How to Influence Enterprise Buyers with Douglas Cole

What's really unique about sales is that it is fundamentally a field that requires you to be good at strategy and psychology. And you have to think about the way in which things are incredibly relative, subjective within a client organization. Welcome to the Future Proof Selling Podcast, a show for B2B sales and business leaders, where we discuss modern B2B sales strategies that will build your pipelines, and set you up for ongoing success. My name is Stephen Norman, and it's a pleasure to be your host.

Enjoy the show. Welcome to the program, everyone, and really pleased to have Mr. Douglas Cole from Toronto in Canada joining me today. Douglas, welcome to the program.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here. All right. So Douglas has just launched a book called The Sales MBA, How to Influence Corporate buyers.

And he's got a really interesting philosophy and structure on how to think about the interaction between a salesperson and their clients and progressing deals. So looking forward to getting into the discussion. Douglas got a long sales background, been working for LinkedIn for five years or more now in a corporate role. So has a lot of practical experience and actually is still in the trenches facing customers and working with teams every day.

So looking forward to this. So Douglas, just tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the book. Sure. Yeah.

Well, professionally, I would say that I have come into a sales role after many years in consulting. So as you say, I've been with LinkedIn for five and a half years now, tech sales. I have a consulting background, but at the moment I lead a team of sales professionals, all of whom are trying to grow enterprise relationships that LinkedIn has with large accounts. And so that's my full-time hat, so to speak.

And then I also wear a second career hat, which is focused on teaching. So within LinkedIn, I lead a bunch of leadership development courses outside of LinkedIn. I'm a lecturer at local business schools in Toronto, the Rotman School and the Schulich School. And I teach classes on sales and consulting fundamentals.

So those are my two hats, full-time sales and then lecturer, teacher. Very good. Very good. So what led you to write this book.

There's a lot of sales books out there. What did you see as a gap or a challenge that wasn't being addressed? Well, the book emerged very organically. What happened was I got to LinkedIn and because I had this consulting background, I identified that there was a skill gap within LinkedIn sales organization around business acumen.

And so I took it upon myself as a very substantial side project to try to build a mini MBA for sales for the global sales team. And so that took years to build out the modules in that program. But in the course of doing that, I was getting a lot of real-time feedback, and I was figuring out what was resonating and what wasn't. And that spurred me to iterate the content and to improve it, not just for a LinkedIn audience, but also for those external audiences that I work with that I was mentioning in my capacity as a lecturer and teacher.

So I started to evolve the content. And at a certain point, I just thought, this has to be codified somehow. I need to put this into a book. because it was starting to cause more pain to think about not doing that than it was to anticipate the work involved.

And I suppose to answer your question a little bit more specifically, because, yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a ton of sales material out there. There's no shortage of it for sure. And I suppose that I identified that the vast majority of sales materials are really focused on particular methodologies.

It's sort of a skill set and tool set type of approach to teaching sales. here's my specific methodology you know here are these techniques whatever and i felt that there was a deeper element to sales that wasn't being talked about because uh i felt that there was a i felt that the particularly enterprise sales b2b sales i felt that there was a missing theory of the game you know reid hoffman the founder of linkedin uses this phrase the theory of the game you need a theory of the game to be successful you know whether you're talking about a board game or a business game you need to understand what's really going on in that game and i felt that that frame for B2B sales was missing.

And so this book, The Sales MBA, How to Influence Corporate Buyers, offers or argues for a very particular frame for understanding B2B sales conversations. Wow. I look forward to getting into that. So you started off on the business acumen and seeing a gap there.

And it's definitely something that I see as well. I don't think it's something mentioned, to be selling to enterprise accounts. We need to have business acumen. We're always told to bring insight to those customers and bring thoughts.

So tell us a bit more about the role of business acumen in the sales process and how we can go about improving that. Well, business acumen, let's just be clear what we're talking about. Business acumen is understanding how a business makes money and how a business competes in an external competitive environment and how it manages to prevail or win under those conditions, right? So it's sort of the strategic and operational agenda of any business in order to be successful.

That's what you mean by business acumen. And it's underdeveloped within reps because generally, many of them do not have business school education. They don't typically have MBAs or business degrees. And furthermore, I think that the nature or the way in which most reps are on board, the way in which they're taught within their company is about how great that company is.

The wonderful things that that company's product or service can do for their customers, that's sort of the essence of their education. And so that's the approach that they tend to take in many client conversations. It's just a really good sense of all the things they can do, but not such a deep sense of what's really going on on the customer side and how you can speak to their underlying business drivers. And I think the need to develop that business acumen and the need to show it, It's just become more and more obvious over time because the whole supply and demand of information right now in our knowledge economy is such that all buyers are completely overwhelmed.

They're completely swamped. As we all know, the volume of outreach continues to escalate and the open rates for that outreach continue to decline, right? So you have buyers and sellers being increasingly distanced from each other because of the sheer deluge of information that involved in business interaction now What that means is that you need to be able to distinguish yourself More and more you need to be able to demonstrate that you not a superficial shallow communicator that you do in fact have a sense of what matters to this person and this person's business.

And so I think that the need for business acumen is just all the more acute because of some of the broader macro trends that we see. Yeah. All right. So you see, it can give folks a competitive edge for sure to sort of stand out in that sort of sea, someone said the sea of sameness that's coming at buyers every day, right?

And it's getting harder to stand out. And you're right, the volume of outreach is increasing, open rates are getting lower. So companies think they have to keep sending more to generate, to meet their lead targets, right? So that's getting crazy.

So tell us a bit more about the theory of the game. So what's the idea behind that? And what's the framework for B2B sales? Yes, the core framework is, my argument is that every B2B sales conversation is essentially involving three overlapping filters.

You have, on the one hand, the external dynamics. In other words, what's going on in the marketplace for that customer? Who are the key competitors? How are they positioned relative to those competitors?

Those are all the external dynamics. And then you have the organizational dynamics at any given time within any given company. You have certain themes that are dominant. You have certain people who are the most influential.

Those kinds of considerations are extremely important for understanding what's going to resonate with a client. And then the third area is the interpersonal dynamics. In other words, what is it about that particular person's psychology that is going to make that person interested or uninterested in what you have to say? How can you get that person to care about your product or service?

And so at any given time, you have these external dynamics, organizational dynamics, interpersonal dynamics. And what I'm arguing in the book is that you need to think of yourself as a salesperson. You need to think of yourself as a strategist for the external side, as a change agent for the organizational side of things, and as a decision architect for those interpersonal considerations. And so that's how the book is structured, Becoming a strategist, becoming a change agent, becoming a decision architect are the three main pillars of the text.

And I talk about what some of the most important questions and principles are within each of those areas. I like it a lot. And you mentioned change agent in understanding the internal organizational dynamics of our clients. And something that I teach to a lot of my folks is we're actually selling change, right?

They're currently solving a problem or performing a function in a certain way, and we're going in with a different idea or a better idea of how to do something. But there are a lot of impacts when you're talking about change, right? There's a lot of considerations. We're not just selling a product here.

That product is going to lead to changing workflow or changing responsibilities, changing how they measure things in the business and so forth, right? So tell us a bit about that, being a change agent as a salesperson. Yeah. Well, one of the most important things to emphasize with regard to advocating for change is that if at all possible, you shouldn't make it harder than it needs to be.

And what I mean by that is, in many cases, salespeople go in as a change agent thinking something along the lines of what you were saying, which is I've got to persuade them to do something different. I have to change their mind somehow and get them to just see what I'm doing as being worth the sweat, worth the pivot that I'm suggesting. Right. And that sometimes is unavoidably your challenge.

But I think in many cases, being a change agent is not so much of that. It's a matter of identifying where the energy already is in the organization and figuring out how to feed that energy. Where is the energy source? How can I feed that energy source with whatever I'm suggesting?

Because that's a lot easier to drive as a change program than if you're trying to persuade people to think totally differently. If they've already made a decision or determination to move in a certain direction, and you're simply allowing them to do that, then that's a more efficient way of approaching the change challenge. So, for example, in one of the projects that I've been involved with, when I was still a seller, I remember I was working with an organization, and it was a very large, old-school organization, telecom company, global telecom company.

And we were trying to sell something to their sales team. And there was already an incumbent, there was an incumbent technology that was likely their preferred choice. And it wasn't obvious yet as to whether they were going to do both or choose one versus the other. But in any case, the energy source in that situation was that they, we found out that we've had two things that are really important.

We found out that they had defined a salesperson of the future model for their team. They thought about how we want to change as an organization. These are the competencies and skills that we want to build toward because we see the industry going that direction. And we also found out that they had made some very substantial investments in their CRM capability.

And so those two things taught us a lot about where the energy was coming from. It told us that they had put a lot of money into a CRM investment and they wanted to provide evidence that that was a good decision for them to have made. And because they were focused on this future competency model for their sales team, they wanted help in order to get there. So the solution that we were offering, first of all, could be integrated with their CRM to make that CRM more, to make it stickier for their team.

So that's how we satisfied that first. That's how we fed the first energy source. And then with regard to the second, we could stand up and enable certain behaviors which were not common at the time, but which were a lot closer to that competency model for the employee of the future. Our solution was designed to support those behaviors.

And so that was an example of trying to be a change agent, but harnessing the pre-existing energy as opposed to trying to persuade someone to do something different. Yeah, okay. Sort of go with the flow that's already there or try and identify, like you say, those energy sources rather than trying to change someone's mind or change an organization's direction. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that great I think that really smart Okay So that on the internal organization dynamics What about the personal dynamics What should we be thinking about there Well that section borrows quite heavily from this area this academic field known as behavioral economics. And it's worth just telling folks who don't understand what that term means.

Let me just explain it quickly. So traditional economics used to assume as one of its core premises that human beings make rational decisions. that if you analyze the actions of individuals and of societies, you can assume that most of those actions are happening for rational reasons. And behavioral economics came in in the late 80s, and more recently, it's become quite a popular realm.

And some of the key figures within that movement, Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Ariely, some of these individuals, they said, no, this is not true. We have evidence, we have lots of evidence to show that in fact, humans are not rational. If you look at the way we decide, it involves concessions to all kinds of irrational forces. So I think that behavioral economics community gives us a very useful framework for thinking about selling.

What the behavioral economics community suggests is that human decision-making is bound by these limits on the human brain. We have these limits of attention, we have these limits of rationality, we have these limits of self-interest. All three of those things limit what we can actually, how we perceive things. And if you think about what a salesperson does, a salesperson operates within those realms because the salesperson, first of all, has to get the buyer's attention.

So we're operating within bounds of attention. The salesperson has to get the buyer to make a judgment about your product or service. And that means operating within the bounds of rationality in terms of how that client views your company. And then third, a seller is trying to get that client to do something, to take action in some way.

In other words, you're operating within bounds of self-interest, how you speak to self-interest in order to spur action. So what I do in the third section, which is called becoming a decision architect, is I talk about some really important principles from behavioral economics that can be applied to sales in order to move effectively within these bounds. So as an example, one of the principles I talk about is the naming and norming, right? So the label you attach to something as a salesperson makes a huge difference to how that is perceived.

Much like in the regular world, if you call gambling gaming, the use of the term gaming is referring to the same thing, but it conveys a much different feeling. That's right. It feels much more benign when you talk about it as gaming as opposed to gambling. And I think, so the word choice of a seller, I was in a situation as a seller once where we were trying to get the pilot to buy on, or sorry, the client to buy onto a pilot program.

But the pilot program felt like a bit of a stretch for them. So we changed the framing of it. We changed it from a pilot program to a champion program. Because what we're trying to convey with the use of the term champion program is that we were assuming that this is worth doing and that we want to do it because we want to build a critical mass of champions to make the ultimate larger program more successful.

That's the purpose in the initial project was to build champions in order to set up the larger program. So those are the kinds of things that I talk about in the third season. It makes sense. And we see politicians doing it all the time.

And we see other folks smart with their communication, very careful with their language. You see in government bills coming up that might involve a lot of new taxes. but it's called like the equality bill or the health development bill or something like that, right? Right.

Yeah. The Republicans in the US, you know, the famous case where they relabeled inheritance taxes as death taxes, right? Oh, there we go. Yes.

Classy example of that. Yeah, exactly. So what are we tapping into there? What's going on when we're naming and norming?

Well, you know, you think about it, we, words are the things that we attach to these ideas and objects that give those ideas and objects, you know, meanings in our minds. But those words are very arbitrary at the end of the day. And each of those words comes with its own groupings of associations, right, that influence the way that that thing is perceived. And these associations change over time.

And I think that a seller, what's really unique about sales is that it is fundamentally a field that requires you to be good at strategy and psychology. And you have to think about the way in which things are incredibly relative, subjective within a client organization. That there's a way within companies that the way things are talked about is very context specific. It's very specific to the norms that have been built up within that company community.

And so you need to be very conscious of this in the words that you're using. And you need to be using words very deliberately so that you are tapping into that local culture. No, and I can think of examples in my past where I've used the wrong word or I've used some sort of trigger word and the customer's gone, oh, no, we wouldn't have anything to do with that. You know, like you can just put your foot in your mouth by using the wrong sort of term.

So definitely, you know, can relate to what you're saying there. So what else around the behavioral economics should we be aware of? What's another tip you've got for us there? I think that probably one of the most important ones is I bring up this book, which is very well known within the sales industry.

And it's worth reemphasizing as one of the most important books ever written for any sales professional. Influenced by Robert Cialdini, I would consider to be one of the harbingers of the behavioral economics movement. because he identified many of the things that behavioral economists are now talking about. In other words, Cialdini was all about making the case that we make snap judgments.

We look for cognitive shortcuts to help us quickly come to- Yeah, make sense of the world, really, yeah. And that's especially true now just because of the sheer volume information we were talking about earlier. People are more and more reliant on these cues, these shorthand cues. So Cialdini talks about these seven influence levers in his book.

He talks about social proof and authority and consistency likability unity reciprocity And I walked through some examples of how people who are really good at sales they extremely good at integrating those influence levers into their messaging So when you crafting a message to a prospect you don't have to choose one of those. Ideally, you choose multiple levers and you weave them into your sentences in order to make your communication that much more persuasive. So there's a section where I talk about some practical examples of how that has been done particularly well.

Oh, very good. Very good. So yeah, we can save salespeople reading Cialdini and Kahneman. They can get the sales version and the sales interpretation from the sales MBA.

So I think that's really good. I think that's really good because we can read this stuff, but it takes a bit of thinking, a bit of working out how to apply it to what we're doing. And no, I absolutely agree with you. People are not rational.

People are individual. They've got their own biases. like there's a lot there. There's definitely a lot there.

And organizations don't make logical decisions either, many times. And we would all know that from working in big companies, lots of things happen that don't make any sense, but you know why they happen. There's just some alignment. The energy is going in a certain direction and things happen.

And then the good vendors and the good salespeople are recognizing that and hooking onto it. Yeah. Modern Germany, one of the most educated, rational societies on earth, decides to cancel the entire nuclear program a few years ago and look where they are. Not a very rational conclusion.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So was there anything else you wanted to say about the external dynamics? We talked about the business acumen part earlier, but was there another aspect that you wanted to highlight?

Yeah, the first section on becoming a strategist is focus on those external dynamics. And what I try to do in that section, as in the others, is boil some very complex topics down to a few key questions. And I think that in the strategy section, strategy is one of these really flexible, amorphous terms that people bandy about in meetings, but without a very precise understanding of what a strategy actually is. And if you strip it down to the studs, a strategy is essentially two questions.

It's where do I compete and how do I win? In other words, you are very deliberately choosing an area of the market that you think is going to be your focus of competition. And you are, by definition, excluding vast swaths of the market that you do not consider to be in scope for your company. And you are then deciding how are you going to win within that segment?

What are the competitive advantages that you bring compared to other companies that are going to set you up and maximize the prospects of prevailing in that market? So where do they compete and how do they win are the two most important questions to be able to answer in order to understand, have some proof that you understand a client's strategy. And then once you understand those things, it becomes a lot easier to link the value of your product or service to whatever that company is trying to do.

If you know, for example, that they have made a conscious decision to move from a mid-market to an enterprise space, that target buyer has now become the focus of their growth efforts as a business and as a sales team. And you know that in order to win that particular buyer, they need to be differentiated from the competition because of X, Y, and Z. That gives you a much more strategic sense of how you can help this client. And so I go through some examples like that.

Yeah, man, very good. Very good. Man, I really love the framework. I think sales folks can get a lot out of this.

And like you said, some of these concepts are talked about, but I think you've put together a really nice framework that brings a lot of these things together that are a bit overlooked and makes a lot of sense to me. So before we wrap up, are there some aspects that we haven't covered or some things you'd like to highlight? I think one of the overarching themes of this book is that I have quite deliberately taken a certain approach to the topic of sales and teaching how to be a better salesperson.

And one word that maybe summarizes it all is mindset. I've tried to ground this whole book in just a different mindset for the salesperson. And what I'm saying essentially is that you need to have a more elevated view of what it is that you're doing as a salesperson. You need to see yourself as a strategist, as a change agent, as a decision architect.

You're not an order taker. You're not a product specialist. you are these three things to the extent that you're working with an enterprise buyer and trying to influence that buyer. That's how you should be viewing your job because it makes you feel better about the job and it makes you better at the job, I think, to change your mindset in that way.

And so the book is trying to flesh out the components of that mindset so that it's more practical for you. It's more feasible and realistic for you. But it is fundamentally a mindset shift that I'm trying to affect through this book. Man, very good.

Well, Douglas, thanks for coming on and I think a lot of value for our listeners here and I recommend everyone go and check out the Sales MBA, How to Influence Corporate Buyers by Douglas Cole and great to have you on the show. Thank you so much, Stephen. Okay. Thanks everyone for watching and listening.

Look forward to engaging with you more. Bye for now. Thanks for listening to the Future Proof Selling Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the program.

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