THE SIMPLEST WAY TO BECOME A STUDENT OF THE GAME OF SALES

Today's interview is a little different. We've got a rep who's become a manager, but some of the topics that we talk about fit right into being a rep as well. And we had a great office hours yesterday on the complex sale, and we were talking about how the simple sale clouds us from seeing how the complex sale works. And It really kind of resonated with me in that this is the distraction. This becomes the trap, and that we treat the complex sale or feel like it's a simple sale, meaning a single decision maker. It's all based off of interest as opposed to what the company is willing to do, wants to do, and can do at this time. Couple of the topics we're going to get into today. So if you're in the courses, everyone is raving about the new app. The app allows you to consume the course on your smartphone or tablet natively, as opposed to going through a browser. To get the app, I put the instructions in the community in the course, or you can just write it down right now. Go to your App Store or Play Store, download the app. It's called Think If ik think, T-H-I-N-K-I-F-I-C as in cat. You download it, sign in with your username and password that you have on the course site, and then search for get the meeting, all one word, no spaces. It'll come right up. Connect to that, and all your content's right there. Let's get into the interview. I'll sum it up at the end.

Hey, Morgan, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Excellent. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. My name's Morgan McDonald. I am currently a sales manager for a virtual receptionist service called Abby Connect. I've been in sales you know, off and on for pretty much my entire career, starting about when I was 19. I was thinking about it today, preparing for this interview, and I was like, what is my sales background? But I started in sales doing cold calling and really like ground level, entry level type sales. And then kind of sandwich that, I left sales for a long time. I worked in restaurants and city governments, you know, as an IT administrator or recruiter. A legal assistant, a business owner, a consultant, and musician, you know, had pretty much everything in between and then came back to sales around, you know, 8 or 9 years ago. And that's when I got into this industry and found sort of a niche that fit me a lot better and really found a way to utilize all of that experience to be a much better salesperson. I knew how to do it functionally, but now I actually knew how to be successful. So, So really kind of full circle journey for me. And now I've gone on from being, you know, a regular sales rep and account executive to being an actual sales manager, which is a whole nother step in the process, obviously. And that's, that's why your content is obviously so like inspiring and informative to me because it speaks to the exact experience that I was having and the struggles of that transition, seeing it from both sides. Yeah. So real pleasure to be here.

What do you like about sales?

I like meeting new people mostly is what I find. I like, I'm a really curious person naturally. I think that's probably the primary thing that you need to make sure you have if you want to get into sales. But I really like to understand problems and solve puzzles and like really get to the root of what someone's issue is and then be able to provide a consultative solution. That's what gives me the most dopamine rush or pleasure that I've actually given them the correct solution. So yeah, that's what gets you up every day. That's the new interactions. It's always a new creative solution that you can find, the variety, the Yeah.

And where's the cure?

I'm very ADHD. So I like, I like a lot of different stimulus coming all the time. Well, I mean, that seems to be pretty consistent among salespeople, the variety. Yeah. I mean, if you get up every day and it's the same thing, I mean, I've done like data entry work before and you can put on headphones and just kind of zone out and just do it. But I can never last that long in a role like that. It's just not, There's not enough variety. There's not enough creative opportunities. And what does it take to be successful in sales from your vantage point? It's mostly headspace, honestly. Like, as long as you know your industry and you know your product and, you know, all the talk tracks and all, you know, all the nuts and bolts of what you're doing, you're competent at your job. It's really about keeping yourself in the right mental space to sell and to make sure that you're not letting the junk from your perspective and the stress that's being put on you affect how you're interacting with the clients. It's about them. It's about their needs, like where they are at in their journey. If you make it about yourself and in your own headspace, it's really disruptive and they just don't want to engage with that. They don't want to take on your stress on top of their own stress as a business owner.

And I think that's probably the most common obstacle people have today because let's face it, what's the easiest thing to talk about?

Yeah, I mean, I can talk about myself all day. I love it. But it's, yeah, what I find though, as a counter to that too though, is if I can relate my own experience to their experience, that is also one of the most powerful tools. So it's kind of like you want to tell them to create rapport and connect with people, but not make it about themselves. So it's like a fine balance you're walking all the time. But the other thing that I kind of find as a manager is most impactful for the reps for me is really making sure that their process, the, the actual like logistical process they go through is super streamlined. It's a big mistake we've made in this like data-oriented, data obsession sort of realm that we've been in for the last 10 years where we want them entering all this extra data and taking all these extra administrative steps that make our job easier to run reports and our job simpler, but it takes them completely out of the mindset of selling and having conversations with people. And it's extremely inefficient so that they can't really scale their effort and create productivity from that. They have to, they have to, every time they sell something, they have to then go in and do an equal or greater amount of work to actually process that sale. So we're in a pretty, I'm in a pretty transactional environment. So my focus tends to be a lot on streamlining that process for them and really giving them the tools and the support that they need to be successful and not trying to micromanage or tell them that they have to fill out more fields or they have to do extra steps in their process. Because, you know, we always think, oh, it's just one extra step. What's the big deal? It's just one click. But if you do it 20 times a day, 5 days a week, 365, it's, it's just drives them insane. And again, it takes them out of the proper headspace Which is, we know, is the most important thing. So it's a cumulative effect, right?

Well, very few managers understand that because they all have that, it's only a few clicks, it just takes a minute. And it's like, okay, well, you do it then.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then they're like, well, I'm busy. I've got my job.

Well, that's exactly it though. The thing that I've always told every manager that I've had, and I've only had like 1, maybe 2 that have ever listened to me when I was an AE. I go, you still, you have to take some calls. It doesn't have to be a lot. It just has to be, it could be 2% of the total call volume, but you have to do something that involves you in the process, speaking to the customers, going through the administrative process, finding the friction points that people have been describing to you, but experiencing them for yourselves. As soon as you disconnect completely from actually selling anyone, you're already losing context about the changing environments, people's attitudes, the process and technology changes that may be rolling in from other departments. You have to stay connected to the work, or how are you gonna coach someone on how to do the work appropriately? You know, it's a, it seems like a basic concept, but it goes, they all go, they all give it lip service. Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely hop on some calls. And then they never do. Just, it never actually happens. And it's a real shame because It gives you so much detailed insight into how things could be better, where the, you know, struggles and friction points are gonna be. And let it, it gets you more credibility with the staff too, because if you show them that you can do it, then they're more likely to be inspired or follow you or listen to you or come to you for coaching, right?

Well, that's it because once you become, let's say, another layer removed, your boss or your boss's boss, anything looks logical.

Right, right. Yeah, super high level, you could justify basically any system or any process. But when you get, when the rubber meets the road, so to speak, it's a totally different story. And that's been the most invigorating part for me, I guess, because, you know, I struggled for a lot of years as an AE, Having experience, having been a business owner myself was something I leveraged to connect to our business-to-business clients, right? So when they talk about their struggles, I'm like, yep, I had a business myself. I know what you're going through. And like, it's that empathy. But when I would try and apply those lessons to their business strategies or to my management, they didn't want any part of that. They're like, you just need to focus on selling. You just— I'm like, well, but I'm telling you, Like we could sell better if we did it this other way and just got a ton of pushback and almost kind of like a religious sort of like, this is how it's done. I can't tell you how many times I heard this is how it's done. This is how everyone's doing it. This is, this is the only way that it'll work. And I'm like, one, I don't think that's true. I don't think everybody's doing everything the same way. And 2, if you're, you know, some, all the greatest businesses have been disruptors. So why would you just want to do something the same way that every other sales rep is doing something or every other business business is doing something when you, when you could do it better potentially or serve your customers more directly. So it's been really fun to have the freedom to develop kind of what I had as a vision for how a sales organization could run and then like build it in real time with people who have bought into that philosophy. So it's very exciting. It's a really great time. I've been working in this role probably about 6 months now. So it's fairly fresh, really new for me.

And I think over the last 15 years, certainly in the SaaS space, it's been copycat.

Yes. Convergence, they call it. So everybody copies the best practices from everybody else until you get like a vanilla product that's the same across everything. And now no one can stand out. So we're all just scraping and struggling to do the same thing but get a different result. And it's like, it's not gonna happen now. It's, we're drowned out in a sea of mediocrity. There's nobody, you want people, you know, good and bad and like, you know, good at some stuff, specialized in this. But now everybody's trying to be like mediocre at everything. It's like, that's not serving the customers either.

Right. Because You know, the solution has to match the problem. Okay. If you're a billion-dollar company that owns a category, your sales organization should look very different than a startup, you know, that's not well funded, just 3 people in a room trying to make a go of it. It's a very different world.

Right, right. Well, and that was the challenge because I had ideas about how I was going to build a sales process. And then when I showed up at the company and I started to look at their process and look at their people, I immediately realized I'm like, oh, my preconceived notions about what should be done here is actually off. Like we, it, you need to design something for a smaller team and a smaller team brings other logistical challenges, which means we have to structure our process differently. And you really have to follow kind of more like principled guidelines when you're doing process design. You can't get too Religious about your like specific, oh, things have to be done this way or they have to, we have to use this software or this system or this, you know, we have to, you read Sandler and you have to follow his methodology.

Yup, front contract.

Somebody recommends that book to me one more time. I'm like, I've read the book. It's a great book. There's some really great nuggets in there. I'm like, but that was like 15 years ago, man. Let's make, I don't, I don't really need to keep going.

Yeah, I know.

Like, I don't need to keep rehashing the same stuff. We're in an ever-changing environment now more than ever. We're in a massively disruptive environment. We have a huge generational shift happening where a bunch of young people are finally coming in to backfill some of these positions and they have a completely different set of needs. You know, like most of the people I work with and that I've hired in the current role are closer to my age, but I've spent a lot of time working with people who are more in their 20s. And it's, it's a completely different approach that you would have to take. It's way more emotional. It's way more empathetic. We're getting more variety of people in sales, which I love. We have, you know, greater diversity of gender, greater diversity of cultural background and greater diversity of introversion versus extroversion. Like we're getting people who you would not typically consider to be a salesperson, and they're very successful if they're given the right environment to be successful in. But the environment that we've traditionally designed is for a specific type of person. So that's the only type of person who can usually find success except for edge case outlier. And now we're gonna have to create a much broader, more diverse, flexible system that can work for a greater variety of people.

Well, that's it. That's the job, right? Yeah. Because people hire young people right outta college and they say, okay, do all these dumb, stupid things all day long.

More faster dumb things.

And it is.

And it's, and they say, well, it's kind of a test. It, you know, builds up grit. And it's like, well, it might, it might build up understand because that creates the headspace. Because if you're forced to get an outcome, what do you care about?

Right, right, exactly. Well, and to be fair, you know, I started cold calling and I also ran a company that did door-to-door sales and there's almost nothing harder. Door-to-door sales is like live action cold calling. Like it's extremely, you have to keep a really thick skin. You have to be engaging in the first 15 to 30 seconds. That's all you're really gonna get. But when you do win those, they're so much more powerful. They feel so much better, like a real accomplishment. But at the same time, I really feel like in the modern sales, for most sales that are happening, they're happening so much in the electronic space. They're happening so much via not just phone calls, but emails and texts and LinkedIn messages and social selling. And, you know, It's gotten to the point where you need somebody who either fits into the part of that process that they're designed for, sort of like a Henry Ford model, right? Like a manufacturing model.

Yeah.

Or you need somebody who can do all the things and is gonna carry a greater load of that journey, even all the way over into customer service. You know what we throw around the terms now? My favorite thing that we do is titles, the titling of everything has just gotten completely ridiculous where account executive used to mean a lot more. Like you used to have to carry a wider part of that process because you actually had to manage the account, you know, we still get that in enterprise solutions and sales. But at my level, they'll throw around senior AE, AE, and, you know, all the VP titles that get thrown around to people who are basically just support middle management and stuff. And it's, it's just gotten to, it's diluted the title itself. They don't mean anything anymore because people have used them for everything. Even BDR, there are like 3 main categories of types of BDRs, but we just call them all BDR, senior consultants, senior BDR. It's— at some point we need to maybe like redefine what these titles even mean because they've just sort of lost any sort of relevancy when it could mean 2 totally different things and look the same on paper.

Yeah. And how did you come up with this mindset or what contributed to it?

Well, actually, it's people like yourself, honestly, influence, you know, listening to a lot of podcasts, listening to other sales leaders and listening to the reps themselves. That's the funny thing is everyone, all managers who are struggling have all of the information that they need to fix the problem because it's coming directly from their employees. If they're not giving you the information, it's because they don't trust you, or they don't think it's gonna do any good because they've given you the feedback before and it hasn't changed anything. So they've kind of given up on trying to provide that feedback. But if you ask them about where their friction points are, what would make their job easier, if you treat it as a support position and not as an authoritarian position from above them, Mm-hmm. We all, we all love— they'll, they will give you what you need to, to know in order to fix the problems. Beyond that, like when it comes to like high-level strategy and, and other things like that, I think we focus a little too much on that. We don't really have control over the economy. We don't really have control over the needs of other people. We need to be receptive to them. We need to understand what they are, but we need to adapt to those. We're not, we're not forcing the industry. We're not going to spend billions to make the industry do what we want it to do. It's going to do what it wants and we need like adjust to that.

Well, that's it because we set up sales reps with this comp plan that gets them focused on selling.

Smart.

But then the manager focuses on command and control.

Right, right.

Which is usually orthogonal to selling.

Right, exactly.

And then you go up and it gets worse and worse.

And I have a, you know, I have kind of a radical perspective when it comes to comp. That was actually one of my big sticking points and kept being like these comp plans that you designed that are super— it's like a calculus problem for me to even figure out what I'm trying to make.

It's a derivative.

Yeah. Like, and what I found over the years was my dashboard obsession and the data obsession was infecting me. I'm like kind of a— I was an IT administrator for a while, so I'm kind of a data person. But I need to not be in that mindset when I'm selling. It's a different kind of way of thinking when I'm selling. So I kept telling them like, hey, we need to simplify this, or more importantly, we need to make this a more of a team model. And those words were like kryptonite to them. They were like, that'll never work. You'll never get people to buy into that. They can't operate unless they have direct control over their own In the future. And while I can see that there is some value in that, the problem that you run into is all of the logistics around lead distribution or territory distribution, right? All of the negative emotions of anxiety and stress that we're dumping into them via this model and never feeling like you can take any time off. I mean, the biggest problem for reps is that they'll accumulate vacation These for years and years and years, never using them because every time they go on vacation, they're instantly losing leads, they're instantly losing opportunities. So they feel like they're burning cash. They can't even relax and decompress. So they burn out in 2 years or less for the most part.

Yeah.

And then they're gone and you have to spend the huge cost of replacing them and the lack of legacy knowledge that you lose when someone like that leaves and they can't teach your other employees. But also, there's no incentive for them to create tools that could create efficiency across your entire department, because that's something that's outside of closing, which means they're not being compensated for it. I mean, they kind of are with their base comp or whatever, and that's why we've been playing this balancing game of how is it 50/50? Is it, you know, 25/75? Is it 60/40 over here? Like, where, where's the right place to be. But I actually think it's getting them on the same page where everyone else's success is— they share in, and everyone shares in their success, and everybody's pushing in the same direction with the same goal. And then you can redistribute labor in a way that makes logical sense. You don't have to worry about all of these other implications and all these other factors that are going to mess with people if you Move. I need you to cover this shift over here, or I need you to do this project over here because you're the best person to do it. But I can't ask you to do it without basically taking money out of your pocket. Like, that's not a healthy relationship. That's not how we operate any other department in any company anywhere. It's, it's kind of wild that it's really just sales that we put under that type of pressure.

Yeah, because I think we treat sales much more like a 1099 job than a W-2 job.

Right, right. I used to call us half a contractor all the time. I'm like, I'm like an employee and half a contractor, like, and you don't really care if I lose half my money. It's no big deal to you because you saved it. You didn't have to pay it out to me. So it's, you know, it's misaligned incentives is how I heard someone describe it one time. It's like we've given the customer one set of incentives, The business one set of incentives. And now we've created a third party of the sales rep who could have incentives that align or misalign with both of those parties. And we're expecting reps to still do the right thing.

Incentivize them to do something wrong.

Yeah. And then we wonder why. But, you know, the funny thing that I've noticed is I've worked with so many great sales reps over the years and The characterization of sales reps as greedy, narcissistic, sort of lazy, and like you have to bribe them to do their job. That's just not ever been my experience. They actually do stuff well outside the scope of their work out of empathy for customers or out of camaraderie and, you know, being a team player with other people. And they're not monolithic. They're not all the same. They aren't this one type of person. So it— I really don't like the— that was one of the things that kind of inspired me to become a sales manager is like, I don't like the way that these people are being treated. They're being talked down to like children, even though they may have 20 years experience in the industry, more than their managers a lot of times. They're being, you know, thrown on these variable models that are really slanted to benefit the company either way, no matter what they do. It's always slanted towards the company. And then they're just like, like I said, characterized in this way that's super negative and like incorrect. That's not who they are. And they can be so much better, but they'll become that if you treat them like that. If you're constantly treating people in a certain way, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when the incentive model is designed like that. Well, that's who they're gonna become. They're gonna become self-centered, And they're gonna just be focused on their success and, you know, the rest of the department can kick sand. They don't really care. But the funny thing is I did that for a while. I kind of went into my shell and I, I shut out all the noise and I just did my work and I was very successful. But the, the department tanked and then pressure came from above. Pressure hit me too. So it didn't even matter that I was successful by myself because now I had to follow all the new rules and I was getting people micromanaging every one of my interactions and why isn't this lead doing this and why aren't you pushing on this? And I'm like, I'm winning here. I'm making quota. Like you should be asking me how I'm doing what I'm doing and applying that to the rest of the department. But instead it becomes this sort of like, why aren't you fitting the mold that we've created that we want to just replicate over and over again? Why aren't you doing the things That will really had a boss tell me one time that he couldn't consider me for a promotion to management because even though I was the only one having success in the department at the time, I wasn't setting a good example for the other reps because he was going to have to ask them to do all these extra tasks and do all these extra things. And I he couldn't have me ask them to do that if I wasn't going to do them myself. I'm like, but if I didn't need them to be successful, why are you even asking them to do that in the first place? Like he's asking the wrong question. He's not thinking about like, maybe those things aren't as important as I thought they were, or maybe that's not what the key to success is.

Yeah.

It's a, it's a, it's a tough conversation to have with people like we talked about earlier when they're so disconnected from the process because they are— these are smart people. These are people who are successful and they're trying to do the right thing, but they don't know what to do. And so just, they're hoping that if you just follow what they're saying, that it's gonna all work out. We just need to be asking the same way that reps need to be asking the customers and discovering what the customer's needs are. The managers need to be discovering what the reps' needs are and really supporting that and finding the right solutions for that.

And what was your motivation to get into leadership?

It was, it was more bent out of frustration, honestly, of not having control. Thinking that I can see a way to do things better, or at least I could do things from a rep's perspective and apply those same principles to management. But also, you know, I had run a business for a while and, well, I don't miss the stress of that, the 24/7 stress of having your own ownership.

No.

I did miss the sort of role and the level of creative control. But more importantly, like being able to build something and being able to have something that, you know, you designed and then watching it work. It's really like a different kind of satisfaction than we get in sales. Sales is a lot more of a spike, dopamine spikes where you're just like, I made a sale, great sale, awesome. I got momentum, move on to the next one. Like process design and management is more like holistic and like take a step back and look at the entire thing running really smoothly. That's, you get, you get the best feeling in sales when there aren't a bunch, when sales management, when there aren't a bunch of spikes, when it's just like really smooth and everything's going and it looks like a machine. Exactly.

And I think everybody wants the machine, but they forget that it's people that are the cogs in the Yeah, these are not gears.

These are not lines of code. These are human beings. The customer is a human being. The sales rep's a human being. The manager and the CEOs are all humans and they have human needs and we need to remember that. We need to go back. Ironically, we need to go way back to a version of a form of selling that existed prior to all of the sales philosophy. They came in and kind of muddied the waters. And then the data and technology approach, which has completely destroyed our ability to interact with each other in a normal, in just a normal way. Can you just talk to someone like a normal person?

Well, people think it's data. Yes, it's information, but it's not facts. No, it's mandated opinions assigned a number that I'll interpret as a fact.

Right.

Which is, tell me what you want to hear and I'll type it in.

Yeah. Or, you know, I mean, data without context, right, can actually give you false impressions, right? Like you can draw completely incorrectly, let alone my biggest gripe, again, having a background in IT was data integrity. Like you're gonna base assumptions on contextualized data that is also incorrect. that is also not even— hasn't been consistently gathered or gathered accurately.

Right.

And you're going to base these high-level, multimillion-dollar, like, decisions on that alone, on that set of data. Like, that's— that would be terrifying to me as someone in their position. Like, that's— how do you know? You're just shooting in the dark and hoping that you happen to get lucky and the data was wrong, but it aligned with something that was kind of true.

Like, Well, well, that's it. And people value that today more than talking to somebody or a group of people who are doing it. They'll say, oh, that's just anecdotal. Well, what you're seeing in that database is anecdotal.

Yeah, exactly. Also the, and, and it's very narrow. It can, it can show you things from one perspective, but it's not, it's not like data's great for like triggering an alarm. If you've been collecting it in the same way for a long period of time and you see like massive variations, it's not telling you what happened. It's just telling you that something happened. You actually have to dive into the anecdotes to find the truth of what it was. And it could be a combination of effects.

Yeah.

So it's not as simple as this dashboard's here, so we have to take action A. This dashboard does this, then we take action B. And it's like that that linear thinking is never going to lead to success. I say a lot of times when we justify these middle management positions, actually things like my position, but they need to be completely reimagined or potentially eliminated, honestly, and replaced with something different. Like they, we assume that any success we have is because of those positions, but that's a correlation-causation fallacy. They're not helping a lot of times. In fact, a lot of times they're probably hurting us and we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on these people who are getting in the way of their staff and are creating negative turnover.

Yeah.

And really just negative toxic attitude. And then we have to replace them and start all over with someone new every, you know, 2 to 3 years. And the reps are churning out at super high. I've never understood the pushback on trying a different system or trying something that makes more sense because they're arguing to me that this is how it's done, this is what works. And I look around and I see reps churning out and no one making quota and I'm like, this is working to you? Like this, this is what you think working looks like? I, it's, it boggles my mind that people are so resistant to any sort of voice of change. I'm like, the world is always changing, man. If you're not adapting, to the changing environment, you're gonna get left behind immediately. And we've been stuck, I feel like, for almost 20 years now in a mindset. And we can't— we're really— I think we may be ready to finally break out of it because there's so much disruption in technology and in the economy and in the world in general. We may finally see some really high points of success from models that are completely different, like sort of like when Google and all of them did that with their offices and changed the way that you structure an office. And then within 5 years, everyone was adapting to it. Like everyone was changing and we kind of overadapted to it maybe and maybe homogenized a little bit too much in that regard. But I want, I'm ready for that. I'm ready for some sort of disruption. So it's a long-winded answer to your question. The reason I'm inspired to go into sales is to help like be a part of that process. And because that's where I feel like the change is necessary. There's only so much I can do as an AE. There's only like, I can only have this tiny little impact. But as a manager, I can, I can help a lot of AEs, but I can also set a model and design a process that would be transposable, would be repeatable into other industries, onto other projects. And it's really just designed around process. Efficiencies, so streamlined efficient processes, not of data, no data obsession, but very much focused on logistics. That allows you to hire a smaller, more efficient team of people, so you can have a higher average quality of rep because if they can process more in their day without doing all this admin, then you don't need as many people. You don't have to throw 15 reps at a problem that could be solved with 5. And then the pay model, changing the incentive structures to something that makes sense for the types of behaviors that we want to see out of reps and that we want to incentivize and that focuses on positive reinforcement and not negative reinforcement. Why do we want to introduce negative emotions into the sales process? We just think, well, that's what works. You know, you put them under stress and then they react. It's like, well, they'll react in the short term with activity. But are they actually gonna find success when you're dumping all these negative emotions into them? No, they're not going to. They, everyone works better when they are in a positive mindset. We know that to be true. And yet we just ignore it when it comes to sales. We think, no, just dump negativity on them, micromanage them, make them do more activities they hate. That'll, that'll, that'll solve the problem.

Cool. Hey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Yeah, definitely. You can always go to our website, www.abby.com. You can look me up on LinkedIn. My name is Morgan James McDonald. But if you just look at Morgan McDonald with Abby, you'll find it on there. We do virtual receptionist services. So you can come and we can— we answer phones for people and with a human being instead of a robot or an AI, I think we were talking about. So Yeah, it's, it's, I'm happy to discuss or meet with anyone. My schedule, I leave as open as I can to be there for my reps, but it's also there to have discussions with anyone who's just curious or interested in being involved in any way.

Well, that's a great example of somebody who looks at sales as a student of the game, really tries to understand the game that you're playing. And in my intro, the simple sale is the game that most people are playing, even if they're in the complex sale. Single point of contact based off of interest versus need or want or desire by the whole company, not just the end user, thinking that it's simple to get done, that they are the final decision maker on all of it. And we tend to find out later. That it's not. Because so many reps just fall right into this trap, and then they wonder why the deal doesn't close. Because interest is not enough. Urgency is not enough. You have to understand how companies buy, and it's not logical sometimes unless you understand the game. It's a very different game. than this simple sale. And managers aren't really pointing this out because they don't see it firsthand. If they haven't sold the product into a new market, meaning not just upselling into the existing accounts or managing accounts, that's different. That does feel a little bit more like the simple sale. But when you're going into a new account where there's no established relationship, They're not using your product or service already. You have to create that. And in that creation, you have to understand that single champion that you have isn't the sole final decision maker. They think they are. You may think they are, but they aren't. And what you'll end up having to learn the hard way is when this stalls, and then you're going to believe them. They're going to say, oh, it's budget, politics, priorities, whatever.

Hmm.

Wouldn't it be nice to learn how to work around that at the beginning instead of here you are, 2 months invested in it and feeling tricked or misled? This is one of the things we have when we deal with people. Their egos, our egos get in the way. We want it to be simple.

Of course we do.

Don't you? I'd love a simple deal. Brian, here's a simple deal. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Some are. Most aren't. So if you want to get those marginal deals, the deals that would not normally close, go to b2brevenue.com and sign up. Get involved. Take a year to really become a student of the game. Get it out of your head. Analyze it. See what other people are doing wrong. Condense 5 years of experience or 10 years experience into one and quit wasting time worrying about subject lines and number of meetings per week.

Those—

you need them. I get it. But people are thinking like the simple sale on the prospecting side as well. You know the old numbers game? The more you make, the more you make. Yeah, that works in the simple sale. But in the complex sale, is it working?

You tell me.

I don't know what you're selling. I can tell you from my experience that reduces revenue. It doesn't increase revenue. It's about effectiveness in the complex sale, not efficiency. Anyone can be efficient. But we're doing hard stuff, so you need to focus on effectiveness. You don't want efficient brain surgery. You want effective brain surgery. Which one do you think? Which, which one is your manager pushing you towards? It's really hard for them to manage effectiveness. It's so easy to manage efficiency. Think. This is a thinking person's game. And don't fall into these traps. Go to b2brevenue.com right now. Sign up. Watch the 2 videos. If you still have questions, email them in or just schedule a call with one of our sales associates who will answer any question you have. We'll see you next time. Make sure you listen to the other podcasts: Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers, The Best of the Brutal Truth, The Sales Leadership Show, and The B2B Revenue Show. We'll see you next time.