The Transaction

TT - 040 - Brent Adamson
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Brent Adamson: [00:00:00] the single biggest opportunity I think we're all walking right past today is not solving for customers confidence in us, but solving for customers confidence in themselves.

if customers aren't confident in a five, six, seven figure purchase that they're going to make on behalf of their company, they're going to choose not to choose.

I think this is the challenger sale of the next 10 years. I really do.

How can I be the sales rep who shows up and engages customers in such a way where the customer says, I feel better about us. I feel better about our ability to make decisions as a result of interacting with that person. that's the way to growth.

That's the way to trust. And that's the way to win.

Craig Rosenberg: Well, um, joking aside, I think, um, uh, well, joking continue.

Sorry. Let me say it a different way. Please continue the joking as we go through everything

Matt Amundson: Are you just talking to yourself?

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, good. No! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Craig Rosenberg: We should just do a podcast where we invite people on, but then I just talk to myself.

Matt Amundson: I like

Craig Rosenberg: just like people just watching to go, what the hell?

Sam Guertin: we'll call it the transaction.

Brent Adamson: Or

we could just call

it, Craig ages gracefully. That's what we'll call it. [00:01:00] Oh,

​

Craig Rosenberg: so Brent is one of our famous guests. His claim to fame was not just being one of the co authors of the Challenger, but dude, you traveled like 200 places a year talking about that, right? I mean, I couldn't, we could not not see you, dude. And the thing was, He's such a good speaker.

If you haven't seen it, you can find stuff online with him that like it was, uh, I saw the speaking stuff before I read the book and like the book's great, but like the speaking is amazing. And then Brent, [00:02:00] uh, uh, we worked together at Gartner where he had come from CEB. He had basically started to lock in.

On, um, new concepts there and to talk about sense making, which by the way, I think, uh, is really important conversation topic as well. That was an amazing. That was my first keynote at Gartner. I saw you give. That was incredible. And now it sounds like you're off to doing new things. You can weave that in.

But like, I'm just so excited. to have the iconic Brent Adamson on

the show.

Brent Adamson: Oh, what up? Cause you're so funny. That's like, it's good to be here, guys. The um, What, what, what no one knows except for Craig, like we used to call each other on, I guess, Teams, wasn't it, Craig? And, uh, at Gartner and say, How you doing? And he'd look at me and say, How are you doing? We, we just, we just check in on each other every once in a while.

But the, um,

Craig Rosenberg: You know, my biggest worry with you, actually Matt might be able to relate, was how many Coke, uh, was [00:03:00] it Coke Zeros that you drank a

Brent Adamson: Diet Coke. Well, when the pandemic hit, I bought a fridge and put it right outside this door here and, and stocked it with Diet Coke. And then when, you know, you guys remember like in the early stages of the pandemic, no one could go anywhere. But then it finally got to the point where you could like go to the dentist for the first time in a year and a half.

Remember that? And I went to the dentist for the first time for a year and a half after stocking this fridge outside this door with Diet Coke and going through like 12 a day. And they said, you realize it's like literally dissolving your teeth. It's like, okay, that's bad. So, yeah. Yeah. It wasn't like, it wasn't like a hygiene issue.

It was literally like just pouring acid into your mouth all day long, you know what I mean? It wasn't, so I've, yeah, so I've switched to iced tea and, and I, you know, and fountain drink Diet Cokes. I, I've now made it so that I have to go get in the car and drive somewhere to get a Diet Coke and hopefully that will solve that issue.

Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: good addiction break. I love it.

Brent Adamson: yeah, there you go.

Craig Rosenberg: So, um, so Brent, the, the sort of the main, there's a main question that we have in the show, which I'm going to ask you in a sec, because the first thing I [00:04:00] learned, I keep giving Matt, I will stop giving you credit after I

Matt Amundson: No, don't stop giving me credit. Don't.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, yeah. So this is what we call the Matt Amundsen feature enhancement for 2.

1 of the transaction, which is. Uh, before we go uh, what you're a top five storyteller all time, probably out there speaking. And so we just want to hear a story of either an amazing sales heroic or not heroic, like sales transformation you saw, like from, uh, you know, from nothing to something, or a funny story about you on your travels, giving keynotes and someone, um, Throwing you for a loop or something like that.

Matt Amundson: We'll accept

either.

Craig Rosenberg: with an incredible story from you

Brent Adamson: So many. I'm like, like, so, um, if you go to Google, uh, don't do it right now, you guys, cause you're supposed to be like interacting with me right now, but everyone else is listening. Um, uh, if you, if you go to this, by the way, this is a true story. [00:05:00] What I'm about to say, if you go to Google and you Google or search engine of your choice and you search for the phrase maggots on a plane, That's right, I just said maggots on a plane.

You will find a video of people de planning an airplane in Atlanta. with maggots falling, uh, live maggots falling from the overhead compartments onto the seats. And in the background, there's a very tall, rather heavyset dude in a white shirt with hair, who I promise you is nonetheless me, uh, thinking, I'm not going to see my kids tonight because we have to get off the plane because there's, there's, there's maggots raining down upon the passengers.

That is a true story. It made national, it made national news. So there you go. You

Matt Amundson: What?

How?

Craig Rosenberg: maddening You

Brent Adamson: didn't see that coming, did you, Craig?

Craig Rosenberg: gotta be kidding

Brent Adamson: That's a true

story.

Craig Rosenberg: have did you want to follow Matt? Did you have a follow up question said maggot attack?

Brent Adamson: Where would you like to go with that?

Matt Amundson: And [00:06:00] that, ladies and gentlemen, is the transaction. We'll see you later. Later.

Craig Rosenberg: Alright, so the,

Brent Adamson: also the time, Craig, I've got video of this. This is before you joined us on our journey together. It was, I'll tell you, it was Skillsoft. It was in Orlando, on the stage, 500 people in the audience. Challenger wins. Here's a bar chart. It's a big stage. And there's, um, the, the way this particular stage was set up is the slides were at the back of the stage.

And oftentimes the slides are in like outriggers, right? They're in screens outside the stage, but this was the slides. So I'm on the stage, slides are right behind me. And I figured, well, no problem. I'm going to turn around and walk over to the slides and point out this really big bar on this bar chart that I think is really cool.

Little did I know that there was about a. 18 inch gap between the back of the stage and the screen where the slides were being projected. And you can see where this goes. I fell off the stage in front of 500 people. And I always thought if I were to fall off the stage, I'd fall off the front of the stage.

But in fact, I fell off the back. And the two things about it are funny. One, there's video, so I can, which I'm [00:07:00] happy to share because it is actually as funny as you might imagine, because I'm like, in the video, I'm in frame, and then I'm gone. I'm just like, I just disappeared straight down. But the hardest part was Craig's people that you know.

You know, like 10 of my colleagues were there selling you because they were doing a challenger engagement, the challenger training, and they're in the front two tables and they literally fell out of their chairs. They were laughing at me so hard that I couldn't get the rest of the room to come back to me and like continue on with the keynote because my colleagues were laughing their asses off at me.

And, uh, so there you go. That's, that's a good one too. That's not maggots on a plane, but that's pretty good. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: well, they're both amazing. You know, that question, Matt, is such an enhancement because we can never stop being surprised.

Matt Amundson: every, every, every show that we've started with that question, it always starts off with a bang, which is great. And I, uh, although I was instructed not to Google, uh, maggots on a plane, I did and can confirm that there

Brent Adamson: It's true, isn't it? It's like, you see, do you see me in the background? I'm the tall guy with the white hair thing or the long with the actual hair saying, I'm not getting home to my kids tonight. That's the only thing [00:08:00] I was thinking is, um,

Craig Rosenberg: You know, and I, I actually, mean, that also shows Matt's, uh, multitasking skills. Cause Matt, we couldn't tell that you were on Google at the

Matt Amundson: Oh, awesome. Yeah. Great.

Brent Adamson: By the way, can we just park at the start? Who cares about sales and marketing? Let's talk about the story for a minute, right? So I'm on this plane, and we're backing up from the gate, right? We're on the tarmac, and we're backing out, and all of a sudden, I'm, I don't like it, because before I had a lot of status, I'm in the way in the back, and this woman stands up in the aisle and starts like, Beating on her head and like acting really crazy and the flight attendants like ma'am ma'am This is an active runway.

You have to sit down and she starts yelling maggots. There's maggots And I was going what is going on and she's screaming there's maggots and that's all of a sudden someone else freaks out There's like dominoes it's like people started like this wave going through the plane people standing up and losing their minds and Also, the plane stops and and anyway, it was maggots.

Yeah, it was it

Matt Amundson: But what did it come from? I mean, I'm going to ask the question that the listeners are wanting to know the answer to now. Like What was the [00:09:00] source?

Brent Adamson: I think in some ways it almost doesn't matter, doesn't it? But apparently I, no, I'm not completely clear, but they were in the overhead department. Apparently someone had brought on some sort of spoiled meat or something in their luggage and they're over in their, in their carry on and it opened up and spilled out

Matt Amundson: Oh my the, yeah, this is a true story.

Brent Adamson: No.

Craig Rosenberg: bro, you're going to have such, uh, so many likes on your, Cut to this, this, this transaction episode,

Brent Adamson: I gotta be, I haven't told the maggots on a play story in probably 10 years. So that's, uh,

Matt Amundson: oh my god. me that,

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, man, and

Brent Adamson: you can see his eyes watching it. Horror focus, Matt,

Matt Amundson: close. I'm closing

that tab. I'm closing I took, this is why I told you not to look. Cause once you go there, you kind of got out of rabbit hole.

Oh, my god

Craig Rosenberg: mean, I'm so creeped out, man, and I'm, uh, yeah, that's amazing. Um, [00:10:00] alright, well, shall we,

Brent Adamson: Yeah. Whatever you want to talk

about.

Craig Rosenberg: question? Well, the, the question we want to ask you, Brent, is, um, Brent. Brent. What's something that the market thinks that they're doing right today? Or some things. It could be multiple.

Uh, it could be methodology, approach, tactics, etc. And they're actually wrong and they should be thinking about it different. And, and what is it or are those things and what should they be doing differently?

Brent Adamson: How much time you got? Um.

Craig Rosenberg: We have, uh, 33 minutes and 22 seconds.

Brent Adamson: then I'll pick the short list. Um. The

Craig Rosenberg: the way, I'm sorry, I gotta interrupt. Those calls that Brent talks about, he had a list of things that were driving him crazy.

Always

Brent Adamson: I've basically the last 20 years of my career have been just screaming get off my lawn to a whole bunch of heads of sales and marketing, right? So the, um, uh, so the, the, the next book is done. It was done in the sense of the manuscripts written. It's off to the publisher. Um, we are now, we are now in a waiting game until September 9 when [00:11:00] it comes out.

Um, it has a name. It's called the frame making sale. That title will become more and more clear over time. Um, my coauthor, Carl Schmitz, former CEB here with me. Um, we're doing weekly, roughly weekly, um, sort of little short videos where we talk about little different pieces of it. Every single chapter of that book in some way or another, Craig, is a takedown of some aspect of sales.

So we, I, and I basically, and I did the same thing in this book I did for Challenger Sale, which is I just put a big old chip on my shoulder and wrote the whole thing out of anger, which is probably not super productive or healthy. Um, but the, um, There's a takedown on customer centricity. There's a takedown on thought leadership.

There's a takedown on value selling. There's a takedown on sales and marketing integration. Um, but there's, so there's a couple, I think the one I find most interesting and pressing right now, particularly in the SaaS world where you play and spend all your time or much of your time, I should say, is this idea of value selling, because there's this idea that we just need to get, and by the way, there's, I gotta be careful.

I'm not talking about the methodology specifically or any specific vendor. And there's some really smart people doing really cool things, [00:12:00] but this whole idea, like we need to convince our customers of our value and that's going to somehow make them appreciate who we are and therefore buy from us is a pretty problematic statement.

So anyway, so that's one and there's good. Yeah. Let me take a breath and see.

Craig Rosenberg: well, let's beat on that. I mean and then you get ready with some others, but like that is a shocking Start to the to the to the answer to the question. So

Brent Adamson: should we, should we, unpack it a little bit? So,

Craig Rosenberg: please.

Brent Adamson: back up and, or maybe move up to a, a sort of a higher level disagreement. Uh, and Craig, you'll know some of this, cause this is some of the stuff we were talking about together, actually, while we were, while we were still at Gartner. But it, it all stems from a single bar chart, as so much does with the work that I do.

Um, in this case, it's a bar chart where we were trying to understand the drivers of what we call a high quality, uh, low regret deal. So this is a deal where your customers buy the broader solution with the bigger or the, you know, the bigger solution with the broader scope and they feel good about it at the same time.

So they have less regret. Um, [00:13:00] The opposite of that would be essentially either transactional sale or, more likely than not, these days, no decision. Right? And in trying to figure out what are the things that need to happen inside a sale, either on the sales side with sales behavior, marketing side, and content, or on the customer side with buying committees and buying journey maps, all this.

So what, what needs to happen in order to maximize or at least increase dramatically the likelihood of You The customer making this kind of purchase of a high quality, low regret deal, therefore, for us on the sales side of selling one. And, and, and, I think in some ways, Craig, you already know the punchline to the story, but the single biggest driver by far, like orders of magnitude bigger, bigger than any challenger related attributes, bigger than anything else we've ever tested, was simply the degree to which customers are confident in the decision that they're making on behalf of their company. so we call this decision confidence. And it turns out, and maybe one of the single biggest no duh sort of statements, maybe that I've kind of stumbled across and written about, is that if customers aren't confident in a five, six, seven figure purchase that they're going to make on behalf of their company, they're going to choose not to choose.

They're going to put it off. They're going to study it more. They're going to wait and see. They're not going to buy. [00:14:00] Now, here's where it takes this weird left turn. This gets into these first sort of, if you will, disagreements because When I, when I share that data, I show that to CEOs, big, small companies, doesn't matter, CROs, CMOs, CCOs.

Um, The reaction is almost inevitably, at least initially, the same, which is, of course, right? It's kind of what, Matt, you just said, I was like, yep. It's like, if customers aren't confident, they're not going to buy, right? But what's interesting, but then what I find often in the C suite, at least, what they say next is they say, and that is why, like with a lot of confidence, and that is why, We need to make sure that customers have confidence in who we are.

They have confidence in our brand, have confidence in our product, have confidence in our people. That's why we need to be a thought leader. So we need to be a trusted advisor. That's why we need to demonstrate the value that we can deliver to their company. And they're all very emphatic and talk like William Shatner, like this, right?

And the, um, but what's interesting though, is when you unpack this decision confidence, what you find is that. is that the sort of the dimensions of decision confidence that matter most of things [00:15:00] that are going to drive this outcome that we all want is the degree to which customers tell us they're confident things like, how confident are we that we even ask the right questions in the first place? How confident, how confident are we that we've done enough research? How confident are we that we've thoroughly examined alternatives? And the point being, when you look at all these dimensions of customer confidence that sum up to this huge driver, None of them have anything to do with the supplier at all.

It's not that they're customer centric, they're supplier agnostic. And so this is why I literally quit my job, put everything on hold, put my family at risk, and decided I'm going to write another book is because I think this message is so interesting and so important that the single biggest opportunity I think we're all walking right past today is not solving for customers confidence in us, but solving for customers confidence in themselves. And, and that, that to me feels like a really, really cool way to go to market. Uh, and, and so the book is an unpacking of that entire story. And, and the method, not the method, because it's not really meant to be a methodology. It really isn't, I promise you. I'm not trying to write the next [00:16:00] methodology, but just call it a toolkit, a set of techniques, call it whatever you want.

But, uh, but what we're trying to unpack in this book is, okay, so how would, what would the kind of customer engagement look like that is specifically and purposefully designed to help customers feel more confident in the decisions that they make in the face of decision complexity? Information overload, uh, objective misalignment, outcome uncertainty.

These are these forces or challenges that are deeply undermining customer confidence today, given how buying is unfolding. And right now, most of what we're doing is either exacerbating the problem or just ignoring it altogether. And so massive opportunity, particularly for first mover. I'll tell you, and I know this sounds super self serving with a wink and a nod it kind of is, but if anyone wants to give me a call on LinkedIn and get the training started, get the workshops going before September 9, you have a massive first mover advantage right now, because it's the, I Craig, I'm telling you, man, I've not felt this strong about something I've been associated with in, well, since about 2009. This stuff, it's really cool. [00:17:00] Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: of He's a, he's a real revenue marketer, right? Like his inner, he's inherently integrated with sales in a way that's way different than most, uh, CMO types.

Matt Amundson: what what I like what I like.

Craig Rosenberg: you run off and go workshop it with Brent. All Yeah, okay. What I like so much about what Brent is saying is he's sort of he's naming something that I've been experiencing for quite a while, right? Like we're seeing this quite a bit, not just as an operator, but when I was doing advisory work as well, which is early stage companies who do founder led selling.

Matt Amundson: are really struggling to do the like booster rocket where they're like, hey, I'm going to get you into space and then I'm going to fall away and let the sales team go. And I think part of that has to do with when you're being sold to by the founder of a company, there's, you, you feel a lot more confident buying [00:18:00] the solution because you're buying it from the person who dreamed it up.

And in most cases, wrote the code, and in most cases, you know, has done the customer success for the first couple, uh, for the first, maybe a couple dozen or so customers, et cetera. And I'm seeing the most friction in the startup space. Uh, in businesses that are just transitioning from founder into sales led, uh, and in a lot of cases, even organizations that claim that they've sort of ditched the founder led selling are still doing quite a bit of founder led selling.

Brent Adamson: amen to that. They 100 percent are. The, uh, you know, it's interesting, Matt, the, um, but when, when those sellers then begin to struggle, and by the way, it goes all the way up into enterprise and, and this is by no means. a criticism of sellers. I think a lot of salespeople have really good intentions, a lot of them have really good skills.

It's just that customers are, it's not that I'm selling badly, it's customers are buying badly. They're just Mm hmm. to make decisions. And we weren't [00:19:00] really trained or deployed to specifically and very purposefully help them. Decide, right? So, so this word value selling it again, this is not because I realize there's companies out there with names like the value selling attachment.

This is not a specific attack on any or it's not even attack really. But, but what happens and I, you see this in annual reports, you see this and you know, investor calls, we need to do a better job and get crisper on conveying the value of our solution to our customers because if they understand our value, etc.

So we, okay. Uh, you know, we build the business case. We build the ROI calculator. We demonstrate all the different things, you know, uh, the ways that our, our solution is going to provide value to our customers. And we show it to our customer. And what I find really interesting, every one of us on this call has been in this situation so maddening and yet it's so familiar is that the customer looks, he says, no, I believe you, I see the value of your solution, but we've decided to go in a different direction.

Matt Amundson: Mm hmm.

Brent Adamson: That one hurts, doesn't it? It's like, okay, I think that literally happened to me last week. It's like, God damn it. Now the, uh, but the, uh, um, and, and so it's like, so the solution that is not to get crisper on your value, they've [00:20:00] already admitted that they see value in your solution. The problem is they weren't fully aligned in this problem they were solving in the first place that leads to the need of your solution, right?

So that is what we tend to think that value, the perception of our value is going to generate. Customer confidence. And I think the better way to think about our value and the perception of value is it's a way to demonstrate customer confidence. And what I mean by that is not an input to confidence, but an output.

And specifically, it's an output of their collective agreement as a buying group on the objectives they're trying to achieve. The tactics are the means by which they're going to achieve those tactics, those objectives, the metrics they'll use to measure those tactics, the targets they're going to set against those metrics and the timelines they're going to run against those targets, objectives, tactics, metrics, targets, timelines.

We lay all this out in the book in a lot of detail, but if customers, any one of those five dimensions creates space. Or opportunity, surface there if you want to get really fancy, for opportunities for lack of confidence or [00:21:00] confidence erosion. If we're not aligned at each one of those levels, I can still perceive your value, but not perceive its relevance.

Matt Amundson: Mm hmm.

Brent Adamson: And that's what matters. And so the question then becomes, how can we not help customers see our value? Rather, how can we help our customer stakeholders become more confident in their alignment across each of those five areas? This is one of the four chapters where we get deep into different solutions for different kinds of confidence.

Uh, but this, this circles back to your question, Craig, where I said value selling is something we kind of take apart. uh, it's really interesting to think of value as an output, as opposed to an input to confidence.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. That is amazingly interesting. By the way, uh, you already said it, but if you, could you repeat for me? Cause the five, what are the five vectors or whatever we

Brent Adamson: I, I banged this out in a hurry. By the way, my coauthor, Carl is like, dude, you can't make five. No one's going to remember. Mike said, I can't remember them and I hate you for it. So we, we call it OTR objectives, tactics, results in the book. We call it so objectives, tactics, results, results has a [00:22:00] couple dimensions.

There's the metrics, the targets and the timelines. So it's, what are we trying to do? How are we trying to do it? How will we know when we get there? That's kind of essentially, that's the, that's the sort of the high level idea. And, and it's like, and notice, Craig, man, I could look at the value. You could give me an ROI calculator and I can look at it and say, Oh yeah, I totally see the value of what we're doing.

But if, but you might be the right answer to a different problem. It's like, there's a guy named Tim. I know really, really well. He's the GM of a big enterprise software company. I told him the story. So my God, that literally just happened to us last week. We lost a 15 million deal when the customer decided to go in a different direction.

I looked at Tim, he's a friend, so I could say this to him. I said, I said, it kind of sucks being your customer's number one solution to their number three problem, doesn't it? And he said, I Mm now.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Brent Adamson: the that is it's not that customer seeing your value is bad. Of course not it's critically important But there's an order of operations to value perception.

I think really matters that again. We kind of walk past

Craig Rosenberg: And then on the tactics, what, [00:23:00] what, what, do you unpack that a little bit

Brent Adamson: Yeah, i'd be happy to so I feel like that guy's it's in the book, but it is and so I probably so am I straight up shilling for the book? Yes, except it's not available yet, but i'd love for people

to read this shill. Yeah, Okay. All right. So but anyway

Matt Amundson: yeah, everybody wants to know what's going to be in it, just given the fact that like the challenger sale became the playbook for most go to market organizations

Brent Adamson: I'll tell you and I mean this with I mean this with huge humility. I people don't buy it. Sometimes they think I'm an arrogant prick, but the I'm from Nebraska. We're very humble people. If this book came anywhere close to that, but I think I think this is the challenger sale of the next 10 years. I really do.

I just, I think this is the next book of our time because it sums up where we are. And so this idea, Craig of, so objectives, you hear a lot in sales about outcome based selling, or what are your customers outcomes? It's kind of similar to that. What are our objectives? What are we trying to do? Now, the thing about objectives is they're stacked, right?

So there's corporate objectives, and then that rolls down to a [00:24:00] CMO's objectives, and that rolls down to, you know, so on down the line. So. Maybe at the top of a company, there's a set of objectives, like we're trying to expand market share in Europe by 15 percent or something. There's an objective. All right, well, how are we going to do that?

And there's lots of different tactics you might use to do that. So then below objectives are tactics. Then what happens, of course, is those tactics get passed down to someone else. And those tactics become someone else's objectives. Objectives. So, you know, like in, in like root causing, we ask, what are the five whys to get down to a root cause?

It's like the five hows, like, all right, that's our top line objective. How are we going to do that? Well, how are we going to do that? How are we going to do that? And how are we going to do that? And off of each one of those tactics, then rolls results. Okay. For that tactic, there's metrics, targets, and timelines.

For that tactic, there's metrics, targets, timelines. I think I, I tried not to overcomplicate it, but I tried to capture something that feels pretty relevant to how we all think about doing business. So that's, that's where we land is OTR. But, but the thing is, I think the, the thing

that's. Right.

Craig Rosenberg: had no fucking idea what we were getting into. Did you? is like

Brent Adamson: Have I told you about the maggots on the plane and when I fell off the [00:25:00] stage? But the, um,

But

Craig Rosenberg: that is brilliant. It's it is actually, I love where you're going on

Brent Adamson: here's where it's really interesting, Craig, is that I think a lot of, uh, and by the way, this goes back, Matt, to your point about founders. Founders just kind of get it in a different sort of way, right? But for a lot of salespeople, and again, with huge respect, it's a freaking hard job, right? But there's a, There's a tendency, at least for some sellers, to think that they're just a taker on these things.

Like, in other words, well, if my customers don't have their bleep together and aren't aligned to what they're trying to do, then I guess I can just show them the ROI calculator and keep my fingers crossed and hope that they, you know, come to want to do what I'm selling, right? But what if there was an opportunity, a means, a set of tactics, tools for you to help them align?

What if you became a maker on this? So part of this chapter, I think we're in chapter five in this discussion. Yes, we are. So the, um, there's a whole set of tools around, you know, customer stakeholder alignment workshops and just like whether it's a zoom [00:26:00] call or it's a two day meeting. But how can I begin to sort of move from a seller role to more of a facilitator role and start to facilitate connections across those stakeholders?

And, and, and one last, at this point, I guess one last thought, Matt, because it's the exact same thing that happened with Challenger, you already said, which is people saw Challenger and said, my best people do this already. To which I often said, well, we know your best people do this already because they wouldn't have shown up in the data unless they were doing it already.

So to be fair, and this is, this is not unsimilar, dissimilar to that same idea, which is, I think a lot of people, when, when they read the frame making sale, they're going to see a lot of things that feel kind of familiar and they're going to say, Oh, that's why that works. Or that's what's going on. Or you put a name to that.

And I don't see that as a bad thing. I see that. I I'm hoping people see that as a good thing, because this isn't like, here's something from Mars. Let's try this completely different thing. It's rather. We're so damn close. If we just understand what problem we're trying to solve for in the first place, which is customer's confidence in themselves, then a lot of the playing cards you already have in your deck can be reshuffled just a little bit, and we can go to market in [00:27:00] a comp with a different set of intentions.

And that it's a mindset shift. That's chapter seven. It's a mindset shift more than a skillset shift. And I think that's, what's really kind of cool about this.

Craig Rosenberg: That is a mic droppable thing. Um, I said thing, cause I wasn't sure of the word to say there. We'll edit something more profound in, but, um, you know, one of the

Brent Adamson: Craig, can I just say, man, I love you, man. I just, I miss working with You You guys don't know, but it's like, if I had a hard day, I'd just give this guy a call and we would just, like, commiserate.

It's just, I miss this guy. yeah. Dissolving my teeth. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah,

Brent Adamson: That's a toothless, I'd be talking to a toothless

Craig Rosenberg: genius from Virginia

by way of Nebraska.

The um, so two things, one, I do want to dive into an area, I'm hoping that we can, we can Uh, nail a couple things here, particularly ones that, um, potentially put Matt on notice, which would be [00:28:00] really cool.

I just, yeah, I just want to get your reaction, you know, reaction to the reaction though. You know, the one thing, by the way, on. I've always felt like when you guys started to talk about that data, um, and what that meant was it meant that organizations and sales teams would have to basically admit to the elephant in the room to really help the prospect.

And I think they were always hesitant to that. Like an example of that is, Uh, you know, look, man, you are going to have to acknowledge the competition.

Brent Adamson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: You are going to have to give in on areas where you, you aren't better. Uh, and you're going to have to provide them with tools that might expose that.

That's like the resistance to that is incredible. You know, and, um, and, and it's hard, you know, and by the way, you know, I think about what you just talked about with the challenger, because I just give you guys a funny story. So I was doing a [00:29:00] sales training, and it was this just with all due respect to all salespeople, but this guy was a classic non leader.

He came out of hitting his number, was doing a startup sales leadership thing. And I said, well, he was in like a market that was totally saturated and frankly had a bad rep. And I said, well then dude, you should go to market and tell everyone dot, dot, dot market doesn't work, right? It's broken. And here's why, and here's why you should.

Uh, we should have a conversation. And he said, well, why would I do that? I'm in that market. I said, bro, you've got to think, if then, if the market hates that category, why would you say you're in it? And you'll have no chance to break out of their decision issues. Um, and someone there, by the way, is holding that perception along the way.

And those are both just examples of, it does take guts.

Brent Adamson: Yeah. It[00:30:00]

Craig Rosenberg: And

then when you talk about a mindset shift, there's guts. There's guts from the CMO, from the founder. I think CMOs gravitate to this stuff a little better, but

like, you know,

a lot of times it's the reps and I do agree. The good reps are always helping.

They still, though, there's a hesitancy, like, what is this going to look like in this positioning exercise? And you should think about that, but sometimes you got to You know, you, to truly help them, you're going to have to admit that there's others in the market and they do some good things and like helping them make that decision.

I think people get caught on that all the time

Brent Adamson: I 100 percent call where they, yeah, they deposition the competitor and then the competitor still wins. They say, well, I, I depositioned, I convinced them or her. And it's

Craig Rosenberg: like, anyway, um, Matt, were you going to say something?

Matt Amundson: Well, my thought was always, especially when, when we were using the tenants of challenger sale, uh, at various organizations where I worked, it was never, [00:31:00] you know, we didn't need to train the people that already did that work. What we were always trying to do was how do you replicate those people? How do you make all the other reps like that person?

And it's hard to sort of pinpoint. And that's why talking about like, you know, putting a name to the things that we know are true, um, is a really good way to zero in on what are the tactics that these people actually deploy in their sales cycle that can be repeated. Because I think in so many cases we go, well there's this great sales person, uh, and they just, they're just such a natural.

They just get it. They're just such a natural. They have a way. They, they understand the buyer or they, you know, have the deepest subject matter expertise. They know when to push. They know when to executive align, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's all, it's always hard to then say, like, how do I go make, you know, shiny example of great salesperson into the sort of standard by which all salespeople operate.

[00:32:00] So having, having challenger sale was a great way of sort of putting the name around what people are doing. Uh, and I, I'm excited to, to, to, to think about it this way because what I think is different is, you know, I remember the day challenger sale came out, came out on, uh, November 10th, 2011. Why do I remember that?

Why do I remember that so vividly? It was my 30th birthday and it was like, uh, Yeah, it was like five weeks after, it was like five weeks after I started at Marketo. And people were already talking about Challenger Sale before the book came out, because the Marketo sales culture was like, we, we read a lot of books around here.

And like, you know, I remember Bill was like telling everybody, Oh, you gotta go out and you gotta buy, uh, Brenton Matt's book. Uh, and, and I think he bought it for the whole sales team. Um, uh,

Brent Adamson: sale was Steven Powell was the global head of sales at Intercontinental Hotel Group and he bought a thousand copies for his entire sales team the week it came out and we were

blown away. But, but Yeah.

actually, Matt, so you may not know this, but the [00:33:00] first time we presented it publicly was in May of 20, uh, 2009.

Matt Amundson: Mm. when we conducted the research and presented what we called an executive retreat at CEB. And, and there were a number of companies in that room. ADP was there, Xerox was there. And those guys were up and running deploying Challenger before the book even came out. Right? And that's kind of where we are right now with frame making, which is why I'm super excited about like replicating an early mover advantage.

Brent Adamson: But, but Craig, it's a, it's a, It is really funny, by the way, Kevin Hendrick, who is now retired, he was the head of one of the heads of sales at ADP and he was looking through the materials and he looked at me, stopped at me and he said, this is amazing and it was, you could tell, like we just found something, like, it was like lightning in a bottle.

And he looked at me and said, totally unexpectedly, although it seems obvious in retrospect, he said, can you Come train every one of my salespeople to do this tomorrow. And I said, Kevin, we found this last week. It's like, no, we can't. I mean, like literally what I'm showing you is a week old. Like that's where we were back then.

And that took us a while to get up, you know, up to speed and deploy it. But, but Craig, if I may, cause you said something that really [00:34:00] struck a chord with me, because it's very personal, which is. Look, I'm not, I'm on the back nine, right? I'm 56 now. I don't know how the hell that happened. But the, uh, if there's, you and I are collecting lessons as we go through this crazy life, right?

Like, top of the list is I don't know how to be a father very good, but that's a different story in a different podcast. But the, uh,

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Brent Adamson: um, but the, If there is something that's really troubling or a problem, don't run away from it, run right at it is one of those lessons that every one of us has to learn a thousand times over and over again.

And in sales, it's the exact same thing. If there's like, I can't tell you how many times I've been on a sales call with, you know, where I'm the subject matter expert and we're in the rented Ford Taurus out in the parking lot and we're about to walk in and they say, whatever you don't bring this up because they don't agree on that or whatever you do, don't bring this up because the competition does that.

And it's like almost guaranteed. What I found with experience over the years is whatever they said, don't bring probably most likely the very, I don't know what the very first, but one of the things you absolutely should bring up, right? Because if you can't get agreement or alignment on that thing, you're kind of toast.

[00:35:00] So now there's ways to do that. And something we've worked really hard at this book is to, it's a little bit of your point then Matt, is to make this stuff feel replicable.

Uh, and, and,

and, tactical and doable. So it's not just like a bunch of sort of concepts. Um, you know, we talk about, we talk a lot about empathy and how important empathy is, but then I, we share a technique for how to effectively, if not become more empathetic than to essentially, you know, Approximate empathy, right?

We call it hypothesis led empathy and it's like literally it's just a very tactical thing you can do to to engage customers with words of emotion and if this sounds too weirdy or tree huggy It's not it's actually really powerful But but we get into these really tactical kinds of things in the book Beyond sort of like tools and frameworks and things like that that are also in there Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: head nods on the pieces and nobody can put it together into an overall approach. and then into their tactics and their [00:36:00] strategy. So, like, you obviously, yeah, I like what you said. I, you know, I feel this all the time. It's like, it, actually, it's very hard to surprise people, uh, in the game if they've been around for a while, but it is powerful to put it into context, right, and to put it into a framework or approach.

Okay, really quick. So, I want to go back to things that I know Matt believes that you said you're going to debunk. Thought leadership go.

Brent Adamson: Oh, thought, thought leadership. All right. So, sorry, sorry for all marketers out there. I'm about to take you behind the shed, but it's done with love, but, um, So, as you guys know, so we just talked about 2011, the Challenger book comes out and the whole point is the way you're going to win today and differentiate yourself in the marketplace is not what you sell, but how you sell and to show up with customers with a commercial insight that changes the way they think, not about your business, but about their business.

There's Challenger sale in literally 15 seconds. Somewhere shortly after the book coming out, we began to think, all of us collectively as a profession, like how can we [00:37:00] approach customers with these ideas, these insights about their business, show them new ways to make money, save money. Sort of. Related but independent of that somewhere around 2013 14 every CEO in the world On the same morning.

I'm convinced of it all struggling to To differentiate themselves on solutions. We'd all built out solution sales and these big complex solutions to differentiate ourselves. And it turns out all our competitors did too. So our solutions were just as commoditized as our products. And so somewhere in 2014, every CEO woke up, looked in the mirror and said, wait a minute, I've got it.

I know how we're going to set ourselves apart in the market. I know how we're going to stand out. We're going to become, wait for it. A thought leader. And if we can become a thought leader, if we can demonstrate to our customers that we have smart things to say, that we have deep expertise, that we can help them with their mission critical priorities, that we're the better position, better, smartest people in the world, they'll come to us first with their toughest, you know, problems to solve.

Shortly thereafter, of course, and no disrespect at all to HubSpot, in fact, they're a partner of ours in a different, uh, But they said, Hey, I've got technology for [00:38:00] that. We're going to call it marketing automation. And marketers all woke up and said, I got a strategy for that. We're going to call it content marketing.

And we all just got on this, this sort of, it's like bicycle of just producing huge amounts of high quantities of high quality content to demonstrate to the world. That were different and smart. I call this the smartness arms race. And if you fast forward about certainly going into the pandemic and no question now today coming out of the pandemic and beyond, it's like we're all just a wash just the world with AI.

It's like it's like times was at forces of orders of magnitude now, but there's just we're all swimming in content. And I think where we landed is the smartness arms race has ended in a tie.

And the only one to lose is your customer. Because they're the ones that are now swimming through all this stuff, just trying to figure out what to do in the first place.

And what I don't need now is yet another white paper, another video or another infographic. What I need is for someone, please, anyone just kind of help me make sense of all this stuff. So I know what matters. I know what questions to ask and I can make a decision I feel good about. If you could be that person, [00:39:00] that's pretty powerful. That's

Craig Rosenberg: Matt, your reaction?

Matt Amundson: I mean, he's not wrong, right? Like, there's, you know, the, the, this is part of what we've talked about, you know, really, since the sort of 2. 0 version of the transaction, which is like the old playbooks that don't work. I think that there are There are people who are still able to tap into this in a way that becomes very effective for them.

People like Adam Robinson and, uh, um, and other CEOs who are very online, very on LinkedIn. Um, where that is, hey, I'm, I'm here, I'm having a direct conversation with you. The, the format is significantly shorter. I'm basically going to make like a single point and then I'm going to jump out and I'm going to leave it open ended.

So, so you guys can have a discussion around it. That works really well. That's like the social, uh, CEO brand that, that I think works incredibly well. And then in a reality, that's just kind of a flavor of thought leadership or of content marketing. It's just a, [00:40:00] you know, kind of the flavor of the week right now.

But I think like, you know, Every time I'm at a brand or I'm working with a company that's like, Hey, we're going to do an ebook. Like my eyes roll because I'm like, I just don't, who's going to read this? You know what I mean? Like who's going to read, like you can make it and you can make it as long as possible.

As long as there is a one page summary that we can post on social, that people can be like, okay, cool. I can read and know everything that's in there in 30 seconds or less. Because you know, that's, that's, That's what people want to do today. So, uh, I think like it's, what I find has become sort of crazy about the content marketing race is that like, um, people don't, in my opinion, people don't value the customer success story anymore.

The way they used to and it I think the biggest question that I would ask and maybe this is, you know, all the reason to buy the book and everybody should buy the book for Christ's sake, everyone should buy it [00:41:00] anyways, but uh, it's like how do like what are the right tactics to establish confidence in buying nowadays?

Because Before we'd say, Hey, don't listen to us, trust our customers. And you know, my strategy for years was to imbue the voice of the customer and all the content that we created. So it didn't seem like we were just a bunch of blowhards. Uh, but even now that feels like a little bit, like people are putting that stuff at arm's length too, just saying, Oh, well, if you created this on behalf of your customer, you're going to create it to sound however you want it to sound.

Brent Adamson: Exactly. Welcome. Welcome, by the way, Matt, to Chapter 6, right? So Chapter 6 is this idea of outcome uncertainty. And if customers are uncertain around the outcomes they're going to achieve with your solution, even if they see the value in it, they're less likely to buy. And the dynamic here that I think is really interesting is the Is exactly what you said, is the customer testimonial, like you get lots of customers to testify.

And what we find with a lot of companies today is like, they'll believe you. They'll say, no, I believe that your five other customers got that amazing value, but we'll screw it up. find some way to mess it up. [00:42:00] Do you know what I mean? Like, this is, this is why we can't have nice things. And it's not that they don't believe you or trust you or trust those other companies.

They don't trust themselves. And they don't trust their own organization. So now the quiz, so again, it's not that you shouldn't do those things. I'd be careful. I'm not trying to throw anything under the bus.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, yeah, like order of operations and how these things all kind of fit together again, when you start putting things through the lens of solving for customers confidence in themselves and things start to do so.

Brent Adamson: So in this world, in the, some of the solutions we talk about here is how can I, you know, it might be, for example, very, something relatively straightforward and simple is to bring your implementation team to the sales meeting. Prior to closing of the sale and map out with customers with their people and actually just like we do like a Sort of a sequence of events on a purchase.

You might do a sequence of events on an installation. Who's gonna own it? What are the dates? What are the checkpoints who's gonna and reassure them? You got this and we got you you can do it. We can help this old Home Depot thing, right? So so in other words, it's not look at all these five other companies.

It did something you can't do doesn't really help I don't think you don't do that But you got to solve for their perception of like [00:43:00] you can do it, too You Do you know what I mean? And that, and I think, by the way, we've offered for each of these different dimensions of challenges and frame making in the book, we've offered suggestions.

What I'm excited about is people reading the book and saying, here's another idea. Here's another way to do that. Here's another way to do that. We collectively as a profession begin to build out a whole just repertoire of, of tactics. I just, we just scratched the surface and we ran out of words at 75, 000, right?

So there's, there's a number of different ways you might solve for that. And, but, but I, and, Full stop. I think that's just, it's a super interesting, I think the other, by the way, there's somewhere else in the book, I don't remember, it doesn't matter where, because you can't get a hold of it yet anyway, but the, we also talk about customer testimonials, something I saw from another company a number of years ago, I think it's really, really smart, is rather than using your customer testimonial to testify to how great you are, Use your customer testimonial as a buying coach.

This is actually in chapter three. So what if, what if your customer who's happy with you sits down with a prospective customer and instead of saying, Oh my God, these guys are great. You're going to love them. Here's how much they generate for us. They'd rather say, Hey, you know what? So we bought this [00:44:00] solution about a year and a half ago.

Let me tell you, it wasn't easy. And if I had to do it all over again, here's two different things I would do. differently to make it easier to buy the solution like this. Here's the people that need to be involved. I wish I'd involved sooner and become sort of a, uh, uh, and again, you're creating social proof, you're creating connection community around not how great we are, but I'm creating community around how to help you feel good about your ability to get this done. That's a, that's another sort of aspect of customer testimony is like super interesting.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. I think, but, um, yeah, I, man, there's a lot to unpack. Just going back to the thought leadership thing.

Brent Adamson: It's really rich, Craig. There's a lot

Craig Rosenberg: let

me,

Matt Amundson: Should write a book about it.

Brent Adamson: I

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. You know what, Brent? I have an idea for a book for you. uh, I do on the, I want to help. I want us to sort of figure out going back to Matt has twice brought up.

the founder and like that personal [00:45:00] aspect. Uh, like, well, what, what's your real reaction to that? Cause that is in Matt and I's world, sort of advising young companies in what he's doing right now. What we found is this is, I don't think this is different to what you're talking about. I think it's something I'd like to figure out how we integrate is that even though it's, Like we sort of talked about the founder winning the deals as I don't think we said a bad thing but like something that like

Brent Adamson: scalable.

Matt Amundson: Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: scalable? But like in the early stage, it's everything. And even later, like I, you know, I have a guy, Tyler here works at Salesforce. I'm like, who's the best sales rep at Salesforce. He's like Marc. And like, um, and so, but what is, how does, does the, the, the, the interaction with humans, their reputation in the room, yeah, I already heard this.

The, the reason I was going to park it, but then you brought up bringing CS in the room or,

Brent Adamson: Yeah. Implementation teams. Yeah. I'm

Craig Rosenberg: a million, a million [00:46:00] degrees in favor of that,

especially by the way, just by nature of their job and people's experiences

with them, they're going to trust them more than the salesperson who's trying to push the deal over the finish line.

Matt Amundson: Yep.

Craig Rosenberg: But like, uh, what about subject matter experts in the sales process? The, the founder as like this kingmaker in there or queenmaker? Um, how does that play into how you think about confidence building with the, um, in this, you know, in your

Brent Adamson: this is where I wish I had a bar chart per se. I think it can help a lot. And in the world you guys live in, it's also a viable strategy for a lot of the size companies you work with and support and invest in, right? You know, some of these companies are such that, like, if they're doing 10 deals a year, the CEO can be involved, the founder can be involved in all of them.

Once you get into enterprise, of course, you know, it's thousands and thousands of deals, and so that's just, it's a non starter. So, but some, but that, I'm not trying to avoid your question, it's um, I think the, I think it's kind of a little bit, Matt, what you said about, like, you know, your best people kind of do this already.

[00:47:00] Founders just do this instinctively, right? Because founders, at the end of the day, most of them, and I'm actually now a founder myself, is that what you're, you really start a company is, is not to sell a product per se. You, you start a company to solve a problem, right? Or to, you know, to help the world with something.

There's something that gets you jazzed enough to put a lot of risk and, and do this thing. And, and so I think when you, one It's your incentive point, Craig. This is like the third rail of sales. We don't go there in the book. But, you know, in talking to a founder, I have less Doubt of their incentives, right?

Because like they founded the company. They clearly wouldn't have done that unless they believed in solving this problem. I mean, it's like you just, there's just, they have, it's not that they have gravitas or experience. Is it that I'm not worried about whether they're trying to get to the president's club at Cancun.

They are the president, right? So they, uh, and so there's, there's an incentive thing. There's an expertise thing. There's an intention thing. Um, I think all that is true. I think where I kind of struggle is, [00:48:00] so there's this belief from a lot of founders, and I've seen this front row seat, which is, okay, how do I get my salespeople to do what I do?

How do I get my salespeople to act like I act? And, and I don't know that replicating the founder is the right way to go about this. I think there are other techniques that sellers can use to build customers confidence themselves that, that are just not the same thing. That's, that's the whole idea of frame making.

So things like social proof, uh, things, uh, that, you know, some of these techniques we've talked about already that become really important when I can't tap into what the founder just has by definition, really.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Brent Adamson: I rambled a bit there, but I hope that was helpful. But that's a I, I, it's a, it's a great question.

It really is.

Craig Rosenberg: I think it's, you know, once we read the book, we can have that conversation about how we integrate those things, by the way, per your point on the founder. Years ago, I remember reading this thing about how the best player on the team rarely makes the best coach. Now, there has been some debunking of that over the years, but vast majority, [00:49:00] it's like, Yeah.

Yeah. You know, uh, it doesn't, it doesn't work. And the point one of the, the guy was making is, well, yeah, because the best player, if Michael Jordan's your coach, he's like, well, why can't you just jump from the free throw line and

Brent Adamson: Right. Just do what That would be better, Right.

Craig Rosenberg: know, and I used to use the Gronk example when he was jumping over linebackers.

It was like, well, you don't train the rest of the team to jump over linebackers. You know, uh, he, you know, he's going to do that. And like, that is interesting. And by the way, a fatal flaw of mine at Topo. It was a cause of incredible friction between me and the sales team because I was like, well, why, why not?

Like, why can't you go do that instead of figuring that out? So I think that's a good point. By the way, there's like a gas leak in one of your places, and so please escape the building as soon as possible. What is that? Oh, okay.

Brent Adamson: I think that's Matt. Yeah. Ha,

ha,

Craig Rosenberg: was just, he had a, there was a

Brent Adamson: He's got real life going on behind him. It's all good. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: the [00:50:00] guy's on vacation, so he came down to do it.

He did Disneyland, you know, so, um, so, um, it, if it is there, um, is part of when you're doing the, it sounds like you did an angry rant, right? Of the book, but I know you, dude, you're, you've, I remember I used

Brent Adamson: Get off my

lawn.

Craig Rosenberg: I used to question you on the challenge. You go, Craig, it's the data.

Well, don't blame me. It's the data. I used to say that all the time. Dixon too, man. He still does that,

Brent Adamson: We will hide behind a bar chart like nobody's business. Like, hey, you can't see me. I'm behind a bar chart.

Craig Rosenberg: Um,

Brent Adamson: Well, and this is data, this is data driven too, but, but, uh, but one, because I'm no longer Guertin, I don't have access to the data I had then, right? So I can, I could cite things, cite things that are publicly available, but I, I miss those days when you had just data, you know, mountains of it, and you could generate more whenever you needed, but, but there's something about this frame making sale, and you've hopefully guys gotten a sense of this from this conversation, is there's, there's just very human element to it as well, right?

It's not just [00:51:00] a, in fact, the last paragraph of the book is, um, um, is at the end of the day, it's not really a selling story or buying story. It's a human story. Uh, and, and I end the book with a line that I actually wrote originally for the marketing symposium for Gartner. When I went the one time I keynoted at the marketing symposium, Matt, it was, uh, when we were talking about these themes of help and helping customers feel better about themselves.

And there's an early version of this in some ways. And I, I stood in front of what, a couple thousand B2B marketers. And I said something to the effect of the following. I said, there's never been a time where doing what's right for marketing and doing what's right for the world are more aligned than they are today.

And that's pretty inspiring. And that's literally how the book ends because I think that's absolutely true for sales as well right now.

It's kind of

Craig Rosenberg: love it. Yeah. Um, but where I was leaning, is there, before we get off, was there anybody who came pretty close to your framework already today that

Brent Adamson: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there, there, we don't call out a lot of names just because it became easier to get the book done without naming a lot of names, but the, uh, there's one in particular, and, and Craig, you might remember me talking about it. It was a guy named Brian Smith, who's now the CEO [00:52:00] of Expedient, which is a cloud services company.

Um, Brian, when I got to know him, he was the head of sales. He's now the CEO. He's literally one of the smartest, uh, and humble, um, chief, You know, CXOs that I've ever met. Brian's brilliant. And actually, we profiled Brian in the Sensemaking for Sales article on HBR. And we pick up on some of that story, um, where he actually, you know, in recognizing, this goes back a little bit, Matt, to what you were saying about, like, there's so much content out there, I gotta compete, what do I do?

And Matt ran into this world where, excuse me, Matt, sorry, that's you, Matt, where Brian ran into this story where, They actually did what we call a content audit or an information audit. What's all the information my customers are consuming now? Where are they getting overwhelmed? What questions are they running into?

And they, they found again and again, and again, it was across every single one of their customers. They were all finding the same video series from one of their top competitors with a fortune 50 name that everyone's heard of. And I won't say no one's heard of Expedient, but you know what I mean? It's like Expedient versus Goliath sort of thing, right?

It's Goliath. Yeah. He was the big one, right? So anyway, so Brian's first reaction was, Oh crap. We [00:53:00] need to have a video series too, right? Cause that's what every marketer, every CSO and things like, they got a video series. We got to go mono, e mono, person to person with, with video series. And they realize, wait, that's going to cost money.

It's going to take a lot of time. And at the end of the day, everyone's still going to find that video series. So instead of running away from it, Craig, your lesson, let's run right at it. And so he taught, he's taught a Salesforce. To actually bring it up proactively. Have you seen this video series from Company X?

And if you haven't, you're going to see it, and it's good. In fact, it's actually really useful. If you haven't seen it already, we'd recommend that you check it out. By the way, as you watch it, we have found in working with other customers like you that there's a couple questions you're likely to have as you watch it.

Here's kind of how those questions play out, and here's sort of our take on it. And so, essentially, it's like getting ahead of not the RFP, but it's like getting ahead of the learning journey. Right. It's, uh, and, and all of this sums up, Craig, I'll have to sort of answer your question. We introduce, um, as I mentioned, it's more of a mindset, much of mindset as a frame, as a, as a skillset.

And we introduced this idea of what we call the frame making mindset. And it essentially is a quote directly [00:54:00] from Brian, which I've heard him say a number of times to his entire company now. And with permission, I've repeated, I've kind of now made, made my own, but I, the first time I heard him say it, it blew me away.

He stood in front of his entire sales force and he said this, he said, guys, we have one job. This is our job. is to help our customers make the best decision they can in as little time as possible. That's it. That's all I want you focused on. And, and inevitably, as I've heard him do this three or four times, inevitably there's someone to raise their hand kind of bravely and say, but Brian, what happens if we help them make a really good decision that they choose to The competition.

And he said, well, that's the second half of the sentence. And as little time as possible, if you're going to lose, lose early. But I want to be the company that shows up specifically with a specific posture designed to help customers make better decisions that they feel good about, and he says, if we lose, then let's make sure that happens early and not late.

And by the way, even if that does happen, then we'll be the first person to call next time when it comes for the next decision, because we're the only ones out there helping them. And that's who I want to be as a Salesforce. And I think that's why Brian's a CEO now. So he's, he's my hero. That guy's he's brilliant. [00:55:00] There you

Craig Rosenberg: Matt,

I admit I queued him up with a watermelon to knock it out of the park with no time left on the clock.

Matt Amundson: Jeez.

Jeez. Oh my god.

Craig Rosenberg: beater, man.

Matt Amundson: smokes.

Brent Adamson: Can I,

Craig Rosenberg: taking credit for that was so bad. I apologize, Brent. Now, how about this? Brent with the naturally delivered buzzer beating story.

At the, I mean, okay.

Brent Adamson: I, can I, can I, can I finish or leave you guys with one thought? And you can tell me if I'm crazy. This is by the way, where I might've taken all the goodwill that I just generated with you over the last whatever 60 minutes and just completely demolish it. Um,

I, I,

Craig Rosenberg: it's about Matt.

Brent Adamson: no, there's a version of this in the book too, but I've actually said this on stage and I always wonder if I should say this out loud or not, but I mean it quite sincerely, which is, There's a metaphor that I think is really important here and what I'm trying to do with this book and what Carl and I are trying to do this book, which is, I want you guys to take a minute and think about some, and quite seriously, think about some of the people in your life who mean a lot to you.

So those relationships, people you really love, you know, a [00:56:00] spouse, a friend, maybe someone from the past, someone you really deeply care about that, where you used to get this really great relationship. And you think about that person, you think about that relationship and you think, you know, I love you. And you think, well, I love you, but, but if you really think about what really makes that relationship great, often, not always me, but oftentimes it's like, I love you, not just because I love you, I love you because I love me when I'm around you.

Matt Amundson: Mm, mm-hmm

Brent Adamson: And that to me is like, if we have one or two people in our lives, at some point where we can say that to be true, it's so powerful and not to be kind of silly about it, but I think there's a really interesting question to ask yourself, what would it take to be that kind of sales professional to our customers?

How can I be the sales rep who shows up and engages customers in such a way where the customer says, not just, Hey, wow, that guy's great, or she's great, but I feel better about us. I feel better about our ability to make decisions as a result of interacting with that person. I think that's the way to growth.

That's the way to trust. And that's the way to win. So that's that, that to me. And that's why Craig at the end day, I think it's a human story. I really do.

Matt Amundson: [00:57:00] Wow. Yeah.

Brent Adamson: That's what I've been working on. You guys as exhausted as I am.

Craig Rosenberg: Jesus, man. I, I, yeah, that was, that was, that was, uh, that was incredible.

Matt Amundson: Amazing.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah. I

Brent Adamson: literally why I quit my job to do this. And I, I, my, I hope the world likes it because I, but I, I believe in this stuff. I really do. and I,

and I,

Craig Rosenberg: is exactly what Matt was saying about the challenger too. Like we knew it before it

Brent Adamson: exactly. Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: these podcast, like everything you said resonated, um, with me and, uh, uh, it's just amazing. So I just, I really appreciate it.

Brent Adamson: Man, you're the best, Greg. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate you. This is what I do. I tell stories, you know, I, I'm a storyteller. I synthesize, I put things together, I connect them and write about them. And, um, and here we are, but you know, uh, you guys can help me get the word out. Um, and again, [00:58:00] to anyone who's out there listening, we'll be talking about this on LinkedIn.

Um, uh, we've created, we, we created a company funny enough to support a list called A to B Insight for any of those challenger fans out there. They'll know why we called it A to B insight. Um, uh, and they, so A to b insight.com is where you can find the, the, the company, uh, again, it's easy to find me on LinkedIn.

Uh, I. I cannot wait to see all the ways that people take this and do things with it I haven't even seen just like they did with challenger. I can't wait to see all the hard questions They ask and I didn't anticipate I'm sure there's gonna be a couple times where they're like, oh crap I should have thought of that or didn't think of that or that's really smart or that's better I'm, totally humble about all of that.

I just I I just want this to be the start of a conversation Which I think would be super cool

Matt Amundson: Awesome. Well, I think if we, if there's more conversations like the one that we had just, just now, uh, it's gonna be a rip roaring success. And I think to your point, probably ends up being the, the new playbook that we use, uh, for, for, for the foreseeable future. 'cause, gosh, like I can't even tell you how many times I've referenced the challenger sale.[00:59:00]

Uh, over the last 13 years.

Brent Adamson: It's crazy, isn't it? It's

humbling as hell. It really is. uh, yeah, you got an early bird customer in that too. So that's a win-win. Um, thank you, man.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. This was amazing.

Craig Rosenberg: we wanted to do on the transaction, and so I'm gonna say, go.

Brent Adamson: Maggot's on a plane. Go, everyone, go check it out. Let's bring it full circle before everyone forgets, right?

Matt Amundson: Oh God.

Craig Rosenberg: Hey,

man, that was awesome,

dude. I, I really appreciate it. Okay.

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