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Keynote: Prioritizing Seller Capability To Engage Today’s Customer – Soirée, Boston

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Spencer Wixom: Let’s get into some sales research here. What I want to talk about here is something important that we need to appreciate. And we’ve touched on it at a couple of points today. But there are a couple of nuances that I want to add to what has been said about it, because it’s very important. And I want to talk about things that have changed in our customers’ world. I’ll say, even beyond that, not only things that have changed but things that are continuously changing. I’m going to share with you three research points around that. Let’s consider each of these in combination and what they do for our seller’s ability to perform today.

First of all, here’s a piece of research for you. This was a study done a few years ago. And this is basically asking a population to think about an opportunity they have to engage with the supplier in the next six months, and what is the likelihood that they will transact business, they will take action, they will do something different in that next six months. And then what we did – we asked that of a broad, large population and then we cut the data by the number of stakeholders in the customer’s organization involved in that purchase decision, in that taking of action. We wanted to see if there was a change in the percentage likelihood that that would take place.

So, when you have one stakeholder involved in that decision there is an 81% likelihood that it will happen in the next six months. Those individuals are pretty confident they can make something happen, they can make a purchase decision happen. When you go to two individuals involved in that purchase decision, it falls to 55%. You’ve got two people of differing opinions pitted against each other trying to make a decision. You had a third person to the mix, it jumps up to 60% – you’ve got someone who can break a tie. Also with four people, you’ve got a group that can seem to work together fairly well. Not 80%, but 60%. Now when you go to five, it drops to 53%. You go to six individuals involved in that purchase decision, it’s 31% percent. The likelihood that they can get something done is one chance in three, roughly.

Now let’s layer on to that some of the research that you probably heard from ZB and from Gartner and Challenger the last few years, of how many stakeholders on average are involved in a complex B2B decision. A few years ago, they came out and they said it was 5.4. A year later they redid the study and they had to update the research to say it was 6.8 people involved in that purchase decision. A few years later, had to update it again, it’s 10.2. I think we have something akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle going on here. You can measure velocity, you can measure position – you can’t measure them both at the same time. I don’t think the particular number is really all that important. Whether it’s six people, eight people, ten people. The important thing is that it is dynamic, that it is changing, and if we don’t appreciate what the change is doing to the likelihood of our sellers being able to close business in a fixed period of time, we are missing something. And we are missing something that could affect our business in a dramatic way.

Let’s talk about a couple of the factors that are involved in complex decisions amongst these large stakeholder groups and why perhaps there is a lower likelihood to make a decision or take action. There’s the diffusion of risk. Organizations are much more risk-averse now after the global financial crisis, trying to push risk to as many stakeholders from as many departments as possible. No one person wants to make a decision. They have an information overload. How can a single individual in an organization sift through all the information of all the various suppliers and come to an informed idea of what that organization should do? Globalization – there are more parts, departments in the business all over the globe that need to have a say when decisions are being made.

I think this fourth one’s interesting, it’s a little bit different than the other three – complex solutions. We as suppliers have a roll in the fact that there are more decision-makers in customers organizations. Because the solutions that we provide integrate into so many aspects of the business that, of course, more stakeholders need to be involved in the decision. We’ve got more stakeholders involved, from a greater diversity of perspectives and departments, and that is directly affecting in many instances that likelihood that a deal will get done in a fixed period of time.

Now let’s think about something else here, which I think is interesting. Taking a long time to not buy. We did another study where we said, “on average when making your purchase decision, how long did it take you as an organization to come to that?” Now, granted, there’s a huge amount of variability around this mean, but it is 4.9 months, the average sales cycle for an organization. This isn’t the important number, the next number that I’m going to show you is the important number.

This is “how long does it take to come to no purchase decision?” 4.7 months. Now, think about this for a second. We also talk about historically there was the wedge involved in your funnel process, right? We’ve got this wedge – we go from ten deals at stage one, to six deals, to four deals, to two deals, to one deal. And we say, “No, you need to compress the centers of that pipeline so it’s more like a nail and less like a wedge.” What we’re looking at here is an upside-down obelisk. We’ve got basically every opportunity going all the way until the end, and then maybe just a few of them close at the end.

It’s really difficult to forecast under those circumstances. That’s tremendous amounts of waste involved in salespeople carrying a consensus group in a customer’s organization for four months, having all kinds of meetings and doing all kinds of negotiations and teaching and debate around what they should buy. For a very small percentage of those at the end of the day to actually close, and all of the others – having spent all that time in the purchase decision process to go nowhere. We have to think about how we address the fact that it takes just as long to not buy as it takes to buy.

Okay, so that’s the second piece. Let me tell you about the third piece here. And this is a really important one, because we’ve been talking a lot lately about understanding the customer – empathizing with the customer. Let’s look at this correlation here. On the one axis here you have the degree of purchase regret: how much did I regret having made a complex B2B purchase decision? And on the X-axis there is the degree the purchase experience was overwhelming or difficult. What we found when we pitted those two against each other is a near-linear correlation. What you have to think about here with your sellers is not only “did that seller close the customer at the end of that sales process?”, but “how did that seller leave the customer at the end of the sales process?” Because if there is a linear correlation between purchase regret on the one hand and an overwhelming purchase experience on the other hand, even if we win we may lose.

How many in this room have had that experience in sales enablement where you’ve actually closed an opportunity in your business, but that buyer has said, “We decided to buy from you but we don’t want to speak to that salesperson again”? We have to think about, how are we leaving customers at the end of the purchase experience – not just are we closing customers at the end of the purchase experience – because these overwhelmed customers in a purchase process will struggle with next steps to implement the solution. They’ll have difficulty making decisions and they’ll have stall-points or delays in the implementation of the solution as a result of being less-than-satisfied with the sales process. And what that’s going to do ultimately is it’s going to create a lower degree of loyalty with us, and make it harder for us to sell more and more often to these existing customers. And they will be much more likely to spread negative word-of-mouth about us in the implementation and the ongoing relationship.

Think about these three things as we’ve just unpacked them. First of all, you’ve got more stakeholders involved causing a lower likelihood in making a decision. You’ve got purchase experiences that don’t close taking about as long as purchase experiences that do. And then you have this risk of a higher likelihood that they will regret that purchase decision or have a negative experience when it is an overwhelming or a difficult process. Then you put one more thing to this, which is really interesting. When we go out to these buyers and we ask them, “what did sellers do in this purchase process that had more stakeholders involved, took longer, sometimes led to no decision – what did the seller do to help you?” And we created a word cloud out of the responses to that, and you can imagine what was said.

So, we really need to think about how we’re treating these customers, particularly as enablement professionals. How are we setting up our sellers to treat buyers or treat customers throughout this complex decision-making process? And what does it do to us if we can’t get this right? Well, there’s not confidence in individual performance. If salespeople are running into all the obstacles I just talked about, they’re really not that confident that they’re going to hit their target.

This is some data, of course, from Salesforce – and I think we’re going to get some updates on this here pretty soon – but more than half of them don’t expect to meet quota under the difficult circumstances they encounter. It was interesting, it was talked about at a panel earlier, this whole idea of needing to measure new talent that we’re bringing into the organization and how effectively we’re bringing that talent in. I think there needs to be a capstone metric of negative return or positive return on new talent. Can we bring talent into an organization with a difficult sales motion and customer buying motion like we have and actually get a positive return on that talent while we bring it in?

The other thing that I think is really important for us to consider is lower yields in some traditional pipeline metrics that we had and what that does to our sellers’ performance. You know, it’s interesting – if we consider just that our buyers remain static in the way they buy from us and the way they interact with us, then we can probably trust some of our key pipeline metrics such as conversations-to-opportunity conversion rates or opportunities-to-close conversion rates. But if our customers change fundamentally in the way they behave, isn’t that going to have some kind of effect on those critical pipeline metrics. And when we have even slight changes – a couple percentage point changes – in our conversation-to-opportunity yields or in our opportunity-to-close yields, that can have a dramatically bigger effect on performance against target.

Let’s talk about some of the things we can do. Let’s look a little bit into the art and the science of selling, and perhaps consider some solutions that we might have. We can push sales process adherence. Or, we can increase lead activity, we can just push more customers and more opportunities into the funnel. Or, we can fundamentally change the product, we can pivot around the product that we have.

Well, sales process adherence – it’s interesting – if you look at just that in isolation, what that does to a likelihood to perform at a high level, it doesn’t really give you much. You cannot get much greater performance out of individuals just by getting them to adhere to a sales process. Increase lead activity? You can’t pour water into a bucket that has holes in it. If you’ve got sub-three percent MQL to conversation rates, you’ve got to think differently about some of those key pipeline metrics and make sure that those are tuned up appropriately before you can pour a whole bunch of new leads and opportunities into your funnel. And product pivot? We don’t really have the time and we don’t have the control to do things like that.

What can we do? Well, there’s an interesting idea that we would suggest – and it’s been hinted at by some of the other presentations earlier today. Number one, the first thing you’ve got to think about here is, do we have a message that properly and effectively engages this customer? Are we bringing the right message to them? Are we bringing the right big idea, the disruptive commercial insight to that customer?

Secondly, are we delivering it in an effective way? Think about the analogy of a play. Do we have the right script, do we have the play written correctly? And then do we have the actors who can effectively perform that play in front of the customer? You get those foundations right, you get your message and you get the capability to deliver that message in a powerful and effective way, and then you can scale it through adherence to an effective process.

When I was in business school in an operations class we had an individual come who machined parts for replicate Shelby Cobras that they would build. And it was interesting because he said to the operations class, “okay, let’s have a debate. What is the ideal batch size?” And people would say, “well, you want to have it large enough so that you can get scale and not too large quality” and things like that. And he said to us, “the batch size is always one.” You’ve got to get it right in one instance, then you can scale it to multiple instances. And I think as sales enablement professionals, we have to think about that in the salespeople that we serve. Get the motion right in one instance, where the message is right and the delivery of that message is powerful, and then scale that motion up in the organization. What we found when you do that, when you put all of these elements together, you start to get a much greater likelihood of high performance out of your sellers.

Okay, let’s talk about message. I’m going to move through this really quickly because this is something we’ve written in books and you can research this some more on your own. Happy to have more conversation about this later. But let me just tell you a couple of things about the message that we should consider. First of all, what are the elements of a message that can drive or change a buyer’s direction? What can break down their status quo and make them want to do something differently? We set out to answer that question with some of our research and it’s really interesting to look at some of the elements.

Let’s talk, first of all, about what are not statistically significant drivers of changing a customer’s direction, of challenging a customer to think differently about his or her status quo and do something different. First of all, having a smart or expert perspective. It’s really hard to differentiate yourself on that – your competitors will probably bring something very similar. Secondly, being easy to understand. Most organizations have figured out how to make their message easy for that customer to understand. Thirdly, having interesting facts or anecdotes – your competitors will also have messages with interesting facts and anecdotes. And finally, having that message be accessible or quick to find.

Most organizations have figured out ways to have their message be accessible and quick to find. What makes a difference? What in that message makes it stand out from somebody else’s message? And we’ve actually touched on this a little bit already today. These are statistically significant drivers. First of all, teach them something new, give them some information they had not yet thought about their business. We’ve been talking about this for quite some time, but this is really a hard thing to get to. Secondly, have a compelling reason for that customer to take action. Teach them something new, give them a compelling reason to take action.

A simple framework we like to think about for that is to break down the A, and build up the B. In sales, for some reason, over time we have wanted so badly to run to the B. We want to tell customers to do something different and we want to show them a solution that aligns to whatever we want them to do differently. Now, the first thing we need to do is to teach them what is missing or what is wrong in their status quo situation. We need to break that down. Once we break that down, we will have that customer motivated to learn something new from us and we can guide them in a different direction toward us.

These are some of the basic elements of commercial teaching that we have talked about and we go more depth in these in our books, but that message needs to challenge customers’ assumptions, it needs to catalyze action, it needs to lead to – not with – our unique strengths, and it needs to be able to scale across customers. This is an important part of sales enablement. We need to be at the forefront of figuring out how to take commercial insights that certain sellers have identified in certain situations that have worked, and scale them. Make them agile, make them flexible to work in other customer situations with other types of businesses. That hard thinking – that creative thinking – needs to be central to a sales enablement organization.

Now, we talk about a choreography to present this concept to customers. Again, I’m going to move through this fairly quickly, this is in chapter three and chapter four of the Challenger sales book. A lot of you have seen this, you’ve probably read this before – those who haven’t I would recommend studying up on this. The reason I bring this up is because this is the art in the sales enablement that we’re a part of. This is the performance we need these salespeople to do. It’s not a performance talking about us. It’s not a performance just providing some thought leadership. It’s a performance that takes a customer through an emotional journey – very akin to an emotional journey they would go through seeing a good play or seeing a good movie.

Let me explain really quickly. First of all, we have to warm them up. We have to give them a reason to want to listen to us. Establish our credibility with that customer. But then a very key point early on in our conversation or our dialogue with customers – and this is a dialogue happening either face-to-face, on the phone, or might also be happening through our content that we’re sending out to customers. We need to think about how our content follows a similar emotional choreography that the sales motion or the sales performance follows. But we need to re-frame their thinking, we need to give them some reason to think fundamentally different about their situation. It breaks the frame of their status quo.

Then what we move into – once somebody’s status quo frame has been broken, they start to feel differently about their current situation and a little bit anxious or apprehensive about it, and we want to add in rational explanations for why they need to change. This is the case for change, right? We need to make the pain of the same greater than the pain of change, and we do this through rational arguments, through facts and through statistics and calculation of pain. Then also we need to add in an emotional element. We have to give them stories or anecdotes that help them understand, make it real for them, make it personal for them, and ultimately we lead them to a new way forward. This is a consultative new direction that we provide to them. And we link that to our solution.

It’s an emotional choreography, and if you ever study the emotional choreographies of good plays and movies, they follow a very similar arc. Also, if you go all the way back to the 4th century BC and you think about Aristotle and his modes of persuasion, you see all of them present here. You see the ethos of credibility, you see the logos of logical argument, you see the pathos of emotional resonance. And I would just say in short, we need to have messages that have ethos, logos, and pathos before us. If we can apply those elements that have been a part of good communication and good rhetoric in every society that we know about as part of our sales conversations before we start to talk about us, we will motivate customers to make a change. That’s some of the art in this. That’s the performance, the message that we’re trying to present.

Let’s jump into the delivery a little bit and talk about the skills. And this is some fun stuff, as was mentioned by Jake just a second ago, that we’ve been doing with our data set, 26,000 different sellers and how they interact across about 40 different sales attributes. And I’ll explain a little bit more about this data as I go through it. But basically what happened is we took all of these different attributes that we had studied in 26,000 sellers, 150 companies, and we looked at them very simply across two axes. The vertical axis here is their correlation with performance. Meaning, do these skills correlate or not correlate with higher performance. And then across the X-axis, the horizontal axis, how likely or unlikely are sellers in general to demonstrate these particular attributes?

It’s interesting how you can see by the scatter plot there that they fall all over those various quadrants. And this is where it gets kind of fascinating, is to look at these various quadrants and see how they differ from one another. And let’s do that, let’s take a look at this. Let’s look at the attributes in the top right here. Discretionary effort, incentive motivation, enduring customer relationships. The first thing you notice about these is a kind of common theme. I like to call these gifts. These are the beneficial things – they do align to high-performance – that high-performers do naturally.

Somebody talked earlier about the importance of really designating between, is this something I can train someone to do, or is this something that they just bring naturally? And you need to make sure you don’t confuse those. You need to identify, what are the gifts we need our salespeople in our organization to have? And you hire for those.

Secondly, let’s go to the bottom right here. This is kind of interesting. Work with anybody, accessible to the customer, give time to others, respect the customer’s time. I call these graces. These are just the common sense things that everybody does. These should be part of your culture in your organization. We are kind to people, we are generous with our time, these are the things we do. Now, will they differentiate high and core performers? No. But they’re just good social graces. You need to make sure you’re not spending a lot of time trying to develop people around these. These are just natural good attitudes you want salespeople to have.

Let’s move to the bottom left. Rigidly follows a sales process, spend time prospecting, takes care of admin and management. We call these chores. These are the necessary yet unpleasant things, but they don’t make a huge difference. The analogy I like to use here is: I have been vacuuming for decades. I have gotten no better at vacuuming, across all of the experience in my life. There is no way to get better at vacuuming. There is a way to buy a better vacuum, and that will help you vacuum better, but you can’t get better at vacuuming. And that’s the way we need to think about chores in our sales organization. I can’t make my salespeople better at this, but I can give them tools to make them more efficient and make it not such a pain for them to do.

Now let’s go top left. Pressure the customer in appropriate moments, offer a unique perspective, discuss pricing and money, identify economic drivers, credible and compelling pitch. These are the skills. These are the hard things that fewer salespeople do because they’re hard. But they matter. And they make a difference between a high-performer and a core-performer. As a sales enablement professional, think about your strategy. When we’re developing our people, are we running at the hard things that few are able to do, or do we distract ourselves by trying to develop our people around gifts that they should just naturally have and you can hire for – social graces that should just be part of our culture and we expect that everybody should manifest them. Or chores, that they can’t get better at, but we just need to make more efficient through tools. We need to focus our development on the skills, on the hardest things that are going to make the biggest difference and are going to make our salespeople stand out in their performance much more so than everybody else. Because that’s how we win, that’s how we get high performers.

Let me show you some proof points of this that I think are just fascinating. As I said, when you’ve got a 26,000-person population you can start to really cut the data in some interesting ways and you can isolate the presence and absence of particular variables and look at the changes in the likelihood of high performance in those variables.

So, for example, let’s just look at a skill and at a chore. You look at bringing a unique perspective as a skill and rigidly following a sales process as a chore. Now the bar there – the zero bar – is typical high-performer likelihood. When you get a population that large, what you tend to see is Pareto analysis. You tend to see, like, on average you’ve got 20% high-performers, 80% core-performers. The question is, in some populations what change happens with the presence and the absence of particular skills or chores or gifts or graces? Negative 40%, this is they do neither. They neither bring a unique perspective nor rigidly follow a sales process. You don’t want salespeople like this.

Now negative 30%, they just adhere to a process. They don’t bring a unique perspective, they adhere to a sales process – they are 30% less likely than the average to be a high-performer. You get a big step change all of a sudden when you just bring a unique perspective. That’s all you do, you just bring a unique perspective, you don’t even have to follow or adhere to a sales process in a rigid way, 25% greater than the average likelihood of being a high-performer. And if you do both, there’s a 50% greater likelihood than the average of being a high-performer. As I said, the batch size is always one. Get them to bring a unique perspective, have the message and have the capability to deliver that message in an effective way. Then scale it through sales process adherence.

Let’s look at another one. Pressuring the customer in difficult moments, that’s a skill, being able to naturally manage that constructive tension with the customer and handle it effectively to motivate the customer to action. And just forming enduring relationships with customers, that’s a gift. Does neither, 55% less likely than the average to be a high-performer. Again, you don’t want salespeople like this. Just forms enduring relationships with customers, 20% less likely than the average to be a high-performer. You’ve got to have a little bit of pressure, you’ve got to have a little bit of motivation, constructive tension, in those conversations. They cannot be free of effective, constructive pressure and tension. Just do that, you’re 10% more likely than the average to be a high performer. You do both, 60% more likely than the average to be a high-performer. Again, get the motion right. Get the message and the delivery of the message right, then scale it. Balance between effective, constructive tension or pressure, and those enduring relationships with customers.

One more thing here. If you remember from our books, originally what we did with the data set we had is we ran a factor analysis and we looked at which of these attributes of the 40 attributes clustered together in particular profiles. And we came up with five profiles. This is why on the right-hand side you have the Challenger, because it was one of the profiles. We named it. You’ve got the Lone Wolf: follows their own instincts, does their own thing. The Problem Solver: supporting all of the customer’s problems, solving problems for the customer. The Relationship Builder: interested in social relationships with customers. The Hard Worker: doing all of the admin work and the planning and just dead-set on doing as much activity as possible. And the Challenger: brings a unique perspective, pressures that customer appropriately, develops that constructive tension.

Then the big question is, on our grid here where we’ve got the gifts, graces, chores, and skills, where do the various profiles tend to land, if you look at the skills that are correlated to those particular profiles? Well, it’s not really a big surprise. The Relationship Builder is very heavy into social graces. This is what they lean on. The Hard Worker is big into chores – just doing the activity, doing what they can. The Problem Solver will do anything they can across all these quadrants just to solve that immediate problem for the customer.The question is, if you’re too distracted solving the immediate problems of the customer, are you truly moving that customer in a different direction? Are you motivating them to think differently? The Lone Wolf is a balance of gifts – you can never bottle a Lone Wolf – and skills. And the Challenger is 100% aligned to the top left. They focus very heavily on developing capability in the skills that a lot of people are running away from. But they are the skills that make a difference, the skills that matter.

The Challenger is creating constructive tension, teaching for differentiation, tailoring for resonance, and taking control. These things have been around for a while, but the main point I want to make here is they’re still foundational to what we’re trying to do. We can’t get away from the skills that really make a difference in moving a customer to do something different. You need to teach that in a tailored way, you need to build constructive tension. You take control to make the customer’s decision-making process easier, less painful. Because if we don’t, it’s going to take a long time to happen – or not happen – and they’re not going to like us very much after it does or it doesn’t.

So, that’s my close to you, that’s my recommendation. Think about that. Batch size is always one. Get that motion right, get the message right, get the delivery of that message in an effective way right. Then figure out a way to scale it through processes and make it a part of your culture. That’s all I’ve got for you. Thank you.

I will just tell you really quickly – we’re doing a lot more of this research so we’re kind of trying to drip this out in an agile, research development type of project. On our website, we’re publishing weekly insight blogs that take some of these skills in isolation and compare them to one another. Subscribe to our blog if you want to see some of that. We also post that to our LinkedIn page, if you want to follow us on LinkedIn.

Emcee: Thank you, Spencer.

SW: Thank you.

Emcee: We do have time for a couple of questions. Any questions? One right here.

Audience 1: Thanks, Spencer. Phil Harriman with Presidio. I had a chance to meet you this morning. In my experience with Skillsoft and rolling out Challenger, we really drank the Kool-Aid and spent a lot of time working with our reps on the choreography. And we got a lot of push-back on that choreography. Trying to have all the different steps in that messaging was really – no pun intended – a challenge. Any comments or best practices around how to use the choreography?

SW: I’m glad you brought that up because it is really interesting. I presented it in its six parts here just to make the point that it has all of those elements of persuasion inherent in it. And that those who are in a central role in the organization – thinking about strategy, whether that’s in building the message or in getting sellers to be able to perform the message – they need to understand all of the component parts of a message. You don’t want to deliver a six-part choreography to a seller and say, “deliver this as a script.” They’re not professional script readers, they’re sellers who want to try and bring their own motion and their own performance to customers. I would just get the big idea right.

And I think there’s a couple of components of the idea that are most important to share with sellers. First is, what’s that shift we’re making in the customer’s business. Secondly, what happens if they don’t change, both from a rational and an emotional standpoint. And then what are we leading them to. You can kind of collapse those six parts down into a much easier three-part way for companies to digest. There is no right answer for how you deliver that to customers. That, as I mentioned earlier, is kind of the job of the sales enablement team, to figure out what the best way is to present a message or an idea to sellers. Similar to jazz music, what chord progressions can we give them that is easiest for them to improvise on top of and make that performance their own?

Emcee: One more question. Any others?

Audience 2: Can you talk a little bit about the activity of discovery as it pertains to a Challenger sale, so framing it in kind of a Challenger pitch. What is it you’re looking for in the discovery process, what is it you’re trying to uncover? And what’s the posture there?

SW: Let me make sure I understand the question. From discovery, are you talking about the discovery of the individual seller in trying to kind of come up with a message for a customer?

Audience 2: I’m talking about understanding value drivers for individuals, teams, business units, and organizations. Usually through conversation and research.

SW: A new insight brief that we actually have up on the website right now talks about, what leads to a greater likelihood of high performance? Is it presenting a professional image? Or I come in with the choreography and I present that concept to the customer. But I give the customer no opportunity in that presentation to come back to me and make it a two-way dialogue, that two-way communication where I’m actually discovering as part of the motion whether the customer agrees with this. Maybe we’re playing ping-pong with this, with each other, and they’re giving me different angles to play off of and the opportunity sort of evolves as it goes through. It is actually much more important to have effective two-way communication than it is to present that professional image.

A lot of people ask, “how does Challenger relate to some of the solution-selling models where you’re going in and asking open-ended questions to discover needs and things like that?” I see it as an evolution, or sort of an added hemisphere, to that. Which is to say, I’m bringing a unique perspective but I’m also going to gather a lot about your organization in that. Now, I need to have done some pre-research on you to be able to have that perspective in the first place, but you’re silly to come in with a firm point of view and say, “This is the way it is. I know it is. You have to digest this” to a customer. Because, particularly when you’re selling to a consensus group of stakeholders, they’re going to be all shades of gray as to how much they agree with that insight or not.

And we talk a little bit about that in our second book. Some will be mobilizers of that concept, excited about it, advocating for it. Some will be talkers, some will be blockers. You have to understand – and only through dialogue and active communication as part of the delivery are you going to know that.

Emcee: Spencer, thank you again. One last round of applause for Spencer Wixom from Challenger.

SW: Thank you, I appreciate it.



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