S1 E3: sales process,about selling to or understanding buying from?

Good morning, leaders. Wake up, smell the coffee. It's 6:30 in the morning somewhere in the world. Welcome to the Irreverent, Bold, Unfiltered podcast and videocast about leadership. You want to move your career to the next level? Look nowhere else. You found the right place. Let's get going, shall we? All right, all right, all right. Well, welcome to Season 1, Episode 3 now. And the topic of the day is How do you sell more? Do you sell more by aligning yourself as a sales organization to a strong sales process on how you're going to sell to prospects and customers? Or are you selling more when actually you're aligned on how people are buying? And is this mutually exclusive? And what's the pros and cons? And we're going to talk about that in a minute. And then, we'll discuss about the format and the different chapters that we have. But before I do that, I'm super excited because it's the first podcast where we have a guest. And I'm super happy to have Roger with us, Roger McConville. Roger and I go back quite a few years, right? I think it's about 19 or something like that. Yeah, 19 years, right?

Yeah.

So, very similar although Roger is not French for sure, but very similar backgrounds where we're both enterprise software people. Roger is pure sales. That's why I said, hey, for such a topic, I need somebody who's been in sales for his entire career. We met at BEA, and then we worked again together at BMC. He spent some time at SAP, Elastic. If my memory serves me well, he had a stint at Oracle. And Intel in the past. He's going to talk about that as well. But super happy to have a very, very, very, very experienced sales leader with me on the podcast today. Roger, anything that you want to outline the past 30-plus years? We're not going to say how many years you've been working.

Yeah, we don't want to go too far. Yeah.

No, we don't want to go too far. What else?

What did I miss? Senior citizens of Senior citizens of sales. Yeah. No, I appreciate the opportunity to participate. And now that you put a date around it, it has been 19-plus years in terms of when we first met. We had the opportunity to work with you. I remember somebody at BEA says, hey, you need a mentor. And they said, oh, we'll pick Christophe. And so we built from there. So it's a pleasure to be a part of this exciting learning expertise for sales leaders. And so, thanks for the opportunity to be a part of it.

All right, cool. So, let's talk about the topic and how we're going to kind of structure it. So, Chapter 1 is going to be, hey, what is it? What are the differences, right? What's the difference between having a sales process-oriented approach to sales or following the buyer journey? And actually, we're going to make a decision, Roger and I. That's the only thing that we prepared. It's unfiltered. It's bold. It's unprepared. But we exchanged on LinkedIn, it was actually. And he said, hey, I'm a big one about dot, dot, dot. If you don't know what he said, we'll wait a bit. But I agree with him. So, I say, hey, I want to make a bold statement saying, hey, we believe that this is better than that. That's going to be the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2 is, well, based on that, how do you align? not only yourself but the rest of the company, the rest of the organizations. How do you align everybody? Because it has an impact on basically how you go to market, period, right? And then, chapter 3, we're going to talk about the business benefit because at the end of the day, is it just a nice exercise that you feel good about or is there a real business benefit in picking one versus the other? And what is it that it has an implication, especially from a sales leadership All right. So, without further delay, and we're going to talk about that for about 30 to 40 minutes. I don't know how long it's going to take us. I'm watching the clock to make sure that we're staying within those guardrails. But chapter 1, what is it and what is best? That's going to be the big thing. So, first, let's think about definition.

Okay.

And try to define what we're talking about. So, I'll ask Roger in a minute if he's in agreement or not with me. We don't know. Again, we haven't prepped to that level of detail. But to me, when you orient yourself around how you're going to sell, it's basically how you push the customer for them to buy your product. That's how you are a seller sales process-oriented sales organization versus if you follow the buyer process or the buyer journey, it's how you answer questions and how you meet the needs of customers and prospects as they're thinking and then deciding of buying from you. So, it's very different in my mind if you organize around yourself around how you're going to sell or how you're going to follow the buyer journey. So, I don't know what you think, Roger. You agree, disagree? You want to add to that?

Well, I agree. I think the shift in attention to that is you really have to understand how the customer is going to buy now. There are a lot of people that still follow standard methodology saying, here's my product. Here's my demo. Here's my proposal. And then they go, well, why hasn't anybody bought anything? And it's really stepping back and saying, what's the process that a company is going to go through? Because many times customers themselves don't know the process. It's not every day that a customer wakes up and buys enterprise software or any technology that's of a substantial level. You may buy, you know, inexpensive applications that are, you know, less than $1,000. But if you're going to have to buy products and you're the key person associated with it, there's somebody that's the change agent. Going to be the person with the compelling concern. And it's finding that individual in the scenario versus I'm going to follow a script and a process. And then you surprise and the deal doesn't happen, or you follow a process and everybody goes along and then it gets no decision. So it's really asking the questions of how are you going to go about this? And it really can be that easy because some people don't even know themselves and they'll surprise you. So they go, geez, we don't know who has to approve this, or they know there's a very structured approach to it. But they don't know how they're going to navigate to it. And so, there's a lot of myths in that process. Everybody goes, oh, it's a committee or it's a CEO, those types of things. So, I think more and more companies are shifting to understand that. It's how they get there because there's not a lot of what I'll say coaching or material or approaches out there that help salespeople look at that process and say, how do you understand it? How do you sell to it?

Yeah, no, I can't agree more. As you were talking, something crossed my mind, which is I think, and let me know what you think. I think that it's a lot easier. I'm going to make a bit of a bold statement here, but I think it's a lot easier as a sales organization and as a sales leader to actually rely on a, well, and then to organize around a sales process because you feel that you're in control of everything. It's like, okay, I'm going to ask this question and that question, and I need to know this and this. You're in control. You define the rules of the game. And that's, I think, more comfortable, maybe not easier, but more comfortable for sales leaders to think that way versus, hey, I got a bunch of people out there. Maybe they want to buy my stuff. Hopefully, they do. And what is it that I need to do to please them, right? Which is a lot more— it sounds a lot more uncertain, more difficult. And that's maybe why there's a bit of fear. I don't know if fear is the right word.

Right.

word, but maybe a bit of fear for a sales leader to go, hey, not forget about sales process altogether. We'll talk about that in chapter 3. But let's organize ourselves against how they want to buy. Would you agree with that, Roger?

Agreed. Yeah. If you don't have a process, then it's completely random. And then, it's impossible to create any level of projection predictability for anybody in your company that says these people are actively in engagement with us, we're helping them solve something we've identified with them in terms of their pain, or we're helping them identify their pain. If you don't have a methodology to begin with, it's going to— you're going to take every prospect and say, oh, they're all legit. It's really adapting your process to say, okay, if we're going to follow the process, we also have to take into consideration how they're going to go buy. Because if you don't, you'll follow your process and then you'll still be unsuccessful at the end because— and you won't know why unless they're willing to explain that to you. And I think you and I have had experiences where we've had deals that just get to the end and they go, oh, it vanished, or it's going to be next month, or it's going to be next quarter. And maybe it does come around in that period of time, but it's— that's the length of time that that customer had to go through to make that transaction happen. And sometimes the processes become so rigid that they go, well, I follow all these steps, therefore I'm going to forecast it, therefore it's going to happen. And when it doesn't—

Therefore it doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen. Everybody's credibility then is suspect in question. So You have to have at least a methodology, but you can't follow it so rigidly that you don't bring the customer into the mix of it.

And of course, Roger, you and I are perfect, so we never fall into that trap.

I've never had that problem ever.

Too many times to remember. Too many times to remember.

Yes, too many. Right.

So, for the audience here, the thing that is, it's like, okay, well, give me an example. Give me an example of things or companies or market that behave like one and market that behave like another one. I'm going to give you 2 examples. So, which one is the more sales process-oriented? I'm going to really, really sell that to that customer. Car. We all love to go to a car dealer and buy a car because they're so nice and they really think about what is it that you want to achieve. No, the only thing that they want is follow the process and they have a finance manager that they go back to when they need approval, which is total BS. And the only thing that they're trying to do is to put you behind the wheels because they know that from here, normally, the sales success increases drastically. So, you are in the sales process no matter how different, right? So, that's one. On the other side of the spectrum is totally oriented around buyer journey is actually, like, for instance, any application on App Store or Android Store where basically, there is nobody outside of the kind of the system is trying to guide you. It's like, hey, I'm going to show you what I'm going to be able to do. You tell me if it fits your needs. And if it does, great. If it doesn't, then no, it doesn't work. And you have no word. So, it's totally aligned and organized around the buyer journey, right? So, this is 2 examples, one very extreme. That's why, for instance, companies like Carvana are trying to get the out of the dealership to actually align to the buyer journey in apps, in stores where there is no— or freemium where there is no influence or as little as possible from the outside in. So, something that I'm going to ask Roger to comment is and try to remove a bit of the fear around organizing yourself around the buyer journey and the buyer process because I think that we're going to make a bold statement. Roger and I are in favor of aligning sales activities around the buyer journey versus how you're going to sell to them. I'm going to say that there is a universal buyer process. We're all different. We all think that we're snowflakes, but actually, we're buying very similarly across everything, basically. And I call it, and I'm pretty sure that other people have that acronyms as well. I'm not pretending that I invented something here, but I call it the ACIP or ACIP as you like. And again, so let me kind of throw out what the acronyms are. So, ACIP, the first is A, it's awareness. It's I have a problem. I wake up in the morning or after a few analysis and research, I have a problem and I need a solution. Awareness. I'm aware I need something, so I'm going to try to find what's available out there. C stands for consideration. Consideration is, hey, now that I did some research, who are the people in the company who can give me a solution to that problem? A, awareness, consideration. I and P. I is intent. Oh, now I'm willing to buy. I have a problem. I need a solution. I know roughly who can give me a solution. And I'm willing to invest and to buy for resolving my business problem. P is purchase, is that I'm buying, right? I have a problem. I need a solution. I know who can give me a solution. I'm willing to buy. And now, I'm buying. And I said, hey, A, sip in again because then after that, it's repurchase, is I'm buying more, right? Or I keep buying from the same people.

Right.

I try to challenge myself, and I'm going to ask Roger in a minute to challenge me on this, but I think it's universal. It applies to almost everybody and to everybody. People spend more or less time in various phases of that universal buying process, but they go through all the phases. And it doesn't matter if it's to buy, well, a car or an ERP in a multibillion-dollar company. So, what do you think? Would you— does it resonate with you? And we haven't talked about it before the call.

No, I appreciate the acronym the way you've got it there. And the key you indicate is that awareness. There's a compelling reason. There's a pain point. Either it's been unearthed or somebody has created that pain point for you. So, it can be externally generated. It can be your Generate it based on your own concern that you're addressing in your business or your your personal life. But then you have to have that pain if you don't, or somebody has made you aware of that pain from a latent standpoint, and now you're saying I've got to take it into consideration. I'm going to go create my criteria. I'm going to go find go forward. Then you're going to create your process, and then you're going to you're purchase it. So there is some kind of methodology that can be. Lengthy, can be short depending on the individual or the organization that's part of. So, it makes a lot of sense. It really narrows down a lot of other language around it to say, if I don't have pain or active pain or latent pain, there really isn't a transaction to be had. And so, I think the awareness piece is that's first.

Yeah. So, let me ask you a question. So, awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, and then purchase again. Which one do you think, and I'm thinking at the same time because I don't know if I have a clear answer myself, but which one do you think is more difficult or complicated or complex, all the 3 of them, for companies to align, to do something about? Personally, I think it's I think it's in the top, in the awareness and consideration. I'm kind of hesitating between those 2 and which one is more complex. But what do you think? Which one? And maybe it's purchase. I don't know. Which one of these different phases do you think is more difficult for companies to really align?

When you look at it from the sales lens, the alignment part between awareness and consideration, because it falls back to if you're using a methodology, you say, well, The methodology I've employed, it says I've already determined this because they have this issue, so they're going to want to solve it. It's understanding who has the awareness and who's going to drive that process. How compelling is it for— is it— it may not be a committee. It's probably just 1 or 2 individuals that are driving it. It's understanding that scenario. It's really finding out who those people are or individuals are because it's not always the most obvious person. Some people say, oh, it's the CEO. It always has that awareness. Rarely is at that level. It's it's it's usually much further down. CEO may have driven the concern to go do that and say, "Hey, I want to put an ERP system to make it the simplistic example." And then you say, "Well, that the CEO doesn't sit down and do the awareness and the exploration and that piece." It says we have a compelling event. Go find out. So I think from a sales lens standpoint, understanding awareness and consideration and setting the guideline to say, "Here's how I can help in that." Process versus just following a script that says, well, now I'm going to demo, now I'm going to propose. Because those steps as a sales rep may not address the awareness and the consideration process the buyer is going through. And I think it's a fair question. I say, if we're successful in showing you how we could address the pain, what would be the process for actually acquiring the solution? And I think that doesn't get asked a lot very early in the cycle. It gets assumed. And then, you get to purchase and they go, well, we're not going to purchase or we're going with somebody else because the decision wasn't compelling enough or there was some other business issue came into play. So, I think those first 2, awareness and consideration, are probably the most challenging to get us as a sales company and an organization to get your head around and approach it.

Yeah. No, thanks. And it's interesting what Roger just said because When he described the failure, i.e., okay, we're not going— and it's kind of funny because I was hesitating because it's like, hey, I'm going to say, hey, we were not able to sell, or is it the person not buying? Oh, that's going to be different. But the impact that Roger just described is later on in the process, like at the purchase time where the person say, hey, no, or the persons. I'm probably going to do a podcast about that. I don't think that There is no more one person deciding. It's always at least a few. And at times, it's decision by committee. But it's not the topic of today. But it's— so, later the failure happened because you have not considered things at the awareness and consideration phase. So, you're missing something or you didn't ask the right questions or you didn't pay attention. You didn't pay attention about where your buyer was in the journey. It's missing. Yeah. Maybe he was in a journey where he knew or she knew or they knew that the only thing that they were doing is awareness and consideration and will stop there. It's like, hey, I have a problem. It's not painful enough. But I'd like to understand what are the solutions. And then, I'm not going into purchase intent and purchasing because it's too expensive. The pain is not big enough for how much I'm going to spend. And we as salespeople, I mean, we all make made that mistake and multiple, multiple times is that, oh, there's somebody with an intent. They want to solve something. So, let's try to sell them something. And as soon as you do that, game is over. You're wasting your time. Would you agree with that big statement, Hunter?

Completely. And that's what a lot of pipelines are for salespeople is that there's initial awareness. They've come to you and they said, I've had this issue. Then, the qualification of that stops at that point of awareness. Let's show them what our solution is. And then it'll, it'll follow just the natural steps. And that's when it starts getting much more complicated, much more insightful, where you have to ask the questions that are in an interrogation, but yet you can listen for what the answers are. And then you start finding out that there's typically more than one person involved, just to the point you're saying, or the pain is starting to wane in terms of its compellingness, or it's actually getting worse. And then it's time to move faster. So it's helping that judgment point where that's at. Versus just saying, here's my proposal, when are we going to move forward? It's— those are critical elements to listen for. And I think that's where a lot of deals stall and a lot of pipeline gets pushed out. Well, they're going to buy next quarter. They're going to buy, you know, 6 months.

And yeah, or never.

You have to go— or never. They'll be forever in my pipeline.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had that too. Yeah, no, that's good. And then it's, you know, and I know I don't know if you had that experience too, Roger, but, and to me it was actually lately where, oh, we need 3 times or 4 times the pipeline, right? We all have in enterprise software that kind of, you know, Yes. GRAIL goal that, yeah, you have to have 3x or 4x. It's like, so when are you saying that 2/3 or 3/4 of your pipe is actually Unreal and not there. No, it's like it's us as salespeople just thinking that because people would like that, they're going to. And no, right? Another thing is, hey, this conversation is not about saying, hey, sales process and sales methodology are bad. They're not bad. Not at all. I mean, MedPic is great and Sandler is great and all those things are great. But it's how you use them. Are you using that to throw things through people's throat? Or are you using that to step down, have a look to your customers and prospects, and understanding how they buy and trying to align those against how they buy? Would you agree with that, Roger?

Completely. You have to have a methodology. And to the point you're making is that there's been sales methodologies for many, many years. They just have evolved and adapted. But at the end of the day, you have to have a structure for understanding your market, designing how, where your solution might potentially go. But you can't get overwrought and your process becomes how you force the process on your customer. Then, you can assure yourself that that deal will stall or delay or you'll lose.

People don't like that. You don't like that. I don't like that. So, why would our customers and prospects like that?

Exactly. Just like you described on the car dealership. We all hate it but we end up going through it because there's no really good alternative.

Exactly. But if there was and there is, then you go. All right. So, that's the end of chapter 1. As usual, it's the longest chapter. So, no worries here. Let's go into chapter 2, which is, hey, okay, fine. We want to align to the buyer journey and how people are buying. Fine. What does that mean? So, let me make some statement here and see what you think, Roger. But so, go-to-market is essentially you have a product, marketing, sales, let's take enterprise software. You have customer success, support and services. And does it impact only sales or is it impacting everybody? My point is, if you align yourself to how people are buying and the buyer journey, it impacts The way you organize and the way all the chain in the go-to-market engine. Because marketing to me is very critical for phase 1 and 2, for awareness and consideration. This is where marketing with the collaboration of everybody else, but this is where marketing plays. This is where I'm the quarterback. I'm the one doing that. And And then, other people are helping. Now, you think about phase 2 and 3, intent and purchase. Sales is the owner of that. It's like, hey, I'm the one. Thanks. I have something. I have a customer. Now, we have a prospect or a customer that has awareness and is considering us to resolve their business problem. Let me convince them that they need to go with us and actually buying from us. And then, customer success is much more on the last one, which is again, the repurchase. It's like, let me make sure that the solution is adopted, is well done at the customer side, that they want to buy more from us, right? And then, product. Does it impact product? I do think that it impacts a lot product because you're not building a product in the same way if you align yourself to the buyer journey versus trying to sell them stuff. Right? Because the in-product experience, the way that you need to arrange things are very different if you have that. So, bold statement. I think that that little decision on are you aligning to how people buy or do you want to sell them something is actually impacting everything. Roger, any comments on that?

Completely agree. If you don't do it, what you have is A marketing product focus that says, this is how we've sold our product thus far. And maybe that's an early adopter technology strategy that says people, everybody wants it. But at the end of the day, if you're going to continue to have that growth, something's going to shift and the decisions are going to be made at different levels. If it's where you can make your product, say if it's highly technical and the developer wants it, as you move upstream inside the organization, Business leaders aren't going to make it on a technical basis. So, you have to adapt it. And so, if you don't align all those resources, you'll have diversion of the strategy. And then, the salesperson will try to take the marketing material and shift it to what they know to be the buyer scenario or the issues. And so, they're rewriting content. Then, you have a successful transaction with a specific set of outcomes. If customer success doesn't know what that outcome is, And they didn't understand the process the customer went through. They're going to take it from a technical lens as well and say, well, here's how you use the product. And the customer says, well, I didn't have that intention. So it's full alignment. I think that's where you get the rebuy is because the customer's seeing what they expected to do. And the natural transaction is to expand that, take it to other divisions, take it to other entities, those types of things. And then that transaction becomes much easier. You don't have to go sell to another division. If you have multi-division companies say, hey, we use this solution here, you should use it over there so we have continuity, much easier sell than, oh, I'm going to go look for another solution. I have the same pain point, but I'm going to go elsewhere. You get a benefit of what that company can do for you. So getting that aligned is absolutely critical. And you see when there's product-led situations where they don't want to align it and marketing's on a different path, sales will eventually plateau out. So, I think it's a great way to approach and get a company aligned. Yeah.

And you touched on the land and expand, right? That kind of the SaaS business model really reinforced that and really put that in the open and making the big change in business models. You and I sold a lot in the on-prem world. Unfortunately, we're that old. And where you basically try to sell as much as possible versus, hey, what is it that you need today? Because I know that then, if I sell you the right amount of stuff, you'll come back and buy more from me, right? In SaaS, we call that the flywheel effect, right? It's like that thing that is amplifying how much you're going to buy and how much we're going to sell you. Here is another thought. If you want, and maybe that's a bit provocative, but we'll go there. If you want to understand if an organization is one way or the other, to me, one big indication point is you look if marketing is under one leader, you go to the website of the company and you look at the leadership And if marketing is under one leader on one side and then sales is under another leader on the other side, and then customer success is under a third person, I'm not saying necessarily it's wrong. What I'm saying is that when you see that, you're probably facing a company that is organized around how I'm going to sell my stuff to customers, not a company that is organized around how I'm going to listen to the buyer journey and understand how they buy. And then, being very process-oriented around those things like, you do this, you do that, you do that. And then, at the end, we're going to sell more. If you look at a company where those things are kind of all together, that's a good indication that knowingly or not, it can happen also just by accident that people think about how I'm going to align with the buyer journey because buyers don't move from one organization to another.

Right.

What they want is a continuous experience and they want to go back and forth.

Oh, well, I intend.

But now, I'm not intending. I'm going to go back to awareness, right? It's a nonlinear process. It can go in loops and go back and forth. So, you look at the organization. You know basically if one is much more buying-oriented versus how I'm going to sell. So, does it make sense, Roger?

Yeah, it resonates very well. And to your point, it may not be obvious sometimes in structure depending on the size of the company. It may have evolved based on who took over a function, but you can get a sense of its align.

Yeah.

In the sense of how customers are supported, how customer success is aligned. And it's not necessarily an organization with its own set of metrics and own agenda. It's still, if you don't solve what the customer's looking for, you won't come back to the awareness phase again to buy more. The awareness phase will go cause search for another solution. So, yeah, that's right. You'll see it. And having people aligned under one scenario is a good indication that alignment's there without having to go suss it out.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool, cool, cool.

So, this is how you align. We'll talk about in a minute about sales methodology and what does this mean. But that was a short but very meaningful and a lot of meat in that chapter. That's the end of chapter 2. So, We've seen what is it. We've seen how you align. Chapter 3, is there any benefit after all? Are we all doing that because it's fun? Or is there a business benefit? Because at the end of the day, this is how you're going to sell more at the end or how we're going to buy more at the end. And in my mind, and Roger, I ask you to comment on that, In my mind, are you going to— if the question is, are we going to get more revenue out of this customer? Is it better that this customer buys more or is it better that we sell more to that customer? And to me, it's kind of obvious that if you organize around helping customers buying more, They're probably going to be buying more than how much you can sell to them by yourself. You see what I mean, Roger?

Completely agree.

Do you agree?

Yeah, yeah. You just look at scenarios that cause accounts to grow. It's the customer's buying. There's a misconception that you're selling it. But at the end of the day, the customer is buying it. And that's a misconception too that people say, well, then we don't need salespeople because they'll just buy. It's like, no, you still need somebody to nurture that conversation. Understand. And then if you're astute enough with them and based on the compelling reason they made for the initial transaction, you say, we see in our research that you might have this elsewhere. Then you're helping the customer identify other pain points. They're going to view that as a trusted advisor versus a salesperson. And I think doing that, then the benefit that starts the flywheel effect and you're helping them solve other problems. where they view you as an advisor versus, oh, I have to sell more to you. To the point you made earlier in the on-premise world, it's like, how big a deal can we buy? Buy $20 million worth of software. You go, are you ever going to use that in 5 years? We don't know. Then SaaS was, well, you need as much as you need, but buy a lot right now and then we'll take it over time. So, that motion is there. But if organizations are really looking at, hey, I'm going to lower my overall cost of acquisition, The return on investment is having the process so the customers could buy more lowers your overall cost of sales versus you just chasing more and more pipeline or greenfield accounts. Those costs never go down because you're only doing the same process each time. And then, it's not generating what you're ultimately looking for is how to help the customer buy your product more effectively and use it. And then, they'll come back and buy more.

Yeah, I think this is totally— and that's it. This is where I think that he's to do business with becomes very, very important is that the less friction you have in how they're going to buy and how you're going to sell to them, the less friction there is, then that means that you're buyer-friendly, right? And because every obstacle is a chance for a deal to derail. Right? So, he's to do business with, which has been here forever. I mean, I remember survey 30 years ago where there was a question, right? But why are we asking that question is because it's important for people. It's like, and it's important for me as a person. It's probably important for you as a person, Roger. It's like how easy it is to do business with this company. And that's a key driver. And when you think about it, it has nothing to do with the product itself.

Right.

No, it has to do with my experience. And then, you said something important. I said, oh, at some point, is because I think it does change the role of sales from selling to being much more consultative, a trusted advisor as you said. And that's different. And actually, I would argue that it's potentially less easy and requires multiple skills and facets that are harder to just, hey, here is, I have a board here on the right of my screen with all the questions that I need to ask and go. And no, it's like, all right, now I need to be much more flexible because I need to make that easy. I need to make that easy for customers, right? Roger, a question for you. We touched on that multiple times during the show here. Does it remove the need for a sales methodology, sales discipline, sales Deal process, deal desk. Okay, we can throw all of that through the window and just wait for them to buy from us?

No, we should all be that lucky. It's to the point you made earlier about alignment of those other functions. It's the elements that are put in place as a result of how you do business. You have a deal desk because they want to help structure the right type of deal based on what you're learning from the customer. It's all the alignment of those functions. So you have to have those still, and you have to have a methodology. Otherwise, it's the wild, wild west because you'll never know what— who's in what methodology in terms of how they're talking to a customer. And everybody's going to have the same pain. So it really comes down to the alignment point. And a point to supplement what you just said a second ago is that if you have alignment and the skill set of that individual, that salesperson becomes that advisor. If the company's aligned, then marketing is coming up with those industry issues that you can bring to a customer and say, our research, the conferences that they're providing and being a part of. Product management is saying, these are the things that we've learned in the product that customers want to address. And so, we're putting those in there. Then, those things are aligned. You bring them to the sales team and say, that helps them become advisors because you don't become an advisor just through all your age and your sagesse. You have to go study as well. But if that information is provided to you regularly, then you could bring those things very quickly and crisply to a customer. And you don't have to become the expert in every situation.

Yeah. Well, you just saved me a conclusion because I think that you concluded the podcast in a far better way than I could have. It's been a joy, Roger, to have you on the show here. I think I think we discussed something very important. Now, we're not the judge. We'll let people give us our comments on the various platforms, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. Great that the technology is enabling us to push to all these platforms. But thank you so much, Roger. It's been a pleasure. I know that we're going to have dinner pretty soon, so it's going to be good to see in 3D versus 2D here, or just the voice for people who are just listening to the podcast. But thanks so much for coming. And any last word, a word of wisdom for all the salespeople out there?

Just listen to what customers are trying to do and ask the question. It's an easy question to ask and say, if we're successful here, how are you going to buy this? And they'll tell you.

There you go. There you go. Here is the secret sauce from Roger McKeownville. Thank you so much. We'll see you in another episode. And in the meantime, never forget, right? Knock it out of the park. That's what we're here to do as leaders in general and sales leaders in particular. Thank you all so much. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Bye.