Dan Martell - Forge High-Impact Sellers with David @ CerebralSelling.com - Escape Velocity Show #25

00:00:00.000 People value all different things for different reasons and so sell the way you buy is just all about understanding like what is that person value and how are they making that buying decision so that you can align your sales motion to them in a very human way.

00:00:14.000 David what's up man good to see I'm gonna reach across the table we go get my exercise really

00:00:31.780 appreciate you making it pleasure yeah it's great um so cerebral selling is your thing I mean so

00:00:38.120 this is interesting this is the first time we've got to meet but I've known of you I think Dan

00:00:41.600 DeBeau introduced us a long time ago.

00:00:43.140 People confuse us all the time, by the way.

00:00:44.560 Well, I actually thought you guys were related.

00:00:46.200 No.

00:00:46.700 I went down the rabbit hole.

00:00:47.540 I was like, guess not.

00:00:48.980 But you guys worked together at Ripple?

00:00:50.980 Yeah, actually for a few companies.

00:00:52.700 So WorkBrain was the first one.

00:00:53.900 Oh, you did WorkBrain as well?

00:00:54.740 Yeah, yeah.

00:00:55.240 So I was employee number 20 at WorkBrain.

00:00:56.540 I remember kind of coming in there

00:00:58.040 when DeBeau had his Batman doll, if he's watching this,

00:01:02.000 Batman figurine on his desk.

00:01:03.400 And it was a great time.

00:01:04.720 So it was 20 people, and then we grew it

00:01:06.440 to 700 people over the course of years.

00:01:08.440 And then we did Ripple together and then Salesforce.

00:01:11.240 So Ripple, I mean, it was so quick.

00:01:13.920 Like, I met Dan at the beginning.

00:01:16.400 Facebook came on as an early customer.

00:01:18.420 And then next thing you know, Benioff

00:01:19.960 buys you guys for a lot of money.

00:01:22.400 And then did you run your VP of sales there?

00:01:25.400 What was the role?

00:01:26.360 Yeah, at Ripple?

00:01:27.100 Yeah, no, at Salesforce.

00:01:29.180 Oh, at Salesforce, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:01:30.200 VP of sales at Ripple.

00:01:31.960 That's right.

00:01:32.420 And then what was your role at Salesforce?

00:01:34.740 Yeah, so at Salesforce, I just had three jobs.

00:01:36.360 So the first job was I ran.

00:01:37.280 Only three.

00:01:37.860 Only three in five years.

00:01:39.080 I love that, yeah.

00:01:39.620 So I ran...

00:01:40.380 Oh, okay, you did them separately.

00:01:41.480 Correct, yeah, separate.

00:01:42.180 On day one, baby, I was like, overachiever.

00:01:44.080 Yeah, concurrent jobs.

00:01:44.620 You got three jobs, yeah.

00:01:46.000 No, so I ran sales for Ripple for a couple years,

00:01:48.880 and then what happens is when Salesforce acquires a company,

00:01:51.220 they kind of let them run solo for a little bit,

00:01:52.840 and then they fold them into the core team.

00:01:55.140 So I said, hey, you know, thanks.

00:01:56.320 We don't need you to run your own sales team anymore,

00:01:58.060 but it was great.

00:01:58.680 Like, we made our number every year for the first two years

00:02:00.940 that we ran the business there,

00:02:02.560 and then I ended up...

00:02:04.280 So I'll tell you what the third job was,

00:02:06.080 which was running small business sales for the eastern U.S.

00:02:08.240 for Salesforce for the core team which was awesome because kind of coming from

00:02:11.480 one of the acquired companies into now repping like all the products that

00:02:15.500 Salesforce sells into companies that were like me which was cool what's their

00:02:19.760 definition of small business so it was basically that's like now I think it's

00:02:23.900 like companies that are less than 40 employees so you know okay so small

00:02:27.080 business yeah they don't do it by revenue yeah like small business

00:02:29.300 customers you know and I had been a small business customer before so it was

00:02:33.180 kind of cool to kind of now be on the other side and then between those two

00:02:36.680 jobs. I had a six-month stint where I basically made up a really cool job that

00:02:40.520 I want to do and I was evangelism lead like basically a sales growth and

00:02:45.440 evangelism lead basically saying hey you know what like Salesforce you have this

00:02:48.860 great company and this great platform and you've learned so much and when I

00:02:52.580 was one of your customers I would have loved to have some of that pixie dust

00:02:55.880 like spread on me so that I can help you by creating some of these customer

00:02:59.420 programs and and in some internal you know work with the leadership team

00:03:03.440 around you know the things that we learned at Ripple around culture and all

00:03:06.380 that kind of stuff.

00:03:06.960 So I did that for six months.

00:03:08.000 So those were the three jobs I had.

00:03:09.260 So evangelism around just ways for,

00:03:12.800 is that for the customers of Salesforce

00:03:14.660 to kind of get some, like how Salesforce does Salesforce?

00:03:17.880 It was both, yeah.

00:03:18.760 So there was definitely, there was like a,

00:03:20.240 here's what we learned.

00:03:21.380 Here's what I had learned building these startups

00:03:23.480 and then coming into the big machine

00:03:24.860 and seeing how the big machine does it,

00:03:26.360 so that I can then tell you as the startup kind of lessons

00:03:29.800 learned kind of from both sides of the fence.

00:03:31.660 What did you learn?

00:03:32.900 Because like that to me, I remember

00:03:34.940 Alex Bard from Sicily.

00:03:37.340 I sat down, had dinner with him after, probably it was a year,

00:03:40.340 and he was like EVP of support or whatever it is,

00:03:42.920 a big module.

00:03:44.040 And I was like, tell me, what's it like working at it?

00:03:46.840 Because Salesforce, if you're in SaaS, we owe.

00:03:50.180 I mean, Salesforce created the ability for a company

00:03:53.960 to put stuff in the cloud.

00:03:55.500 Their marketing dollar educated the market.

00:03:57.560 We owe a lot to Mark Benioff in Salesforce, I believe.

00:04:01.420 What did you learn as somebody with your background in sales?

00:04:06.100 What did they do right?

00:04:07.000 What was interesting?

00:04:09.140 What was that like working at Salesforce?

00:04:11.080 Yeah.

00:04:11.660 Well, the cool thing is that you can see at Salesforce

00:04:13.480 that you don't get in small companies

00:04:14.800 is you can see data trends at scale.

00:04:16.840 So it's one thing to have 10 reps, 20, 30 reps.

00:04:18.840 But if you have thousands of reps

00:04:20.980 who are all operating along the same comp plan,

00:04:23.180 the same month end, year end, you can see some of these tactics.

00:04:26.260 Tweaks and changes, how do they impact?

00:04:28.040 Yeah, that you can't see when you're just small.

00:04:29.800 How many reps would they have?

00:04:32.320 Let's say when you did the small businesses in,

00:04:34.360 was it North America or Canada?

00:04:35.540 Yeah, so North America.

00:04:36.740 How many reps?

00:04:37.300 Actually, just America.

00:04:38.380 Canada was its own separate team.

00:04:39.760 Just the Americas. 0.98

00:04:40.600 So in small business at that time for America,

00:04:42.580 there was about 150 sales reps.

00:04:43.900 Wow.

00:04:44.360 Yeah.

00:04:44.760 OK.

00:04:45.700 And they're all in the same comp plan.

00:04:48.300 And was it divided by territory?

00:04:50.000 How was Leeds and?

00:04:51.400 Correct, yeah.

00:04:52.080 So you kind of have, everyone has their own little geographic

00:04:55.120 area, which could be if you're in New York City.

00:04:57.120 So I supported the teams in New York.

00:04:59.180 So they're really subdivided quite a bit versus, you know,

00:05:02.540 New York is almost its own municipal state.

00:05:04.940 Totally, yeah.

00:05:05.900 And it was really interesting to see even

00:05:07.620 the kinds of customers you get when you're in New York

00:05:10.560 or Boston versus Miami or Raleigh, North Carolina.

00:05:13.560 You actually need the complexion of the customers

00:05:16.040 are different, and so the complexion of the sales rep

00:05:18.260 that can be successful.

00:05:19.300 The complexion of the customers are different.

00:05:21.940 And then the salesperson had to map to that buying process?

00:05:28.420 Buying process, like level of knowledge about the cloud,

00:05:31.780 the types of businesses.

00:05:32.980 So you might have more manufacturing, more high tech,

00:05:35.540 like the kind of sales cycle they typically like to lead.

00:05:37.640 And even, it's funny, like even for me,

00:05:39.360 managing teams across different cities.

00:05:42.100 So you had Toronto, I had Atlanta, I had New York.

00:05:45.340 The reps are different in different ways.

00:05:47.260 Like in New York, the reps are just

00:05:48.460 like crazy hustle machines, right?

00:05:50.840 And in the South, they're great and a lot more relaxed.

00:05:53.600 And they love going to their barbecues

00:05:56.500 and high school football and all that kind of stuff.

00:05:57.920 So it's actually a very cool dynamic

00:06:00.440 to see both the rep and customer interactions

00:06:02.600 in different places.

00:06:03.940 And what were some of the things

00:06:05.900 that you took away from that experience in regards

00:06:08.300 to how you teach people today how to sell the way customers

00:06:13.520 want to buy?

00:06:14.100 Yeah.

00:06:14.760 Well, one of the things I think with most marketing and sales

00:06:17.540 organizations is that we're very keen to push our products

00:06:19.960 and services.

00:06:20.580 So we have content and e-books and all these kind of things.

00:06:23.420 And then whenever we do an event,

00:06:25.540 can sometimes turn into like a very thinly veiled product pitch it's like oh

00:06:29.060 yeah here's what we learned and boom product here's the punchline at the end

00:06:32.180 and and i believe customers today are very like receptive like the way i kind

00:06:36.100 of describe it sometimes like you have kids right yeah i have kids when my kids

00:06:39.460 come to me and they're about to proposition me for something like a ride

00:06:43.540 to go somewhere or i want to download this app or i want to eat something

00:06:46.500 before bedtime like how long does it take you to tell that they're about to hit

00:06:50.100 you up with a question you know like like in two seconds but just by how they

00:06:54.260 approach you right and you get very immediately defensive you're like the answer is no whatever

00:06:57.940 it is right yeah okay what's your question starts off by saying i know you're gonna say no and i'm

00:07:01.460 like of course if you say that that's right you ask it so customers get very defensive right and

00:07:07.220 it's and as people we get very defensive and so when i attend an event or there's some kind of

00:07:12.180 like marketing something something and i can i can feel that there's a product pitch like coming here

00:07:17.780 but the amazing thing is when you don't pitch a product there the customers have this like moment

00:07:22.740 of delight where they're like oh my gosh like they didn't even pick they were just genuinely

00:07:26.160 helpful and was it well i'll tell you so one of the things that i learned is when i started doing

00:07:30.380 these executive dinners as part of our our territory and we would just go into various

00:07:35.400 cities and we would get a whole bunch of executives from our customers together and i would facilitate

00:07:39.280 just a conversation i would i would buy people copies of one of my favorite books that had

00:07:42.880 nothing to do with sales and we would drive a conversation that was great for me and it gave

00:07:47.700 us access to those people and it and it um uh you know kind of engendered them to the brand because

00:07:52.200 we were actually helpful but when we measured the roi of all of our sales and marketing activities

00:07:56.880 those had the highest roi of any event that we did really because pure gives pure give like we

00:08:02.880 we just we built the relationship we added value and then what happens is at the end of that you

00:08:07.000 didn't do uh hey we just launched this new module nope pure give pure give yeah because imagine like

00:08:13.940 these people who are very standoffish they don't want to talk to us and so what was the payoff down

00:08:17.560 the road we learned more about their business and how we could help they saw

00:08:21.220 us and this is really really important especially for young sellers who you know

00:08:26.720 I so I wrote this article in Harvard Business in the springtime about this

00:08:29.500 concept they call experience asymmetry which is most of sales is a younger less

00:08:33.640 experienced salesperson calling on a more senior level decision maker whose

00:08:37.300 job they've never done and this is actually there's a big divide and it's

00:08:40.120 getting worse yeah not we because the average age of a sales rep is just

00:08:43.180 It's getting lower, yeah.

00:08:44.420 So if you're a younger sales rep and you're

00:08:46.800 calling on your older customer, they're not taking your calls.

00:08:49.000 Because like, who's this kid and what are they going to teach me?

00:08:50.620 Yeah, what does he know about my business?

00:08:51.620 So we do these events.

00:08:52.440 We do these dinners.

00:08:53.180 And all of a sudden, they get to know us a little bit better.

00:08:55.220 We remove the layer of abstraction

00:08:57.000 where they see us as people and not the enemy, which

00:09:00.280 is the case a lot of times.

00:09:02.120 And then they take our calls.

00:09:03.260 And they tell us stuff about their business.

00:09:04.700 And so we start changing from the enemy to a human.

00:09:08.780 And so that's what these events, that's

00:09:10.520 one of the things I learned.

00:09:11.740 having these events where it's just a pure give

00:09:14.660 can be tremendously powerful.

00:09:15.820 But it's not just, it has to be, you know,

00:09:18.160 it's not just, oh, let's just have a dinner and chit chat.

00:09:20.020 It has to be properly facilitated.

00:09:22.140 But that was definitely one of the biggest learnings.

00:09:24.340 I haven't, I'm still waiting on my copy of your book,

00:09:26.960 but is this what you're covering in your book in regards to,

00:09:31.960 because the title is, I mean, do you want to unpack it?

00:09:34.540 Is it buy the way, or sell the way you buy?

00:09:37.080 Sell the way you buy.

00:09:37.920 Yeah.

00:09:38.420 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:38.920 So yeah, so the book's called Sell the Way You Buy.

00:09:40.860 And the idea behind sell the way people, if I tell you that title, you have like an intuitive

00:09:44.440 sense of like what it would be, but there's really two parts to it. So the book is all about how to

00:09:49.960 connect with modern customers and sell and win more business through science, empathy, emotional

00:09:53.880 intelligence. But when I think about sell the way you buy, I think about two things. Number one is

00:09:58.240 empathy. Like don't use tactics that wouldn't work on you as a buyer. And I had this kind of

00:10:03.280 epiphany when I was at Salesforce where, you know, you're kind of in this amazing sales machine and

00:10:07.780 it's the end of the month, end of the quarter and people are like, hustle, hustle, make the calls,

00:10:10.680 make the calls there's never been a better time to buy and all these things

00:10:13.240 are good and true and it really like it pumps the team up

00:10:16.120 and they start operating with this kind of sense of urgency and nothing you're

00:10:19.480 asking the team to do is unethical it's not category

00:10:22.520 categorically ineffective but then what would happen is i would go back to my

00:10:26.440 desk and my phone would ring and who was it

00:10:29.000 it was sales people trying to sell me something because i'm a vp at salesforce

00:10:31.640 10 of the quarter or a recruiter trying to you know trying to yeah you know and

00:10:35.880 and i don't like talking to sales people

00:10:38.520 right and so what happens is i had this like little epiphany where i'm like i'm not i'm not

00:10:43.160 selling the way i'm buying here like i'm telling my reps i mean i'm almost kind of like by by

00:10:48.360 complicitly i'm just endorsing these tactics yeah which are not bad but that's not how i would buy

00:10:53.800 so there's an empathetic component as well yeah but the second piece which actually interestingly

00:10:58.120 more powerful is the fact that the way we buy things is often subconscious to us the way we

00:11:03.400 make decisions or some things we don't often think about and our brain actually tricks us

00:11:07.880 into thinking that we buy things in a certain way

00:11:10.040 that is actually not true.

00:11:11.700 So sell the way you buy actually helps us unpack

00:11:14.600 how we make decisions.

00:11:15.300 How you actually buy.

00:11:16.160 Correct.

00:11:16.700 Because a lot of people think they know the way,

00:11:19.440 but when you look at it, it's not.

00:11:21.560 What are some of those insights that you cover

00:11:23.320 in the book around that?

00:11:25.020 Yeah, so one of the biggest things I cover

00:11:27.520 is I talk about this concept I call the solution fit paradox.

00:11:31.040 So here's the question, and for everyone who's watching this

00:11:33.220 to answer this question.

00:11:34.840 Think about when a customer of yours

00:11:36.780 involved with you in a sales cycle there's three outcomes at the end of that sales cycle they buy

00:11:41.820 your solution win loss they buy someone else's solution or build it themselves they solve it

00:11:46.300 some other way or they do nothing okay so imagine you looked at all of your sales cycles and you

00:11:51.980 kind of rank them in those three categories what did the customer do and now let's say you're an

00:11:56.460 auditing firm you're deloitte your kpmg and you were called in to audit that customer's decision

00:12:01.820 And the question you need to ask is, OK, how often do the customer make the best decision for them?

00:12:06.860 Best as defined as the right business outcome, ROI, if you were the board of directors, it made the most sense for them.

00:12:16.500 Like what percentage of the time?

00:12:19.160 And so I would ask you, when you see people buy things, what percentage of the time would you say it's actually the right thing for them?

00:12:25.480 25%. It's not very high.

00:12:26.720 Not very high.

00:12:27.960 The kind of the layperson example I give is like, let's say-

00:12:30.640 late, too soon, not a good process.

00:12:33.700 It was too expensive.

00:12:34.780 Yeah, they paid too much.

00:12:35.620 It paid too much.

00:12:36.700 No one else was using it.

00:12:37.780 It was in the magic quadrant, but whatever, it wouldn't be.

00:12:41.740 And the same thing actually applies in our personal lives.

00:12:43.880 I often ask people, I say, if I asked you

00:12:45.880 to write down everything that you ate for lunch,

00:12:48.880 now you look like a pretty healthy guy,

00:12:50.300 but if I said, over the last month,

00:12:52.180 write down everything you ate for lunch,

00:12:53.560 I'm going to take that list.

00:12:54.400 I'm going to show it to your doctor.

00:12:56.200 And I'm asking all the people out there,

00:12:57.740 what percentage of the time would your doctor say,

00:12:59.860 You ate the best thing for you, calorically, food groups,

00:13:03.220 in terms of your energy level, macros.

00:13:05.680 Like, it's the same thing.

00:13:06.700 It's actually, you know, when I ask that to people,

00:13:08.380 sometimes I say, is there a negative number I can do?

00:13:10.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:11.680 Hasn't been a good month.

00:13:13.180 But if I asked you a different question,

00:13:14.560 were you happy with what you ordered?

00:13:15.800 Everyone would be like, yeah, I was

00:13:16.980 happy with what I ordered.

00:13:17.960 And so this idea of, like, we don't do things

00:13:19.960 that are good for us.

00:13:20.780 We don't buy the best products for us.

00:13:22.420 And so value and ROI are two very different things.

00:13:26.200 And oftentimes, salespeople confuse them.

00:13:27.980 And where is the harm?

00:13:29.300 I mean, obviously, there's harm in it.

00:13:30.800 But what's the impact if we do this right?

00:13:35.180 The impact if we get that right in regards to value

00:13:39.000 or the fact that they get those wrong,

00:13:41.540 how are they supposed to solve that problem?

00:13:44.520 So the way I think about selling the way you buy

00:13:46.880 is not about getting it right.

00:13:48.380 Because for example, what was your objective

00:13:51.200 when you ordered lunch?

00:13:52.740 Was it to just be super healthy and lean and in shape?

00:13:55.200 And so like, hey, look, I don't care what the food tastes like.

00:13:57.380 That was my objective.

00:13:58.700 Or was it, you know what, I had a hard day.

00:14:01.880 I deserve something else.

00:14:03.460 What was the objective?

00:14:04.220 So if someone, let's say, for example, you go on vacation.

00:14:08.700 You could go on vacation in tons of places.

00:14:10.260 And if I were to ask you, what was the ROI of your last vacation?

00:14:13.820 You'd be like, well, I went to this really fancy, expensive

00:14:17.000 place.

00:14:17.500 But I'm like, what if you just had a staycation?

00:14:19.000 What would the ROI of that be?

00:14:20.080 It may still be similar.

00:14:21.800 Or not commensurate with the amount of money,

00:14:23.980 or the kind of car you drive.

00:14:25.600 People value all different things for different reasons.

00:14:27.940 So sell the way you buy.

00:14:29.560 It's just all about understanding, what is that person value?

00:14:33.520 And how are they making that buying decision

00:14:35.620 so that you can align your sales motion to them

00:14:37.600 in a very human way?

00:14:40.760 And is that where I know you wrote a blog post about connecting

00:14:43.900 the emotional, there's an emotional component to a buyer.

00:14:47.620 It's not the logical ROI.

00:14:50.460 And sometimes it's about the role.

00:14:52.040 It's about the recognition that maybe they don't want to.

00:14:55.120 I know some people, they say people buy IBM

00:14:57.560 because they don't get fired or whatever.

00:14:59.260 Is that the full spectrum that a lot of sellers don't

00:15:03.460 understand is that it's not just about the ROI of the product,

00:15:06.800 but it's kind of the value to the individual

00:15:08.840 making that decision?

00:15:10.240 Yeah, that's one of the things, for sure.

00:15:12.480 Even in the realm of objection handling,

00:15:15.880 what's the most common objection salespeople get

00:15:17.960 in any sales capacity, would you say?

00:15:19.940 Too expensive.

00:15:20.880 Too expensive.

00:15:21.700 Great.

00:15:23.000 What does that mean, it's too expensive?

00:15:26.480 In relation to what?

00:15:27.520 Yeah, take out a piece of paper and write down all the permutations of, like, it's too expensive.

00:15:31.320 Like, it's too expensive compared to this other thing.

00:15:33.940 It's too expensive for my budget.

00:15:35.100 It's too expensive because my buddy Dan works at your competitor.

00:15:37.840 I'm just going to buy from him anyways.

00:15:39.260 And some of those things might be spoken, and some of those things might be unspoken, right?

00:15:43.380 So really diving down to figuring out, like, what do people value?

00:15:46.620 Like, what's on their mind?

00:15:47.780 And more importantly, how are you going to get them to tell you?

00:15:51.140 Because people don't want to tell you.

00:15:52.140 You're the enemy in sales, right?

00:15:53.460 People don't want to tell you things.

00:15:54.280 The more information you give me, the more you're going to use against me.

00:15:56.500 Yeah.

00:15:56.980 Yeah.

00:15:57.180 Like, even if I say, like, so what's your budget?

00:15:59.320 Yeah.

00:15:59.940 Like, you're thinking all of a sudden, like,

00:16:01.860 what's he going to do with this information?

00:16:04.480 Like, is he going to change his number based on what I say, right?

00:16:07.520 So sell the way you buy is kind of thinking about, like,

00:16:10.720 how this human interaction plays out,

00:16:12.520 both scientifically and just kind of, you know, operationally,

00:16:15.140 and kind of aligning your sales motion

00:16:16.420 so it just feels a lot more natural and authentic.

00:16:19.560 When you work with companies and guide them

00:16:21.780 or they kind of consume your content

00:16:23.360 and change tweaks to their business,

00:16:25.180 What are some of the things the sales teams

00:16:28.400 would fundamentally feel or see around either the questions

00:16:32.500 or the timelines or the way things are presented?

00:16:36.220 What's the unique aspect of your approach?

00:16:38.920 This included, but what are actionable things

00:16:43.120 founders listening to this that are selling

00:16:44.800 can do tomorrow on their next call, their next demo?

00:16:48.280 Yeah.

00:16:49.180 So there's some things that are just super simple

00:16:52.060 that you can do.

00:16:52.700 So for example, if I were to ask you

00:16:54.700 a question that could be contentious.

00:16:56.860 What's your budget for this project?

00:16:58.320 And you're like, OK, why is this person asking?

00:16:59.860 There's tons of questions that we get asked all the time

00:17:02.040 that we don't want to answer.

00:17:02.940 I like that we're contentious.

00:17:04.000 Yeah, because it feels like they're

00:17:06.500 trying to do something with that.

00:17:07.960 Yeah.

00:17:08.460 Like, Dan, how much money do you make doing this?

00:17:10.400 Yeah.

00:17:10.900 You're like, why does he want to know that?

00:17:12.800 What's he going to do, right?

00:17:14.140 So if you ever, and it's funny, a lot of these things

00:17:16.160 are kind of like ad hoc, but if you ever

00:17:17.560 feel that you've asked a question,

00:17:19.240 that if you were asked that question in return,

00:17:21.100 it would be contentious, append the question

00:17:23.520 with the phrase, the reason I ask is because.

00:17:25.920 Ooh.

00:17:26.760 Right?

00:17:27.120 Do you still ask it that way, or you go to that question

00:17:29.100 instead?

00:17:29.880 No, you say like, can I just say, what's

00:17:31.560 your budget for this project?

00:17:32.520 The reason I ask is because some of my clients

00:17:35.400 don't have a budget for this.

00:17:36.480 And if you want me to help you create one, I can.

00:17:38.940 The reason I ask is because.

00:17:39.960 The reason I ask is because.

00:17:41.060 And I'm just giving you, I'm not

00:17:43.480 talking about all the science behind why that works.

00:17:45.700 But that's a super simple thing that you

00:17:47.920 can do to get people to open up to you.

00:17:49.520 And so what's the impact?

00:17:50.640 It's like, if you inject a few of these just very

00:17:53.460 simple that take no finesse at all,

00:17:55.760 like little tiny things into your sales motion,

00:17:58.340 you'll find that, for example, people

00:17:59.920 are more willing to tell you things.

00:18:01.420 Or a big issue is no-shows on demos or next step calls.

00:18:06.300 Like, all right, so Dan, so we're

00:18:07.420 going to talk in a month now, does that sound good to you?

00:18:09.820 And you're like, yep.

00:18:10.760 I'm like, OK, call me if there's a change.

00:18:12.780 And you're like, all right.

00:18:14.360 And then you no-show on the call.

00:18:16.380 And so a very simple tweak is asking the person.

00:18:19.780 So again, there's a ton of science behind this.

00:18:23.420 But the science of asking questions, like, Dan,

00:18:25.700 if for whatever reason you can't make the meeting in a month,

00:18:28.520 will you call me?

00:18:29.840 That micro-commitment.

00:18:30.820 Micro-commitment is way different than like, yeah.

00:18:34.520 Restaurants use that really well.

00:18:36.700 I'm stealing this from a restaurant.

00:18:37.940 100%.

00:18:38.540 Restaurant study.

00:18:39.240 But all these little things, we learn so much.

00:18:42.120 I actually believe that we learn so much not just

00:18:44.020 from how we interact with our kids,

00:18:45.580 how we operate in our own personal lives.

00:18:47.240 If you've ever been on the phone with your telco

00:18:49.580 and they're pissing you off because they won't give you 0.87

00:18:51.560 the discount, you're like, I want to speak to the manager.

00:18:53.400 Like, that's, what do you want out of that?

00:18:56.160 Like, even if the manager tells you the same thing,

00:18:58.820 you still might actually feel better at the end of the day

00:19:00.820 because you're buying-

00:19:01.660 Yeah, because I talked to somebody

00:19:02.500 I feel like was in control.

00:19:03.860 Totally, it's a feeling.

00:19:04.440 Like, we all buy feelings at the end of the day.

00:19:06.380 Like, that's what value is.

00:19:07.500 It's a subjective feeling.

00:19:08.460 Even ROI, we're conditioned,

00:19:10.300 especially in enterprise B2B sales,

00:19:11.920 to put together these amazing, you know,

00:19:14.160 gleaming ROI business cases for our customers.

00:19:17.460 But in the end, it all just comes down

00:19:19.120 to whether they believe it or not.

00:19:20.580 Do they believe that these things are,

00:19:22.040 If anyone's ever put together an ROI case study

00:19:24.340 and then found at the end of the day, like, oh, yeah,

00:19:25.960 the payback is like in two hours.

00:19:28.100 That's weird.

00:19:28.680 Yeah, of course.

00:19:30.140 Let's go back and massage the data to make it more realistic.

00:19:32.600 All you're trying to do is get people to buy in

00:19:34.200 and feel it's reasonable, right?

00:19:35.280 Yeah, feelings.

00:19:36.420 And in regards to the objections, I think there was five

00:19:39.240 I saw an article you wrote.

00:19:41.280 What's the right way to overcome these using either language

00:19:45.420 or process tweaks based on the fundamentals of the book?

00:19:49.400 Yeah.

00:19:49.700 Well, I think one of the biggest mistakes people

00:19:51.200 make when they think about objection handling.

00:19:52.880 Now, in SaaS sales, in B2B sales,

00:19:55.640 we like to have our playbooks, right?

00:19:57.560 Customer says this, an objection, like, boom, we say this.

00:20:01.040 Yeah, feel, felt, found, whatever.

00:20:02.700 That's right.

00:20:03.360 And the reality is, like, there's no one hit crush.

00:20:05.300 It's not like, oh, I say this, and now, boom,

00:20:07.160 the objection's gone away.

00:20:08.900 Especially if you don't really know

00:20:10.400 what the root cause of the objection is in the first place.

00:20:12.960 Maybe I just want to get off the phone with you,

00:20:14.720 and there is nothing you're ever going to say.

00:20:17.000 It's going to make it work.

00:20:18.200 Or when I ask him, like, oh, man, this

00:20:20.120 really expensive maybe i am asking you to help me architect a financial commercial deal that makes

00:20:26.120 this viable for me right so the biggest mistake people make is that they they compartmentalize

00:20:31.240 their playbook too much and some someone says this boom you say this this competitor comes up

00:20:35.080 oh okay now we have to say this to get around that competitor when in reality the way i kind

00:20:39.000 of describe it it's like sparring right so customer punches you and then you block and

00:20:43.160 then you hit them back and i'm not saying you should hit it yeah you know it's kind of a back

00:20:47.000 and forth so the example i often give is like let's say you met someone at a party and you

00:20:52.240 exchange phone numbers and you call it up and you're like hey yeah it's david we met at the

00:20:55.500 party yesterday you know would you like to go next saturday night and they say no i'm busy

00:21:01.900 and now you're left wondering okay well do they are they really busy or do they just not want to

00:21:08.760 go out with me at all so what do you do how do you find out what do you do dan it's been a while

00:21:13.920 I've been married for a while.

00:21:17.460 I would probably say, how about, I'd probably

00:21:19.840 say a couple of weeks later.

00:21:20.980 Perfect, yeah.

00:21:21.420 Back in town.

00:21:22.300 So what you're doing is you're testing the objection.

00:21:25.360 You want to see, is this a pure logistical issue of like,

00:21:28.560 it's two weeks is fine.

00:21:31.020 Or there's something else.

00:21:31.860 And if they say, oh, I'm really busy.

00:21:33.880 Then I kind of get the hint.

00:21:34.980 You get the hint.

00:21:35.580 Or you might say, well, why don't you

00:21:36.720 let me know when you're free?

00:21:38.020 And then they're like, oh, OK, I'll call you, right?

00:21:41.820 So it's a back and forth, right?

00:21:44.160 And so that's when you think about the spectrum of intent

00:21:48.660 in which objections exist, sometimes you

00:21:51.440 need to go back and forth a few rounds, spar a few rounds,

00:21:53.940 until you figure out where this objection is coming from,

00:21:56.580 and if it's even overcomable, and how

00:21:58.020 you're going to overcome it.

00:21:59.220 Got it.

00:21:59.520 So you're trying to figure it, and that's testing it.

00:22:01.420 You want to see if it's a real objection,

00:22:02.820 or is there an opportunity there or not?

00:22:07.380 Because I find, again, I probably

00:22:09.180 have a bit of a man crush on Benioff and Salesforce.

00:22:11.800 was like their sales process when you saw it did you feel like wow that's really well thought out

00:22:18.360 or was it like oh that's really old or like is there things that startups can borrow from the

00:22:24.780 way they structure the training you know how they got their reps productive how they hired reps how

00:22:30.600 they comp like was there is there anything that you feel like worth founders you know pattern

00:22:35.820 matching against yeah well i think the first thing is like a common language so the great thing is

00:22:39.640 that everyone at Salesforce, you know, and this is part of the training. It's like you, you learn

00:22:43.720 to speak the common language. Like, so when I say this is in stage five or stage six, I know what

00:22:48.440 that means. And if, for example, I'm a sales leader and I get a, a, a, a quote request from

00:22:53.840 a client saying, Hey, I'm sending out this paperwork. And I look in the CRM and it says

00:22:57.660 it's in stage five. I'm like, Oh, we don't send out paperwork until it's in stage six. So like,

00:23:01.580 where is this? Right. And so having that common language across the organization is very powerful

00:23:07.160 because everyone's on the same page.

00:23:08.540 And it also makes your job as a leader a little bit easier,

00:23:11.240 because you're not like some rogue agent where you're just

00:23:13.160 doing things differently.

00:23:14.040 So the common language, I'd say, is very powerful.

00:23:17.120 The other thing that Salesforce does very well,

00:23:18.680 and it's interesting now, sometimes I'll talk to a company

00:23:20.920 and I'll say, oh, our year end ends in February,

00:23:23.840 and then we're going to have our sales kick off in June.

00:23:26.660 I'm like, oh, why do you do that?

00:23:28.100 And they're like, well, because we don't have the comp plans.

00:23:30.660 We don't have all these kinds of things.

00:23:32.620 And one thing that Salesforce does really, really well, pardon me, is they turn that ship around really fast after year end.

00:23:42.920 So the planning for the next fiscal year starts months before.

00:23:45.940 In fact, people often say that for leaders at Salesforce, the last few months of the end of the year when the planning really kicks into high gear is like our year end.

00:23:55.420 Because missing hiring targets is like a cardinal sin.

00:23:59.020 People need to be promoted and moved up.

00:24:00.700 It's a big machine.

00:24:01.420 So we start really, really early.

00:24:03.300 And then the year ends on January 31.

00:24:06.980 And then the first, second week of February,

00:24:08.440 you are in the sales kickoff, ready to go again.

00:24:12.280 We don't need comp plans.

00:24:13.120 Work on your old comp plan.

00:24:14.260 Territory, we'll figure that out.

00:24:15.880 They turn the ship around and just get you

00:24:17.680 reoriented really quickly so they don't lose any momentum.

00:24:21.260 Yeah, so that's one thing I have not seen as much in the startup

00:24:25.180 world is that they just keep everyone really focused.

00:24:27.820 And then in regards to lead gen, I mean,

00:24:31.180 The SMB side, was it all inbound and they were just making calls,

00:24:34.100 or were they responsible for generating their own demand?

00:24:36.480 Yeah, so in small business, it's more inbound than, obviously, like the bigger companies.

00:24:40.420 There's also just more companies.

00:24:42.840 But it also depends on the territory.

00:24:44.700 So you might have, and this is part of, there's a very elaborate algorithm they go through

00:24:48.720 to kind of score territories so that if you have a, like if I'm a manager

00:24:53.200 and I have 10 territories in my region and 10 reps, all the territories are different.

00:24:57.680 Some might have some greater percentage of new business customers.

00:25:01.180 Some might have more green field.

00:25:03.460 Some might have more inbound.

00:25:04.620 Some might have less inbound.

00:25:06.280 But they're all balanced so that as a rep, ideally,

00:25:09.760 you could take any of those.

00:25:10.720 Some are quotas.

00:25:11.680 Yeah, the quota's the same.

00:25:13.640 And so you might have a teeny tiny postage stamp

00:25:16.720 of a territory, but more existing customers

00:25:20.140 and savvier customers versus a whole big territory that's

00:25:23.500 a little bit more green field.

00:25:24.520 So it's pretty balanced.

00:25:26.020 It's really neat.

00:25:26.800 Yeah, as a startup guy, when I joined Salesforce,

00:25:30.580 there were 6,000 employees.

00:25:32.240 And when I left five years later, they were 24,000 employees.

00:25:35.800 And now they're 40,000.

00:25:37.060 So it's pretty bonkers.

00:25:38.500 So crazy.

00:25:40.600 What does the work that you do with clients look like?

00:25:45.140 Yeah, so my main focus is training.

00:25:48.700 So I've developed a curriculum, so the science, empathy,

00:25:51.400 execution, emotional intelligence-based training

00:25:53.380 curriculum that is very foundational.

00:25:56.460 So it covers a lot of the foundational elements

00:25:59.240 like messaging, so how you describe what you do, discovery, like how do you get people to tell you

00:26:03.820 things they don't want to tell you, and quite honestly, prime them to discuss the pains that

00:26:07.900 might be latent in the back of their mind, objection handling, like how do you actually

00:26:12.180 overcome objections with this kind of sparring mentality and understanding the root cause,

00:26:16.280 and then things like negotiation. And I think about negotiation as like, everything is a

00:26:20.220 negotiation. They ask you for a demo, it's a negotiation, right? So I teach kind of foundational

00:26:25.360 curriculum and i also teach sales leadership uh through my practice i also teach at the

00:26:30.100 smith school of business here at queen's university that's cool which is awesome actually

00:26:33.960 it's a big big focus of mine which is foundational sales education because we don't we don't teach

00:26:38.700 it in universities or high ed uh you know places of learning so this is so crazy it is crazy it's

00:26:45.060 like either you've got it and it's just something that you do inherently or you know you're trained

00:26:50.140 but you're a professional salesperson but like everything's a pipeline everything has stages

00:26:54.580 and there's a process to get it from stage one to two.

00:27:00.180 And in regards to the leadership stuff,

00:27:02.820 what's the cadence, and I don't know if you cover this,

00:27:07.300 but on a daily basis, weekly, as a maybe player coach

00:27:12.200 or just as a sales coach or a leader,

00:27:13.800 what's the right way to manage a sales team

00:27:17.260 from your perspective?

00:27:19.820 So it's a big question.

00:27:21.100 there are there's a lot of a lot of the people watching or listening are founder-led sales then

00:27:27.700 sales teams but like now they're like okay i've got three reps and i probably should be doing

00:27:32.660 maybe weekly one-on-ones or maybe daily whatever like what's the cadence that you think at that

00:27:39.500 stage they should be looking at well so i'll say two things the first thing is just think like

00:27:43.600 exercise i often go through with people i train as i say think back to the best manager you ever

00:27:48.780 had okay what was it about that manager that makes them so great if you have a pencil and paper take

00:27:54.300 that out write it down okay so i do this with with groups time and time again and the the traits that

00:28:00.300 always not just come to the top like they're almost exclusively the only ones that are there

00:28:05.660 are the ones that relate to my manager cared about me that's it they couldn't do their it wasn't like

00:28:11.020 oh they were really good at being an individual contributor yeah they pushed me they they believed

00:28:16.060 in me they gave me the freedom to fail they gave me feedback like they cared

00:28:20.440 about me so that's like the number one thing for me in terms of being a good

00:28:24.760 leader operationally like how often should we be meeting and so on I like

00:28:29.500 like a weekly cadence of meeting and in fact there was a study that I often quote

00:28:32.680 it was in Harvard business that talked about sales rep productivity and they

00:28:36.640 measured all of these various metrics across sales or productivity and they

00:28:40.340 found that the top sales reps excelled in in kind of three main areas number one

00:28:44.200 One, time spent with customers.

00:28:46.280 Who would have thought we spent time with customers?

00:28:48.800 Number two was just the network they had in their own company.

00:28:52.580 And it was actually funny.

00:28:53.440 We talked about, like, WorkBrain back in the day.

00:28:55.340 So I joined when there was 20 people, and then it grew to 700.

00:28:59.020 But I also led the hockey team there.

00:29:01.880 It was a good Canadian company.

00:29:03.760 We had a hockey team.

00:29:04.700 And so kind of the fun thing was I knew a lot of people from the beginning,

00:29:08.000 and I also got to associate and play hockey with people, engineers, customers,

00:29:12.620 that I would never have spoken to at the company

00:29:14.880 had I not had that outlet.

00:29:17.240 And so it actually made my job a lot easier

00:29:19.140 because when I needed something,

00:29:20.420 I had a network of people to go to.

00:29:22.760 So that was the second thing they found in the study.

00:29:25.160 And the third thing was time spent getting coaching

00:29:27.760 from leaders and managers.

00:29:29.640 And so coaching is the number one thing

00:29:31.880 that you can do to enhance and increase

00:29:34.220 the effectiveness of your sales team.

00:29:36.740 It needs to be done the right way,

00:29:38.560 which is the big tricky part.

00:29:40.880 It's like, what am I?

00:29:41.420 Okay, so great.

00:29:42.080 It's like going to the gym.

00:29:43.280 Just go to the gym, right?

00:29:44.840 And then you show up to the gym, you're like,

00:29:45.980 what am I supposed to do?

00:29:46.840 And then what happens is, if you show up to the gym,

00:29:49.160 and you don't know the exercises to do, you pick this up,

00:29:51.680 you pick that up, you're like, OK, I'm done.

00:29:53.620 You don't come back to the gym anymore.

00:29:55.200 So people get out of the coaching habit.

00:29:56.840 Yeah.

00:29:57.140 Totally.

00:29:57.480 So yeah, meeting every week, having an agenda that is,

00:30:01.160 I would say, consistent but not predictable.

00:30:03.620 Meaning, just because we talked about this last week

00:30:07.400 doesn't mean we have to talk about it this week.

00:30:08.760 Or it's the end of the year, we're

00:30:09.920 going to talk about career, we're

00:30:11.080 We're going to talk about quotas for next year.

00:30:12.900 So it's consistent in that it happens all the time,

00:30:15.320 and that we know generally what we're going to speak about.

00:30:17.320 But it doesn't have to be the same thing every single time.

00:30:19.660 So weekly coaching cadence for an hour.

00:30:22.320 I used to, when I had a big team, I would do 45 minutes.

00:30:25.040 And are they bringing calls?

00:30:26.380 Are you listening to tape?

00:30:29.020 It all depends.

00:30:30.760 Sometimes, so you're for sure bringing data

00:30:34.320 that you have on your dashboards and all these kinds of things.

00:30:36.820 One of the things that I love to do,

00:30:39.500 which I stole from Mark Roberge, I'm sure you know.

00:30:41.620 I had, yeah.

00:30:42.580 Mark's brilliant.

00:30:43.500 He's the man.

00:30:44.600 And one of the things that he did, which I loved,

00:30:47.820 which was every month, and he's a big fan of the one thing.

00:30:50.600 Just do one thing.

00:30:51.380 I love the one thing.

00:30:52.000 Well, that's it.

00:30:52.380 He's like, don't change your swing.

00:30:55.460 And that's why I asked, what do you do?

00:30:57.060 Because I've seen sales managers almost critique

00:31:00.180 on a daily basis.

00:31:01.420 Or I have a sales rep, and he's always like, yeah,

00:31:04.740 I'm thinking I'm going to do this.

00:31:05.540 And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:31:06.960 The one thing that we talked about, stick to that two weeks,

00:31:09.440 Nail it, move on.

00:31:10.440 Because, man, it's like trying to shoot a moving target.

00:31:15.180 And it's like, what did you actually make better?

00:31:17.840 Who knows if this actually had an impact?

00:31:19.640 For sure.

00:31:20.200 Well, I'll tell you.

00:31:21.000 So the thing that he did, which was just focus on the one

00:31:23.300 thing, but the way he broke it down, which I really love,

00:31:25.500 which was like, OK, so we're working with Dan this month.

00:31:27.820 What's the one thing that we're working on Dan with?

00:31:29.980 Why did we choose that thing?

00:31:31.840 What are we going to do to work on that together?

00:31:33.740 And how are we going to know if he got better at that thing?

00:31:36.320 And so I would take that.

00:31:37.620 And he keeps the logs.

00:31:38.720 It keeps a lot of the progression.

00:31:40.100 Totally, yeah.

00:31:40.960 So I would have a spreadsheet.

00:31:42.480 And then every month, I would have

00:31:44.040 a different tab with everyone on my team, what we're working on.

00:31:46.400 And the cool thing was it helped me get a sense for what

00:31:49.200 we were collectively working on.

00:31:50.460 So I'm like, oh, I'm working on the same thing with six people.

00:31:53.180 Maybe I should create some training.

00:31:54.120 Maybe I should do some training around that.

00:31:55.760 And then, OK, this person isn't moving off of this thing

00:31:58.340 fast enough.

00:31:58.920 He's really good at it.

00:31:59.720 What's taking so long?

00:32:00.720 So it does have to be a little bit individualized.

00:32:04.400 Yeah.

00:32:04.820 And if there's certainly a mandate that you're pushing

00:32:06.360 across the team, then you can do that.

00:32:08.240 But yeah, that's the whole thing.

00:32:09.580 It's like if you're coaching someone on a sports team,

00:32:12.800 the coach does coach the team in a macro sense,

00:32:16.760 but then there's a lot of micro-coaching.

00:32:18.460 Totally.

00:32:18.960 How they interact.

00:32:20.180 A lot of people are using it.

00:32:21.540 You've mentioned a few times sales motion.

00:32:23.300 It's kind of a newish thing, and really revenue

00:32:26.880 optimization as well.

00:32:29.300 When people hear that, they've never

00:32:30.680 heard that term before.

00:32:31.640 How do you explain sales motion?

00:32:35.140 It's funny.

00:32:35.720 It's a question I haven't really thought too much about.

00:32:38.060 When I think about sales motion, it's almost like the collective, you know, it's like think about like what's your what's your swing?

00:32:45.140 You know, it's like I'm shifting my weight here.

00:32:47.060 I'm lifting my elbow here.

00:32:48.500 Like your sales motion is the combination of like how you describe what you do and how you do discovery and how you make your customers feel and like how you're tracking all this in your CRM.

00:32:56.340 So it just kind of sales cycle doesn't seem to, you know, apply because sales motion seems to implicate like there's a human to human element of it as well, not just like the analytical piece.

00:33:06.680 And do you look at sales motion like freemium

00:33:10.880 is a sales motion versus the SMB customer segments

00:33:15.080 of sales motion?

00:33:15.980 Or what's in and what's out?

00:33:18.380 Is it marketing involved in that?

00:33:20.160 Is customer success involved in that?

00:33:23.720 Where do you say that is a relevant conversation

00:33:26.960 for the sales motion?

00:33:27.760 Or is it all pretty much the customer's experience

00:33:30.560 in a buying process is the sales motion?

00:33:34.100 I think it's different than the customer's buying process,

00:33:36.220 because there's things that happen behind the scenes

00:33:37.940 in your sales motion that the customer doesn't see

00:33:41.020 and shouldn't see, quite frankly.

00:33:42.240 But are still part of operational awareness

00:33:44.660 and things you could tweak.

00:33:45.720 Yeah, I don't think about, oh, there's

00:33:48.080 like an SMB or a freemium sales motion.

00:33:51.580 I don't know, it's actually, have you

00:33:53.020 heard this as a term that's kind of used very,

00:33:55.180 I think it's terms used, you know.

00:33:57.400 I almost feel like it's like VCs are using,

00:34:02.320 it's kind of one of those things where,

00:34:04.240 Because there's different ways to almost go to market now,

00:34:07.400 it's almost like, let's talk about our sales motion.

00:34:10.000 It's not as simple as just like lead gen, pipeline,

00:34:13.480 and then hand off to customer success.

00:34:15.040 It's just, what do we do and what do we not do?

00:34:19.540 Let's try to build a repeatable scalable model.

00:34:21.340 I don't know.

00:34:21.640 I find it, I just love, especially in SAS, when I started off,

00:34:26.180 it was just like there was no data.

00:34:27.640 There was no best practices.

00:34:29.000 There was no, and again, Salesforce,

00:34:32.040 I think they called it revenue retention.

00:34:33.800 like customer success wasn't customer.

00:34:35.920 Even customer success is like a new thing.

00:34:38.680 RevOps is a newish thing in the last three or four years.

00:34:41.540 And I've just heard more people talk

00:34:43.760 about the concept of sales motion versus sales cycle.

00:34:47.660 I just like it.

00:34:48.360 It feels more human.

00:34:49.860 It feels less abrasive.

00:34:52.980 But I was just curious kind of your thoughts

00:34:54.880 on how that all connects.

00:34:56.120 Yeah, maybe it's turning into one

00:34:57.580 of these like AI machine learning where people are just

00:34:59.740 using it and like, I don't think that word means what you

00:35:01.680 think it means.

00:35:02.680 I think it might be just a better way

00:35:05.380 to talk about the customer experience

00:35:08.720 through that process.

00:35:11.980 Do you have any other kind of, I like the reason I ask,

00:35:15.700 do you have any other examples of just good questions

00:35:20.020 to ask in a sales conversation that's broadly

00:35:22.320 applicable to other SaaS founders in regards

00:35:24.460 to dealing with objections or asking for the order

00:35:28.600 or dealing with, well, just send me the quote,

00:35:31.260 and I'll get back to you kind of scenarios.

00:35:32.980 Yeah.

00:35:33.440 I'm going to try not to be too cerebral

00:35:34.940 because there's actually quite a lot of science around,

00:35:36.820 for example, like ordering your questions

00:35:39.940 to produce a certain kind of,

00:35:41.500 and this is like, this is kind of very advanced

00:35:44.260 because most people are taught to ask layered questions.

00:35:46.760 Like, what's the problem?

00:35:47.880 How long has it been going on?

00:35:48.800 Can you give me an example?

00:35:49.740 Like, what do you think they're,

00:35:50.400 like, those are all good.

00:35:52.060 But there's also kind of like a school of thought

00:35:54.120 and actually a lot of science around

00:35:55.380 like the way you order your discovery questions.

00:35:57.520 So for example, if I were to ask you,

00:35:59.900 like are you happy these days you're like oh that's like a hard question to answer because

00:36:04.760 there's a lot of things that feed into my happiness right but if I say like how many

00:36:08.180 dates have you been on in the last month actually so I'm stealing this yeah I'm stealing this

00:36:12.220 example from one of my favorite books thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman but you know

00:36:17.200 they talk about like these very specific questions versus like the very broad questions now if I ask

00:36:22.000 you like so for example I say are you happy with your overall level of fitness and you might be

00:36:25.440 like like I guess like you know like well let me ask you this how many times have you been to the

00:36:29.460 Yeah, it's cognitive over.

00:36:31.080 There's a lot of cognitive use to answer one.

00:36:33.780 It's more qual versus quant, but they both

00:36:37.220 get me to the same place.

00:36:38.280 Correct.

00:36:38.980 Well, one is easier to answer, because it's more tangible.

00:36:41.440 In fact, online, I saw Kenan, he asked this question.

00:36:45.440 Are you happy in your marriage?

00:36:47.300 And then the follow-up question might be,

00:36:49.260 when was the last time you just bought your wife flowers 1.00

00:36:51.300 for no reason?

00:36:52.340 The first question is hard to answer,

00:36:54.660 and the second question is really easy.

00:36:56.320 And so we're tempted to ask the first question,

00:36:58.200 then the second, versus asking the more specific question

00:37:01.540 first.

00:37:02.040 So if I said, Dan, how many times have you

00:37:03.300 been to the gym in the last month?

00:37:04.760 Oh, and then are you happy with your fitness?

00:37:06.200 Then now I ask you, are you happy

00:37:07.500 with your overall level of fitness?

00:37:08.820 What happens is called a substitution heuristic.

00:37:11.340 The emotion from the first question, which is very clear,

00:37:14.320 then colors the answer to the second question.

00:37:16.700 So again, this is not like a.

00:37:18.600 No, this is good.

00:37:19.260 This is why people listen.

00:37:20.200 Yeah.

00:37:20.700 This is good stuff, man.

00:37:21.200 This is not a novice tactic, right?

00:37:22.920 But it takes a little bit like a kind of mindful approach.

00:37:26.720 There's tons, like, in terms of how you describe what you do,

00:37:29.000 how you handle objections.

00:37:30.260 I want to, I mean, this is the stuff that fascinates me.

00:37:32.760 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:32.860 So in regards to doing the discovery properly,

00:37:37.340 like, how do we get people?

00:37:38.820 I mean, the reason I ask is this, but, like, is there,

00:37:42.760 is it OK to go sequentially?

00:37:45.440 Or is, like, in regards to, like, you know,

00:37:48.320 broad-speaking problem space versus specific,

00:37:51.660 like, is there some weird things where you can do it backwards?

00:37:54.280 What's the right way to do discovery calls?

00:37:55.760 Yeah.

00:37:56.260 I say never fall in love, right?

00:37:57.760 Like the example I often give is I said,

00:37:59.700 if I want you to make a lasagna, OK,

00:38:02.080 you wouldn't just go to Google, search for lasagna recipes,

00:38:04.860 find the first one, and then just do that, right?

00:38:06.980 Like you'd look at a couple of recipes,

00:38:08.660 see what ingredients you had in the house.

00:38:10.080 Reviews, yeah.

00:38:11.280 What you feel comfortable with.

00:38:12.260 Ask them for some friends. 0.94

00:38:12.900 And then it would suck, and then you would make another one.

00:38:15.760 So I advocate don't fall in love with anything.

00:38:18.060 And not every single tactic is going

00:38:20.120 to work in all instances, right?

00:38:21.520 And unfortunately, when we don't have the arsenal of tactics

00:38:24.680 or I'll call it foundational sales education.

00:38:28.980 If you were a doctor, you would not take a CPR course,

00:38:31.920 then go work in the emergency room.

00:38:33.600 Two different things, yeah.

00:38:34.460 You need to have all these things to pull on.

00:38:36.680 And unfortunately, or unfortunately,

00:38:38.160 as the average age of a modern seller gets younger,

00:38:41.060 they're super smart and enthusiastic.

00:38:42.580 They just have fewer experiences to pull on.

00:38:45.620 And so there's no one right or wrong way.

00:38:49.380 It's funny, you look at Elon Musk, right?

00:38:51.640 And here's a guy, he's not the best speaker.

00:38:54.660 the world you know like he has a vision for the future of the planet that he's trying to enact

00:38:58.900 through his products or services he he doesn't advertise like i've never seen an ad for a tesla

00:39:04.180 or anything anywhere and yet he's got like everyone's like imagination right and so like

00:39:08.980 there's lots of different ways to do it and he is not stuck in what i would refer to as like a sea of

00:39:14.020 sameness like there's there's not a lot of people doing what he's doing and yet for most people who

00:39:18.900 have like a b2b technology business there's a million people that do what you do and even if

00:39:23.060 if you think that you're this delicate, unique snowflake,

00:39:27.140 that's to you.

00:39:28.300 To your customers, the way Chris Orlob at Gong described

00:39:30.680 this, which I loved, was if you're walking in the park

00:39:32.900 and you see someone pushing a carriage with twins in it,

00:39:35.220 and you look at the twins, you're like, oh,

00:39:37.880 they look the same to me.

00:39:39.080 The parents can tell them apart, but they just

00:39:41.180 look the same to you.

00:39:42.380 And so most of us are stuck in that.

00:39:44.360 So whatever it is you think you do that's so amazing and unique,

00:39:47.480 as a customer, first of all, I spend a fraction of a percent 0.99

00:39:50.360 giving a shit about what it is that you do. 0.98

00:39:53.000 got my own problems to deal with and so when i do kind of open my mind to what you have to say 0.99

00:39:57.320 it has to hit me like an armor piercing bullet otherwise i'm just going to like move on right

00:40:02.540 so very simple things like when i ask people what do you do what do you what do you say like it's

00:40:08.580 a question we get asked all the time and we're always wondering like who who's the person asking

00:40:13.220 like if one of my wife's friends asked me what i do i say oh i train sales people and they say

00:40:17.420 that's nice and they go on with the rest of their day yeah right but how you answer that question

00:40:21.740 And when you are stuck in kind of this undifferentiated sea

00:40:24.780 of similar sounding solutions, makes a difference, right?

00:40:28.060 So there are definitely some messaging tactics, which I would

00:40:30.260 say, yes, use them all the time, you know,

00:40:32.980 versus discovery and objection handling, which

00:40:34.700 can sometimes be more case specific.

00:40:36.360 But the big thing, as you're saying,

00:40:37.860 is continue to educate yourself around different ways.

00:40:42.320 Because especially with a young seller,

00:40:44.840 if you're listening to this and you want to up your game,

00:40:47.660 be exposed to other ways of presenting,

00:40:50.960 dealing with objections?

00:40:52.400 And is it to find their own cadence and either the economy

00:40:57.980 like using the right words, using words that

00:40:59.840 cut through the noise?

00:41:01.100 And is it just to find it the way that feels good for you

00:41:03.800 so that it doesn't feel like it's a script?

00:41:05.960 What are your thoughts on scripts versus talk tracks

00:41:08.120 versus just inherent skills, just natural?

00:41:14.940 So do you get calls from telemarketers?

00:41:17.240 Well, I get them.

00:41:17.900 I just don't answer them.

00:41:18.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:19.900 So when you get a call from a telemarketer,

00:41:22.640 how long does it take you to tell

00:41:23.860 that they're reading from a script?

00:41:25.240 Oh, like four seconds.

00:41:26.620 Four seconds, yeah.

00:41:27.520 Like almost instantaneously, right?

00:41:28.960 Yeah, like three or four words in.

00:41:30.040 So we can tell.

00:41:30.820 So it's a combination of two things.

00:41:32.280 Like, yes, we do need to arm people with the talk tracks

00:41:35.260 and the words, right?

00:41:36.500 And do it consistently across the company,

00:41:38.420 so we're all saying the same thing, which is a huge,

00:41:40.420 Huge problem.

00:41:41.080 Huge problem, where we don't all say the same thing.

00:41:43.060 No.

00:41:43.680 And I love what you said earlier when you talked about it.

00:41:45.640 Overselling.

00:41:46.180 Overselling, customer success is like, what?

00:41:48.400 Sales told you?

00:41:49.020 No, we don't do that, right?

00:41:50.640 And you're like, oh, come on.

00:41:51.740 And maybe we actually do do that, but customer success didn't.

00:41:55.040 Yeah, no, we told them.

00:41:56.460 So there needs to be some consistency in the playbook.

00:41:59.420 But then also from an execution standpoint, one of the biggest challenges is that people,

00:42:03.560 especially young sellers, feel emotionally encumbered.

00:42:06.220 So you come into a big company or a company in general, and you're like, here's the product,

00:42:10.140 here's the pitch.

00:42:11.020 We want you to go out down.

00:42:11.980 We want you to call these people on this list and bother them and take them away from what

00:42:15.980 they're doing and tell them how awesome we are.

00:42:17.360 Go do that. 0.60

00:42:18.180 and you're like oh crap like that's not cool like i don't like to be bothered in my personal life and 0.97

00:42:24.420 shoot i don't even talk on the phone that much and you know anymore i mean the phone is for old 0.93

00:42:28.500 people right so you're asking me to do these things that are kind of inconsistent with what i

00:42:33.140 do and believe and behave and so when i go and do them it feels kind of unnatural and oftentimes i

00:42:39.460 saw this all the time at salesforce especially with the new york crew who are awesome so imagine

00:42:44.340 this you look in your sale you look in your crm and you see tons of activity lots of calls emails

00:42:48.900 no pipeline right and so you're like what's going on like maybe it's something operational

00:42:53.300 maybe you're calling at the wrong time of day or calling the wrong person but i would listen

00:42:57.060 to these phone calls like and there's a million call recording you know technology out there so

00:43:01.700 i'm listening to these phone calls and i'm like it sounds like to me if i were to just close my eyes

00:43:07.380 and not pay attention to the words you're saying it feels like you're bothering them like it feels

00:43:13.300 You feel like you know you're bothering them, right?

00:43:16.660 And you're projecting that.

00:43:17.440 And you're projecting that.

00:43:18.340 So how do you...

00:43:18.860 Now, imagine you were calling the other person

00:43:20.360 and tell them they won $10 million in the lottery.

00:43:22.040 Yeah, how would you communicate that?

00:43:23.480 Different feeling, right?

00:43:24.440 Yeah.

00:43:24.760 But the problem is for...

00:43:25.820 So that's, you know, it's all very well and good to say,

00:43:27.700 like, get excited and pumped about what you're doing.

00:43:29.660 The reality is most of us are not feeding starving children

00:43:33.440 in third world countries.

00:43:34.400 We're not curing disease, like some of us are.

00:43:36.520 But a lot of us are selling a technology

00:43:38.260 that helps people automate their blah, blah, blah.

00:43:41.460 Workflow, yeah.

00:43:42.240 How am I supposed to get...

00:43:43.580 And as a CEO, you can get totally behind that

00:43:45.640 because this is your baby.

00:43:46.300 You built this thing.

00:43:47.060 It's your vision.

00:43:47.560 You built your...

00:43:48.120 But now you're like a young sales rep

00:43:50.480 and you're like,

00:43:50.900 how do I get emotionally behind this thing

00:43:53.200 so I'm not encumbered when I call people?

00:43:55.740 Yeah.

00:43:56.180 Even armed with the pitch.

00:43:58.240 Yeah.

00:43:58.400 You know, I remember we were at a sales kickoff

00:44:01.220 at Salesforce.

00:44:01.780 This is 2001.

00:44:02.920 I want to say 2014, 2015.

00:44:05.080 And Aziz Ansari was performing...

00:44:07.180 And now I did not know who Aziz Ansari was at the time.

00:44:10.160 He was doing sales kickoffs at Salesforce.

00:44:12.120 Yeah, that's fascinating.

00:44:13.140 So he's doing his stand-up routine.

00:44:15.080 There's maybe 1,000 of us in this ballroom.

00:44:17.440 And I'd never heard of him or seen him before.

00:44:19.860 He talks a lot about dating and the modern era and dating with apps and the whole thing.

00:44:24.360 And so all of his content, he's talking to middle-aged software people who are married.

00:44:29.940 So it's totally bombing.

00:44:31.740 So about 40 minutes in, he just kind of switches gears.

00:44:35.380 And he's like, Salesforce.

00:44:36.740 And he didn't even know what Salesforce is.

00:44:38.040 He's like, Salesforce, you guys hired me to come in here, do your kickoff.

00:44:40.980 he's like what the hell do you guys even do and so he points to parker harris right co-founder

00:44:46.920 salesforce in the front row and he's like you you look important he's like salesforce.com

00:44:54.120 he's like what do you guys do and everyone's like waiting to see what he says so what does

00:45:04.080 parker say he says what the marketing you know at that time was which is actually not far from

00:45:10.040 is now she says you know we help our customers connect with their customers in all new ways

00:45:15.000 and everyone's like quiet just to see what's going to happen and aziz ansari like erupts into laughter

00:45:19.240 he's like what the hell does that mean he's like do your customers know this is like a pyramid scheme

00:45:23.080 or something like that yeah and everyone's like laughing as well because like those messages well

00:45:28.200 might be good and correct are contrived in a marketing lab and people don't talk like that

00:45:32.840 they don't talk like that right and so that's like the big disconnect is like okay great it's

00:45:36.920 It's great to have these marketing statements.

00:45:39.480 It's creative, yeah.

00:45:40.240 But a sales rep can't go out and say those words to a customer

00:45:43.680 because it sounds like a pitch.

00:45:44.860 And as soon as it sounds that way, customers turn it off.

00:45:47.660 Yeah, the answer is no.

00:45:48.420 What's your question?

00:45:49.520 We can become parents again.

00:45:51.080 So yeah, that's the real trick, is

00:45:53.720 how do you have a human-to-human conversation that is still,

00:45:58.760 you've still put thought into it.

00:46:00.240 And I think you were kind of alluding to this before.

00:46:02.800 Salespeople can be taught.

00:46:05.140 There's certain natural born, oh, yeah.

00:46:06.800 When you say someone has natural-born sales abilities,

00:46:08.800 usually you're just saying, like, they're extroverted,

00:46:11.440 a gift of gab, like, they're very personable.

00:46:13.580 And we meet a lot of these, what I call, unconscious sellers.

00:46:16.380 And shout out to my sister, who I always joke with her. 0.91

00:46:19.320 I say she's an unconsciously good seller.

00:46:20.920 She's a personal trainer, and she's great at what she does, 1.00

00:46:23.800 but she doesn't know why she's so good, right?

00:46:26.760 She just happens to be personal. 0.99

00:46:28.000 But if she knew what those things were...

00:46:31.120 She could maybe front-load them, repeat them.

00:46:34.000 Repeat them, train other people on how to do them.

00:46:35.980 Crazy idea. 1.00

00:46:36.460 And if you're an unconsciously bad seller, meaning you go out and you do all this bullshit stuff. 0.99

00:46:42.360 You keep talking after you get the deal. 0.88

00:46:44.520 Not only does it not work, and it's bad for you, but what's even worse is, and this is almost unique for the sales profession.

00:46:52.240 There's very few professions that are like this.

00:46:53.860 It ruins it for everyone else.

00:46:56.700 Scorched earth.

00:46:57.620 So now when I'm a salesperson, I speak to a customer like, you don't want to talk to me because I'm the enemy.

00:47:01.240 I'm a good guy.

00:47:03.220 I actually do believe that all bad salespeople are not bad people.

00:47:08.400 They have families.

00:47:09.440 They play sports.

00:47:10.860 They kiss their kids goodnight.

00:47:12.940 They're good people, right?

00:47:14.460 But they're just executing these plays that have been taught to them because we don't teach sales in business school.

00:47:20.480 And sales and buying has changed so much in the last 5, 10 years that sales has not kept up.

00:47:26.640 A lot of selling systems and knowledge are good, but they're old, right?

00:47:30.500 And buyers have changed their buying habits a lot faster

00:47:34.820 than sales have retooled.

00:47:35.740 So David, I want to get you back in the future

00:47:37.740 to talk about this.

00:47:38.940 Because even the selling process,

00:47:42.660 I think what's happening now, when a lot of the work

00:47:44.900 is being done by the product and the marketing,

00:47:48.020 how much of it is selling versus order taking?

00:47:50.180 And is comp structure is going to be the same?

00:47:52.540 I mean, there's a lot of stuff to deep dive in.

00:47:54.500 Plus, it sounds like you've got the science and research

00:47:57.220 to back it.

00:47:57.760 And I feel like we rushed through that.

00:47:59.320 So you cool coming back another time?

00:48:01.060 Absolutely.

00:48:01.400 I'd love that.

00:48:01.720 Awesome.

00:48:01.940 Really appreciate you making the show.

00:48:03.060 Appreciate it, man.

00:48:03.280 Yeah.

00:48:03.540 Thanks, David.

00:48:04.320 Talk soon, man.

00:48:05.080 Absolutely.

00:48:05.680 Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.

00:48:08.900 Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.

00:48:14.380 Be sure to check out the next episode.

Dan Martell - April 09, 2020

Forge High-Impact Sellers with David @ CerebralSelling.com - Escape Velocity Show #25

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript