The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon

we collected 2 and 1 half million sales calls and studied them with a machine learning platform at scale the big Insight is that you're losing most of your sales deals not to competition but to indecision and that indecision stems from their fear of failure dialing up the fomo backfires 87% of the time they're not afraid of missing out they're afraid of messing up you just talk about how to actually leverage these insights to improve your sales process you have something I think you call the jolt method yeah jolt them forward so the first thing is

we've got to judge their level of indecision the second thing is we got to offer a recommendation the third thing is we've got to get them to start trusting us we call limit the exploration and the t is we've got to drisk the deal we got to take some risk off the table great Segway to the Challenger sale which is basically this on steroids most sales people are trying to figure out what keeping the customer up at night the Challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night what's a

risk that they don't know about but you do holy moly this is going to be the most action-packed high density podcast episode we've done today my guest is Matt Dixon Matt is one of the world's foremost experts in sales known for his groundbreaking Research into what makes the best sales people different from everyone else his first book The Challenger sale was a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller and has sold over a million copies worldwide his most recent book The jolt effect Builds on his lessons and insights and will change how you do sales in

our conversation Matt breaks down what you're probably doing wrong in your sales process based on Research into millions of sales conversations and then how to tweak your process to be a lot more successful this episode is for anyone that wants to improve their sales skills or improve the rate at which they close deals with that I bring you Matt Dixon and if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously Matt thank

you so much for being here welcome to the podcast hey it's great to be here thank you than you for the invitation lny it's great to have you here so first of all a huge thank you to April Dunford for connecting us she's a a huge fan of your work she mentioned you a number of times on the podcast episode that she did she's great yeah she's very nice she's amazing okay so you basically spend your time researching salespeople and digging into what makes the best salespeople different from all the rest and then synthesizing these

lessons into these really actionable pieces of advice so that anyone can become better at sales which to me feels like a dream come true even if I'm not a salesperson even though many of us do sales part-time but especially if you're a salesperson so first of all just to give people a sense of the work that you do can you just talk a bit about the research that went into the books that we're going to talk about we're going to be focusing on the Challenger sale and the jolt effect what is the research that you

did yeah sure um so uh may just start with a challenger because that chronologically came first so we actually started did that research study in uh I think it was in late 2008 actually and um we published initial results to at the time I was working for a company called CB which was acquired by Gartner group uh in 2017 a research organization and and I was running the group that served heads of sales uh business to business heads of sales around the world we had five or 600 clients around the world and we launched that

study in 08 we published the initial results for our clients in 09 we kept collecting some data and then we published the book in 2011 the book was published off a data set of 6,000 salespeople so we did an in-depth survey with 6,000 salespeople as well as collected performance data on those 6,000 sellers uh this was a it was Global cross industry different types of companies as well product companies services companies large small slow growth fast growth you name it over time though you know that that research has been ongoing so we've collected data I

think to date on roughly a quarter million salespeople around the world uh that we continue to go back and not just validate the original findings but look at how things are changing and do cuts of the data now that the data set so big so that was a survey based piece of research we did uh the jolt effect we started that research in uh 2020 actually it was actually in March of 2020 which I think is a time that everybody remembers with probably mixed mixed emotions most of them bad um I think uh though you

remember March was a time when people were getting into Tiger King and baking sour dough bread much a few months later that got really old but in the beginning it was kind of you know surprising and weird and you know uh this this whole pandemic thing but um we actually thought because we're huge nerds um that this would be an interesting time to do a sales research project we had always been fascinated by uh what Professor Neil rackam did back in the 70s and 80s in spin selling and he and his research team sat in

on 30 something thousand sales calls physically sat in uh on these meetings and took notes they a team of psychologists to produce the research that went into spin selling and so we always kind of aspire to get at the at kind if you will at the coal face or where the rubber hits the road in sales which is the sales conversation when that salesp person is sitting across from the customer the problem with that is it's really hard to get people to pay for that kind of research and uh you know that kind of undertaking

and and then let alone getting invited into those meetings because a lot of the really critical sales meetings took place of course in the client's office until March of 2020 when that all changed and the entire sales process for every company on Earth went to zoom and teams and web Xs and other virtual platforms and so we recruited several dozen companies across industry and around the world into a large Global study we collected two and a half million uh sales calls and studied them with a machine learning platform at scale so that was a very

different kind of research project and you know honestly it's it's fun just as a researcher to look back on Challenger and you know the manual kind of survey based approach and the interviews and all this stuff to fast forward to like today being able to take advantage of large data sets and advanced technology to study you know millions of sales conversations is is pretty cool amazing okay so the second book the most recent book The jolt effect is based on these two and a half million sales conversations that's right I love insights that come from

tons of data so this is most excellent this episode is brought to you by interpret interpret unifies all of your customer interactions from gong calls to zenes tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews and make it available for your product team it's used by Leading product orgs like canva notion Loom linear and descript to accurately integrate the voice of the customer into your product development process helping you build best-in-class products what makes interprets special is its ability to build customer specific adaptive AI models that provide the most granular and accurate categorization of all your

customer feedback and also Connect customer feedback to revenue impact to help product leaders confidently prioritize things that will actually move the needle for your business if you want a custom model built for your organization so that you can automate your feedback loops and prioritize your road map with confidence get in touch with the team at interpret. c/ Lenny that's n t p.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by webflow we're all friends here so let's be real for a second we all know that your website shouldn't be a static asset it should be a

dynamic part of your strategy that drives convergence that's business 101 but here's a number for you 54% of leaders say web updates take too long that's over half of you listening right now that's where web flow comes in their visual first platform allows you to build launch and optimize web pages fast that means you can set ambitious business goals and your site can rise to the challenge learn how teams like Dropbox Ideo and orange theory trust webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today at web flow.com let's dive into the insights from the jolt effect

so the way that I understand is the big Insight is that you're losing most of your sales deals not to competition but to indecision basically customers preferring to do nothing versus choosing something because they are afraid of making a mistake good summary yeah St if you're busy like you said it more succin I've been doing this for a while you said it way more speckly than I can I I think you know we uh just to back up for a little bit I I think the one of the data points I always start with when

I present the research on the jolt effect is that our analysis showed that anywhere between 40 and 60% of the average salesperson's qualified pipelines these aren't just leads you know sometimes bad leads that are thrown over to us by marketing these are qualified opportunities these are you know people we've met with customers we've pursued we've engaged they're in the sales process 40 to 60% of them will be ultimately marked as Clos loss no decision that's actually I think that number is actually on the rise especially in places like SAS and in the broader Tech sector

over the past uh year and a but that's a really painful thing right if you think about a s as a salesperson that for 46% of your deals you're going to spend a lot of time energy resources a lot of your company's money and their time and resources pursuing these opportunities where you eventually just get ghosted and you don't really know what happened just like the customer evap the opportunity evaporated on you ghosted you they went radio silent you don't really know what happened there and so we um we decided to take this two and

a half million sales call data set which you could have used to answer lots of different questions but we were really fascinated by this question maybe two two questions one is why do customers make no decision like because you understand it's frustrating as a salesperson but it's also puzzling for customers to do that they go through the entire process to evaluate a solution and many of those customers say yeah I want to buy then they ghost the salesperson and it's just it's so puzzling like why would they waste their own time evaluating a solution and

then doing nothing then the the more important question is probably what do the very best salesp people do differently what have they figured out to avoid that outcome cool and we're going to talk about that latter part to help people understand why because it sounds like okay I guess this happens but help people understand why this happens like why are people nervous to make a mistake and not make a decision at all so let me maybe take us a step back L there was a reason we actually even asked as that question that you just

asked and the reason was this you know when we looked at sales calls if you think of a the typical sales process or buying Journey it kind of moves through three phases phase number one is the customer in their status quo it's what they do today right they use your competitor's product maybe they do use a homegrown solution maybe they never saw a need for a solution like yours but that's their current state step two is we got to get them to agree that the current state is no longer acceptable and they've got to move

forward in a new and different way that we call that agreement on a vision we got to get their intent to move forward and to change and then step number three is you got to get them to buy something right so that's the action step where they they execute the doc you sign they sign on the line that is dotted and they send the contract back it's simple three-step process and what we found in our analysis is whether the big places where a lot of deals fall out of that process is between intent and action

so it's after the point where the customer says yeah I lety this sounds great I'm sold let's talk but before the point where that actually deal gets sold a lot of deals kind of go sideways in that moment and the way this comes across in sales calls is that customers start if you will retiga concerns that they had they had asked and you thought You' address much earlier like what what might go wrong and is this really the right answer for us and they and these are things that are puzzling to salese because like it

feels like this thing is slipping through my fingers like right before my eyes I thought we had this closed I thought you said you want to move forward and now you're asking questions that we addressed three months ago what's going on and so what salespeople tend to do because they've grown up in a world where they've been told the only reason the customer hesitates is because you haven't put to bed their status quo bias so we all know all human beings not just customers but perhaps especially customers are uh guilty of status quo bias meaning

we are prone to laziness and doing nothing because it's easier it's inertia right it's easier to just keep doing more of the same than to change Behavior change is really hard and sales people been taught that the status quo is their biggest competitor and if the customer to get cold feet it's because they still think either what they're doing today is good enough what you are proposing is not a very a compelling enough reason to change or maybe it's just not a TP priority for them or their organization it's got to be one of those

reasons so what sales people have been armed to do is go out and dial up the fomo right uh and and kind of make the customer sweat a little bit so the first thing they do is they say you know Lenny remember the demos and the proof of concept trial we how excited you were and like those those benefits like you got to pay for it like it's you're not going to get all those great benefits for your organization unless you sign the agreement if that doesn't work I'll try to kind of scare you into

action by dialing up the fear uncertainty and doubt and saying Lenny you know you told me about these problems in your your business you guys are really struggling right now um by the way Jad mentioned we're working with all of your competitors and they're seeing tremendous benefits from our product and you're going to be left in the dust and those problems you brought up with me they're not going to solve themselves so I'm trying to create that burning platform a little bit for the customer and uh and get them to realize the cost of their

inaction like there is a cost of doing nothing and if those two things don't work what most sales people go to is the 10% discount that's only good this quarter right so it's it's like the price driven urgency like maybe this will be the thing you need to just get you over the Finish Line what we were so surprised by which led us to the question you asked Lenny was that 87% of the time when salespeople do that dial up the fomo in those moments especially with a customer who says that they're ready to move

forward but they start to backpedal and waffle and waiver and become hesitant dialing up the fomo backfires 87% of the time in other words it increases the odds the deal will be lost to no decision if it weren't for that finding we never would have even bothered asking the question about like why do people end up why do we lose deals in decision why do customers make no decision but this was really puzzling because it flew in the face of everything we talked about including you know in Challenger to be totally candid we talk about

how Challengers are exceptional at breaking the customer status quo bias by showing them the pain of same is worse than the pain of change and and again overcoming that inertia that not just individuals but organizations suffer from Challengers are really good at that and so here we see that the tactics that you might associate with challenging actually kind of backfire which was as the author of The Challenger still a little bit troubling to me but we'll come back to that but uh I think what we realized was we got it right but we got it

kind of half right and so we went back into the data and we asked a slightly different question which is why are deals lost and no decision what drives that and we found that actually there is there are a lot of deals that are lost because the customer does actually prefer their status quo so that is status quo bias like they believe what they in say is good enough what you're talking about it's not a compelling enough reason to change or this is not a top priority those are all status quo preference reasons but it

turns out those are only 44% of the no decision losses 56% of no decision losses are customers who are who want to buy but can't buy because they're stuck in this no man's land of indecision and that indecision itself stem from their fear of failure which you put your finger on earlier and this is the part I found so fascinating so we we dug into the psych research we we read probably 30 years of of um cognitive psychology Journal articles many of them from uh Dutch universities which I find very interesting but apparently very big

into this stuff you know a lot of the condom cond and cerski work around um law subversion and prospect theory Etc and one of the big findings we came across is that there's actually a more powerful human bias even more powerful than status quo bias that rears its ugly head and causes indecision and that is called the Omission bias the Omission bias is if you get down to it is is the fact that people don't want to be blamed for making decisions that lead to a loss in in the human mind there are two types

of loss that we think about we all like to avoid loss but not all losses created equal there are losses that happen when we do nothing and then there are losses that happen because we did something so we made a decision we picked a vendor we we executed a contract and then something bad happened and it turns out that in the human mind people are okay with missing out they are not okay with messing up and being blam and this is really powerful it's even more powerful than status quo bias as I said and so

the shth hand for salespeople is this dialing up the fomo can be very effective to overcome status quo bias but knowing that every human being including all of your customers what includeing that definition of human beings are um definely afraid of being personally blamed if things go wrong the fuo actually matters more than the F Mo the fu is the fear of messing up or in the not safeer work version of your podcast I'd say FAU Fu but your listeners can figure out what that stands for on their own but this is really powerful for

custom for salespeople right to understand look if you are trying to scare your customer into action you're going to miss out on these benefits you're going to miss out on solving these problems you're just going to pay more later if you don't say yes now what you're what you're really doing is using Scare Tactics but you're trying to scare some who's already afraid the problem is they're not afraid of the thing you think they're afraid of they're not afraid of missing out they're afraid of messing up and so we've got to address that as salespeople

we've got to help instill the confidence in the customer that you're making a great decision I've got your back this is gonna all you're going to look like a hero not like a fool and that's really what the jolt effect is about is about how the very best salespeople execute that so it wasn't that we were wrong with Challenger it's just the story was kind of incomplete you got to break status quo by if you don't do that you're never going to have an indecision problem but even once you overcome the customer's indifference and their

status quo bias you got a second battle you've got to fight which is youve got to instill the confidence and make them feel good about this frankly leap of faith they're about to take and their fear you got to deal with the fear that if something goes wrong they're worried that they're going to be blamed for it we're going to talk about this method you developed for how to actually do all the things you're talking about but first to make this even more real what I'm thinking about is an example so may is a good

example maybe a CRM like a better CRM product say someone has Salesforce installed and now they're like there's probably something better out there we should probably evaluate and then I'm thinking from the perspective of a startup trying to build the better serum there's always this advice you have to be 10 times better for anyone to pay any attention and I think that feeds into exactly what you're showing is like you needs to be so much better that this fear is reduced can you just talk about maybe an example whether it's that one or a different

one to make this more concrete we encountered a ton of examples it's so interesting you mentioned uh startups and I think sometimes I was actually with a big enterprise software company and I think um when and I presented this research to some of their sales leaders and one of the folks in the room said I'm really glad we are who we are that we are the 800 pound gorilla especially in a market like we're in right now because you know the old adage goes it wasn't IBM but the old adage is that nobody ever got

fired for buying from IBM right this company is like the IBM of their space they're the 800 pound gorilla they've got the brand strength the reputation they're the safe choice right and so this this team felt kind of comfortable or comforted I should say by that fact especially in a tight environment where it's a it's a battle for deals and for mind share and for uh for wins out there in the market right now especially in Tech and what I said is you've got to remember though that may be true and I would argue and

I think you're right that for a startup yeah you've got to be 10 times better to get get the Mind share it maybe even better than that to get somebody to take a leap of faith with you and so there is inherent risk in going with the unpr proven player but I I cautioned these folks and I said now remember what are the things that drive fear of failure in indecision it turns out there are three big ones the first one is um have I made the right choice I know I want to work with

this vendor but did I configure the solution The Proposal the right way the right contract length the right implementation The Right Use cases the right Integrations all that Professional Services or DIY all those big questions the second thing that customers worry about if you second fear of failure is that they're going to learn something after the contract is signed that's going to make the decision look like not such a great decision I'll give you a really specific example about this I spoke to a tech company not not too long ago maybe a month ago and

they landed their biggest deal of of their existence there was an early stage company seven figure deal GameChanger for this organization and they beat out some big established competitors it was a huge win you know they went out they celebrated it was just totally amazing big their first big Enterprise win in their first seven figure deal and their first Victory against some of these incumbents unfortunately uh about two weeks after they won this deal the new Gardner magic quadrant on their space came out and they were shown to be kind of eh right they weren't

the leader but they're sort of middle of the pack and all of a sudden the the client who signed the agreement uh the CTO just got like crap rained from everybody saying did you see the gardener magic quadrant it looks like the company we just plunk down 7 figures with was kind of seen as so so by The Gardener analyst have we talked to these guys and those guys and why aren't we going with the leaders and you know blah blah blah they ended up backing out of the contract because the CTO said I can't

I'm spending every day talking to all the other key stakeholders trying to convince them that yes we did all of our due diligence and it but I just life is too short and we're probably gonna end up going with one of the big players we're sorry I mean that's such a painful story right but that's the customer who's like they're going to keep doing research because they don't want to be surprised when some new piece of information comes to light so it's the second big fear failure driver or failure driver the third one is that

the customers worried they're just not going to see the ROI they're not going to get the full benefits you know you might Pro um project for them a 5x Improvement in sales productivity what if it comes in at two or 3x and my name's on the agreement and the CFO comes asking why we didn't get the benefits we thought you know today's environment that's not just egg on your face you could get fired for that stuff so you know this is this is the client who's really looking for that vendor to have their back and

to assure them that they're going to see the benefits that are being projected and promised through the sale so what I said to this big Enterprise tech company was look you guys yes it's tough to be a startup right now early stage company there's a lot of risk there but who's offering more choices them or you guys you guys have a partner ecosystem you have like 20 different Cloud products you bought like seven companies in the past three years you have a cornucopia of options which adds to the buyer anxiety that they have't chosen the

right thing second do you think there's more written about you guys or about them there you could fill a football stadium with all the coverage on you guys and you know are your compe I mean there is everybody's got an opinion about you because you are the 800 pound girl and everybody's worked with you before and they have opinions good and bad and people want to leave no stone on turn and then lastly turns out you guys are a lot more expensive because you're trying to move from selling simple products like these ankle biters out

there these startups into selling big Enterprise Solutions you guys are selling like not seven figure deals eight figure deals nine figure deals to your customers that increases the customer's anxiety that I really have to see return on this and so you in many respects are getting whipsawed by these these factors in a way that the startups are not because they're not they don't have as many choices right they don't there's not as much coverage about that the investment is lower and so there's a little bit less risk for the customer so you're not you guys

aren't immune just because you're the Big Brand you're doing a great job making it clear why it's so nerve-wracking to buy new software there's just so many things that could hurt you as a person at a company April Dunford I think she I think this is barred from your language that she talks about how it's actually more stressful these days to buy software than to sell software because of all these things you've talked about yeah I I think she's I think she's on point on that I mean it's it's a uh your customers are yeah

they're really really afraid of this not panning out and it it was so interesting and salespeople can think of so many different occasions where the purchase buying your product just made all the sense in the world for the customer it would make things so much better it would solve such big problems for them um they're so dissatisfied with their current approach it's just a no-brainer and the customer will look at that and they will agree with you and they still won't make a decision because of the wh ifs right yeah this is uh got to

be very frustrating for Founders to L usen to and be like come on our product is so much better what are you doing uh but I think this explains a lot of the challenges they're probably having this episode is brought to you by Heap the product analytics solution that shows you everything users do on your digital product website mobile product or other Digital Services we all know a great digital experience when we see it it's intuitive it anticipates your needs and makes it easy for you to do your job if you're trying to build that

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to get started with a demo that's heap.io Lenny this great segue to talking about how to actually leverage these insights to improve your sales process you have something I think you call the jolt method yes awesome let's get into the jolt is it's an acronym so um it just so happened it worked out that way but I I like it because it's memorable but it also speaks to what's happening right our customers stuck in their indecisive State they want to buy from us but they just can't because they're worried about what might go wrong got

to jolt them forward we got to jolt them into action beautiful so how do we do it so the first thing is we've got to judge their level of indecision the second so we got figure out what we're dealing with the second thing is we got to offer a recommendation the third thing is we've got to get them to stop doing endless research and start trusting us and limiting we call limit the exploration and the t is we've got to drisk the deal we got to take some risk off the table and we got to

we establish that safety net for the customers they feel like we've got their back so then we talk about each of those I'll start with the J because you know uh it's first um but but also I think the way I I while it's kind of linear I wouldn't I would encourage listeners don't think about this as a process where it's like I do step one two 3 four JT think of it as it starts with the J and the J tells you what the next step is is it the t is it the L

is it the O is it the O and then we gotta deal with t then we gotta go back to the O because it comes up again so think of it as sort of the divining Rod so how do we figure out what's got the customer nervous and and this is a really really really tricky thing because um and I've likened indecision to like the carbon monoxide poisoning of sales it's everywhere but it's odorless it's tasteless you can't you know but you need a carbon monoxide detector and that's what the J is so how do

we get fear of failure on the table and the problem with this is that um and and I think most your listeners will be familiar with this everybody especially customers suffers and Senior Executives especially especially suffer from what's called The Dun and Krueger effect which is they think they are better at things than they really are and decisiveness is one of those things that buyers will think they will say they think they're decisive in fact if you surveyed your customers not they recommend this and you add hundred of them if they consider themselves to be

decisive folks like 99 out of 100 will say absolutely yes I make the tough calls I manage from the gut you know I live on the edge as an executive making those big calls but the research tells a very different story it turns out that 87% of buyers in our two and a half million sales calls we studied either showed moderate or high levels of indecision the folks who are not worried about fear or failure were 133% so yeah those people do exist and by the way if you find one of those people you should

sell them everything as soon as possible because they they're they're making the decision quite literally on the dollars and cents and and the ROI and you know whether it makes sense for their business it's a rational decision for them but for the rest they're dealing with a lot of emotion and that emotion is all you know wrapped up with fear failure and what's so tough about this is that it's not just Dunning Krueger like we think we're more decisive than we really are even if your customer knows that they're indecisive or they're worried about fail

or how their boss is going to perceive them if this purchase doesn't pan out they don't like talking about it because it's embarrassing you know they don't want to talk about like God I gotta tell you like this better pay off because it doesn't I'm already on thin ice with my boss she doesn't like me already this is gonna be the last straw you know nobody's gonna say that stuff um and so how do we get on the table um one of the things we don't think works particularly well are kind of classic open-ended questions

like Lenny do you find when you go to The Cheesecake Factory do you leave satisfied or hungry because you can't decide what to order like it's either not great approaches with customers you you'll end the sale pretty quickly because again your customers find that kind of offensive they'd like to think of themselves as decisive people and so we found a technique this is actually not in the book we found it after we wrote the book called pings and Echoes that high performers use so think of like the the way a surface ship might detect a

submarine in the water using Sonar they send a ping out into the water and they're listening if you will using Sonar for the reflection back and the reflection tells them is it a friendly submarine enemy submarine is it just a whale is it heading towards us away from us at what speed are they about to torpedo us all that good stuff and um what we want to do the same thing in sales so the way this works is that a salesperson will try to articulate but in a non not to out the customer but to

get confirmation or refutation if you will that what they've uh articulated is actually a concern for their buyers so hypothetically let's imagine we're talking about purchase and we've had a lot of great conversations shown you a lot of demos you guys have liked everything we've shown we showed you partner options we showed you different configurations we did PC over here we did a pilot over there you know you guys are just eating it all up but I'm kind of getting the sneaking feeling that you guys actually don't know what you want and we've shown you

a lot and we've probably made that problem worse and so what I might say to you is you know Lenny I'm just curious if we could calibrate here for just a moment and there's a reason I'm asking this which is a lot of the customer at this point in our process of working together they get almost overwhelmed with all the options and look I probably made this worse we're very proud of what we do I want to show you the art paint the art of the possible but I'm also I also know if we're going

to do business together you told me right right away budgets are limited and you don't have you can't have it all so you've got to decide what's nice to have and what's NE to have I'm just curious are you and your team clear on what would be in and out of the proposal and what the what's going to happen is one of two things one you might might say or or a few things you might say you know what no I we don't know and we have liked everything shown us but as you said we

can't have it all so we'd be really curious to know what do other companies like us start with you know how do we get going what what are the things we can do without and we can maybe add later on down the road or you might get the customer says no no no we were just being polite there's a lot of stuff you showed us that we're not actually that interested in it's cool but it's just not for us we are very clear on what we want and so let me share that with you now

however ever what I'm really concerned about is once we get this kind of specked out and configured and priced I'm going to take it to the CFO because I've got to get her approval on this and I can't build our business case on the claim you guys make about improving sales productivity by 10% because she'll laugh me out of her office and so help me get grounded in what's a believable outcome for us right so that I can sell it and I can be confident we're going to actually hit it so it's again it's not

designed to embarrass the customer designed to get this on the table so it can be recognized and dealt with and contextualized you're not you're totally normal everybody struggles with this you know there's a lot of stuff we throw in front of people and they you know it it ends up doing some harm they don't know what to pick let me be of service and value to you and so that's the first thing that we point to and that's going to tell us okay is it a choice problem they don't they're overwhelmed they don't know what

to choose like that example we just used is it that they're just doing endless research and they feel like they haven't really come down the learning curve yet around this purchase or is it no I I don't I don't actually know that we're going to get what we're paying for here and we'll we screw this stuff up every day of the week and twice on Sunday and I don't think it's going to be any different and then I'm going to get blamed so help me manage the downside risk but it tells us kind of where

to go next on that on that Journey if that makes sense yeah awesome so the advice there is basically get a sense of how clear they are internally on knowing exactly what they want that'll help them make a decision so there's kind of this like moment of okay let's just help me understand I think question the way you phrase are you and your team clear on what would be in or out of this proposal yeah and that's that's just a uh one example that's if I hypothesize that you're really struggling with what to choose now

my hypothesis might be you know what you want you've done plenty of research but you're really worried about the ROI right you're just worried like you just aren't going to be able to accomplish that so that ping might sound very different it might be you know we've been we've been having a discussion about like you we've been you've been asking for multiple terms of the ROI calculation and changing parameters and really trying to make it bulletproof but you know a lot of customers uh struggle with that a little bit because that that's a big thing

you're putting your name against that and so maybe we should have a conversation about whether that's a concern for you is there believability Gap is there an execution Gap you're worried about on your side or on our side let's have a conversation about that so I can uh set the proper expectations so you feel really confident going to the CFO and and lobbying for investment here you know so so that ping could go in but it's based on what I think is holding you got it so it's just like at this point many customers have

this question and that maybe comes from the thing that you think is probably blocking them I think that's perfect language at this point most most customers like you are thinking about this or they're kind of worried about that or they're getting a little anxious about this let's have a conversation about it awesome you know okay cool let's go to step two uh offering your the oh yeah so this this was right with that example we talked about before you know options are options are really a double-edged sword it what we know from the research is

that options are great early on so if you're meeting at the trade show and the customers swinging by your booth or you're doing a first demo or first like let a thousand flowers bloom but if you want the customer to actually make a decision you got to get the weed whacker out and like call it down to a manageable set of choices and the science is very clear on this that too many choices at some point will overwhelm the customer and at least a lot of bad outcomes it leads to the customer not making a

decision at all because they don't want to make the wrong decision I I want to work with you but you put so many options in front of us like I don't want to be blamed if I choose the wrong one and it leads to things like postdecision dysfunction which is I thought I made the right decisions but now I'm learning more and people are asking hard questions and maybe I need to go revisit this and and hey Lenny we're gonna we're gonna have to scrap that agreement and start over because I don't think we can

figure this right way so um we have to be we have to there's a time in place offer options and there's a time and place a narrow choices up the simple guidance here for salespeople is that you've got to shift your posture from asking the customer what they want and just diagnosing their needs to actually recommending to them what they should do and sales people get a little bit anxious about this I find because they don't want to be seen as like I told you to do a but you're like I don't want to do

that I want to do B and now I feel like we're at odds and so they worry about that and so sales people have grown up in this world that like it's the it's the customer's Choice the customer's always right let me just guide them but they're the one should make this decision but sometimes the customer can't and they don't know enough about these decisions like we know this stuff was we eat sleep and breathe it every day as salespeople we work in this industry they don't and so we are in a much better position

to be able to guide them toward like you know what you don't really need X Y and Z you can leave that out of proposal companies like you they get started in this way let me put three options in front of you I would go the middle one because I really think that's going to be the best for you in the first year and then we can expand from there the here's an analogy I I'll often tell people to think about the last time they went to a fancy restaurant and they looked at a menu

with like some expensive Entre and everything looked delicious right but they didn't know what to order so you ask the weight person what they recommend how helpful is it if that weight person says to you well what are you in the mood to eat tonight like it's no help at all right you're no closer to a decision they basically just dump the problem back on your lab but what great weight people do is they say you know if you want my opinion I love this dish and I'd probably say it's our most popular we sell

out of it every night we've still got it so you're in luck it's a lot of food though it's big portion if you're in the mood for something lighter there's a vegetarian option it doesn't get as much play on Yelp but I love this one it's absolutely delicious it's one of our kind of uh Darkhorse favorites if you will but remember everything we make here is delicious so if you don't like those choices you're not going to go wrong with any of them but those are just my favorites now what happens in that moment is

what psychologists call the delegation effect which is rather than the burden of a bad decision being solely on the on the shoulders of the decider that burden is shared now think about it if you order the dish the weight person recommended and you don't like it whose fault is it well technically it's your fault because you ordered it but it's also kind of their fault because they recommended it and so you feel like there's some safety in getting that recommendation that endorsement it's a really simple example but it works in complex sales as well customers

are looking for somebody to share in the risk and the burden of making a bad decision and having that you know partner who's guiding them toward what they should care about and what they shouldn't care about what they should consider and what they should take out of The Proposal is is actually very reassuring and comforting them and increases the odds of getting some kind of decision from them amazing this is a great segue to the Challenger sale which we're going to talk about but let's get through the last two steps and then we'll talk about

the Challenger sale which is basically this on steroids the S on steroids the last two so L is about you know this customer who's doing endless amounts of research every salesperson seen this customer like they're never happy with the number of reference calls or the you know um the amount of research they've done they want to talk to more and more people they're just in information overload mode and or what you we might call analysis paralysis mode because at some point they're just they're never satisfied with they always feel like all the answers will be

in the next white paper they read or the the next reference call they do or the next person on LinkedIn they talk to and so what salespeople need to do to stop that you got to understand I think why customers do that it's they don't want to be surprised that is the the main reason but they also don't trust the salesperson to be for coming so they believe the salesperson is paid to sell them more than they need to put one over on them hide the dirty laundry only talk about the things that work in

the platform not the things that don't work you know uh you're not going to do you're not gonna get introduced to any of the customers who hate you you're only G introduce the customers who love you and we know we're gonna say great things about us so that's what the customer thinks right that is what uh is in the customer's mind and so you've got to actually shift get the customer to stop trying to be an expert and start trusting you as an expert and there are two keys to that the first one is you've

got to establish some trust I know that sounds like a platitude but we found in the analysis there are specific things that sales great sales people do very early on they are brutally transparent with customers about like hey I know you were interested in this capability I gotta be honest it's you know we get mixed reviews on that uh it's kind of an early capability for us we're still trying to iron out the Kinks or I know you are interested in this use case but I have to be honest we're actually not the best in

the Market at that our competitors is much better at that than we are you know so these kinds of moments show the customer that you're not here to put one over on them you're here to get them to a great decision it kind of makes no difference to the salesperson whether the customer buys from them doesn't buy from them it it buys from a competitor you just want to help them get to a great decision so that's step number one is is building that trust and step number two is you got to demonstrate some expertise

and and what we see in so many sales interactions especially in Tech is that salespeople will show up with the clown carve experts the subject matter experts the solutions Engineers the the product people the executive and then they will just punt to these people and what happens in that moment is is dangerous for the salesperson the customer it sounds like they're loving it right they're loving that I'm talking to people who really know their stuff but what's also happening in that moment is the salesperson is actively getting delegated down to the person they sound like

and if they don't sound like any more than a glorified MC or a coordinator then that's kind of all the customer will perceive them as so what right or ability would you have to guide the customer on what to choose if you've offered no value or expertise you've got to at least you don't have to be as deep as the product people are you're not going to be you're a salesp person you're not a product person but you do have to be deeper on it than the customer and you do have to demonstrate that expertise

and so those are the keys to getting the customer to stop trying to be an expert and start trusting you as their expert and then the t is taking risk off the table two keys to doing that I think the first one happens really early actually and that is uh resetting the customer expectations average salespeople love when they get an inbound lead from a customer who says hey I saw that case study on your website of the customer who got the 10x Improvement in sales productivity and we want that like that sounds great and that

that company's in our industry amazing like that's a slam dug business case for us and the average salesperson is thinking like if you're excited about that I'm not gonna talk you out of it because that means you're going to be excited to take it the CFO and excited to sign the agreement and get going what great sales people do though is they know that while they'll stand by those claims those case studies those proof points they try to kind of under promise and overd deliver and they might say something along the lines of you know

Lenny absolutely that is that is a great case I was involved in that sale but what you also need to understand is everything went perfectly they resourced it to the hilt they had no integration issues no hiccups it was beautiful and seamless and I don't think you and I can think of many technology implementations that happen that way and so what I'd rather we do is build your business case around a 5x Improvement in sales productivity because we see that at least that in 100% of our implementations and then let's set up to overd deliver

against that because I think we're going to do better than that based on what I know about your organization easily 6 Seven 8 9% maybe even 10 but I don't want you to just walking in and promising 10x Improvement sales productivity if we finish the year and we're at 7x and the CFO is now asking hard questions when in absolute terms she should be thrilled with 7x right so let's make sure we set ourselves up for Success the other thing you got to do though is establish some safety net options so there are lots of

different shapes and forms these can take everything from um you know know before the deal is closed pulling the implementation team onto the call or the customer success team or the account management team so we can start Road mapping hey as soon as we get signature here's how we're going to spend our next six months together to make sure you guys are getting all the value you expect if not more here's what we got to do here the stage Gates here the owners here are the metrics we're going to man monitor here's how often we're

going to connect with each other instills a lot of confidence with the customer because it feels like oh you guys have done this before right you've been there you've done that you've helped other customers like me get value everything from that stuff to adding in Professional Services support like especially like you think about tech purchase I'm not saying give it away for free but you will find that high performing salese will also add on Professional Services but in it's not just because they're selling more which they are because they're high performing sales people it's the

way they position that they usually position it as an insurance policy hey like I know you guys want to DIY this is one of the great things about our solution you totally can you get all the the training support all the videos you got all the enablement content you need but I know this is a big priority for you and I think it would be really smart to carve out a slug of Professional Services hours that way our a team is lined up in case anything slips and if it does we get you back up

on track because the last thing we want is for you guys to be upset that you're losing ground and you're not going to deliver on the uh the outcomes that you promised to your boss so so let's set set that up so there's lots of different ways we can create those opt out Clauses in some Industries are an option not very common in B2B but in some cases you can offer those or specialized contract car vs for instance so you know there's lots of different things we can do to create that safety out where the

customer doesn't feel like they're jumping out of an airplane by themselves but you are the tandem skydiving instructor that's going to guide them safely to the ground amazing and all of this especially this last step is coming from they're probably not going to decide at anything that that's what you're fighting is help them that's right be less worried about messing up yeah that's right I especially love this point about under promising and overd delivering because so much of and most of this is B2B SAS software that you're working with right like B2B SAS companies we

our data set cut Ross um I think that uh it might just be that SAS is the place where we're seeing the most indecision these days you know but um it's it does not suggest it's kind of an easy target but uh but it is rif with indecision these days and unfortunately I think it's also Rife with a lot of these missteps that salespeople make that actually make things worse but we had data from manufacturing firm Services uh businesses that cut across so this was a this is pretty pre this was prevalent and consistent across

Industries so so the under promising overd delivery I think that's especially powerful for where most companies want to get to is uh net revenue retention being higher than 100% where you can expand larger within the org and it makes sense to help them set up Bas feel like wow this is so much better than we even thought it was going to be versus absolutely yeah it's not delivering what we thought amazing okay any last piece of wisdom to leave listeners with around the jolt effect before we move on to the Challenger sale I you know

the only thing I would um I would would suggest is that for anybody I mean I think it just do it is this is that you should hit the pause button when the customer because the customers we all know are going to get cold feet often late stage and it can be very frustrating and the knee-jerk reaction for almost every salesperson out there this happened like in our analysis 75% of sales people we studied would immediately go out to dialing up the fomo like it go back to doing that like you're not going to get

these benefits you're going to be you know stuck in this this terrible State of Affairs you're in right now dial up the cost of inaction or let's try to use some price based or other like delivery window based urgency driver to get the customer to move forward but just remember that if the customer's already convinced that the status quo is suboptimal and they've you've already got the intent that you're basically again you're you're using fear on top of a customer you know selling it to a customer's already afraid and you're actually making it worse so

hitting the pause button and just reflecting a little bit on what's really going on here is it that they're indifferent or is it that they're indecisive and those are actually two very different things amazing I know you have a meeting in 10 minutes so we're going to this is going to be the most action packed high density podcast episode we've done we got 10 minutes talking about challender sale first of all how many copies of this book have you sold at this point I think it's about a million a lot yeah okay so it's a

legendary book in the world of sales I imagine many people have heard of it at least some people know the teachings let's spend a little time there if I were to summarize the big inside of the book basically it's the best salese challenge their prospects thinking and teach them about the market and what they should be doing versus just helping them get what they want yeah very well said I think one of the just like the the fomo fomu kind of shorthand here's a shorthand I'd give to salespeople is like the most most salespeople are

trying to figure out what's keeping the customer up at night right it's classic solution selling needs diagnosis Etc the Challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night what is the thing you know that they need to know what is the way that other customers are using your solution to generate returns uh in benefit for their organization what's the risk that they don't know about but you do because by the way you're going to talk to you know 10 times more customers than they or I say you're going to

talk to like 10 of that customer in a week than you or 10 times more than in a week than they will all year so you are a window into the outside world for them and that's what Challengers really understand it's not free Consulting though because if you remember from the Challenger sale it's not just about bringing these provocative ideas that reframe the customer's understanding of of the world it's about uh leading to your unique benefits all right so you're what you're really trying to do is kind of create a fire and then be the

only person in town who sells the fire extinguisher that'll put it out is there an example you could share of of a Challenger sale type of sale yeah I there's a in we wrote a sequel of the Challenger sale called The Challenger customer and in that book we talk about a case from a company called DP uh DP as the name would suggest uh manufacturers are produces Dental Supplies right so they sell equipment and product into Dental practices and dental offices and uh years ago dents sply had developed you we all know I think your

listeners can all relate to this when you go to the dentist and the hygienist is you know polishing your teeth or they're using the water pick or unfortunately maybe the den using the drill and that wand has a very heavy like power cord that's attached to it and it's attached to this power base and and that it feeds water through there and electrical current and all those things uh Den had developed the world's first lightweight ergonomic cordless wand that drill bits could be attached to you know cleaning cleaning implements Etc and it was a total

breakthrough they actually when they unveiled it it was pretty interesting they gave you remember the scene in Pulp Fiction where they open the briefcase and that it emanates like a light emits from it so they gave all their salespeople like this little aluminum briefcase thing with this eggshell foam and a and a a wand in there I can't remember what it's called let called it the XP 9000 wand but it had one demo wand in there and they would go around to dental offices and be like uh and it was lit literally like light had

blue lighting inside and it was really cool the reveal and they take it out and they give it to the dentist or the the head of the dental office and they would hold it and be like wow like it's so much lighter and it's ergonomic and this thing is cordless it's amazing it's a revolution and then the first thing they would ask is how much is it so and when they told them it costs like three times more than the current oldfashioned wands are using with the heavy cord it they would gently put it back

in the briefcase close the briefcase say can you give me a price on new drill bits or new like polishing detachments and so they they couldn't get anybody to want to pay for this thing that was much more expensive than the old one so they did a lot of work and they figured out they they knew that this was unique they knew this is a unique product nobody else in the market made this they're the only supplier Who had who had figured this out total Innovation but they haven't they hadn't given the customer reason to

want to pay a premium for that Innovation until they figured out the connection between the equipment that hygienists use and uh absenteeism and workers comp it turns out that one of the biggest professions that where you get carpal tunnel syndrome uh shoulder and neck and lower back uh injuries is uh being a dental hygienist and the reason is that they're standing holding that heavy wand being dragged down by that heavy cord at an awkward angle all day long uh so that's why dental offices really struggle to keep hygienist showing up not you know not calling

sick not out for months at a time for reconstructive Soldier uh shoulder surgery not with exorbitant uh Health uh benefits claims and workers comp uh claims and so they came in and and they revised their sales pitch so now when they come into the dental office they sit down they say you I'd like to talk to you about um your hygienist uh Workforce and are you guys seeing higher turnover have you seen any absenteeism due to carpal or lower back or neck or shoulder injuries what are you guys doing about that what's the cost to

your business and they get the dentist talking and and the way they start talking about it is not just the the insurance and workers costs it's stuff like you know when my hygienists get injured and this is pretty it's a repetitive motion business and job and when they get injured and they call in sick I've got to reschedule all these cleanings and all these appointments and that's a bunch of upset customers who end up then going to the practice down the street or saying bad things about me on on Google reviews or what have you

so there's all kinds of Ripple effects uh for the dentist the cost of of of losing a hygienist is massive uh and the market for hiring them is very very tight so what denly does say start the conversation there and then they say you know one of the things that we figured out is the primary based on our own independent research the one the primary drivers of all these bad outcomes absenteeism uh repetitive motion injuries is uh related to the equipment that hygienists use it's because they're holding that old-fashioned heavy wand attached to that big

heavy power cable at an awkward angle doing repetitive motion all day but what if you could solve for that what if that was no longer a problem the D says well how would you solve for that there's no other techn that's what we got we've had the same equipment for 30 years let me show you the new XP 9000 world world's first cordless lightweight ergonomic drill and we can show you that it is far preferred by hygienists because they don't get injured as often because it's much easier to hold and it doesn't put stress on

the joints and kind of pinch points if you will where Hy tend to experience these injuries so it's just simple example but you see again they're still selling a fancy fancy wand right but before they were leading with it let me show you this and talk about the features benefits and that led to how you know how much it cost now they're leading to it they're starting with an insight about and giving the customer reason to care about solving this business problem and it turns out the only way to solve it is buying this XP

9000 drill from dly so the key lesson from this book and I know we don't have a ton of time to into it is start with an Insight they may not be aware of give them a sense of where the things are going help them learn something about the future and the problems that they need to know about that they may not be aware of and then how transition to here is how we can solve that for you yeah that's exactly right and make sure those connections are really tight right that getting this right starts

with answering the question why should the customer buy from you instead of your competitor and it's not because you're more customer Centric or more Innovative impossible to prove your competitors claim the same thing it's not that you're the leading glob solution provider of whatever you sell it starts with the product or the way you deliver the product or something about your service delivery that only your company does you are only capable of nobody else can touch with the barge pole and then the second question is what would have to be true for the customer to

want to pay us for that to pay a premium ideally and that's that's kind of the that's the core components if you will of a Challenger conversation amazing okay Matt I promised I let you out of here in time so final questions weing folks find your books if they want to dig in further and how can listeners be useful to you well I thank thank you for the offer I I love being you know I love being connected with folks who heard me on shows like this one so if you heard me on the podcast

I heard you on L show shoot me a LinkedIn invite I'm pretty active there uh love being connected with folks so please reach out to me if you want to learn more about uh jolt effect so we do a lot of workshops and training around that uh that uh methodology visit jolt effect.com there's a ton of there's also a lot of free tools on there that you can download that help you put some of these Concepts into practice with your sales teams U or if you're an individual seller uh and then of course the books

are the books are available everywhere good books are sold which I think is on the internet these days so amazing Matt thank you so much here it was it was a blast thank you bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you

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