Josh Bersin [00:00:00]:
Salespeople in general have a very, very hard job. They’re trying to encourage somebody to make a decision for something that they may not even know they need. And so there’s all sorts of obstacles to that. There’s distractions, there’s competitors, there’s blockers, there’s objections, there’s all these reasons. So they’re actually under a lot of stress. So you want to reduce the stress on your salespeople and give them confidence because the more confidence they have, believe it or not, the more they will sell.
Heather Cole [00:00:32]:
This is Go-To-Market Magic, the show where we talk to go to marketing leaders and visionaries about those “aha!” moments they’ve experienced and also the pivotal decisions that they’ve made, all in the name of growth.
Steve Watt [00:00:43]:
And we don’t just mean revenue growth that goes up and to the right.
Heather Cole [00:00:46]:
But that’s nice too.
Steve Watt [00:00:47]:
We’re talking about how they improve their teams, their industries, their careers and their lives because growth isn’t quite what it used to be.
Heather Cole [00:00:55]:
I’m Heather Cole.
Steve Watt [00:00:56]:
And I’m Steve Watt.
Heather Cole [00:00:57]:
Let’s uncover some of the magic that makes it happen. Steve, I am so excited about our guest today.
Steve Watt [00:01:06]:
So am I, Heather. Josh Bersin. A lot of people know the name now you get to know him a little better. Josh is an analyst, he’s a multiple time author and he’s a real true thought leader in the way business is changing and the impact that’s having on workforces around the world and across industries. His latest book, Irresistible, digs into seven big changes and seven secrets that top firms are leveraging to really thrive in today’s world. And he’s going to share some of those “aha!” insights with us today.
Heather Cole [00:01:45]:
I’m really excited to get into it. Let’s go. Today we have Josh Bersin with us. Welcome to Go-To-Market Magic, Josh.
Josh Bersin [00:01:54]:
Thank you, Heather. I’m looking forward to talking about go-to-market for a change.
Heather Cole [00:01:59]:
It’s really interesting because sales has long been the environment that traditionally is based on individual achievement and a defined hierarchy and those clearly defined job roles with specific rules about what you do and when you do it and how you do it. And then worst of all, we promote sales reps that are good at their job to be managers that really don’t know how to coach and don’t know much about kind of this team selling environment. So your latest book, Irresistible, talks about those seven pillars. And when I think about revenue organizations and sales organizations, it kind of flies in the face in what you’re talking about in a lot of these traditional organizations. And is this something that’s really possible in this environment?
Josh Bersin [00:02:42]:
Yes, and I’ll speak from my own experience. I’ve been in sales, I’ve managed sales teams, I have relatives that work in sales. And maybe to simplify a complicated issue, there’s two ideas of sales. One is the salespeople are hired guns, they’re replaceable parts. We’re going to bring them in, we’re going to turn them on, we’re going to push them, we’re going to train them, we’re going to set them out in front of customers. They’re going to follow the process and if they don’t hit the numbers, we’ll find somebody else who can do it. That is actually the 19 hundreds industrial model of work where we considered human beings as replaceable parts. And most companies have moved away from that. Now, of course, every company is selling different things and so they have different sales process. But the second model of sales is we’re going to really understand our sales process by looking at the customer needs and looking at the solution and how it fits and how we’re going to best position it and how quickly we’re going to be able to get to a pain point that we can sell it. We’re going to explain to the salespeople what that process is. We’re going to teach them how to get to know the customers and understand the selling environment, which means the competitors and the alternatives to our product. And then we’re going to trust them to come back to us and talk to us about what they’re experiencing so they can get better and better at their jobs. And we’re going to respect them as learning people who will probably come back and teach us things about the market that we didn’t know. Because I’ll tell you, every company I’ve ever worked for and I’m in my late 60s, what we thought was going to happen when we launched some new product actually wasn’t exactly what happened. It was close, but we learned something else. And the salespeople always seem to know why somebody’s not buying something. It isn’t necessarily the salesperson’s fault when the product’s mispositioned or the price is too high. And so we need to teach them how to become better and better at their jobs. And I think some of the research I’ve done in the human capital area in various companies has shown that the secret is not to push salespeople or to give them more and more money and more and more incentives. It’s to constantly understand the environment, to move up the value curve as an organization over and over and over again as the more competitors enter the market, as the customer needs change, as the product sets change and so forth. So one of the reasons that the first model exists is there’s another problem that a lot of companies have, and we just went through this is there’s a belief system in a lot of companies that in order to generate more revenue we need to hire more salespeople. So let’s double the size of the sales force and we’ll double the revenue? Maybe not. Depends how you organize it. Depends on where they go after the market, depends on how well they’re trained, depends on how well the rest of the company can support them with operations and marketing and other tools. And so what happens is a lot of companies in the last year overhired, the economy slowed down, the budgets got tight, and all of a sudden they said, well, what are we doing with all these people? How’d you guys all get here? You’re not hitting your numbers. I’ve always felt that great salespeople are always good at fulfilling demand in a company that knows what the demand is and knows how to fulfill it, if the salespeople are underperforming, it’s usually not their fault. It’s usually something bigger than that. So I think Irresistible applies completely. One more point, I’ll just make one more comment on this, Heather. We work with generally Human Capital and HR organizations around the world, and many of the software companies that sell tools to HR are our clients. So we know a lot of heads of sales of software companies and some of the biggest private equity firms that buy software companies that are underperforming like Vista Equity and others have told me when they buy an underperforming software company. The first thing they do is they quadruple the amount of money on sales training because there was never enough because the salespeople don’t have enough information about the market, the knowledge, the competition, the selling process, the environment and so forth. So I think you have to think about a salesperson as a growing, highly productive person that obviously is very aspirational and ambitious, and the more help we give them, in most cases, the higher performing you’re going to get as a result. And that’s really what the book is all about, is really respecting that.
Heather Cole [00:07:18]:
So that stat that you just gave is fascinating, and a lot of our listeners are from the enablement space and they focus very heavily on making sure that they have competence and content and everything that they need to have the better conversations that they’re having. One of the things that enablers struggle with the most is attaching that value of what they do to the outcomes that they’re seeing with the reps. Is that something they’re constantly struggling about, how to attach value to the learning? Do you have any thoughts on that one a little deeper?
Josh Bersin [00:07:52]:
I mean, I’ve had so much experience with sales training. I went through IBM sales training in the 1980s, so I went through a year of training. It was so long ago it seems silly. We went through a year long case study on how to sell an online mainframes to companies that had bad systems. But what they were doing, basically is they were teaching us not only the products, I mean, we obviously knew what the products were and how they worked. They were teaching environment. The challenges inside of the companies, the different personas of the different buying groups. The IT person, the CFO, the CEO, the other people we were going to sell to, they were giving us confidence, so that when we would go out and talk to a large company. We wouldn’t be intimidated by some surprising question or some surprising issue that would send us scurrying back to the office, afraid to come back and have another conversation. And that’s what sales training does. Sales training doesn’t turn you into a rocket ship, but it gives you the confidence to overcome these objections and challenges. And one of the parts of sales training that I don’t know if sales enablement people maybe spend enough time on is learning from other salespeople what they did and how they closed a deal. I mean, some of it isn’t just technical skills and how to communicate with people and so forth. It’s watching other people succeed. Because I’m not a natural salesperson. I wasn’t born that way. I used to sit around in these meetings at IBM and other companies where I worked, and I would watch the really successful salespeople and I would observe them and I was watching what they were doing and how they were asking questions and listening and when they were responding. And I was constantly thinking, wow, there’s a real knack to this. And it helped me. So I think sales enablement people have this very complex job that includes all of that, including product and technical and competition and so forth. And I think one way to justify the expense if somebody’s challenging you is to probably look at the highest performing salespeople you have and interview them and get to know what it is they do and how they do it. And you’ll realize they’re very knowledgeable about many things that they’ve learned, perhaps at your company or have elsewhere.
Steve Watt [00:10:05]:
Josh, what do you say to the CRO who says, we don’t have the luxury of doing that right now? The economy is tough, we’re behind on our number. I need my guys on the phone, I need them in meetings, I need them prospecting. It would be wonderful for them to do all this learning, but we don’t have the luxury of that.
Josh Bersin [00:10:21]:
Well, it depends on what you’re selling. If you’re selling nuts and bolts, okay, just tell them to get on the phone and tell everybody how much they cost. But if you’re selling a high value product that requires some conversations and value creation, you’re making a big mistake by not training people, because the amount of activity won’t necessarily correlate to the amount of results. Because if you do measure activity only, you will find some people are generating lots of results with lots of activity, and some people are generating low results with more activity because they’re not saying the right thing or reaching out to the right people or having the right conversations. So I think that’s an unenlightened view by a chief revenue officer. It’s the old story of sharpening the saw. I mean, you can keep sawing down the trees as the saw gets duller and duller and duller, but you’re going to do it slower and slower and slower.
Steve Watt [00:11:11]:
I agree with you, and I think probably most of our listeners do but how do we get through to that person who says we can’t do that?
Josh Bersin [00:11:17]:
Here’s another reason that I would say to heads of sales, and I’ve seen this in our company, salespeople in general have a very hard job. They’re trying to encourage somebody to make a decision for something that they may not even know they need. And so there’s all sorts of obstacles to that. There’s distractions, there’s competitors, there’s blockers, there’s objections, there’s all these reasons. So they’re actually under a lot of stress. So you want to reduce the stress on your salespeople and give them confidence because the more confidence they have, believe it or not, the more they will sell. I know in my world, because I do a lot of sales too, because I’m very confident about what we do. People love to buy from us because they just feel safe. So you want your salespeople to project that level of confidence. Training does that for them. So if they’re not trained, they’re always wondering, gee, I hope he doesn’t say anything about this because I wouldn’t know how to answer it.
Heather Cole [00:12:09]:
Yeah, it’s interesting, we keep repeating that mantra in enablement, which is there’s the competence, the skills, the knowledge and the process expertise that they have to know, but they have to have both the confidence and the context of the situation to be able to be effective. I’m going to switch gears here a little bit. How can we do a podcast without talking about AI? Of course, you recently had your irresistible conference and the theme there was an AI component around organizational ingenuity. And how do you apply AI in an irresistible organization? And that is such an interesting concept to me. Can you tell us a little bit more about organizational ingenuity and what it means?
Josh Bersin [00:12:51]:
I mean, one of the most tricky and important issues in business in any team of people, particularly in sales, is the roles, the organizational structure, the amount of distractions and bureaucracy that’s getting in people’s way to get their job done, and people’s ability to learn and communicate with each other to get their work done. And so in the context of a whole company, organizational ingenuity means looking at all those issues systemically. And we mostly talk to HR people about that and there’s all sorts of techniques for that. But in sales, I think you have that problem basically in virtually every company. If I’m a salesperson or a sales leader, and I’m finding people are calling on accounts that they don’t feel qualified to deal with because they’re too complicated or maybe they’re moving too slow and they might need somebody to help them, or they might want to get some tips from another salesperson. And they’re being asked to go to quarterly business reviews and do inspection reports with their manager. And they get asked a bunch of questions and they’re getting defensive. You’ve got an organizational problem that isn’t a sales capability problem. That’s an organizational problem. And I think what a great sales leader should do is look at the accounts or the territory that you’re dealing with and the product you have and say, how can we best organize our team to sell the most stuff or the most revenue to this plot of land that we’re given access to go after? Maybe we have people teaming up. Maybe we have two or three people working on the large accounts together and they share leads and information with each other, or maybe not. Maybe we have a bunch of independent operators going after accounts one at a time, and then they reach a certain stage, we bring other people to help them. I don’t know the answer because every company is a little bit different, but those are organizational issues that sometimes managers haven’t just thought about enough. And I know in the sales organizations I’ve been in the most successful sales leaders, and every now and then I’ve run into some that are amazing. They know how to organize things so people have the right accounts, they have the right team, set up the sales support organization or the tech support organization is set up in the right way to help them. They have the right demos, they have the right support for the demos. Those are all part of enablement. Enablement isn’t just training. Enablement is really creating an organization structure that works for the company. I mean, when I was at IBM, I was there for ten years. The first two or three years we were organized by product. Then we were organized by geography, then we were organized by industry, then we were organized by solution area. Then Lou Gersner came in and we got organized by services. So in the ten years I was there, there were five massive reorganizations of the sales organization. And I used to go to my boss and I’d say, well, why do we keep doing this? He said, Because we got to go where the market is going and we don’t want to sit still. And what IBM was doing and at that point in time, IBM was a very successful sales organization. Most of you probably weren’t around then, but nobody could stop them back in that era of it. They were always looking at ways to get deeper and deeper and deeper into customers through different organization models that would bring salespeople into different roles to work together on accounts. So, like I said, there’s no perfect model. Every company is different. But the other thing about organizational ingenuity is if you’re going to use AI and the salesperson is going to have access to way more information than they ever had before, maybe you don’t need so many of them. Maybe you don’t just keep piling on and piling on and piling on. Maybe you look at productivity per person, per rep per team, as one of the ways to grow. And the AI can help you do that. AI is really good at learning about a market, learning about a customer, learning about a competitor very quickly without having to wait for a training person to teach you something. So, in a sense, well equipped HR or Salespeople are going to be super salespeople because they’re going to access way more information about their clients now than they ever could before, and they can get it almost on demand without having to wait for somebody to get it for them.
Steve Watt [00:17:05]:
Taking that thinking even further, Josh, you made it really clear, don’t just be piling on loads of additional salespeople, but are we heading to a world where maybe that a company that has 200 salespeople now might have 20 salespeople in five years? But like you said, they are extreme high performers. They are enabled like never before, and those 20 people are going to be delivering what 200 are today? Or is it not going to go that far?
Josh Bersin [00:17:30]:
No, I do, I think it depends on the management strategy and the CEO and the CFO, but I think more revenue per salesperson is where the world should be going. If you’re a good, well run company and you’re using technology and you’re moving up the value chain and your customer base, if you’re selling a commodity product, it may or may not happen quite so quickly, but that’s certainly what we’re seeing. And that begs the question of, do you have the right salespeople? Because if the price is going up or the value proposition is going up and you’re not necessarily in a transactional sale, which some companies are, you might need people that are more solution oriented in their thinking and that are more interested in that kind of a sales job. I don’t know if auto salesmen will ever change. I’ll bet the revenue per sale in an auto dealership has gone way up because they have more marketing and they have more intelligence about who’s coming in the door and what they’re going to need. To me, sales is all about solving the customer’s problem as quickly as you possibly can and positioning your product as one of the critical parts of the solution. So there’s a lot of listening and attention to understanding to me, in a great sales environment.
Heather Cole [00:18:44]:
So you’ve sold in the past, you’ve seen how it’s changed. You have, I think, a child in sales now. When you think about the advice that you would give him if we’re talking about fewer, better sellers, and Forrester years ago said, oh, B2B selling is going to be reduced to nothing by 2021, and it didn’t come to pass. But a lot of things have changed, including we know what we can do differently with COVID It accelerated a lot of that digital transformation. And if I’m somebody who is selling now or thinking about getting into selling, what is it that I should be doing? What is it that I should be thinking about what is it that I should be changing to be able to do that work better?
Steve Watt [00:19:28]:
Or put another way, if there’s only going to be 20 instead of 200, how do I make sure I’m one of the 20?
Josh Bersin [00:19:33]:
The way I see the world in my world is mostly larger companies. But the world to the customer is very confusing no matter who you’re selling to. They’re bombarded with information, they’re bombarded with marketing, they’re bombarded with news, they’re bombarded with problems inside their own company. You want to be the educator that clarifies their life and makes their life easier to understand. And if you can do that, there’s no problem selling them what you have. The feeds and speeds of your product are eventually going to come up. But if it starts with that, you’ve lost an opportunity to educate them. Now in order for you to educate them, you have to be educated. You need to know what’s going on. You need to do some research on the company before you call them. You need to be able to ask some good questions so that they don’t feel like you’re just wasting their time. And you have to have a perspective of some kind that will help them think about their job better. And I think that’s the kind of thing you need to do as a prep before you make the call. What am I going to try to learn about this person? And what am I going to try to teach them to move them along down the cell cycle to understand why our product is so great for them? And maybe you find out in that process it’s not. And that’s actually good too because you’ve now developed a relationship that you can come back to later when the time is right and they will buy from you because you didn’t shove something down their throat they didn’t need. I think this idea that the customers are extremely overwhelmed and confused and flooded with information existed, but now they’re flooded with information. So I think this education process is really important part of selling, which means that as a salesperson you don’t have to just close, try to ask for the deal all the time. You can educate people and then later get to that point. And the Challenger Sale that’s done so well and all these other methodologies, I think everybody is a solution seller, whether you believe you are or not. And in order to be a solution seller you got to know what the problem is and then you have to educate the person who has the problem. What’s the context of the problem and how can it be solved. So that to me is the essence of this.
Steve Watt [00:21:40]:
What’s the single biggest skill or attribute you’d look for in a modern sales leader?
Josh Bersin [00:21:46]:
I think sizing people up and really getting to know a salesperson and figuring out where that person’s rough edges are and what it is they’re good at and what they need help with and really polishing and coaching and developing them. I think that’s really what sales leaders should do. And if the person who isn’t successful despite that, well, maybe they’re just in the wrong job, maybe they’re in the wrong company, maybe they’re in the wrong territory. But I think that’s what great sales leaders do is they just develop people so they have the confidence to go out there and do more and more.
Heather Cole [00:22:22]:
Absolutely. So I’m going to switch gears a little bit on you here. There’s one thing that you did mention recently that you’re doing with your organization is you’re leveraging AI to pull together. And I don’t think it’s launched yet. So I don’t know how much you’ll talk about it, but to me it’s fascinating because a lot of our audience also relies heavily on research and advisory firms and what’s going on there. The ability, as you said, we’re overwhelmed by information all the time. How do we know what’s right in your world? How do you think AI is going to impact your ability to get the best information out there and of course, how you’re using it in your firm as well?
Josh Bersin [00:23:02]:
Sure. Well, we do research on HR and training and technologies and things around HR, and we generally do the research like an analyst firm. And we write reports. And so we have hundreds and hundreds of reports. We have case studies and vendor profiles and stuff. And then a client will call and say, we’re designing a new performance management system. What do we need to know? So if you’re good, like, I’ve done this a lot, I’ll know what questions to ask them. If I ask them the right questions, they’re going to want to come to us and hire us or buy us. But most of our employees haven’t done this for 25 years like I have. So they’ll get that question and they don’t know where to start. What our copilot does is our AI copilot has indexed and essentially through the AI, looked at all of the research we’ve ever done and allows our internal employees and soon our customers to go in and ask the copilot the question and the copilot will answer it, looking at all the research we’ve ever done in a short form and then give them indexes and links to the things they want to read. Now, if I think about the old way of doing that, find the person who knows the answer, find the document, read it, go to the page, and hopefully find the thing you’re looking for. And by the time you get there, you’re like, I forgot what I was looking for, I’m too busy. I’ll do that some other time. Right. So this is a massive change in the way you can find information. And I think every sales organization has the opportunity to do this. Take your competitive guide, take your product guide, take your price list, take your market industry market overviews and all that stuff, including things from people like us. And you’ll be able to put it into an AI Copilot or chatbot and there’s lots of tools that are being developed right now to do that. And now I don’t have to go find the specialist and dig him up and ask him information and get him on the phone. I can just find the information myself. And the interesting thing about AI is if I don’t understand the answer I can ask another question or I can ask a clarifying question and it’ll reform the answer better until I get it. So it’s a really massive change. And in our company so we’re not very big, we’re about 40 or 45 people but our revenue per employee would blow your mind. It’s very high. And the reason is we all talk to each other a lot and we all know pretty much a lot about what’s going on in different parts of our research. Now that we have our Copilot, virtually any one of our salespeople or advisors can be almost as smart as the analysts that did the research. So I think that Use case is out there for virtually every company to democratize that information directly to the frontline people.
Heather Cole [00:25:41]:
Yeah. So as a research and advisory firm, does that scare you or you see tremendous opportunity?
Josh Bersin [00:25:47]:
No, what I like about it, it’s actually great for us because our co-pilot only accesses our research so it’s not distracted with advertising and promotion. In my domain — listen, for what we do, I compete with 5000 people writing blogs who self proclaimed pundits who think they know how to do everything in HR because they did it once before and they’re all very smart. But we’ve done a lot of research on it. So what we can do is we can differentiate ourselves based on our content and our IP. And so I think for IP companies and content companies, generative AI is going to be a whole new opportunity to unlock a lot of the content and the business model for clients.
Heather Cole [00:26:29]:
Yeah, that is huge. So fascinating stuff. I’m a former Forrester analyst.
Josh Bersin [00:26:34]:
Okay, so you’ve been there.
Heather Cole [00:26:37]:
Democratization of it is key and you’re the first person who’s coming out and talking about doing it because it’s almost like do you kill the goose that laid the golden egg? It’s in your head. It’s what makes the analysts valuable and how do you get it out there and not cannibalize a business?
Josh Bersin [00:26:55]:
Well, see and the thing is for me, having done this for a long time, I would much rather have a client have learned a lot and then call me, then ask me the basics over and over and over again. I’m not using my time well. So I want the clients to be as smart as possible and then call us. By the way, we don’t give away this stuff for free anyway, so they have to buy it to get it.
Heather Cole [00:27:16]:
And I think there’s a lot of lessons that correlate over to the sales organization is you want them to be as smart as they can be before they have to ask somebody a question. It’s also the market itself is what you’re describing is you’re buy learning versus buy knowing. It’s not that transactional sale that you’re going after. We’re going to switch gears and ask you some of those lightning round questions that we like to do. All right? So first question real quick. Looking back, you talked a lot about IBM, and you’ve talked about other folks that you’ve worked for in the past. What role really shaped you in a way that you didn’t expect?
Josh Bersin [00:27:51]:
So I worked in sales support, I worked in sales, I worked in management, I worked in business development, which is another form of sales. The job that changed my career personally was when I was a product manager, because for the ten or 15 years that I was in sales jobs, I was actually always more interested in the product than the sales process. So all of a sudden, when I became a product manager, I had to learn about marketing, I had to learn about competitive positioning, I had to learn about engineering, I had to learn about sales training, because we have to launch things and figure out how to position them. So that job really helped me become a general manager and an entrepreneur. So anybody that wants to become sort of a general product manager leader should work as a product manager at some point. I think that role is a very pivotal role in companies, and it brings a lot of things together.
Heather Cole [00:28:41]:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. So along those lines, too, what manager or mentor from your past had the biggest impact on your career and where you are today?
Josh Bersin [00:28:51]:
By far the person that had the most impact, and he’s discussed in the book is a guy by the name of Bob Fairbanks, who was my boss at IBM. He was my boss for like, eight or nine years. He was an old school sales executive. Never took his coat off, never took his tie off. Loved talking to the customers, loved taking care of us, managed the team, made sure that our quota was reasonable. He always fought with the management to get our quota reduced. But he was really a know, I joined IBM a couple of years out of graduate school, so I was pretty young. He knew we didn’t know what we were doing. He coached us along. He threw us into the deep end of the pool and made sure we talked to customers that were way over our head. And he actually would tell the customers, he would prepare them that were coming in and say, look, I want you to help this young guy get to know your business because he’s not going to try to sell you anything, but at least he’s learning. So he did all sorts of things for us that I remembered later in life that came back over and over again. He was just a really good manager and a really good coach. He also took a risk for us when we had a client, a customer problem, some of the products we sold hadn’t worked correctly. He did the right thing. He always did the right thing, including fighting internally to get the rest of IBM to fix the problems that we couldn’t fix in the sales organization. He took care of all of that. So honorable guy and always respected him and learned a lot from him.
Heather Cole [00:30:19]:
Yeah. And that so aligns with what you talk about today and those kind of seven pillars and the role of what a leader should be, too. That’s great. So one last one and it’s fun. Lunch with any business leader, alive or dead, who would you choose?
Josh Bersin [00:30:34]:
It’s not Elon Musk, by the way. I think I know enough about him. I’d kind of like to get to know Jamie Dimon. I respect these guys that have been at the senior levels of very large companies for a long time and they’ve been through many transformations and changes and I’d love to sort of hear their perspective on how they’ve managed it. He’s been leading that company for a long time. They’re 50% larger than their second largest bank now. And he’s very involved in the regulatory environment, the internal operations, the customer environment, the financial markets, everything. I would love to get a chance to have lunch with him.
Heather Cole [00:31:13]:
Yeah. And it’s interesting, he says things that are unexpected and often come true.
Josh Bersin [00:31:19]:
Yeah. And he’s also very pragmatic. He didn’t believe in crypto and sure enough, look at what happened. So he’s got a lot of good judgment and I’m sure we could all learn a lot from people like that.
Heather Cole [00:31:28]:
Josh, thank you so much for joining us today on Go-to-Market Magic. We really appreciate you.
Josh Bersin [00:31:34]:
Thank you, Heather.
Heather Cole [00:31:40]:
So that was a great conversation. Steve, what were your main takeaways out of it?
Steve Watt [00:31:44]:
I think the first thing that jumped out at me, Heather, was when Josh said that when PE firms are taking ownership of struggling software companies, one of the first things they’re doing is significantly increasing the investment in sales training. I think you said a 4x increase. That’s massive. Right. That is not business as usual. That is a surgical strike on part of that organization and obviously coming from a place of a lot of confidence that this is going to make a big difference.
Heather Cole [00:32:18]:
Yeah. And these are companies that do this over and over and they see what works and they understand that sales enablement that learning is one of the biggest pieces that they can deliver impact through to make sales go up and we’ve known that for a while. But it’s interesting that the people that are looking at companies that are troubled are saying, this is how you’re going to help solve your problem, which is very different than it has been in the past.
Steve Watt [00:32:41]:
And I can only imagine prior to the PE firms taking over, that there could have been this downward cycle going on in these software companies where it’s like, we can’t invest in training, we don’t have the headcount, we don’t have the time, we don’t have the luxury, we don’t have the money. Just sell more, crack the whip, run harder, keep doing what you’re doing, but do more of it and it’s not working. And then when the PE firm comes in with this, as you said, this view across multiple portfolio companies, they don’t come in and crack the whip again. They come in and say, no, we’re going to make a change here. We’re not going to be cutting this training. We’re going to significantly increase that. I think that is a really important.
Heather Cole [00:33:25]:
Takeaway and I think you can’t just deliver the same old, same old, like just tell them what they need to know, drown them in elearning, put them in a week long training class. It has to follow that cadence of what he discussed as understanding what your best reps, your best sellers are doing and how they’re doing it differently. And I remember when I was in selling and he kind of described this too, he said, we looked at what the best people are doing. My challenge always was, I’m not sure I can do what she is doing. Watching somebody very good at delivering a message or saying it in a certain way. But when you have the opportunity to watch a variety, as we do today, with the technology available of people saying things in different ways and delivering messages and having conversations in different ways, you can recognize yourself in a person that’s doing it well and saying that I can do not sure I can do it the way they did it. But this one that sounds like me and that could come out of my mouth and I can do it in that way.
Steve Watt [00:34:27]:
That is so much more empowering than an old approach that says, here’s a script, here’s a flow, here’s a playbook, just do that. And if you’re not doing it exactly like that, you’re doing it wrong. That is not empowering for the seller, but it’s also not creating a good experience for the buyer. I’m so with you there, Heather. To be able to say, look, here’s five different models of excellence, here’s five different sellers who are getting to the goal in five very different ways and to be able to consume their videos and recordings and walk in their shoes a little bit and as you said, identify your path and say, it’s not that. I could never be that. I don’t want to be that, but I could be that or I could be some combination of this and that. I think that is just such a more empowering and ultimately more effective approach. And as you said, technology makes that extremely accessible today. It would have been quite impractical in the past.
Heather Cole [00:35:27]:
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that builds. What he was talking about was this confidence. And he said that back in the know, IBM and Xerox and ADP and all those big companies used to wait a year before you were really considered ready to go. You were selling, but you weren’t there, you were still in training. And a lot of that was developing the confidence to be able to have those conversations and understanding the context and marketing sure that you had the credibility when you opened your mouth in front of a customer to be there. And part of that is that knowledge sourcing and it took a year to really learn it all and to understand it and to be exposed to it all. I loved what he said around the ability to use AI. Not for writing more irritating emails faster, but to use it as engine to tap the knowledge base of your company, your markets, your competition, everything that you need to know and being able to bring it to the reps in a way that is relevant and also in a way that is much easier to access than it ever has been before. And the power of AI there is going to be huge in the future, I think, for B, two B sales. And it sounds like they’re leveraging it in the research and advisory space as well.
Steve Watt [00:36:47]:
I think that’s a really important message. Obviously, everybody’s talking about AI in a lot of different ways and one of the questions comes up is, is AI going to replace me? Is AI going to replace salespeople or is AI just going to make the world that is already inundated with sales and marketing messages? Is it just going to make it ten times worse, 100 times worse, where we’re just going to be inundated with spam and marketing messages and everything at every turn? And I think what Josh is saying, it’s neither of those. It’s not here to replace you, it’s not here to turn you into a spam bot. It’s here to enable and empower you, to have the brain trust of your organization and all the insights and all the data and everything at your fingertips. It’s here to make you the human seller, stronger, faster and more relevant and more valuable to your buyer. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. Which then leads into we might actually need fewer salespeople, though. It’s not that the AI is replacing you per se. It’s that we may have fewer, better enabled, better empowered and ultimately more effective salespeople who are going to be bringing down double or quadruple the revenue that they are today. So I think the whole AI thing is a really nuanced space, and it was very cool to hear Josh’s perspective.
Heather Cole [00:38:13]:
I think that message of it’s going to make good sellers great, and it’s going to make great sellers more productive.
Steve Watt [00:38:22]:
If you want more stories like this one, follow the show on YouTube or on your favorite podcast app.
Heather Cole [00:38:28]:
And if you’d like to dig even deeper into these topics, check out gotomarket-magic.com for our hand picked resources and recommendations from both Steve and I.
Steve Watt [00:38:43]:
Want more conversation like these, but live and in-person? Join us at Shift. Shift is the annual conference for go to market leaders in San Diego this year. It’s October 23 to the 26, and it’s going to be fantastic. Go to seismic.com/shift for registration and more information.
