YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Dixon

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2024-05-30
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2024-05-30
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  1. “Guilty of status quo violis, meaning we are prone to laziness and doing nothing because it's easier, it's inertia, right? It's easier to just keep doing more of the same than to change behavior. Change is really hard. And salespeople have been taught that the status quo is their biggest competitor. And if the customer is starting to get cold feet, it's because they still think either what they're doing today is good enough, what you are proposing is not a compelling enough reason to change, or maybe it's just not a top priority for them or their organization. It's got to be one of those reasons. So what salespeople have been armed to do is go out and dial up the FOMO, right? And kind of make the customer sweat a little bit. So the first thing they do is they say, you know, Lenny, remember the demos and the proof of concept trial? How excited you were and like those benefits, like, you got to pay for it. Like you're not going to get all those great benefits for your organization unless you sign the agreement. If that doesn't work, I'll try to kind of scare you into action by dialing up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and saying, Lenny, you know, you told me.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In action. So it's after the point where the customer says, Yeah, Lenny, this sounds great. I'm sold. Let's talk. But before the point where that actually deal gets sold, a lot of deals kind of go sideways in that moment. And the way this comes across in sales calls is that customers start, if you will, relitigating concerns that they had asked and you thought you would address much earlier, like what might go wrong and is this really the right answer for us. And these are things that are puzzling to salespeople because it's like it feels like this thing is slipping through my fingers. Like right before my eyes, I thought we had this close. I thought you said you want to move forward. And now you're asking questions that we addressed three months ago. What's going on? And so what salespeople tend to do because they've grown up in a world where they've been told, the only reason the customer hesitates is because you haven't put to bed their status quo bias. So we all know, all human beings, not just customers, but perhaps especially customers.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So let me maybe take us a step back. There was a reason we actually even asked that question that you just asked. And the reason was this. When we looked at sales calls, if you think of the typical sales process or buying journey, it kind of moves through three phases. Phase number one is the customer in their status quo. It's what they do today, right? They use your competitor's product. Maybe they use a homegrown solution. Maybe they never saw a need for a solution like yours, but that's their current state. Step two is we've got to get them to agree that the current state is no longer acceptable and they've got to move forward in a new and different way. We call that agreement on a vision. We've got to get their intent to move forward and to change. And then step number three is you got to get them to buy something, right? So that's the action step where they execute the document, they sign on the line that is dotted, and they send the contract back. It's simple three-step process. And what we found in our analysis is one of the big places where a lot of deals fall out of that process is between”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “A lot of your company's money and their time and resources pursuing these opportunities where you eventually just get ghosted. And you don't really know what happened just like the customer, the opportunity evaporated on you. They ghosted you. They went radio silent. You don't really know what happened there. And so we decided to take this two and a half million sales call data set, which you could have used to answer lots of different questions, but we were really fascinated by this question, maybe two, two questions. One is why do customers make no decision? Because you understand as frustrating as a salesperson, but it's also puzzling for customers to do that. They go through the entire process to evaluate a solution, and many of those customers say, yeah, I want to buy, and then they ghost the salesperson, and it's just, it's so puzzling. Like, why would they waste their own time evaluating a solution and then doing nothing? Then the more important question is probably, what do the very best salespeople do differently? What if they figured out to avoid that outcome?”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Good summary. Yeah, if you're busy, like you said it more succinctly. I've been doing this for a while now, and you said it way more sickly than I can. I think, you know, we, just to back up for a little bit, I think one of the data points I always start with when I present the research on the jolt effect is that our analysis showed that anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the average salesperson's qualified pipelines, these aren't just leads, you know, sometimes bad leads are thrown over to us by marketing. These are qualified opportunities. These are people we've met with, customers we've pursued, we've engaged, they're in the sales process. 40 to 60 percent of them will be ultimately marked as closed loss no decision. That's actually, I think that number is actually on the rise, especially in places like SAS and in the broader tech sector over the past year and a half. But that's a really painful thing, right? If you think about a salesperson that for 46% of your deals, you're going to spend a lot of time, energy, resources.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Into a large global study. We collected two and a half million sales calls and studied them with a machine learning platform at scale. So that was a very different kind of research project. And honestly, it's fun just as a researcher to look back on Challenger and the manual kind of survey-based approach and the interviews and all this stuff to fast forward today being able to take advantage of large data sets and advance technology to study millions of sales conversations is pretty cool.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Research project, we had always been fascinated by what Professor Neil Rackham did back in the 70s and 80s in spin selling. And he and his research team sat in on 30-something thousand sales calls, physically sat in on these meetings and took notes. They're a team of psychologists to produce the research that went into spin selling. And so we always kind of aspire to get, if you will, at the coal face or where the rubber hits the road in sales, which is the sales conversation when that salesperson's sitting across from the customer. The problem with that is it's really hard to get people to pay for that kind of research and that kind of undertaking and then let alone getting invited into those meetings. There's a lot of the really critical sales meetings took place, of course, in the client's office until March of 2020 when that all changed and the entire sales process for every company on earth went to Zoom and Teams and WebEx and other virtual platforms. And so we recruited several dozen companies across industry and around the world.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Slow growth, fast growth, you name it. Over time, though, that research has been ongoing. So we've collected data, I think, to date on roughly a quarter million salespeople around the world that we continue to go back in, not just validate the original findings, but look at how things are changing and do cuts of the data now that the data's set so big. So that was a survey-based piece of research we did. The Jolt effect, we started that research in 2020, actually. It was actually in March of 2020, which I think is a time that everybody remembers with probably mixed emotions, most of them bad. I think, though, you remember March was a time when people were getting into Tiger King and baking sourdough bread. It was, a few months later, that got really old. But in the beginning, it was kind of surprising and weird and, you know, this whole pandemic thing. But we actually thought because we're huge nerds that this would be an interesting time to do a sales.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, sure. So I'll just start with Challenger because that chronologically came first. So we actually started that research study in, I think it was in late 2008 actually, and we published the initial results to at the time I was working for a company called CEB, which was acquired by Gartner Group in 2017, a research organization. And I was running the group that served heads of sales, business business heads of sales around the world. We had five or six hundred clients around the world. And we launched that study in 08. We published the initial results to our clients in 09. We kept collecting some data. And then we published the book in 2011. The book was published off a data set of 6,000 salespeople. So we did an in-depth survey with 6,000 salespeople as well as collective performance data on those 6,000 sellers. It was global cross-industry, different types of companies as well, product companies, services companies, large, small.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Most salespeople are trying to figure out what keeping the customer up at night. The challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night. What's the risk that they don't know about, but you do?”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “jolt them forward so the first thing is we've got to judge their level of indecision the second thing is we've got to offer a recommendation the third thing is we've got to get them to start trusting us we call limit the exploration and the t is we've got to de-risk the deal we've got to take some risk off the table”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In that indecision stems from their fear of failure. Dialing up the FOMO backfires 87% of the time. They're not afraid of missing out. They're afraid of messing up.”

    2024-05-30 · Lenny's Podcast · The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source