Brian Gubernick argues that fixing sales conversion problems by studying failures backfires. Instead, he uses Appreciative Inquiry: find where conversion already works, extract those patterns, and make them the standard. The 5-D process turns top performers' behaviors into playbooks the whole team follows.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let me start today's episode with a situation that almost every sales team leader has faced. You look at your numbers and you realize that your lead conversion rate is not where you expect it to be. Maybe it's at— I'm going to make up numbers here— maybe it's at 8%, but based on your market and what you're spending in terms of marketing and, and just your team's mix and experience, it should be 12% or it should be 15%. When this happens, what do most leaders do? Well, what they do is they pull reports and start digging deep into those reports, or they start working on their sales scripts. They tighten up the scripts, or they coach their people even harder. They're asking questions like, hey, why aren't we converting? And usually when these things happen, things don't meaningfully change. Today, in, in today's episode, I want to introduce a framework that I just recently learned that does a great job attacking this problem differently. The framework's called Appreciative Inquiry, and I want to show you how to use it to raise conversion without burning out your team or killing morale. Now, I'm going to use this problem I just outlined, that your sales team conversion is X and you want it to be Y, and we're going to anchor to that as our example today. However, if that's not your game, please, please, please still pay attention because this model, what I'm describing, this framework can be used in all sorts of organizational challenges as well as challenges and obstacles outside of the 9 to 5. So again, I will use the sales team challenge as an example. But listen to what I'm, what I'm sharing and how we're going about, you know, solving here in a different sort of manner and apply these principles to whatever, whatever it is, um, is, is, is, uh, a subject you are facing in your respective world. So going back to this sales trouble or sales problem, what's the default approach? Well, the default leadership move is to fix on a focus on missed follow-ups or weak objection handling, bad scripts, like I said, inconsistent discipline. This is where we go, and none of those are, are wrong. Like, there may be some opportunity to improve in those areas, but here's the issue with that. When you lead with deficiency, people start to get defensive, and when people get defensive, the learning pretty much shuts down. You end up managing compliance instead of really uplifting or unlocking performance. I think appreciative inquiry does a great job changing this entire equation. So, what is this whole appreciative inquiry model I'm talking about? It's based on one core idea: organizations grow in the direction of the questions they repeatedly ask. Organizations grow in the direction of the questions they repeatedly ask. So instead of asking, why are we failing? Appreciative inquiry asks, when are we succeeding and why? Hope you heard that. Instead of asking, why are we failing? When you use appreciative inquiry, you're asking, hey, when are we succeeding and why are we succeeding? So instead of diagnosing weaknesses, What we're doing is amplifying proven strengths. Now, let's bring this back to our sales conversion problem. Let's say your team is converting at an 8% rate, but based on benchmarks and experience and all these things, it should be 12%. So, that gap is costing you real money. It's costing you real money. The traditional approach is to ask, why is our conversion so low? Appreciative inquiry would instead ask a better question, which is, where is conversion already working? Okay, now step 1, there's these 5 D's process, the letter D, 5 D's in appreciative inquiry. Step 1 is discover. Discover means to, in this particular example, study your best conversions. What do I mean when I say that? Pull the data and ask Who on the team is converting at a higher rate, say 15 to 18%? Which lead sources are converting at the highest rate? What— which types of calls result in appointments more consistently? And then, and this is I think a really critical component, go interview success. What do I mean when I say that? Go ask your top conversion— converters, I'm sorry, questions like, Hey, walk me through a call that you turned into a client, or what did you say early in the conversation, or how do you create trust so fast, or what do you not say that others do? You could, you could think of other questions here, but you're asking your top converters these questions, and what you're trying to do is extract patterns, not necessarily opinions. I'm not looking for motivation, I'm looking for some degree of operational intelligence. So step 1 is to discover. Step 2 is to dream. What do I mean when I say dream? I mean define what great looks like. Bring your team into this conversation. Ask questions like, hey, in the spirit of dreaming, if we converted at 12% consistently, what would change for you? How would your income look? How would your stress level change? What would our team culture feel like? This step matters because people don't tend to commit to metrics, they commit to the meaning behind those metrics. Now the conversion becomes less about a number and becomes more about stability, confidence, freedom. So, step 2 is dream. Step 3 is to design. Design, which is really turning success into systems. Remember everything you just learned? Take what you learn from the top performers and codify it. Implement it. What language they're using that consistently works. How can I teach others to leverage it? The first 90 seconds of a high-converting call. How can I codify that? The questions that build trust the fastest. The follow-up cadence that converts. Remember, what you extracted from the top performers, how do we bring it to everybody else? I'm not looking for tips. I'm looking for team standards. So maybe you go out and create a top 10 questions that convert playbook, or you go out and create a minimum follow-up standard that's based on proven behavior of your top converters. So you're not inventing this, you actually discovered it from within your own team, and adoption ends up being higher. Step 4, the fourth D, is destiny. What do I mean when I say destiny? I mean reinforce and multiply. You have to reinforce what works. So spotlight wins tied to the new standard, agents applying the behavior, improvements to conversion. So you coach to replicate success. It's not just to fix failure. So over time, your 15 to 18% performers, they stop being the outliers. And it becomes the new norm. So step 4 is destiny. Here's the takeaway. Most leaders try to fix sales problems by studying what's broken. High-level leaders scale results by studying what works and then making it repeatable. Appreciative inquiry does not lower standards. It raises belief and clarity. And execution. So here's your action item, action step for the day. Identify one metric in your business that's underperforming. Then I want you to ask this question instead of the usual one. I want you to ask, where is this already working? And how do we make that the rule instead of the exception? So identify one metric in your business that's underperforming and then ask, where is this already working and how do we make that the rule instead of the exception? I think that one question alone can change your team's immediate trajectory. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
