Invest in Human-Centric Skills for Better Selling with Andy Paul

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA KD and oh boy, oh boy, we are in for a treat today because we get to go into the vault. The vault of sales intelligence and mastery from the mind of the Andy Paul. Yes, he's at the level now where you can put a the in front of his name. And this is why. This man has led sales teams to going public. He has led sales teams to ipo. He has consulted some of the biggest and best sales teams out there. You know, companies like Square. He's had his own podcast acquired by another company, and this podcast has over 1000 episodes, which means he has had the opportunity to pick the minds of the best of the best out there over a thousand times. And so what we're going to dive into today is opening up this vault and saying what has he learned over the past 5, 10, 15 years of being in this industry and learning from the rest of the industry at the same time? I can't wait for this one because we have him on the other side of the mic today. Andy Paul, welcome to the show, kd.

Thank you very much. Very generous introduction. Thank you.

It's really fun when it's all true as well. Right. And I know sometimes people get uncomfortable because it's all the praise gets thrown at us, so we're not used to taking it. But my man, you have done so much in and for this industry and it's something I really admire and look up to.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I spent the last, certain last 12 years, now 11 years, now, is deliberately saying, okay, I'm very fortunate in my career. What can I do to give back? And the podcast is part of that.

And I love it because it's something where there weren't. I mean, you started a lot of this sales podcast world. You were one of the first true ones, like, dedicated to sales, sales leadership and in this B2B SaaS space. And so, you know, I'm ready to dive in, kind of like dive into this kind of topic by topic. So we're going to go almost from beginning to end if you think about sales in the SaaS industry and really kind of see what pops up to mind from some of the interviews and some of your experiences as well. So let's start at the very beginning of sales development, right. Where a lot of people start their careers and it's really the tip of the spear for more sales. Most sales orgs. What are some of the learnings you've had over the past, you know, four to five years speaking to people in this space, like what seems to be working or maybe the opposite, what, you know, isn't working, that people are still out there doing well.

Yeah, a lot of it's not working. Right. So there's been a change over this period as you've seen the conversation shift from the enthusiasm for sort of the, I'll label it, the predictable revenue model to people thinking, okay, well, you know, it's not quite as black and white as we thought near. We all sort of rushed into it. And now for certain situations and certain environments, maybe that's not the model for us. Right. And so you're seeing, and I hear more and more frequently as sales leaders say, yeah, we're sort of modifying that or we're migrating away or maybe we're doing a more complex enterprise sale and maybe we team an SDR with a senior seller, but maybe it's not even an sdr. Maybe it's really only a senior sdr. So there's, there's changes afoot. And it's not gonna be as, I think applied as in blanket fashion. It's sort of been in the past.

What do you think is driven that change.

Results or the lack of. Right. I mean, I think that that SAS as a business, the overall win rate that companies have is relatively low. And when they try to bring that type of win rate into a more enterprise, complex enterprise environment where there aren't as many prospects, you can't be as wasteful. And so you have to make sure that you win a higher fraction of your deals. So that says, look how we have to reevaluate everything about what we're doing, starting with how do we initially engage with people and prospects all the way up to how we work the deals and close it.

And I think that's where, if you think about, you know, and also, too, I think people forget how old predictable revenue is.

20 years.

It's 20. 20 years where, like, getting an email was like, oh, that's fun. Oh, oh, you want to know who to talk to? Sure. Andy, here's who you want to talk to.

Right.

And they're trying to apply it to this new space where, you know, everyone's doing it. So if you take that next step, how do you stand out?

Right.

When you are trying to prospect, when you are trying to kind of break into some of these accounts, what are some of the ways that you're hearing and seeing to stand out? Right. Where you can kind of garner that attention to get the conversation started?

That's the $64,000 question. Right. And I think that's the place where most companies are struggling. Right. How do you stand out in the noise? How do you command the time and attention of the people that you're. You're trying to outreach to?

And.

It'S a tough one. Right. I think that where we're seeing companies, say, is, look, we have to experiment more widely with what we're doing. It may be a combination of things. It's. Yeah, may not. Well, we know about Omnichannel. We got to be more present in more places. But at the end of the day, it does boil down to how do you as a human interact with another human being when you have that opportunity? And everything that goes into the randomness of being able to intersect with somebody so you can get them on a phone or having them respond to a message or so on. But for me, what I focus on is really, when you have that opportunity, what do you do with it? And we're still too pitch oriented. This is how we set up our SDRs, let's pitch. And there's been some studies that show that actually if you get hold of a senior person and you start the conversation on the right foot and you pose a question to have them think about a potential outcome, they'll engage. We're not doing SDR as a favor by saying, look, this is the way you have to do it. I think too many sales leaders, sales bosses, are sort of caught up in this framework because it's become this playbook that everybody does. Everybody does this playbook. It starts at the top. We're not enabling our sales managers to be able to help their sellers do better jobs of these things.

And it's a shame because if you think about where, especially on the SDR side and in SaaS, I think part of this is very particular to SaaS is it's so product focused and it's like, all right, people get to know their product, but they don't get to know the prospect. They don't know how to have a conversation with that senior leader. They have no idea.

Yeah. It comes to an idea that I've been talking about more recently, which is something actually I borrow from soccer. And people listen to the show, know I'm soccer obsessed. And I remember seeing this interview with a coach in the Premier League who was talking about, well, you know, when you bring young people into the team, we spend a few months training them how to be a person before we train them how to be a player. And to me, this is something we're missing in sales. Right. We know this is a human business. We know that the ability to connect with another human being, the ability to unleash your curiosity, to keep probing, to be able to help the buyer. Some of these things are just human skills. And we make the assumption that people coming into the workforce in sales know how to do this, they know how to be human and they don't necessarily. And so let's spend the time to invest in them to help them with sort of these just, I said basic human oriented skills and then let's teach them how to be a seller.

What do you think the core of those things would be?

Right?

If you could pick, you know, two to three of like, let's really focus on teaching people how to do that. What do you think those two to three core things would be?

Well, I think one that gets overlooked and actually gets talked down about is just being able to connect to someone, how to open a conversation, how to engage in small talk with somebody. I hear sales leaders all the time, say, oh, my. Buyers don't have time for small talk. Well, actually, they do, because the research is pretty clear. This is how you engage somebody's interest. This is how you demonstrate an interest in them, which in turn makes you interesting. And so it doesn't have to be. Sure, maybe some people overdo it, but it still is a critical part of connecting with another human being. Another thing I think is just learning how you build trustworthiness with a prospect. There's been some great books written, like Stephen M r. Covey. The Speed of Trust talks about the pillars of trust building. We have to help sellers with that mindset understand what it takes to do that. But I think it's all encompassed under this umbrella of just a different mindset about what sales is. And too few people look at selling as a service. And it is a service we're providing to buyers. Buyers have a job that they're trying to accomplish, which is, and I like to summarize it this way, your buyer, what they're trying to do is they're trying to quickly gather and make sense of the information they need in order to make a decision with the least investment of their time and attention possible. That's what your buyers are trying to do. And so your job as a seller, in part, is, how do I help them accomplish that? I'm there to serve them, to help them do that. So I think a lot of it's just also changing the mindset. Because if your mindset as you're going out is, I've got to go call this number of people, and I got to pitch my product, I got to set a certain number of meetings. There's nothing about helping in there. And I think that's. That's problematic.

I love it. I love it. We actually just covered this with our inside Org a couple months ago of like, we're here. What. Let's list all the ways we help our prospect, right? And like, we did, like, we listed all these. And I was like, this is what we do. This is what we do. So when you're calling, remember that. When you're emailing, remember that. When they shut you down, remember, remember that. Like, we're trying to help. But if you're trying to book, they can tell. And if you're trying to close, they can tell.

Right. And that, that plays to motivations. Right? Is one of the ways you build trust is to be completely transparent in your motivations and then to live up to those motivations, you know, operate with integrity and just the common Scenario in sales we see all the time is, is I've lived it in my career is, hey, we're here to help, Mr. Prospect, we're here to help. We have a couple conversations. Oh, by the way, it's the end of our month. Yeah, if we could just, yeah, if we give you this discount or you know, what's it's the equivalent of, you know, what's it going to take to get you in this car today? Happens every month.

Sales.

You know, we want to look down our noses at car salespeople, but we engage in the exact same behavior.

All right, so I'm going to throw a loaded question at you then because I have a personal belief here and you know, I've talked about this publicly, quickly, what do you think would happen if we got rid of commissions? Would that help solve some of this? Because that trustworthiness is the commission and the quota that causes reps to do those things and it's the commission as well that buyers know. Buyers know you get paid to close the deal. So there's already an inherent lack of trust. What do you think would happen if we got rid of commissions now before anyone listening loses their mind and goes, oh, well, no, we pay for over performance. If people are crushing it, that's fine. But like if it was more like, hey, this is your job, go do it. If you overperform, you'll get paid more, but if not, this is your job, would that solve some of this, you think?

Oh, I think it would. But I think you have to start at the management level because I believe managers are the source of almost all discounting and managers incentives. So one way that I look at, I tell people to think about it, is that when you get to the end of the month, if you're a retailer, let's say, and you got product on the shelf and you have too much product on the shelf at the end of the month, what do you do? You run a special to get rid of the product, the surplus. Well, when you get to the end of a month, what a manager has is a surplus of unmet quota. So in order to move their surplus of unmet quota, we authorize discounts. And so it's not to say left to their own devices that sellers wouldn't do it. But the fact is the motivation really starts at the management level and so we have to address it there first. What are the incentives that managers have and how do we stop managers from dipping into that well and either pushing their people to act this way or encouraging their people to act this way. And my favorite story about this, which I include in my new book, led me to say, okay, I'm just not going to do this anymore. Was very early in my career. Buyer had promised a pretty good sized deal. This was at the end of the year. It wasn't make or break for the company, but it was big for my manager. I was already overquoted. It wasn't as big a thing for me. And the buyer was going on vacation between Christmas and New Year's and he didn't fax in the order. So the manager made me call the guide. My customer at home on Christmas Eve, on Christmas Eve, as they were having their dinner and opening their presents to ask him to fax me the order. And I thought, and I was two years, three years, five years in my career at that point. And I said, that's it. I'm not doing that anymore. I mean, if you're not making your number, that's not my problem. I was over my number. But this happens all the time, so I think it has to start there. So to your point about the sellers. Yeah. You can read study after study that says that the primary motivation for salespeople is not making money. It's the job satisfaction, a job well done. That's the things that come with it. So, yeah, pay people well for performance and I think you could do away with commissions. And there are companies in the past that have done it. Digital Equipment Corporation grew a very large computer company without paying commissions. Others have done it as well.

Yeah, I think there's going to be a shift over the next five to seven years around this. And especially with product led coming in and like the challenges that are coming with trying to break through that, that carrot always hanging there isn't what drives the behavior. It just isn't. And it causes, I think, more issues on the back end than what people believe. It helps.

Well, and I think where we see the most abuse is with people who, who perhaps are more motivated by the money than by doing a good job. And for me, and my talks with, with people have been very successful in their sales, the commission was an outcome. It's great. You know, it's been, I've been very fortunate in my career, but it wasn't the reason I got up and worked every morning.

Right. No, I love that. I think that's, that's something we're going to take a look at over the next few years because I think you start to see that shift a little bit. And if we're trying to get the trust of the buyer back, knowing that the person you're on the phone with actually is only trying to help, not that 50% of their income is tied to you. Saying yes, I think would change that dynamic just a little bit.

Well, I think it's also a mindset thing. And I'll throw another sort of simplified mindset that I think if we can get sellers to think about this, this makes all the difference, which is I like to take the complexities and simplify them. And this is one is. So for me, selling is nothing more than the following. It's listening to understand what's the most important thing to the buyer and then helping them get that. That's what our job is in sales, is to understand what's the most important thing to this person. How can I help them get that? And if you go out there with that mindset, instead of saying, my job is to sell something, my job is to understand what's most important to you and then figure out a way to help you get that. I think sellers approach the job completely different perspective. And then some of the pure raw monetary considerations on a weekly monthly basis maybe start fading a little bit. Because if you do a good job at that, helping somebody get what's most important to them, yeah, we'll pay you well. And in the meantime, you have a customer that's hopefully going into the whole relationship feeling better served right than they would if they felt like they're pushed into making a decision.

And I really, really like that. It's a good segue into kind of the next formation.

Right.

We talked kind of early stage prospect. Now we get into the close a little bit more here. What you're touching on there is key is like understanding what's most important to them right through this proper discovery and go through that process. So what are some of the ways you've seen, you've coached and you've heard of? Like, how do you actually discover that? Right? Because a lot of reps, they get their little discovery checklist and they go, so, Andy, how many employees do you have and how long have you been there and what are your biggest challenges this year? Okay, let me pitch. How do you actually start to learn some of these things about your buyer?

We have to sort of think about there's a difference between knowing and understanding. And what we do is we train sellers how to go out and basically do a survey of the buyer. It's like a survey taker outside a grocery store. I've got my survey on my clipboard and you answer these questions. And so we've gathered some information about the buyer, but we don't understand it. We don't understand what it means. We don't understand why it's important to the buyer. We don't understand the context. So I believe from a discovery standpoint, there's a couple things we have to focus on. One is discovery is not a discrete event. Discovery is something that happens every time you interact with a buyer. But we do a disservice to sellers because we lay out these sales processes that show discovery is this. This single stage of the process that even has exit criteria. And the fact is, that's not the way we learn. It's not the way your buyers learn. Right. As we continue to build trust in the relationship and what we have with the buyer, they're going to trust us with more information. They're going to give us permission to ask deeper questions and better questions. So we have to stop this. Hey, discovery is what we do on our second call. It doesn't mean you don't ask questions, but you deepen your discovery every time you interact with the buyer. And this is just a different mindset. And the way you do this is ask a variety of different questions. Because I think one of the ways you deliver value to a buyer is through the questions you ask, because you're giving them reason to stop and think in a way that perhaps they haven't before. So one of my favorite types of. Again, my new book, I outlined six types of discovery questions. But one that's always been my favorite is what I call an impact question, where I ask the buyer to tell me what the impact of making a change will be. And I sort of do a stacked question or layered questions. Start at the highest level. What would the impact be? When you're asking what the impact be, what you're asking is quantify what this will mean to you. Right. Not from an emotional standpoint, but sure, I'll get that. But what's the impact actually going to be on the organization? What's the impact going to be on your team? What's the impact going to be on you personally? What's it going to mean for you and the way you conduct your job is this is a 10% increase in revenue? Is it? Let's get down to that level. Because when I really understand the impact, then we can start understanding a little bit more about why these things are important to them. And also when you ask people to quantify the impact is it starts becoming real to them. Right? Because they're putting themselves into the picture frame. I'm now jumping into the picture about what it's going to be like to use your product. I'm taking this mental test drive of your product. That's an essential step of decision making. Everybody does a mental test drive at one point or another. So for me, that's an important question type. But it's just one of many. But it helps you start digging down. Because at the end of the day, what I want to know is not only what's the most important thing to you, I want to know who it's most important to and why. Because I think one of the. I don't say damages, but one of the ways people misconstrue this data we all get about the number of stakeholders involved in decisions is that somehow they're all equally weighted in their influence on the decision. The fact is they're not human beings in a group. Some people are going to be more dominant than their personalities. They're going to be more influential within that circle. As a seller, you need to find out who those are and you need to understand why these things that are important to them are important to them.

And I love that. And I think we talk about impact a lot, and there's two types of impact.

Right.

There's the impact of change, but also the impact of not changing. Like what happens if you don't change. Right. And getting them to think about that as well a little bit early on. But then to your. Go ahead.

Well, yeah, my point is, I think sometimes that gets overstated, though, because one of the things I'm not a fan of is asking questions about pain points. Because I think when people are making a change, they're moving forward to something new. Right? Yes. There's a challenge to be overcome. There's a barrier to overcome. But their motivation is a new state. It's not leaving the old state, it's achieving the new state. And so I always want to focus on that. Right. And I'd. So I think we too focused on the whole thing about pain and the impact of not changing because. Sure, it's a great question to ask, but I think that they serve. No. Right. Sometimes it's. It's. Yeah, you're making it more clear. But they're really focused on what can I get right? This is this. What's the future state going to be? I want their focus on that.

And then how do you help paint that picture then? Right. So, okay, we've got these good questions, right? How do you help paint that Better future. How do you said something really, really like key there that I want people to catch is like get them to picture using or get them to picture that better future.

Well and to go deeper in that. So another type of question I like to ask, I call vision questions, which is to have the buyer walk you through what it would be like to actually be using the product. So instead now it's just what the impact is. But say, so let's go, what would this mean on like a daily basis? Let's walk through on your job. Right, so what would this mean to you if you could do xyz, right is, you know, and just have them take you through it. All right, what, what would it be for your team? And so put them into that again, into that picture, but at a more detailed operational level. It's almost like said, walking them through a demo without the product and you get them to start creating this again, this vision in their own mind of what success looks like. And I like to say, because I know there's. And some people find this a little controversial because we talk about telling stories so much, but the fact is the only, in my belief and my really the only story the buyer really wants to hear is their own story, their own story of success. And so you want to paint that for them. And it's through the questions you ask about having them engage in sort of the detail, sort of pseudo use of your product and what it would mean for them on a day to day basis in their life, in their work life that you start creating that. And that gives them a tangible thing to buy into. It's one thing to do sort of a demo. And yeah, we use some of their data and so on, but you take it beyond that, go deeper. Right. What really, tell me what, how's this going to impact you on a day to day basis? What would your day. Walk me through what your day would look like. Then they start. Oh yeah, they start living that.

And I love that. Right. It all starts in our minds first, right? Absolutely. Before we swipe that card, before we sign a contract, we have to picture using it, picture the end result happening and then we want it, which I think is phenomenal. So, all right, we've got SDR processing, prospecting, we've gone closing, we've been touching on a little bit. So let's open up this can of worms now. Leadership, right? And there's, there's the management side and then there's the VP side. So we'll split these into two. Look at the frontline manager. Right. Where are some areas that they should be spending more time now that they're probably not?

Well, can I take it one step further above.

Of course.

Yeah. We're not helping our frontline managers, Right. We under invest in them substantially. And I would say we as a profession is they get promoted very quickly unless they're in a really large enterprise, they receive almost no training, and we presume they suddenly become an expert in all these facets of management and personal development, personal growth of the people working for them, things that they just aren't equipped because they haven't been taught. Right. And so it's not their fault. They're not failing, we're failing them. And I like to use the sort of the apocryphal hyperbole of saying, okay, we spend $15 billion a year training salespeople in the United States. Maybe 10% of that gets spent on managers. What if we flip that ratio? What if we spent 90% of it on training our managers, only 10% on training our sellers? What do we think would happen? And I'll tell you what I think would happen. I think sales would go up because we're giving these people that are responsible for the development of our sellers the tools to be able to do so. And so that's just my soapbox. I would start there, right? I would dramatically change how much we invest in managers. But then I think if you're a manager, yeah, you have the same obligation for continuous learning that you do as a seller. So you need to invest in yourself the same way that you would when you're first coming up in your career. In fact, maybe I'd say it's more urgent that you do so because it's more complex. It's not just dealing with yourself now and understanding, let's say, the psychology of a buyer now you need to understand the psychology of the people that work for you. Right. How do you coach somebody? How do you help them put together a growth plan? How do you. How do you understand what performance improvement really means? How do you help upskill these individuals? Again, they're not equipped to do that. If they're not being equipped, then you need to take on some of that responsibility yourself. And I think those that succeed have some intuition, perhaps better than others about it, but they also invest in that. So you have to read, you have to watch videos. You got to do the same things that. There it is. Go to conferences, talk to your customers. I mean, I still learned so much about sales and management from my customers. Just be Open to influences. And then don't fall into this mindset that you think you know what you're doing, because you don't. And it's not your fault. It is.

It's such a common error, I think, on both sides to your point, right, Is like, leaders will promote people up and give them no support. But also sometimes reps that get promoted up, they feel like they do know it already. It's like, just because you were a great rep, you're now a rookie manager. And it's putting that student cap back on a little bit and going, I have a lot to learn here.

Well, but even if you're a great rep, I mean, I got promoted in my first job. I got promoted after 21 months to management in sales. I took on responsibility for 12 people, and it's like, I hadn't even learned how to sell yet. Right. I mean, granted, I'd done a good job. I had made president's club. But really, did I know how to sell after less than two years? Of course not. So the idea was even sort of ludicrous of me teaching these other people how to do it, especially when some of them were 20 years older than I was. So, yeah, you have to be. Have this humility, this intellectual humility to be an effective leader, to say, yeah, there's a lot I don't know. And there's a great quote I like from the late Clayton Christensen, wrote the Innovator's Dilemma and other great books. You know, he said that, Gosh, I always get this. I always get this backward. I got. Give me a second. I get the quote right? Because it's such a good quote. He says questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the questions, the answers have nowhere to go. And I think that's, you know, as your manager, it's like, yeah, you got to ask these questions, right? You gotta. You can't assume that you know something. You gotta continue to be asking and learning because then the information has a place to go in your brain.

And so what for you have been some of those key learnings as a leader, you know, as you look back at your career and people you've worked with and developed, and, you know, we trip over and we make mistakes and we learn. Like, what are some of those key management learnings that you have that you could share and say, these. These are some of the areas where I made mistakes, too. I've made so many mistakes as, like, you know, as a manager and leader, you know, like, what what are some.

Of those learnings as a human? We're just. We're going to do it. Yeah. Well, I mean, the most important one is one we all learn. But I think that so many people don't practice enough in sort of a leadership role is that it's. We only succeed if our people succeed. And so I tried to always keep in mind that my primary job was to help my sellers become the best version of themselves. And to the extent I could do that, then I would succeed. And I learned early on from a manager that actually a CEO at a startup I work for who he just blew me away. As I remember bringing in, we're meeting with a salesperson that worked for me. I was VP of sales and working the CEO, and we were talking about this one account and what the seller was going to do. And I started taking my cue from the CEO and what the seller was laying out was just wrong. Right. But he wasn't going to say it. He was going to let that person go learn. And I think having that patience to let people learn from their mistakes and not feeling like you have to jump in and correct them all the time and put them on the right path before things happen, it's like being a helicopter parent, right. As you're trying to go in and protect your children from something you think might happen. Well, no, let them experience defeat. Let them experience failure. Let them learn from it. But I think people feel so under the gun these days. They don't feel they have the luxury to do that. But you almost don't have the luxury not to, because this is how your people learn. And so that was a great lesson for me, is sometimes I just got to keep my mouth closed as well.

I love that. That patience. Right. The, you know, we talk about this often, even with my own management team. Right. Is slow down to speed up. Slow down. Like, you may think that getting in there and get after it and hopping on that call, like you're doing everything so fast and it's hurting you in the long run, versus slow down, let them learn. Take the time to address things one by one instead of also, you know, made this mistake as a leader myself, all the feedback like, okay, so here you did that demo.

Cool.

Let me give you all the feedback versus here, this. We're gonna work on this right here. And eventually we'll get to the other things.

Well, yeah. And I. So one of the things I learned from a manager, which early in my career, which I have done still do, is he would. He would want to do, like a detailed pipeline review, let's say. And he demanded that you know everything. But he would ask questions. Deep, deep question. You go through this pipeline. But I got to the end of it, and I was like, oh, he never told me what to do. He just wanted to make sure that I knew. Right. So by asking his questions, he was setting the example of how much I should know about the account. And it was humbling experience. I thought, oh, my God. He really, in some respects, knows more about these things than I do my own accounts, just through the questions he was asking. But I think that's something for managers to think about is when you. Let's say you're doing a pipeline review. Yeah. Go deep. Make sure. Ask the questions. Make sure your seller understands you don't have to give your advice or your opinion about anything. This is the gap I think the too many managers want to jump, as you said, is let them figure it out.

We have a little acronym we joke about with my management team internally. Right. It's wwkda.

What would KD advise?

Ask.

Ask.

Yeah. Right. And that's actually the whole premise, right? What you're just talking about. I'm not there to tell you what to do. And that's not what would KD do? It's not what KD advise. It's what ask. And it's taking that pause. Like, you know what? Especially if you've worked with me for a few years, you probably know what I would ask. Go those extra layers deeper and do those questions yourself and then come with the problem or the solution or the idea. But it's really encouraging. Ask that extra question. Slow down. Right. The whole thing is, slow down.

Absolutely.

Ask your question.

Yeah. And that's. And remember, I was working with a client a number of years ago, and one of the sellers thought, he said, oh, God, this is really. You're really micromanaging. I said, what happened? Have I suggested anything to you? I'm just asking the questions. And it was like, oh, yeah. Then you sort of start getting it right. Yeah. That's all you want. I just want to make sure you're up to speed.

I love it. I love it. And questions. As I hope everyone listening, you see the theme here in selling and in leadership and a lot of times in life, it's the questions we ask. I love that analogy of, like, questions are where the answers go in your brain. If you don't ask the question, you can't find the answer. Right. So awesome. And I have two more key questions for you before we wrap up. We've already been at 40 minutes. I knew this was going to go way too fast. So the first one, you know, we call it like the big three, right? People remember things at the beginning, they remember things towards the end of the things that we've talked about. And also just through your experience and your reach of, like getting to speak to so many people around sales and leadership and scaling. If you could give three key takeaways or pieces of advice like these three things as foundation, either from our conversation today or conversations that you've had that have really left an impact on you, what would those three things be?

Great question or questions? Well, one is it's still a human business, so start there. Use that as your foundation. It always starts. Everything's built off the connection you form with another human being. And you really, you know, people, you see people writing about this on LinkedIn and so on, is, you know, downplaying the importance of this. But the fact is everything you do subsequent to the connection is built on the connection. So if you don't make the connection, you're not going to go anywhere. And so it's still, as a seller, a large part, what you do is based on your ability to form a connection with another human being and build a rapport, have some empathy, build trust. That's not. That part's not going away. So I think that's. If you always want to talk about how much sales is changing, and I like to say, let's talk about how much has stayed the same. And this is one of the real critical things. Gosh, you know, I like to say sales is much simpler than people think. And I think this idea about having in the right mindsets that people be in is really understanding what their job is. We talked about it earlier is if a seller started their work every day in their outreach and their calls, and they said, look, my mission is just to understand what's most important to my buyer and then put together a plan to help them get that. That's just a different path for people. And I think that that's really critical. And I've held that mindset in my career. And I'm somebody that was not a fit to be in most of the jobs I had, I think certainly early in my career, selling very complex technical products. I was not a technically trained person. I was smart enough guy that could learn, you know, at a certain level, the products. But. But the ability to be successful is based on helping somebody and people being. Having the trust in me to be able to Help them get what was important to them. And so I think that's, that's just, you know, these mindsets are just simple but, but so crucial. And, and we, we do a disservice again to our salespeople and to people in the, and to our buyers. When we become so pitch oriented and really like called us, we indulge in being salesy and it's really, it's time to stop that type of behavior. Right? We could just stop it right now. We have the power. It has no value to buyers. It has no value to sellers. There's a great book put out a couple of years ago by a professor from Wharton, Jonah Berger, called the Catalyst, talking about persuasion. And he said, cites a study, I don't know if it's his study or somebody else's study. Says universally everybody hates being persuaded. Here's what they term was persuasion reactants. We intuitively resist being persuaded. Yet this is the primary mode of operation that we train sellers in. And so again, I call that salesy behavior. And we just have to stop. I mean it's past time and we can all stop doing that today. We don't need to do that. I like to tell sellers, here's the one question, one question a buyer will never ask you. And the question is, hey, Katie, I love what you're selling, I love the product, but you're just not salesy enough. Could you be more salesy?

No one stopped you and said, wait, you didn't ask enough discovery questions.

It's just like no one's ever going to ask you to be more salesy. So why are we doing it? And the solution really is pretty simple. So I think that's one. The third thing, I think we get too hung up on process. Process is important, but you know, there's a whole cadre of people that think that process sells, process and sell people sell. And what you have to do is give people more autonomy within a process. And I think this is a stumbling block that we have is it's not that. It's not that process is important, but we need to give people the freedom to become the best version of themselves within that process. I think that we sort of touched on this earlier is that too many sales managers are fearful of sort of and operate off a position of fear in their jobs and not making their numbers, being hammered by their bosses, whatever, that they don't feel comfortable giving this a level of autonomy to their sellers to grow and develop. And it's holding everybody back. And so I think we're sort of hopefully coming towards inflection points we talked about earlier with regard to specific sales models. Where I think one of the impacts would be is that, you know, we're less focused on sort of the detailed activity metrics and more about outcomes, but also holding people accountable for outcomes, but understanding also that everybody operates just a little bit differently and trying to stop making everybody a clone of the next person.

Man, I love that. That itself could have been the entire episode as well. Like, that was just gold, man. Like, I knew this was going to be good. And I was also like, man, we're not going to be able to keep this within the window. There's no way, like, we could go on this forever. I got one more for you here, right? The name of the podcast is Live Better Sell Better, right? And you've been dropping some nuggets along the way that I think we're very aligned on. We have this weird idea, right, that if we did take better care of ourselves and act like humans and have more joy, energy, fulfillment, that the sales would also be better. What would your Live better advice be for the people listening?

Worry less. You know, it's hard to not worry in sales, right, because we're in this business where the clock resets to zero every 30 days. But, you know, the worry never got me ahead and it's just, I think it's a struggle. So I think exercise, nutrition, sleep, you know, meditation, breathing exercises, things that, that you need to just live a better life, pay attention to them. You know, I've got, I wear these activity trackers.

I've got the ur.

I've got my apple watch on my bed. And now I got this eight sleep thing. I don't know if you've heard about that. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm probably over indexing on data about personal fitness these days, but why not, right? And I am more conscious about it. I am more conscious now, but getting more sleep and I am conscious about the other things. Even though I've been actively involved in fitness my entire life as a runner and a swimmer and a bicyclist and so on, but can always do better. But yeah, the net effect is just. I think you talk about joy, I think joy is an important thing. Steve Carve, the coach of the warriors, talked about, you know, he builds this culture based on joy, compassion and competition. But he was saying, you know, the competition part of it. And you think about that's basketball. He created this great basketball program. You had the warriors with us. Joy, you get right? Just it's fun I mean, sales is fun. I've been in it for over four decades. I mean, it wasn't. It's been amazing. I mean, I've traveled the world. I've sold on every continent but Antarctica. Started my career selling women's shoes and sold deals over 100 million worth, over $100 million and everything in between. And I said, met all these fascinating people and I've had my own company for 20 years and have this great podcast that I' learned so much from talking to all these smart people like yourself. Yeah, it was fun, right? And so you have to. You have to enjoy it and get the joy from it. Compassion part is, you know, we're trying to help people. We're trying to. That's our job. And the competition, interestingly, and Kerr talks about the car, talks about this as well as Steve Kerr, I guess is. Is a lot of. It's the competition with ourselves is to make the extra call to invest in ourselves. We're basically competing with ourselves and competing sort of with our allocation of time. It's not competition with the person sitting next to me or competition with my competitors. That's part of the fun is competing with my competitors, but competing with myself to make the right decisions to do the things that will have me, help me have a more fulfilling career. And so, yeah, you don't last in it as long as I have if you don't sort of take care of yourself.

Take care of yourself and have some fun.

And have some fun. It's not that there aren't moments of frustration and, you know, pound your head against the wall type thing, because, you know, we are dealing with people. It's a people business. But, yeah, by and large, it's been tremendous fun and I've been incredibly fortunate to have this career I could never have anticipated. History major out of college, literally had no idea what to do to where I am today. It's like, yeah, I've been lucky. Love it.

I love it, man. I love it. Now, where can people get more of you? I heard you drop a book. You said you got your second book out now is.

It's a third book.

It's number three.

Third book coming in February.

Okay.

And we're gonna be announcing it soon. When's this episode going to air?

I'll wait until you tell me to say go.

Okay, well, you can do it anytime. But the book will be coming out in February. We'll be announcing it toward the end of October, beginning of November. Yeah, I'm very excited about it because it really it deals with some of the topics to talk about today, which is, look, we, as a profession, we indulge in these behaviors that have no value to our buyers and our sellers. I'll call them the salesy behaviors, but actually I have a name for them. You'll get from the book.

Awesome.

And it's just time to draw a line in the sand and say, look, enough is enough. We've been doing these things for 100 plus years. Let's stop adding. Technology hasn't changed, exacerbated, and made some of them worse than it's been in the past. So let's just stop. And that your success in life and in sales could really be boiled down to four attributes. And so these four attributes are, which I'll go into in depth in the book, are connection, curiosity, understanding, and generosity. And from that, you can build a life and a career. And the book shows you how to do it.

Do we get the title yet? Is that finalized?

Oh, yeah, it's finalized. We're not announcing it quite yet, but it's coming.

Awesome.

You'll like it. It makes it very clear what it's about.

I cannot wait. I will be first in line to scoop that up and I will make sure everyone in the Patreon group as well has that access and knows about it. Because if it's anywhere close to what we Talked about in 50 minutes today, it's going to be well worth the read and getting into detail. I'm really, really excited for format.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm excited about it too. It's my best one yet and it's been long and coming because books morph as you start to write them. And then the pandemic actually sort of gave me extra time to think about it, which was I'm sort of grateful for having extra time and sort of changed a little bit, made it more concise, a little more powerful. So, yeah, and fortunate to work with a great team to help me write it too.

Hell yes. Well, while people wait for the book, where else can they get more of you? Where should they connect? What should they listen to? Where can I get more of the Andy Paul in their life?

So thank you. First of all, LinkedIn is a great place to connect with me. Post content quite frequently there and then please do connect with me if you haven't connected with me already. And then my podcast sales enablement with Andy Paul. And we have three new episodes a week and yeah, lots of great content stretching back just about a thousand episodes.

Oh, yes, my man. This was everything I thought it was going to be and a little bit more. Thank you so much for your time, your energy, your insights, man. I greatly appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I support. Pleasure to be here. And we'll do it again. We'll have you back online before too long. Hell, yeah.

Let's make it happen, man.

Yep.