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Hello friends. Welcome everyone to another fantastic
β Hi friends, welcome to the WinRite Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now that was Charlie Green and Charlie is my guest on this really special episode of the WinRite Podcast. Now, Charlie Green is one of the leading authorities on building trust in business and sales, in particular. He is the co author of the legendary book, The Trusted Advisor, as well as the author of other books, including Trust Based Selling, and he is the founder of Trusted Advisor Associates.
Now, my other guest today, also like Charlie, a longtime friend, is Dave Brock. Dave is the founder and CEO of Partners in Excellence, which is a global sales consulting firm. It's also the author of great book titled sales manager, survival guide. One listener note before we jump into this discussion. If you enjoyed this show, please do me a favor.
Take a second. Now, before we begin to rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts, it helps the show get discovered by even more professional sellers, just like you are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. Well, if you're ready, let's jump in the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, can't thank my guests enough, Dave Brock, Charlie green for sharing their wisdom with us today, as well as their insights. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to 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.
βepisode. Join me today.
Two of my favorite people in sales and in general Charlie Green, Dave Brock. Gentlemen, take turns, introduce yourselves. Start with you, Dave. Well,
survival guide. I run a company called partners and excellence. We do kind of business strategy and go to market kind of consulting in a general kind of curmudgeon on everything in sale.
and don't downplay. You work with some very large enterprises in your consulting business around the world, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. Our target clients are really kind of global 500 to 750 companies around the world.
Okay. Yeah. And you've, Been in this business a while, right?
This tells you, yes.
No, since Dave was assuming you're watching the video, he was pulling his gray hair. So yeah there
old. I've just been ridden hard and put away wet,
you go. There you go. Also joining us, Charlie Green. Charlie, how are you doing?
I'm doing great. Andy. Thanks for having us on.
So yeah. Tell us about you.
I'm here mainly because I coauthored a book called the trusted advisor and a couple other books called trust based selling. Before that I ran a small business called trusted advisor associates cleverly titled after the book before that, about 20 years in management consulting. Medium sized firm, um, big clients back then, but I'm 95 retired now hanging out with great folks like you.
Oh, there we go. Okay. Yeah, people, if you haven't read the trusted advisor, I highly recommend it. It's one of the classics in terms of, well, what things we're gonna talk about is, you know, building the trust based relationship with clients that enable you to help them make decisions, right, in their business.
That's fundamentally what you're trying to do. I have that right?
Absolutely.
So let's start there. Because π π π for me, I look at, you know, issues that exist in sales and there's always been issues in sales. There's a new set of issues as time goes on, but fundamentally, I think we're in an era where more so than ever, we're really focused on the product over how, you know, what we're pushing our products as opposed to really helping the customer make decisions.
Right. There seems to be very little emphasis. I see in any of the training or materials or content, even on LinkedIn is saying, look. Our job is not to push a product and persuade the buyer to buy it, but it's to help them make the decision to make a change, right? If they don't make that decision to change, there's going to be no purchase. And to be able to do that, you need to be in a position of trust. Tell me what you think about that, Charlie.
Well, I'll tweak that a little bit. You don't have to be in a position of trust because not everybody is. But if you are in a position of trust, you're hands over, you know, much better situated. People tend to buy stuff from people they trust at far higher rates than they do from people they don't trust.
Without trust, you deal with, you know, features and price. With trust, lots of things happen.
I've talked on this show before as Gartner had a study, I think it's the spring of 2023, 2023 saying the number one factor dictates the buyer B2B buyers selection of vendors trustworthiness. , they had a list of like nine factors and basically product and price weren't on that list, right?
It's, but far and away, number one. Trustworthiness. And it's not necessarily trust of the vendor, though. That's part of it, but it says, well, trust of the individual as the representation of that vendor.
Yeah, which is, by the way, I suggest is under, underrated. People tend to think trust, and they hear institutional, Oh, I trust Google, I trust Apple, whatever. No, they, yes, but they trust the person with whom they're interacting to a far greater extent, more than we tend to admit.
Yeah. Dave, what do you think?
Absolutely. And also, so you look at his trust being a fundamental to this, but then you start saying, well, how do we start establishing trust with these people? And you know, there are things like, , empathy, curiosity, understanding. The thing that we miss is. We talk about what we're interested in.
The customer is not interested in that. And until we connect with the customer with where, what they are interested in, we have no basis for building trust because we aren't connecting with them at all. And so I think the fundamental error is, you know, as you started out, Andy, we're all product customer, unless they're very late into their cycle, doesn't care about that.
They care about what they care about and it's the change initiative we talked about. It's understanding what they're trying to do. It's trying to navigate that. And it, the degree to which we can have high impact conversations on those things they care about causes us to really build trust, build capability, and all that kind of thing.
Well, when you read more and more about, certainly we've all experienced this at some point in our careers. But again, if you, again, if you go by, it's on LinkedIn, you're seeing more talk about this as the prospect, the lead that comes in and I know exactly what I want, , I've done all the research, , I've , run all my questions through, you know, chat to peer or whatever they didn't give me some ideas, but we know what we've worked all out internally, you know, don't bother me with a salesperson.
I just, I know what I want. And, yeah, I find that sort of, you know, interesting because, , what you're seeing is that, okay, , let's just reduce sales to serve a product and price type competition. But my advice to sellers when they, you know, talk about this with me is, well, hey, that's not a prospect then, right?
If I can't influence the way the customer's thinking about the problem or the outcomes they want to achieve, then why am I spending my time? Because I don't want to be in just a purely price competition and, but I can't have influence if I can't, if I don't have trust.
Well, this product focus selling is really kind of a an adaptation of consumer based selling. You know, I walk into Home Depot and they say, which aisle? And then when I go into the aisle, they come and say, Oh, you're interested in lumber. How can I help you in buying our lumber? And we're doing the very same thing.
And also I had to get to the point where I had to figure out lumber and which place I wanted to go. And so the opportunity that we're missing and Gartner and all sorts of other people, have come up with all sorts of data about the people that want to buy that never reach that product selection point.
So there's a huge amount because we're inter intercepting the customer at the very last point of what they're trying to do where we have very little differentiation. And and that kind of thing. And they've done all the heavy lifting and may have gone, you know, done some things incorrectly. And also it's, you know, I keep saying, why don't we get involved in helping them define and solve their problem?
Get them to the point where they can make an informed decision and because of the trust, hopefully, that we've established and the understanding that we've established, we have, we create a heavy bias towards our solution. So, again, part of it is we're intercepting the customer at the easiest part of their buying cycle and where far many customers have started but never even gotten to that point so we're wasting a huge amount of opportunity.
Well, it's part of that due to the fact that at least in certain segments, and that's not true across the board, but is there's a reliance on the inbound, right? Where, this is again, I'm not gonna speak for you, Dave or Charlie, but Yeah, I had almost no inbound leads in my career when I was carrying a bag.
The opportunities that I won and I won lots of them were, it's not to say I didn't occasionally have an inbound, you know, a referral or something, but in the main, they were opportunities where we went out and spoke to customers that maybe weren't even aware that there was an opportunity for them, right.
To make this change, to achieve certain things in their business. And I know this is still happening to some degree, and you see it in some of the top performers that I've spoke to on the show and so on. But in the main, there's sort of this reliance on, hey, what's the inbound and how do I sort through those?
Yeah, I'm kind of intrigued that you know, the sample you set up, Andy, somebody phoning up and saying, I've been through all the research, I've been through all the chat, GPT, you know, I know what I want, exactly this, that, and the other. And I hear that as a language of defensive and fear. And I'd be inclined to say, well, why are you calling me? Was it, did you, why did you not check a box on the computer and just buy it? Do you need me to write an order for you or? Occasionally, you're in a position to say, well, does that mean you want the model A or the model Z? And they haven't thought that out.
But what you want to get to is a place that Dave is talking about. And it's harder in today's environment, which you're both describing. You know, it's so loaded with models of inbound and the other. But we do have to kind of get back to that place of open discussion. Where you can explore problems jointly without all the kabuki dance of defensiveness and I've done my research and so forth, you know, there was a book.
I'm okay. You're okay. Years ago. I always thought it should be called. I'm an idiot. You're an idiot. Let's get real and talk. That's what you want to get to the challenges. How do you get there? How do you stop the kabuki dance and all the defensiveness and have a real conversation?
Yeah, well, I think you're right about the fear. The fear I think comes from both sides. Right. Is buyers dread the idea of having to talk with the salesperson and there's this inherent sort of fear in that, not all buyers parts, but in some. And I think, yeah, to the degree they think, yeah, I've got it all figured out.
Yeah. Don't bother me. Yeah, I think there's a, that's a really interesting perspective. I think there's a lot of defensiveness in that. And it seems like sort of a cry for help. Doesn't it?
does kind of. Again, why are they picking up the phone if they got it all? I remember years ago, some guy, you know, was out in Lubbock, Texas or something, and needed to interview him. And the guy said, I've only got 20 minutes and I'm busy all day. And I said, well, how about seven in the morning?
And he said, well, how about eight? And I got there at eight. And we talked for three hours. Because once you're there, you know, the magic happens.
Yeah.
But you got to get through the defensiveness.
Well, I, you know, I think in kind of the spirit of yes and, I think you got to get through the defensiveness. But what I look at is we've created this terrible reinforcing, we've trained our buyers to respond to the way we sell and we've created this terrible kind of death spiral reinforcing loop. And I look at how do we get out of that?
How do we, I look at, Even if we get buyers in that last, you know, 15, 20 percent of their buying process and make them confident in the product, the data we're showing is the number of people that fail to get there is overwhelming, it's the majority. The number of people that
failed to get there. Meaning I noticed a no decision just so people,
no, yeah, , no decision made, or the number of people that have regret after they've made a decision.
So what we're looking at overwhelming data that for those people that get through the process, overwhelming data that they have regret. And it's maybe less about the product decision, but more are they doing the right thing. Some of it might be the product decision. So we have all these clear indicators and data points that say what we and the buyers are doing together.
isn't working for either of us.
Right.
But we're stuck in this doom loop of continuing to reinforce and accentuate those bad behaviors.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You think, just take two data points in my mind that, that speak to what you're just talking about. One is, all right, we know we've got this persistent persistently low win rates that exist in B2B. And we have, according to Gartner and Forrester and others, 75 percent of B2B buyers who say report, they prefer not to talk to a salesperson the next time they have to make a purchase decision.
Right? So, one is indicative of the buyer's vote on the quality of their experience with sellers, the win rate. And the other is this indication of massive dissatisfaction on the part of buyers with their experiences with sellers. And so, I agree. It's like, how do we then break out of this, you call it the doom loop or downward spiral?
Because it is self perpetuating, to a large degree, right? You think about, so that a dynamics, you'll get sort of the typical pipeline with, you know, 4x, 5x pipeline coverage, that's there because of the low win rates.
Yep.
And, Also, when you think about, okay, well, part of what marketing is relying on is in developing messaging and so on is relying on feedback from the field.
And I would contend that the feedback coming from a 20 percent win rate seller is not nearly as valuable as that coming from a 50 percent win rate seller.
Right.
Let me pose a question is, do you think, I was about to say modern day sellers, but what I'll say is current sellers, do you think that they're really interested in establishing relationships?
Some.
By and large, no.
But we all grew up in, in an era where relationships and getting to know people and, you know, they weren't my best friends but, you know, they some did actually become some best friends. But anyway is, what's changed from this thing of saying it's purely transactional? You're a widget called a customer.
I do my stuff with you, but I don't want to develop a relationship with you in any way. And likewise, the customers don't want to develop a relationship with us,
I think that's, yeah, I think that's that last part, I think it's just not true, right? Cause I think if people are making a decision that has elements of risk to it, then they want validation. Right? It's all well and good to have sort of the bravado of saying, look, ah, we know exactly what we want and we don't need to talk to sellers and so on until you make a bad decision, you lose your job.
right?
Right? And then the next time, what are you going to do differently? So, and obviously it depends on the product and service and price and complexity and all these various factors. But I think there's a large element here of sort of talking to the audience and telling them what they want to hear. And I was having this conversation with somebody earlier this week and it's not a criticism. It's just the way things are, right? Is that we all came of age in a different era where we learned to have these fully synchronous conversations with humans. We didn't grow up on messaging platforms and connecting with people through messaging for better or for worse, right?
Not necessarily saying but we're taking people without that same. experience. And even when we said years and years ago, and we start in sales, there were still some segment of people were hired that had no basic communication skills or inner interpersonal skills. Right. But I think we have a higher fraction of them today that lacks or the fundamentals they need for being thrown into a job where the job is to talk to people and have conversations.
And. We don't provide the training on that in general. We mean, employers generally don't provide that type of training. And I was, I pinged people oftentimes on the show about who are enablement or sales leaders said, well, how are you training people to develop trust and you look at the typical onboarding program for a company, new sales employees, there's nothing on the curriculum about trust building.
There's nothing about communication skills and.
It's much broader, of course, than just, you know, companies and sales managers. We live in a world that for the past, I don't know, 50 years, whatever, has increasingly put emphasis on processes, on metrics, and analysis, on, you know, we came of age in the day, you know, before spreadsheets were around, for God's sakes.
Think about that. And databases and you know, all the kinds of analytical tools. So the world has come to believe, and it's been emphasized by COVID and online and so forth, that somehow all that personal crap is old school. , white haired old guys talking to you, it doesn't matter. Well, guess what?
Human DNA has not changed in the last 50 years, much less the last 20, much less the last five. It's still the same. So, the absence of trust in all the world that we live in because there's so little human interaction anywhere but the importance of trust has not gone away. It's gotten magnified, if anything, because you have fewer opportunities and moments to stress it, and it's still as important as it ever was.
Right. And so to that point is, so I consider, I'd sort of increasingly, and I, sorry, this is my last book, but I'm emphasizing it in the new book that'll be coming out next year is yeah, the core of what we're doing is just some basic human competencies, right? I call them connection, curiosity, understanding, generosity, or helpfulness, if you will, which are sort of the underly and underpin any sort of trust you're going to develop with somebody. To your point, Charlie's is, you know, we're perhaps becoming less competent in very human ways.
Yes.
And okay. Yeah. There's lots of factors that we can't control. What's all going on in the world, if we're employing people to come represent the company and going out and speaking with other people, you know, just to sell our products, just seems like, gosh, we need to focus a lot of our training on that.
Right. How do I, how do we, you know, I believe everybody is born with the same amount of curiosity, for instance, but as people grow up through life, you know, they're told, Hey, stop asking questions, right? Just follow the process.
So, so everything starts at home. And so, so why would we expect our people to go out and engage customers in these trust based conversations, in these relationships? Based conversations. Well, within our own organizations, we display none of that. And, you see that through the employee engagement data, you see that in, in the attrition data and all that kind of thing.
Is, If we aren't displaying those behaviors in how we work with each other in our organizations, and it doesn't mean that we don't have disagreements and arguments and fights, but how do we kind of have that respect for who each person is and that they're part of our team and what we're trying to do.
If we can't have those kinds of conversations in the organization, there's no reason in how that will ever work. Be able to consistently execute those things with our customers.
Yeah, no I, yeah, yes. I somewhat.
just to pile on that point, I I saw a little LinkedIn conversation a couple days ago, A guy was talking about relationships and selling and so forth. And somebody chimed in and said, well, I'm in the tech sector and that stuff doesn't matter. You know, we know how to buy tech stuff through rational, logical, impersonal stuff.
And I immediately thought, remember nobody ever got fired by hiring IBM. That's fear bait. That's all emotion. No. And the fact is, it's still, it's if anything more relevant than Dave can speak to that in the tech sector. I know I deal a lot with. With the big four and there is this fear even though that's a business that has more interactions with them than with sass, for
You've done the big four consulting companies. Yeah.
a big four accounting
You're kind of, yeah.
accounting consulting, et cetera. Yeah. And there is a hesitancy to reach out on a personal basis. They're just risk averse. Now, partly that's their accountants, but mostly it's generationally true. It's true of our times in general, people are fearful of making a social faux pas. They kind of know they don't have the social skills.
And they draw back and they hesitate to take little risks. And if there's those of us that have read Robert Cialdini, the number one factor in being trustworthy is to trust the other person first. Why would you trust somebody that won't trust you? So the way to initiate this is learn to take a risk on others and they then reciprocate as a very natural human function. How do we take risks? Well, that's not easy for people in this day and age, but to Dave's point, to your point, you gotta do it.
Yeah, well, and I, right, and I think one of the things that makes it hard, and this is my theory, and I've, that it didn't originate, I don't think I've seen others write about it, is that one of the things that sort of makes this fear happen is that, You know, people are sort of accustomed to being able to edit how they appear in public through social media, right?
They only put the good version of themselves out there. Well, in real life, when you go out and talk to people, you can't edit yourself. You know, you have to be prepared to be the best version of yourself. And I think,
I wish I could at it.
yeah, me too, just can't keep my mouth shut, but, you know, it, I think that's, that plays into it.
Right. And along with this idea is that we're just in these sort of core human competencies, people are less competent and this, Until we really address that, and we think, people like Jonathan Haidt and others writing about it these days. This is, you know, an issue that transcends sales, but it certainly impacts it, because to use your point, Charlie, is, you know, what if we said, , to sellers, Hey, , if you're going to generate a new lead, you have to go do it in person.
Right. Well, what if we went, had to go back to local territories, right. You know, everybody had a local territory. How would the current generation of sellers feel about that?
Yeah, they'd be scared to death.
Well, as we were, when we got started, right. So it was only through doing it that we actually overcame that, that fear.
But the value to us of doing it was we built these relationships. Right? We learn how to understand what's happened, taking place in a relationship, in a conversation with another human being that we're sitting across from. And it's not that you can't replicate that to some degree virtually, you absolutely can.
Yeah,
But it's not the same, right?
you, it's we underestimate how much you can do it virtually, but yeah, I mean it's lacking a little bit, but it's still quite possible.
Oh, sure. Yeah. But that's also, that's This was the thing that sort of got me during COVID is everybody saying, Oh, who knew you could sell a hundred thousand dollar deal fully virtually. And I was like, no, well, we were selling multimillion dollar systems overseas. People, we saw it once before I got an order.
We did it all over the phone. That was all virtual selling.
I look at pre pandemic and, you know, in our company, we book very large deals. And the majority of those deals were done over the phone. And all, there were very few that we had to go. It may be at one point in the deal we'd have to visit the people personally, but there's a lot that we can, I think we under, I think establishing that relationship and presence through whatever vehicle we do, whether it's face to face, over old technologies like the phone through virtual kinds of things.
Is I think we've lost the focus of how do we develop that relationship? I don't You know in two thousand two thousand ten I don't know how many conversations I had with people i'd never met before On the phone and we'd go through, you know, trying to get to know each other We'd start talking about issues and things like that And over a period of several calls we can develop really good relationships And we were able to close million dollar plus deals, and so I think, I think we find, and we use these things as excuses not to develop relationships, rather than as tools that help us develop the relationships.
I agree. I think one of the problem is though, this is that as I was implying before is there are, you know, quote unquote experts out there, thought leaders. Saying. Hey, they're not important. You know, they're still telling the audience what they want to hear, rather than telling them what they need to hear.
Which is, no, they are, these are still really important. And you and I know some of these, the three of us know some of these people are saying, Ah, no one has time for relationships, buyers don't care. It's like, Yeah. Yeah. It's very cynical to go out and tell people that because sometimes people giving that advice are hugely personable people that rely on relationships to build their business is that, yeah, this is still a human to human business.
And yeah, I know there are people saying, I don't know, AI is going to take care of all that, we're going to disenfranchise the human seller altogether because in the, you know, in the pursuit of efficiency, who cares what effect on us, the human side, which is effectiveness. Let's just process.
Right.
Yeah,
But yeah, sure. Certain types of products, that's going to be the case has been the case. There'll be more products that fall into that.
sure.
But I think that if you're
Yeah nobody wants to go to a teller anymore. Once ATMs came around, and now ATMs are getting divorced too. But that's, you know, getting money out of an institution that's your money already. That's not the same as closing a 100, 000 deal, a 1, 000, 000 deal, a 10, 000, 000 deal whatsoever. To the point of reduced media and COVID and so forth, we forget the new, like, people that are blind, they supposedly get much more sensitive around other senses, or people that are deaf, they get very better at the other senses, we lose the notion that questions are not purely mechanical.
That voices are not just words shrunk in like wow is a full sentence and how you enunciate wow Tells you a lot more about it So those are the conversations you can have over a phone if you understand the nuances of human communication I would argue we all do know that we all understand it. We learned in kindergarten We've just forcibly been forgotten about it.
We've been told by so many people ignore that stuff from kindergarten You know, get your diction correct, get your questions right, get the process flow loaded correctly, everything will be fine. You can forget kindergarten. No, you can't. You need to remember kindergarten.
I think it's a great example. And it brings up another point, which is not to digress too far, but yeah, there was something I'd read during the pandemic, the study that was done that said that. Yeah, if you actually want to communicate more effectively is you should do it on a phone, not over zoom. And what they're saying is when you're forced to actually listen and you're not distracted visually that you actually pick up nuance that you wouldn't hear otherwise that you know, the tone and, you know, the enunciation things you talked about that actually people do sense and listen to that are part of them forming a perception of who you are as a human actually come across more effectively on the phone than zoom.
Totally true, and yet I see, and yet if you add the visual, that should give us so many more sensory points, right? Yeah, I gotta tell you, the number of people on webinars that I give, that keep their camera off, you know, willfully in some cases, you know, way more than half. And you're depriving the other people of a prime sense of human, one of the five senses, you know, get your damn face up there and get rid of that, you know, automatic background.
And we know you're not standing in front of the golden gate, you know, show us your living world. There's a lot of information there.
Yeah. No I agree. Yeah, it's, well, we just have, we still have this challenge. We're talking about basis or communication challenge, but, we're going to get better at it if we actually practice it. Right. And practice an authentic way and be less. Process driven, you know, one of the, so it's a great quote the other day, because, you know, we've, I've written in LinkedIn this year about a client of mine who pouring well above quota and had already had 2024 in the bag and then by May, but then he was let go by his company because he wasn't setting enough meetings.
He wasn't hitting the basic activity metrics.
Love that story.
And it's like, yeah, we've got so fixated on this and I, and it's, you read about people writing about on LinkedIn is that, you know, they're anticipating more of this because of ai. And I saw this fascinating quote and yeah, people know, big soccer fan and soccer's football, soccer slash soccer went through its own sort of rigid period and is the word surf.
Coming up, or they are very rigid about the formations they play and that the way they executed, you know, the processes execute their play during the game. And there's a great quote from this coach saying is that, you know, there's a change now where coaches are going from a rigid process to giving the players a platform.
On which they can extemporize, right? And instead we've gone through this whole period where we've developed these processes, whose whole intent is to eliminate spontaneity on the part of the seller. And so to ensure that we know exactly what the seller is doing at any moment in time. And I sense that.
Maybe we're getting to a point where there might be a tipping point here in general culture at large, so also influence sales where it's like, yeah, maybe we need to start trusting the human again.
Amen.
Maybe I'll see that
so here, I'll present a contrarian view. I'm not sure I believe in it, but I'll present the contrarian view is I see too often we finding more excuses to not do this
give people freedom.
to not give people freedom or for people to actually want to start doing these things and again, look at, you know, Okay. This whole rise of social chatbots, that my best friend is an AI agent.
You know, I can do all sorts of things with my best friend. , , and I don't know what drives this, is to a greater comfort. Though our stress levels and our mental health levels are declining, we're getting into a greater comfort. of becoming more distant from other people. And it's a kind of weird, scary thing, but you start seeing is how you know, so much of what we see with technology right now is it gives us the excuse to do more of the things that we know are healthier for us, either personally or business wise or whatever, but we can retract back into those things.
And there's some sort of weird comfort with that.
Yeah. Well, okay. I have to think about that for a second. It's, I don't know. Go ahead,
else. Something else going on there. I think that you know, AI is like a lot of other new technologies in that the first applications tend to be efficiency or porno those are where they show up first. And, you know, we automate chatbots. I'm reminded a couple of months ago, I booked a flight on spirit airlines, my fault. I had to cancel it later and I call it and they had AI chatbots and they zip through brilliantly within about 30 seconds, all the relevant questions. And then they said, now we're transferring to a human. Expected wait time, 55 minutes. 55 minutes? You know, total misapplication of terminology. Missing what's important.
You can call it whatever you want. It's bad.
So,
Well, but it raises the point though, Dave, as you bring up in terms of, you know, people with yeah, AI driven assistance on websites and so on is this level of, okay, well trust, right? Cause we know we're going to see more AI in sales. We're starting to see it already though. It's more on the, Hey, let's help the seller prepare themselves aside.
But yeah, the issue of trust in AI. And sales is a big one, right? As I think people want to, if to the more where we're going to shed their human relationships ourselves and rely on the, you know, the automation, the machines to do it, I think it becomes limiting, not necessarily.
Oh, absolutely. I think, it's not that different than other previous things. We've all learned how to avoid Nigerian princes. You know, we learned that one pretty quickly. And we'll learn, how to, you know, Deep fakes and all that stuff we'll learn. But the delusion is that you can fake your way through it.
It's like George Burns once said, the most important thing in life is sincerity. If you can fake that, you got it made. You know, you can't fake it. That's the point. So, using AI to support your, , making you better prepared, going in, doing a first draft, all that good stuff, it's great. You know, but the last mile, so to speak, the last contact, you better figure out how to make it personal.
yeah, there are applications like, yeah, I saw the sort of a summary of a study that had been done. I don't know if it was at Hopkins or somewhere using AI for medical decision making. Right. And they were trying this out and if I remember correctly, it was well, okay, they sort of plateaued in sort of the usage and adoption of it. And they were sort of curious why in some cases actually it's started diminishing use. It was an issue really of trust to some degree, but almost more than trust, it was maybe trusting that they understood. Right. And so when they interviewed people about, you know, why aren't you using the same way or, you know, why?
And he said, well, you know, yes, I may have cancer. That's just like a thousand, a hundred thousand other people have cancer. No one feels it the way I do. No
me put a finer point on that. We all know there are driverless cars out there, and occasionally they have accidents. The accident rate of driverless cars is lower than driver cars. Does that make us all say, Oh, good, let's have driverless cars. They're ready. No, it doesn't. Because once somebody smacks into a school bus and people get killed, you know, we don't want to hear the overall success rates.
It's not relevant.
But I think the other point in this example I was giving though, was that, you know, the tendency with the technology is we treat people in a more of a mass way, right? You are like, it's pattern recognition, right? You're like everybody else.
Right, exactly.
at some point people say, well, I'm not though, right? Yes, outwardly I look like everybody else, but you're not helpful to me because I feel this differently.
I feel this uniquely and I see this in sales. All the time is that, Hey, we're going to give you an ICP and here's a persona, somebody you're going to talk to. And the seller goes in and says, look, we've worked with dozens of companies just like yours to help them dah. And what the buyer is hearing is
I'm like everybody else. You're no different.
I'm not like everybody else.
We have, we look at our business differently. We have a different type of culture. We process the way we think about the world and the market is different. And when you're coming in here and telling me, basically, I'm just like everybody else that I'm supposed to draw comfort from that, actually I have the opposite reaction.
Exactly. Like if you go to a doctor, and the doctor says, listen, there's a lot of this going around, and you've got three of the symptoms, so take this medication because it's going to work. No. You want to hear the doctor say, have you got this? Have you got that? You know what? I bet you there's a lot of this going around.
This is probably what this is. Take these pills and call me tomorrow. Let's see how it works. You want it personalized. We want it in medicine, we want it in you know, all these other applications. Why would we not want it in sales?
But we want it uniquely authorized, personalized, right? And that's, I think this is the thing that's a challenge that, and I think the opportunity for humans, relative to the machines, that the machines won't be able to do is this, you know, level of understanding of what's unique about the person.
Dave.
Are either of you seeing any trends in people having an aversion to those conversations? Being very uncomfortable and saying, you mean I actually have to talk to and engage a customer? Do I have to develop that relationship? Is, and it's not. Can I conduct a meaningful conversation, but I, every once in a while I start seeing more and more people just don't want to have those conversations.
They want to minimize them, and there's, there seems to be almost a fear that I have to talk to a human being that maybe believes, may tell me I'm full of all sorts of stuff.
Right.
And I've gotten a sense of that in a lot of the people I talk to and work with and see is there actually is a, what didn't exist even 10, 15 years ago is, you know, I always am eager to have a conversation.
They may kick my teeth in,
Yeah.
but you know, I'm eager to have those conversations and I look forward to them. Much more than I look forward to internal meetings, but I see I'm starting to get a bit of an aversion of, I don't want to have to do that or either of you saying
I'm seeing it slightly differently. So with the, say the coaching clients that I work with, the individual contributors that they're sort of lost is maybe the better way of saying it is that, you know, if they just listen to what their managers are telling them and, you know, follow the process and these are the script and these are the questions answered.
And so it's like, it doesn't, it's not working for them. Right. And. Yeah, there's also operating in an environment where they're already given the recipes for things. There's a step by step instructions,
Yeah.
and they're finding out that, well, actually I operate in an environment that's much more ambiguous than that.
So I need to be able to know how to navigate that without having somebody tell me this is the next step to take. And so I think, yeah, there's maybe a little bit of hesitancy in some cases. But I think, If they felt more empowered individually to figure things out, then they would develop that muscle and we'd see less of it.
And I, to me, this is the basic obstacle for many sellers is the fear of taking the wrong step.
but that reverts back to the lack of trust we have internally
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You've
We don't trust our people. So you follow this recipe precisely. And if you deviate from it.
Right.
We'll punish you even if the recipe isn't working, if you deviate from that, we'll punish you.
Right. And this is the thing that, yeah, circle back to the game, the conversation we were talking about, you know, the importance of, , these low win rates is people are saying, follow this process and I'm going like, but it's yielding a 20 percent average win rate, which if it's, that's the average win rate is 20 percent in your sales team.
That means you've got probably 60 to 70 percent of them below 20 percent and a few high performers moving, , disproportionately affecting that average. It's like, it doesn't work. And just because you command a high valuation as an organization, doesn't mean your sales process works, because those things are completely unrelated. And I, , I love this, you know, quote from Deming, you know, the founder of the modern quality control movement, great business thinkers. My favorite quote says, you know, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
Yes.
And so if it's, if your system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, and you're getting a 20 percent win rate, then, you know, you're losing by design.
Right? That's not a, that's not a flaw. That's the feature of the way you've designed your process.
A feature, not a bug. Yeah. I think oh, I had a thought there. I'm sorry. I
That's okay. That's okay. We're going back and forth.
so let's go back to something we started the conversation with a little bit, is despite us seeing these things, why are we so committed to the status quo? Well, the
We all wonder that.
Let's go back right to the beginning. We talked about fear and an old wise guy with hair whiter than mine once told me the root negative human emotion is fear, either fear of losing what you got or fear of not getting what you want. If you want to know what the dysfunction is, ask what people are afraid of.
And to David's point, I don't think people are more fearful. I think that the fear kicks in at a lower level, put it that way, but it's always been there. People have always been afraid of trying new stuff, taking a risk, whatever. But I think to draw the difference back in our day, you were thrown into it.
It was like, go in the water and figure out how to swim. And we are, by design, structurally, our systems do not throw people in the water. They say, learn this system and this structure and you know, it's, maybe it's your fault if it doesn't work. But,
right. But I think that's the critical point though, is they assume that the structure and the processes are good and that the people deviate from them, that therefore they must be bad. And I think that's
can't propose.
right. And I think this is the huge, you know, difference between perhaps in the environments we came up with in sales, where you said we're sort of thrown to the sharks pretty quickly.
And we've Either figured it out or we didn't right, but it's not like we're completely unsupported, but we're also
security we can get in this thing is, it is not our fault if it doesn't work if we follow the process. It's somebody else's fault, so we can blame somebody else. We followed the script to a T
Yeah.
and the customers hung up the phone. It's not our fault because we did that.
And we're now engaging in systemic blame throwing, which is a pretty low level of dysfunction. You're right.
well Yeah, and so it's interesting. So maybe one of the issues and we may we save it for next conversation is If it's the case as you talked about Dave Is that then maybe sales is attracting people with different personality and mindsets than it was before, where for me, yeah, I'm not a great process follower and because it wasn't going to work for me, but I didn't work for people that were in organizations that were so hung up on the process that they said, yeah, do the process or get out of here.
Right? We're given a framework. Here's, here are the guidelines. Here are the guardrails. You operate within these guardrails. Great. Make your number. Great. Stay within the guardrails. Do what you will. And we don't set up guardrails anymore. We define step by step processes. And this, and I think if that's the case, then if you're somebody saying, am I going to get into sales or not?
Me, given the guardrails and freedom, Hey, you're the owner of this territory. You're the owner of this, , this book of business. You're the CEO of this book of business. That's a way different. Mindset you go into that job with and where you want to approach it, as opposed to, you know, here are the accounts you're going to call today.
This is how you're going to do it. deviate from the script. Thoughts, last thoughts, or did I sum it up so beautifully that everybody's speechless? There we go.
Let's go with that.
All right, perfect. Let's go with that.
Or we could go on for hours and hours, but
we'll come
we'll do this for we'll go into the next
yeah, we'll do a next session. All right. All right. Dave, Charlie, as always pleasure and look forward to doing again soon.