Mastering Modern Selling
At Mastering Modern Selling, our mission is to equip you with the insights, strategies, and tools necessary to excel in the ever-evolving landscape of sales. Traditional sales approaches, marketing tactics, and lead-generation methods are becoming obsolete. In today's market, buyers dictate the buying process and have little patience for cold calls, email blasts, or aggressive sales tactics.
In this new era of sales and marketing, success hinges on building meaningful relationships with prospects and buyers. We believe in leveraging the power of modern strategies, techniques, and technologies to foster these connections. This approach, often referred to as Modern Selling, encompasses leveraging digital and social channels to create demand and cultivate strong relationships with prospects, partners, and customers.
By mastering Modern Selling, you and your team can enhance your visibility in the marketplace, establish yourselves as trusted advisors, accelerate pipeline growth and revenue, and position yourselves as the employer of choice in your industry.
Join us on Mastering Modern Selling as we explore the principles, practices, and innovations driving success in today's sales landscape.
Mastering Modern Selling
MMS #83 - Reimagining Sales Leadership: Strategies for Today’s Market with David Priemer
In this engaging episode of Mastering Modern Selling, we had the pleasure of hosting David Priemer, a seasoned sales strategist known for his contrarian approach to modern sales practices. David shared profound insights and strategies to reimagine and revitalize sales processes, emphasizing a journey from conventional sales tactics to innovative and effective methods.
Key Takeaways:
- Value-Driven Discovery Calls: David stresses the importance of transforming mundane discovery calls into value-driven interactions. He advocates for these calls to focus on the buyer, making them not just about gathering information but about providing immediate value, which engages and benefits the prospective client.
- Sales as a Science: Emphasizing sales as a science rather than an art, David underscores the necessity of having a systematic approach. He believes in developing a robust sales process that can withstand the high turnover typically seen in sales roles, ensuring continuity and consistency in performance.
- Challenging Old School Methods: David challenges traditional sales tactics and emphasizes the importance of a sales culture that is adaptable and continuously evolving. He advises organizations to shed outdated practices and adopt new strategies that align with modern buyers' expectations and behaviors.
- Strategic Changes and Assessments: Highlighting the strategic changes necessary within organizations, David talks about his unique maturity assessment tool that helps sales leaders understand and improve their sales processes and strategies effectively.
- Building a Destination Team: The concept of 'destination team' is crucial in David's strategy, where a sales team is not just about having great salespeople but about having the right processes and environment that attract and nurture talent, fostering long-term success.
David Priemer’s insights remind us that successful selling in today's market requires more than just following a script; it demands a deep understanding of the sales process, creativity in approach, and most importantly, a focus on providing genuine value to customers.
His strategies are a call to action for sales professionals and organizations to rethink their methods and align with modern expectations to achieve sustainable success.
Don't miss out—your next big idea could be just one episode away!
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Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling relationships social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fistbump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller, carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of LeadSmart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive into business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape.
Speaker 2:This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fistbump Brought to you by.
Speaker 3:Fistbump. So we are at 72, right 83.
Speaker 2:83.
Speaker 3:You know what?
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, I actually I thought 82. I don't know why I said 72. 83.
Speaker 3:Of mastering modern selling. That is what we call this, brandon, just so you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. I thought I was going to place an order at McDonald's here for a second. That's how my day has been.
Speaker 3:Anyway, welcome, Good to have you. Sorry Carson's not with us today. I know he has some family things he's taking care of, but we have another awesome guest, david Premer. David welcome.
Speaker 4:Hey, great to be with you here. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2:Can I do this?
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, Good product placement.
Speaker 2:Just do that for the whole show, if that's okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's better than my face.
Speaker 2:Tom, do you mind if I kick this off a little?
Speaker 3:bit no, please, please.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to go off script. So I found David's book, and this is his older book. He's got a new one coming out. We're going to talk about that as well.
Speaker 2:But I read this book and I couldn't put it down because I kept going yeah, yeah, you see all my dog ear pages and my notes and everything. Oh yeah, yeah, oh, I got to remember that. Oh yeah, that's right. What I love, david, is you took all of your experience and you've got amazing experience, but you've turned it into something very logical and practical and I feel like a lot of times books and and and consultants speak is is very rigid, like oh, and this is what, and in a in a in a real world situation, or in a in a in a in a classroom or when, when you're writing things up on the whiteboard, it all sounds good, but this got back down to a lot of practical stuff for me, like just remember the fact that there's human beings on the other side and they don't want to be treated any other way. Is that a fair way of kind of summarizing my fan boy speak?
Speaker 4:A hundred percent. Well, my gosh, where do we start? I mean this, all this all came to be when I was working at Salesforce. So I was just, you know, like, like Tom, I'm startup sales guy. You know, did these four tech startups and my third one ends up getting acquired by Salesforce, which is how I got to work there, and I used to run at Salesforce. At the end of my tenure there, I used to run small business sales for the Eastern US at Salesforce.
Speaker 4:So I had all these like young, enthusiastic sales reps and what I found was the tactics that they were executing in the field not unethical, not categorically ineffective, but as a VP at Salesforce, people were prospecting into me all the time. People wanted to sell me stuff, and so I found that a lot of the tactics that people were using on me were things I was having no part of. I wasn't answering my phone unless it was an internal call that I could see. Not responding to cold outreach on email, LinkedIn, anything like that, and I'm like my team is doing the same thing, Like the same thing, that I'm not responding to. That's what they're doing.
Speaker 4:So I kind of went back to my. I was a research scientist before. I got into sales many years ago and I said you know what, there's got to be a better way. So I took it really intentionally in terms of like figuring out, like what are the pathways and mechanisms by which human beings make purchasing decisions? How can we, ironically, use science to be more human in our sales interactions? And that's kind of that was the catalyst for this journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3:I have a couple of questions and yeah, loha to Bob. Good to see him.
Speaker 2:Yeah shout out, shout out to Bob and anyone else Hold your thought for a second, tom, because, because I got so excited, I skipped the beginning where you'd say welcome to everybody. Put in the comments. You know who, where you're from. Please join with comments and tell everybody. Put your comments in, because David's going to be a great source of information, so I'd love for you all to participate and get you involved.
Speaker 3:So, david, what year were you at Salesforce, like roughly, when was that? When you were there?
Speaker 4:2012 to 2017. So when, I joined, salesforce was about 6,000 employees and when I left they were about 24,000 or 25,000 employees.
Speaker 3:So you were there right at the heart of the predictable revenue craze. Right, I mean predictable revenue Aaron Ross's book that came directly out of Salesforce and I assume that was a key part of your play playbook, or was it part of the playbook at the time? And how did you mold what you were finding with the predictable revenue playbook?
Speaker 4:it's funny. So I'm a fan of the predictable revenue playbook. It was something that we started implementing at the company before I worked at salesforce. But here's here's kind of like the big problem and where I focus and where I continue to focus. It's funny because now, when it comes to sales technology, there's all these tools there's like AI, this and personalization at scale, and all these things that we can do more so than ever before, and yet the data shows that it's actually taking more connection, attempts to interact with a customer than it ever has. The average age and experience level and tenure of a new salesperson is lower than it's ever been, and so the data shows that we're worse at sales than we were before, even with all of these things.
Speaker 4:And so I said it's great that you have all this technology, but at the end of the day, for any kind of sophisticated sale or big concerted purchase, it involves a human being talking to another human being and some kind of discourse happening in the decision being made, even if you use technology to figure out, like what their phone number is and who to reach out to all that kind of stuff. So it very much comes down to that human interaction and that's where I spend a lot of time. What do we say? How do we describe what we do? How do we do good discovery and handle objections and negotiate and doing all these things? But there's a very human element to what I do. In my view, that's the frontier. That's the biggest problem that we need to solve as a sales community.
Speaker 3:So was that more where you were going with the previous book or is that more on the latest book? Tell us a little bit about your books and kind of what the key points were, and of course we'll talk about the latest one here.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the first one, sell the Way you Buy, was all about kind of like the science and empathy based sales tactics. So like number one, don't use tactics that wouldn't work on you, but also like be really curious about the pathways and mechanisms, as I said, by which human beings make purchasing decisions. When you say it like this, they get it. When they say it. When you say it like that, their eyes glaze over and they don't get it, you know. So that's really what sell the way you buy is all about, and I kind of put all of the tactics that we think of in sales from messaging like discovery, objection handling through that lens, because and we were kind of talking about this in the pre-show One of the reasons why sales get such a bad rap is because we go out there and we execute these tactics that are based in nothing other than this is the way we've always done it Like. This is just the history In my book.
Speaker 4:The first chapter in Sell the Way you Buy is called the Cobra Kai Paradox, which for many people. I'm 48 years old, so when I was nine, the movie the Karate Kid comes out and I love the movie, but it tells a story of these jerk bully kids that learn karate from this person who teaches them the wrong way. And they're not bad kids, they're just doing it because that's what someone told them, and so that's what we've ended up with. In sales, we just do things like we were talking about, off the top, this robotic language. We send people emails using words that human beings don't say to each other because that's what our marketing department gave us and like isn't that the playbook? And the answer is like no, you're talking to another human being. Like sound like a human being, and it's funny that we have to, you know, teach people how to do this. Anyway, so that's what Sell. The Way you Buy is all about. The sales leader they need is a little different. Bob feels old now.
Speaker 3:He's saying yeah, don't worry, bob, you're probably not that old. So when did this book, that book, your first book, come out?
Speaker 4:So it came out at the height of the pandemic of April, even, you know, then it then it became easier as people started investing especially in B2B technology, in cloud technologies, because we couldn't see each other and all that kind of stuff, and it got a little easier. And unfortunately that tends to obfuscate during good times, obfuscate some of the challenges that we actually have with our sales motion. And so now you're seeing, especially in the last couple of years, as sales has gotten much harder, the stuff that used to work doesn't anymore, and so a lot of organizations are going back to the drawing board saying, shoot, like we can't run those old sales playbooks anymore because they just don't work Right, and so the appetite for these new tactics is has been great.
Speaker 3:So we talk about this all the time. And but I mentioned in your take, why do you think sales has gotten harder?
Speaker 4:well, you know, when you think about just adversity in the market, unless you were selling in 2008 during the last financial crisis, like you, everything has been kind of up into the rightish, you know, since then. You know, especially in technology, with the growth of cloud technologies and companies migrating, like, everyone is looking for these. You know these new solutions and, in general, people have money to spend on these solutions. But now it's getting harder because, you know, with recession fears and in rising interest rates, company budgets are getting tighter. You know, with recession fears and in rising interest rates, company budgets are getting tighter.
Speaker 4:Some of this stuff is actually, you know, legit. You know in terms of, you know, downsizing and layoffs and all, but some of it is preemptive fears. You know we, oh, we can't raise money, we can't, and so what's happening now is companies don't have as much money to spend. There's like the fear in the market. They're trying to do more with less and they think to themselves that the problems that they're encountering aren't so hard. They can just solve them on their own. It reminds me of in my younger days, when we're expecting a starter home, expecting our first kid, and, like leaky faucet, I'm like, oh, I can fix that, why not? I don't have to pay someone to fix it. So I convinced myself that these are things that I can do and and. So that's what. That's what you're seeing now in the market in the face of all these solutions, and the number of solutions in the market is, you know I give this example all the time In 2011, there were 150 marketing technologies available on the market.
Speaker 4:Now, for 2023, over 11,000, like it's grown by 70 times. Three over 11,000, like it's grown by 70 times. And so, as a buyer like I, don't know how to pick these solutions anymore, and so buying has become a lot more complex. Budgets are a lot tighter, there's a lot of fear in the market, and so it's not so easy. If you're one of these niche vendors, it's not like before, where you know, in the glory days, early 2000s, there's only so many solutions on the market. Now there's like a million solutions. In the glory days, early 2000s, there's only so many solutions on the market. Now there's like a million solutions. So how do we, as sellers, help our buyers navigate this complex environment where they don't have a lot of money and they think they can solve all their problems on their own?
Speaker 2:That's why it's so hard?
Speaker 3:now Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Brandon, yeah, I was going to say it's. This whole ecosystem that we've all been a part of is interesting. There's so many things coming together. So the startup culture, the VC, the angel investor, all of that, the greed of capitalism. The people think they're going to start a company and become a unicorn. Even the fact that we have the term unicorn speaks to what's going on. It's created all kinds of noise, so it's made selling harder for everybody. And then there's this new thing out here that people like to forget about is the buyer journey has changed because buyer tools have changed. Right?
Speaker 2:We, we, as you said earlier I think it was during the show, maybe it was in the pre but you know, we don't. We don't take calls from people we don't know, because there's so many calls coming into us. We don't pay attention to cold email because there's so many emails coming into us. And so we've got these fears some warranted, some just, you know, emotional fears of we're not going to be able to raise money. Interest rates are going up, da, da, da, da da.
Speaker 2:And we've got this old school mentality and we've got what I call old school and old old school. We've got the most recent old school over the last 10 years of this I believe an anomaly that these tactics even worked messaging at scale, cold calling at scale, and that even worked. And now we've got this inflection point where all these things are coming together and there's just this collective oh shit moment and a lot of non-decisions because people are scared, they don't know what to do. Is that? Do you guys think that's a fair assessment too, based on what David was saying don't know what to do. Do you guys think?
Speaker 3:that's a fair assessment too, based on what David was saying. Yeah, I think, and I want to. I heard you say a couple of things, david. I do agree, right, that the economic, the macro level conditions are obviously very different now than they were two or three years ago, especially in the tech space, which was fueled by a lot of external money.
Speaker 3:But I think what you also said and we talk a lot about this on the show is the noise level has gotten higher and higher and higher. So you have to be way, way more intelligent and creative to rise above the noise, right, and even if you were buying a lot, even if the economy picks up the noise level with AI and all these other things that are going on I mean, look at social, brandon, I mean LinkedIn is getting noisier because of AI and some of these AI things. So social is getting noisier, everything's getting noisier. We've got to cut through that somehow and rise above the noise. I think that's what I heard you say, david is kind of a key part of the message in the book.
Speaker 4:Yeah, in fact, you know one of the things I talk about in the book.
Speaker 4:My last company was focused on what we called advocate marketing, which is this idea that, from a conversion rate perspective, if I make a recommendation to you, we're friends. I'm like, hey, you know what, you know who I went with for this solution. I went with you know this company, you're just going to go with that company, right. And so, like, these kinds of like trusted recommendations convert at a much higher rate than you know web and social, all that kind of stuff. And so, yes, like, the way people buy is certainly fundamentally changed, the other part of it as well. And there's like again, this is why I love sales, because it's so nuanced, like there's so many, it's like an engineering equation with so many variables, with all this like margin of error. Part of the other challenge is that as these solutions get more niche and they get more complex and the average age of a salesperson gets lower, one of the things I talk about in the book and I wrote an article in Harvard Business about this five years ago was this phenomenon that I noticed that when you take a young, enthusiastic salesperson, you give them like a high-tech solution and you tell them go call grownups I don't mean to use an unnecessarily juvenile example Go call grownups. Call the VP of sales, call the VP of marketing, call the CIO, call grownups whose job you've never done and I want you to tell them with a high level of conviction about how you're going to lead them into the future. That's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 4:And you know what? It's funny because when I used to run small business for the Eastern US at Salesforce, I would have these reps, my New York City sales reps. They always hustled the most tons of calls, tons of emails, and I would have these reps that would have lots of activity, lots of flourish and no pipeline. So it's like, well, what's, what's going on? They're like I don't know, david, I'm doing all the things that you're telling me to do. So I would start listening to their calls and if I just I use this, I always say this I'm like if I close my eyes and I don't even care what the words are, I'm just listening, just to listen, just to hear what they say, and I'm like you know what? You sound like, tom. You sound like you're bothering this customer. You sound like one of my kids when they're about to hit me up for something that they think I'm going to say no to already you know, what I'm saying.
Speaker 4:I can hear the fear. You know, a couple of years ago my daughter was on the volleyball team at her high school and she comes to you know she's. She has this early morning practice she needs a lift too. That she totally forgot about. She comes down. She's like early morning practice, she needs a lift to. That she totally forgot about she comes down.
Speaker 4:She's like, um, dad, I'm like the answer is no, immediately like I'm immediately defensive forget it and so your tone, your approach, your conviction, your confidence plays a huge part in your ability to convert customers. And yet what we arm these and I say kids, but it's really everyone like salespeople with is, like product information, marketing, speak, all sorts of crap that your customers don't care about, especially when all of the other vendors in your space go out and they have oh, we're just like you, like we say the same thing, right, and so when a customer can't figure out what to do, they just shut down especially in the face of this lack of conviction.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like so, something I've been saying and I believe to be true, and maybe I'm FOS, I don't know, but it's over the last eight decade we've not trained a whole lot of salespeople. Now, a lot of our customers they're either Microsoft partners and they they tend to be full cycle AEs. They're manufacturing and they tend to be full cycle AEs. And then there's some people in the tech space where you know, our first job like my first job in sales was I was a full cycle AE.
Speaker 2:I had a small territory and I had small types of companies where I couldn't do too much damage. But I got to learn everything and I had to learn how to build rapport, I had to learn how to ask questions and I got coached and trained and did all that. But I was kind of in a playground where if I made mistakes it wasn't going to be a big challenge. I feel like a lot of this in the tech space anyway, with SDRs. They haven't really been trained to sell, they were trained to I don't even know if I want to call it prospect, because it was this weird anomaly of the way that you prospected to try and get people into a demo. Is that accurate?
Speaker 3:Is that accurate and, if so, how is that playing out now when the data shows lots of S, sdr and the efficiency? If they get one meeting every month or something, that's not really an efficient sales model.
Speaker 2:Right. But my, my point is they haven't really learned how to sell. No, so as we, as we go into this next season and they think, oh, I've got five years of sales experience, Do they Like? Do they really they have SDR experience? Like, if you're going to what I would call quote, kind of a real company with full cycle AEs, I just don't think that they're prepared, because it's a different motion. Like, David, you were saying they're all prepared with you know the product specs and value propositions and all that, but they're not prepared to say hey, Mr and Ms Customer, what's going on?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean they're not prepared to have like those grown up conversations Because, again, like, what we arm them with is like a very rigid script and a lot of product training, like and they believe, okay, if we just talk about, like the product they're going to did, you know, you know that we have this platform that will enable you to do it. And like no one cares, like they live, the customers live in the world of of problems and we and sales people, for whatever reason, we tend to live in the world of products and then we just, you know, we try to pitch the product, as well as the fact that a lot of the SDRs, like they're younger I mean this is like it's the entry level sales job and, in many ways, like the hardest job in sales. We tell them to call again grownups, you know, learned customers to talk about how we can help them, and we arm them with product related information. Like that's the recipe for disaster.
Speaker 4:Now there are certain tactical elements of like how do you get someone on the phone? And like what do you say in the voicemail? And like you know, those are things we can for sure teach them, but you know, if you ask me, that's not why, you know, if, if you're telling me an SDR is being unsuccessful, it's probably not some of those tactical things, it's. It's really like the meat of what they're saying. Like you know, are you saying something that makes me want to lean in and say this is really interesting. You know, tell me more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going to Tom. Let's transition to some of the comments and then I want to move. I know a big portion of our audience too, david, is not from the tech space. They're not SDRs.
Speaker 2:I want to move into and I think it's a lot of the content from your new book about how are we leading and training salespeople to be successful as we come into this, the trite term of the new normal. But it's just true. We've got this new environment in front of us. Buyers are different. The way we can communicate with them is different. We don't have as much face-to-face new, new, new.
Speaker 3:So, tom, which comments do you want to bring up, because you definitely have some fans here? David, from Melissa Hi.
Speaker 4:Melissa, good to see you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't think we've ever been told we're intelligent. Brandon, this is great you know, definitely not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I've been told I think I'm intelligent, but that's different, right.
Speaker 3:And then I like Bob's comment here saying you know, yes, it seems to be getting harder, but the root cause of the problems are still human problems, right? In other words, the problems that we're trying to sell against or to spotlight today probably have a lot of similarities to the things we were doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, just obviously manifesting in a different way. I think that's a really good point and I want to. You know, butch, he's reminded that he was in sales 30 years before Salesforce. He's definitely OG of the group here. And I want to hit Chris's comment as well is you know he's right, right, what Chris is saying here is these concepts make so much sense. No wonder it's so damn hard. It's just, it's just very simple. Oh yeah.
Speaker 4:I say like if sales was so easy, we'd be paying high school students minimum wage to do it. You know, instead of you know really smart people a lot of money to do it successfully. Because you have to balance, like, all of these variables. It's, it's. It's kind of funny like I think about this and, anyways, I have some new concepts brewing in my head. But when you think about one of the problems that exist in sales today, a lot of people think that they can solve their own problems. You know like, oh, I can fix that leaky faucet or I can rewire my house, but you really couldn't. And it's because of a psychological principle it's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which tells us that the skills that we need in order to be really good at something are the same skills that we need to know that we're not good at that thing. So, for example, you might watch an Olympic swimmer on TV or someone who does a sport that you used to do I think we were talking about Brandon Badminton used to do.
Speaker 4:Soccer, Soccer, shoot Soccer yeah, so you watch soccer? Who plays badminton? There was a client I was talking to who answered the question and said badminton.
Speaker 3:I didn't know, brandon, you were into badminton.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so that's going to be a new thing. So Brandon says, well, I used to play soccer, so we talked about this. Do you ever watch soccer on TV? And you think to yourself, I know, those are pros doing this thing, but like, but I can do that, I could do it, like I could hang with them a little bit, Right, and the reality is, like you could, you would. You're nowhere near close.
Speaker 4:I think you were saying you know, you, you kick the ball halfway across the field and someone traps it, you know, underneath. I'm like that's really hard, but it looks really easy when they do it Right. And so that's really what modern selling is Like. When you see it done really well, it looks like nothing, it looks like just a human being having a conversation, right. But there's actually a lot of variables and number crunching and all sorts of things that are happening beyond, you know, in the background, that make it look so easy, right, but it's obviously because I said off the top the reason I love sales it's like an engineering formula with so many different variables, with margins of error. You know, I'm going toe to toe with you, I'm trying to prospect into you. You just had a fight, you know, with your spouse that morning. Now you're on the phone with me. Now you're in a bad mood, like I can't control that Right, but yet you know I have to handle it.
Speaker 2:So anyways, that's that's one of the challenges and that, yeah. And then, in that nuance, like I can't remember where I read this and if it's in your book, tell me. It was somebody. They had a first conversation with somebody and they got on and because they didn't go right into their pitch, they said, well, you know how's it going today, what's going on? And the person said something about an issue kind of going on with their family. And the person said something about an issue kind of going on with their family.
Speaker 2:And basically the entire time they had allotted was just being a human and responding to this person that was going through some potential big distress, empathized with them and really didn't have the conversation that they wanted to have. And at the end of it the person said you know what? I am so sorry, we used up all the time. Why don't we schedule another time next week and give you my attention? And then the next week, when they had it, that relationship was so solidified because they displayed empathy. They made like, hey, my time. They treated the person like a human being in need, not like a prospect and a number to close a deal, and they ended up closing a deal. Now, obviously, you like it when the story ends with a close to deal. But those types of nuances they come from experience and they come from being properly trained to actually care about people on the other side, and not just. Here's our playbook. Go do the playbook. We know the buyer's fully in control and yet so often run the playbook instead of adapt to the human.
Speaker 4:A hundred percent. You know, a lot of times we have these things that we like a list of things we need to get out of the initial discovery call.
Speaker 4:We need to know the budget, the timing, the list of that. Who's going to be the decision maker. You're not going to get all that right. It's better to have. You get as much as you can, prioritize what's most important, but have that human conversation because this might be actually be kind of a good little segue into like the second book. So the second book is called the sales leader they need and it's all about. It actually takes a very similar approach to sell the way you buy, but just for sales leaders. So you know, with sell the way you buy it, science and empathy, don't use tactics that wouldn't work on you and be really curious about how it all works With sales leaders.
Speaker 4:One of the questions I asked the sales leaders that I train in my practice I say like, can you picture about this sales leader that made them the best, the best you ever worked for? What was it about them? And then I go to the whiteboard and I write down everything they tell me and I've done this hundreds of times so I know what the answer is. And everything they tell me falls into two main categories. One category is the best sales leader and the other category is the best sales leader. So I know what the answer is, and everything they tell me falls into two main categories. One category, one which I would argue is probably the most important, which is they cared about me, right, they challenged me, they pushed me, they believed in me, they were transparent, they coached me, like. They did all these things not because they were trying to get me to hit the quota explicitly, but because they cared about me as a person. And number two, they helped me grow.
Speaker 4:And and then I asked these reps like what kind of rep did you show up as for this leader? Or I asked the leaders like what did you? What kind of rep did you show up as for the best leader you ever had? And they would say, oh my gosh, like I would, I would run through a brick wall for Brandon, I would do anything, like I didn't want to disappoint him, right.
Speaker 4:And so I say to these leaders like you already know, if you want to be the best your team ever had, and unleash that discretionary effort from them like, get them to try really hard, you already know what you need to do. Then the question so care, that's it the you need to do. Then the question so care, that's it. The same thing happens with your customers as well, like they can tell if you're just trying to make the sale or you actually genuinely care about helping them find the right thing for them, which may not be your solution at the end of the day. Right, they can tell and they will always come back to you, just the way the sales reps who value working with that leader will always come back to them.
Speaker 4:It won't. The sales reps who value working with that leader will always come back to them. It won't be the last time they work with them, and so what I tried to do in the second book was codify. All right. So if you want to care about your team and help them grow, what are the five skills that you need to be doing to learn in order to become that leader? So, trying to very similar you know that's the way kind of my research scientist mind works is to try to codify things to make it easier for people to figure out.
Speaker 3:So are you up for sharing some of those five things?
Speaker 2:No All right, can I throw this before you go, because I do want to transition Bob Britton was a little late to the comments on talking about sell the way you buy for us, but I would like to come back to that at the end if we have time, and if not, maybe we carve out something, because I think that's really interesting topic. But I do want to move on to the leadership side for today. So, bob, thanks for that, and we're going to do our best to get back to it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so, so, yeah, so, let's, we'll talk about this. I was just kidding, obviously, about the leadership behaviors, so so some are easier than others. You know I talk about creating transparency. You know, driving accountability, protecting and advocating for your team, coaching them and giving and getting feedback. Some of these things are obviously universal, you know, good leadership traits to have, but applied in a sales context, there's a lot of specific use cases that are really important. So, you know, as an example, you know, one of the things is, I say, transparency when all you're doing is you're giving people orders.
Speaker 4:And for many of us, you know, in sales leadership roles, we got here because we were good sales reps, right, and so you know, we often think that if we just flex those muscles again and help our teams be really good at selling and just tell them what to do because we have a lot of the answers, then that's the solution. But the problem is when we just tell people what to do and, by the way, I always like to temper what I say by saying like you know, you might agree with what I'm saying, you might not, but like there's data and science to back this up. You know, I don't want to be in a position where I say, oh, here's what you should do, because this is what I did, like that's the Cobra Kai tactics. We want to get out of that. If we can show people the impact that their efforts have, they'll be more intentional about how they go about them. So, for example, simple transparency example you know, as a sales leader, one of the things that you're asked to do is present the revenue details of the revenue operation to the executive teams, to your board of directors, whatever have you, and what I want the team to do is be really diligent about completing the fields in the CRM.
Speaker 4:You know I need you to keep Salesforce HubSpot. I need you to keep that stuff up to date, because you know, if I go to the board with incorrect information or like lies, that's not good for anyone. And so what I would do is, when I would ask my team members to like, ok, keep your stuff up to date, I would pull their forecast data, I would put it into like my presentation, and before I went to the board, I would say, hey, team, here's what you know, your date, here's the data I pulled from Salesforce. And here's the story I'm going to tell right, right now.
Speaker 4:I don't believe this. I don't believe that, and the reason I don't believe it is because I see the average age of the deals in the pipeline are three times longer than what our average sales cycle is. So when you tell me we have 5x coverage next quarter, I don't believe you. I don't believe you're trying to intentionally deceive me, but I think you've just pushed deals out there that have no business being there. So this is like the kind of straight talk dialogue I would have with my team. I'm like I want to show you what I'm going to show the board and I want to show you the story that I'm telling, and I also want you to know here are the decisions that are going to get made based on this. So if I can give you more insight into how the business runs, what I'm going to do with the information that you're giving me by creating some of that transparency, I can get you to act with more intent.
Speaker 3:Do you find this is an interesting point, because you hear this a lot right Is that even as marketers or salespeople we have to act more like a business person and less as a marketer or less as a salesperson? Do you find, david, with your clients and what you do, that when that transparency occurs, that you see the sales team acting more like business people, thinking more like, does it sort of organically transfer over by just the behavior of that sales leader?
Speaker 4:Yeah, 100%. Like, if I can give you insight into how the business runs. You're not just going to do things like robotically, you're going to do things with the right level of intentionality and you're going to be able to moderate your behaviors. You know even little things, like you know I talked about. You know transparency and even accountability is showing people what good looks like. You know, if I say, oh, you tell me, I need you to keep your stuff up to date in Salesforce, what does that mean? Like, let me show you what like a good next step looks like. Here are the things of a good next step.
Speaker 4:When you tell me, hey, david, my opportunities are up to date in Salesforce, I want you to. Here's what that means to me. It means that these four fields have been updated in the last week. There's a timestamp on this. Like I want to set you up for success. So if I ever ask you to do something, you know I love you know, bob, saying this here, like you know, it's more helpful to know the why than just the what. Absolutely, giving people like that background is really important, but then also, like the what and being very clear on what the expectations were are important. So you have that gold standard to shoot for, and there's tons of examples of how sales reps go into their sales motion and unknowingly do bad or screw something up, not because they're ill-intentioned or they're lazy, it's just that we were never clear on what good looked like in this instance, David.
Speaker 2:That makes me think of this question. What should salespeople be doing or saying or asking of their leaders as they come into this? As we've established, there's just headwinds. There's all kinds of new stuff in front of us. What should the sales team be asking?
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, look, I think you know a lot of salespeople want feedback, they want to be coached, they want to be good. You know it's funny in my practice I know a lot of people don't want to be good, but a lot of people do want to be good and they want just like that. You know I don't again unnecessarily juvenile example, but the child wants the parent, parents attention. Like I want you to tell me, you know, how can I be better at my job. You know the ride alongs, the feedback.
Speaker 4:So I think that's something that's very reasonable, like if you want me to be good, you have to invest in me by giving me some of this, you know, feedback and coaching. And also like clearing the roadblocks for me to be successful. So if there's something that I feel is limiting my ability to be successful, then, as the leader kind of, your job is to block and tackle for me right Now. It's usually the leaders who should be taking more of this initiative saying hey, brandon, what's one thing I can do to clear the road for you to be more successful? But not unreasonable, certainly for reps to be asking this of their leaders.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that reminds me we hear a lot. I hear a lot because we do so much with LinkedIn and a LinkedIn first motion. I have a lot of sales professionals that say, gosh, I wish my CEO would be more active on LinkedIn. It would help me build my personal brand when I have my CEO doing it. And the analogy is like when we go to an event we go to a conference or a trade show when our CEO has a large network at that event, my job gets easier because people know my CEO. Their reputation helps open my doors. But when they don't have a reputation, then it's like I'm fighting upstream and so just asking those things of your leadership and then then, of course, hoping that they'll be receptive, versus saying yes and not doing anything 100, although I would argue that the majority of the onus.
Speaker 4:I would love, you know, for reps to be empowered to say like hey look, you know, leader, here's what I need from you. But I think the onus falls much more on the leader. You chose this. You didn't have to do this, you chose it.
Speaker 2:I agree with you. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of sales producers that are in teams that if they don't ask for it, they're not going to get much of anything, and I'm sure that's why you wrote your next book.
Speaker 3:So I have a question. I want to tie into Kathy's comment here. Kathy was saying it's about revenue responsibility versus quota. Words matter and salespeople need to understand why they matter as much as why the products matter. I want to talk a question related to revenue responsibility. Do you find, david, that you know and you talked about transparency and even how to you know best practices for putting stuff into Salesforce? But do most organizations even have a consistent definition of an opportunity and how that opportunity you know can transform or be transparent with their team on how that actually plays out?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean the quick answer is no. I mean, you know some do, but even if they do have a definition for what an opportunity is, oftentimes there's a disconnect in the handoff between teams. You know the marketing leads always suck and then the SDRs aren't qualifying the right opportunities, or maybe sometimes they they're. You know, like if I'm you know I've seen this as well like I'm a buddy that with the sdr who gets comp based on how many opportunities they flip, so I kind of accept opportunities that maybe aren't in the strike zone and so, yeah, there's tons of inconsistency and you know it makes it very difficult for these, you know, different parts of your organization to communicate with each other and, and you know, move the move these opportunities forward.
Speaker 3:I mean, I would think, getting that, getting your shit together on that part of it and really understanding your stages, what your close rate, your velocity rate, where is a high intent that really sets a foundation to understand that business aspect of things like you were talking about before. Because, think about it, what are they taking to the board meeting? Right, they're trying to take opportunities or actually qualified pipeline. In my book, the very first chapter, the reason I wrote the book was I went to a board meeting and I looked like an idiot and I was like what the hell happened here and I didn't want to go through that again. And that's where I did all the research I ended up putting in my book. So I feel exactly what you're talking about and I think it's a bigger and bigger problem all the time of really just understanding, as she said, what is the revenue responsibility and how do we actually achieve that. A lot of organizations don't really know it's funny, don't really know.
Speaker 4:It's funny the chapter four of my book, where I talk about driving accountability I started with the first section is preparing for the board meeting. Because, exactly what you said, when I prepare for the board meeting, or if you're out there presenting in front of the executive team, they don't just want to know what the answer is, they are judging you and your suitability, tom, to be in that role. Right, right and it's and it as an aside, it's funny I invested in my last VP sales role. I invested in this analytics package that was expensive, that I only really used once a quarter when I was going to present in front of the board, and the reason why I used it was because it gave me insights into my business that I couldn't have gotten any other way. So I was willing to pay a bunch of money to look smart in front of the board because they're, you know, because they're judging me, and I wish that my team felt a little bit of that pressure that I felt.
Speaker 4:I think if they felt that pressure they would try harder, you know, in their roles, to get the right data to me, you know. And so this transference of accountability is actually like a really important concept Like how do we hold our team accountable? And I think one of the great kind of you know works of magic of great sales leaders is that they know how much of the you know. Oftentimes we get a lot of pressure from the boards and the executive team and the investors and we're like we go to the team, we're like team, you got to like try harder. We got like the boards breathing down my neck and we just transfer a hundred percent of that, you know, that pressure to the team. So knowing how much of that pressure to transfer and by what mechanism is really important.
Speaker 3:But I do wish that they felt that level of accountability, a little bit more accountability than they do, like the way I felt no, I think it's awesome and in my in, you know, when I wrote about in the book where I got the punch in the stomach is one of the board members or people in there said how confident do you feel about what you just presented? And I was like, uh, you know, um, and I couldn't answer the question. And this wasn't my first rodeo either, right, I've, I've done a few of these before. But I got to this point. I was like man, I don't feel like I can back up what I'm talking about here and that was sort of that shift that you were talking about. You know, the COVID era, things getting harder, the buyer, all these sort of perfect storm of things coming together. So I'm a big proponent of what you're talking about, of that transparency and accountability and getting the team involved in the business, not just in the as Kathy says, the quota of what they're doing.
Speaker 4:So a hundred percent. Well, it's funny. I'll give you like a you know, both a leadership tip and a sales tip, Cause I talk about this in my discovery training is I say the concept is sell more by losing faster. And what do I mean by that? When I look at the amount of time in real life Salesforce and the company, after the amount of time that my sales reps were spending in the discovery phase of sales cycles for deals they ended up winning versus deals they ended up losing, I found they were spending like three times longer in discovering for deals we ended up losing.
Speaker 4:And why Customers go dark. We can't get the executives on the phone, Like they're just giving us the signals that they're just not that into us. But the reps that do a better job of saying, hey, you know what? Like they're just not that into me. I'm not going to focus on them and just focus on, like the newer, high potential opportunities. Those teams and reps actually did better. They had higher levels of attainment because they weren't focused on all of these distractions. So I use this as an example of you know kind of what we're talking about here, like execution, looking at the data and saying like I don't believe that. These opportunities that you're kind of stashing out three months from now, I don't believe they're real, because look at how long we spent in the discovery phase of these things. Right, and so having some of that real talk, using data, keeping our teams focused, driving some accountability, will actually have an impact on our bottom line. But yeah, it's like this very simple kind of common sense thing.
Speaker 3:Like, just use data, transparency, focus to achieve the goal that you're looking for, that come through the social, the relationship building or whatever are of much higher quality, much higher percentage close than something that came in through a you know, mql, a traditional sort of MQL. So I think it's also really valuable to not only understand what you just said, david, but what is it? You know where these quote unquote leads are coming from and a lot of times that can probably act as a certainly a lens into is this discovery going to go way off base or take forever? Right, you can. You can look at a lot of variables and tell whether or not this thing probably has some legs or doesn't.
Speaker 4:100%, yeah, Like you know, I sometimes refer to these as like the physical, chemical properties. It's like, eh, judging by this piece of data and that piece, this doesn't smell like a deal.
Speaker 3:That's actually going to Not really too good yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just simple sniff test, and I think a lot of times we don't have the freedom to be able to do some of the simple sniff test. But what I hear you saying with that as a sales of yours and encouraging them and looking at the data and show, okay, our longer sales cycles have a higher loss rate. What's going on here, like what's happening and it's logical when you start unpacking it that way, like the harder they are to get the information out through the discoveries and the harder they are to get back to the next conversation, to go deeper. Probably not a high priority. It's not a high priority. They're really not that interested. Maybe they're acting out of a little bit of courtesy, but either way it's going to waste your time.
Speaker 3:But, brandon let's even go back to how we started this with noise. Right Time is never your friend, because time just opens up the opportunity for more noise to get in. That you now have to overcome. So anyway, sorry, David.
Speaker 4:No, you can use data as well. I'll give this example, because I give this example in the book. So one of the sales leaders I coach, he was trying to get his team to do more prospecting. Of course sales teams, they like the nice inbound leads. Like I don't want to have to get on the phone or do all more prospecting. Of course sales teams, they like the nice inbound leads, I don't want to have to get on the phone or do all the prospecting. So his team was like no, we're just going to work the inbound leads. And they said they're like well, brandon, the inbound leads, they close faster than the outbound leads. So why would I focus on the outbound leads? So what does he do? He gets into the data and he says yeah, it's true, the inbound leads close 17% faster than the outbound leads, but the revenue from the outbound leads are 83% greater. I forget what the statistic, whatever it was, it was compelling. And so all of a sudden it seems like, oh, okay, well, when you put it like that, again, we're being responsible for the revenue and the leading indicators and the behaviors that drive that revenue.
Speaker 4:Sometimes we can use data to kind of, you know, soften the minds of our teams and get them to move in the direction that we want. Even you know and so far you're talking about, like, forecasting you know when we always have to kind of, you know, beat our reps over the head to like get all the crap, all the stuff that you pushed out into future. You know, quarters, like you got to get that out because here's the downstream impact on, like, on our business. And you know I always use this litmus test. You know, back when we were at Salesforce, as I said, okay, like, take one of these little opportunities you pushed out, what if Mark Benioff called you into his office and said you know, tom, this opportunity, this one here, tell me about that.
Speaker 4:Why is this one closing three months from now? You know, could you defend to your point, like, your board experience? Like, how confident do you feel in this Tom? Like, how much could you defend? You know what's going to happen and for most of us in sales, there's like a very thin veneer of confidence where we just either say things or we actually don't know, and our customers can tell if we believe or don't believe in our solution, just the way our team members can tell whether we know what the hell we're talking about, as it relates to improving our sales motion.
Speaker 2:So I've got a common theme through our conversation.
Speaker 4:If you're asked about your confidence level in some sort of sale and your answer is it's not a good thing, yeah, well, yeah, and one of the reasons why people sometimes don't have confidence is because all we do is we train them on like products like, oh, like here's the product.
Speaker 4:Like we don't train them enough on the problem you know you think about when you go into the doctor's office and the doctor has seen a lot of cases like yours and they have a lot of knowledge. Like you develop lots of confidence, you want to go back to that doctor. You know you don't want to have someone who you just like. Oh well, I got this machine that I plug in and it tells me, like if you don't have the knowledge or context or conviction behind what you're saying, then why would your team and why would your customers believe you? Yeah, completely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wanted to go back.
Speaker 3:Brandon, or do you have another you want to? I?
Speaker 2:do? I've got a question on. I wanted to go back, Brandon, how often do they actually go and look at the data and have these types of conversations and let the data motivate and tell that narrative to help the sales team understand what their world really looks?
Speaker 4:like you mean like internally, yeah, yeah, yeah, not enough. I have a section in my book that I call let data do the hard work, as it relates to driving accountability, and so you know oftentimes like oh, brandon, you've got to make more calls. You know, tom, you've got to do more of this. Your conversion rate, you know, like and so like. Why do I have to as a leader, why do I have to have these conversations? Can I not use data that I give you visibility into to help moderate you, self-moderate your behaviors? So, yeah, we don't use data enough, we don't often use data in the right way, and the great thing about data is that it's impartial. It just it's like science, it is what it is. You know, I'm not. You know, and I can deliver it without imposing my personal emotional bias on it, if I said hey, tom, I noticed that you're near the bottom of the leaderboard as it relates to the number of prospecting calls that you're making every week, what's going on, and I can prove out why making that number is important. But, yeah, a lot of organizations don't use they. We use simple data like oh, you're not hitting your quota, you're behind on this, but there's actually a lot more we can do in some of these nuanced examples, like I gave around, the speed of the sales cycle versus the revenue associated with it.
Speaker 4:Or, for example, one of the things that we used to look at a lot at Salesforce was install-based deals or new business. So we would say reps love to sell products and services to existing customers because it's easier. I'll sell you a few more licenses here and there, a new product. But we also knew at Salesforce that for every dollar that we bring in within 18 months, that dollar is going to turn into $7 of expansion revenue. So, brandon, when I say last month that 90% of your revenue came from the install base, that's great. You hit your number last month. But why I'm concerned is because if you keep doing that, that trend continues, you're not going to have enough new business to feed your quota for, you know, months to come and so like a lot of that, like more nuanced data is also really important in terms of driving behavior, just not not just like the top line stuff you know I like this is interesting butch's comment on there.
Speaker 2:Tom is um. You know the, whose team's second most important measure was cost of a boarded transaction. It really gets again. Let's look at the data and make the awareness of the time spent, the cost loss, the opportunity missed, part of the culture and things that we talk about. How often should a leader be talking about those things? Or am I off base with thinking that that's an important part of culture?
Speaker 4:It certainly is, and it's funny. So, as I was doing this research for Sell the Way you Buy, I was working with Shopify and one of my friends and sales leaders at Shopify she was telling me that one of the metrics that they track on their dashboard is what they refer to as TTL time to lose and it's a metric that tells us, like basically, how much time you know we're wasting in opportunities. And the idea is like, if we're going to lose, I want to lose quickly. You know that the worst thing I can do is lose slowly, but in fact, like, the even worse thing than that is losing slowly and not realizing you're losing, which a lot of people do. Yeah, but, like, I want to optimize my sales machine not just for wins but also losses.
Speaker 4:Right, and so when every deal is precious, we often think, oh, we need to hang on to it. You know that. Well, they said call me back in six months, so I might as well just push that opportunity down the field. You know, meanwhile, like no, like we should be optimizing for losses If someone's not a good fit. This is again what my data showed. My New York city sales reps, who are much more ruthless with their time had a much larger proportion of fresh pipeline, pipeline that was like less than 60 days old, versus other teams that had lots of 90 plus day old pipeline. That was kind of sticking around. And my New York City sales teams had much higher attainment because they were just more focused. So optimizing your funnel, not just for wins but lost time, is really important. But I'll tell you I have not seen a lot of organizations do that.
Speaker 3:I think that's, you know, now more than ever, I think that is a very, very key strategy, because if you are going to invest more, more time, more relationships, more energy, more intelligence into the qualified deals, you can't be wasting your time with the ones that aren't going to win. So you've got to put your attention on the ones that really matter, right, and so getting the ones out of the way, and plus the hope. You know it's all this hope stuff, right, that's the. That's where confidence goes away, is where the hope factor comes in and overtakes the actual, real data. And you know, that's what I saw, that when I really looked at it, that when I debugged that board meeting, I had a lot of hope and not a lot of confidence, and that had to switch very, very quickly.
Speaker 4:Defensibility is an important like OK, so you have a lot of hope, Prove to me or defend why this deal is going to close. If you can't, you know, as they say, hope is not a strategy, so yeah.
Speaker 2:And it again. We come back to data and information as a motivator. If we're looking at this from the data and let the narrative show like, hey, these deals don't tend to close, here's the data to show it, it should also be a motivator and almost a coach to help the sales rep navigate the process better. Like, oh, my slow deals have not been converting, they've been slow because of X, y, z reasons. Let me go make sure that those things aren't happening earlier in the stages so I'm not dealing with another slow deal that doesn't resolve. Does that logic follow, guys, or am I? I'm no, I'm just confusing everybody.
Speaker 4:No, no. I think it's reasonable to look at what the data is telling you like at every stage you know of the sales process, so yeah at the beginning if it's taking too long to run through discovery.
Speaker 4:People aren't being lined up. The customer's ghosting you like me, like the chances are they're not that into you, right, you know like, so we should act accordingly. It doesn't mean that we should completely jettison and abandon the deal, although in some cases we should, but we should act accordingly. The other thing is, I would say, like salespeople can also be more prescriptive, and I'm I talk about the power of prescription a lot because we're we're like the doctors in this doctor patient relationship. So you know it's incumbent upon us to help our customers, you know, navigate this process as efficiently as possible. You know, if I talk to a client that I know is going to like, so I'll give you an example In my practice I have lots of great, I'm grateful to have lots of nice big, you know, software companies that I work with and smaller ones.
Speaker 4:But the big software companies you, if I go through the regular channels, oh, let's talk to the enablement team and let's talk to this. That's the slow road to failure. In order for my larger client engagements to be successful, there needs to be a leader who stands up and says we're gonna do this and I'm gonna figure out how to fund it. And I'm not gonna go through the channels because I know that's the slow road to, you know, to victory or failure. If I'm talking to a big company and we're having these initial conversations and I'm not getting the sense that that leader is going to stick their hand up and say like, yes, I want this to be done, then my spidey sense goes off and I might say, you know, hey, brandon, like typically, you know, I found working with big companies, if we go through the proper, like all these channels, like it's just going to be the slow road to failure. All these people are going to want to get involved and it's going to take a lot.
Speaker 4:It's like, it's kind of like the way I would handle against an RFP process where a company says, oh, we want to go through an RFP. I'm like, and here's why, and here's what's going to happen, you're going to make these connections internally. You're going to be told this. You're going to be told that, like you know, do you think that we can navigate through this somehow? Because, like I know the way this movie is going to end and if I'm not getting the feels that we're going to be able to, you know, navigate our way to the finish line, then like, maybe this isn't for us. So I think salespeople have a great opportunity to do that with their customers. It's like be prescriptive and like, if you don't feel like it's going in the right direction, you know, like feel free to like challenge the customer on why it's not. And I say, you know, kathy has a point here.
Speaker 3:Well that you just answered her question. I think perfectly that's how you make the conversations more productive, is make them more prescriptive, and then the fear factor kind of goes away.
Speaker 4:And I would also say, you know, Kathy which I think is a great point, because I talk about this in the sales leader they need, I say, like people, when they fear consequences, they're less likely to you know, to act or to give you the truth. So the example I give is, like you know, my kids, when they were little, we would like to wake up on Saturday mornings and make waffles, and so one Saturday morning I wake up and I hear this big thud in the kitchen and I go down and there's like a chair that's like pushed up against the cupboard and there's like a bag of chocolate chips on the floor, with like three kids that look guilty as hell sitting there, and I come down, kids that look guilty as hell sitting there, and I come down.
Speaker 4:I'm like who did this? And of course, exactly. It's like, oh, no one did it, of course. Like no one can remember what exactly happened. I don't know, I don't. It's like I have no recollection of this happening, and so the reason why their memories all of a sudden disappear is because they fear there's a consequence. They think, well, dad's going to be angry if they find out who it is. So what do I do? Like I take that fear away and I say, hey, look, I, I'm not angry. I, you know, I just need to clean this up. And so I would appreciate if someone who may have been involved in this, like if they could just help me. And then all of a sudden I get, like you know, some hand raises right.
Speaker 4:So you know, kathy, I know it's a tricky line to balance here, but when salespeople have a fear of failure, yes, they tend to hang on to things for too long, but if we make it OK, like I want you to give up stuff that you don't feel is a good fit, or at least let's talk about it Like the consequence isn't there, or at least the fear isn't there. Then we can have that much more open relationship, like you can play relaxed. So I think that's really important. If we want to make these conversations more productive, we have to kind of you know, look, sales is a. You know it's a winning and losing game. You got to put up the numbers. But it's not all about the numbers. If we can reduce the consequence of that fear of failure, then people will be more likely to kind of lean in and do what's necessary to be more effective.
Speaker 2:I think, as we wrap up, Tom, I think one of my big takeaways from today is going to be that make not failure, but make the conversation around loss and the cost of loss part of the conversation so that it empowers people to move bad deals through quicker and, just you know, get to it as you say, lose faster on deals that don't pass the sniff test and be okay Instead of the fear of failure. Go, I got to do everything I can to try and salvage it. We need kind of know like this isn't going to go anywhere. Let's kind of move on. Let's go ahead and ask these harder questions and just kind of get the shit out on the table so that we can go yep, it's shit, let's move on and be okay with it. I think that's, that's my, that's my takeaway from the day.
Speaker 3:I think you're right on. I mean, you know what on a good, a really good salesperson is batting one for four, one out of four, one out of three, right, maybe? I mean, it's the other two out of three that you want to really understand, to really learn and get better.
Speaker 2:So I think that's a great it reminds me of my old Brian Tracy training and now that I'm saying it, I should have known this for lots of years and I probably did and then forgot it. But you know, we'd say you start to get to a point where you know your numbers and you know, like hey, it's going to take me 24 of these to make a deal. So when you get your fifth no, you're like sweet, let's go get number six, let's go get number seven, let's get there. So the 24th one becomes a yes.
Speaker 3:And it is. It's motivating Absolutely, David. Awesome stuff today, Some really good nuggets in here. This is one worth re-listening to for sure. If somebody wants to get your book, find out more about your consulting, where should they go?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean the books are all available on Amazon. It's probably the easiest. There you go.
Speaker 2:I don't have the other one, I don't have the other one. I don't have it up here because it's not out yet, right?
Speaker 4:Well, so okay, here I'll do the product placement for you. So here it is. Um, it's technically out May 1st, although, um, you know between us, it is available on Amazon now. Don't don't, don't say that too loudly, but it is available on Amazon now so you can get them on Amazon. And then for the rest of the stuff I give away tons of stuff for free, it's all you know, mostly ungated. You can go to my website, cerebralsellingcom YouTube channel by the same name tons of articles, videos, content, free training for you to digest from there. Awesome, brandon, I think.
Speaker 3:Carson's going to be really sorry he missed this one today.
Speaker 2:I think so too. Carson would have had a lot of fun with David. Yeah, so we're going to have to do it again, carson's our sales producer for Microsoft, and so he brings a new, a different lens to it and really gets into the from the producer standpoint. Well we can do it again.
Speaker 4:I just got to write another book at some point in the future, and then we'll do another one.
Speaker 2:Well, no, we'll come back and talk about the other book when I have it in my hand.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, for sure, yeah, All right. Well, thanks again.
Speaker 3:Thanks everybody for the comments. Great comments today, Good questions David, good luck with the book and everybody. Have a good week, my pleasure.
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