THE #1 SECRET TO STRENGTHEN YOUR GAME IN B2B ENTERPRISE SALES

I did a couple of polls in the last week or so, and it really emphasized why Closing the Complex Sale, the course, is so necessary. This is the poll I did, and this may seem obvious to you, but before you say that, pause the podcast and you write it down and you tell me. So the question was, Because I hate that term, I either win or I learn, because people don't learn. Meaning that what they— what went wrong was either obvious or blinded by their emotions, wasn't really their knowledge.

Okay.

So I asked, on your— on a deal that you recently lost, Did you learn anything? If yes, put a comment below. If no, just check no. It was the lowest activity poll I've ever done on LinkedIn. And you probably know why. Because people would have to think about what they learned if they said yes. And if they said no, then they, then they seemed stupid that they didn't learn anything. And there goes the— I either win or I learn component. And I didn't mean to really degrade anybody. I was really trying to understand if people did learn something, what did they learn? And I was expecting a bunch of things I never thought about, some non-obvious elements. So, pause the podcast right now and write down What did you learn after the most recent loss or a big important loss? Okay, or just pause it, write it down, then come back. I'll wait right here. Oh, you're back. Thank you. What most— what everybody wrote, there was not one single thing that was anything above what I would think a C+, B- player would know. Meaning that it was about price, it was about single-threadedness, it was about timing, all this stuff that, you know, pretty much everyone would think is obvious. So it's not knowledge. They knew this stuff. They didn't learn it. They remembered it.

Okay.

So this Which brings me to my next point is, and these were experienced people. These were not first-year sales development reps. These were people with 5, 10, 15, 20 years of experience. And I congratulated them for being honest enough to admit it. But why did they not remember it? Because it wasn't about they didn't know it. They knew it. You know it. I know it. Anybody who's been in sales for a year knows it. They were blinded by their own emotional need, their own attachment and focus on the outcome instead of the process. And how many of that is us? Most of us. Because they all fell into the trap of, I don't need to plan. I don't need to— I don't need to do this. separate myself from this emotionally and be able to analyze it. I don't need to have a process. I've been doing this for 5 or 10 years. Oh, but you're a human being and you get blinded by your own needs. So today's topic on the podcast and the discussion is strengths and weaknesses. But there's something else between a strength and a weakness. A weakness implies that you eat— you're aware of it. That you're aware of, uh, multi-threaded deals. You're aware of competing against doing nothing. You're aware of sending a proposal in is going to kill your deal. There's this category called oblivious, meaning that it's be— it's below a weakness. It's something that you're blinded to or don't even care about or don't even see. And this again is not about intelligence. It's about planning and strategizing and having a process. Because like when we go traveling, if you forget your phone charger, for instance, or your socks or your dress shoes or your tie or your belt, you have to go to a store to get it. And you'll probably remember next time. But if you forgot 3 or 4 times in a row, you're kind of oblivious to packing. Either you don't want to do it because you kind of know it's not an intelligence thing, it's a process thing. You probably pack first thing in the morning instead of the night before, and you're groggy and you're rushed and you're anxious about traveling and you oversee That phone charger plugged into the wall right next to the suitcase. See how I'm getting at that it's not about intelligence, it's about process? And process is just another word for how you play the game. The game, and it's always, you know, everyone hits me up about, it's not a game, it's my living. I get it, I get it, I get it. But I'm trying to condense the complexity into the comprehensible. So that we can focus on a particular confined element of reality.

A game.

Let's get into this discussion. I'll sum it up at the end, and I've got some treats at the end for you. So if you're not in Closing the Complex Sale and you're wondering, oh, do I need it? Am I going to learn something? Yeah, you're going to learn how to win and close the complex sale. Is that important? And how to prevent These little traps that we fall into all the time. It's our emotions. It's not our intelligence. And the problem is, by the time you recognize it and admit it, the deal's over. And then everybody comes, how do I recapture it? Oh, that's a little bit harder. Let's get into it.

Let's talk about strengths and weaknesses, Dustin. Do you have strong feelings about this? Yeah.

So years ago when I went into medical device, I, I worked for a company called Stryker. Most people recognize them and they were really big on strengths and they partnered with Gallup at the time. So even to get a job at the company, you had to do this Gallup interview, which was all based off strengths with that particular division. And then once you got into the company, they would make you do the, the full Gallup test, which would rank your strengths from 1 to 30. And then your top 5 people would literally put on their offices or they'd have it on their profile so that you would know everybody's top 5 strengths. So that it was a little corny, a little cheesy and pretty intense, but it kind of made me think a lot more about doubling down on your strengths versus working on your weaknesses. And I, I do feel that that helps a salesperson if they focus on their strengths and maybe outsource their weaknesses or try to limit those weaknesses as much as possible versus trying to work on them and get better at your weaknesses.

And how did it help you as far as selling, or did it?

I think, I think it definitely did. Um, I mean, some of the ones that really, for me, are all about achieving, focus, competition, focusing on the future, and being more strategic. So I, I kind of gravitated to that, and that's probably why I was able to move up quickly and manage larger deals and opportunities because I was thinking more long-term. But I think just knowing my weaknesses and my strengths made me kind of focus on those. And then, and if I did have weaknesses, I would try to outsource that or have someone else help me there, or not put myself in positions where I could struggle with those weaknesses. So I think just knowing the differences and where they're at does help you from a sales standpoint.

Yeah, I can see that.

And I think a lot of people Obviously try to strengthen their weaknesses. And do, do you think that's wrong or is just not effective or?

I don't think it's wrong, but I think some of the weaknesses could be something that you're never gonna probably be really good at it. So if I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend, I think you just want to be competent enough to get by on those weaknesses. Yeah. But not try to change the game and completely turn that weakness into a strength. I mean, that, that could be possible, but I don't think you want to spend all your energy there. Why not focus on where you're the best at as a salesperson and double down there? Because that's probably where you're going to make more money versus trying to constantly fix your weaknesses. I think you should be competent or outsource it somehow, but not spend all your time trying to change your weakness. It's just my perspective.

And did you focus on improving your strengths?

Yeah, I did. I did. So I mean, those ones that kind of popped off to me. I really, I think the industry goes into it too. So it also goes into what industry are you good at selling in. So I tried to, based off my strengths, I would decide where could I thrive and eventually ended up kind of doing more entrepreneurial startup type positions because I thought my strengths, I was already acting like that. So I thought that maybe that's where I should go. I guess there's more to come on if I can be successful as an entrepreneur, but It kind of led me down that path with my strengths and what I know I was good at. And then also partnering with somebody that can help you too. So in my position now, I'm good at certain things and then my business partner's good at other things and we try to kind of play off each other's strengths. So same thing in sales, it could be maybe the industry. So med device isn't for everybody. SaaS probably isn't for everybody. But if you know what you're good at, if, if you're not good at finding new business, then you probably don't want to go into a role where you're nonstop trying to find new business. If you're better at just nurturing accounts and taking orders and dealing with the fire drills, maybe that's where you go. So I think it does, it can help based off the industry you're in or what type of roles you pursue, I believe.

Well, I mean, even from a learning standpoint, we do what we tend to be good at and it becomes a natural reinforcement cycle. We're good at it, we get a good outcome, reinforces that we're good at it. We try and become better at it, we get more outcome. And trying to improve a weakness— let's say you're not a good public speaker and your job requires some of it, but you know, you let your sales engineer do the public speaking, or you bring your manager in to do it in front of executives— things that I've done in the past. You can get away with it for some period, but if you're not good at it and you've— and you blow it you get that cortisol shot where you're like, you don't feel good, you're depressed, you don't feel like doing it again. But let's say you're good at it. You're natural in front of a group of people. You may not be good at closing or differentiation, but you're good at engaging people. So you naturally get that dopamine every time and you kind of just naturally become attracted to it. So maybe it's just ingrained in us that we can't really, or it's just not effective to work on our weaknesses.

Yeah, no, I would, I would agree. I mean, it's kind of the effective versus efficient conversation. If you're constantly working on your weaknesses, trying to improve them, it feels like maybe you're making progress. But if you're always going to have that weakness and never overcome it, does it really— is it worthwhile to go above and beyond to try to fix it? And there are certain situations, maybe it does, but I think playing off your strengths, using your BDRs or SDRs, your sales engineers, your man— maybe your manager's great to come in towards the end of the deal in front of those high-up folks at the company to kind of razzle and dazzle a little bit. So you just need to kind of Think about those things, and I believe it's helped me for sure. I mean, some of my weaknesses is I earlier on wasn't good at taking feedback. I continue to try to get better at taking feedback and not take stuff personally. I say yes too much and overcommit myself to different things when I really should prioritize better, and I just try to do too much myself sometimes. So I I try to be aware of those so it doesn't limit me, but. How can you utilize your resources and people in your company or counterparts to help you?

And I think a lot of managers make this mistake. They want everyone on the team to be identical, interchangeable soldiers, right? Uniform and be just like them. And I can't imagine a more disastrous strategy than that. Because first, it's not going to happen. Second, just by you trying to change people, it's going to create a rub there. And I think especially today, a lot of managers are hiring good administrators, not good salespeople. They're getting judged by how the CRM looks instead of how the revenue looks. And they think they're correlated, and they're inversely correlated. I haven't met one top sales rep yet who was a great administrator. Let's face it: why do we get into sales? It's because we are either money motivated or can't do anything else. And it was a lot more of the can't do anything else than there is just the money motivated. And what is everything else? Everything else is kind of the things that the company likes, you know, nice organization, structured, obedient. And then you got these salespeople who are none of that, and, and you try and wrangle them in to become really good data entry accountants. And if they're not good at that, they think they're not good at sales.

It's a great point. And I was looking back at the companies I worked for and there was, maybe it was just the time and the decade, but you started looking around and everyone was sort of the same. They kept hiring all the same type of people. And for a while I think that works, but at some point it's probably gonna catch up to you. So I think you want to have more diversity on the team. You don't want every single person to be Like Dustin or Brian, because that doesn't make sense. You want to have different people that can do different things to help each other out. But I think a lot of times as a manager or organizations in general, they try to hire the same type of people. And that was sort of going back to the med device. They had a basically a profile for each division of what successful reps looked like. And that's why they did all partnership with with Gallup. And it obviously worked because the company did really well for a long time. But it at some point, it's probably you want to get more outside opinions from different perspectives and different companies or different, maybe people coming from SaaS into med device and kind of changing it up. I mean, so that's a great, great thought there is we all try to, we want everyone to be the same, but we actually need to have different strengths throughout the team.

Well, that's it when you interview salespeople, because I, that's what I do all day, you know, but there's patterns, but There's not really cookie cutter. You know, they, they come to the right conclusions about curiosity and empathy and conversations. How they get there, it can be completely different and how they implement it, completely, completely different. Because there's no real points for style in sales. When you get the order in for $1 million, they don't give you more commission because you did it the company way, or you did it— there's no style points. It's not gymnastics. You either get the outcome or you don't. How you get the outcome, as long as it's ethically and legal, it's kind of up to us. I think it's the definition of like a StrengthsFinder type thing, as opposed to Like engineering, you get points for style. They look at your code and even if it works, if it's a mess to maintain, they're not psyched about it. It's called a hack versus engineering. In sales, it's kind of encouraged.

No, it's, it's true. And I think another epiphany I had is when I was climbing the corporate ladder, I realized that majority of my time was dealing with internal conversations, whether it be meetings with marketing or supply chain. And although I was competent and I could do that, I wasn't enjoying it. And I don't think I was good at it because only 20% of my time was in front of the customer at that point, making deals happen, having conversations. The rest was internal because I was dealing with Home Depot and there was so much logistics involved. So I realized I'm best in front of the customer selling deals or trying to find new opportunities, not dealing with all the bureaucracy and internal things. So I think if you, it can give you some epiphanies too of where you want to go. And then I ended up going more to a commissioned sales job after that in a different industry. So that's some other things too to think about is I think, I really do think it can help your career and kind of the path you go on if you kind of maximize your strengths as well.

And I think you should lead with your strengths. You know, if you're a good networker, you don't need to cold call. Network. Is it different? Does it matter how you get the deal?

No.

So just go network. If you're terrible at prospecting, hire somebody to do it. If you— if the company won't, augment it with technology. Come up with something more creative. I think too many people or too many managers want everybody to just do the process and, but give people the freedom to do the process their way because if they don't like it, they're probably not gonna do it or they're gonna fake it.

Yeah, I'm not good at cold calling. I don't know if I ever will be or ever will want to be, but some people Maybe they grew up in that and they just, they're great at pounding the phones and they don't give up and they're willing to make 50 to 100 calls a day. And hey, that's awesome. Eventually you're going to get a couple hits, hopefully. But if you, if you can do that, then more power to you. But that's not really how I maximize my time. So I, I got better at personal branding and LinkedIn. So that's where I spend the majority of my prospecting. But for other people, they might want to network or go to in-person events. So yeah, you need to know. It really does help with prospecting too, depending on what, what you're good at. Or maybe you don't, you're not as savvy on the phone, so you want to do more LinkedIn.

And how about if you're not good at what you like doing? Maybe that's kind of— have you seen people like that who insist on leading with their weakness or ignoring their strengths?

I see people Try to do hard things. So, I mean, that's something I try to do in, in the morning. It doesn't necessarily have to be work-related, but I try to do uncomfortable things to break the ice and get me more ingrained in that mentality. From a work standpoint, I do try to eat the frog, whatever that may be. If that, that tough thing, I don't know if it's necessarily a weakness, it's just something I don't want to do. So I'll try to do that first thing in the morning. And I do believe in doing uncomfortable and hard things cuz I think it makes sales easier, whether that be personally or professionally. But that's a great thought. I don't, I'm trying to think of a weakness that I try to purposely do in the morning. I don't know. Do you have any examples?

I see a lot of people getting stuck doing what they think they should do versus what they like to do or will do or are good at, you know, and I think it's just checkboxing instead of really thinking. And there are certain things that you really have to develop that, you know, if you— let's say you have bad judgment, you got to get that to at least okay judgment. Otherwise, you'll be wasting a lot of time. Like, if you're, if you're good at the conversation, sometimes you don't matter who's on the other side.

It's just somebody.

Well, it does matter who's on the other side. You know, because you get a lot of people, wow, they're listening to me, so clearly they must be interested. They might be lonely. So I think there are a lot of things you have to be at least marginally good at in sales. But if you're money motivated, I think that will naturally happen. If the motivation's there, then you tend to become good enough at it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then sales cures all. So if you're hitting your numbers, most of the time no one's going to care what exactly you're doing day to day. But you did make me think of when I went to a startup at one point and they were all about cold calls. It was just different industry staffing. That was what they wanted to do. So they were expecting a certain amount of calls a day. And that was just completely opposite of what I'd had success with. So that was a struggle because I was trying to force myself to do it a little bit and keeping an open mind. Maybe, okay, I can't just completely bash this. Maybe there is, maybe this industry does work, but I never really believed it or bought into it. So it was just kind of a, uh, it just wasn't going to work from the beginning because I knew it wasn't for me and I didn't believe in it. So that, that was probably a tough situation. And then if you get to a certain point in your career where you've had success and good experience, you're going to push back more than earlier in your career. At least in my case, I was, I wasn't. drinking the Kool-Aid like I, I would have maybe 10 years prior. So that, that was a tougher situation is if, if you think you're getting forced to do stuff or you perceive that you're getting forced even though you know it's not gonna be effective and then you're just wasting time and then you're gonna get burnt out and then you don't even know what your strengths or weaknesses are at that point if you're, if you're just banging your head against the wall.

So I think the first thing is to really kind of determine what do you, what are your strengths? What are you good at and like to do and will do? And then kind of what are you not good at and don't like to do? And try and stay away from the jobs that have the things that you don't like to do and are not good at.

Mm-hmm.

Like in your case, if it's— if they're 100% or 80% focused on cold calling as the way of getting new business and new opportunities and you don't like it and you're not good at it, What's the likelihood it's gonna work?

Yeah, you call me out there, but it didn't work out.

So. Well, I mean, I've interviewed at jobs and there used to be this big argument in the market, you know, either you're a tools salesperson or a product salesperson, meaning you're part of something else or you're the big solution. And I didn't really— I understood the difference and I was much more on the tool side and they didn't think you could sell on this other side, but I wanted to do it. It wasn't a strength of mine. It was a top-down sell as opposed to a bottom-up sell. It wasn't as technical as it was business vision oriented, but I wanted to do it. And when I was given the opportunity, I did it pretty well. And I think we have to kind of also have those ambitions that if we want to move into a different type of sale, let's say you're in retail right now and you want to move to B2B, you know, but you never went to an office, you never sat in a cubicle, you never used the phone as a sales tool, but you want to. I think that can work out. But if you don't want to, how can it work out? You're going to be unhappy. They're going to be unhappy. There's no positive reinforcement and you're just kind of doing the grind every day, even though it pays twice as much.

Yeah, that's a great point. And I think it does kind of cross over because I do, encourage people to push themselves, get out of their comfort zone and try new things. And a lot of those new things could be things you're not comfortable with or weaknesses, I guess. So that does kind of cross over there and making me think about it a little bit differently. So, cause I'm all about getting uncomfortable and doing that type of stuff, but you need to know, to your point, you need to know what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. So you're making educated decisions when you go to a new company or new industry, or if you're not. good in front of the C-suite and you're going to a job that's all enterprise, that maybe could be tough, or maybe you want to stretch yourself and figure it out. So I think understanding the difference between the two, and I still keep track of, even though you can say what you want about the Gallup and all that, but I still keep track of those top 5 from that Gallup. I probably need to take it again to see what's changed because I feel like it might have changed a little bit, but it is nice to know your top 5 and kind of where your weaknesses are so you can kind of divide and conquer from that standpoint. What— I was curious to know what are some strengths that you think you're good at or that you've tried to gravitate towards in your career?

Well, early on it was the technology. Naturally, I was a user of it. I could talk to other users of it and it was just a natural progression. But they were not the decision makers. They could be champions, they could be coaches. The decision makers were much higher. It was very expensive. And to convince them, you had to do the economic equations. And I used to come up with this little demo that I could show a manager where it would take me less than a minute to make this change to their program and their current environment. It would take them 18 hours to have that change reflected into the program. And I could do that demo and the manager would be like, how much? It was just, you know, because you're showing them kind of, you know, not 10 orders, it was 1,000 orders of magnitude productivity increase.

Wow.

And it was the, you know, it's a silver bullet, the lockout that we had. No one else could do it, even though I could show them how to do it on the competitive piece of hardware, but I wouldn't. I show it only on ours. But you know, you need a manager who appreciates that, understands it. And I used to work with this salesperson who was just the opposite. She was incredible at getting us in front of the decision maker, the high-level money person. She was gregarious, had the, what you would think of as a classic salesperson personality. She, you know, no just went by her like 100 miles an hour. She'd just be on it, on it, on it, get the meeting. But once she was in the meeting, had nothing to say. So you had to have someone right behind her with what to say. And that was kind of me. And so we worked together really well. But then when I became a rep, I didn't have that capability at all. So I was really weak at that. And I used to leverage my manager, VP, and CEO to get those meetings. And you can do that when you're selling big, high-priced items. But if you're selling small, inexpensive things, that's hard to do. You can't have them in front of 5 people a day. You get like one a week, once a quarter. So you better make it matter. And so then I knew I would have to get at least good enough to get that meeting. I didn't have to be as good as the other person, but I had to be good enough to get that meeting.

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Kind of play on your strengths. I mean, I've traditionally been good at, I think, making decisions. So once I feel good about something and I've done my due diligence, I'm going to make the decision. I'm not going to go back and forth and rethink about it. I'm just going to do it. That could be good and bad if I make the wrong decision, but at least I'm moving forward and making action. So that's something I do. I think I have good resilience and grit. Grit gets overused, but I've had a lot of challenges the last couple years and been able to overcome those. So I think that's important. And I do have that kind of strategic look where I'm thinking long term. I'm not just thinking about right now. I'm thinking about where can I get next quarter, the year. So I, I think long term, which helps in the complex sales. So those are just a few things that pop out to me. And then following up, I usually anytime I say I'm going to do something, I follow up, which I feel like gets lost a little bit more these days. You don't get as many follow-up emails after interviews and it seems to be, it's so simple, but it's something that I've just always done is try to send a follow-up email after my meeting within 24 hours and I just try to stick to that.

Yeah. And I think today, I think managers should also think of this. It's like, because everybody wants the pristine CRM, why not just hire a data entry person? To to to clean it every day, all day, so that it looks the way the manager wants it without the reps having to spend more than a half hour a day on it. Just have somebody you know fill in the things, correct the things, have it look the way the manager wants. I mean, for the you got to imagine because if if you're taking Let's say just an hour a day out of 10 people, that's 10 hours, very expensive hours.

Mm-hmm.

That would more than pay for 1 or 2 data entry, data cleansing CRM people, and everyone's happy.

And of course the pushback you get is that, oh, is that, that's their job.

It's like, no, not really. It's really their job's to sell.

Yeah. CRM, expense reports, all that admin is just brutal. Any, any good salesperson tends to hate that type of stuff. So, and I'm right there with it because it just drags you out. You always put it off and then you wait and then it gets piled up and then you definitely don't want to do it. And then you just probably don't even take accurate notes and it's not even correct. So it's just a, it's a wild goose chase. Yeah. That seems like a no-brainer to hire people to do that, but every place I've been, it seems very rare that I actually have to do it.

Yeah.

Right.

Because why not have, you know, the pre-101 with the data entry person who goes through it, you know, because they know it inside out. They can do it twice as fast and they know exactly what the manager wants to see and just go through it with you for a half hour. Because what does the manager really care about? What's going to close and when? Everything else is noise. And just have that one person clean it up and, you know, correct it. I can't tell you the number of calls I'd be like, ah, that deal's not showing in the forecast. And it's like I spent a half hour trying to get it to show up in the forecast. And it's like the manager will not correct it because they want you to learn how to do it. And you got to stop what you're doing, fire it up, and trying to do the forensics. On why it's not showing up in their forecast. And this is productive. This is automation.

Oh yeah, it's brutal. And then every company I've been at, none of the data is accurate. So from, it's been built up over, it's been built up over years from all these different sales reps who didn't do anything or didn't put it in there correctly. And then you're supposed to clean up all the old mess. So which makes you even more not want to do it. So It seems to be a trend everywhere that, that, that, that's going on. But then the leadership lives by the CRM for whatever reason. I don't know why, because it's never accurate.

Well, you know why? It's easier than doing their job, right? Because they don't wanna talk to their reps. They wanna work through the, the CRM becomes the proxy. You know, it's like, yeah, because wouldn't you like us to have a proxy between us and the customer? That's what we are. We are the proxy. It's our job to get the deal done. It'd be so much easier just to check in. Oh, it's not done. Oh, okay. Let's go yell at the customer. And I think it's really ruined sales in a lot of standpoints because guess what the poor person puts in? Exactly what the manager wants to see, not reality. Because if you put reality and then they call you.

Yeah. And nobody wants that towards the end of the week on a Friday or whatever day it may be. They're trying to avoid that at all costs. So it makes sense why nothing's accurate.

And guess what ends up happening? It's the rep who's the best with the CRM that gets promoted to manager as opposed to the person who's best with customers and deals. And then all of a sudden it perpetuates and you got a bunch of accountants running sales instead of salespeople running sales.

That's a good one too. That goes back to the strengths of a lot of times who, who do they bring to management and why? And if they're doing it because of that, that's not gonna help probably reinforce a strong sales team if that's the people that are getting promoted or sometimes the top sales rep maybe isn't a good manager and they just automatically think the top salesperson is gonna be good at managing people, which isn't always the case either. Yeah.

And it should be the person who's good at working in a team, who likes helping other people and is good at selling. Because how hard is it to find data entry people? That's not a highly skilled job. How hard is it to find a good salesperson? Really hard. How hard is it to find a great sales leader? Incredibly hard. So what do we do instead of take the lowest common denominator and put some money towards that? No, let's take the highest common denominator and lower it to do it, be as ineffective as possible.

So true. Yeah. No, I've, there's many times where I've seen people get promoted to management and it just wasn't, the right fit, but they were just kind of climbing the ladder and it just made sense from corporate. And it doesn't always work out that way.

And after the intro, my statement about in the complex sale is you don't learn anything until you put it into a prevention process. Meaning if you, let's say, take the case of, oh, they told me they were the decision maker. But clearly they're not because every person I ever tried or had a meeting with told me they were the decision maker. Every single one of them. And 99.9% of the time they were not. Anybody who's not at least a— Now, you also got to decide what decision are we talking about? In their mind, it is their decision. And each of us has a decision to make whether we help the rep or sponsor them or entertain them or tell them the truth. That's our decision. But in our sales rep mind, what we're thinking is, are you the person that if I sign the quote or send the quote to you, it doesn't have to get approved by anyone else? It just gets issued by procurement. And in that case, I would say 99.9% of the time they are not the decision maker. But we tend to have to find that out the hard way at the end of the quarter when we find out the deal is nowhere in a procurement style. It's not funded. It's not approved. It's not in the process of getting approval. They don't know how to do it even if they wanted to do it. This is kind of where we are on the oblivious category. Now, most of these people understand this, but they didn't want to test it. They didn't want to think through it. It's like when somebody says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it. You think they're gonna do it, but no, that's a blow-off. That's, that's not even a misinterpretation. In some cases. Now, this is an incredibly important part of selling because if you think you're right but you're wrong, not only did you not learn anything, you've kind of became dumber because now you think that something is right even though it's clearly wrong. You think they are the decision maker. You're wrong. You kind of know it, but you don't want to know it. Oh boy, are we in trouble now. And this perpetuates in sales. And you could say, oh, it's laziness, it's rookiness, it's, it's emotion. That's what it is. It's not intelligence. It's not experience. It's emotion. You focused on the comfort of hearing that they're the decision maker versus the discomfort of really digging into it. Like, okay, you're the decision maker. What's your budget authority? How much can you spend without it going the next level up? Oh, you're a first-line engineer and you can make the decision on a quarter of a million dollar Purchase? Well, that'd be the first time in my life I've ever heard of that. So how do you get away from this? You have to understand how the complex sale is done and plan ahead. Plan how you're going to play the game before you play the game. Some call it practice. Some call it preparation. Some call it thinking, strategizing. The challenge is if you do it afterwards, likelihood is near zero of working, probably under 5%. If you do it before, the probability of it working is above 80%. Now, it brings me to another category of polls where I was asking, and I've kind of done this before because I get a kick out of it. Because it really emphasizes why there's so much turmoil in sales today. I asked sales reps to rank themselves A player, B player, C player. And of course, 75% said A player. Okay. So maybe then I said, well, maybe they don't understand what an A player is. Maybe I'm wrong. So I put a poll out and I go, what do you consider an A player? The top 1%, the top 10%, the top 25%, the top 50%. Now, if 75% think they're A players, you would think everyone would pick the top 50%. No, no, no, no. They got this one right. They know what an A player is, but they don't understand how good they are. Because you know where you are in your ranking at your company, the past company, in general. I'll tell you right now, if you're not making $500,000 or more, you're not in the top 10%. Sorry. Top 1% is well over $1 million. Top 10% is well over $500K. Now, you might be in a different industry that doesn't pay that well, but you know where you stand. You can Google it. You can ask your friends. You know it by the cars they drive, the houses they live in, the schools their kids go to. And I'm not saying that this is the only element of sales, but it's the one that everyone has tangible results for. So how many of those 75% that think they're A-players are making that kind of money, or even above $250,000, which I would think would be the top, what, 30%? 25%, 30%? You judge for yourself. I'd say less than 5% were. So I'm not doing this to beat anybody up or make anybody feel bad. I'm making people try to think how realistic their skill sets are. So when you're looking at strengths versus weaknesses and things you're oblivious to, you have to have a minimum skill level at each. Or be able to augment it with somebody else. Maybe your strength is so good it can pull you along. Only you can tell that. But if you're oblivious, that means it's not even on the radar. Like, you know the people that are oblivious. They, they're talking too much. They're not listening. They're going directly for the outcome, skipping all the steps. Something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault. They're just unaware of this particular characteristic or skill that they need in their job. Now, if you tell that person about this oblivious thing, are they going to take it as a gift or a punishment?

Punishment.

Now, an A-player would take it as a gift, wouldn't you?

I would.

I've gotten feedback on the podcast that hurt me, hurt my feelings, but some of it was right. And you can tell how my interviews have changed over the years because of that feedback. Some of it was constructive, some of it was hateful, some of it was indirect. Some of it was really mean, but that's okay. I've got a thick skin. I've been in sales my whole life. And we all should get that thick skin. It's not thick enough, I'll tell you. So don't test it. Appreciate you listening. I want you to think through this skill. Maybe make a list. What's your strongest thing? What are the weaknesses you can live with and which ones need a little bit of improvement? And what are you oblivious to? Get somebody you really trust and tell them, give them a gift. I go, look, I got something. Can you tell me something that I'm oblivious about that if I changed, I could take my game to the next level? That's a gift. That is— you would think it's a punishment, but that's a real gift. And I've given that gift a couple times. And I've learned that most people, 9 out of 10, can't take it, don't want it. So I don't really give it unless it's pulled out of me. And then maybe half don't— still don't want it. It's just human nature. We don't want to hear about our weaknesses. And we definitely don't want to hear about the oblivious stuff. But boy, do we need it. Crave it. That's what an A-player does. We'll see you next time.