"Those who can't do, teach" is borderline idiotic. Teaching, in fact, is one of the best ways to solidify and continue your learning of a topic. In this episode, we talk about how current and aspiring sales leaders can leverage this fact as a superpower.
"Those who can't do, teach" is borderline idiotic. Teaching, in fact, is one of the best ways to solidify and continue your learning of a topic. In this episode, we talk about how current and aspiring sales leaders can leverage this fact as a superpower.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go. I've got a great guest for you today. We're going to dig into a topic that's going to make your teams better. It's going to make you better if you do it, because things don't make you better if you don't do them. I'm joined by Mike Flornoi, senior Vice President at JLE Industries, and he's got a topic that he brought up on the internet the other day. I'm going to read you the topic here in a second. First, I want to say hello, mike, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Corey, I appreciate you having me ma'am.
Speaker 1:All right. So you did this LinkedIn post. I like to read the LinkedIn feed sometimes for either humor for myself or to pick something up and take it away and I said, well, this is a good one. I want to talk to this guy about this. He says free advice Be the first to raise your hand to train the new rep. It will help you more than it'll help them. When you show someone how to do something the correct way, you remind yourself how it's supposed to be done. When you're in a role for some time, it's easy to get lazy with certain things or to shortcut the process because you are competently unconscious. Mike, take us through what motivated this post and then let's dissect it a little bit.
Speaker 2:So, if I remember correctly, I was listening to an audio book. I tend to do that a lot. I skip over the music, put an audio book, try to feed myself constantly with things I should be thinking about. It beats Britney Spears right. You know she's not going to make you that much better. Well, it depends on what moves you're in. Maybe you're in the mood for Britney Spears. There we go. A little motivation. She's got a new song out, apparently. Yeah, so I was listening to audio book and the topic was around giving either giving to yourself or giving to your customer, or giving to your coworkers. And this topic sort of raced through my mind when I worked for a company called Fleet Maddox years and years, and years ago was bought by Verizon for a couple billion dollars Fun stuff.
Speaker 2:I was a senior account executive there and the account executives or closers, whatever they referred to us, as there were a handful of us and when we bring a new closer in or through training, or when a sales development rep would book their first appointment, they would come to us and sit in with us on those appointments. Or if a new guy was trying to get trained up or if someone was struggling, they would sit in with us. And you know we had specific ways that we went through our meetings. The first part was sort of an introduction, some fact finding and questions, and then we went into a full discovery and then we did a demonstration and then we walked through our closing questions and closing techniques and I found that whenever I did that for either a new person or for someone who was struggling, I tend to do things that I had forgotten that I was supposed to do or maybe left out in the process, because I was doing four or five demos a day, 20 days a month for years and years and years, and it's easy to get the lazy with things that you don't necessarily think have value, or you've gotten so good at something that you can sort of shortcut what you do and kind of get through the demo a little bit quicker and still end up with the same result.
Speaker 2:But then you notice that when you sit down with someone and you go through the correct process, it ends up working and you go, man, I forgot that I used to ask that question. Or I forgot that I used to tie down that a little bit better. I forgot I used to show this spot of my demo. I've sort of started skipping over that, but I did it for the benefit of this person that was struggling or other brand new and wow, that really worked for me and it almost brings you back to the basics or the things that got you to the successful point before you started smooth sailing and it can really re-energize your sales efforts by reaching out to either help someone or a new guy. I love that.
Speaker 1:And I think we use the word basics and here's the. I think what happens is people get this emotional reaction to the word basic because basic could mean simple, introductory, that thing I used to need. But what it really is is a fundamental that helps support everything else. It either makes things more effective or it makes things easier. Is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 2:I think so. I mean, there's a reason why that term get back to the basics is used in sports and teams and sales organizations is because, to your point, it's more about a fundamental right. If you're trying to do all this wild and crazy things that may or may not work, but you stick to the things, the fundamentals of the basics, that got you here in the first place, it allows that baseline that you know is going to be successful a large percentage of the time. So, yeah, I agree with basics, better said, fundamentals.
Speaker 1:And you get to a point where you might think you're winning, you might think you're doing great, but you don't have a great barometer. There's not a competition out there where somebody else is working the same exact deal with the same exact prospect with your same exact product. You just don't. You don't have that, and so your, your win rate might be 30%. You think you're killing it, but it could be 37% if you were playing some of these fundamentals. I mean, 31 is better than 30. 31 is better than 30. Yeah, that can. That can make a difference for a lot of people. That's right. Yeah, that's fascinating. So that give us a couple specific examples like what, what is you talked about? Showing a specific feature in a demo, asking it, asking a discovery question like what's the thing that you remember? Really jumping out at you, because I imagine if it's, if it's something that sticks in your mind, it's something that other folks are going to, it's going to resonate with them.
Speaker 2:When you're you know, I think that when you do sales presentations A lot, let's say you know there's all different types of sales roles nowadays.
Speaker 2:You know you've got the traditional SDR role which, by the way, is hardest job in the business. I don't think you can be the best accounting executive in the world unless you have had sales development experience. That might be something that people would argue with me about, but I'd be happy to argue with them about that. I think you have to do the sales development role in order to be the best accounting, not say you can be a good one, but it would be the best one. So you got the sales development role, you got the traditional account executive, you got the full cycle account executive, where you know they go and hunt in and kill and eat and they do the whole thing. So there's different levels of you know sales representatives out there and I'm talking about the folks that you know do a lot of presentations, right. So if you're doing even a couple presentations a day, but you know even more so the people who are doing five and I know a lot of guys out there they're doing multiple presentations a day 20, 20 working days a month. It is very easy to just continue to do the same thing and slowly slip and forget things. You know you just you sort of does off. You know you've done the same discovery, you've asked the same questions, you show the same product, but the small things throughout there you can forget to do like maybe on the front end, asking a specific question to let you know that you are talking to the right person. Right, you've asked the discovery question that maybe you would have skipped over because you just rolling through it and you asked that one question and you realize that this person isn't qualified. I shouldn't be doing an hour presentation this person. Right, I need to maybe back up a little bit and develop that opportunity opportunity a little bit better and then bring someone else in.
Speaker 2:So now you know you're conscious of that, or maybe throughout the demo showing your product, there's a piece of the demo that you've skipped over because you're sort of rushing through it. Or you've gotten to the meat potatoes and there's one wow factor that you know you're not wowed by anymore because you showed it 1000 times. Doesn't mean the customer won't be wowed by it, but it's almost lost its, lost its excitement to you. So you don't translate that into the, into the customer demonstration, or maybe as towards the end of the process? You know where you're asking specific, you know pre close questions like how would you see yourself using that? Those sorts of just testing the waters before you.
Speaker 2:You know you try to win the business of the person that you're meeting with. There's a few different areas that you can completely get lazy with If you're not intentional about it. And I think bringing somebody new in or training someone, it just brings that back and you remember the training that you went through and you sort of do it the right way and you go. Man, I have been slipping on asking that question. It's just a good tool. It's a free way to tighten your, your process up a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good question. You want them to ask it because you're not confident they're going to be able to push the deal over the finish line if they don't ask questions like this, which means it's good. That's right. I love the point around the salesperson discounts the importance of, or just doesn't spend that much time because they're not wowed by, it's not new and exciting to them anymore. It's part of the job. Part of the job because to recognize that you've got somebody over there, somebody that you're doing a demo or presentation for, who's literally never seen this before, and they must be treated like an audience member.
Speaker 1:Imagine if you were at a play and the actors on the stage just, oh, they've done this 20 times, they're just not really that into it. So if you're at a play for the first time, you're going to have a really bad experience. Couldn't have said it better. It's literally the same thing. And then also, since we talk about pool and gambling a lot on this show, you are a strong pool player. Talk to us a little bit about fundamentals and how failure to pay attention to fundamentals impacts yourself in a pool tournament, because that is a competitive place where if you don't pay attention, you're getting it knocked out real fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. I mean, if you don't hold the pool stick right, you don't chalk your stick, yeah, you don't mark your pocket. Those are all losses, right, hold it, hold it right.
Speaker 1:Loose your grip right. Cradle, cradle, not hold. Yeah, that's the thing right.
Speaker 2:Some people get excited.
Speaker 1:They're like I'm going to tighten my grip. But if you walk up behind somebody, that's an experienced pool. I mean, I've seen guys have this happen to them in a bar. They're sitting there losing. Somebody walks up behind them and they're like loosen up a little bit, that's it.
Speaker 1:And that's the coaching. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Elbow don't drop your elbow, Because this is how you tell if you want to bet somebody in pool or not. If they hold the cue tight and they drop their elbow, play them for money. If their elbow looks like butter and they have a loose grip, don't play them for money. That's my rule that I go by.
Speaker 2:Curious. If you agree with that, that's not a bad rule to have. It's not a bad rule to have. I'd also not bet the guy money. I bet the guy money who brought his own pool stick. There you go. If the guy's playing with the beat up house stick winning, don't play that guy?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because they're doing that for appearances. Right, that's right. Yeah, I think this is a good analogy. Here's why, in pool, you get constant feedback as to if you're at the top of your game or not. If you're a sales manager and you've got somebody on our team that's doing great, the question is, is it the market, is it just the batch of customers or prospects that they've had recently that are in a better position to buy? Or is it them? Because there's three types of prospects.
Speaker 1:There's people that are never going to buy from you. There's people that are going to buy from you no matter what, and there's those other people that you can influence, and the only reason sales teams exist is for that third category of folks that they might buy. They might buy from you, and that's where sales is positioned, but you only have one sales cycle with each company at any given time, so you don't have that feedback that you're getting if you're winning a game or losing a game, or winning a game that brings up an interesting point too, and I've always said that if I sell, if I work for Walmart, for example, and I sold a product for Walmart, when that customer thinks about Walmart, they think about my face, they buy from you.
Speaker 2:They don't think about your boss, they don't think about the VP that works there, they're thinking about you. So, to your point, you have got to be enthusiastic and on your game every single time. I mean, that's just the way it is. I think that training someone or having someone in your office sort of shakes up your environment a little bit. Everybody has that drive to work that they drive every single day. They could probably do it with their eyes closed, but it's easy for you to.
Speaker 2:If you're on the phone or something like that, you just pass by the exit, you get distracted. And so changing up your environment, bringing someone in to listen, training someone new, getting you out of that mold that you get stuck in, and obviously wanting to help someone get better, is part of it. When you share things with folks, there's a part of you that wakes up or lights up and you feel good about that. When you feel good, you're positive. When you're positive, you're enthusiastic. When you're enthusiastic, the customer feels that right. It's just sort of a chain reaction that happens. So I've always said raise your hand. Plus, it doesn't hurt you if you're trying to move up in your career or your job, if your sales manager knows, hey, when a new guy comes in, bob is the first one to raise his hand and wants to help. That can't be bad for your career or for your stickiness in an organization, especially in the time right now where there isn't a lot of certainty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people used to always say I don't know if they say it so much anymore, but they used to always say I want more responsibility. It used to be the cry of the employees I want more responsibility. I know a lot of people still do. Some people want more work-life balance. That's fine too. Whatever you want, if you want it, you should verbalize it. But if you want more responsibility, what Mike's talking about is exactly what more responsibility looks like. Help somebody develop their skills.
Speaker 1:And you say one word which I really want to dig into a little bit more is this idea of unconscious competence. So in 1960, there was a textbook published called Management of Training Programs by three professors at New York University, and there are four levels in their hierarchy of competence. So imagine that you've got a pyramid with four levels. So the bottom you've got unconscious incompetence, where you don't know what you don't know. Then the next level is you've got conscious incompetence. You know that, you don't know it. Then the third level that's the third. Yeah, that's way better than not knowing what you don't know Exactly. So you're like OK, cool. So this is like my pool game right now Long shots off the rail with poor cut angles. I'm going to really struggle. So maybe I'm going to play some defense. I know that I can't execute the shot very well under pressure, especially at a nine foot table of tight pockets.
Speaker 1:So you've got that first level of unconscious incompetence. Then conscious incompetence. Third level is conscious competence, and so what you've got to pay attention to is to kind of flip here. So conscious competence means you know it, but you have to think about it. And this is where salespeople get really caught up, because they're thinking about the next question to ask and they're not listening to what the prospect says. But when they become an expert and they get to the level of where somebody that's got experience, it's really good. That's unconscious competence.
Speaker 1:So now we're unconsciously competent, and that goes back to what Mike was talking about with driving the car. You don't think about it. You can't tell a story of exactly when you decided to use the turn signal and how you shifted your feet on the drive over. You just say, well, I drove over, took 12 minutes. That's the whole idea. So if you've got unconscious competence, it's both a blessing and a curse. And A, you're good and that's awesome. But B, you might not be recognizing the holes in your game because you're not thinking about it that hard. That's right. But then when you start training these folks that are unconsciously incompetent because they don't know what they don't know, or they're consciously incompetent and they know they don't know it and they just need to get better, that's where both of you can work together to just get better.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what I'm saying. You know it's consciously incompetent To your point is a blessing and a curse, because you're always going to achieve a high level right, but you can easily not be able to point to exactly why you achieved it. There's so many people who just I don't know how he does it. He does it every single month and you can get to the point where you kind of don't even know how you do it. So if you are off at all, it's hard to diagnose where you're off.
Speaker 2:If you just have always been good at it or you've developed the skill to be just good for a very long time, it's hard to diagnose what you're doing wrong if, for some reason, you have an off month, right. So it's like if you're unconscious about it, you're not taking notes, helping people, staying on top of your game, staying sharp. It is more difficult to diagnose what you're doing wrong. Maybe you're not doing anything wrong, maybe it is the market, maybe the product has changed, maybe there's a competitor out there, and then you start second guessing yourself, you start changing a whole bunch of things and now you get a 90 day slump that you're trying to get yourself out of, when you're unconsciously competent and you got to go figure out why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and this is where everybody always says that it's tough when you promote the best sales person to sales manager. This, specifically, is what they're talking about, because you're taking someone that's really good and they don't have a very clear idea of A, y and B. How to translate that to other people who aren't them. Because, do it like me, hold my beer and watch this. That doesn't work. It's funny, but it's not good in business.
Speaker 2:It is funny and you know, promoting your best sales got to the sales manager. That's a whole another topic. It's been an hour on because I've got conflicting feelings about that topic there. It's a widely debated.
Speaker 1:Well, dig into it a little, because to me, this is it. It's you're taking someone that's unconsciously competent and you're trying to get them to lead another group of folks that hit on each one of these four levels of the four stages of competence. So what are your thoughts on that promotion?
Speaker 2:Well, you can look at it two ways. You could look at it like I'm taking my best salesperson and putting them in a management position where they're not going to affect the outcome the way they used to. Or, if you do it the right way, let's say you have 10 account executives, for example, and you got one guy that puts up a huge percentage of business every single month, month then month out, unconsciously, competent, rocking and rolling, and you could say, if I go down to nine account executives and one director of sales, I'm going to lose his production. However, if you take that one guy, you make him the director of sales over those nine guys and he can impact each one of them by 10%. You have just really moved the chains, and so that's why I get sort of conflicted feelings in that, because it is a difficult decision to make.
Speaker 2:But I think if you do it the right way, if that person is a person who has been building rapport with his colleagues, helping his colleagues, training, and they actually have a process that they follow and they have trust of the people they work for, and those people will follow that person, they're a true leader, they want to do it and you have a very strategic approach to it. It could be the best thing that happened to an organization. If you promote your best sales guy and all he wants to do is sell that's what he wants to do he wants to go live in the corner and sell then that's a bad decision, because I have worked with folks in my life that they don't want to manage right and they get the pressure or either it's internal or external that they need to move up in their career. They've been doing this for a long time.
Speaker 2:Some people are perfectly happy being the top sales guy and let's not forget if you're the top sales guy, you're normally making the most money in the company, right? So going into a management job now, you're gonna have people texting you on the weekends and you got a whole bunch of personalities that you gotta manage and you're stuck between the owners or CEOs of the company and the guys out there in the fields. You're in this middle ground trying to negotiate the two for the success of the business. But if it's done right, if that person is the right person, then I don't think it's a mistake. But it has to be done right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it has to be done right. And then there's always that third option, which is they want it, you don't give it to them, they leave, and now you're stuck with choice two or somebody from the outside which can cause a whole other set of problems.
Speaker 2:You're not wrong. You seen that movie before.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've seen that one. I've seen the movie. Yeah, I think that's it. And so if you were gonna promote somebody and they've got this unconscious competence thing, when.
Speaker 1:They're good, they can't describe why, or they tell you things they might see. The thing is they have an idea why they're gonna tell you something, but what they tell you doesn't necessarily translate to. Okay, we hire a little Timmy off the street. How do we get a little Timmy doing that? How do you bridge that gap? And so you get this person in the mindset and in the habit of deconstructing what they know, what they do, and translating that knowledge to someone else without being able to do the Johnny Mimonic brain chip implant.
Speaker 2:I mean, I literally can't think of a guy right now won't say his name, cause that wouldn't be nice but there is a guy that I know specifically that no one knew how he did what he did. People were confused like how did he do that? So not only did he not know, but no one else knew either, and that's what makes it even crazier. But I think with sales you just have to have a blueprint, you have to slice things up into stages. You have your discovery piece up front, you have your demonstration piece, you have your qualifying questions, you have your pre-closed questions, you have your ROI that you go through, or presenting the value and the pricing. I mean, no matter what you're selling, it's gonna have a good mix of those same sorts of components.
Speaker 2:So really taking some time to understand what is working well, what's not working well, sticking to a process once you've determined this is the process that we want, and then documenting that process, is probably the best way to do it right. So if I was a sales manager coming into a new company, I would want to sit with the new, the best sales guy, and I'd write down what they did top to bottom and go back and look at it, listen to it. I figure out what was good and what was different. I'd go look at a guy who was struggling. I'd look at somebody in the middle and then try to figure out where we were off what made this guy so good, what made this guy struggle, what are the gaps in between and try to come to a middle ground of here's a really standardized process that we can do based on all those data points, cause sales is an art form in a science at the same time, which is what makes it so crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's not one specific recipe that's always going to work for everybody. No, it doesn't. If anybody out there wants a template describing what Mike's talking about, I've got something for you. Email me at freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom, I'll get it over to you. Use the subject by new manager, just so I make sure I know what document I'm referring to, since we're all you giving away free stuff on this show. Yeah, that's really good. It's funny. I've had so many guests recently and the common theme is write it down, write it down, write it down, write it down. And I think that, going back to your original point, around back to basics, it's 2023, some industries are humming, some people are killing it out there, some people are struggling a lot right now, and if you're struggling and you've got this opportunity to get more out of what you've got, writing it down and making sure that the process is bulletproof, that you've got all of this lined up, that's the matter.
Speaker 2:I'll share a story with you from this past weekend. I'd stay in touch with all different types of roles and industries and really just all around the board, from CEOs down to the SDRs, and I talked to them on a regular basis. Some were close to me, some are not so close and just sort of associates. But I got a call this weekend or a text from somebody on my network and he said "'Hey man, when you get a chance? "'i'd really like to talk to you? "'i'm struggling right now "'because my company increased their prices'". He sells advertising for realtors. So if you're a realtor, you can call them and they'll sell you advertising and do blog postings, they do website buildings, all kinds of things like that. And he was crushing it. And then company just came out and significantly increased prices Not like a 10% negligible price, but pretty significant price increase and he's like my one call closes have gone away. He's like not one call closing anybody he goes. In addition to that, I'll have the meeting and when I go from my follow-up meeting or my feedback to try to get the decision, they're ghosting me, not getting anything. So I'm really struggling right now.
Speaker 2:Actually, let me pull this up while we're talking and he was like I just would love to know you know sort of your insight or what do you think I could be doing differently? And so we were going back and forth on texts and then he just called me. He was like, hey, I just figured I'd call you, be a little bit easier. He caught me at a good time and so I started to ask him some questions like how much did it go up? Is it the implementation cost? Is it the monthly pricing? Yeah, kind of both, but we can, we can wave initial setup pricing, but we can't do this over here. And then so I started asking them I was like well, what package were you selling before? Like, if there's five packages, which one were you selling? He's like I was selling like the third package the most, and that was where the you know, the bang for the buck for the customer was. And then also, like I felt like that was a sweet spot and so I asked him I was like well, how did you get to selling the middle of the road third package back when pricing was lower? He said, well, I started up at like the fourth or fifth, and when I went through that and then I was able to secure a package at you know, the middle of the road, which was was really good ARR for me, but then it worked well for the customer. I could always upgrade them later, and that's where I was doing.
Speaker 2:All a lot of my one call closes, and so I asked him I said, well, now that your pricing has gone up, are you still showing fourth and fifth package and then going, falling back to the third? And he goes no, no, the first and second because. And I said, well, why he goes? I just because, man, it's so much more expensive. And I said well, first of all, sounds like you don't believe that the value is there, right? If you don't believe the value is there, you're not going to close deals. Do you think there's a value to it? And he goes well, yeah, now we're giving them 24 blog postings a year about, rather than eight. And I was like, why are you giving them three times the the ROI on blog posts? I mean, like dude, that's, that's incredible. Is that going to bring them business? He hasn't been doing business, a lot of business. Ok, well, you got to convince yourself first of all that what you're selling has a real value, because if you're, not convinced, then you're not going to convince me.
Speaker 2:But hey, I said, didn't you sell? You're selling the first and second package. If you don't get a bite there, then there's nothing else for you to go back to them with. Right, I said so nothing. The pricing changed, but you changed your process. You went from going up here and selling the value on that and then negotiating your way down to the middle of the road.
Speaker 2:Now you're at the bottom of the rung. You've got nowhere to go. You don't even believe in it. So go back, you know. Think about what you did, how you presented the first, you know fourth and fifth package before the prices were raised. You might need to tweak that a little bit, you know, with the additional context and value that the pricing reflects now, but you've got to go back to what was working before. So I don't even think he realized that he did that, right? So, talking about it reaching out it's another thing I encourage, right? So many people are scared to say I'm struggling. See how people want to tell you that they're killing it all the time, every day which you got to have a trusted network.
Speaker 1:Yeah, trusted network and just pick up the phone and have a conversation, because I imagine people in his close personal life probably don't know that universe nearly as well as you do, right? And so you're somebody that you can lean on.
Speaker 1:I'm saying I've got guys I call, so let me ask you this question. So you have that conversation with him, did it trigger any tangential ideas about something inside of your business? Of course, of course it did. That goes back to what we were talking about. So you're coaching him on this thing. It's so cool when this happens.
Speaker 1:You just get a trigger, because that's why I love the you know, I love the LinkedIn posts, because it triggers me to think of things that are relevant to me. And it might be some comment that's like it doesn't. It might not be directly relevant, it might be dumb, who knows, I don't know whatever, but it says oh, wow, man, you should be thinking about so many things to think about. And then, in this example, pricing and packaging and how you present it, and if your mindset is I mean, this is what I always talk about with coaching there's there's three types of challenges that you coach. You coach a skill set challenge, a mindset challenge or an activity challenge. In this case, the guy obviously has a mindset challenge around pricing and until you get through that mindset challenge, everything's going to be hard. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's stuff. If anybody wants any information on how to coach mindset challenges differently. Got a course for you. Email free stuff at coachtearemcom free stuff at coachtearemcom. We'll give that over to you. Yeah, that's a really that's a really important distinction. And, like I think the other piece is that folks don't necessarily especially people that ever bought something for their company. They don't necessarily understand what it means for companies to spend money.
Speaker 1:I think it's the same as for them to spend money Like, oh, if I go sit courtside I can't have a big bar tab because I spent that money I could have spent on the bar, on the tickets, because it's fairly limited and and you know even individuals that make a lot of cash like they don't really have that much cash from salary, relative to companies that can draw down massive amounts of capital to invest in stuff if it provides some kind of return. So tell me a little bit about your experience helping folks understand the difference between business money and personal money.
Speaker 2:You know, I used to tell the guys that work for me never judge a prospect based on your wallet. Just a simple way to remember it. Right, never judge a part prospect based on your wallet, and that could be in the positive aspect or the negative aspect. I mean, just, you have to separate yourself from your personal finances, from the product that you're selling. Right, you might be selling a million dollar piece of equipment that you know you personally will never be able to write a check for. You might be selling something that you know you could afford 10 times a month, right. But if you are thinking about that when you're presenting the pricing, you're, you're at a loss, right, sort of like. What else do you think you're going to be able to do?
Speaker 2:I was talking to my network colleague about he didn't feel even if he won't admit it, he didn't feel like the pricing was fair, right, he thought that it was expensive. He wasn't selling it with the same excitement as he was before the prices were raised. That right. There alone, in changing the process and how he's presented it, guaranteed that that was what was contributing to his pricing or his sales going down. Now don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:If a company goes out and increases prices, you can't expect sales to not be impacted by that, but he tripled the amount of blog posts that they get, so it sounds like it was a fair trade. You know that's right.
Speaker 2:So I'm sure they worked that out and thought about that before they made the price increase. I'm sure there's great reasons for it, but any company knows that if we just decided up our pricing, we're gonna be affected in our volume for a little while until things stabilize right. Yeah, but if I was a software company and I intended on increasing my pricing, the very first thing I do is sell it to my account executives. I would sell the reason why we're increasing pricing. I would make sure they were bought in. I would make sure there weren't you know water cooler conversations going on about how stupid it is or how our sales are gonna go down, and I'd probably do it in siloed efforts before I did it across the entire organization.
Speaker 2:So I could sort of work some of those things out, cause I don't think it's smart to say, hey, we're charging 50% more, you guys go work it out. Here's what, here's why, here's the things you can give. I don't think that's smart. Personal opinion. It damages culture, that's right it does, and I can tell you that if they have a hundred account executives there was probably one that picked up the phone, called somebody and said hey, man, what do you think about this?
Speaker 2:People don't do that on a regular basis. I have managed hundreds and thousands of sales representatives in the last 20 years and the amount of people who actually raised their hand or pick up the phone or send an email or ask for help is like less than 1%, and those people are the ones that end up probably doing really well. But it's a small percentage. How do you encourage?
Speaker 1:people to do that.
Speaker 2:I think you have to just go help without being asked in it and it helps facilitate an environment of it's okay, yeah, you help. Go help somebody when you see it right. It's easy to see someone frustrated or flustered. It's easy to pull the dashboard and know when someone's having a bad month. I mean if you you're in the wrong game.
Speaker 2:If you can't tell somebody's not doing so, hot right. So go help someone without them having to ask, and when you help them and it works for them, then they're more likely to come ask you again. You gotta be open. People have to feel like you're open to helping them and not shut off from what's really going on.
Speaker 1:Well, and other people will see that too. They'll see wow, they went and asked for help, or they didn't ask for help, they just got help.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I remind people all the time if someone helps me close a deal, right, my bank account doesn't know the difference. Who cares, right? I mean, if you help me close a deal, okay, still wouldn't my bank account? Yeah, you're my customer. Who cares if you got a little bit of help? I think that salespeople, we can be so prideful sometimes, but it just doesn't matter, get some help.
Speaker 1:After the best salespeople out there I mean the biggest ticket, let me not say the best salespeople the folks out there doing big, big deals. All they have is help. They're orchestrators of help. Yeah, you got a sales engineering team and executive team and implementation team. You got all these people that you're quarterbacking customers, reference stories, customer success manager. You're sitting there closing the folks that are out there closing seven figure deals. They're working these big deal teams and they're at the highest level of individual contributor direct sales and all they're doing is getting help from other people. So if you're out there not closing seven figure deals, be like them, get help. That's what helps you build that skillset of team-based selling. And team-based selling is not having your manager come on the meeting and do discovery and demos for you. It's about leveraging specific skillsets to get through specific blockers. And if there is a specific blocker, and even if it is discovery or demo, whatever it is around a new product or if you're new in the business, ask for help, but don't ask for the same help three to four to five times in a row. Show them that you take that, you run with it, you invest in yourself, you get better and then move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1:Man, something you said triggered another comment. I keep talking about these common themes, so here's another common theme and I think I've got a hypothesis. A lot of sales enablement teams have been decimated. People are getting laid off left and right. They're cutting back sales enable departments and what I've seen over the last few years is people spend almost all of their time preparing for the thing and much less time reinforcing or making sure the thing is successful. And the thing could be a sales methodology rollout, it could be a tool rollout or, in this case, it could be a pricing and packaging update. And if all the time is spent on market research and coming up with a new pricing strategy and a presentation around that, and then you air quotes, roll it out to the sales team in a meeting, that should be flipped.
Speaker 1:Spend some time thinking about it, sure, but spend some time, like Mike said, selling it to the sales team, reinforcing it, ensuring that they know what's in it for them, what's in it for the customer, what are the objections they're gonna run into, how do you want them to work through that and what are the reasonable expectations? Which customers are you gonna lose If we, hey, customer success team expect elevated churn of X amount from these types of folks and here's what we want to do about it and all of these types of things. Put some spiffs on there. It's just good practice for change management because, like I keep saying recently, all the hard stuff is after the launch. This stuff before is just logistics. It just takes time, time and money. You can solve any logistical problem. I know you're in logistics business so maybe I'm wrong on this but for time and money you can solve most things that are like planning and preparing and all that type of stuff. Getting humans to maintain a changed state longer term, that's harder.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100% agree with that, and once you launch something, you learn things that you could not have learned before the launch. Yeah, I think everyone knows that you can't account for every variable or how people are gonna react, how customers are gonna react. There are pieces of it that you just will not be able to predict. You can prepare for if you're a boxer or you're a UFC fighter. You can prepare for a fight for months and months or a year and get into the ring and something completely different to happen in that moment that you just weren't prepared for, and so I really think what you were saying makes sense that you spend all this time thinking about what's gonna happen and preparing for everything and then you just expect the salespeople to be able to deliver on it because they're your salespeople. That is not a good approach. Salespeople have an innate ability to smell something that doesn't seem right. That's what we get paid to do. We typically are getting sold from upper management on why this comp plan is great or why this product is this, and you just gotta get real with your team, and it builds respect and culture and it builds an open environment where people will give you feedback, and you have to be open to feedback too, right? A lot of people will say they want feedback, but then when they get it, they don't want it. You can choose to accept it or reject the feedback. We should be open to it, no matter what, right? So if I was rolling out a pricing, a new price strategy that was significantly higher, I'd do some numbers on a top representative, a middle, the red, the left representative and a lower representative and I'd say look, if you do the same numbers that you're doing right now, sell this many customers each month at this new price point. It's gonna translate into X number of dollars more per year in your commissions. Does that sound like something you'd want? Well, of course I would. Okay, so let's start there. There's something really positive here you can do the same production and you can get paid more. Anybody got a problem with that? No, sir? Okay, cool, moving right along Now with that additional money that we're charging the customers, here's what we're gonna provide them, right?
Speaker 2:So we were giving eight blogs a year per customer. Now we're going to 24. So we've done the research that eight blogs postings per year generates this much revenue for our customer. If we go to 24, it generates this much revenue per customer. So the ROI now is 10X what we were given before and really get my salespeople sold on the fact that this is not socks off and explain it to them in a way so that when they get in front of the customer they can translate the message of why we increase pricing and what it does for them and have them be excited about it. And that would really help to negate any new customer losses on projected sales, because it was done with a strategic approach rolling it out, and then I'd test it out with a handful of people, people that I know are gonna adopt change, and then now I've got people in my organization that are gonna help me sell it to the rest of the organization, right. So it's just about doing it the right way with a process.
Speaker 1:That's great. So, yeah, it's having a good change management process, selling it to the team, really understanding what their reactions are gonna be, and I also love what you said about knowing that things are gonna come up after the fact. It's like when SpaceX launched the massive Starship Elon said two days before the launch, 50-50,. It gets off the landing pad. And what's? The news media say? It exploded.
Speaker 1:Well, it exploded after it got off the landing pad or launch pad and flew for four minutes, and I don't even wanna know the amount of telemetric data and other things that they were able to gather from that thing. So now, what are they gonna be able to do? Well, that next four minutes is the next one. Are gonna explode after half an hour, not explode at all and be one of the safer forms of transportation. Is it gonna get us to Mars? I don't know. But I'll tell you one thing they learned a lot, and if you treat everything as it has to launch and be absolutely perfect, otherwise I'm gonna either bury my head in the sand or you're called a complete failure. That's just how the world works anymore. You gotta learn from all of these experiences. Sure, do Love it. Well, mike, we got a hop. We're running out of time here. Anything that you wanna plug, anything you wanna hire people. You guys wanna talk about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:No, I just I'm here for you, Corey, so I wanna talk about a great topic, nothing about myself. Feel free to shoot me a LinkedIn request to accept. All that's all.
Speaker 1:Alrighty, sounds good. Well, thanks, mike, appreciate it. Everybody else this has been. The Sales Management Podcast had a couple free offers today. That email address one more time is freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Check out our free version, Not a free trial. We actually have full free version of CoachDRM at our website, coachdrmcom. And like and subscribe Sales Management Podcast. Apple and Spotify. We'll see you next time. We'll see you then.