🎙️ Transcript: Win Rate Podcast with Andy Paul

Win Rate Podcast
Maintaining Win Rates in Tough Markets
Andy Paul, Dave Brock, David Kreiger, Ralph Barsi
June 12, 2024

Ralph Barsi:
Some of the lower performers that don't do well in an organization - and go from lily pad to lily pad - essentially, they're just bringing their mediocre practices from their organization, and they're not holding themselves accountable for improving...

...Those A-players that are being told to give the leads to...the mediocre reps aren't modeling the success and the best practices that they're seeing from those A-players.

And they're kind of hoping it all works out, just kind of waiting for that organization to train them up versus taking the initiative.

Andy Paul:
Hi friends, and welcome to "The Win Rate Podcast." I'm your host, Andy Paul.

Now that was Ralph Barsi and Ralph is one of my guests on this episode of "The Win Rate Podcast." Ralph Barsi is the Vice President of Sales at Kahua.

My other guests today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, supplier experience, and improving your win rates are Dave Brock.

Dave is the founder and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a global sales consulting firm, and he's a frequent contributor and collaborator on this show.

Also joining me is David Kreiger. David is the founder and president of SalesRoads.

Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion:

If you enjoy this podcast, if you enjoy the show, please, really appreciate it, do me a favor, take a quick second before I welcome today's guests, to rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Now, this helps us get discovered by an even larger audience of sales professionals who are looking to take their careers and their win rates to the next level.

So I really appreciate that and thank you for your help. Alright, you ready? Let's jump into the discussion.

Andy:
Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of "The Win Rate Podcast." I'm your host, Andy Paul, and gosh, as always, just look at the brilliance of the people that are joining me here, starting with the rock 'n' roll star that is Ralph Barsi.

Ralph, how are you doing?

Ralph:
Wonderful. Great to be here, Andy.

Andy:
Now, when people talk about rock stars and sales, they usually think, "Oh, top performers."

But Ralph is a recording musician, right?

Ralph:
I am.

Andy:
You're in a band. You're still recording records? You still tour...

Ralph:
Not touring so much. We do hit the studio as often as we can and I've played drums now for too long to record. I don't know, it's close to 50 years.

Andy:
Wow! So, you started like you were two or something, right?

Ralph:
Yeah, I was three years old when I started formal lessons and I haven't looked back.

Andy:
Now, if you want to see Ralph in action, you can find your group...you can find videos on YouTube, right?

Ralph:
You can, yeah. Our band is called Segue, S-E-G-U-E, and we've been together since 1994. We've released three records since then, which you could find on all the hot channels out there. And yeah, it definitely keeps some pep in our step, that's for sure.

Andy:
Excellent. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun to watch the video and watch Ralph rocking out, leading the charge. So welcome Ralph, as always.

David Kreiger, thank you for coming back. David Brock...you've also, gosh, almost feels like you're a co-host sometimes, the number of times we talk, so yeah, really I could give everybody just a few minutes to introduce or a few seconds to introduce ourselves.

I sort was going to plunge ahead thinking, I know you guys, but not everybody maybe, so David Kreiger, tell us what you do.

David Kreiger:
Yeah, so I'm president of SalesRoads. So, we are an SDR outsourcing company, so helping our clients with prospecting, generating appointments for their AEs, and if they want to outsource that whole department to us, we look at it that way.

So we really partner with our clients and we become part of their organization to be able to develop that SDR capability for them.

Andy:
Cool. A question for you on that. Who hires you? Marketing or Sales?

David:
It's a mixture, but more Sales, but we do have some Marketing leaders who do step in and lead the charge and bring us in.

Andy:
Okay. Alright. Dave Brock.

Dave Brock:
I'm Dave Brock, author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide. I run a consulting company called Partners in EXCELLENCE.

We're more of a general management consulting company for larger global corporations, but with a real heavy sales and go-to-market-type focus.

Andy:
And Ralph, tell us about the work side of Ralph.

Ralph:
VP of Sales at a company called Kahua. We are in the construction management space and we provide construction owners and developers with a project management platform to help streamline their construction projects.

Andy:
Got it. Very cool. Alright, so thought that, in this episode, we'd dive into...there's a report that was published recently approved by Pavilion and Ebsta called "B2B Sales Benchmarks."

And I thought, well, okay, the title itself for me was a little problematic to start with because there's assumption that SaaS is B2B, it encompasses all of B2B, which is, it's a part of it.

So alright, a little hubris there in terms of naming it B2B Sales Benchmarks.

So it was really SaaS benchmarks, but I wanted to look at some of the findings because when I looked through the analysis and so on, it to me, I dunno, betrayed a little bit of perhaps a lack of understanding what's really happening and cause and effect and so on.

So one of the first things they highlight in the report is saying, "Hey, the economic environment was tough in 2023 and before," and the comment made is made that "as budgets tighten win rates fall."

And that's never been my experience and I've sold through more recessions than I care to count.

Certainly the number of opportunities you're working on falls, but personally, I've never, either myself personally, or the people I've...teams I've managed...never experienced fallen win rates when budgets tighten.

So I don't see the correlation. Do you guys?

Dave Kreiger, you look most puzzled, why don't you take the lead and respond?

David K:
Sure. We at SalesRoads didn't see that last year. I think there were a lot of other outstanding reasons for that and other things we did to invest in a few capabilities that allowed us to maintain our win rates and we also revamped some of our processes.

But I would just say, generally, as we looked at some of the work that our clients did and the throughput of some of the appointments that we booked, I'll be honest, we did see harder win rates last year.

And so, I don't know - and just taking a mini step back - I think that it does make sense. I think people take longer when the economic environment is a little bit more challenging, especially if we're talking about SaaS and venture-backed companies.

I think there was a lot of pressure from other companies, and other SaaS companies, when they're making investments, to really scrutinize the investments, and they needed to maybe check a few more boxes and get a little bit more input from different people within the organization.

And so, we saw that it did take longer for companies to close and their sales cycles extended and win rates did fall a bit.

And so, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on why it hasn't been that way.

But what we found is that a lot of times companies will increase the number of leads that are looking forward to make up for some of that, and that it is a more challenging sales environment and you have to refine your processes to try to overcome it.

But from a macro standpoint, it is more challenging and you will see win rates decrease.

Andy:
Dave Brock, before I share my opinion...

Dave B:
Well, I can see how you can do some research and see win rates have fallen, but not for good reasons.

And what I've seen a lot, in the decline and the economy, is sales managers, sales executives, and salespeople panic.

So they start casting wider and wider nets, trying to find whatever business they can. And by doing that, their win rates are going to plummet - least I know you and I and have been through at least several of these kind of downturns.

And what you learn in these kinds of things is you have to actually sharpen and narrow your focus.

And if you sharpen and narrow your focus, you should be able to maintain or actually increase your win rate and all.

But I think what I saw in some of our clients is a panic reaction and that panic reaction causes you to cast a wider net.

And so in that sense, I could see win rates going down.

Andy:
Yeah, I would reframe that as terms of casting wide nets as losing discipline.

Dave:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Andy:
So Ralph...

Dave:
In bad economic downturn...in bad economies, you have to tighten your discipline.

Andy:
Right. Ralph.

Ralph:
I agree. I think you do have to tighten discipline and, frankly raise standards in general, despite what's going on in the economy.

And I think David was spot on when he talked about just the refinement of your processes to accommodate this downturn, albeit a temporary one.

It always is, right? So it sometimes feels eternal when you're in the moment, but it is temporary.

And so if you're raising the standards, you're refining your processes and you're sticking to the fundamentals of building the rapport and credibility that's required, really getting an understanding of what the prospect's problems are and maybe what a prescriptive solution might be down the line, the win rates shouldn't be too impacted, at least shouldn't be as negatively impacted as this study makes it sound.

Andy:
Yeah, I agree. So obviously I tip my hand on my perspective, but is yeah, I may have fewer opportunities that fit my criteria as a seller that I will want to invest my time in that I will.

But I think it's important as a salesperson in tough times, as you not relax your standards, you not relax your discipline.

And to your point, Ralph, is perhaps double-down on some of it because yeah, okay, there may be an impact to top line results, but that's a conversation the company needs to have with the board and whomever, because the next big statistic in this report was 69% of reps missed quota in 2023.

Yeah, there are reasons why, but I could still ask why, because it's just lunacy that that's the case, right?

Because what's happened is people know full well, we're in the midst of a downturn, certainly in the SaaS world, and yet quotas were increased, right?

There was no acceptance of reality, but quotas, "Hey, we're going to make sure we grow 10, 15, or whatever percent this year."

So why did they do that?

But the implication in this report is, yeah, somehow the sellers are at fault for this.

And I don't think that's the case at all. David.

David K:
Yeah, I think that sometimes sales managers, and it's really coming from above that it's Management by Excel Spreadsheet, and you want, you've got certain close rates that you need and you have got certain sales that you need.

And if you put it into the spreadsheet, then that becomes the reality and that's the number you need to hit to get the next round of funding, or to hit the numbers that were set out.

But really, I think one of the most important jobs of a sales leader is speaking truth to power, not to emphasize, and really being real about it and saying, "Listen, this is the economic conditions, this is the budget you're giving me, which is probably shrinking at the same time, and this is what I really can do."

But people are afraid to do that because we know what the lifespan of CRO is and people can just get discarded for those things.

But I think the best sales leaders are the ones that can legitimately look at those numbers, explain to the people who want them, what is real and what isn't real, and be able to make that case because at the end of the day, when you create those unrealistic expectations for your reps, it actually, I think we all know, has the opposite effect because it's demotivating.

When you have a number you can't really hit. It's not like it's always a stretch goal, and that's magic to hit it. And so I think it really lies with that sales leader.

Andy:
It's in the same report. Again, there's sort of this air of mystery around the fact that, oh, well, "Turnover increased from 22% to 36%."

It's like, well, but nowhere in the report did they tie it to quotas and the way the quotas are set, it's like, come on, let's give the whole picture here. Right?

There's a cause and effect here. Dave....

Dave B:
Well, you know what I'm going to say on this is that there's been, I think, huge irrationality in the way we set quotas; and we set quotas not based on, I've always set quotas as stretch goals, but they'd come from kind of an analysis of what's realistic, what's possible, not what's outrageous or what's driven by our investors or driven by our expectations for growth and so on.

And expectations for growth should go down when we're in tough economic terms.

So it's not surprising that more people miss their quota. And you look at kind of the dynamics of how everything happens is you look at shortening tenures.

So more and more people are inexperienced and they're going to be missing their quotas.

You look at declining...Andy, you and I are broken records on declining win rates, and they're declining even more.

I'm also telling you how old I am by using the term broken records.

Ralph:
Yes, you're okay, Dave.

Dave B:
So, we see all these compounding effects that make it worse.

And what disturbed me about the report is, and maybe I'm jumping ahead in the conversation, is, "This is the way things are. We got to suck it up and learn how to work in this environment," and I don't see executives challenging "Why are they this way and how do we start changing things?"

You did something the other day about why do we accept these low win rates and adjust our pipeline coverage for those win rates?

Why don't we ask ourselves the questions of how do we increase the win rates? And going back to missing quota is why are people missing quota? Are we setting quotas reasonably?

Are there some other effects and so on? And people aren't drilling into, they're looking at the numbers and not what drives the numbers and how we can influence those things that drive the numbers.

Andy:
Ralph, you're shaking your head, or nodding your head actually.

Ralph:
Yeah, sorry. Nodding.

No, I agree with a lot of what Dave's saying. So my disclaimer here is I haven't read the study.

Andy:
Yeah. Oh, I know.

Ralph:
I'm just sharing my opinions and my insights based on literally this discussion in the moment. But as a sales leader, I'm not going to decrease quotas.

It's just not going to happen.

But at the same time, I think we really need to listen to what Dave just said about, and what David said even earlier, about the refining of the processes and getting to the mechanics of the individuals that comprise the sales team, and making sure that if you...not, if you, but when you raise the quotas, it should be implied that you're marrying that with enablement, that you're enabling that with...that you're allowing those reps to be trained, certified, clear on the mission.

And when I talk about enablement and certification, I don't necessarily mean about the given product that they're going to market with, but it's about the problems in the market that your product ultimately resolves.

It's about communicating with a number of stakeholders. It's about managing expectations up and down the chain of command.

We were just talking a few minutes ago about making sure that you're talking in proper context when it comes to the number and the actuals versus the plan.

All of that kind of goes into that enablement umbrella. But I don't see myself or any sales leader for that matter, ever decreasing quota. If they do, I'd love to meet them.

Andy:
Well, would you if you could?

Ralph:
I don't know. Personally, I'm a big fan of expanding versus contracting and growing and continuing on the trajectory and the rising tide lifting all boats.

But I'm also very mindful of the mechanics of what has to raise the number, but not just for the sake of raising the number.

Andy:
Yeah, I appreciate that. But isn't there certain of an element of rising tide lifts all boats to say, "Look, rather than have 70% of our reps not hit quota," which has to create, and I've seen it, it creates this confidence gap in sellers, right?

Because I've been in sales, they're telling themselves, "Hey, I've been doing this for years and every year I am coming up short," because year over year we're seeing more than 50% of reps not hitting their quotas.

Just from a human psychology standpoint.

I've always believed, and the way I've operated, is I've made sure as many of my reps could hit quota as possible because they got confidence from hitting the number, even if there was a different number than somebody else had.

But once somebody has gotten in the habit of hitting a number, what do they want to do above all else?

They want to keep hitting the number. Once they experience success, they want to keep having success.

And we seem to just have ignored this just basic lesson of human psychology in sales, in favor of let's just keep pressing forward and "Oh, if we only have 20, 30% of reps make quota, that's okay."

I think that's a really flawed worldview.

And one of the things I take inspiration from, I brought this up on the show before, is I've read this article several years ago about the Chicago Public School District, high schools - one of the most troubled school districts in the country - and they knew that, if they could get kids to graduate high school that we know that has the knock-on effect from terms of lifetime income potential is huge, right?

So they started this program that was determined not to let kids fail. They called it "Freshmen On Target."

And so you're freshmen, you got extra support because you hit the goals, they were set for freshmen.

They know if they got you through freshman year, you have a higher likelihood of going and keeping in school from all four years and graduating.

Because success breeds confidence and confidence breeds desire to keep succeeding.

We seem to have missed that lesson in the sales world. To me, it's just this is, I, we all know the world's really shortsighted, but then go ahead, Dave.

David K:
And it changes the way that they look at themselves. "I am somebody who hits quota. I am somebody who passes my classes" versus "I'm somebody who always doesn't hit quota. And that perception of yourself becomes reality."

Andy:
And yet we seem to be content to let that happen.

Dave B:
This report shows the lowest number of people I've seen hitting quota. It's 31% of people have hit implicitly, 31% hit or exceeded their quota.

And for the last few years we've seen that somewhere in the range of 40%. There's this whole mindset around huge amounts of over-assignment of quota, perhaps irrational assignment of quota.

There's this huge mindset of "I can make my numbers with 20% of my people doing, hitting, or exceeding my quota."

I've always been an aggressive quota setter, but I kind of designed my plan so that somewhere 75, 80% of my team will, is expected to, hit quota, hit or quota.

And there I think you start getting back to some of the underlying people issues, David, that you just mentioned, and Andy, that you mentioned about how do you build confidence?

How do you build morale? How do you build skill and capability? One of the things we see this revolving door in short tenure is people want to be successful.

And if they can't be successful in one organization, they'd go to the other organization, and the other organization, the other organization, and guess what?

They never achieve success in any organization. And also there was a whole bunch of things broken.

We could and should be doing so much better and we could and should be performing so much better.

Andy:
Well, let me ask a question. I'm going to start with you, Ralph. This is in response to this report.

Somebody had posted on LinkedIn, though go nameless, said, "Look, the solution to all this, the good news is there's solution."

It was basically the way it was phrased, and the solution is "give all your best leads to your best reps."

Ralph:
Oh boy.

Andy:
And that is, I'll just tell you, I think it's so incredibly shortsighted and wrongheaded, it makes my blood boil when I hear that.

It doesn't work. It is self-defeating, ultimately.

Tell me if I'm wrong. Is that what somebody should be doing instead of...yeah, my belief is if you've got reps you don't trust to handle leads. You either coach 'em to get better or you coach 'em to go work somewhere else.

Ralph:
Yeah, I have a lot of different thoughts on this. So first of all, you said tell me you're wrong. You're not wrong.

I agree with you on that point. And I also have seen firsthand, as I know you gentlemen have as well, when people go from organization to organization, and I don't always...in fact, often, I don't blame the organization more than I blame the individual.

I do think some of the lower performers that don't do well in an organization and go from lily pad to lily pad, essentially they're bringing their mediocre practices from an organization in a lot of respects, and they're not holding themselves accountable for improving.

Those A-players that are being told to give the leads to the mediocre reps aren't modeling the success and the best practices that they're seeing from those A-players.

And they're kind of hoping it all works out.

They're arriving at a new organization, just kind of waiting for that organization to train them up versus taking the initiative, being proactive, talking about what their plan might look like, providing some context, et cetera, et cetera.

So, I think in large part, I probably find myself blaming the individual more than the organization.

Andy:
Sure. I think there's certain strata of individuals, yes, that probably don't belong in sales as a career. And that's fine.

It doesn't make 'em bad people, it's just not the right fit, right? Sure. They need to be encouraged to find something that's the right fit.

Ralph:
And I'd include, pardon the interruption, Andy, I'd include some of the sales leaders in that mix too.

They, too, are in the wrong role.

Andy:
Right.

Dave B:
But I think you called that post out to me and I ended up with a knee-jerk-long diatribe blog post on it.

But let's say we implement that strategy. So we know our A-players are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, trying to find things to do with their time.

They just aren't busy enough chasing opportunities and all that. So they have plenty of capacity to absorb all those really good leads.

And so the first, you start seeing, the first flaw in this thinking is that our top players are filling every moment they can chasing business that they can.

So we put more stuff on them and that's going to drive their performance status. They try and manage all that.

So their win rates go down. Then what happens is, the lead that are left over are lower quality leads, so those go to our B-players.

And so their performance goes down because they're lower quality leads and all that kind of thing.

So, this whole philosophy is absolutely insane, is what we're doing with that "give best leads to the A-players" is we're lowering their performance because we're overloading them, we're lowering the performance of our B-players because we're giving them crap.

And you just start playing that forward and it's kind of insane.

One of the things that I go back to my days when I ran fairly large organization, what I gave to my A-players was my toughest leads because they were going to win them rather than give them to a B-player or C-player.

But I'd also try and develop B-players' capabilities of doing that thing. But there's not a lot of real coherent thinking when you start reading things like "give my best leads to the A-player."

Andy:
David.

David K:
Yeah, I think this shows fundamentally what is broken about the whole sales infrastructure when we look at it.

Because I think that great sales teams, and it's great sales leaders look at the system, and Ralph, I think you were touching on this in the methodologies, not necessarily the individuals.

Now they coach individuals, all those things, but they're not just like, "Today I need to send leads to this person or this person's failing, I'm going to swoop in on this deal" and things like that.

That's not sustainable. And you're not going to create overall sales success where you're continually hitting quota.

What you've got to be looking at is the system that will continually work over time, and not just this month, or this quarter, or this year.

And if you start just doing things like that that you're describing, "giving the best sales leads to the best people" might help you in this month or this quarter, but it undermines the system because where are your A-players going to come?

How do you develop the A-players? And when those A-players get promoted or get poached, all of a sudden you're going to be and you're going to be creating the system of catch up.

So I think, and I get it, we're all under pressure to hit our numbers that month, that quarter, and things like that.

But again, the best sales leaders I've seen take that step back and they focus on the system, the processes, irregardless of the people.

Now they're people and they know how to coach 'em. So I'm not saying that, but they're focusing on making the system work. And that's just one great example of making the system not work,

Andy:
Right. Because as a leader, take Ralph for instance, great leader, what Ralph's going to do is say, "Look, I want to be able to teach my B-players how to handle the A leads, and the only way I'm not going to be able to just, 'Hey, go shadow an A-player.' No, they need to work it. And so I need to be there to coach them and help them learn how to handle. And once they've learned what good looks like, then hey, they want to go out and do more good, right?"

Ralph:
That's right.

Andy:
And it's just like you always, I can't remember how many times it's like a consultant and fractional leader, you come into a company and their growth is stalled out in terms of new business acquisition and this is the problem.

This is exactly the problem. They're feeding all the good leads to the first person in the door and the first person in the door or the first couple had the benefit of learning side-by-side with the founder how to sell these types of deals.

And so it had this institutional knowledge, and then became closely held, and they reinforced it.

And so when I'd come in these situations, I'd say, "Oh, the only person with tenure was that first person in the door."

And this has been an endless cycle of other people coming in and out. They were starved of opportunities, they didn't know what good was and not they were completely dependent on inbound.

But still, we all know these opportunities come in.

And this idea that you're just going to focus 'em all, rather than being a proactive coach and leader and help as many of your people as possible, those who are willing to put in the work as Ralph talked about, to learn how to work those type of opportunities, that's just laziness.

Dave B:
We have this kind of systemic thing that's been being in accelerating over several years, and both David and Ralph really hit on it, is that, as we start having these shorter and shorter tenures, rather than looking at things over time and look at how do we design the process and sustain and improve the process over time, we have people coming in - depending on the data you read - average tenure for the leader is somewhere between 11 and 18 months.

So they come in with the mindset...

Andy:
How many, Ralph...

Dave B:
How many months has it been?

Ralph:
It's been 10, Dave.

Dave B:
You have at least another month to go.

Ralph:
Yeah, I'm just embarking on the left end of the range there.

Dave B:
But the average tenure is 11 to 18 months. And so they come in with the mindset, what can I do in that time?

And so we have these kind of very short-sided - and you understand why they do that - I don't know that I agree with that.

They come in and say, "What can I accomplish in this time period?" And they do what they can.

But what that drives is very, is the opposite of what David said, is it doesn't drive systematic process-based. How do we improve month over month, quarter over time? Because if a month later we'll call Ralph up and say, who are you working for now?

Because he's going to go and try.

Andy:
We just jinxed poor Ralph.

Dave B:
Ralph probably is getting exposed to my perverse sense of humor, but that's, we've designed that into the system so people have that mindset of I'm not going to look over the long term.

I'm not going to look over sustained performance improvement. I'm going to do what I can, right now...it is very short term as long as I can, then I'll go do the same thing someplace else and someplace else.

And so what we see, and again, Andy, you and I have talked about this, is we actually see, even though we're hitting our numbers, we're underperforming in potential.

Andy:
Right?

Well, yeah. That's what win rate data shows. Absolutely.

So another interesting, moving on with the report, that was interesting is, well several is, one is saying that 44% of deals were reported as being pushed in timeframe - was elongated.

We started touching that earlier, but I guess my question is does that have to be a given in this type of environment?

Ralph:
That, roughly...

Andy:
...the deal to

Ralph:
44% of the deals push?

Andy:
Yeah...

Ralph:
I think it's natural to anticipate those types of rates will push. I think that's just realistic, but planning for it as well.

Andy:
Well, I just wonder whether that's really new. That was really my question.

That just always the case.

Ralph:
Sounds manual.

Andy:
Yeah, this sort of making, "Hey, this is an artifact of what's going on," but for me it's like I don't think sellers are very good at, and this is not meant to be a criticism.

I think it's hard. It's hard when you're in an opportunity to really say, look, here's a firm, here's a firm close date.

And yeah, we're going to try our best to get at that point, but shit happens and you have minimal control over that. But I don't see that as an artifact of time slowing down necessarily.

David K:
Its...oh, go ahead Ralph.

Ralph:
No, please.

David K:
I agree. It's always there and it's obviously a big part of sales and trying to figure out proactively where the blockers are going to be, and who are the people within the team that's going to be making the final decisions, who are going to be our advocates and who aren't, and making sure you're proactive and the best salespeople do that.

So I think that's, irregardless of slower times. I think there are, and maybe better salespeople can anticipate it.

There are more surprises during times when budgets are leaner.

If you go back to 2021 when money's just flowing and cost of capital is low, the CFOs and different people have less of a propensity to put on the breaks or ask more questions, the better ones still should have, right?

There are a lot of mistakes made, but I think just human nature, it's easier to buy things as an organization when it feels like capital isn't so constrained.

And so I can see it being elongated. Again, as I said at the beginning, I saw it with some of our clients that it was longer sales cycles than they anticipated, and I don't think that undermines, I think the point you're making Andy, and which Dave you said at the beginning too, is that you do just have to sharpen your tools and you've got to know that those surprises might come.

You've got to be good and double down on thinking through all the different constituents you're going to have to win over and try to be proactive and try to counteract it.

But I do think there's headwinds and that doesn't mean good salespeople don't try to figure out ways to overcome the headwinds.

Andy:
Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that this brings up, at least for me is because as I read the report and so on, and again makes senses more on larger deals, but we see a lot of, and you see a lot of stuff right about presenting business cases and so on.

Is that, and this report sort alludes to it, is that people are using sellers typically use business cases toward the end of the deal to justify the purchases was saying for me, I always did at the beginning.

It is part of qualification.

If I couldn't put together, I always call it a rough order of magnitude business case because things could change subsequent to that, but based on really defining what the customer wanted to achieve, if rough order of magnitude, pricing, look at do the calculation they need, whether there's payback period, ROI return on invested capital, whatever it was, and then say, "Well, based on this, is this enough to say, yeah, if this holds true, we're going to make a decision," not necessarily by me, but they're going to make a decision.

And if it couldn't get to that, then I'd say, well, okay, maybe now's not the right time.

Ralph:
And also at that phase, Andy, it's also bringing up "Here's what we think might be in our way throughout this process, validate if we're accurate or not."

And also it's almost like a U-shape at the beginning of the cycle, whether that's a buying cycle or a selling cycle, that's up to you.

That's not only when you introduce the business case at the beginning and at the end, I would argue, but it's also when I've seen leadership be the most impactful, is when they're introduced at the beginning and at the end of that big U.

Andy:
You're talking leadership on the sales side.

Ralph:
That's right. That's right. That's what I mean.

Andy:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely interest what other people think because oftentimes when I was leading teams, I was sort of first person and beyond the founder.

And so yeah, I wanted to get that person because I was selling highly complex technical stuff that I was really over my head on for the most part.

So it was really important for me to have the leadership and the founder there near the beginning to help set the tone.

Dave B:
Andy one things, I think the report is co-mingling and conflating issues that can't be conflated is, one...

And as David mentioned in tough economies, it's natural that buying cycles are longer, customers are much more cautious about what they're doing.

But a longer buying cycle is different from a push.

A push has to do with our accuracy in forecasting when the customer needs to have the solution placed. And we've had push problems.

A push problem is virtually independent of the economy, "How well aligned am I with what the customer's trying to achieve when they need to achieve it?" and so on.

So I'll have longer sales cycles here, but that shouldn't impact my ability to be roughly in the right range of the target close date.

Whenever I go into a client, one of my favorite things is I said, "Show me this data from Salesforce" or whatever. It's one of my favorite fields. It is the number of times the target close date has changed.

And I remember a few years ago I was sitting down and we were sitting down doing the quarterly forecast and, one of the guys, one of the largest deals I'd seen that they had, and it was critical for them to make the number.

The rep came in, did a deal review and said, trust me, it's going to come in, it's going to come in when I say it. And I thought, let me understand this, "The target closed date has slipped 11 times in the last 15 months. Why should I leave you this time?"

And so the fact that we aren't well aligned with our customer and their buying process and helping them understand, what do you need to have a decision made and a decision put in place, and then how do we align what we do to keep that?

They'll slip a little bit, but how do we keep that as solid as we can?

Another quick story is, a number of years ago I was working with a client. They were selling to custom packaging machinery to a chocolate company, and it put these little wrappers on the chocolate, which happens to be a very complex thing.

And it turns out the big chocolate buying season is September through December.

So that meant they had to have these manufacturing lines in place by a certain period of time to test the manufacturing lines and start making chocolates so that they can have them in the stores September through December.

And so you start walking back and you go to the customer and say, "You need to make," it takes us so much to build this machine, so "you need to make a decision by this date."

They could hold that date really firm with the customer because they go to the customer and say, "f you miss this date, you will lose 400 million dollars in revenue."

And so did they split the establishment as the target closed date?

They made it within a couple of weeks.

Ralph:
I'm sure they did.

Dave B:
He saw 'em, but I keep seeing these pushes and pushes. That's bad sales execution, not an issue around the economy, but it's an issue around the economy.

Andy:
But it's a company issue, isn't it? That really, in my opinion, you guys correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I really think this is a management and coaching issue is to help people develop because yeah, I was referring a study that folks closed did I think about a year ago, which was, they asked, they looked into the CRM system to see what the reason for win-loss was, that was put into Salesforce, and then they went back to the buyers and asked them, and the reps are only right 15% of the time.

And so my thinking is that, "Well, if the sellers themselves are only right about that 15% of the time, then they have no idea when the deal's going to close."

In general, but to me that's sure you could say that's a sales issue, but it's really a sales leadership issue.

A management issue is how are you working with their sellers to help them learn how to work opportunities and understand, get to the level of understanding what the buyers, what's going to drive the decision, as Dave did, at what timeframe and so on. And clearly that's not happening.

David K:
And what else if they didn't know that, what else did they not understand about the prospect and their issues and what they were trying to help them with?

So there's a high correlation I think, between the two, losing that deal and getting it.

Andy:
One of my favorite stories, which I wrote about in one of my books, is, I was on a train in Penn Station, I was heading up to Boston, it was the last day of a month, and some young guy in a suit comes in and sits in the chair in front of me and the seat in front of me on Acela and pulls out his phone and he's clearly talking to his boss and the boss is clearly saying, "What the hell happened?" Right?

"This deal and the seller's hemming and hawing," and "what was this and that" and so on. And then finally he breaks out the classic, he goes, "Well, the buyers were just liars."

Laughing out loud in the seat behind me. He doesn't know I'm laughing at him, but it's just like, "Oh my God, dude, you committed to something happening and you had no idea, clearly, what it was going to take to make it happen or what was going to make it happen in the timeframe that you committed to.

Ralph:
Brutal.

Andy:
It's brutal for sellers, but again, I think this is the job of certainly frontline managers to help sellers with this.

There was another stat in the report that was saying that, of all deals lost, 61% were reported by the reps to be lost due to, quote / unquote, "indecision."

Now, oh, you see that little artifact raising...

DavidK:
Celebrated...

Andy:
...celebrated...that is...deals aren't Lost Indecision.

It's like a buyer saying, "Oh, we don't know to buy A or B, so we're going to do nothing. If they meant, and I'm referring to the...they meant about "lost to no decision" is, yeah, I think one of the great misconceptions in sales is the fact that no decision is not a decision.

No decision is a decision.

Ralph:
Absolutely.

Andy:
We're not buying from you. That's the decision.

David K:
And we're happy with status quo.

Andy:
Yeah.

David K:
Or happier...we didn't go with you.

Andy:
You didn't give it a reason to change.

David K:
Right.

Andy:
Decision customers ultimately make is not a decision to buy a product, it's a decision to make a change. That's right. You didn't give us a reason to make a change, right?

So it's not 62% lost their decision, but from the closed study that 85% of the reasons the sellers give a wrong anyway. So clearly that one's not correct.

Ralph:
On that note, I'm a huge proponent, I don't know how you all feel about this, but I'm a big fan of win reports and loss reports, and circulating those across the organization, actually meeting on the win reports.

For example, our organization, not to be partial, but we hold a monthly loss review call, and account executives get on the call and they walk us through what change they thought was occurring, what response they thought the prospect was giving to the given change, and why we lost the deal.

Surprisingly, yes, there's a percentage that they don't include themselves, the reps that is on the excuse list, but a majority of them, fortunately...

Andy:
I do I want to see that one in Salesforce, Ralph, is, "I screwed up. That was one reason: I screwed up."

Ralph:
Yeah, that's not on one of the dropdown menus, I guess, in Salesforce, but a lot of benefit from those types of calls is my point.

Andy:
Absolutely.

Dave B:
But I think what Ralph's doing...saying here is...it's so important, and I so seldom see it done, is we look at Salesforce and do the dropdown box, and it's always won because of sales superiority, it's always lost because of price or features or something like that.

But sitting down and doing the reviews and going to one step further to say, "Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently? How would you have changed your approach?"

Because now, you start helping people think, so I don't replicate the same mistake over and over again. I try and learn from those losses and grow from them and that kind of thing.

The type of people that do what Ralph is suggesting, the number of people I can probably count on...

Andy:
It's unfortunate it's pretty small.

When you talk to win-loss vendors like Clozd tends to be purchased by product marketing. They get that win-loss analysis and they're saying, okay, well we want to tune our offering or change our pricing.

It's infrequent that you then see it, that information on this day-to-day, week to week, month to month basis, Ralph talked...used by sales to really analyze what's happening at the seller level as opposed to a more strategic level. David.

David K:
And again, there's a lot of egos out there, but I think some of the best salespeople I have seen do not fess up but say, "Listen, this is where I messed up."

And they they're and they think about things and that's how they grow and they learn. And so I get it, and again, it's the whole sort of a theme over the course there both for leaders and salespeople, there's a short-term feeling like you're worried if you don't hit your quota, you might get fired, all those things.

But when you take the longer term perspective and you say, "Listen, I'm going to say this is where I messed up" and ask your manager for advice or the team for advice, you're going to grow.

You're going to become a better salesperson and you're going to be more likely to hit your quota in months and quarters and years to come.

And so it's a shame that people do feel that they can't do it. I think some of it's the personality because everyone has, it goes, but it's also the culture.

And if you can create a culture of salespeople, and that starts again with the leader, if they can show that they made a mistake and show that in front of their team and show that vulnerability or whatever you want to call it, you can create a culture where people do self-reflect more, and then you've created a system of learning.

Andy:
Last question. Sorry, breaking outside of this report, but it was raised by another post that I saw. Actually Dave initially shared with me, our inboxes are lousy with you and I sharing stuff we see on LinkedIn that we think is, and this one was from somebody saying, "Look, basically everybody at an executive level and in sales needs to have a side hustle," right?

Ralph:
Needs to have one?

Andy:
Needs to have one. But basically saying is, look, this is your form of self-protection against an uncertain future is that you need to have something else going.

And I just thought about that and I was like, I understand, sure people have some side hustles going, but as a form of self-protection in sales, never.

This was just me. I lost a job at sales, I got laid off. We've all been through the wringer, but I never operated on a day-today basis worried about losing my job because I was pretty confident that I had a track record and I was going to be able to find work.

I think that's been what I've seen over course of my career, which, except for maybe Dave, is longer than everybody's is, like...

Dave B:
Careful there, Andy.

Ralph:
Go easy on 'em. Andy. Go easy.

Andy:
Well, I know we're the same age the, I may be older, but anyway, is, my fear is that people operate in such a level of fear. They're going to get so distracted by thinking they need to protect themselves and having something else going, but they're not going to have the bandwidth to focus on what the primary task is.

Ralph:
I see both sides of it. I really do. I see the pros and the cons.

The cons are, look, if you're chasing two rabbits, they're both going to escape. You know what I mean?

You're going to end up being the loser.

The pro side of having the side hustle is, when you've got a website called layoffs.fyi, showing you pretty much on a daily or weekly basis, all the layoffs that are happening across high tech, it's pretty daunting.

And you start to realize as an individual contributor that, "Wait a minute, maybe it's not me. And I actually am pretty good at what I do, and it still doesn't ensure my future at this specific company."

And so that I understand where you might want to peek over the fence a little bit because you got to put food on the table at the end of the day. So I do see both sides of it. I don't know if I feel strongly about one or the other,

Andy:
But this whole thing about lays in tech though...

Dave B:
Peeking over the fence and looking and having some opportunities perhaps on deck is different from a side hustle.

Ralph:
Depends on what the side hustle is.

Andy:
Rock musician. Yeah. Yes. Well,

Ralph:
Great example.

Andy:
But that's different than operating a full-fledged business as what this person basically For sure. Absolutely.

Personally advocating was have a business and it's like, yeah, but again, are you so fearful, right? And have such lack of confidence in it.

And to your point about layoffs, yes, you look at the layoffs, tons of layoffs, but there was this arc on the Wall Street Journal today.

It's like, oh, this never used to happen in tech. Hey, I've been in tech. I don't want to say until when, but, it's always been there.

And in big numbers, and this is not a new artifact, but the protection for me is to say, "Look, to have a full fledged business on the side, it's, to be really good at what you do, your primary profession."

Ralph:
Go deep.

Andy:
That's the best protection against the uncertainty that exists. Just be really good at what you do.

Dave B:
Andy, what you're alluding to, and you've kind of mentioned a couple of times here, is there's this kind of undercurrent of culture, of fear, and uncertainty and hedging your bet, and not being all in, and it tends to kind of snowball on itself and this kind of lack of trust, in each other, in the organization that I think is really toxic to people, to organizations, and to our overall performance.

And has my suspicions about how it's generated and how it's been reinforced over the years, and, until we start changing some of these things.

It's interesting, is, when we do projects right now, one of my biggest qualifying questions is what's average tenure of your management team and what's average tenure of the reps?

The interesting thing, and I've been doing a lot of research for the new book, is when you look at the very top performers in a segment, their average tenures are significantly longer than everybody else.

Andy:
Top performers, meaning, at a company level, within the company.

Dave B:
If you look at within a market segment, the consistent top performers, much longer average tenures, and there's some of the, you look at it, we build the experience where we enforce it, we grow our people, blah, blah, blah.

But what we've seen is this whole culture of churning and lack of trust and lack of loyalty of people, to the company, to the people. And again, that causes us to actually perform lower than we really could and should be performing.

Andy:
David.

David K:
Yeah, I think being a great salesperson is really hard and takes everything you've got to be great at it.

Starting a business or even if it's just "solopreneurship," I know that's the big buzzword, it's really hard.

We see a lot of influencers out there that make it seem easier, but it's not. It is really hard.

And so I think the analogy about bunnies that Ralph bought up is the right one, right?

You can't be good at both, and you need to at least know what your focus is.

Now, if you have a passion like music for Ralph and that's your side hustle or something else, and that's fun and that's a relief and you want to have it, then that's something different.

But if you're doing it as a backup and you're doing that as fear, you're going to fail at both.

Now, if you want to start your own company and that's going to be your focus, I would say focus, get out.

First of all, it's not fair to the company, but also for you to really be successful, you've got to focus as quickly as possible, try to get funding or cut your expenses or whatnot.

Because to start a company, it's all, when I started SalesRoads, I was working around the clock into the wee hours of the morning all weekend, and so both are really hard and so just pick what you want to be great at because it's very hard.

Look at Michael Jordan. He wasn't great at baseball, right?

Dave B:
See, what I love about what you're saying, David, is you're doing this as a purposeful strategy of where you want to go as opposed to the way this post presented.

It was a hedging strategy, which chasing the two rabbits and so and think all of us, when I started the business, I was CEO of a company and I had actually told the board is I'm to be leaving in a few months, but I did some over that period.

I started wrapping up my new business, making sure I had somebody to replace me and so on, and driving that, but that was because it was my purpose and my goal to go that direction and that I really get. That's so powerful.

But again, as a hedging our bet kind of philosophy that is so tough.

Andy:
Yeah, so I'm sure this is probably been said, but just sort of sprung to mind is like, yeah, you try to hedge against failure, you're hedging against success.

David K:
Absolutely.

Andy:
Wow. I'll have to write that one down. I'll turn around though.

Ralph:
A good one.

Andy:
Alright, with that, we've run out of time. Thank you everyone for such a great conversation. I presume people can find you all on LinkedIn, right?

David K:
You got it.

Andy:
You got it. Alright everyone, thank you so much. Look forward to having everyone back again.

Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of The Win Rate Podcast.

First of all, I want to thank my guests, Ralph Barsi, David Brock, and David Kreiger, for sharing their insights with us today.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, The Win Rate Podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

As always, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul.