The Transaction

Matt, do you know the story of Dave Brock being an advisor to some rap website?

Have you heard this yet?

No, but I'm excited.

Yeah, but listen, so Dave Brock is the dude, so like I used to call this guy for everything, and it was like, there was no topic he couldn't tackle.

Dave, what was the site again?

It was originally a company called hiphopbattle.com, and it started out as kind of rap battle site.

They'd go around to all these communities and cities and set up battles.

But as part of it, oh, this is years ago, I was sitting early in the morning, I was flying to Prague to do a keynote speech, and I'm sitting in Skippal changing planes, and there are these, this group of guys kind of struggling saying, are we on the right plane and so on and so forth.

So I try and help them, and it turns out it's part of Wu-Tang.

They're going to Prague for a concert.

So we talked and all that, and I said, hey, I'm on the board of this company, and they said, oh, we've been trying to do something with them.

And I said, oh, here's the CEO's private number.

Well, we get to Prague, and we're in baggage claim, and they said, hey, what are you doing this evening?

And they sent a limo over for me, and I go and I get backstage to this concert.

And so I'm trying to stand backstage looking cool in this whole thing.

It was really fun.

I met a lot of really interesting people and had a good time with that company.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to Meddpicc, 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 we've been really excited to have you on.

Matt's heard, Matt knows you, but before, like, Dave's been a mentor to me, frankly, for years.

I've always been able to go to him and get amazing advice and stories like we just had.

And you know, it's funny because, like, I've always known him as one of the best sales go-to-market consultants out there in the market.

He's the author of a really good book, Sales Manager Survival Guide, that everyone should read.

It's a framework that allows you to think about sales management in the right way.

He's, I hate this word, but he is a thought leader.

He's some of the best writing out there.

Yes, I know.

It's crazy to think that he has thoughts and he's one of the best guys in the game.

So I'm just been really excited to finally have today's guest on The Transaction, Dave Brock.

Further, thank you for that, Craig.

But if it isn't enough proof to you, Craig is not as smart as he looks in this narrative.

Yeah, Matt knows that.

So, all right, here's how we like to start, Dave.

What is something or some things that the market thinks they're doing right?

That could be approaches, best practices, methodologies, you name it.

And they're actually wrong.

And they should be thinking about it a different way.

So, I think there may be two to three things that I think really stand out to me that we really get wrong.

Kind of the first thing is our whole approach to customer engagement and prospecting in our whole approach around win rates is just so fraud.

So, you start looking at the data, we right now are accepting 15% to 20% win rates as the laws of nature.

And that's absolutely unacceptable.

I've forgotten what the data is, but maybe two to four years ago, the number of touches that we had to make to get a response was somewhere in the 200 to 400 range, not somewhere in the 1000 to 1500 range.

And probably in two years, it'll be 4000 range.

And so what we're doing is we're saying, okay, those are laws of nature.

You know, I have AI that can ramp up my outreaches, you know, and I can do the math.

You know, if I have a 20% win rate, I know what I have to do in top of funnel and pipeline and all that.

And let's go to it.

And those are just two of the biggest flaws.

I never see any conversation that says, what might we change?

How do we do things differently?

So that's one issue.

I think the second one that I look at, and it's related to the third one, is we get involved much too late in the buying cycle.

The customer has done all the heavy lifting.

And by the time they talk to us, we're comparing tier three products.

Does your product do this?

And can I get it cheaper than the other products?

And so we get engaged at a point where we have very, very little influence over what the customer is trying to do.

And then the third piece, which is a little bit related, is we tend to talk about ourselves and pitch our products rather than talk to the customer about what they're trying to do and what their problem is.

And the data behind that shows that that's probably the least efficient and least effective way to engage the customer.

So those are kind of the three biggies that I tend to whine a lot about in my posts and in other kinds of conversations.

So am I warm shit?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

I mean, I'm in market and I see all that.

The thing I'm really curious about is I'd love to jump on point number three, where you talk about, you know, we tend to sell product more and that's a losing proposition based upon data.

What data are you utilizing to come up with that as your thought and what you would lead with?

A lot of it comes from some kind of age old Gartner data.

And then some of it comes from data that we see in our own practice right now.

So we spend a lot of time and this is primarily focused on very complex buying processes.

What we do is we talk to people about business focused selling.

We said, rather than go in and pitch our products, why don't we go in and talk to the customer about what they care about?

And so we set this ground rule.

We cannot talk to the customer about the product even if they ask us.

And so what the conversations are is what is it that you're trying to do?

Why are you trying to do it?

Who should be involved?

What should we be looking at?

What are the issues around?

What are the risks?

Blah, blah, blah.

And we go in conversations like that to really help the customer understand what they're trying to do and at some point to say, how can you help us?

And also the data we see from that is we see, for instance, one client had very good win rates.

They had 50% win rates.

Their win rates are now up to 82%.

Their average deal sizes have gone from 10,000 to 1.5 million.

And no decisions made have gone down by 20%.

And then the most kind of counterintuitive thing is sales cycles have gone down by 30 to 40%.

And we see this consistently in time after time is what we're really doing is cutting down to the real issues the customer is concerned about and not wasting their or our time on other issues until it's appropriate for them to be considering those things.

The tricky part about that is maintaining control over a sales cycle when it feels like you're ceding control to the prospect.

It creates the perception that the buyer is in control of the sales cycle when in reality, actually the sales rep is still in control of the sales cycle.

Because if you're leaning into, tell me what you're trying to solve for, tell me what you need in order to be successful, it does encourage the buyer to be, I think, a little bit more frank, more forthright, more revealing of what the buying process is going to look like, how they're going to assess the value of your solution, how they're going to determine if your solution can solve their problem.

And yet the salesperson must maintain control, otherwise, you know, it goes nowhere.

So to me, that feels like you're the place where in kind of modern SaaS selling, a salesperson might feel like, ooh, I'm giving too much control over the buyer, and then they're going to dictate timelines and price and things like that.

How does a seller stay in control in that situation?

Well, I kind of agree and disagree.

Are we ever really in control?

The customer will and does dictate those things unless we have a collaborative process that we're agreeing to do to walk through.

So one is, I think the assumption that we are in control of the process is a fraud assumption.

The customer ultimately is in control of what they're doing.

The problem is they don't know what they're doing.

Yeah.

And so how do we help the customer understand what the buying process should be?

How do we help them go through and say, based on our experience of working with hundreds and thousands of organizations in the past, here is what we've seen people do to successfully navigate.

Here are the questions they should be asking themselves.

Here are the things they should be considering.

Here are the people they should be getting involved in the process.

Here are the people that they need to convince to get support and so on and so forth.

So what we do is we help the customer build and navigate the process.

Again, they don't know what they're doing, but they'll do what they don't know and screw things up.

And that's why sales cycles end up being so long, or that's why no decisions made are at around 60%.

They simply don't know what they're doing.

And we most of the time don't help them because all we're focused on is convincing them to buy our product.

So we're not meeting at the critical issue, at the critical point that allows them to make progress through their buying cycle.

So if you were talking to a sales rep today and sort of answering those tough questions about how we make the prospect feel like they're in control by also kind of steering the ship of this is what a buying process should look like, what are some of the things that you would recommend to a seller to do, sort of answering some of your own questions that you were postulating earlier, which were like, how do we assess value?

Who should we be talking to?

What are the metrics that you're hoping to affect?

What is the right way to infer all that in a sales cycle?

So I think one is implicit in some of the conversation as we get into a combative process with the customer where what we really need to be is in collaborative conversation.

We're trying to achieve the same goal, which is to say, we want you to be successful because only when you're successful at reaching end of job on this process, do we get a purchase order.

So how do we leverage that success?

And again, what we as sellers tend to do is we tend to say, we focus on explaining more about our product and what our product does.

Where unless they're at the very end of their buying cycle where they've done all the heavy lifting themselves, they don't know what they should be looking at.

So what we have to do is guide them through and help them navigate through thoroughly understanding their problem and all the aspects around it.

You know, you look at it and just as a question, how many organizations do you know that offer deep business and financial acumen training?

Well, not a lot.

Not a lot.

And so how are we expected, unless we train our people in what the customer cares about, how are we going to have those collaborative conversations?

How are we going to help them navigate that process?

You know, I look at this thing.

I spend a lot of time talking to Matt and Ted.

And, you know, I look at this lost opportunity, 60% of committed buying decisions, where they're funded, 60% of them end in no decision made.

Look at that waste.

The customer spends a lot of time.

We spend a lot of time trying to sell them.

And at the end of the day, they don't make a decision.

You know, what if we started asking ourselves questions of how do we cut that in half?

I have one client in Australia where the CRO actually went, after we went through some discussions on this, he went through and created a new kind of metric to say, how are we going to cut no decisions made by 15%?

At the end of the year, they cut it by 10%, but they were making huge progress.

So we struggle to achieve our numbers, but we have all the stuff in front of us to be able to achieve our numbers, but we aren't exploiting it correctly.

So for instance, we don't control no decision made.

We accept 15% to 20% won rates.

When, you know, I used to fire people when they had less than 30% won rates.

We look at all these things, we struggle for opportunity when we're squandering the opportunity that we already have.

So on, you know, I've always struggled with business acumen training, Dave.

Like, because I get it, you know, well, no.

Are you laughing because I said I have always struggled?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

No, but because I understand like the you know, if you read a book, a sales book, there's these sort of groupings of folks.

You have the best sales reps who have the business acumen and can listen to a buyer and co-create or, you know, craft a solution together.

Then we've got folks that know how to do discovery.

They know that because there's a list.

They can ask questions, but they have no idea what to do with it.

And it's really annoying and uncomfortable.

That's actually worse than anything where they ask a question and then you're like, is that what you just heard?

And then we have a whole crew who don't know either.

So I understand we have to help them be able to, when they're having those conversations with the buyer, be able to have an understanding of business, to be able to translate that into a business conversation.

And so I've always understood that we have to help with sort of business acumen training.

And by the way, Matt and I live in SAS, like a mid-market SAS rep is 30 something years old, like they're young and they don't know.

And so yeah, they need to understand how businesses work and how business works.

But like I don't, the training for that and to help them with that, that I struggle with making like really specific recommendations there.

Like what would you tell someone if they understand, listen to this podcast, they're like, we need better business acumen.

Like what would you tell them to do?

So the first thing is really understanding your customer.

So let me tell you about an experiment that we just completed.

You know Howard Dover at UT Dallas.

So for the last two semesters, with his undergraduate digital prospect in class, we've run an experiment.

We've created something, there's something I created called the Brock Questionnaire.

And it's modeled after the Colbert Questionnaire.

And if you don't know the Colbert Questionnaire, go to YouTube.

It's a hilarious, but actually a very insightful kind of comedy interview that Stephen Colbert does.

So I created this questionnaire that's, and it's something that we've been doing informally for years with our clients that says, do you really understand your customer's job?

You know, I used to go to software companies, you sell to the CIO.

What's the CIO do?

Well, he manages IT.

Well, what's that mean?

When I get two or three levels deep, they don't know how to go any further.

So with Howard's class, I gave them a set of 15 questions that completely characterize the role.

They called CROs of Fortune 500 companies, and they called CROs of Russell 2000 companies.

And they had interviews.

Now, not everybody accepted the interview.

When I visited them last week and they did their final reports, they were disappointed.

They said, well, our close rates on this were only about 50%.

I said, well, that's pretty cool.

SaaS close rates are 15% to 20%, so you're doing much better.

And they said our conversion from prospecting was only about 30%.

And I said, well, conversion rates in SaaS is you'll be disappointed when you get your jobs.

But what they did is they did these interviews, and the feedback from the customers was nobody has ever asked me those questions before, number one.

And so they were really interested in these conversations because they knew these people were going to try and sell them something.

But all they talked about was I want to understand you and your job and what you need to be successful.

And so these were 30-minute interviews.

And then they went and tried to sell them stuff.

And they, you know, I think what they did is they doubled their performance over previous years.

The other thing is the CROs, a lot of them contacted me because they knew this Brock questionnaire thing.

They said, one, nobody has ever had this conversation with me before and it was a fun conversation.

Two, it caused me to reflect and think about issues that I really hadn't been paying attention to.

So it starts with something as simple as let me talk to the customer about who they are, what they do, what their concerns are, what causes them to be successful and so on and so forth, and then let me take that information and think about it and say, how can I help this person?

And so here we have undergraduates who haven't really sold before doing this and producing tremendous results.

So it's as simple as having those conversations.

There are other things you can do that train them.

You know, if we sell to technology accounts, if we sell to industrial product accounts, if we sell to financial services or whatever, that you can deepen the business acumen and all, but it's not that difficult.

And so, you know, just training people and saying, how do I understand what businesses are?

How do I understand who the key personas in my prospects are?

And what they do, now I can start having conversations that are interesting to them.

By the way, I just, while you were talking, I looked at the Colbert question, Ert, is that?

Correct.

So is it number one best sandwich?

Is that the first one?

Yeah, yeah, see, it's a comedy routine.

He goes through things.

What's the best sandwich?

Have you ever asked somebody for an autograph?

What number am I thinking of?

So there's a lot of comedy things, but there are also some interesting questions, like what five words would you want to be remembered by?

And what's interesting is less the questionnaire, the questions, but more the conversation you get into with each question.

And that's what these students were finding out, is the questions were a starting point for a conversation where they could really deeply understand the customer.

The other magic piece to that was, each one of them did eight interviews.

So what they needed to do was prospect far beyond that.

But now they said, I know what a CRO in retail financial services cares about because I talk to these two or three people.

So now I can leverage those lessons in every CRO of retail financial services I talk to.

Now probably be 85% on target.

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Okay.

So that makes total sense.

By the way, the best question on this, those were, you picked the good ones.

What do you think happens when we die is number six.

Yeah.

Actually, just for everyone's enjoyment.

So number one is best sandwich.

Number two is what's one thing you own that you should really throw out?

Matt, please answer that one.

We'll come back to you.

What is the scariest animal?

Apples or oranges?

Interesting.

Have you ever asked someone for their autograph that Dave brought that one up?

And I have, by the way.

What do you think happens when we die?

Favorite action movie?

Die Hard.

Favorite smell?

That's, I'll have to dig in on that one.

Least favorite smell?

I think we know the answer to that one.

Exercise period worth it, which is amazing.

Flat or sparkling?

Most used app on your phone?

You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life.

What is it?

What number am I thinking of?

Two, obviously.

Describe the rest of your life in five words.

It's amazing.

And so you took that, you created the Brock questionnaire.

Yeah, and it's a comedy routine, but what's interesting is what you get into in those conversations, as silly as some of those questions are.

Mine is I don't have the humor and cleverness that Stephen Colbert has, but it's really, you know, tell me about what your role is.

Tell me who you depend on to do your job.

Who depends on you?

Tell me how you're measured.

What are the biggest issues you do?

How do you spend your day?

Things like that, so that we can really kind of understand, this is what these people are trying to do.

This is the reality of their time and how they spend their time and what they do.

And now that I have that, I have a pretty good understanding of them.

And I go back and we instructed the salespeople at UTD, go back and think where your leverage points, what is what you're selling?

How can that help them based on what you've learned?

That's awesome.

I love that.

So by the way, as you were talking, there was one thing I noticed.

The vertical SaaS sales teams had this distinct advantage that they had to live and breathe in industry all day.

And it was like their ability to get the business acumen, like Procore, right?

They were construction, construction, construction.

And at a certain point, I remember Dennis, who was the CRO, said, you're going in the field every month, right?

And that was to close business, right?

That wasn't like some nice thing to go do.

That was because it was better.

But by doing that and putting a hard hat on and going on construction sites and meeting these folks and spending time with them, sales reps over time and faster than, I mean, really, I don't have a number on it.

But basically, if you went in the field over your first quarter and you put the hard hat on and you went and had those conversations, in one quarter, you had the acumen to talk to that market in a way that you couldn't.

And I don't know if you guys remember this.

I think I brought it up before, but one of my favorite stories, this was like marketing props, 2008.

And they had this guy who was the former CMO of Motorola Rugged Wireless.

And he was brought in to go make changes there.

And one of the things that he did was he basically said, they sold to first responders.

And he said, look, everyone here in this organization is going to go out in the field, and you are going to spend time with first responders.

And that was everyone, product, you name it.

And he did all of these little things.

He put pictures of first responders all through the walls.

He was like, we are going to live and breathe these folks.

And he wasn't talking about his marketing campaigns.

He wasn't talking about how sales sold.

He was talking about just this inundation of information on the buyers that allowed for the kind of acumen to be able to be more successful as a developer of product, as a marketer, as a salesperson or whatever.

It's so relatively simple to do that.

And part of this too is not only understanding their jobs, their industries and what they do, but it's also understanding the language that they use.

If you look at the Procore guys, when they go out and talk to customers, there's certain language that they use because that's what you use in construction industries.

I remember, and this goes back sometime around the time fire was invented.

Yeah, Dave was around for that.

I managed a very large group selling manufacturing solutions to manufacturers for IBM.

I remember we had a conversation.

We got the top design engineers for GGM to sit down with us and talk about our design solutions.

Some of my specialists started talking about, we can help you design your cars to be more aerodynamic.

At that moment, they stopped the meeting and said, you clearly don't understand car automobile design.

Come back to us when you understand it.

What happened was aerodynamics are important in automotive design, but they use different words to describe aerodynamics.

It's called photo lines.

Because we weren't using their terminology, they wanted to make a point to us that said, you don't understand our business.

Aerodynamics was important when we talked to Boeing and all those kinds of customers.

But when we talked to car manufacturers, we had to talk about the same contact, same thing, but use different language to establish our credibility and establish our understanding.

These are just dirt simple kinds of things, but we never talk about it.

As a result, we never connect as effectively with the customer as we should.

When we do this, I go back to when you start talking to the customer in a collaborative way, when you connect with them about what they care about, win rates skyrocket, no decisions made, promise, average deal values goes up and sales cycles go down, and then guess what?

Retention and renewal goes up because you keep continuing those conversations.

So I just go crazy when I see what we're doing in SaaS selling and say, you know, it's so easy to change our win rates.

It's so easy to change our average deal value.

It's so easy to do these things, but we never do it.

I was thinking about when we had Ted Purcell and we asked him like, what's that thing that, you know, same question we asked in the start, which is hilarious.

I just did the question 30 minutes ago and I already forgot how we asked that.

But he said that we assume that the buyer knows how to buy and actually they don't.

Yeah.

And that's what Dave said earlier.

And that enablement is amazing.

I just thought of this amazing story, you guys.

Like it was God, it was pride.

It's amazing how time flies.

But 10, 12 years ago, it was an open source company selling a gnarly prize like Scala or something like early before.

And it was like there was only the best were using it.

You know, Facebook, et cetera.

And so the CEO, Mark Brewer, who's like an ex-CRO, he said, look, here is...

So he created this guide to how to buy, you know, how to buy, how buyers have to buy this stuff because it's too hard.

They basically had this problem.

They'd go in and a developer would be like, ooh, Scala, that's great.

Hold on, let me go find out.

Then you go and get shot down because it was too much change management.

So like he said, well, look, like here's how like the best buyers buy it.

Here's what we think they should do.

His examples was like, don't go directly to the boss.

Not yet.

Like after you talk, go do this.

So they created it for the sales guys.

Then what they realized was that it was actually an enablement tool that they should give to the buyer.

It was amazing.

It became the key to getting deals done.

It was like this was an enablement tool.

They actually turned around and started to give it to the people because their interest was starting on a low level.

It was the reality.

How do we get through all these steps?

They would actually give that to the buyer to help them make the right moves because these guys who had interests were making moves that were getting deals killed or worse.

That was one of the reasons why opportunities were staying open so long and falling off was because they had someone who was really interested, but they didn't know how to get it done and they were getting shot down left and right because they weren't enabled.

Anyway, I thought of that, Dave.

We've seen bunches of organizations do this, but also you go back to, remember the old Gartner spaghetti diagram?

That's the biggest demonstration that customers don't know how to buy.

They wander, they change their minds, they go back and forth, start and stop, shift and all those kinds of things.

And all we're doing is we're leveraging, here's how people have organized themselves on similar kinds of projects.

Here's how they develop a project plan.

Here's how they step through this.

Let me help you navigate this process.

So rather than doing all that wandering, starting and stopping, we're helping them go on this, their buying journey in a more purposeful, more focused way.

And that's how we separate, how we reduce buying cycles.

I completely agree.

There have been times when I've been buying software where a sales rep will give me kind of a timeline of how to buy, right?

Like today we're doing this thing.

Most of our customers within four days will come back and we'll have a conversation on this topic, or I'll demonstrate value this way, or if you're in a trial that should be enough time for you to determine these three things.

Then from there, we're going to do this.

Then from there, we're going to do this.

And what I will say as a buyer, anytime I'm buying something I've never bought before, I'm always concerned it's going to be expensive, time consuming, and I'll end up buying the thing that is wrong because I didn't know how to evaluate it.

And I think a lot of sales reps, like, they take this stuff for granted, but it's like, in your slide deck, if you had a timeline of how to buy a thing, and actually we did this at Marketo for a while, and the timeline at Marketo, because we sold a lot to SMB, was like two weeks.

And you know what?

Almost every deal closed within two weeks.

Because we set the parameters, the buyer knew what to expect.

The buyer was like, great, I'm going to be through this in two weeks.

I thought this would take six to ten or something like that.

They're like, this is efficient, I like this.

Because to Ted's point and to the point that Dave was making earlier, it's like people just don't know how to buy.

They don't know how to buy.

And we take for granted that they do.

And we ask questions in sales cycles like, well, what do you want to do next?

And as a buyer, when I hear what do I want to do next, I tell you what I want to do next.

I want to close the laptop.

I want to go hang out with my kids.

I want to watch the Timberwolves play the Nuggets.

That's what I want to do.

I don't know.

You tell me what I should do.

Like, I'd actually appreciate you putting your neck out here.

Yeah.

And you highlighted something.

A few years ago, we were working with this company that said sold DevOps solutions and all that kind of thing.

And it's part of the classic thing you do in the marketplace, is you say, here, 30-day trial period.

And people would sign up for these trial licenses and stuff.

And what that would do is it would trigger the inside sales team to call and say, oh, you're interested in buying this software.

You signed up for a trial.

Tell me your decision criteria.

Tell me your needs and so on and so forth.

And their conversion rates on those ended up being like less than 10%.

So what we did is we changed the question.

They said, I noticed you signed up for a trial.

What are you trying to learn in that trial?

And you know how 30-day trials work is people sign up for it.

They ignore it until day 29.

Then they send you an email.

Can you extend it?

Yeah, right.

And so on.

So nothing happened.

So what we did is we focused on we want to create this successful trial experience.

So the first conversation is, what do you want to accomplish?

And then we started saying, here's how you leverage the trial to start accomplishing those things and achieve what you're trying to do in this trial.

And you could guess that in focusing on their success in that trial, the win rates went up to, I think they went up, the conversion rates and win rates went up to over 60%.

So we tend to focus on the wrong things and not the things that are most helpful to the customer and where they are in their buying process.

First, a note, our buddy Robert Kaler has really, he does a lot of work on managing the trial in his enablement.

It's really great stuff.

He's like, here's how you do.

Many people don't scope it.

They don't say, well, what do you do when you kick off?

Like, what are you looking for?

How do you, do you have checkpoints that are related to what they're trying to solve?

What do you do at the end?

You just let them, hey, do you like it?

Great.

And like he, he sort of maps it out.

It's, it's, it's really great stuff.

So we've had a number, like I've had an, maybe not on our show, but like we've had a number of conversations that I think is real, which is particularly in our world, SaaS and software and tech, that the buyer is more, wants to see the product faster.

Right.

And so like we're seeing like ratios of SCs and SCs to sales reps.

Like it's like almost one to one because of the buyers wants to jump into product early.

Or you see this whole movement around demo automation, like can we show them things earlier?

So with your approach, which is we can't talk product until we've had the business conversation.

Is that in conflict with how buyers today want to engage and look at products?

I think what that's showing is we're getting, we're engaging them very, very late in their buying cycle.

Because if they want to, if they're to the point where we want to see product, they've done all the heavy lifting beforehand to figure out what are they trying to do?

Why are they trying to do that?

All that sort of stuff.

We know what we want to do.

We know how to do it.

We know three products can do this.

So now I want to call these people and see their product.

But the problem is, did they get to that point correctly?

Did they get to that point considering all the things that they really should have considered?

So I think what you're describing, Craig, is the problem that we have in getting engaged far too late.

If we get engaged earlier, one is we help them become much more successful in what they're doing, two is we drive a bias towards us, and three is we help them get through the process much more effectively, much more efficiently.

So I would argue that we need to figure out how to engage them earlier in the process and not wait till they've gotten to the point where I just want to see the product.

Because I've figured out everything I need to do.

All I want to do is see if your product does what I need to do.

But in that, so let's just take that use case, which is God willing, for many of the companies out there that have people that want to buy the product.

So what would you tell a sales rep to do there when they come in and they're at the stage where they think they know what they're doing?

I know we're getting to them too late, but we're in the deal.

We still want to do, we still want to be a business.

We want to have a business focused conversation and craft a solution together.

So what would you tell a sales rep to do there?

So I would kind of say, I recognize that you're anxious to see the product and so on, but let's take 15 minutes and let me really understand how you got to this point, what you're trying to do and have them kind of go back and then use that to see, understand the underlying problems that they're trying to do, the underlying issues that they're trying to do and so on.

And maybe say, did you consider this in your evaluation?

Have you thought of this?

Did you look at these things?

And in those kinds of things, one is in that conversation, you learn very important things to talk about when you do show them the product that are really relevant to them.

Two is you may actually say, you missed some really important stuff.

Have you thought about these things?

Do you understand this?

Do you understand what these mean?

And to get things to be reconsidered.

Back about 20 years ago, we were doing something with a major company.

And we went in and did some wind loss analysis and disinvolved interviews with customers and so on and that kind of thing.

And what we found is the degree to which we're out of sync with where the customer is in their buying process is every stage we're out of sync, our probability of winning goes down by 17 to 20%.

So when a customer calls us and says, I'm at the point where I want to see your product, I want to understand your product, they've gone through their discovery needs, initial assessment and so on and so forth.

But all that information is critical to our success.

We've not done that.

So what we tend to do is we jump to where the customer is and we're lacking a huge amount of knowledge.

So you think of if I have a discovery phase, a proposal phase, a demonstration phase, I'm two stages out, already I've decreased my probability of winning by 40%.

I have to know that stuff as a salesperson to conduct that demonstration of the software very, very effectively.

So we can't skip those steps.

We have to figure out a way to get that information so we can present the demo in a relevant context.

So we have to say, hey, give me 15 minutes, give me a half an hour.

I want to understand how you got to this point, why you've made the choices you've had, and maybe discuss whether you've omitted something.

There might be a different way of looking at these things.

That's awesome.

So Dave, you've been around forever.

My favorite thing are your stories.

By the way, I didn't mean the been around forever thing.

I did help invent FIRE.

That's right.

Well, I mean, that was a huge innovation.

Can you tell us the greatest sales story that you've ever run into?

I love amazing stories like that.

Do you have any that come to mind?

Well, there's so many of them that are interesting.

I'll tell you one that kind of relates to this.

And it's a major deal.

I was working with a very, very large software company selling supply chain solutions.

They had been working for a couple of years.

They'd actually gotten approval from the CIO for their solution, but they could never get it approved by the corporate executives.

And it happened to be in grocery.

And so I did a little bit of research and I said, can you set up a call for me with the CFO?

This is a company that's a hundred billion dollars in revenue.

And they, you know, by this time, they were kind of doing what I call it pissing on the Asian's call.

We can expect, I mean, we aren't going to get this deal.

So we might as well inflict a lot on these guys.

So I went in and met with the CFO.

And, you know, after we went through all the, you know, greetings type stuff, I said, do you realize you're paying your suppliers $13 billion a year to put stuff in green dumpsters behind your stores?

And he looked at me and he said, how do you come up with that number?

And I said, well, there's some data and so on and so forth.

I went through that and he went up to the whiteboard.

He said, well, you don't know what I know.

I said, no, I don't.

And so he started going through some calculations.

He said, no, it's not $13 billion, Dave, as I started looking at what you said and all that, it's $22 billion.

How can you help us?

And so within a 45-minute conversation, by focusing on what was critical to their success, is we were able to turn this thing loose.

And within a couple of weeks, they had assigned approval on this thing.

And so again, it's an example of how do we understand their business, how do we understand their business impact, and so on.

This sales team, a very sophisticated sales team, was focusing on the CIO and their problem, which was supply chain management issues.

But they weren't focusing on the problem that they were really solving, which was reducing waste of $22 billion.

Wow.

By the way, the sending Dave in to piss on the ashes and then you coming out with the real value to what they were selling, that's the header there.

That's amazing.

Well, Dave, I really appreciate this and our listeners will too.

And thank you for all the stories and all the anecdotes there.

That's like what makes The Transaction.

And so really appreciate you coming on and dropping your bombs, as we like to say.

Amazing.

Well, it's always fun getting into conversations with you guys.

So I really appreciate the invitation.

Thanks so much.

Yeah, thank you.

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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