Masters of MEDDICC - The Art Of Decision Criteria With Luke Rogers - #Episode 17

Speaker A: I opted to study game theory. And I remember, uh, you know, Douggan used to say that set up dynamics is great. Sales is about playing chess, not checkers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.

Speaker A: Right. Because you're always thinking many, many moves ahead. And most salespeople, unfortunately, they're just playing checkers. They're reacting right.

Speaker B: People say it's hard to get to the comparison. I'm like, it's good, that's a good thing. You don't want it to be easy because then everybody would do it.

Speaker A: That's what differentiates average salespeople from great salespeople is the great ones run towards hard. You go, great, it's hard. Let's have it. The mindset you've got to adopt when you do this research and this preparation about this individual and this company and the fact that our solution is going to add value, you have to believe so deeply in what we do that is going to be so transformational for that person. If you have that conviction over, uh, that what you do is good for the people that you're talking to, you'll just be beyond successful.

Speaker B: Welcome to Masters of Medic. I'm here with Luke Rogers. Welcome, Luke, how are you doing?

Speaker A: I feel fantastic, mate, thank you.

Speaker B: Good. And Luke is the vice president, Amir, at the ever fast growing Comply Advantage.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: Yeah. It was great to see you.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker B: Why don't you introduce yourself to our audience, Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this wonderful world of sales.

Speaker A: Oh, the whole world of sales.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, um, again, thanks so much. Love the opportunity to talk. Um, really love what you guys do.

Speaker B: Thanks.

Speaker A: And really love the idea of being able to share some of what I've learned over the years. So how do I get into sales? Like the original story, it was definitely by accident. I was selling laptops at Comet. For those of you that, you know, those of us that are old enough to remember Comet as electrical. Yeah. Um, I set up my, um, own company when I was 15 and so just by necessity of, you know, being an early entrepreneur, I learned, you know, how to sell and talk to people.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But then really realized that as after university, like that was the direction, direction I wanted to go. My first real job, my first real sales job was at the Cisco Graduate scheme in their sales academy there.

Speaker B: Wow, I've heard about that. That's, that's quite a, that's a good place to start.

Speaker A: You know, they pumped a fortune into it and it was, it was a difficult time because it was 08 when I graduated. So the world was sort of falling apart and I was really lucky to get into this. And you know, they were definitely one of the marquee academies and they basically spent nine months, took us to Amsterdam and it was kind of like a Noah's Ark situation where they like took, you know, a pair from the uk, a pair from France, a pair from Spain, you know, put us all together in some like MTV style experiment of an, you know, Amsterdam, um, housing complex. And then we were all just educated in the world of sales in a very academic way. And then also obviously all the product stuff. But it was a great, great grounding and you know, they probably spent $300,000 on each of us.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: From m. An education perspective. So really lucky to have had that. Wow.

Speaker B: It's funny what you say about the MTV show. You definitely, if there were some cameras around, documentary, that sort of thing would be. I think I'd watch it. I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that'd be, yeah, some, some spicy bits too.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Especially being Amsterdam, I expect. Yeah. So what was your business at 15?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, I, it was, you know, it was the time of Windows Millennium Edition and it was ah, the time of everyone getting the Internet, you know, an AOL disc from asda, you know, and so viruses were rife and it was just a bunch of distressed mums and dads who'd bought a computer, realized that it was full of viruses and the kids had broken it and I was just going around my, my hometown basically fixing it, charging 50 pounds an hour, but it just ballooned and it went from being this kind of call out service to people wanting to buy computers from me. So I signed up a deal with a distributor, uh, and that meant I could buy in hardware cheap. And I sent myself out on a course to go and learn how to build PCs, putting them together, undercutting the retailers selling them, built a website to sell them online, starting getting, you know, orders online as well. And um, before I knew it, you know, a year, year and a half in, we were turning over about a quarter of a million pounds.

Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, that's incredible.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was a great wow.

Speaker B: And it set you up perfectly for what we all deal with, working in tech, where people think we work in it. So you actually, when we get those calls from, you know, grandma saying can you come help us fix my computer? You actually probably could.

Speaker A: That was, it was what I was doing so many, you know, you know, blessed like really like retired people who are like trying to learn computers that would, would quite happily sit there and let me teach them for. But yeah, no, it was a great grind. I'm, I'm a geek. I mean I, you know I've been into IT and games and computers for as long as I can remember. So yeah, I love this world of constantly being exposed to all these new technological innovations and then being able to bring them into the business world. It's, it's, it's a real privilege.

Speaker B: So you had this great start at Cisco. That sounds like, yeah, sounds brilliant. And then what, what. How long did you work at Cisco?

Speaker A: 3 and a half years. So graduated from that program, did a year as a bdr, basically um, quota carrying BDR and then inside sales and then, then graduated into a job there selling their new data center solutions that they just launched which was kind of cool new market entrant thing but so did three and a half years. Got a bit frustrated with the graduate um, pay shackles that you know, you sort of look around and kind of go well I'm doing just as much revenue as everyone else and earning a fraction. So went to IBM. Don't regret that I did that because it really exposed me to the right, the kind of cultures that I love and you know, as a place in the world for IBM for sure. That's not, it's not for me, you know, just wasn't really a pipeline generating culture, there wasn't really a uh, playbook culture there, any of that. Uh, it was just kind of a bit of a play it safe. And so I did that for 18 months and then that's when I changed my life and joined App Dynamics.

Speaker B: And it's like one that is one extreme to another, you know from. And one of the things that I always find when I talk to people that have had, you know, kind of the meteoric success that you've had in your career is that they have this undeniable underlying drive and aspiration. And I always sort of find, you know, uh, you can tell me if, if this is the same people. I always find that there's this, you, I'm um, you kind of have an aspiration to constantly be moving forward. So it's like whatever, wherever you are today, six months ago, a year ago, you would be very happy with where you are right now. But if I told ask you if you're happy where you are right now, you're like no, I need to keep moving forward. And so that I think is why so many people like you find it hard. IBM.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because there is no direct connection to if I do this. Then I'll have this direct result of improving myself and driving myself forward. And then you go from that to apd, and not specifically apd, but the culture and the people there where famously, you know, that is the place that if you can hit the ground running and if you can keep up that pace, you can, you know, run 100 miles an hour.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was. It was. It was an epiphany moment.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, um, a real watershed turning point in my life. And I. And I. I say life because it was something bigger than just a career turning point. You know, it exposed me to a completely different type of person and a totally different type of mindset.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That has since been codified by Carl Zwack in the book Mindset of, you know, a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.

Speaker B: Of course. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I found that a lot of people had quite a fixed way of thinking, a fixed mindset in my career to date at that point. And then all of a sudden, you're just around these people that think anything is possible. Yes. And you've got a leader that basically says you're, you know, you're capable of anything you put your mind to. And not only that, he's giving you tools like medic qualification frameworks and, you know, all these other supporting processes and techniques to help you realize your potential. And it's. It's almost like there's no limit on it anymore. And there wasn't a limit on it. And it was. It was an incredible time of my life. It's. I met my now wife the week that I started at App Dynam. Uh, you know, wow. After years of dating and unsuccessfully, and, um, I think I just. I found myself.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I love that there's something as well, which I don't think gets talked about enough. We look at successful people all the time, and we trace back their origin story, if you like. And it can come from, you know, complete opposite ends. You could have the most supportive parents that back you and. And, you know, tell you you can achieve anything. Like kind of what you just said there. And then, of course, there's the other side, which is like the. Almost like having a chip on your shoulder because you've had it tough and you've. You've f. And you're a fighter and you're a winner. But what I don't think we talk about enough, we recognize the parenting and how that can set someone up to have high aspirations and drive. But the idea of having a leader that can do that, it's the same thing, surely, if not more directly linked to your success, because they are, they're not parenting you, they're literally making you professionally successful. And like, I love how you describe that because it's just so, it's so visceral to me. Like the idea of like someone telling you you're capable of this. I believe in you. If you're driven, then that confirms and underpins that, but it also makes you accountable to them because you probably don't want to let them down either.

Speaker A: No. And that's, you know, you think about the teachers in school that used to, you really used to respond to. It was the ones where when they said, I'm not angry, I'm not upset, I'm just disappointed. You know, the same way your parents would do that if you respect them. And it's the same thing, you know, when you develop a level of respect for somebody because they're having such a transformational impact on your life, it doesn't matter if they make you feel really awful some days because, you know, they tell you what you don't want to hear and, you know the hard truth, you still respect them. And I, you know, I've since come to identify with that as a real core value of mine as a leader, as, you know, a culture of respect.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It doesn't, it's not a, it's not necessarily that I have to be everyone's friend, you know, but if I can respect, if I can get their respect and they, I can, you know, give them mine and we can make each other better as a result of that, then I can replicate what I was experienced to. And to your point, you're absolutely right. Like I say to my leadership team, now remember, you are the most important person in the life of your sales team or your presales team because you're the person that they spend the most amount of time with really in any given day. I spend more time with my team than I do with my wife in the day she's off at work as well.

Speaker B: So it's a huge responsibility internally. Our company, we have this concept of our culture is a winning culture. And the reason why we focus so much on that is because our goal is to hire people that are, ah, winners, but more so importantly, people that really passionately care about their craft. And that can be, you know, Nick, as our producer over there, as a videographer and editor, has like, that's his craft. Um, someone in the sales team, their craft is being the best salesperson. And if you, if you find the right people, true A players, and they truly care about their craft and all the things that go with it, then what a, uh, byproduct of that is they will have to win. It's not that they want to win, it's that they'll be massively unhappy if they're not winning because they will feel like they're not meeting their potential there. They're not, you know, they're meeting their aspirations. And so the idea there is if you uh, if you, if you focus purely on just setting everyone up, everyone up to win, then everyone be happy. And we always, we have this sort of joke which is like, no amount of like ping pong perks or pizza will ever make up for how bad or never like mask the negative feeling of losing or get anywhere near the wonderful feeling of winning. And so. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of like the um, the people that are surrounding you, particularly your manager playing such a big part of that, I think is, yeah, only

Speaker A: bring some, something brilliant up. That is, is a conclusion that I came to, you know, in the last few years of, especially working in uh, B2B software sales where the sales cycles are longer and lumpier.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you know, with the complexities that Covid brought into, into selling and the, that came with that, uh, and also, you know, the current macroeconomic environment that we find ourselves in, where budgets are tighter and everyone's being a lot more rigid, it's like winning. And that feeling of winning, how you help somebody feel like that, it doesn't just come through closing business. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It has to come through other things because people can't wait nine months to feel like they're winning.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It's too long. Yeah. So one of the things that is just great about these high performance cultures with these tools and these techniques that we use, is that if you bring somebody in, even, even somebody who's already great, and you baseline them and you say, right, let's look at your hard sales skills.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And let's look at your soft skills. And let's go through a process of you doing some self analysis to say, where do you think you rank?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: On your ability to pipeline, generate your presence in front of an eb Your ability to set the decision criteria, you know, how good are you at champion identification, building all these things. And then I'll do the same. And then what we'll do is we'll calibrate that and we'll get it down to one place where we say, right. So right now you're a Two out of five on this. And so while we're building pipeline, which is obviously the name of the game because you're new, we're also in parallel going to have a contract, a development contract between you and me that says my job is to get you from a two to four in three months. And that's winning.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is winning. Yeah.

Speaker A: Because you know, you're fulfilling your end of the bargain, you're developing people.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's you know, actually probably worth way more than a uh, deal will ever be.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because that is long lasting value that you're adding for sure.

Speaker B: And so tangible if it's, especially if it's self, you know, self analysis. You said you've, that's come from inside, that's not been put upon you. That's not some system that said it. It's like you, I'm a free, I want to get to a 4. And the person I most look up to and respect and look for actually, you know, I look for their feedback and appreciation is telling me, yeah, I think we can see that you've moved to a. I love that. I think like this is such a fun topic, winning for me particularly in sales and revenue because I think we as an industry get it so wrong. I mean you touched on it at the start. The idea of it being like, you know, the sales cycle long is how you define success or failure. But there's a couple of bits here I really get quite excited about. One is that there are so many wins in those. Let's go to your nine month example. There's so many wins. There's like did we become vendor of choice? Did we get a meeting with the economic buyer? Did we accelerate the decision process? Did we uh, influence the decision criteria to ask strengths and our competitors weakness to be laid traps all the way through? Um, there's hundreds that happen and not only are they wins but they are learning points and points of encouragement for the rest of the team. So if you have as you have like a great culture and you say, you know, well done Sarah who's just got a meeting with economic buyer at abc. Org like uh, Sarah, how did you share with the team? How did you do that? It's a learning point. So that's like the first thing I get excited about winning. The second thing I get, I get excited about on the topic of winning in sales is that we fundamentally get the criteria of success and failure wrong. And this is this concept of did you win the deal? Yes, good job, you succeeded. Did you lose a Deal. Okay. Unlucky, you failed like in black and white terms. And of course there's the whole you never fail, you learn. And I agree with that. But if we just sort of zoom in on what we're trying to be, which is high performing teams and we just class successors like closed won instead of closed loss, we are missing a huge, huge. And it's that idea of, you know, how much did you win by and how fast did you win? And those two aren't necessarily like, those two overlap. Because of course if you can win a deal for argument's sake for 50k in a month instead of a deal for 100k in like 6 months, but there's upside to increase, uh, expand, then that's probably a good thing. But yeah. So this, Yeah. I just, I so often see success defined as closed one rather than.

Speaker A: And it creates a huge ongoing problem. And it's something that, you know, I've come into, you know, Comply Advantage is, is such a successful product that actually a huge amount of our sales, uh, come from inbound.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Over 95%.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's because there's, you know, good reputation, it's got a huge G2 score, very, very happy customers. So you know, there's been this tendency in this habit formed naturally of the salespeople have just been reacting to inbound leads. But you still, when you get an inbound lead, while you might not have had to do the outbound to get that, it's still going to take you, you know, three, four, five months to close it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if the value of that is 20, 30k and you could spend six months closing a 300k deal. Uh, but it feels good because everyone's telling you that winning is the only thing that matters.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And if you're not winning and you don't have a deal and that's a problem because 3x pipeline and all of that sort of stuff, then it's creating really bad habits. It is because it's, it's, it's not, it's not a wise time. Use of your time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, and it's, it's, it's a, it's a real problem I think where you know, sales leaders who just focus on revenue and um, I think most of them are missing so much opportunity.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: As a result of that.

Speaker B: And it's one of those simple, simple things to boil down. It's like it's a matter of they're looking for quantity over quality and they're looking at the lagging indicators and all things that we know we all learn along the way. The wrong way of doing things. But it does so often start at the top, doesn't it, this expectation. I remember coming into a sales role and um, the CRO there telling me that you need 5x pipeline coverage. And I came in, I looked at the pipeline, I had 8x and I was like, I've heard about these jobs because I was always the one that gets in. And I'm like oh, uh, not another turnaround job. Right. And I caught. And I remember started thinking, yeah, I've heard about these jobs where they're actually easy. And I started getting exciting. And uh, then I realized that basically get to a certain point in the quarter and the like hypothetically or metaphorically speaking, the reps just lift up next quarter's carpet and sweep those deals in. Um, and, but the, the, I guess the, the, the learning from that was actually as we, as, as, as I kind of ramped up myself and we settled in, we actually needed a free X pipeline coverage. So it was, it was like the, the indicators were so far off, like so far off. And you know that would have just if, if I didn't have the fortune to have the experience to be able to spot those things coming that would have just been, you know, probably that the sales leader in that role without the experience to see those things coming would have been like excitement, then shock and failure and then excitement and shock and failure until they either had some luck or probably lost their job.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think the miss is just thinking it's 3x pipeline because somebody else said that once upon a time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you thought that sounded a good idea because it's industry standard and ah, not knowing what is my conversion rate at each stage.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Not really analytically understanding your funnel to say okay, if a stage one opportunities at discovery stage. And that's where we're really trying to find pain and we're trying to find champion and we give ourselves 30 days to do that and it needs to move in a month. Then how, what like what is our drop off from stage one to stage two?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, and then was our drop off from stage two to stage three when we want to, you know, essentially set decision criteria, the economic buyer get ready for that like proof of value point in the sales cycle. What's our drop off there? And then as you go all the way through to close and then going right now I know what my conversion rate is at each stage.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Then maybe I can establish what my top of funnel stage one Pipeline needs to look like to make sure I can reverse engineer into my quota. But even more importantly now my job as the sales leader is to how do I improve each one of those conversion points because that is what dials up productivity. Because it comes a point where the law of physics just says you can't shovel more pipeline in.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: There's uh, only so many hours in the day people have got to close deals. Your job is then to say, how do I make sure that my current 0.25x, you know, conversion to, from stage one to stage two becomes a uh, point four.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, or 40% and, and that's why I obsess about now. And you take the science of medic and you take all of the supporting processes and you know, I know we'll talk about it today, but like the decision criteria. Ah, like has been one of the most meaningful amendments to that conversion profile of that funnel because it's, it's, it's really winning the game before you've even started to play it.

Speaker B: I love that. Yeah. I could not agree more. And um, I know we, we talked about it like this. For me it's, it's always one. The decision criteria is the one that I, when people ask what's my favorite like or the, the normal question is what's the most important. I always try and change the question because I think we all know like, you know, we get, you get into the whole chicken and egg of pain versus champion and things and I think everyone feels innately why those things are important. But the, the what, the game changer as you actually, you know, I've kind of put a word to you. Winning the game before it's even started playing is decision criteria. Because the idea of the, the, what it comes back to for me is the, this concept of our customers knowing what they need from us.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, the, the idea of us expecting our customers to be experts in buying a solution like ours. Like do we even want that? Like, do like what they've got day jobs.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Exactly. I um, did this exercise, um, last year, uh, early last year probably about a year ago where I went through over. No kidding, over 200 LinkedIn, uh, job descriptions for marketing roles. Right. Marketing director. It was like a director VP level marketing roles. And I went through 200 and now today it'll be really easy because I'll just use ChatGPT. But then it wasn't working like it is now. Um, and I was looking for a book bullet point of responsibility about technology.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: I didn't find a single one. And you know, you've got like, your marketing role is, you know, very broad. And that's why I picked it, you know, because if it's like security or something like that, you could, you could, you could imagine find technology. But marketing, there was just nothing there. Not a mention about buying technology, managing technology, nothing. And so we expect to go in to meet these people and expect them to have chops about buying solutions like ours. Absolutely not. The only way they'll have that, and this is the risk is if they have got their decision criteria from at worst our competition or like hopefully a little bit better from a, from an analyst or something like that. But it's very rarely gonna by nature of coming from those places favor us.

Speaker A: No. And actually if it's come from our competition, we'll do everything to screw us.

Speaker B: Yeah. Which is what we're trying to do as well, right?

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. But I think the difference is, you know, when you're really value selling and you, you use something like the three whys to really capture the, the need. And one of the things that you know, we're going through at uh, compliantage right now is we're really trying to help the Persona, the primary Persona, which is the chief compliance officer or the chief risk officer. We're really trying to help them make themselves more business relevant. Kind of the same way that ten years ago we were doing that at AppDynamics, um, and we were taking the CIO and helping them get a seat at the top table by saying we're moving our business online and if we are not performant as a website and we can't give our customers a good e commerce experience, then we're not going to be relevant or be made extinct. And it's, you know, we're in a similar world in the financial world now where the chief compliance and the chief risk officer is saying, you know, what got us here isn't going to get us there because regulations are getting tighter. Money laundering is getting worse, not better. Criminals are getting more sophisticated, more and more payments are moving online. Like we have to get smarter, we have to get tougher. And also it directly impacts the client experience because if your compliance policies are too conservative and you make it difficult for people to buy your products or create an account on your system, then they'll just abandon and they'll, and they'll disappear. So it's, it's about saying to the champion that wants to drive change. That, as you point out, uh, probably doesn't really know how and when gets challenged for their significant investment they need to make in, in the, in the boardroom. It's about helping them defend it in a way where they say no. I know I'm asking to change the compliance system, but I'm asking to change it because I can improve conversion rate by 13%, I can reduce our operational expense by 11%, I can completely change the speed at which we can enter new markets. And it's totally different from what the conversation would be often from our incumbents or legacy competitors, which is risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, risk. You know, steady state, don't rock the boat, don't do anything, don't disrupt. Like we have to disrupt. Like we have to change the world. Like three and a half trillion dollars a year is laundered by criminals through the world's financial system. Like and it's growing, that's 5% of GDP. We have to do something differently. So the decision criteria, it shouldn't just be seen as a way of kind of subverting your competitors, but actually helping your champion make ah, a really good value added choice and helping them defend that value added choice in the face of the safe option. Just like people used to say, you don't get fired for buying ib Right. Yeah. But also those businesses that didn't buy anything But IBM for 30 years, a lot of them aren't around anymore.

Speaker B: I love that. Yeah, absolutely right. And that comes back to a bit I think that so many people overlook in decision criteria which is that they just consider the technical elements. Right. And if you're, if you're broadening your view of uh, decision, uh criteria outside, of course technical is important, we're selling technical solutions, of course it's going to be important. But if you're considering, particularly in that, that I love how you described, you know, that that sort of journey that you're setting your champion, you're sort of setting them free and empowering them with a guide going into battle. Yeah, they are. Yeah, yeah. And if you give them the technical guide and they go and try and have a conversation with an economic buyer about that, that what, what are these feeds and speeds you're talking about? Yeah, exactly. But if you empower them to have the economic decision criteria where you know, as you so aptly put, you know, they can go in and talk to the business case side of it and you know, not, you know, you did mention you're not saying risk, but I do think that is a big part of, you know, a big, big part about the um, I always think about it like this. There's almost like the gain when you're selling gain. Um, it gets people excited and they want to buy from you. If you're selling sort of pain like risk, then they feel compelled. Like it's like the emotion of themselves versus looking after the company. So you have that, you've got that perfect balance there. Um, and it just. And then there's. We also class the third uh, type of decision criteria which is like relationship based, which is not just do they like you? It's like do they feel like they can be partners? Feel like you're moving in the same direction as they want you to?

Speaker A: You ask most customers after you've closed the deal, why did you buy the deal?

Speaker B: That's a great point.

Speaker A: What will they say? They say the primary reason we chose to go with you was because of your team.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And that's what I hear. Nine times out of ten they don't turn around and say because you've got widget xyz.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Or you know, because you're green and not blue. They say because of you. Yeah. And, and uh, because of the pre sales team, because of the post sales team, because of the executive team, because of the account executive. And how they, how they helped me go on this journey, you know, as a buyer, as you, as you rightly said, they are doing this off the side of their desk.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In addition to probably a day job that is already consuming more than 40 hours a week.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Right. They are going internally to try and drive meaningful and potentially high risk change. Right. They have to build consensus, they have to create organizational wide awareness. They have to go through, they have to create investment cases, they have to go and go through the scrutiny of the budget process. They are often challenged by people who have alternate points of view. There's always political elements they are going to battle. Ah. And so many salespeople think that actually they're the salesperson during a deal and they're not. It's our champion. And if you can help your champion clearly articulate the criteria by which they're making their decision and why and make it really definitive, sensible and link it to that business value, then you know, you're not sending them into, you know, a, uh, lost cause.

Speaker B: Yeah. I had this wonderful experience recently that talks to a lot of what you said there where we had a, ah, customer of ours, um, and we, you know, we had a really well managed deal going throughout. It was, you know, everything was going really, really well. And our champion was Um, a great champion. They, you know, they delivered everything was per. Like there's no. No complaints at all. But then the unusual thing for me was, you know, normally my experience of selling, you. You close the deal and then other people engage and move forward. But in our role, we were a little bit more involved going forward. And, um, uh, the economic buyer was most certainly the president of the company, which is a little bit unusual. Um, but also the CEO was involved as well. And we were kind of treating them as an economic buyer profile because they were a little bit more involved than, uh, they were sort of emotionally attached to the project. And I was sat with my champion. Um, and the CEO walked into the room and I was like, oh, is that CEO? He said, yes. I said, oh, what's it like? I don't know. I've never seen him before. And I thought to myself, whoa, hang on a minute. And it just. I could feel the deal going in reverse and about how the salesperson worked. The deal had done such a good job of priming the champion for the conversation with the economic buyer as a Persona. And so we just assumed that they. They knew each other and they spoke because there was so much. There was so much feedback back and forth. But it wasn't. It was via, like, proxy mostly the president. And then therefore, the president got the economic buyer download as well, which would have shared with the CEO. So. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker A: Well, I mean, I work for the CEO, uh, at Comply Advantage, and, you know, I speak to him for half an hour a week, if that.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: So, you know, if you're, you know, one or two layers away, even in a small company, it's absolutely feasible that you've never met or spoken to that person. And, you know, I think it was 12 months ago now, and maybe it's still the case. But, um, Jamie Dimon, uh, STP Morgan Chase, was signing off everything over a million dollars. Yeah. At JP Morgan Chase.

Speaker B: That's. That's a.

Speaker A: It wasn't. No one's getting. I mean, with Jamie Dimon, you know, selling a. Selling some software.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like, if you are, then credit to you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But yeah, uh, if he's the real eb. The CEO of JP Morgan.

Speaker B: Yeah. That's such a good point as well, because we've seen. I'm sure you've seen this. You hear it a lot, where the new economic buyer is the CFO by default. Right. And the way that we've been sort of working with our clients with it is like, well, look, that does up the Ante. Right. Because typically the economic buyer has a, um, direct vested interest in the project and that's the nature of the eb. But now the direct vested interest is the capital investment or the investment investment. And so that's why they're involved, but they're not necessarily. Even though economic buyers aren't really, you know, they're not in tune with, like we said, like the technical decision criteria or the day to day, they at least are aligned, you know, they at least understand, you know, what, what we're all here for and what we're talking about. But the CFO by nature can't be because by nature of what we've just said, they have to have the same engagement in HR systems, ERP systems, they have to have the same engagement in office space and you know, insurance and uh, tens and tens and tens of other things. And so what we have to do and therefore the likelihood of us getting, um, time with them and being able to really kind of hit it off as we would normally with a typical ecommerce buyer is harder. And so it just for me comes back to this idea of if you treat the ecomic buyer as a Persona and you work backwards and use things like the value pyramid to really kind of make sure you're relevant to what that organization is trying to do and what you use all the information you've learned to prime your champion to be able to sell for you when you're not there so that they can cover off those boxes, then it's the right thing to do. But this idea that I think I hear a lot now, which is like, yes, the economic buyer is now the cfo. And what I see people do is they go, well, I'm not going to get to them. So I like, let's just not try, right? And it's like, it's bonkers, isn't it? But that's almost the thing. And it's like, um, I always say this, but it's true. People say it's hard to get to the home buyer. I'm like, it's good, that's a good thing. You don't want it to be easy because then everybody would do it.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And also that's what differentiates average salespeople from great salespeople is the great ones run towards hard. Go. Great, it's hard, let's have it.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a, uh, especially given the

Speaker A: tools that we've created, right. If you build a really brilliant three wise with your champions. I've seen champions take a three wise into a C level meeting with EBs and C level people fight over who's going to own that document and put their name on it. I love it because it's been so good. I remember when I was managing the Canadian team in Appdynamics and this one deal I'll never forget, there was two C level people that worked for the CEO who got hold of the three wise and it was so good that they was a full scale fallout.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it was, um, you know, it just made me just think like we do these things and we're capable of doing these things and it's, it's mind blowing for these people.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, that's what good selling is.

Speaker A: That's what good selling is.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, it's making people feel like that.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it goes back to what we're talking about. The same, the same thing that you did there with the Free wise, uh, building Building Free Wise and empowering your champion to think it's their own document. Building the champion deck, building value pyramid building. The decision criteria is the one that is, I think, the most powerful because it's, it's, um, it's timeless. Right. And it evolves, of course, and that's something you have to kind of keep on top of because, you know, people will be trying to evolve it back towards their strengths away from you and all that kind of stuff. But that idea of if you can. We were just, uh, we had a team off site yesterday and we spent um, a couple of hours working on creating that classic kind of buyer's guide. If somebody's thinking about methodology or framework or anything like that, let's help them have a, let's help them have a, uh, buyer's guide of what we think good looks like. And of course just so happens to be what good looks like is us. But that's like we'll be miss selling if we didn't, you know, that's what good looks like.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And ultimately you're, you're, you know, you're setting out to solve somebody's problem. So even if you do influence someone's thinking, which is what everyone for the test of time has done in any form of scenario, whether it's, you know, advertising a type of perfume on tv. Right. It doesn't matter. Right. It shouldn't be seen as shady.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because ultimately, if it solves the problem of the organization that's ultimately going to buy it, then there's, what's the harm. I say this on, on a PG Tuesday when people, you know, get irritated or, you know, they, they call, they make a cold call and the prospect says, no, thank you, or I'm too busy or, you know, whatever. I said, the mindset you've got to adopt when you do this research in this preparation about this individual and this company and the fact that our solution is going to add value, you have to be, you have to believe so deeply.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In what we do that is going to be so transformational for that person. You have to be sorry for them. The fact that they said that, uh, yes. You have to call them back and say, I think I'll take the blame here because I clearly didn't do a very good job. But I think this is not something that you're going to want to match. You know, you're going to want to miss. And, and I think it's like if you have that conviction over that what you do is good for the people that you're talking to, you know, you'll just be beyond successful.

Speaker B: I had a brilliant lesson which is the opposite of this, where I work for an organization and it's a, it's a, it's a. Not a very exciting story. But basically they gave our sales team a. We were allowed to, we basically picked, uh, 50, uh, accounts, I think it was, and they gave us an amount of um, credit, if you like, that we could give the software to those companies for um. And so let's say if it was Tesco's and the ARR would have been a million dollars, then it would have taken a million dollars out of this pot of money and Tesco's could have the software for free. It was like they were just so keen on getting these, these logos for a different reason rather than just having the logos. It was a bit more complicated. But that is effectively as a revenue team, the opportunity we had. So I get all excited, right? I get the, I buy a whiteboard in the office and I mark, I print out logos, the actual Tesco's logo, the ASOS logo. Uh, I've got them all down here and I've got the AE with their picture next to it, like all the way down. And I've got like magnet, um, boards of like the sales stages, who we've contacted, what we go. Because I'm like, we've got a good product. Every company that we're selling to would be better with our product. It's not, it's not a opinion. It's like, it's a very black and white product. It's a better thing. I thought we're just going to do our number here and then everything else is a bonus. I kid you not. We have a guess how much free money we sold.

Speaker A: None.

Speaker B: Zero.

Speaker A: Because free, free is free, right? I mean, yeah, you can't put a value on something. Then why would they put a value on something?

Speaker B: I know. And, and the craziest thing is, I believe that some of those accounts on there, we had opportunities.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: It wasn't like they were cold.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I wish that, that, I wish that if that was like a little lesson that everyone could download into their brain, it would make them think, well,

Speaker A: I mean, I, I've, I've, I've, you know, in a number of companies now, I've sold the most expensive version of the thing on the market. And if it really is the premium, if it really is the Rolls Royce, then great people will pay for it. But don't every time you give it away or you overly discount it, you're cheapening everything. And all the hard work the engineers did to build it and all the hard work that good salespeople have done to value sell it. And there you are trying to win a deal in a commodity situation because you don't have a champion and you haven't met the EB and you haven't artic, articulated the problem properly. So you're using discount, you just, you're just cheapening it for everybody.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I, I, I, the thing I always come back to is that our customers typically don't know how much our solutions should cost.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: Right. And the way I sort of frame that to salespeople, say when you went for an interview with the company you're working at right now and what you know is the average price, how close in that interview process were you to guessing what the average price was? And you might go, oh, I thought it must be at 50k. And if it's like 30k or if it's 90k, then you are as far off as your, your prospects probably will be, uh, in that same company, actually, the, uh, EMEA team, and this would be interesting if you had the same experience. The EMEA's team's AOV was $35,000 and the US's team's AOV was $85,000. Sorry, $84,000. Um, and for, uh, me in my career, uh, doing like, EMEA roles, the EMEA team was pretty much on parity with the US team in terms of average selling price, average order value. Value. Right. That was always how I expected it. So it was a surprise. For me to come in and there'd be a disparity. Um, the first thing I did was send. I don't think I've ever told anyone this. I sent, um, an E. I basically created an email that looked like it had been forwarded to me. Um, ah, this probably doesn't make it sound very good, but there's a good reason for this. And so it looked like. And it was basically from rev Ops saying you can new minimum price. And so I put the minimum price to 36k and I'll. I'll minimum. Our, uh, average selling price is 35. So I was like, all right, let's go one up on that. Um, and, you know, before that was 24k. And guess what? The average, you know, it was like the. Every deal was 24k, funnily enough. And so all of a sudden every deal became 36K. And as we battled going upstream, we actually in a year managed to get to 85k, so 1000 above what the US was. And that for me was like a real telling point because I don't think, you know, I wasn't doing anything as the leader there special. It was just, it was like hitting reset. It was like if I had like that Men in Black, like mind blank thing. Yeah. That was all it was. And that for me shows the uh, power of perception. And going back to what you were saying around discounting and things like that and how that doesn't have quite the impact that

Speaker A: I saw this firsthand. And um, we did a lot of land and expand deals in the AppDynamics days and in my time at Instabase as well, where, uh, we'd go in with one use case, maybe on one application, in one part of one part, you know, one part of the M. Massive bank. Right. And so it was really important that that first deal, yeah, didn't have, um, a really high discount. It was often in a land situation, people so desperate to win the logo.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I remember the difference between, you know, a deal we did at one, ah, big American bank where the unit price, they discounted it 85% of list.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then with the bank that I had landed one of the big four in the UK, I was 11% off list.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And the difference between those two accounts, similar number of licenses that they bought over the course of three years. But the revenue that came from the bank in the UK was 8x higher because of the legacy of that initial land point. Right. And. And it's something that I went back to the VC Community. When I was leaving Uptonomics and shared that, I said, you have to be very, very vigilant that when you land these tier one organizations that you are not setting this really low price point precedent because you will not escape that.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think price is such. That classic thing about doubling your price is not talked about enough. The idea of just everybody's like, what is your perception of price? And, um, I can't remember which um, V is it? I think it might be Anderson that just says like double your pricing.

Speaker A: And if you look, if your product's working and customers are happy with it and it's doing what it says it does and it's accruing to value, people will, they'll tolerate that, you know, and you can manage the bridging of that. Right. With, with clients and contracts so that people don't feel like they're getting unduly screwed over. But, um, I think it's very standard in industry that, you know, great software, as it gets better, and especially in the world of subscription software that we live in now, where updates are part of things, the package, people do expect to be paying incrementally more year over year if they're renewing it.

Speaker B: And I think this comes back to something really important that we've talked about before, you and I, which is this idea of like, you know, you and I both like, love decision criteria, love the idea of like differentiating ourselves and making that the kind of the, the real thing we lead with, um, for all the reasons we talked about. But what I often see happen is that people will do a great job of like almost going into an organization that either didn't know they had a pain, they didn't know how bad the pain was, or they didn't know it could be solved. Salesperson does a brilliant job about creating urgency around this pain and making it come right to the top of the priorities list about solving it. And for one reason, for another good reasons, for the customer's perspective, they decide to look at other solutions, other vendors to make sure they're getting the best of what they're looking for. And what the salesperson often fails to do is to tie the differentiation of their decision criteria into the pain and the metrics in solving that pain. So they kind of, the way I kind of describe it is quite a sort of rough way of saying it, but it's like they create pipeline for their competitors.

Speaker A: They do, yeah.

Speaker B: Because, yeah, they're not going to walk in and go, well, actually it's good that they Raised that, you know, we can't do it actually, uh, because you know, our solution is not as good. They're never going to say that even if it's true. They're going to say no. That's absolutely right. Here's how we do it. Right, right. And, and then you're, you know, you've created unique value and it's been commoditized because you haven't attached it to your unique proposition, unique decision criteria. So how do you, you know, you're selling, like you said, you're selling against, um, an innovative solution against incumbents. How do you get your teams to like make sure that they're really connecting the business value to the technical kind of side of things?

Speaker A: I love this topic. So we're going to spend a bit of time here.

Speaker B: Good, good, good.

Speaker A: And I want to start actually by giving a bit of a shout out out.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: To all the amazing pre sales people in this world that don't get anywhere near enough love or attention or respect or credit for the work that they do day in, day out. You know, it always often falls to the ae.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Ah, the AE closed the deal. But in all years, you know, the, the 15 years I've been selling software, I wouldn't have closed a single deal.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Without an excellent pre salesperson working in there. Um, and so a lot of what I'll talk about today right now is, you know, I'm going to make sure, I want to make sure from the outset that it is, it's very clear to people that you can't actually do this as an AE in my opinion, uh, especially if you're selling quite a technical piece of software. But you know, even Comply Advantage isn't a highly technical piece of software. It doesn't really need or involve it at all. But there are still people who are subject matter experts that operate the compliance systems day in, day out that your pre sales team needs to face off against to help build that credibility. Because you can't do what we're about to talk about if you don't have somebody pairing off at the technical champion level. And you can't own the business champion and the EB and the technical champion as the ae. It's not, it's not realistic. So yeah, huge love to my pre sales friends. Um, so let's start by saying what happens most of the time when people think they're practicing Medic and they think they're going through doing their little tick box exercise. I think the majority of companies unfortunately that use medic and unfortunately, the question that the salespeople ask is to the prospect. Now we've talked about and established the fact that you've got pain and it's clear that you want to do something about it. Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, what is your decision criteria? Yeah, and they go, oh, you know Shelley, that's a great question. Um, let me get back to you on that. And so what do you think happens? Well, a week goes by and Shelley's, you know, some middle manager or C minus 2 has sent an email out to all the subject matter experts or technical people and said, hey, we, we think we need to change our system.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: What should we use as our criteria for buying it? And so what happens is those people that have been using the incumbent technology for the last 20 years use that tribal knowledge of, well, what do we do today? And all the features and the things that, the way the current system works to build a spreadsheet or a list of things that they think they want to buy. Technical capabilities that are apparently going to solve this high level business problem that we've just quantified, which all that is doing is creating a decision criteria for do nothing.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, I never even thought about it like that. Yeah, that's spot on.

Speaker A: Because they're like, well, I don't want you to change this tool. Yeah, I like it. I've got a certification in it. I go to the conference every year. I have done, I play golf with the guy, you know, it's like. And all of a sudden the champion is just completely kneecap themselves because it's a. The salespeople have just left it completely to chance. Yeah, the champion doesn't really know how to go about accruing decision criteria. Nobody has helped connect it to the business outcome. And then the champion doesn't know that doing all of these little technical things won't accrue to solving the pain. And somebody will just tell them, oh, well, we'll just change the way we're using the incumbent and all of a sudden everything will be better. Better. And it won't be. And you'll have just done six to nine months worth of work for absolutely nothing and you'll lose. So the first mistake that people make is that is they ask the question, do not do that. That's my advice to everybody. So what should we do? Right. Well, and then there's layers of excellence involved in this activity. I think at a basic level what you can say is, hey, we've quantified the problem statement in the Y NF thing. And you've collaborated with me on that. And they go, yeah, it was a great piece of work. I really appreciate you kind of codifying that for me. And you see. Well, what we've also done is we've taken a bunch of our key capabilities and mapped those to how they would have the ability to solve the problems and we've weaved a story. And that's your why me.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And that is such an essential part of the three whys process. You see these, you see these people building three whys and they build away anything. So I've got three whys. No you haven't. You've got a one way.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that one why can be used by your competition.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: To then set their decision criteria. You've done them a m. Massive favor.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So the, the precursor in my opinion to actually doing the decision criteria document is that initial why me slide. That just gets somebody bought in at a higher level about why your unique approach to solving this problem is the right way. And an example for us is we're a full stack compliance solution. We have our own data on every financial criminal in the world and we also provide the screening and application layer and we provide the workflow layer. Our competitors do all of that in pieces. Some of them have one of them, some of them have two of them. A lot of them partner with each other. But that creates a big mess which makes it really easy for criminals to evade detection. We need from the outset at a high level to help people understand why having a full stack compliance solution with its own proprietary data set powered by AI, why that is going to solve the problem and why only that is going to solve the problem to the extent that they want to solve it by and only then can you start talking about the nitty gritty.

Speaker B: Yes. And it's almost like in those situations you've not just defended your differentiators, you've laid traps for the competition. And it's like there's not really much. The thing about effective traps like that is there's not much like they don't. They're kind of the uh, the outcome is never really neutral for the competitor because they never really come out away without a little bit of a mark. Even if they, they turn up and they say no, that's right, that, that we don't do it like that. Let us how. How we do it differently. And they're very honest. Like they still, they're still coming from behind. And even if their alternative is, let's be honest, not bad or Good. They're still, they're seen as the. Yeah, but uh, look at the way we do it and your steam as the thought leader.

Speaker A: Well then that's where you have to, this is, this is where you, the real magic comes in is, is how do you checkmate them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. How do you make it basically impossible for them to, you know, win on price.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Because if, to your point, if they come in and they're like almost as good. Yeah, but the half the price. Yeah, I know what I do.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would buy that. Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. Or if they are, you know, nowhere near as good. Um, but they do manage to change the criteria and convince somebody or they have a champion that manages to change things. Um, then again you toast. So once you've got that initial buy in, that's when you then have to go create that organizational consensus at that point with your champion that there is a new way of doing this. It is a full stack way of doing this and it is going to change the way we look at everything. We're going to move from this case by case view to a single view of the customer. Right. And that's when you start layering in the next level of detail where you start to say, right, well if we do want to transform the way that we operate as a, ah, as a company, we have to totally change our process. And this is where you start to really trip your competitors up by. You take a, a list of critical capabilities and that's what we've always called them. What are these, what are the critical capabilities? And this is where you're getting into technical detail that we require to have the ability to do these things. So if we are all resolute on um, we do want a single view of the customer, what are the critical capabilities, the features and functions then that get us there. And that's when you start to plant your really unique secret sauce in there and convince people that, well, if you want to do this, but you don't have the critical capability to do that, then you'll not get there. And they go, okay. And then once you've got that consensus, kind of almost at a spreadsheet level, right. Where you've got 10 key abilities with, you know, uh, 30, 40 critical capabilities all mapped there. And the, those, those key abilities are linked to the business outcomes you're trying to drive.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You've got a decision criteria document.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But you have to build that with your customer. The next mistake, I see people, as they start to practice this next level of the skill is they do all this really hard work. They build that spreadsheet and they just email it over.

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker A: And they say, I built this for you. And the customer goes, uh, uh, uh, okay, thanks. But I've got one.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. You've got to make it feel like it's their own thinking.

Speaker A: You've got to build it with them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, because who would ever use something like that, uh, to publicly in their own company defend a decision?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And certainly drive change if they didn't feel like they built it.

Speaker B: One of the things that I love to see people do is and this people think I'm a little bit daft for this, but I genuinely believe this is a, uh, this is what, this is the level we should hold ourselves to, which is if I've got a first meeting, I'm not even talking about MBM necessarily. Just this is my first contact with the customer. I think think the salesperson should write the follow up call before the meeting.

Speaker A: That's a good idea.

Speaker B: And the idea here is this. Of course we're not going to just get off the meeting, hit send. But we're putting ourselves into the zone where we go at the end of this meeting, what thing would I want to say to this customer? Right. And so I'm saying, you know, I'm saying first and foremost, some, you know, usual stuff which takes time. Just like, great to meet you, blah, blah, blah. Um, and I'm looking to, I'm almost like foreseeing the outcome I want, which is like, as we agreed, these would be the next steps, whatever it was. But one thing I also like to do is I like to try and plant the decision criteria from the first conversation.

Speaker A: Bingo.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Bingo.

Speaker B: And what I'll say is it sounds to me like you're looking for a solution that does these things. It also sounds from our conversation and again this, this doesn't have to be first call. It could, this can happen throughout. This can be the line you follow throughout. It also sounds to me like you're also looking for this and this. Um, would you agree with degree? And therefore then it's their idea and it's come into that. And the other thing with this as well, going back saying you started with, which is the SES is I love it. If I've got a call like that and the SE is on and I get them and I say, um, you know, now Luke is gonna, Luke's gonna follow up with some of his thoughts on the technical side of things. Because as we know that, you know, the Customer wants to hear from the SE anyway, they see him as more credible. They see him as having less of an ulterior motor. All the good stuff we know. And so if we can do that and then it starts this sort of separate, you know, there's lots of wins here. One of them is, you know, you, you're preparing for what you want from the meeting. The other one is that you're getting to set the decision criteria. The third one is that by bringing in your sc, you are doing something I don't think we talk about enough, which is like reverse multi threading. Because so often we just stuck the AE and then we go, well, you need five contacts or ten contacts. Yeah. So if we reverse like single thread from a multi thread from this way around. And then the other bit, the last bit. Why I think this is so important is that if you've had a great first meeting and you've done everything right and you've got a great. Everything's gone perfectly even anything just from good, whether that person's working in an office or not, it doesn't matter that per. That customer is going to. You're going to be flavor of the month. You're going to be in their head. And they might walk to the kitchen and see the cio. They might walk, they might join another call and say, how's your morning going? Yeah, I just had a great call. This guy from Luke from Comply Advantage. You know, we're having that problem over there right now. What do you want your customer in this case, we don't know their champion yet. But what do you want them to do? Do you want them to like, try and ad lib what they remember or do you want them to go, yeah, actually just got this email here. So you're like, bang, straight into their hands. Yeah, straight into their hands.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, I love this. And you know, as you talking here, it reminds me. So I studied artificial intelligence at uni and you know, as a geek.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I opted to study game theory. And really what you're talking about is game theory. And I remember, you know, Doug and used to say that setup dynamics is great. Sales is about playing chess, not checkers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.

Speaker A: Right, because you're always thinking many, many moves ahead. And most salespeople, you know, unfortunately, they're just playing checkers. They're reacting right, oh, I've got this email. I'll, uh, respond to it. I'll do this. What you're thinking about is, right, I'm gonna work back from a deal. Nine months from now. And if you think about that, that's like a nine month game of chess.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And all of the moves that would go into a nine month game of chess. And like if you're really at the top of your game you're able to do that like Kasparov level. And that is, you know, that is game theory really and that you know, decision criteria I think and the art of this part of medicine is probably the most applicable to you know, game theory because it is really about right, I'm going to do this and then this is going to happen and then they're going to send an email and then someone's going to say they don't like it and then the competitors champion is going to try and input their criteria and then I'm going to need to run a workshop with my pre salesperson to help box that off and take that out again. And then at that point we're going to republish version 2 of this and then we're going to have to update the three whys and how an EB meeting where we bring in the version of the decision criteria. And it's always thinking, right, 9 step, 10 step, 11 step. And it is, it's, it's game theory. And this is, I think what again really great sales leaders do is they get on a whiteboard with their reps and they kind of go, right, here's where you are.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Here's where you want to be two weeks from now. Yes, a lot is going to happen.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Here are all the things that can happen. Let's work backwards.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And let's think about that and let's plan for all of those steps. But right now I wasn't taking that, mate. That was email before the first meeting, bro.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Yeah. And what you're talking about there is basically it's the same that the concept of what a lot we've talked about and the great things you said around decision criteria have been around, um, taking control and influencing it and moving it towards momentum towards you. And then a lot of the stuff you said there is like about um, taking control of decision process as well and putting things you and I remember this is like I'm sure every, I perhaps think, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but I think perhaps everybody listening to this would have had this eureka moment where I remember having a deal and you know, I sort of, I leveled up in as a salesperson, you know, went to a uh, joined a new company and definitely like the level leveled up and the expectation, the execution leveled up. Similar probably for you from IBM. For me it was uh, Oracle to sprinklr. So very similar probably in that regard of going from like a large org to a playbook company. And um, I remember, and it sounds daft when I think about it now, but I had this great deal on the go. Everything was like all the green if you like. And um, uh, my boss's boss said to me is like, um, so have you sent over our MSA for their legal team to have a look at? And I was like, like no, of course not. We're not vendor of choice yet. And he like, like. But I didn't say that. That's what I was thinking my head. And he. And I sort of went, no, I haven't. And I'm thinking like I, I uh, didn't want to like say because he's like, he's used my boss's boss. But. And I remember having this like thing, I'm walking out going like what? And then I sort of, I sussed out, I was like, oh, that's actually a thing. You don't have to wait for them, you know, like, oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Because all. Because actually what will happen is they'll send you theirs and it'll be 93 pages long. Or you could get your eight page MSA M in there and save yourself three months. And I think this, when you're dealing with larger organizations as well, the decision criteria, I think it's smaller companies, sometimes people can just buy against that. But often, especially now, RFIs and RFPs are a, uh, huge part of, uh, a mandatory part of the procurement process. And again, I think that people who respond to unsolicited RFPISA that mad. Yeah, absolutely mad. You think about all of the awareness and consideration that has gone into writing that and the influence that they will have had either from their incumbents or from challenges that have come in and PG'd in there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you're responding to something that you've had absolutely no influence. Your chances of winning that are like less than 5%. Yeah. Why would you spend all of the time and energy responding all these ways? But conversely, if you build a great decision criteria document that they can easily lift into an RFP template, you've also just done your champion a massive favor and you've won the deal before the RFP process.

Speaker B: Yeah. And especially going back to what you said before, um, with the free wise document, if they taking it and they're seeing they're like that, thank you for that, um, I'm gonna take your logo off of this and I'm gonna make it look like.

Speaker A: Well, don't even put your logo on

Speaker B: it in the first place.

Speaker A: That's true. We are three wise template is, is, is just white, white slides. It says, insert customer logo here.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then as soon as you really kind of, you know, in the groove of the client, just say, can I have your PowerPoint template? Yeah, corporate PowerPoint template.

Speaker B: That so tip that. I love that tip for everyone listening. If you work with a public company and you go on their investor website, you can get there without asking that you can download their corporate documents and it will have, you know, their layout and stuff like that. You can often they actually like. I've even found it in PowerPoint format as well.

Speaker A: Have you? So good.

Speaker B: It's a, it's a bonkers thing to do.

Speaker A: But, but again, you, you the, the secret shouldn't be a secret.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But the real Art Champion building is all about these deposits, right? Yeah, Deposits and withdrawals. That's the way I always think about the team M. It's like it's, it's a, it's a build test loop.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And you're, you're always trying to do things and build goodwill with the Champion and help them. Right. But then you're asking them for things all the time. And so you're depositing, but you're withdrawing all the time. So it is like a bank account.

Speaker B: I like that.

Speaker A: And then what you've got to be conscious of is when do you become overdrawn? Because that's when you enter a state of stress and that's when relationships fall apart. When you've done a bit in the beginning and then you stop giving and then all of a sudden you're just saying, okay, well when's the next meeting and when are you seeing procurement next? I need a meeting with legal because. Because I've got to close this deal in three weeks and my boss is on my back and it's like, what have you done for that person?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's when you burn a champion. But if you have this concept of this build test loop of deposits and withdrawals and you're thinking about, well, if I put this slide deck in their format and put their name on the front of it, knowing that I built it with them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I've just done them a favor.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because that's work now they don't have to do.

Speaker B: Exactly. Right.

Speaker A: And if you're always thinking about work that you can take away from them and do for them, you will really help that individual.

Speaker B: I like this, I love that way of putting it because one of the challenges I see with salespeople when they build champions, they're good at building. So there's a few things that one thing, they build champions and they either they're worried about making them, executing them, you know, like making, you know, asking them to do the things because they feel like. And that part of the reason is they don't want to upset them. They don't want to make that withdrawal or like ask anything of them because

Speaker A: they know they're in that, that zone.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's very true. Yeah. And I always say this thing like we're not trying to make, we're uh, not trying to marry our champions, not trying to be friends for life. Although ironically, I have a number of my best friends are actually like, what, you know what? My M. RCRO was our champion with a deal we did with Cisco. And it's like he's one of my best friends. Um, another one of my best friends was a champion of one of the best. So it's almost like. But at the time we weren't friends friends. Like we got on very well. But I wasn't treating the relationship like a friendship. I was treating the relationship like a, a, um, uh, mutually beneficial relationship where look, and that's what, that's the art of champion building.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That's why the vested in them having a vested interest in our success is so important.

Speaker A: Symbiosis.

Speaker B: Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because without that, it's, it's the cash withdrawals are, uh, you know, you're going to get into debt. One way or another, one of you is going to be in debt. Very. That's a great way of putting it. It's a great way sort of to paint that picture of the cash withdrawals and deposits have even, you know, I love that. That's really, really cool. Yeah.

Speaker A: I've got a lot from you so far.

Speaker B: I know. This is, this is like, um, this is the thing. Like I, I, I have this superbly. I mean I love sales anyway, but I have like the most privileged opportunity to get to talk to people because I feel like I'm just like, uh, I, I say this to people all the time. Like when, when people say ask about sort of mentorship and stuff. And I was like, you should start a podcast because you can, you can like you who you see as being like the biggest experts in your industry and you just sort of, you know, chat to them and at the same time it, you know, it benefits everyone.

Speaker A: So, uh, you know your stuff. So you ask very much.

Speaker B: Thank you. If people have heard that as I'm feeling like, oh man, I want to get back on the tools. Uh, what is, what should they, should they look you up on LinkedIn?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. Yeah. You know, anyone that, that isn't trying to sell me recruiting services or software, I will, uh, I will respond to, which is hard sometimes to weed through that. But, um, you know, the jobs board as well, I've got great ta team so, you know, the jobs are all up on there. But yeah, LinkedIn's a great way to reach me. And um, you know, I love connecting with people, especially, you know, tip again, you're connecting with me, write me a personalized message. Right. Just say, say why. Why you're asking to connect with me otherwise. And I say that to people when they're PGing as well. Like don't just cold connect with people because they just, you know, all sorts of random people trying to do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's not hard. It's, it's not, it's almost like the more AI and automation gets better, I actually feel like it's easier to stand out. You know, it's like, it's, it's just, uh, my favorite one is digress. But my favorite one is that companies that write right to me, they, they, they, the automation tools, capital, they auto correct the name of the company. So they give us a capital M M and lowercase edict.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so I'm just instantly, I'm like, oh, that's, that's automated. It's just gone. Just straight away.

Speaker A: I got an email yesterday. Hi, Mark, I'd like to sell you some, uh, sales productivity. I was like, okay, wow, you could not have failed harder at that.

Speaker B: So, yeah, ah, targeted messaging for sales.

Speaker A: Please, you know, just call me as well. You can get hold of my number. Great. Because I'll respect that. Right. Send me a WhatsApp. You know, uh, you know, I just, I say the same to my team. Like, I'm a busy manager these days. We're trying to sell to busy managers. All I respect, be super direct, tell me what you want and tell me why you contacted me. You know, I'm like, I'll make time for you.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, it's just, it's, it's just about being relevant.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Relevant and researched. I think those two things together. If you, yeah. You can get someone's attention.

Speaker A: And that's all the generic AI sales stuff just needs to go away.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because it's just. It's just making it worse.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Everybody.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Although, you know, there is. I still stand by the argument that I can stand out. I was. I will. I can stand out. But again, like, if. If. If people are just so.

Speaker A: I think it's worse for our customers.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: I think that's the part of the problem that this. The fatigue.

Speaker B: It is a fatigue of, uh.

Speaker A: That people getting from inbound comms, it's just, you know, they're just not reading things anymore. I mean, I don't read any. Anything from, like a third party that comes into my inbox now. I don't even open it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because I just know it's some outreach sequence that no one's put any effort into.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're absolutely right. So. Well, we are right up on time. I know you're a busy man.

Speaker A: I could talk to you all day.

Speaker B: Well, let's get. Let's do this again sometimes.

Speaker A: I'd love.

Speaker B: Love to do that. So thank you so much, Luke. And, um, yeah, everyone, if you want to get hold of Luke, if you think. If you. What you've heard sounds like. I know it sounds up my street. You know, where to. To find him and make sure. Relevant and well researched. Uh, yeah. Thank you very much, sir.