The Transaction

So, there was this viral thing that my kids watch and they say all the time, and it was this guy covered in chocolate saying, I'm the Easter Bunny, I'm the Easter Bunny.

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.

So happy to have you guys on the call, because I can't figure out, like, what happened here.

This is like the top meme, and this guy's just covered in chocolate, and he's like, he's got this, he's like, I'm the Easter Bunny, I'm the Easter Bunny.

I mean, it's scary, it's wild, and my littlest guy, the nine-year-old, is running around going, hey, dad, I'm the Easter Bunny, I'm the Easter Bunny.

And it's just, all right, forget it.

By the way, let's, on the business front, I was trying to get your bio together, because we just do, you know, getting everyone ready to meet Becc Holland, and I'm like, the thing is, is, I'll just do how, like, I intended, it is so awesome to have you on the show.

Because, yeah, and Matt and I, when we sort of talk through stuff, we're like, we get excited, I'll call, as he will tell you, I call him like 14 times a day.

I have an 8 a.m.

call that he's likely prepared for.

He's like taking the kids to school.

I call him whenever I'm in the car, I'm just calling Matt.

And we're like, dude, like, as the show sort of developed and we had this, you know, these conversations around, you know, what's happening in the market and how we have to change the way we think, and we're like, we gotta get back.

And so, and then when I told him, hey, we got back Holland, he's like, yes, dude.

It's like the perfect guest for this show.

I still remember, I saw Matt killing it on the treadmill at one conference.

I don't know if you remember that.

It was a sales law conference years ago.

And I saw you were, it was just me and you working out on the treadmill.

I'm so excited to meet you.

I remember that you were like, you were like, you should run a marathon.

And I was like, no fucking way.

You remember that?

And I did run a marathon.

Yes.

Have you run one?

Oh, this is cool, you guys.

I'm total.

I did, yeah.

I ran LA in 2021.

Brutal.

I want to ask what your time is, but I want to be classy, so I'm torn.

Yeah, it's four hours, 12 minutes.

I'm not lighting the world on fire.

Good job.

That's so cool.

All right, you are listening to The Transaction.

Let's do it.

So, but, so I was thinking like, the way I think about Beck is, we have these guests where we've watched their narrative develop via social content and speaking over time, right?

So it's like, Beck sort of first sort of hits our.

Screen, probably, what, 2018, 2019?

Is that about right?

Yeah, and you were doing, I think, sales development at Chorus, and then you're taking all these things that you're learning, watching, and then I'm like, you're so hyper-intelligent, you have this like, you're questioning everything, you're putting everything, you're changing minds, but writing and talking in such an incredibly compelling way, and that sort of allowed us to sort of start to get, you know, learn from you, and we've been learning from you over that time, and it's like, been amazing to watch.

So look, I mean, I can't, there can't be anybody better to have on this show because of how you're thinking about things.

So you guys, our guest today is Becc Holland, and she is, I just associate her with Becc Holland.

It's an incredible self brand because of the work that she's done.

And welcome to The Transaction.

Thank you so much for coming in from France.

This is a global show.

It's a global show.

Craig, I remember your first, one of your conferences back in, I want to say 2018 or 2019, it was with Topo.

It was Rev Summit, was that the name of it?

And I remember it was so well put together.

And I saw you on stage and I was like, I want to be friends with that guy.

And the data that y'all punted out, it was so detailed and it was so well put together that I was like, I want to be friends with that guy.

He knows data.

Those were the days.

Now I'm just rolling around town with long hair and talking about the Easter Bunny.

All right.

So here's the big question.

Let's start.

Let's learn from Becc while we have time.

It's just great to catch up, everyone, but like you can't, you guys will just be, your mind will be blown by this conversation, but we're going to start with what we ask everyone, which is what is something or some things that the market thinks they're doing right or is the best practice or a way of doing things where they're actually wrong and they should be thinking about it differently.

So what is that and what should they be doing?

I'm going to start with that.

And let's go.

Okay.

Is this question to me or is this to Matt, Matt and Sam?

Come on now.

I mean, I know all Matt takes.

There's a number of things that come to mind.

I think the most deleterious thing that people believe about sales go to market in general that is hurting them today is they believe that the role of a seller is to either get the buyer to think in a certain way or to talk about their pain, to exacerbate the pain or to lead them down a path, to see if you're a good fit.

From my perspective, that's all fine and good.

You find out the pain.

You find out the problem that they believe it exists.

That's all fine and good.

But from a buyer's perspective, there's no value to them.

Value is defined as something that they didn't know beforehand, specifically if that belief could hurt them eventually.

So from my view, up in the cloud's view, a seller's role is to find one of two things, a misdiagnosis or a misdiagnosis, that without that information, something a buyer believes that is incorrect or something that they missed entirely, that if they rolled forward with those wrong beliefs, it would hurt them in the future.

So from my view, the role of a seller is not to get what the buyer believes and execute on that, but to almost like a doctor, correct the buyer and some of the misassumptions that they may have within the expertise of what you're selling.

That is amazing, Andy used the phrase, which is incredible.

So but if you, so you, I mean, what you just described, we see all the time.

I mean, it's basically everyone.

And so what, you know, how are you, how are you helping them change that mindset or, you know, what?

I mean, yeah, well, there's a number of different selling methodologies or schools of thought that have rolled out over the last couple hundred years.

Product centric, feature centric, benefit centric, pain centric, and then we finally got to problem centric.

But essentially the first three, product centric, feature centric, and then benefit centric, it's like a patient walks into a doctor's office, the doctor asks zero questions and starts talking about all the great products, medications that they have for the person or all the great features of the medication or in benefit centric, all of the ad hoc generic upsides to the medication of like, oh, you're going to lose weight or your skin will look better when you take this medication.

So those are clearly out, which I think we all know in practice, like we know in our head in theory, but benefit centric specifically, I see executed on I'd say 40% of the time.

So there's only two real benefits that people don't have enough of that they always want more of.

I'm going to see if you guys can guess them.

There's only two things that people don't have enough of and they always want more of.

Let's see.

Let's see if you can guess what they are.

Yeah.

Sorry.

By the way, just a side note.

Actually, before I answer that, because this is what I was doing, I'm at full confession.

When you started talking about the doctor, have you ever seen, have you heard Andy Raskin talk about the arrogant doctor?

Yeah.

Yeah, so he calls the way that companies have approached their messaging like an arrogant doctor.

So it's like, so you have a problem, pain, I have a solution, I'm going to tell you why it's better than everything else, right?

Which is actually not a great approach.

All right.

So anyway, back to this.

So what are the two generic things that people don't have enough of that they always want more of?

What are the two generic things that they don't have enough of?

They always want more of.

But they are.

Yeah.

Time.

Matt got one of them.

Time.

There's one.

Okay, I got one.

I got one.

What's the other one?

Money.

Time and money.

So, you'll see most value props are like, wait, clap it up, Matt, clap.

Where's the clapboard?

There you go.

Benefit-centric.

Or we say like, more time, more money, save time, save money, leave revenue on the table, you know, lack of resources.

I'd say 40% of sellers are like doubling down there.

The rest of them are on pain-centric, which is the patient comes into the doctor's office, the doctor starts to ask questions this time, which is great.

But they're about pain only.

So you come into the, you know, office and they're like, what hurts?

My arm.

How long has it been hurting?

It's been hurting for three weeks.

What's the impact to you if you don't solve it?

Well, I guess I can't play ball with my kids.

What are your kid's names, Timmy?

What will little Timmy think when he grows up and he doesn't have a father who would play baseball with them?

But it's all about pain to get the person to basically talk about the pain so they feel like they should solve the problem more, that they should bite more.

So I think pain questions are important.

You need to know what hurts and why they came in.

But if you stop at that, let's say that you ask the question of what hurts, and I like my arm.

You're like, how long has it been hurting?

You're like, three weeks.

What do you not know at that point?

Let's see if you all can guess.

What do you not know at that point?

You know that their arm hurts and you know it's been hurting for three weeks, but what do you not know?

How did they hurt it?

Yeah.

There's one of them.

Yeah.

How did they hurt it?

You don't know how they've had to make adjustments to what they do as a result of the pain.

You don't know the real issue.

Now?

What were you talking about, Craig?

What do you mean you don't know the real issue?

Well, if you say, so if someone says, I think, well, I was going to use my own medical example, but it'll show how old I am.

If someone comes in and says, my shoulder hurts, a sales rep will jump on that and say, great, here's this thing called Vicodin that will help you with the hurt.

But actually, what we got to figure out is like, well, like, but what is it?

Right.

And what, you know, what, what's really happening here is, you know, part that's, that's what I mean there is that it doesn't tell you enough if you just say that my shoulder hurts, right?

And so like, that's not actually not.

Yeah.

So it's like, it's like, I don't know what the root cause is.

So I would say you need to take Vicodin when actually you don't need to take Vicodin.

I could think that it's, you know, heaven forbid, like, oh, I just, you just twisted your arm or your shoulder when actually it was a sunburn or actually it was heaven forbid cancer and the buyer doesn't know that.

So 82 to 87%, it's no big secret Gartner putting out a number of different stats of buyers don't want to sell or involved in the call today.

And if I had to guess why, it's because they never learned anything from the seller that they didn't know beforehand other than price.

So the opportunity and the role of a seller from my perspective and a prospector is to diagnose and find something that the buyer didn't know, find an impact that they didn't know was coming.

So object emotion stays emotion, object at rest stays at rest.

So if you're going outbound, your buyer based on what they know is at rest.

So unless you find an impact that they didn't know about something that's going to happen to them if they don't solve for it, you know, a problem that exists, a tactical problem that exists, a business problem that exists, unless you find one of those based on what they know already, which is what pain is, they're not mobilizing to buy.

So a seller just from the ethical view, in my opinion, their role is to go into the room and to ask a certain amount of questions that aren't the question dead on, but are a certain amount of specific questions around leading indicators, leaning indicators or coincidental indicators and lagging indicators that help me as a doctor, me as the expert know that something's going to happen to you or what something is happening to you currently that that person didn't know.

So the reason we can't vent medications, you know, some of them are like over the counter, but some of them are prescription.

The reason we need a person to do that or need a person to evaluate that is a buyer, statistically speaking, and majority of the time is wrong.

Right?

So I think that the huge misdiagnosis by the industry is that the role of the seller is to objection handle or to talk in a certain way or make someone feel heard or make someone feel understood or be human or be empathetic or be kind or be funny or be pattern-interruptive or build a relationship.

And it's like, I will take a doctor that is a jerk who can diagnose things over a doctor who bakes me cookies, who cannot diagnose things or diagnosis things inaccurately any day of the week.

So from like at the crux, the the catechism of the understanding is that a seller is supposed to get a buyer to think in a certain way.

And I'm like, it has nothing to do with that really at all.

In my opinion, the doctor is in there, the seller is in there to ask questions, to understand what the buyer doesn't know that could hurt them if they keep rolling forward on that belief.

That's awesome.

So essentially, the truth is, is that we've always talked about selling the pain.

But we're, but we're not in, especially in this world, we're like, so many, well, first of all, it's hard to get people into deals.

But when you're in a deal, so many sellers are losing deals because they're not getting to that moment.

Right.

And then along that same sort of track is you have a minimal amount of time with the buyer and so can you in that time, help them learn something about themselves that they weren't thinking about.

And that's what you're talking about.

And that is amazing and totally, and that is different.

It's funny because if we did just wrote the headline, right, then it was just like, you know, you know, pain, that's boring, right?

I mean, it's not boring, but every guy we have or woman we have on the show is going to bring up, well, you got to sell the pain, right, steroids versus painkillers, all this stuff.

But what you're saying, the issue is it's not that people understand we got to identify the pain.

The issue is we're taking and running with on face value what they're saying and hoping to tie our product to that when in actuality we can help them, you know, really figure out what's going on and what really the effects that it's already had that you may not even know because you're dealing with this chronic pain.

And then what will happen to you going forward?

That is a credible story that a seller can, you know, A, attract the buyer with because that means they leave the call going, you know, I just, I never thought about that.

But two, down the line when we're losing deals, you know, in my opinion, one of the biggest issues is that we're in this adjustment phase from a selling perspective where we're losing deals because we were a product before.

So a buyer could get on and go, yeah, I want that sales and get, but the story that they're telling the organization, right, because everyone thinks it's just ROI, but that the story along with it has to be compelling in that we're not helping them understand their story.

So there's all these elements to it that I think are amazing and really that that insight is invaluable.

So, yeah, I mean, we're banking on the fact that they're correct if we're like, what's the pain?

What's the problem?

What's the like?

And I hear this question all the time.

You know, people say like, always ask this question.

What's the impact to you if you don't solve this today?

And it's like, if they know the impact and they're correct, they didn't need you.

The bigger problem is usually they're not.

So I went into a number of different doctor's appointments to like develop this line of thinking, and I went into one of the doctors and I said, hey, he said, why are you here today?

And I'm like, well, it's a bigger question.

He's like, what's wrong?

And I'm like, what's wrong with me is a whole nother can of worms.

I'm here to ask you questions about how you ask questions.

He was like, oh boy.

I was like, I was like, you're gonna need to pay it either way.

And I was like, so I have a question.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

But you know, all the ideas in the world won't get you a great podcast.

That's where Ringmaster comes in.

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When people come into your office, your practice, why do they usually come in?

He said 99.9% of the time it's pain.

I'm like, got it.

So out of those 99.9% of the time that they come in, how often have they self-diagnosed?

He's like, thanks to WebMD, 95.

So 95% of the time they've self-diagnosed, which we know the buyers are doing more research than ever before.

Forrester pointed out a stat that they're evaluating 20 different variables before they're coming to us, right?

Because they know that they're going to have to bank on their own knowledge, intelligence acumen to solve the problem anyway, because they don't have the self-care help.

So I said, okay, out of this 95% that come in and self-diagnose, how often are they incorrect?

He said, can I be honest with you?

90% of the time, they have missed something or they believe something that's not true.

So I'm like, if you're going in, based on pain, from my perspective, it's not about showing me that you know me, it's about showing me that you know something about me that I don't know.

That's where you're going to build that rapport.

That's where you're going to gain credibility.

A lot of people talk about rapport of like, oh, it's talking about the boat picture in the background or what's going on in your personal life.

And I'm like, rapport is a French term, oddly enough, and it actually means to be brought back.

And if I had to guess what you're being brought back to is the buyer is simply put, trying to solve problems, as many problems as they can in the quickest amount of time possible.

So you're restoring yourself to the buyer side and you're saying, why don't I diagnose the problems that they know about and make sure that everything's valid there, that they believe the things that are true.

But why don't I diagnose the problems that they don't know about?

Because not all problems are pain in the present.

So the difference between a pain and a problem is a pain isn't any negative experience and a problem is anything you solve or solve for.

But not all pains are problems, meaning not all things that are negative experience do we solve for and not all problems are painful yet.

If I'm going to, you know, like heaven forbid, cancer is a very good example of a non-pain based condition.

So these are the most dangerous conditions for people because they go on and on and on and progress on and on and on and the person doesn't know because there's no pain in the present.

So if I'm going to go to the desert in two weeks and I'm buying water today, there is no pain in the present, right?

But there's pain in the future if I don't solve for it today.

So I think the biggest misunderstanding is that the seller thinks like, okay, I'm going to go ahead and bank off of what does the buyer want to solve?

Mike Jolt's effect goes into this of like their status quo and there's indecision.

Status quo is they don't think that the problem is big enough to die.

Indecision is they do admit that the problem is big enough, but they still don't roll forward.

If I had to guess why, it's because they say that in the book, they talk about how 87% of the deals are lost not to status quo, they're lost to indecision, right?

So the buyer says the problem is big enough, but then they have to go to procurement and they have to go to internal people and they have to go through a legal process and the price tag is ticking up and up in their mind of what happens if they solve for this thing correctly.

And they're left in their mind thinking, the seller doesn't know anything that I don't know because of the discovery process, you know?

So if they didn't know anything that I didn't know then, I'm going to be the one that's left to solve for this, so they chicken out near the end.

So how you build that rapport is by within discovery.

I'm like, what are you discovering?

If in 60% of your deals or more, what the buyer believed and what you believed weren't different, then there was no point.

There was no point for them to have you involved.

You're a price tag.

You add pressure.

You add an agenda.

You name the puppy.

You add a face of a person you got to turn down.

So I'm like, if I am in the selling room, if I'm on the discovery floor, I'm like, I'm going to spend 30 minutes.

I'm going to try and find as many things that they believe that are not true about their current condition or about the problem that they're solving and as many promises they didn't know that existed today within that 30 minutes.

And that's the value to the buyer, whether they move forward with me or not.

Matt AmundsenNo, we.

Love long rants.

So, but so, you know, the, the thing I think about as you're describing this is enablement.

And not enablement, because I could, I have a new rant on sales enablement, by the way.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Wow.

Yeah, man.

I'm like, oh, let me side.

Let me park that for a sec, because I have a pretty, I have a headline on that one.

By the way, my side profile is terrible to remind me, it's fantastic is, oh, jeez, stop it.

Yeah, dang it.

So but like, you know, that 30 minute call that you're describing, I have so many examples.

It's funny, I guarantee back from her talking about, like her conversations with buyers or customers for her has the same thing.

We used to have this all the time at Topo, right, which is like they come in and say, well, our sales development team is terrible.

We need help with that.

And then we look in and there was there was issues way far down the line that they never thought of like a great example is segmentation, ideal customer profile, like that's a different thing than they thought was just messaging and touch patterns or whatever.

So I get it.

But like the only people that could do it, right, really get on and have that deep, true diagnosis and true like description of the implications that were happening were not necessarily the same people.

And so what is that like, how do you help people transform that 30 minute call to have the impact that you're describing?

Because that to me, so everything you said makes sense.

But can I get a salesperson on the call to go do that?

Side note, for all sellers out there, I know 20% of you, I guaranteed you some version of this.

I guarantee because you're the ones hitting the number right now.

But we got to help the 80.

So, Becc, like what do we do here?

Like if Matt's going to go, you know what, I just learned this thing on the show.

I'm going to go fix, you know, the way we do our 30 minute call with the sales team.

Like what should we do?

So, Jordan Peterson, like them, love them, hate them, don't want to listen to them.

He talks about this a lot of how a problem is only a problem in the presence of a metric.

Right?

So, the first thing that I would need to do is I need to learn what my buyer is metriced on and every buyer person is going to be metriced on things that are different.

So there's a lagging indicator, which is the final performance based metric that they're hired or fired, promoted and demoted to drive.

So it's what comes out of the engine.

There's a leading indicator, which is the input, what goes into the engine, which is the, if it's a root cause, it's the leading indicator that you change to affect the lagging indicator, and then you have leaning indicators, which are coincidental indicators, which are basically during the game, people evaluate those to predict whether they're going to hit their outcome, hit their goal, and if not, which one is the root cause.

So for instance, if I'm an SDR, my lagging indicator is booked meetings, my leading indicator, and there's usually only one to three of those, my leading indicators are the quality of the email, quantity of the emails, what time of day that I send them out, what people that I send them out to, what companies I send them out to, et cetera, and a leaning indicator is open rate, or reply rate, or call connect rate.

So the first thing I need to do if I'm a seller is simply put, and you might say that this is a long process, and I'm like, well, this is how your buyer sees you either way.

I come from a really technical background, meaning my dad's a mechanical engineer.

He built fins for missile heads for the government for 40 years.

My mom's biology professor, my sister's an ER doctor, my brother's a PhD electrical engineer, and I'm in sales.

And the number one thing that they say is that when salespeople come in, that they simply put don't understand the first thing about what they do.

So the first thing that I would do is if you are listening to this or you're watching this and you can't close your eyes and name what your buyers are metriced on, how sales enablement metric versus sales versus sales ops versus SDR versus marketing versus HR.

There's always a quantitative metric that answers a qualitative question of is this person good at blank?

So like IT director at server uptime, for instance, HR, it's going to be employee churn, so if you can't name those metrics, I would start there and research those.

The second step is I would start to research and it's actually a pretty quick process.

I can usually do it within 15 minutes.

It's find out the industry averages for those, you know, what's the industry average uptime?

What's the industry average quota attainment?

So like some of the TOPA research, for instance, would talk about 76% of SDRs weren't hitting quota or 85% of the AEs aren't hitting 75% of the quota or TOPA research talked about 35 cold emails per day were sent out, you know, or 40 calls were made per day and that yields four connects.

So the second piece of data that I want to know is what are the industry averages for those people?

If nothing else, you can bring those to the people within the discovery call.

So just because I have a body doesn't mean I know what's going wrong with it.

Just because I have a human body doesn't mean I know what the average weight is or if I'm overweight or if I'm underweight, considerably speaking.

But the third piece is I would research at what point, quantitative point, do those indicators suggest that you have a problem?

So if I ask someone, how many calories do you eat per day and they say 5,000, I'm like, I want to know how long they've been doing that.

How tall are they?

What's their...

But I can guess that if they're eating 5,000 calories, they probably have somewhat of a weight problem.

Now, I'd still have to ask some questions of like, Michael Phelps, for instance, would ingest 3,500 and he was still rail thin, right?

But I would need to know what are the points that those quantitative points would cause a problem.

So in discovery, and I hear my stomach is also hurting, and it's not the seller's fault.

The seller's been trained like this for thousands of years, right?

Our understanding is we need to convince someone or persuade someone or make them feel something.

But when I hear these calls, they're like, what's the impact to you?

What's the root cause?

What's the problem?

I'm like, I wouldn't ask any self-diagnosis questions or leading questions.

You want to lose weight?

You want to lose money?

Or you want to make money?

You want to, you know, be rich?

You want your six pack abs?

I wouldn't worry about any of those questions.

The only questions that I ask are for them specifically, what is the status of those indicators?

How many cold emails are you sending out per day?

What time of day are you sending them out on average?

So if they tell me that they're sending out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning, like most people are, I'm like, well, statistically speaking, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday afternoon, 2 p.m.

to 6 p.m.

are the best times to send them.

So if they're sending them then, or I'll ask, what's your average open rate?

Industry average is 15 to 25.

And if they say like, it's 20, I might got it.

Anything less than a 50% open rate and you have a deliverability problem, period.

I know that because I'm the quote, unquote expert, right?

That's my job to know that.

I don't deserve a gold star.

It's my job to know that, right?

It's not their job to be an expert in cutting hair, right?

It's my job as a seller to ask those questions to know, like, okay, if I ask open rate and they say 20, I'm like, I got one problem that they don't know about, it's deliverability.

Like, how many emails are you sending?

And they're like 400 per day.

I'm like, I got another one.

Anything over 50 emails, and that's also going to cause deliverability problem.

And there's no way that they could be personalizing, which is what's going to cause the average reply rate.

Average reply rate is 0.5 to 0.7.

So if I look into it, the average reply rate is 3.

I'm like, actually, according to most people, you're not that bad.

Now, there's a lot of things we can do about that.

And just those data points, all of a sudden, I'll finish with this.

A good litmus test to me, that they're finding value from the call, and this is a leaning indicator, but they'll try to extend the call.

They'll be like, hey, can you stay on for like five, five, ten, fifteen more minutes because they want an expert.

They're not the expert.

They haven't studied, but they've never gotten one.

So once they realize that you can be that value piece of like, the difference isn't necessarily the quality of a product.

The difference is how do I use that product and which product do I use?

My sister had someone come into the ER and she had limited down to two things.

It's either a blood clot or an aortic dissection.

The problem with that is aortic dissection is you're hemorrhaging blood in your heart.

So the solution is a blood thickener.

A blood clot, the solution is a blood thinner.

So a solution is only a solution if it actually solves the problem.

So she was like, if I prescribe the wrong thing right now, if I give her something that thickens her blood and it's a blood clot, she's dead.

Within the next 30 minutes, so I know that's grave, but I'm like, sellers, that's the situation that you're in.

And it can mean the difference between someone keeping their job and not keeping their job, is you asking the right amount of questions to diagnose the correct things and prescribe the right things.

It can mean the difference between them getting promoted or getting fired tomorrow, tomorrow based on those questions.

Right.

And so, so I would, I love that.

And I also love the two things, the mention once again of Topo, I really appreciate it.

I loved the research.

Big Topo plug.

I like it, but I love the data.

I really loved your data, Craig.

I was like, Topo just came out of her apartment.

I know, man.

Here we are.

Oh man, that's awesome.

Those were the days.

And then, by the way, the other thing is you mentioned haircut again, and I wonder if that was a slip because you can't help but wonder if I need a haircut.

I'm French now, so I'm going to move to the next question.

Okay, but like the, if I'm on the 30 minute call and I've done, so I'm going to work backwards.

I love what you're saying that we can, that was, that makes total sense to me and is doable.

It requires some resource, but it's doable.

But am I in that 30 minute call, if I see the metrics gaps, what's the next step either on that call or on the next one?

Am I as a seller, because what you're talking about is real diagnosis, which in many cases is, again, I'm just going with, it's hard.

If you look at standard sales enablement stuff, it's, I'm not sure it gets to where you're trying to go.

And so like, how do, you know, I just want to sort of dig in on that part of either the call or the sales process.

Like after I've been through that, like what, what would be the next step?

What does that look like?

Yeah.

So basically the, the discovery call should always be removed from the demo, in my opinion.

And that might seem trite, but you can't do both in the same call.

And when I hear people say that they can, you know, I'm like, and, and sometimes the feedback will be like, oh, well, a buyer wants this.

I'm like, I find that until you start asking the questions and finding the things they didn't know.

And then the buyer goes down that rabbit hole and they want that instead based on what they know about normal sellers.

Yes, they just want to see the demo and they want pricing, you know, honestly.

But I'm like, that's an order taker and there are faster ways simply put to take orders.

You can have a VP of product, basically do a demo and put it on the site and put on pricing and you can speed it up probably for X year conversion.

So to answer your question, usually the second call is where I'm going into and I don't quote unquote challenge them, meaning usually I don't even have to like, this sounds bad.

Usually I don't even have to I just go into here are the things that you know, like basically the problem based on what I know of what we're going to solve your industry averages, here's where you tack up.

This is from what I what I understand we need to solve and solve for.

Let me go into the different pieces of product they basically can solve for that.

But essentially, I remove one call from the other but a couple of pieces that can buy you over into the next call.

First of all, I look for two or three pieces of candy, so to speak, that I can give them in the first call, meaning I'm like, so how many meetings you booking on average and they're like, oh, we're terrible and our open rate is terrible.

And like, what do you mean by terrible?

They're like, our open rate is 35%.

And like, well, actually, given industry average, your open rate is quite high.

Now, there's a lot of things we can do about it.

But industry average is 15 to 25.

So you're actually, respectively speaking, doing quite well.

All right, so really, really?

So I like I try to hand them a couple of pieces of candy, they'll be like, our discovery conversion is really bad.

I'm like, well, what do you mean by really bad and close one?

I'm like, well, first of all, what's your definition of an opportunity?

Is it banned?

Is something subjective?

And what's the conversion into close one?

Because it's always subjective and all over the place.

We like, yeah, so the AE says whether they want to accept it or not.

I'm like, what's the average clip between when they accept it and then when they close one it?

They're like, well, it varies from AE to AE.

I'm like, how big is the lag?

They're like 5% to 95%.

I'm like, well, you know, I usually don't say it, but I'm like, that means that you have no data, essentially.

But point being, they'll say like, our conversion is actually really bad, it's 15% or our conversion is actually really, really good.

It's 35%.

I'm like, well, industry average for outbound is 6% in the close one.

Industry average for inbound is 35%.

So people falsely hybrid and they say it's 20.

So when someone says they're god of conversion and it's 30% and we've just gone into they aren't going outbound, I'm like, actually, against the industry, you're actually quite low.

But if you are going outbound and there are 9% conversion, I'm like, actually, according to the industry, you're quite high.

Now a number of different things that we can do about that.

But I try to give them several pieces of candy within the discovery call itself.

And then at the end, you know, I'm like, okay, so I have one question.

Will you give me another call?

They're like, yeah, I'll give you another call.

And I'm like, okay, so this we're going to go into on that call.

But if nothing else, if you decide to ghost me, and you never want to talk to me again, I would blink if I were you.

And I try to give them one tip that has it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have to do anything with me that I'm like, they're just seeing value is value is value, anything that can help them in their role.

So I'm like, if I were you, if you could just get the SDRs to shift the time of day that they're calling from, you know, Monday and Tuesday morning to Thursday and Friday afternoon, you'll usually see the biggest results.

Or a lot of times I'll prep a deck of like, you mentioned that you have 22% open rate.

And industry like if you have anything less than a 50%, you have a deliverability problem.

Do you have a custom tracking link set up?

They're like, what's that?

I'm like, so the answer is no.

You need to get some tracking link set up, look into DKEM, SPF, DMARC, you know, I'll send over a couple of articles.

Here are some of the words to stay away from.

No more than 50 emails per day.

Don't send them all at the same time.

Don't send them at equidistant times and subject lines can't be the same.

Otherwise, they're metricing for non-human behavior.

So if you send out 50 emails that all have the same exact subject line, they're going to say, this is non-human behavior, they're going to hit you on deliverability.

So we can talk about quality and training the team and blah, blah, blah.

The reality is the quality is only a piece of it.

If a tree fell in the forest, no one was around to hear it.

It did actually fall.

So if you sent the email but didn't even get it in the inbox, did you even actually send it?

So I'm like, I'm going to send you a deck and I'm going to send you a couple links on DKIM and DMARC.

So I would do those whether you work with me or not.

But either way, I'll see you Thursday at 2.

And I have never had someone drop off.

I think that they so far, I've been lucky, you know, but so far, I the two sets that I don't know if I should be proud, whatever.

I haven't lost a competitive deal today.

And I have never had a drop off of first, first to second call.

And you got to keep in mind, and then I'm going to stop talking.

I'm going up against industry titans.

People have been in the industry for 60 years, have thousands of employees.

If I were to talk about my case studies, or how credible I am, or metrics, or the assets that I would get smoked in every single last deal, but I didn't have that option.

I'm like, I just simply have to out learn my competitors and then out learn my buyer for my buyer's sake about what's going on with them.

So even if this product hypothetically has more gizmos, if it's the wrong gizmo for me to be using, then it's not going to help me at all.

It's probably going to hurt me.

And if nothing else, it's going to waste my money.

So even though this looks a little bit more shiny, I'm going to bank on that this girl because of her nerdy research, whatever it is, might be able to help me diagnose a couple things for me that I don't know.

So if I were a seller, I'd say the one tip that I can give you is research your buyer every single week for at least 15 minutes, learn a couple new things about your buyer.

But if nothing else, their metrics and industry averages, and all of a sudden organically, you'll start to see your buyer start to open up because they know that your agenda is the same as theirs, which is solve their problem and make their world better.

That is amazing.

I love that tactic so much.

Like that is going to be the big soundbite.

I'd say coming off this is like that tactic between the first and the second call is unbelievably great.

And it's funny because the thing that that I find a lot of times when speaking to experts like yourself is like it's hard as a buyer to pinpoint the things that I love about sellers, but it's that type of selling tactics where it's like, hey, you know, maybe you never buy from me, but let me just tell you one thing that you should do differently.

You don't have to buy my software, you don't have to buy my service in order to do that.

If you made this one tweak, I bet you get like really good results.

And when that's true, and it almost always is, I'm like, oh, I got to buy from this person because they know my space so well.

They know my problem so well.

I'm like chalk it up to a girl who grew up and knew she was unlikable.

Right?

I spent a lot of lenses reading books, but I'm like, you know, Craig, you're like, hey, thanks for the topo research.

And I'm like, I actually used you, meaning I needed your stuff.

I needed data.

I needed to know how many calls were being made per day and how many emails were being sent per day.

And what was the average open rate?

What was the average reply rate?

Because I needed it to help my buyer.

And if you put all that stuff aside and you just want to be selfish, I'm like, I need to smoke my competitors.

Do my competitors know all that data?

We all say that we're there to help the buyer until I see ever 1000s and 1000s of people loading to an injection handling webinar about how to make them feel hurt so they can open up so you can close them.

And I'm like, y'all, there is a problem.

There is a very big problem with our agenda.

My agenda shouldn't be to challenge them.

My agenda shouldn't be to make them think in a certain way or feel better.

My agenda is to make them better.

You don't need to detach from the outcome.

You just need to change your outcome.

Then you get the questions of like, what keeps you up at night?

What's your priorities in 2020?

We all know and hate your debt.

If I say what's the impact to you, you're dead.

If I say what's the root cause of your death?

And I'm like, I need to shift that agenda, shift that outcome to diagnosing the things that they don't know about.

That you can be as aggressive as you want.

You can ask as many questions as you want.

They can be closed-ended questions.

I heard someone say the other day, they're like, don't ask a closed-ended question on a cold call because then the buyer answers yes or no or whatever, and then you're dead.

You have nowhere to go.

And I'm like, if you wanted to, the place you were trying to go was to get them to think in a certain way, I'll agree with you.

But if you're a place to diagnose, if I'm like, what's your open rate?

And they say 20%.

It was a piece of data that I needed.

It doesn't matter if it was closed-ended.

Where I was going is diagnosing.

So I'm like, that opens up the path of like, oh, that is a problem or that's not a problem.

Whether they thought it, knew it, you know, came to terms with it or not.

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.

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