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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Barry Traylor. And Barry is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Barry alongside one of my other guests, Jim Dickey is co founder of sales mastery, where they help companies transform their sales organizations.
Barry and Jim are also co founders of CSO insights, where they provided an excellent source of primary research into B2B sales performance. And CSO insights was later acquired by Miller Hyman. My other guest today for this round table discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and increasing win rates is Eric Stein.
Eric is a three times CRO and hugely experienced enterprise seller. Most recently, he was CRO and chief commercial officer at Skillsoft. Now quick , few items of business before we jump into today's discussion. First, if you're interested in getting. Even more actionable ideas about how to elevate your sales effectiveness.
Then please subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It's called win rate Wednesday. And each week on Wednesday, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rate. So to subscribe, just visit my website, andypaul. com it's right there. As soon as you come to the homepage. Second, this is your last opportunity to register for the new session of my buyer experience bootcamp, which is starting on September 12th.
This is my five week group coaching program that teaches sellers how to fix their broken win rates by delivering a buying experience that your buyers actually want and actually need. Because how you sell is how you win and how you help is how you win. So for more information and to grab your seat in this class, go to andypaul.
com slash bootcamp. Okay, ready? Let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen as always. I'm so grateful for your support of the show and I want to thank my guests, Barry trailer, Jim Dickey, and Eric Stein 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 every listener podcast.
Also, don't forget to subscribe to my weekly newsletter called win rate Wednesday and each week on Wednesday, you'll receive an actionable tip that you can put to use in your selling to become a more effective seller and to accelerate your win rates. So again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today until next time.
I'm your host, Andy, Paul, good selling everyone.
. welcome everyone to this episode of the win rate podcast. So glad you could join me. I just can't go around everybody. Just spend a quick 30 seconds to a minute introducing themselves. We'll start with you, Jim Dickey.
Jim Dickey, Sales Mastery. We've been doing primary research on the problems facing sales teams for the last 20 years. And more importantly, what do you do about it? How do you leverage people, process, technology, knowledge to optimize sales?
Very concise. I like that. Eric,
Oh, wow. Okay. Eric Stein, I am a three time chief revenue officer, and I think over the course of my career, I have had more than 3, 500 salespeople report to me and have delivered over 5 billion in revenue to a variety of mid cap and large cap software companies.
that works. Barry,
Barry Traylor, also with Sales Mastery. Been involved in sales for a long time. I was an engineer. How long?
you tell me? I'll tell you.
60 years.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's more than me. Wow.
And Joan will be completely upset with me because she feels like I talk about age too much. I really didn't. In any event civil engineer for 10 years.
The latter half of that was selling engineering design services. I got out of engineering and into sales training. I was with Miller Hyman for about 10 years then did sales process mapping through the 90s. And created a software company called Salesware that was acquired, and then we had brought Jim in as an advisor to our company, and when that gig was up Jim and I became close personal friends and started CSO Insights in 2001, so we've been partners now for 22 years.
I, unlike Eric, I haven't necessarily managed 3, 500. but I've probably done sales training with three or four times that number. And kind of my area of expertise is sales process and my love is sellers and their sales managers.
Got it. Yeah. Very good. Very good. I mean, CSO insights. Yeah. I would eagerly await the annual report on sales performance. One of the few sources are good primary research into sales, right? I mean, to me, it seems like an interest in your opinion on that. Is this. little good research into sales.
I'm starting to wonder why that is. I mean, it's such a big field. And yet we really suffer from a lack of good solid primary research.
Well, I think there are a couple of reasons and Jim and I were always the first to admit that our numbers were squishy because in large part, many of the note a they're all self reported.
Sure.
And B, many of the numbers that are reported are really best guesses. You know, how many touch points before.
First contact how many calls, what's the sales cycle length between the first call and moving on to education to proposing and so on. But, you know, when you have several hundred responses, you know, it normalizes and you get some fair idea. There are five metrics that we use as the basis for our scorecard and prior to that with the SRP matrix in that.
Those are percentage of revenue plan attained, percentage of reps meeting or beating quota total sales rep turnover, both voluntary and involuntary, and outcome of forecast deals. And the reason that we use those are actual numbers that people measure and keep track of.
And so these others may be squishy, but those are not.
And that. Always brings us back to some level of reality. Why there isn't more, I think I think there are a couple of reasons. One, I think there's been a whole lot of art and philosophy and less science. You know, a lot of what are called best practices, I think, are really best opinions.
yeah,
And Jim and Art Jim and my...
You know, sort of mantra quoting Edwards Deming, without data, you're just another guy with an opinion. So, you know, we want the data.
well, I have my other favorite Deming quote, which I love because I say it to like, you know, sales leaders in the sass world that have these you know, incredibly low win rates and I've been trying to build these organizations on top of it, which is that dummies famous goes, you know, every system is perfectly designed to get the results.
It gets
You got
I like Mike Tyson. Everybody's got a strategy till I get punched in the face.
face, right?
Well, let me ask you a question because this is, you know, you brought up the question of quota attainment and this is, this gets talked about endlessly within the sales world. Yeah. And it's like, well, how much value does that really have, , as a measure these days, given that there's so much randomness involved in the setting of quotas and so on is, and then , you've got, , one of my other favorite expressions Goodhart's Law, that says, you know, when a measure becomes a target, it loses all value as a measure.
Is quota still working? Anybody can answer that question.
think I think quote is working because you know, it's a base thing. This is a hassle work, but you know, Barry's made a comment for years that quota represents your company's best guess at your territory's potential, but it doesn't represent your potential. And I think that's the thing we're missing is what's the potential of the individual. And if you tell me that my number is X, I'm going to hit X. Well, what if my potential is 150% X. And I think that's what we really are doing a disservice to the profession is we're not looking at the individuals going back through and saying, you know, what could you be doing this year? And how could we be helping you to do that?
You know, we're just focused on a number and I get that's what the CFO wants and the CEO wants because Wall Street's going to expect it, but it's not showing the potential of the person or the company. Thank
Yeah, because, I mean, the whole thing with Goodhart's law that he found, I, you know, his, has some mathematical proofs of this, of it, was that the reason when something, a measure becomes a target, loses value as a measure is because people optimize their processes to achieve the target, right? And to your point, Jim is suddenly people are saying, well, yeah, I'm going to optimize my process to sell, you know, 1, 000, 000 this year, but maybe my potential really is a million and a half, but I'm artificially constraining it because we've got this target, this artificial target we put in there, Eric, you had a reaction to that.
I had, I did, I had a very strong reaction to it. My reaction actually surprised myself because I think it's changed over the 20 some odd years I've been in the business. I really like quota as a target and the metric. I like it for a variety of reasons. The first is I feel like as a leader, one of the things I've developed over the last 10 years is a really good sense of where the middle of my organization.
This and how far I can move it to the right. I think that in any organization you have people who are always or almost always. going to exceed their quota, and people who, even if you started them at 99% of plan, would have hit their quota. But the, badly true.
You've got one yard. You've got all season to close it.
Didn't even know that was gonna come out of my mouth until it did.
Yeah.
But I think the vast majority of your organization falls within the middle. And I think the goal for any Revenue leader is figuring out who those people are and how far to the right you can move them. And I think 1 of the things quotas are really effective at are getting the folks who are going to hit it 2 out of 3, 3 out of 4, 3 out of 5 times.
To get it just a little bit more often than not, or to push them that last mile of productivity. I think that the percentage of reps who hits a plan is an important metric because What it says about sales productivity and organizational potential is really important. And because I think a lot of companies sometimes game the other metrics that are not really well defined.
Like, I've sort of had my fill of companies touting their NRR. And then you read the footnotes and there are like a hundred caveats around it, you know, from our top 100 customers only located in the state of North Carolina after three o'clock on a Thursday, like they've defined the set of what they're measuring down, or they don't tell you that they tripled the number of salespeople or success managers to hit that NRR expansion.
And so. I see a lot of value in quota at an organizational level, but I'll also concede that I think you and Jim were talking about at the individual level and as an individual measure of performance, I'm not sure it's effective for about 40% of the population that's always going to over deliver and the population that never is.
It's not really helpful as a development tool for
What would we use instead? I mean, I've got an
I would like to weigh in between those two.
Sure. Go ahead.
Number one, I consider it the big lie, which is, and it's been foisted upon sellers from day one and it continues, which is you are your number. And it's just not true. And the first time I, in Oracle I got up in front of the, you know, conference and said, You are not your number.
The room exploded in laughter. It's like, of course we're, are you out of your mind? Your number is a reflection of what you do and how well you do it, but it is not you. Take away your cool house, your cool car, your thousand dollar suit, whatever else, you're still here. So, you are not your number. Your number, your performance is a reflection of what you do and how well you do it.
This notion of organizational potential, I think, is very interesting. Because it, it begins to address the system. If, with any metric, what you're trying to do is raise the mean and reduce the variance. Okay, so if you've got a hundred sales reps and the mean is 52% or 46 percent or whatever are making quota and the range is from 28 percent to 200 percent.
It's a healthier organization if you can raise the mean to 60 percent and reduce the variance from 60 to 150. Okay? Here's the important thing. I did a video on this. We have it in our channel on Sales Math. So it's... I won't go into the story, you can watch the video if you want. But that variance is normal operating variance, and that's a reflection of the system and the organization, not the individual.
You look at it and you say, this guy's got, he came in at 40%, everybody thinks he's a, you know, a turd, and the guy who came in at 200%, everybody thinks he's a hero. If they're operating within normal variance, they're both playing the game.
So I, I posed the question. What could we use instead of quota? Does anybody have thoughts about that?
How about if we look at leaning or leading indicators instead of lagging indicators? I got in a big argument with with a VP of sales. I said, you know, the problem, you know, 80% of the people on the job this was from a McKinsey study years ago, don't know what they're supposed to be doing.
They either do what the person in front of them did, what the people alongside of them are doing, or what they swore they'd do differently if they ever got this job. And my observation is 90% of the people don't know how they're doing, because they don't get timely, accurate, relevant, so on feedback.
And this VP of sales said, that's not true in sales. You absolutely know how you're doing. I said, really, tell me about it. He goes, come on Barrett, wake up, man. It's coming back to quota. If you're 80% of quota, not so good. If you're 120% of quota, better. I said, good information, but not the answer to the question.
The question is, how are you doing? 80% of quota, 120, whatever. It's not how you're doing. It's how you've done so far. The real question is, and how are you doing? The real question that everybody really wants the answer for, is, including the CFO, how are you going to do? And so, to answer those questions, you've got to be in front of the power curve, not behind it, which is where quota is.
So I've got two. That I think are pretty important and I've sort of been turning over in my mind to the value of a third. The first is logo count. I don't necessarily have an interest in a sales rep who hits 200% of plan but churns for customers while they're getting that 200% from one. And so I year over year logo count.
And year over year net revenue. And that's where I do think NRR is a valuable metric because I want to understand what is the growth on a year over year basis. The third is forward months of bookings inside that base. And I've been turning that around because over the last several years, one of the metrics I've used to measure my own organization is average contract length and forward months of bookings.
I want to know how much selling time. We have how much time do we have to expand the account or to land new ones as opposed to being caught in a renewal cycle or having a high cost maintenance business. Because the cost of a large customer base, that's on an annual recurring plan with no auto renew or no long term agreements is.
Risk and the reason I'm pulling my punches on that is the recent uptick in inflation sort of three years is my sweet spot in one of the organizations I ran and needed my approval to sign a contract shorter than three years or longer than three years. Because ultimately, after 3 years, you probably need to make price adjustments if the account is not growing organically, but there are a ton of exceptions to that rule that are highly circumstantial.
But I do like logo count and NRR as a metric of the book of business assigned to a row.
Okay.
think one of the things that strikes me too is for years we ended up paying on quota and quota attainment because that's the only thing we have visibility into. so we all know salespeople who closed deals and did everything wrong. We know salespeople who not closed deals when they did everything right.
And so I think weaving into this thing now, we can start to measure activity and the quality of the activity. You know, there are tools in place right now that'll go out there and take a conversation like we're having today. They'll transcribe, but they'll analyze it. They'll figure out did who talked about what?
And I can start saying is are the reps talking about the new product or not? You know, I want them talking about the new product. Are they engaging with the right people or not? So, you know, part of my sales process is, you know, at stage three we should meet the C F O. Is there ever been a discussion with the C F O?
I can go grab that.
Are their activities? So I can say, hey, they sent three emails out to CFOs never responded. Or they, hey, they did and the guy responded right away. So I think it's being able to go in and make part of it, especially in the downturn, part of it is saying, I'm going to pay you based on doing the activities I'm telling you to do if you're doing them the right way.
And I'm going to monitor that. And if somebody gets a demo at the CEO level, they ought to get credit for that. Because that's what we want them to do. And if we do that, and we get everybody working, then we're going to be able to see what's going on in the process. And we're going to be able to change.
Because the biggest problem the sales organizations have, is that they have to sell at the speed of change. Everything changes.
When does that patience run out, though, Jim, right? Assuming product market fit, assuming the problem isn't the product.
Yep.
Which I know is an opening Andy for the top nine things and product and price don't
Yeah.
there, but assuming the problem isn't product market fit and assuming that rep is in the right market segment in the right set of industries.
So, it's not a growth job. How long do we have a tolerance for a sales rep who is not new to role new to company or new to territory that's doing the right things, but isn't closing deals. I mean, at some point, the quantitative stuff has to matter. Can't all be MBO driven.
Yeah, that's it's part of the equation. But I think too is, if they're doing all the right things, all the things we're telling them to do, are they the right thing? Because I think it's responsibility of sales management to be constantly looking at the sales process and said what mid course adjustments do we need to make?
Right.
And they need to be able to have access to the data to debug that. So if I'm telling you, call on, you know, I remember doing a project with 3M years ago, and the whole thing was. You got to get nursing involved in step three of the sales process because otherwise purchasing is going to be involved and purchasing hates us because we're the most expensive cost and we're the, and we're the, you know, but we're the easiest to use test.
So the nurses love us because they were easiest to administer. Purchasing hates us. Well, that was working for a while until the other guys ended up changing, you know, the whole value proposition on it. And so I think that's where we've got to be taking a look at activities and debugging it. Because what worked today is not going to be working, you know, three months from now, if we ever get through this recession, if it ever happens, we're going to have a whole new selling environment.
And so we're going to have to make a, you know, real fast changes, not, Hey, the sales kickoff meetings in next January. Let's address this. We got to do it now. And so that's why I think we've got have to find ways to measure activities and monitor them.
What, so here's a different approach to it. And one that I've used in the past quite successfully growing successful organization. Which is productivity based and actual productivity, meaning a rate of output per unit of input. So revenue generated per hour of selling time. The way I got to this is I was working for a company that started life as a defense contractor.
So everybody had to keep hours. We had to track our hours on time cards. You need to do that for overhead calculations for the defense side. So on the commercial side, I was sitting there going, well, God, we're tracking, you know, basically 40 hours a week on our time card and turning it in and overhead. I said, well, let's assign job numbers to our qualified opportunities in the pipe and start charging time to them. you as a seller, because this is, your finite resource as a seller is time, right? So what I want to know is how much time did it take for both the individual as well as the organization, because we're selling large deals that took input from everybody, right? So people charge time to a deal, and I knew if I had, I could look at it and say, well, gosh, I got one seller.
Did a million dollars in business this year, let's say. Theoretically, it took him X number of hours of his time. But it took 4X hours from the rest of the organization to support this person to get that revenue. Whereas the other person took half that amount of time from himself and for the rest of the organization. So then I can start saying expectations for what I could say, okay, and I did, I assigned this is your productivity factor, right? And so I want you to do is this year, we're gonna try to increase that by 5% or 10%. So now I said, look, if I invest in this person or in the invest in themselves, I should be able to see the output of that, right?
Cause that's going to improve productivity. They're going to be able to be more effective in front of the. In front of the customer, right? Things that may have took a week before. Maybe it only takes half a week now or whatever. I found it extremely valuable because now I had real levers to pull as a manager to say what's happening, what's not happening.
You know, this takes too much sales engineering time. Maybe this person needs to have more product training so they can be a little more self sufficient up to a certain level before we bring the SEs in and so on. It seems to me like focusing on the time and what the output is per unit of time. Time is the resource, right?
And if we were
If we were trying to calculate, I was gonna say, I've just finished real quick is then I could calculate and say, look, instead of guessing, well, we've got 10 sellers and this is their quota and we're going to apply the, you know, here's the mean 40. We'll do it. Here's the fudge factor.
I can say, no, I've got 10 sellers. I know what the productivity is for each of those sellers. Plus or minus 5%. I could be very accurate in predicting what was going to happen the next year. Thoughts?
I don't disagree with you, and I, Eric, I don't disagree with you either. I think there are... Component I mentioned I was in civil engineering. The last five years I was the sales manager, business development manager. Don't say sales and
Right?
at least back, not back then. And we had exactly what you're describing.
It was called phase nine. I hadn't thought about this year. Phase 90 were jobs that were, you know, front end feasibility, promo, whatever you want to call 'em, people charged time to it. And at one of the leadership meetings. I was trotting out the numbers and you know, how things had improved in one area and not in another and so on.
And this guy, Gene, who ran the water resources divisions, he, and our numbers were really good. And he threw down his pen and he said, I've just got to say something, go for it. What do you got? He says, you only go after work. You know, you can get I said, you got me, Gene,
You got me.
guilty. And it's like, what the hell are you talking about?
And he, we did a lot of government work. And back then they had. Form 254 and 255, and they would throw submissions at these things all the time. At some point the Corps of Engineers is going to owe us one. I said, they don't owe you anything. Are you kidding me? So there's that. You know, Ideal Customer Profile, ICP.
What's your ICP? Jim and I've been making this bet for 30 years. I still have my house. And I'll make it again today. I will bet you a big number, right now, you've got good people, working hard, trying to get business, you don't want.
Oh, absolutely.
You just got finished saying a minute ago, their most precious, finite resource, time.
time. Absolutely.
here we are, and it's like, what the hell? So, yes, I get the productivity, I get the math. But let's also look at the activity and do we even know what we're going after? The other thing, Eric, I just want to say I agree with you as well.
That's where analytics come in. Everybody talks about close rate. Okay, so we got a 40% close rate. I'm not going to go down that rat hole. But let's just say. Reasonably homogenized deals. 100 come in, 40 come out, 60 get lost. Great. Okay, they're equal. But when you know, when you plot it out, if you have a five, let's say a five step sales process, and this guy loses.
20 in Step 1, and 30 in Step 2, and 10 in Step 3, and then, good, that's a 40% close rate. The next guy loses none in Step 1, 10 in Step 2, 10 in Step 3, and 40 at Step 4. Okay, identical close rates. But massively different productivity. And so, here's the question, Eric. When you look at those numbers and you compare them and we are now looking at leading versus lagging, what is, what does this first rep know that the second one doesn't in terms of qualifying?
And what does this second one know that the first one doesn't about, you know, whatever prospect? I don't know.
I'm really glad you asked that question.
I don't see that kind of, I'll borrow a term from you, A. I don't see that kind of intellectual curiosity on the part of sales management, sales ops, translates directly into individual relevant coaching.
Yeah. I think you, you raise probably the two most valuable points. in sales and the two most difficult things for any revenue leader to deal with. The first has to do with sales reps. And I'm actually going to paraphrase from an absolutely outstanding and one of the best sales team trainers I have ever worked with before a gentleman named Eric Shaver of Kensei Partners, who says that reps need to be trained to understand that they're not selling ERP to the CIO.
They're selling free cashflow to the CFO. And so understanding how that shows up. In a measured process of why it is important to qualify need and budget first, and then to understand the specifics of the problem second, and then to scope the solution to that problem third, with defined things that happen at each stage is critical, but it ties back to something that Jim said earlier that I want to underline, and I think I'm quoting you directly, Jim, When I say about 10 minutes ago, you said it should be sales management's responsibility to, and what I see so many organizations struggle with what I have had to establish almost every time I have stepped in to run a revenue organization is number one, there has been almost no investment.
In truly enabling sales managers to manage, they mostly understand how to sell to a customer. They mostly do not understand , how to manage salespeople. And the two things they miss are a clear understanding of what should somebody do at each stage of the process and what should happen as a result of it.
And one of my organization, we called it the five A's, right? What activities do I perform? What assets do I use to perform them? What artifact do I create for the customer? What agreement do I need from whom at the customer to move on? And who is accountable for doing that? So to your point, Andy, you get the right integration of sales consultants and value engineers and e executives at the right stage of the process.
And two, by aligning each of those five a's to whatever your sales process is. It helps sales managers, Barry, get to the point where if you've got a rep who's losing 40% of their deals in the fourth or fifth stage of the sales process, they know what the problem is because you should have a ton fall out in qualification and discovery and nothing fall out once you're in solution validation and negotiation.
But most it.
like one of the, yeah,
Bingo!
well
One organization, one group I was speaking to talked about close rates, and I said, you know, people said, whatever, some percentage close, have a close rate of 40%, and a smaller percentage had a close rate of 50%. And these were survey results from a different outfit, not our results. They had all participated in this, I said, let me ask you something.
These numbers look about right, and then, yeah, I said, okay. So, 40%, 50%, whatever your close rate is, 40% of what? Everything that comes into the pipeline? Oh, no, I wouldn't say that. 40% of deals where you proposed? 40% where you made the cut? And finally, one guy said, it depends when you start counting.
And I said, great, let's make it simple. By your company's definition, when do you start counting? It's like, so these things that you're talking about, that, you know, the actionable and accountable and so on, I totally agree with it. That's what I think process mapping is about, including the buyer's actions.
And they either are or are not getting these things done, and it'll show up over time.
So Eric has asked the question, cause yeah, you come most recently from running a large revenue organization is, you know, as you know, I'm doing a lot of work these days, really digging into win rates with a company's data and some fairly good sized organizations as well. And it seems like just one common problem across organizations these days is. And I could phrase it several different ways, but one of the ways is that don't feel like they can say no to any opportunity that comes across their desk. And so, to Barry's point, and my point about time, is they're investing time in things that at one level, they fully expect to lose. And I see this as somewhat endemic actually, as I look at more and more detailed, really detailed win rate data by stage that, you know, companies and we're helping them analyze what this really means for them.
But one of the things that's really clear is there's not a good sort of uniform acceptance criteria for sellers. Go ahead, anybody. Big silence
you directed it to Eric, so I'm holding my
I wasn't sure what the implied question was, so I'm just going to answer the one I want to.
Sure, go ahead.
And I'm going to go back to to something that Barry said about the comment that your manager made to you. When I carried a bag, I want to 88% of the time because
And also, before you go on, you said that on the last show that you were on that came up, and yeah, someone reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, there's no way.
I I'll ask a different way. 88% of what?
And I said, if Eric said, I'm sure it's 88% cause we've been talking about it.
During the time I carried a bag I competed for 49 new deals and I won 45. And I I struggled for years to figure out how to get sales managers to do the same thing. Yeah, I'll never forget. It
was 2002. I was a sales manager. I was running the higher education business and I had a rep who wanted to compete a deal at the University of Kentucky. Our company had tried once before to win the same deal at the University of Kentucky. Had won the technical selection and kept getting torpedoed by a CIO who was in the pocket of one of our competitors.
Plus, the University of Kentucky gets its funding from the State of Kentucky Legislature, and the State of Kentucky Legislature had not funded the project because the bill was before the State of Kentucky Legislature for the next year. And I will never forget the amount of noise that I got for saying no to competing the opportunity.
I would not put resources behind it. I directed the sales rep not to pursue it. I shut down pre sales and proposals and I got a ton of heat. And so I can confirm that you were correct. But the reality is that if you are doing qualification well and you know what your business, is, then you too can have an 88% win. You should have a really good sense of what segment, what industry, what solution is your best fit, which isn't to say that you shouldn't try and grow that. 88% is probably artificially high. If you're not losing enough, you're probably not trying enough. But at the time that I was in that business, it was an industry business and we had very little credibility.
And so in order to be taken seriously, we needed to win almost every time. And so we had to pick our at bats really carefully or the industry wasn't going to take us seriously. As we grew that business, the win rate down went down into the mid fifties and that's probably where it belonged. Because we got more at bats that we wouldn't have gotten.
But I still stand by the principle that your wholesales manager took umbrage to, Barry. Which is, if you have a really good sense of who your customer is and what business is yours, then you should have a win rate that's higher than 50%. Because it means you're spending your time efficiently and effectively.
Yeah. And people measured that.
Eric you're bringing up something really important, which is that, you know, what the customer values and let me talk about that for a second. We did it. We did a joint study with foreign ferry and we did it 2 years apart. Excuse me. We did it 4 years apart pre cobit. And then when we were in, in the middle of cobit, but we interviewed 500 B to B buyers and, you know, everybody's been talking about the fact challenge has been saying all this buying is happening without sellers being involved.
And we said, great, let's go get some metrics. So I went out and interviewed 500 B2B buyers, not people in purchasing or procurement, but executives who are making six, seven, eight figure decisions. And went out and talked to these people and said, when are you engaging salespeople? And when we ran the first study, the first time in 2018, if 56% of the execs said, we engage salespeople in either the first step, or we're trying to figure out what the problem is.
Or we've done that and we're bringing them in when we're trying to start figuring out what the solution might look like. At 56% went down to 43% four years later. And then we asked them, well, is there anything that would make you involve salespeople earlier in the process? And when we did it in 2018, 9% of the people said, there's nothing you could do to make me involve salespeople earlier, which meant 91% of people said there was something. When we did it again, four years later, 25% of the people said nothing. But then we asked them, what is it for the 75%? We said, there is something, what is it? And it fell into three buckets. They said, if this is new to me and I proceed that you could be an educational resource to me and help me navigate this, I will bring you in earlier if this is con risky and risk came in two flavors, if it's risky to me personally.
Like, if this initiative doesn't get off, you know, get pulled off, I get fired, I'll bring you in, or if it's risky, the organization I'll bring you in. And the last one is if it's complex.
So, you know, I got to go build consensus. I can't just do it with my department. I've got to bring in another functional area.
So I need to bring in partners outside of us. Think Boeing, having to bring in GE to build the jet engine for the aircraft. And I think, too, are we really going out and talking about. Productivity means that we're being productive, but in whose eyes? Because the sales process is here for one reason, it supports the buying process.
And I think, I don't think a lot of companies are doing a good enough job of understanding what's the customer really valued today, because it's not the product and the price. It's more value add.
Yeah. Helping them make a decision.
I think there are a couple other things about what Eric said. Not the least of which is under investing in frontline sales managers. We have said for years that frontline sales managers are overlooked and overwhelmed. I wrote an article everybody I think knows Archimedes quote, if I had a lever long enough, you know the rest of the quote, I could move the world.
That's how most people remember it, but it's actually, if I had a lever long enough and a fulcrum against which to place it. A lever without a fulcrum is just a stick and without you know, a fulcrum, there's no leverage. In our view, the first line sales manager is the fulcrum for every one of these sticks.
Whether it's compensation, CRM product training, whatever they're the fulcrum and they need to be, they not only need to be bought in, they need to be up to speed. And comfortable and fast seal with whatever the program is. And most often that's not true. So they go through training, this is good stuff, I'd love my people to do it.
But, you know, I need to study it again before I start trying to coach them. You know, who's got time for that? The other thing I think that still happens and I'm willing, I'd love to be wrong about this. But I still think there's a lot of ego and a lot of machismo. You know, way back when I was doing Miller Hyman training, they always had, everything came together on a thing called the blue sheet, where all the elements of the analysis came together.
And then people would present it you know, in the work, afternoon workshop of day two. And this guy's presenting on Canteen Corporation. And it, it looked like somebody got cut. I mean, there are red flags everywhere. I mean, you know, the, he can't identify the economic buyer. And then they'll talk to him and it's this and it's that.
Everything is like unknown or just missing. And I'm looking at this thing and I mean, it's just like, there's no way this guy's going to win something. And I said, well, why are you calling on these guys? How long have you been calling? He said, I've been calling on them for two years. This is what you have after two years?
He goes, yeah, you know, they're like totally in our competitor's pocket. Why are you still doing this? And he said, my manager is telling me to. And I'm standing there and I said, who the hell is your manager? And the guy next to me says, I am, what of it? It says, we're going to break into this account.
And to me... What that manager was doing was like taking his rep and throwing him as hard as he could against the front door of Canteen. We're going to bust into this account. Oh, sorry, pal. Here, let me help you up. Here, let's do it again. Whammo! Oh, sorry, pal. Let me help you up. I mean, it's ridiculous.
And I think what also compounds that are these rules of thumb. You need 3, 4, 5x your quote and your pipeline. And so people just throw in anything that they can they don't go through the rigorous acceptance that you're talking about, Eric. I think universally, unless you've got some way hot product, most reps, I will say this with confidence, do not have enough good stuff going in their pipeline.
And I think they do that because, you know, somebody's got pressure on them to have some multiple of their quota. If you said, look, you can throw away anything in here that you don't feel good about, that you've made the best effort or whatever, I think most, and not get in trouble, I think most people would take a third of it and just toss it.
Absolutely. All right.
why do we keep doing that to ourselves? Why do we keep doing that to each other? That's the question. And I think that's cultural and a bunch of other things.
we shouldn't have to come back and we'll explore that further from that point forward. Unfortunately, we've run short on time here today and yeah, we didn't begin to cover what I'd hoped we'd cover, but it was a great conversation. So if people want to reach out to each of you and learn more about your doing, Barry.
Barry at SalesMastery. com. Very straightforward. Our contact info, you know, is on our website. It's on our website, salesmastery. com. I'd love everybody to come visit. One thing I do want to do is put in a pitch for our survey. We're gathering data right now. And if you go to our website there'll be a pop up for the survey.
That would be very helpful if you can do that. And of course I'm on LinkedIn as well.
Perfect. Jim.
Send Jim at SalesMastery. com and Jim Dickey, D I C K I E, on LinkedIn.
Excellent. And Eric.
You can find me on LinkedIn best way to reach me.
All right. Perfect. Well, everyone, thank you very much. And yeah, we'll get the group back together. We'll do this again.
We'll get the band back together.
We'll get the band back together.