THE TIPPING POINT FOR THIS REP THAT ENABLE HIM TO CRUSH IT

Hey, before we get started with the interview, and we've got a great one for you today, I wanted to thank everybody for liking, commenting, and sharing my content on LinkedIn and telling a friend about the show. Make sure you check out the other podcasts: Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers, The Sales Leadership Show, and The B2B Revenue Leadership Show as well. Here we go with the interview. I'll sum it up at the end and give everybody an update on the courses. Now's the time to take them. Now's the time to crush your number.

Here we go. Hey, Michael, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Yeah, glad to be here, Brian. Thanks. So I'm Michael Watt. I'm out of the DC metro area. And I found myself in sales after a failed career at Collegiate athletics. So I was a baseball player, uh, blessed that I got to play, um, Division II NCAA, but I was always just a grinder on the team. Um, ended up being able to play a little bit of minors, independent minors, but ultimately was told pretty young, um, that baseball and sports wasn't for me. So it's time to find a job. And, uh, I found myself in the sales profession and I really never looked back.

And take it you like it.

I think that it's, uh, one of those things where people ask, well, did you find sales or did sales find me? And I think it was, uh, a marriage that was meant to happen for the both of us.

And, and why? What do you like about it?

Well, you know, as a really competitive person, um, I've never found anything that gets you that, um, adrenaline rush, that fear of the chase, or pardon me, the thrill of the chase than sports. Nothing has come close in a professional setting for me, Brian, to release those competitive juices and put them to work. I think that it's a natural fit for somebody like me.

I take it you like the smaller companies because you're closer to the metal?

Didn't start that way. can make a bigger impact at the smaller companies. So, um, I started my career in tech sales at IBM, uh, then went to Gartner, and now I'm at a startup, uh, out of Rockville, Maryland called Expert AI. I think that it's a natural progression going from the big to smalls because you feel like you can, uh, wear a lot more hats, have a bigger impact on the organization and a client in a startup environment. I would say it's a lot more exciting maybe than, um, Working for the big 100-year tech company.

Yeah, a little scarier though, or?

It's not for the faint at heart, um, but, but I think at the core of it, it's you, you stick to the fundamentals of what got me here in the first place, right? Um, I'm tasked with more responsibilities, which, which is great. Um, you can say that there's more pressure, but I think just going back to the athletic acumen I'm used to this, right? Uh, you have that mental toughness, and if you stick with the, uh, the things that got you there, I feel like, uh, success will happen.

And what would you say you're best at in that sales game?

Good question. So I think for me, um, with my background, getting into the complex solution selling has really been my forte. And getting into situations with clients where I really had to put on the consulting hat and understand what are their challenges, what are their pain points, go through the different levels of the organization in terms of, you know, not just the, the immediate users of a solution, but what's the management team that oversees that department. what are they tasked with and what are they challenged with and how can I help them meet their mission-critical priorities? And then looking at it even more holistically on how does this fit into the company's corporate objectives and the chief executive officer's objectives and just trying to come up with solutions that fit the mold well and will ultimately allow the company to be successful, but also consider all the different stakeholders because, you know, in complex sales, there's probably, uh, 25, 30 different people involved, and they all come from different perspectives and have different objectives. And you kind of have to figure out how to get everybody in the same boat with you relatively quickly and make sure that we're all in agreement on what we're trying to accomplish.

And I, I got to believe, certainly because you're selling a new technology, right, into a complex situation that you get a lot of false positives where there's interest, but not a mission-critical need that's going to be backed by funding.

Yeah, I'd say that's accurate, especially when I first got into AI a couple years ago, it was still magic. And people thought that AI could do everything. Right. And as I think it was Bill Gates said, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of technology over the next 2 years and underestimate, uh, the impact it'll have over the next decade.

Yeah.

I think that, um, we were forced because of failed projects, right? We're kind of— we're all forced to take a different look at it and now evaluate that, well, artificial intelligence is just intuitive modern software development. Treat it the same as you would any other initiative 5 years ago. And if you stick to those fundamentals, you'll probably have success as opposed to maybe going too broad with your scope or coming in not with the right, well-defined objectives for how you're gonna measure success. So I definitely feel like we're a lot more equipped to be successful in the AI market now than a few years back through a lot of trials and errors.

Yeah, and was the past big company names helpful Or was it too much of a crutch where all of a sudden, because I've seen people go big to small and what ends up happening is they don't have the brand recognition, the context within the account.

Yeah, I think for some people it was, it can be tough. I think for me, I've always been in roles when I was at big companies, where I always had that, that entrepreneurial spirit.

Yeah.

So, you know, coming in and I'm the, I'm the maker of change, right? And I'm being tasked with changing and pivoting the way the company is going to market. So I think that that helped a lot, Brian. But I think at the end, it, you know, sales is sales. I think that, um, there's definitely some truth that once you lose the big brand recognition, uh, it gets a lot harder.

Yeah, certainly, at least at that initial meeting, right? Because it's like, oh, who are you? You know, when you have, you know, an AT&T, an IBM, or a Gartner, there's recognition at least that I should talk to these people.

Yeah, but I think that once you get to that first meeting, then that's where the lights really come on and start shining. Because I know what the process is to go through that consultative approach. And, and it's really, you know, it's the rapport building, it's understanding what the, um, what the pain points are, what the objectives are, seeing if you're going to be a good fit, right? And then at that point, you know, starting to explore with the client what this journey would look like together. And if you feel like this is something that's, uh, really relevant for you, let's create that mutual action plan to work together so that we can accomplish your objectives. So I think that, yeah, getting the first meeting, getting the attention, especially in today's market, right? We lost a lot of our traditional ways that startups would acquire new customers. So we had to get a lot smarter. And then it feels like everybody's doing the same thing. So it gets very noisy in the marketplace. But once you get past that, I think that the sales process, big or small, is the same. It just, I think that in the startup arena, you can be a little bit more agile to meet customer needs. Whereas the big companies, sometimes you felt constrained in what you could offer, even though it wasn't necessarily the right fit. It's what the company product manager is telling me I can do, as opposed to having a little bit of autonomy to be flexible and meet the customer where they're at.

But I also got to imagine in your space, there's lots of ways to solve the problem.

Yeah. And, and I think for me, um, one of the interesting things about my background, so, you know, obviously I was an athlete and I was just a grinder. So I applied that and the traits that I learned being on a big team sport to, uh, sales. But then as I got into complex solution selling, um, I got to a point in my career where I'm not getting any younger. If I'm going, I need to do it now. So my entrance to tech was actually, to take a step back, I got accepted at University of Notre Dame and said, hey, you know what? I think I need to do this. So I studied consulting and finance. And what I did is I really took that problem-solving method, the McKinsey problem-solving method would be the closest to it, where what people make the mistake of, Brian, I feel is that— Most salespeople and most people in general at a client, they use a bottom-up methodology. So they understand the problem from their perspective, right? And they're able to articulate that problem statement. And then they gather the relevant data to analyze the situation and then make a decision. What they fail to really do is also take that top-down approach of really looking at things from the board of directors and the competitive landscape and the CEO's perspective. And that's where the McKinsey problem-solving method, they use an issue tree where basically you look at the problem statement and then you start thinking out and playing out the scenarios of how could you solve this. Well, if I'm doing that for a complex sales deal, I'm thinking organizationally and strategically, I'm identifying all the different ways that they could achieve their objectives that don't involve me. And now I can take that and I can position myself in a way that I can be the answer. And I'm positioning myself around these alternatives that you could go to so that I'm already kind of doing my blocking and tackling with how I'm approaching the client so that I'm increasing the likelihood that, you know, You're going to choose me over a competitor or my solution over an alternative.

Is that the approach you take? Is that top-down or is it concurrent?

Very concurrent because, obviously, in a complex sales situation, the bottom-up approach, right? You might be working with IT. You're working with certain business units. Then you're also working with operations and the innovation team. you know, other organizations that are there or other groups that are there, right? So each of them have their own objectives.

Right.

So you have to approach it from their way. But what I found, Brian, is that taking that Notre Dame problem solving, for me, if you can take this really big complex situation and sometimes, you know, as IBM, we're working on deals, our team that was $50 million a year in revenue commit. If you can take that big complex problem and break it down into a 4-quadrant one-pager where you have your problem statement, your solution, the ROI and the business case, and then the urgency to act now and why your solution and only your solution. If I can do that at that executive level, I've just completed the business justification for my sponsor to take that deal run it to the chief procurement officer, get the budget that they need. And essentially, I did the consulting for them so they can figure out how to get things done organizationally. So I think that simplifying things and going back to baseball, simplifying really complex situations down to 3 steps, right? I only need 3 strikes to get somebody out. Hopefully I can get them out on the first pitch. I only need 3 outs, right? So going through that, just simplifying things and breaking them down into really manageable chunks that makes sense, right? And getting the client to get on board with that. I found that that is definitely a way that I've been able to leverage some of my experiences to make things that are complex less complex and more consumable to be able to actually act on, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, we're not looking for strategy, we're looking for execution.

Right.

And is this something that you learned in MBA school, or is this something that you started there and you practiced it at IBM or Gartner?

Yeah, so I'd say for me, I was really curious in the consulting because I saw the big value that, you know, if I can be a solution consultant and think of myself as a sales consultant, you know, that's That's a different type of sale that I'm going to make, right? Like, that's, that's something I can get myself into and make a career out of.

Yeah.

Hey, you know, we know that if you're transaction-based selling, you're not really necessarily selling, right? You're—

Right, servicing. Yeah.

So I really enjoy that part of it in the tech environment because you can oftentimes create a solution, right, with the software, the services, the cloud, package everything together to actually make something happen. So I think that for me personally, I was exposed in that through MBA. And then when I started my career in tech, I then applied that and adapted it to sales. I don't think that you have to get an MBA to do that, right? There's a lot of really great thought leadership that you can read, you know, Viva Barkis and her problem-solving method. is what I learned at Notre Dame. That was really good for me, but you can pick up her book and learn the same methodologies and just apply them to what makes sense for you. I think that it's a matter of taking that and applying it. And I think that that's really what I tried to do with my personal education background was, if I'm learning something in the day, I want to be trying to apply it at night. in a startup that I was involved or something of that nature. So I think that it's, um, good best practices, but then you have to actually take it from strategy to execution and action. And I think that, that you just learn through going through a lot of at-bats and a lot of cycles with a lot of different client situations.

And I guess the key is to make sure it's something they really care about, not just that you care about. Right.

Yeah, that's Again, I think that's why, you know, anytime you're talking to a client about a strategic initiative of theirs, that's why you break it down to understand, well, what are their goals and objectives, right? What's their bonus based on? You know, maybe not frame it that way with them.

No.

Comfort level. But at the end, it's about helping them. But then also, it's public knowledge for me to be able to find out what the corporate objectives are. Right. I can go to any earnings or investor day call, find out that, and try to figure out how do I link that.

You can, but sometimes those are a little fluffy and they're written by outside people and they're in terminology that isn't the internal vocabulary.

And yeah, I think the other thing that I really took Brian, from, from my, you know, applying practically what I learned from MBA that anybody can just learn at any time, um, to be able to apply that to a sales situation is creating the business case, right? Because we know that our clients know what their problems are. They think they have a vision on how to solve them, but they need to get through the procurement and budget gauntlet.

Yep.

And I found, especially in my early days, that if I'm dealing with an IT audience, they're not necessarily the best at putting together a pro forma that produces the business case that the business needs to be able to justify a multimillion-dollar expenditure.

No, and hence they get stuck, right?

Right. And, but that's where I can come in or my team can come in where we know from other clients what some of those benchmarks are for what the KPIs are that you can put together a business case.

Yeah.

So if I know what my client's objectives are, you know, there's probably a handful, you know, 5 or 6 different KPIs I could use. I can select which KPIs, you know, through asking the questions to the client, I can get good data from them so I can piece together the business case. And then my hallmark was actually the best class in MBA I took was the first finance class, right? Just the intro to MBA finance. I learned the internal rate of return or IRR, and that's been my go-to in terms of how to show a client an ROI on a solution. And basically what it is, is that the first year, the initial investment is a negative. So if it's a $5 million solution, it's minus $5 million, right? That's year 0. And then the next 2 years or the next 3 years, I then calculate, well, what's the financial value to the client, right? And then you do the business case where maybe there's $5 million worth of efficiency gains that we can calculate, and then there's some cost avoidance for another $2.5 million, and then there's $2.5 million of other business benefit values that we got. So now I've got minus $5 million, and then years 1, 2, and 3 are plus $10 million, plus $10 million, plus $10 million, right? And I plug that into my little simple financial calculator, I get the internal rate of return. Oftentimes with an AI solution, I can get a 10x return, no problem. Showing that in that simple type of form to the client with the appendix that can back up where all the numbers came from, if you can get the client to be on board and validate that, yeah, these are the numbers I would use, This isn't fluff, you haven't overestimated this business case. If you can show it in those types of simple terms, and then my IRR really becomes my return on investment, and then I could even, if I wanted to, do a net present value with that type of situation. But that's just kind of the things that I help, because really I view that in complex solution selling, you're also trying to enable your clients to be able to get things done with them internally. And sometimes I can be the the, the person that breaks those silos, right? Because you and your team are working with all the different constituents and they may not necessarily get in the same room and talk to each other.

Right.

You're working with all of them. So I think you learn pretty quickly how to identify what every group needs, that bottom-down approach or bottom-up approach, and then adapt that to the top-down which is the strategic part of it. And then normally when you can get that to line up, you know, more often than not, my team and myself have always been able, Brian, to get the budget at the end of the quarter, right? To get our deals to be approved, to get our deals to be prioritized on us because we truly were consultants to the client. It's just that our model in tech sales is that we get paid from the solution that we produces a result, as opposed to I get paid for the strategic engagement. And now the thing that I always struggle with, with consulting is that the person who does the strategy doesn't do the execution, right? And how can you learn? I made some mistakes and I should have corrected them, right? How can you really truly get better? You know, obviously in a tech environment, we did the strategy, now we do the execution. If we did something wrong in the process, we're going to know about it. Going back to my comments earlier about the AI market, how it's changed, well, it's because we did the strategy and we did the execution. If we went wrong in the strategy, we found out about it in the execution. We get better. We make sure that we don't repeat those mistakes again. I think that's why AI projects are finally starting to yield the returns that people were expecting them to.

Yeah, I think that that top-down piece was missing, because the people making the decision talk in those That vocabulary. They don't talk in NLP and heuristics and gigabits, right? That has no meaning to them.

Yeah, and I saw it right when I got into tech at IBM, right? Typically, your first point of entry is the IT department, and they weren't speaking business, so you had to kind of coach them on to be salespeople, to be candid, right, on how to sell that we have this problem, we can fix it this way. Here's the problem, here's the solution, here's the ROI and business case, and here's why we have to act now and why this particular, uh, solution partner is going to be able to fulfill that need for us.

And have you been able to, or have you had any frustration with the company buying into this model?

I think that no, because I think that, you know, small consumable chunks.

Yeah.

Right. It's— I think that what I bring to the table, Brian, is really just a perspective that I can try to put myself in the client's shoes and also try to put myself at a holistic value level with the company. And it's not about major overhauls, but it's just, you know, during certain situations and certain parts of the sales stage, you know, if we do this, this is going to be perceived really well from the client. And then of course you just adapt, right? You know, going back to being a pitcher, I'm in control of the game until I release the ball, and at which point then I just have to adapt and the rest of the team has to adapt to whatever happens when the player hits it. I think that feels as much the same.

You know, because the pitcher and grinding didn't connect with me, you know, because the pitcher is all about precision, right? It's all this energy, hyper-focused.

Sure, um, over the course of a 3-hour game where you're throwing 120 pitches.

You can't get lazy though, right? Yeah, right. It's like then you have a wild ball or you hit somebody or you pull your arm out of the socket, right?

Yeah, I think, I think the mental toughness, right? Because I think also as a pitcher, sometimes I, I could lose focus and I could walk a batter on 4 pitches just because I lost my concentration, right? We can all fall asleep at the wheel at our day jobs sometimes too, right?

You also— yeah, because I was a pitcher as well. And I don't know if— I'm sure you did Little League, but I don't know how supportive the parents and the opponents were. But in my day, they were yelling at you when you were pitching, trying to get you off balance and take your focus, calling you names, whiff it. So the amount of focus it required was enormous.

Yeah, I think it comes with the mental toughness, right? And obviously you can relate that you deal with so much rejection in sports. And, um, you know, I got to a point where I was playing with people that were a lot better than me. And, you know, one, one particular time, uh, and of course he ended up becoming the, uh, 2010 MVP for the National League. So, uh, facing Joey Votto, get him up with 2 strikes in high school, I'm gonna strike him out, I hang the split finger. You know what somebody like that's gonna do with it. Well, the next time that I saw him and I got 2 strikes up, uh, that at-bat, you can be sure I didn't make that mistake. You can make— you can be darn sure that he swung and missed at that, at that 3rd strike. Um, so I think that, you know, you have to kind of forget about the rejection sometimes because we deal with a lot of it and just kind of stick to the the fundamentals of what got me here in the first place, right? If I follow the same process and I'm doing the best practices, I'm listening to my client, right? I'm trying to provide something of value. More often than not, I find that you'll find yourself in the right situation. And then ultimately too, it's a numbers game too, right? You know, in sports, sometimes you do everything right and they just happen to get a lucky hit, and you can get a couple lucky hits, and that can change the outcome of the game, right? Or you didn't get the call or what have you. I think that at the end of the day, you just want to put the, the A-game out there, uh, and if you do that consistently, I think that's where the grinder part of it is, right? Consistently, you need to just do things right and good things will happen.

And, and I think you also made a decision because clearly you were great at pitching, but And certainly it's a lottery-type job, right? Where it's 1 out of a million, 1 out of 10, you know. And when you're young, you think it's you. Everybody thinks it's them, right?

Oh yeah, thought it was me, that's for certain.

Until you find—

you go, wow, they're really good. Yeah, and you don't know that. You don't know what you— you don't know what you don't know. So until you're in a position where you're facing a person like that, right, um, first sign is that he, he's taking my fastball and he's so far in front of it, he's hitting lasers 120 feet down the line, hitting the fence by third base, right? Like, what do you do there? Um, Yeah. I'll throw the off-speed, um, because he's so far in front of the fastball. But yeah, I think that you don't recognize that, but also that's Being results-oriented, you kind of figured it out, right? And, you know, as a pitcher, you really truly learn to pitch when people can start catching up to your fastball. Now I have to hit my spots, right? Now I have to get into the finesse and the strategy part of it and the thinking in 3s, right?

Mm-hmm.

Not just sheer athletic ability now that's going to get me there. I think that that's a lot to it. I think also, um, just on the athletic side, you know, You know, not everybody's body is capable of making it to pro sports and being able to play 162 games a year.

It's just, it's, you know, um, especially as a pitcher, because it's like there's only so many slots and it's very easy to test how well you are as opposed to a right fielder, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's Right.

And in my case, if I can't throw strikes, it doesn't matter how hard you throw. You get good hitters, they only swing at strikes. And that and the arm injuries were ultimately the end for me. But I think that, yeah, I think that the grinder part of it is just the commitment, right? I think that you have to go through certain things and ultimately, you know, always strive to get better. But also, I think from an athletic and a sales perspective, you take in new information and you adapt. And of course, the game changes too, right? The situation changes. I think that, you know, obviously the pandemic has had a lot to do with reshuffling the strategic imperatives of big business, right? The same as in baseball. I was playing in the DC Men's League and, you know, holy crap, the, the launch angle. Like, I've never had so many pop flies for outs in my life, right? I'm supposed to be a ground ball pitcher. Everybody's skying it because, because they're, um, the game has changed just that much. And that's just a men's league that that's impacted, right? So I think that, um, you know, it's being focused. I think Focusing on the team, but also I think for me early on, especially being coachable, right? I learned that in baseball. If I want to get better, I have to listen to my coaches. Um, but also sometimes that means that I have to learn that I can maybe push back on my coaches a little bit for a certain reason if I can justify it too, right? So you have to learn that aspect of it. But, um, yeah, I think that, you know, sales is a, you know, 200-plus day a year job and you just kind of have to keep going through the motions with intent and enthusiasm. Otherwise, it's easy to get down and be kind of worn out because of all the rejection that you're gonna take, right?

Yeah.

You know, for me, it's always been helping clients do things that they can't do on their own and be successful in helping my clients meet their objectives, right? Like, that to me is winning, right? Right. So that's the thrill that I get from sales. You know, of course, yeah, everybody hates to lose, but I think that I love to win more. And I think also in sales too, with the results-oriented part of it, in baseball, I could get pegged with the loss, right? I'm responsible for either the win or the loss of the team.

Yeah.

I get recorded as that. I think in sales, it's the same. So, you know, having an after-action review that we lost a really competitive proof of concept, um, and we could have done things better. And let's not point fingers, right? But let's just identify what did we do really good and what could we do better next time, and let's upgrade that. And if you're not willing to do that, you'll never get better.

Cool. Hey, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Michael Watt MBA. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

There's something about teaching Winning the Complex Sale that's so rewarding, is that you get to teach people how companies buy, how deals get done, and how to prevent them from getting stuck. The default is for them to get stuck. And this— these skills, the part of it's knowledge, but most of it is hard hard-earned lessons from a career of trying to win and winning large complex deals with no brand name, with no account ownership, just from scratch competing against bigger companies. And I got to tell you, I talk to a lot of sales leaders. I read pretty much every sales leadership book that comes out, everything that's on the complex sale, and nobody else teaches this because So many people who have been successful, it's because there's a demand for their product. There's a brand behind it. But what if you're in a new space? What if your company isn't that established? What if you don't have time for all that? You've got to learn how to win the complex sale and how to not get stuck in the traps that we're all going to face. It's that time of year. This is the time to really double down on your skills. And how do you do that? You got to hear other people talking about deals. You got to talk about particular situations, traps that you're either in or you're concerned about falling into. And from the comments that I see from very senior people on LinkedIn, They don't know. They don't understand. They listen to the platitudes. I'm a trusted advisor. Yeah, okay. Where's the deal? If they trusted you and your advice so much, where's the deal? Well, they don't know how to get it done. You gotta learn this and apply it and get it out of your head so that you can anticipate it and not fall into those classic traps. But what if you have the other problem? My pipeline, it's kind of skinny and no leads coming in, Brian. Where are all the good leads? Where are the Glengarry leads? They don't come in anymore. Sorry. Unless you're in the tornado or you're a unicorn or you lucked out, you have to go get your own leads. And that's changed. People don't want to hear your cold calls, your pitches, your spam, but they do want to talk about themselves. So how do you build up that conversation? How do you develop a system to do that? Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting helps people in the course fill up their calendar with great conversations that turn into business discussions. Today we can tell before we even contact somebody, can they afford it? Are they most likely to have the problem that we solve? It's not blind anymore. We're not opening up phone books and calling off a list or bingo cards. We have the internet and we should be able to leverage that to prioritize who is most likely going to need the product that we have to solve the problem that they have. Winning the Complex Sale solves that. And with both courses, I include the Questions That Sell course with it. So once you sign up, just send me a note. I'll send you the coupon code and you'll be able to get that as well. The Questions That Sell course builds up the exact questions to build the conversation into a business urgency. Instead of pitching, it uses questions, the only mind control that we have, to focus the client on what we want them focused on. It's infinitely better than spin. It's not crap selling. It's real questions from somebody who sold this whole life, starting where the other person is and getting them to where you want them to be. So go sign up today. Don't waste your time. Don't keep losing deals. It's costing you every day. You can pay per month. It is a monthly payment. plan, or you can pay all at once. The payment plan, it's not a membership, it's a payment plan. So, but it does give you the ability to stretch it out over 12 months, your access time to the course, so that it doesn't cost a lot upfront. You get access for a year, you get unlimited one-on-ones, which is a 30-minute Zoom call with me. We have office hours every other Friday. Everything is recorded and put in the course. Office hours is an hour-long discussion about what you care about, not what I care about, what you care about. So bring your issues, case studies, problems, situations, questions, and we cover them all. We record it. Everything's put back on the course. You never miss anything in case the times don't work out for you. And guess what? There's 3 years of them in there. There's, there's more content than you could probably consume in a year. But you need to get good at sales. It is a performance profession. It only matters how well you do it today. Now, much like a musician, much like an athlete, much like any other performance profession, it's not a quiz. It's a performance. It's how well you do it now. Sign up today.