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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Lori:
My longtime saying it has been, never confuse sales activity with accomplishment. Because right, it's really easy to be busy and stay busy and it's one other thing to be productive. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, here, but maybe somebody that's listening, it will make them think that not everything you do is high value and you need to focus on high value things that lead to moving your opportunity forward and ultimately bringing it to closure.
Andy Paul:
Hi friends, welcome to the Win Rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Lori Richardson, and Lori is one of my guests on this episode of the Win Rate podcast. Lori is the founder and president of Women Sales Pros. She's the founder of her own company, Score More Sales, as well as the author of an excellent book titled she Sells. And she's the host of her own podcast titled Conversations with Women in Sales. My other guest today for this roundtable discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and increasing your win rates is Matt Benelli. Matt is the co founder of Coacham, which is a coaching execution platform. Matt is also the host of a new podcast titled Coach to Scale how Modern Leaders Build a Coaching Culture. Now, a few quick items of business before we jump into today's discussion. First, if you're serious about improving your sales effectiveness and increasing your win rates, then please subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's called win rate Wednesday. And each Wednesday you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates. Now to subscribe, just visit my website, Andypaul.com. It's right there on the homepage. Second, we still have a few spaces available for the next session on my Buyer Experience Boot Camp, starting on September twelveTH. This Buyer Experience Bootcamp is my five week group coaching program that teaches you how to fix your broken win rates by delivering the buying experience your buyers actually want. Because how you sell is how you win. So registration is open for just a few more days. For more information and to grab your seat in this class, go to andypault.com slash bootcamp. Okay, if you're ready, let's jump into the discussion. Hello and welcome to today's show. Joining me as my guests, first of all, Laurie Richardson, longtime friend, founder of Score More Sales, president of Women's Sales Pros, and author of a book recently. We've been talking about book for a long time. Laurie, you got it published, a great book called she Sells, and we're going to give you a chance to talk about that a little bit later. And then also joining us is Matt Benelli, co founder of Coacham. So, yeah, we'll start with Laurie. Laurie, why don't you fill in that bio just a little bit, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Lori:
Yeah, thanks Andy, it's a pleasure to be here with you and Matt. I have been involved in selling my entire life and got into helping other companies to sell better and build better sales teams about 20 years ago and have been self employed ever since then and launched Women Sales Pros in 2015. When I walked into a room of almost 100 sales managers and directors of sales, and they were almost all men, and I just thought, is this the 80s? Because there aren't very many women in this room. There are maybe four women. And that's what caused me to start doing research about women in sales and getting more women into sales. And then ultimately the book.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit of the book. Don't skip over it. Yeah.
Lori:
So the book is called she sells, Attract, Retain and Promote Great Women in B. Two b sales. And it's a lot of answers. It's very tactical for those managers and leaders who do want more women on their sales team who do want more diversity, but they're having trouble either in the hiring or the onboarding or the retention. And so we just answer lots of questions in the book, very hands on.
Andy Paul:
Yeah, we're going to ask you a question about that just a little bit later. So, Matt, tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure.
Matt:
Like Lori, I've been an operator in the Space in Sales for many years. We focus primarily on helping of B to B and technology clients. I've served in all of the roles with SDR, frontline manager, director, VP, which means I've made every mistake in the book probably more times than I care to admit. And then one of them was and it's one of the reasons why I'm really looking forward to this discussion is really trying to build a gender diverse team and really focusing on how to do that for the right reasons, but made all the mistakes along the way and accepted a lot of the excuses. So as a leader, as someone buildings, I want to read that book. And as I mentioned before we got started, I also am sharing it with my daughter, who's just entering the workforce. So all of that, andy and Lori led me and a few others to co found Hochum, where we're focused on helping managers be better coaches, help them focus on coaching and developing their people to help them become the best versions of themselves individually and help the company achieve its goals as well.
Andy Paul:
Got it. And so is Coacham in the market?
Matt:
Is Coachim in the market?
Andy Paul:
Yeah. You're selling to customers right now?
Matt:
Yeah, we're selling to customers right now. If you know anybody no, we do. We're a startup in the true sense of the word. We have our first several clients that will work in Dill Jillian to make sure that they're successful so that they can tell the world. And we love having conversations about coaching.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. No, I love it. I love it. I think it's well long overdue to have something that's so focused specifically on frontline managers to help them become better. Because I think all of us here, certainly on this panel and many people listening, understand just the incredible impact frontline managers have on the success of the people that work for them and the.
Lori:
Lack of training they often get and.
Andy Paul:
The lack of training they get, which is shameful. I would say 20 words or less. Yeah. I like to say, look, if we spend LinkedIn's state of sales a couple of years ago, says, like $15 billion a year on sales training in the United States, of which, let's say 5% of it maybe, is spent on training frontline managers? What would happen if we shifted those ratios and said, look, we're going to spend 95% of those $15 billion on enabling and training frontline managers and leadership in general, and we'll spend 5% on training salespeople? What would happen?
Lori:
Great idea.
Andy Paul:
I think we'd be better off for it.
Matt:
Well, we would be better off. Customers would be happier, longer term clients, which means more retention, less churn. Employees would stay at organizations longer, so they would be more productive. I know that's an important point for you, Andy, where you spend a lot of time talking about productivity. A lot of good things will happen. And the data clearly supports it. The data clearly supports that a coaching organization, an organization that focuses on measuring the coaching behaviors of managers, does well longer term versus a more directive organization where the manager says, here's what you need to do, or worse, step out of the way, let me show you how it's done.
Andy Paul:
I think we're seeing right. We're seeing the impact of that, though, right, as it becomes sort of this self fulfilling cycle of events that happen, as if you have managers that are undertrained. Because we know that frontline managers typically are themselves relatively inexperienced, even as salespeople. Right? They could be the top salesperson or whomever, but they've been in sales for a relatively short period of time themselves, so they're uncertain even about really how to navigate throughout the entire sales process confidently. Then we throw them in these roles where they're responsible for developing other people. And I was promoted. My first sales management job in 22 months, something like that. Here I was, 23 years old, managing twelve people, and sure, I just had two good years of sales under my belt, not even. And it's like, okay, now what do I do?
Matt:
You got the battlefield promotion. Wow. Great year, Andy. You're a tremendous salesperson now you're a manager.
Andy Paul:
You're a manager. Yeah. And when I got promoted, there's supposed to be two sales managers. When I got promoted, the other sales manager was gone. I was like, okay. Yeah. But I look at that. I remember those first until they brought another sales manager on, which took them a few months, but there's this period of, like three or four months. I remember those being the most stressful period in my career. It was just like yeah. I did eventually get sent to training for it. I got two weeks of training. Yeah. I was like because I felt responsible.
Lori:
Yeah, that's why you were so stressed, because you cared, right? You cared so much.
Andy Paul:
But now we take young people and they feel like they have to follow a recipe or a playbook, and it's like, no, it's all about the people.
Lori:
Yeah.
Andy Paul:
So a question for you is because this show was about sales effectiveness and win rates is so, Matt, when you were carrying a bag, did you track.
Matt:
Your win rate diligently Andy down to the hour? No, I did not. I did not track my win rate. I was told that you needed a four X or five X or three X pipeline and that we all needed to get that. But I also know that when I first started, I needed a hell of a lot more pipeline than that than the other folks who needed less pipeline to close the same amount of business. But I didn't know that until later. So that's a longer answer, but the short answer is hell no.
Andy Paul:
Hell no.
Lori:
Laurie well, on the other hand, I did track a lot of things. I tracked successful conversations way back when compared to dials and connect, and I would do the whole thing and I would track my win rate, generally speaking, but I did it for myself. And I worked for companies that had leaderboards and things like that, but they were pretty crude. Yeah. So I'd say not as well as you can do now. So a lot of great metrics that are available, a lot of great ways to track better than I did.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. Well, I was fortunate to have a boss who really emphasized it. It wasn't knowing the organization, tracked it. He just said, I need to track it because this is what successful people do. You understand? This is your most critical metric. But yeah, to your point, lori is given all the technologies available to track data these days, very few people are tracking their win. Yeah, I have anecdotal evidence of talking to lots and lots, hundreds and hundreds of people in all sorts of organizations. People aren't tracking it. Yeah. We've been running some cohort based coaching programs over the last six months, and I would say fewer than 10% of the sellers, many of whom are experienced 1020 year sellers coming into it, know their win rate. So if they don't know it, that means no one's asking them to know it. The managers aren't tracking it either.
Matt:
Well, I'd be interested to what you and Lori think here, but one of the challenges that seems to get in the way for managers tracking it is to do that, you have to really have a 360 degree view into where salespeople are spending their time. And in order to do that, it comes across as to many managers, especially newer managers, they don't want to be that micromanager. And that has a pejorative context that many managers want to avoid. And while it is important for some reason, it's got a bad mean.
Andy Paul:
Lori, the companies you work with as a consultant, are they tracking win rates?
Lori:
Yeah, I would say so. That's why I'm curious what you mean by that, Matt, about micromanaging. Do you mean because opportunities come from a lot of different places or is there not a central place to track opportunities and ultimately closure of those?
Matt:
Well, I guess if I went on to say that, what I mean is it's not being tracked at the individual level. And so where I see companies that are tracking win rates all the time, every way till Sunday, but the specific win rate of rep A versus rep B versus rep C and what is being done with that information? Or how to coach and develop and coach up the folks who have the lower win rates to be more like those in the top decile. That type of focus I don't see happening as much as companies I think would benefit from.
Andy Paul:
Yeah, I think companies also are what they're doing is they're looking a little bit to your point, Matt. They're looking at average win rates, but they're not looking at as, hey, what's our win rate? By product or by segment or by deal size or deal length or any of the things that are really for you really to understand sort of the composition of your revenue, you really should understand.
Lori:
So important.
Andy Paul:
Yeah, and I can just love it's anecdotal as, I'll admit, but I have talked to a lot of people on this show over the years and very few people know this. And it's sort of shocking to me because we've all become obsessed with our activity metrics and so on. But at the end of the day, the buyer ultimately has a vote about whether you win or not. And your win rate is the buyer's vote on how well a job you did.
Lori:
Yeah.
Andy Paul:
So I would think that's something that should be top of list for people. And so I guess I'd ask the question, one of the questions of asking all the guests that come on the show is in your mind what? It's hard to generalize, I know, but my follow up question we'll get into the reason why I asked this is what is an acceptable win rate for an Ae?
Lori:
Laurie, when it depends. I'd love to give you a number.
Andy Paul:
Well, tell us what you mean. Depend on what?
Lori:
Well, for me, progressing in my career and a lot of people, I've seen win rates get better over time, generally.
Andy Paul:
Hopefully.
Lori:
Yeah, hopefully falls well. So a newer AEA is not going to be as successful.
Andy Paul:
Also, I'm assuming that past the learning curve.
Lori:
We're talking about people they're referred, they're higher. It could be a lot of different things. But I haven't seen a percentage. I know what we do, but it's different when you have more of a brand out there. But I don't know. Matt, do you have any idea?
Andy Paul:
Well, and Before Matt Goes, just by way of context, is a really excellent book that's published within the last couple of years called Strikingly Different Selling, authored by Jennifer Colossimo and co authors, all execs with Franklin Covey. And they'd commissioned outside research on win rate. And they found that thousands of companies were surveyed, I want to say 4500, I could be off across multiple industry segments, so not just tech. And they found that on deals one hundred K and higher, 100K is relatively small deal these days. Per K and higher win rate, 17% average.
Lori:
Wow.
Andy Paul:
As well, in B two B, this is B to B across different industry segments. I forget exactly how many, but so interesting. So, yeah, you look at that and say, well, and I'd referred this in my last book, is when your win rates are so low, the buyers are making the decision to buy from you in spite of you, not because of you. Yeah, right. That experience in general, what they're saying is the experience with sellers is so bad that, yeah, we need to make a change, but we're doing it not because of them, but because in spite of them. And now a word from Cognizant. Picture this, your revenue team, armed with accurate B Two B contact data that leaves missed opportunities and unreachable prospects in the past, look no further than Cognizant, the B two B contact data provider that stands out with unwavering focus on data quality and coverage. Cognizant's US data set alone offers two times more cell phone numbers than any other provider on the market. And it gets even better. 7 million human verified cell phone numbers, backed by a 98% accuracy rate, deliver precision like you've never seen before. And if international business growth is on the horizon, cognizant offers the most complete GDPR compliant data in Europe, making your expansion dreams more attainable than ever. Customers like Drift have already experienced the power of Cognizant. In just 30 days, they proved ROI and now book 70% of their outbound meetings using Cognizant's cell phone data. But don't take our word for it. Get a free data sample and test the quality for yourself. Head over to Cognizant.com slash data sample to get your free data sample today. That's cognizant.com slash data sample.
Matt:
Andy, I think that we've all grown up in the business where having a three X, a four X, a five X pipeline coverage would be an indicator of success. So if you have five X coverage that supports, about what you just said, a 17%, your win rate is going.
Andy Paul:
To be the reciprocal of your pipeline coverage requirement. Rule of thumb.
Matt:
I just spoke with a potential client today and they were talking about the need to improve their process and part of it was in their CRM system when they issued a quote, they called that at 50%. And so the follow up question was, so if you issue a proposal or quote, how many of those do you win? And it was like a lot less than 50%. It doesn't jive. So it also, I think, depends when do you measure the win rate from what point in the pipeline? Because a lot of what we see happening is the confusion of activity with results. And there's a lot of stuff in the pipeline that can give us a false sense of security. And we know if we have all these deals, we feel like we're working stuff, something's going to close. And I think that's where coaching and that's where the leader, the manager can come in to help provide some objectivity, to help put that extra set of eyes and ears to say, hey, I know you're working really hard. This isn't a reflection on you. But do you really think this is a qualified opportunity that you and the rest of the team should be investing their time on instead? Sometimes the managers drop so hard that they get in the happy ears too, and they're willing to work and throw resources at every opportunity. And it just perpetuates that low win rate that you're talking about, which creates a tremendous opportunity cost.
Lori:
And if I could add without doing that soon enough, the time cost is insurmountable unbelievable in terms of wasted time when people are trying to nurture unqualified opportunities.
Andy Paul:
Oh, yeah, and to Matt's point about we sort of perpetuate these vicious cycles, well, think about it. It operates on, in my mind, multiple levels. So think about just from a marketing spend standpoint, right? If you're operating a low win rate environment, let's say it's 20%, you're putting a lot of stress on marketing to keep that pipeline full of activity, right, of potential leads. But if you manage to get your win rates up where they should be, you'll decide what that number could be later is. Yeah, even if you increase it to 30% or 35%, you need many fewer leads. But when you are in a low win rate environment, just think of the feedback that's getting fed back to marketing about the type of leads we need. It's not very good because you really don't have a good handle on it because you're only winning in one of every five. So again, that creates this vicious cycle where the feedback from sales to marketing really isn't that good. Whereas if you're winning a higher fraction of your deals, that intelligence you feedback to marketing about the type of opportunities you should be getting from them. Be much more on.
Matt:
How what about this, Andy, where you start to realize, all right, if everyone understands what their personal win rate is, and then the manager works with each individual to improve that win rate from wherever it is we're talking about consistent improvement. We're now a personalized coaching so we don't need a revolution, but if we could just evolve and get that proverbial 1% better every day, every week, every month, it's going to have a big impact on the organization.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. The knock on effects, I said on marketing spend, on even staffing. Right. Look at so many companies now they decide to, well, if we're going to scale, we need to add these bodies. But you're adding these bodies into a process that's inherently ineffective. So we should really be doing is focusing, well, how do we learn how to sell the product we have? Achieve a higher win rate, then let's add people into that who can because we now understand how to sell. Whereas like most companies these days, oftentimes, especially when they're trying to scale quickly, is they don't know how to sell the product they have. Yeah.
Lori:
I like, Matt, that you said personalized coaching as opposed to pushing something at people but actually doing it based on their success or lack of success and based on the traits that they need to focus on and the skills that they have.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. There was something I'd read this week, LinkedIn well known thought leader, or let's say somebody with a relatively big following, talking about how the sales environment changed and we're through with the growth at all costs type stuff. And it saying for him, his best advice was if you really want to grow sales, you got to get your best leads, give it to your best people because the best people make sure you can convert and win at higher rates. And he was defining top sellers as people who had able to achieve a 35% win rate. And I was just thinking back to my conversation with Dave Brock on the show. Dave was on the first episode. Dave top sales consultant, ran teams for big companies and his experience was similar to mine, is I was managing teams at companies, we were growing. 35% was the minimum in order to people to keep their jobs. Yeah, people are thinking 35% win rates, well, that's a top seller.
Lori:
I'm like, yeah, that's amazing.
Andy Paul:
Is it? Have we changed that much where I think that represents top performance?
Lori:
Well just going to say we've been in this period certainly in the tech sector, where you didn't have to be that good to be successful and that's all the bubble burst. And now people are learning in very hard lessons that you do need to be good and you do need to know what you're talking about and you do need to add value to your buyers. And so it's not surprising, but yeah, top sellers should have a much higher win rate than that.
Andy Paul:
What do you think, Matt?
Matt:
I think, yes. What are we trying to aspire to? Right, we should have better win rates. The question then becomes, well, why don't.
Andy Paul:
We.
Matt:
That there's greater headwinds this business is not getting any easier, for sure. But what are we doing to get better? What are we really doing to improve those win rates? What was the win rate last quarter, last year? And then why is it what it is and what can we do to fix it? And how do we take steps to do that? So when the three of us got into this business, there was the 80 80 rule. 80% of the sellers made 80% or more of their number. And what's happened over the past ten plus years is the investment in technology and tools to support sellers has increased exponentially. The investment in training, I think you said it was $15 billion. That number has gone up tremendously and the incentives and the spiffs have gone up. Everybody's trying the best they can, but how are those aligned? How are those aligned to support the behavior that we want our sellers to embody on a daily basis? So it's so focused on getting the deal. And I've heard you talk about this, Andy, on several of your podcasts, sales acceleration and how that's a myth. So oh, how do we do that? We sell by the end of the month and we'll give you this discount. And you said once, have you ever done the analysis on how many of those deals actually close? And the answer is obviously not, because I know that I've gone around the world asking that question. And if a sales team offers ten different incentives, ten deals, puts incentives out there to get those ten deals closed in the month, on average, the self reporting back is that maybe two of those ten will close, which means that eight don't. That eight don't, and those eight go forward. And then what happens next month? We're negotiating off of the lower price. Yes, we've all been, and we're all doing it for trying to do the right reasons. But why is it and it's I think partly because of the short term pressures that CROs sales leaders, frontline managers and reps are under to get the deal, not focusing on doing the right behaviors consistently over time. That's hard.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. Laurie, you're about to jump in.
Lori:
No, I totally agree. It makes a lot of sense, and I still think it comes from the lack of leadership vision, clear goals, and training and coaching for the frontline leadership, the managers. If that isn't done well, people are just doing the best they can, like Matt said. But that doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't mean that it's going to lead to deal closure and to happy buyers.
Andy Paul:
Yeah, well, reflecting back on point you talked about earlier, Lori, this is not a new issue, but it seems to be something that's been accentuated or amplified over the last 1015 years, is that as a seller, you have to make a choice about where you invest your time. And you've got a limited amount of time, so you have to be incredibly disciplined about who you're choosing to sell to. But this idea of choosing who you sell to seems foreign to a lot of sellers because they feel this pressure is, I got these opportunities, we have to sell to these opportunities. You don't get this five X pipeline coverage requirement when it should be, yeah, I'm going to sell to you, I'm not going to sell to you because you're just not a good enough fit. We can go through the reasons they were going to disqualify you. And I was taught very early on by one particular manager is don't think about qualifying prospects, start with disqualifying them first. Right. Get rid of the people you shouldn't be spending time with and you are making a choice who you want to sell to. And I talk about those as sellers and I think it's such an important mindset to have as so few are being sort of taught this is that, yeah, I understand the pressures you feel. We all felt pressures as people who are individual self contributors to hit our numbers and so on and so forth. But ultimately you have to control your time and control where you think you can succeed and the best path to doing that and you shouldn't feel pressured into investing, let yourself feel pressured into investing your time into something that's just not a good fit.
Matt:
Yeah, a lot of sellers, especially younger, less experienced sellers coming into the business, don't know that they can select with whom they spend their time with versus not. And they feel empowered when they go through training and they understand that they can. So you talk a lot about mindset and really, how important is that? So one of the phrases that rings loudly is that not everybody is qualified to be your customer.
Andy Paul:
Right?
Matt:
Not everybody. Whatever company you work for, not every prospect is qualified to become a customer for a whole host of different reasons. And the other one is that prospects buy for their reasons on their timelines, they buy for their reasons, not yours. Right? And so if you think about like that, it really changes how we approach and engage with clients and how managers help coach their salespeople to work.
Andy Paul:
I think that sellers should look at this whole process of who they decide they're going to sell to is like, I use this image in my first book is you're the bouncer at the head of the velvet rope, letting people into a club. And it's up to you, you decide who gets into your club and not everybody gets into your club. And as a seller, you're listening as individual contributors. That's one way of taking control of how you sell, is making that decision about, yeah, this is very entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial and also, hey, we're trying to as a salesperson, I look at things as every step I take, every interaction I have should be designed to increase the. Probability of me winning the deal. Right, right. And that starts with choosing who it is you're going to sell to.
Matt:
Well, going into the wayback machine, the.
Andy Paul:
Way back machine, I was the bouncer.
Matt:
At that club, and.
Andy Paul:
One of the.
Matt:
Things that we learned is one of the ways to get people to want to come into your club is to tell them that you can't just walk in. You have to wait to get into the club. And we would create this line. And then all of a sudden, what happened is we were in downtown Boston, so the Patriots players or the players, right? They'd walk up and they're like, what's going on here? We want to get in. Well, there's a line. Well here. Can we get in? And maybe I don't want to divulge too much we're being reported, but it ended up being a good entrepreneurial business. The club made its money, and we realized that being this broker to this exclusive place where people were waiting in line to get in had its privileges. You don't just let anyone into the club.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. Sellers I think especially, again, if you're really focused on, hey, I want to win a greater fraction of my deals, learn how to do that consistently, because it is to my mind, it's an experience of shown. It's a ticket to more consistent success selling bigger deals, ultimately, perhaps, earning more money. Is sellers you have to exercise some sort of control over how you spend your time. And until you establish that control and again, it's a learning curve. Admittedly, as we become more experienced, it becomes easier to do, but it does also put the onus on you to deliver. Right?
Lori:
Yeah. Matt said my longtime saying, it has been never confuse sales activity with accomplishment because it's really easy to be busy and stay busy, and it's one other thing to be productive. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but maybe somebody that's listening, it will make them think that not everything you do is high value. And you need to focus on those high value things, like you said, Andy, that lead to moving your opportunity forward and ultimately bringing it to closure, or not, one or the other does it.
Andy Paul:
Make the possibility of winning higher? And example I like to give is I'm a huge soccer fan. Right. And so one of the metrics that's used in soccer is they have this metric called the Xg, the expected goal. And so what they do is they track every shot on goal that's made the distance it's made from, the direction it's made for, was it kicked, was it headed? And there's these variables, and they track and assign a sort of score, a rating to it. But the idea being is that shots taken from a certain percent, certain position on the field, left foot, right foot, whatever, has a certain expected goal value. And so it drives sort of the formation the teams use and the strategies they employ to try to get the ball in a position where a player with a high expected goal average takes the shot right to maximize the possibility of scoring. Because it's a game where scoring is at a premium. Just like in sales, winning is at a premium.
Matt:
Well, so Andy, isn't that sifting through the data, taking all that data that's out there, using the information to get some insight, to create a competitive advantage, understanding where to shoot from. Right.
Andy Paul:
And that's huge based on the team you have, right? Yeah.
Matt:
I was watching the basketball game, the Celtics game the other night with my daughter in Boston, and I said, I don't ever remember as a kid that they would shoot this many three pointers. And so I went into Chat GBT and said something like, is the number of three point shots more now than they were 20 years ago? And I got this 100%. And it's because they found with the data, with the ability to track these things, they recognized that if you shot more at three pointers, you'd win more.
Lori:
Of them, you'd make more of them.
Matt:
And then, okay, now we have to recruit people. You missed every shot.
Andy Paul:
You don't take.
Matt:
All that. But that's really using the five to eight or whatever the number is. Now the proliferation of this technology stack to help managers and sellers figure out which shots to take and when and which ones not to take. Kind of going back to the club analogy, we let people in the club that were always problems, and it was always a problem to get them out of the club to the point where, no, you can't come into the club anymore because you're a pain in the ass. You cause problems, you cause police to come here. Don't let those people in anymore. The data is very clear.
Andy Paul:
Right.
Matt:
So it's the same idea we sellers, we take on clients just to get the deal that we're like. This is going to be a problem later. And I think more and more sales leaders are recognizing that the quality of the revenue is as or more important than the quantity.
Andy Paul:
Yeah, I agree. Not all revenue is equal, but I think you also balance that, though, with more and more companies hopefully are doing this, is understanding why the buyer bought. Right. Because the data shows increasingly that the decisions that buyers are making, especially in crowded markets with a lot of competitors, really doesn't have anything to do with the product or the price because they're virtually all the same. So what's the differentiation is, what is the experience we had going through this process to make our decision? What was our experience with the seller? Well, it not only matters, it's the single biggest individual factor in the buyer's decision. And they brought this up in the Challenger sale based on Gartner or CB research, how's that 1213 years ago when the book was published, and it's only become more so since then. And now a message from Closed an often overlooked way to improve your win rate is to identify and close win back opportunities. After conducting tens of thousands of buyer interviews, closed has found that 10% of Closed loss deals have the potential to be won back at some point in the future. Now, identifying these win back opportunities early and knowing when and how to follow up could be worth millions. Closed recently helped one of their customers identify and win a $500,000 winback opportunity within days of it being marked as Closed lost. Closed automatically reached out to perform a win loss interview when the deal was marked Closed Loss in the CRM, and the buyer said, well, actually, we're still interested and we're ready to sign the contract. Closed is finding winback deals on a daily basis for their clients. How about for you? To help you get started receiving the value of consistent, direct, candid feedback from your buyers, closed is offering all my listeners a free gift. Just go to Winlosstoolkit.com and they'll send you a bunch of valuable tools to help you get your win loss program started. The toolkit includes a comprehensive guide to running a successful win loss program, an ROI, Calculator, and they'll even perform your first win loss interview for free to help you see the value of getting feedback directly from your buyers. So to claim your gift, visit winlosstoolkit.com. That's winlosstoolkit.com. And now a message from Allego. Are you struggling to make your sales team more efficient and improve time to productivity with Allego's modern revenue? Enablement platform marketing sales and enablement teams get on the same page for continuous improvement. So break through all the noise and deliver the buying experiences that your buyers today demand. Enable faster ramp times for your rep and more revenue for your business in less time. To see how it all can work for you, go to allego.com. Slash demo. That is allego.com slash demo.
Matt:
Andy, I've heard you talk in other podcasts about the reason why people buy, right? And I think Mark Magnaka talked about it as the so what question was like, what's the one what's of all the things that's important? What's the one thing that's most important? I e, why are you buying? And as we know, it's never price, although we're always made to feel that way. And I was at a Del EMC event some years ago, and I was at Oracle and the CIO of Dell EMC did a poll and he was asking all of their clients, like, why did you buy? And the way he netted it out, he said not one person said because of price and a lot of the reasons in that business, right? At Del EMC storage and protection, he said people bought and invested with the company because they wanted to know if the stuff hit the proverbial fan that they could call someone and they were going to get attention like someone had their back. And that was way more important than getting lowest price trust.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. Also, I think extending that a little bit forward in time or back in time is this idea. And I was talking to a customer last week about customer of another company, about how they made their decision and for them, they kept coming back to Is. They were extrapolating based on their experience with the salesperson and the members of the sales team that they were dealing with, they were extrapolating from that what the experience would be like working with the company as a customer. And this is, I think happens all the time. Right. Is to your point, Matt, about price and yeah, they're making a decision based, like I said, on trust, as Lori said, this experience, what's it say about the opportunity or what the opportunity will be like to work with this company? And what are the personal connections or the relationships we built? Credibility, trust, those are things that increasingly drive decisions. When I said products are basically perceived to be, I wouldn't say commodities, but.
Lori:
Pretty interchangeable and those early impressions right. That was the whole thing about having young SDRs in the role of the first contact to a higher level person. It wasn't a very good idea in a lot of cases, and in some it worked out. But generally that whole role is being reevaluated.
Andy Paul:
Yeah.
Matt:
In the role of taking the least experienced people and having them do the most difficult job. What can go wrong, right.
Andy Paul:
But you think about it when Matt, you were doing that right? I was out making calls in the field when I was that age.
Lori:
Yeah, me too.
Andy Paul:
I like to say I was 21, I looked twelve. I was talking to people about changing their business and investing 100,000 plus dollars, which in today's term was like half a million dollars. But I think the advantage I had compared to the young people that are doing the SDR job is they're just trying to do that one small thing. Right. Whereas I had the chance to engage in a conversation beyond that because everybody's always in their beginning part of their stage, beginning part of their sales career, you don't know anything. And believe me, I knew nothing. Right. I knew nothing about real thing about business, knew nothing about sales. I said I looked like a teenager and yet presence Club my first year. But I think it's because I got more time with them. Right. I asked questions they knew I wasn't just trying to sell a meeting, I was there trying to engage with them. And I found that as long as I was showing up authentically curious and continued to ask questions, that they gave me as much time as I wanted. I almost never had somebody cut me off. So I think SDRs are sort of a disadvantage because they've got this limited agenda. They don't get a chance to engage beyond get a what if. That's it. You never get a chance to really I said, learn what takes to go deeper.
Matt:
Well, I'm sure both Andy and Laurie, you've had people take you under their wing.
Andy Paul:
Oh yeah.
Matt:
And not just your managers, but like customers. Your customers.
Andy Paul:
Absolutely.
Matt:
And so I feel like I benefited you made me think of something. I feel like I benefited from that as well because I remember flying from Boston out to San Francisco and that Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska was my territory and I was in the investment business. And I would go into these office parks and just, like, knock on doors of Payne Weber and Smith Barney and Dean Witter, et cetera. And I was trying and I think I was showing up authentically. I had no idea what I was doing. But I learned somehow how to build the relationships and human beings ultimately want to help other human beings. And so they knew I didn't know anything, but if I was helping them out and I was giving my best, they would reciprocate. Most of the time. Not all the time. I have some stories there, I'm sure we all do. But then on the flip side, success can be a poor teacher where you go to President's Club your first year and you don't have the mentorship moving forward and you think you're all that in the bag of chips. It could go the other way.
Andy Paul:
It can, yeah, if you're not keeping an open mind. But to your point, it's precisely right. I have two customers in particular in the first few years of my career that did just what you said, just took me under their wings and basically taught me how to sell to. Yeah, you're never going to do that though. And this is leading to a different point, which is I think, again, sort of focused on this whole idea of win rate. One of the things that came out of research that was done by this company, trinity Perspectives in Australia, run by Kean McLaughlin, who both you may or may not know. Tremendous amount of research into win loss analyses and one of the key reasons why summarizing over thousands of interviews why people buy and why they win, why they is the connection, the relationships, emotional connection you make with the buyers so important. It's one of the critical reasons so many people these days want to talk down the importance of that. And yet I think it's more important than ever. And yeah, especially if you're new and you learn that have learned, get the experience, learn how to start building these types of connections with people, it pays itself back many times over.
Matt:
I'll butcher the quote from Professor Deming from many years ago, product management consultant Paraphrasing. He said, the problems that we all run into as sellers has almost nothing to do with the product and almost everything to do with the interactions between the buyer and the seller. I'll dig up the quote and send it to both of you, but that was 50, 60 years ago or more. And it's still true today. But a lot of times today as sellers, and again, we're all doing the best we can. I don't want to point fingers because again, I've made all the mistakes, but they subscribe to the Arthur Red Motley school of selling, right when Quipped he was famously equipped. The 13 greatest words in sales know your products, know your customers, call them incessantly and ask them to buy. We call that spaghetti selling now.
Andy Paul:
Yes, spaghetti selling. Well, Deming has a great quote as we sort of circle back to win rates, is I like this W. Edwards Deming, I think his name was one of the great business consultants, is he said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And so when we're in these environments where sales teams have, let's say, the average that they found in the Franklin Covey Research 17%, or let's say you're a moderately higher 25% win rate, as a team, we can say that. Hey, yeah, there's sellers have individual sellers have a big role to play in that, but the system they're operating within is designed to yield low win rates. And so you really have to be thinking about this as a seller, you can sort of do what we talked about, forest, you take control because we know you're in a system that's being designed to do something different and you have to break out of that. But then also as managers, you have to think about, right, you've set it up to be a low win rate environment. What are you doing to change sorry, just one more thing I'll let you guys comment is remember speaking to the CRO of a publicly traded, SaaS company? This was right before the Pandemic at a conference asking about their growth plans. And we had already had the conversation about their win rate. Their corporate win rate was like a 19% average win rate. And they're on service, very successful, publicly traded. So what are you doing? What's your sales growth plan this year? It was all about more on the top of the funnel. And I was like, given your low win rate, wouldn't it be faster and less expensive, more sustainable way to grow, to focus on increasing your win rates? Instead, go from 19% this year to shoot for 23% this year. And the way the response was just silence because it had never entered his thinking. That was what the approachers take.
Lori:
They probably didn't know how possibly but.
Andy Paul:
It just wasn't considered as part of the toolkit. And so I think this is sort of back to the Deming quote is we've got certainly a SaaS world. All these consultants going around being paid tons of money that we're going to create your revenue architecture and this is what we're going to do. And it's like, oh great, but it's yielding these low win rates and who's really benefiting from that?
Lori:
I'm just glad to hear Denning's name again because I haven't heard that for a long time. He says some good stuff and James.
Matt:
Clear Atomic habits kind of piggybacked on that. I think his phrase was something along the lines of you don't rise to the level of your talents, you fall to the level of your systems.
Lori:
Totally agree.
Matt:
I read a book on goal setting toward the end of the year and at the end of it had these top seven things you need to do when hitting your goals. And one of them was the last one was don't lose stuff.
Andy Paul:
I was like, what? And then I read it and I.
Matt:
Was like, this is stupid. And then I read it, I was out for a walk and I'm like, wait a minute, that's my problem. I can't find what where are my notes? Where did I put them?
Lori:
Where did I scorpio time wise? Right?
Matt:
I had this great idea, I wrote it down. Where did I put it? Where's that sticky? Where's that thing in my pocket? And it's like, don't lose stuff. Like have a system for whatever it is that's important to you. It dawned on me sometimes these things that come off as silly are actually very impact or can be.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. But Clear, I think one of those great quotes from his book is every action paraphrasing but every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Matt:
Yes.
Andy Paul:
And in my last book I sort of changed the wording a bit and said every action you take is a vote for the type of seller you want to become. And so if you want to get better, if you want to increase your win rates, if you want to have a sustainable career and a growing career, then you have to be very intentional about everything you do, being geared towards helping your buyers make progress toward making their decision. You have to be conscious of what's the experience the buyer is having with you. And yeah, it gets to what Claire said, it gets to what Deming said. You is what's your personal process is your personal process yielding the results that you want it to yield. Because at end the of the day, it's up to you. Yeah, your boss can tell you what to do and they obviously do. But yeah, in my own career I sort of had to forge my own path. Not that I was so on, but I think if there are 5 million salespeople in the world, there are 5 million unique ways of selling. And really the job of managers is to help people become, as you said before, Matt, to become the best version of themselves.
Matt:
In the context I think what we're all saying, though, is within the context of a team, within the context of a system where it's not having robots. I know you've talked about this, right? The human approach to stuff. It's not trying to clone people, but it is getting more people to do more of the right things at the right time more often, right? Yes.
Lori:
Like parameters, right?
Matt:
Yeah. Language, value, system goals.
Andy Paul:
Well, I think Pirate comes to and this beginning to run a little short on time here, but I just want to bring up interested in your take on this, because you had somebody ask me and said, yeah, well gosh. You write and talk so much about the human first approach to selling and the power of that, and yet we talk about winning a lot. And is that sort of antithetical to some degree? I think it's because sellers don't really understand why winning is important. I think about why are people in sales, right? We know why people say they go into sales in the first place, which, yeah, we want to make money and so on, but for people that have been in sales trying to make it a career, the research has been pretty clear that it's not the money. There's fulfillment that comes from the job that you do, from helping your buyers achieve certain things that are important to them, and you can't help your buyer if you don't win their business. And that's where this becomes so important. If we want the fulfillment in our career, we're never getting that fulfillment if we don't learn how to create the experiences that enable us to win our customers business.
Lori:
And if we assume that by winning their business, we're helping them.
Andy Paul:
Yes.
Lori:
That's where it's got to be both. So you have to represent products and services that can do that. And that it's amazing.
Andy Paul:
But that's part of for sellers is being in control of their situation. I'll call it as a gentleman, that Brandon Fluharty. He's been on the show, he's been on other shows and somebody mentored a bit and he writes a lot about how to close he's hugely talented individual, writes close big deals, writes about winning big deals. But yeah, he agrees and he and I talk about it is you have to be able to put yourself in the right situation to do that.
Lori:
And that's up to you also.
Andy Paul:
That's up to you.
Lori:
It's your choice, not anybody around you. Yeah, right.
Andy Paul:
But ultimately it should be in sales. When you have to think about the importance of winning is not earning money, it's this fulfillment from helping other people. This is the connection and this is what you aspire to.
Matt:
Pink talk, dan Pink talks about that, right? Way back, book drive. Right. Autonomy, mastery, purpose. Why are you in sales? Why you're in sales might be different than why Lori's in sales versus me. And then how do you advance that? Because that's what gets people out and gets people in bed in the morning.
Andy Paul:
But I think the deeper you go into your career in sales, it's the purpose more than anything else. It's the animating thing that keeps you coming back, at least for me, is, yeah, I've been very fortunate in my career, made good money, have a great life. But I was never really thinking about the money. I was thinking about what I was trying to achieve for somebody or work with somebody, because I knew in the back of my mind, if I could achieve that, the rewards come. But I think what keeps people in the job is this purpose is the fulfillment. And again, you're never going to experience that unless you put yourself in a position to help your buyers, and you help your buyers by winning their business.
Lori:
Yeah. Makes sense.
Matt:
Andy yes. So being that authentic self, think about that as a question. Is that a question or if I'm a seller and I'm working with you, and we're in a sales cycle, and we're at the later stages, and you say something like, well, why you? Or how can you help me? And I say, Andy, I know we can help you. The question is, do you believe it? The reality is, I can't help you unless you select us. I can't help you unless you work with us. And I shut up. How does that is that bad?
Andy Paul:
I think that the buyers make that why you decision much sooner than that, right? Because the buyers are making the decision whether they're going to invest their time in you, right, as opposed to somebody else. And that why you question, which I wrote about in my last book, is they're going to answer that through how they're experiencing you, and they'll become more confirmed in that opinion as you go further into the buying journey. But they make that first cut pretty early on, has been my experience.
Matt:
That's why they saying deals don't fall apart at the end. That's just when the seller finds out about it. Deals don't fall apart at the end of the month order. Is that just when you're notified.
Andy Paul:
It's so true. It's such a great saying. Well, but it's so true when you're newer in the business. And unfortunately, some people hold on this too long, but they tend to think it's like, well, the buyer is talking to three vendors, and we're all being treated equally, right? We're all being given the same amount of time. We're all being given the same amount of attention. It's like no buyer decides. Oftentimes that first impression is like, yeah, I like these people. Yeah, they're going to get preferential treatment. And that's why this whole idea of to your point, Laura, you made this first impressions are so critical, and how you build these initial connections with buyers. I think a point you were talking about earlier matt is buyers become fans, quote unquote, fans of certain salespeople. They become supporters of them, and they want to see certain salespeople do a good job. They're not going to make a bad decision just to necessarily help a salesperson, but they have a rooting interest in certain sellers.
Lori:
I think of that as a consumer. Absolutely. There are certain people that are just so sharp and they get it. They hear you, they reflect it back, and it's like, I love this person, I want to buy something from them.
Matt:
Assuming you go to a restaurant and all of a sudden you're getting upsold on the wine or whatever, chocolate souffle, because they don't hey, can I have everyone's attention? Can I tell you about the menu? And they create some exclusivity. Oh, if you want that dessert, you're going to have to order it now because this takes a while.
Lori:
Limited.
Andy Paul:
We've only got two more left. You might want to order that now before I just letting you know.
Matt:
Yeah, you're looking at that. Let me double check it. Let's see if we have any left. I'll be right back.
Lori:
Yeah. And that works in B. That transcends it into b to b. Because we're human.
Matt:
Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Paul:
Because we're humans. Right.
Matt:
Also.
Andy Paul:
Go ahead, Matt.
Matt:
I'm sorry, Laurie. How do we amplify I thought you were going in a different direction. You talked about that experience there. But what about, do we do anything anymore without checking the reviews? No one goes anywhere. No one buys anything anymore without checking to see what other people have to say. And so you talk about fans of salespeople. How do you make that focus on creating those raving fans that will tell other people, because think about the power that that has in our world today.
Andy Paul:
So you were saying, how do we serve? Because you froze a little bit in the talk, Is. So how do we sort of get this rating of sellers, if you will, out there, or reviews of sellers?
Matt:
Well, just referrals and introductions and things like that. Just expanding on what you're saying about creating those fans and having those experiences and, hey, you might like working with this person or with this company because we loved it.
Andy Paul:
Yes, absolutely. I think it's as a seller, you should be mindful of the fact that just as part of your career, but in any, again, environment, you're with is I know there were several times I think I won pretty sizable deals based on who I was. Right. My team is part of it. No one wins a deal alone. But the point person for it, they sort of wanted me to win because to Laurie's point, I made them feel heard. I made them feel understood. I made them feel like we had really listened and we really knew what was most important to them, what they were trying to get out of the deal we were working on. Yeah.
Matt:
Maya. Angelou effect.
Andy Paul:
Yeah. How do you make them feel? Right. Exactly. All right, well, gosh, this has been great. We went on a long time. Really appreciate you guys sticking around and doing this. So, Lori, also, people can connect with you and learn more about Score More Sales, Women's Sales Pros, buy your book, all those things.
Lori:
So I'm on LinkedIn. Lori Richardson look up, score more sales. The book looks like this on Amazon. She sells the green one. And at scoreboard sales at women's sales pros I'm all over the place. So I'd love to engage with anyone that listen and make sure you say that you listened, because that's yeah, yeah.
Andy Paul:
Let her know where you heard.
Matt:
And Matt, well, my son's graduating from the University of Colorado next week, so to borrow a phrase from their new coach, Coach Prime Dion Sanders, I ain't hard to find.
Andy Paul:
Is he entering the transfer portal?
Matt:
So on LinkedIn and our website WW coachum IO. And we're on Twitter at Mdbanelli and at Coacham now.
Andy Paul:
Got it.
Matt:
Let's engage.
Andy Paul:
Excellent. Well, thank you both very much and look forward to having you back. This was great. Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the Win Rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. I'm so grateful for your support of the show. And I want to thank my guests, Lori Richardson and Matt Bonelli, for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the Win Rate Podcast with Andy Paul on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don't forget to subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's called win rate Wednesday. And each week on Wednesday, no surprise, you'll receive one actual tip that you can put to use in your selling to become a more effective seller and to accelerate your win rates. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy. Paul. Good selling, everyone.