WHAT THE INSIDE OF YOUR PROSPECTS DECISION LOOKS LIKE AND HOW TO CHANGE IT

Hey, if you're in the Get the Meeting course, check out the last office hours. I showed an example of how I got a founder requesting a meeting from me in less than 50 minutes. It works. It really works. You just have to understand people, how to motivate them, how to connect with them as a human being, not as a salesperson. So we're meeting Tomorrow. I love this. It's a nice way of doing business. It doesn't work that way every time or with everybody, but enough to crush your number because that's all we need. Let's get into this interview today. What we're going to learn is how companies make decisions internally. This little peek into what's going on behind the curtains is only— you're only going to get it from people who have known it. And I've got a webinar coming up that I'm doing with a partner. In June. I'll announce it as soon as we have the date solidified, but keep an eye out for it. And what I'm going to be doing is sharing with the audience how companies are making decisions. Now, this is a mini-course at best. What you really need to do is map it to what you're doing, what the issues are there, and work through it. Because we see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, and that's not the truth. The truth is very different, and the only way to learn that is the hard way. So you can either learn from someone else's mistakes or make your own. One is very inexpensive and one is very expensive. Let's get into this interview. I'll sum it up at the end. And if you're interested in the courses, go to b2brevenue.com. There's 2 videos on them. If you still have questions, schedule a call. But be ready to sign up. It's not a chit-chat and it's not with me. It's one of the members of the team. So, don't be surprised about that.

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

Sure.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me, Bryan. My name is Ted Wilson. I'm in Austin, Texas. So I'm an account executive with a company called SoftServe. So we are a technology consulting and software engineering services company. And I've been here about 6 years and I was born and raised on the East Coast. I went to school in Texas, played some baseball and have been in sales ever since.

And why sales for you?

Partly because they gave me a job out of college.

Among the array of opportunities facing you.

Exactly. I graduated with a literature degree. So I realized quickly that that meant very little in the business world at first anyway. No, but, you know, in all honesty, I think why sales for me, there's a lot of the culture of succeeding in sports translating over to succeeding in sales. And that at least is a great foundation early in your sales career. Yeah.

Oh, what sport was, was your favorite?

Baseball. Yeah.

At what position?

Catcher.

Okay.

So the, the, the, the, you know, you're the quarterback of your deal. For me is, yeah, you're the, the catcher of your deal, right? That's the analogy there.

Yeah. You're kind of the last line of defense.

Exactly. Yeah.

And how long did it take before you got comfortable in sales? Because, you know, literature degree didn't really prepare you for much other than teaching English, I guess.

Yeah, no, I think actually the transition was very smooth and very quick. And what I found is I've always been in B2B sales, right? My first gig was in New York City as more or less with a startup. So at the time this was 15 or 20 years ago, but at the time they were focused on revolutionizing the way that the news media globally digested information coming out from the corporate PR world, but in the form of streaming video. So at the time, getting these really big, robust streaming video files transferred correctly over the internet was a kind of a new technology. And then from there, going into much more services-driven sales for a Fortune 50 company here in Austin. And then, you know, here at SoftServe today, I think in B2B creativity for me has always been much more paramount to my success than any sort of technical playbook or, you know, sales training playbook for me personally.

Can you give us an example of that? When you say creativity, what does that mean to you?

Sure. Yeah. So creativity, I think first and foremost, thinking that you don't have a sales catalog or playbook if you're in a consulting company, right? If the top 5% at my company and, you know, our competitive companies like us, the top 5% sellers probably come up with a deal that when you look at the blueprint actually doesn't really exist anywhere in your sales book. Right. It has all the nuances and flavors of that customer, that addressable market, new and emerging technologies. So I think creativity and thinking outside of the box can be actually much more advantageous than prescriptive nature, right? And being able to sell repeatedly, if that makes sense.

I take it you don't get a lot of inbound?

Not a ton of inbound. Yeah, we have to really go off of a big Referral business in terms of our past book of business where we've sold and had customers be successful and then a lot of partner and channel sales.

Yeah, because I'm kind of finding that today that everybody wants kind of a playbook, a script, a cadence and they just want to hit buttons all day.

So it's fascinating. So I sell technology capability. I don't sell a product. I sell services only. So when we get sellers who come from big, big, big high-tech companies or big SaaS companies, kind of scratch my head thinking, well, you've always been able to sell this big brand product where the time to value is very short. But at my company, which is pure consultative sales and services sales, there might be a long time to value. But in the end, the customer owns IP and they own the solution. They have economy of scale and it's bespoke to what they need. But that doesn't come easily, right?

Right. You can't demo people, right? I guess exactly the way you can with a product or have, I guess you could have reference calls and stuff. So how do you handle that? How do you build up that trust and differentiation between you and the alternatives?

Yeah, good question. So the best way to do it is to have obviously case studies and referenceable work. But as part of that, we like to think about our solutions in the form of better, for better or worse, accelerators, right? So if we've used artificial intelligence to optimize or automate something in whatever industry, let's say the energy industry, well, we know the general fingerprint of what made that successful. The nuances that differ customer to customer might be size and scale, might be type of data, might be the, the business workflow or logic. But generally, we know how to do that. So what we're really selling to the next customer is how to do it a little quicker, a little faster, a little cheaper, a little bit better than the last time we did it as a consultant, right? So an accelerator for us might still be like There might not be code behind it that we're selling, but there's a reference architecture, there's mocked up graphics of some type, right? There's something that they can still take to their business and say, would this help you out in your, in your workflow?

Yeah. And do you partner with software companies, infrastructure companies to kind of leverage their, you know, beachhead within the account?

Absolutely. Yes, that's a very big part of our business. If you're, you know, if you're Microsoft or Salesforce or AWS or Google Cloud, you are a very big item on the customer spend sheet.

Yeah.

You at the end of the day sell infrastructure solutions, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, right? So the services angle that we bring is always integral. But we still have to— now I'm selling to multiple people right now. I'm selling to the cloud partner. Here's how you're gonna make consumption revenue. I'm selling the customer business value. And actually more times than not, I'm selling internally to get my team excited about what I just sold.

Yeah, because it's like an ecosystem type sale.

Exactly.

Where you're not selling your autonomous service, you're your autonomous services connected to this ecosystem.

Yep, exactly. It's typically like the SI, systems integration, connective tissue at the sale.

And what's hard about it? Everything?

I think what's hard about it is what I love, which is kind of to my earlier point, that lack of defined playbook. I would be bored out of my mind if I had like a catalog of SKUs I went out every day selling. So I do think that, you know, I like the fact that every sale is different. Every customer is a little different. I also think that what's hard, also what's exciting is that if we are able to get a customer to do a lot of things we do, it's something that likely could show up in like their 10-K or their corporate OKRs and strategy because we are the ones who help them adopt machine learning, right? Or we're the ones who help them adopt a data-driven approach to their ESG strategy or, you know, big, messy, complicated things.

And how'd you come up with this mindset? Was it natural or did somebody say, no, don't be selling features and functions, be thinking about the big picture?

Yeah, you know, I think first of all, failing a lot is always helpful, right?

It's a good teacher, isn't it?

Yes. Yeah. I mean, going back to the baseball analogy, it's like, you know, if you fail 70% of the time, you make the Hall of Fame. Like, that's an awkward mindset to adopt when you're 25 or 30 years old, right? I do think that trying to focus more on getting out in the field, failing a lot, seeing how, like in my case, my customers have the spectrum of do I, do I buy this solution as a product, right? Or do I build it from scratch? Building's always harder and messier. That's what we offer. So it also helps me by disqualifying right away a lot of other prospects. So that, I think learning how to narrow the gap and understand in your head what qualified really means is really, really helpful early on.

That's it because they're looking at it build versus buy or, you know, how much do they buy and how much do they integrate because they're not gonna build everything. They're gonna build, Some of it, right?

Right.

How did you learn all that? Because that's a lot of your own capabilities, but the whole ecosystem, you have to have a little thread of understanding through the whole architecture.

One thing that really helped me was, um, my first job, like I mentioned, was really more of a digital product company. We had a I used to call it a marketplace product that we were selling. And I liked that. But, but what I decided was I wanted to get closer to, I have a buzzy term, but art of the possible, right? And I think getting closer to that for me meant consulting and services. I wanted to, I wanted to figure out a way to add more polish to my sale, my sales approach. So I took a little bit of a leap of faith when I moved here to Austin and I worked with a Pretty large India-based company, purely services. They had me on-site, badged consulting, selling inside of a Fortune 50 company and, you know, selling business process improvement, which at the time I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but I accepted the role.

It's like digital transformation, right?

Yeah, yeah. A lot, a lot of intangible things, but that was a huge leg up for me in my career. because I had to get very, very, very deep in into a very large multinational account. And I just for 3 or 4 years straight, I was selling only white space inside that one account. And that helped me establish a lot of that polish. And I then thought, okay, well, this is how a Fortune 50 company thinks about business process improvement or optimization, automation. How do I go out to the rest of the addressable market, that most of which is not that big, and kind of dumb it down a little bit, right? Distill it down into things that are feel packaged that they can buy. That was a huge learning moment for me.

I love that because I did that early in my career as well, where you were on-site badged, going to their meetings, trying to get people to use and think your way. You're part of the crew, right?

If, if I— if somebody wasn't signing my proposal, uh, unfortunately for them, I showed up and tapped them on the shoulder behind their, their cube, right? Yeah, it's very helpful.

Well, a lot of salespeople today don't get that experience, and they don't understand what happens after that 1-hour presentation and demo you give.

Which leads to a very good point. The best way to learn, I think, in B2B sales is to somehow establish a feedback loop in your sales process. And obviously, easier said than done, right? You can't assure yourself that after your big pitch deck you do get feedback, but there are strategies you can use, right? For example, in the beginning of a deal that you know is gonna be qualified, You might suggest to the part, to the customer, here's what you're probably getting into when you're talking to me. This is probably gonna be 3 to 4 months, and we're gonna need an NDA, and I'm gonna need to see some of your data. There's gonna be moments where you feel like you're entering the trough of disillusionment. But bear with me, right? Because we've done this before, and I'm gonna need recurring cadence of calls. I'm gonna need to talk to your team members and Feedback loops, I think, are very important.

It's critical. Otherwise you're guessing.

Correct. Yeah. You get, you get to the edge of some point where you've pushed your proposal and then you're just, you're hoping, right? Yeah.

And checking in and the discussions that are happening, you're not privy to.

Exactly. Exactly.

Where when you're on site, you might not be in the meeting, but you can meet up for lunch or coffee with somebody who was in the meeting.

Right.

And if you're doing your job really well, they're inviting you to the parties on the weekend.

Yeah. And if you start your career in inside sales, for example, and it's a little bit more of a quantifiable goal, right? I do think that's valuable to somebody learning how to sell. But ultimately, yes, you, you know, you gotta find your way out to being an outdoor cat, right? You gotta, And, and, you know, get the feedback loop of understanding, you know, my, my proposal to automate this is supposed to do this. Sure, that makes success successful above the line, but like, what am I really helping you do? Am I helping you do something that, that is automated but frees up 80% of your team's time to do, do more compelling stuff? Does that make you get out of bed in the morning more excited, right? Does that help your guys feel like they're upscaling their careers? Because that's really, I think in B2B, that's where the big sales are really made, right? That you gotta understand both levels of outcomes.

And that's it. And if you're not there, the likelihood is just to put it onto the pile of good ideas to do someday.

Correct.

Yeah. And what motivates you as a salesperson?

Yeah, good question. I guess I'm actually dealing with this concept right now because I've been fortunate to work for good companies and I've had great success as a salesperson quantifiably. I'm starting to realize as I get older, inevitably, I care more and more about the success of those around me.

Yeah.

And the one thing I struggle with is, does that automatically mean that as a sales professional, I go into sales management? Maybe, maybe not, right? It's the same thing as software engineers Salesforce has to grapple with. Just because I've become a great software engineer, do I get promoted until I manage software engineers or Is that taking me out of the coding game where my most value is? So I'm working through the mental loops and hurdles of that right now, actually. Yeah.

And what would keep you in sales versus going into leadership? Have you managed people before? Do you know what that's like or do you—

Seldomly at a small level. I think I just like winning. I love winning. I love the competition. I like being close to customers and understanding that, what keeps them up at night, what makes them win. And I see it from our own leadership. Like, if they catch me one-on-one, they're asking me more than I'm asking them. They're saying, well, what's going on with our customers? What's— where do you think we should be going? Right? What is keeping them up at night? And I, that causes me, because that makes me realize, again, going back to feedback loop, you have to have your top sellers helping drive your business based on your customers, right?

Yeah. Because that type of sale, you know, people don't come outta college and be able to do it.

Right, right. You know, it's interesting. with the state of technology, right? I mean, ChatGPT has been all over the news for the last 3 or 4 months, and that has a lot of people, grandmothers, right, thinking about technology in a way they didn't think about it 3 months ago. And as a consulting company, when you go talk to a customer, they think a lot of the hard stuff is what we actually think is kind of the easy stuff. Like machine learning seems like this mystical, magical land. Not for a machine learning engineer that, that is only 26 and has grown up in a digital native world, right? The hard stuff is like change management, process change, like organizational agility, right? These like big, messy, open-ended things. So when I go talk to a customer, I have to help them understand The technology behind what you're asking, it's probably not the hard part, right? The, the people process tools equation, the, the people and the process is actually much harder than the tools in a lot of cases.

Well, the bigger the company, the harder change is.

Exactly. It's painful.

Yeah, because there's all these interdependencies that no one's seeing. That if you change this one thing, you know, there's this ripple effect that happens, right? And they've kind of learned not to change anything because it's gonna break something. It always does, right?

I mean, a lot of businesses could start leveraging ChatGPT right now, but they don't know how to. The technology's there, right? But they don't understand what that actually means for their people. The way they monetize, the way they build things based on technology in their business that might make them more open to risk now if they're using things like this, right?

And what's the hardest part of your job?

Well, if I'm trying to sell to, let's say, utility company, right? Utility company here in Texas where I'm based. Utility company might have thousands of employees, multiple lines of business, and then there's the person there that I'm talking to, and then they're talking to SoftServe, which is 14,000 people. But I'm there navigating what their company wants through one person who in turn is talking to SoftServe through one person. I think I spend most of my time and thought and stress making sure that that translation happens in the most clear, direct, impactful way.

Yeah.

We're essentially the cogs behind both of what our companies are trying to do, which is great, right? It's exciting, but I need to make sure that all of that is being translated appropriately.

And where do your deals typically get stuck?

2 places. One would be something is cool and innovative and technologically driven, but doesn't map back to a need to have. It's a nice to have on this year's budget, right? The other is sort of a coopetition between our company and the other company we're trying to work with's internal development team and capability. And I need to make sure they understand that we're, we're better and faster together, and we want to help them on one project and move on to the next project. We don't want to stick around and milk it, right?

Yeah. Because in the first case, the science experiment or the, you know, prototype—

Science experiment.

Yeah. They're nice, but there's not much money in it. And if there's no business requirement behind it, it's a skunkworks type thing and it might take off someday. And then in the latter case, people feel you might be stepping on your, their toes.

Right.

And kind of augmenting them out of their role.

Absolutely right. And that means, you know, the latter ends up presenting its ugly head usually too late if I haven't managed that, right? That kind of kills your deal without knowing your deal is dead.

Yeah, because they hamstring you when you're not there.

Right.

Have you found a particular way to prevent that?

I think part of it is managing the presale process with top-down and bottom-up both in mind. You know, what I mean by that is sort of, first of all, broadening the group of stakeholders that are involved in it is very helpful. I think a lot of salespeople in B2B sales focus, of course, up high. You know, I wanna sell to the CEO. It's like, well, I don't really wanna talk to the CEO actually unless I have a reason and something to say, right? Because the CEO gets in the room, they turn to the next guy.

What do you think?

The next guy. And usually it's a problem, not an opportunity that comes out of it. But I think, you know, bottom up is really important too, right? Because I wanna make sure there's a role assigned everybody in this story from the data engineer all the way up to the vice president who's engaging with, you know, say a line of business on something we're trying to accomplish. And from my side, that's also mapping like for like, right? They bring a very technical person, great, I'll bring my very technical person. If they bring somebody who's talking about change management, I'll bring my change management consultant, right? So I think all those pieces flowing together like a little Stratego board versus not having that like-for-like mapping during the presale.

And what are the red flags that you found that you've gotten pretty far down the road, but you're getting the sense that it's not gonna close? I gotta imagine Given the amount of investment you've made, you've developed a way of sensing that.

Yes, I would say it's really about, it's going back to that concept of nice to have versus need to have. And if you're dealing with a larger company, obviously they deal with pretty formalized budgeting cycles and prioritization goes into that. And you, I start to get a sense of Is this something that was sort of pitched internally on my customer side that, that was accepted as a cool idea, but not prioritized into this year's budget? That's why I really try very hard to understand upfront what their buying process is. And I— this is a little bit of a vague statement, but I try to tell my team internally that let's get them to have their buying process adhere to the way we want to sell instead of selling based on the way they want to buy. And that sets everything up pretty well from the beginning if we can get the former and not the latter. Yeah, makes sense.

And have you been able to Take something that they are, that is a nice to have and convert it to a must have?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One that comes to mind is, you know, in the realm of data science and artificial intelligence, we do work with a company who has, you know, they're a big company, they're industry specific. They have a problem that a lot of companies have, which is they've spent the last 30, 40 years investing a ton in very high salaries for these subject matter experts, people that have PhDs, people that have years, I mean, decades of experience doing a very discrete subject matter specific process for their business. We've helped them learn how to apply AI to that corporate knowledge base so that it can continue being a benefit for them in the future, even after this group of folks start to retire, or, you know, software starts to redefine the way that group of people does their job. So that's helping this, this type of company not only retain top talent and attract top talent, because you're getting people who never had to interact with software to now feel enabled by software, but you're also helping them think about even maybe commercializing this type of technology. And that's, that's something that started as a science fair project but has become a longstanding relationship.

And how do you separate yourself and your company so that you're not viewed as a commodity?

As a salesperson or in terms of my company?

Your own style. Because the natural thing is, oh, well, we've, we've been working with X company for years. They've got a guy who knows this. I'm sure you've heard that.

Yeah, it's all in my line of work. It's very, very, very relationship driven. So I don't become a commodity because I'm the feedback loop between my company and the market we want to sell to. I know where they're going. I know how they're spending their money or how they're thinking about spending their money. I think at the company level, We don't allow ourselves to be commoditized because we continually reimagine the way that our core product can be bought. The core product is just people, engineering hours, but you have to continually uplevel the way that that is perceived and purchased by a customer. Cool.

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

Sure. Yeah, I'm active on LinkedIn. And like I said, our company SoftServe is at www.softserveinc.com. And I can also be contacted through the website channel.

So it seems so easy to be selling to companies, doesn't it? Until you find out what's going on internally. And then all of a sudden, the ghosting and the delays Start to make sense. But they're all preventable, but you have to have a strategy and a plan and understanding how ephemeral, flaky, unpredictable this can be because you can have a champion and then as soon as you hang up the phone or walk out of the office, somebody else calls them, they go into a next meeting and your top priority is now number 17. How do you keep it up at number 1 or number 2 to make sure you get that deal? Because that's why we're doing all this hard work. Don't you want to learn this? Because even when you learn it, it's still not easy. It's still a lot of work. And I think too many people just keep trying to find that silver bullet, that easy way. Good luck. Good luck with that. It took me 5 years to figure out that there was no silver bullet. And then I found the real power. The real power is understanding the game you're playing and getting really good at it. Training yourself like an athlete, like a performer, like any profession every day, coming up with systems, habits, learnings, understandings. Testing your hypothesis constantly. It's work. It is. I get it. But not doing it doesn't get you anywhere. Gets you further away from your goal instead of further towards it. Make the decision today to take charge of your career. This is your chance. And you can come up with all kinds of excuses. I know everything already. Okay, good. Good luck with that. Or, I've been there.

I can—

I have every platitude for every— Okay, okay. I've heard them all. They bore me now because I know you're lying to yourself. And I sit there and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Come back when you're ready. Most of life is getting ourselves ready to take the action that we need to change our life for the better. To give up a bad thing or pick up a good thing and stick with it every day, just a minute or two a day. Have it expand, have it become your passion. Nobody comes out of the womb saying, I wanna sell, I wanna do million-dollar deals. They do small deals, they do bigger deals, they get that reward, they want more. They hate wasting their time, they wanna work smarter. All good reasons. Trying doing it on your own, it's so old school. I had to, but there was no choice. You know, I had a bunch of friends. We'd sit down and pick each other's brains, uh, run deals by each other, josh at each other, prod each other. It helped, but it was, you know, once a month maybe. Not every day, all day. Today you have an app where you can download hundreds of hours of office hours and one-on-ones, case studies, examples, all on the topic you care the most about— getting meetings and closing deals. How are you going to get better at it? Trial and error? 5, 10, 15 years? Learning from the best? 5, 10, 15 days, weeks, months.

Wow.

There's a difference there. And you can say, oh, Brian, you're just trying to sell me your course. No, I'm really trying to help you. That's my passion. But you gotta want help. You gotta want to get better. I wanna get better. You should see my, my house. I got Post-its, calendars. Keeping track of a lot of stuff. I wear all this biometric crap to keep track of my health. Pretty controlled diet. My system, my calendar, pretty structured. Not too rigid, but reasonably structured because I want to become better every day. And I got friends hitting me up, hey, let's go away, let's do this. And I'm like, I'd like to. But I really like this. I like helping salespeople sell more. It's a good feeling. Sign up today. Go to b2brevenue.com. There's 2 videos. One on how the courses work, the logistics, you know, the website to go to, how to sign up, video-based. They're in English. Nice to have a recent computer with good speakers, have a smartphone, you know, the things that 99.99% have. The other part is, which course is right for me? That's the most popular question. Kind of baffles me because either you don't get enough meetings in your pipeline, you're spending too much time prospecting when you're not supposed to be, you got like 2 or 3 deals a quarter and the rest of the time is trying to find another deal. Here's the way to find another deal. Lots of deals. You know, it's different than inbound. Inbound comes to you. There's already established curiosity, maybe some interest. They save you a couple months. Cold outbound is hard. So you have to do it a lot and you have to be patient with it because nobody is on our time frame. They're on their time frame. We can Engage and create that urgency once we've engaged. But the pitch, the pitch just isn't what it used to be. Because if you hear one pitch a week, it's enjoyable, it's entertaining. You hear one pitch a half hour or an hour, it's annoying. That's all. It's not that the pitches aren't good or okay or passable. It's just people are overwhelmed. And the pitch only works when there's active pain. So you gotta first find active pain and then find a channel you can pitch them on. Good luck with that. Or you can talk to them. That lost art of the conversation. I'll teach you how to do that online at scale, efficiently and effectively.

I love it.

I do it all the time. It's become a game for me. I love doing it. I want you to learn to love doing it too. Sign up today. We'll see you next time.