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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 Keith Rosen and Keith is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Keith Rosen is a top global sales coach. She's the founder of a company called Profit Builders and author book titled Sales Leadership. My other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving win rates are Cristina Yaramillo.
Christina is the founder and president of Personal ABM. Also joining us is Rob Durant. Rob is the CEO of US Operations of the Institute of Sales Professionals, as well as the founder of Flywheel Results. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, if you enjoy the show, please do me a favor and take a second now before we begin to rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
It helps us to get discovered by even more professional sellers, just like you, who are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. And if you're ready, let's jump into the discussion. Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Christina Yaramio, Rob Duran, and Keith Rosen 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 Apple podcast, Spotify, or every listener podcasts. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul, good selling everyone.
All right, friends. Welcome to another episode of the win rate podcast. Another all star cast of guest panelists joining me. I'm gonna give everybody a minute to introduce themselves. Kristina, we'll start with you.
All right. Thanks, Andy. I'm Kristina Jaramillo. I'm president of Personal ABM. We're an account based go to market firm, and we focus on helping sales, marketing, and customer success teams improve account experiences and interactions that they're delivering to their key accounts and key customers so they can increase their win rates.
Perfect. Talking my love language. Keith, you're next.
Keith Rosen here author of coaching salespeople into sales champions and sales leadership. And for the last 32 years and 76 countries and six continents have the pleasure of working with. of thousands of wonderful sales people and sales leaders to help them create the success that they want in their lives and get to the level of success that they thought that wasn't even possible for them.
So really helping upskill managers so they can make their salespeople champions. Yeah,
Wow. You must've
started when you were
don't listen. I just had a birthday. Okay, Andy, don't rub it in. All right.
Well, you want to tell us how old you are?
What's that?
You want to tell us how old you are?
There's a lot of syllables in there. 57.
You guys are all babies. Okay,
Oh, come on. Well, I'll tell you something. I have to share this with you. Because honestly, this was a breakthrough moment. I got some really great coaching from an Uber driver the other day.
Oh, yeah, we've got to hear this.
And I have to say, it's really, honestly, really transformed a lot of how I think about getting older.
And he was a gentleman from Haiti, actually, and he actually maybe was right around my age, maybe a few years younger, and we were chatting just, you know, to me, getting into an Uber is just like getting in and seeing who your next friend is going to be. And just really to me, having one of my core values of connection and wanting to, you know, learn and explore and understand it's just such a great opportunity.
So we're talking and I was sharing with him, I said, Oh yeah, I just had a birthday. I feel like I'm so getting old. And of course, everyone has that same quintessential conversation like, Oh, you know, it's just a number, which, you know, to me is, you know, not really a little BS on that. But what he said to me was this.
He said, Keith, if you're not getting older for you, you're doing it for others.
Ah,
ooh.
And it, I don't know how it's hitting you guys, but for whatever reason, it just hit me. And I'm like, wait a second,
I like
you know what, this isn't about us every year. You know, of course we want to stay in shape physically, mentally healthy, spiritually. But still, we're kind of always looking ahead at our age.
But I, you know, what is, what a totally selfless way. And of course, you know, prodding myself on being selfless is seeing it through the eyes of others and saying you're doing this for them.
I love
just like, man, just where's the maximum tip I can give you because you're so getting that right
Write a custom amount in. Custom
I'm going to use that.
Take it Rob.
Yeah, Rob, so tell us about you.
Hi, I'm Rob Durant and I was a reluctant seller. In fact, I was tricked into my first sales role, hired as a customer service representative
I thought maybe you were kidnapped or something.
more or less. Now I'm the CEO of U. S. Operations for the Institute of Sales Professionals. The ISP has one goal, to elevate the profession of sales.
And how are you doing that?
I was hoping you would ask.
Well, there was such a pregnant pause there, I felt like I had to jump into the space. Yeah, go ahead.
Three Cs. Content, certification, and community. The ISP has been in the UK for about 10 years now. We've built up about 10, 000 members. And now we're rolling it out to the U. S. as well as Australia, New Zealand, and India.
So what's, what does the certification, you know, what's it comprised of?
Sure. We have two primary certifications. The first is an ethics certification. So students take up to eight hours of study and then sit for an exam in ethics certification. We also have a sales foundation certification. which is where you have 24 hours of personal development, either through our platform or independent study that you've done. And the unique part about the ISP certification is that we are the only organization in the UK that has the UK government's office of qualifications. Certification. So we're the only ones that are government regulated and audited annually. So it's not just a rubber stamp of yeah, you're ethical. It is actually a rigorous course of study.
And is this something that employers are looking for that certification or they want to, or they're paying for their sellers to get certified?
It's really up to the organization or the individual. You can join as an organization and have your sellers go through that. You can join as an individual and have that certification.
So, Kristina, Keith, what do you guys think about the idea of certifying and, or even potentially licensing salespeople? We, there are, you know, numerous sales professions or, you know, subsegments in the sales world where license is required. Broker, dealer broker. Financial world, real estate agents, real estate brokers, others. Is this something that would be useful and be to be selling in your minds? Anybody? Kristina?
certainly have an opinion, but of course, ladies first.
Oh, thank you very much, Keith. The only thing I would say is it must get tricky to say what is ethical in the U. K. versus what's ethical in the U. S. And the laws have got to be very confusing when it comes to I know privacy is a big issue in the U. K. and in the Europe. And we're trying to do it here in the U.
S., but I'd be interested to hear how that feeds into the whole ethics thing. And I'm sure A. I. is throwing a curveball into this.
But also, just on the capability side, right? You have to, if you want to do somebody's hair, you have to have a license, right? You want to do a, you know, aesthetician, you have to , do nails and so on. You have to have a license to practice and there's some certification For And continuing education credits.
Yeah, I was, actually I was drafting a post that's, I think it's going on for LinkedIn, it's going to go next week. It's like, you know, we want to say, look, we're this very serious profession. We're on the same level as these, you know, lawyers and thus and such that, you know, are certified and licensed to practice. And they have, you know, 20 to 40 to sometimes 80 hours a year of continuing education required. And in sales, we've got none of it.
So there were two things that were brought up there and I'm happy to address both of them. First of all, regarding the ethics and the laws, the certification that we've built is actually based on the more stringent US laws.
Ah.
In terms of licensing, I want to be clear, I have no interest in requiring licensing for all sellers. Now, Andy, to your point, some industries already have that, real estate comes to mind, and I fully support that, but what we are here to do is to provide that level of independent assurance that this is an ethical seller, this is somebody that has a sales foundation, Training if that's something that the individual or the organization wishes to use to differentiate themselves from others in their same industry who don't have this same level of certification.
So requirement, most definitely not, but absolutely a point of differentiation. If, for example, You were sitting in an interview across from somebody asking about the ethical certification and you could speak to that. How might that set you apart from your competition? The person who interviewed right before you, But didn't have that.
Otherwise, on paper, your transcripts all look the same. Your experiences all look the same. This is just that plus one that allows you to say, I have invested in myself and my profession, and here's the proof of that investment.
Keith.
And if I could just jump on that, Rob and to me it's really falls into two quadrants. You know, it's about either for, it's either for you or it's for your profession. And unfortunately I'm totally keeping you light years away from about to. What I'm about to say is, unfortunately, most certifications are not worth its weight in paper.
And for a variety of reasons, actually, for all the reasons that you shared is exactly what they don't have. So let's work off something as you share what you're doing, making an impact in the profession, building in the ethical I guess, boundaries and characteristics as well as skill sets that leaders, sales leaders need.
And to your point, It's sort of like to me, the coaching profession is when I first started 33 or 34 years ago and sold my other business and said, wow, I'm going to be a coach. This is incredible. I get to help people create their greatest lives ever. This is fantastic. And I would go around and people would say, Keith, what are you doing now?
And I would say, I'm a coach and they would say, well, what team? And I'll say the team of life and business and the laugh in my face, you know, it was at that time, quite frankly, where the international coach federation was founded, which I was part of one of the founding members of the international coach federation.
We created a certification process for coaching that included several different levels of certification. It had included back to your point, Andy every couple of years you needed to get recertified or, you know, take some courses to continue your accreditation. So it had all those really good components.
Created, you know, the exams, you had to be listened to another certified coach and evaluated. And it was really a lot of components to it. Side note, the one thing I didn't realize is that they were going to put all of the founding members through the process we created.
Did you
It was definitely definitely not an easy one.
So, but to back to your point is If I can go to an organization , and I, and they say, well, Keith, you know, you're a coach, what makes you different from another coach? Well, I have my master certified coach designation. Well, again, , what does it mean to the, you know, employer and what does it mean to the person I'm speaking with?
And then conversely, how much does that mean to me? And I think that's a, It's a tough balance where I find it to be very subjective based on industry. And I think we're in a situation, quite frankly, you and I, where is probably needs the most guardrails and many others.
Yeah. Well, let me ask everybody a question because this is sort of a thought triggered by this conversation here is you know, why you know this Lots of studies talk about, you know, Hey, 75 percent of buyers don't want to talk to sellers anymore. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm wondering why, I've never really seen a company say, in the B2B space, say, Okay, We're going to make it a virtue about how we interact with our customers, and how we sell to them. And we're going to, We're going to market that, right? We're different in the way we deal with you. We're going to, we're going to have, you know, certain standards and we're going to make guarantees, promises, you know, to our customers that this is the experience you're going to have to be able to help you go through your process to make a decision and so on. And I, it seems like it would be something that would make so much sense for a company to do where instead what we see, seem to be seeing now is company serve. Backpedaling away from salespeople. You know, how can we get rid of the salespeople? How can we use technology instead? And it's like,
Automate everything.
sounds like a missed opportunity for a company that really got serious about hey, this is the way we treat our customers.
You know, it's sort of triggered by your ethical standards discussion, Rob, but it's sort of expanding and saying, this is what we stand for. This is the experience you're going to have with us.
But never seen a CEO stand up and do that. Kristina, go ahead,
I just happened to be thinking of it while you guys were talking was I think people that are selling into really regulated industries like people that are selling into customers that might be, you know, somebody that's selling FP& A tech, for example, selling into banks or selling into insurance brokers.
I think that kind of ethical training would be really helpful. amazing for a seller to have of that organization, because I know if I was in that industry, that's something I'd probably be looking for. And I would make the process so much more I feel more comfortable. And I would feel that the person that I'm speaking to has my best interest at heart, knowing how regulated the industry that I serve, like the customers that we serve as an organization.
So I just want to put that out there.
Rob, what do you think?
Yeah I, just to echo that interestingly, I was just working for organization chap, which is a nonprofit specifically for hospice, hospitality, home health care. And not a shameless plug, but one of the greatest group of organizations and leaders I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, but talk about an industry where if I'm looking for home care, probably one of the first questions I want to ask is you guys licensed or trained in any way, or, you know, what am I getting that you're taking care of me or my elderly parent?
You know, help me understand. And I would think. You know, more so than, hey, , and I think this is the struggle is, , and again, I'm simplifying this, but walking into a card dealership, Hey, you know, wait a second before I buy this from you. Are you a certified salesperson?
You know, I just
Yeah.
Different
We're talking about ethical sales and ethical sales certification as though Oh. It is differentiator. And at this point, it is. What about the day when we talk about it as table stakes? And that's what we're trying to get to is to make it not a conversation starter, a non starter. So yeah, we talk about it, certain industries would most definitely need to have this or benefit from it and so on.
How, why is it that B2B SaaS doesn't? Need an ethical certification. And what does that mean for me as the buyer who doesn't have that as a point of reference.
Yeah.
You know, we often say people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Well, before they can trust you, before they can like you, they certainly have to get to know you. Having that as one of the many reasons to have that conversation with you. Cheers. Makes that transition so much easier.
What's interesting this all sort of triggers thought for me is I was seeing a post this week and I type a post on LinkedIn that always sort of drives me crazy. It was somebody starts calling out what they considered old fashioned sales training, right? Now we need to move past this old fashioned sales training.
And they listed seven things they thought that sellers should be trained in. Brand building, copywriting, automation Selling social, demo training, psychology of sales, modern day prospecting, cold email. And I'm reading that list, I said, none of this has to do with the fundamental things we were just talking about. Connection, right? We assume people have the basic human competencies to be able to connect with another human being to build credibility and trust, which is the foundation. We just all agree it's the foundation of everything, right? We have to know somebody. Where's that on the list? It's not even there. It's, you know, psychology of selling. Yep. Who gives a shit about that? How about the psychology of decision making, right? That's our buyers. Let's, this is a list this person put out and that's not an insignificant following on LinkedIn. It's like, we're not doing our sellers any favor training them like this and enabling like this. Where's business acumen on this? Where's, , for me, you know, the core human skills of connection, curiosity, understanding, generosity, you know, communication skills, just not there.
It's funny that you
mean what truly makes an authentically exceptional a player. It sounds to me is that's what you just described, Andy, because you know that, you know, and it triggers exactly what you know, while we're talking, it's because, you know, before the pandemic to where we are today, it's amazing that while 76 to 80 percent of companies at this point have changed the way they buy only 17 to 18 percent of companies have changed the way they sell.
Yeah. Why is that
What? And then we wonder why we're, you know, experiencing these challenges. And there's another thing I, and I can't get it out of my head and I'm glad it was a statistic that I saw from the Carnegie Institute of Technology where it said 15 percent of your ability to Sell. And be successful is based on product knowledge.
85 percent is based on your ability to connect, negotiate, lead, and communicate.
yeah, absolutely. These fundamental human skills that, you know, any young person, this is not a new challenge. This is not a generational issue. Any new, young person new to selling, we assume they have these fundamental communication skills. You know, because what we're going to do is we're going to take you as a junior person, we're going to put you in a situation where you have to talk to somebody with whom you have a huge status mismatch, right?
Right. And we're just going to assume you know how to do that. Right? And that's,
as I said,
and, you have the confidence to,
Any confidence? Yeah, people ask
then? The knowledge
Right. Well, I think part of it is just the confidence, too. As Keith said, is know, often I sort of jestingly say this. People say, well, , what's the key to good salesmanship?
And I say, well, good parenting. Because, my parents took me when I was
wait, can we just stop on that and say, I am so stealing that from you. That was fantastic. Thank
That's a good one.
I'll give you full attribution, Andy. All right.
Is, you know, when we were young, my siblings and I, my parents brought us into their parties and made us have conversations with their friends, right? We
have a conversation with adults that we and have conversations, right? And, you know, not that we're fantastic people or whatever, but that's a skill we all developed, is feeling comfortable talking to people with whom we had a status mismatch. Well, we can we can help sellers that are new to the profession learn that, right? This list of garbage that this, people put out have nothing to do with how to connect with someone, how to communicate, how to inspire them, how to lead them as Keith talked about, such an important part of selling. Why do we fault them? I think it's just this.
It's and it's amazing because you know we can't really always blame the company and I'll be the first to always blame the company is that, , it's almost like to your point, what makes a great sell your parents is that, there's a global epidemic. Everyone's running around with this.
You know, I guarantee everyone right now their phone is in arm's reach. Okay, anyone here? It's not an arms reach right now because here's mine right here. Okay, now I got it right here. And, you know, oh my gosh, God forbid if it's not in the same room. But this has destroyed the ability for people to connect, especially the younger generations.
You talk about the, we talk about the importance of connection, authenticity, communication, engagement actually being able to listen, ask right questions. What was the last time, , you see kids that engage with that, with not walking around with their phones and iPads, you know, put kids in the social environment.
Now they're all just looking at their phones, you know, ghosting, you know, I didn't grow up with ghosting, ghosting, you mean you, you actually date someone and then you don't want to date them and you stop talking to them by not writing? Like, what, when, how did this happen? This is the world we're living in, so it's not even now, and now companies are faced with this, right?
And now you have, you know, the different generational gaps bringing these people in and now to even compound this issue is that the predominant sales and leadership strategy today is care. That's what people want most today, because this is the world we live in our remote hybrid world. So now it's bringing people in and, you know, people graduating from school or finding their first job.
And it's, yeah, granted, we can teach them the technical skills all day long, but you know, to truly teach someone how to care, you know, if we really stop and think about
Yeah. And I want
a syllabus?
Yeah, and I want to come back to that in a bit. Rob, you're about to.
Yeah. Keith, you said it's easy to blame the company, but we maybe shouldn't blame the company. I am not letting them off the hook that easily. And here's why. In my first role as a sales enablement professional, I was brought in to revamp the onboarding and ongoing training and development of a sales team.
And I said to my VP of sales, after observing what they had in place and whatever I said, there are four pillars that I am going to build my onboarding and ongoing training around. First of all, Of course we need to know your product and all of the solutions and price points given. And the second is we need to know your systems, your CRM, your all of the other systems that we use to do business.
I'd also like to include communication skills. And I want to include business acumen. And he said to me, no, Rob, cut your timeline in half. We hire them because they have the business acumen and because we, they have the communications skills. My pushback was if you're hiring because they have this. Where did they get it? Because the previous employer hired them because they have this as well. And we say, oh, you don't have to go to college to be in sales. And I strongly believe you do not have to go to college to be in sales. And you do not have to be a business major or a sales major to be in sales.
Some great history majors have done fantastic in sales. I knew my audience, Sandy. I knew it was you.
Me too.
But you cannot presume that they will have those skills simply because you've hired them for sales. And if you've hired them, it is incumbent upon you to both screen for those skills in your interview process, which they do not do.
and continually train and develop those skills, which they most definitely do not do because those are training hours. That's a cost. Cost is bad. It's that short term, short sighted vision that has gotten us to this point. And it is only continuing to exacerbate with the technology and, oh, AI will save us.
AI doesn't know what we don't know.
Yeah.
Automation is just gonna automate bad processes and bad selling.
Right.
AI artificial information. So, so, you know, but, you know, I'll go back to what you were saying, though, you know, growing people, do you have to go have an education to be in sales? No., Are people have a proclivity and a certain pension and a disposition to be in sales?
Absolutely. But, , back to your point is that, you know, getting into the profession of sales, getting into , Andy talked about it before. If you're a technical expert in sass in a sass company should you have a degree? I don't know. Or certification.
I guess it always depends on how important it is to the individual wants to learn and the person who, you know, they're speaking to how important it is. But I think that's the point is that at the end of the day we talk about a learning culture. You know, I mentioned, I heard, I think someone said to say here earlier about a growth mindset, right?
Not a fixed mindset. And as much as I love that you said, we're not going to let companies off the hook. And I'm with you, my friend on that a hundred percent, there's this one part though. And I've been you know, the reluctancy in my voice is I agree companies their primary objective is to make their people more valuable every day.
Here's the thing though, professional and personal development is each person's personal responsibility. I am responsible for my own development. I can't look at a company and say, you are 100 percent responsible for my personal and professional development. Cause while I think ideally, yes, it'd be wonderful.
What happens if they are giving them maybe 80 percent of what they need or 50 percent or 30 percent or 20 percent point of it being responsible is really making sure what you're not getting at the company. It doesn't mean it's a bad company. It doesn't mean you don't love the culture. But if you're still not getting what you need from your peers or your boss or from, you know, enablement or training, then it's up to you to go out and seek out a coach, a mentor or peer.
But, so what would we think is sort of the baseline though? Because, you know, I gave you this example, this one post and so on. And I, I think if you're training people that are, yeah, new into the profession, that you really only focus on two things, which is human skills that we just talked about, human competencies I call them, and business acumen. And I think you can just forget most of what goes for sales training these days. What That's not really the issue. That's not why they're being evaluated by a buyer. They're being evaluated because are you listening? Are you, do I have trust in you? Do you understand what we're really trying to do?
Are you helping me make progress toward making this decision? You know.
You just hit the nail on the head there, Andy. You said that's not what they're evaluated by the buyer. The two things that they are not getting are the two things that the buyer evaluates them on. The two things that they are getting, going back to the four pillars I was talking about, are the two things that we believe drive the things that we're going to measure you on. And we've still got it backwards. Yeah.
Yeah. Shocking. Yeah?
speak for you, but I see where, you know, pre pandemic and again, just speak broadly for a second if we had a 15 minute conversation with the prospect, you know, we'd, chit chat for about 10 minutes or so, get to know each other. And then we would dive right into, , the conversation or any type of presentation.
And since that time and how I am also again, , to your point, Andy, is like, forget sales training. The new sales strategy is coaching your customers and caring for them. That's what they want most. And now , we get on a meeting with a prospect and now it's, you know, 30 minutes just connecting with people and, , maybe, Oh, you want to talk product and service?
So you want me to just send you the contract? If it wasn't that easy, right? No, but we're talking, you know, 20 minutes, , business and 30 minutes, you know, connection of just human being, making that human fostering that human connection, because that's what people want most today.
Well, it's interesting you say that though.
including our prospects and customers.
But there are voices out there. Fairly loud voices. saying as a result of the pandemic is buyers just don't have time for that. Right. They just want to get right to business. And I'm like,
Really,
Are these people actually talking to other people?
Andy, we need
actually in the real
and get, we need to get those people on your show and have a conversation with them.
Be
You prove them wrong in two seconds by talking to them.
Yeah, well, but, well,
I'll let you take the round for sitting on that one then.
one of the loudest voices. is this extremely personable person. So, yeah, there's another agenda there about why they're I think what they're doing is cynically talking to the audience of people who are uncomfortable making those connections, right? Newer people in the profession, and saying, oh, well, you don't need to do that. They're trying to make them feel comfortable, and the fact is no you need to do this, because the data predominantly that we're seeing predominantly says, The factors that are driving and most influential in the buyer's decision are these human factors. Starting with trustworthiness. Right? It's not the product or the price.
Product or price is table stakes. Right? If you're selling a conversational intelligence package, there's 150 companies selling that. Do you really think you're differentiating yourself on the basis of product or price? No. Are you
able to help the buyer make a decision?
whether it's onboarding or ongoing training is. Okay. It's oh, yeah, I was on boarded. Really? How long was your onboarding? It was about a week long. What did they cover? Oh, well, they you know, they covered company story and product and service and you know Deliverables how much time did they spend on?
Sales process. Oh, no, they gave us the PDF.
Yeah. Here's the playbook.
it. That's it. Okay. Okay And that's what they're doing today versus, you know, to your point, it's just,
I wonder if companies are just assuming that when they hire someone for sales, that they already know how to sell. As opposed to
Yeah, but to Rob's point, I think you're right. But I think that, well, I'll start with a story. A woman named Dawn Dieter Schmelz who runs the sales program at Kansas State University, which Kansas State University is one of the premier undergraduate sales programs. Been around a long time. And she was on the podcast telling the story about her First year sales program. Yeah, I don't know if they're sophomores or juniors or whatever in her class. So these kids are 19 years old, 18, 19 years old, never had any exposure to sales. And they're doing role play. And she said, the thing that's funny, she says, , all the ones that are playing the role of the sellers are super salesy. Right? All the stereotypical things that , we think are bad. They know before they, that's what their image of what a seller is. So, I think part of this education we have for sellers that we don't do enough to sort of disabuse them of, this notion of that's not a role you play, that's not the role you're playing.
I blame Hollywood, really.
It
see right there. I was going to go right to, I blame all the managers for that one.
Well, it's both, right?
Well, is Hollywood really just art imitating life, though? Those stories came from somewhere. Those ugly sales stories? Those are the ones we remember most. That's why they make it on screen.
Sure. Well, Okay, I'll just give my own. I've been around longer than all of you guys is, you know, all my car exper buying experiences. My first one,, sir, mirrored that bad experience, right? And what's happened though, and people ask me, you know, as a business owner and so on, you know, I'd buy stuff for my business, have other personal buying experiences, I'll say far and away. The most professional buying experiences I've had, or professional sales experiences I've experienced in the last 8 to 10 years have been car salespeople. Full
stop. That profession has changed so dramatically
in terms of the way they've been. It's had to, right? But it's sellers, software sellers should go work in car dealerships, and they learned so much about how to sell and how to work with buyers.
Because they have a lot to learn from, because they're quite, frankly, not as good as the ones I've been working with.
Well, what was that? What was that? Will Smith movie? Where he was a stockbroker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Pursuit of
happiness.
of happiness. If that wasn't inspirational and sales, I don't know what it was.
Yeah.
And
Yeah, we just can't
an interesting, the same thing that inspired him since what we're talking about here to achieve what he did was all based on the one thing, love, all the love for his son, get him out of the streets.
This
But it's just it's not how we're training, because, you know, the two who was talking about onboarding Rob was talking about onboarding. I guess Keith, you were talking about as well as is. Yeah, there's this. Mythical idea of full productivity, right? We're going to on board people in six weeks. There'll be a quote unquote full productivity.
It's like, really? It's like, I'd be willing to bet that we took,
this was all, I don't know.
if we tripled that length of time, right? If we said, look, we have somebody a year to get to full productivity. I guarantee as opposed to somebody that will say is in three months, oftentimes you're three months, full productivity. I'm willing, if you give somebody a year to get to full productivity, and we're going to train them throughout that time, some of the things we've talked about. In year two, I'm willing to bet the person who took a year to get to full productivity is producing way more than the one that had the 90 day onboarding. But we just don't have patience for it anymore, right? We don't have time. It's
Well, we have quarterly revenue targets to hit. I don't have the year to give them. I need their sales now. What we forget is empty seats don't fill quota or
well, yeah, but yeah, you look back in the days when certainly I got started, not to be reminiscent about that, but yeah, I went to work for a big company that, I had eight weeks of classroom training the first year. , the big tech companies of the day. I didn't necessarily think it was great training, but I know I benefited from it, right? It was a structure, it was there, I'd write about my last book, a lot of it was sort of cringe inducing, but yeah. But, you know, I learned what not to do, what I wasn't comfortable doing. But at least you had a structure around it, and they didn't expect us to crush it in the first six months.
I have, I can't remember the last time I worked with a company and asked them to share with me their sales process. And it wasn't just a one page process. That was just like a one word acronym. I'm like, okay, wow, that sounds really sexy. So what, oh, this is our, let's say this is our discovery stage.
This is our assess stage. Wow. Brilliant. Now, I'm just curious if I was a new salesperson and you were teaching me this, how would I execute on this? And the manager would say, well, what do you mean? I just gave you the framework. Yeah. But I'm seeing just the framework
How do I get to each step?
I'm like, yeah, I'm seeing like, this is what you do every, in every step.
I got that. And I see what you're showing me is, okay, these are the points you got to hit. I got that. But. What's coming out of my mouth? What are the questions I need to ask? What am I supposed to say? Oh, no, you can just, you know, just, that you'll figure out on your own, . Every salesperson does it their own way.
Well, then why are you giving me this template?
other end. Here's the script. Yeah. But what happens when my buyer didn't read the same script?
Then you need to email it to them immediately.
Have they ever? Yeah, I mean it was, our sales processes of methodologies, at least the modern ones, have really been created with this idea of how do we remove spontaneity from the sales process and the buying process. Right? And how do we ensure that the sellers always say the same thing at the same time?
And, again, do people not operate in the real world? Since when has any sales process ever gone according to plan?
They're never linear.
Yeah, well, and somebody talked about, you know, pre pandemic, you know, Gartner in 2018 came out with their buyer enablement study with their famous spaghetti diagram of a buying process,
which was this, you know, Rube Goldberg like, I don't know if anybody recognized that reference, but, you know, this flowchart that, you know, overlapping, recurring, da, anything but linear. And as one, I've never heard, maybe they're, I'm sure they're out there, you can, somebody can contact me and let me know. I haven't seen one company change their linear sequential stage based selling process to align with what the buyers are doing.
And what salespeople would love or what they'd misbelieve is, wait the selling is about having the buyer align with. You know, having their selling process aligned with my, you know, excuse me, their buying process with my selling process and then you're supposed to align your selling process with their buying process, just like you're supposed to align how they like to communicate.
Okay, not how
you prefer it. Yeah, exactly.
You know, and to your point, that is that, you know, organic squiggly line. And you know, to the point is that you just can't give a salesperson a pitch deck anymore and just say, here, use this and go ahead and kill people with 100 slides and detail of every single one.
Well, yeah, I
certainly something people don't have the patience for, and
to myself yesterday, I was reading this LinkedIn post. This basically was an obituary for the predictable revenue model of selling. And. And, you know, , can't do SDSI more, no mass emailing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, you know, we know this predictable revenue thing was just a thought experiment that, you know, came out of Silicon Valley that, , sort of mimicked what Salesforce had done, which was a, you know, one of a kind sort of unicorns environment. , no one stopped at all during this last 20, 25 years and said, asked the buyer, is this how you'd like sellers to interact with you? What we're going to do is we're going to take our most inexperienced person and we're going to have them call as high in your organization as they possibly can, where they have no value to add, and then when they get you, we're not really going to talk to you, we're going to hand you off to someone else who may or may not be qualified.
It's like, right? It's like, you wonder why buyers are pissed off and don't want to talk to sales people. That's it.
this is exactly, it beelines perfectly to companies are so good. At seeing the what? What's going on? Looking at the data, here's the data. It looks terrible, but if there's ever a case for coaching because they need to get to the why and they're not, and this is what we're talking about here. You know, why are companies in this state in the first place?
, if you start with that question, , you could wrap this entire conversation around that, but. You know, they'll put no, Keith, we have our numbers to hit, , it's like what rob said. We've got our numbers here. We have a target on the back, you know, what's always about what's next?
And we never stopped for a second and be like, what about what's now?
Yeah.
Keith, you talk about the why. I love Simon Sinek's Start With Why as an opportunity to start that conversation. So every onboarding training I've ever developed since I've learned of that video, every class I teach at the beginning of the semester, within the first 30 minutes of meeting my students, We sit down and together we watch Simon Sinek's Start With Why. As I said, as a way to start that conversation, because after that video, I pass out a piece of paper to them and I ask them to write down their why. So you're in Intro to Marketing here at Northeastern University. Why? Why are you in this marketing class? Why are you at Northeastern? Why are you in college at all?
And I want you to ask yourself why at least five times. Why is this? Well, then why is that? No one will ever ask you to share what you've written, but I want you to take a moment right now to write that down. And I say to them, after they write it down, here's why I asked you to write it down. Because inevitably, whether it's in a sales role or as a student or whatever, six months down the line, six years down the line, you will have a day where you just ask yourself, why the am I doing this? And on that day, I want you to come back to what you wrote down today. And on that day, if what you wrote down today is very different from what you've written down or the why that you have at that moment. You know that it's time to change. And if what you've written down that day is very similar to what you still believe today, you know, you just had a bad day and move on. And that allows me to later have the conversation with them as the sales rep, six months down the line. Well, why are they going to buy? And it doesn't stop it. Well, you know, the price and whatever. Yes. But why is that? And why is that? And they get it. They understand why we're digging. And when they get to something, well, I don't know, then it's time for you to go back and find out that why, until we can figure out all of the reasons in that chain.
See I, That resonates for me in terms of just listening to getting to that deeper point of why interesting though, I, I believe it, what's your, why doesn't come first? What's what perceives that as what's your who? Because if you don't know your who, how can you align who you are with what your purposes, what your intents are, why you're doing what you're doing?
And, you know, said in a different way. If you know your why and like we're always saying, if you're not honoring your why, another way I say it is, okay, what core value aren't you honoring that you're not being true to? So if you know, you're someone, you know, I know my core values are connection, collaboration, love, music, extreme self care, travel family, kids, all that, all those things truly passionate about religion, culture, all those things you know, that those are my core values.
As so if you were to define, , Keith in a box, you know, this is , who he is when he's fully self expressed. Well, that's That's my who. Now I have to match my who with my why. You know, that's that alignment. So I'm matching who I am with the true purpose, which is the why. And it's a good model because sometimes people, to your point, maybe you're just having a bad day. Maybe you're just having a bad day. How do you know if you're having a bad day? Well, there's a feeling. You can't touch it. Sometimes with the label, it kind of, some people have manifests in their chest. It's because we're probably not honoring our why or one of our core values. This
All right. Hey, this has been great. We're going to come to end of time, but not end of time, but end of our time. Of course, it could be a big surprise when you're listening to this. Maybe it is the end of times, but
Is this
we'll find out. We'll find out in
self realized and
Yeah.
the robots start taking over and
Yeah.
I for one, look forward to the day where our robot overlords decide everything for me.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll have, I was thinking the other day, , watching the rollout of the RoboTaxi from Tesla. It's just, you know, the streets are full of those and I don't have to own a car. And it's, you know, wherever I want to go, just one, there's one going my direction. Sounds great, actually.
All right. Well, friends, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, people can all, everybody, you can all be reached on LinkedIn, I presume. That's my
Correct.
There we go.
Perfect. All right. Well. Thanks again, and we'll look forward to doing it again soon.