Is the funnel model fundamentally flawed? If so, how do salespeople approach that problem in a new and different way? Today’s guest will help explain why it may be helpful to think about the funnel in a different way.

Carman Pirie is the Co-Founder of Kula Partners, which is currently handling mostly manufacturing clients. Carman is working on turning the funnel sideways – but what does that mean? Listen in to find out, as Carman discusses why he’s excited about his work, how to get companies to think in a way that emphasizes personalization, and how to get past resistance to sales’ involvement in building campaigns. 

Episode Highlights:

• Why Carman got excited about the work that he does
• How Carman is turning the funnel sideways
• Carman’s process for starting conversations
• How to get companies to think in a more personalized way
• How to get past resistance to letting sales build campaigns
• What changes in marketing when dealing with a smaller number of accounts
• Starting the engagement process
• Direct mail segmentation
• How firms get started with Kula Partners

Resources:

Carman Pirie

Kula Partners

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. We’re going to do our best today to eliminate what we’re hearing as background noise next to my house in California. There are some hammering going on just in time for this podcast, but we’re going to persevere and I want you guys to meet Carman Pirie. One thing that he just said to me while we were getting ready for this podcast was, “The funnel is fundamentally flawed.” The thinking about the funnel is fundamentally flawed, and you know what? I 100% agree with him.

I want him to come on the show today and talk to us about the funnel, about the way we think about the funnel because let’s face it, predictable revenue spoil everybody in thinking there’s this ubiquitous number of leads out there that we can weave through, segment, and get down to the 8-10 great opportunities per month, but in reality, not everybody has that many list records to actually work on.

Carman is the co founder of Kula Partners. He primarily works with manufacturing companies, but that doesn’t matter because what matters is, he’s working with companies that have a finite number of accounts. Either they’re growing their base with new products or existing products, or they are doing some net new, but by no means is that the main breadwinner for the company. Carman, welcome to the podcast.

Carman: Marylou, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Marylou: Let’s start with the funnel. Let’s start with what gets you so excited about the work that you do and granted in B2B manufacturing. I want the audience to not turn off their heads now on sale as well as manufacturing. No. What it is all about is trying to get a finite number of clients,  either net new business or existing business that’s growing the base. What got you focused on this part of that whole scenario in the sales process?

Carman: So for the listeners, no need to turn off at the notion of manufacturing. I’m really talking here about complex B2B sales scenarios which frankly, I have a lot of similarities even to smaller professional services organizations. I say that as somebody who does sales for an agency of course. I see more similarities than differences.

I guess what I’m on about this is that, I feel like as you mentioned in the intro that this funnel thinking is predicated on a number of tactics and activities at the top of funnel that are intended to drive the people further down the funnel by a BANT qualification, et cetera, to MQL, SQL and beyond, and the base assumption in all of that is that the top of the funnel is unlimited.

For a good number of the clients that I work with, that’s just not the reality. They may have 20 or 30 clients or customer story that buy from them currently and a good year is adding four or five. If you’re in that scenario, chances are you should be able to define a list of 200 organizations or so that you need to be talking to, not 2000, not 200,000.

In some ways, I feel like the promise of scale that comes with digital marketing, it is somewhat out of whack with the business reality of a lot of people. I would say that’s the same for my own agency as an example, or a marketing agency focused on helping manufacturers transform their sales and marketing apparatus. That right there is a fairly finite universe of people that we can serve. We don’t have to be able to define who that is, not just spray and pray with proper SEO.

Marylou: Right. These service industries, a lot of my clients that have long sales cycles, even sports, I do some work in the sports area, where they’re trying to get the luxury box seats filled, those are a finite number of people that can fill those seats. It’s anything that you think, “Wow, I can’t sell to everybody, I can only sell to a segment.”  Segmenting is actually the way the world nowadays, because with all of the new legislation for email conversations and things, GDPR being one example, we have to be more segmented in our approach, more personalized in our approach. What you’re talking about with us today is all about the process of doing that, and how to set that.

One thing you said in the intro, before we got on live was, that you’re turning the funnel sideways, can you help us understand what that means?

Carman: If you could imagine just tilting that funnel, just tilt it left so that funnel now looks like an arrow pointing right, and then tack on an arrow pointing left on the other side of that and make it into a diamond. in some ways that’s the buying journey that we ought to be imagining our universe of prospects on. It starts with the human that we can identify at the front end of that. The diamond drives that point home in my view that it starts at one person, not at a limitless number of hundreds of thousands.

If you think about it, most of those prospects in these complex B2B scenarios are moving from a point in their lives where they don’t perhaps even know that they need what it is you sell. They moved from there through needs discovery, initial research, etcetera, and then they get to a point where they’re actually going to make some purchase decision. They engage their internal stakeholders, and procurement and whatnot. Then they begin to move down that convergence side of the diamond, down to what we traditionally think of is that funnel. That’s when they become visible to sales, if you will, the procurement, the RFP’s been sent out, request for information, or what have you, have been distributed, they’ve taken some sales meetings, but when we look at when that prospect is actually most open to influence, when can we most introduce opportunity for greater margin, enhanced value, et cetera? How can we frame the discussion and when are they most open to that? It’s in that point when they actually don’t even know that they need what it is we sell.

That’s at the point when they’re invisible to our sales organizations if we’re thinking about BANT. It just strikes me as this really contradictory thing, where we have our best people engaged in conversations that are actually, in some ways, at least open to influence.

Marylou: Right. What is a typical process, or planning, or assessment for us to be able to start these conversations almost like stealthy conversations with people and reaching them in their head, where they’re at in their head. How we go about that? Where do we start?

Carman: If we start from the point of view of, “We don’t need an unlimited number of prospects. We don’t have an unlimited number of prospects, but what we need are 100 to 300, or what have you, relationships that we need to build, and then at some point, those people become open to considering what it is we sell.” If we think about it that way, then it changes a lot of how we might approach it from a marketing and sales combined approach. How do we get sales people more involved in some of that marketing function that’s more and more up funnel—if you think of it in a traditional sense, but moving down the diamond in the model that I’ve tried to introduce here—how do we get sales people engaged in dialogue with our prospects at a point when they perhaps don’t even know that they need what it is we sell? There’s some great examples of how to do that.

Frankly were on one right now. Podcasts are a great way to do that. You can connect with prospects and get them on to a podcast and develop a relationship with them in the lead up to having them on your show. Frankly, transition that in to a sales relationship 6–12 months down the road. You can get introduced to them in a way through creating marketing with them. It doesn’t have to be a podcast, of course. I know that there’s lots of different ways to do content networking. But it’s funny, we rarely see sales people particularly engaged in that. In large organizations that I work with, manufacturing organizations, they’re just quite resistant to doing, it sounds like the purview of the marketing department, if it’s the purview of anyone.

Marylou: Right, I was going to say that some of it is culturally within the company itself saying, “No, that’s a marketing function and you shall not cross over into doing that,” which is a disservice sometimes, because a lot of times the sales people become almost experts in a certain area of the field, whatever they’re selling, so they have the ability to write blog posts, to do webinars, maybe under the guidance of marketing, but actually to deliver them outside of marketing. A lot of what you’re talking about would actually be beneficial for those folks who are trying to get these and woo these early clients and potential clients into that funnel.

That’s the problem, marketing is built in so many companies to cast a wide net. It’s hard to get them to think individualized or personalized or hyper personalized.

Carman: And it’s running counter to the fact that buyers, especially for my clients, in this B2B space are becoming more and more technical. They’re demanding sales people to be more technical, and the sales people that are rising to that challenge can really benefit from their enhanced technical knowledge if they can actually meet with prospects on that level earlier in the process by the content networking that we talked about before.

I believe it was actually on one of your earlier shows, you interviewed Tony Hughes and he mentioned the stat that 75% of the deals are won by the organization that first provided education or insight into the problem.

Marylou: Yes.

Carman: Not to sleight marketers, but marketers are often less capable of providing that level of education and insight into a highly technical situation. Very often, the sales organization would be better suited. We need to break down those barriers between them and begin to think of this is more continuous whole. If we want a seamless customer experience from the earliest stage of prospect identification, all the way through to customer delight, if we want that to be seamless, we need to take the seams out of organizations, too.

Marylou: Yeah, it’s just so hard sometimes. If you think I’m sitting here listening to this, it’s like marketing doesn’t want to let go. It will be very difficult for us to even to a pilot project in some companies to say, “Hey, let’s help the sales folks build the campaign. High touch campaign, personalized in nature, outside of the marketing umbrella.” It’s an uphill battle. I’ve been doing this now for 30 some odd years and there’s a lot of resistance, especially in the larger companies, to be that nimble, to allow sales used some of the traditionally chartered marketing activities. How do you get around that?

Carman: The first thing you do is embrace what you just said and say, “The good news is, if it was really easy, everybody would be doing it, and then there would be less advantage for us getting it right,”  so I guess there’s some positive inherent in that. I guess what I hear from the marketers that I work with every day is a pretty healthy appetite for collaboration with the sales organization, a thirst for it in some way.

Marylou: I’m not seeing that, but that’s just my world.

Carman: Yeah, I have actually found in the podcast that we have, we interview manufacturing marketers every week and there have been times when I admit that I’ve tried to characterize the marketing and sales relationship as being more hostile than it actually was in reality. The guest called me on it. I’ve been called on it enough now that I believe them. Hopefully, you start to see it soon, too, Marylou.

Marylou: I don’t know. I am very pessimistic about that because that’s one of the biggest problems that I see is the alignment of marketing and sales, and the willingness to let go, even if it’s just a small subset. There’s always a common denominator here and that we’re all trying to get net new business and a lot more revenue, but there are some just lines being drawn—not all companies, but quite a few—where you have product marketing people who are responsible for the marketing of the product itself, then you have corporate marketing people, who are responsible for the corporate communications. Then there’s that marketing message, the brand distinction, brand essence, and that’s where if there’s a heavy emphasis on brand, it’s difficult to get things done and approved so that sales can go and do something.

I’ve seen it so much that I’m actually hopeful and optimistic now after hearing you say that marketers are not saying that. That’s great, but people listening in the audience are rolling their eyes right now saying, “Yeah, that sounds great on paper but…”

Carman: Yeah. Well, your point around when it starts to impact brand, does that mean sales can get a free license to go off and do what they want? I don’t think that that’s really probably what we’re hoping for here, but I guess, once marketing became at least partially responsible for lead generation, it changed in some way fundamentally the relationship between marketing and sales. A lot of organizations count themselves for a while, just in that dialogue between basically sales and the leads that marketing are sending them back and forth right.

I guess, I’ve noticed in the folks that I speak with that there’s quite an interest in moving beyond that, that traditional dialogue is dying off. I’m not happy to be proven wrong, but if your listeners want to prove me wrong, they can.

Marylou: Well, it could be too, you’re focused on certain industries and certain industries might be more open to it than others. That’s also another way to look at this. I primarily work in healthcare a lot. I do a little bit of manufacturing. I do services and, all in all for the most part, there’s a willingness to listen and willingness to maybe plan, but execution, they want control primarily at the whole process.

That makes it difficult for even doing such simple things as riding what I call a sales conversation canvas, which is the actual touches, the actual sales conversations that we put inside of a sequence, a multi-touch, multi-channel sequence, but the way I like to approach it is, “Look marketing, you’re in charge of the assets for sure and what we’ll do is we’ll create what we think is a nice one page wireframe to include with this conversation, but we want you obviously to approve it. Make sure it’s got the right profile and the right… whatever the fonts are, and making sure on branding perspective that we’re not running solo on that.”

That seems to work best, but what happens is, if we rely 100% on marketing to write some of that copy for us, we have a different side of things, we’re in a persuasive conversation on the sale side, we’re not in an attraction conversation necessarily all the time. If we get marketing to do our emails, it’s very much attraction-based and sometimes that hurts our conversion rates.

Carman: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The people writing sale sequences, things of that sort, need to have had actual contact with the enemy before. They need to have sold something. It’s not something that can be done academically. In fact, when you read a script that’s been written by a marketer that’s never sold anything, it’s obvious.

There’s a danger in creating the separation anywhere along the line there, we have to find a way through this because if marketing is creating the bigger chunks of content or whatever that are being referenced within or maybe links to within those sales, emails, or what have you, right there, so often is the point of disconnect. You go from a sales conversation that’s focused on a prospect’s actual requirements to sometimes a marketing conversation that seems like somebody had their head up throughout the entire time. Marketing can be better when they bring sales to the party and vice-versa.

It’s funny because most marketers I talked to would suggest that sales has more power in their organization. Depending on what side of this debate you’re on, you may have different perceptions, color, shaping our points of view here.

Marylou: Yeah, and the beauty of what we’re talking about right now is that your cracking the code in your world. You’re able to bring the marketing and sales people together. The way that you described the task at hand, the pursuit plan that you’re coming up with, because there’s a limited number of accounts by definition, screams for marketing and sales department. In that context, that’s why you’re probably having a lot of success.

A lot of times though, we’re working with clients who have the 2000 records and that they also have the 200. It’s very difficult for us to spin those different plates is what I’m saying. I’m very encouraged by the fact that perhaps all this time, we’ve been presenting the problem incorrectly, but the challenge, and that is that you don’t have a standard problem. You’re on a sideways diet.

Carman: Precisely. If you think about how marketing comes to the table and says how they’ve been doing in the last quarter and they talk about things that they’re top level organic search traffic and things of that sort. We have the technology now to know, “Yeah, great. What is our digital presence doing in terms of how many people has it attracted from our top 200 target accounts? What is our conversion rate down through this fictitious funnel that we’re talking about people that are actually within our target cohort versus people just showing up at our site for whatever reason?”

I we can begin to take those marketing metrics and later on that target account focus in so many of these instances, it can be a really nice point of bringing together the two functions. It can be a real point of them coalescing I think.

Marylou: Right, and then you apply the magic that you’ve come up with and say, “Look, this is the scenario. This is the sales conversation canvass to utilize as a recipe for this particular segmented part of the market.” Those small number of accounts are what I call jump accounts. I saw that from one of my clients. When they call, we jump. When they bat an eyelash, we jump because we want them as clients. Those guys are treated very differently. We do require more of a handshake, an alignment, a camaraderie which we work in sales in order to get the conversation started, and to question through gently the pipeline to the point of opportunity we’ve done.

Carman: Yeah, and the extent that we can be successful in engaging people earlier in that process and doing so using the joint forces of marketing and sales, then we can get to a place where we’re shaping the purchase process before it happens. Then we can extract more value. It is not just whether or not we close business, but it’s how profitable is a business that we close.

It happens that the procurement process is standardized without any influence and then you’re just playing the same game as everyone else in that funnel thinking. The real carrot at the end of all of this is if we can bring together the skill sets, we can actually get into the process earlier. We can overcome the typical failure to position in these kinds of large purchase scenarios. We can overcome the failure so often to frame the purchase process, and to control it.

Marylou: In your experience then, Carman, the traditional ‘warm up the chill’ campaigns that marketing does for, let’s just call it the tier two accounts, or tier three accounts which are the rest of the world—not the […], the other guys—what changes when we’re working with a smaller number of accounts? I know I’m asking you to be more generalized, but you mentioned something like podcast.

Are there other types of activities that lend themselves for these finite number of accounts? More often than not, knowing that we have different industries, different verticals, different sales cycles, but the traditional way would be to blast out an email sequence that warmed up the chill. What have you seen in your world that adds more credibility to the actual conversion of these folks and getting them to think about, “Wow, I never thought about that,” or, “Gee, how did they do that?” or, “Wow, I should spend some time with these people because they’re saying some stuff that wasn’t even on my radar.” What are those things that you recommend?

Carman: I would say the Forrest Gump moment. When you have a finite group that you can sell to, those same organizations are often very heavily invested in trade shows. That’s where they find the finite people that they talk to. Basically, just thinking about your mark in this way and who you’re selling to this way, you can surround those trade show environments in a much more sophisticated way than what most people are doing now.

Whether that’s just LinkedIn, paid social advertising targeted towards those organizations that are attending that trade show, and promoting content in advance of it, promoting your presence there, et cetera, we can just get a lot more focused on where most people are spending their dollars.

Marylou: Yeah. The other thing that I’ve done with the trade show in line is to pre-invite them, if we can, to do a workshop of some sort, like a webinar but a seminar kind of thing that’s free. We’re trying to get butts and feet so we engage people. If we can get a list of the attendees, or if we have a list last year and reach out to the companies.

Again, we have our target list so we should be able to target those people in that list, ask them if they’re going to that trade show, “Hey, great. We’re doing a workshop on this topic. We know that you have been interested in something like this. Would you want us to reserve a seat for you?” and that gets people to start the engagement process so that the folks that are there know they’re coming, have some unique characteristics of their offering that they want to demonstrate, and then more importantly, can start engaging in that face-to-face conversation which is fabulous to get people engaged and wanting to know more about what we do.

Carman: Absolutely. Of course, if you have the actual attendee list, that can become a lot easier. When you don’t have that, you just simply know the organizations that are likely to be there that you want to be telling to, you can work backwards from that as well.

Another missed opportunity tactically that is just so obvious is that every trade show is based geographically. It actually has a place where it’s happening. You can target mobile advertising within a kilometer or a mile radius from that location. You can be getting conference attendees that are just like checking the weather on their phone, or looking for local restaurants or whatever at lunch, but you can be warming them up that way as well, and doing so in a very targeted and very low cost manner.

Marylou: Yeah, this is great.

Carman: The only brand halo.

Marylou: Right. What other things besides trade shows have you seen and worked on? How about direct mail? Has that come back to this type of segmentation?

Carman: Absolutely. We really try to help people think about these more complex processes as also being multi touch point in terms of the hierarchy of their organization. One of the other areas that’s underutilized in our space is that many manufactures, mid-sized manufacturers, are still family owned, maybe 5-6 generations on. The businesses that they typically try to sell to oftentimes can be family owned as well, as an example.

It can be a great point of connectivity at the executive level of these organizations that can help grease the skids of any future sales conversation, but it’s almost never leveraged that we can actually have our senior, our president, our owner actually connect with this person on the basis that we’re both fifth generation family business owners. Of course, they want to engage in that conversation. It’s something that we share with so few other people. Anytime I’ve uncovered that parallel in a target account list and suggest that somebody do that as a way in, they’re almost always shocked.

Marylou: Definitely. I remember asking the CEO to write a letter. This is for a food company that was […] Midwest. We did a split test of handwriting it versus the director of marketing writing it. We overwhelmingly got a higher response rate because people related to the fact that first of all, if we decide to write a letter—we did an email campaign actually—but it’s almost in the form of a letter of introduction and it was very successful, asking him to do that versus the director of marketing doing that.

Another question about this whole manufacturing vertical, I wonder if you also had this experience. The tenure of the sales executive. How long have you guys and gals been in the role of the companies that you service on average?

Carman: Way longer than the marketing folks. It’s not uncommon to see 40-year veterans. I’ve got to say, one of the things that fascinated me as I’ve gotten deeper in my work with manufacturers is that, it seems odd, but marketers almost seem like they’re hungrier than the sales folks sometimes. Once they’ve been around for 30-40 years, the sales folks are farming the pre-existing accounts and any sense of hunting has long since…

Marylou: Left the building.

Carman: Yeah. Sometimes these younger marketers that are hip to bring new leads to the table are almost yelling into the ether. It’s been a surprise, but also the tenure of the sales organization can lead to some challenges in changing it and making it more digitally savvy as an example, but at the same time, almost every organization that I worked with has at least a portion of it that can be worked with. They’re not all 40-year vets.

Marylou: Right. It’s interesting because in the last couple of years I’ve been asked to speak at conventions and conferences in industries that average 10 years or 20 plus years as a sales rep. It is frustrating for me because of the fact that I’m 61, that they’re not willing to adopt or just listen to a new way of doing things as they have their rolodex, and they have their way of doing business, and this whole thought of all of our systems, and leveraging technology to help with the conversation is just something they will not do. Because there’s more of them than me, it’s very difficult to convince.

What we do is we tried like you said, take the younger guys who might be not at book yet and still need to do some planting of seeds and get them excited about what we’re doing and then hopefully, it’ll propagate through. By no means can we go in and say, “This is what we’re going to do now everybody,” because it just doesn’t work that way. It’s been very frustrating for someone like me who is all about getting everybody in the hunting mode and it’s […]. I like the fact that you ebb and flow and pick the battle where you can, and eventually, they’ll probably get through to those people who really need it and […].

Carman: An old agency veteran friend of mine once told me to stock that bootcamp counsel and to know demand. Was that ever true when trying to get an older salesperson who doesn’t want to change, change.

But I must say, I have found some success in some of the sales enablement technologies. When they hear that, “Don’t worry about the CRM right now. Don’t worry about tracking your activity or what have you,”, but this is a way that you can know if your prospect opened the email and is looking at your proposal. Sometimes, that type of very simple functionality can deliver a lot of benefits and is enough of an intrigue to get them playing ball.

Marylou: Carman, if anyone ever find out exactly […] about is because this is a mysterious part of the […], it seems that cultural personalities are a big part of finessing through this, and frankly, I’m a passive person so sometimes it’s difficult. If someone’s listening to this and is like, “You know what? This does sound like our firm,” how do we get started with you? What we do first?

Carman: How do you get started with Kula Partners?

Marylou: Yeah, just going down the path of figuring this out and first of all, do we have those 20-40 accounts, 200 accounts, or whatever it is? How do we get to that point? What do we need to change in our sequences, our messaging, our sales conversations. Where do we get started with someone like you and your knowledge in figuring out if this is a good fit for us?

Carman: I guess there could be a lot of different starting points. Maybe I won’t answer the question as directly as you might like, but in some ways, what I find most of my prospects and clients, the shift that they undertake is shifting from this organization-centric mindset in their marketing and sales function and really fundamentally transforming it to a more human-centered process.

They’re taking a more human-centered design approach in how they build out their marketing and sales function. Start from extrapolating from those target client profiles and knowing the organizations that we serve, and then unpack that into the actual personas and the actual people. Know who is our lead economic buyer, then make up of that buying committee, and then begin to build our overall marketing and sales framework around that.

That process from there then tends to unfold from a point of view of creating a digital foundation for that to be launched from, be that a website beyond that digital trade show presence, et cetera. Even things like your factory towards how you transform all of those things to make them more centered on the actual people that we’re selling to, not talking in this bland organizational speak about superior quality, great service, and amazing people in these broad generalities. The way that gets started is it starts by getting grounded and who we’re actually building for, and on abstracting that as much as possible.

Marylou: What I like to do is look at simple quadrant and across the X axis, the horizontal, I have existing and new. Across the Y axis, I have existing and new, and then I put clients on the X axis, I put cards on the Y axis, now I have four quadrants. If I’m selling to existing clients with existing products, that’s my base. Those are the people that I want to continue to have long lifetime value with, and my conversation is going to be very different than the quadrant right next to it which is new clients with existing products.

Those clients need a little bit different conversations. If you think about it like that with new and existing products, new and existing clients, and you have four quadrants, find out where you’re at, and where most do your business is coming from.

That will also help you do what Carman is saying, unpacked from that quadrant, “Okay, these accounts are my jump accounts. In those job jump accounts, these are the types of people with whom I’m going to have conversation initially, or maybe follow up conversations with,” and as Carman said, you’ve got to change your whole attitude of approach to these people. From what he even said, […] towards. Who would have thought of that right? But it makes perfect sense. Look at all the touch points that you have relating to that buyer profile and change it accordingly for that particular quadrant.

It’s not everybody, it’s just the people who reside in the quadrant that you’re trying to bring more revenue in. You’re going to have multiple funnels and some are going to look like Carman’s diamonds, and some are going to look like the regular funnel, but it’s not one size fits all. That’s one of the biggest mistakes people make. They try to push everybody down the same funnel and it just isn’t like that. Carman, thank you so much for your time today. I apologize for the next door neighbor hammering, but we got through it.

Carman: Marylou, it’s been interesting. It sounded like you were in a tunnel a time or two, but with any luck at all, the audio folks will do their magic, and it would be fantastic.

Marylou: Yes.

Carman: Thank you for having me on the show today.

Marylou: Wonderful. I’ll put it in the show notes everybody, Carman’s contact information, LinkedIn, et cetera, and his website. He’s the cofounder Kula Partners. There’s a lot of stuff on his website that you can check out independently of the podcast. Thanks again, Carman. I appreciate your time.

Carman: Thanks a lot, Marylou.

How do you set up a pipeline that leverages all types of channels and technology, but also keeps that human spirit alive? Today’s guest will help answer that question and others.

Joining the podcast today is Jonathan Soares. Jonathan is the founder and CEO of Agency Labs and has a background in both technology and consumer sales. He’s been at this for 15 years and he covers the entire pipeline. Listen in to hear.

Episode Highlights:

• Jonathan’s background and how he got to his current position
• How to leverage cold calling with newer technology and how that can advance prospects through the pipeline
• What a typical warm introduction looks like and what technologies to use
• How many opportunities can be generated from Jonathan’s process
• Different roles within the funnel
• Influencer mapping
• How the GDPR affects Jonathan’s work
• How to get started leveraging LinkedIn

Resources:

Jonathan Soares

Email: jonathan@agencylabs.com

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Jonathan Soares. I asked him to come on to the show because he has a lot of background in both technology and consumer sales. He’s been at this for 15 years and he covers the entire pipeline. Our conversation is going to ebb and flow through the entire pipeline, but he really has a great background in the prospecting side of things and also how to leverage technology with social selling.

As you all know, I’m a process person, but there are points in the process where it amplifies, accentuates, points out, whatever you want to call it, skills and also mindset. Jonathan is going to help us navigate how to set-up a pipeline that’s going to allow us to leverage all types of channels, including social, and then take those prospects, leverage technology where we can, but also keep that human spirit alive so that we don’t have what we used to call cold calling. We’re trying to eliminate that in all facets of our selling and leveraging technology to do that.

Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Jonathan to the podcast. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Marylou, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be on your podcast and I look forward to our conversation.

Marylou: Tell the folks where you’ve been over the last 15 years and what got you to where you are today in your company, the founder and CEO of Agency Labs. What caused you to get to where you are now and work in this process with your company?

Jonathan: I started my entrepreneurial career in the consumer products world. I had an idea 10+ years ago that natural and specialty foods would eventually become mainstream national brands, and decided to take our family barbecue sauce recipe and prove out that concept. Within three years, my products were featured in over 15,000 stores nationally, and I spent the earlier part of my 20s doing headquarter calls and working with national category buyers, distributors, retailers across major supermarkets, club stores, mass merchandisers.

That really gave me a very unique perspective into the client relationship management experience, the prospecting experience, how to go against the grain when an industry has been doing things a certain way for years upon years, and how thinking outside the box and being a bit more creative can enhance prospecting. I took all those experiences and I said, “All right. Once I transition to that business in 2010, I decided to get into the technology word.”

People always asked me, “How did you get from sauce to software?” With any entrepreneur, it’s all about solving a problem or fixing a pain point. In technology, I saw a huge pain point in the agency world, where agencies were all competing against this $80 billion digital ecosystem. There are 30,000+ agencies in the country. Instead of me being another agency, I said, “Well, instead of competing with everyone, why don’t I collaborate?”

I created this infrastructure, a technology house of sorts, where we help agencies on a project-basis, very senior US-based team, and we empower our agency partners to succeed in the digital world because the more we empower them to deliver amazing results to their clients, the more work we get. Our clients end up being our biggest business development vehicle, based on the success we had with them with our projects.

It’s all come full circle and I’m looking forward to taking a deep dive and discussing that in a bit more detail.

Marylou: That’s great. For those listening, an agency is going to be similar in scope in what you guys do on a solo level. What I want you to think about as you’re listening to Jonathan talk today is how you can apply this to your daily workflow. A lot of what agencies do is a repeatable task that they set up for their clients, that’s consistent, that if their clients want to, they can scale. That’s what we’re trying to do on a solo level, but also if we were in teams, trying to get our team to do the same thing. So, it fits really nicely.

Let’s talk about the idea of cold calling. As we all know, there are three channels we could focus on for business development. There’s an inbound or attraction channel. There’s this outreach channel where we’re targeting accounts that we want to go after, we haven’t necessarily started conversations with them yet, we’re trying to start the conversation, or we’re trying to extend a previous conversation that may have gone dormant. And then the third lever that we can pull is referral networks where we’re taking our clients, our partners, and working with them to get more business opportunities in our fold.

Jonathan, taking that into consideration, tell us what your concept is of cold calling and how we can leverage that with these newer technologies to advance prospects through the pipeline.

Jonathan: Cold calling is one of the most highly debated topics in the […] sales outreach process. I like to take the ‘best of both worlds’ approach where cold calling can work if it’s part of your overall funnel. I don’t believe that it should start with cold calling, but I think that after you had a sequence or a targeted set of outreaches, cold calling can be highly effective. It also really depends on the industry.

When I was in the consumer products space, I cold call all the time. Before that when I was in college, I was a loan officer and that’s what really got me moving on cold calling because I was there literally with my prospecting list calling hundreds of people on a daily basis. When I decided after college to start this consumer products business, it was already ingrained in my head. I was fearless, I can deal with rejection, and most of the category buyers, grocery, CEOs out there, weren’t really exposed to the digital world because we’re going back over 10 years ago. Cold calling was a necessity to really break down certain barriers and get in front of folks.

Before I started with cold calling, I always started with a personal letter. I would create my prospecting list, at that time 50 or 100 grocery prospects, and I would send each of them a letter introducing myself and my products. I played on the young entrepreneur angle. I was 20–21 at that time starting that business and most of the individuals that were in that industry at the time were probably 20–30 years my senior. I knew that angle was going to work really well for me.

I sold them on my vision and philosophy for where the industry was going. After that, I would follow-up probably two weeks thereafter with a cold call. Two weeks after that, I would follow-up with sending some product samples, and then from there I would start sending them an email which I had pulled here online or through other industry relationships.

It’s like a 3–4 sequence outreach process that I would do. Eventually, we get to the point where it was a warm-enough lead that I will feel comfortable having someone in my network potentially expedite introduction if I had no ability to do so. In that situation, even in the early days, cold calling for me was always something that’s part of the process.

Now, in the digital world, working with agencies—by agencies I mean advertising digital creative agencies—everything is so digitally enabled and everyone’s time is so valuable. Not to say other industries their time is invaluable, but in the agency world, it’s very production-driven. As a production, project managers, producers, developers, designers are constantly in campaign mode either designing or developing a website, an app, you name it. So, when a random cold call comes through, it really throws that person to a tizzy.

Oftentimes, from my experience in the early days of the business, the rejection was detrimental to my outreach. After a few of those, I really realized that there has to be a different way. That’s when I started leveraging social media because that demographic was actively tweeting, they were actively posting photos on Instagram, they were engaging on LinkedIn. I thought to myself if I can create a warm introduction by engaging with their content or sharing content and developing my own personality, it would allow me to further enhance my outreach. Then, once I felt I had established a warm relationship, I would incorporate cold calling into that mix as part of my overall strategy. But I had to turn the monologue’s head a bit so that I could target people there more effectively.

Marylou: Give us a recipe for what you consider to be a warm relationship. There’s a lot of context around that particular topic and in the past, we’ve had scoring system that score engagement. If I downloaded the white paper or if I clicked on a link that you suggested or if I viewed a page on a website, those all count towards engagements. Help us understand the recipe that you use on average.

Again, the caveat here for everybody listening is it depends on the vertical. It depends on the persona, the person that you’re trying to get belly-to-belly with, but overall, there maybe a rhythm here I want you guys to come away with from this conversation with Jonathan because he is my kind of guy. He is the test-test-test scenario. Put your ego in your pocket, not worry about rejection, and let the data help you decide—what’s statistically relevant data, that is—which way you need to go. So, give us an understanding of a typical, warm introduction. What that looks like.

Jonathan: Typically, I’ll start with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is amazing for B2B sales and there’s two primary tools that I will use. The first is eLink Pro. Basically, what eLink Pro is, it’s a Chrome extension. Once you have LinkedIn account open, you’ll download eLink and you can go through LinkedIn and do a targeted search.

Let’s say I want to target agency owners, for example, in the greater inner city area that have 50–200 or whatever the metric is, company size that are in the marketing and advertising industry, they’ve been in their role for X amount of years, and I’ll get a very granulated targeted search. From there, I will engage eLink, enable auto view their profiles. I get what I thinking like, “What’s the relevant CO or the importance of viewing a profile?” Unlike any of the social networks, LinkedIn tells you who’s looking at your profile. I’ll get a notification when someone looks at my profile. There’s a good probability that if I think it’s an intriguing individual, I’ll probably look at their profile back.

Increasing your profile visibility is an effective approach to really building up that warm lead. I’ll probably send data anywhere from 200–300 profile views on a daily basis and usually, I’m getting probably 10%, 15%, 20% of that of people that are actually engaging back and looking at my profile. Sometimes, they’ll send me a connection request. Other times, I might say, “You know what? I want to add them because we’re looking at each other’s profiles.” That’s the first step.

From there, I’ll use a tool called LeadIQ, and what LeadIQ does is it’s the same kind of a Chrome plugin, but it will actually scrape that search query in LinkedIn into a prospecting list. There might be 500 or 1000 individuals on there I’ll go through and I’ll pull their data, first name, last name, title, email address, phone number, industry, company, it pulls everything for you, and it cross-references it against a global database that they license out to some data provider. It provides a very robust prospecting list.

I’ll take that prospecting list and then I’ll queue it up into a Drip campaign. Typically, our outreach is anywhere from every 4–6 weeks. It’s highly targeted outreach, but it’s also at scale. It’s not spamming to the point where we just randomly emailing whoever their brother, but it’s an approach that allows us to efficiently target individuals at a very granular level. I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator in different types of search approaches to really get that list or point where we have prospects that I know that are going to yield a high conversion rate.

Once that’s done, I’ll take that prospecting list, I’ll run it through a verification tool called BriteVerify that will output all of the valid email addresses that are provided to me through the platform. If any email addresses is invalid, I have an email permutation application that my team built for me, that I will actually take those invalid emails, it will create 15 potential variations of that email, and then I’ll run it through the verification tool again to see if that will yield a valid email. There’s multiple steps in making sure that I cleanse the data that I’m using to outreach.

Once that happens, I’ll go through that list and then I’ll start looking for those prospects on social media. I’ll go to Twitter, Instagram, and I’ll either follow them on those accounts or engage specifically on their content. Typically, it’s sharing feedback, “Hey, I love that photo,” or if it’s a topic that they’re talking about engaging in that conversation.

So, there you go. It’s already a warm outreach if they’re responding back to you. From there, it’s a one-to-one email that’s hyper personalized, directly from me to that person. I’m not a fan of newsletters or blast/mass email marketing. I think it’s highly ineffective. […] what the data shown me, but I do believe in that targeted approach and that’s the workflow that I go through. Typically, the cold call is probably a step for or so in that process of email outreach in Drip that have actually occurred prior to leaving either voice mail or talking directly to that individual.

Marylou: Let’s talk waterfall. You started giving me some numbers. I’m curious from the standpoint of this process starting with LinkedIn, the eLink Pro from the Chrome extension. About how many opportunities would an individual in your organization, using your process currently, generate per month? You don’t need to give me the exact amount.

For example, the Predictable Revenue waterfall that we work with and still work with, yields 8–10 qualified opportunities a month based on 1000 touches per month or some sort. It could be 1000 unique touches or it could be 1000 touches over the course of what we call a sequence which is multiple touches over the course of time.

Do you have goals like that? If so, going through this process, how much time is spent on prospecting, typically, and what’s the yield at the end from this funnel that you’ve created?

Jonathan: It’s a big question there. It’s timing-driven. Part of our process and relationship building, most of these agencies that we’re working with are getting inbound from a lot of offshore development firms. Hundreds of them email me on a weekly basis. Being able to stand out and be very genuine is very important.

The first step in our email process is relationship building. Going through capabilities, maybe 10% of the time there’s an active project that timing work in our favor and, “Hey, we got a project we want to talk to you about.” But realistically, we usually use anywhere from 2–3 months out from actually having a project that is to a design or that they’ve just closed.

Once we have that initial capabilities call, it’s important for us to check in every six weeks or so, just to check on the production schedule, how things are going, and what’s on the horizon. There’s a broader funnel that happens around there.

What typically happens for new account managers that come on board, is usually there’s a 4–5 month curve, whereas after you started the first wave of outreach, after 4–5 months, we start seeing the actual opportunity funnel filling out. Our goal at that point is about 10–15 opportunities on a monthly basis and typically, the close process is around 2–3 weeks. Oftentimes, there might be opportunities that an agency is actually working on being on, so it’s a longer process. That list ends up increasing over time and piggybacking on itself. Out of that 10–15 opportunities, it’s kind of skewed on our close rate.

Generally speaking, once we’ve established a relationship and we have our capability discussion, our close rate is very high, but we have to take into account internal capacity. If an agency all of a sudden has internal bandwidth that freeze up, it’s out of our control. If their client ends up with a different vendor through an RFP process, that’s out of our control. It’s most effective for us when there’s a signed, sealed, and delivered project, and we know that within 1–2 […] is actually going to be active opportunity. That’s something, too, that we have to take into account as we’re going through that overall sales […].

The frequency of outreach and the volume of outreach is really important, so that we can keep top of mind and build up those agency relationships on an ongoing basis. Ideally, out of the 10 or 15 opportunities on a monthly basis, where our goal is for anywhere from 50–60 touch points, which is generally an initial capabilities meeting or an email exchange of our portfolio, on average about 10–15 of those on a weekly basis, based on weekly campaigns that we’re sending out.

Marylou: This is great. Also enlighten us on the actual prospect team that you’re working with. Are there going to be multiple roles that are engaging with you or do you focus on a singular role and then work out from there?

For example, in the book Predictable Prospecting, in Chapter 3 we talk about this influence map and we want to be able to engage in conversation with a variety of people because we’re not always going to get to the decision maker day one. We look at direct and indirect influencers as well now.

With the agencies, are you typically talking to the principals of the agency? Or are there multiple roles that you set up with these funnels in order to engage via the LinkedIn process?

Jonathan: It’s interesting that you brought up the influencer map. We actually built out a software application for one of our clients that consults and advises multinational, global corporations, primarily the oil and gas industry. We created this influencer mapping software that allowed them to create a data visualization solution so that when these larger organizations want to go into Mexico, for example, they can see the President of Mexico and the broader web of the 30 or 40 influencers from his family to his colleagues and other people on his cabinet, and see what’s the best approach to getting into that political system.

Marylou: That’s awesome. Love that.

Jonathan: It was a very cool project. So, I’m with you on the mapping. I keep saying ‘it depends’ because with sales and in prospecting, there are so many variables, but it’s […]. Oftentimes, if I’m doing the outreach, we find much more success if I’m reaching out to the C-suite because it’s founder-to-founder, CEO-to-CEO, and they’re more likely to engage in that with my account manager. Typically, he’s reaching out to either head of production, a project manager, creative director.

There’s about five or seven profiles within an agency that are either decision makers or influence decision makers on the overall production schedule, and those are people that are in the day-to-day production function and typically are dealing with a lot of the BS and headaches of—in the agency world—the very inefficient model when it comes to technical production.

A lot of agencies try to do it and many of them have horror stories working with development firms. I can spend the whole show talking about all those issues that would go with that, but […] the role that have the biggest pain points and during our sales pitch, that pitch resonates with them the most, and from there it’s either passed around or we get to the point where we’re being engaged as a vendor or bidding on active projects.

Marylou: This process that you’ve developed is wonderful. It complements the work that I do in terms of having multiple decision makers or influencers, and then you’re hyper personalizing the conversation once you have technology help you warm up that chill campaign—that’s what we call it—and basically trying to get to the point where it makes sense to have that belly-to-belly conversation, virtually via phone or whatever medium works best for your prospect and have it on a hyper personalized level, meaning you’re personalizing the conversation, you’re not leveraging it through a mass media contact or the mass marketing net of old which has gone out of the scope now for most of us.

How are you handling with you European and non-US clients? This GDPR issue and the ability to leverage other channels besides email or opt-in versus non-opt-in. Have you come across that yet with agencies that you work with abroad?

Jonathan: All the agencies that we work with are US-based, mainly because of cost. Most of the European agencies, or South American, or Asian agencies are typically feeding into Eastern Europe, India, South America, for offshore and nearshore developers, and there’s just a huge cost disparity where we might be in the $150–$200 blended hourly rate. Those firms are generally in the $20–$60 an hour range, though. It’s been highly inefficient for us to even explore global agencies. So, for us it’s all US-based. Luckily, no GDPR issues.

Marylou: Not yet. It’s coming. LinkedIn we’ve seen a spike now in people who started to utilize LinkedIn, but unfortunately, they are using it in a mass way to get connections. They get the connection, then they just “vomit” all over you with what they’ve got, and give you no reason why you should consider. There is no relationship being established. It’s just taking the mass emailing of cold calling and plopping it into LinkedIn and thinking that’s going to work for them.

I love what you’re doing here, really working on the relationship and looking at the relationship and engagement of the prospect with your content assets and your messaging, and then and only then you take them to the level of the one-on-one type conversation with hyper personalized.

I want to be respectful of people’s time. We could talk all day because I really enjoyed where you’re going and what you’ve done, but if we were to wrap up this conversation, if I’m sitting here thinking, “You know? I really don’t know how to use LinkedIn or don’t use LinkedIn, my boss tells me to get a list and start calling,” how would you get people to that next step of success in starting to leverage LinkedIn or what you mentioned also other channels?

I’m so used to B2B. Maybe it’s not right. Maybe we should be using Twitter, but if I had to pick one for a B2B, I have a relationship sale, that it gets that 10–15 ops per month, where would I leverage LinkedIn and how should I go about doing that?

Jonathan: I would start with LinkedIn, without a doubt. Googling is the first way to start, going to YouTube and LinkedIn growth hacking videos. There’s such an abundance of information out there. All you really have to do is start digging a little bit and searching for that type of content.

From there, I think it should be maybe 10%–15% of your outreach to start and build up some metrics and data that you can present to your supervisor/manager and say, “Hey, look. This is the outreach I’ve been doing per your guidance. Here is the outreach I’ve been testing and here’s the data as a result,” and like you mentioned before, let the data speak for itself. I think if you’re thoughtful about how you’re leveraging some of these platforms in tracking them effectively, you’re going to see pretty unique results.

Also, I can’t stress enough the importance of having a really clean and polished-up profile. That’s your digital representation of who you are and what you do. So, going through and cleaning up your LinkedIn, again, there’s tutorials online that you can look at to how to have an effective LinkedIn profile.

Creating content is something that doesn’t have to be part of the funnel per se, but it’s part of your brand. Each sales professional should be building their own brand because people want to do business with people they can relate to or people that they trust. The best way to do that is to put yourself out there. That could be through video content, talking about topics, talking about your industry, talking about anything, but putting it out there in a way that is not intrusive and you’re being thoughtful. That will add a lot of value to the overall system.

Again, testing different things. I advise someone not to do targeted email. I think it’s the worst. What most of them don’t realize about LinkedIn is that it’s first and foremost a recruiting tool. […] people find jobs. Most of the time, people sign-up with LinkedIn with their personal email address. When you’re sending them a direct email, they’re actually getting notifications in their personal email folder, and 9 times out of 10, people don’t check that as frequently.

They also think that, that outreach is about their career, so prospecting in that way creates a very erratic workflow for people that I work in to reach out to folks. I think that’s one you need to be thoughtful of, but for the most part, it’s really just putting yourself out there, searching, testing new things, letting the data drive all of the future decisions that you’re going to make with the rest of your team.

Marylou: So, again to summarize here, 10%–15% of your time, folks, so if you’re doing your daily workflow. There’s a process that I like to use, Jonathan, called first in 10. It’s not nearly as beefy as what you’re doing, but it gives people the workflow habit of connecting through LinkedIn. First in 10 is very simple. First thing in the morning or first break you have, go ahead and try to reach out to 10 people. They can be new people, they could be people who are already in your network, with whom you want to continue or restart a conversation.

If you do this everyday, 10 per day, 22 business days a month, you’re now generating 220 more thoughtful conversations. This is not spamming people. This is thoughtful conversations that you’re doing every month and over time, you’ll have that statistically relevant data so that you can start seeing the value of this type of connection. It’s all about repetition and consistency. This is not something you do whilst you’re drinking your coffee every once in a while. This is an everyday thing to get you in that habit.

Jonathan, how can we reach out to you for further information or get to know what your company is doing with agencies? What’s the best way to get a hold of you?

Jonathan: Well, first thing, go to LinkedIn. That’s the first step in the whole process. I’m on there, add me, follow me, whatever you choose. Feel free to email me, jonathan@agencylabs.com. You can find me @agencylabs.com on most of the other social platforms, Twitter, Instagram. I’m pretty active and I always respond. Feel free to reach out. I love to add value to your community and beyond.

Marylou: Wonderful. Thank you so much and I’ll make sure everyone that I’ll work with Jonathan in getting some of these links, to these tools that whiz by while you were listening, that I think would be very helpful to get started. If you are committed to leveraging this potential channel for part of your prospecting rhythm, I think it’s a wise thing to use some of these tools because they’ll really help you catapult your prospecting skills to that next level. Jonathan, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it having you on the podcast.

Jonathan: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure.

Can you get better performance from your team just by asking questions? Asking the right questions can build and strengthen your management coaching skills and allow your team to perform at their highest levels. Today’s guest will explain how the ability to ask the right questions can help you tap into the human potential of your team.

Chick Herbert is a Des Moines executive who’s come up with a process that he calls question-centric coaching. Listen in to hear what Chick has to say about pinpointing where people on your team are struggling, asking the right questions, and motivating your team.

Episode Highlights:

• Chick’s background
• Chick’s working relationship with Brad Williams
• Pinpointing where people are struggling
• Asking questions that get people to contemplate their own struggles and behavior
• The frustration of witnessing ineffective leaders
• What about Chick’s process motivates people
• Tracking progress
• Whether styles of coaching differ based on sales roles
• Extending knowledge to other team members
• What to do when you’re not used to asking questions
• How to use silence
• The value of preparation
• Truth and ground truth

Resources:

Chick Herbert

It Begs the Question

Chick on Twitter

Email Chick: Chick.Herbert2@gmail.com

Transcript:

Marylou: Hello there. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Chick Herbert. Chick is a local Des Moines executive. Many of you know, I part-time in Des Moine, Iowa. I wanted you to meet Chick. The reason for this podcast interview was for those folks who are in management positions who are always trying to eke out high-performance from their team. Chick has come up with a powerful process that taps into the human potential of your team and does so through the art of asking questions. 

We all know in sales and in sales process, I harp on the ability to ask good questions is going to allow us to advance prospects through the pipeline. Here, the ability to ask good questions allows you to build and strengthen your management coaching skills in your company and allows your team to perform at the highest potential. You’re really making a difference in lifting performance but also improving morale. Here he is folks, Chick Herbert.

Chick: I grew up on the south side of Des Moines and went to Iowa state. I actually did work in northern California. I worked for a semiconductor business. Technically, the manufacturing was in Singapore but Milpitas was the headquarters. I lived in Mountain View, then worked in Milpitas, then I worked for Motorola in Chicago, and got lured back here many years ago by a small boutique consulting firm. I never thought we’d live in Des Moine but absolutely so happy we’re here. I do love the city.

Marylou: Yeah. The first week we’ve got here, I thought, “Oh, no. This is not going to work,” because we were food-centric in San Francisco. When we first came here, I think we went to Court Avenue Brewery or something. I don’t remember where we were, but although the food was delicious, the presentation was not something that I was used to and the plates were so huge. I thought to myself, “This is not going to work.” But it all worked out. We’re definitely happy with all the choices around. Our […] exploding with great restaurants. I’m pretty happy.

Is the NCMIC Group, is that who wooed back? And is that where you’re still are? What’s the relationship there?

Chick: No. The woo back was about 25 years ago. Most recently, I was with Wells Fargo for 13½ years. I had three very different jobs. For the first four years, I ran a global sales team and worked across a fairly large-sized organization within Wells Fargo. I’ve always had a passion for developing people. I’m an engineer by degree, so I’m technical in nature but really enjoy people. The book blends both of those concepts together. 

Then, I was responsible for the leadership development and the executive succession planning or talent planning for a big chunk of organization of Wells—it was about 60,000 people—looking at who the next leaders were that we thought could be the CFO of the mortgage company or the next head of the credit card business, what do we need from a strategic move and experience perspective, from a skill development, all the way down to frontline managers of what do we need to do to better equip them to lead their teams. Loved it, but I’m not an HR guy. I’m a business guy with a penchant for people.

About six years ago, I moved back into the business on the executive team of one of our consumer lending businesses. I was responsible for strategy, customer experience, design thinking, sales, and sales relationship stuff. During all of that, I wrote the book. I had to get approval from the corporate council of Wells to do that. I’ve take vacation and I do speaking and consulting around the book and other things. 

NCMIC had hired my co-author to be the new CEO a couple of years ago. Mike had me in doing my work here, and then they approached me and said, “Why don’t you just come to work for us?” That’s not why I do in any of these. I’m just really passionate about it and loved it. It allows me to continue to do what I’m really good at. Also, have my day job which, most of the time are stuff I’m good at but not always. They just made a really unique offer. I came here six months ago and they created a role on their executive team. It’s a new position in the organization. I still do my speaking and consulting on the side. I have that.

Marylou: Interesting. That’s awesome. The relationship with Brad Williams just because Brad is Brad or have your work cross paths?

Chick: Very good question. Crossed paths in the short time I’ve been at NCMIC. One of the things I’m helping lead the effort to get our sales, we have six different businesses within our walls. All very independent. All do things differently. No common language, no methodology from a sales strategy. We’re implementing Salesforce and I’m leading that effort as the executive sponsor. We’re also done a lot of sales development work. Concurrent to that, we created an enterprise selling strategy. That sounds more complex and glamorous than it is. This is all small business selling, not anything extremely complex. 

Brad’s company, Dextra, is who we hired to implement sales. They’re the outside consulting firm that we hired to be the Salesforce implementers with us. Brad, has a really talented young woman named  Christina Roeder and she is his business development person. Christina was a great partner and has a real passion for developing sales process. She was very involved early and we asked Brad if he wanted to come and sit in on a session that she and I co-facilitated. I just struck up a relationship with Brad and we’ve had a lunch a couple of times. He had approached me on my interest of joining the two of you and some of the other folks doing your workshop.

Marylou: Oh, okay. I was wondering how these all fit together. Brad is a connector, there’s no doubt. He said, “Marylou, you must get to know Chick,” and I said, “Okay.”

Chick: He oversold that.

Marylou: He’s really amazing and fun but we have yet to work together. We’ve gotten to know each other really well, we had a number of different meanings over the years, but we have not worked together on a client project, for sure. This was the first attempt after many many years of talking about it, of putting together a workshop and understanding from that point of view of how we can orchestrate it, who we should invite, who should be leading it. It was a first attempt for us to bring together our talents which actually worked really well. I do top of funnel to opportunities and need to opportunities to close in this particular workshop. It was really a fun time to get together, try it out, and see how it worked out.

Chick: You were happy with everything?

Marylou: Yes. I do these already. Just getting in the door part. His piece was something I heard him do before. It was nice to give the audience the entire picture because I literally stopped at opportunity. You know from your now dealing with Salesforce, it’s really an engine for opportunity to close. It’s not necessarily a business development engine. In fact, it’s horrible at it. I very seldom use or worry about Salesforce other than as a data repository to store the metrics, the sales conversations wrap-up, and all the things we need on top of funnel so we have our waterfalls in place. That’s the extent of my usage of Salesforce.

Chick: I’m excited. I have not ordered your book yet but I am going to do that. I really want to learn more about your work. Brad speaks very highly as do others and would just love to understand that a bit more because I spend a lot of time in that space as well. I don’t know if you even had a chance to look through the PDF that I sent you of the book. 

One of the interesting things that I think as an engineer, I was always taught that you need to understand where the constraint is in the process. If you’re not working on the constraint or the place that you’ve got the greatest difference between demand and capacity, then you’re not really making meaningful improvements.

My experience on the sales side is a lot of sales leaders, (1) they’re not very good. (2) They use a one-size-fits-all approach. They will go into a team and have everybody focus on improving at this stage in the sales pipeline, when not everybody needs help there. Other people may have a constraint in their pipeline in the next stage. By opening up the capacity or improving their skill on that one area, all you’re doing is causing a bigger backup on the pipeline at the next stage.

I love to get your feedback as you read through those chapters just to see if it aligns with how you think about things, if you disagree with it. I just love that in the conversation.

Marylou: I will definitely do that. I think, with me, it is all about relative position in the pipeline. We have intra within the stage and inter from stage to stage metrics that aligned with the wrap-up telephone conversation or email. Whatever conversation they’re having whether it’s email, social, direct mail, or whatever. It allows us to pinpoint the scorecard process where people are getting stuck. The roleplaying, huddles, and the daily day in the life of the business developer is modified based on where we’re seeing the data tell us that we’re struggling, or not working hard enough, or trying to cheat the system and gain the system a little bit.

Chick: […] exactly the same thing.

Marylou: Yeah. I love that you’re approaching it from the form of a question.

Chick: Yeah, because my experience is leaders will go in and tell people what to do. “This is how I did it because I was a gunslinger and the best salesperson that ever worked in the door of this company.” All of that is not digestible or meaningful or practical for somebody who has a completely different style. How do you ask questions to get people to contemplate what their struggles are with executing that particular stage? How do you get people to recognize some of their own behavior that’s getting in the way instead of just telling everybody how to fix it? By doing so, you’re not creating any capacity and buy-in from that person.

I’ve worked with Fortune 50 to small private firms, every different functions, and dozens of different industries from healthcare to financial services. One of the areas that I think are the worst coaches are the people on the sales world. It’s a lot of telling and not a lot of asking, not a lot of listening, and not a lot of diagnosis as to how they can help.

Marylou: Or it’s that sink or swim mentality. That’s the way I grew up in sales. I, like you, am a computer software engineer. My career started by walking in the office one day, noticing it’s a little bit quiet. Then, the phone rang. It was my boss up in Sunnyvale—I worked in LA—saying, “Hey, Marylou. We’ve had some issues, as you know, with selling this disruptive technology. We fired all the salespeople and now all you guys are sales. Good luck!” That was my introduction into sales. 

Luckily, I had some good fortune of working at Xerox first. They were heavy on training, especially if college grads, even though I was a computer science major. They put me through their sales training program. The Xerox sales training program at the time was topnotch. Probably, it’s still is if they have something. I got training in an area that I was a little bit puzzled as to why they would want an engineer to be taking to sales training. They explained it as, “Look, your clients are the employees at Xerox. You work in the data center, they’re your clients, and there are certain techniques and certain questioning habits that we want you to internalize so that you have a better relationship with clients. They’ll use the data center more and they won’t outsource to others.” “All right.” 

Remembering that helped me rise above this feeling of dread and driving home thinking, “My life is over. How can they do that?” It allowed me to think, “All right. I’m a process expert, I’m an engineer, I build operating systems, so I should be able to figure out at least step one.” That’s how I got started. As I leverage the knowledge I had with process, I look at things, relative position, I looked at things, “What do I need to pass go? What materials? What data do I need to collect?”

Then I, being a student and an engineer, we’re always studying, trying to better ourselves. I read everything I could from everybody I could on the subject and knew I didn’t need to necessarily work on the process side of things because I had that. What I needed was the skillset and the mindset. The mindset was the hardest thing for me to grasp. We solve problems as they come in. We don’t necessarily have a habitual way or reaching out to people. We’re more reactive than proactive in some cases.

That was a big aha moment of how to turn on our proactive engine inside of my head so that not unlike brushing my teeth, I would make those 40 calls. We didn’t have email at the time, there was no internet. Or send those direct mail letters or sit in the parking lot at six in the morning when you […] CEO to come in so you can have a conversation, stuff like that.

I really want to understand what drove you from being an engineer in process, then attacking it from question side of things knowing that there is not a one-size-fits-all? When you’re dealing with people, you’re dealing with a myriad of things that can go wrong. Tell me what was that moment where you said, “I need to get this information down on paper”?

Chick: It’s a great question. I think it was the frustration of witnessing so many ineffective leaders in all functions but sales included, that talked a good game but didn’t have any method of their madness, and would just go around and be the cheerleader and get people fired up. In one of my roles, I talked about being responsible that helped create a defined sales strategy and approach.

Probably similar to a lot of things that you’ve done, my approach was not to go tell them what they’re doing wrong and tell them this is how they need to do it right, it was to ask questions. It was very consultative in nature and it would be a simple question of, “All right, Marylou, you’ve got this territory in Northern California. Tell me about who do you call on? What kind of prospects fit into your sweet spot? What’s your strategy of covering this territory?” I was continually shocked at the responses that would be, “Well, I do a swing up to Sacramento once a month. Then, I always go over and I hit this area, and then I like to go down to this area. I just do that cycle on a monthly basis.” That was about as deep as the strategy went.

Over the course of the engagement, I would ask them a lot of questions. As I ask them, I’d ask followup questions, and they would come with the conclusions themselves that that’s probably not a very effective strategy. I’ll say, “Would it be helpful if you thought about opportunities this way?”

One of my stories I talked about if you’re going fishing, what’s the most important thing? People say the bait, the rod, the strength of the line, the reel, the time of day. I respond that all of these are really important but the most important thing when you go fishing is you go fishing where there are fish. Are you taking the time to think about where you’re going to fish and have the highest likelihood to get some bites?

Through the whole process, we developed a common sales strategy that we would define and agree to. When we go to implement that, some leaders were much better than others at coaching and leading people around the new process. The ones that were effective were the ones that invoke that same strategy. It was, how do we get people to take a different approach, recognize their job as not to just tell people, “Here’s your unattainable goal. Go get it and swim,” but to understand the metrics, understand the process, understand where people—my terminology— one-size-fits-one, not one-size-fits-all.

Marylou: I love that.

Chick: What does Marylou need? What does Chick needs? Is it skill? Is it knowledge? Is it at that? How do I use questions to develop those different needs? It was an evolution, I guess, which would have been a shorter answer for you, sorry. 

Marylou: No, this is great. I’m sitting here thinking, I know when I go work with clients. We’re all gung-ho to put in something new, we go through the training, and we start working on the new thing, improving it. Then, I leave. And then, it just falls apart. What in your process motivates them to continue on? This is not a set it and forget it thing especially with people. People are so variable that you just can’t set it and go. You have to monitor it and nuance it. How does this part of your process when you’re working with clients with managers, with leaders, how do you instill that sense of honor to continue on with this so that the whole person is growing as a result of it?

Chick: The linchpin is the leader or leaders. You just have to have somebody at the appropriate level in the organization that is going to work at the right altitude—not too high, not too low—to ensure that it doesn’t go by the wayside. Quite frankly, I think we give people way too much leeway to self opt-out of things. To me, it’s not a full democracy. There’s always the, “Well, what about your top producer if they don’t want to do it?” You have to decide if you’re willing to held hostage by them and the damage of them not participating. If you’re okay with that, then so be it.

You can let people openly and upwardly do everything to sabotage the process. That to me is not acceptable. Part of that is from accountability. “You can stay. If you don’t like it you can leave but there’s not a door number three that you can stay and ditch. That’s not optional path. What do we need to do to get you on board?” What I found is, the thing that motivates most people to continue is, it works. If people are making money and being successful, that’s the best way to create that accountability and desire to continue moving forward.

Marylou: But you also, in the book, indicated ways to track progress, so there’s some visual components to this so that it’s not all theory. Whenever I hear management and getting the people side of things, my head goes a little woo woo sometimes because how do you process or codify people, their behaviors, and their attitudes? You’ve really shown here and demonstrated that a little bit of process, a pinch of process, a little bit of management training, and questioning go a long way coming together to create a process, a system, and a method you can maintain. 

Chick: Yeah. In a lot of companies I’ve done work with and I’m sure this is true for you, you become a bit of the company bartender or people will confide in you. One of the things that I believe causes a lot of unrest and organizations is that people don’t know what’s expected of them. They also don’t know how their manager is going to show up and which person is going to be there today. Is it going to be nice Chick who’s really happy and giddy? Or is it going to be angry Chick who tells me I’m doing everything wrong and I’ve got to do better? It would appear that neither of those reactions are predicted based on me, it’s really Chick’s mood. 

A lot of this does come down to the discipline and the predictability of the managers. For example, I sat in hundreds of meetings across the country where a manager would be meeting with an employee doing their one-on-one. The employee would simply be sitting there as a passenger in this conversation. The manager would just do a verbal download of all of their wisdom. No questions, no confirmation of understanding, no questions around how they’re going to apply with their hearing, none of that. 

A little thing that I always incorporate is at the end of a one-on-one, I encourage managers to say, “All right, Marylou. Can you give me a quick summary of a recap of what we talked about and what we agreed to?” Just by doing that, I’m shifting it from my agenda to, “Now, it’s your stuff.” When we come back together, the first thing I’m going to do is, “Hey, Marylou, can you please provide a quick recap of what we’ve talked about last week and what we decided.” Just to get the discipline where we’re not going to talk about at once, then it’s on the next fire the next week. A lot of it comes down to getting people to apply.

I’m not a big believer that we need a lot more training. I believe we need a lot more coaching. Training is acquisition of new knowledge which is great and very important but if I don’t apply it, which is where the coaching comes in, it’s not going to happen. 

If I’m working with a salesperson to improve their ability to close deals and they’re not an aggressive personality, they’d have a hard time asking for the business. We’re going to talk about how they can overcome that, how can they close in a way that they’re comfortable, and then, they’re going to go off and do it. If I can observe them do it, that’s great. Then, we’re going to debrief and talk about how that went, what worked, did you get the deal or did you not get the deal. It really comes down to how that is applied. All of that to me, goes back to the manager and asking questions to get people to think at that level. 

Marylou: The sales roles in many companies could be split amongst business development team. There could be account executives who close the business, account managers, et cetera. Are there different styles of coaching that you recommend based on what types of sales role they’re in?

The reason why I asked that is I’m finding, from a business developer point of view, where they’re not necessarily working smaller number of deals because they’re trying to find people to qualify and get to an opportunity. We’re talking to a lot more people. There’s a little bit more habit involved.

Does that require a different type of manager than say, someone who’s going to be working with account executives and getting to close. Or can one person, with your training or with this particular method, do well in all facets of sales?

Chick: That’s a really good question. I’ll do my best to answer it. From my experience, what excites me about what we wrote about and what I talked to people about, is it’s universal and applies whether it’s a relationship management role, a business development role, a CFO role, a product management role, a healthcare administrator role. The questions applies everywhere. It can be done by the same person.

I do think, the aptitude and the natural strengths of a person are going to influence their interest. If somebody is really technical and likes to have a lot of things coming through the pipeline quickly and the sales cycle is quick, that’s very different than an enterprise strategic selling model that is going to take 18–24 months to close. I think natural attributes of the leader and their interest in that product has a bigger impact on the success or failure versus their ability to use this approach in question-centric coaching. The types of questions it would be asked, the pace, and the number of the batch people had in those different stages, that certainly is going to vary, but the underlined premise would be consistent.

Marylou: Interesting. The book is broken out into four or five sections?

Chick: Four sections.

Marylou: Four sections. The first section is all about the fundamentals of coaching. Is this for the person who has already coached or is already in a management role? Could it be for aspiring coaches and managers? For example, I have a lot of folks right now; my clients. They have done really well in the sales development role. The next progression for them, growth within the company is go to a lead role. I start freaking out when I hear that because they don’t have any type of any management training. Would this be applicable to someone like that who’s thinking about? They’re naturally starting to ask good questions of their clients, of their prospects. I’m curious if this is something that people who are not really yet in the coaching or leadership role to take in and be able to apply.

Chick: Great question and yes. The one thing that I’ve never seen is any data that correlates leadership or coaching effectiveness based on level or tenure. In fact, I think organizations put too much credence in the number of years of doing something. Is it that I’ve done this job for 20 years and every year, I continue to grow and learn—you talked about that curiosity and that learning desire as an engineer—so that I continue to evolve? Or am I doing things the first year and I’ve repeated them for 20 years? Those are two different people. I find a lot of folks would fall in that category. There’s the percentage of the tail of the distribution better than growers and the learners.

I think that whether it’s somebody who’s been leading for a while, quite frankly, I don’t equate them as being an effective leaders just because they’ve done it for a long time. I think this is really good for everybody. I consider myself successful. I consider myself the level that I worked at my day job is in the executive level, but I still follow the same principles. I’ve seen enough of peers or similar level people that are really bad at this stuff. I’ve seen enough trainwrecks to know that it’s not universally done.

Marylou: And we don’t help, either, because here I am telling you that I’m worried about high producing sales executive going in the management. I have nothing to base on. I just have a fear of it.

Chick: But you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I think the attributes that make someone a great producer are not always the same attributes that are going to make them a great leader. If you’re a great producer, it may just be tenacity. It may be, you’re going to hold on through. It could be a number of things. Now, you’re shifting where you need to be responsible for not managing other people but developing other people. That can often be in conflict of how they’ve been successful. I share the same concerns and I’ve seen plenty of failures were the top producer becomes the leader. What I see is one of the things we talked about in the book, is working on the system versus working in the system.

Marylou: Yeah, I saw that in chapter three in the book. It’s a great section to learn about, especially for me, alleviating my fears. I just don’t have a lot of insight into what to look for, for a good producer, as you say—excellent producer—who wants to grow within the company. The natural progression is going to be, at some point, into management. They have it down, at least in my world, because they’ve proven over and over again the routine is habitual in nature and that they’re consistent and bordering unpredictable. For the most part, very consistent. To take that and then plump them in to a role where now they’re responsible for team performance and stragglers, how is that going to work with a personality who’s so driven and so disciplined to be able to pinpoint the areas of lead in the rest of the team?

This first section of the book is really great. Essentially, […] to be okay with. You can definitely get there but there are some warning signs. There are some key things that you really need to consider first before you make that leap. 

Chick: Absolutely, and will they fundamentally enjoy the activities associated with that role? I think people do aspire to move into a different role. My personal opinion is, organizations sometimes undervalue an individual contributor role. Not everybody needs to aspire to be a leader of people.

What I think happens is most people that are in that mindset or the organization just promotes them because they were the best at whatever they were leading person. They spent a lot of years crafting their ability to underwrite or to run technology independently. Now, they move into this role and they continue to spend time. In fact, they’re working on versus in. Those people, I think, it’s really natural for them to dive back into the system. Instead of helping, “You and I used to be peers, I’ve got promoted, now you work for me.” What’s really easy for me to dive back in and rescue a deal that may go bad that you’re involved in, but not bring you along from a development perspective simultaneously. I saved the deal but I don’t build any capacity in you.

It’s easy for me to do that because that’s where I spent my career. I wasn’t the best deal maker that there was. That’s not the sole responsibility. It’s also to develop people and doing it or telling them how you did it is not going to build capacity in other people. It just doesn’t work. These people can reject it. It’s like if you’re selling, you don’t just go in and tell somebody about all the great things your product does. You start with questions. You start by diagnosing what’s going on in their world and how might you be able to help them. But that’s not where you begin. 

Marylou: Looking for those gaps to see if there’s a good fit there. Truly, a diagnostic process. You’re right. I’ve seen it over and over again in my 30 years of working with sales people as coming in, saving the day, yet there is no instruction of what happens after that. How did that happen? What just transpired? Yes, you saved me but how can I do this on my own going forward? What’s the teaching moment or moments here?

Chick: Exactly, right. I would profess that, that teaching moment doesn’t serve with the person you saved the deal going into a two-hour dissertation about what they did. I profess that it would be good to say, “Marylou, what did you observed? Let’s take a step back and reflect on how we got into this position in the first place. When I came in, where were we? What are some of the things you observed that I did that were beneficial.” It’s being very deliberative about that debrief process so that learning take place. Not just jumping in the car or an airplane and parachuting into the next crisis.

Marylou: Right. The other thing I liked about this whole process is that we can also chronicle these dialogues, these exchanges in the form of a playbook or something that can help the rest of the folks coming up through the ranks, to look at certain situations or to listen to certain situations that happened, how that was overcome, what the teaching points where, and what are the next steps were as we march people down that pipeline.

I think that’s another area that this is beautiful for is extending that knowledge out to other team members who may be struggling, not right now, but will be someday. I think with all the tools we have now, shame on us if we’re not doing essentially those interviews or debriefings, like you’ve said. After the fact, who understand what went well, what we can improve on, what we have done differently, how did you feel about that, what would you do differently, what do you think the next stage or step is, et cetera.

Chick: That’s exactly right. I was an industrial engineer. I was taught plan, do, review. You talked about the debrief and that’s exactly the mindset. The same thing, ideally, let’s plan this. I’m going to go on a call with you. Let’s talk about our roles. Let’s talk about how we’re going to approach this. Again, if I’m the manager traveling with someone on my team, I’m going to be asking questions about, “Tell me about what you’ve identified as why we might be a good fit. Tell me about how they’re currently managing, whatever it is, our product does. Tell me about what research you’ve done about the organization and whether they’re doing well.” It’s getting people to think about that preparation, not just telling someone you need to be prepared. I think, we make far too many assumptions that if we just tell people something, they automatically know what needs to be done. In some cases that’s true, but not always. 

Marylou: This goes to our prospects, too. This is so correlated to our prospects. We don’t assume that they’re going to understand which option is the best for them, that they’re going to somehow feed through these three different things and figure it out. We have to demonstrate for them and start helping them understand which of these three options best fits them.

Chick: Exactly right. You’re absolutely right. One other point you talked about where you said you can document it in a playbook which is what I spent a good part of my career doing. We’ve done things with sales leaders, bringing in divisional sales managers or regional sales managers and talking about understanding where each person on their team, their sales producers, where they struggle in their pipeline—similar to what you get them to do using the data and the metrics—but then, talk about how have you coached people around a constraint at this stage? At the close stage? What have you done? What kind of questions do you ask?

Not only do we build sales playbooks, but we build sales coaching playbooks so that they’re not all having to reinvent the wheel. There are only so many different things you can encounter. Let’s capture those, understand those, and identify the types of questions we want to use to help build people’s knowledge and skills in those particular areas.

Marylou: I think the biggest aha moment for the listeners, I’m hoping, is this is not a passive process. This is a very proactive, very engaged process. It requires you to get out of that command and control mode, and more in we’re a team, we all have valuable input, we’re all coming from different areas of knowledge, different experiences.

I got a message today from one of my clients. They wanted to have a document that explains some type of hardware configurations. It was asked by the sales executive. “Where is this document?” I naturally said, “You know what? Great. This is a perfect opportunity for you to research what all of the different hardware options are and let’s present it in our next huddle so that we can talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each. We can talk about whether it makes sense to do a campaign around this because if we’re getting this question a lot, it’s something that we want to hit as we go into a conversation or maybe create should ask questions document.”

It’s taking that spin of, “I’m going to do this for you,” and putting it rather, “Great question, great need, let’s have you managed that, collecting the data, and present to us—you’re a salesperson—the why behind which one over the other.” They’re glad to do that but it’s just so not natural for people to take that and run with it.

Chick: I agree. What a great way to engage your team, engage a person, and give them a stretch assignment so they can develop some additional skills. If you’re going to present something, you know as well as anybody, you become a master of it. I’m not sure what the negative or the reason you wouldn’t do that other than it’s just isn’t how we normally do things.

Marylou: Sometimes even I as a consultant, it’s faster for me to do something, but I’m realizing—this is before, now I’ve had this great book to actually reinforce that—it’s helping me really understand that yes, it may be 70% of what we want, but it’s 70% that I’m not doing either. It’s basically 70% done, we’re going to find tune and finesse, and make beautiful the other 30%.

By the way, we have a conversation around it. We talked about experiences we’ve had with clients. We talked about all these things that help us understand the story behind the need for this. It’s just opens up the ability for the reps to have deeper conversations, more meaningful conversations; it’s just a winwin. Taking that mindset and saying, “Yup, this is great. You’re in charge. Go figure it out. Here’s the stuff that you need to do. We’ll put it together as a team and make it a production document, in this case, that we can use to run our sales process.”

Chick: I think it’s a great opportunity for that leader. Even through the development of this document and the discussion with the sales team, as a leader, I’m going to stay engaged with that person. I’m going to coach them through that process as well to the extent that it’s going to depend on the person.

Rather than saying, “You know what, here’s what you need to do first,” which is what most commanding control leaders would do, my approach would be, “Walk me through what you see in the four steps of this process entailing. How are you going to start?” Not because I don’t trust them, but because by asking that question, it helps me assess their critical thinking skills in an environment or in a process that’s different than what they do everyday. 

The whole point of the book is how do you develop the critical thinking skills of your team? How do you improve your position of leverage as a leader? Your team is better equipped to solve problems on their own and they don’t need to be coming to you in a panic. This is a great opportunity to do that outside of the traditional pipeline or whatever it is that they’re doing.

You’re right. It’s a different habit that has to be formed. You have to get in the habit of asking questions. Quite frankly, I think you need to prepare for those conversations differently. Most managers just wing it because their conversations were pretty surfacy. If you’re not used to asking questions, write down a few questions that you can ask just to get the conversation started. You’re not dictating it and you silences your friend or ally and not the enemy.

I think leaders that do try and ask questions, if the other person doesn’t respond immediately, they feel compelled to fill the dead air and give them the answer. I think asking a good question, silence is the evidence of a good question because it means that they’re contemplating. Let them contemplate. Ask the question and let them think about it.

Marylou: Your section two of the book really helps us understand the fundamentals of questions. The basics, but also the strategic use of them which is very helpful. I think because we’re all kind of like, “How do I ask a good question?” or “What’s a good question?” we now have to do these. We should know how to do these or at least work on doing these to that implication question process that we learned with the spin-selling methodology that helps us help people think outside the box, challenge us a bit, and pokes them a little bit. We know how to do that pretty well, but we’re dealing with our own people, so there’s a way to approach that and I think you’re right. Listing them all down, getting an understanding of what the outcomes that you’re looking for, and then backing it up into what types of questions you could ask to understand how they view that outcome is really important.

Chick: I agree. Some people are very inquisitive and just naturally ask questions. There is a strategy of using questions. It’s learnable. You can repeat it. I always tell leaders that it isn’t their natural habit. You don’t need to have 50 questions in your toolbelt. I ask the same questions often. Back to being predictable, by doing that, if I asked a question every time we meet, over time, you’re going to come in prepared to answer that question. I’m changing behavior by me asking questions.

Marylou: I love that. Actually, this section of the book, for those of you, is great to hone your skills for asking questions of your prospects, for business developers, and the AEs alike. This is really great section of the book that helps you think about the complexity of the questions, how to approach them from a relationship and trust point of view. Really valuable information regardless whether you’re doing this type of coaching or managing, but also if you’re dealing with working with people you don’t really know very well and you’re trying to get some engagement out of that conversation.

We move to that section three now, where we’re actually implementing. This is where we’ve really start seeing the value of preparation as you said. You prepare, you execute, you review. That’s so great to see that. This is the actual execution. Are there certain areas there that you wanted to point out to people that you think really differentiate what you’re trying to do in this book versus some of the other management books that may be out there for sales management? Are there certain things within the section that you want to highlight for us?

Chick: Yeah, a couple of things. One would be, you have to get to know your team. In most cases, at a deeper level than you know your team today. You may know them because you worked with them for 10 years. You know about their family. But, for example, have you ever asked them a question of, “What motivates you? What part of your role do you think you do the very best and why?” So, trying to get underneath the skin and have more meaningful conversations.

Interestingly enough, I’m doing a session with some leaders in healthcare. There was a survey or pre-assessment of their skills in different areas. I think people have the tendency to overrate the level of trust with their team, their ability to communicate effectively, and their overall leadership skills. Part of this is getting to know people and having a high trust relationship where they’re willing to speak the truth to you. I found in a lot of places, that does not happen. 

I’ve got two sons that served in the military and one’s still in. He’s an intelligence analyst. I love the term “truth” and “ground truth.” Truth is the truth that you hear from your command and control station. Ground truth is what’s going on in the real world. There is often a very big difference between these two. Talk to a leader like, “Oh no. In my team, everybody’s engaged. They’re doing a great job. I’ve got a really high trust team, great communication, we get to talk to people.” I’m like, “Absolutely not.” I’m afraid to say anything. How do you get to know the team and get to that one-size-fits-one so that you really know how you can help people improve?

The other thing would be, especially in the sales world which I know a lot of your listeners are in, understanding where people have a constraint in their sales process and using your tools to identify that so that you’re applying a one-size-fits-one instead of a one-size-fits-all. Really, that diagnosis of where to coach, if you’ve got metrics which a lot of organizations do, that’s great. I found even with those metrics, they don’t really use them from a coaching perspective. You use them from a managing perspective saying, “We’ve got to get more deals through the pipe,” but they’re not doing anything to help figure out how to accomplish that. Telling somebody they need to increase their production and asking some questions what’s getting in the way are very different conversations.

Marylou: Right. Like you said, they do have data but maybe not specific to location in the pipeline, necessarily, where things are getting gunky and stuck. That’s what I found. Like you’ve said, they’re looking at global overall type numbers, summaries, instead of detail, inter- and intra-stage metrics that helps us understand where the conversations are failing.

Chick: Yeah, that’s a great point. I see so many leaders working in the wrong altitude. They’re working so high. The analogy that I was using in another meeting today, I was driving in my car this weekend and I was in an area that I didn’t know. My GPS and my car was zoomed in really close, maybe a quarter mile around my car. I was panic-stricken because I didn’t know what direction I was going. I didn’t know how to proceed. I zoomed out, went up, and got context to some big landmarks. “Okay, I got it. Now I know where I’m going.”

If I’m zoomed way out, it doesn’t help me because I can’t even see the road I’m on. If I’m zoomed in too far, I see way too much detail of the road and everything right around me. I’ve got to figure out that altitude is a leader that I need to work at to effectively transform my team and my organization.

Marylou: That’s a great analogy. I love that.

Chick: Thank you.

Marylou: It really focuses on the fact that it’s a variable. This whole thing is variable in nature from the standpoint of people variable. There’s a lot of areas where you can stockpile knowledge and assistance because we’ve been down that road before in some other capacity with some other person and are able to now create a library of, “Here’s the things where we’ve been. Here’s the obstacles we’re able to overcome. Here’s some of the new challenges we’re working on now. Isn’t this fun?”

Chick: You have to look at it.

Marylou: Yeah, exactly.

Chick: It’s all changing. That attitude is different for every person on the team because of what they need. To me, that’s what makes all of these fun. You really have to be in the game to understand what people need, at what time, and that is always evolving. People are growing and changing,

Marylou: The book is It Begs the Question, Chick Herbert, Learn how the best managers drive performance through Question-Centric Coaching. Now, is that your terminology? Question-Centric Coaching? QCC?

Chick: Yes, it is. 

Marylou: Great. What’s the best way that we can continue. We’ll get the book, of course, on Amazon. Are there other ways that we can get to know you, your process, your training, what’s available for us to learn more. Where will we go do that?

Chick: I do have a website. It’s not a super robust website but it does have quite a bit of the information on it. The website is questioncentriccoaching.com. It’s a long URL but questioncentriccoaching.com and you can also purchase the book there. It talks about the premise in some of the other services and the work that we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you today and talk about it. I’m very passionate about it. I didn’t write the book because I aspire to write a book. I wanted to write the book because a lot of people said, “You should write a book to help more people do this because it works.” It’s not something I turn on and turn off. It really is in my DNA. I’m passionate about it. My goal is to try and eradicate bad leadership. There’s unfortunately too much of it around.

Marylou: I was also going to say that’s lifelong work that you’re talking about now.

Chick: It definitely a little too aspirational. 

Marylou: I’m great at process, I’m a little bit not too sure about people, but obviously for me, I’m the coach. I’m a consultant. I’m dealing with people all the time. Having those tools in your tool chest of how to get people to engage, how to get them to do the work that needs to be done at hand, have fun doing it, and enjoy it. Why don’t you come back later if you’re a consultant like me for that next project? It’s really great to have this side of the knowledge, understood, practice, apply, and really this is a planning, execution, and review process. It’s never ending. 

I love the way that the book is laid out because you can really consume it and start applying it. It’s like a manual or a reference book which is a nice way to write a book. Go back to it. I’m sure you have a lot of readers who’ve earmarked sections of the book where they go back and review all the time. That’s it. That’s the mark of a good book, for sure.

Chick: That is nice of a compliment one could get, so thanks. And that was the intent. It wasn’t to have it be a big theoretical book that you didn’t know what to do. I’m a pretty simple person. It’s a pretty simple book with some icons and graphics to convey points. The intent was to give people that they can literally use tools in their very next conversation. It’s as simple as that.

Marylou: Wonderful. Chick, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate it. I’ll be sure to put all the links and things on Chick’s page everybody. For those of you who are driving and don’t have time to write something down, don’t worry, it’ll all be all up there. The book is, again, It Begs the Question-Learn how the best managers drive performance through Question-Centric Coaching. Thank you, Chick, so much for your time.

Chick: Thank you, Marylou. I really enjoyed it and appreciated the opportunity.

How does trust between team members translate to better communication and higher performance? And how can you translate your trust-building skills to your sales calls in order to build rapport quickly?

To explore these questions and more, Jason Treu joins today’s podcast episode. Jason is an executive coach who works with teams to help them build trust and communication skills and increase performance. He’s also the author of the book Social Wealth. Listen in to hear what Jason has to say about the top issues in the sales industry today, how to turn a team into a cohesive unit, and how to build rapport in the first few minutes of a phone call.

Episode Highlights:

• The top issues Jason sees in the industry today
• The importance of hiring
• Whether any type of team can be turned into a cohesive team
• Where to start in building a trust mindset
• The trust-building process
• Building rapport in the first few minutes of a call
• Jason’s book, Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships By Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network
• What can be done to start getting teams to high performance

Resources:

Jason Treu

Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships By Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is all about trust. Trust, high performance, teamwork, and I’m very happy to have Jason Treu. Pronounced as Troy but it’s T-R-E-U for those of you who are looking him up. It’s Jason T-R-E-U. It’s pronounced Troy. He’s an executive coach, works with teams to really get our teams at high performance, great communicators, and most importantly build this trust that’s necessary.

All of you know, top of funnel where we work, we have a real issue with keeping people engaged and keeping teams together and high performing. Jason is all about that. Today, we’re going to talk about the work that he does. Some things for you to consider as you’re putting together these teams for business development in creating a high performance, highly interactive, highly engaged team. Welcome, Jason, to the podcast.

Jason: Thanks for having me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.

Marylou: Let’s figure this out. Where do we begin? What are the biggest issues that you see in general? If we can focus on top of funnel because that’s where my teams are—is the sales executives that are working in business development—what are you seeing as some of the biggest issues that if you’re listening to this podcast, you want to be able to isolate what are those top issues that I’m dealing with and how do I resolve this? Let’s start with, what are the top issues that you’re seeing in the industry today?

Jason: I think bottomline is people are not just performing as high as they could be, that’s one issue. Underperformance is pretty rampant. I would also say that few people who are working at their highest level. Gartner, at a stat, […] self reporting only 16% is employees said they were putting force their maximum daily effort.

I would say then the other part is obviously employee retention. People are leaving jobs all the time and it costs anywhere from 100%-300% to replace those individuals. Also, I think, you see a lack of trust going on from the customer side of the issue as well. People just don’t trust working with individuals in an organization today, probably more than ever. That all hurts your model and how you’re working with those individual external to your organization.

The other part of it, I’d say the 5th one really agile teams. Meaning, today, teams are having to be thrown together and put together on the fly. Not a lot of teams are together for a long period of time. Unless you build a significant amount of trust, caring, connection, and belonging, you can’t ever reach the ability you have them operate at their highest level together. That’s where the magic begins.

When you start to take a look at all of those issues, they’re pretty significant because the teams and the organizations that can master that can compete on a significantly larger playing field. At the end of the day, beat organizations and lead them 5, 10, 15, 20 times bigger than the they are because they won’t have that. They’re working at such a low level that you can out blank them and people will want to work with you so much more because the relationship they have with you is so radically different. Not only then they view against the competition, but really anyone they’ve ever worked with.

Marylou: In your experience, is this a hiring issue to begin with or are you comfortable that you can work with teams that have been, like you say, bootstrapped together, don’t necessarily have the skillset within the organization that they’ve been put into at this point in time? Or is it hiring the issue? Or can you take any type of hodge-podge team and create a cohesive, trust-driven team out of this band of misfits, if you will. Where does that lie along the spectra?

Jason: That’s an excellent question. On the hiring side of things I think the challenge begins with you got to have more team dynamic question. I would say, the more question that get people character value, communication, collaboration than what most people ask. At the end of the day, when you look at core hiring, the biggest hire you’ll ever have a problem with is—and I have this in clients and they’re extremely difficult to get rid of—is extremely high-performers you don’t buy in the vision value and go off with reservations.

The fear is, how can I have someone who’s crushing it? How could I ever fire them? But because you didn’t do a good enough job of really on the frontend examining who they are as a person, you just let them in. Now, they’re a cancer in the organization but how do you get rid of your number one salesperson?

The other point, how do you keep them because it’s killing the rest of the organization? I do think on the hiring side of things, you do have to start asking a different set of questions. The reason that questions like that work as well is that if you ask the question like, “What’s your greatest strength?” Everyone listening to this would have that someone asked this question. You’re on autopilot, you’re on robot mode. But if you ask someone a question like, “Tell me about the worst thing you ever been on and how did you handle it? What did you? Did you try to only engage […] people motivated, or just work with them?” Your performance wouldn’t fall off.

They’ve never been asked that type of question before, so that helps you to start to evaluate. But on the other side of it, on the flip side of it, they’ve done tons of studies where they looked at all-star teams versus hiring just B-players. They found that B-players often will outperform all-star teams. In fact, most of the time they will because people who are all-stars have hard time working and coordinating together. They also did another research study for doctors where they put an all-star team of doctors together in cities to do operations. They compared that again to doctors who went from hospital to hospital and brought their core team that they’re working with, they weren’t all-stars. They found that the team that travel together and work in other hospital, in other setting outperformed all-star doctor teams and people significantly. The amount of patient […] is another thing that went on.

The more important thing is what do you do with the team right now to build extremely high level of trust with them and how do you do that in order to get the things that are necessary? The reason that trust works is the precursor for everything that you do. The bottomline is in your head personally, it goes off and says, “How much do I trust that person on a scale of 1-10?” Because that’s who you share your most intimate details with, the people that are your best friend, family, partner, or whatever. You don’t go to Starbucks and just walk in line with someone and tell folks who are complete stranger,well, I guess there could be someone that does that, but probably […] no one else. Some of us wouldn’t do that.

That’s really the first thing that you have to do in an organization is to be able to skyrocket trust in minutes with people. The problem is most teams, and the data shows, it will take you somewhere between 200-400 hours to form a very close working relationship with someone. Because the time is necessary because most people follow the path that, “I’ll be vulnerable and share with you only after I trust you.” It’s an extremely slow process because I have to get know you, there’s a time element. Well, again, we really don’t have that in today’s world. If you go back on all the clocks in the ‘60s, yeah, you can do that because most people work in a place 20, 30, or 40 years. If you don’t have years to warm someone up and have that leeway. You now have to do that instantly. If you don’t, you’re underperforming from the get-go.

B-players are just as effective as all-stars if you add in the trust element. Even probably more so because there’s a lot less issue going on in terms of, “I’m right. I’m really good. I’ve got to get someone to bend other people.”

Marylou: Wow. My head’s spinning because there’s a mindset in our industry that you leave the all-stars alone. You leave the outliers alone. They’re performers, we don’t know how they do it. They’re not necessarily nice people, but they get done job and they’re contributing to revenue. This is a big mindset change for leaders saying, “Wow, B-players. Can I really make them into a cohesive high performing team?” If I have a band, I have my two outliers and the rest of the 80% are the B-players, where do we start in developing the skill set or mindset to have this trust that you’re talking about? Are there exercises you work with clients on?

Jason: There are. The one thing that I look at is that you have to start off with the trust building process because [..] before the phone call is that when there’s a communication problem between people because this happens in a lot of organizations. They’ve got more team with a large oil and gas organization, they have other divisions. The company is doing very well but other divisions are talking to other people because they don’t trust them. They don’t want to let secrets out. They’re all little package for the most part.

The problem with that is there’s a lot of knowledge transfer people are missing that practices can help, that they aren’t leveraging which means they’re underperforming what they could be doing if they actually got together with people and had people to call up when they had a problem or an issue or they were unsure to do. They could bounce things off, start to ask people, and get to know people throughout the entire organization.

That may look like it’s communication, collaboration, and teamwork problem and it is but we don’t know until we build in our trust, the problem solves itself. A lot of times, if you do this, people just start communicating and collaborating. You don’t even need to do that work. If you solve the root problem, now we’re not looking at the leaf on the tree, it’s not a hiring problem anymore if you solve it in the onboarding.

I’ll tell you what to do because I’ve tried about everything and looked at it. […] a day which starts to happen with trust is that what’s game changing about it is vulnerability. When you can get people to be vulnerable with other people, you then can rocket trust. We’ve all done this because we’ve all met someone within 5 or 10 minutes and felt like we’ve either known them our entire lives or known them really well. What happens is, someone’s vulnerable and shared something, whatever that was—when they were weird, their experience. I don’t know. When the other person […] and what happens is you stair step up vulnerability and rocket it. You did in that one conversation what most people do 20 or 30 times.

The problem is we’re not doing it all the time. It’s more haphazard than it’s anything else. If you take that as an example, when I ask people the most vulnerable times in their lives, it’s always with a conversation in words. If the person that you cared about the most, if you could never tell them, “I love you,” they would never know. If you went to a wedding and you can never say, “I do,” it didn’t matter that you did the wedding. The word solidifies the relationship.

Marylou: Exactly.

Jason: People do all these other exercises and activities to try to build teams. At the end of the day, it’s just a waste of time. What you need to do is to get people to know your experience, your emotions, relate to you deeply, and understand that quickly. The only way you do that is by asking questions.

What I found that’s even more powerful, you can do one on one and it can work really well, but the most powerful way to do it in the organization is in the team. If you do it by a team, you can relate to a few people. Let’s say, you have five people like we talked about before. If you have five people and you’re sitting in that group, four other people in front of you, to create a strong group environment, I don’t need to connect with every person in that team, the four people.

Let’s even say there’s several group of people, you don’t have to participate. What you need to do with those four other people is to connect to probably two of them in a way either through experience.  If I asked you, “Tell me about the most important lesson you learned. Who’s your personal hero? Tell me about the biggest setback you had in the last five years and how you dealt with it? Tell me about some time when your heart was broken?” You just have to relate either experience or the emotion. It would probably […] and you start to feel this connection in safety with the people that you’re at and it’s called […]. Neurologically, biologically, and chemically, now, you feel safe. They call this psychological safety.

When you feel like that, what starts to happen is those people in your group, let’s just pretend it’s the first time you ever met them. You’ll put them in your inner circle. Psychologically, if you will, because those people now when you ask questions like that and ask probably a several more, more information that even the people that are the closest in your life now, and that anyone else in the planet know. Even though, the time element isn’t there, the feeling that they know you is there. They have that information and you know them.

Then, what happens is you’re more open to them. You can take the time element of what would take 200 hours and do that significantly faster. Literally, probably, hours where you can feel the same way with those people especially if you’re with them six months or a year, you can speed up that process pretty radically in order to feel extreme closeness towards them and this tight bonding where then you can be at that performance level that you need.

I’ll say the last thing is there is a research study by professor Arthur Aron who did it back in 1997 which was the thing that really made me open up my eyes to this. He was trying to create close relationship with people in 45 minutes. He had complete strangers ask questions, this was just paired, they didn’t know each other. Ask 36 vulnerable questions over 45 minutes. What was crazy was at the end, they surveyed preimposed, and what they found out was 30% of the people created the closest relationship in their life in 45 minutes. […] dozens and dozens of times over the year since that time.

In every environment, with every age group, in every geography, it didn’t matter where or what. I found that out myself by trying to do this. That’s really where the magic starts and ends. It’s quick, it’s not hard, and there’s pre radical results going on because of it.

Marylou: Wow. This is great for teams. My mind is, again, spinning about this. In business development, what we’re doing in working with new clients, we’re looking at trying to build that rapport. We’re on that first conversation, it’s not 45 minutes, it’s maybe three or four. In that space of time, do you think it’s possible for us to establish rapport in that small window of time with people we don’t know?

Jason: Sure. When I tell people they only have a couple of minutes, I ask them to ask uplifting questions and they dig into people that make them talk about gratifying things, or things that they’re proud of, or things that are meaningful to them so you can understand what’s going on and open the door to have more conversation. Questions are like, “What are you most excited about in your life right now? Who’s your personal hero? What do you most grateful for? What’s the greatest achievement that you had?” Even a question like, “What’s the important lesson you learned over the last year?” You can even say at someone like, “I want to ask you a couple of questions to get to understand you more as a person. Here’s some questions that I actually saw from the game. I’d just like to ask you them. Would that be okay?”

They always say, “Yes.” When you say it like a game, everyone wants to because they’re like, “Oh, a game. I want to play.” It’s also for the fun and it opens the door because the fear of missing out is so high in today’s world. People can’t say no. If they would say no, you know you’re in trouble because then you know your relationship is really […], where they really don’t want to talk to you about something. It’s more transaction-driven.

I haven’t had that happened but I guess it’s possible. BUt then when you do, you can get to know them and over time you can ask other questions. You can start to realize that understanding the things that they value and their experience and getting to know them is particularly important. Then, you can relate to them and make comments. It’s more important for them to share with you because they’ll see a lot […] through you.

Obviously, you don’t want to make this an interview. You want to get them talking more so you understand what’s going on. Because then you can start to ask questions like, “What are your pet peeves? How do you best like to communicate with individuals?” I want to know, “What would be the best way for me to work with you?” Then, you […] phone calls, texts, emails. A lot of the things that go on I find is it’s not both side that don’t want to do great work, they just operate differently. You don’t ask enough questions to understand that. You think when you send long emails to people, there’s a lot of people who only want an email with three sentences. You do more than that, they get annoyed. They get annoyed because you haven’t figured that out. Obviously, there’s no way for the people listening to this to magically wake up and figure that out except by asking.

You have to start to get to know people in a deep way and start to ask these questions over time, you can’t ask them all upfront. You have to start building the rapport. In building that deep trust initially, so they’re more willing to do that. Why is that important? Think about it this way, if you get mad at someone you really care about, there’s a lot more leeway, they’re willing to let things go and forget it. Why? Because the relationship is more important than the argument.

When you start off with someone who doesn’t know you, that’s not true. It’s in your best interest to do that because you can test more things, if they’re more willing to take leaps of faith. The requirement is, if I can build higher trust with you, then all these stuff goes better. Everyone listening to this, think about the best client engagement you’ve had, think about the best team you’ve been on, and think about how you felt, think about what you can do, think about all those results. Another way, if you can replicate that experience over every team you’re on and every client you’re with, think what that would do to your business and your career. You could imagine…

Marylou: Yeah. Game changer, 100%. I’m sitting here thinking, “Wow.” The folks that are listening to this call, we talked about over and over again, humanizing the sales conversation. We can leverage technology. We can do as much as we can but at the end of the day, it’s that belly to belly, even though it can be virtual or the phone, it’s that conversation that gives you that wealth of information, that rapport, and trust. You have it here.

Let’s talk about your book, Social Wealth. Tell me about what got you interested in that. Putting this out there is great for people. For those listening, Social Wealth is the name of Jason Treu’s book. I think for us in business development, this is a must have resource for us to be able to read, understand, and start. We apply everything, Jason. We read something, we apply what we’re learning in that sales conversation. I think this type of book is all about building extraordinary relationships. That’s really what we’re trying to do is transform that conversation in that first call where we only have a finite period of time to start building that rapport. Tell us about the book.

Jason: I started to write this book because obviously, all my clients wanted to build great relationships for some reasons. While I was looking at all the rest of the books, there were books by Keith Ferrazzi, at that time, Never Eat Alone, and a lot of great books, but the problem is they were […] story, they weren’t really a blueprint. I thought to myself, “Get rid of the story. I’ll give you a blueprint.” It’s 90% content inside of there that you can use in a way that you can reference it chapter by chapter. You can go back, start to leverage it, and understand how it can start to work for you, and where to go to meet people both personally and professionally at the same time.

And then things on how to go a conference and how to leverage that as well because there’s a lot that you can do inside of a conference. For instance, one of the things that I do with people, my own clients—which surprisingly almost no one does every single time—is if you contact the speakers ahead of time or if you get a list of the people and contact them for meetings, you’ll be amazed with how many meetings you get because people never contact them. I know it seems like hard. Like in hunter.io, you can actually get all the email aliases to contact people. Most people are pretty open in meetings because they want to be more successful and get more out of these. No one does it. I typically will go and help people do this. Like my clients who went to real estate conference that got significant amount of funding in meeting with people just by sending an email.

If you start to figure out things like that and then start communicating with them, and these conversations being much more vulnerable in getting to know them, you can really change the game on what’s going on. When you do those things, you lead with giving essentially. Giving can be listening because it’s what the people in your inner circle do. When you can start to mimic that and do those things with acquaintances, the human brain does not know the difference between reality and fantasy. Meaning, that the people that you’ve known for 20 years or for five minutes, they can’t tell the difference. That’s why when you met someone in five minutes, it’s like you’ve known them forever. Your brain doesn’t know the difference, so you feel the same way. What you do is you have to act the same and then those things can really be sped up.

Throughout the book, I try to help people get through a process where they can create familiarity with people, create an open space dialogue, where people care about them and they care about other people. That creates more of a contribution mindset where you’re less attached about what you’re getting, and more of a helping other people, and rolling people in your success and their success, and doing it in a way that sets more of a win-win situation for the most part. There’s always going to be challenges. You’re going to be able to do that much more than other people will. You’ll stand out because you’ll be doing significantly different things. When you’re dealing with a lot of the people that people here you’re dealing with, they’re getting phone calls all the time. If you’re in a room like that and you stand out differently than the other 99% of the people, how can you not help by being successful? Because those people will want to do business with you.

If you ask someone a question early on, they’ll get to know you more. “What is it that you care about?” […] would you ask other questions like that? Well then, they’re thinking, “Only people would ever ask me like that are the people that really care about me. Because why else would they do it? What could their agenda be?” Then, that person’s like, “Wouldn’t it be great to go work with that person or atleast explore them more?” Then, you have their sales skills and other things come into play. But before then, you […] that opportunity because again, the first question someone’s asking themselves all the time is, “Do I trust you or do I not?” That’s the gatekeeper question in the back of our subconscious mind. You have to get by that person. If you don’t, you won’t be successful. It’s going to be really difficult to do that.

Great salespeople do this in another way. I’ve spoken to them and asked them about some of the things I’m doing and they do it in another way, but it’s unique to them. It’s hard for them to share it with other people because it’s part of who they are, not the […] that they’re using. That’s where the challenge comes in in building trust with people.

Marylou: That’s exactly why they’re outliers. They can’t be calm. You cannot build a process around them. You can’t build a series of skill sets around them. For these other, 80%-90% of the people in sales who you want to be high producers, there is a process and method—a series of teachings—that they can learn in order to become more productive in whatever job that they’re looking for. That’s where your work is just wonderful for the folks that are in that market of the 80%, which is most of us anyway.

Jason: It is. That’s the thing that’s great about it. The other thing that starts to happen too is if you start to talk to people who are really good sales people, they’ll walk in the door, they’ll pickup the phone. Those are calling people. Because they look at it and saying, “I don’t care if 30 says no and one say yes.” But other people don’t. By doing other activities such as getting into a sales huddle and asking three things that you’re grateful for can cause a state change when you look at the abundance of the world. All the other people do something where they’re bringing up a photo of the people that they love the most or […] experience and giving them 30 seconds to a minute in a group and just sharing it. That makes everyone feel good and gets to know each other. You can do something like text someone else in the organization or just share in the group how someone helped you and thank them for it and what impact it’s made.

When you start doing that, the first thing that you do, it will change how you approach the phone in your engagement because your mind is changed. It can take a minute a person and that’s all you need to do. There’s so much research behind all this stuff and people doing it. I see the difference in it. I think people can take a […] of their time and realize that when people come in or do stuff, even if it’s just a remote thing, you can do all this stuff too. It really doesn’t matter. But you’ve got to help people along on this journey. Then they will shine and come out.

Again, my belief is and I’ve seen this happen is that B-players can crush it as much as all-stars can and even do a better job. They just need a little bit more help to get there and to show them the inside of what does is look like to be operating in the top 1%. What does it feel like, what does it look like. Then, people can find their way. You just have to give them a popcorn trail. Then they’ll be able to flourish on their own because they’re be like, “Oh, that’s what it feels like.” That’s how it is. The other […] you still know. What you said before now wires they do but their brain works so much differently that when they try to communicate to other people, it gets lost in translation. Those people actually even feel more confused when they’re trying to explain it. They’ll like, “I just don’t get it. I’ll never be good at this.” That’s the worst thing you can do.

Marylou: The downward spiral. They feel defeated. They’ll feel like, “I can never measure up.” Managers and leaders who are listening to this phone call, this is the issue. We can’t necessarily calm the outliers and make everyone else be like them. We have to create just a way of learning and teaching for the B folks to be able to perform at optimum. It’s right here. Jason Treu’s book.

To finish up here, let’s talk about how people can get ahold of you, what we can do to start working on getting our teams at high performance? Where’s the best way we can engage with you to do that?

Jason: Sure. You can go to my website. It’s jasontreu.com. I have my teambuilding game. It’s a free one called Cards Against Mundanity. I just came out with an actual physical poker style card that are brand new, that I’ve tested, that’s solely for purchase, and I do for workshop and other coaching for people so you can just go there and get all the details on it. You can use the PDF […] and the other one, there’s instructions to use.

I just want people to get out there and you’ll be […] and start to understand it because teamwork is the most important soft skill out there. Period. A team is not just necessarily the internal team. The team is the relationship you have with outside entities such as customer’s prospect, partners. If you don’t understand how to do that, you’re putting both hands behind your back. It’s the least understood out of all the soft skill by far because people just think that it’s just magic and that people understand how to do it. I’d even say it’s more important than self awareness although self awareness is really low, it leads the conversations people are having.

Teamwork is one where we’re having, that’s much further down the pipe. We’re looking really at the leaves and no one’s really looking at the root and that becomes a massive problem. The people you’re talking to would get significantly higher results. Pretty much almost overnight. They would see it if they start to indoctrinate this more and more inside of their organization. It’s not that expensive either. A lot of these stuff is essentially free. You don’t take people off site and do a expensive things. In fact, it’s like when you do a trust call or something, all that is is sending money to do an activity to have a conversation. Why don’t you just have a conversation to begin with and then you don’t need the activity.

Marylou: Right. I think this is a nice tool. A lot of it feels like there’s no process or method behind it. It’s either you have it or you don’t. I think what you’re sharing with us today is that there is a process, there is a method, there’s a series of exercises one can do. You don’t necessarily have to be inherently capable.

We have a business development team. We have eight people on it. One guy is the outlier, but the other seven, they’re all coachable, trainable, we can get them to be high performers. Don’t give up on them. But we need to have a series or method of being able to get people comfortable and try these things in a setting that is safe. That way, they can be their true self but yet excel in the role. I think that is the biggest gift that you gift to your audience, Jason. It’s the ability to know that, “I can achieve what I want to do in my career, but I need some tools to do that,” and you have some of those tools that are vital to the success of the business development team.

Jason: Yeah. Since you’re a manager and you have extreme trust with people, which are very high level, your employees will be eight times more engaged which leads to significantly higher performance. You have to have a very high level of trust. That’s what people misunderstood. There’s a recent study that just came out, people want to scale 1-5 in a Likert Scale. If they rated it three or four, meaning 5 would be extreme for us and 1 would be no. They rated you a three or four. It would be just having trust, slightly above average trust, it’s the same thing as having distrust if you have to score a five. If you did not score a five on the trust scale, it doesn’t matter. Your team is not operating at the level it could be operating at. I think that’s pretty eye opening, what you have to do in order to make all of this happen.

Again, when we get in more of the data in the research, we really dig in and see this stuff is extremely important and it’s something that we overlook. That’s why conversations like these are important. There’s a lot of road to get there but you just gotta start somewhere. You have to have a people strategy and a structure to do this which isn’t that hard or time consuming, but you have to have it in place because otherwise, you’re just not getting those people. Part of the other thing that starts to happen too is that people, when they leave the office at six or seven o’clock, they’re going to go home and listen to a podcast. They’re going to read more. Why? Because they care more and they want everyone to be successful. They care about their managers’ success. They don’t want disappoint other people. It’s not just what they’re doing at work. […] too because they want not only themselves but everyone else successful.

When you get in a contribution mindset, you now are more willing to take a leap of faith, and you’re doing crazy stuff like when mother’s lift up cars to save their kids, when you start getting more […] in the head, again, it’s completely game changing on the results that happens inside of the team. It’s all possible. As I’ve said before, we’ve all been on teams where we’d accomplished amazing things either personally or professionally that we never thought were possible. […] replicate that.

Marylou: Exactly. This has been a wonderful conversation. I hope those listeners really take to heart that the success of our business development teams is people, process, and technology. But the people component is where we struggle the most. The ability to retain the team, the ability to be able to reach out to customers and prospects, be authentic, and be able to have those conversations—this is the foundation to be able to build that within your teams.

Jason, thank you so much for your time today. I very much appreciate it. I’ll be sure to put all the links for everybody in the page for the podcast, his book, contact information. I really suggest that you contact him to work with the teams that you have in place right now especially if you’re struggling and not meeting your monthly numbers or even if you’re at a point where you’re at a status quo and want to take it to the next level. He’s the perfect person to be able to take those teams and grow the team internally, so that they’re the high performance team that you’re hoping for.

Jason, thanks again for your time.

Jason: Thank you for having me in the show.

The experience of being a customer has changed rapidly just over the past few decades. But while the customer experience has changed, has it improved? Is there room for further improvement?

Today’s guest is Ian Moyse of Natterbox. He joins the podcast today to talk about disruptions in the customer experience, how customer experience is changing, and why it matters. Listen in to hear what Ian has to say about where this kind of disruption has the biggest impact, how buyer personas can improve the customer experience, and how customer experience impacts revenue and customer loyalty.

Episode Highlights:

• How disruptors are changing the customer experience
• Where disruption is having the biggest impact
• When consumers prefer to interact with a human rather than a machine
• Using buyer personas to optimize the customer experience
• When it’s important to communicate via phone rather than email or chat
• Analyzing how customer experience impacts loyalty and revenue

Resources:

Ian Moyse

Ian on Twitter

Natterbox

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a really interesting guest. I’m going to ask him to introduce himself because what he’s doing is such a great topic that I don’t want to flub it and bungle it. With me today is Ian Moyse. He works for a company called Natterbox. With that, I would like him to tell us the topic today which is customer experience, the word ‘disruption’ was used, so you know that this is going to be a fiery discussion. Let’s start by introducing Ian.

Ian, tell us about yourself and tell us what got you interested in this topic.

Ian: Sure. Thanks, Marylou. The interest is the day job, a combination of sales leadership. It comes as part and parcel of winning and retaining customers. Also, in the technology I’m involved in, I’m European sales director, as you mentioned, at Natterbox which is the most embedded telephony for Salesforce. We utilize customer data to personalize a telephony experience; personalize and shorten one of the bits that’s been missing. I also sit as non-exec at a number of other technology firms and industry bodies. I get a good feel for what’s going on in different sectors, different sizes, and dynamics of company.

The world changed, right? We, as humans, are the customer. You and me are the customer of whether it be an Uber, Airbnb, whoever it is, the stores. I follow what’s happening in the US, as well as in Europe, in retail we’re seeing devastation. We’ve seen stores that have been around or brands that have been around for an incredibly long period, seizing to exist, or trying to ratify and change their whole business around the way the customer and their offerings, and it’s hard.

Amazon got there first. I remember when Amazon first came out. I think a lot of people poo-pooed it. “It was a bookseller. Ehh, I don’t know if people…” and all of that but it was just books. What people didn’t foresee was they were a platform. They were never just a bookseller. That just happened to be where they started. We’re seeing the same with Uber now. Uber is a taxi company. No, it’s not. It’s a platform for transportation. We’re seeing UberRUSH now and we’re seeing Ubereats moving parcels and food.

We’re at a market where disruptors are coming about and saying, “There’s a different way of doing this now.” Because of the technology that is now available and the affordability of that technology. Everyone has a smartphone. If I can enable a smartphone user to do something in their daily life than they do already—quicker, smarter, cheaper, more conveniently—there is a high-propensity of rapid attraction and disrupts what’s theirs. It’s not that the existing customer experience or biodynamic is necessarily—it served its purpose for when we were there. What we saw in the 70s was the experience you’d get for what was around in the 70s and the way we behaved.

The millennials and Gen Zs now, they’ve grown up with these technology. They expect to, “I want it now. I want it faster. I want it quick.” They have no issue about it being delivered through something like Amazon Prime and delivered automatically using ring—your doors opened by the delivery driver and put them while you’re out there—all these sort of stuff which, if we said these 20 or 30 years ago, I think we’d have all said, “No one would accept that.” It’s happening. Right now it’s happening and it’s accelerating. How do you operate in that world? It’s difficult.

Marylou: Yeah, definitely. Is the focus in the segment of the market where you have existing customers or is this now applying across retention, existing customers, new customers? Where is the main focus that we’re seeing disruption have the biggest impact? Is it in the base or is it in getting new? Or is it a combination there?

Ian: I think it’s a combination of where were seeing a disrupt offering, a different way of doing something that already existed. We’re doing it differently. Airbnb, there’s all sorts of rentals and stuff, but there wasn’t anything really like Airbnb that disrupt an individual’s specific thing. As Uber, it started off with taxis, now it’s any deliveries. I think the danger is your existing base.

We all remember Blockbuster video. Hiring videos, going along probably, coming away with two or three because you can’t make a decision which one are you going to get. It worked. When that came out—and videos came out in the 80s—it was a humongous success because that was the new. That was what we saw and they disrupted it in a way because you can rent these things. They’re too expensive to purchase at that time. I remember, a video, a film, to buy it would have been £100-£120. If you saw that today and no one would even believe it. A DVD is typically, in your market, I guess around $10-$15. They disrupted themselves and came out with a way that people digest video material.

What we now have is Netflix, Amazon Love Film, and these other platforms. Apple is about to come into that space quite aggressively according to all the reports that I’m seeing. Where it’s been disrupted again with the different way of doing it because of the technology we now have. That’s the challenge, you’ve got to address your bias. It’s not about whether you’re right and wrong. It’s not about whether you’ve got a good brand or a good product, it’s how does the buyer choose to digest your market segment and are you serving them in that way.

In retail, for example, we see an incredible amount of companies trying to figure out how do we transition to being online as well as bricks and mortar. How do we do the combination? They cannot ignore the online market because it’s just too big but they’re not used to it. Amazon had the luxury building from ground up, from scratch.

Often, what I’ll say to business is, when I’m in a exec world chatting about any advice is, get a whiteboard, get a paper, understand your business, and you start from scratch. Just have a meeting and just start from the principle in your heads, “If we were starting this business today, to compete with us, how do we do it? What were the processes be? What would be the technology? How would we address the customer?” Don’t get bogged down in any ball and chain of legacy you’ve got. I know you can’t actually then do that and execute on it exactly that easily, but that’s the mindset you’re going to start from is, “If we all left and went to a startup to disrupt this market, how would we do it today?” You’ll find there’ll be systems or approaches you’ll take that you couldn’t have taken 10 years ago because it didn’t exist or they weren’t affordable.

AI is now coming into this market and at an incredibly affordable rate. We’re going to see more and more of chat box where you’re chatting to people your customer experience. You think it’s a human and it’s actually not.

One of the interesting dilemmas we’ve got is, what we do is working with telephony side which […] talking about this at an event next week. “[…] telephony is going to die, right?” When something falls through the cracks, where do you turn? If something doesn’t work with a supplier—with your gas supplier, and the boiler fix, or something, or doing electronically on the website for self-serve—if it doesn’t work and you fall through the cracks, that they haven’t got it perfect, where do you turn? Quickly, you’ll probably turn it into live chat, and if there wasn’t a live chat, where’s the phone number?

Marylou: Exactly.

Ian: That’s where we see businesses increasingly falling down because they’ve not scoped for that exception. The example I’ll be giving next week is, we’re all going to the retail stores today and there’s the self-serve tail where we can go to scan your own goods. And then there’d be 10 of those and there’d be someone over there where there’s a couple of people actually human, serving. The first I’m going to ask the audience is, “Where do you go?” Some people would still go to the human by default. The second one is, “What happens when you go to the self-serve? Do you ever have it not worked? Do you ever see other people next to you go, excuse me, can I get some help?” Happens all the time, right? As soon as something falls through the cracks, you’ve got to go cope for or you’re that human element for help. If not, your customer experience immediately falls straight away from what you’re trying to deliver.

It’s great alternating and looking what technologies you can use. I’m looking at the Panaseer of Amazon who do a fantastic job, but Amazon’s got an incredibly deep pockets and an incredible technology ownership. Most businesses will never achieve what Amazon have achieved. Although you may aspire to it, what they’ve done may look easy, but it is not. They’ve invested an incredible amount of money and time to build the experience they’ve built. It’s a great aspiration to how do we empower customers to self-serve where they choose to, but also, understanding, at times, customers are not going to self-serve and we need to deliver a shortened, personalized customer experience.

Marylou: I think that’s great. I know just recently, for me personally, I have a house in California that is literally down to the studs now. I have been running back and forth to IKEA which we have at here in California. I got a curtain rod that looked like it was going to be easy to install but once I got into it, I realized, “This is difficult.” Luckily, I was able to go to YouTube, of all places, and find an installation. But they said, even in that YouTube video, “If all else fails, pick up the phone, and call and talk to someone.”

Ian: There you go.

Marylou: Is that going to be the best way? My stress level instantly went down because I knew, I’ll look at the video, I’ll go through that, but at the end of the day, if I can’t figure this out—and I can see myself pretty mechanical in nature—but if I can’t figure it out I know I have an escape goat. Then contrast that to a recent experience I’ve had with a local vendor here who does basically, follow-up software, their based in the Pacific Northwest. It has been a nightmare to try to get any type of help, to get any type of turnaround time because we’ve had to go to the knowledge base. We have to try to figure it out there. If that didn’t work, then you put in a ticket. It’s just like you can never speak to a human.

Ian: Typically, think about that, when you want to speak to a human is when all else fails. You’re probably at that end position where, “I’m desperate now. I got this. I thought it’d be easier. I wanted to get this camera set up for the wedding next Saturday. Actually, I’ve got a day left now. I haven’t got time.” The time pressure, whatever it is, now you get frustrated, “I  just want to speak to someone now.” Then, if the provider hasn’t catered for that experience, that’s when you hit the problem.

Amazon gets away with it because, I don’t about you, but every time I got into their live chat for help where products turn up and it was the wrong product, which happens, they pick an awful lot of products, the volume that they ship is going to happen, but the speed at which they dealt with it on live chat, I’ve always had someone appear on my live chat very quickly, works with the problem with me, resolve it, send the label, can send it back, new one’s on the way. I’m happy because you’re there 24/7 because you’ve resourced it and you can afford to do so.

How many times have we gone to a company that you’re describing there, “Are there a phone number? I’ll phone them.” What you get is into a queue. Typically, you’ll end up with an IVR, Interactive Voice Response, and often they are confusing. They haven’t tested how does this works for the customers. You’ll go through and you’ll wait in a queue for someone. You’ll get through and invariably, sometimes what happens is, “You should have pushed a three instead of a four in the third menu. That product sits in a different division. Let me transfer you.” “Okay, fantastic. Where are you transferring me to? An agent?” “No, no, no. I can only transfer you to their call queue.” Then you go into their call queue. Now, your blood’s starting to boil a little bit more. “How long have I been on the phone?” “40 minutes.” It’s your day and the problem typically has been caused to you by a purchase or something that’s gone wrong and you just want to get resolution–short, quick. “I just want to get this done and move on with my life.” Great.

Then you get through—this is the worst case scenario—they said, “Actually, the person you speak to will need an engineer to call you and talk you through it. Can they call you back this afternoon?” “Okay, give me the number.” As you put the phone down, how much are you thinking, “I wonder if they’re going to call me back?” Maybe you wait until 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM. Some people would’ve called him back, others will believe in 5:00 PM. 6:00 PM comes and you phone back, and their office is shut now.

Marylou: Right.

Ian: Here’s the problem. You’ve already had a bad customer experience. When you phone tomorrow, when they’re open office hours, and you’re probably really frustrated, yes, still having to burn more time on this. It’s now your time. They’re not serving you. “I just want to get a fix.” You go through the same IVR again. You get the same queue again. But they know they didn’t call you back. You called yesterday. They took your details, took your number, didn’t call you back.

You call in today, they treat you exactly the same. Shouldn’t it be that when you call back tomorrow, as an example, they can detect your phone number, “That’s the phone number we were supposed to call someone back on yesterday.” And automatically, present you with the dynamic message to say, “Ah, Mr. Moyse, we can detect, we didn’t call you back yesterday as promised. Apologies. If that’s what you’re calling about please press 1 and we will prioritize you straight through into a preferential line. If it’s anything else, press 2.” In which case it diverts to the normal IVR because you know with a good deal of certainty that they’ll call you back because the problem didn’t close off yesterday.

If you treat them differently, guess what? You turn a frustrated customer into a delighted one. Straightaway, you treat them differently. Who’s ever heard that happen? One, straight through to an agent who gets told and prompted, “We didn’t call these guys back yesterday,” and starts the call with big apologies. “We’re going to get this sorted for you right now. That’s our error.” Boom! It diffuses that customer’s piece. It diffuses the risk of customer churn because you’ve taken away that pain. As opposed to, “Put me through a lot more pain now. Treat me like you did yesterday, guess what I’m going to do all day? I’ll moan about that and tell people about it. ‘Oh my god, don’t call them.'” That’s what we’ve got to change.

What I just described is easy for us and we do that in the telephony world. On our website, everyone optimizes the customer journey. You think about what’s gone on for years, shortened and personalized customer journeys and websites, have been a focus of marketing for years. It needs to be the same across Omni channel. However your customer interacts with you, whether it be live chat, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, whatever you open yourself up to for your customers to be able to interact with you, you need to do two things. One is, you need to be responsive. Two is, you need to do it well. If you can’t, don’t open yourself up to 10 different Omni channels. Don’t open yourself up to, “You can contact us on Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube. Here’s 20 ways you can contact us.”

The number of times I’ve tweeted a company and I’ve seen both ends of the scale. A complaint, “Let’s go there. Let’s see what happens.” Some are instantaneously responding because they know the world is seeing it. I did this with a kid’s swimming goggles once. There was a problem, it shredded after getting it. They were on it instantly, “Please, come online, to direct message. Give us your address and your personal details. Which one is it? We’ve got a replacement on the way to you now.” Fantastic. I have others I’ve tweeted, I have never heard back from them. They’re not monitoring the channels they’ve opened to the customer.

You’ve got to understand the world we now live in. Where are your customers and how do they expect to interact with you? If they’re millennials, guess what, Snapchat may be an appropriate platform. If they’re not and your demographic is 60-80 year olds, where do they choose to communicate? What method you want to use and do it well?

Marylou: Though you mentioned above in the call, forget legacy, let’s get on a whiteboard, and figure this out. My audience is, for the most part, we love process. I’m curious if you can walk us through a very simple—let’s just pick one channel—and walk us through what inputs you’re looking for in order to help determine, granted I’m sure it’s different across industries, but what are the ingredients that we have to make sure we think about as we’re going through mapping this out? Forgetting about legacy and going forward. Can you give us an example?

Ian: Yes, absolutely. The first one I touched on there is what is your buyer persona? I’ve had people say, “Well, we sell to everyone.” “Okay, but talk me through it.” Then they start talking through and start saying, “84% of our customers are in this demographic; they’re female between 40 and 55.” Great. That’s most the way you need to put your effort in serving your customer, not getting something right for the 2% that are 20-25 year old woman who want to deal with you on WhatsApp. Unless, you can do WhatsApp as well.

What happens is I’ve seen people look at their personas. They say, “We’ve got every persona.”  “Yeah, but what’s the split of that in your business?” Maybe it’s equal across all of them, but if it’s not, that gives you a first clue to how you need to address them. Once you’ve identified that, Well, actually, most of our customers want to speak to us on the phone. Some of them are starting to use web forms or want to buy our products through Amazon,” for example, “so we need an Amazon store.” What is it you’re seeing? Where do we need to address it? You need to be able to isolate this down to a few things that you can do incredibly well. Do not boil the ocean.

I see too often with the process side which then leads into the technology side, and the people aspect, and the data of boiling the ocean. Try to address everything. We don’t tick every box. The biggest thing is isolate down where are the majority of your customers. How do they want to communicate with us? Do they want to self-serve and order electronically? When do they want to communicate with us? Maybe it’s like yourself when you say, “It’s like here. We can’t fix something or something is missing. There’s a bolt missing in the box.” That’s where we see people get ahold of us. Typically, they want to get ahold and speak to someone because they don’t know which part […] is. We need to make it easy for them to interact with us in the way they need to interact for the used case they’ve got at that point in time.

Some things are served by video, right? You described video. If video is the right way to go, fantastic. You’ve got a platform with YouTube you can host stuff on or Vimeo. You can address that from your website and your help pages.

If it’s not that easy and it’s something you normally need to talk someone through then you’re going to need have phone interaction. You need to screenshare with them. Is there a PC piece of software? What is it you’re going to need to do, and provide the resources, and work through the process. Put yourselves in the shoes of your customer. How do I want to interact in the initial purchase? What are the things that could go wrong in the process? How would I want to interact with those? It isn’t always the same platform. It changes.

Too often, what I see also is, people address the channel and try to keep the customer on that channel. I talk about social selling—I’m not going to drag into that now because we could do a whole nother call—but when I see salespeople and they say, “I spoke to the customer. I touched base with the customer yesterday.” I always ask them, “You actually spoke to them?” “No, no, no. It was an email.” “That’s not speaking to them. Why did you do it as an email?” “Oh, they emailed me back.” Particularly in sales, it’s a […] what customer service tends to do is, if the customer emails you, you email back; if they interact with your live chat, you keep a live chat.

There’s nothing wrong, if there’s a more appropriate channel to deal with a specific problem or customer requirement, to switch channels and say to the customer, “I hope you don’t mind, it might be easier if we jump to the call now. Can I kick off a call through this live chat so that we can actually speak? Or, “Can I screen share to show you something which will fix how you use designer software?” If you use the most appropriate method to resolve the customer issue the fastest to their satisfaction.

Marylou: Exactly. We use that, what you just described. I teach my folks, no matter what channel they start on, our goal is to always try to get them to the phone. Why? Because one phone call equals 20 emails in our world.

Ian: Yeah. You can detect misinterpretation straightaway. You can hear tonality of the customer. “You sounded a bit confused there.” Whereas an email, you don’t get any of that. You lose it all. It’s formulaic.

Marylou: You get some sentiment, but there’s a lot of guessing going around.

Ian: Exactly. You read the email how I interpreted it one way; you read it in a totally different way. Particularly in technology. How many times have we gone on searching for help and you followed the instructions, it doesn’t work, someone explained it to you and you go, “No, no, no. I was clicking there.” “Oh, I could see how you could make that mistake. I never thought of that. When I wrote the instructions, I didn’t see that button over there that looks similar.” To me, that was obvious.

Marylou: Right. I have more familiarity with the right path when I think of the nuances of you going down the wrong rabbit hole.

Ian: Yep. The minute you’ve done that, everything else becomes wrong. Whereas in a conversation, you identify so much quicker.

Marylou: As we finish the conversation here, I want to be very respectful of your time. I know you’re not feeling very well.

Ian: Sure. Thank you.

Marylou: If I decide, I’m doing this and I am committed to it. Do you have any type of benchmarks or analytics that you can share with us as to how this is impacting loyalty or revenue? What are some numbers that we can aspire to overall? I know my industry is […] different, but what does this mean for us in terms of lifetime value or revenue?

Ian: Right now, when I talk customer experience, events, and this piece, firstly, think about you. You behave differently today. We all do it. I’ve never used Uber but I’ve used Amazon. We all, in some way in our lives, digest IoT, a new technology for your heating system, whatever. We’re using new technology. You can’t get away from it and it would never go back. Unless, we get a solo birth then all technology goes. In which case we wouldn’t have any choice for that but that’s it. We are in the position wherein we’re going forward. With millennials and Zs, they’re adapting to technology even quicker, inventing. The world we live in is prolificating innovation because always on a tech available, so you can innovate that. You’ve got to do something and you’ve got to do it now. Unless whatever you do cannot be disrupted.

If you’re a barber and you cut people’s hair, you’re probably not going to be massively disrupted. You might find there’s a booking system you can use, it makes it easier to get more people through the door and not lose customers. You can’t get in and fed-up queueing. You are not going to be replaced at this point by some robot cutting hair. That’s probably a long way off. But you’ve got to look at what’s going on in the world and digest how do, in our business, make use of this type of technology. It might not be all of it. It might be just AI. It might be just chat box, it might be just going on social. Start digesting and delivering a different experience to your customer.

And to answer the question, sorry, I’m deflecting it in terms of stats. A good one is the Walker Study. All the analyst are talking the same thing right now. Wherever you look, the Walker Study came out and it said, “By 2020, customer experience will outweigh price and feature as the main differentiator.” It’s not that you’re going to pay 10x the price for something, but we all live in a world where, whatever you’ve got, there’s probably a similar comparable. You always have a competitor. No one’s exactly the same but they’ll be similarities of the customer has a choice. The customer in today’s world can find their choice quickly. You can search on Amazon, I always keep coming back to Amazon or Google, and you want to go and buy one of these handsets for your phone that takes […]—there are tons of them. You can find all of them by searching for the generic or you search for the one you’ve just seen in the magazine. Guess what? The others come up as well. Choice is in the customer’s lap instantly.

Marylou: Instant. Yes.

Ian: Price is typically reasonably similar. Unless, there’s some specialization or something which differentiates you as […] the market. What’s the difference going to be? I think it’s going to be brand and customer experience. People are buying into that and that’s where you’re going to get your loyalty, that’s where you’re going to get your customer reference and your reviews. Peer reviews are becoming incredibly more important. You go online, even for a ¢59 app now in the app exchange, you’ll look at the star rating. Then you might scroll on the reviews and say, “Okay. Yeah. People are saying it’s good. I’ll have a chance.” It’s 59 cents people. Software used to be hundreds and hundreds of pounds or £40 for a game, but we still look because it’s the world we’ve become used to. Information, peer reviews, are at our fingertips. Customer experience forms part of that.

Marylou: Exactly. Ian, thank you so much for talking with me today. What’s the best way that our folks can get ahold of you if they want to take steps further or look at some of your writings?

Ian: Yep. Please do. I publish a lot of non-pitchy white papers and discussion bullet points. Two places: one is, ianmoyse.co.uk, that would take you to my LinkedIn profile, and @ianmoyse.cloud will take you to my Twitter profile.

Marylou: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Have fun next week at your speech.

Ian: Thank you. Thanks, Marylou. Bye-bye.