WHY YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW COMPANIES MAKE BUYING DECISIONS IN B2B SALES

The large complex sale is a mystery. It's a puzzle, isn't it? What else is there in life where you go through this long, arduous process where they want it, need it, can afford it, it's important to them, but they don't do it? Is it because they don't want it? No, they want it. Is it because they can't afford it? No, they can afford it. Uh, is the timing not right?

Hmm, maybe.

Politics? Maybe.

But isn't this the nature of large groups? The inability to come to a consensus and a conclusion? This organizational psychology is something that we really don't talk enough about in sales. Everybody thinks the big complex sale is much like a small transactional sale where Does the product do what they want? Yes. Is it reasonably priced or competitively priced? Yes. Why not buy it? And they buy it. But that logic doesn't work in the large complex sale. And it kind of puts a hex on our thinking because it doesn't make sense to us. Why is this not working? This is what we're going to talk about today. Before I get into it though, I want to tell you a little story. When I was, I guess, not a kid but kind of growing up, got my first computer, one of the first games I bought for the computer was chess. This is when you had to buy the game as opposed to downloading it. Why'd I buy it? Because trying to find somebody to play chess with was half the problem. And then you have to hope that they stick with the game instead of giving up when I beat them, or me getting upset when they beat me. But if I didn't buy that chess game, how would I practice chess? I know how to play chess, but I needed reps. I needed time in playing the game. This is what brevitypitch.com does for us in sales. Because we think sales is just knowing. We know what to say. We know the features, the benefits, the objection handles, the closes. But how well do we execute them? Sometimes okay, sometimes not so okay. And How much does that cost us? What do you mean? There's no cost. We, we never pay. That's the problem. You pay, but you don't get aware of paying. You don't get a bill. You just don't get commission. So that's how you pay— in lost income. But we don't want to look at that, so our brain doesn't look at that. Our brain just, look, give me another one. And this is what I love about sales today is, okay, I didn't prepare. I kind of didn't do very well. It didn't close. Give me another one. You imagine how marketing feels. Well, our job is to close those deals, the precious few. And to do it, we've got to be at the top of our game. Much like a chess game for a chess player, we need a simulation, a way of practicing, exploring, getting comfortable with. And this is what the customers of Brevity Pitch are telling me. It's like, you know, Brian, I wasn't bought into it at first, but now I see it making money for me. And this is one of the only Sales tech technologies that makes money for you. Everything else is about managing you, micromanaging you. This is not it. This is to make you a better salesperson. You can just tell your manager not to even look at it or block them from it. The point is to get great at sales. And if you're a manager, wouldn't you Hire just reps who want to become great at sales. Now, imagine if you were hiring a rep who says, no, no, I've been doing this for 5 years and I know exactly what I'm doing. I don't need any warm-up. I don't need any practice. Just give me more deals to lose. Would you hire that person? Would you? Do you think any musician, any performance would ever get anywhere if they didn't rehearse, if they didn't polish? Remember, comedians spend a year, one whole year, to come up with one hour of comedy. Does it take that long to write an hour's worth of jokes or stories? No, it doesn't. It takes a year to polish them. To get the timing right, to have the sequence right, have the buildup right, the close right. Do you not think that they don't know those jokes by heart? They've been doing it 3 times a night for a year. That's close to 1,000 times. But still, it takes a year. And this is what they've been doing for 20 years. So in sales, we're stuck in this knowledge mindset, but no one cares what you know. All they care about is how well you're connecting with them, how well you're helping them, how well you're getting them— them being the prospect— to focus on what really matters: the cost of not doing something, the impact that it'll have on them personally. We always think of these things after the call. And one of my mottos was, I have never been overprepared for a call. And I'm not talking about bringing the right things or coming up with the right talking points. I'm talking about handling what they're going through, designing my questions, putting the timing just right, pacing the call. Those things, hmm, it's a lot of thought. Most people just wing it, but most people don't want to become great at sales. Which are you? Go to brevitypitch.com, check it out, drag your manager over there and tell them, this is one product that Brian Burns tells me will increase my revenue. And how can it not? How can it not? It's very lifelike. You'll love it.

Here we go.

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

Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. So, um, so yeah, I'm 25 years in sales. I, I started off my career actually selling office supplies door-to-door. Um, not like I wasn't wandering around with a bag of pencils or anything. Thing. It was for a corporate stationer, a bit like Office Depot in the US, you know, and that was a great experience because it teaches you very quickly to not be so completely obsessed with what everyone thinks of you. And as an individual contributor, I kind of worked my way into technology because that's kind of fundamentally far more interesting for me than pens and pencils. And I kind of worked my way through the ranks of individual contributors all the way up to doing $20 million deals to some of the largest banks in the world. So I tend to specialize now in advice around what I would consider complex sales, those big ticket items, 6, 7, 8-figure deals. I've built a couple of teams for businesses that we took on to become unicorns. So my kind of specialism was creating the regional offices and really for the last 18 months, 2 years, I now predominantly advise CROs, CEOs on how to accelerate their revenue strategy.

Cool. Now, how'd you make that leap from office supplies door to door to fintech? Who gave you the first chance or how'd you make that leap?

Yeah, it was with, you might actually know, it was with an American PR software company that was called Vocas at the time. And yeah, I mean, that was a fairly simple form of SaaS. They were like $5,000 ticket deals. But I, you know, I think that's quite a common thing for most people. You've gotta find that foothold for your career when you've got get into technology because everyone wanted to be in technology.

And how'd you get good at it? You got really good at it.

Yeah, look, I think through a combination of working for some amazing people, working for some terrible bosses and, you know, making a lot of mistakes as well. I think, you know, a lot of the learning that I've done is, you know, I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And Yeah, so what I try and do now is, is help people to, to get to where I am with a little bit less scar tissue.

Yeah, because you brought up the thing, because a lot of people say when you have a terrible boss, it's really awful, but you do learn stuff, right? You learn what not to do.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, sometimes I feel that you actually learn more from bad bosses and bad experiences than you do from good ones. Uh, they're just not always fun learnings.

And what do you see as your driver in sales? Is it competitiveness? Is it financial? Is it status? Is it independence?

Yeah. So I think originally it was very much paying the bills. It's, you know, I was coin operated and I'm sure you hear that tons. I was coin operated as a salesperson. But as I got into bigger and bigger deals, I have to say the cerebral challenge of those things, is really quite stimulating. It's a bit like a game of chess, you know, you can't really afford to fail. So you have to think kind of pathologically 10 moves ahead. And I think that's quite a, you know, I deny any, you know, challenge anyone to say that's not an interesting pursuit.

A lot of people try and kind of skate over it by saying it's just about relationships or the product sells itself.

No.

Or timing.

Not at all.

Oh no, I mean, I touched it.

Yeah, I'll opine.

Yeah.

So I think I was reflecting on this and I think when you get into really big ticket deals, it stops being about benefit and it starts becoming about risk. And what I mean by that is, you know, everyone when they buy anything, whether it's kind of a car or a piece of software, they always get swept up in the possibilities. Like, you know, it's the amount of money it can save us, the features it can bring us, the customers we can acquire with it, all of those sorts of things. But when it starts, you know, being what I call an invasive technology sale, there's a moment where the kind of the brakes come on and it's like, well, what if we get this wrong? What if we spend 3 years implementing a CRM or an ERP system and it doesn't do what we want? Like, that's a career-ending decision. And that's why, you know, all of these stakeholder groups get bought in. And that's where a lot of the complexity comes from. Because it's a significant decision that they can't afford to get it wrong, basically.

Yeah. And I kind of had this debate where this one CRO says it's not about change. Well, maybe the word in your definition of change is different than mine. But like in that case, you get a lot of groups, it affects a lot of people's workflow, status, politics. So they have opinions about it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, yeah, one of the stories from earlier in my career, this is one of the larger deals I did. We spent 18 months working in it and this executive that had the CIO's ear was brought in at the last minute. And, you know, he pulled me aside and said, James, if you can't do this one thing for me, like, I'm gonna kill your deal. He'd like, he'd been brought in from absolutely nowhere. So, you know, you've got all of these different people with different, you know, it's very easy for salespeople to mistake the opinions of individuals with the feelings and the consensus of the entire organization. And organizations really are just that. They're a collection of people with their own agendas and their own views. And that's where the complexity lies.

And how do you manage that? Do you, because you talked about risk, do you focus on what happens if they don't do this? Do you focus on competitiveness, on their own personal losses if they don't make this change?

Look, I think there are 2 parts of a complex sale. There is like the first part, which is usually comprised of, you know, a group, a small group of stakeholders where they're building the business case. And that's to me what you're describing there, which is, you know, what is the impetus they have to do this thing at all? You know, but once they've essentially built the business case, then it comes on to why should they do this thing with you versus the other competitors and internal technology build. So, you know, I think absolutely your point is valid, but it tends to pertain more to that kind of that first part of the sales cycle or the buying cycle. I'm a big fan. I think salespeople talk way too much about sales cycles, which is really, really arbitrary because actually, if you, you know, what what salespeople should be obsessed about is how people buy, like be an expert of organizational psychology. And that's where the game is.

And what do you think people don't understand about that?

Oh, where to begin? So a lot of the work that I do, I'd even say maybe 60% of the work that I do is educating CEOs and C-suite of how banks buy because a lot of the time, They don't realize that, you know, one of the most difficult bits of news that I have to break to executives is once a deal part, like kind of passes a certain value or complexity, it absolutely will cross one fiscal year to the next. Because if you're gonna buy something that's, you know, $1 million or $10 million ARR, you know, no organization has that sitting in their current budgets. And, you know, if they need to mobilize groups of stakeholders and implementation teams, they don't kind of turn that on a dime. So yeah, one of the biggest things that I have to educate people on is the timescales and that what that buying process looks like. And, you know, really it's the buying process is an 18-month or 24-month pursuit. You can enter as a sales process at an arbitrary point along that journey, but that's what the buying journey looks like.

And, you know, how about the things like, why don't you just call the CEO?

Yeah, look, I, it's funny, I think I've managed to avoid an RFP once, like with a strategically important deal. But generally, you've just got to accept that if the CEO kind of wades in with his big boots every time, kind of treading on all over the governance of the business, then it's not really a very effective business. So would the CEO do that? Potentially, but they would do everything in their power to kind of avoid getting involved because he's undermining the entire business.

Yeah.

And how do you, or what is the hardest part of that sale? Is it keeping it going? Because like I see a lot of people have a hard time, like once they've decided they're gonna do something, they're probably gonna do it with you. But there's no real time feeling.

Yeah, I think the hardest bit is once they, once you have built the business case and you go into that RFP process, it becomes an arm's length engagement because it goes into a kind of a process of governance. You know, you will be prohibited from meeting with people often, you know, you will only be able to have meetings that are sanctioned. So the nature of the game is how do you win that opportunity before the governance starts and kind of any salesperson will probably tell you that, you know, if you don't know about an RFP when it lands, you're probably not gonna win it. And there's a lot of truth in that. The best time to get access to and influence executives and kind of build that strong body of evidence that you need is before the RFP comes in.

Yeah. And because once it hits the street, then the red flag is up and all the competitors converge.

Absolutely. Yeah. But it's more the point that it's a level playing field at that point. Like, it is deliberately constructed to provide a level playing field. And let's be honest, we're not in it to give everyone a fair chance. We wanna win. So how do we do that before it becomes a level playing field?

And what do you think you figured out about the complex sale that most people don't get?

Oh, I think There are, there's so many facets to what I consider kind of good sales. One of the most important things is lots of salespeople, good salespeople know what information they need to be able to navigate that sale. Great salespeople know how to ask the questions. So it's, you know, how can you understand the impact of the individual's ego that you're talking to on the information that you get them? So like if you ask a really blunt and two-dimensional Like, are you, are you the person that makes this decision? You know, you're not asking them who makes the decision. You're asking them, are you unimportant? So, you know, it's—

Does your opinion matter? Yeah.

Do you matter at all? So, you know, the, the, the game is like, how can you be an expert at eliciting really accurate information? Because it's only when you have that accurate information can you determine what you need to do next.

That's it. Because a lot of the classic questions like, what, how's the decision gonna be made? It's like, well, they're gonna make something up. So you have to be lied to.

This is great. I mean, and it also assumes that they even know how the decision is made. No, they don't know. Like, you know, if you're selling, so I'll kind of take some terminology from financial services. If you're selling a core banking system, which is kind of a big piece of tech like ERP, You know, they might buy technology, but this is a piece of technology that they buy every 10 years. The chances that they've ever bought that or know how that is purchased is nearly zero. So I mean, that's the thing. The salesperson needs to be the expert on how organizations buy. And it's, you know, certainly you can ask them to guide you, but don't take what they tell you as gospel.

You know, Yeah, because what ends up happening is 2 people who don't know where they're going are guiding each other, and then they wonder why we're leading each other. Are we lost? And how did you come about this kind of capability? Did somebody teach you? Did you kind of have a passion for the puzzle?

Yes. Yeah, I think once I, there was a point in my career and I couldn't say exactly where it was. It was probably kind of around 10 years ago that I became obsessed with understanding how buyers think and how organizations work. And at that point, I became a student of it. I really kind of rejected, like, if I look at traditional sales training, they just, it's very, it's very go in there and ask these questions and you know, Spin, Medic, all of these things. And it doesn't allow for the genuine complexity of these businesses. So yeah, I would say to anyone, you've got to have a really compelling curiosity because that's what drives true understanding.

Yeah, because if you read all those books, it all sounds like you do this, then they run down to procurement and issue a PO. But if you do all this, all you have is interest.

And maybe a next meeting.

Yeah. And it's also important to understand that, you know, having sold office supplies and having sold the $20 million deals, they are so, so different. And it probably sounds obvious, but, you know, a lot of the time, you know, with big infrastructure technology processes, you can't create a need. I think that's also one of the things in enterprise sales. You can't create pain. You can tap into it. You can put your finger on it. You can, exacerbate it. But, you know, one of my colleagues uses a great metaphor, which is, you know, selling big infrastructure projects is like selling heart transplants door to door. Like, someone is either gonna need one or they're not gonna need one. So, you know, it's just a question of a lot of those times positioning yourselves effectively where the need is there. You can't, you know, so you don't go heart shopping because you want to run a marathon a couple of minutes faster. So yeah, some cases you can create need and in others it's strategic.

And did you learn it from him or did you learn it from your own trial and error where you go 6 months into a sales process and you find out they love your product, but there's no need, no burning need?

Yeah. So as I said earlier, it was a combination of working with great people. But, you know, I made my fair share of mistakes. I mean, I think one of the biggest mistakes that I made and lots of salespeople make is they confuse the champion with a coach. Like, you know, I've lost deals where, you know, the people were coaching me all the time on how to position and they had no credibility within the business. So, you know, I haven't won every single opportunity in my career. You know, there have been great moments, but I've made mistakes and you kind of take those forward. And as I said, that scar tissue, that's You know, if you're paying close attention, those are the things that you can really use to springboard your career. Yeah.

And how many people within the account or what was your strategy? Let's say from after that first presentation, you've got a trial going. What do you do differently than your competitor?

So I'm always trying to expand my access for stakeholders. You know, one of the, again, one of the problems that one of the mistakes that I've made that other people make is they get, they find someone in the business that loves them and they set up camp there. And if it turns out that that person doesn't have credibility or they leave the business, you know, all the doors are shut. So it's how can you expand your access? You know, I think the technical term is multithreading, but I call it kind of building redundancy into your kind of stakeholder access.

Yeah, I kind of call it going steady because it has this Oh, don't they tell you not to talk to anybody else in a lot of cases?

Yeah.

Which is like you dating someone else.

Yeah. And look, the brutal truth is that, yeah, the brutal truth is that if you go around your stakeholder, it might go wrong. But I know statistically speaking, you are more likely to lose a deal by kind of setting up camp and not building out that group. So, you know, the lesser of two evils there Is biting the bullet and just being unafraid to ruffle some feathers.

Yeah, because you gotta ask yourself, is there really a legitimate business reason why they don't want other people in the company involved or aware of this?

Yeah. Yeah. And usually it's just their pet project and it's not real and you're wasting, you're wasting your time.

Yeah, you're kind of educating and building a great buddy. It's one-sided. And what other things do you find your clients just are blind to or they don't want to know that you're kind of the deliverer of the truth? Because for you to be able to help them, you've got to really convince them of certain things about what the market is really like. Yeah.

So, well, so I advise on revenue holistically. So it's not just sales and I should say that I don't really distinguish sales and marketing as being different things at all. There's the buyer, there's the information that they need to feel confident making a purchasing decision and sales and marketing are just 2 different channels for delivering that. And, you know, one of the things that I often have to advise on is if you have this kind of one-dimensional pipeline set up where essentially you've got a group of salespeople and you give them laptops and you say, go make it rain. That is just not gonna be successful in today's society. You need to be at events creating roundtables. You need alliance teams networking with the Deloites, the McKinseys, you know, all of these influencer groups. And one of the things that I think is particularly under pressure in businesses now is this kind of pathological need to measure things. And sales is quite easy to measure. So, so people just go, right, let's just do sales because we can measure it. Um, but actually there are lots of other things that you need to do that you can't measure. And just because they're more difficult to measure doesn't mean they, they don't have kind of a huge intrinsic value in the overall kind of, um, buying process.

Yeah, that measurement thing. Well, it causes the wrong behaviors. Yeah.

Yeah.

One of my favorite ones is, is Goodhart's Law. Uh, I don't know if you've heard that.

Oh yeah, right. Once you make it a measure, it fails to become a good measure because now everyone's gaming it.

Yeah. Yep. So, so SDRs are going out making appointments with, you know, the guy that changes the coffee machine and marketing create MQLs as their North Star. So it's creating clickbait campaigns to collect email addresses. So yeah, yeah, you need to be careful about that.

And this idea that I only trust data. So you have to go type it into the CRM, your opinion. Now it's data. Now they accept it as a fact as opposed to just talking through a deal.

Yeah. And I think one of the areas of business that's really suffered is, you know, partnerships, channel alliances, whatever you want to call it. You know, again, if you're just measuring it on the opportunities that you bring in, you're not measuring some really other important value adds that they bring like influence revenue. So the partner didn't deliver it, but they're kind of co-selling with you. So again, you know, I've seen whole partner teams get mothballed because they are measuring the wrong things.

And how did you learn the marketing side of it? Did you, was that part of your role at a previous company or?

No, I mean, I think most CROs come from either the sales or the marketing background. And I obviously came more from the from the sales route. But again, when I was, you know, studying how people buy, one of the things that kind of stuck with me about 10 years ago, probably the best salesperson that I know said, and he was in auto sales and he said, look, 10 years ago, people used to come in and say, tell me about automobiles, like this really clueless buyer. And then like with the internet, with the availability of information, they would come in and suddenly say, you know, I want the, uh, pearl pink, you know, uh, leather upholstery with the Bose, the 600-watt stereo. Like, the availability of information has empowered buyers, and that made me realize that, you know, the information landscape has kind of fundamentally changed how buyers like to behave, and they like to do more self-directed research before they engage with salespeople. Now, from a salesperson's perspective, that doesn't mean that you should sit there and wait for marketing to feed you. But if you look at revenue holistically within a business, you've got to be able to create your brand. You've got to be able to service that informational need through a number of channels.

Yeah, because a lot of salespeople either don't value marketing or don't understand it. So they kind of just do their own thing. And it's good to hear a sales leader who kind of has a balance there. Because if you know how to do it, it's really valuable.

Yeah, and it's super tricky. But, you know, I think marketing is undergoing quite a big change at the moment in the fact that there was a period, and I don't mean to be kind of derogatory to marketing, but it was let's make things pretty and it wasn't performance driven. And I think we now need to move to a spot that where, you know, marketers are compensated and, you know, performance is expected from them in the same way that it is from salespeople.

And what do you see as great marketing today? Do you see it or?

Yeah, I mean, I think it takes so many shapes because you don't tend to go, oh wow, it's the Super Bowl advert. I'm gonna go out and buy that, right? I'm gonna go out and buy a Lexus. Um, it's lots of little things that drip into the subconscious. So actually the best marketing is almost invisible. Um, really, you know what, from an attribution standpoint, you know, we, what we measure is the last touch, not all the touches that come before it.

And which is still stupid, right? You know, because when you're talking to a client CEO and you're recommending something, there's no way to attribute that, right?

No, no. And, you know, someone watching this podcast, like on LinkedIn, they speak to you, one of us does business with them. How do you attribute that unless you actually ask them the qualitative questions? But we can't measure it in the channel.

Answered accurately. But usually people click the first one just to get it over with.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a great story from Again, one of the deals that I did back in 2015, which was a few million, we finally managed to get access to the Chief Technology Officer of a bank. And in the middle of the meeting, he just got up and he grabbed his whiteboard pencil and he drew the slide that the CEO did. He gave a keynote at a presentation at an event 4 years earlier. 4 years, like he had Nothing to buy from us. And then he could just summon that, that, that one magical experience at a critical moment. And if, if, if the CEO hadn't been at that event and they hadn't presented, would we have got the deal?

Right.

I wouldn't wanna find out.

But that, that is what B2B marketing is like. You get all kinds of people that don't have the company domain in their email address and it's over months, if not years. Now, let's say a salesperson's listening to you. How do I go from office equipment to $20 million deals? What skills should I develop?

The biggest challenge, the biggest challenge is seeing the additional layers. So if you have a, like, let's just say probably office supplies isn't a good place to start. But if you're selling SaaS for 5 or 10 grand, you need to acknowledge that you're gonna be able to go from proving value to negotiating to closing the deal in 3 months because there's gonna be a single decision maker and they've probably just got that amount of cash standing. If you can make a good enough case for it, they'll put in, grab a load of cash and pay for your technology. But because of all of those complexities that we talked about earlier, you know, it's seeing all of those different layers, the decision maker, the economic decision maker, becomes buying forums, quorums, stakeholder groups, champions, coaches, you know, it has, you know, 10 more layers. So start thinking about what those layers look like in a business because that's really where a lot of salespeople struggle to kind of cross the chasm. They just can't think 3-dimensionally in that kind of depth. So if you can start to understand how big companies buy, You're gonna set yourself up well.

And, and do you think, because you probably sold on-prem, certainly for the $20 million deals, how much more valuable is it to be on-prem than it is to try and do a deal like that remotely?

Oh, so selling, being there. Oh, there's no question. You've gotta be on site. Just spend your life on a plane. Because smaller deals are, you can fail and learn iteratively because like you pitch, you have a bad day, it doesn't matter. You just pick up the phone, you dial the next one, you dust yourself off. You know, when you have big, big enterprise, it's a success and failure is binary. Like you're either 0% of target or you're 200% of target. So you need to take every single opportunity that's presented to you. So absolutely. I mean, I've got on a plane to near enough have a coffee with someone. Now I'm not suggesting that you have have unqualified meetings. But, you know, if it gives you an advantage, you take it.

Yeah. And I think it's something that's been overlooked for a couple of reasons, you know, pandemic, but economics and this new focus on high velocity selling as opposed to high revenue selling.

Yeah. And I think that's actually made it a little bit more difficult because buyers are actually a little bit more reluctant to get off their armchair and go into an office and meet you. But that's still where the advantage is. So I think where it's changed post-COVID is you're now fighting with a buyer that is perhaps even less accessible than they were before, but it doesn't make it any less worthwhile for you to do that if you can.

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

Yeah, if you find me on LinkedIn, I'm James Barker and my business is GTM Hive.

Yeah. Well, one of the tragedies today is that we're not going on site as much, certainly not as much as we did before the pandemic, if at all. And the lack of doing that has really given us a very narrow or shallow view of how companies make decisions. When you're on-premise, walking the halls, attending the meetings, heading out to lunch with the people, coming back, talking through these things, maybe even working up to getting a badge to hang out there, you all of a sudden understand what companies go through when they're coming up with these changes, why people push back, why people are behind it. What the resistance is. And all of a sudden it makes sense. But when you're sitting at home or in your cubicle, it's hard to imagine that. The only vantage point we have is what we're told, the words that were said. And I got to tell you, those are not facts. They're just opinions. I know everyone thinks that they're facts. It's just one person's opinion. And usually a person that has zero budget authority, meaning that unless they pay for it, they can't spend the company's money. And this is critical. And a lot of people think, oh, the CFO can— is the only person who can spend the company's money. CFO can spend the company's money on their stuff. So if you're selling under their organization, that's the right person. The rest of the company It's got a whole nother motto, a whole lot of mission. And when I think of— I see a lot of posts where everyone thinks that the CFO is the economic decision maker.

Uh, you're clueless.

Sorry.

Um, I've never had a CFO kill a deal. They, they try and resist sometimes. They, they usually are the most prudent, most conservative person in the decision path. And yes, the CEO may ask them their opinion. Doesn't mean it's a fact. Doesn't mean they can't veto it. It is just ridiculous what people naturally come to a conclusion about selling, having never done it.

Because—

or they just do it like You know, what we see today with, you know, pounding and transactional-type selling, that's much closer to service than it is selling. If you want to become great at sales, you have to understand how organizations change. Because today, less than half of those great deals, the committed deals, the forecastable deals, the ones over 90% About half of them come in. The new logo ones. The repeat business, yeah, that's much more predictable. But why? Everyone thinks it's politics or money. But politics, you can put anything under that. Why does it not happen? Doesn't have enough momentum. It's not a priority. No access to the economic decision maker. No great business case. There's a lot of reasons. And you can either rely on your champion to sell it for you, or, or you could teach your champion how to do it and work together with them. But that's a skill, and you have to learn what they need. And this is what I did learn from a CFO. I learned what the board needs to see, how they want to look at it. And guess what? The CEO wants to look at it that way, and the CFO wants to look at it that way. And that's what the auditors want to see as well. And when I learned this, my deals became much more predictable, much more controllable. And I became good at sales, not because I talked pretty, but because I knew the process. I knew the game that I was playing. Most people are playing the SDR game, thinking that if I get a meeting and then I get a demo and then I get a presentation, that I get a deal. That's a transaction. And you may get the deal, but most likely you won't. And if you don't, you know what the commission on that is? Zero. That's your lost income, not income. So if you started looking at the world as either commission or lost commission, you'd be much more focused. But you won't do that. It's too painful. Reality's a bitch. Who wants to face it? Well, we all face it eventually. And wouldn't you rather be rich when you face it? So if you want to learn how These deals get done, go to b2brevenue.com and check out Closing the Complex Sale. I teach you exactly how. And is it easy? No, it's not. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of, you know, ego suppression and understanding. But once you do and it succeeds, Then you get commission, not lost commission. So just ask yourself, which do you want? Commission or lost commission? Right now you're getting lost commission. It's not pulling it out of your bank account, but it's not putting it in either. Let's put something in the bank account. b2brevenue.com. The other course is Start the conversation, get the meeting. How do you get into those precious few accounts?

What does everybody do?

They have this huge list.

Why?

Because it feels good. And what does everybody think? Let's see if they're interested. Well, if they were interested, they would already be on someone else's website, yours or your competitors. Okay, so maybe they're curious. Maybe. And what's the likelihood that your little email or cold call voicemail is going to hit them at the right time where they're open-minded to converse? Near zero. They have to get the email. They have to open the email. They have to read it. They have to understand it. And the first step That's why you get all those objections. Let's get great at sales. Go to b2brevenue.com. Sign up today. If you're a manager, we've got 2 certified instructors that can come on-site and walk your team right through this so that you don't have to spam and leave voicemails all day. Unless you like to. We'll see you next time.

Thanks, Dustin.