Decoding Sales Indecision with Matt Dixon -The Transaction - Ep # 10
I have this story, I've been dying to tell people, I haven't been dying, it's not that big of a deal, but like, last night I was at an event, and there was a, I'd call it a director level from LinkedIn, okay?
This was a small event, maybe 30 people, and the guest list was sent in advance, okay?
I was the keynote, so also up there, talking about myself, there was two people from LinkedIn, okay?
This guy, and then this, I would say like, really charismatic young woman who clearly, I'll refer back to her a little more.
So the guy meets me, and he says, so Craig, tell me about your background.
And I'm like, bro, you work at LinkedIn.
How could you, that's like, I was telling this kid in the associate group there, outside Jonas, you know the kid's funniest style, you know Matt, he's like, that's anti-dog fooding.
I was like, anti-dog, I was like, bro, you work at LinkedIn.
You had all this time, you knew in advance, you couldn't even look.
The other person that was with him, the young woman, amazing.
She was doing all the things LinkedIn tells you to do.
She's like, oh my God, we have 150 shared connections.
I don't even know where to start going through to see the people you know.
You seem to know a lot of people from LinkedIn that used to work at LinkedIn before.
Did you have some association with LinkedIn?
That's a conversation starter.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I hope, I don't know if the guy's gonna be listening.
I'll give him that tip.
Bro, eat your own dog, dude.
From ABM to PLG, from medic to med pic, the world of business is constantly evolving.
We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.
I'm Matt Amundson, and he's Craig Rosenberg.
Let's get started.
That reminds me of, it's not exactly the same story, but I had a story years ago.
I worked with a sales rep.
This is back before you called customers on, way before Zoom, before you called customers on their mobile devices.
Right.
And he would ring up the customer in their office, and the first question he would ask is, hey, where are you today?
And the customer would invariably say, I'm in my office, where you called me.
It's a similar level of like, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, in this country, we have things called area codes, and the first three numbers that you dialed in order to get ahold of me, they're a good signal for where I'm currently sitting.
Where I am, yeah.
Awesome.
So I do want to say this, Dixon, before we start.
I'm gonna call you Dixon, because we've got Amundson, so I'm gonna use you guys last name.
So it's Matt Dixon, everyone.
Is Matt Amundson, he's been really excited about today's interview with you.
It's true.
He just needs to get out more.
Yeah, I'll, no, but like, I mean, our last conversation was amazing, and we've all, we've been following you.
I don't know about we're, exactly what inspires Amundson, but like I, the only reason we couldn't have you on the show earlier, when we would have been dying to, just would look weird, because we had you on the other show so soon.
But yeah, I mean, I, Matt Amundsen was getting me really excited about today too.
So like, well, Matt, what inspired, what was so inspirational about having Dixon on the show today?
Well, I've been following all of the content.
He's been pretty active on LinkedIn lately.
He's just been doing a bunch of interviews, and like, they're, you know, the results of The Jolt Effect seem to be some of the best signal in total, like how to be selling today, given the market dynamics.
And what I hear all the time, and Craig hears this as well, is, you know, old things don't work anymore, but mostly people just say, hey, the old ways don't work anymore.
There are very few people who are stepping forward and saying, yes, that is true, and this is what you should be doing instead.
So, it's a lot of pontification on like, hey, this isn't working, what is working, who has the answer, nobody has the answer, and yet you've taken the bold step and come forward with not only the book The Jolt Effect, but all the thought leadership that you've been putting out into social and into the podcastosphere since the launch of the book that I think has got people really excited.
So we're just thrilled to have you on today because our audience, I think very specifically, is looking for what is the answer?
How do we do sales?
How do we get away from these, what is it, like 15% of sales reps hitting their numbers or whatever the latest data is?
And back into maybe not the same level of success we had when things were really frothy, but how do we start to normalize and right the ship and start to prepare for the next stage of our business's growth?
So that's why I'm so excited to have Matt Dixon on the show, The Transaction.
Well, very, with that setup, I am surely going to disappoint, so let's get over it.
Oh, by the way, yeah, go ahead.
I'm thrilled to be here.
Thank you guys for having me.
Yeah, you bet.
All right, so, and just to, we sort of jumped in with assuming everyone knows you, but I would say iconic author in our world in the B2B sales and marketing space, for us, obviously, our initiation to you was the Challenger sale, which was just epic game change in terms of how we think.
And by the way, Matt's in marketing, I'm in sales.
So that just proves how much you cross over.
And then this Jolt Effect book, as you know, I've actually given it to as many people as I can.
I've had you on the show, I had you talk to the portfolios.
It's so great, it's so timely.
So your royalty check is in the mail, Craig, so.
Yeah, and it's just not enough to say that.
So here's our big question that we start the show with.
And then let's just go from there, if you would, which is, what's something that the market thinks they're doing right, or is the best practice, or where an approach?
And they're actually wrong, and they should be thinking about it differently.
I'm going to leave it at that, see what you say.
How much time do we have?
The hour.
We should usually get to the hour, actually.
Yes, so go for it.
Oh, gosh.
That's an hour minimum of content.
I think, let me point to three things, maybe.
So I think there are, I'll try to keep it at three, but both are, they're all high level, so we can dig in on any of these that pique your interest.
So I think the first one, let me back up.
I'd say there, I think there are three big challenges, no pun intended, facing salespeople today.
I think the first one is, it has been going on since we wrote the Challenger Sale, is the phenomenon of customers learning on their own, consuming, and this is actually only accelerated, right?
There's so much content out there.
Much of it actually very good content, and our customers have no shortage of analyst opinions, coverage of vendors, comparative rankings, case studies, proof points, ROI calculators.
I mean, they can do, it's just like how we all buy stuff today in our personal lives.
In business, business customers can increasingly box sales people out, can figure out what are we trying to do?
Who should be on the short list?
What are their relative capabilities?
About how much should we pay for this product or service or solution?
And then they force the vendors to compete on price.
Again, that's a problem we wrote about in the Challenger sale.
Challenger we positioned as kind of the, that's the, you know, don't wait for your customer to contact you because at that point, the customer actually doesn't care about your point of view around what they should do or how you compare against your, against other players in the market.
They just care about who can do it for the lowest price possible and who can they really put the screws to in terms of terms and conditions.
So Challenger is kind of the antidote to that or the counterpoint to that which is you should be out there engaging customers where they learn.
Obviously, marketing plays a key role in that.
But salespeople do as well.
And then how do we tell stories that, you know, get out of this motion of asking customers what's keeping them up at night, which is kind of the age old solution selling approach and start bringing insights that reframe the way the customer thinks about their own business.
Because we want them to think differently about you.
The first step is to get them to think differently about their own business and what right answer is for their organization.
Only then will they see you and your solution in a different light.
So again, that's the motion, Challenger.
But that's the first big problem.
The second big problem is consensus buying.
And actually, I think this is an interesting one too.
We wrote the follow on book, The Challenger Customer came out.
It was more of a cult classic, I think.
But came out in 2015.
And that was about this problem of the growth of buying committees.
But remember, 2015, five years before all of sales ended up on Zoom and Teams and WebEx, right?
And even back then, we found that there are roughly six to seven stakeholders on the typical buying committee.
What most salespeople do in that world is they go try to find their coach or their advocate or their champion.
And these people go by very many different names.
But what hyperfores do is they target a very specific type of stakeholder that we call a mobilizer.
Conversations with mobilizers are not easy, which is why most salespeople don't, they meet with these people and then they walk out of the door, they get off the Zoom and say, what a jerk, you know?
But these are the people that the very best salespeople, challengers understand are the people you want to put your story in the hands of.
Because only these people have the wherewithal to get a dysfunctional buying committee whose typical, the easy thing for a dysfunctional buying committee to agree to is to do nothing, right?
Stay the course, avoid disruption, keep our powder dry, sit on the fence, pick your metaphor.
But a mobilizer, when the going gets tough in the buying committee, will lean into that debate.
If they know that what you are proposing is right answer for their business, they will cash the political chips and they have the ability to get these dysfunctional stakeholders to coalesce around that idea to move forward on something greater than the lowest common denominator.
And this is a problem I actually think has gotten much worse just in the past couple of years.
And I think virtual platforms like Zoom are kind of the particle accelerator of buying committee growth because if you think about it, there's no downside to the customer inviting everybody in the organization to sit in on the demo and everybody to sit in on the walkthrough of the vendor's proposal and these kinds of things.
Because from the buyer's standpoint, this brings us to the third problem, it helps them mitigate risk.
It's not just me, I brought all these people to weigh in.
But when all those people show up, it becomes a real morass for the salesperson and try to disentangle that and think, who amongst these 20, 30 different people have shown up, who's the person I should hitch my wagon to?
It's not always the senior most or the quote unquote economic buyer is a really big decision.
You gotta get that right.
Then you gotta equip those people to be successful to drive that consensus.
So that's problem number two.
Problem number three is the big rise in no decision losses.
And this is what we wrote about in The Jolt Effect just recently.
So we found that 40 to 60% of the average salesperson's qualified pipelines, whose qualified opportunities, mind you, will end up marked as closed loss, no decision.
Now, back to your question, Craig, what most salespeople do in that scenario, because salespeople are very familiar with this moment where things feel like they're falling apart.
You said you were really excited at the demo.
We high-fived each other after the POC or the pilot.
And now it feels like you're sorry.
I jokingly tell people, not jokingly, because it's not really, she's not funny, but you guys probably laugh, but it reminds me of my dating life in college where things were really good.
And then the counterparty starts ghosting me and going radio silent.
And so I wonder what I did wrong.
And what salespeople do in that moment, of course, is they dial up the FOMO, right?
And it's usually some combination of, you're not, remember how excited you were about that demo?
Remember how much you guys raved about the pilot?
Remember that these problems, that's step one, like you're not gonna get these benefits if you don't buy our solution.
Step two is like, make you squirm, realize the cost of your inaction.
These problems aren't gonna solve themselves.
You can't wish them away.
Like your competitors are, we're working with all of them and they're making tremendous gains using our platform and you guys are gonna be left in the dust.
And then step number three is usually the 10% discount that's only good this quarter.
And so it's typically some combination of those FOMO tactics, right?
But I'm trying to scare you into like, you gotta go, like we gotta go, move forward.
And what we found is that that actually makes things, typically makes things worse, not better.
It's about an 87% probability that that will make things worse, it'll increase the odds the deal will be lost to no decision, especially when we're talking about buyers who have stated their intent to move forward, but then the deal stalls out, right?
And then they get cold feet and they become hesitant.
And so the antidote there is of course this Jolt Playbook, it's about these behaviors at high performance.
I think at the highest level, what I would say is every salesperson out there, and Challenger's a great example of this, is equipped to overcome customer indifference, right, whatever methodology you pick.
I happen to be partial to Challenger, but there are lots of approaches to do that.
And that's about defeating the customer status quo bias.
Overcoming indecision is a different ball of wax.
It's not about dialing up the FOMO, it's about dialing down what we call the FOMU, the fear of messing up, or the not safe for work version.
Non-family friendly version is faux-fou, but your listeners can figure out on their own what that stands for.
And that's a different motion, right?
That's about instilling confidence in your customer.
They made a great decision, you've got their back.
You're gonna look like a hero, not like a fool.
And these are the things that slow up deals, especially right now.
And you guys, again, we'll have time for one more question after this.
But you guys kind of teed this up, right?
There's a lot of this going around right now.
And I think in large part, because the past couple of years, we've seen a reckoning specifically in the SaaS market.
You have a lot of customers going through.
Once things got tight, the CFO came calling and they started looking at who's using all these seat licenses we're paying for and are we really getting value out of these solutions?
And then, seat count got limbed, licenses got whacked, contract out clauses were invoked.
And again, the Reaper came calling for concessions and discounts and this, that, and the other thing, and it's just been really tough out there.
But I think that a lot of buyers have that hangover of, I cannot put my name on another deal where we roll something out and we buy everybody a seat of access and like 10% of my salespeople use it or 10% of my marketing team uses it or whatever it is.
Yeah.
That was awesome already.
By the way, I did see this, Matt, I wanted to throw this to you, that there was a SaaS benchmark by Pavilion and Epsta and they found that 61% of B2B sellers are losing deals to status quo, no decision.
So you are directly in our bullseye.
We certainly, Matt and I certainly have seen to our peers and working with other folks that we have a close rate sales cycle time, sorry about that everyone, no decision, deal fallout problem like we've never seen before.
So everything you're talking about to us is amazingly relevant.
So without going into the full Jolt playbook, what you described as the first reaction by most salespeople is threat in FOMO.
What are some things you would recommend or how should we approach or think about FOMO and that end of the sales cycle sort of set up?
I know not giving away the whole Jolt Effect, but some of the big ideas there.
Yeah, sure.
So Jolt is an acronym for those who have read the book know this, but it stands for the four behaviors that high performers exhibit.
This was revealed through an analysis of 2.5 million sales costs.
We are actually, in many respects, the beneficiaries of this virtual selling wave that happened in the spring of 2020.
Everyone has learned to bake sourdough bread and watching Tiger King, and we decided to launch a big research study, because that's nothing better to do.
It was fascinating.
I mean, suddenly you can study where the rubber hits the road in sales and start to finish, because surely even before the pandemic, sellers and customers were getting more comfortable with virtual platforms as part of the sale, but the really important meetings still happened in the client's office, and so it was really hard to kind of be a fly in the wall for those, but that wasn't true.
As of March 2020, it may never happen again, right?
So it's kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us.
I'd actually say hopefully it doesn't happen ever again, right?
Because I do think there's real...
In general, but I think for sales, too, I think the...
My personal view, at least, is that there's no replacement for live in terms of building client relationships, and I think it's a critical part and unfortunately still an overlooked part of the sale.
But let me just back up.
So we studied this and we found these four behaviors.
Judging the level of indecision, which is all about diagnosing where is indecision coming from, what's causing it, how big is the problem, can we surmount it or not, or should we just cut bait?
O is about offering your recommendation.
L is about limiting the expiration, and T is about taking risk off the table.
So I'll speak to the OLT because J is a little bit...
Again, it's about size and problem.
We can come back to that one.
But if I step back, what I would tell you is that this FOMU, this fear of messing up, in the research...
And this is something that's actually fascinating because it turns out that there are three things that people tend to worry about when it comes to being personally responsible for a decision that goes awry.
This is not just our research.
This is 30 years of social science research that validates this.
The first one is that people have trouble choosing.
So it may be that you have convinced me that I have this big problem and that your company can help us solve it, but you have put in front of me every imaginable integration and configuration and contract length option and use cases you can address.
So I know I want to work with you, but I don't know how to work with you.
And in a world where customers are looking at all these options and they're saying, boy, these all look really good, the safest choice and the one that customers often default to is don't choose any of them.
Let somebody else put their name on the contract and choose the wrong configuration, then get blamed and fired for it.
I'm not going to do that.
And so choice overload is the first problem.
The second big problem that people struggle with and the second fear of failure comes from information overload.
So this is when our customer is awash in thought leadership, analyst reports, opinions from people in their LinkedIn network or in discussion groups or communities on LinkedIn.
Everybody's got an opinion and they're just trying to consume.
And here's the thing is that our customer is not as smart about our solution and the use cases we address in the space, the technology that our platform is based on as we are because they do what they do, we do what we do.
They're never going to be as smart as we are, but it doesn't stop them from trying because what they really want to avoid is getting surprised after the contract is signed when some new piece of information comes to light that actually was not revealed during the due diligence or the research phase, and that piece of information makes the decision seem like not such a great idea after all.
So this leads to endless kind of spinning of wheels in information consumption and analysis paralysis.
Then the third fear is what we call outcome uncertainty, but specifically what this means is that customers are worried they're not going to get full value from the purchase.
So this runs the gamut from it's not going to deliver the promised benefits or ROI, whether that's top line growth, cost savings, market share growth, employee engagement, whatever it is.
Or increasingly today, especially with SaaS, we're not going to see the adoption and the usage that we're expecting, and only if we get that will this yield the benefits, because a lot of customers have been burned by that over the past several years.
So those are the three big failure points.
So the OLT and Jolt kind of address each of those three.
So I'll just take them really quickly, and we can dig down in each one of these if you want.
So the O is about offering your recommendations.
So when the customer is overwhelmed with too many options, what salespeople have been taught to do, and so this is kind of a click deeper, Craig, on your question before about what are they doing today that they should stop doing, and what's the different approach they should take.
What most salespeople do when a customer is struggling with like, I'm not sure which direction to go, is they ask the customer what's most important to them.
They diagnose their needs, because that's what they've been taught to do for like 30 years now.
And no salesperson wants to say, oh, Craig, go in this direction, or oh, Matt, like, this is the option you want, and have the customer come back and say, no, I disagree, because now we're at odds with one another.
So I'd much rather guide you to making the choice, and I want to tell you what to choose.
And I've likened this to, you know, how we all feel in restaurants when you're looking at a menu, and there's lots of great options, and you ask the wait person what's good here, and the wait person says, well, what are you in the mood to eat tonight?
It gives no help whatsoever.
What great wait will do is say, right, like, thanks a lot.
But that's what most salespeople do when the customer's struggling with what to choose.
What great salespeople do is they say, they harness what's called the delegation effect, and the way they do that is they say, here's our most popular dish, and it's also a favorite of almost every diner here.
We run out of it every night.
We've still got it tonight.
You're in luck.
Here's another option.
It doesn't get as many Yelp reviews, but I love this one.
It's a vegetarian dish.
It's a lot smaller portion.
It's a lot lighter, but I love that one, too.
It's kind of a cult classic or a sleeper choice, but everything we make here is great.
You really can't make a bad choice.
In that moment, what's happening, it's a very simple example, but this is true of complex B2B sales as well.
We found this in our analysis.
What happens is the burden of making a bad decision is now shared between the recommender and the decider.
Now, think about it.
If you go with the dish the way the person recommended, you don't like it, technically it's your fault because you ordered it, but it's also kind of their fault because they suggested you order it.
And this works in B2B sales as well.
So the counterpoint on the O, offering your recommendation, we've got to shift from endless needs diagnosis, and this is not to suggest that giving your customer lots of options isn't a great thing.
Customers love options.
But keep the options early in the sale.
Keep them on the website.
Keep them at the trade show booth.
Keep them in the early demos and sales calls.
But as you move forward, you've got to chalk the field, and you've got to narrow up the consideration set, and then you've got to advise the customer on what course of action they should take, based on your personal experience, your knowledge of their company, what other company customers like them get value out of.
That's what they're looking for you to do.
The L is about limiting the expiration, right?
So we know our customers love to do research, and this is a really painful trap.
I'll tell you, the thing that salespeople need to avoid is endlessly feeding the beast, if you will, of information consumption.
Average performing salespeople love this because it gives them something to tell their manager in a pipeline review.
Oh, no, no.
Don't worry.
I've got Matt signed up for another reference call.
Craig is going to do another POC in another part of Craig's business, so we're good.
We're going to do another demo with Craig's team, even though it's the same team that saw the last three demos.
And they like this because it's a next step, and it feels like the customer is engaged in the purchase process, but what high performers know is that customer is actually moving away from a decision, not towards it, and all this information is actually not helping them.
So what they do instead is they try to get the customer to stop trying to be an expert.
They start trusting them as their expert.
Now, doing that is a bit nuanced.
It takes some finesse, but there's two keys to it.
The first one is establishing a basis of trust, and the other one is actually demonstrating your expertise.
So on the first point, this basis of trust, and I know that sounds kind of generic, but quite literally what high performers will do is they will come clean with the customer early on about use cases their platform does not address, or where integrations that aren't really ready for prime time, or things that are actually, I'm sorry, like not even on our roadmap, or places, believe it or not, we found examples of this where the competitor is actually better than you are at addressing a certain thing.
And those are, or telling the customer what not to buy, right?
I know you're looking at the premium version.
You don't actually need that.
The basic version is going to be just fine with you.
We can always expand later.
Those moments build a lot of trust because the customer suddenly realizes you're not here to hide the dirty laundry and put one over on me.
You're here to get me to a great decision.
Now, the second piece there is you've got to demonstrate your expertise, right?
Because it's one thing to be trusted, but you've got to be in a position where the customer is listening to you.
OK, so Craig, which option should we consider?
I've got a whole stack of white papers.
Is there one I actually should read and which one should I ignore?
There's some resources you can recommend, so I can get smart and be conversant about this decision, and I can look smart in front of my boss.
I'll only look to you to provide that counsel if you are seen as an expert.
The problem, especially in tech sales today, is that we over rely on subject matter experts.
We show up with the clown car of experts, the solutions engineers, the product people, the customer success people, the executive sponsors.
Everybody shows up, and then we just, as sales people, we punt the conversation to those folks.
And that's a really dangerous thing, because what happens in that moment is you get delegated down to the person you sound like, and you've got to be seen as an expert by your customer.
So great salespeople, it's not that they don't invite those subject matter experts to the call, they do, but they very tightly choreograph their participation.
And they're very clear up front, because product people love to go on, they think they're being helpful, but it's dangerous for the salesperson.
So they will carefully choreograph and say, look, Craig, they have a question about our integration with this platform, and I think their question is kind of technical, so I don't want to overstate my expertise here, so that's why I'm bringing you on the call.
I'm going to tee that up right away, then we're going to tell them you have another call you have to go to and you're going to leave, and then you're going to hand it back to me, right?
Because I've got to have that person come to me.
If they think I'm just a glorified MC, then what value, I'm not in any position to recommend an option or a direction for them if I don't know what I'm talking about.
Then the last piece is, again, this taking risk off the table.
And again, I think a lot of salespeople, they make it feel to the customer like they're taking a leap of faith.
They're jumping out of an airplane for the first time with no tandem skydiving instructor.
But you've got to make them feel like you've got their back.
And there's a lot of different ways to do this.
One great way, which a lot of salespeople ignore or overlook to their detriment is by properly setting expectations right up front.
Because I think what happens is, and Matt, you know this as a marketer, we've got case studies and success stories that we're really proud of.
We've got reference customers co-presenting with us at the trade show.
And we tell a really amazing story.
The 10x improvement in sales productivity, we help this customer generate.
And then we get inbounds off of that.
We get a lot of customers saying, boy, if you could generate that, that's a slam dunk with our CFO.
We're in.
Let's go.
And average salespeople are like, OK, if that's going to get you to take this to the CFO, I'm not going to talk you out of it.
Great salespeople are going to say, hey, absolutely.
10x return, 100, or improvement in sales productivity, totally possible.
But I was a part of that deal, and I know everything went perfectly.
And we know sometimes things don't always go perfectly.
And they resourced this to the hilt.
They had no competing priorities.
And so what I'd rather do is have you anchor your business case on 5x, because your CFO is going to love that, and set you up for success, because I know we're going to overperform.
By the way, I know 5x is the floor, because we've never seen a customer not get at least that.
So I think you're going to end up 6, 7, 8, 9, maybe even 10x, and you're going to look like a hero.
So doing that upfront, then on the back end, tons of creative options in terms of providing your customer with a safety net.
Everything from showing them the mutual value plan, pulling your customer success partner in earlier to paint the vision of how do we go from signature to value?
How do we show them the roadmap, who's involved, what the KPIs are, what the gotchas are, the landmines to avoid, et cetera, the ownership on each stage, to show them how we're going to get them to value?
We've done this before.
It's just a recipe.
We just need to follow the recipe.
Or, in some cases, contract carve-outs or even out clauses are used by some vendors offering professional services support.
Not for free, but bundling that in so that you got the A team lined up in case the DIY path you think you want to go down doesn't really pan out.
We got the A team lined up to come in and swarm the problem, get you back on track.
So again, a high-level walkthrough.
We talk about any of those.
We go back to the J.
We talk about the other books.
We talk about sports.
Whatever you guys want.
God, you're good.
That was ridiculous, man.
I don't even...
Like I said before, you guys just need to get out more.
Well, that's true.
I was enthralled.
All right.
Let's dig in a little bit on that because on your...
We don't need to go to the J or the T today or whatever.
So the information overload is really interesting to me because one thing I think you and Amundsen used to always say is the problem is everyone's creating good content.
It's not a bad content problem, Matt.
Don't worry.
Matt's the CMO, creating good content.
You guys are creating great content, but everyone's creating great content.
It's hard to figure out what to go do.
That's one piece.
But you said the most important thing is they're looking at everything they can to get comfortable.
Yeah, that's right.
But do you still recommend that we provide content, and you've said this to me before, which is even if you got to give them your competitors' content, that's a winning play too.
So you're trying to bundle, hey, if you only read these things and here's why I'm giving them to you, is that kind of the idea?
Yeah, you got it.
There's actually a piece that Brent wrote in HBR a couple of years ago where they talk about this problem of, what he called, I think, the smartness arms race that B2B vendors are in.
To your point, I mean, there's a lot of really good content out there.
Another point of view on content I'll get to in a moment, but I think there's a profile.
I think the article was called Sense Making for Sales, and in that article, they actually profile a company where they provide kind of a reading list, if you will, a set of resources for customers.
If you're new to the space, you'd never consider, think about AI, right?
Like, everyone talks about it.
Like, I guarantee you, like, nobody would understand until it works, or, like, where to start, or what to do about it.
It's like FOMU on steroids, right?
I don't know what to choose.
I don't know.
There's so much content.
Like, you could fill an NFL stadium with everything that's written on AI just this year, and it's hugely risky because it's really expensive.
Like, it might have negative repercussions on my workforce and their engagement.
Or my customer's like, I have no idea how this is going to...
They may rise up and kill us all.
Like, I don't know.
It's like it's very risky.
So it is a perfect vortex of FOMU.
But Brent, in that article, they actually profiled a company.
I don't remember who it was specifically, but they built a resource list for customers just starting their learning journey.
Because here's the thing, to your point, Craig, some amount of research is perfectly normal and totally expected and encouraged, I think, which I'll come back to that point in a moment.
But you've got to get the customer comfortable that they're getting smart enough, but also they're not going to be an expert.
And I think the reality is if we really ask ourselves, why do our customers do all this research?
Why are they trying to become an expert?
It's because of something that psychologists call the agency level, which is that there is a fundamental information asymmetry that always exists between a salesperson or a vendor and a customer.
The vendor or the salesperson knows all the stuff that doesn't work in the platform.
They know all the integrations that are not ready for primetime.
They know the things that have been on the product roadmap for five years and are likely never going to come off the product roadmap.
They know all the customers who hate them.
And they have turned out who I will never introduce you to, right?
And I won't even mention and I'll pretend I didn't know they were customers of ours.
So the customer feels like you are incentivized as a salesperson to hide all that information from me.
You are incentivized to oversell me.
You are incentivized to paint as rosy a picture as possible.
You don't want to give me any reason to doubt your capabilities or what your platform can do.
And so again, the key to undoing that is to be like kind of ruthlessly transparent with the customer, be totally honest about what you can and can't do, what you're good at and what you're not, things you pride yourselves on and things that you're not as proud of, right?
And what you're really good at.
And those moments, I think, really do build a lot of credibility with your customer.
Were they less inclined to want to be an expert and figure out, were you hiding from me?
And more inclined to ask you, Craig, what should I...
I can't look like an idiot when my boss asks me, did we do all of our research?
And I want to sound credible.
Are there a couple of podcasts, maybe some of your competitors' content, et cetera?
In fact, this company that Brent profiled in this article, I believe in their reading list or the suggested list of resources, included some of their competitors' content, which is actually quite good.
It's a great buying guide kind of reference stuff.
Now, I'll just come back on the content point for one moment and kind of take us back in time to Challenger.
I think the reality is that in Challenger customer, we talked about this in a lot more detail.
I would say it's funny because I think Challenger, as I think back on it, was a book that was for sales, but it was kind of accidentally also for marketing.
For sure, yeah.
I think Challenger customer ended up being a book that was more purposefully written for both communities.
But I think one of the things we talk about a lot is that in marketers, I think they're very focused on putting out thought leadership, right?
And we try to draw a distinction between thought leadership and insight and then commercial insight.
So thought leadership, I would describe as largely confirmatory.
So it's content that's on the latest trends.
By the way, it's important, but it's designed to show your customer that you as a vendor are with it.
You're on the latest topics, whether it's AI, whether it's the cloud, whether it's cyber risk, whatever it is, the new work environments, any number of things.
And you want to be seen as like we're in the know, like we've got a point of view here.
But again, it doesn't refute the customers or break the customer's existing mental model.
It tends to kind of reinforce it.
Insight is different because insight is frame breaking.
It shows, it reframes the way the customer thinks about the problem.
And commercial insight is different.
And by the way, on the inside, I would just tell you that the shorthand for this is it's not designed to show the customer that you're smart.
It's designed to show them that they're wrong.
And I know that sounds confrontational, but that's the kind of content that cuts through the noise when people are like, whoa, I didn't know that.
I want to hear more about that.
Commercial insight is the kind of insight that actually then leads to your solution.
So it doesn't just reframe the way the client understands the opportunity or the risk or whatever in the market.
It leads to you as the only vendor who can solve for that opportunity because of your unique strengths.
Pulling that off is very hard, but that is the difference maker, I think, because it gets you out of this motion of shouting into the wind, burning through leads, and having armies of BDRs cold-calling people and spouting off about feeds and speeds and features and benefits, and instead into a world where you're putting content out there and they're calling you.
Because, by the way, if they want to solve that problem that you just talked to them is out there, you're the only vendor who can help them solve it.
And that is a thing of beauty when you can get that right because you have basically chalked the field and customers have pre-qualified themselves by the time the form gets filled out on the website, the phone rings.
It gets hard to get that right, but we have seen a number of companies get it right and seen phenomenal results in doing so.
So I would say yes, Craig, absolutely.
It doesn't mean take your foot off the gas on the content.
Absolutely, it means provide, instill that trust, and then provide your customer with a curated list.
But you got to get them to believe that the content you're sending them is in their best interest to stick to that reading list and not try to go off of it.
And then lastly, the very best thing to do is put content in there that shapes the way they think about the problem in a way that leads to you.
So thinking about that content, just for the listeners, I think about a business like Gong.
And when you think about thought leadership, Gong's talking about, hey, the future of sales looks like this, right?
Like whatever that topic is, here's the future of sales, whether it involves AI, whether it involves call intelligence, whether it involves email, et cetera.
This is the future.
The insight is we analyzed X number of calls, and did you know that when salespeople say this phrase, they lose 70% of the time?
And then the commercial insight is companies who are able to track that their sales reps are doing that and change their behavior through training are X% more successful.
Yeah, I think it's very well said, Matt.
I think the added thing, just to make it even harder, what I would say is, so there's one more, like it's wafer thinned, it's one more thing that you've got to do here, which is, I think that is all beautifully said.
I think the final litmus test is this, which is, is that something that only Gong, and just to pick that as an example, it's not Hey Gong Gong, but is that something that only they can do?
Or is it something you can get through SalesLoft or Clary or any of the other providers out there?
And I think that's actually the hardest thing.
And we often say with Challenger, that whole journey starts with answering a very simple question, which is, why should your customer buy from you instead of your competitor?
Now, when you ask that question, people run head first, because we've all been living in corporate land for a very long time.
I can't remember the term used before.
Was it like podcast?
Oh, sphere?
Podcastopia is better.
It's a new word.
It's cool.
So we've all been living in corporatopia for a very long time.
And so I think when you ask that question of leaders, they run right into the, well, they should buy from us because we are more customer centric, because we are more entrepreneurial, because we're more innovative, we're more socially responsible.
Those are all fine things, but they're almost impossible to measure.
And there are also things that your competitors say.
In fact, I don't think this was in the book actually, but we did a side study where we looked at vendors in specific sectors in industry.
So we looked at how they described themselves on the About Us page of their website.
Did you know that like 85% of vendors in every single vertical described themselves as the leading global solution provider for whatever they do, right?
That can't be true by definition, but we all talk about ourselves the same exact way, and then we're surprised that we all are asked to respond to RFPs, and we're like, how can they not appreciate our differences?
Because you taught them not to appreciate your differences.
So I think the final hurdle here is to really answer that question.
We call it the Deb Oler question, because Deb Oler, who used to run Granger North America, coined that question many, many years ago, and she said their own journey towards an insight, a commercial insight-based sales conversation started with answering that question.
We have to really crystallize what is the thing we do here at Granger that nobody else does.
Now, it's typically a product you build or an attribute of that product or the way you deploy it or the way you support it or the service around it.
There's lots of different opportunities for differentiation, but finding that out, nailing that comes down to thinking about a Venn diagram with three circles.
The top one, I would say the first circle is things that your customer needs and both things they know that they need and things that we know they need but they don't yet know they need, underappreciated needs or unknown needs.
The second circle is what your competitor does to address those needs.
In this case, back to your example, you would look at what does SalesLoft do?
What does Clarice Wingman product do?
Like all the other conversational and conversation intelligence platforms, how do they address the customer's known and unknown needs?
The last circle is what does Gong do?
What are our capabilities?
The way you've got to nail this is you've got to avoid the overlap of those three circles because that's a race to the bottom on price.
Using that example, if tracking that term that leads to a reduction in conversion rates is something that any platform can do, then you can compete for it, but unless you're the cheapest provider, you're probably not going to win that business.
What you've got to do is figure out what's the overlap between our capabilities and the customer's needs and how do we teach to that, the thing that's not shared with the competitor.
Again, getting that right is really hard.
Before you put ink to paper and start drawing up your commercial insight that leads to that capability, you've got to ask yourself, is it really unique?
Or is this something that our competitors also claim, too?
And look, rightly or wrongly, I think it's hard for salespeople when we tell them, go sell to, this is our unique benefit, and they come back and say, yeah, but all of our competitors claim that, too.
We say, no, no, but they're lying.
We're telling the truth.
That's the big difference.
But it's hard.
So it's got to be truly unique.
Two, it's got to be credible.
It's got to be something you can point to reference customers, examples of companies who have bought your solution to address that problem.
And then finally, it's got to be valuable.
It's all well and good if it's credible and actually unique.
But if it doesn't solve a big origin problem, then who cares?
So those are the big litmus tests.
And when you produce insights, you've got to nail that question.
And then I think to get to this reframing insight, the next question you ask, if we know why our customers should buy from us instead of our competitor, the next question is this, what would have to be true for our customer to want to pay us for that capability?
Ideally, to pay us a premium relative to the market for that benefit, for that capability.
And that's the core of, that's where your commercial insight lives, right?
Because it's about a content, data, research insight that teaches the customer that this is a big problem.
You've been undervaluing it or underestimating how big it is, or you didn't know what drove it, or you didn't even know it was there.
And by the way, we're the only ones who can help you solve it.
So you're basically trying to create a proprietary fire and then sell the only fire extinguisher and talent that puts it out.
And you're so literary.
Yeah, he's good.
All right, we have a little bit of time left.
Do you guys mind?
I just want to, I lied.
I do want to jump to Jay for one sec.
Sure, yeah.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jay's one of my favorites.
It's okay to be a liar, Craig.
He's a differently truthful.
He's not lying.
I wouldn't say that this is all of Jay, but this idea of gauging in decision.
I'm going to just incorporate other podcast episodes we've had in Podcastopia is they talk a lot about elements of discovery and customer understanding.
Nobody has talked about understanding and decision at that particular account.
What would you say to that?
I always forget it when I think about Jolt Effect.
It's so important, but how do we address that?
This is, I think, in some respects, one of the most fascinating, most poorly understood, but yet the most important aspects of it.
I think one of the ways I would encourage listeners to think about Jolt is, it's not a linear, like start with the J, then do the L, then the L and the T.
J, everything starts with the J, and then based on what you learn, you might do the L, you might do the T, you might go back to the O, you might have to go back to the T, because they get cold feet late.
So it directs you where to go.
Now, there are a couple of things I would say about indecision.
And indecision is like the carbon monoxide poisoning of sales conversion.
And why I say that is just like carbon monoxide, it is colorless, it's tasteless, it's odorless.
You need special equipment to find out if it's in the air.
And it's deadly.
And the metaphor, I think, is the reason the metaphor works is that just like carbon monoxide, indecision is nothing, nothing that any of your customers will ever cop to.
So if you ask 100 of your customers, how many of them consider themselves to be decisive, 100 of them will say yes.
I will tell you that the data would suggest that 87 of them are lying to you.
So 87% of the conversations we studied had customers with either moderate or high levels of indecision that they were demonstrating in the call.
Only about 13% of them were truly rational, truly decisive folks.
And I always tell salespeople, if you find one of those folks, you should sell them everything as soon as possible.
Because it's just rare, like run, off, tackle, left, that's your play.
Now, with the 87%, what's really troubling is that, first of all, everybody likes to think that they're decisive.
It's the Donnie Krueger effect, right?
But people think they're more decisive than they actually are.
But if you have a scenario where they all think they're decisive and nobody's gonna cop to it, how do you detect it?
How do you get it on the table so it can be dealt with?
And one of the things that we discovered, this is actually after we wrote the book, this is not in the book.
But we discovered it afterwards.
This question came up a lot.
Like, our customers, actually, they get really offended when we try to hint that maybe they're having trouble making a decision.
I had this experience, I'll tell you guys a quick story.
I was doing a dinner with a tech vendor and the CTO of a big manufacturing company was there.
And I was talking about the Jolt Effect and mentioned the fact that there's no correlation between level of decisiveness and seniority.
It turns out C-level executives are just as indecisive as folks lower down the food chain.
And she got very upset about this and literally pounded the table and said, I get paid a bunch of money to make really hard decisions.
And if I got afraid of making those decisions, I would be out.
It wouldn't last five minutes in this job to make 100 tough decisions a day.
I don't buy this at all.
When she left, I was hanging out with the sales team from the tech company that hosted the event.
And they told me that she was the most indecisive customer that they deal with.
So again, we're not particularly self-aware about this stuff.
In the dedication to The Jolt Effect, there's actually a funny line where I say, my wife and kids think it's hugely ironic that I wrote a book about how to make better decisions.
But anyway, I digress.
Oh, too autobiographical.
But here's the thing.
So how do we get indecision on the table so we can size it, we can assess it, we can understand what's our playbook to overcome it and deal with it?
And a lot of the techniques taught in sales are not particularly helpful to us.
So think about open-ended questions.
If you were to ask your customer, Craig, do you consider yourself a decisive leader or an indecisive leader?
Like you can kiss that sales, that sale goodbye.
People, as my story, it was a good example of that.
People get pretty offended by that.
Even looking for what we called in the challenge of customer, we talk about this idea of customer verifiers, which is trying to look for, is the customer tracking with me?
Is their buying process tracking with my selling process?
That's helpful for a lot of reasons, but it's not really helpful to track indecision because the customer may verify that they're with you rationally, but emotionally, they've got this sinking feeling that like, I'm not really comfortable putting my name on this.
And so I'm just going to go to this person.
And as we get farther on, I'm not there emotionally.
So how do we get on the table?
This technique we found, the name we came up with it is Pings and Echoes, and it kind of derives from the world of submarine warfare and sonar.
So if a surface ship is trying to detect a submarine, this is like, I'm doing my best Sean Connery here from-
One ping, Vasily.
One ping only.
Yeah, that's right.
You got it.
So they will send a ping into the water.
They then listen quite literally for the reflection of that ping back into their sonar equipment.
That tells them, is it an enemy submarine, a friendly submarine?
Is it heading towards us at what speed?
Is it opening its torpedo doors?
That's the extent of my submarine warfare knowledge.
But what it's doing in sales, here's the corollary.
Just like a ping is sending a sound and then listening for basically the echo back, what we're trying to do is send a signal to our customer and then listen for the echo or reflection back.
So it might be something like this.
I might say, you know, Matt, we've been has some great conversations, been engaged with you guys, I think now for about three months.
And I'm just curious, I kind of want to pull up here and ask you.
And there's a reason I'm asking, which is that sometimes we get a little excited about what we do here.
We'd like to let 1000 flowers bloom.
But we know sometimes we make that actually makes it hard to make a decision.
You told me in our very first phone call, you remember you told me that budgets really tight, and this is a key decision, but resources and budget are not unlimited.
And so you got to be really careful, you got to configure this the right way.
And so I'm just thinking about that.
And, you know, we've gotten positive feedback and all the, you know, the demos we've done on the POC, on the integrations we've showed you, you know, it's just, we have let a thousand flowers bloom.
And I'm just wondering, are you and your team really clear now on what's nice to have and what's neat to have given your limited budget resources, what should be in the initial proposal?
If you are not clear on what that is, I would love to be a steward for you and a guide for you here, because I can recommend what I've seen other cups of brings us to the O, right?
Other companies like you have done it, what they get a lot of value out of, and if not, I just set me straight because I'm just again, I'm reflecting on my other customer conversations and where people kind of get caught up a little bit at this point in the process.
Now what Matt might say is, yeah, you know what?
We are a little bit overwhelmed, but in a good way by what we've seen, but we can't have it all.
And this is a really big decision, so we could use a little bit of guidance.
What do other customers do?
What they tend to do as a starting point?
We want to get to the all singing, all dancing version of the platform, which can't do that right now.
So where do we start?
I mean, how do we make sure we get some runs on the board so that we earn the right to expand and grow with you because we both want that kind of relationship.
Or Matt might say, no, actually, we were just being nice.
There was a bunch of stuff you showed us.
We have no interest in it.
Let me tell you what those things are.
Or you might say something like, hey, yeah, no, we're actually pretty clear on what we want.
It gives you a little bit of help, but pretty clear.
And I want to share that with you.
But I'll tell you what has the team really anxious is that we're about to go into the CFO's office for a review of this proposal promising a 10x improvement in productivity.
And I just know our company and there's no investment we've ever made that's ever yielded that kind of return.
We screw this stuff up every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
So can you help us there?
Because we just need to present a realistic case that doesn't leave us hanging out to dry.
Because if we don't realize those benefits, heads are going to roll.
And it's going to be start with the person, me, whose name is on the contract.
So help me out there.
So again, it's designed to confirm or refute your hypothesis as to what, again, it's us articulating what we think might be keeping the customer from moving forward, what we think their source of indecision is.
But in a way that is not designed to out them or embarrass them or create a debate, it's designed to make them feel like this is okay and it's totally normal and I'm here to help.
That's what we're trying to generate.
That is a full hour.
Wasted another perfectly good hour with that.
No, man, that was unbelievable.
Matt, did that fulfill your expectations on what you thought today would be?
Sorry.
Yeah, I was a little bit nervous about these parts, but then he helped me through that process and he really got all the key components that I wanted to get in those first call and he's teed us up nicely for subsequent calls where we can just add increasing value.
So Matt, you're the best.
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Dixon on The Transaction, once again, delivering incredible value to us.
So we can only assume it will deliver incredible value to the audience because that was incredible.
I think that's the least I've said in any podcast.
That was unbelievable.
But thank you.
Thank you.
And we look forward to joining you.
Thank you guys for the invite.
It's always great to hang out with you and talk shop and talk about the research and I'd love to do it again.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.
Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.
What are you actually doing here?
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