and Kyle Williams 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.
Also, don't forget to subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's called win rate Wednesday. Each week on Wednesday, you'll receive an actual tip that you can put to use in your selling, become more effective seller. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time I'm your host, Andy Paul.
Good selling everyone.
Welcome everyone and welcome to my guests. James, why don't you lead off, give us a few minutes about yourself and
what you do. Sure, yeah, my name's James Islay, so I'm CEO and co founder of a company called Cognizant. So we're a B2B , data company. We specialize in providing, premium contact data in globally.
And we, we have a, about... , 70 percent of our business in Europe and about 30 percent of our business in North America. And yeah we're, we currently 500 people plus just raised the series day. And , I had a fantastic first half of the year. Yeah. You mentioned that before.
Yeah. Very exciting. Maybe we'll get into that a little bit.
Matt, well, yeah, thank you. It's my third tour of duty here, Andy. So so great to be back. What's that? Yeah, 1st on this part 1st on this 1 true. True. True. Very true. It's a whole new era, but Matt Malamuka, I'm a co founder and managing partner of a growth equity firm called peak span capital.
We are about a 1. 5Billion dollar a U. M. business across 3 funds. We're solely focused on B2B software, solely focused on the growth stage of company development, looking for companies that are doing really strategic things in categories that we think have real staying power because B2B software is so big, we further silo the universe into themes or kind of subsegments, and as partners, you can lead no more than three.
So we try to get really steeped in these themes. So I lead sales tech, among two others, marketing tech and hospitality tech, Had the privilege of partnering with James and his team in mid 2019. So great example of the types of businesses we're looking to partner with. So really happy to be here.
Great.
Great to see you as always. And then finally, Kyle you actually are a repeat guest on this show, so,
Kyle's a bit honored to be back. Yeah.
I'm Kyle Williams. I'm a sales leader that learned how to code. I was early Google Cloud sales learned how to code along the way. Now I run a company called Bricks Stack.
We help companies with really hard to identify I C P with. Go to market strategy and really dialing in on pointing at the market correctly. And I'm actually starting to incubate a product, which we might well, it's in stealth at the moment, but I think at some point in the podcast, we might talk about that a little bit more for executives who are building their personal brand and looking to go outbound.
Yeah, I'm
familiar with that. Yeah.
We can jump into that.
So James, we're gonna start with you though, is cause the show, this is the win rate podcast and the impetus for starting the show was sort of my experience
talking with literally hundreds, if not thousands of leaders, corporate leaders, sales leaders, sellers, and sort of, Astounded by how little focus people have been
putting on win rates.
And as sort of, I guess, start with you as a CEO of a high growth company, how focused are you on win rates in terms of, a metric that has value to you and growing the
company? Yeah, extremely, like I say, extremely focused on it. It's just like, cognizance evolved from a company that was really, primarily servicing like an SMB customer in its early stages to like, in the last couple of years, really having, an SMB mid market enterprise, segmentation of customers like we've, we just, we've like homegrown most of our sales team and they've really, grown up servicing that.
SMB commercial business, and now we're taking some of those sellers and then getting them to do enterprise sales. So, so, like, there's a lot there in terms of, like, them learning to sell to enterprises. There's a lot for us as an organization to be able to teach our. Start our sales team to sell to enterprises and so, like, and then there's also the same time the changes in the economy, it's getting a lot harder to do outbound right now.
I think that's a consistent trend. And at the same time, what we also seen is our inbound win rates of, Okay. Stay the same. So it's very interesting now that I've got a more complex company. I can see where the challenges are coming in. Like, I've recently, made changes to the leadership and sales team and gone back in and dived into The sales function deeply.
I think made a number of changes like implementing medic like, so we can kind of, upscale and have a consistency in how we sell. And right now, I like diving into the, like personally into the subject of multi threading deals because, and making sure we've got better tooling, creating new tooling.
For our sales team so that they can really, prepare for meetings better and multi thread better. Cause I think like that's where the, like, like, it's got harder for sure. And I think that, our tooling and our training needs to be improved to get the same win rates we had in the easier economy.
We need to engage more contacts. And, again I gave a talk about this earlier this week at a conference called SAS growth. I think it's like the organization's responsibility to. Provide the tooling, provide the training to upgrade the sales people. Like, we shouldn't expect, we, we should in this economy expect when rates to be dropping like essentially outbound enterprise sales, unless we're actually investing in skills, training tools to get, to do, to have that uplift right in, in, for the scene,
there's this general.
Commentary that sort of runs through, we've seen over the last six months or so, which is that yeah, necessarily win rates fall, during a tough economy and that I have to say that's never been my experience is that, your win rate is sort of independent of the economy. You're, you have a way of selling and you have a certain level of effectiveness that you've.
Established now, you may have fewer opportunities you're working on for sure, but those that you're actually working on why would your win rates necessarily
fall? I think they would fall if like you had a low skill level, like, if it was very easy, like, if, a year ago, like, like two years ago, a year ago, it would only take one decision maker to close a deal. And now it takes like five, but your team has only been single threaded. They would only ever, they got so used to speaking to a single contact that, and you never really like had a discipline in your system to get them to do like proper preparation to make sure that they were multi threading deals properly.
Now, if you had a great sales system that was built in tougher times, and you had that in bill, then. Then you'll probably see consistency on the win rates. But like, I think what I'm seeing in a lot of orgs that grew up during, or, essentially built their sales teams in easy times is that they're suffering.
I've seen some really interesting things in the last, even just in the last couple of weeks. I'm seeing like a lot of organizations struggling and not upgrading their tooling. And they're almost having the reaction to actually just pull out of. Pull out of markets like give up an outbound. Like i'm seeing a lot of that actually versus yeah, i'm seeing that i'm seeing that I know a couple of companies that they especially like companies that have gone into like Europe i'm seeing like quite a few u.
s Companies kind of retreating a little bit from the european market instead of like investing more and investing in better tools investing in better like, like just upgrading their system their systems and their processes around outbound or just sales in general, they're kind of looking at their win rates and going, okay, well, the win rates are dropping and then taking that as a signal to like consolidate in the U S for instance or just to focus on.
On inbound on more marketing dollars, where, when rates are pretty much consistent,
it's really interesting. And Andy, I know you talk a lot about this too. And I think from an investor's perspective, too. If you think about just the access to capital in the last, certainly five years, until recently, it's been so abundant that I think there's been a supply and demand imbalance in software land in a lot of categories.
And by virtue of that, with, unlimited access to very cheap capital, you do have a lot of companies that haven't needed to learn how to sell because they can just jam things in the top of the funnel. And even with a, subpar win rate as compared to historical, levels they still been able to grow and grow nicely.
Right? And so it's actually really, it's really interesting. And I think James, the other thing too, that I think you all did really brilliantly in scaling. The business was, not every company has this opportunity, but started and founded in the UK, where you identified just a massive greenfield opportunity.
And, really scaled nicely developed the product kind of, figured out product market fit in a region with less competitive density and intensity. And then, got went to the U. S. When it was right when the time was right, and you were ready for it. And you were getting pulled there and all those things.
I think a lot of vendors get, whether it's to your point, going to Europe or going to the U S they just kind of do so because they think they need to do so and end up burning a lot of money and time doing it. But yeah.
Yeah. And then vice versa, sorry. Yeah. They'll say like a little bit vice versa.
A lot of UK companies go to the U S and then fail. And then just give up. Like you see, you see, like, it's interesting to see both things happening now, like announcing the inverse, like us companies going into Europe, not being successful. Cause they get there they take the wrong approach to the European market, European markets.
Because it's a S because there's multiple of them and they're all different. And then they treat it like the U S market. And then I'm seeing now, like, like in some cases, high profile company names kind of giving up and consolidating their sales back in the U S which I, like, I think is a mistake.
Why would the win rates go down? Shouldn't they be consistent? Maybe there's fewer. There's one thing I'm seeing is. Say you have some target that we need to have a hundred opportunities generated in a certain timeframe and companies have decreased, say paid spend, or they stopped investing in certain areas, or they're finding that certain inbound has decreased.
And so they increase the amount of activity coming from say SDRs where maybe the win rate for the SDR driven opportunities was the same, but it now makes up a bigger portion of their pipeline. So your overall win rate is going down where at a lead source level, it's relatively stable. I'm seeing that pattern happen
quite a bit.
Yeah. You and I saw that at one company we spoke with Kyle is that they'd certainly weren't paying attention, I think, to the message that the win rates were sending, which was, Hey, we're really doing a great job and winning at a pretty healthy rate. It wasn't, it was like 40 percent rate on our outbound developed opportunities, but our inbound we're winning like at 20%.
But suddenly the flood of inbound, they got really good at generating inbound leads. So it's like, well, Hey, let's just do more of this low wind rate stuff. And they completely ignored the really higher dollar value, high wind rate opportunities rather than grow that part of their business. As I said, they sort of got lazy.
The other thing that just the broad trend that, from my perspective and vantage point that they're worth me a lot. Which I think is definitely resonant with your perspective and kind of, mantra, Andy, and has been for a while is just this move to, if you think about the last, really 5 to 10 years, in sales tech.
There's been such a flood of new startups and new kind of emerging categories and subcategories, like the sales tech stack is has burgeoned to a massive degree. There's been tons of investment dollars. And I think by virtue of all of that, there has been a kind of an inherent, like shift in, in in the world of sales strategy to be kind of sales centric, like, pushing the strategy that the company
proactively thinks is the right one versus, listening to the buyer and actually, pursuing a more buyer centric approach and trying to enable that buyer to make the right decision. And so I think that's part of the reason when rates are as low as they are too, because , and we see it in the investing world too, where there's a lot of this kind of 1 size fits all growth at all cost model.
And that's really, because that's what the investment firm needs, not like what the company needs. Right? So there's an interesting parallel there with buyer centricity and kind of seller centric. Most and so I think the companies that we're seeing doing the best really are, really understanding their to your earlier question and comment, like, their win rates, in good markets and bad are very consistently high and they're listening to their buyers.
Like, they're really letting the buyer kind of help drive and navigate the process and they're really enabling and supporting the buyer to make the right decision. Yeah. And
we certainly saw this. Approach validated, if you will, maybe the wrong word, but because there's been plenty of research about this, but more recently with the Gartner report that came out
by the time this airs, it'll be a couple of months.
And where they showed is, Hey, here are the nine, ranked in order of importance. Here are the nine most important factors that influenced the selection of a vendor by the buyer. And. Yes, seven of the nine were, well, first of all,
I like to show this chart that I
created to sellers and I'll say, okay, tell me what's missing from this list of, the nine most important things that influenced the decision.
That's like, Oh, product isn't there. Oh, price isn't there. And it's seven of the nine are very specifically. Experience based, right? The way the buyer experiences the seller. And it seems like that's a message that's really hard to take hold, right? Because it seems like a whole training infrastructure is lined up to sort of emphasize, selling a product.
What the Gartner data really shows is that, and this is, this split that I've seen for forever in sales is, sellers are selling a product, buyers are selecting a vendor, and they're on two different paths. And it's like, until we can reconcile that, it seems like we're always going to be struggling with this issue of win
rates.
Well, and I think Andy too, just, part of the reason, and curious for your perspective, because I've seen you work your magic, and this is why you're so, so unique and powerful. It's harder it's easier to train. How to spell a product rate than it is to kind of, train and learn and communicate a more nuanced approach.
Right? And so, like, I think that's probably the reality. It's harder to do that. And again, I've seen you navigate that really well, but it's hard, right? It's much easier and much more straightforward to to teach a process and a structure and like, command of something that you're in total control of.
Yeah, but are you Right ? That's, I think that's where the, you're
in total control. It doesn't mean people like it on the other end. Yeah. So you're in total control of it. But but yeah, I think it's harder and, curious for others' perspectives. Of course. Yeah.
James, what do you think about that?
In, in, yeah, in terms of the, those criteria of like the yeah the, I think one of the things that I'm. Seeing in terms of the, like in terms of this, one of the problems that we're tackling internally is just that knowledge that the this, the, this, our sales staff have of the product itself, right.
It's like teaching our sales team, like about the competition, about the products, about guiding the customer through that experience. Like that's one of the big things that we're tackling right now. Like again, it's about Their product knowledge and their education on it. Like that's something that we, we found just needed to be upgraded, right?
In terms of like the, like our own training of our own sales team and sales staff. And I think like, again it's maybe a case of that it, it was also easy for a long period of time that there was just so much money in the market and I didn't gain, it's just. Sales enablement, right?
And ramping how we ramp reps and how well we train them and the tooling that we give them that all needs to get to the next level, which again, fits into that. But, the Ghana study that you talked about.
Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to ask James, what are, because some of it too, obviously, is an ability to think on your feet and react to something versus again, just kind of shove a process down somebody's throat.
What are some of the criteria or characteristics that you all look for in, in potential sellers? I'm curious because you've done an amazing job and just to toot your own horn, because you probably won't the sales productivity, consistency and distribution across the rep base that you guys. Have posted since, since I've been partnering with you for years.
Is remarkable. And so you've built this amazing engine. And but again you've been consistently just really good at finding talent. What are some of the things that you all, or your sales leaders are looking for in, in the folks that you bring on board?
I think like, we started off in the S and B and then we've gone up market to like mid market and enterprise, so, for most of our journey so far, we've been very good at bringing graduates, Training them, to a good degree for the SMB market and then doing volume sales.
Right? And then what we've really found as we've moved into mid market and enterprise is that we've had to build a better sales enablement, right? Better, more robust training and more robust and better tools. And so, like, that's the phase of learning that we're going through now is that upgrading like and I think that.
Yeah, that's a big learning for us right now. And, where we're putting a lot of investment it's just more training more multi threading of deals better tooling better assets for the sales team in terms of yeah training, competitive intelligence Understanding your product assets, , like, that's a big shift in a big upgrade.
And I think that a lot of companies on that growth journey that's a point you can stall 📍 in, stall or, if you kind of taking salespeople that have sold into, S and B, and then just expect them to be able to, Navigate those more complex enterprise, upper mid market deals or just hiring the wrong people that don't have that experience.
So James, and yeah, this is really a question for everybody, but we'll start with you is so what's, what's a good win rate. What should the expectation be as a seller, as you're embarking on your career and you're building your expertise and your experience base. What's a good
win rate.
What should, what's
your personal expectation
being? I guess on our side, I guess what you, what are you benchmarking against? Right? Like, I guess you're benchmarking against your best reps, right? Like, like, what are your best reps doing versus your your mid-tier reps,
that's one way to look at it, ? I , what does your experience say seeing that you've looked at this topic a lot? Like I, I've only looked at it really in my organization.
Is it, is the question benchmark or is there an objective standard?
Yeah, I know, like I, I look at the differences across say the different types of. Deal that are coming in, in terms of, like, is it inbound outbound? What type of size company is it? And then I'm looking at across reps. And then, also, like, bearing in mind, , what stage we're at in terms of the training the type of market.
Yeah, I'm trying to weigh all those things. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've so talked again, lots and lots of people about this is what I found is that very consistently those sellers who are, use this generic term, top sellers, they simply they win more than they lose.
Sorry, but 50%,
yeah, 50. 1 as a minimum is, and I think that is not to ask a leading question, which I just did, but I think that is a standard that sellers should aspire to. Just that I'm in this business and just starting at the top let alone, we can get later, we can get all the factors that can influence that.
But I would want my sellers as a manager and I did is say, look, your goal is to win more than you lose.
Matt and Andy, and I'm sure others have a perspective too. I think what's interesting about , your allusion to benchmarks, James is, I think the benchmarks, the quote unquote standards have been have been pulled down recently because I do think there's a lot of just the kind of sales training and et cetera, just kind of things that people think they know in their gut, especially younger folks who.
. Who are just kind of newer to the game and they think like these 25, 30 percent win rates are like best in class. , and then I think that the reality is to salespeople are some of the most kind of logically motivated folks on the planet. And so if you tell them that 30 percent is best in class, like, that's where the bell curve will kind of revolve around.
So it's interesting. I agree with you, Andy, and I've seen some of the most successful companies I've worked with, and it varies by industry category and stage and all of that stuff, of course, but we worked with a business at our prior firm called Clairmail and one of our operating advisors, Pete Daffern was The CEO there, they were doing mobile banking software before, a lot of these banks had mobile software.
Right? So, like, they were actually like, bringing a lot of these banks online for the 1st time. And they've really narrowed down their I C P. I think at one point they had a list of maybe 80 banks in the US that they were going after, and they went six quarters without losing a deal. They landed 18 of the top, I think 25 banks in the country.
And so that's, that's unrealistic in some markets, but it's a great example of they knew what they were going after and it was a gly narrow market, right. For a little bit, but they nailed it so,
Well, and I think that's a point and Kyle, you and I've talked about this a bunch is that, one thing that distinguishes sellers that are selling at high win rates is that they're really good at making choices in their selling, right?
Who I'm going to sell to, who I'm going to invest my time and who I'm going to disqualify. Anyway, if you're
going to win more than you lose, you have to play where you can win and you have to make those choices about, am I even going to play this game or, save this one for later or. They're just not the right fit for what we're doing, which to your point, Matt, you have to really know, not just as a rep to what James was saying about having the product knowledge about, you have to be able to make that determination really early on to say, is this where I'm going to spend my time and resource, but as an organization as well, to understand where we're pointed and sometimes to make that scary choice to say, it's this narrow slice at the moment.
I think one thing I see a lot is. Yeah. Organizations that are making the switch from primarily inbound to expanding the outbound is you take all your inbound, you look at your win rates, you say, we win here, we lose here. But there's a hidden dimension, which is we win when these factors are true and they come to us.
And so what does that hidden and they came to us dimension that often is because if you just look at, okay, there's this many employees and they have this much revenue, then the TAM feels massive. And sometimes it is making that hard choice. To be able to play where you can win.
It doesn't want the difficulties.
I was gonna say, it's not one of the difficulties though, in that environment that we see and that causes, or the, continues are converging on lower win rates is this pressure to think, Oh my gosh, we've been in this mode where pipeline is King, right? We need to have all these activities. And if we don't have a certain amount of pipeline, we're going to feel.
Nervous and anxious because you're assuming we're only going to close a really small percentage of them, but it's making that transition to say, well, now we're going to change things. We're gonna start winning much higher fraction, but then you have sales leaders that are panicking because, Oh, but what about pipeline?
Yeah, I guess it's a bit about the analysis you do, right? How deep like, as orgs, right? Like, especially, we're, we're like, series D. Funded company, right? We've, we're not that old, we're about 6 years old as an organization.
So we're pretty young. And again, like, we were getting better and better doing the analysis, right? And then, yeah, like, we've gone from mostly serving SMB and it being a volume game to then, like, having richer, more complex pipeline, and then just Yeah, I think that's a part of, like, getting to that next level as an organization, right?
Of then, yeah, being able to qualify opportunities better, being able to, yeah, get out, get those opportunities out of the pipeline that are probably not going to close versus just, serving them on mass. It's a good standard to set right to say, okay, yeah, your reps should be having a 50 percent win rate and then driving towards that.
I don't think we've like, like, if I read a lot of the materials on LinkedIn or the books about sales, I don't see, like, haven't really heard. Like focus before or somebody saying, you should be looking to get a 50 percent win, right? You should be looking to qualify out all the garbage that's in your pipeline and one of the metrics to show that you're doing that right is a 50 percent win rate, right?
This is you know, like, your win rate is a metric that just Comes out at the end of the pipeline at the end. Your rep is going to hit quota and then, that's your focus, right? Rep hits quota is the focus. Win rate is kind of one of those byproducts of the system that you built, right?
I think that's it. It's a good thing to focus in on of like, okay Yeah, actually 50 percent win rate should be one of the things that we're optimizing for It changes, I think that's
it's really I think that's part of the issue that I was scratching at 2, which is, a lot of the stuff and folks with a megaphone might be like misleading to some degree.
Like, a lot of the data out there. That's, benchmarking and folks are certainly influenced and biased by, the market environment last, 5, 6 years, but 1 of the things to James that again, to give you all credit, I That I think you've done really brilliantly is really aligning your kind of go to market focus and motion with where, you can win from a product perspective.
You're a data business, refracting your data set and making sure your sellers are enabled with the tools and the kind of. Product value prop, if you will, to give them the best chance at success. And so, I think that's been another great thing that you guys have done attacking Greenfield where it is, but also again, aligning kind of product and innovation cycles.
With where you're going after and what the regional specific nuances or requirements might be too. So, again, you guys have crushed that.
Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah, the winner thing is you talk about quota and.
People know I'm sort of a skeptic about the value of quota these days, but yeah, is win rate something that should be included in compensation plans?
I think the organization has a responsibility to dive into, for me, it's like, what's the organization's responsibility? And what's the reps responsibility? Right? And I don't really, like, I'm getting quite strongly passionate about this in terms of you, if the organization is, it's the organization's job to optimize and build great systems around the pipeline, right?
And then to give it. The reps, great training great tool sets, great materials. Right. And then there should be no excuses. Right. So I guess like win rate should be something that the organization should be optimizing for to ensure that the rep doesn't have, isn't wasting their time on, on weak opportunities.
Well, I actually think, interestingly. And from my perspective, the ability to know where to spend your time and prioritize it accordingly, i. e. Where you can win that next. That's like next level thinking. And from my perspective, and it's similar to being able to think on your feet and navigate a more complex, sophisticated sales cycle.
And so, in my view, that's actually probably I would guess it's tightly correlated. The folks that can do that well are probably, the folks that have a good win rate, but are also be just, could perform better, even without the enablement tools around them, because they're just the types of folks that can figure it out.
And so it's interesting, I would guess that it's actually pretty correlated with it, because that's hard. It's hard to do that. And it's hard. It's not necessarily a. A natural skill of a lot of folks, too. And so it's hard to teach that. I think, too, especially if you're a junior seller.
Yeah, that's the thing of managers that are willing to show people how it's done.
Right? We're sort of going through this era. You've referenced the format where it's all about activity levels. And less about, mentoring and coaching and, showing how it's done. And, yeah, one of my favorite examples of, why this is so problematic. We see this these days is like on LinkedIn.
Yeah, not that there's always good advice there. But several prominent voices saying, look, yeah. Hey, 2023 is gonna be tough. So you gotta give your best leads to your best salespeople. And it's like. Well, why? Right? So you're just going to keep, your two people that are doing well, you're just going to continue to feed them deals, and you're not going to teach the rest of your team how to get better and how to improve and how to work these deals, so you can grow your bench and grow your strength as an organization.
There's stuff coming from leadership, I think is much of an issue and sort of dictating and saying, I think it's kind of lazy behavior. Yeah, let's give our best leads to our best people instead of saying, no, how do I help all my people become
the best? It's like letting LeBron James take the open layup, right?
It's like, anyone, this is like, those are, and James, sorry, I cut you off, but. Go for it.
Yeah, no, there was one article on LinkedIn where the, one SAS company provided it's, win rates per rep and then what they had seen over the last year. And the conclusion was, which a lot of people commented is what they saw is that their best sellers were still selling at the same, Performance as they were, during the good times, but they're, they're mid tier, lower tier reps that performance had really dropped off.
And what, what does that say? I think it goes back to, those high performers know how to sell. They know how to multi thread. They know how to and they haven't really taught those skills. To the, to the other layers, right. They haven't taught them how to multi thread.
They haven't, maybe also there is a bit of like, yeah, they're routing the best leads to those people. So it's easier for them as well. But again, like, it's, yeah it's a warning sign cause you're putting all your bets on a couple of people.
And then at the same time, what it should be telling you is that we need to do. We need to invest more now because like, things are a bit tougher. We should be investing in more tools, more training, more materials. And then we should see that through the win rates and, of, of the whole group lifting higher, right?
, so it's about digging deeper and not just waiting for the good times to come back. Well, the
other thing too, and it's just one comment on that. I think also from my perspective, like The just the proliferation of the function broadly, and just the inside sales model in the last 10 or 15 years, like, speaking from a board member perspective, I think there is it starts at the foundation in terms of just lead quality to and where to spend time because I think most are probably compensated on a number of.
Demos set, right? And then there's very little put on the quality of those demos, or how they progress through the pipeline. And so it does start at the foundational layer. I think 2, where it's like, just jamming stuff into the top of the pipeline. And folks, if you incentivize the right behavior.
Or I know it talks about, like, micro commissioning specific activities that you want folks to do. I think that could be it's harder to do that. Right? And so that's why it's it's harder to track that stuff. But I do think you could even start there at the very foundational level.
Yeah, no, I think
it's a great idea with that micro commissioning. One of the reasons I like, win rates is because I think this is the purest expression of the buyer's experience with you as a seller. Nothing speaks to it more than the win rate. And so they have that vote. So yeah, understanding what the behaviors are, the skills are that need to be incorporated in order to create these better buying experiences.
And if, yeah, there's an idea of micro commissioning or something like that, that could be implemented. I think that's really... Yeah. A clever idea to look at because this is really, I think the issue that we're confronting is that
it's not like we don't know what
works with, we've had so much data that's come from it.
We've had, this Gartner studies, just an example. There was an others I referenced on the show they've been done, deep wind loss analyses, research,
our wind loss analyses that show that, Hey it's how the buyer
experiences a seller, products, a competitive product, a competitive price is largely considered table stakes.
So where I, if that's the case,
the decisions are made on the margins on these ways that the buyers experience
going with the seller, going through their process.
Yeah. I guess like one of the stats, from a talk I gave the other day, it'd be nice to discuss this. Like, so the average sales leader and the average SDR is typically in tenure for like 18 months.
Right. So again it's, having this all. Like, built into the systems and not having it like in a leader that's teaching it. Right. So, because you're going to, if you just think about those turnovers of staff, like, like, what I see again and again is just organizations that haven't made this systematic and then go through like these.
I've seen that quite a bit. Now these, this kind of like, , phases of performance. Right. And then they see performance collapse. And so, because it's a leadership team that have. Yeah. Or a leader that put in a certain system puts in like, performance in place. And then when they leave the performance collapses versus the organizations actually made that systematic.
And then you could switch out the leader and everything would still work to the same degree.
Yeah, I think to that point to sometimes it's, oftentimes it's hard to tell. Especially for a new sales leader or a new kind of motion, et cetera, standing up or building out the effort. It's hard to tell how things are going because there's a lot of focus on the activity metrics.
And I also think folks, folks want to show that they're busy. And so, like, that's oftentimes I think why folks spend time on the wrong opportunities, because they want to have stuff in their pipeline, right? Whether it's good or not. And again, if you're standing up, you're setting up an effort for the 1st time, are we looking at the right activity metrics?
I guess is 1 of the interesting questions because I think we all agree that win rate. Is a great barometer. But, Andy curious, Andy, Kyle, if James, if you guys have any kind of more let's talked about earlier activity metrics that you all think are good indicators of we're spending time with our, the right folks.
And
I think some of it, you can slice when rate by stage, because some of the problem, as you alluded to bad, as you spit up your. Function and then you watch your stage zero acceptance rate plummet because we don't have a chance to win 50 percent much less progress. 50 percent of the leads that are coming through the door.
Some of the challenge or the reason I think for that is 10 years ago. Yes, their function was primarily a function of doing things at scale was a challenge and it was a feedback mechanism, right? If I reach out to 100 prospects. Whether it's good or not, I'll get 20 replies that might tell me who I got wrong or what my message was off and then you could improve.
And so it became a game of. Who sends the most, gets the most feedback, improves the most, ultimately has the best targeting and messaging. And now you have to have it all pretty well dialed in. Otherwise, at best, you get two words, one word if they're not being nice back. You're not learning anything from the activity anymore.
So the activity no longer gives you a feedback loop. The feedback has to come before you hit send on your outbound. So that's even qualitative things like, one of the exercises I do is interview the top rep. Not to ask them what campaign should we do or what targeting should we do, but what do you do to prepare for a first call because you're going to spend calories because that's valuable.
And then what goes off in your head as you do that preparation, what patterns, how do you expect that call to go? And those are the heuristics really that you need to extract from the team. It's not necessarily a metric. The metric is going to be how well is our sales acceptance tracking? Are we putting the right things in the top of the funnel such that we're getting the response such that the folks we put in the first date tend to be accepted?
But it starts with some of those heuristics, I think. Yeah. And you can,
Some of them may seem even a little soft, but you can quantify trust, right? Gartner, that was number one factor influencing vendor selection was trustworthiness. There's ways you can quantify that as you move through the process.
Are you getting the answers to the questions that you need, right. In order to be able to really come up with a solution for the buyer and really understand what they're trying to accomplish. If you're not getting that information, chances are that you haven't earned the trust to be able to either ask the question or even ask it, but get the answer to it.
And so, well, some of it may be fairly, quantitative based like activity in some cases, it's may seem a little softer on the surface, but it's very tangible and measurable and has an impact on. And so you can create scorecards the Navy to sort of say, okay, yeah. Have we achieved this level of trust that we need to proceed?
That's what I'm building tooling around that right now, like, specifically around that. Cause, like, well, one of the things that, diving into, my own organization Salesforce notes, et cetera. Like, is that preparation? Have we done that work to really. Learn that pain points that we've spoken to enough contacts to really understand the organization before we go to the decision maker and have that conversation.
Right? Like, so that there's the, yeah, so we can build trust because, trust is built through knowledge of the problems that they have. Right? And so again it's. It's that change of having to work harder and learn more to get the sale closed than we've had to do for the last couple of years.
Right? And as most SDRs and you and my salespeople, like they, generally that there's a generation that have grown up in like a very, an easier period. And so there's a, yeah, there's there's there's extra effort that needs to be put into this time.
I don't know if you all have started to, but if you all know Amy Cuddy, she's a professor at Harvard Business School and her whole thing is all about just body language and just what human beings react to and she kind of boils it down to 2 things. Which are competence do I know what I'm talking about?
And confidence. Can I trust this person? And so it's really interesting. Like, there's a lot of kind of, behavioral psychology behind all that. And so, but again, those are harder a little bit harder to measure for what it's worth Andy. And you'd be happy to hear this. I think a lot of organizations investment firms pursuing kind of an outbound model, reaching out to companies, et cetera.
Yeah. Will really kind of compensate and incentivize their equivalent of their like, the associates based on a number of outreaches. We actually at our firm, just the partners reach out. So we kind of flip that on its head, but we instead look at a number of kind of engagements that make it to a certain stage, which for us is right around like issuance of a term sheet.
And so, for us, you could send 10 emails in a year. You could send 100 and it doesn't matter. What matters is how many engagements are progressing. And so it's part and parcel with what we're talking about, like, spending time on the right opportunities. And there's a real opportunity cost to that too, right?
So you need to make sure you can execute when you get the chance. Well,
that's precisely right. And yeah, if you're going to invest the time you have to be able to, and the buyer's going to invest the time, then you have to be able to provide them a return on that investment of time. And that is, yeah, I'm gonna help you make progress toward making your decision more effectively than the competition will.
Big time. Yeah.
I think like, one of the, speaking to as a sales leader in our space And, one of the, one of his big lessons, which then I took to Cognizant was just, getting his reps to believe what was possible, right? Like, we had a lot of reps that had sold commercial deals, average ACV of, 20, let's say, like, 20k a year to the SMB market.
And then. Then getting to do a seven figure deal, like that was even possible, right? Like to change that mindset. And it's the same with like the win rates, right? Like if they got used to a certain win rate of 20%, like, it's like, actually no, you can get to a 50 percent win rate. It is possible.
But they've never seen that. Like most of them have ever, they've never seen that win rate. So it's not like for them, it's like an impossible thing to believe. It's like, it's lenticles or something. Right. And so, like, so I guess it's. Real
in the house. It's such a great point though.
And I, yeah, I remember back in, 20 20, 20 21, people marveling, oh my gosh. Who could have thought that we could have closed a hundred thousand dollars deals all remotely, and it's like, shit, we were doing that 30 years ago and million dollar deals. Right. It's just a matter of doing it and knowing that you can do it.
Then, to your point, James, it's like, Well, of course we could do that. Right? Let's do more of it. Let's do bigger deals. It's not the, it's not the medium. That's the barrier.
It's us the confidence and competence point to right. Be confident. Like, we actually in historically in the couple of years ago, we sold a business to S.
A. P. And we're catching up with the corp dev kind of guy who did the acquisition and you always want it to go well. So they're like, but you don't want to go too well. So, so you're like, oh, man, we really left a lot on the table there and within, I think it was within 3 quarters, then 7x the size of the business because they walked into the room where we were, all of our twists saying, please, sir, can I have some more for, The 90 K deal and they were SAP and they walked in and said, it's 3 million now.
And they said, all right. And so it's interesting, right? Like that swagger and confidence and it definitely matters. We've seen it a lot. Well, I
think, and James, not a comment on what you've done, cause you're doing great is, but yeah, I deal with so many companies say, we're going to earn our spurs, selling small business, and then we're going to migrate up to the enterprise and so on is, startups I worked at, we sold stuff that could only be sold to large enterprise.
So if you want my deals, if you, Hey, if you want to sell to big companies, go sell to big companies, right? There's nothing you're really going to learn selling to small companies. That's going to teach you how to sell to big companies. And I think it's, yeah, a different strategy companies can use to grow effectively is yeah, go big.
Also named one company that has effectively straddled both motions. That's a big company. Now I don't think there's any, maybe you could argue Google, but there's really no examples. That's what I agree. Every time it's like show point to me. The company that's effectively navigated both paths, because it's just very different.
Absolutely. All right, gentlemen, unfortunately, we've reached the end of our time here. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. We covered a lot of ground. Quickly, how can people get in touch with you, Matt?
Just Matt at peakspancapital. com, like spanning mountain peaks. Check out our website.
We got a new website. We have a bunch of resources for entrepreneurs up there on our scaling HQ section. Andy did a great masterclass. For us and just some really good content. We love just helping entrepreneurs out. So we'd love to help. All
right,
James. Yeah. James. islaisilayatcognizm. com. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
And yeah you can contact our main website just cognizant. com. Perfect. And Kyle.
Kyle at brickstack.
com. Perfect. And LinkedIn, of course. So thank you everybody. And look forward to having you all back. We'll do it again.