Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to Selling What's Possible, the podcast that's pushing the boundaries of modern account sales. I'm your host, David Irwin, CEO of Polaris I/O and a veteran with 30 years of experience in successful account sales programs.
In each episode, we'll dive deep into the world of strategic account development, uncovering innovative approaches and fresh perspectives that you may not have considered before. We'll be joined by top sales professionals, revenue leaders, and dynamic innovators who are reshaping the landscape of account sales.
Whether you're navigating the complexities of key accounts or seeking to expand value-driven outcomes for your customers, this podcast is your guide to consistently growing your strategic account relationships.
Get ready to challenge conventional wisdom, explore new methodologies, and unlock the full potential of your account sales strategies. This is Selling What's Possible - where we turn potential into reality.
Dave Irwin (00:00)
welcome to another episode of Selling What's Possible. Joining me today is Keenan. Keenan is author of Gap Selling And before we get into it, Keenan on enterprise accounts and our audience is account executives, account leaders, you know.
really the whole support team on enterprise accounts. And I'm not talking about just small and medium sized accounts, but I'm talking about sort of the large account relationships, the one that drive oftentimes for companies, know, a significant amount of the revenue and volume. We're gonna introduce these concepts that you promote around, the gap. And if you could just give our audience
a little bit about the philosophy and the background of what you bring to the table in terms of your approach and the concepts behind gap selling.
Keenan (00:44)
Yeah, I mean, so really simple. I wrote Gap selling because I felt that salespeople were missing the nail. They were just missing the point of selling and they were what I call product centric. They had a product, you know, and they talked all about that product and said how that product could fix certain things or address certain things. But the truth of the matter is if you really look at buying and I'm going to take a step back, because even buying, you look at decision making, when you stop and look at decision making,
there's a fundamental psychological underpinning. And that underpinning is this, nobody makes a decision to change unless their current state is untenable. Now what's interesting, what creates a lot of ambiguity in that, and that's to our advantage, is most people don't have all the information at their fingertips when they're about to change. They think they do. Now, very simple things they do or not, but generally speaking, they don't have all the information. So the process of working with buyers or people who are looking at making a decision to change,
comes down to how well you can help them, help, watch what I did here, help them assess their current state. Where am I now? What's going on? What's happening? What's the impact not changing? How does that align with my goals? How does it align with my values? Where do I think I wanna go? What happens if I don't go there? Like all of that is part of how we make decisions. So what I recognize is that what happens is people go through this consciously or subconsciously every time they make a decision. You can't get away from it.
So if we're salespeople, our job isn't to get somebody to buy a product. Our job is to help facilitate that change, is to help them with that change. And so that's where the gap came from. It's here's your current state, here's your future state. That space in between is the gap. And if you can't get to that gap, then you really can't influence the sale because that's the value. And the bigger the gap, the more value there is in changing and the more inclined people are going to change.
Dave Irwin (02:34)
Yeah, that's a great concept and account teams, know, I've been 30 years, 35 years in account management running large scale enterprise accounts. And there's a fundamental problem, know, we spend 90 % of our time on the solution, but only 10 % on the problem. And we need to flip that. And so you get into sort of a whole like, assessing the problem and there's a lack of
Keenan (02:51)
Yes. Yes.
Dave Irwin (02:58)
In account management, these organizations are so large and so big, they have so many problems to address, but there's no real easy way to uncover what those problems are. But even if you do, one of the things that you promote is just spending more time on really understanding the problem, right?
Keenan (03:17)
So, you know, in a lot of ways it's sort of like a, a doctor or an engineer trying to assess or value what's happening. So because you bring up account management off an enterprise accounts, I'll use that backdrop. When you look at a, if you're an account manager and you're doing a good job at account management and you understand the products and services you sell and the problems they solve, you should be able to see them coming, right? So you,
being in there every day, you should see something that's happening inside the organization, whether it's a root cause or it's an actual problem or an impact, you should see what's going on. And therefore you should use that as a jumping off point, right? So it's going to be, it's probably gonna be the worst metaphor you've ever seen in your life, but it's the one that came to me right away. If I am redoing my basement, right? And my neighbor or happens to work at Home Depot, I'm making this shit up, right? And they see me every hour or two getting out of my car,
I getting into my car, driving somewhere and coming back and doing that every couple of hours and doing it for a week or so, they recognize something's wrong, right? And so they go on and say, hey man, what's going on? Like, I know you're doing your base but you're leaving every 15 or 20 or every hour or two, what's going on? And I'm like, how are you getting anything done? I'm like, I know, I know. just, every time I go there, I forget something. See what I did right there? Every time I go, I come back, I forgot something. So I'm in the middle of the project and I forgot something.
So that's, notice what I described, observation. He observed something that I was doing that didn't make sense that he thought might be a problem. Well, good account managers should be able to do that as well. And the minute you get that, you go and approach that by and say, I noticed this. I noticed you're stopping the manufacturing equipment. I noticed that you guys are running out of this. I noticed, I noticed something going on. Could you take a few minutes to talk to me? What's happening? Now in my dumb metaphor, I told him that I'm going off. His next question should be,
So man, that must be dragging this whole project on. I'm like, you have no idea. Then you might ask me, why are you redoing it? I gotta sell the house. Or it's just so old that my kids won't use it anymore, whatever. And it's like, so you wanna get it done by this time, but you wanna accomplish this. But now I'm into the future state. This is very high level, but as I go through these questions, it becomes very clear and easy for this guy to say, well, know, Home Depot has a delivery service or
or Home Depot has a project checklist, where every time you hit a project, it tells you all the things you need before you start that project. So now you don't have to forget things. If you said you redo in the bathroom, it has a whole list of all the things you need. Do you think that might help you? Yes. Do see what I did there? So that's the whole key is I built this structure that helps you understand their current state and what information you're looking for.
then translate that to the future state and what they want to accomplish. And once you've done that, becomes painfully clear what the next step is.
The whole point is to start the conversation around the acceptance of, yes, this is happening.
The minute they say, yes, this is happening. Now you start digging into how long is it happening? What's the impact of it's happening? Why is it happening? Like, you know, tell me about this. Tell me about that.
Dave Irwin (06:36)
Well, I like, I like your metaphor of a doctor, sort of, if you think about your account and the entire corporation first is like a single patient and you're going around assessing sort of problems, you know, what, does a doctor do? Right? They don't, they don't start prescribing the treatment, you know, right away when they walk in the door, right? They're asking a lot of questions, trying to assess and understand it, but the account managers are in a unique position to sort of
look at that account as a patient and one that they can address a lot of different problems with. So that's a good sort of mental state. So what about the concept of the fact that inside of one of these huge accounts, right, there's lots of, so just on an individual transaction, there can be many buyers, right? There's like 10 mini patients, you know, there's the IT team, there's the procurement team, the finance team, the sponsoring, you business unit.
When you get into sort of framing the gap, you the future state, you modify it per buyer? How do you think about multiple buyers in the same sort of, you know, decision-making process? Because some of these, you know, 10 buyers, 20 buyers is not uncommon now when you're into, you know, larger scale, you know, sales opportunities inside of an account.
Keenan (07:55)
Well, I think the first thing you do is you have to build an account diagram or account buyer matrix, right? Like who's involved and what is their role in it? How many of them are just influencers versus actual decision makers versus how many people can say no, but can't say yes. I think that's the one thing we miss all too often is that there are a lot of people that can say no, but can't say yes. I mean, those are biggest pain in the butt. I think so once you have that matrix and you understand each of their roles, what you have to ask yourself is, you know, how does this problem in
Sales, we'll go with that. Problem in sales affect IT. What is IT's position and why would they say or not, why would they say no or yes or what are they going to need to see to feel comfortable? Okay, so the first thing I like to do is go to the actual functional group who's having the frontline business problem it's trying to solve, right? And I want to do a full-fledged gap selling so I can assess the cost of inaction.
So I'm gonna do this whole entire process and get to a gap. And if I've done it correctly within the functional group and the buyers in that functional group, I'm gonna have enterprise level, I'm gonna have a 10, 12, 15, $20 million, $50 million hole, right?
So now when I go to our gap, now when I go to IT and IT is like, look, you can't do this. It doesn't meet our, what do you call it? Our cybersecurity standards or something like that. So unless another competitor does, just leave that out, I was like, okay, great. But do you understand that this is $60 million hole that you're stopping? So help us understand how we can help you feel comfortable so that you can then make sure that you're not in the way of sales.
So walk us through, and then I do the same thing, current state future state, walk us through what that process looks like and those policies look like. Where is the biggest concern with this ours? Can we fix that or is there a way you can soften up the policies? Can we do other things? So you just go through and figure out again, right? What their current state is, what their desired future state is and what is the gap to them within their functional group. So it takes a lot, but you don't do it with every single person. You'll never get the sale done. And then what you do is when you get that functional group piece labeled,
I hate to say this, but you leverage it against all the naysayers. So it's not, you're not buying the phone. It's you're not letting sales get recouped that $60 million or worse yet, you're getting in the way of sales missing quota again. And you're kind of implying, do you want that on your head? Because they know it needs to be fixed and they're ready to move. You're in the way of them missing quota again.
Dave Irwin (10:31)
That's great. it sounds like, you know, mapping out a diagram, making sure you at least understand the functional departments, you know, involved, you sort of fit the story around each of those. But basically it's the clarity of that current state versus future state. How do you, do you show that visually? Do you encourage people to show like a picture of that, or is it in the form of outcomes or desired outcomes or impacts? What is that, you know, output that
that works so well from your point of view in terms of selling that future state. What does it look like?
Keenan (11:08)
Well, we don't believe it's selling the future state. We believe it's selling the gap. And here's why, right? If you look at psychology, and I started this, we believe very strongly that gap selling is based in very fundamental psychological elements. And one of them is that people are driven, or are driven either at the course of levels towards pleasure or away from pain, right? Too many salespeople sell the pleasure piece.
Okay, and marketing's great at selling the pleasure piece. It's like, look, it's a beautiful car. It's this and everybody gets excited and moves to that. But what we've known is people I think are five times more likely to move away from pain, right? So when you do gap selling properly, you're actually selling them both. We start with, hey man, this is what happens if you don't change. And here's the key piece, everybody listening, please for the love of God, hear this closely. And I use a statement every time when it comes to the current state, you cannot.
Dave Irwin (11:42)
Yeah.
Keenan (12:06)
tell them what the current state is. You must ask the questions and only record what they tell you. So when you say, here's the current state, Dave, right? You then say, you told me that you're missing quota by $5 million. You told me that only 60 % of your team is above 50 % of quota. You told me, you see what I'm doing here, Dave?
I'm not making it up, I'm not suggesting, I'm not comparing it to other people. You told me, and therefore if you don't change, this will continue or it could get worse. Then you say, you also told me ideally you'd like to get to 110 % of quota. You want to do that because you just got bought by a private equity firm and they have the expectation of an exit by 2027. And if you don't get these numbers up, they don't make that exit. You also told me, right, see what I'm doing?
so we can get you there. So what I've just done is I've taken you through the pain and the pleasure and put it together.
Dave Irwin (13:09)
Yeah, yeah, emphasizing, right. Emphasizing the pain. And one of the things too is these large deals, you know, we see this all the time in account management, but they, the context of the situation changes too. It's almost like there's an environment around the buyer, right? And then, they're faced with new challenges and evolving situations and new, new things happen. So I call this the relevancy gap, but it's kind of like, if you don't stay on top of those changing contextual factors along the way.
Keenan (13:09)
and then your world. Sorry, go
Yes, yes.
Dave Irwin (13:39)
that are affecting the buyer, you're not as relevant as you would be if you were aware. And clients really appreciate that. I mean, you can tell the difference when a buyer knows that someone is trying to, helps them solve their problem, genuinely help them solve their problem. And that's what builds trust. And, you know, that's a key thing in account management, right?
Keenan (14:01)
Yeah, I think you hit something interesting. And because we're talking enterprise and particularly account management, but enterprise in general, the larger the enterprise, the more complex the solution or the sale, that those are usually in my opinion attached. Usually you don't have complex sales for simple solutions and vice versa. Something happens and I'd like to do some more work on this and maybe even consider writing a book with a psychologist, but I too much in the work right now.
A level of irrationality enters the equation. That is why enterprise deals are so difficult because most of us like to operate from very clear, rational situations, right? We're losing a billion dollars. We know why we're losing it. We better fix it. They're gonna fix it. They're losing a billion dollars, but yet they never fix it. It's kind of like government, right? They know that they're in trouble. They know things aren't working. They know...
but getting them to actually move to fix it, make the investment, make the decision, et cetera, becomes flooded with irrationalities. What if there are other things that we should attack first? What if this doesn't work? It could be my job. What if we make the wrong decision, right? We didn't get the right people on board. So even though we think it's gonna work, we'll be blamed if it doesn't work, even though Tom was the one who made the decision. You see what I'm saying?
There's all kinds of this irrational thought process environment going on that undermines the rational decision. And that changes the game because you can't manage irrationality.
Dave Irwin (15:41)
Yeah, that's a great point. think it's sort of like a storm around the whole thing and you have to sort of, have to be patient, you know, on these bigger deals, right? As you, as you watch them evolve over time. That's, that's part of the issue. And part of the problem is the, is just the changing conditions on the ground and then weighing that in. think, I think to your point, mapping out the requirements in detail, but also tracking and monitoring the different shifting sort of.
Because again, it's an opportunity to show up and be relevant in the context of what's happening to that buyer. let's just flip to the mindset. So why is it so hard for people to adopt problem-centric sort of selling versus product-centric selling?
It's kind of like, used to use this word productitis, but it's sort of like, everybody has it and you can keep it sort of at bay, but it can creep back in, right? As almost a bad habit. so, talk a little bit about your perspective on that and how you sort of, how do you embrace problem solving for life? Cause I would bet that the best account managers are the best problem solvers.
Keenan (16:50)
No questions asked. I would argue the most successful entrepreneurs are the best problem solvers as well. So there's a multiple, I think there are multiple reasons. I will try to keep this short and just kind of touch on them and you can dig deeper if you prefer. One of the main reasons is I believe the sales culture. As much as the sales culture, collectively the ecosystem runs around talking about selling product and sell the solution. mean, sorry, sell the problem, sell the solution, et cetera, et cetera. It's just look at the behaviors.
It's not there, right? No one has the patience for it. And sadly, even those who really believe it don't really understand. I mean, it's gonna be another one of my crazy metaphors, but I really play football, play football. It's most important. And we're playing football, we're playing football. But then I go in and I'm like, you're not playing football. You're playing rugby. Okay, yep, the ball looks similar and you attack each other, but you're not playing anything close to football in spite of what you may think. So I think the first two are, the environment doesn't allow for it because it takes patience.
Dave Irwin (17:43)
Yeah.
Keenan (17:49)
And everybody just wants sales yesterday and push, push, push, push, push, push. Secondly, they don't even really understand what true problem centric selling looks like. And so they bastardized it. They've, they've messed it all up and think they're doing it. And then they pass that nasty stuff on to the people they were, they, they coach and that person grows up and they pass on to the next person. That's the first two. The other one though, that I think is very important is it takes a level of critical thinking skills. It takes a level of.
intelligence, it takes a level of business acumen, et cetera, that a lot of people don't have and are willing to develop and sales organizations don't develop the business acumen.
I would challenge any sale, anybody listen to this, particularly at the enterprise level, I would challenge you and I'll give you some free consulting hours just to prove it to me. Go look at your entire sales enablement process from the onboarding to the training to
a product training, et cetera, and tell me how many hours are spent on training your team on the businesses that you sell to. mean, deep training on the business, who are their customers? How is their product used? How is it taken to market? How does it integrate with other parts of the organization? How does it integrate with the machines? What happens when it's not working? How does it affect cashflow? Like,
Literally step back and I could do that. That's why we're so good here. could tell you exactly how a sales organization's top to bottom, how they work, how they integrate, et cetera, et cetera. The average person can't do that. If you can't do that, you can't go and ask questions. can't be a problem solver. You don't understand the environment of what you're trying to solve. I could never be a problem solver for trying to fix a yield of corn, because I have no idea. I have no idea how you plant corn to maximize yield, what the nitrate ratio needs to be in the soil.
any of that shit. So if I got to sell corn tomorrow, I'm to be a farmer. I'm going to educate the hell out of myself. Sales organizations and companies do not educate their salespeople in the businesses of which they sell and their products make a difference. And finally, they do not teach them the business acumen on top of it all. So of course you're not going to be able to problem-centric sell.
Dave Irwin (20:05)
Well, I think that's such a great point because these, you know, lot of these large enterprise companies, you know, they have, they have enterprise client groups or strategic account team or some kind of diamond account group, but that should have its own culture. That should have its own sort of set of tools and process. Cause it's a lot more about that prescriptive problem solving over and over and over again. Cause I've seen, I've seen incredible success at these large accounts when you have somebody that's good at.
Keenan (20:21)
100 %
Dave Irwin (20:34)
They can pull out hundreds of deals in a year systematically over time and and it's because of the trust and the trust comes from that relevancy and that relevancy comes from the knowledge the business acumen and understanding of the role Right and that comes from insights and really having a deep dive So you're not training on the product you're training on the clients business and you're basically educating the account team on that business and you're evolving that trust and when you have that trust they
Keenan (20:58)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (21:01)
You know, big companies will come to you to solve problems without RFPing any of that. They'll just trust you to solve the problem. They too many things to deal with, too many things to solve. So I really appreciate that point. think people conflate these two worlds, you know, they just apply sales training right into the enterprise accounts and reinforce the transactional behavior versus building relationships. And I wanted to get into that now because, you know, sales transactions are different.
Keenan (21:06)
Yes, they will.
Dave Irwin (21:31)
than account relationships. Now you could say an account, a big account is the sum of a lot of sales transactions, but it's more than that, isn't it? mean, as you evolve that trust, you win bigger deals, you become a more strategic partner. You see some of those announcements where a company, they announce a billion dollar partnership, or you don't get deals like that done without an incredible level of trust and mapping.
of value between the two companies. So the relationship has an opportunity to evolve, right? From transactional sales to prescriptive selling, as you pointed out, really solving the problem, even beyond that to strategic partnership levels. That design, you know, talk a little bit about your perspective on how, you know, it's like, basically, you're just increasingly addressing a bigger gap.
Right? mean, isn't that a thing?
Keenan (22:32)
I
would say a big, I would say you're getting good at identifying multiple gaps and putting them in the appropriate prioritization of the appropriate boxes. So I think what it comes down to again is consider, it's the right word, it's just overplayed. Consider yourself a consultant or a trusted advisor, right? So it's absolutely the right word. It's just so overplayed. It really bothers me because it's become so trite now. But regardless of that, your ability to build relationships on credibility.
That is the key piece that I think everybody misses. And I don't think buyers even get, create the opportunity for many people to position themselves as these true trusted advisor consultants because people have screwed it up so often. They've sort of opened the door for that and then they just end up screwing it up. But the best ones earn that credibility one deal at a time because they offered the right solution with the right, we'll call features or functions.
that addressed the actual problem that person was having at that time. It allowed them to reach the desired outcomes they were looking for, et cetera. So it worked and then they do it again. And then another time they come and say, look, I don't think we're the best fit for this. Based on what I know about this problem and how you've described it, I'm not comfortable doing this. I recommend you go over here and here's why. Do you see what I'm saying? And another point time, the customer says something like, well, I don't think we're gonna go with you right now. And you're like, okay, I understand it, but.
based on what I heard from you and my understanding of the problem, I'm concerned with this. Like, ooh, that's a good point. Didn't think about that. So now you're back. The longer you are, let me start this way. The more you understand at a functional level and then cross-functionally and then eventually the whole org. But if it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise, you are never going to understand that organization horizontally. You're never going to, so stop trying. Stay within the groups and areas you can make the biggest impact, right?
And as you continue to deliver on their goals and objectives through your solutions, the more credible you're going to become. And then the more they're going to look to you for more help because they trust you. They trust that if you make a solution or you offer something and you do something, it's in their best interest, not yours. And we struggle with that. Just look at internal cultures of sales. It is driven by the sales.
teams objectives, not the buyers.
Dave Irwin (25:02)
Right. That's such a great point. I think, I think for account executives, the best account executives, not only being good at problem solving, but they also have to take all this information, these requirements, as you talk about this knowledge and they got to share it back internally with their teams because accounts, you know, buy from the team and their trust of the team to deliver on top of the problem solving sort of match up and fit. Right. It's,
Keenan (25:17)
Yes, yes.
Dave Irwin (25:30)
It's sort of, mean, you have, it's not just a seller now. It's, like the team's ability to be relevant together as a team. know, nobody teaches account teams how to team. don't teach account teams how to work together, how to, you know, be, you know, one single unit and, and aligned on the same page and match off with the right people. You know, it's kind of, you know, it's easy to do a military analogy, like special forces, but it's like,
that teaming side of things, it's really the account executive at least share the knowledge back with the team, keep them informed and up to date. So they're relevant too in those day-to-day conversations. Doesn't that play a role?
Keenan (26:13)
It absolutely does. And even though you didn't bring this up, it's a big part, on what you do, it's a big part of account management and a massive hole. It's a massive hole.
Just think about all the accounts you know and everybody listening, think about anytime you've worked with a customer and you have a customer success team, call it customer account management, customer success, there's another CSA called customer service, right, whatever it is. And your job is to help the client use, maintain, engage with your product or service. You see it lot in SaaS, right? So you sell the SaaS and then your customer success team comes over and they have these quarterly
meetings. Do know what I'm talking about? Where they talk about
Dave Irwin (26:55)
Yeah, the QBRs, right. Yep.
Keenan (26:57)
Yeah, yeah.
The majority of these QB, I'm gonna say majority being nice, but every QB I've ever been in from a customer success side talks about the product, if they're using the product, the frequency of using the product, and they use it to talk about other features or functions that the buyer is not using. Sound about right? Okay. Yes, very good. Here's the problem. If you properly gap sold, then you should have known the current state problem, impact, cause,
Dave Irwin (27:14)
Yes, particularly for software companies.
Keenan (27:27)
You should have known the desired outcome of the future state, future state physical and literal future state problem solved, et cetera, right? You should have known all that. So in a real world customer success environment, every quarterly business review should start with, okay, Dave, when we started this two years ago, I'll just do this, six months ago, you were at whatever the metric was. You were only at a 20 % XYZ, okay?
and that was costing you $17 million a year in lost revenue and whatever, right? And widget expense. You brought our product to solve that. Well, since then we've instituted the product and we've seen a 5 % increase in that. So now you're at 25%. Now we know that you want to get to 60%, but we're heading in the right direction. Your team is using this part of our product and that's why we've seen this bump. But we notice only
7 % of the team is logged in. We noticed that this other feature we told you is critical to getting to this goal is not being used at all. So we'd to set up a meeting to retrain everybody again, because we were concerned they don't understand. Because to get from that 25 % to the 60 by in two years, we have to get your team comfortable with this. Do you see what I'm doing right here? I'm literally making the reason you bought the product, the center of the conversation, not my product.
Dave Irwin (28:42)
Yeah.
Keenan (28:51)
But what we do is we sell the product with product centric selling, buy the phone, buy the phone. Then we do support by, hey, you're not using the camera as much as you should. and you didn't download enough apps. And we're doing product centric customer success. And then at the end of two years, when that customer did not reach their goal, someone picks up and says, we spent all this money on these guys and we only moved that needle 3%. What the frick happened? Yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem.
Dave Irwin (29:16)
Yeah, yeah. Well, think, I think inside of enterprise accounts, I mean, it really becomes the gap selling opportunity is so great because there's so many opportunities. And if you do it right, as you pointed out, you build a lot of different points of, of, you occupy a lot of different spots. You know, we have this thing instead of white space, which is where did I not sell my product? Right. We talk about blue space, which is what are all the problems.
you know, a client wants to solve and why don't I go focus on that view of it, which is the reverse. I should just go in and go into different problem areas and solve those. There's a lot more problem areas to solve than you even have products. So I think, you know, it's sort of flipping that around, but it's, if anybody should be embracing this concept of gap selling and working this way and making it customer centric, if anything, like lead with the customer's point of view.
Keenan (29:58)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (30:12)
You're right, the QBRs are basically self-serving. They're almost for account, the inside management team to understand how did our products serve this client, not what does the client need? And this is a cultural problem for them.
Keenan (30:15)
Yes.
What is
the client trying to accomplish? Let's move away from that term need, right? We do that, what does the client need? No, what is the client trying to accomplish? An old school Stephen Covey, right? Start with the end in mind, right?
Dave Irwin (30:45)
Yeah, and the outcomes aren't the focus. It's the task list. You've got some really interesting statistics, I think, just on buyers themselves, like their own ability to even solve their own problems or even to know what their problems are or to recognize when they should be acting on a problem. there's one quote somebody said to me once, that like 85 % of CEOs don't think their own companies know how to solve their own problems.
So they want people to help them solve their problems. That's the point. So they need people to come in and help them problem solve. And they're welcoming of that. Talk a little bit about some of your research there and statistics around.
Keenan (31:11)
Yes.
I don't have
it in front of me. So I'll just try to do my best. So everybody go download it at salesgrowth.com. Download it. It's the how buyers want to buy survey. But some of the things that jumped out at me, and again, I'm telling them to mess up the numbers so no one lose their business, is that something like 40 % of people or 45 % of buyers, re-scope the problem.
after they start the buying process. So that was one that shocked me. So what it tells you is they go in and they think they need something or they're looking to buy something and they haven't even properly scoped the problem before they even started. They're like, it's sort of like me going back to Home Depot all the time, right? Over and over again, like I don't understand the problem. I haven't tried to fix it. So that's the first one. So I thought it was fascinating that these buyers running out there trying to buy products and services have no idea what they're trying to fix or they haven't really got a good understanding. Another one is,
Dave Irwin (32:06)
Yeah, over and over.
Keenan (32:21)
the average rescope once they do figure out is anywhere between three and five times. So that old school adage that has stuck with us forever, a buyer's 70 % through the buying process by the time they reach out to a sales person, they may think they are, but they're not because they have no idea what they're trying to solve for, right? I mean, other statistics that jumped out at me is I think 50 % or 60 % of people actually have bought something from somebody they didn't know they needed.
I love that one. It's like, I didn't even know I needed this until I met a salesperson. So this is fantastic. So it's filled with these types of statistics that should, that paint a picture of what buyers want from salespeople. The big thing that came out collectively was buyers said they want three things. They want salespeople who understand the problems they're trying to solve, what they're trying to accomplish and an understanding of the product in that order. Product was third.
Dave Irwin (32:53)
Hahaha
Keenan (33:21)
in almost every category when it came to what did they want from a salesperson? Product was third, which makes logical sense, because if you're pushing a product and you don't know the problem, impact, the root cause of what you're trying to accomplish, you lose credibility because why are you trying to sell me this, right? So I think there was a lot in there that really highlighted that salespeople need to change and where they need to change. And so anybody who cares enough, who runs a sales org, it's a blueprint of how you should structure your sales org.
Dave Irwin (33:50)
Yeah, I think that when you're on the selling side, you don't think about the fact that the buyer needs guidance. They need a trusted advisor. They're looking for ideas. They want insights brought to them and it's going to change, Their buying situation is going to evolve and they're going to learn things. And if you're there along the way, you earn that right. But there is a payoff for businesses. And I agree with you.
Businesses are way too sales centric and they're not looking at these, I call it the invisible pipeline, but there's this huge amount of needs that can be solved at these large enterprise accounts. you know, that's just the global 2000. spent half the world, half the globe's money is spent by the top 2000 companies in the world. There's so much problem solving opportunity there, but they don't look at it as, they put the right machinery in place, you know, in the right culture as we talked about to sort of,
mind that, but when it's done well by, you know, just somebody who's good at problem solving, somebody who's good at listening, you know, somebody who's empathetic with the customer's need, just basically don't you don't have to try too hard. You just got to be there. You will be amazed at the results you can get, you know, the repeat sales, the volume, the building, the trust, you know, people start to, we even have quotes from research 20 years ago. That's, you know, when I find a vendor that
Keenan (34:55)
Yes.
Dave Irwin (35:11)
that I trust to solve my problems. I don't even look anymore to other vendors or other alternatives, because I don't have time. So I know I can just go to them over and over again. So that's really what we're after in the enterprise account side. So wrapping up, Keenan, it's been great to talk about this on the enterprise side. What would be sort of just top takeaways that you would recommend to account teams, larger account teams, just from applying these concepts that you?
Keenan (35:15)
Yes, yeah.
Thank you.
Dave Irwin (35:39)
that you recommend in gap selling.
Keenan (35:42)
Who's the advice
for the person who runs the entire sales organization like the CRO, the individual who manages the account team, who's the advice for?
Dave Irwin (35:50)
Well, maybe we break it into two buckets. One could be for organizational leaders like CROs, how should you think about a different type of approach inside of enterprise accounts? And the second is for account leaders, right? Who are leading their team, who are that lead trusted advisor to the client, who's expected to drive these large scale growth.
Keenan (36:10)
From the CRO perspective,
it's a pretty complicated answer. I'm gonna simply say this is you need to step back and take a good solid look at your sales organization and ask yourself, where are you heavy and where are you weak across these three elements? The skills layer, which you're probably pretty decent at, you got enablement team, you got the skills letter, but then how are you translating that skill layer into what we call the opportunity layer? What type of processes and methods are in place to...
to watch the salesperson, guide the salesperson, coach the salesperson, help them build strategies around the account management element. What are those strategies based on? What methods are you using to build those strategies, et cetera? So again, you have to look at this from a process and a tool perspective, like in a framework perspective. What tools, process, and frameworks have I put in place that is going to improve the way my sales team connects with folks?
What are the, what is the vernacular that's being used? What is the frameworks being used? What are the policy? What is all of that look like? And then finally, how does that translate into forecasting, which I won't force with. So I just don't believe CRO spent enough time truly understanding the framework, culture and environment that they built. Right? I mean, I literally had a, here's a perfect example. I'm not going to say the name longer answer than you wanted, but this is probably a $350 million company and
The CEO, CRO looked me right in the eye and he said, we probably have thousands of opportunities sitting in our pipeline that are dead that nobody's touched. They're actual opportunities. I'm like, they're not just names, they're literally opportunities. And he had to build some process that will allow them to weed those out so they could figure out what the real opportunities were and what the shitty ones were. And all I can think about is, and you still have your job. And you still have your job.
Dave Irwin (37:58)
Yeah.
Keenan (38:01)
I don't care what you like, you do not understand. You have not built the right processes, methods, frameworks, structures to either prevent that from happening or fix it and get back on track, right? So that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Not enough CROs are close enough to their sales org to actually understand what works, what doesn't work and know that it's running effectively. On the other side, at the account management level, everything we said here, my advice is simply understand that customer.
better than anybody, the customer understands themselves. If you're running multiple teams, like so if you're the account manager and you've got six, seven, eight, nine, 12 people that work for you to manage that account, then I would manage every one of them to the same concept. if one's in HR and one's in IT or whatever, where are they functionally responsible? And is their job to understand that function better than anybody else, including the customer itself? I would, again, back to establishing structures and frameworks, I would have meetings and I would have...
frameworks that require that my team can come back and report on what they've learned, what they know. I'd have repositories of data that allowed me and or them to be able to track who's running what, what's important, where's the organization going, where are they struggling, what problems have we seen, et cetera. It matters that whole thing from a data and a relationship perspective so I can always stay on top of it. And so that the buyer always knows that my whole day is built as if I were an employee around maximizing their ability to meet their goals.
Dave Irwin (39:30)
Fantastic, fantastic advice. Well, thanks Keenan for joining us. It's been great to talk about this. what would be a way for our audience to get a hold of you or access the content, the stats you talked about?
Keenan (39:42)
So you can go to salesgrowth.com and go to resources. We have a million of them, everything you could possibly imagine. You can follow me, Keenan at LinkedIn. You can follow a company, Sales Growth, a company on LinkedIn. It's not too hard. Any one of those spots you can find us.