The JOLT Effect & Overcoming Indecision w/ author Ted McKenna

Ted, what was the biggest aha moment in the Jiltfax for you?

I think the biggest aha moment for us was really that fomu fear of messing up outweighs fear of missing out, which is kind of what all of us have used for decades as a way to kind of push for change.

Hello, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. My mission, as ever, is to draw that Venn diagram of Account experience, you know, with 1 circle being B2B sales and account management and the other one of customer experience. And where those circles overlap, that bit in the middle, that's really where we're aiming at of account experience. And every week I get to talk to an industry leader who shares best practices and tips to help you develop your Account experience program. I'm also a father of four, I'm a founder, and I'm fantastically interested in human relationships. And I'll have anything to with the that furthers the science of people to people communication, actually how that impacts enterprise sales. So I was so happy to be able to contact the author of the book that there's so much buzz around at the moment in sales. It's called the Jolt How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. I read the book four weeks ago or so and already started a book club in the office and it's affecting the way that I'm communicating with customers. So I'm so excited as a fanboy already to have co author of the book on today, Ted McKenna, to talk to us on the Account Experience podcast. Just before we get into it, a little bit of background about Ted because he's probably too humble to talk about it himself, but he founded DCM Insights, which is a customer understanding lab that uses data and research to help companies grow customer relationships. So really right in our ballpark here. And you've probably seen him his articles in the Harvard Business Review because he's a well known sales and customer experience researcher and I think he's probably the world's leading exper on customer indecision. And that's really what we want to get into today. Hello, Ted, welcome to the Account Experience podcast. It's great to have you on.

Yeah, Adam, thanks for having me. Really, really excited to discuss this and kind of get into it.

Oh, fantastic. Well, first of all, I want to find out what was your inspiration for writing the Jolt Effects? Tell us where that came from.

Yeah, it was kind of two things. So Matt, my co author, Matt Dixon and I, we were conducting a big Study on sales. And it just so happened that it was kind of right at the beginning of the pandemic, which of course had lots of societal damage that we won't get into. But for us as researchers, it did offer us kind of a unique opportunity in that overnight, many sales conversations that typically happened, you know, out of sight in the customer's office, in Starbucks and coffee shops around the world, all of a sudden went virtual on zoom. And so it offered this real interesting opportunity because we're at the time working for this machine learning AI company who studied conversations, recorded conversations. And so we had this unique opportunity to gather way more actual recorded conversations, observed directly what's going on at the moment. So that was part of the inspiration, is just the timing of it worked in that we had this unique opportunity to get data that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to get. But the other thing, as we started to kind of get into it, we saw actually more losses than we expected to see. That was one of our first kind of findings. You know, a lot of law, a lot more losses than you expect. Even in situations when it felt like the buyer was quite excited, when the buyer was quite ready to you seemingly to buy, even situations where there was an inbound lead and the seller was saying things like, you called me, what's going on here? Why are you hesitating? And so that kind of went into a whole sort of new angle to the study, which is, you know, what causes people to get hung up even in situations when they want to buy. And that's kind of. That became the inspiration for indecision and kind of what drives it, how sellers handle it in those situations.

So let me just get this straight. So you had. We had a couple of things working in your favor. You had sort of an electronic way of storing and analyzing sales calls, combined with the effects of the pandemic. So those things together became your research target. And then you found that people were becoming more indecisive. Let me just, you know, ask you about that. Was that something that came out of the pandemic indecision? Or was or is that a trend that's been going on for some time?

You know, I think it's. You bring up a good point about the technology and the possibilities that it affords. Because if you go even further back, of course, even just the advent of the type of machine learning technology, frankly, transcription technology, the things that we would use to analyze big data sets and conversation, recorded conversation, is a huge data, data set that alone offered up potential opportunities. But this was a unique opportunity in the B2B sales arena. You know, when you think about indecision though, so, so therefore there is a potential for the fact that just because we are observing it in this setting for the first time, that we're able to spot things that we wouldn't have otherwise spotted in the past. So if you think about the way the human indecision arises in conversation, a lot of it is kind of implicit between the lines signals that the seller either picks up or they don't. These are emotions that come out through the course of the conversation. And without the technology, the machine learning the categories that we, we've done to train the machine to spot these things, we wouldn't have otherwise known those things were there. So there's, there is part of that that I think is we're just spotting things that were already kind of under the surface and we weren't able to really fully detect it, certainly not measure it in great depth and that we have now. But there's also, I think, real evidence that there are secular things going on that have made indecision bigger today and will probably be bigger tomorrow than it was yesterday. So we talk in the book about kind of the three big drivers of customer indecision, one of which being the number of options kind of overwhelming a given buyer. They are not capable of making decisions even if they want to buy, they still have to make a decision about what to buy. And there's a couple different options that always, that people, maybe more than a couple, maybe dozens of different options they have to choose between and they get stuck because they're not good at making trade offs. Well, what supplier out there is reducing the number of options for their buyers? Most are increasing the number of options, the number of potential ways that they could be flexible for their buyers. So that's, that's one reason that things are, I think, are increasing information availability. And the abundance of, of information is also kind of creating these really interesting dynamics where the buyer has access to more information than ever before. And it's the information abundance itself that creates this hesitation because they feel like I have to know it all and something else is going to come out tomorrow and I'll make a decision today and it'll look like I made the wrong decision later. And so it creates these interesting sort of hesitations. And again, you can't turn the Internet off. Like more information is going to be available tomorrow than there is today and so forth. And then outcomes go ahead. Sorry.

No, I totally agree. I'm sorry. I'M excited to jump in there because my grown up daughter calls choice disease. I wrote about it on the blog. I was like, this is the world of Netflix. When you can scroll down through several hundred titles and go, yeah, there's nothing, nothing that we want to watch. You hear about people dating. There's a bigger dating pool than ever because of things like Tinder and things like that. And yet people are unhappy with their choices. So I agree there's gonna be this long term slide towards over choice, you know. Yeah, no, totally about that in the book, you know.

Well, and there's lots of psychologists that have talked about this for a long time too. I mean, Barry Schwartz famously talked about this in the Paradox of Choice. We talk a little bit about that in the book. But his point is, you know, as, as choice expands, you know, counterintuitively, we get less happy, you know, and because frankly, the more choice there are, the more choices there are, the more likely I am to mess up by picking the wrong thing. The other one though, is last one is kind of interesting. It's around outcome uncertainty that that kind of drives this indecision for buyers. And this is also on the rise in part because suppliers themselves have played into the notion of selling transformation to the buyers. And this is particularly true, I think, in technology circles where it can be really tempting to lead with this very big vision, this very big, you know, idea of we're going to disrupt this market, we are new, new, exciting technology, and we are going to transform everything you're going to do. I mean, think about how many suppliers and vendors have on their website something that says digital transformation. I mean, everyone wants to play into it, but for the buyer, that can both be enticing but also crippling in the sense that transformation's hard. It's really difficult to get lots of people involved there. And from a psychology perspective, it also makes it more likely that something's going to go wrong and I'm going to get blamed if I'm the one kind of pushing down that path. So all these things are kind of on the rise and behind the scene, pushing indecision higher and higher for sales teams to now deal with in a different way than they have before.

Yeah, I love the way that. Well, the book for me really seems like it's in two halves. The first part of the book is how you identify the indecision and help to qualify the best opportunities you have based on a kind of a, you know, on the stats there. And then the second half gets into a kind of a, you know, a cookbook actually, about how to, how to handle it. So let's come back to the cookbook later on, but dive into some of the, some of your research that shows about how to, how to spot indecision about, you know, what to do about, about how to, you know, when you've identified it, whether you throw it out or go forward. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first mistake that, that many sellers and frankly post sale teams, as well as you think about the customer experience, the customer success teams, account managers, whatnot. There, there is this assumption that unless the buyer's telling me that they're, they're indecisive, but they're not. And what we're find actually is that when you look at the data, there's a lot more indecision happening beneath the surface than you might think. You know, our data showed that at least 80, 87% of, of interactions had at least moderate to high levels of, of indecision. These are deep, dark fears that people have. They are emotions and, and frustrations and confusion that they have about differing things. And it's not always the case that somebody is so forthcoming as to say, hey Adam, I'm really indecisive and I'm just not going to make a decision, you know, at all. And so there is a little bit of like reading between, between the lines, some active listening involved, but also you have to be very clear on what to listen for. You know, what are the signals of somebody who might be struggling with valuation problems or lack of information and so forth. And so we talk in the book about kind of what might those signals be. But there's also an element of if I haven't heard anything yet, I can't just assume that there's nothing there. One of the things we talk to, to our customers about now is, is it's not in the book. It's, this is research that kind of came out after the book. But it's think about acting like a, like a battleship sending out sonar looking for submarines underneath the surface of the water. You know, they, they don't just listen for what's coming. If they, if they don't think there might be something lurking underneath the surface that they don't know is there, they start sending out pings, looking for and identifying, you know, what those sources, in that case, the submarine that might shoot it down. But in the case of a seller or the case of a customer success agent or customer service agent, it help me understand the level of indecision that you might have and the nature of it, such that I can both use it as a way to understand the relative attractiveness of this opportunity. Should I keep, you know, hunting after this thing or not? Or how can I forecast the renewal opportunity on the customer experience side, but then also treat it to your point on the cookbook, like, what do I do to address this and help them get past this indecision?

Yeah, I was really struck by your research, the difference between, you know, what we used to think of as the, as a very skillful enterprise playbook, the FOMO approach. Also, Matt Dixon, your co author's background with the challenger sale isn't there, which is like, you know, you nudge the buyer to go, hey, you might be missing out on this. And what do you contrast the other side of it? How do you describe it these days?

Well, look, I think everyone in sales forever, and this is true not just in sales, I would argue for any, you know, customer service agent is looking to cross sell, upsell. Any customer experience agent is looking to drive a renewal. Any customer success team that's looking to grow that account over time. You're selling a notion of change. You're selling, you know, them taking and doing something different than they're doing today and hopefully with you as the supplier of choice. And so because of that, and because we know that humans generally are wired to want to avoid loss, we appeal to that loss. We appeal to this fear of missing out. None of us as, as individuals, as consumers, but also when we go to, to buy things on behalf of our own company, we don't want to miss out on, you know, returns that could really solve big problems for us. We don't want to miss out on, on things that our competitors are going to do to outpace us. We don't want to miss out on fixing, you know, big problems. And so sellers for decades have been taught and told and trained that they have one tool and that's a hammer. And every problem that they approach is a nail, and that's the customer's status quo. And I just need to beat that status quo. And if I beat that status quo, if I persuade you enough, that ought to be enough to get you past any of your concerns about change. And so this is that appeal to fomo. What we found when addressing indecision in particular, buyers who are sort of gripped by high levels of indecision is that FOMO play, not only does it not work, it actually backfires 84% of the time. And instead, and that's partly because, actually, in large part because the buyer who's gripped by indecision is not worried about messing up so much as they are worried about messing up. They are not so worried about missing out as they are about messing up. And that's the kind of the core insight of the. Of the book and of the study, is that what drives indecision is this fear that I'm going to mess up. It's. It's what psychologists call the error of commission. I'm going to act, something's going to go horribly wrong, and I'm going to get blamed. And so we need to help them address this fear of messing up rather than their fear of missing out.

And I thought that was a key transition. That really became an aha moment for me. If you keep flogging the dead horse of going back in and just knocking back the objections, you're missing the point that it's actually, you know, it can turn people off. It goes back to your Netflix choice disease. You know, you're just making it more difficult for the person to make that decision. So that was a real revelation.

That is what they're trying to. So the assumption on the seller's part is that they must just not get how great we are. That must be the problem. And I haven't done my job to persuade you. I mean, I know you're saying that you want it, but you must not want it enough because otherwise you wouldn't be hesitating. And so they run back to that, you know, look what happened. Look what will happen if you don't buy this. Look what'll happen if you. If you don't go down this path and they try to scare them into that purchase. To your point, on. On it not working. It's actually worse than that. It. It backfires. So you'd be better off doing nothing at all in running that FOMO play. You actually make it less likely they're going to make a decision because you are terrifying them and you're scaring a buyer who's already scared, you know, but they're scared about something different, which is that messing up.

So let's move on to. I don't want to give all the secrets away here. I mean, people should buy the book for that. But let's move a little bit into the diagnosing of that issue of indecision and then a couple of points about the playbook as we come out of it. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. So as you start to detect the different types of indecision that they might have, you might run a differing type of playbook to address that. Indecision jolt is an acronym. So it is. It has double meaning. So we're trying to jolt customers past their indecision. But it also happens to stand for the four behaviors that we found that the best sellers do as a way to jolt customers past their indecision. So judging the level of indecision is the first one. I talked a little bit about that, about almost qualifying an opportunity, going above and beyond typical criteria we might. Might use as a way to understand, is this a attractive buyer? Is this somebody I might want to spend time with? How should I think about forecasting this opportunity over and above things like their budget and their timing and what's going on inside the company, and are they a good fit? I might look to now qualify and forecast this potential opportunity based on their ability to decide. And that's kind of where that the pings and echoes come in to play from a sonar perspective, offering a recommendation as the O. So this is about kind of flipping from asking the customer, hey, what do you think you want to do? To telling them what I think they should do. And this, remember, this is the buyer who's kind of gripped by uncertainty because they don't know which option to choose, and they're kind of stuck. And so the best sellers are flipping into a recommendation mode. Hey, this is what I would do if I were you. And so there's. There's an interesting element here where they're kind of shifting blame from. From that buyer back to the seller. Right? So, Adam, I'm sure you've. You've been to a restaurant before, and you ask a waiter for a recommendation, right? But what you don't want to hear back is, you know, you imagine you walk in a restaurant, you say, you know, what's good here? And the. The. The waiter comes back and says, I don't know, how hungry are you? You know, we laugh, but that's kind of what sellers do in these situations, right?

Yeah, I'm good. Because it's that. I mean, I think it's my favorite kind of metaphor in sales is you go into a restaurant and that you say, well, what have you got that's good enough to wait? I've just been to visit the chef, and he's got this fantastic piece of meat that he bought today at the market. And the way he's confident in selling it, he or she, I should say, is selling it to you. And just saying that's the choice that brings you along. It's that story and involvement with a bit of emotion and perhaps some vulnerability, you know, that, that, that brings things, things along and that I think that's one of the biggest impacts from that chapter.

Certainly narrative matters quite a bit. The I think there is an element here of helping the buyer to understand not just what to buy, but what not to buy. So in making that recommendation, I'm also taking things off of the table and saying, you know what, this isn't, this probably isn't right. And so therefore I earn a little bit of trust in that process. Because who among us has not felt like they've over purchased or been oversold, you know, in those situations? So there's a little bit of nuance into how you go about making an accurate recommendation. Limiting the exploration. That's the one we're, we're using as a way to address that lack of information. Yeah, you know, the buyer who kind of gets into analysis paralysis mode, feeling like they have to become an expert on every single thing. The in technology I think we all can circles, we can all sort of picture these customers who feel like they have to memorize the user guide, you know, before they're willing to actually go and purchase. And they ask you more questions than you know, even your most loyal customers have ever asked. And so we've got to find a ways to limit that exploration. We talk in the book about owning the flow of information and sort of anticipating objections. That's something, that's a technique that a lot of customer service agents might be familiar with. We talked in, there was a previous set of study that we did in a book called the Effortless Experience. And there's a technique that best customer service agents use called Next Next Issue Avoidance. And what they're looking for is kind of the downstream problem. So you bought, you customer didn't tell me that this is your problem. But customers like you, when they have these problems, they typically have these other problems. And let me cut this off the pass and tell you about how to solve this problem. And I do that on the customer service side because I'm looking to prevent the callback. Right. I'm looking to, I know that if, if they go to try this, something's going to go wrong and they're going to call me back again. So I'm trying to prevent that. That same thing sort of applies in this context in sales when you're dealing with this indecisive buyer who hasn't raised this objection yet. But buyers who are worried about this often worry about that. Let me just put this on the table now and get this out there. It's a very trust building type thing because the buyer feels like you're looking out for me. You know, you've been down this path before. You know where this road goes. And therefore I don't feel like I need to be the expert myself.

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We talk about Radical Candor as a way of bridging that gap. I've seen that concept before of Radical Commander, but when you put it together with this, it makes perfect sense. Can you elaborate a little bit about how you see Radical Candor? I think, and especially using the example of customer success or retention sales, to me that seems like a really important part of it.

Yeah. And Radical Candor is not a new concept, but I think when we saw what sellers were doing in the study, it rang true to us as a description and a depiction of what the best sellers are doing. I think the thing to be careful about with Radical Candor, and it is essentially calling a spade a spade. Right when. When the, when the buyer is totally wrapped around the axle and they are asking for the 7th or 8th or 9th demo, and you know that that's not going to change their decision calculus at all, but they keep asking for it. And so you have to find ways to essentially at some point call timeout and Say, look, let's, let's get this out on the table. What is the question behind the question? What's the thing that's really kind of driving this hesitation or the, or the need for this, all this different information? I think with, with radical candor, though, you gotta be careful to break that out too soon or too often because it is something that requires a little bit of foundation of trust before you get there. So we talk a little bit about kind of you have to earn the trust and then radical canders in some ways, kind of the. I need to spend the trust at certain points. And, and so I think that's true on the, on the, on the customer experience and customer service side as well as we think about loyal customers and the bank of trust that we're building up over time. There are, of course, times we know, you know, they're, they're going down the wrong path. They're not doing something that that's appropriate. They're not using our, our tool in the way that they should be. And I need to be honest with them when that, when that happens. So that's kind of what radical candor is all about here.

I can so relate to that. We had an issue earlier on in the day. We were talking to one of our clients, phoned up, hey, we want to do this, which is frankly off beam, and we don't think it's the right thing. And you know, we've got. One of the customer success agents is somewhat reluctant to really go bat on that. But we go, look, let's look at the net promoter scores we got with this company. They're really getting solid eight, nines and tens. We've got enough stuff in the bank that we can talk about that stuff. They will trust us. And it does help to go back in and say, look, this is gonna be tough for me to talk to you, but it's not the right decision. It really works, Ted. It really works.

It does. It's hard. Look, radical, candid, probably amongst all of the skills in the study, in the book, is probably one that's gonna take a little bit of time to master. But you know, it is something where it is sort of a long term play in that if you don't say anything and you, and you just let them keep going down that path, even if you're getting those great MPS scores now, you'd have to assume that erodes, you know, over time because their experience is going to erode. And so therefore, at some point somebody has to say something. So that's Kind of what that's. What that's about.

Yeah. I did a great podcast last week actually with Ashley Raquel de Navinia Dunlop on the 4th.

Okay.

Trust. And it really leads into that, you know, about how you can use vulnerability to help really become trusting. I think that these two concepts together can really help to cement a good relationship.

That's fascinating. Yeah, no, I. I find that the whole, you know, trust is an. It's, you know, it's like empathy. It's. It's a word that like means everything and nothing at the same time because it's just used in so many different ways. So anytime any person brings new research and it gets more specific.

Yes.

About what is meant there is totally useful and valuable.

Yeah. And just to finish off with a radical candor, it's one thing that can be overused, isn't it? You put it right as sort of an obnoxious aggression. You don't want to be an a hole about the whole thing.

Well, you guys, it has to be delivered. And again, I just now breaking my own rule in an empathetic manner. But I think, you know, the guidance we give sales teams here is that this is a break glass in case of emergency situation like this is. This is not something you break out every single day. You know, you do it in certain situations when it feels like if. If I don't do this, they will forever be caught in that vortex of information exploration.

Yeah. And I also think as vendors, we are so guilty of it. I was reading it, I was thinking, God, we have so much stuff on our website that we've just. We give people. And limiting it is helpful because it saves time for everybody. I think that's a very positive way of doing it.

Yeah.

To bring the concept time. The T is the key thing to help get to the sales. Ted, can you give some color on that?

Yeah. This is the one I think for sales teams it feels both most obvious, but also is more of kind of the aha moment. Because if you think about these buyers who are gripped by uncertainty and they're worried about I'm not going to get what I'm paying for, you've got to find a way to give them a little bit of protection in that decision. And so we talk in the book about managing downside risk and the ability to use safety nets as part of that decision. And there are both informal ways to do that and more formal ways. There's inexpensive ways to do it and more expensive ways to do it. You know, simple value roadmaps can be one example of an informal, inexpensive way to approach it. And you're just showing them, hey, we have a plan here. We understand where this is going. You're not alone. Because indecision can be a rather lonely thing for that buyer who wants to buy, needs to buy and is just stuck. And. But the other thing about taking risk off the table that I think people kind of forget, and as a researcher, this is, I have to make sure that I, I don't let them forget this because in the predictive bottle, this was the number one variable. It's the thing that made the biggest difference was expectation setting. And this, this is something you can do. You know, one thing that's interesting, Adam, about taking risk off the table is people assume it's sort of a last mile thing only, you know, it's like the thing I need to do right at the end to make sure they feel confident about signing, you know, the agreement. And then there's some truth to that. But there are things that a seller can be doing or any person who's working with a customer, frankly, can be doing from the first meeting that they have with them. Yeah. To set the proper expectations to make sure that, you know, the customer doesn't start getting, you know, their eyes too big for their stomach and sort of getting outsized expectations. We can work back to make sure that their expectations are set on practical, achievable, real things because those are going to be the outcomes that they then can feel better about and more importantly, advocate for across the organization. And so those are kind of the two key skills when you think about taking risk off the table. In B2B sales, I think there is this assumption that I can't do anything to take risk off the table because I haven't been permissioned to do it. Like, I can't give them a backout clause, I can't give them a cancellation. And so therefore I do nothing at all. And that's the real mistake. I think that's that sales teams and frankly customer experience and customer service teams would make is just assuming there's nothing I can do and so I do nothing. So safety nets just are never given. And so therefore we shouldn't be surprised when that buyer does in fact get stuck.

Yeah, that's where the risk can come in. And it's not helped, frankly, by legalese. I think that we have in contracts sometimes, you know, sort of human trust works better also. You know, and this is also the interesting thing, especially when we think about SaaS or recurring revenue type things is that you don't always have to go big from day one, do you? You can actually, you can grow it over time. And that's where the customer success teams come in. So not be greedy. That was one of my takeaways too.

Yeah, we talked in the book. Starting small is certainly something that I think some top sellers will do in these situations. Now it's tough because, you know, most sales teams, even you know, customer experience teams, customer success teams who are doing cross sell upsell are incentivized on.

Yeah.

You know, the dollar. Right. And so. Or the, you know, closing more business. And so it's tough. It's a tough pill to swallow sometimes to say, you know, I'll take a smaller deal. But you have to contrast that with what the alternative might be, which is that they do nothing at all. So sometimes doing something is better than nothing. And that's kind of.

And that if I think about it, and that's why Jolt is such a good name to be honest. That's when you jolt somebody along that. And I think that's really in the remit of sales VPs or CROs to really. To look down and just go like just, you know, let's just, let's just move it in or move it forward or move it out with this. Do something.

Yeah.

One of the things I'd just like to, to dig into, you know, because customer experience is very much my thing. And I know Ted, that's your background as well. So how, how do you see this. This working? You know, have you do better customer experiences reduce indecision or is that just a. Just a non correlation? What have you seen there?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing to, to realize as you think about customer experience is that the sales team, if they don't deal with indecision, can create real headaches for you and for the organization. There are times when they will wrestle a decision across the finish line, you know, even in spite of the fact that indecision still exists. And this is where you start seeing, you know, what psychologists would call post decision dysfunction. You know, from the moment that you start working with them, they start questioning the decisions that they made. They start backtracking, you know, on those decisions and they start talking about backing out of the deal or getting out of the agreement. And so indecision that lurks beyond that deal becomes those immediate churn potential situations. You know, for those buyers. There is a lot of evidence. There's a chapter in the book, I think it's chapter eight that talks about going beyond and sort of what, what makes for loyal customers with respect to indecision. And it does map a little bit to previous research we've done around reducing effort friction of the experience itself. And this turns out to be true both for sales and customer experience. Teams alike is the easier we can make the experience, the less friction that they feel, the more likely they are to both enjoy the experience. But also it so happens, spend more with us as well. And there's, there's some amount of that that's kind of, you know, somewhat obvious is just think about your own personal experience you're going to, to purchase. But there's, of course it's easier said than done in terms of making that experience, you know, easy kind of low friction. And that also reduces indecision. So if it's easy. So take, take for example, I make a great recommendation, you know, which is part of the reducing a decision is to offer recommendation in a firm and personal manner. When I do that, it should make the whole entire decision process a lot cleaner and a lot simpler for that seller. Not only am I separating out things that I don't need to go and purchase, but I'm focusing in on the things that I really need. And therefore I should feel less need to go and examine every single corner of your, of your user guide. And I shouldn't need, you know, demos on features that I don't. I know now I'm not going to buy. Right. It reduces my appetite for consumption and that alone makes the process faster and simpler. So there's other examples like that. But certainly reducing a decision should make the whole process easier and we know that leads to more loyalty as a customer.

Yeah. And I think especially when we're thinking about recurring revenue or you know, renewal sales, you need to neutralize indecision early on, don't you? You need to make sure that people are fully committed. So it's almost like you just need to, you need to keep jolting them along the process 12 months of the year just to, just to be in that zone. You're doing the right thing. You're. It's much easier to do this than nothing else. That's, that's what I took away from it. Now that's that, you know, that's something I know that's important to our business.

Yeah. I mean customer value consultants would talk about the fact that we don't often in the post sales setting remind our customers enough about what the value drivers are.

Yeah.

You know that we don't, we don't Talk to them often enough about, hey, you've done this and there's real value there. And so as a consequence you end up at renewal time having these difficult conversations because you're sort of playing catch up, you know, and they don't really, actually, they haven't paid attention. They don't really give you credit for the things that you've done well across the course of the year. I think the same thing is true with respect to dealing with indecision. So you get the customer past that, that purchase and they've overcome their indecision. But then we should be reminding them of, hey, how's that recommendation going? The safety net that we work, that we talked through, how's that working? Let's, let's kind of make sure we're reminding of that as well because again, that indecision, because it is a very human thing, just because they got over it doesn't mean it goes away forever. And in fact it can grow back again and either prevent the next purchase or prevent us from growing. And so I think in similar mind, you've got to look to almost remind them in some ways of what we've done to overcome that indecision in the first place. And that falls right on the customer experience team, the customer success team, the account manager, you name it.

Can you give any examples of who you think is doing it well, who's really taken Joel to heart or maybe they taught you how this was working.

So I think there are lots of examples. I think the better examples tend to actually come in the consumer context of companies. We think that do a good job of helping. I mean Amazon's one we talk about a little bit in that they do a great job of filtering decisions for us, making recommendations, chalking the field of if you're going to buy, here's a couple of different ways to think about, you know, these different potential options. So I think that's a, that's a good example sort of in the, in the consumer world, in the, in the B2B world, you know, we see many, many ex. I mean, by definition the study was, was conducted by observing what the best sellers were doing. And so there's millions of people out there today who are already very good at jolting. You tend to find that the more individual level than at the organizational level, you know, I don't know that we, there's one specific company we point to and say they are world class that has an organization at overcoming indecision. But most sales organizations have at least a subset of their Team who are really good at this already and, you know, they might be good at like J and O, but struggle with the L and the T. So there will be some variation there too. And so we tend to see kind of examples and pockets of best practices more at this sort of individual level than the organizational level.

Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I'm thinking about how you can benchmark internally is a really good idea. Okay, Ted, I'm going to get you to get your crystal ball out.

Okay?

Imagine, imagine the next few years. I mean, we're hearing things about ChatGPT the whole time. I mean, are we all going to be put out of a job, do you think, in terms of customer relations, you know, learning. Joel. But hey, isn't ChatGPT going to sell for us in the future?

Well, I mean, the short answer I think in, in my view, is no. We could start with the sales side and purchasing, and then we could talk about whether the same thing might apply on the customer experience side. But, you know, because of course, there's lots of, on the customer service side, tons of bots out there that try to handle more and more of the, of the experience too. Although I have a point of view on that as well. On the sales side. I think the, the, the reason I don't think that's going away. We get asked this question often, and it's usually in the, in the context of research that's out there about buyers not wanting to talk to salespeople. They prefer to, to do more and more of the purchase experience on their own. And so you start to wonder what, what's the point of the seller? The thing, though, when you look at this, this study of indecision, is you can see real clear evidence that purchasing, even in B2B, maybe especially in B2B purchases, is a very emotional exercise, far more so than you might have otherwise thought, and actually very clear evidence that they need a seller or somebody to help them overcome those, the, the emotion that they feel in those situations. I mean, the simpler way of saying is that until buyers themselves are not purchasing, like until humans are not purchasing, you know, we're going to still need humans on the other side of the equation to help them overcome those situations. But I think it's equally interesting to think about, you know, the full customer journey and the role that bots and technology might play, you know, to help buyers both, of course, make the experience easier when we can but address some of their sort of base human emotions as well.

That's a pretty good answer. I think that if anything, we need to up our skills as humans to help it and it really is in the relationship and trust areas. And again, I think that's one of the things I really, really appreciated about the book, Ted, because it really reminds you that there are, you know, we're all humans and you can actually nudge people along. I really appreciated that. And I just want to say I'm a huge fanboy. I have recommended it to at least half a dozen people of people I really respect. I give it a solid 10. And if you're out there just going to hold the book up here, it's the Jolt Effect. It's out now. All right. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna. It's a great read if you're in sales or if you're in customer experience. Ted, thanks for being with us today. Now, fascinating talk. How do people reach you if they want to get more of this fountain knowledge?

Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me, Adam. Really enjoyed the discussion and appreciate your kind words about the book. You could find me on LinkedIn just Ted McKenna there you can go to our website is dcminsights. Com and then there's a separate site for the book called jolteffect. Com. On there you can find a bunch of information about the book itself. You can find how to buy the book if you're so inclined. There's also a series of free resources and tools that you can download on the site. And for sales teams that have interest, there's avenues to explore further support there from a training and development perspective. And so that's on joltifact.com Ted, thank.

You so much for sharing your time with us today. I really appreciate it. And we'll be jolting the community with this.

Very good. Thanks, Adam.