Lessons - The Future of Sales | Andy Paul - Global Sales Expert, Author & Podcast Host

Why would you want to because I feel like your current version of sales and what you do speak about in your book and we'll get into that later, but that version of sales is more modern way of looking at sales is a much more modern lens of what sales is what what's curious to me is why you went against the grain when sales I don't want to put a timestamp on it and God forbid I don't want to date you at all but like X years ago was a very much of a cold calling ABC use car salesman all the negative stereotypes that you associate with sales a lot of that came from a certain culture that's evolved and progressed and become a lot better. Well, how do you have another question? I would argue it hasn't. And so I would make the case of my book is that that yeah, I think that that actually it's become worse. I think we went I think that that's, you know, the sort of over reliance on on process and technology and an effort by many in sales don't want to take the human out of the equation. Has has sort of amplified these bad behaviors, you know, the pitch first to listen to respond rather than listen to understand, you know, just the lack of any sort of making connection with another human being understand that your job is to be there to help understand what's most important to them as opposed to just pitching and plugging your product to me the underlying behaviors are the same and I think we've amplified the impact of it with technology. And I think that that on top of that is, you know, we look at what's considered our modern sales processes is it's we as long as we still have these these linear stage based processes that we have and that are embedded in CRM systems and you know, people's processes. They haven't changed for decades they're the same fundamental sales process initial initial call initial qualification demo presentation proposal whatever the order is if you Google it. Yeah, the modern sales process same when I was taught decades ago. Now we've got ways to facilitate it. Excuse me that that didn't exist before, but you want things I find fascinating that in this is not something that a lot of research has been done, but I think needs to be looked at as I firmly believe that the sort of base unit based level productivity of an individual seller today. Despite the technology is no greater than it was, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, and by productivity, what I mean is I'd find a specific way, which is the amount of revenue generated per hour of actual sales time. And there's no data that exists to tell us that it's gotten better. And so if we look at the proxies like, you know, knowledge worker productivity increases and so on, is what we see in Paul Krutman has written about this several times in New York Times, this is Yeah, we saw improvements are through the advent of email and high speed internet, but in the last 20 years, the level of productivity increase among knowledge workers space has been kind of flat. So we have to assume the same is true with sales. But we are talking about so that's an interesting very interesting point, but productivity versus ethical or customer focused sales are those are two very different conversations. So with the increase in technology, you could argue that you could be ruthless and you could be persuasive and you could be guiding somebody down the sales cycle, but just doing it more efficiently alternatively, the other conversation could be well, OK, productivity is one thing, but how do we sell better? How do we be more ethical sales people because your argument stands that we haven't become that much better in the past 20 to 30 years and that's interesting to me because I do you cannot be denied that the sales cycle, you know, you do your, you know, you top of funnel, you do your discovery and then you sort of get them through all the way through to negotiate, you know, proposal negotiation, close all the different steps and sales cycle. Yes, that it's an easy way to teach over sales what I want your opinion on is whether or not you feel as though there's more of there's more of an intent focus or almost like an empathetic approach to which customers should continue on to the next path in the sales cycle, whereas if there is no empathetic, you know, cognizance of of is this customer right, then it's just ruthless. Just move you on to the next sales, you know, next next step in the sales cycle than close you, so this, do you think the sales process is the issue or do you think it's the fact that the people that are guiding customers through the sales process are not being empathetic to the actual needs of the customer, does that make sense. Yeah, I mean, I think so I think there are lots of lots of points in there, so one is is yeah, I don't think that sellers today are, you know, any better or worse in terms of their interactions with buyers, then they were for and I think that's problematic right I think we're agreed. Yeah, yeah, and surveys such that people have done, which again, I don't believe are hugely scientific, but from Gartner and Forrester and others saying, wow, you know buyers don't want to deal with sellers anymore. Yeah, I don't think they ever did quite frankly what they do is they want to deal with a seller who can help them achieve what they're trying to get done right to help them. Yeah, define the problem and define what's the best outcome for them and help them get that they sell a buyer wants to talk to a seller who do that. But with this data is coming back and saying about buyers not going to talk to sellers reflects the fact that they're not getting any value from those interactions. So to me, that argues the fact that we're not getting better, we're not necessarily worse, but we're not getting any better in that dimension. And now technology enables buyers to do more of it on their own, thus they're saying in the absence of value from a seller, I'm going to proceed myself. And so I think that that is really sort of the crux of the matters, we're not creating these buying experiences for the buyer that takes someone to invest their time and attention on us as sellers. Okay, so then I was going to say to follow up on that. So then is the buying experience is the issue with the actual sales cycle or is there another component of the buying experience that we could do better. Yeah, I think it's to your point about, you know, we don't focus on making the connection at the human level that we don't focus on being intentional about how we build trust because we're so animated and driven by our process. Right, then meeting our metrics, our activity metrics and so on, that we put sellers in a nearly impossible position. I mean, think about as it's not uncommon to say in the SAS world for an AE to have requirement to have a 5x pipeline coverage in their pipeline for their number. Well, what most sellers and sales leaders don't understand is if that's the case, then your win rate, meaning the percentage of the opportunities you close out of your most qualified opportunities is going to be the reciprocal of your pipeline coverage ratio. So if you say we need 5x coverage, you're doing sellers to just superficially deal with all their customers. Right, and there as a result, what we see is like close 20% their win rates 20% or 20 to 25% some very, very, very typical in the SAS world. And it's like, that's a problem. I mean, if you're in sales, which is a performance based profession. And if we sort of accept the adage that practice makes perfect. If you're only winning one of every five of your opportunities, what are you practicing the most? You're practicing losing, you're practicing building a pipeline just so that so that you can close that 20% yeah, tulips, basically, you're okay with that. But everybody seems to be okay with that. I'm not saying you should be okay with that, but yeah, that's what people are. I'm going to say, well, what are you going to do to, you know, here's your win rate, what are you going to do to grow sales this year? We're going to put more stuff in the top of the pipeline because our process we know it works and it's going to produce a 20% win rate. So what's the value to you of increasing your win rate 1% 2% what's it mean to you? Think about it and it's just insanity. So we want to give people the ability to feel confident about what they're doing. You confidence comes from success, give people the ability to succeed, let them succeed some more. So instead of engineering our processes to generate 20% win rates, engineering your process to generate a 50% win rate. What will that look like? Like I tell you, your sellers will be more and more motivated. They're not going to be experiencing this much burnout. We have the ability to do this. This is part I want to talk about this in my new book is like, we need to rethink because they're fundamentally doing things the same way we were doing for decades.