Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Derek Wazinski. And Derek is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Derek is senior director of enterprise sales for the U S for open classrooms. My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness and the buyer experience and improving your win rates are Olivier Labbe, Olivier is the co founder and managing partner at Inflection Capital Partners.
Also joining us today is Fred Diamond, and Fred is president and co founder of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. He's also the host of the very long running Sales Game Changers podcast. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion. If you enjoy this podcast, please do me a favor.
Take a second now before we begin to rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts. If you can do that, it helps us get discovered by even more professional sellers who are looking to take their careers to the next level. So thank you for your help with that. 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, Olivia Labbe, Fred Diamond, and Derek Wazinski for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, to the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, 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.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast. Another great lineup of guest panelists here today. Joining me give away a few seconds, introduce themselves. We'll start with you, Olivier.
Well, thanks for having me. Good to see you, Andy. I am a recovering operator. I have been in tech for the last 20 years or so, and recently decided to take off on my own launch an advisory service organization focused on helping Series A companies essentially I think of it as like, start up in a box.
We have a team that Of professionals that have been doing this for a long time and we come in on a consulting basis and Yeah, that's what we do.
Yeah. And just, Ollie was early into Glassdoor, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it was super early. You know, probably like around number 80 at Glassdoor in terms of the point count. Did a few years there. That was my first foray into tech and it was pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty fun. A couple of years in, I decided to go earlier because we had grown quite a bit during my time there, I think five or six X employee growth and revenue skyrocketed.
So went to a company called flipped off at that time. I just pivoted zero revenue, nine people fast forward less than two years later, got acquired by LinkedIn which is a really fun journey for me. Thank you. I got to build out the sales team for the first time and then was hired at G2 before anyone knew what G2 was formerly G2 crowd and had a good run there for four years.
Was responsible for building out the teams on the revenue side and took it from one to 50 in four years flat. And then went to metadata as president and had another good run there, closed series A, B, and went from two to 15 in less than three years.
Yeah. What a slacker. Okay.
That's why I'm recovering.
that's why you're recovering well, but I think the most interesting thing you've done is, but I think, I'm not sure you're still doing it. Your ferry company.
Yeah, it's still evolving. Yes, we we have a contract with Treasure Island and I went to Burning Man several years ago. I tend to go every few years and I met somebody there and we hit it off and he was telling me that he just got a boat and getting a contract with Facebook at the time.
And then we were able to grow that and had a contract with Genentech for years and procured more boats. And and now we operate out of the ferry terminal to Treasure Island. And yeah, it's a company that has been around for a while and trying to make it easy to commute around the Bay by leveraging, you know, the water.
Very cool. So that in the San Francisco Bay area, people don't remember treasure Island right in the middle of the Bay bridge transit. So yeah, great diversification. Good side hustle. All right. Fred.
That's great. Yeah. So my name is Fred diamond. I run an organization. It's called the Institute for excellence in sales. And most of our customers, which we call partners are large B2B type companies like Amazon web services, Salesforce, Oracle, et cetera. And we're well known for a couple of things. We we're known for our designations.
We have something called premier sales employer. Basically great places to work, but sales organizations were also known for our women in sales programs. We do some women in sales, global leadership development. We also have our premier women in sales employer where we rank companies that are great places for women in sales companies like Oracle Salesforce.
Again, C vent software, JG Wentworth. We have a big award.
I'm going to start singing the jingle. Yeah.
They're a, an amazing sales organization based outside of Philly. Everybody knows their commercials from three o'clock in the morning, but they have built just an incredible sales structure and sales organization. It's very inclusive.
It's very well thought out. They're on the leading edge of what companies, what people are sales people were doing on the phone as well. I'm based in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC, but we Members all over the globe. It's not really a side hustle, but also I'm a world renowned expert on Lyme disease and other tick borne illnesses.
I wrote a book about a year and a half ago, summer of 2022. It's called love, hope Lyme, what family members, partners, and friends who love a chronic Lyme survivor need to know, and I'm also the host of the love, hope Lyme podcast. Which is kind of incredible because Andy, you and I met when I was hosting the sales game changers podcast.
And I remember you were the the milestone the hair, the the leading sales podcaster, and I made it a point to get to know you so that I could learn some of your secrets on how to be successful. With my sales game changes podcast for up to 690 episodes, we typically interview VPs of sales at companies about.
Right now it's, how are they working with customers and how are they leading teams? And I have an interesting story about the Lyme stuff as it relates to sales, which we'll talk about later on, but yeah, so,
Also another slacker, only 600 episodes was podcast. Derek pressure's
Hi. Yes. Hi. My name is Derek Wazinski. I've been in , business sales for the past 25 years, the first 15 years I spent in software and hardware sales for companies like Trimble and Xerox and others. And then the last 10 years I've really been focusing in on and been selling and running teams and building teams in the SaaS space.
I started my career unlike a lot of other people. I was actually, I, when I came out of the service, I went into corporate IT and I worked my way up in 10 years from a night shift computer operator in the old mainframe days to a chief information officer for a large regional law firm in the Midwest.
About a 50 person team, nine different offices. So when I made the jump. To selling to the IT space, which I have for the past 20 or so years I really did it in a way where I was on the receiving end of a lot of bad sales pitches. A lot of bad sales pitches. A lot of would you like to buy some software?
You know, if you remember the old commercial of the cutout guy, it's like, would you like to buy some software? There was a lot of that going on. And I really kind of figured out at the time, there was a gap, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, where I am in the Seattle area for professional salespeople that really knew what it was like to be a buyer.
So, I was able to cobble together some success at these legacy companies and then spent the last 10 years, as I said, really focused in on software as a service, infrastructure as a service, almost anything as a service. And right now. After being successful in doing that, I took a little bit of time off.
And over this last year, I've come on board as the senior sales director for a education company called Open Classrooms. And what they do and what we do now is I spend all of my time convincing enterprise companies to go to a skills first hiring platform, as opposed to a credentialed or a degree based hiring platform, and hire tech apprentices.
So the legacy apprentice program that you're probably aware of for electricians and plumbers also exists for software developers and cyber security experts and everything else. And as if you've known you guys have probably sold to the IT organizations yourselves over your careers, you definitely know there is a dish that the, there is a disproportionate amount of people that look like me in.
IT sales and sales management. And they have a very interesting
you mean with the beard?
Yeah, with the beard and with the Patagonia vest. No, what middle aged white guys. So, so the challenge has been to go ahead and upwards to the point where you know, only one in three CIOs in the United States are African or excuse me, only 3 percent of CIOs in the United States are African American.
And that's the reason is because only 3 percent of software developers are African American, right? So, so what we're doing is we're convincing big companies think of every big company that you could possibly think of Fortune 500. My job is to call into them, talk to them about apprenticeship programs and have them discover that, you know, maybe growing my own pipeline of cyber security experts.
and putting them through a year apprenticeship program and then hiring them at the end of it is better than for me going out and just trying to hire hired guns who are going to leave me in six months anyways when someone pays them 12, 000 more a year. So that's kind of where we're focusing and we're really focusing on bringing forward people that are underrepresented. So women black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, those people that and from areas that normally you wouldn't that you wouldn't suggest remote working has really opened up the the ability for many different people to apply for and to get tech jobs and knowledge worker jobs.
So that's where I'm spending hopefully. Knock on wood. That's where I'll be spending the remainder of my sales time before my grand retirement getting people jobs every day.
Why can't we apply an apprentice model to selling?
You're looking at my 2025 sales plan right there. Yes. So you are exactly correct. So you are exactly correct. And, you know, one of the reasons I came on board is because we were really focused on obviously the tech space, but there are a multitude of different professions out there, whether it be HR generalist, whether it be junior accountant, whether it be business development or sales rep, that really could benefit from a year long apprenticeship program taught by subject matter experts with project based methodology.
So you can go ahead and so a hiring manager can know at the end of the day, What does this person really know how to do, as opposed to the throwing darts is the board hiring process that we have now, whereas if someone sounds good in an interview, we bring them on board and then we figure out what's happening.
Yeah. I think I being much older than all of you guys is benefited coming of age in a generation where. Yeah. My first sales job with this major tech company of the day. And they basically had what was an apprenticeship program, right? And we were hired into these, they didn't call them sales training.
They call marketing management training programs. And, we spent 10 weeks in my case, 10 weeks in a classroom in the first year. We had certain milestones I'd hit in terms of sales of a certain product line in order to get trained on the next product line up. And so on. And yeah, it was with a pretty specific intent, you know, in retrospect, you know, once we got in, we sort of understood as, yeah, they're going to weed a lot of people out, but there was a level of patience and investment that just doesn't really seem to exist much anymore.
It seems to have faded that, you know, Hey, we're going to onboard people. You got 90 days and I'm like.
I call that the sassification of B2B sales.
Yeah. And it's like, well, that's just so counterproductive because we all know people learn at different rates, they mature at different rates, you know, they get it, you know, it becomes clear at different rates at different times. And I've challenged people on this show before I said, yeah, I wanted to bet that if you know, you have a three month or six month, you know, onboarding up to full quote, full productivity program if you instead took a year.
Right. that in year two, the person who took the year would perform better than the person you onboarded in three or six months. And yet you always see these calculations about, oh, the ROI on 90 day onboarding. 'cause they get the, you know, it's like blah, blah, blah. It's like, she's so shortsighted.
Anyway I just throw it out there for discussion.
no, that's, I've got a lot of, I've got a lot of spicy takes on that, but
well, go ahead. That's why we're here.
no, I listened. I called it the sassification of the sales process B2B sales process for a reason. I've spent the last 10 years in sass and what I've seen from a leadership perspective is CROs and BPs of sales that are very interested in their own exit and very interested in revenue at any cost.
Versus professional development versus building something that is going to, you know, stand the test of time, say what you will about legacy companies like IBM and Xerox and others like that. But when I was in Xerox training, I got sales training and they wanted me to be there for the rest of my career and they really focused on not what I was doing in the first 90 days, but what I was going to do in my first nine months or in my first two years, that type of thing.
And, you know, slowly that's changed, and it's changed because our focus is different, because everything is faster, but really what it is, it's because, you know, the, you know, the customer may always be right, but the shareholder is always the one who's listened to, or the investor is always the one who's listened to.
So that's kind of, that's kind of, and so there's this epic battle going on. for many sales leaders is how do I weigh this? How do I go ahead and meet all my KPIs and report to my board and do everything else, but also actually build something that's going to be lasting more than four quarters. It's a big, it's, and it's a big challenge right now because what I see right now, and you go on LinkedIn, all of the sales reps that have been laid off the past year from SAS, we see them getting jobs. Now they're going into. into manufacturing or dental sales or packaging or all of these legacy sales positions to go ahead and provide organizations with their talent.
Because SAS is saturated, it's saturated with this whole hire fast and fire quicker kind of mentality.
Olivier, what do you think?
Well, I feel that I was fortunate. I got into sales kind of accidentally and I got my mid to late twenties and I went to a company called Paychex and Paychex was a Amazing training company. We had to, you start off, you're doing like training for like a couple of weeks in the office and then they fly you to the headquarters where you spend two more weeks there.
You have to wear a suit, which I thought was just, you know, interesting being in the Bay Area and, you know, Now, I think they've dropped the suits. But anyway, the training was excellent and they had a lot of stats about, you know, how well you do in the training and how well you will do once you, you get your territory.
But basically you had like two months of full training before you even were giving a territory, you would learn everything about, you know, the payroll business and industry. And they turned, you know, They're one of the best training programs when it comes to large companies software wasn't as good but it's payroll.
But I really enjoyed the fact that I was trained. And if you did well, they would invest in you more. And so second year, they would bring you back up. And so that's one of the things we don't see happening much in SAS. A lot of, you know, last year has been cost cutting and The shelf life of these you know, revenue leaders tends to be, you know, short, right?
And so, unfortunately, many of them do not spend the resources required in enablement. That's something that you see time and time again, and, you know, a lot of them are, you know, always afraid that, you know, their time is going to be up this quarter or next quarter. And I think that Unless there's a shift in mindset from the top down.
I don't know that's going to happen. You know, a lot of, you know, investors now are not investing in, you know, software like they used to, unless, you know, there's an AI component. And I think what we're going to see in the future is that you're going to be able to scale the company to 10 million in revenue with.
A fraction of the amount of employees that you require in the seeing a lot of technology where, you know, as long as you record your gone calls, it can turn into content pretty, you know, quickly and easily. You can automate a lot of functionality. And so what will be interesting is, you know, these next gen companies are going to be able to, you know, raise less than before.
Operate way more efficiently and only have a handful of people and go to market to get the 10 million bucks. And I think that's kind of interesting. I think, you know, the future of sales is going to be like, can you manage technology? Do you know, and how can you make it work for yourself so that your output can two, three, four X.
Well, yeah, we could make an argument that there's been an over employment in sales in SAS, right?
At G2, we just hired inexperienced people and that was my budget and we just train and enable them. And, you know, that would be significant turnover. And some people would really turn out and had some people go from BDR to enterprise rep within a couple of years. It was a good opportunity, but it was.
You know, intensive, right? We threw a lot of money at, you know, from a headcount perspective, it worked out in that case, but I think that it's not what investors want anymore. You got to scale efficiently, which is changing a lot of how people are thinking about, you know, hiring and retaining talent, developing.
yeah. I think we can go back and talk more about this later. Cause I, you know, the word efficiency gets used a lot, but it's, to me, before you can be efficient, you have to be effective
Right,
why I know that the dream is really efficient, go to market. It's like, well, sure, but it has to be effective, right?
If we're going to do it with 17 percent win rates across the board, like we've been trying to do the last 20 years, we're still going to the same issues we have today. So, but I do want to get back into that. So Fred, your take.
Yeah, I have a little bit of, a little I agree with everything that that Derek and Olivier just said, but I want to tell a little story that kind of exemplifies it a little bit. Caries this I think it was like 2019, so it was before the pandemic, so it's five years ago, which is crazy.
It seems crazy.
to say it's five years.
I'm old enough. The year 2000 still seems like it's in the future.
Oh, was it, what's today? Thursday? Was it yesterday or 1986 that I you know,
Yeah.
Exactly.
no, but anyway I. There's a SAS company that was a member of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. And the VP of sales asked me to come do like a lunch and learn on sales careers. So it was 2019 was probably the spring of 2019.
They had 30 people and they were all, you know, youngish one or two or three years out of college. And I went down and I was very excited. I do this not infrequently. So there's 30 people they brought in burritos or whatever. And all these kids, like I said, they were typically one or two or three years out of school.
So I'm standing next to the VP of sales. And the first question I asked was how many of you think you're going to be in sales? There was 30 people in the room besides the two of us. How many of you think you're going to be in sales a year from now? And I would, I'll pull the three of you. How many hands do you think went up when I said, how many of you think you're going to be in sales a year from now, Olivia, how many fans do you think went up
It's a handful.
handful, Andy
Yeah, less than a third.
and Derek?
Yeah, I was going to say 33%.
Well, you guys are pros. You guys know this industry, five hands went up. So, and I've asked that question a minute ago. So I've said to the other people, I said how come you didn't raise your hand? First of all, the VP of sales is standing next to me. So your boss's boss is standing next to me.
his hand go up?
That's a good point. But here's the thing. So I said, how come you didn't raise your hand? Well, it's kind of harder than I thought it was. Oh, how about you? Well, I really don't like making phone calls. I thought all I'd have to do is make emails and write blogs. How about you? Well, I'm kind of thinking I want to go for a, not-for-profit, but meanwhile the five.
Hands that went up, you know, and I gave my talk. Here's what I would do if I were you. Here's who I would talk to. Here's how I would get a mentor. Here's things I wouldn't learn, blah, blah, blah. The five people who said they wanted to stay in sales, they were like in front of me. You know, like, like, like just like dogs, like drooling, anything I would say, Mr.
Diamond, you know, and it was amazing. And then I said to the V and we ended, everybody was very nice. Even the 20 some odd kids, I got questions from them about things they could do. And I, but I said to the VP of sales afterwards, I said, that's stunning to me. He said, you know what he says? If three of those guys are successful, we're going to have a great year.
And he says, if four of them are successful, we're going to have our best year ever. And he used the baseball analogy. You know, if it's a Sunday summer game and it's 95 degrees in July, you still need somebody to throw nine innings. Right. So he said, I need them to make the calls. I don't, I know they're going to leave and we're going to have to recruit again next year, but it's part of how we do things.
And I remember thinking like, I don't know if that's the most efficient way. Someone used the word efficiency before, but it goes back to, you know, you know, the whole concept of overhiring which someone brought up before, but, you know, sales is the hardest job in the company. We all know, I believe, and being good.
Right. I also, I started my career at Apple computer and we had a year's worth of sales training and product training, and, you know, you weren't really. They didn't really have SDRs per se, like we do now. So you got on the field a little bit quicker. And they also hired successful people. They didn't really hire kids out of school.
People who had worked at Xerox, I had Xerox training, et cetera. But yeah, he said, you know, he goes, if those three out of those five, then I'm going to have a great year and yeah, we know they'll be gone. And, you know, we have our recruiting down pretty well.
I don't think in the future we're going to be able to you know, as a, as revenue leaders be able to plan that way. You know, paychecks again, they knew one third of the class would not be there by the end of the year. Right. So they knew that turnover was massive. And so I think in the future, hiring and selecting the right individuals and developing them is going to be way more cost effective than, you know, hiring a huge class and, You know, being okay with 20 or 30 percent of the class working out.
Yeah, I would.
go ahead.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I would just make the case that you know, I think what I was talking about service of back to the future type thing because you know, I look at my experience growing revenue teams that startups that sort of pre SAS. So they weren't software companies though. We did have aspects of recurring revenue in them, but yeah my, my mission was, is I'd go in and say, okay, how can we double or triple revenues without adding to the headcount?
Right.
And that's what we did. That's sort of as the expectation was, is yeah, you're going to be able to lease double revenue. And I was brought in oftentimes I was replacing a founder or somebody that had been running sales. But this whole idea of teaching people how to really become effective at selling what the product is that you have and doing it at a success rate that, You know, serve to me as minimal standard, you can do that, right?
But we serve, I think really to Ollie's point, it's just so hiring, mass hiring that we do, we've got this mode of doing it and companies never really learned how to sell the product. There are individuals that did, but in general, you don't make the case. You'll get average win rates on core products into their core segments.
And. They were pretty bad across the board, except for to Fred's point, a couple of people.
I think, you know, I think we're back, you know, what's old is new again. And kind of, we've come around full circle. I think legacy sales organizations were built to find the wolves. To use the vernacular. I think legacy sales, you know, we all know the 80, 20 rule. We all know, I think legacy like Xerox, I can, cause I went through the training, like, you know, you guys have went through paychecks and others.
It's like that whole process were to find the natural wolves, to find the people that with minimal management would go out there as a field salesperson, who we would call a remote salesperson now, but you know, a field salesperson that would go out there armed with a laptop or a PC. Franklin planner or whatever the hell else they had
Now, do you remember the three ring D binders that
Yes, the 3 ring. Yes, that was what the original deck was in the 3 ring binder. Here's my presentation, but they were, it was to find the wolves. And then, of course, we started selling a lot of software and everything else like that. And then it all came down to solution selling and you could create all these.
All these training programs came on. You could build your teams. You could find the way to do this. Everything went from field sales to inside sales, where it was more about having a butt in a seat and making calls and being there for the inbound and everything else. And I think to Oliver's point and to Fred's point We've kind of with the advent of technology and the smartness of the customer and the customer using technology, it's all about finding the wolves again.
I think it's all about, I'm the first one to say and, you know, and Andy, we've had conversations before about sales training and sales organizations and that, but I really do feel, and this is me having a spicy take that I think the future of B2B sales is A wolf in a position where they have technology process and a support structure to feed them what they need in order to do what they do.
You want to find wolf for the listeners and you want to
so. . Yeah. So. So, you know, in. In the olden days, we used to go ahead and kind of, you know, kind of categorize what type of salespeople there are. And there were salespeople that you could train to get to a certain point, there were salespeople that you could apply process to, and they would go, you would teach them a methodology and how to do it.
And then there were the guys and the gals who in your organization would never enter anything into the CRM, would never show up for the sales meetings. And they were top of the board consistently, and nobody, even they couldn't figure out, couldn't document , how they did it.
It was analyzing if you're a baseball fan, why is Ted Williams so great? You know, no, it was just, he was. And the challenge was is like, well, you know, how do you go ahead and give him what he needs in order to hit as many home runs as he can to win pennants and do everything else like that.
And so the Wolf salesperson is the person with minimal support or minimal management support can go out there, their self they're self sufficient, but they're also self motivated and they go out there and they perform the tasks necessary in order in a way they can't really define in order to be, to provide the organization new revenue and sales excellence and in, in the subsequent sales trainings after that, when you go to solution selling, when you go to challenger selling and everything else like that, even in those trainings, there was the point of which if you find a wolf, leave him alone.
Okay. Which is really what they said, you can over process someone like that. But if you have that kind of person in your organization, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do, regardless of the training you provide them, regardless of the 730 training organizations, they're going to be able to take little bits and pieces.
They're always learning. And they're going to be able to apply that to the organization. And that's why we went ahead and, you know, and Xerox was the same way where it was, you know, the 80, 20 rule, 20 percent of your team was providing 80 percent of your revenue. So you help them do as much as they can.
And then when you looked, when you went you went ahead and went in your hiring process and you went ahead and found them. And I think we're getting to that point now where technology is so cool. Able to assist an individual person and not only the selling of something, but also the buying of something and the buyer's journey has changed and, you know, old things like picking up the phone, you know, doesn't, you know, you know, millennials and Gen Z, they don't use the phone to talk, they use the phone to do this.
So it's like, how do we go ahead and it's this, and it's the wolves now, it's the people that know that instinctively go to, you know what, if my customer is talking on WhatsApp, I'm going to be a WhatsApp expert. Right. That's how I'm going to do it. I'm not gonna, I'm not going to invest in a legacy kind of training that is teaching me how to do something five years ago or 10 years ago.
I agree on the assessment with wolves that, yeah, I sort of was that in my career. And,
and what's the biggest, and I'm
but I think part of the issue for me, or part of the challenge is that I think that's okay. Right. I think we should encourage more of that. I think what curious, everybody's take on this, 'cause it seems like one of the things that's fallen by the wayside in the last X number of years in selling is this idea that you as a salesperson. your patch, right? That you're sort of CEO of your patch. So you have this stake in it and. At least, you know, I benefited from coming of age and sales in this or I was given a lot of latitude about how I was going to develop that patch because they're saying, look, you're accountable. You know, this is, we got to, we have to produce, but I'm not as concerned about, I'm the boss saying to me, I'm not as concerned about the details.
Right. Obviously we've got to adhere to, you know, ethical and integrity guidelines and so on, but for doing good business, You could be doing good business different than the next person. And that's okay.
Yes.
But it seems like we've, and I think to a point someone was going before is, you know, leaders have such short tenures is that anything that's a variance from standard makes them really nervous because, you know, it could be an issue.
I have a comment. So we again, we're doing today's interview in February of 2024 for people listening in the future. And at the, you know, I alluded again before, you know, pandemic, et cetera. You know, the last three years have been kind of interesting because we've been talking about things like empathy, of course and mindset and mindfulness and all these things, which of course are critical for the sales to be successful.
I had two very I had two conversations at the end of last year of November and December of 2023 that have stuck with me and the team that runs the Institute for Excellence in Sales, again, one of the things that we did during the pandemic to stay valid and vital was our women in sales programs.
And we created something called the Premier Women in Sales Employer, where we recognize companies that are great. And Derek was alluding to some of this before, and we created a document at the end of 2023 called. Best practices for women and underrepresented communities in sales. And it talked about three things that companies who are great employers do.
They have ERGs, they are more thoughtful in their hiring and recruiting, and they also have senior level commitment. But I had three conversations the two conversations I want to talk about. One was with the senior. Leader for public sector for one of the two biggest and well known brands in technology.
And we were talking about stuff that you and I, the three of us or the four of us are talking about right now. And he said, whatever happened to selling, he said, what happened to the 30, 60, 90 day plan? Right. You know, and he said, he's like, we don't do that. We stopped doing those because we were focusing on, again, you know, how's everybody and being empathetic.
And it was real stuff. You know, the world had changed. But they're saying now it's like, what happened to those things that we used to do and management used to effectively monitor, et cetera. And this was like the number one sales guy for regulated industries for one of the top two technology companies in the world.
And this wasn't a joke. He was making a serious comment. The other was with another of the top five large S technology companies in the world. And again, we got known at the Institute for excellence in sales for our women in sales program. So a VP. In that organization called myself and my partner and says, I want to talk to you about what we're doing for the men.
He says, it's great that we're doing a lot of things to bring women in sales and to raise them. He said, but I have all these young men that don't know how to start a conversation. And like Derek was, or whoever was alluding to before about it, it was Derek about, You know, the Gen Z and whatever, you know, they use their phone.
Yeah. They don't pick up the physical phone. They don't know how to have conversations. This VP of sales at a company that we all know that's a brand name said, my young men have no idea how to engage in a conversation now they know how to text and they know how to, you know, You know, whatever they need to do on the technology side.
But she said, I've seen them in conversations and they don't have any idea. And she said, now that we're going to be getting back to normal business, what was more normal than before, as we come out of the last couple of years, she said, we're at a serious Inflection point here where we need to be teaching these people, these young men was who she was talking about men in their third twenties and early thirties.
She goes, they don't know how to have conversations. So the reason I bring this up is we've been told at the Institute, help us get back to a lot of the basics. Now, the basics aren't going to be what Xerox taught 40 years ago, because it's just not that it's not valid anymore, but It's different.
Well, you know, I'll go ahead and add, you know, to comment on that. And again, with a spicy take, as far as, so for understand for me, understanding is, and having spent, like I said, last 10 years in SAS and the majority of it in leadership positions and that the challenge is, yes, we need people to be able to talk to customers, but where and how they talk to the customers.
is dependent upon how the customer likes to talk. And the challenge is, with what you're saying, and again, this is just, you know, a conversation we're having, a debate, you know, from a debate aspect, is that my feeling is, as the customer gets younger, the challenge is, how do we incorporate the best practices that we've learned throughout the course of our career, but apply it to channels, in which the 30 year old customer wants to speak to.
So yes, perhaps the 30 year old salesperson doesn't know how to have a conversation in person on a, at a conference room, but I would argue the 30 year old buyer probably doesn't either. So the challenge is do we invest time, effort, and energy in teaching people how to shoe horses? Or do we train them how to drive a car is like, like that, like, that's the challenge.
And I think there's a little, I think there's arguments for both. And I think there's capabilities where you can merge and, you know, and have a unified kind of idea. But I would, I challenge whenever I hear a sales leader talk about my young team doesn't, I never hear them say.
My young customer doesn't because that's what we're looking at. And when you talk about diversity and when you talk about a DEI when you talk about those types of things within sales organizations, we have to realize as leaders is we want to build sales organizations. that look like our customer base.
And the challenge is that as those organizations change, and as they become more diversified, and as they speak in different channels and do different things, we have to be cognizant of the fact that we, it's, you know, it's similar to the old joke about the guy who's looking for his keys outside the bar under a spotlight.
And you go up to him and you say, well, were you looking for your keys? Yeah, I can't find them. Well, where'd you lose them? I lost them in back of the bar. Why are you looking here? Well, the light's better here. Like that. Like we have to stop looking where the light is, where we're used to and start realizing that we have to meet the customer.
The royal. We have to meet the customer where they're speaking to us. For instance, a story I had a, at one of my, at one of my former employers. I had a fantastic customer that was interested in they had purchased something from us and then about six months later, they were handed off to an account manager.
Cause I was in charge of account executives, a new business, and we handed off to account manager and they were interested in upsell, probably doubling the opportunity within six months. And my AE went to the AM and said, listen, this customer really likes to come. To converse over WhatsApp. They don't answer the phone.
They don't go over email. They want to do everything on WhatsApp. So here's the history of my WhatsApp conversations. He uploaded them into Salesforce, everything else. And the AM who was, you know, a long term person in that organization said, well, I don't communicate over WhatsApp now. Now, mind you, you're laughing, but I ask everybody who's listening to this.
How many times have you heard something similar in your own org?
I'm just, yeah, laughing cause you went out of your way not to call the AM old. Olivier, what do you think?
Well, your show is about, you know, making people better at their craft of sales. And so I think, you know, the one point I want to make is it comes down to trust. And however, you know, and obviously if you can adapt to the person you're selling you know, based on, you know, the demographics, their location and their age, what have you you can build.
Credibility more quickly. But if people are going to buy, and if you want to increase the conversion rates, you've got to get people to trust you. And so, become a subject matter expert do your research, show up in like. You know, ask them questions about, you know, their past and their accomplishments.
That's definitely going to work to your advantage to, you know, get them to trust you and show that you know what you're talking about. And I don't think it matters if we're doing WhatsApp or, you know, Facebook Messenger or just regular old texting. At the end of the day you need to adapt and you need to build the trust.
And that's the number one thing that's going to help you be a successful salesperson.
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we've sort of gone, we've talked several times, but you know, back to the future type moments, you know, one thing that's, Always sort of strikes me, increasingly strikes me these days is, you know, I look back in the arc of my own career and I think about what I thought I knew when I was in my twenties, what I thought I knew in my thirties, what I thought I knew in my forties. And, you know, the one constant and I, you know, sort of pare back the bullshit as I get older and, you know, spend more time thinking and working with people and, you know, really experiencing it's like, you Really to your point, Olivia it's the people, right? It is the trust. Yeah. People want to denigrate this idea of trust and the human connection being so important.
I think to your point you're making earlier about, yeah, smaller organizations, more efficient. Hey, that's why I was brought up. You want to have smaller, more effective organizations, but they're also much more effective at. The human part of it, right, is to really connect, build that trust, dive deep to really understand the buyer.
Right. I think another thing that's sort of a trend, which has really been sort of destructive with selling over the past. And number of years, this idea is that, you know, we want to make it, you know, selling like McDonald's, right. Where it's the same experience. So we have this cookie cutter approach and it, and the net result was it's become very superficial in the minds of the buyer.
We're good at gathering information. We're not good at understanding information and applying that to the context of the buyer and what they're trying to accomplish. And you know, you still see this out there on a daily basis. And it's like, nah, you just want to say, look, it is all about the trust.
It all starts with this human connection. More and more research is showing it even last few years, including with Gartner, you know, number one, most important factor B2B buyer state that influences their choice. The vendor is trust.
yeah.
We're talking about right now. We all probably get a lot of people who reach out to us and say, what should I be doing? You know, what is your advice for me to get better at sales or how can I have a great successful career in sales?
My answer is always, if it's one thing that they're looking for is to become an expert in an industry. Right. It's to become like Olivier mentioned subject matter expert
Specialize.
specialize in government or insurance or financial services, hospitality, whatever it might be so that you can talk to the customer at their level and help them address their challenges.
I'm just curious, the same question for all three of you guys. If one person said, you know, how can I get better at sales? What's the one thing you advise? What would you say Andy, why don't you go first? And then Derek and Olivier as I'm taking over your show
yeah. Well, thanks Fred. Thanks for having me on your show. So yeah, specialization. I've been writing about this recently. I've got some posts I'm going to be posting on LinkedIn coming up soon on this. Is yeah. I look at my own career is start off selling to construction industry.
Right. I knew Jack about the construction industry, but yeah, that was the patch I was given. Cause there was a great software package that existed at that time that ran on our system. Yeah. And everywhere I've gone in my career, I've specialized and, uh, it's, you just don't hear about it as much.
And so I had a vertical market expertise and these are the customers I sold to. And yeah, I was telling somebody last week, you know, last startup I was running a team is we had maybe a hundred customers, potential customers worldwide. That made us better, right? There wasn't something we were afraid of. It was like, Oh my God, we are specializing these.
We knew these people inside and out and enable us to close some really large deals because we just knew forward and backwards. So yeah, I think specialization is really important and sellers, if you're not specifically given, you know, an account list, an account patch or geographic territory or whatever that's aligned to specialization. I did is I took it on myself. I specialized myself. Yeah. Olivia.
stories, people remember stories. And so your job as a rep, when you join a company is to understand the stories of successful customers and find the patterns there and then share them as your own. Right? Because people are going to remember it doesn't matter what features functionality you come up with, right?
At the end of the day, it's what's my, what are my problems? You understand my persona, right? So if you're selling into. Marketing. So I specialize in, in, in MarTech for the last 15 years. And so I understand marketers and how they're measured, especially on the demand gen side. But I remember stories and I would train my team on sharing stories.
Cause that's what they're going to remember. And then when they go and ask for budget for CFO and be like, you know, they'll be able to not just go into the features that are going to be great for them. Or the ROI that's, you know, they can expect, but, you know, here's how they've helped these companies.
And that's what we need.
Yeah.
you know, I have something in the similar track, but it's like, I do believe that to be a excellent salesperson right now, one has to immerse themselves and understanding the larger human condition. And I think if you're spending all your time reading sales books, that's great. I think every third book, you should probably pick up a great work of literature.
I can tell you, I probably learned more about why people make decisions by reading Thornton Wilder. That I have by reading So, so, so the challenge is understanding, utilizing the library, utilizing the bookstore to understand why people make decisions, how people build consensus that all buying, all decisions are emotional.
And it's just by trying to understand that and understanding what the process is, how someone makes an emotional decision, but then uses data to back up that emotional decision, understanding, you know, the psychological aspect of human beings. I think wolves do that instinctually. And I think that's
We're back to wolves.
really good.
Well, I think that's why they're really good at what they do. I think because they can, because they have that that, that spider sense that, that sixth sense to go ahead and really kind of understand what's really happening. You know, I can tell you the biggest sales I've ever made in my career.
My team has made my career. We really understood why the customer was making a decision. Why not the how, not the when, not the band, not the budget, not, but why understand the why, and that all delves down to, and you can go, you could go to Maslow's triangle, you can go to anything else, but it all delves down to what is the reason.
They're here. What is the reason they're doing this? And it all, when you peel back all the layers of that onion, it, you know, it's just that we're a bunch of people trying to figure it out. So if you can help in that aspect and make it easier for them and then of course, you know, you can't go wrong by, you know, bettering yourselves and reading great works of literature.
Cause it just helps you within your own thing. But I think that's one of the things so immerse yourself in that. And every third, you know, sales book, you know, pick up something from the dusty classics.
Yeah. I've oftentimes recommended that people read Shakespeare.
Yes. Oh, that's
It's, there's a great book out that was written by a gentleman named Harold Bloom. Fantastic scholar called Shakespeare and the invention of the human. And basically say that thesis was that, you know, Shakespeare basically invented many of the ways that we think about relationships and human interactions in the sort of transition from, you know, pre Renaissance period to post Renaissance and so on.
So, yeah,
And all his characters tell you why they're doing their things. That's the best part. It's like they come right out and say it in iambic pantameter. They go ahead and say exactly, these are my motivations, this is what I'm doing, and this is what's going to, I think, is going to happen.
yeah, somewhat tangential, but somewhat related as a source of really, you know, content I would recommend for sellers these days. Is I've been listening to a lot of podcasts hosted by comedians and the one particular host, Mike Berdiglia titled working it out and reinvents invites other comedians on.
They talk about how they develop the material, how they work out their jokes. They talk about the process of learning how to be on stage and how to connect at a human level with the audience. Right. And it's just. Every time I'm always listening on my walks or runs and I'm stopping and writing notes to myself because listening to podcasts, cause yeah, their life is these, yeah, most of these comedians are observational humor, but they're very in tune to people.
Right. And I'd urge people. Yeah. Listen, I'm like bigly as podcast. You're going to learn something. I do then, you know, constantly about presentation. One thing like, yeah, I've never been a big, you know, Fan and my whole career of role play, for instance, because I was always like, well, I'm interacting with somebody that isn't a real person, right?
They've, they're set up for a situation. They don't really get it. And, you know, now there's a big theme about, well, practice, you know, we're going to practice and it's, you know, sort of like role play, but different and I always, and you hear on LinkedIn, you read on LinkedIn, don't send your reps out to practice on paying customers.
I'm like, 180 from that, you know, I put them out and have them practice with real customers. That's how you learn. And you'll see these comedians talking about. You know, they develop new material. What'd they do? They go on the road and like, they go into clubs, paying customers, tried the new stuff out.
Don't
Mike Bigley is talking about, he was heckled once when he's giving a, try his new stuff out.
Cause he was reading off a piece of paper. They're
was going to say,
to see what works, to see what connects, to see what, you know, and that's, we're serving that same business. If we can't make that connection, we can't build that level of trust. People let us in to tell them our stories. nothing ever happens.
Concur.
I kind of differ. If you don't mind you know, it's one thing that I've learned in the last, I created the Institute for Excellence in Sales about 10 years ago. And one thing I learned is that sales is a profession, right? And if you're in a profession, you're a professional. So we use the analogy.
If you're a golf professional, you're playing, you know, you're on the driving range for two hours. You're, Putt for three hours. And I don't completely disagree. And by the way, I used to listen to Mark Mike Babiblia's show as well. But when he did those things, he was doing them Tuesday night in a club in Albany.
You know, he wasn't doing it at the punchline. He wasn't trying out new stuff at the punchline in Los Angeles, you know, at seven 30 on a Saturday. that's when he was doing all of those, working out the stuff, working out the routines you know, One thing I've learned in the last four years is especially when a lot of things stopped is if you're a professional in sales right now, well, what do you need to do?
You need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to interact. You need to be able to strategically pull together things. You need to understand, as Olivia said before, how to build trust. You know, you need to understand how everything plays, you know? So a lot of that, I believe practice is very important.
And I believe that the great sales leaders, and it's not like, Maybe you got to be creative with it. You got to understand how the mind goes. Can I tell one other quick story that I learned that might be helpful to we have real briefly this is something that I learned as well, which kind of goes back to Olivia saying before, I think the great salespeople you're talking about reading Shakespeare and reading the classics, you gotta be interesting.
Right. And you gotta be curious. My podcast, Andy, the word curious comes up time and time again. I just want to give one quick example. I mentioned in the introduction that I became an expert on Lyme disease. Lyme disease is a tick borne illness. It's at the epidemic stage or 63 million people on the planet that has Lyme disease.
And once it gets into the chronic stage it's incurable. So there's no cure for it. You can moderate how you be, but. There's no cure. You have fatigue, you have a neurological type things. So someone in my life had chronic Lyme disease and I decided to become an expert on it. So I wrote a book, which I published and I'm all over Facebook on my late, my Lyme disease stuff.
And I started a podcast about a year ago. Cause we're doing today's show in February. I was at an event, an industry event, and my customers are VPs of sales. They joined the Institute and there was a guy who was a customer of mine. Eight, nine years ago. And he hasn't been a customer over the last seven or eight years.
I was at an event at the Ritz Carlton in Tyson's corner. I saw the guy across the hallway and I did a wave and I expected that was going to be it. Meanwhile, he starts walking towards me and I'm saying to myself, okay, this is interesting. And he comes up to me and you know, we're LinkedIn friends, Facebook friends at this point.
And he says, what's all this stuff that you're doing about Lyme disease? And I told him my brief story, which I've told over hours or minutes and two minutes. I told him why I'm becoming an expert. And he said, well, I'm interested because I have a 32 year old son who has chronic Lyme disease. He hasn't left his room in three years.
He can't work. He has all these, Things that happen with Lyme disease. And I said to him, well, have you tried SOT therapy? Yeah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Well, have you seen this doctor? Yeah we had the most authentic conversation I've ever had in my life. I didn't have to say to him, well, tell me your pains.
I know his pains, , his 32 year old child is living in his room, used to be an athlete. Can't work. So, and I know how expensive it is and how frustrating it is. As a parent, you can't solve this. It's not go take a pill. You, there's so many different varying ways to do it. We talked for 30 minutes, totally authentic.
Then at the 30th minute mark, he says, well, tell me what's going on with the Institute for excellence in sales. I said, Oh, well, blah, blah, blah. He goes, well, maybe it's time we took another look at it. And then two weeks later, we did a zoom call that a month later, they became one of our partners. But I said to my, you know, it was like, I didn't have to ask him his pain, , and it was.
I wasn't thinking to myself, okay, what's the next question I need to ask him. It was just a life human being trusted, you know, Lydia's trust where it was a organic, trusted conversation. And we had 10 years of history. But I hadn't spoken to him in 10 years. He's, , whatever, but, and then I said, wow.
And then they became a customer and I didn't sit down in 2020 and say, I'm going to find a disease and I'm going to write a book about it and I'm going to start a podcast and hopefully some VPs will have a, you know, it just happened in my life for whatever reason. But it led me to think from a sales perspective, you know, you gotta care.
, and you got to have something to say, you know, he don't want to talk to me about, well, what are the latest theories on conversations and using WhatsApp? And I'm like, you know, he doesn't give a shit. All these VPs, they know this stuff, , maybe they're not necessarily deploying it or implementing the right way, but, you know, they, they know.
You know, especially the guys and ladies who are successful and et cetera, but, you know, just have something to say, cast some causes, understand what's going on in the fricking world. Yeah. You don't want to talk about sex and religion, of course, but, you know, have some validity on what you're talking.
I agree. I agree. Yeah. Just we're getting back to just being an interesting human being. Yeah.
That's actually Sex and Religion is my podcast. It's on
Yeah. Okay.
now. I'm just kidding. Great.
wait to get invited to that. All right. Well, unfortunately we've run out of time, but gosh, this is, I think the fastest hour we've ever had. So, appreciate everybody joining in and I've sort of forgone this whole thing about asking people where they can find you because it's going LinkedIn and hopefully you're there.
It's become the default. So, yeah. Appreciate by joining me and I look forward to having you back again.
Fantastic. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks, Andy.