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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!
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to the Win Rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now, that was Dave Brock and Dave's one of my guests on this the debut episode of the Win Rate Podcast. So welcome everyone. Many of you may have heard one of the 1200 more episodes from my first podcast Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul.
Well, times have changed for sellers and buyers in the eight years since I started that show. The needs of sellers have changed and what buyers are looking for in sellers has also changed. So I decided there was time to change up my podcast. So the old podcast is history, and here we are. Trying something new to help you increase your sales effectiveness, improve the buyer experience, and increase your win rates.
My guest today for this round table discussion are Dave Brock. Dave is the founder and c o of Partners in Excellence, a leading sales consulting firm that helps its clients outperform and outsell their competitors. Also joining me today to talk about [00:01:00] sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and win rates as Brandon Fluharty.
Brandon is a hugely successful enterprise sales professional, and now he's the founder of Be Focused Live Great, where he mentors top performing sales professionals to achieve their career and earnings potential. So you ready? Let's jump into the discussion.
Okay friends, that's it for this . Very first episode of the Win Rate podcast. So first of all, I wanna thank you for taking the time to listen. So grateful for your support of the show, and I wanna thank my guest, Dave Brock and Brandon Fluharty for sharing their insights with us today.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the Win Rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you could also leave us a rating and a review, let us know how we're doing, while we'd certainly appreciate that, and you can do all that on your phone in less than a minute as soon as this episode is over.
So thank you for your help. Also, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter. [00:02:00] It's called Wednesday Win Rate. Each week you receive an actionable tip that you can put to use in your selling to become a more effective seller and accelerate your win rates. You can subscribe at my website, andy paul.com. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today.
Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
Andy: Welcome everybody. Welcome to this brand new podcast and before we get started with our guests on this very first episode, I wanna lay out for you sort of the premise of the show and. I wrote my most recent book saw without Selling Out in large measure because conversations I was having with hundreds of sales leaders and sales managers and individual contributors and other people involved in sales, and also looking at data from sales industry analysts and research firms that made the case that [00:03:00] really over the course of the last 10 to 15 years we've actually gotten worse at this whole business of selling.
Not better. You know, despite all the advantages we have of tool, great tools and technology that we're becoming less proficient in what we do in front of buyers and helping our buyers make their decisions. And there's no place that the drop in sales effectiveness showed more than in the continuing fall of win rates In B2B selling the authors of an excellent book title, strikingly Different Selling, commissioned a third party research firm to go out and talk with thousands of B2B sales organizations across the globe.
In multiple market segments, not just in tech. And what they discovered is the average win rate of on deals over a hundred thousand dollars. So yeah, on deals of pretty modest size, average win rate in B2B sales is 17%. In other words, sellers on average are winning less than one out of five opportunities.
They worked on their most qualified opportunities. And [00:04:00] what's perhaps most shocking about that, at least to me, is, and see my guests think about this, is. Is that seemingly sales managers and sales leaders and sellers are oblivious to their win rates and the story that the win rate tells about how they sell.
So this podcast, this new podcast, is we're gonna focus on sales effectiveness. We're gonna focus on win rates. We're gonna talk about the story and the meaning of your win rates and the factors that influence your win ratings, your win rates, excuse me and the fact that nearly every aspect of your selling does indeed influence your win rate.
We're gonna talk to factors that influence buyers and decisions they make, and obviously the influence that has on your win rates. And as always, with all of my podcasts over the years, you can expect practical takeaways that you can use to help improve your selling and your win rates. Because here's the thing, as a seller, there's lots of things we can't control.
We can't control the product, we can't control the features, can't control the pricing, but we can control how we sell. In today's modern markets [00:05:00] where buyers are so inundated by a surplus of choice, in many markets, the vendors all appear to be alike to the buyers. The products all roughly do the same thing.
The products are all priced roughly the same. So in the absence of true differentiation, most important differentiation in the mind, the buyer becomes the experience to have with the seller. And so the key to improving your win rates is, Improve how you sell, improve the experience that you provide the buyer as they're going through the buying process.
So every week I'll be here with a range of guests with various backgrounds and expertise to help you do just that, to help you improve your win rates. So today I've got two very special guests to help me kick off this brand new podcast. First up, we've got Brandon Flu, Hardy. Brandon's an extremely accomplished salesperson.
Many of you follow him on LinkedIn. He's now an entrepreneur helping other sellers try to achieve and what he achieved, the great success he achieved in his career. [00:06:00] So, Brandon, welcome to the show
Thanks, Andy.
Dave: and with Brandon it. Joining today is Dave Brock. Friend of mine I think we've, I dunno, we've known each other it seems like for a while.
Dave. Dave has a long background in sales and sales leadership, and for a number of years has run the firm. He founded a really highly respected sales consulting firm, works with sales teams around the world on issues of sales effectiveness. So Dave, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
All right, so brief introductions, Brandon, expand on that brief
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: James.
Brandon: Yeah, no. Excited to be here, Andy. And with you here, Dave. So, I started, my first sales role happened. Intuit, like many in sales, happened into sales. I started as an account manager in 2006 in New York City after a failed attempt of becoming a professional soccer player in Europe. And
Dave: Soccer football. Football is life.
Andy: Yes. You'll never walk alone. I know. We're both [00:07:00] Liverpool
Dave: Liverpool fans. Yes.
Andy: And then I made a life decision to leave New York City. And we landed in a small town in Florida, Sarasota. And I had to climb my way up selling $45 print ads to small local bars and restaurants, to eventually getting into mid-market sales, to eventually getting into enterprise sales, to eventually thriving with a mid-cap public conversational AI company.
Where I sold into strategic accounts had my most prolific period during that four year period. Able to be a perennial seven figure seller and a seven figure earner. And last year, in 2022, decided to turn that income into independence and start my own one person business which yeah, as you mentioned, helping other sellers to turn their intentions into impact, into income, and eventually independence.
Dave: And [00:08:00] I, I take all credit for your
Andy: Yes. Yes. And our coaching in 20 18, 20 19 was instrumental in laying some of the foundations
Dave: your, I think that was your first million dollar year, wasn't it?
Andy: That
Dave: Yeah. So, and who was your coach? Just to say that again. Okay.
Brandon: I hope you got a healthy commission from that.
Andy: Yeah I should have gotten paid, not on an early basis, but on a percentage, but I'm just happy to that his success. So, Dave, tell us a little bit about you.
Dave: I'm Dave Brock author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide and upcoming Sales Executive Survival Guide. I run a boutique consulting company called Partners in Excellence. About 15 of us scattered around the world. Primarily working with very large corporations. And all my, I got into sales in a very obscure way.
I was studying for my PhD in theoretical physics and planning on being a researcher in professor. And one weekend I was up skiing at Heavenly [00:09:00] Valley. Met this inventor. And so we'd ski down together and then ride the chair and talk about his invention together. And a couple weeks later he calls me up and he says, Dave, how'd you like to be our senior vice president of product development and engineering.
And here I was 21 years old and said, holy shit. This is cool stuff. And it was a typical Silicon Valley story. We had a hot product and we failed miserably. And and I discovered, you know, there's a lot to bringing a, building a startup company, a lot more than just a hot product. And so I went and got my mba, ended up going to the dark side of the world.
I sold mainframe computers for IBM m and New York City. Then went up the food chain in ibm went and ran co-founded a software company. In kind of the engineering design space and that grew that fairly quickly. Went and ran as c or CEO of some turnaround tech companies. Went back and founded a [00:10:00] small AI company in the very early days of AI and ended upsell it to the original company I had co-founded.
And now I try and stay ahead of all the trouble I cause.
Yeah. Yeah. And you did that very well. So, well, thank you both for joining me. I mean, this is, I know for you guys too. This is a. This whole idea of effectiveness in sales about win rates in particular, we've all talked about it individually, we'll talk about it here together, is to me it's the single most important metric for an individual contributor is the win rate, and I think even necessarily for a team as well.
But I mean, it is the clearest indication of the value your buyer has found in the experience of working with you and Yeah, their vote and really what, how good a job you did is selling. I'm just interested in your take on it, Dave, why don't you talk about that for a second.
Brandon: I think win rate is kind of a starting point for really performance leverage. I think one of the most important things [00:11:00] we have to start talking about at win rates is, What is it, how do you measure it? Because almost everybody I talk to has a different way of measuring it, whether it's, you know, from just raw leads to what orders are produced, which is probably the worst way to, to measure a win rate, or, , more typically what I look at is , rock solid qualified opportunities where people have made a commitment to do something and what percentage of those do we win?
And then why?
Dave: Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, you look at the start of a period month or whatever and yeah, if you've working on, yeah, if you have 10 opportunities you're working on and 10 close, what percentage of those did you win? That's your win rate.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: Pretty, keep it real simple. I mean, I know there's, as you said, there's some debate about that, but Brandon, what do you think about that?
Andy: Yeah I fully agree. I think there needs to be clarity on defining what a true win rate is because everybody seems to have their own definition on it. And when I, again, look at the portion when I was selling into Fortune 500 companies in a strategic account. [00:12:00] Role. I was obsessed about really two, two things, win rates.
I, I kept, you know, data for myself outside of Salesforce that I would constantly look at and check in with myself on a constant basis. At minimum monthly win rate was a part of that and my average bookings, I was, you know, focused on net new logo acquisition. So I was focused on what's my average bookings, how do I improve that?
Those were then the two levers that I could manage my process, my business against. And the way I defined win rate was if there was a mutual agreement from both sides of the table to pursue something. And we committed our time, energy, and intention towards that. And I got to a stage where it was. Me deciding, yes, this is worth engaging with.
And the client side, the prospect said, yes, this is worth engaging, where we could actually [00:13:00] put something in front of them to decide on,
And make a decision on. That's what I looked at a lead because an SDR set up an appointment and convinced them to take a half hour meeting. That is not an opportunity, that's not necessarily a qualified opportunity.
Dave: Right. Yeah. My definition is very similar to yours, Brandon is, yeah, you're talking to somebody that's made the commitment to invest the time out. I call it time, attention, and resources to, to make a decision. And yeah, if you get to another, A period and you put in the disposition of the deal in Salesforce and it's, you know, you win or you lose, right?
And that percentage that you win and what's so, You said you tracked it. So what was your win rate?
Andy: So I ended my career at 78% when, right?
Dave: Okay. Make me feel bad. Well, mine, mine was, so, I mean, I sold during my career as a yeah, seller before I started my own company selling things from [00:14:00] figures to nine figure type deals. But I was at 63%. That was mine. And I tracked it through a big chunk of my career. Cuz for me that was everything.
I mean, I didn't know that there was what else made more sense? Dave Chu. And did you track it or,
Brandon: Well, I mean, in my company right now, win rate is one of four critical metrics that we track. You know, in our company we have of the 15 people, we have 13 that are basically sellers and deliverers, and we range 82 to 89%.
Dave: Right. What's shocking to me and over the last couple quarters back in the fall of 2022, it, my company, we started this cohort based coaching program called Selling School, which is really to teach people how to use The precepts from my book Sell without Selling out to increase their win rates.
And when we get together for the first meeting, we ask people, these are all AEs, many of them with [00:15:00] 10 to 15 years experience. We ask, what's your win rate? And fewer than 10% can answer the question.
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: the same thing with managers, though I deal
Dave: Although, yeah, that was the next thing I was
Brandon: level executives and you know, some of the first questions I ask them is, you know, what's your, you know, what's your overall win rate? What's your average deal size? What's your average sales cycle look like? And most of them are absolutely clueless about what those metrics are.
Dave: Yes. Well, this is so curious. So why do you think that is? Why do you think that it, this is not. You know, we've gotten so sidetracked by the activity metrics that we've lost sight of the fact that this is the thing that measures the job you're doing. It's not your quota it's your win rate.
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, being a part of a high growth SaaS company and I'm seeing this now with the individuals that I mentor and coach, is that fear-based management has creeped in and it's it's activity. [00:16:00] Metrics over impact. And you know, I think especially in today's environment, there's a return to rigor by organizations that needs to be flipped on its head.
And impact needs to be measured at a higher degree of scrutiny. And I think we've just for the past several years, call it maybe a decade, it, you know, a lot of, at least. In the SaaS worlds, in the technology world, the high growth, you know, unicorn types of company. The amount of growth that's occurred ha has been pretty staggering.
And so there's been a complacency you know, laziness, but also fear from the top. And it stems all the way at the board level of we have to just grow at all costs. I think that has, Trained sellers from the bottom up that it's all about activity. It's all about number of emails sent, number of calls to meetings ratio.
How [00:17:00] many proposals have you sent out? And we've been sort of programmed to be very robotic versus bringing a very human, you know, experience into a human-driven business that, that we're in. And. You know, for me personally, I, again, working with Fortune 500 level accounts, being hyper strategic. I knew that I couldn't measure based off the impact, oh, excuse me, activity.
It had to be based off of. Impact, you know, I need to be super rigorous about even saying no more than yes. And in fact, that was sort of the key driver for me is making def you know, no say no as my default. Versus, I think what we typically see in sales is, yes, give me more leads. Give me, let me say yes to every opportunity because I don't know what's going to come next.
And I think that stems from the top. And to be corrected at the top.
I think there[00:18:00] I think leveraging off what Brandon has said, there's just such an irrational focus on activity. Right now, and you know, as I look at, you know, people measure number of dials you make, number of emails you make, you know, those kinds of things. And you know, any, with the technologies we have today, any person that can't make a hundred dials by the first coffee break in the morning you know, isn't doing their job.
How many conversations have they had is a different issue. And, you know, and today with chat G p T I've read an article a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn, 15 minutes I can send out a thousand personalized emails, but what kind of responses am I getting? So I think we get distracted by a, as Brandon says, the activities we do and not the outcomes or impact those activities have.
I think at a senior management level, I see another kind of distraction is. [00:19:00] We meet our revenue goals. So for instance, I had last year I had a project with a very large company, about a 6 billion company. They'd been growing by about 20% a year, and they've been beating their revenue goals every year.
And they said, Jeff, Dave, we're really doing fantastic. We just want you to come in and look at us and say, you know, we have these ambitions for the next five years. How well positioned are we to do that? And I looked at it and their average win rate was 17%. And they had no idea cuz they were so distracted by we're hitting our revenue targets.
And I went to them and I said, no problem. You're gonna meet your five year objectives, no problem at all. But I'm sure glad I'm not a shareholder because you're underperforming your potential.
Dave: Right.
Brandon: Right? And when I said you know, your win rate's, 17%. I used to fire people whose win rates were less than 30%.
And I said, look at the[00:20:00] you're happy with the revenue that you're achieving, but look at the revenue you could get if you simply doubled your win rate. And so at a senior executive level, there's this distraction. Are we hitting our revenue targets or are we performing to our potential?
Dave: I think it's also amplified by this idea that are we hitting our marketing targets, right?
Brandon: Yeah.
Dave: you know, if you increase win rates, you know, if. My story when I was working at startups is my, you know, unique skill was come in and take over a sales team and double and triple revenue without adding headcount
Brandon: Yeah.
Dave: because we teach people how to sell what they have and to be effective at doing it.
And in today's environment, just think of all the money you could save from marketing spend if people were able to. Sell with higher wind rates because you would need less pipeline. But there's this, you know, pipeline infatuation among other infatuations that exist out [00:21:00] there. And it's part of the, at least to me, and I'm not put be too crude with the analogy, but you know, if you're operating in the surf consistent basis as your company was that you talk, your client, Dave, you talked about they could be meeting their goals, but basically they've turned sales into playing the odds.
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: we got enough, you know, a casino game we sort of know what the, our odds are of winning. So if we just keep feeding the funnel with enough and we're just competent at selling, not really good at selling, just competent looking at our targets.
Brandon: you know, I kind of take it from a maybe different point of view too is you know, if you're getting 17%, one rate and you look at having to do, you know, hundreds of calls, thousands of emails, That's just too much work for me.
Andy: Yeah,
Dave: Yeah.
Brandon: I'd rather win, you know, when two or three times this, the amount these guys are doing with, because the pipeline dynamics change profoundly, you know, if you just double [00:22:00] your, if you double your win rate or if you double your win rate and double your average deal size and things like that.
And people don't know how to take a look at those metrics and play the games to say. You know, and I'm, you know, frankly a lazy sales guy is, you know, for me, go, you know, we're at, you know, in the mid eighties for win rates. Our average deal sizes are a million and a half dollars. And we really reduced our sales cycle tremendously.
And so I get a lot done with a very little bit of work. And I don't wanna work so hard to, you know, deal with thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls.
Andy: Yeah. And I think that's spot on, that there's this obsession with busyness that spurs on this activity driven type of approach. Where, you know, I think the better principle is in, and I'm stealing this from Greg McEwen, author of essentialism Less. But [00:23:00] better. And if you could design your sales team or frankly your organization around that principle, then it becomes really about recruiting.
You know, back to the analogy we like to use a lot, Andy, you know, athletics, you know, world-class sports teams know how to recruit well. And so if that, but that's gotta be steeped in a design principle around. Less but better so that you can bring in true impact players. And you don't need to manage around busyness.
You don't need to manage around impact. In fact, what becomes a better metric to have discussions in, in one-on-one meetings is, well, tell me about a story you uncovered with a prospect or a customer this past week versus how many meetings did you set? What's the point of having four meetings that lead to know.
You know, future conversations or impact. But if you could have you know, [00:24:00] an earth, a real customer story, that's a better conversation to have in a one-on-one, one, one-on-one meeting versus just looking at a set of activities, so, you know.
Dave: Yeah. No I'm sorry to interrupt. I was just gonna say it's, yeah, one of my favorite. Quotes recently I've been using is from Edward Deming, right? Or the great father of Quality Control. And I posted on this a week or so ago. He said, you know, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
Brandon: Yep.
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: And you know, we look what's happening, certainly in the SaaS world, and you know, these companies accepting these low win rates. That's the way the system's designed. And yeah, I always sort of amused as you know, people tout down know these high price consulting firms they bring in to do their revenue architecture.
And it's like, sure, but what's your win rates? And you need to have a process. But the process is generating these subor subpar results that are leaving, as I think Dave mentioned, is leaving money on the table.
Brandon: Yeah.[00:25:00]
Dave: And it's like, why are we celebrating that?
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: This is the system. So lemme ask a question as individual contributors and as organizations, what's a good win rate in your mind?
Andy: You know, I gravitate towards you know, 70% or above. I think is sort of the bare minimum. I, you know, I don't know that you can put a specific number on and be interested. In hearing Dave, who's seeing 80 plus percent, maybe the 70% is too low. But that seems a lot more manageable.
Then you can design quality systems around Recruiting. Marketing has a very distinct function in supporting sales in knot of just. Bring in everything that can possibly come through the door, that can be hyper selective. In, you know, here are specific accounts that we want to pursue because we have a distinct point of view on it.
We have a [00:26:00] distinct per point perspective on it because we know we can make the biggest impact at these organizations versus trying to rule the world, change the world, win everything because of this. Sort of ignorant, e egotistical view that you know, a startup needs to become a billion dollar unicorn.
You know, versus a calm, sustainable company that does high quality work.
Dave: And I think there's, you triggered a thought as too, is that to me, one of the real issues when you're, again, an organization that's operating in a low win rate environment is that this sort of feeds through back to marketing and creating this vicious cycle is that if you're only winning a. 17%, as Dave talked about, of your oppor qualified opportunities, how can you be an effective channel back to marketing and say, this is who we should be targeting in our marketing efforts, because you don't really know right?
Until you get your win rate up. And if you do, then this win rate goes [00:27:00] up, then you can start creating a virtuous cycle. We say, Hey, we really get this right because I would make the argument that at 17% win rates or 25% win rates, Despite this being the buzzword that many marketers like to use, you don't have product market fit.
I mean, there's one of two things that happen at low win rates. Either you one and or both. Either you don't have product market fit or you just suck at selling, and it's probably some combination of the both.
Brandon: and I was in a conversation this morning with Brent Adamson, Matt Hines, and we kind of got into that. And your costs of selling. You know, so if you're looking at it from an organization point of view in profitability, your costs of selling at those low win rates are just prohibitive.
If I could with the same headcount,
You know, winning 30%, 40%, think of what that dumps down to my bottom line and driving profitability.
Dave: Well, I mean there was a guy that took issue with me online a couple weeks ago. So I made this comment, I said, you know, [00:28:00] anything under a hundred K is pretty much transactional these days. And he is like, how can you say that? He said, you know, could, would you call this deal, you know, our average deal size 35 K and you know, we make eight calls and we do five demos and we talk to, and I'm like, dude, if you're only winning 25% of your deals, that doesn't pay.
You can't keep doing that.
Andy: That's right. And that's the root of it. That is the root of the issues that I think false narrative and that false thinking is just throw a bunch of bodies at it, get the land. It can expand later. I buck that trend. So I, in the four year period where, you know, I earned life changing income, I, I.
Purposely went into 14 very strategic accounts that, again, we had that mutual buy-in from both sides of the table. I lost four of those opportunities. Those were four lar. The three of those were those companies [00:29:00] saying, thanks, Brandon. We appreciated everything you put in front of us, but we're going in a different direction.
Yeah, those stump, one of those was our company choosing not to move forward, even though that particular company wanted to move forward. That stings too. But you know, as
Dave: Yeah. One
Andy: try, yeah, nothing you can do about that. But the other 14 opportunities that I won, I was hired to be what you were describing, Andy, is just go sell a starter package.
That's what we called it. And granted it was a $250,000. Program, but the idea was just go hustle, constant activity, get in front of these stakeholders. But I thought to myself, well wait a minute. If I am going to spend six months, nine months, however long it's going to take to sell a 200%, a $250,000 problem that I'm solving for, it's gonna take just as long [00:30:00] if.
If not longer than if I were to elevate my stature within the organization to try to solve for a 25 million problem. And what I ended up doing was win rate is the parents metric. And then my average deal size and my average deal cycle were sort of the complimentary metrics that supported win rate.
My average booking was 1.92 million. When I was hired to sell an average of $250,000 deals by elevating up within the organization, I go into the deep blue ocean and reduce the competition. I'm no longer in R F P territory. We're talking about transformations, and that's again, a focus on quality.
That's a focus on impact. That's a different selling style than, okay, let's hire some robots if we could. And just sell these small, you know, packages that get the new logo in the [00:31:00] door and then we'll figure it out later. And where I'm coaching a lot of individuals now are individuals who have to fix those problems.
Oh we just got a horrible deal done that didn't strategically align. With the initiatives, the growth initiatives of the organization just to get a deal done at the end of the quarter. And now you know, an AE or an account manager has to come in and fix that. Now there's opportunity in fixing those problems, but why is that a problem in the first place?
Dave: And you brought up a really critical point too. I'm sorry, Davis, just real quickly is yeah. The amount of time that you needed to invest as a seller for a $250,000 deal could be very similar to a 25 million deal. I mean, I, this was something I discovered early in my career, which is why I gravitated upmarket.
It was like, It's taken me just as long to sell to this mid-size company as says to this big company, let me go sell to the big company Dave.
Brandon: No, Brandon said something that, that I think is really important as I kinda look at the performance lever mix. There are all sorts of [00:32:00] performance levers, but the core ones are win rate, average deal size, and sales cycle. And what I find too many people doing is they almost accept those as laws of nature.
Dave: Right.
Brandon: That I can't change. So I do the math to get my revenue and you know, if my win rate's 17% then, and my, you know, my revenue per deal is a thousand dollars and if I wanna make a billion dollars, I gotta do hell of a lot of prospecting. But you know, they don't look, it says what causes each one of these and how do we tweak them?
And things like, you know, and as I kind of look at it, you asked the question earlier is, what's a good win rate as a consultant? The only responsible answer I can get say is, it depends but is that I worked with a company, very large European company. Each salesperson had an average of about a thousand accounts.
Their average deal value was about $10,000 and. [00:33:00] And their win rates were really pretty good in the mid fifties. And they came to me and said, Dave, to meet our growth objectives, we're going to have to hire 500 salespeople a quarter. That's excuse me, 500 salespeople a month. That's kind of tough.
Dave: Yeah. You think,
Brandon: How do we do that? How do we afford it? Blah, blah, blah. So we went through and re-engineered the thing, and we all of a sudden said, you know, something's wrong. So what we did is we started getting in under these numbers that we've been talking about, and first we did is we created an inside sales organization.
We took the average salespeople from average of a 1000 accounts, each to 15 accounts each, and we kept their quotas the same. And most of 'em are saying, oh my God, what do I do?
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: And what they had to do is we have to chase things at higher deal values,
Dave: Right.
Brandon: Because, you know, their win rates are pretty good.
So you start looking at what the leverage is. How do we go after higher deal [00:34:00] values? Well, the interesting thing they found was those deals always existed, but they were so busy doing that transactional stuff. That they were missing those big deals, and all of a sudden they started going in. So within 18 months, their average deal size went from $10,000 to, I believe the first phase was $300,000.
And within three years, their average deal size was a million and a half dollars. And last year their average deal size was 10 million.
Dave: Yeah.
Brandon: And, you know, is, but what happened is. We got the managers to really understand what drives the numbers, where are the levers here and how do we start tweaking them.
What was interesting as we went through this is their wind rates went up to, in the mid sixties, low seventies average deal sizes were skyrocketing. So you can imagine the revenue impact. The thing that they were looking at then is, How do we [00:35:00] tweak sales cycle and sales cycle is a bit of a tougher thing to tweak,
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: but
Dave: It's, but I mean, this is, gets to one of my, you know, bugaboos is you know, organization think, oh, well we gotta start with small companies. We, you know,
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: we will learn what we're doing selling to small companies and it'll go upmarket over time and. My approach was always in, in growing companies was, if we wanna sell to big companies, let's start selling by selling to big companies.
That's how we learn what we need to do. This is how we get good at selling to big companies, isn't it? And so that's one I think companies really miss the mark on is if you wanna sell to big companies, start by selling to big companies. The other thing too is yes. Yeah we've all have talked about sales cycles, you know, that I don't think sales cycles are duration.
I think they're quantity. It's, you know, the amount of time you put in because that's your ultimate limiting factor as an organization of how many deals you can do.
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: But,
Dave: you know, [00:36:00] companies are completely un mindful of that. I mean,
Brandon: that's where you start going through an engineering. What you do is in our own company years ago, I mean, we have very high win rates. We have reasonably high transaction values. And so he started saying, what can we do? We discovered we were doing an average of 22 meetings per to close.
And for us, most, about 50% of the time, it meant jumping on an airplane. Taking the time to fly, maybe internationally pay for that and looking at all the time. And so you try and pack as much as you could into a trip, but it was still a huge time drain and a huge cost. And so we started looking at what do we do?
And we took kind of a design thinking kind of approach. And we have, we're now down to an average of. Nine meetings to close. So we've doubled our productivity. We haven't reduced the customer decision cycle off. We've reduced it by about 20% but we've [00:37:00] reduced the time It takes us to do a deal by over 50%, so now we can go and do, you know, grow our revenues and do more deals.
Yeah, and the funny thing about that, Is customers love it because we're accomplishing much more in every meeting and we're making them much more productive. And so we've doubled our productivity. But see what I don't see in this current culture of sellers and particularly sales managers is that let's get, let's not accept the numbers.
Let's get underneath and see what causes the numbers. And how we, where we can start tweaking to drive performance. And I think part of it is this growth regardless of the cost, so we can always get BC funding, we can always get money. And so that causes us to be a little bit lazy. And not look at how do we tweak the numbers when Brandon, you're a kid by [00:38:00] my standards.
But you know, when you had these limited budgets and you said, how do you double your sales without any increase in headcount, any increase in budget, you sit down and scratch your head a few times.
Dave: The theory of constraints is great for sellers, right? I mean, this is how you figure it out. Go ahead, Brandon.
Andy: I, Dave, I love that you used the term design thinking because that's what the macroeconomic environment is forcing organizations to do. Again we've sort of been in a decade of easy funding you know, easy access to capital. That's all changed over the past 18, 24 months, and it's gonna force us to go back to using design thinking using human-centered principles.
To think about all the con important constituents here. You've got the seller, right? Who's on the verge of burnout? Who's being told, you know, activity. Busy. You've got, you know, mid-level managers and you've got sales leadership who's. [00:39:00] Taking the pressure from, you know, the VCs and the board, Hey, where's the revenue we've got, you know, to meet that 20% growth target quarter over quarter.
But if we step back and think about. The, you know, also the prospect and the clients as this human-centered approach. And then it becomes, as you said, Dave, an engineering exercise. And here's a story of just that, you know, in 2018 I was of the mindset as an individual contributor, I can win everything.
Yes. And I was saying yes to everything. And Andy, the person who introduced you, me to you, Sean Burke, my manager at the time great manager. We sat down at the end of 2018, which was a, it was a strong year for me. Won, you know, Delta Airlines a great deal with another large organization. I was, you know, M V P, so I thought I was hot stuff again, thinking, ah, I can win every account, just give me everything.
[00:40:00] But he sat me down and he was very direct and said, Brandon, you're great in front of organizations where you obviously care about them. And I benefited from being in the bee to. To be, to see space. So it was very easy for me to be a customer of a lot of these large organizations that I was pursuing.
And that became a bit of my ethos of, well, I want to be their customer before I asked them to be our customer and the organizations where I couldn't be that it showed and he joined me in every. One of the meetings along with a large account team, and he said, Brandon when you obviously know something about the brand and it's very clear that you're passionate about being their customer.
It shows when you are not that shows as well, and there's a big difference. So I went through a design thinking exercise using the Japanese concept, icky guy, which is, you know, a Venn [00:41:00] diagram of what are you good acts, what does the world need? And so forth. And I did something similar. I had five criteria.
Of things that were important to me, and I applied that as a filter against my strategic account list of 50 accounts, and I removed a lot of things. I then made no my default versus saying yes to every single account. And I went from a strong year earning 200 k that first year to a million and a half that in 2019 by focusing on.
Working very specific accounts, not the largest accounts I removed. You know, some very large organizations, Walmart, apple, but I went further down the Fort Fortune 500 list. Again, very large organizations, but I knew I could get high up in those organizations. I knew I could move faster. And that impacted my win rate and went from 68% into the seventies.
I. Increased my average bookings, I decreased [00:42:00] my sales cycle, and I eventually got into like six month sales cycle selling, you know, an average of, you know, seven figure deals by going through that design thinking type of exercise. Where again, no was the default, less but better was really sort of the design principle that went into that.
Brandon: So, so applying Consultee, consultee ease, or whatever it is to what Brandon's saying is what Brandon did is he really focused on what's my icp, and he just narrowed that target and rather than going after the world, he said, Here are the people I wanna work with where I can have an impact, where I'm interested in, and they're going to be interested in me.
And, you know, if you know the fastest way to improve performance it's amazing how easy it is. Focus on your win rate. And what you do is you do vicious disqualification. You know, our pipelines are filled with wishful thinking and [00:43:00] crap. You know, we can double win rates and double performance just by cleaning the crap out of our pipelines.
Dave: Well, and this is thing that drives me crazy as a big voice in the VC world that was talking last year about, you know, as you scale, your win rates are gonna go down.
Brandon: Hard
Dave: I was like, yeah. And I was like, well, why? Well, because you have more conversations. I said, well, so I said, you know, that doesn't mean you let 'em into your pipeline.
It's like, you know, as a seller you choose as brand. So why, as I said, you choose who you wanna sell to. And I, my first book, I used the analogy of, you know, you as a seller, you are the bouncer at the head of the velvet rope. Who are you gonna let into your club? And you, that's the decision, that decision.
Has a huge impact on your win rate and your ability to serve your
Brandon: and the most, under one of the most overlooked things in really. The value we can create with our customers and the performance we can drive [00:44:00] both for them and for us is that icp and you know, the narrower and more refined you have it, you know, you know, is all I want to do is I wanna focus on the customers.
Where I am the best in the world at solving a certain kind of problems and the customers that have those problems, I don't wanna waste my time on anybody else as charming and interesting as they might be. I'm wasting my time and their time.
Andy: That's right. I call it the category of one seller. The seller, individual contributors need to be empowered to feel like they are a category of one. Only they in the world can solve the challenges of. The person on the other side of the table, the prospect or the client, they should feel that experience and sellers need to be enabled to make these decisions.
Listen, you're hiring smart people for a reason. Now, don't handicap [00:45:00] them by putting on layers of micromanagement. They are business owners within the larger organization.
Dave: And also just from a psychology standpoint though too is, you know, if you're at a 25% win rate, just use that as an individual and you know, if practice makes perfect, what are you practicing doing day in and day out? You're practicing losing, right? I lose three quarters of what I do. I'm gonna get pretty good at that.
And so we have to get, put people in a position where they have confidence if they wanna be that, that, you know, market of one, as you talked about, that brand of one. Yeah. That comes from having the confidence of winning and you know, people serve, sometimes they hear me talk about winning. It's like, you know, isn't that little salesy or something?
It's like, no, it's not salesy at all. It's like, why do we stay in sales? Right. Some people say, I stay in sales cause I'm motivated by the money or so on. But we know from research that people are most successful over the long term are not motivated. Primarily by money, but it's by what they achieve, the fulfillment they find from working with their customers and so [00:46:00] on.
Brandon: But
I
Dave: you can't. Why It's gonna, I was just gonna finish one sentence is you can't help your customers if you can't win their business.
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: No.
Dave: I mean, that's it.
Brandon: You know, and part of it is we need to be very selfish and jealous about our time,
and I'm not going to work with anybody that's gonna waste my time. I can't help them and they're not going to help me. And, but there are very few people that have that psychology and as a consequence, they're wasting huge amounts of time.
Dave: And I think people fiddle with the wrong things too and that you were sort of running outta time. But I just wanna bring up one other point and get your take on it. Is, I mean, Dave, you listened on the webinar I did this week with Brent Adamson and Aaron Evans and Howard Dover, and you're nicely commenting throughout it, but there was one comment that somebody made cuz I had, I'd brought up win rates and the guy jumps into the comets and said, He says, you know, win rate data [00:47:00] is garbage unless your processes are really nailed tight.
And I was like, well, that's like saying I wanna lose weight. I know I needed to go to the gym, but I'm not gonna go to the gym until I lose weight.
Brandon: Now.
Dave: Right. I mean, that's like, no it's, you know, you sometimes people critique win rate as being a lagging indicator and it's like, no, it's a leading indicator of future sales performance.
Andy: That's right. It's an indicator that you have found the right type of customers that you can impact. That that they value what you offer. So use it. Just like when I talk about seven figure earnings and seven figure W two s PE people seem to get triggered by that. It's just a. It's just an outcome of figuring out what worked and doubling down on the things that work.
That's, again, how you get into that category of one territory is being ruthless about your time, and I would argue also the other finite resources that. A lot of modern sellers [00:48:00] struggle with, and everybody in the performance economy is your energy and attention, right? No use having all the time on the, in the world if you're draining your energy because you're constantly hustling around the clock and getting four hours of sleep and wearing that as a badge of honor, you need to have the right energy as well.
Same with your attention, you know, are you. Mindlessly scrolling social media, or are you reactively opening your laptop at the start of the day and giving your time, energy, and attention away to others before you've defined? This is the impact. This is the most important thing that I wanna do. Which by the way, leads to you as an individual contributor, feeling more fulfilled and to what?
What I love Dave talking about earlier is I was very similar. It was sort of a lazy seller. I want to do as least amount of work as possible. With the highest amount of return we should all aspire to that as [00:49:00] performance-based knowledge workers, our skills and our knowledge is up here. We don't have to be like a factory worker and trying to work like a labor worker.
You use your skills, in your knowledge to find where you can find the biggest impact. And that takes a ma, a level of discipline to say, no, I'm not gonna give my time or energy or attention away. Until I, you know, can focus on the most important task, which are high leverage, high value activities
Brandon: it's interesting when I work with clients a lot of times. I go in and I'll first, you know, we're trying to do analysis and understand what the problems are and so on and so forth, and oftentimes I ask 'em, I say, Tell me who your laziest sellers are, who consistently make their numbers. And they say, well, why do you wanna do that?
Because I said, they've broken the code.
Andy: yes.
Brandon: You know, they, you know, the people get that can make their numbers without breaking a sweat. Have broken [00:50:00] the code. They have the secret. And then you have all these other people that are working 70, 80 hour weeks, you know, doing thousands of emails. Hundreds of calls not making their numbers.
And you know, I feel bad for them. They're working really hard. You know, they're trying really hard, but, you know, nobody's helping them break the code to say, what is it that I do? And it's those lazy sellers that consistently make their numbers.
Dave: well that's cuz you know, the ethos is that somehow more is always better. Right? Remember talking to a client that was. A few years ago they were celebrating the fact they had won the biggest deal today in the company, and they did a pretty good job of documenting, you know, everything that went into it. And I looked at the detail of their win loss, their internal win loss analysis, and went to the CEO e o and said, yeah, you can do one more of those deals this year. What are you talking about? I said, look at all the time it took [00:51:00] And you're just mindlessly having meetings, sort like the example I gave before the 35 k deal, they were doing, you know, five demos on.
It's like, you spent all this time on this deal and it's not replicable. You can't do this again.
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: it's just like, hadn't even occurred cuz the, they were celebrating the fact, yeah, we got it. It's like, yeah, but you can't do another one.
Brandon: But that's again, about being jealous or being, I mean, stingy and selfish about your time.
Andy: Yeah.
Dave: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so yeah, if you have a 35 K deal, you have to re-look at your process. So that's your average contract value across your sales. You can't afford to spend this amount of time on it. You have to figure a way, and it's dancers a necessarily product led growth. I mean, it could be a product that demands a seller to be involved, but you need to figure it out.
Andy: Yeah.
Brandon: Yep.
Dave: All right guys. Thank you so much. You guys will come back as often as possible cause this has been great conversation and we didn't touch many of the things I wanted to talk about, but we've got time. [00:52:00] This is just the start of this journey, so I really appreciate it. Brandon, tell people how they can contact you and learn about what you do.
Andy: Yeah, very active on LinkedIn. Great place to follow and connect with me there as well as some of the resources on brand and flu.com.
Dave: Brandon flo.com. Yes. Yeah, do follow Brandon on LinkedIn. Dave.
Brandon: LinkedIn as well and Partners Next, excellence blog.com.
Dave: Excellent. All right, gentlemen, thank you and look forward to doing again soon.
Andy: Thanks, Andy.
Brandon: Take care.