Almost everything modern sales teaches is backwards | Richard Spanier

Speaker A: Hello and welcome back once again to the Inquisitive Podcast with me, Marcus Kauchi. Today my guest is Richard Spanier. Richard is somebody who I've followed for quite a while. We've interacted on LinkedIn and um, he's recently released a book on trust. And uh, today we're going to be exploring why sales has hit, um, a low point. What needs to change, and how to create a frictionless buying experience because the context in which we trade has changed. So Rick, without any further ado, could you just give us 60 seconds on your background, please?

Speaker B: Sure. Um, in sales, my background began, uh, 45 years ago and I was, uh, I kind of flailed into sales. I was looking for something after my other journey had ended. And I, uh, was lucky, I was lucky to get involved in an industry that I, uh, really enjoyed. I really enjoyed the telecommunications equipment industry because I've always been kind of a communications nerd. Um, and that worked for me. Um, over the years I've seen sales, um, changing, uh, and not for the good. I see a broken model that people are still arguing in favor of, while the shift clearly has been, uh, from sales initiating contact to buyers initiating contact based on research, based on their own work and their own due diligence. So that's about, I don't know if that's 60 seconds or not, Marcus, but that's, that's kind of where I'm coming from.

Speaker A: Excellent. So your book starts with a, ah, very clear claim that sales has a trust problem, not a tech problem, not a productivity problem, not a lead gen problem. Let's start there. What's made that impossible for you to ignore?

Speaker B: In my consulting work, I mentioned 45 years, 30 years were in sales, uh, 15 have been in consulting. And there's a moment in time, uh, and it was five years ago and the guy's name was Jim. I'm not going to go any further than that. But he came to me looking for help with outreach and he had failed dismally with two other vendors. He didn't get the results he wanted. And he said to me, um, I don't want another postmortem. I don't want another postmortem of a failed campaign. I need results. And how are you going to do that for me? And I was gobsmacked to use the Britishism. I was gobsmacked because I realized that my next move normally would have been, well, we need to personalize. We need to personalize your emails. We need to really get to them. And um, I Didn't have a solution because the solutions I saw for personalization were clumsy. They were clumsy. They were obvious. Um, insert a name, you know, insert his role, and from the role make assumptions about the responsibilities and the problems they face. It blew up my face. I said, jim, I can't work with you because, honestly, I just don't have an answer. No, I cannot do that. I, um, just need. I need a different path, and I haven't found it yet. So thanks for your interest, but, uh, no, I mean, I had to walk away from it. That started a long journey toward looking into, um, trust and where trust was being lost. And it was being lost in the interaction between the seller who was pushing and the buyer who's resisting. Um, and when you frame it that way, you say to yourself, well, why not acknowledge the fact that today, especially this was coming on board even four or five years ago? Why not acknowledge the fact that the buyers are already very, very busy? They are doing research. They have the Internet. They have AI today. So when they come to us, they're prepared. They know a pretty good amount about what we are already doing. So when we get into notions like pipeline and qualification and all the icp, all the things I tear apart. The notion of a funnel, where people begin at the top and progress orderly down through the bottom of the funnel and come out as a sale, all of that was fading. And it got me thinking, well, how, you know, it's easy to. It's easy to be a critic. Critique is easy. I can point to. And we can all point to the statistics on email response rates, phone call response rates, all that stuff. Um, we can talk about that. We can talk about the fact that buying decisions are already made or vendor decisions have been made well in advance of anybody getting to them, you know, using traditional systems. So how do we. What do we do? And that I came up with, what if I had a landing page? What if that landing page spoke specifically to that group of people, that particular problem, that specific problem? And what if we gave them an opportunity to use their own inputs to generate ideas and results that jive with what they're looking into? So that's where it began. Um, because the distrust was, you see, the distort. Every, Every poll has ever been taken, uh, on trustworthiness by profession. You'll see sales, uh, toward the very. Toward the top of the distrust in the bottom of the trust. Okay, so that's not by accident. Um, you know, we have. We have a vocation in industry, uh, that has not really kept in Tune with the people they're attempting to serve. So that would be a brief overview.

Speaker A: So you talk in the book about frictionless by design, and it's not about a better funnel or sharper cadence. It's a redesigned buying environment. So you've just mentioned that the buyer is already very active and in motion. Um, and sales's job is to remove friction and support that buying motion. Um, so I'm curious, in environments where sellers have monthly activity targets, monthly revenue targets, um, how do they do this without getting fired?

Speaker B: Well, they don't. And they will get fired, most likely because it's a different system. They can't. There is massive role changes that we're going to be seeing. Okay, so they have quotas. I argue against quotas. Okay, I say instead of having leaderboards and stack rankings, why not have something instead? How about a situation where, um, a team, okay, not a team of sellers, a team works on an account. So you might have a sales engineer, you might have a csr. Uh, you'll probably have, of course, a seller, uh, you'll probably have a manager. Let's say you have a hundred thousand dollar deal and the profit margin on that deal is 10%. We'll keep the numbers simple. You got $10,000. Why not take that $10,000 and divide it equally, Equally among every player that touched that deal. We talk about teamwork, okay? We hear about teamwork, you know, makes a dream work. Okay? Had a grace on my nerves, but people say it, so why not, why not provide the benefit, the financial benefit from the sale across the board to the team that actually produces a sale so that the csr, you know, gets paid, the AE gets paid, the manager gets paid, the engineer gets paid, and uh, you can expand that, but over time, if you're looking at a five million dollar business and a million dollars of profit coming and you can be talking about real money spread equally. So the system isn't going to help people who are tied to this model that's in place now. And I know that's radical, um, and I mean it to be radical because when we look at what people are doing today, you know, it's clearly not working. But let me look at the role of the SDR for a minute. As a sales development representative, today they are tasked with mundane work for the most part. They're sitting making phone calls, they're sending out emails. All those things are going to be replaced by AI. They're in the process. So will a lot of their roles. We have 650,000 SDRs in the United States. What's going to happen to those people when AI uh takes the grunt work out of what they do and leaves them with free time? My argument is, well, use that free time to get better at what you do. Not. Work smarter instead of harder. Work smarter and harder. Okay, so it's so when, when these people, I'm sorry, I'm going to close with this, they are in a position of jeopardy. There's nothing to prevent them from becoming a member of the team that shares the profits. You can call it an ae, you can call them whatever you want. We need to provide a pass for these people. You know, not providing a pass is unethical, but at the same time as standard business in our, uh, society.

Speaker A: Well, I think that the problem that I see is that many uh, leaders and investors will see that as a way of cutting heads. But in the last three recessions and I've lived through, ah, five now, um, in the last three they cut their heads, then they had to hire a whole load of people back because uh, a lot of institutional knowledge walked out the door, uh, always pushed, um, and customers found that they resented it because they built relationships with people, um, they had to then keep repeating themselves. And I think part of the problem uh, with the way modern um, go to market works is that everyone is siloed. They're targeted on competing uh, metrics and their activity based. So every time you go from uh, marketing to the sdr, the SDR to the ae, the AE to customer success and so on, they have to start all over again. Which is incredibly frustrating and frankly fucking rude.

Speaker B: Um, well it is and that is actually what got me on the warpath. So um, I'm glad I didn't have to define that friction.

Speaker A: It's incredibly wasteful because it means that the buyer is not making progress towards the outcome that they're renting from you. So in terms of how we go to market, I think instead of slashing heads, redeploy those people on high value activity. So I'm with you 100% that the team should be compensated. I think the team should work together on a smaller number of accounts. I always teach my clients because my sweet spot is people selling into the mid market and lower enterprise. And if you've got 200 or 2,000 accounts, you can't possibly cover them all. And not all prospects are equal because they may not really have a problem that you can solve or if they do have a problem you can solve, they may not consider it to be a priority. Because of other things going on within their context. And if you're an AE or an SDR working on 200, uh, target accounts, it's very, very difficult to do the research, to do the COVID get the coverage, build the multi threaded relationships. So my thinking is that we should target maybe 20 per pod. And that pod focuses on deep research. Understand the company, their strategy, their vision, where they are in their business lifecycle, their investment and funding lifecycle. We understand what's going on in their business. Are they in scaling up? Are they in growth? Are they in turnaround? Are they in a continuation flatline? Are they in recovery? Because the conversations that we meet them, uh, with, uh, at those points are different. And by role function they are different. If we're talking to a CRO or a VP of Sales or a Chief Commercial Officer or VP of Marketing, uh, or uh, head of Customer Success or head of Engineering and Product, the conversations need to be tailored to them. So I love the idea of the landing page that you just described where they start building their own adventure. Because what it does is it feeds your. Build your own statement of work, which instead of writing a proposal as an author of a work of fiction, um, you're now a scribe taking what they are trying to hire and seeing whether or not you are capable of executing on that. And I think that's a massive shift. But what it also does is it means that your conversion rate goes through the roof. Instead of having a 1 in 23 conversion rate, you're going in the upper, uh, 80% mark. Oh, yeah. If you write a statement of work that has the customer's fingerprints, voice and vision over it, you should have a near 100% close rate, which is a lot more productive, a lot more profitable, and a lot cheaper to sell and service.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I agree with that. I think that when the people come to us as sellers, it's an entirely different equation. And um, when they come to us, understanding who we are, what we do, what the impact will be in terms of reducing risk. You know, risk is. You mentioned a bunch of things and they're all 100% on target. What you didn't mention is risk. And when buyers are making purchase, and I'm not talking, you were upper, mid and lower enterprise. That's pretty much where I worked. Um, the people aren't always looking, they're never looking features and benefits. They're looking about how, you know, when we used to say, um, what's in it for me? I learned that from the AT T days as they were transitioning to Lucent. What's the new for me? Well, that's one thing, but the other thing is, um, risk. Um, how is, if I make this decision today, um, what are my risks going to be? Downstream, you know, and that's really critically important because I think reduction of risk. The buyer isn't going to come back. If they've gone through the process I outlined, they're not going to come back. They're not going to say, oh, sales did this to me. It's a decision they made on their own using material that is, it is not specifically geared towards the seller. It's industry kind of information they've gone through that they're not going to blame sales. You can say this was our decision process, you know, and it's a whole different world when we get there. Instead of, um, well, you know, sales led and we followed. No, we led. Sales helped and we made a decision. We understand the risks and I talk about risks a lot, but I mean it's really a key component of.

Speaker A: Well, you beat me to the punch because, uh, risk is more important than pain and it's also more important even than the outcome in facilitating that decision. And buyers are uh, looking at it through what uh, I'd describe as a three by three matrix. There's the functional risk, there's the social and political risk, and then there's the personal and emotional risks. And they're assessing them as to whether they're affordable, non affordable or compulsory. And if we don't take the time as a team to try and work out what those risks are, then chances are we're going to miss the mark. And we're also going to misread objections, silence, hesitation and all of those things that everyone teaches, um, how to handle. But as a buyer, do you want to be handled, convinced, lied to, manipulated, pressured? Um, none of us do. And the problem is that if we are focused on the supply side of the deal, which is what virtually every sales methodology teaches, um, they all do it. They talk about paying, budget, decision, they talk about budget authority, need and time, um, medpic and all of those. They're very good, but they're useful internally from the buyer's perspective. All they do is actually create projected risk in the buyer's mind. And they're not just having to handle risk themselves because that social and political layer means that when you are not present in that room, they are having to have corridor conversations, second and third room conversations. The second room is normally their boss and the third room is the allocation committee. You're not going to get anywhere near them. And your message has to carry and be safe for them to do so. Which is why in our work we concentrate a lot on decision safety. Um, so making the buying process frictionless by design is key. But unless you create decision safety, and that's for both buyer and seller, because if the seller is feeling pressure, they will do stupid things like offered pointless discounts. Um, they will interrupt, they'll put customers under pressure, they'll try and bring deals forward in order to make this month's quota. And the net result of that is they then become an obstacle to the buyer feeling safe. And psychological safety on both sides is critical. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think even on a zoom call, um, buyers can sense commission breath, you know, is the term that came up years ago, and I think it's so good. Um, and that's when we talk about trust and distrust. I mean, what is more emblematic than commission breath? When they sense they are being manipulated into a process that doesn't really address their needs, they have to kind of get through it. They have to like, okay, okay, do your thing. But let's get that. When I think of champions, okay, the notion of champions, which I always thought was odd, but I mean, in reality, in sales, we've had them, we've all had champions that helped us get a deal across the table. When you try to systematize that, here's the thing, we don't know. When your champion, who is not the key decision maker, goes to the key decision maker and has that discussion, do they stand up for you or do they say, oh, yeah, you're right, know, I don't want to take the political risk of arguing, you know, so even the notion of champion kind of falls apart because that decision is only going to be made by one or two people, regardless who else is getting involved, Someone is going to acknowledge it legally purchasing and approved by a C suite person. So, um, I don't know if that answers the question, but, you know, I. I think that, um, there will always be buyer's remorse, regardless of the premises. If we use brick and this might design traditional model, there's always going to be that after the, you know, that after jock about, oh, we've worth this. Now what do we do? Um, this isn't good. This isn't going to mitigate that. That's good. But at least the decision is when they've reached on their own terms, um, you know, using information that isn't shuttled, uh, to them, they've been Able to explore the landing page, the interactive elements, whatever. Um, but they have an ownership that they can protect when they go to speak to the people who may or may not acknowledge this is a good path to go on.

Speaker A: Well, I'm curious to get your take on this. We've obviously explored how central risk is. So in your view, what can the seller do to leave the buyer feeling, I can defend this decision when Rick isn't around.

Speaker B: The seller needs to divorce themselves from the mouth, from. From the constraints of the system they're working. That's an act of courage. Um, and it's unusual at best. But, you know, that to me, is the difference that they have to be willing to own their work regardless. You know, they have to if they're interacting with a buyer. And that comes across, you know, it's a whole different calculus. I mean, it really is. I mean, it's, uh, we've worked through a thing together, uh, on our buyer terms, not your seller terms. But you've been a wonderful guide throughout this.

Speaker A: So one thing I loved about what you said earlier is that you separated buyer's remorse from regret and blame, um, or you separated regret and blame in the buyer's remorse, um, situation. So what can frictionless by design reduce? Remorse itself or the feeling that the buyer was pushed into something that they didn't own?

Speaker B: The latter really being pushed into something they didn't own. And that comes across so clearly. I've been running a series of polls. Trust was the most important characteristic of a successful sale. 75%. This was like 200 people. Okay? There's other things, you know, but trust just bangs on through. And so how do we engender that trust? Well, here's a simple thing. Okay, Maybe I get extreme on this, but I think it's important. Gated versus ungated content, we have thought up there, okay? We have on the landing page on people, right? There are pieces there. Now, I went to download four different, um, reports last week. Every one of them, it wasn't just give me your email. It was, get your email, your company name, your company email address, your, uh, annual income for one of them. Um, and other questions, slicing it. Now, how does a buyer look at that? As opposed to going to a landing page, where, here's a report, it's clearly made evident, it's available. And what you do is you download it. You download it. You don't give them an email address, you don't give them, pardon my English, but you don't give anything, okay? You just download the freaking report. Now, okay, we're not tracking them, you know, we're not conducting surveillance, you know, which is key to this whole model. Um, we're not doing that. What we're saying is we think this is valuable to you as the ecom, uh, IT director who's contemplating a change, uh, on Ruby on rails from Vision 4 to Vision 7, version 4. 7. Well, that's a whole different thing. Okay. People are going to sense that. Oh, they're not, you know, they're not like skulking around the corner, popping up, can I help you? Um, what they're doing is they're making information from freely available to you without constraint. You know what, at the end of the day, and I get this pushback a lot at the end of the day, people will come to you if they've had a satisfactory experience, if what they've encountered made sense. Guess what? Uh, they're going to call, they're going to hit that button that says, do you want to discuss this further? Rather than book a sales call or, you know, book a call or set an appointment or anything else, you know, if you have ungated content, it's, it's emblematic of the approach I take. Okay. Because at the end of the day there are people who are going to surface. Not as many as you get. Oh, they replied to my email. No, that's not the issue. The issue is when they come to you, they are self qualified, they're interested. And you talk about close rates. Yeah, well, maybe we do get closer to 100% than whatever it is today. 20. You know those numbers, our meeting, us.

Speaker A: I love your optimism.

Speaker B: Well, I mean you look at, I look at the numbers and I go through this with clients. Um, if you send out 10,000 emails, how many of uh, those emails are going to result in a sale? And I'm going to take the position that none.

Speaker A: None to one.

Speaker B: None to one. Maybe one. Yeah, but so that costs a lot of money. That, that's an expensive proposition because there's a lot involved in sending out 10,000 emails. So if instead people have come to your landing page, people have engaged and now your closing rate, I'm not going to say 100% because I don't think that's possible. But I think if you get 80, 90% because they're ready to talk, they understand the risks, they've read your pieces, they know that you're not talking to them in generic terms, but you're talking to them. What is it in your role that is creating an issue? Because the Ruby Unrest scenario. Well, you know, if we do a jump, um, immediately, we, we're going to really screw up Black Friday. Okay? Because if this thing doesn't go smoothly, the CSR is going to be up at 10am tearing m their hair out because suddenly the system has collapsed. You know, with conversion, um, the IT people will look at it differently. Uh, well, what is the risk involved if we do this of that transformation going smoothly? Um, those are the kinds of examples I bring out in the book. And they're all based on real client engagements. I mean, this is not stuff I just came up with, you know, this is real stuff. And, um, I think that answers the question, but dig in.

Speaker A: So if the buyer reaches the decision on their own terms, what evidence tells us that they've reached it safely, not just independently, then

Speaker B: I'm not sure safely.

Speaker A: Um, it's de risked, um, transparent.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I see very little risk, I guess, is what I'm saying. I don't see a heck of a lot of risk except downstream. You know, let's say you're selling the software solution and it looks great, you have a great case for being adapted. But, you know, suddenly we get into this internal warfare, you know, with, with, um, the CSRs and the AES, the SBRS, all fighting for, uh, attribution while the, while the solution is foundering. So they're either trying to get away, they're trying to get attributed to their work, or they're trying to divorce themselves from the solution, you know, and, and um, I think that's where we are today and that's part of the model. I don't want to too much, but what I Keep noting on LinkedIn particularly is as AI continues its encroachment and starts hollowing out the bottom, you know, the sales pyramid roles, um, we're seeing people beginning to fight with the AES, the sdr, csrs, management. They're all starting to fight. They need to muscle their way, um, for attribution or anything else. And you know, you gave us a lousy lead or. Well, you know, we, we weren't able to, to really work on that lead because of X, Y and Z. And when it went into production, when you get to those people, it was like, who came up with this idea. So we're seeing all this internal conflict in that traditional model where I think it can be remediate, remediated or removed. In a different model like mine, what's coming across from them is often if

Speaker A: we give customers information, the assumption is that they've understood how to use it. And I think part of our job is to make ourselves available so when they are ready to have that conversation and we create a, uh, space for them, uh, to come back and ask questions. What I see in most organizations is decisions get passed down the chain of command. The activity happens, people report back, and they report back a limited amount of information because their CRM field, uh, demands certain information or they realize that it's unsafe to tell the whole truth. And so after it's gone from the CSR to the AE to the sales manager, the manager to the vp, the VP to the CRO, the CRO to the CFO and then to the board in six levels of dilution. So the decisions that they're making are based essentially on theatrics, massaged content and material, um, incomplete information. The CRM. I mean in your book you say something along the lines of about 20, 25% is accurate. I would have to dispute that because in my experience if you're getting above 20% at the very highest, you're doing pretty well. Because most CRM wasn't implemented in order to help sellers sell more and more often more easily to more customers and then get repeat customers. It's there to give the management the illusion of control.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think I talk about that a lot. Let me get back to the other question because I think it's important. Um, in, in a frictionless by design environment, everybody plays a role and communications does not end with the sale or you know, once they've gone through the, the process of implementation. Uh, you're always there and you're always going to be part of that loop. You're now finally the trusted partner. We talked a bit about that earlier, but now you really are, now you are actually a consultant. You're not selling, you're a consultant to them. So why wouldn't they come back? Why? What? You know, when I was selling this is, you know, I knew that in my work, 25% of my income every year came from what in the communications industry we called ads, moves and changes. A company was expanding, they need a new system. Uh, they're adding people they need, they need more phones, you know, uh, they open a new office in another state. How are we going to link those two systems together? That was 25 of my income. Would I want to hand that off to an aftermarket team? No. Number one, they're going to screw it up and number two is coming out of my pocket, you know, so, and this goes to the heart, maybe this is, needs to be said, maybe not. But I was a full cycle salesperson. That meant I sourced my leads, negotiated, closed and stayed with them. And that is the reason why 25% of my income is dependent on that, um, in a frictionless by design thing that's normalized. I mean, you want to stay in front of those people. You want to be the person. Why? Because the other part of that was always another 10% or more came from referrals. Okay. And I think we see people trying to systematize referral systems. My goodness, how dumb is that? You know, when you think about it, you get a referral when you've earned a referral, not because you asked for a referral. If you have to ask, you know, you're treading on very thin ice because the people you think might be in your corner might not be in your corner. They might, yeah, he did a great job, whatever. It doesn't mean they're going to give you a glowing recommendation. So you can't create a system that goes to all of your accounts, identify someone and ask them for a referral. To me, that's nuts.

Speaker A: I'm going to push back slightly. Not that I disagree with the third thinking, but I firmly believe you can systematize getting referrals because it's part of the go to market function where uh, you're multi threading and you're asking Rick. So besides you and I, who else would we need to involve? Because it's going to affect them. Would product be affected? Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, for sure. Internally, absolutely. 100. I'm talking about external. I'm talking about. Well, Joe bought from us and he really liked me. Uh, hey Joe, who else can you recommend that we've sold pitching to?

Speaker A: Well, I'll challenge you on that as well because I think um, we can look at the customer's customer, we can look at their supply chain, their joint ventures, their channel partnerships, their entire ecosystem. And again, very few of the businesses that you and I sell to are ah, standalones. They don't sell a product, uh, and no one else uh, is involved. They're normally a component customers are trying to solve for all sorts of problems. And it may be that it creates an opportunity for you to bring in other vendors, um, who are trusted also, um, because you've actually invested the time and effort in understanding where their strengths lie and how their strengths make up for the weaknesses in your proposition or the gaps that your customer is trying to resolve for. So I think the whole idea of systematizing the expansion sale is really key and the model that we teach is protect first. Everyone else goes for win first new logos. This obsession with new logos, you've got a 1 in 23 win rate from selling them from cold. They're the most expensive and they have the highest churn rate. So protect the ones that you've got so you're not letting people in through the front door and letting them out through the back door. Then expansion for the right reasons. Like you said, the ads, changes, moves and so on. Because you've got about 1 in 6 win rate there even without training and your profit margin is massively higher. Then win back recapture accounts that you've lost. Historically you've got about one in four chance of winning those back if you run a good win back campaign. And then finally targeted new logo acquisition but generated uh, warm or hot instead of going out cold and interrupting people. I mean you mentioned a 10,000 email list. Well the 9,999 you interrupted with something that was poorly timed, irrelevant and uh, not valuable. How many of those will never do business with your company, as Dan Kennedy says? And what's the knock on effect if you make those bad decisions? There is an invisible on cost not only in terms of lost future customers, but if you do make a sale to the wrong uh, customer, you now export the misery to the customer success team or the account management team or the product team, the support team, all of whom then end up paying a price and your cost of service goes up and the churn rate is significantly higher than it could be and you're having to then replace churned customers you should never have sold to. Redeploy those resources on your sweet spot. Ideal customers who are in your serviceable obtainable market, not your total addressable market. And miraculously your profit margin goes up, you need less funding, you have to take on less debt, you don't need as many heads. So that has a knock on effect for hr, um, for rev ops and so on. And you can become incredibly profitable in a really short space of time. I've got clients who are 400% more successful than teams that are four times their size. That's a factor of 16x with 75% lower salary costs.

Speaker B: Yeah, I uh, mean back. I'm not going to another trip down memory lane, but it's pertinent. When I started the modus operandi in sales was basically I was a field sales guy. I would knock on doors, walk in, I want to see what kind of phone system we had. And that told me whether or not they were. If they had AT&T, man, that was the best thing in the world. If they had a competitor in the emerging market, I knew to walk, but I started to cheat. And I was accused of cheating because what I did was, um, as a manager, I had hired a guy from AT&T. And he was awful. He just knew that book. He didn't. He couldn't adapt to a new book. And then he went into long distance. He calls me up and he says, well, let's get together for lunch. I said, okay, Jim. I was worried because I thought he might shoot me. But, um, we got together and he said, why don't we trade leads?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I said, I said, oh, what do you mean? He said, I have a call. He says, I got a call with, uh, Ballads for Ingersoll. Next week. They're going to need a new phone system. They're opening a brand new office. Why don't you go in and tell them I sent you and let's work the deal together and I'll do discounts on my side. You do something on your side. And that worked. And it expanded and it expanded, and we became close working partners over the years. On another one, these telecommunications consultants are out beating the bushes with hospitals, universities, large companies, and they would invite you in, you to respond to an RFP. I captured about four of them. So I had a steady supply of RFPs. I know this. This gets people crazy. RFPs, all notion of RFPs. Don't waste your time. But guess what? If a consultant is issuing an RFP and they're going to have three vendors bid, and it was usually three, you had a 33% chance of winning a deal. I did better than that. I won about two thirds of those deals. I wasn't knocking on doors, I wasn't picking up the phone calling. I was cheating. I was working with consultants. I was working with a partner in long distance. So that, with that as an aside, I'll, uh, feed the desk back to you.

Speaker A: Well, that's exactly what I mean by systematizing referrals. If someone already has trusted relationships, then it makes sense to piggyback off their credibility. And the relationships they also have. Uh, something else that you can do, which is perfectly legitimate, is do lead swaps. So if you're both selling similar products and going after the same accounts, if you don't win it and you're not going to win it, make the recommendation to somebody else who is better suited and swap leads. And that works as well. Nothing illegal about it. And it's perfectly reasonable to do because you're serving the customer's intended outcome. I think one thing that we should also talk about in terms of trust is being absolutely clear when you are the wrong vendor for what they are looking for and to recommend your competition when they are the right vendor.

Speaker B: That is really. I'm, um, glad you said that because kind of runs counter, you know, to what a lot of sales type people think. But it's critical. I was selling some pretty sophisticated stuff. Okay. Um, if a company was looking for something really, really basic, uh, there was no why not give it to someone I knew? And you're right, that works. I mean, it just makes sense. It's not illegal or, you know, counter to your company or anything else. Because guess what? At the same time, when they run into something they can't handle, um, you know, a big call center application with activated voice and everything else, you know, oh, guess what? You know, hey, Rick, I can't do this. Why don't you talk to Jason, you know, whoever it is. So, yeah, you're right. I mean, I don't know that it's frowned upon. I just don't think it's acted on as much as it should be.

Speaker A: It. Well, in my experience, often they, the seller has to keep it below the radar because their managers are saying, what are you doing helping the enemy? Uh, our job is not to win the sale. Our job is to facilitate the right decision for the customer that is right for them. They can defend and they can live with, and they can live with for a very long time. Because if we don't do that, then we aren't being biocentric at all. What we're doing is we're being self serving and short termist. And what's interesting is the referrals that come off the back of doing that are, uh, often incredibly strong. I remember doing this once and I got 12 really solid referrals off a client because I recommended a competitor over me. The competitor didn't get those referrals. I did. Because he understood what I could do and where I was a good fit. And he knew a dozen people and he immediately, I mean, it was literally within 90 minutes of finishing that call. I had an email with, uh, 12 people's contact details and he contacted each of them personally to say why they should speak to me. I got to be honest, that saved me, I reckon, a month's worth of prospecting.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I had my annual fourth quarter miracle because I had a CPA firm that I had sold to. I got very friendly with the owner and suddenly I start getting calls September, October, November, even into December. Um, I need to buy a phone system. Okay, you need to buy a phone system. Why do you need to buy a phone system? Because I want the incentive tax credit. If I spend a thousand dollars, I get a hundred dollars back top line off taxes. I said, oh, well, where'd you hear that? Oh, that was Howard. I said, oh, okay. I called Howard, who's the owner of the CPA firm. He says, oh, yeah, I'm telling everybody to call you because, you know, it's money right off the top of their taxes. I look like a hero. Works for you. You know, it's those, See the people, a lot of salespeople don't get connections. They're linear. You know, their, their thinking is linear. They don't see the connections because what can the person you just sold to, um, do for you, you know, in terms of generating new business? If you ask them, it's one thing when they come forward and suddenly you're getting leads. This lead come from, these are, some of them were pretty big companies. Uh, they wanted a big tax credit. Um, it all, it all went back to an initial sale with Howard, you know, and, and that, that played for years. That was until it ran out. Tax credit.

Speaker A: You touched on something else which is really important, which is, and you said it right at the beginning, no one buys features and benefits our job. And this is where the CSRA partnership and marketing partnership can really come into their own. We can identify what the job to be done is that they're really hiring from us. And in doing that, what we discover is that it's not about getting better SEO, it's not about getting a telephone system, it's not about paying down an automated system. There are other things that they are trying to achieve. So our job is to understand the buying journey. And we need to understand, is there a problem? Are there centers of dissatisfaction? How do those have to cluster for there to be a trigger or a catalyst for change and change now? What are the risks that uh, they are experiencing by not changing? When they move into passive looking, um, they're trying to learn how. So all the stuff that you said in terms of creating non gated content, their expenses, and uh, being there to help them, uh, understand how they can solve their problem, that's really tackling the passive looking phase. In the active looking phase, they're exploring their options. So lying or withholding information about who your competitors are actually does them a disservice. And I think it does you a disservice as well. When they're moving into deciding they're now making trade offs. Do we need five bedrooms or four? Do we need a dining room or can we eat at the kitchen table? You know, and all of this kind of stuff. And so, um, our job is to meet our buyer where they are and understand the context in which they are trading because they're having to take this information back. And most of the buyer's journey, 95 to 99% of it, happens without any seller contact. And when the sales conversation is finished that particular moment, they're then going back and fighting internally. They're fighting other people for the same time, budget, resource and their headcount. Uh, they're competing with other priorities. And if we haven't equipped them to handle those conversations in a way that keeps them safe politically, functionally, personally, then they'll ghost us. Which explains to a large extent why 60% of all pipeline ends up ghosting. And you've got this great big constipated middle. Then you've got the forecast. Uh, fiction. This idea of someone trying to squeeze a commit. I remember coaching someone not, uh, long ago. And, um, they had a new CRO come in and he was banging on about how they had to have more commits. So everyone gave him commits. But 90% of them don't happen when they're committed. So the forecast is just complete drivel.

Speaker B: Yeah. In Trust, Trust Sales 2030, my book, I have a chapter, okay, a devoted chapter to pipe trees. And that's what you just said is the essence of that. My point is that pipelines, uh, are really fiction. We all agree on that. There's no, there's no question that you start looking at pipelines. We all know that they're nonsense. Um, but we countenance it, we allow it, you know, and it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, why even you. Pipelines are good for. If you need to move gas from a terminal to another terminal, that's a pipeline. Everyone understands a pipeline, uh, water, liquid. So if an alarm goes off suddenly, okay, well, there's a flood or there's an explosion or something awful is going on on that pipeline, we need to jump on it. They don't say, oh, well, you know, it looks like the top of funnel is growing pretty good. No, it's like you need immediate action. We don't recalibrate, you know, instruments to make up for the fact that we don't know what the heck is really going on. Which is about 95% of pipelineology right now. So, you know, there's a chat. I like that chapter because, um, I started off with a, uh, real sample of a pipeline. It's a true pipeline, water, gas, pipeline, going bonkers, you know, and the action, you know, had to be taken based on real evidence, real numbers, you know. And within a day, how that had been resolved and the flooding or this fuel leak was averted.

Speaker A: Well, I, I think that whole idea of operating, um, pipeline and CRM to give the illusion of control is incredibly damaging because most sellers interpret under pressure what they can report. And so what we should be doing is replacing it with something else. And you talked about evidence. So what is the evidence that the seller should be reporting back that is genuinely indicative of the health of. We'll call it a pipeline for now.

Speaker B: But, um, their forecast, There's a pipeline, but it's not a pipeline of odds. You know, it's not like we have, you know, five stages in the pipeline and they've gone from early to ready to rock and roll. Uh, that goes away because the pipeline begins with interest. Okay, so you've cut out three levels of the standard pipeline. It's not like, you know, they qualify, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, when they've come to us, our pipeline is like more like a liquid natural gas or oil pipeline. We know what's in there and we. And this is what's going to freak people out the most about. And I acknowledge it in the book. Um, the measurements we're using are entirely different. Okay. We are looking at how the platform itself is performing. Are people abandoning one spot in our minds prematurely or are they not going from this to that? You know, they're not going from a content to a, to a, uh, an element into an interactive element. Okay. We want to see how that flow is taking place within the system. We don't care about individual deals. The individual deals are important. We have. We know where they are, who they are, and everything else. They've come to us, we haven't reached out. So when we chop out the first three levels, we left with a pipeline of solid opportunity. Now, whether or not we're 100 able to capitalize on this, that's. That's another question. Because it's always a human system. The politics involved, this risk management involved, involved. You know, we have all those things that can derail any deal or it's just not enough of a priority right now. You know, we acknowledge it's important, but you're competing like you said earlier we're competing with our resources to purchase something. And this may be the best thing since sliced toast for the sales department. But we don't really need that right now. What we need is something on the operations that, that's really critical. Front burner. And if we have to spend a million dollars, you know we're going to spend it on that, other than something that looks good, but, you know, it can wait until we get through whatever comes next that has our immediate attention.

Speaker A: Well, I, I think what we should be doing is building an evidence layer. And the evidence layer is looking at what's actually happening within the buyer organization in the last two weeks. Has the buyer moved this conversation forward internally? Is the next step something that the buyer initiated or we foisted on them? Because I think too often sellers and their managers are looking for, um, weak signals in order that they can check a box instead of looking for real evidence that demonstrates that this is something that they want, that they need, they're committed to. Because intent is different from commitment. Commitment is different from capability or ability. Willingness is different from intent. You know, all of these things matter and there's nuance, um, to it all. And unless we are capturing evidence, then what we're going to find is we're working off hope and narrative, which is frankly a pretty shitty way of going about running a business. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I mean, when I look at it and, you know, I get, I get a bug up on a lot of stuff and one of them is signals based. You know, right now it's fading, I think, actually. But signal space was that we have to do signal space lead generation. So every time Dick and Harry, who sees that I took on a role was as vice president of sales, rational VP of sales at Alleran, uh, the floodgates open. We can help you with AI, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hey, we are an AI company. We've been doing it for 20 years. We have packages that are, uh, ready to rock and roll. But they saw that I had that role and now they jumped on or they'll see that funding cycle came through. So they must need what I have to sell because they're in the industry. So it just makes common sense that they. No, they don't. Okay, they run, they raise that funding for any number of reasons, probably none of which have anything to do with buying your solution. They need more Runway. Whatever the, whatever, whatever the money came in, you know, from, or it. It's probably has nothing at all to do with. But all those signals you get in my Case I probably got 20. Okay. In real jobs and real, real people, I'm sure they get way more than that. So how do you wade through that? Um, I think my solution just makes more sense.

Speaker A: Well, I'm with you. I think we need an evidence room and we've got to stop sellers and managers turning weak signals into strong claims and commits. I think we have to remove friction along the way and eliminate, ah, vendor serving pressure and stop the surveillance, um, so buyers can learn and engage safely without feeling pressure. I think we need to make sure that the buyer can explain and defend and um, fund and approve and implement and live with the decision. And we've got to create dependable revenue. And the way we do that is by building revenue confidence from buyer own movement, not seller activity and not CRM theater.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is, that is the central point, I think, of my frictionless design. And I'm not the only guy doing this. I mean I, I'm seeing, I'm, I'm getting feedback from people in Australia and other places that are doing remarkable work, really great work. Uh, and it's built on the same premise, you know, that we have a broken system. No amount of tinkering around the edges is going to fix it because at the end of the day it's all activities in terms of sales. It's all activity driven. Well, you can't fix that. Okay? You just can't fix that. You can't do. You know, you're not going to do better email, you're not going to do better cold calling. Those activities have come and gone. I mean they're like zombies. I mean they're not really dead. Uh, they're out there m. You know, moving around, scaring people. But they don't work, you know, so how do you address that? How do you. And they're, I forget their names. Adam and someone else in Australia. Uh, they're doing some terrific, terrific work. Yeah, Yeah. I think they're doing some remarkable stuff. And I don't know if you noticed lately, they're, uh, he's working with George. I forget his concourse or something. Uh, and Aaron Ross, Aaron Ross has surfaced with that and I think it's great because I think Aaron was misunderstood. Uh, and his, um, solution that worked very well in his circumstance became, uh, a blueprint that had nothing to do with what he had been doing initially. So I see a lot of great work going on there and um, I think there's a building momentum. Uh, are we going to win the, are we going to win the day and Everything's going to change. Nah, not in my lifetime. Um, but I think, um, I end the book with a note on the path to professionalism. And I think that's, um, a goal. I think maybe if 1 or 2 or 3% of selling, um, companies move into Adam's model or your model, my model, um, and they're working and the others continuing to do what they do, um, I think there's going to be a lot of action. Action moving away from the old model to these newer models. And with that, we're going to see a rise of professionalism. Not at the level of a doctor, of attorney, doctor or lawyer, um, engineer, not professional, but people who, um, are centered on helping people within small slices of work. We don't need generalists. Here's where I'm really heading with this today. The generalist is fading fast. You got to be very specific about who you can help and how you can help them. I'm working with. I referenced the company I was working with, uh, earlier this year. We wound up, we talked about icp, okay, the ideal customer profile. What we found out was, well, we have 15 ideal customer profiles. And guess what? Each one needs its own messaging. Each one needs its own tools to make decisions. It might be an roi, uh, converter. It might be a pricing calculator. Because in another poll, Irene, guess what? Pricing is the number one thing they're interested in seeing from a vendor initially. We're marching along. We can't continue doing everything the way it's been done. And the funny thing is, Marcus, is to me is this. You know, I think we tend to focus on, uh, software sales. You know, they get a lot of attention. They're a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of all B2B commerce. And when we look outside of, uh, software sales, we see a world that has never moved away from full cycle, has never really, you know, it's still a dominant way of selling there. There are differences, obviously, there are different approaches, but at the end of the day, we're going to be seen as something that works, that's reliable. And, you know, I always say, uh, sellers of herd animals. And that goes for sellers, managers, owner. They chase bright, shiny object. When that no longer works, they need to make a decision. I think the decision is going to be toward more what we're doing and, uh, inclusively and less about what they've been doing now. It's going to be a period of, um, uncertainty. You know, it's going to be crazy. I wish I had all the answers. I called My book a field guide for a reason. I mean, I didn't come out. Here's the methodology. Okay. Seller do these 15 steps. It's not med. It's none of that stuff. It's a framework just allow you to think, to think about what we're involved in. And I think when you do that thinking, professionalism doesn't become just, um. I don't like when I hear a sales profession. We're a sales industry. Maybe we get toward a profession, but we have to have an acknowledgement. And it comes down. It's always about service. If we're not serving, uh, them, not ourselves, if we're not serving our clients, how do we claim to be professions? I mean, to me, it doesn't work.

Speaker A: Rick, we've come to time, but I have a couple questions to finish. Finish with. My first one is what would you recommend sellers stop doing in order to create less friction and be more trustworthy?

Speaker B: I think they need to stop listening to their managers. I'm serious as a heart attack. Um, you know, I was always, um, the unmanageable yet profitable, you know, salesperson. I was not beloved by management because, like the things I talked about earlier in terms of lead generation, using partnerships and stuff. Well, you can't do that. Well, yes, I can. Um, stop listening. Develop your own life. Because the job you have today is not going to be the job you have two years from now. You need to create a path for yourself. So stop listening. Pay them obeyance. You know, yes, I'll do this yet or you won't. But at the end of the day, you gotta get. You gotta make that break because it's not going to take you into 2030. 2030 is the target for me that I'm looking at, and it's in the title of the book. By 2030, I think the shift will have already taken place in large part. Um, and I think it's going to grow. So again, you know, it sounds kind of crazy, but m. You know, remember brick in the wall, hey, teachers, you know, leave those kids alone. Hey, guys, don't listen to them because they're going to make trouble for you in your career. So I've always been kind of a radical, you know, and, um, in that I see radical change is necessary in certain periods of time. Uh, and I'll just leave it right at that.

Speaker A: Well, I'm with you. In fact, I'm just finishing off a book called Managing up for those who want to operate frictionlessly created, um, decision safety and keep their job. So if Anyone, uh, wants an early copy of that or get on the waiting list, then DM me. I think sellers should stop making the story stronger than the evidence. Stop treating activity as progress. It isn't. It's just noise in most cases. Stop, for God's sake. Trying to create urgency, false urgency. All you're going to do is piss people off and scare them. Stop calling a friendly contact a champion. Stop pushing next steps that you haven't earned the right to and don't exist. And stop winning business that the buyer can't defend, implement or live with. Because all you're going to do is create, churn and a problem for other people in your own organization. And start protecting the decision, not just the deal. Um, ask what the buyer's done, separate evidence from inference and make the next move. Earn its place. Help buyers choose well, even when that means not choosing you.

Speaker B: If we could agree 110%, if that were possible, I would agree with you 110%. And, and the thing that gets me the craziest, and there are things that make me pretty crazy, is the sense of manufacturing urgency. Oh my goodness. Who ever thought of that? Whoever thought that you could manufacture urgency? That is like totally bonkers. There's a lot of stuff I think is crazy, but that one always leads the list. That one. And embrace rejection. What? Uh, no, you don't embrace. You learn from it. You learn to adapt. You don't embrace failure, you don't embrace rejection. I mean, how crazy is that?

Speaker A: Well, I think a lot of this stems back to the 80s, so it's about 40 years worth of really terrible neoliberalism and uh, you know, rampant, uh, self serving, uh, capitalism gone wrong. You, uh, know, without going overly political, what I've seen over the last 40, 45 years is people have forgotten that we exist because of, not in spite of the customer. They are hiring outcomes. They are not buying our products. They don't care about you, your company, your quota, your shareholders, um, they don't care about, uh, your shareholders exit plans. What they want to know is, can you help me solve my problem in a way that I can defend, I can afford and I can live with, and I'm not going to get it in the neck for having recommended it, even if it goes wrong. Because I made the best possible decision with the available information. Which is why Todd Capone talks about the transparency sale and he's again, another one. I'd go with 110%. Right. You've got to be transparent. Withhold nothing. Lying by omission is still lying, withholding information that is relevant to the customer's decision. And remember that on day two, after they've bought, someone has to live with, maintain, manage, roll out, uh, create, adoption, uh, measure and the sale is not over when the transaction is done or when the money clears your account. So again I have to agree with you completely that what we need to do is we need to make teams accountable and get rid of this pin factory idea. It's pinheaded of that. You're going to silo all these different functions. We worked on a project a couple of years back where marketing was being given pats on the back because they'd managed to increase their pipeline, uh, to something like 3,000 leads a month. The problem was that sales were spending their time, at least 95% of it, on people who couldn't buy, wouldn't buy or shouldn't buy. Then sales cycles got longer, the conversion rate dropped, uh, they discounted more and they ended up being 42% of where they should have been over an 18 month period because marketing was being successful. Well, did you see? And you've got to have a chance to step back and ask what's really happening here. Don't just look at the headline, don't look at the transaction. The transaction is a moment in time. And as far as the buyer is concerned, that is where they take on all of the risk and that shouldn't be. Our job is not risk transfer. Our job is risk removal.

Speaker B: It has to be. I don't know how we get over the hurdles but um, won't be in my lifetime. But I think ultimately this sales industry has to change. It's not a question of will they change, they have to. They don't have a way not to change because everything's drying out. Uh, the traditional methods, outreach no longer work. Um, buyers are just smarter and better equipped, uh, in their buying decisions. You got to ride with them, you can't stand in front of them. And I think that's, I think it's happening, I think it's going to happen. And uh, my own contribution to it is, is just kind of simplistic in a way. It's like listen to your buyers, give them room to breathe, you know, earn the title of respected, uh, partner. Um, when you do those, I mean it's going to change. It's not going to change overnight and it is going to be incred incredible amount of resistance from within the, from within the industry. I'm just going to end on that. I think um, we are Goring a lot of oxes out there. We are going companies and industry that's poured probably trillions of dollars into a machine that just doesn't work, you know. And for them to make a shift is like going to be turning the Queen Elizabeth around in the Thames. You know, it's not going to be an easy thing to accomplish, but it's necessary. And um, you know, any role that I played in it, um, I'm happy, you know, I'm proud to say, yeah, I wrote this book, maybe it'll be read, maybe it won't be read, maybe it'll have an impact, maybe it won't. But I was able to over 45 years come to a point where I thought, I have something to say. I think it's valuable, I think it's on point and I hope people will listen because I don't think there's a possible way of not that's with my book of my framework. But so the movement was in the industry.

Speaker A: Well, I enjoyed the book. I recommend it. For those who've grown up in what I would loosely, uh, term a traditional modern sales environment. You will find it deeply unsettling for the right reasons and it gives you perspective. I think. Whilst, uh, Rick said that the age of the generalist is over, I think people with range, um, actually their time has just come because you need to be able to understand that the full range of owners within a buying committee, the problem owner, the process owner, the outcome owner, the risk avoiders, the invisible influencers, the champions, the sponsors, the financial, uh, decision makers, the allocators and the person who owns the problem. On day two, you need to understand their context, which means you need to understand the competitive landscape in which they trade, which includes do nothing. You need to understand your own competition. You need to understand the choices that your customers are going to have to make, which means that you have to get good at researching. You need to research the context in which they trade their competitive landscape. And if you do all of this, weirdly enough, your workload drops to a fraction of the activity workload that you're currently inflicting and burning yourself out with. So in wrapping up, how can people get hold of you?

Speaker B: First of all, best is on LinkedIn. Um, best go to my LinkedIn, uh, address. That's my first line. Um, I don't respond to cold email and I don't answer cold email phone calls. So I'm not going both with that. Um, but LinkedIn, I, uh, I engage, let me put it that way. Um, I have A CRM, uh, very small CRM called Biggin by Zoho. It's not a plug, um, but I've got about 300 people in there who, um, I've interacted with on, um, LinkedIn. So I've met you there. Ah, Dave Brock. You know, a lot of the people that I really respect. Adam, one of the people I really respect, incredibly, um, I've met on LinkedIn. A lot of customers I have met on LinkedIn. So to me it's kind of a carnival. You know, it's kind of classy and ugly. Um, but boy, you meet some wonderful people. And, um, that's, that's where I'm, I, I've got calls tomorrow. I'm going to end with this. I got called, I got reached to on LinkedIn by a guy in Vietnam and he took my book. Okay. And uh, he created essentially a landing page for that book along with one of my interactive elements, which isn't quite baked in fully yet. But I'm talking to him on Friday and I don't know what else to do except thank him and say, how can we work together? And that is the key to LinkedIn. And that's the key to how, how can we work together? I like you, I like what you're talking about. Let's think about working together. I got like 200 plus people in there who earned that status with, and, um, you know, the rest is noise.

Speaker A: So you've got a golden ticket and you can go back and whisper in the ear of the IDIOT Rick, age 23 or so. What one bit of advice would you give him that you wish you'd learned earlier?

Speaker B: Don't get a graduate degree. Graduate degrees in philosophy of education, go to law school, but, uh, if that doesn't work, go to sales. Your dad did it. Your grandfather did it. They did. Okay. I have a lot of friends. That would be my advice. I hear the same advice to my son, but he decided to become an attorney instead.

Speaker A: Well, that's a sales role.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is. Uh, as he mentions to me frequently.

Speaker A: Excellent. Richard Spaniard.

Speaker B: Thank you. Well, thank you, Marcus. It's always enjoyable, especially the last few weeks, getting to really get to know you. Especially to you. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: My pleasure. So this is Marcus Caci signing off once again from the Inquisitor podcast. If you've enjoyed this, please, like, comment, share. Uh, uh, dm. Either Rick or myself, uh, if you have questions and both of us will respond, uh, for goodness sake, please don't cold pitch us something pointless. Be a researcher. If you're going to try and sell us something, stop giving business updates that are accurate enough to defend to your boss and too thin to trust. Help your managers, your leaders, and your buyers the facts. Identify what the assumptions are, what the conditions are, what the choices are, and what the costs are. Clearly enough to make good decisions deliberately and do the same for your customers. Stop this theater. Enough is enough. You know, this is your opportunity, uh, to be at the forefront of the change in the profession of selling. And sales is a profession. It's the oldest profession. The other one is just a subset. So on that note, thank you very much. Happy selling. Bye. Bye. Let.

Speaker B: Me.