Welcome to SALES with ASLAN, a weekly podcast hosted by ASLAN Co-founders Tom Stanfill and Tab Norris, geared at helping sales professionals and sales leaders eliminate the hard sell. At the end of the day, we believe that selling is serving. ASLAN helps sellers make the shift from a ‘typical’ sales approach, to one that makes us more influential because we embrace the truth that the customer’s receptivity is more important than your value prop or message.
The goal of these interviews is to spotlight various experts in the world of sales and sales leadership – sharing informational stories, techniques, and expert interviews on the sales topics you care about.
The following are notes from Ep. 158 – “Sell Without Selling Out” featuring Special Guest Andy Paul – Part 1
In this episode, Tom and Tab are joined by special guest Andy Paul – sales expert, author, and host of his own podcast, Sales Enablement with Andy Paul.
They discuss how we see our role as a seller, the challenges of selling, how the traditional approach to selling and the “predictable revenue playbook” is failing us… basically, why we need to change the way we sell. And the kicker is, when you understand and embrace these ideas, not only will you enjoy selling more, you’ll be more successful.
Listen to the conversation here:
Resources:
- Check out Andy Paul’s podcast
- Check out Andy Paul’s website or connect with him on LinkedIn
- Check out Andy Paul’s books
Transcript:
00:14
Tom Stanfill
Welcome Tab and our audience, our vast listening audience, to nother episode of SALES with ASLAN. Selling with ASLAN. These episodes are getting more powerful and powerful as we continue to build a stellar list of guests, which I know you have one of those today.
00:36
Tab Norris
It really is fun. I’m learning. Yeah, you know, it’s good. When I go to my podcast notes page to prepare for things, tell me what, wait a minute. We talked about that the other day with a really smart person.
00:54
Tom Stanfill
Exactly. Yeah. We’re like, okay, we got to intro this program and we have so many great notes, it’s hard to determine how are we going to set this podcast up, because we could go on for hours, which we don’t want to take away. Let’s just dive in and say who we’ve got? We’ve got Andy Paul on the show, Yab. Amazing. Great guy. I was on his podcast and he was gracious enough to come on our podcast. He has got one of the most popular podcasts on selling called Sales Enablement with Andy Paul. Over 1100 episodes, millions of downloads. I mean, this guy’s legit. He’s the author of three books. He’s got his own sales training and consulting firm. What I love most about him, Tab, is he’s got street cred.
01:42
Tab Norris
Yeah, he does.
01:44
Tom Stanfill
He’s not some guy that couldn’t so he teaches, he developed his philosophy and the wisdom that he shares from selling over $600 million of technical solutions. So he’s been super successful. Obviously, he’s worked with hundreds of leaders and sellers, maybe thousands of sellers over his career. So he’s sharing his wisdom today, Tab. We’re going to specifically dive into his new book that came out, I think, just about a month ago, sell Without Selling Out a Guide to Success on Your Own Terms.
02:22
Tab Norris
Yeah, great book. I will say this, I’m going to make a decision because I get too as the co host, I don’t take a note of power, but this is kind of when I get to play it and I do it every once in a while.
02:33
Tom Stanfill
You played the power co host and I have no say. I can’t override this.
02:39
Tab Norris
You can’t override this. But we had so much good stuff. We’re going to divide this into two parts.
02:46
Tom Stanfill
Two parts.
02:47
Tab Norris
This is two parts.
02:48
Tom Stanfill
That was your call, Tab. So we’re going to have to divide. We’re going to focus on part one. I think there’s a natural break in this podcast because we first talk about the challenges the seller faces and how the traditional approach to selling and how I love this term, the predictable revenue playbook isn’t working. It’s not working right.
Everybody’s doing the same thing. They’re like, hey, what is the predictable things we can do and what process do we need to implement to be successful and turn the final. The problem is that process is working less and less effectively, and everybody’s doing the same thing. People reps are struggling to differentiate themselves. They’re getting burned out, and it’s just not working, which is obviously what we’re passionate about. He’s going to talk about how to develop your personal brand and what’s the key to differentiating yourself now, and it is leading to winning more. It not only Tab is what he shares, which is what we’re so passionate about. It’s not just about winning more. It’s about finding meaning and enjoying what you do. I love to elevate the role of sellers. We have an important role. People have problems, right? Their livelihood, their jobs or incentives dependent upon us helping our customers solve their problems.
04:06
Tom Stanfill
And so he’s passionate about that. I think the more we understand our role in that process and learning how decision makers make decisions, the more meaning we find, the more we enjoy. And the beauty is you’re more successful.
04:19
Tab Norris
Yeah, I totally agree. This is a great time with Andy.
04:24
Tom Stanfill
Great time with Andy. So without further ado, let’s dive in.
Andy Paul, welcome to the show, my friend.
04:32
Andy Paul
Hey, Tom. Thanks for having me.
04:34
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, I was telling Tab about being on your podcast, and I said, this guy is like an ASLAN brother. Like, I felt like I met a brother from another. After I read his book, because I hadn’t read his book when I was on his podcast, and after reading his book, I’m like, oh, my gosh, he talks about the sign above the head, except he talks about the popups above somebody’s head that telecast their motive. I’m like, it’s like we could finish each other’s sentences. He’s cooler than we are, as we just discussed, because he has offices on both coast.
05:14
Tab Norris
See, that’s really cool.
05:24
Tom Stanfill
Well, we want to talk about your new book. I was actually in the Charlotte airport recently, and there’s not many books in the airport bookstore.
05:36
Andy Paul
Right.
05:37
Tom Stanfill
Right there’s, there’s just a smattering of books. I sometimes try to stop by and see maybe possibly my book could be in there. So far, no. I look down on the shelf and there’s like, 15 books of your book selling in. You tell me the title because I don’t want to screw it up.
05:56
Andy Paul
Sell without selling out.
05:58
Tom Stanfill
Selling. Sell without selling out. I want to say selling in because that’s the kind of what you’re teaching people, right? But sell without selling it’s all back. So congratulations. I devoured the book. Loved it.
06:11
Andy Paul
Thank you very much.
06:12
Tom Stanfill
I also want to just say thank you for elevating the profession and your message, it’s just spoton.
06:20
Andy Paul
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a mission for a long time.
06:26
Tom Stanfill
So this is your third book?
06:28
Andy Paul
Third book, yes.
06:30
Tom Stanfill
Wow.
06:31
Andy Paul
Sort of a late bloomer. The book has come over the last ten years, chapter of my career I never thought really would exist. Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.
06:46
Tom Stanfill
How did you get into how did you become an author? What was the catalyst of becoming an author just because you had to get it in writing?
06:55
Andy Paul
Yeah, sort of a couple of things. One is I’d had several ideas for books that I wanted to write and over the years, which I’d never gotten around to for one reason or another. In 2010, I got married and moved from San Diego to New York where my wife has a real job and thought, okay, disrupted my business . Maybe a good time to try to write that book. Like a lot of people, you write a book because you have a consultant, you think it’s a calling card.
07:30
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. Build credibility.
07:32
Andy Paul
Yeah, but then a lot of people liked it. I did everything backwards. I hadn’t been on social yet. I hadn’t built a platform. I didn’t have anything. I started backfilled.
07:47
Tom Stanfill
Oh, really? We’ll have to talk offline because that’s kind of my story. We have all the people that have been trained through our organization Aslan, and so we’re serving them. I was never passionate about building a social media platform, nor I don’t think you are either tech.
08:05
Tab Norris
No.
08:07
Andy Paul
Yeah, it’s just a way to get clients these days. I think imperatives really changed over the last ten years, for sure. Especially LinkedIn, where it’s even at that time, people if you said LinkedIn 2010 2012, most people thought job site type of thing, but now it’s where business is done.
08:30
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, it’s definitely legitimate. I’ve learned to appreciate it because especially for LinkedIn and how people can communicate and you can get to know organizations and what their values are, who’s contributing and the kind of content they’re putting out, it becomes pretty easy to see who you want to follow and who has similar approaches. I found it a great way to build community. I mean, around your business. Probably not necessarily personally.
09:01
Andy Paul
Yeah, I mean, well, it can go both ways, right? It’s part of our business. It’s part of the business. My Sunrun it’s a booming part of our business is helping people build their audiences and monetize them on LinkedIn.
09:16
Tom Stanfill
Okay, I didn’t know that. I actually didn’t know that.
09:21
Andy Paul
Okay. Yeah. Even people that we have some corporations that are clients, we have individuals or thought leaders like us that are monetizing for the training businesses or the coaching practices help businesses are building pipeline using LinkedIn.
09:43
Tom Stanfill
Sounds like we need to hire you.
09:45
Andy Paul
We can talk about that offline.
09:47
Tom Stanfill
You know what? We’re going to give you a discount on this podcast.
09:50
Andy Paul
Perfect.
09:54
Tom Stanfill
All right, well, let’s talk about the latest project, the book Selling Out. Tell us about the premise of the book. I know you talk about selling out versus selling in.
10:05
Andy Paul
Right.
10:05
Tom Stanfill
I love that concept. Just talk to us about the premise of the book and why it’s so important to shift from selling out to selling in.
10:14
Andy Paul
Yeah, the genesis really started with this idea that through my podcast and since I’ve written my second book, it’s like, oh, my gosh, based on hundreds and hundreds of conversations on my podcast and the work I do with companies, it’s like, wow, we’re just not getting better at this thing called B to B selling. And arguably, we’re getting worse.
10:40
Tom Stanfill
I think the customers getting fed up. The rates are staying the same. Yeah.
10:44
Andy Paul
You look at the external data points, whether it’s CSO, Insight Data, or other companies, it’s like, yeah, you’ve seen the facts and figures, quote, attainments dropping, win rates are dropping. You have these whole segments of industry like software industry, SAS business that operate on incredibly low win rates, 20% win rates considered acceptable. I’m like, what world am I living in where they said, hey, people don’t even focus on this? What I consider is the most important metric that exists because this is the customer’s referendum on how well you’re doing. Yeah, I chose you. Or let’s say in the book more often, you’re not being chosen. When you have these low win rates, what the buyer is basically doing is buying from you in spite of you, not because of you. What a horrible place to be. Right. You’re a sales professional, and ironically, there are people hitting their numbers at those win rates, which just speaks to how low the numbers are they have to.
11:52
Tom Stanfill
Hit how hard they have to work to find the few who will buy in spite of them. Yeah, that’s miserable.
12:00
Andy Paul
It’s miserable. Even if you’re succeeding, that’s going to be horrible, because as I like to say, if you’re only winning one of every five most qualified opportunities, if practice makes perfect, what are you practicing day in and day out? Losing. Why do I be in that position? I mean, sure, you’re not going to win every deal. I mean, in my career, prestar my consulting business, selling a range of tech products, both hardware and subscription services, and large complex communication systems, it’s about 63%. It’s my win rate overall.
12:43
Tom Stanfill
Okay.
12:44
Andy Paul
From deals ranging up to nine figures. It’s like I don’t know, it just seemed normal. The people I managed, the teams I built, that’s our way. We aimed at we aimed at least 50% as a minimum, say, look, if we have somebody that’s really a qualified opportunity, qualified in the way that we qualify them, then we should win.
13:07
Tom Stanfill
Anyway, I love the idea that the reality that we see as a seller, those win rates, is not reality. I work with a company a couple of weeks ago, and their win rate was 9%. That doesn’t have to be that’s not the standard. It doesn’t have to be that’s a choice because we work with other organizations where sellers outsell the second place seller two to one.
13:36
Andy Paul
Yeah, it’s definitely a choice.
13:40
Tom Stanfill
There is a way to learn how to sell where you can actually I’ve seen it when rates as high as 90%, I’m sure.
13:50
Andy Paul
Yeah.
13:50
Tom Stanfill
Now, I think usually that can happen only in organizations where you’re selling more of a solution services that you can because it’s hard to when you’re selling something finite like equipment capital, certain people just can’t consume that.
14:07
Andy Paul
Right, but I mean, this idea of the choice is so apropos because I remember this meeting a few years ago with the CRO of a publicly traded SaaS company and Tom, what his growth plans were for this following year. It’s all about top of funnel, right. Because we have all these tools, we can generate tons of inbound demand and combined with our outbound programs, we have tons of opportunity flow coming through. I was just listening to him, I say I still work best on that. We’ve got finally Tuned machine, we got.
14:40
Tom Stanfill
Hire a bunch of SDRs dials I can control.
14:44
Andy Paul
Right. I’m saying but I know because I spoken to one of his senior execs before, I said, I know your win rate is at 20%. What are you focusing on in terms of increasing your win rate? Because increasing your win rate is probably a less expensive path to growing revenue than generating more crap from your outbound and inbound programs. It just looked at me like I was from Mars.
15:07
Tab Norris
Yeah.
15:08
Andy Paul
And it just uncrossed his mind then.
15:12
Tab Norris
Spreadsheet quite as well as his other stuff.
15:15
Andy Paul
Probably. Well, yeah, but the thing is, it is more controllable, right? I mean, sure, you can generate tons of as we’ve done with Martech and our sales technology, we generate tons of opportunity flow. But people don’t want to qualify. They’re working on too many deals at one time and there’s all these things that going on. Yeah, I looked at that and said, okay, what’s one of the real problems? In my mind, what I was seeing and experiencing and hearing was everybody’s just leaning into the process. Like we’ve got these processes now enabled by our technology. If we just follow the process right, where I call it sales becomes like a casino game, right. We know if we do these minimum number of things, we’re going to win 20% of our deals and it’s like, yeah, but wow, a, that sucks and B, there’s a way to change that.
16:11
Andy Paul
The way to change that is focusing on the part that the buyer really focuses on is what’s their experience with the seller.
16:19
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. That also, I think, leads to the wide engagement so low if my success rate is 20% or my fail rate is 80%, or my success rate is 10%, whatever it is and my failure, that’s why reps, they don’t want to do the casino game because the odds are greatly against them.
16:42
Andy Paul
They’re not equipped to do different.
16:46
Tom Stanfill
Culture. It’s what they do.
16:47
Tab Norris
They’re just, they get plugged in the system and then they go.
16:50
Andy Paul
Right. I remember years ago I got a call from a potential client and they said, I’d love to have you come work with us and do discovery exploration. They just spent shitload of money with a very high profile sales training company, focuses on the software world. I said, okay, well, why do you need us? You just invest this as well. Because we got the training and figured out we still don’t know how to sell after training.
17:28
Tab Norris
Yeah, you messed it up.
17:30
Andy Paul
They have a process, but everything was about the process. Just follow the process. These are the numbers and the metrics are important, don’t mistake me, but at the end of the day, it’s still a human selling to a human.
17:44
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.
17:45
Andy Paul
There’s people trying to convince younger generations of sellers that the human stuff is just not that important. Just execute the process.
17:57
Tom Stanfill
And it’s true. You talked about, you said that buyers don’t need your process.
18:04
Andy Paul
Not at all.
18:07
Tom Stanfill
I know you’re talking about the dials that you the productivity dials that you look at and just say, follow the process related to that. There’s also the process of how I try to move an opportunity or customer through exactly the funnel. What do you see that’s fundamentally broken about that process? Why are reps resistant to changing it?
18:32
Andy Paul
I’m not sure how much reps are versus leaders.
18:34
Tom Stanfill
Okay, you think it’s a leadership?
18:36
Andy Paul
I think it’s leader issue. When I was doing the research for the book, I said, okay, yeah, let’s do research on sales process. If you just go to Google and you Google sales process and you check for the images and among the hundreds of thousands of diagrams you see is they’re all the same.
18:58
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.
19:00
Andy Paul
The thing that was striking was they are the same thing I was trained on four decades ago. The process hadn’t changed at all. The only thing we had done is we put a layer of automation on it. Right. The thing is problematic is that doesn’t relate to what the buyers going through at all. As long as we’re on these parallel paths, we’re going to continue to be struggling. We have to get to a point where sellers and buyers are using the exact same terminology about where the buyer stands in their process.
19:35
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. That is so easy to change, but it just doesn’t happen. If we centered it around, how does the buyer need to make decisions and how do we eliminate risk from that process and helping them? Because you talk about that in the book. How do I simplify and just help the buyer make a decision and figure out what they need, then if we orient around that, it makes it much easier to move the deal forward because you are offering next steps based on what’s best for them, not on the process that was given to you by your leadership. Absolutely. And I get it. It’s all built into your CRM. We organize it by stages, but I think we could at least offer what’s the customer’s objective at each one of those stages and how do we understand or at least orient around what helps them make the decision.
20:29
Tom Stanfill
I think there’s just a big gap.
20:32
Andy Paul
Yeah. You’ve probably seen Gartner’s diagram that came out three or four years ago. Their minor enablement diagram the buyer journey, which is called the spaghetti diagram, which is complex drawing flow chart. You say, okay, well, that’s how the buyer perceives what they’re doing. Now you look at sales process. Oh, it’s this five stage linear process. It goes, do these in different universes altogether.
20:58
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.
20:59
Andy Paul
When the first time I’d seen the gardener diagram, there’s a meeting with some gardener folks and it showed and it’s like it was just like, oh my God, the last time I figured this out, this is what I had experienced over the years. It was never this neat linear process. It’s fluid, messy, chaotic process to try to get anything done. And then I say, well, jeez. Yeah, I have actually had a conversation with Brent Hansen a few weeks ago about this. I said, So, Brent, tell me, I know you’re not the gardener any longer, but how many companies looked at what you guys did, say, this is the buying process, and said, let’s change our sales process to try to better align with what the buyer is going through? And the answer was a couple.
21:49
Tab Norris
Right.
21:52
Andy Paul
Let’s just deny the buyers reality and let’s just focus on what we’re doing and that will get us the point we need to be. And it’s just not working. It’s working less successfully than it ever has.
22:05
Tom Stanfill
I think it’s a great point. I think if it’s a sales organization is willing to at least just overlay the sales or the customer process or buying process, which, by the way, is being embraced in marketing. Marketing is all about the customer journey and how to create the customer journey website if we would do the same thing in sales and just overlay that. So, yeah, we have our intuitive steps that we follow. If we can also look at what’s the buyer journey, I don’t think that’s that difficult. I know it’s not fluid, or I should say chronological, because we go back and forth, but at least we can understand the stages that they go through. It does move back and forth depending on who you’re working with and where you are in the process. But I think that’s an easy fix.
22:47
Andy Paul
Well, I think there’s a way to simplify what Gartner come up and what they found out through their research to make it more applicable to sellers. I like to say there’s only three stages in the okay, and again maybe risk oversimplification but you can fit details in it. Buyers basically go through three motions and I call the what, the how and the who in the what stage is what’s our challenge and what are the outcomes we can achieve by addressing our challenge. Once we’ve settled on that then we go to market and say, okay, how are we going to achieve that? We’ll talk to sellers, we’ll talk to vendors, we’ll look and see if there’s something and we’ll formulate a number of options that will enable us to achieve our desired outcomes. Your job as a seller is that when the buyers formulate those options that there’s a tom and tabsized hole in a number of those options that you fit in.
23:52
Andy Paul
Right. You’re trying to get yourself designed into those options. The third order decision for the customer is, well who am I going to do this with?
24:01
Tom Stanfill
One’s about the need, the problem and the solution and the other is about the who work with.
24:06
Andy Paul
Part of the reason I frame it this way is because you hear all this again, the research from the analyst firms saying oh my God, buyers no longer want to talk to sellers. My first reaction to that was, well, what’s new? I don’t think in the recorded history of mankind no buyers ever wanted to talk to a seller.
24:28
Tab Norris
I can’t wait.
24:30
Andy Paul
Yeah, I can’t wait. I sure hope Andy calls me today. But they need to talk to sellers. And that’s the thing. In order for the buyers to what do they need to talk to sellers? Sellers to come in and ask them questions they don’t know to ask themselves, give them insights they haven’t come across, their own business might help them understand their challenges and their potential outcomes. To think more deeply and broadly about what they’re trying to accomplish. Right? That’s the what stage and if you’re coming in and pitching before you understand those things, before the buyer even understands them, nothing’s going to happen because you’re pitching something that has no clear understanding of what even their problems or potential outcomes they want are.
25:18
Tom Stanfill
I think that’s one of the easiest ways to create competitive advantage in a way is to help them figure out what problem do they have, what challenges make sense of that. You talk about understanding and I want to dive into the four pillars. Understanding is one of those keys and help them figure out how they may not need your solution. We don’t know what solution they need, but how do they need to address that problem? Is the problem real? How do they need to address it which may include your solution may not. Honestly enter into that as a consultant that can add value to that. When you get involved with that mindset and the ability to speak to that, and you make that part of your process versus the pitch or the presentation, I would say you want to make a recommendation, not a presentation.
26:05
Andy Paul
Exactly. To your point, though, is that at the end of the what stage, ideally, you really haven’t even talked about your product that much.
26:16
Tom Stanfill
No.
26:17
Andy Paul
Because what you’re trying to do at that point is coalesce around an understanding with the buyer that, yes, this is it. These are the things, this is the pain, this is the vision we can see of where we could go to get the outcomes we want.
26:33
Tom Stanfill
You told a story about a European technology company, I think it was European technology, where you met with the board, twelve board members, and instead of making a presentation, you just went to the flip chart and started drawing. Drawing. Was that all around your to talk about that? Was that all around the three motions that you just discussed? Or were you doing that live? Were you kind of doing it live?
27:01
Andy Paul
The desire was to say, look, I think our competitive advantage oftentimes, especially at that company, was that we just understood people better than the buyers, better than our competitors. It was just a group of really smart people. I worked for engineers that were real problem solvers and very innovative and creative and didn’t feel bound by, yeah, this is a product, but, hey, we’d be willing to make a change if it met the customers needs. We just became so ingrained that, yeah, we just want to understand. Right. We want to make sure we understand better. In fact, we’re going to be a key to helping you, the buyer, understand as well. The end of that story was getting the order and why the customer said, because you made us feel understood. And it requires patience. Right. You don’t want to jump in and just get a pitch.
28:09
Andy Paul
Your product, it’s about you. It’s about the buyer. Let’s see if we can understand. When you have these stages delineated the way we do them traditionally in sales, you always feel this inherent pressure. How do I get to the next stage?
28:22
Tom Stanfill
Right?
28:23
Andy Paul
How do I finish? Discovery. This is the story you never finished Discovery. When you put Discovery in a box and you say, look, as many people do, well, here are the exit criteria for our discovery stage. Like, you’re really kidding yourself if you really understand fully at that point. Right.
28:42
Tom Stanfill
They don’t fully understand. They don’t fully understand constant, evolving, changing, dynamic situation. Right. You’re always adjusting what happens when a.
28:54
Andy Paul
Buyer goes through their buying process as they get smarter about their options.
28:58
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.
28:59
Andy Paul
If you’re stuck based on, hey, this is what our discovery was, and this is how we quote, unquote, qualified them, well, that’s easy.
29:08
Tom Stanfill
If you say, I’m going to ask three or four questions that help me tee up what product I want or solution I want to present.
29:13
Andy Paul
Sure.
29:13
Tom Stanfill
That you call it listening to sell. Basically, yeah, listen to responding to respond, not listening to understand, then that’s kind of easy. It’s like I’m waiting for you to say yes, okay, now I can respond to that because otherwise I don’t know where you’re going and I don’t know how to respond to that. That may require work and it may require, as you call it, intellectual.
29:35
Andy Paul
Humility, assuming you don’t know something. Yes. Well, I think one of the great formative parts of my career was working in environments where we didn’t have a product to sell. Tell the story in the book where I go to work to small startups that were doing some defense work and CEO hired me to start a commercial division of the company. I said, great, so what are we going to sell? You sell whatever you want. Who do we sell to? Whoever you want. The only requirement was is that the customer had to not only pay for the production of the product, they had to pay for all the RNG as well. So it’s custom build. Well, in that case, when you really said you don’t have a set ICP, you don’t have a set product and a set solution, the customer to go out, ask questions and listen and just the focus on really understanding and write about the book.
30:42
Andy Paul
This is why this idea of persuasion I write about is dangerous because in those situations, how could I go persuade somebody? This was the best solution to a problem they didn’t know they had but products that didn’t exist, which I.
30:58
Tom Stanfill
Think is the perfect world for someone that really knows how to influence like that’s. The best job in the world is when you got a blank slate and you can understand. For the low level seller who needs the bullet points and the pitch slides or the demo, they’re in trouble. I think that’s a yeah, right.
31:20
Andy Paul
I mean, people operate at different levels, but I think more sales people are capable of doing that then the managers want to give them credit for doing. If we enable them appropriately, if we enable them to say, look, what’s my job as a salesperson again? Write about this in the book. Most sellers and I’ve done the system, I take a note, right, for the Pandemics, we’re a prominent SaaS company. I casually did a poll to the room. I said, so what’s your job? And it all came back. Some variation of my job is to persuade somebody to buy my product.
31:57
Tom Stanfill
Right?
31:59
Andy Paul
Like, well, no, it’s not your job at all. Right. I mean, our job is to understand the buyer and things are truly most important to them in terms of challenges they face and the. Help them get that. Now, if you take the first approach, your job is to persuade somebody to buy your product. This whole idea of understanding them falls by the wayside because it doesn’t really matter whether they understand or not. My job persuade you to buy my product whether I understand you or not. Yeah.
32:31
Tab Norris
They know, I mean you’re motive, right?
32:33
Andy Paul
Oh, instantly.
32:35
Tab Norris
Exactly.
32:36
Andy Paul
Yeah. Obviously to your point to that is you’re not able to build the levels of trust you want when your motivations you want your motivations to be clear, but you want to be clear in the sense that you’re there to help, not that you’re there. Just purely self motivated and self interested. Right.
32:55
Tom Stanfill
What’s beautiful about that and you make this point, the book, when you have that approach, you actually make more money, you’re more successful, your customers are more low or close. I love this truth about selling. The more we focus on serving our customers, the more we understand what’s important to them and help them solve their problems and really embrace the right approach. We win. It’s like we don’t lose it’s like do the right thing, but it’s going to cost you. No, do the right thing and you’re actually going to make more money. It’s one of the few maybe, I don’t know if it’s the few professions, I thought through that, but I know it’s true for selling. Maybe short term, maybe today it doesn’t work. Maybe today if I tell them the truth. I’ve definitely had situations where I say I don’t do that, but I would argue I just saved probably a day of time.
33:47
Tab Norris
Yeah, exactly. Because you’re being strategic in where you spend your time.
33:52
Andy Paul
That’s a mystery to most sellers these days because you think about it, especially, again, not to pick on Software World, but AI transcription businesses in general is managers say, look, you’ve got a pipeline coverage requirement, so you’ve got a standard. You often see here is five X pipeline coverage requirement. You gave a keynote to assess Sales Leadership Group and I said, so I just want to throw it out there. You understand your win rate is going to be the reciprocal of your pipeline coverage ratio. You’ve got a five X pipeline coverage requirements, you’re going to have a win rate.
34:37
Tom Stanfill
Right.
34:38
Andy Paul
There’s a this dud silence in the room. Just do the math. It works out almost.
34:47
Tom Stanfill
They start with we’re not very good in sales. We start there. Since we can’t sell, let’s throw more in the pipeline and we’ll sell less. We have great products. We’re not catching any fish in this lake, but let’s fish it more exactly. With the same lure. Let’s do everything. Let’s just do more. Like there’s other lakes and there’s other lures and maybe you don’t know how to catch and it’s always in the trees. You like in this word picture I love this word picture.
35:23
Andy Paul
Yeah.
35:26
Tab Norris
It’S not fun either. I was talking to a sales rep yesterday, and he’s telling me this whole thing, and he’s like, it takes me 200 calls to talk to blah, blah. It just sounded awful. It was all about filling the funnel. I said, well, do you think there’s a better way? He goes, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. This is just the way it works. He’s already just decided, but it happens all the time.
35:56
Andy Paul
Oh, yeah. This idea of saying, look, which is the way I approached it, is both personally analyzed building teams is let’s figure out what we need to do to achieve the win rate we want, and then let’s scale our process based on that so we can replicate our win rate again. This is one of these what moments for most sales leaders these days because they come into an environment where we adopted this quote, unquote, predictable revenue playbook. It’s all based on how much crap we can put on the top of the funnel. We’ll just close a thin percentage of that, as opposed to saying, well, let’s sell the way we want to sell. Let’s figure out how to get the results we want to get and then figure out how can we scale that by maintaining the win rate that we want.
36:46
Tom Stanfill
I’ve always argued that sorry, go ahead.
36:49
Andy Paul
No, go ahead. That was it.
36:50
Tom Stanfill
I’ve always argued that Osaka came from this manufacturing military mindset. It’s like we have this approach. You do it, you replicate it, and you just follow this process, and you have this much error, and you just keep it’s like versus the art of what you’ve talked about in the book is the art of selling and learning how to execute. You have less control. You feel like you have less control as a leader. Right. Because you’re giving them autonomy to make decisions and what we would say drop the rope and start pulling the customer and putting pressure on them. If you trust your team and you trust them to learn about the customer, they’re going to sell more, they’re going to win more. It’s a completely different way to manage or lead your team and think about your pipeline, as you said, and how to sell.
37:50
Andy Paul
Well. I think the irony I pointed on several occasions is that through the growth of what we’ve seen over the last tech industry in general. But say. In the last 14 years in the SaaS business excuse me. All these companies have created been created to disrupt existing marketplaces and provide a new way of looking at the world because they’ve all defaulted to the most compliance oriented. Conformity based selling processes. Except no disruption.
38:25
Tab Norris
Yeah, right.
38:27
Andy Paul
I find so curious as these companies, this is a really disruptive company, but man, we are most rigid, unbending sales process possible, which is just like I said, it’s not working. Right. Sure there are companies that have succeeded using variations of model, but people take the wrong message from that and say what was the model that enabled it? No, it was the company and the product that happened to be hit at the right time. They could use other models and achieve the same results. Yeah, we’re at this point now though, this whole SDR model is creaking and people to really be paying attention and think, OK, what’s coming next? For me, as you can tell from the book, I think what’s next is hey, think about from perspective of the buyer. That again, pick on software, pick one category. Conversational intelligence. Right. Because one we all know.
39:31
Andy Paul
We know the prominent vendors. Two years ago, maybe there were a dozen companies doing it. Now there’s literally like 40 companies or more that are doing it. From the buyers perspective, if the products all look alike, which they fundamentally do, they all fundamentally do the same things. The price all basically the same. On what basis do you make your decision? You’re making a decision based on your experience, the buying experience you have with them because that’s the only thing that’s different. The who, the who or the how?
40:06
Tom Stanfill
Maybe the experience. The who or the how experience.
40:08
Andy Paul
Point is your experience with the seller. Even the challenge years ago talked about this as being the critical decision point and other analysts have since then is you as a seller. You’re the difference maker. If you’re going to use the same old rigid sales process and you come across using the same tactics, sounds just like the same BS that everybody else is giving them. Yeah, you’re not going to win. Those people that bring the human to it, they’re going to win.
40:36
Tab Norris
Well, Tom, I think this is going to be a really good place for us to stop today.
40:41
Tom Stanfill
Are you pulling the cohost card?
40:43
Tab Norris
You know I am.
40:44
Tom Stanfill
You are. A little power trip.
40:46
Tab Norris
It’s a lot of pressure. I’m sitting back here just making all kinds of decisions. You have no idea. You have no idea.
40:53
Tom Stanfill
Although dialed. Yeah, we got Sam Cassidy, she’s a producer. She’s doing the behind the scenes you’re the on air talent and you’re making all the big executive decisions. Exactly.
41:05
Tab Norris
You’re just having fun, baby. Just learning and having fun.
41:09
Tom Stanfill
What a great, I love his perspective. I love Andy’s perspective on our role. It really does. What he’s talking about in this first episode, in this first part is it really changes everything. How we think about a role, our beliefs and our approach to selling drives our behavior. I love the set up and I love where we’re going in part two. The way he talks about the four pillars of success is radically different than anything you’re going to hear if you pick up a book on how to sell or you listen to thought leaders. I mean, he’s going to talk about things like generosity, he’s going to talk about curiosity and connection. You can’t miss this next episode that we’re going to have that follows because it’s a great place here to shift from the foundation of how we see our role and why we need to change the way we sell.
41:58
Tom Stanfill
Now he’s going to dive into kind of the tackle things we need to be successful. If you love this episode, let us know. Remember, if you’re passionate about what we’re passionate about, which is teaching people to be other centered at home and at work, let us know. Please share the podcast and give us comments because that’s the best way for people to find us and to let us know what we’re doing has an impact and is helping you. Thanks for joining us for another episode of SALES with ASLAN.
