November 22, 2022 • 40 mins
Emil interviews Matt Dixon on his latest sales book, The Jolt Effect. The two discuss how the new book builds on Matt's well-known past work on The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. Matt goes off-script in relation to the book and provides his unique perspective on how Marketing can help with overcoming customer indecision by reducing the complexity of choosing product options. Jolt-driven marketers should build "happy meals" that most optimally map to the needs of the key ICP groups.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
- Hi friends, we are getting ready
to record episode seven ofthe Cerebrations Podcast.
(00:22):
In the previous episode, Ihad the pleasure to speak
with one of the ChallengerEvangelists, Jen Allen.
We learned about Challengerand how it's evolved over time,
and most importantly,
how the successful implementationof Challenger requires
the adoption of a Challenger mindset
and not merely doing training
or following prescribedsteps in a process.
(00:42):
Today I'm going to upthe ante even higher,
by bringing to the discussionno one other but the author
of "The Challenger Sale"book himself, Matt Dixon.
Many of you may already be aware
of Matt's new bestsellingbook called "The JOLT Effect."
In his typical fearlessresearcher fashion,
Matt had embarked on a remarkable journey
that involved using AIand conversational NLP
(01:06):
to analyze more than 2million sales conversations.
We will discuss hislatest research findings
about customer indecisionbeing an even bigger enemy
to sales than sticking with a status quo.
We'll connect the dotsbetween Challenger and JOLT.
We'll also dwell on the topic
of how marketing can support sales
in overcoming customer indecision.
(01:27):
I'm truly honored to hostMatt Dixon on this episode.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado,
let's get started.
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
Hi Matt, how are you?
- Hey, Emil, how are you?
(01:47):
Thank you for the invite to your show.
- Oh yeah, absolutely, thank you so much.
I'm really honored tohave you on the show,
I've definitely been following
a lot of your recent online appearances
on different webinars,and I'm super excited
to have a conversation with you today.
And before we get started,
(02:07):
I'm just gonna push here at the bottom,
a quick call to action for everyone,
to go to Cerebrations.info!to find out a little bit more
about you and maybe some useful links
that they may wanna explore,
and also to see the rosterof other podcast episodes
that I have in case they'reinterested in learning more
(02:28):
about this podcast and what thetopics there've been so far.
But anyway, I think in general,
there's not a lot of needfor real introduction
because most of theviewers of this podcast
probably already know everything
about your best-selling books.
But in terms of just aquick context, can you...
(02:50):
You've been doing salesresearch for decades,
can you tell me what motivatesyou to keep exploring more?
- Oh gosh, it's a really good question.
I don't know if I'vegotten that one before,
I guess, Emil, I wouldsay maybe two things.
I think one is that...
or three things, three things.
So you're gonna regretasking this question.
I think the first thingis, we find a lot of...
(03:12):
in the research, we find a lot of answers,
but I think in the process,we also uncover new questions
that we hadn't thought of before
and new questions that were unaddressed.
I'll give you an example,
so I think many listeners are familiar
with "The Challenger Sale,"when we wrote that book,
one of the things werealized after we wrote it
was that in many respects,it's about the story
(03:33):
of a first sales interaction,
but as we know, especially in B2B sales,
going from getting one person excited
about your vision and your solution,
to getting the whole buyingcommittee on board is a very...
that's a long journey.
And so we took a second,we did a second study
on what do best salespeople do
to manage the consensusbuying environments,
(03:55):
as when you have to get agroup of stakeholders together,
so it's just one example
and I think "JOLT Effect" is no different.
I guess that's the first thing,
we uncover a lot of questions,
the second thing is I've been excited
about the advances in technology
that now allow us to dosales research in very new
and different ways fromthe way we once did it.
All the books I've done before,
(04:16):
have all been based on surveyresearch, a lot of interviews,
case profiles, "The JOLTEffect" as we'll talk about
was a machine learning-based study
of 2 1/2 million sales calls,which is totally different,
a different scale, a different...
a whole set of new tools and capabilities
that get me excited as a researcher,
and then I think the thirdthing I would point to
(04:36):
is the customer buying environment
is not changing anytime soon.
As soon as we think we gotthe customer pinned down
and we understand them,
they go and change the waythat they engage with us,
and their expectations change.
And I think that's goingto continue to change
and to evolve, and so I'm justwaiting to see what's next,
I think on all of those dimensions.
- Great, I mean, I am aresearcher at heart as well,
(04:59):
and I think you justhit the nail on the head
that research is tied to reality
and in real life thingschange all the time.
- That's right.
- The more research you do,the more questions you uncover
and you just have to keepon peeling that onion
and find more,
so thank you for clarifyingthat as well for us.
(05:20):
So you mentioned alreadyJOLTs, and I know that people
may have already familiarizedthemselves with it,
but just for the sake ofquick introduction here,
what exactly is JOLT
and how did you come upwith the main premise
of your new book?
- Yeah, if I take people backto the origins of the study,
(05:42):
we always wanted to do astudy using modern technology,
now, when we really wanted to do a study,
actual recorded sales conversations,the problem of course,
up until March of 2020 is that those,
many of the importantconversations happened
in the customer's office,
but when the pandemic hit andwe all went into lockdown,
that changed overnight, as you remember,
and so we partnered withseveral dozen companies,
(06:02):
collected 2 1/2 million sales calls
and used a machine learning platform
from a company called Tethr,
to bring structure andmeaning to that data.
So that was kind of theoccasion of the why now.
Now in terms of the topic,JOLT deals with this question
of no decision losses, whichare really, really painful
for salespeople, for managers,
and for the entirecommercial organization,
(06:23):
sales and marketing,
to have customers go throughthe entire sales process
only to end up doing nothing.
And you think about thesecustomers who spend so much time
with us, they eat up a lot of our time,
the time from our team,subject matter experts,
solutions engineers, executive sponsors,
and not to say nothing of thecustomers' own time investment
(06:43):
that they make, sometimesthis can go on for months
or even years, and then forthe customer to do nothing,
has always been a reallypuzzling thing to me.
Like what would possesssomebody to invest so much time
and energy to just do nothing?
And then more importantly,what do the best salespeople do
to overcome that?
What do they do to avoidthat happening to them?
So that was the topicthat we chose to study
(07:05):
with this big dataset, andthen to your question, Emil,
what we found was...
and this will be the ChrisNodes' version of what we found,
and I definitely encourageall the listeners
to go check out the book,there's also an HBR article
maybe we could link to as well,
called "Stop Losing toCustomer Indecision,"
which we wrote this summer,
it's a good summary of thearguments in "The JOLT Effect,"
(07:27):
so check that out as wellif you're pressed for time,
but here's what we found in a nutshell
is, we all know thisin sales and marketing
that when the customer...
there's a point where sometimesthe customer gets cold feet,
they say they're into,they wanna lead from,
depart from their status quo,
they wanna move forward with us,
and then they start totalk themselves out of it,
they start to disengage from the sale,
(07:48):
and we've seen thismovie many, many times.
What ends up happening is theystop responding to our emails
in the wonderful ways theyonce did, and now they offer us
very cut responses very intermittently,
they don't show up to our calls,
they start ghosting usand going radio silent,
and the salespersoncontinues to chase them
because salespeople are very hopeful
(08:09):
and they think hope springs eternal.
So they keep chasing those opportunities
and eventually we mark themas closed lost decision.
Now, what salespeople have been taught
for a long, long time,
is that the reason acustomer starts to disengage
and get cold feet, isthat they're still in love
with their status quo.
And we talk about this in"The Challenger Sale" as well,
that the best salespeople are very good
at showing the customerthe pain of same is worse
(08:30):
than the pain of change.
They're very good at breakingthe gravitational pull
that the status quo has on the customer,
which we know, is very, very powerful.
And so what they do is they go back
and they hammer the status quo.
They try to dial up the FUD,
the fear, uncertainty and doubt,
create the burning platform,
talk up the benefits of the solution,
how great it's going to be, ifyou just bought our solution,
you can totally solve all theseproblems in your business,
(08:53):
or maybe they just holda disappearing discount
in front of them.
It's only good, this priceis only good this quarter,
you have to buy now or the price goes up,
and what we found isit was very surprising,
we found, I call those FOMOtactics, fear of missing out
and what we found isthat those techniques,
especially with a customerwho's already articulated
their preference to move forward with you,
to leave the status quo behind
(09:14):
move forward with you and your solution,
those techniques when theystart to get cold feet,
actually make things worse,they don't make things better.
There was an 84% probabilitythat doing that stuff
will actually drive thecustomer to no decision,
it will actually increasethe odds they do nothing.
And when we dug intothe data, what we found
is that no decisionlosses are actually born
of two different things.
(09:35):
On the one hand, you've got customers
who prefer the status quo,
and that was about 44% ofthe no decision losses,
but the bigger chunkof no decision losses,
were losses due to indecision.
These are customers who are convinced
that the status quo is suboptimal,
are convinced that youare the right supplier
to move forward with,
but nevertheless, theystruggle to make a decision.
And those specific strugglescome down to three fears
(09:58):
that they have.
The first one is, have Ichosen the right thing?
You've put a lot ofoptions in front of me,
in this final version of your platform,
the final version of your solution,
have we made the rightdecisions, contract length,
how broad we're gonna go,
bells and whistles andintegrations and partner solutions,
all these things that could goin, those are hard decisions
and my fear as a customer is,did I pick the right product,
(10:20):
actually the right solution to buy?
I know you're the supplierI wanna work with,
but did I buy the right solution?
The second thing is,the customer are fearful
that they haven't done enough research,
that they don't feellike they're smart enough
about this big decisionyou're asking them to make,
and maybe it's the next white paper,
the one they didn't read,that has all the answers
that they should have gotten
before they bought the solution.
Then the third one wecall outcome uncertainty.
(10:41):
This is the fear the customer has
that they might not realize the benefits
that you're promising from the purchase.
They might not see the costsavings or the revenue growth
or the risk mitigation, andthen that's gonna be a bad look.
And Emil, if you think aboutthe current environment,
those are decisions thatcould get you fired,
and where budget is decisions,
even low level decisions noware so heavily scrutinized.
(11:02):
And so customers, if I were to summarize,
while we've told salespeoplefor years and years,
when the customer starts tohesitate to dial up the FOMO,
what we actually should bedoing, is dialing down the FOMU,
FOMU is the Fear of Messing Up.
And it turns out thatthe Fear of Messing Up
is actually the bigger problem
and it's the bigger driverof no decision losses.
So JOLT is a playbook,it's four behaviors,
(11:24):
it's an acronym as those ofyou who've read the book know,
judge the level of indecision,offer your recommendation,
limit the exploration andtake risk off the table,
that together comprise a playbook,
not for beating the status quo,
but for overcoming customer indecision.
Now, because again, afteryou've beaten the status quo
and put it to bed, what thecustomer start worrying about
(11:44):
is, did I pick the right configuration,
have I done enough research about this,
do I have any assurance ofsuccess from this vendor?
And those are the thingsthat end up causing them
to get cold feet and not move forward,
and so we need to dealwith that as salespeople.
And those behaviors, just like Challenger,
we didn't invent them, wefound that these are things
that top salespeople are doing right now,
they never read a sales book about it,
(12:06):
they never got a sales training on it,
they just they're best salespeople,
they figure out how tonavigate around obstacles
when they see them inthe buying environment.
- Yeah, that's great summary.
Thank you very much for theChris Nodes as you said,
but I think it's verynecessary for everyone
to kind of align one more time,
even if they've already heardthis from another webinar.
(12:26):
I'm actually gonna touch onthe importance of understanding
the nuance a little later in this podcast,
but before that, Iwanted to share with you
an anecdote personallythat really impressed me.
So around the time when I firstsaw your posts on LinkedIn
about the upcoming book,it wasn't even published,
we had an experience atmy company with a vendor
(12:49):
that was chasing us for six, seven months,
I would say they did everythingaccording to the book,
nothing that I would personallyadvise them against doing,
and they pretty much, theyshowed us testimonials
that allowed us to understandwhat kind of upside potential
(13:13):
we have in front of us,in terms of like gains,
of benefits from usingthem, in terms of reviews,
they showed us that they're best in class,
followed for years, and Iwas the main decision maker,
they've picked me correctly,
they knew that I have the budget,
I've told them I have the budget for this,
I brought in the head of sales
who actually would've beenpretty much the main user of that
(13:34):
together with the sales team,
and then on the last call when they...
I could see in theirface, they were smiling
and they thought theywere gonna ring that bell
and say, "We have a deal,"and we just looked at them
and we said, "Sorry guys, wejust think we're not ready.
As a company, we're not matureenough, our team is new,
we just hired a bunch of new sales folks
and we right now, we can't even get them
(13:56):
to use the CRM correctly,let alone use something else,
so sorry, we are not gonna buy it."
And it was a huge disappointment,
I could see on their faces,they were just not...
- Oh, yeah, you just get out of the room.
- And that happened just a few weeks
before I read what you posted on LinkedIn
when you started talking about JOLT
and I was like, wow, it resonates so much,
I just read one sentenceand I got it immediately.
(14:18):
But I just think that that'shappening all the time,
I see it happening so much...
- That's a great anecdote, Emil,
because what you're describing is not...
it doesn't sound like,at least, in this case,
again, I was not part ofthat buying experience,
but it doesn't sound likethere were really any questions
from your side aboutthat this would represent
a better way of doing things,
that the solution that thevendor would propose was great,
(14:41):
their customers love them,that things look great,
but at the end of the day, Ithink you had some questions
about like, what if we don'tget full value out of things?
- What if our team cannot not use it,
they don't know how to useit, what are we gonna do?
- It's not even thevendor, it's you, right?
And it's like, I just don'tknow that we'll get the benefits
and who wants to havetheir name associated
with a big purchase and thennot realize the benefits?
(15:01):
Like that's a bad look,nobody wants to do that.
- Yeah, so I just thought I'llmention this anecdote here,
because I feel like with most people,
nowadays when I try toexplain, people ask me,
"So what are you soexcited about these days?"
And I tell them, "Well, Ijust started reading JOLTs
and been following Matton all these webinars,"
(15:21):
and most of the times they're like,
"Okay, so what exactly does it mean?"
And then I give them this anecdote
and I tell them, "This is what it means."
Think about what happenedon the other side,
the vendor, they had the head of sales,
not some junior salesperson there
and he was totally surprised listening,
on like being witness to whatwas happening on the call.
And you mentioned earlierChallenger a little bit,
(15:42):
so I have to ask you, isJOLT a natural evolution
of the Challenger methodology
or are you observing a complete disruption
in the buyer's journey?
- Yeah, it's a really good question.
So I think it's a littlebit of both actually.
So I think I've had thisdiscussion with so many people
(16:04):
about whether this problemof customer indecision
is a new problem
or is it just a problemwe've only found now?
And so on the one hand, we think about...
we see these on the news,these wonderful images
from the Webb Telescope
that there's like amillion miles past the moon
and it's allowing us to view the universe
in ways that we never could before,
but those things were always there,
(16:24):
we just didn't have thetechnology to find them.
So in some respects, I thinkindecision is like that,
it is everywhere, but we'venever been taught to look for it
or to study it, and nowwith modern technology
to study 2 1/2 million salescalls with machine learning,
we have like that big telescope
out in the million miles past the moon,
we have the technology to find it.
But I think the flip side of that,
the counterargument is that,in fact, it's a new problem,
(16:49):
and I think if you lookat the things that...
So take the downturn aside,
so I think it's easy for everyone to agree
that yes, no decisionlosses are going to spike
for every supplier andevery vendor out there
over the next couple of years,
especially if the economyhits the skids a little bit.
So I'm not talking about that,
but what I'm talking aboutis, if you look at the things
that drive indecision,the number of options,
(17:11):
every vendor out there isoffering more and more options,
partner ecosystems, bellsand whistles, roadmap items,
different configurationsof their platforms,
we all love, especially inmarketing and above the funnel
because it attracts people in,
but when we put more optionsin front of people, as we know,
and Barry Schwartz writes about this
in "The Paradox of Choice,"it makes it harder for them
(17:33):
to pick something and itincreases the odds they do nothing
'cause they don't wanna make a bad choice.
And so the number of options
most vendors are putting outthere is only increasing,
like very few of us aregoing the opposite direction
and simplifying, most ofus are making our options
more complex and numerous.
The second thing, theamount of information
and you know this very wellworking with marketers,
the amount of informationon any use case, any market,
(17:56):
any technology, any industry today,
is orders of magnitudegreater than it was yesterday
and tomorrow will be evengreater than it is today
and there's no putting thatgenie back in the bottle,
we are just...
There's so much contentcoming at the buyer
that is impossible forthem to consume it all.
They'll never consume it all
yet they want to deeply consume it all.
So this struggle that like,have I done enough research?
(18:17):
Well, what if that is like running a race
where you'll never get to the finish line,
but the customer feels
like I've gotta get to the finish line
or I'm going to be making a decision
about which I'm not well-informed.
So that's the second one,
and the third one, eventhis valuation problems
of feeling like I might notget what I'm paying for,
I think as suppliers shift
from selling simple transactional products
(18:38):
that can be swapped in nowto selling more integrated,
value added, sticky but also expensive
and disruptive solutions,not just the product
but the layers of service,the long-term transformation,
we're all selling transformation, right?
And as we embed ourselves inthe customer organization,
that becomes a very, veryrisky decision for the buyer
and we're amplifying the likelihood
(19:00):
that they will get cold feet
and worry about not gettingwhat they're paying for.
And so I think thoseare all secular trends
that even if you put the downturn aside,
I think the drivers ofindecision are getting worse.
And so one of the thingsI would say though
with respect to Challenger,
remember, if we go backto the earlier point,
44% of no decision losses
(19:20):
are because we didn't beatthe customer status quo,
that is the first thing asalesperson's got to do,
and in marketing, we've gotto equip our salespeople
to be able to overcomethe customer status quo,
the status quo is a very,very powerful enemy,
you will not sell anything
if you cannot convincethe customer to part ways
with their status quo.
And we know people are lazy,
(19:40):
they're genetically engineeredto avoid energy expenditure
when they don't need to.
They don't like to change
and they will pass up anobviously better options
in order to just keep doingwhat they're doing today.
So that is a powerfulenemy, it's job number one.
But once the customer agrees
to move away from the status quo,
and they agree to moveforward with your vision,
(20:02):
then they start worrying
about, have I chosen the right thing?
Have I done enough research?
Have I any assurance ofsuccess from this partner?
And those are the thingswe now need to deal with.
So the way I think about JOLTis it is not a replacement
for anybody's sales methodology.
So if you're a Challenger shop
or maybe your company is a MEDDIC shop
or it's a Sandler shop,it really doesn't matter,
I happen to be part of theChallenger for obvious reasons,
(20:24):
but there are lots of methodologies.
All of those sales methodologies
are predicated on beatingthe customer status quo.
There are no methodologies outthere until we produced JOLT,
to deal with indecision.
But I think about it this way,
is that a salesperson needs two playbooks.
They've gotta have a playbookfor beating the status quo,
that is your current sales methodology,
you should get absolutely,
(20:45):
exceptionally you aretalented in terms of...
in high levels of execution
in terms of being able to deliver that
and execute against it,
but the flip side isyou also need a playbook
for overcoming indecision,
which nobody's really equipped to do,
and so think about JOLT as an overlay
to whatever you do today.
That's good, so it'snot a forget Challenger,
it's a do-this-on-top-of Challenger
(21:06):
because Challenger solvesfor half the problem,
it solves for the status quo problem,
it does not solve forthe indecision problem.
- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense,
thanks for clarifying things.
So I've watched many ofyour recent webinars,
I've already mentioned that several times
and I'm really impressed.
There's been a lot of veryinteresting discussions,
you did this webinarsinvolving different guests
(21:29):
and also just the audiencehas been very active
on all of these, raisinga lot of questions,
but I have to admit thatfrom my point of view,
a lot of the discussion thatI've seen has been focused
on the implications of yourresearch findings on sales,
and it makes sense, it's abook primarily meant for sales.
But at the end of the day, notonly because I'm a marketer
(21:51):
and because this podcastis trying to balance
between sales and marketing executives,
but in general,
there's the proverbial salesand marketing alignment
that everyone is talking about.
So does marketing need a JOLT?
(both giggling)
What should marketing do to support sales
or overcome customers' indecision?
(22:12):
- Yeah, it's great,another great question.
So what I would say, we talkabout this with Challenger
and I think the same is true of JOLT,
that Challenger was aboutindividual salesperson skills,
but it was also aboutorganizational capability.
Challenger doesn't workunless marketing is helping
to develop those insightsthat Challengers can use
to challenge customer thinking.
If you don't have insight,
(22:33):
you're not a Challenger,you're just annoying,
and so it doesn't work.
It has to be both sales andmarketing and alignment.
And I think JOLT is the same,
and I think you're quite right
and this was probably a function
of like we had to hit adeadline with the publisher,
so we stayed focused withthe tactical sales side.
But certainly, as I've hadconversations with folks
and we knew this as wewere writing the research,
it is also, JOLT isalso an individual skill
(22:56):
and an organizational capability.
I'll give you a few ideas here.
So think about offering recommendations,
how do we chop the field for our customers
and then recommend an option?
'Cause it turns out that'swhat best salespeople do
to overcome this paradox of choice.
Who figures out what those packages are,
those pre-built configurations?
Well, that's probably marketing
(23:16):
in partnership with productand sales leadership.
What are the use cases, the ICPs,
the target needs-basedsegments we're selling into,
and how do we configurepre-built happy meals
or configurations thatmap to those use cases
and those buyer types?
That's a great role for the organization,
and arguably, it's not something
you want your salespeople doing
(23:36):
because they don't havethe breadth of perspective
across the entirety ofwhat's working out there.
What are our best customers doing?
What do they buy and howdo we guide everyone else
to buy the same thing?
Second, we think aboutthe amount of information.
I steer your listeners to an article
that my Challenger co-author,Brent Adamson wrote,
"Sense Making for Sales," was in HBR,
(23:57):
I believe, earlier this year,
and in that article,Brent talks about the idea
that marketing plays a pivotal...
in a world of abundant information,
marketing plays a really pivotal role
to structure a learningjourney for the customer.
Every customer, youcan't wave a magic wand
and tell them, "Oh, you don'tneed to read any content,
just trust me," becauseA, they don't trust you,
and so they will, theydo wanna be informed,
(24:19):
but there's a point where theyengage in analysis paralysis.
But if we can feed them enough content
that gets them to feellike they're conversant
and knowledgeable and they're not...
it is not a situation
in which they're taking a leap of faith,
but they feel like they'vebeen well-informed,
how do we structure that learning journey?
(24:39):
Some of it is probably our content,
maybe it's some of ourcompetitors' content,
third-party analyst reportslike Gartner Magic Quadrants,
Forrester analyst reports, et cetera,
but as marketing, we arein a great position to say,
if you want to get like the five articles,
two podcasts and YouTubevideo that you need to consume
to go from the...
(24:59):
I wanna say 101 level, but even below that
to like a 201 or 301level of understanding,
here's what you should consume.
That's not something that salespeople
should come up with either,
they probably have a senseof things they recommend,
but you probably have onesalesperson over here recommending
for people to read that article
and then these other salespeople saying
like, "No, that's terrible,"
they should read something else.
Marketing should be really the arbiter
of what that learning journey looks like,
(25:20):
and then finally, takingrisk off the table.
These are...
What we don't wanna have happen,
we know best salespeople willcome up with creative ways
to de-risk the purchase for the customer,
but we don't want salespeopleknocking on finances door,
their managers door asking for permission
every time they're tryingto structure a contract
in a creative way or bundlein professional services
(25:41):
in a certain way, let's pre-buildthose de-risking options
and train sales people andequip them with content
so they can deliver them and use them
in the moment with the customer.
So again, the role of the organization
is very clear in JOLT, justlike it was with Challenger,
it's probably fodder fora bonus chapter if I...
but I still have to getthis book in the room here,
(26:02):
(Matt laughing)
but it's next on my to-do list I think,
'cause there's a lot towrite about in that area.
- Great, yeah, no, I'llbe anxiously waiting
for something like that,
I think it'll be a veryinteresting read for me
at least personally anda lot of my colleagues.
I mean, let me ask you, whenyou talk about de-risking,
(26:23):
in the traditional sense whenwe talking about status quo,
overcoming the status quo,
some of that is, let's createsome customer testimonials
just to show the impact thatwe've had on the customer.
We increased by 30% whatever,
or we reduced the cost by whatever, 30%.
On the other hand, rightnow as you're talking
(26:44):
about the de-risk of the indecision,
de-risking the indecision,
I started thinking, well,what if marketing focuses
on creating testimonials, wherethe focus is on how to move
the process of implementation was,
how customers were managed,how they were managed by us
(27:06):
so that they can go down the easiest path,
is that something that weshould be focusing on as well?
- I think so.
I actually think...
So there's one thing thatI think have case profiles
that point to the return
that a customer saw frombuying your solution.
I think it's a differentthing to be able to architect
or roadmap out like, wecall it a value roadmap
(27:28):
or benefits capture roadmap,
but here's how we go from contract signed,
to capturing benefits and capturing value,
here are all the moving parts,
here's who needs to be involved,
here are the KPIs and metrics we look for
and here are the gotchas.
Here are the pitfalls we want to avoid,
and this by the way, thisroadmap is built back
from one, the experience of customers
(27:50):
who've gotten tremendous value,
way more than theyexpected from our platform.
But it's also informed by those companies
who've made missteps andlessons we've learned
about how to do this well,
that's different froma customer case study,
but that's a great, it's almostlike a safety net, right?
To show the customeryou've been there before,
you've done this before andyou have a high success rate
(28:11):
because it's like you'regoing on a journey
through the woods orthe jungle with a guide
and they say, "I knowexactly how to get there,
by the way, we don't wanna go that way
because there're some lions over there,
we don't wanna go this waythere're some poisonous snakes
and you wanna go this way,
and here are the things to watch out for,"
so that is a huge confidence giver
that you're working with avendor that has been there before
(28:33):
and they've done this before successfully,
that's a great role for marketing to play.
- Great, so that's a good point.
From my point of view, from a...
I'm focused on healthcaretechnology at the moment
and they're the big elephant in the room
is Epic as an EHR system.
And a lot of hospital systems
(28:54):
have spent hundreds ofmillions of dollars,
close to a billion dollars sometimes
on implementations of Epic,
and the CIO, who mostlikely is driving that,
for them this is basicallytheir whole career trajectory,
it's a make or break experience.
- That's right.
- So anything you can do tobasically alleviate the concerns
(29:15):
that implementing an extrasystem is gonna jeopardize Epic
or is gonna ask for more resources,
it's definitely gonna help,
so I can definitely relate towhat you were saying earlier.
- Absolutely.
- So a similar questionthat I was gonna ask you,
and you mentioned earlier a little bit
so it kind of promptedme to wait until later
(29:35):
in the episode, but I've hadrecently a lot of conversations
with CEOs and heads of sales,and one thing that I noticed
that is kind of interesting to me,
also a little discouraging,they're all nodding in agreement
as I describe to them the JOLT's findings
and basically, the main premisethat we discussed earlier.
(29:57):
And when I tell them,
let's focus on overcoming the indecision,
they say, "Yeah, okay, yeah."
But then they start commentingand basically providing me
with their ideas andI start hearing things
that relate more toovercoming the status quo,
not so much overcoming indecision.
So what do sales and marketing executives
(30:21):
often get wrong about JOLT?
Like why is it so easy for them
to just kinda say, "Yeah, I got it,"
but that's exactly what we've been doing?
- It's so interesting becauseI've seen this as well, Emil,
is that you will geta lot of nodding heads
and it's like, "All right,we need more case studies,
we need a sharper ROI calculator,
we need more proof points,"and these kinds of things
(30:41):
and customer case studies,profile success stories,
reference clients, allthese kinds of things,
and it's like, no, no,that's what you need
to beat the status quo,you should keep doing that,
but remember your customers,
that's all about how the customer can win
by buying your solution,
the reason they become indecisiveis their fear of failure
through buying your solution.
Solving that is a verydifferent category of things,
(31:05):
but you're right, I mean,why does this happen?
I mean, I think it's the same reason
that when salespeople gothrough sales training
and it sounds like this farapart from what they do today,
they slip back into whatthey're already doing
'cause they have a falsepositive, "Oh, I already do that."
And so I think there's a real danger
and you've gotta create that sort of chasm
(31:27):
and that cognitive dissonance
so that they see what they're doing
as clearly distinct fromwhat they should be doing.
And in this story, we're notsaying to stop doing that,
so again, you've gotto beat the status quo,
but overcoming indecision
is a fundamentally different thing,
but again, as human beings,
I think we have confirmation bias
and we are grooved to lookfor what we already know
(31:50):
in things that we're encounteringfor the first time even.
So when they see indecision,
people go immediately to, oh,well, it's a value problem
and you didn't convince thecustomer to move forward
so we need to dial thatup and sharpen that,
but it's actually not, it'snot a value problem at all.
And again, I think therealization oftentimes for folks
is that you can easily have a customer
(32:13):
who will hand on heart say,"I totally believe your ROI,
I absolutely believe ourstatus quo is terrible,
it's very suboptimal.
It's leading to lostrevenue growth opportunity,
cost leakage risk for our organization,
or lost market share,whatever it is, it's horrible.
What you guys are talking about is great,
the ROI looks terrific, yourreference customers love you,
(32:34):
these case studies, theseare companies just like us,
I'm in, I'm with you."
But they will many of them still not buy
because you haven'tsolved for the other stuff
that they're worried about.
And as we talk about quite often,
because it results in the same outcome,
which is no decision,
and because we've all grown up in a world,
sales and marketinghave grown up in a world
(32:54):
where we've only ever believed
and we've only ever been taught
that the only reason acustomer does nothing
is because they stillprefer their status quo,
it still comes down to value,
and so we've gotta sharpenour value articulation.
This research now unveils thatthat is part of the problem,
but it's less than half of the problem.
The bigger problem istheir fear of failure.
And at the end of the day,look, no customer ever got fired
(33:16):
for maintaining the status quo,
people maintain thestatus quo all the time,
it happens every day.
And the status quo has manyparents in an organization,
many people have theirhand in the status quo,
but people do get firedfor changing the status quo
and to go down a differentpath and to try to change it,
and if that doesn't workout, that usually falls down
or comes down on some person
and it's usually the personwhose name is on the contract,
(33:37):
and that person is desperatelyfearful of failure.
Customers as we say, areokay with missing out,
they are not okay with messing up.
And so when you try to go back
and sharpen your ROI calculatorand put more case studies
and proof points and referencecustomers in front of them,
all you're doing is tryingto help them realize
the cost of the inaction.
Here's what's gonna happento you if you don't do this,
(33:58):
you're gonna miss out onthese great opportunities.
Don't you want this ROI, don'tyou want these opportunities?
But that's not what they're worried about.
They're not worried aboutthe loss from inaction,
they're worried about the lossthat might occur from action,
from actually doing something
and having it be a big mistake for them
and having it rest ontheir shoulders entirely.
- Yeah, that's a very goodteaching point, I guess,
(34:20):
for everyone because Ithink we just oftentimes
have the tendency toscratch on the surface
and not really try to dive deep enough
to understand what really isdriving some of these comments
that we hear on the other side,
and it's easy to confusethe fear of messing up
with the fear of missing out.
So yeah, it's a good point.
(34:41):
I mean, that kind ofleads, it's a good segue
into my last question for today,
and I always ask the questionof all my podcast guests,
this is supposed to be educational.
So I want for the viewers andthe listeners of this podcast
to learn something,
what are the key takeawaysfrom this episode?
(35:02):
What are the two or three things
that you'd like to really drive home?
- Yeah, I think there'sone I would point to
that's I think really important, is to...
again, we just talked about this,
but to recognize the difference
between missing out and messing up
and recognizing that our customers,
what keeps them from moving forward
is not because they don't buythat they're gonna miss out
and so much of what we doin sales and marketing,
(35:24):
whether it's better ROIcalculators, better proof points,
better success stories,so on and so forth,
that is all about dialingup the cost of inaction,
but the customer's not worriedabout that predominantly,
what they're worried about is messing up.
That is the bigger thing
and so we've gotta solve for that.
We've gotta solve forthat in sales training,
in coaching we've gotta...
in enablement, we've gotta solve for that
(35:45):
at the organizational level,
marketing, productfinance, to equip people
so that they can overcome indecision.
But I think the big takeaway,
what I will tell you is,again, it is part of the reason
that people get head-faked about this
and they say, "Well, I have no decision,"
well, clearly they stillprefer the status quo,
so we gotta convince themto leave the status quo.
And I think the head-fake for salespeople
(36:07):
or the knee-jerk reaction
is when the customer gets cold feet,
as I suspect, with thatvendor you were talking to,
who was trying to sell you this deal
and they were all excited 'cause you're...
and you pulled the windout of their sales,
and said, "No, it's not the right time,"
my suspicion is they probably went back
to, "Well, Emil, you must not,
like you're gonna missout on this opportunity.
Like look at the ROI,look at the proof points,
(36:28):
look at all...
we're working with all yourcompetitors, by the way,
they're seeing tremendous gains"
and they try to makeyou squirm a little bit,
or they say, "Well, I totally understand,
but it's a lot cheaper if you buy it today
than if you wait six months,"
or "There's an implementation window
that we can offer you a slot right now,
but if you don't buy now,
it could be a year beforewe could roll this out
'cause we have so much demand."
And what happens in that moment
(36:48):
is, and the reason it backfires,
is it sounds like youwere already convinced
that this vendor solutionwould be a better option,
and when they start doing these things,
what they're using is scare tactics
to try to sell to somebodywho's already afraid,
but they're afraid of something else.
And in your case, we're not mature enough,
we're not at the levelwhere we can capture
the full benefits here
and I cannot afford towaste scarce budget dollars
(37:11):
and resources on an investmentthat doesn't fully pay off.
That is your concern,
it's not that I don't believeyou about your solution
and how great it is.
So it rings hollow at best
and at worst, it actually,again, it gives you more
to be worried about
and not only am I worried aboutnot getting full benefits,
it's also gonna be more expensive
when we do decide to buy it.
(37:32):
So now I'm worried about that too,
that is a recipe for doing nothing.
So the less and the big takeaway I think
is for salespeople to hit pause.
Before you go back to the FUD,
before you go back to dial up the ROI,
before you dangle the 10% discount,
as you said earlier, Emil,dig deeper and ask yourself,
what do you think is reallykeeping this customer
from moving forward?
Is it 'cause they don't believe you
(37:52):
and they don't understand,
they don't think this is acompelling enough alternative
to their status quo?
Well, you may have a status quo problem,
or is this something else?
Is it fear of failure?
And if it is, how do we not...
What we don't wanna stopdoing is dialing up the cost
of doing nothing, of inaction,we wanna start dialing down
the fear of failure or dialingdown the cost of action,
(38:12):
like dial down the FOMU, andthat's a different approach.
And simply pausing and askingyourself that question,
I think can help avoid the situation
where your knee-jerkreaction is to make it...
turn the screws and as we see in the data,
oftentimes make it worse.
- Yeah, that's very much true.
Thank you very much forsummarizing at the end,
(38:33):
the key takeaways, I thinkthat's helpful for everyone.
And once again, I reallyappreciate you having on...
like having you on this podcast,
it's been a pleasure for meto speak to you about JOLT
and an honor to have you on this podcast,
so thank you very much,Matt, thanks for your time...
- Thanks for having me.- I appreciate
all your insights and I hopeto host you on another occasion
(38:54):
and for another episode in the future,
but I really would like to thank you
for everything you did today.
- Thanks, Emil.- Have a good day.
- You too.
(bright upbeat music)
(39:54):
(air whooshing)
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
- Hi friends, we are getting ready
to record episode seven ofthe Cerebrations Podcast.
(00:22):
In the previous episode, Ihad the pleasure to speak
with one of the ChallengerEvangelists, Jen Allen.
We learned about Challengerand how it's evolved over time,
and most importantly,
how the successful implementationof Challenger requires
the adoption of a Challenger mindset
and not merely doing training
or following prescribedsteps in a process.
(00:42):
Today I'm going to upthe ante even higher,
by bringing to the discussionno one other but the author
of "The Challenger Sale"book himself, Matt Dixon.
Many of you may already be aware
of Matt's new bestsellingbook called "The JOLT Effect."
In his typical fearlessresearcher fashion,
Matt had embarked on a remarkable journey
that involved using AIand conversational NLP
(01:06):
to analyze more than 2million sales conversations.
We will discuss hislatest research findings
about customer indecisionbeing an even bigger enemy
to sales than sticking with a status quo.
We'll connect the dotsbetween Challenger and JOLT.
We'll also dwell on the topic
of how marketing can support sales
in overcoming customer indecision.
(01:27):
I'm truly honored to hostMatt Dixon on this episode.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado,
let's get started.
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
Hi Matt, how are you?
- Hey, Emil, how are you?
(01:47):
Thank you for the invite to your show.
- Oh yeah, absolutely, thank you so much.
I'm really honored tohave you on the show,
I've definitely been following
a lot of your recent online appearances
on different webinars,and I'm super excited
to have a conversation with you today.
And before we get started,
(02:07):
I'm just gonna push here at the bottom,
a quick call to action for everyone,
to go to Cerebrations.info!to find out a little bit more
about you and maybe some useful links
that they may wanna explore,
and also to see the rosterof other podcast episodes
that I have in case they'reinterested in learning more
(02:28):
about this podcast and what thetopics there've been so far.
But anyway, I think in general,
there's not a lot of needfor real introduction
because most of theviewers of this podcast
probably already know everything
about your best-selling books.
But in terms of just aquick context, can you...
(02:50):
You've been doing salesresearch for decades,
can you tell me what motivatesyou to keep exploring more?
- Oh gosh, it's a really good question.
I don't know if I'vegotten that one before,
I guess, Emil, I wouldsay maybe two things.
I think one is that...
or three things, three things.
So you're gonna regretasking this question.
I think the first thingis, we find a lot of...
(03:12):
in the research, we find a lot of answers,
but I think in the process,we also uncover new questions
that we hadn't thought of before
and new questions that were unaddressed.
I'll give you an example,
so I think many listeners are familiar
with "The Challenger Sale,"when we wrote that book,
one of the things werealized after we wrote it
was that in many respects,it's about the story
(03:33):
of a first sales interaction,
but as we know, especially in B2B sales,
going from getting one person excited
about your vision and your solution,
to getting the whole buyingcommittee on board is a very...
that's a long journey.
And so we took a second,we did a second study
on what do best salespeople do
to manage the consensusbuying environments,
(03:55):
as when you have to get agroup of stakeholders together,
so it's just one example
and I think "JOLT Effect" is no different.
I guess that's the first thing,
we uncover a lot of questions,
the second thing is I've been excited
about the advances in technology
that now allow us to dosales research in very new
and different ways fromthe way we once did it.
All the books I've done before,
(04:16):
have all been based on surveyresearch, a lot of interviews,
case profiles, "The JOLTEffect" as we'll talk about
was a machine learning-based study
of 2 1/2 million sales calls,which is totally different,
a different scale, a different...
a whole set of new tools and capabilities
that get me excited as a researcher,
and then I think the thirdthing I would point to
(04:36):
is the customer buying environment
is not changing anytime soon.
As soon as we think we gotthe customer pinned down
and we understand them,
they go and change the waythat they engage with us,
and their expectations change.
And I think that's goingto continue to change
and to evolve, and so I'm justwaiting to see what's next,
I think on all of those dimensions.
- Great, I mean, I am aresearcher at heart as well,
(04:59):
and I think you justhit the nail on the head
that research is tied to reality
and in real life thingschange all the time.
- That's right.
- The more research you do,the more questions you uncover
and you just have to keepon peeling that onion
and find more,
so thank you for clarifyingthat as well for us.
(05:20):
So you mentioned alreadyJOLTs, and I know that people
may have already familiarizedthemselves with it,
but just for the sake ofquick introduction here,
what exactly is JOLT
and how did you come upwith the main premise
of your new book?
- Yeah, if I take people backto the origins of the study,
(05:42):
we always wanted to do astudy using modern technology,
now, when we really wanted to do a study,
actual recorded sales conversations,the problem of course,
up until March of 2020 is that those,
many of the importantconversations happened
in the customer's office,
but when the pandemic hit andwe all went into lockdown,
that changed overnight, as you remember,
and so we partnered withseveral dozen companies,
(06:02):
collected 2 1/2 million sales calls
and used a machine learning platform
from a company called Tethr,
to bring structure andmeaning to that data.
So that was kind of theoccasion of the why now.
Now in terms of the topic,JOLT deals with this question
of no decision losses, whichare really, really painful
for salespeople, for managers,
and for the entirecommercial organization,
(06:23):
sales and marketing,
to have customers go throughthe entire sales process
only to end up doing nothing.
And you think about thesecustomers who spend so much time
with us, they eat up a lot of our time,
the time from our team,subject matter experts,
solutions engineers, executive sponsors,
and not to say nothing of thecustomers' own time investment
(06:43):
that they make, sometimesthis can go on for months
or even years, and then forthe customer to do nothing,
has always been a reallypuzzling thing to me.
Like what would possesssomebody to invest so much time
and energy to just do nothing?
And then more importantly,what do the best salespeople do
to overcome that?
What do they do to avoidthat happening to them?
So that was the topicthat we chose to study
(07:05):
with this big dataset, andthen to your question, Emil,
what we found was...
and this will be the ChrisNodes' version of what we found,
and I definitely encourageall the listeners
to go check out the book,there's also an HBR article
maybe we could link to as well,
called "Stop Losing toCustomer Indecision,"
which we wrote this summer,
it's a good summary of thearguments in "The JOLT Effect,"
(07:27):
so check that out as wellif you're pressed for time,
but here's what we found in a nutshell
is, we all know thisin sales and marketing
that when the customer...
there's a point where sometimesthe customer gets cold feet,
they say they're into,they wanna lead from,
depart from their status quo,
they wanna move forward with us,
and then they start totalk themselves out of it,
they start to disengage from the sale,
(07:48):
and we've seen thismovie many, many times.
What ends up happening is theystop responding to our emails
in the wonderful ways theyonce did, and now they offer us
very cut responses very intermittently,
they don't show up to our calls,
they start ghosting usand going radio silent,
and the salespersoncontinues to chase them
because salespeople are very hopeful
(08:09):
and they think hope springs eternal.
So they keep chasing those opportunities
and eventually we mark themas closed lost decision.
Now, what salespeople have been taught
for a long, long time,
is that the reason acustomer starts to disengage
and get cold feet, isthat they're still in love
with their status quo.
And we talk about this in"The Challenger Sale" as well,
that the best salespeople are very good
at showing the customerthe pain of same is worse
(08:30):
than the pain of change.
They're very good at breakingthe gravitational pull
that the status quo has on the customer,
which we know, is very, very powerful.
And so what they do is they go back
and they hammer the status quo.
They try to dial up the FUD,
the fear, uncertainty and doubt,
create the burning platform,
talk up the benefits of the solution,
how great it's going to be, ifyou just bought our solution,
you can totally solve all theseproblems in your business,
(08:53):
or maybe they just holda disappearing discount
in front of them.
It's only good, this priceis only good this quarter,
you have to buy now or the price goes up,
and what we found isit was very surprising,
we found, I call those FOMOtactics, fear of missing out
and what we found isthat those techniques,
especially with a customerwho's already articulated
their preference to move forward with you,
to leave the status quo behind
(09:14):
move forward with you and your solution,
those techniques when theystart to get cold feet,
actually make things worse,they don't make things better.
There was an 84% probabilitythat doing that stuff
will actually drive thecustomer to no decision,
it will actually increasethe odds they do nothing.
And when we dug intothe data, what we found
is that no decisionlosses are actually born
of two different things.
(09:35):
On the one hand, you've got customers
who prefer the status quo,
and that was about 44% ofthe no decision losses,
but the bigger chunkof no decision losses,
were losses due to indecision.
These are customers who are convinced
that the status quo is suboptimal,
are convinced that youare the right supplier
to move forward with,
but nevertheless, theystruggle to make a decision.
And those specific strugglescome down to three fears
(09:58):
that they have.
The first one is, have Ichosen the right thing?
You've put a lot ofoptions in front of me,
in this final version of your platform,
the final version of your solution,
have we made the rightdecisions, contract length,
how broad we're gonna go,
bells and whistles andintegrations and partner solutions,
all these things that could goin, those are hard decisions
and my fear as a customer is,did I pick the right product,
(10:20):
actually the right solution to buy?
I know you're the supplierI wanna work with,
but did I buy the right solution?
The second thing is,the customer are fearful
that they haven't done enough research,
that they don't feellike they're smart enough
about this big decisionyou're asking them to make,
and maybe it's the next white paper,
the one they didn't read,that has all the answers
that they should have gotten
before they bought the solution.
Then the third one wecall outcome uncertainty.
(10:41):
This is the fear the customer has
that they might not realize the benefits
that you're promising from the purchase.
They might not see the costsavings or the revenue growth
or the risk mitigation, andthen that's gonna be a bad look.
And Emil, if you think aboutthe current environment,
those are decisions thatcould get you fired,
and where budget is decisions,
even low level decisions noware so heavily scrutinized.
(11:02):
And so customers, if I were to summarize,
while we've told salespeoplefor years and years,
when the customer starts tohesitate to dial up the FOMO,
what we actually should bedoing, is dialing down the FOMU,
FOMU is the Fear of Messing Up.
And it turns out thatthe Fear of Messing Up
is actually the bigger problem
and it's the bigger driverof no decision losses.
So JOLT is a playbook,it's four behaviors,
(11:24):
it's an acronym as those ofyou who've read the book know,
judge the level of indecision,offer your recommendation,
limit the exploration andtake risk off the table,
that together comprise a playbook,
not for beating the status quo,
but for overcoming customer indecision.
Now, because again, afteryou've beaten the status quo
and put it to bed, what thecustomer start worrying about
(11:44):
is, did I pick the right configuration,
have I done enough research about this,
do I have any assurance ofsuccess from this vendor?
And those are the thingsthat end up causing them
to get cold feet and not move forward,
and so we need to dealwith that as salespeople.
And those behaviors, just like Challenger,
we didn't invent them, wefound that these are things
that top salespeople are doing right now,
they never read a sales book about it,
(12:06):
they never got a sales training on it,
they just they're best salespeople,
they figure out how tonavigate around obstacles
when they see them inthe buying environment.
- Yeah, that's great summary.
Thank you very much for theChris Nodes as you said,
but I think it's verynecessary for everyone
to kind of align one more time,
even if they've already heardthis from another webinar.
(12:26):
I'm actually gonna touch onthe importance of understanding
the nuance a little later in this podcast,
but before that, Iwanted to share with you
an anecdote personallythat really impressed me.
So around the time when I firstsaw your posts on LinkedIn
about the upcoming book,it wasn't even published,
we had an experience atmy company with a vendor
(12:49):
that was chasing us for six, seven months,
I would say they did everythingaccording to the book,
nothing that I would personallyadvise them against doing,
and they pretty much, theyshowed us testimonials
that allowed us to understandwhat kind of upside potential
(13:13):
we have in front of us,in terms of like gains,
of benefits from usingthem, in terms of reviews,
they showed us that they're best in class,
followed for years, and Iwas the main decision maker,
they've picked me correctly,
they knew that I have the budget,
I've told them I have the budget for this,
I brought in the head of sales
who actually would've beenpretty much the main user of that
(13:34):
together with the sales team,
and then on the last call when they...
I could see in theirface, they were smiling
and they thought theywere gonna ring that bell
and say, "We have a deal,"and we just looked at them
and we said, "Sorry guys, wejust think we're not ready.
As a company, we're not matureenough, our team is new,
we just hired a bunch of new sales folks
and we right now, we can't even get them
(13:56):
to use the CRM correctly,let alone use something else,
so sorry, we are not gonna buy it."
And it was a huge disappointment,
I could see on their faces,they were just not...
- Oh, yeah, you just get out of the room.
- And that happened just a few weeks
before I read what you posted on LinkedIn
when you started talking about JOLT
and I was like, wow, it resonates so much,
I just read one sentenceand I got it immediately.
(14:18):
But I just think that that'shappening all the time,
I see it happening so much...
- That's a great anecdote, Emil,
because what you're describing is not...
it doesn't sound like,at least, in this case,
again, I was not part ofthat buying experience,
but it doesn't sound likethere were really any questions
from your side aboutthat this would represent
a better way of doing things,
that the solution that thevendor would propose was great,
(14:41):
their customers love them,that things look great,
but at the end of the day, Ithink you had some questions
about like, what if we don'tget full value out of things?
- What if our team cannot not use it,
they don't know how to useit, what are we gonna do?
- It's not even thevendor, it's you, right?
And it's like, I just don'tknow that we'll get the benefits
and who wants to havetheir name associated
with a big purchase and thennot realize the benefits?
(15:01):
Like that's a bad look,nobody wants to do that.
- Yeah, so I just thought I'llmention this anecdote here,
because I feel like with most people,
nowadays when I try toexplain, people ask me,
"So what are you soexcited about these days?"
And I tell them, "Well, Ijust started reading JOLTs
and been following Matton all these webinars,"
(15:21):
and most of the times they're like,
"Okay, so what exactly does it mean?"
And then I give them this anecdote
and I tell them, "This is what it means."
Think about what happenedon the other side,
the vendor, they had the head of sales,
not some junior salesperson there
and he was totally surprised listening,
on like being witness to whatwas happening on the call.
And you mentioned earlierChallenger a little bit,
(15:42):
so I have to ask you, isJOLT a natural evolution
of the Challenger methodology
or are you observing a complete disruption
in the buyer's journey?
- Yeah, it's a really good question.
So I think it's a littlebit of both actually.
So I think I've had thisdiscussion with so many people
(16:04):
about whether this problemof customer indecision
is a new problem
or is it just a problemwe've only found now?
And so on the one hand, we think about...
we see these on the news,these wonderful images
from the Webb Telescope
that there's like amillion miles past the moon
and it's allowing us to view the universe
in ways that we never could before,
but those things were always there,
(16:24):
we just didn't have thetechnology to find them.
So in some respects, I thinkindecision is like that,
it is everywhere, but we'venever been taught to look for it
or to study it, and nowwith modern technology
to study 2 1/2 million salescalls with machine learning,
we have like that big telescope
out in the million miles past the moon,
we have the technology to find it.
But I think the flip side of that,
the counterargument is that,in fact, it's a new problem,
(16:49):
and I think if you lookat the things that...
So take the downturn aside,
so I think it's easy for everyone to agree
that yes, no decisionlosses are going to spike
for every supplier andevery vendor out there
over the next couple of years,
especially if the economyhits the skids a little bit.
So I'm not talking about that,
but what I'm talking aboutis, if you look at the things
that drive indecision,the number of options,
(17:11):
every vendor out there isoffering more and more options,
partner ecosystems, bellsand whistles, roadmap items,
different configurationsof their platforms,
we all love, especially inmarketing and above the funnel
because it attracts people in,
but when we put more optionsin front of people, as we know,
and Barry Schwartz writes about this
in "The Paradox of Choice,"it makes it harder for them
(17:33):
to pick something and itincreases the odds they do nothing
'cause they don't wanna make a bad choice.
And so the number of options
most vendors are putting outthere is only increasing,
like very few of us aregoing the opposite direction
and simplifying, most ofus are making our options
more complex and numerous.
The second thing, theamount of information
and you know this very wellworking with marketers,
the amount of informationon any use case, any market,
(17:56):
any technology, any industry today,
is orders of magnitudegreater than it was yesterday
and tomorrow will be evengreater than it is today
and there's no putting thatgenie back in the bottle,
we are just...
There's so much contentcoming at the buyer
that is impossible forthem to consume it all.
They'll never consume it all
yet they want to deeply consume it all.
So this struggle that like,have I done enough research?
(18:17):
Well, what if that is like running a race
where you'll never get to the finish line,
but the customer feels
like I've gotta get to the finish line
or I'm going to be making a decision
about which I'm not well-informed.
So that's the second one,
and the third one, eventhis valuation problems
of feeling like I might notget what I'm paying for,
I think as suppliers shift
from selling simple transactional products
(18:38):
that can be swapped in nowto selling more integrated,
value added, sticky but also expensive
and disruptive solutions,not just the product
but the layers of service,the long-term transformation,
we're all selling transformation, right?
And as we embed ourselves inthe customer organization,
that becomes a very, veryrisky decision for the buyer
and we're amplifying the likelihood
(19:00):
that they will get cold feet
and worry about not gettingwhat they're paying for.
And so I think thoseare all secular trends
that even if you put the downturn aside,
I think the drivers ofindecision are getting worse.
And so one of the thingsI would say though
with respect to Challenger,
remember, if we go backto the earlier point,
44% of no decision losses
(19:20):
are because we didn't beatthe customer status quo,
that is the first thing asalesperson's got to do,
and in marketing, we've gotto equip our salespeople
to be able to overcomethe customer status quo,
the status quo is a very,very powerful enemy,
you will not sell anything
if you cannot convincethe customer to part ways
with their status quo.
And we know people are lazy,
(19:40):
they're genetically engineeredto avoid energy expenditure
when they don't need to.
They don't like to change
and they will pass up anobviously better options
in order to just keep doingwhat they're doing today.
So that is a powerfulenemy, it's job number one.
But once the customer agrees
to move away from the status quo,
and they agree to moveforward with your vision,
(20:02):
then they start worrying
about, have I chosen the right thing?
Have I done enough research?
Have I any assurance ofsuccess from this partner?
And those are the thingswe now need to deal with.
So the way I think about JOLTis it is not a replacement
for anybody's sales methodology.
So if you're a Challenger shop
or maybe your company is a MEDDIC shop
or it's a Sandler shop,it really doesn't matter,
I happen to be part of theChallenger for obvious reasons,
(20:24):
but there are lots of methodologies.
All of those sales methodologies
are predicated on beatingthe customer status quo.
There are no methodologies outthere until we produced JOLT,
to deal with indecision.
But I think about it this way,
is that a salesperson needs two playbooks.
They've gotta have a playbookfor beating the status quo,
that is your current sales methodology,
you should get absolutely,
(20:45):
exceptionally you aretalented in terms of...
in high levels of execution
in terms of being able to deliver that
and execute against it,
but the flip side isyou also need a playbook
for overcoming indecision,
which nobody's really equipped to do,
and so think about JOLT as an overlay
to whatever you do today.
That's good, so it'snot a forget Challenger,
it's a do-this-on-top-of Challenger
(21:06):
because Challenger solvesfor half the problem,
it solves for the status quo problem,
it does not solve forthe indecision problem.
- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense,
thanks for clarifying things.
So I've watched many ofyour recent webinars,
I've already mentioned that several times
and I'm really impressed.
There's been a lot of veryinteresting discussions,
you did this webinarsinvolving different guests
(21:29):
and also just the audiencehas been very active
on all of these, raisinga lot of questions,
but I have to admit thatfrom my point of view,
a lot of the discussion thatI've seen has been focused
on the implications of yourresearch findings on sales,
and it makes sense, it's abook primarily meant for sales.
But at the end of the day, notonly because I'm a marketer
(21:51):
and because this podcastis trying to balance
between sales and marketing executives,
but in general,
there's the proverbial salesand marketing alignment
that everyone is talking about.
So does marketing need a JOLT?
(both giggling)
What should marketing do to support sales
or overcome customers' indecision?
(22:12):
- Yeah, it's great,another great question.
So what I would say, we talkabout this with Challenger
and I think the same is true of JOLT,
that Challenger was aboutindividual salesperson skills,
but it was also aboutorganizational capability.
Challenger doesn't workunless marketing is helping
to develop those insightsthat Challengers can use
to challenge customer thinking.
If you don't have insight,
(22:33):
you're not a Challenger,you're just annoying,
and so it doesn't work.
It has to be both sales andmarketing and alignment.
And I think JOLT is the same,
and I think you're quite right
and this was probably a function
of like we had to hit adeadline with the publisher,
so we stayed focused withthe tactical sales side.
But certainly, as I've hadconversations with folks
and we knew this as wewere writing the research,
it is also, JOLT isalso an individual skill
(22:56):
and an organizational capability.
I'll give you a few ideas here.
So think about offering recommendations,
how do we chop the field for our customers
and then recommend an option?
'Cause it turns out that'swhat best salespeople do
to overcome this paradox of choice.
Who figures out what those packages are,
those pre-built configurations?
Well, that's probably marketing
(23:16):
in partnership with productand sales leadership.
What are the use cases, the ICPs,
the target needs-basedsegments we're selling into,
and how do we configurepre-built happy meals
or configurations thatmap to those use cases
and those buyer types?
That's a great role for the organization,
and arguably, it's not something
you want your salespeople doing
(23:36):
because they don't havethe breadth of perspective
across the entirety ofwhat's working out there.
What are our best customers doing?
What do they buy and howdo we guide everyone else
to buy the same thing?
Second, we think aboutthe amount of information.
I steer your listeners to an article
that my Challenger co-author,Brent Adamson wrote,
"Sense Making for Sales," was in HBR,
(23:57):
I believe, earlier this year,
and in that article,Brent talks about the idea
that marketing plays a pivotal...
in a world of abundant information,
marketing plays a really pivotal role
to structure a learningjourney for the customer.
Every customer, youcan't wave a magic wand
and tell them, "Oh, you don'tneed to read any content,
just trust me," becauseA, they don't trust you,
and so they will, theydo wanna be informed,
(24:19):
but there's a point where theyengage in analysis paralysis.
But if we can feed them enough content
that gets them to feellike they're conversant
and knowledgeable and they're not...
it is not a situation
in which they're taking a leap of faith,
but they feel like they'vebeen well-informed,
how do we structure that learning journey?
(24:39):
Some of it is probably our content,
maybe it's some of ourcompetitors' content,
third-party analyst reportslike Gartner Magic Quadrants,
Forrester analyst reports, et cetera,
but as marketing, we arein a great position to say,
if you want to get like the five articles,
two podcasts and YouTubevideo that you need to consume
to go from the...
(24:59):
I wanna say 101 level, but even below that
to like a 201 or 301level of understanding,
here's what you should consume.
That's not something that salespeople
should come up with either,
they probably have a senseof things they recommend,
but you probably have onesalesperson over here recommending
for people to read that article
and then these other salespeople saying
like, "No, that's terrible,"
they should read something else.
Marketing should be really the arbiter
of what that learning journey looks like,
(25:20):
and then finally, takingrisk off the table.
These are...
What we don't wanna have happen,
we know best salespeople willcome up with creative ways
to de-risk the purchase for the customer,
but we don't want salespeopleknocking on finances door,
their managers door asking for permission
every time they're tryingto structure a contract
in a creative way or bundlein professional services
(25:41):
in a certain way, let's pre-buildthose de-risking options
and train sales people andequip them with content
so they can deliver them and use them
in the moment with the customer.
So again, the role of the organization
is very clear in JOLT, justlike it was with Challenger,
it's probably fodder fora bonus chapter if I...
but I still have to getthis book in the room here,
(26:02):
(Matt laughing)
but it's next on my to-do list I think,
'cause there's a lot towrite about in that area.
- Great, yeah, no, I'llbe anxiously waiting
for something like that,
I think it'll be a veryinteresting read for me
at least personally anda lot of my colleagues.
I mean, let me ask you, whenyou talk about de-risking,
(26:23):
in the traditional sense whenwe talking about status quo,
overcoming the status quo,
some of that is, let's createsome customer testimonials
just to show the impact thatwe've had on the customer.
We increased by 30% whatever,
or we reduced the cost by whatever, 30%.
On the other hand, rightnow as you're talking
(26:44):
about the de-risk of the indecision,
de-risking the indecision,
I started thinking, well,what if marketing focuses
on creating testimonials, wherethe focus is on how to move
the process of implementation was,
how customers were managed,how they were managed by us
(27:06):
so that they can go down the easiest path,
is that something that weshould be focusing on as well?
- I think so.
I actually think...
So there's one thing thatI think have case profiles
that point to the return
that a customer saw frombuying your solution.
I think it's a differentthing to be able to architect
or roadmap out like, wecall it a value roadmap
(27:28):
or benefits capture roadmap,
but here's how we go from contract signed,
to capturing benefits and capturing value,
here are all the moving parts,
here's who needs to be involved,
here are the KPIs and metrics we look for
and here are the gotchas.
Here are the pitfalls we want to avoid,
and this by the way, thisroadmap is built back
from one, the experience of customers
(27:50):
who've gotten tremendous value,
way more than theyexpected from our platform.
But it's also informed by those companies
who've made missteps andlessons we've learned
about how to do this well,
that's different froma customer case study,
but that's a great, it's almostlike a safety net, right?
To show the customeryou've been there before,
you've done this before andyou have a high success rate
(28:11):
because it's like you'regoing on a journey
through the woods orthe jungle with a guide
and they say, "I knowexactly how to get there,
by the way, we don't wanna go that way
because there're some lions over there,
we don't wanna go this waythere're some poisonous snakes
and you wanna go this way,
and here are the things to watch out for,"
so that is a huge confidence giver
that you're working with avendor that has been there before
(28:33):
and they've done this before successfully,
that's a great role for marketing to play.
- Great, so that's a good point.
From my point of view, from a...
I'm focused on healthcaretechnology at the moment
and they're the big elephant in the room
is Epic as an EHR system.
And a lot of hospital systems
(28:54):
have spent hundreds ofmillions of dollars,
close to a billion dollars sometimes
on implementations of Epic,
and the CIO, who mostlikely is driving that,
for them this is basicallytheir whole career trajectory,
it's a make or break experience.
- That's right.
- So anything you can do tobasically alleviate the concerns
(29:15):
that implementing an extrasystem is gonna jeopardize Epic
or is gonna ask for more resources,
it's definitely gonna help,
so I can definitely relate towhat you were saying earlier.
- Absolutely.
- So a similar questionthat I was gonna ask you,
and you mentioned earlier a little bit
so it kind of promptedme to wait until later
(29:35):
in the episode, but I've hadrecently a lot of conversations
with CEOs and heads of sales,and one thing that I noticed
that is kind of interesting to me,
also a little discouraging,they're all nodding in agreement
as I describe to them the JOLT's findings
and basically, the main premisethat we discussed earlier.
(29:57):
And when I tell them,
let's focus on overcoming the indecision,
they say, "Yeah, okay, yeah."
But then they start commentingand basically providing me
with their ideas andI start hearing things
that relate more toovercoming the status quo,
not so much overcoming indecision.
So what do sales and marketing executives
(30:21):
often get wrong about JOLT?
Like why is it so easy for them
to just kinda say, "Yeah, I got it,"
but that's exactly what we've been doing?
- It's so interesting becauseI've seen this as well, Emil,
is that you will geta lot of nodding heads
and it's like, "All right,we need more case studies,
we need a sharper ROI calculator,
we need more proof points,"and these kinds of things
(30:41):
and customer case studies,profile success stories,
reference clients, allthese kinds of things,
and it's like, no, no,that's what you need
to beat the status quo,you should keep doing that,
but remember your customers,
that's all about how the customer can win
by buying your solution,
the reason they become indecisiveis their fear of failure
through buying your solution.
Solving that is a verydifferent category of things,
(31:05):
but you're right, I mean,why does this happen?
I mean, I think it's the same reason
that when salespeople gothrough sales training
and it sounds like this farapart from what they do today,
they slip back into whatthey're already doing
'cause they have a falsepositive, "Oh, I already do that."
And so I think there's a real danger
and you've gotta create that sort of chasm
(31:27):
and that cognitive dissonance
so that they see what they're doing
as clearly distinct fromwhat they should be doing.
And in this story, we're notsaying to stop doing that,
so again, you've gotto beat the status quo,
but overcoming indecision
is a fundamentally different thing,
but again, as human beings,
I think we have confirmation bias
and we are grooved to lookfor what we already know
(31:50):
in things that we're encounteringfor the first time even.
So when they see indecision,
people go immediately to, oh,well, it's a value problem
and you didn't convince thecustomer to move forward
so we need to dial thatup and sharpen that,
but it's actually not, it'snot a value problem at all.
And again, I think therealization oftentimes for folks
is that you can easily have a customer
(32:13):
who will hand on heart say,"I totally believe your ROI,
I absolutely believe ourstatus quo is terrible,
it's very suboptimal.
It's leading to lostrevenue growth opportunity,
cost leakage risk for our organization,
or lost market share,whatever it is, it's horrible.
What you guys are talking about is great,
the ROI looks terrific, yourreference customers love you,
(32:34):
these case studies, theseare companies just like us,
I'm in, I'm with you."
But they will many of them still not buy
because you haven'tsolved for the other stuff
that they're worried about.
And as we talk about quite often,
because it results in the same outcome,
which is no decision,
and because we've all grown up in a world,
sales and marketinghave grown up in a world
(32:54):
where we've only ever believed
and we've only ever been taught
that the only reason acustomer does nothing
is because they stillprefer their status quo,
it still comes down to value,
and so we've gotta sharpenour value articulation.
This research now unveils thatthat is part of the problem,
but it's less than half of the problem.
The bigger problem istheir fear of failure.
And at the end of the day,look, no customer ever got fired
(33:16):
for maintaining the status quo,
people maintain thestatus quo all the time,
it happens every day.
And the status quo has manyparents in an organization,
many people have theirhand in the status quo,
but people do get firedfor changing the status quo
and to go down a differentpath and to try to change it,
and if that doesn't workout, that usually falls down
or comes down on some person
and it's usually the personwhose name is on the contract,
(33:37):
and that person is desperatelyfearful of failure.
Customers as we say, areokay with missing out,
they are not okay with messing up.
And so when you try to go back
and sharpen your ROI calculatorand put more case studies
and proof points and referencecustomers in front of them,
all you're doing is tryingto help them realize
the cost of the inaction.
Here's what's gonna happento you if you don't do this,
(33:58):
you're gonna miss out onthese great opportunities.
Don't you want this ROI, don'tyou want these opportunities?
But that's not what they're worried about.
They're not worried aboutthe loss from inaction,
they're worried about the lossthat might occur from action,
from actually doing something
and having it be a big mistake for them
and having it rest ontheir shoulders entirely.
- Yeah, that's a very goodteaching point, I guess,
(34:20):
for everyone because Ithink we just oftentimes
have the tendency toscratch on the surface
and not really try to dive deep enough
to understand what really isdriving some of these comments
that we hear on the other side,
and it's easy to confusethe fear of messing up
with the fear of missing out.
So yeah, it's a good point.
(34:41):
I mean, that kind ofleads, it's a good segue
into my last question for today,
and I always ask the questionof all my podcast guests,
this is supposed to be educational.
So I want for the viewers andthe listeners of this podcast
to learn something,
what are the key takeawaysfrom this episode?
(35:02):
What are the two or three things
that you'd like to really drive home?
- Yeah, I think there'sone I would point to
that's I think really important, is to...
again, we just talked about this,
but to recognize the difference
between missing out and messing up
and recognizing that our customers,
what keeps them from moving forward
is not because they don't buythat they're gonna miss out
and so much of what we doin sales and marketing,
(35:24):
whether it's better ROIcalculators, better proof points,
better success stories,so on and so forth,
that is all about dialingup the cost of inaction,
but the customer's not worriedabout that predominantly,
what they're worried about is messing up.
That is the bigger thing
and so we've gotta solve for that.
We've gotta solve forthat in sales training,
in coaching we've gotta...
in enablement, we've gotta solve for that
(35:45):
at the organizational level,
marketing, productfinance, to equip people
so that they can overcome indecision.
But I think the big takeaway,
what I will tell you is,again, it is part of the reason
that people get head-faked about this
and they say, "Well, I have no decision,"
well, clearly they stillprefer the status quo,
so we gotta convince themto leave the status quo.
And I think the head-fake for salespeople
(36:07):
or the knee-jerk reaction
is when the customer gets cold feet,
as I suspect, with thatvendor you were talking to,
who was trying to sell you this deal
and they were all excited 'cause you're...
and you pulled the windout of their sales,
and said, "No, it's not the right time,"
my suspicion is they probably went back
to, "Well, Emil, you must not,
like you're gonna missout on this opportunity.
Like look at the ROI,look at the proof points,
(36:28):
look at all...
we're working with all yourcompetitors, by the way,
they're seeing tremendous gains"
and they try to makeyou squirm a little bit,
or they say, "Well, I totally understand,
but it's a lot cheaper if you buy it today
than if you wait six months,"
or "There's an implementation window
that we can offer you a slot right now,
but if you don't buy now,
it could be a year beforewe could roll this out
'cause we have so much demand."
And what happens in that moment
(36:48):
is, and the reason it backfires,
is it sounds like youwere already convinced
that this vendor solutionwould be a better option,
and when they start doing these things,
what they're using is scare tactics
to try to sell to somebodywho's already afraid,
but they're afraid of something else.
And in your case, we're not mature enough,
we're not at the levelwhere we can capture
the full benefits here
and I cannot afford towaste scarce budget dollars
(37:11):
and resources on an investmentthat doesn't fully pay off.
That is your concern,
it's not that I don't believeyou about your solution
and how great it is.
So it rings hollow at best
and at worst, it actually,again, it gives you more
to be worried about
and not only am I worried aboutnot getting full benefits,
it's also gonna be more expensive
when we do decide to buy it.
(37:32):
So now I'm worried about that too,
that is a recipe for doing nothing.
So the less and the big takeaway I think
is for salespeople to hit pause.
Before you go back to the FUD,
before you go back to dial up the ROI,
before you dangle the 10% discount,
as you said earlier, Emil,dig deeper and ask yourself,
what do you think is reallykeeping this customer
from moving forward?
Is it 'cause they don't believe you
(37:52):
and they don't understand,
they don't think this is acompelling enough alternative
to their status quo?
Well, you may have a status quo problem,
or is this something else?
Is it fear of failure?
And if it is, how do we not...
What we don't wanna stopdoing is dialing up the cost
of doing nothing, of inaction,we wanna start dialing down
the fear of failure or dialingdown the cost of action,
(38:12):
like dial down the FOMU, andthat's a different approach.
And simply pausing and askingyourself that question,
I think can help avoid the situation
where your knee-jerkreaction is to make it...
turn the screws and as we see in the data,
oftentimes make it worse.
- Yeah, that's very much true.
Thank you very much forsummarizing at the end,
(38:33):
the key takeaways, I thinkthat's helpful for everyone.
And once again, I reallyappreciate you having on...
like having you on this podcast,
it's been a pleasure for meto speak to you about JOLT
and an honor to have you on this podcast,
so thank you very much,Matt, thanks for your time...
- Thanks for having me.- I appreciate
all your insights and I hopeto host you on another occasion
(38:54):
and for another episode in the future,
but I really would like to thank you
for everything you did today.
- Thanks, Emil.- Have a good day.
- You too.
(bright upbeat music)
(39:54):
(air whooshing)
(bright upbeat music)
(air whooshing)
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