Get ready for some serious sales wisdom as Tom, Brandon and Carson sit down with Matt Dixon, the brilliant mind behind "The Challenger Sale" and "The Jolt Effect," to dissect the seismic shifts in B2B sales and the rise of social selling. This episode is a masterclass in overcoming the silent sales-killer: customer indecision. It's not just another pitch; it’s the unveiling of a groundbreaking approach that moves past fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to instead embrace strategies that challenge the norm.
Have you ever faced the frustration of a deal slipping through your fingers, not due to a competitor's edge, but because of your client's sudden cold feet? Our conversation with Matt dives into the psychological maze that traps customers in indecision, as we dissect the tactics that top sales performers use to guide clients through their inertia. We're pulling back the curtain on the sales process, sharing proven strategies to engage and lead clients from a standstill to the satisfaction of a sealed deal.
As we explore the varying landscapes of sales environments, Matt equip syou with the tools to cut through indecision, echoing back client concerns to illuminate their true needs. This conversation is more than just a discussion; it's a strategic playbook designed to empower you to transform indecision into action across any sales terrain. Join us for an episode that could redefine your sales approach and help you chart a course to success with the confidence of a seasoned navigator.
Get ready for some serious sales wisdom as Tom, Brandon and Carson sit down with Matt Dixon, the brilliant mind behind "The Challenger Sale" and "The Jolt Effect," to dissect the seismic shifts in B2B sales and the rise of social selling. This episode is a masterclass in overcoming the silent sales-killer: customer indecision. It's not just another pitch; it’s the unveiling of a groundbreaking approach that moves past fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to instead embrace strategies that challenge the norm.
Have you ever faced the frustration of a deal slipping through your fingers, not due to a competitor's edge, but because of your client's sudden cold feet? Our conversation with Matt dives into the psychological maze that traps customers in indecision, as we dissect the tactics that top sales performers use to guide clients through their inertia. We're pulling back the curtain on the sales process, sharing proven strategies to engage and lead clients from a standstill to the satisfaction of a sealed deal.
As we explore the varying landscapes of sales environments, Matt equip syou with the tools to cut through indecision, echoing back client concerns to illuminate their true needs. This conversation is more than just a discussion; it's a strategic playbook designed to empower you to transform indecision into action across any sales terrain. Join us for an episode that could redefine your sales approach and help you chart a course to success with the confidence of a seasoned navigator.
Welcome to Social Selling 2.0 Live Show and Podcast, where each week, we explore the future of B2B sales. Social has changed the B2B and professional services landscape forever. Capturing and keeping buyer attention has never been more challenging. Our mission is to help you discover new strategies, new technologies, new go-to-market systems and stay up-to-date with what is working now in B2B sales. Your hosts are Carson Hedy, the number one social seller at Microsoft, tom Burton, a best-selling author and B2B sales specialist, and Brandon Lee, an entrepreneur with multiple seven and eight figure exits and a leading voice in LinkedIn social selling. Brandon and Tom also lead social selling 2.0 solutions, which offers turnkey consulting, coaching and training to B2B sales leaders.
Speaker 2:Now let's start the show, hey everybody, welcome to episode number 62, social Selling 2.0. I'm here again with Carson and Brandon and our special guest Matt Dixon. Matt welcome.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, great to be here. It's great to be with guys. I've only stalked on LinkedIn but haven't actually met in person yet, so it's fun.
Speaker 4:I stalked him for years.
Speaker 3:Doesn't everybody, though?
Speaker 4:Come on, yeah, I actually met last month in Seattle and I had more people come up to me asking you know Brandon Lee right? And knowing who I was.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like he's like the Kevin Bacon in social selling. Where's someone?
Speaker 5:I see you're so full of crap.
Speaker 4:That'll be his name in next week's episode.
Speaker 2:Carson, were you stalking him so you can get to Leah Thompson? Was that where you were trying?
Speaker 4:to accomplish. You caught me. It's the back to the future tie-in. Brandon was in the movie Matt, so oh, all right.
Speaker 5:The star power. Yeah, the challenge is if you blink, you missed it, so don't get too impressed. Hey, at least you're in it.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome everybody who is online. We see, I see Bob and Larry already jumping in. Welcome. This is going to be an interesting show, and I think we were just talking before we came on. Matt, you're actually going to go through some materials here, which is actually a little different on this show. Usually you just have to listen to us talk. So this is going to be impressive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm happy to share a little bit of content just to kind of get things going. But you guys give me the stage hook whenever you want me to shut up.
Speaker 2:Well, matt, why don't you start, you know? Tell everybody, if they don't know you already, a little bit about yourself, your background, and then we can kind of jump in and go from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so well, thanks again for having me. So I may you know I've struggled for years to explain what I do for a living. My mother knows I live in DC and I work for agents like groups that have strange acronyms, so she assumes I must buy. But I assure you it's not true. So I think I best subscribe probably as a sales anthropologist, so I bring research-based methods to study changes in customer buying behavior and what the implications are for salespeople, and been doing that for a long time. So we, you know we've done a lot of research and some of that research has ended up in a few books. So we I was co-author of the Challenger Sale and the Challenger Customer and most recently the Jolte Effect, which came out the fall of last year, which is what we're going to talk about today. There you go, carson's got a, brandon's got a hard copy. So there it is, yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, I got to tell a story about that too, because when I started listening to the Jolte Effect, I was cutting the grass and I think my neighbors thought I was nuts because they were wondering why I stopped like every strip and was like taking notes, absolutely love it. So we owe a great deal to you, matt and I. You know we've done a lot of trainings on the Challenger methodology and I guess if Brandon Lee is the Kevin Bacon of social selling, does that make you, if you're the anthropologist, indiana Jones of social selling?
Speaker 3:I'm just on the outside looking in. I just you know, maybe I am the Indiana Jones I guess that's or like the Jane Goodall of sales.
Speaker 4:I like it, I like it.
Speaker 5:Oh, man, carson, I think you know, and really, matt, we're really grateful to have you here. We're excited to hear directly from you, and Carson and I have been going back and forth quite a bit for months on Jolte Effect and, carson, before we started, you had a really really great statement. That, I think, is honestly the best way to kick this off, especially for anybody that hasn't read the book yet, that has no idea what we're going to talk about, especially coming from Challenger Sale, to what the foundation that you and I talked about or took from Jolte Effect. So you want to kick that off because I just thought that was perfect for getting this conversation going.
Speaker 4:No, this is great. But what amazed me, matt and yeah, I'm just going to cut right into the heart, right? So what amazed me about Jolte Effect was the ability to, you know, mid and post pandemic, we have this amazing ability to look at the data of all these recorded calls, because we've made this big switch to the library and we have so much remote work and that's kind of at the basis. But what jumped out at me the most? Two major terms one, radical standard, and two, you talking about how so many of us, myself included, have historically been trained to sell against FUD fear and even today I hear so many sales evangelists talking about hey, we've got this time stamp, we're going to take away the discount if you don't sign by this date. And your way of approaching this and I'm not going to give any of it away because I want people to hear it from you but about just really de-risking that decision. That is what profoundly changed my outlook in reading Jolte Effect now twice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, like I said to you, I didn't know you also read twice. I told Brandon he's told me he read it twice and I'm like that's one more time than I read it. I think that's really cool. Those are cool pickups.
Speaker 3:The radical candor thing I'll give folk that's not my term, that was Kim Scott, who is just a brilliant business writer and coined that term, but I think it really does apply and we can talk about how it applies in this framework of the Jolte Effect. But I think, carson, the thing I hear most from salespeople and sales leaders is I've grown up in this world believing that my only enemy is the customer status quo. It's not the competition, it's the customer's deep-seated desire to do nothing because customers are lazy and they don't like to change. Like we're all lazy and we don't like to change. And if the customer starts ghosting me or disengaging from the sale especially if they told me they want to buy and then they start pulling back, it's got to be that they still think their status quo is good enough. And so I come in with that fud hammer and I think and you see a lot of this on LinkedIn you guys are 100% right.
Speaker 3:Like I just was reading today a post about like here's your Q4 playbook. Like you got to dial up the cost of inaction and these things, and I'm like actually, what your customer's more worried about is not the cost of inaction, it's the cost of action and that's the thing that's got them up at night. And so not for every customer. There are plenty of customers who aren't convinced to change, but those who are bought in that they need to change. The thing that often keeps them from moving forward is that. You know, it's what we call. It's not the fear of missing out, it's the fear of messing up, and so, yeah, so I'll talk a little bit more about that research, just so I'm sure we have some folks on here who are not familiar with it, and I'll give you the Clips Notes version and make Carson and Brandon feel bad for paying for the book because you guys get the shorthand version. That's it.
Speaker 5:No, no, no, it's a really big it's full of notes.
Speaker 4:We do this thing on my team calls every week called what Are you Learning? And on two different teams that I've been a part of, I've shared your book and my learnings from that because, again, I was trained FUD for years upon years and don't get me wrong, I'm successful because of relationships that I built. But standing that fear of messing up was really the profound breakthrough that I had.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, by the way, just and this is not, this isn't a point of fingers to anybody I mean, challenger Sale is really a story we talk about. In Challenger there's a line that Challengers are really good at helping the customer realize the pain of same is worse than the pain of change. So it's all about dialing up that FUD that costs it in action and that is one of the things that Challengers are very good at. But I think what we realize in this research, it's not that that's not important, it's critically important. The customer doesn't think they should change like you're never gonna have an indecision problem, like you haven't. Even you're not gonna collect 200 bucks in pass-go. But I think what really great salespeople have realized is that that's not enough. It's sales, as we'll talk about is. There's two axes to the play and there may be more, but there's at least two we've discovered.
Speaker 2:So Well, matt, let's jump in. Let's jump in some of the slides you have and, if you're online listening, jump in with questions, because I think we can make this interactive as you kind of go through and take questions and but we have some structure, which I think is gonna be great.
Speaker 3:So so let's start there. Let me do this. Okay, I think all right. So sorry, this is a little bit. I've always I always have to relearn the platform when we get on new platforms, so where?
Speaker 5:is my point of style.
Speaker 1:And this is the truth.
Speaker 2:We'll try to explain it as we go along to, for the people on the podcasts listening to audio. Yup, of course, can you guys see that? Oh, look at that Well done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, perfect, wow, alright. I didn't think I had the technical capabilities to put that. Man, we have come to the point.
Speaker 3:Here we are. Alright, it is a brave new world. Okay, so Jolt Effect, let's jump right into it. This is a story about a problem. This is one of those things that, honestly, guys, I would say I feel like a lot of my careers been around this concept of better to be lucky than good, and this is definitely one of those examples where we wrote this book in the fall of to a public student fall of last year, and we started researching this problem of customer indecision back in 2020. I'll tell everyone where the research came from and the data, because that's part of the story, carson, as you said before.
Speaker 3:But I think what is interesting is that back then, things were actually pretty good in the B2B sales world. We were especially like places like SaaS and tech. We're just blowing up, you know God. Reps were having no problem closing deals, and it was only. And as we started researching this, we actually had a fair number of sales leaders who said I don't really think indecision is a problem. I don't think we have a lot of no decision losses. We're actually. Our bigger problem is like we've got so much business and qualifying opportunities to make sure we go through the right customers. Fast forward to fall of 2022 and even into the current environment we're all selling into and I think we all know that indecision, ghosting, radio silence has become a huge problem. But I will share with you guys you know this is the data point we pulled from our data set back in the summer of 2022, that anywhere between 40 and 60% of the average sales person's qualified pipelines so these are qualified opportunities will ultimately be lost to no decision. So Mark then in the CRM system has closed loss, no decision, and that's just a huge dead weight loss for any sales person. But if you're a manager or a sales leader, you multiply that across a number of people on your team or in your organization. It gets pretty expensive. But again, I would argue, for a lot of companies, especially in the SaaS space right now, the number is even higher than that. It's probably 70, 80% of deals being lost to no decision.
Speaker 3:Now, I mentioned that the data itself was actually part of the story here, so we took the guys hinted at this in the upfront. But back in the you guys remember spring of 2020, topsy turvy time in the world. There's the days of Tiger King and baking sourdough, bread and all the good stuff, right. But because, as these guys know, we're huge nerds. So we saw this as an opportunity to do a sales study because we had suddenly access to this mountain of recorded sales costs Because, remember, spring of 2020 was when sales went 100% virtual. Customers didn't want you in their office, they didn't even want you six feet away, they wanted you to stay in your side of the country. Do not come visit me.
Speaker 3:Everything happened on Zoom, and so we had access to millions of recorded sales calls. We recruited several dozen companies, said, hey, we're gonna run a research study for about 18 months. Would you send us all of your sales calls recorded sales calls, mapped, appended to the rep who was selling the deal and the opportunity, so we could dynamically update that opportunity close? Was it lost? Was it one? Was it lost to get close to note, due to no decision, et cetera. We transcribed all those calls using a transcription engine and then we use a machine learning platform from a company called Tether to study it at scale.
Speaker 3:All told, we looked at 8,300 variables. All kind of pointed at this question of why do customers do nothing? Like what would possess a customer, especially a customer, to like go through an entire sales process and then do nothing. Why would they wanna waste not just our time but their own time doing that? And, more importantly, where the best sales people do to avoid it.
Speaker 3:I'll pull forward a little bit of the good news here. I started in a bit of a depressing spot, but the good news is this is that high performers have figured out how to avoid this problem, or largely avoid it, I should say. Average performer win rates in our study were 26%, which I think in current environment people might look at and say, gosh, I wish we were converting it to 26%, but that was the average. In our study, high performer win rates were closer to 60% 59 to be exact and in and of itself that won't surprise anybody. But this part might surprise you that across 8,300 variables we studied the biggest swing factor, the biggest explainer of that gap between average performers and high performers, was how high performers dealt with what we would call the cold feet moment in the sale.
Speaker 3:This is the moment that typically happens after the customer says they want to buy, but before the point where they actually do buy, right? So this is the point where customers start, you know, dredging up concerns and objections that you're like why are we still talking about this, like I thought I put that concern to bed. I thought I handled that objection. I thought we got you on the phone with the reference customer, we did a POC like we were good and now, all of a sudden, it seems like you're reconsidering your decision. Now let's, before I show you what high performers do, let's talk about what most sales people do. And Carson set up really nicely before. This is a prototypical sales or buying journey, I should say. But in sales process, if you will, that a customer goes through. So I know everyone's sales process is more complicated than this. The customer's buying process is way more complicated than this. But they're basically three moments in a B2B sale Moment.
Speaker 3:Number one is where we engage the customer for the first time. We find them in their status quo. This is the way they do things today. Maybe they use a homegrown solution, maybe they use your competitor's solution, maybe they use your solution, but in a narrow use case, and you want them to use it enterprise wide, or use the full set of capabilities, or use the platinum version, not the silver version, whatever it is. That's the way the customer does things today. Now the first act in the sales play is to get them from what they do today to agreeing what they do today is not good enough and they need to move forward in a new direction and using your solution as the way to enable that, right. So we've got to get them to agree on a vision and that is answering for the customer the why change question right, you got to get them to say status quo is not good enough. We need to move forward and we want to work with you guys.
Speaker 3:Now the last step in the play, or the second act in the play, is to get the customer from saying they want to buy to getting them to actually buy. And what we found in our study is that this is actually where a lot of deals go sideways, especially these days. You get a lot of window shopping, you get a lot of customers who say they're bought in, but then they start hemming and hawing and waffling and wavering and straddling the fence and they start ghosting you and going radio silent. And, exactly as Carson said, that every sales person has been taught that in this scenario, there's only one reason the customer is hesitating and it's because they are still suffering from status quo bias. Right, they still believe what they're doing today is good enough. What you're talking about is not a compelling enough reason to change, or maybe this just isn't a big priority for them or in their business. And so what you find in these sales calls two and a half million sales calls is that almost 75% of the time when the customer starts to vibrate after they've stayed their tent but before they execute the docusign, when they start to vibrate and waffle and waver and backpedal, 75% of sellers almost go back to hammer this close.
Speaker 3:Now sellers do this in really one of three ways. The first attempt is almost always to reconvince the customer of how good the solution is, to rearticulate the benefits, to point back to all the success that you had in the pilot or the proof of concept or all the amazing reference calls you had, or to point out the case studies and the proof points and the ROI projection and just talk that up, because what you're trying to get the customer to realize is like you're not gonna get all these benefits if you say no. How could you pass up on such goodness that we're going to offer you? If that doesn't work? The second play is usually the fun play, which is make the customer realize the cost of inaction right. Dial up the pain right. Create the burning platform. Help them understand that they stand to lose significantly if they don't move forward, that the status quo is not just that sub-op, it's no longer tenable Like if this is a burning platform. You have to move forward.
Speaker 3:If those two plays don't work, almost every sales person in our study resorts to the third play, which is the 10% discount. That's only good. This quarter, right. It's the urgency driver, right. Sometimes it's not a discount. Sometimes it's like hey, if you don't say yes now, you're gonna have to wait six months to implement the solution because we're so busy. Then you're not gonna get the full benefits next year, your boss is gonna be mad at you and you're not gonna get your bonus, and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:So those are the three plays we see sellers run, and it's again because sellers have been taught basically to dial up the FOMO. If you're missing out, you're gonna miss out on these benefits, you're gonna miss out on this opportunity to fix your terrible SaaS goal, or you're just gonna miss out on this discount that I'm offering you right now. This didn't surprise us that sales people did this. In fact, it was probably encouraging to us that they were doing what they'd been trained to do for years. But when we ran the data, we found something surprising, which is that that FOMO playbook actually backfires way more often than it works out. In fact, it increases the odds that a customer will wind up in a no-decision state. This was pretty shocking to us because, again, it's given the base of a lot of sales conventional wisdom, what sales people have taught for a very long time and, candidly, what we said, as I pointed out before in the Challenger sale. You know Challenger's really good at overcoming the customer status quo. So how could it be that doing that would actually make things worse, not better? And so we dug into the data and we found something a bit surprising, which is that when a customer makes no decision, it turns out there are two reasons that can happen.
Speaker 3:Now, sales people have only ever been taught what they're doing. The first reason is the one they've been taught that the customer, deep down, prefers their status quo. What I'm doing today is good enough. What you're talking about is not a compelling enough reason to switch, or this is not a top priority for me or my business. Those are all status quo preference reasons that an ideal could be lost without a decision. But it turns out there's a second reason, and the second reason has nothing to do with the status quo. It is customer indecision, which itself stems from their fear of failure. Now a lot of people ask me.
Speaker 3:They're like oh isn't it a no decision loss, in fact a decision the customer's deciding to stay with their status quo, and what I tell them is that, yes, 44% of the time that is true. There are customers out there who are just being polite. They're not telling you that they believe their status quo is good enough and they're not that impressed with what you're proposing, and they just believe that they're gonna stay put, and they consciously make that decision. But 56% of the time, the customer winds up in no decision, not because they don't believe in the value you're offering, but because they can't make a decision. They wanna buy from you, but they can't pull the trigger, and the thing that keeps them from pulling the trigger is their fear, or their fear that something is gonna go wrong. Now, when I show those people this, there are two things that surprise them. One is that you know a lot of sellers, of course, sell to C level executives, and these are people who get paid to make the big decisions, and so sales people get confused over the fact that their customers are just afraid of messing up. They're afraid of screwing up or failing. Now this just to explain what's going on here is actually tied to a deep seated human bias. We're all familiar with status quo bias right, the desire to just stay put, human laziness, the desire not to change that has been the enemy we've been focused on for a very long time in sales. But there's another very and arguably more powerful bias called the omission bias, which has been thoroughly documented by a number of behavioral economists and psychologists, including these guys, that's Amos Siverski on the left and Daniel Kahneman on the right, who did a lot of research around this concept called omission and in different types of loss. So let me just explain this in very short fashion. So what these guys discovered and again this has been validated through countless psychological experiments, behavioral economics studies is that human beings think about loss in two dimensions.
Speaker 3:On the one hand, you've got what are called errors of omission. This is when you lose out or you realize a cost or an error. You experience an error or loss because you didn't do anything, you chose not to act and you experience a loss as a result. So when we talk about the cost of inaction in sales, what we're talking about is an error of omission you chose not to act and you experienced a loss as a result. That is very different from what's on the right. That's an error of commission. An error of commission is when you experience a loss not because you didn't act, but because you did act. You made a decision, you chose a course of action and that decision led to a loss.
Speaker 3:Now these two circles look like the same size on this page, but let me show you in your brain how they appear. It's like this this is called the omission bias. This stipulates that people are more wired to avoid loss. Even if it's the same exact size, quantity and scope of loss. It is much worse for us as people to be perfectly responsible for that loss than to be an innocent bystander in having that loss happen. So the shorthand for salespeople is this that the fear of missing out, it turns out for your customers, is a heck of a lot less important to them than the foe move. What is the foe move? The foe move is the fear of messing up. Not say for a work version as foe move, but these guys told me to keep that family friendly, so we'll let you figure out in your own what that is.
Speaker 4:If you get brand and going, sometimes it isn't as family friendly.
Speaker 3:So the fear of f-ing off. This is a big deal for salespeople. What this tells you is that even at a very senior level, even when you're selling to that C-level executive, that very senior, that very important top officer, they suffer mightily from their fear that they will be personally associated with a mistake, that their name will be on a purchase, a software purchase, a transformation engagement with a consulting firm, whatever it is, and it goes sideways and they are to blame. So that's thing one that salespeople get wrapped around the axle. A little bit of this like why are these decision makers so worried about messing up? It's because we all worry about messing up. But the second question salespeople ask me is well, what are they worried about? Messing up, like, what specifically are they worried about? And the data was pretty telling here.
Speaker 3:It turns out there are three big fears of failure that customers have. The first one comes from choice overload. This is where we as salespeople, supported ably by our marketing team, put so many options in front of our customers contract lengths, use case, specific deployments versus enterprise-wide, partner integrations you name it different versions of the platform, silver, gold, platinum. We put all this choice in front of them and when they look at all those choices they get, they freeze. And the real concern is I know I want to work with you as a vendor, but how to work with you? Because what I can't afford to have happen is I choose configuration A and it turns out configuration B would have been much better for us, but we can't change that for three years because we're locked into a three-year contract. Now I've got egg on my face. So in that world, the safest decision for the customers don't choose any option and just kick the can down the road. The second fear of failure comes from information overload. And this is a customer who's just worried that they haven't done enough research, that all of their questions and fears will be addressed in the next white paper they read. Or if they just wait six months for the next Gardner Magic Quadrant to come out, then they will be able to say I've left those so in turn, what they're trying to avoid is a situation in which new information comes to light after the decision is made, and then new information makes the purchase seem like not such a great idea.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you guys, real quick story. Just the other day sales leader from a tech company told me they sold the biggest deal of the year this year to a big financial services company. Two weeks after they got ink on the contract and they signed this deal and they drank champagne and there was a big win for them, biggest deal they've ever sold the Gardner Magic Quadrant came out and the Gardner Magic Quadrant showed that they were kind of nah right, sort of middle of the pack not the worst, but definitely not the best and what ended up happening was the whole deal started unraveling on them because the senior decision maker who signed off on it started getting bombarded by colleagues who were forwarding him screenshots from the Gardner Magic Quadrant saying hey, the guys we just signed off on this multi-million dollar deal with Gardner doesn't think they're that great? Have we talked to these guys? And what about those guys? And why did we talk to you know? So on and so forth. Why did we go with the leaders? And so now this customer is going back and talking to other vendors while at the same time kind of rolling out the solution they already purchased, but sort of trying to find a way to read a lot of the agreement in case they find a better option.
Speaker 3:So again, this is something customers all fear. The last one comes from expectations overload. This is where the customer feels like they might not get what they're paying for. Not that you're going to steal their money, but that may be true in some industries but what they're really worried about is they won't see the full benefits. So think about, in today's environment, any technology purchase or especially SaaS purchases. We just went through a reckoning five to 10 years of countless SaaS licenses being purchased for every different function in the company. And then things got right and the CFO started looking at how many of those licenses were being used. It was horrified with what they found that there were tons of unused licenses. And now they're renegotiating all their contracts and they're canceling all these licenses. And SaaS is paying the price.
Speaker 3:Think about your customers fear when their hand is hovering over. Like the next ass agreement, they're gonna roll out a thousand seat licenses. They are deeply afraid that this is gonna be like the next motion pictures are in this, in this theater, and they don't want to be a. They don't have anything to do with the A star role in that motion picture, right, they do. They cannot afford to be perceived as fools. They want to be perceived as heroes. And this is the customer who's basically saying look, I need to get a key from you as a partner, as a vendor, that we are gonna get what we're paying for. That people will adopt this tool, that they will see the r I will see the cost of the will see the sales productivity improvement that you're promising, because if we don't in, my name is associated with it. That's not just egg on my face. I could get fired, especially in this environment. So those are the three big fears that customers have.
Speaker 3:Now. Just a couple more things I'll share with you guys. If I were to put this together with the you know, on some of the research we've done around challenger, everything we've learned to date around the importance of beating the status quo, here's what I tell you is that it's absolutely critical that sales people beat the status quo. If you don't answer the why change question, if you don't show the customer that the pain of same is worse than the pain of change, you don't get them over the hump. If you solve for their indifference, don't worry about indecision you're never gonna get part of the sale for that to be a problem. I think what the data showed us is that great sales people are not just really great at that. Also great at the second part, which they never most sales people under appreciate didn't even know was a deal that they had to deal with.
Speaker 3:Second part of the conditions ultimately about putting an arm around the customer, saying it's gonna be okay, you made a great decision. You're working with a trusted advisor, so you don't need to worry about being surprised by information later. I've been your guide in your, your story along this journey. I've got your back and, by the way, we've done this a thousand times before and we have a recipe for getting value out of our solution. You don't need to worry about it again. There's a safety net here. With a catch, you look like a hero, not like a fool. So, again, this is not about the difference, about overcoming indecision and selling customer confidence. As you can see here across the course of that by journey Sales people gotta stop selling to the fear, dialing up the fear and then the shift gears to start dialing down the fear. Right, that's what we're talking about now, the playbook that we talked about. The book is the job, and maybe we'll talk more about this in q and I'll give you guys real high level here. I'm just an acronym judging indecision, offering your recommendation, limiting the expression, taking risk off the table just very quickly.
Speaker 3:Judging level of indecision is about equipping sales with the new set of techniques designed to understand not just can the customer buy, can this customer decide? It turns out if they can make a decision, or you see that as as to why the chasm across to get them to make a decision. It might be an opportunity for disqualification, right, but part of the j is telling us what they're worried about. Are they worried about too many choices, too much information or too much risk? And I'm not gonna get what a pain for. So that's where the old T come in. The old is all about shifting our posture from Offering endless number of options in diagnosing customer needs, actually telling the customer what to buy at some point. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but if you want your customer make a decision, you gotta talk to field and you gotta show them what they should buy and advocate for a path of action. The L is all about limiting expiration.
Speaker 3:This is where the radical candor piece that cars talk about earlier comes in. You know what customers will do research until the house come home. But the read the data is very clear that the more you feed information to them, the less likely it is that they'll ever conclude their learning journey and make a decision. What really great sales people are good at is getting the stop being to be an expert themselves. Start trusting the sales person as their expert in earning the right to use a bit of radical candor to say look, carson, I don't think you need a fifth reference call. I don't think you learn anything new from that call. Then you learn in the previous four reference calls you know in. Maybe there's some other way we can address your concern. Let's just have a frank conversation about what's keeping you from making this decision.
Speaker 3:The T is about dealing with that expectations of the lord's best, setting proper expectations under promising, over delivering. But it's also about establishing safety net options. So the customer feels like that the downside risk is managed it's a D risk decision and that most of what they're looking at is upside, not downside, risk mitigation. Okay, so that's our job playbook, and last I'll show you guys is the effect of this. So we were able to chart when rates by level of decision demonstrate by the customer in the car and what we found is that there's not surprisingly if you look at average performers are what we call core sales people. Here they do pretty well where there's low levels of indecision. By the way, if you find a customer who is unencumbered by the fear of failure, you should sell them every single thing your company makes as soon as humanly possible, right? So here's? The other thing I'll tell you is that that's only 13% of the market that falls into the low level of indecision zone. 87% of the deals we studied when, with customers that either moderate or high levels of indecision as you can see here Average perform when it's kind of fall apart, the more indecisive the customer becomes.
Speaker 3:Now, if we look at jolt sellers, these are people doing the four things I just kind of gave a high level on a moment ago.
Speaker 3:They knocked the cover off the ball with the decisive customers, not surprisingly. But they convert. Almost 60% of the opportunities is not really as a customer. Statistically that's the biggest difference, because that's where most of the opportunities reside, in that In decision zone, and they still do really well, in fact better than average. Remember the average in our say was 26%. You can put it 31% with those deeply indecisive customers. So it's far more than five X greater win rate than average performance, see with those really kind of deeply my I type so opportunities though that's about as fast as I can walk through, so I'm gonna stop sharing and we got some Q&A discussion here, but just a high level. Again, when I present this to sales teams, there's like we go into each of those pillars because there's there's some interesting and surprising data in each of those and maybe we can talk a little bit about that here. But again, happy to go wherever you guys in the audience.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I want to make a quick segue and then we'll jump into some great audience questions. But I was thinking, as you were going mad, like I could listen to you all day. But then I realized I have so.
Speaker 4:I don't want to tell them on this show, talking about, you know, getting into the C-suite and and also the impact that sometimes social selling and AI can have in the mix. And it's all about probability, right. There were two things that really jumped out at me and what you just went through. Number one C levels. They're not invincible. In fact, the biggest deal that I've done over my last, over my career, there were seven significant C level changes within the two year sales cycle.
Speaker 4:And so your point they need to win, and so we have to show them the path to either win or make that decision in the way I've boiled this down to my team. The customer in action is not because they're married to status quo, it's just they're not ready to commit to you. Yeah, it happened because they don't see the value in what you have to offer. It's just that you've not de-risked the decision enough for them at this point time. And I always like to make movie references, as Tom and Brandon know, I could do some really low hanging, not just movies that Brandon was in right.
Speaker 4:Right, I go for movie references low hanging fruit like moneyball, but that's too easy because we talk about that all the time. I was thinking beautiful minds, you know all the and all the stuff out, because when I listen to you, that's what I think about. It's all about probability and odds, but you showed us what a jolt seller can do when we leverage things like social selling Through your research. Where do you think we can ultimately take this from a probability and odds perspective?
Speaker 5:Yeah, great question.
Speaker 3:Let me speak to one thing you said earlier, carson, so the you know we talk about the sea level and how they're not immune. I think what's really interesting is, again surprises sales people that their sea level buyer is just as afraid of screwing up as anybody else. What is true, though, about sea level decision makers is they're much less likely to talk about it because, again, they've got the sea sea level title, they've got the the VP title, whatever it is, and it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to admit that you're worried about how you'll be perceived, not just by the higher ups, but maybe by your investors, your board and even by your team, right, so, so, getting them comfortable to talk about this thing we talked about a lot in the book is how do you, how do you get in decision if you're failure on the table, so they can be discussed openly, but in a safe kind of way, right in, not in a way that embarrasses your customer, because that's not going to end well, but in a way that makes it. It's an empathetic engagement, like. I understand that this is a hard decision. I'm here to help, right, and I want to get you to a great decision, whether that's buy from us, don't buy from us what have you?
Speaker 3:I think you know it's essentially it's a big question. You asked about kind of where this is all going to go, and I think it's funny because I somebody asked me this the other day. I square kind of round about, answered your question, but somebody asked me you know, has indecision always been there or is it like one of these things that you know we only were able to discover because we have the technology to do it right? We never studied two and a half million sales calls so we didn't know before. So I think in some respects that's true, like it has been there and it's been underappreciated and now we have the technology to see it. So it's like that Whatever the name is of that fancy telescope that's like a million miles past the moon and it sends back these amazing pictures of the outer galaxy that Always there. They've been there for billions of years but we never had the technology to see it. So I think it is just kind of like that.
Speaker 3:But at the same time I actually think that indecision is getting worse and I think if you think about the things that are causing it Too many options, too much information, too much risk those things are all getting worse on a just a secular trend basis. So every provider out there has a partner ecosystem. They have tons of options. You know they're throwing options. It's eminent configurability for your customer Information. I mean In any space there's more information written about that company, that's competitors, that industry, that use case, that technology today than there was yesterday and tomorrow there's today. Your customers will never get through it all, will never become the experts that we are About what we do in the rest to you know what companies have been on a long journey from selling products which are pretty much all the solutions which are sticky right there. They offer transformation opportunities for the customer. But that's pretty risky, like Everybody loves selling transformation. But transformation is a double edged sword because it sounds really cool but it's a big commitment, it's a big risk for your buyer right, and so I think those things are kind of on a secular trend to get worse.
Speaker 3:Now, from a from an odds perspective, I do think that, look, if the only thing that comes out of this research is that that sales people hit the pump, the brakes and hit the pause button before they assume that that has a big customer, like every has, a customer is a nail and I got my phone hammer and my phone hammer is really good. At town they at least have the pause button and explore a little bit, understand. Is it because you're not sold on the value? That may actually well be, and maybe your phone hammers are really good hammer to bust out, but if it's not, if it's that the customers intellectually bought in there thinking like you can stop selling me now and sold and instead they're worried about being associated with purchase sideways and doesn't pay off, that's that phone hammers gonna make things worse, not better. So you need that dial down.
Speaker 3:The phone will playbook, right. So I think, if it's so, just at least do that. I think we'd be in a much better place than we are today. Because the fun playbook, the phone tactics are so pervasive and you know customers hate it. It's just like drive them crazy. It feels like I press your sales tactics and look, I'm very, very sympathetic. Sellers are in a tough spot right now because the top environment out there, and so then they start leaning on these techniques even harder and it makes even worse.
Speaker 2:You know and that, one thing I I've seen recently, as you were talking about this and some sales, I think there are clues to indecision that are all over the sales cycle in a specific example I've heard recently in some cycles I've been involved in is worried about adoption.
Speaker 2:will people use? This is technology and what I'm realizing is the way that we try and handle that is. Of course, they will look how great it is, they're gonna love it, they're gonna love it, they're gonna love it when in fact, it's really a signal or a clue of indecision that we need to be represented. So I think a big part of this is recognizing indecision when we see it and not trying to check off another box because they're handling an objection.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know it's a great point. I'll share something that's actually not in the book, which is I blame the publisher, not us, because I had a deadline and we had to finish in my, so we were still going through the data after we sent the manuscript and we discovered something pretty interesting. We have a lot of questions from folks about you know what techniques are useful to identify indecision. I think the one tom is exactly what you said, which is engaging, really good active listening and I think also recognizing that sometimes the things customers are asking for saying you might think are good things. Like I want another demo with the same team. Will see a little past five demos. On another reference call, what do? Another poc, another part of the business you know, continue to collect data and build the business case. Like that feels good to some sellers. Like I cool, I have something to put in the c rm system. I have something to tell my manager when we have a pipeline review. No, no, like we got another call coming up. Another demo, another reference call. You know it feels like we're making progress, but in fact many of those things are masking underlying fear, failure, indecision and actually a bad thing, not a good thing. So I think it's like tuning our listening for signs of indecision. You said now Especially is that I mentioned before.
Speaker 3:Senior executives are gonna be very low to admit that they are scared again fired or they're scared of how they're gonna look. They don't talk about this back. I'll tell you guys. I did a dinner with some senior exact not too long ago. Cto of one of the world's biggest manufacturers stormed out of the dinner after I did the presentation. She was so offended. Add the suggestion that I, like her, we're afraid of failure. She said I make a hundred decisions a day that I would get fired if I was worried about screwing up. Like that is that's not my job. Like I gotta go. As soon as you left in the rest of the client's cleared out, the technology company is hosting the meeting. I'm sure her she was their client told me she's the most indecisive buyer they have. So you know. So look it's. It's something it's uncomfortable talking about it. So how do you get on the table? We want back into the data and we found this technique that high performers are using wheat borrow a term from submarine warfare. Actually it's a call, pings and echoes.
Speaker 3:So open ended questions are really useful here, where you say like hey, carcel, like when you go to the cheese cake factory, do you leave hungry or satisfied? Like, can you make a decision? I want to order, you know? Or saying like hey, brandon, are you worried about getting canned for this decision? I'm just curious. Like you know, I'm like.
Speaker 3:Those are not great questions, but what you can do is try to articulate the fear you think your customer suffering from, but in a way that doesn't out them but, but makes them benchmarks and then makes them understand this is something everybody worries about, in calibrates it, in gets on the table. So can you discuss? Might be something like hey, tom, you know, you know I put a lot of options in front of you. Sounds like your table is everything I show you. But I'm just curious and here's why I'm gonna ask questions that about this point in the sale, I find a lot of customers start spinning their wheels a little bit on what, what's nice to have, what's need to have. If I asked you guys right now, do you think you could tell me what are the must have capabilities and what are the things you might want to wait till next year, the year after, to implement? I'm in.
Speaker 3:Look at the reason I asked this is not because I sense that you guys don't know, it's just that I know lots of other customers struggle with this is really what we do. We probably show you maybe too much stuff. Could you tell me what's really important, you? And, if you can, I'd love to be a resource to you to help guide you to make a decision. You told me early on budget is not unlimited and you gotta make some hard choices and I want to help you make the right ones. And if I miss reading the situation, then help me understand what.
Speaker 3:What else might be. You know, worrying you about this purchase and what? What might you think might go wrong? My be adoption might be something else. Now you might say back to me, like you know what, we're just being nice and saying we like there's a lot of resources we have no interest in, but I can tell you right now what we want, what we don't want, what you might say, yeah, honestly, I don't really know. You know, if we had to make a decision today, I think we really be impressed to make that call. Use a little bit of help so that what's nice about that is it gets on the table. It doesn't make the embarrass the customer, it makes them feel very normal because other customers are worried about this too. But it allows you to get like a sub, a surf ship, pinging the water to see if they get a reflection back from the submarine, because you can't see the decision right now talking about it. Right, you gotta get on the table.
Speaker 5:Yeah, man, I'm a question and I think I saw I think cloths have the same question, because you know what, when I sell to a lot and this is where Carson and I are on kind of different ends I sold a lot of smb, yeah, and I'm usually talking to founder c e o, some of the variables you guys were talking about, you know, the cx o getting. You know, fear of getting fired and things like that I generally don't, yeah, deal with that. Is this pertain to smaller size companies? Is this just relevant for enterprise?
Speaker 3:yeah, great question. So we are getting second cross. We looked at Smaller deals sold to you know more than smb kind of sale and which kind of more of a transactional cadence. And we looked at Large enterprise deals where you know start to end the entire sales cycle took almost the entirety of our, our study cycle, which was like eighteen months, so is like a year plus sales cycle, you know hundred million dollar plus deal size. We didn't find any difference in level of indecision until we actually put we put some just for for the hell of it. We actually fed in some consumer calls into the model Think about like call center reps selling like cell phone plans or cable service or like travel insurance, things like that and we actually found that no decision loss rates were actually really high in those consumer segments.
Speaker 3:They're probably closer to like sixty percent in the s case and closer to forty percent in large enterprise. That's why, remember earlier I showed you guys the rain forty to sixty percent deals lost no decision. The reason for that range was Transactional sales into more than smb space had a higher no decision loss rate because customers do a lot of window shopping and for them it's not a huge investment to Get on a call or two and then go to the sales person. Enterprise deals. We're talking about like multi million dollar solutions. Customers think a little bit before the answer into those purchase.
Speaker 3:Right, because I know it's gonna be huge time for them. Not true at all. They're worried about wasting their own time and if they know deep down we're never gonna make a decision, I'm gonna think twice before going down that path. Now consumer calls were more like eighty percent no decision loss, right? If you guys Think about how many things we put in our amazon shopping cart that we never buy, that's perfect example, but I'm but yeah, so there was a little bit of range there, but the effectiveness of some of the techniques didn't vary at all actually just as effective in simple transactional sales as in large scale enterprise sales.
Speaker 5:And I think that's interesting. It speaks to and carcino not talk about this later to. I think carcin and I we both love social selling for different reasons, and I think for carcin on the swarm approach and the research approach and then on the smaller companies, one of the things that I like about it is the trust factor.
Speaker 5:Yes, you know, the use of the show really a lot of trust. The use of the conversations we have in in social and the people we engage with in social build a lot of credibility and trust and I think that speaks to the data that you just spoke about right.
Speaker 3:I think you're on something I think is really important. We didn't. We didn't study this per se social song per se in the research. However, I think we've done some more recent research actually, for folks might be interested. We did a study of a. Do we're sellers? These are professional services partners. These are people who basically sell their own advisory capability.
Speaker 3:So think about like partners in law or accounting or consulting or investment banking, wealth management, etc. We just published those results in hbr a few weeks, a few weeks ago, and one of the things we found there is that those folks rely heavily because buying advisory is such a black box for a customer. You can't test it right, you can demo or you can't pilot, you can't get the tires on somebody smart, right consultants expertise is very hard to test. It's a little bit of a leap of faith. So those, those best partners in the world we lie heavily on social proof and I demonstrating building that trust which is partly a function of their network Another folks who they know and are connected to about for them.
Speaker 3:But I think about this from a social selling standpoint. My hypothesis would be that this is a phenomenal d risking technique, right when we can leverage our network and we can establish connections and I can say, brandon, you know, I know you work with tom, tom and I actually were colleagues at this company before we actually worked with tom at his last company. Blah, blah, blah. You know, we should building those connections because people buy from people they know. When they trust right and having that Fundamentally, I think d risk it. So it's like oh, there's a basis of trust, there's a relationship that even exist here that I can rely on almost as a safety net and gives me confidence that I'm not gonna be left holding the bag, you're not gonna oversell, oversell me over promise under the river, etc.
Speaker 5:That's very good, I go.
Speaker 2:Well, do you have another question, brandon? Sorry.
Speaker 5:No, no. I was just gonna say there's a lot there. I know we're out of time, but my brain's going down several different trails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was gonna say we didn't really have enough meat in this episode so we're gonna have to get to that we take this up in future. No, and a lot of the comments in here, and I'm sorry we're not gonna get a chance to get to all the questions and comments here, but maybe you know I think a lot of these are addressed in the book as well. But I think it's to me the biggest takeaway. That is, just keep that radar on and just start by looking for signs of indecision rather than looking for signs where I need to talk more about, you know, the features, benefits and the Fed, as you pointed out, and test that. I have a sales call coming up in eight minutes here. I'm gonna go on to that call very differently after listening to this and I would have otherwise and I'm gonna listen for that. You know it's with a group of people and so forth.
Speaker 3:And Tom, I loved your adoption example. It's a perfect one, especially in this current environment. You know, look, I think we've all been in part of deals with. The customer said you can stop selling to me now I'm sorry. That would be great if they all said that. Then you know it's like okay, cool, we're done. Convincing.
Speaker 2:Now we can move to the next phase.
Speaker 3:Yeah we can move to the next stage, but customers don't. They don't provide such a clear roadmap sometimes.
Speaker 2:Well, matt, thank you Really really good stuff. I'm gonna go re-listen again to the book Carson. I might do it while mowing my lawn, just so I can impress my neighbors also Chop your toes off.
Speaker 4:That's all I can do. Don't do a lot of driving, because I'd be lucky when taking notes on Matt's book while you're driving. Not a great idea. Bye Tom.
Speaker 5:That was great Matt.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for your advice, thanks for your guys, thank you for the invitation.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, this was fantastic and I think you know one of the big takeaways too. You know, I always like to say I pride myself in being a student of selling and I love the fact that we have the ability to study data around hard data. That doesn't lie around calls and trends and it doesn't mean that selling with FUD didn't have a percentage of probability of working. However, if you really get to the heart of sitting in and de-risking the decision and helping these C-levels and VPs come out as winners, your chances of success go way up.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you're right. I think this is an exciting time with all the data we have, and hopefully this is the beginning of you know lots of, lots more database research around what great sellers are doing. I think we're gonna have some more surprising discoveries as more research is done.
Speaker 4:So Well, I can't wait to read whatever the next book is, Mac.
Speaker 3:I'm still having flashbacks from the last one, so we'll see we did have an RG across.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, if you want the book, I'm sure it's on Amazon and all the local places there. Carson, wrap it up.
Speaker 4:Until next time. Thank you everyone for joining and happy social selling Thanks everyone.
Speaker 5:Take care guys. Bye everybody.
Speaker 2:Hey, tom Burton here and I wanted to personally thank you for listening or watching today's episode of Social Selling 2.0. If you enjoyed or found value in today's show, please share with your friends and colleagues. Also, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast outlet. And please also subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our free online community at socialselling20.com. There you'll get free access to the latest social selling resources, training sessions, webinars and can collaborate with other social selling professions. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.