Dan Smith, CAO of Winning By Design, argues sales has shifted from pushy pitches to problem-solving. He introduces the 10-20-70 learning rule: 10% reading, 20% practice, 70% teaching others. Modern SaaS and subscription models changed how people buy, and founders must teach their teams to sell by doing, not lecturing.
Chapters
All right, so while you're still standing, the thing that I want to start off with is that how we have been taught in school traditionally has been a lie. We are all taught that we learn by doing this lecture style, but in fact, the best way to learn is only 10% by reading or listening to a lecture. 20% of learning comes from practicing it, doing role plays with each other, implementing what you just learned. 70%— does anybody know where that comes from? Teaching others. Well, I love teaching others. It's a really great way to learn. It's probably the fastest way, but it's actually doing it. Teaching is a form of doing it. How many hours does it take to become an expert at something? 10,000. And I think that's a lie too, because we've all been in cars with taxi drivers who have definitely put in 10,000 hours of driving, and they're not very good drivers. It's actually the amount of time that you spend deliberately practicing it. So the things that you learn today are I want you to know how to actually execute on that. So without further ado, if you need another stretch, go for it. Sit back down. This is gonna be hopefully a really engaging session, 'cause that's the best way to learn. Now for the video, do you need this mic, or can I speak outside of the mic? Need the mic, all right. I'll do my best then. I like to write. We'll figure it out together. So I stumbled into sales accidentally. My almost story and those are my favorite types of ways to get to know somebody, is what almost happened to you. Did anybody check out my LinkedIn and see my almost story? You did? My favorite almost story is that I almost did CPR on Michael Jackson. What? I stumbled into sales after pursuing a career in medicine. Well, I got pretty far along. I got into med school, deferred for a year, And decided to try my hand at healthcare. Now, healthcare side of business was a really interesting position for me. I worked in the ER for 3 and a half years, loved it. Worked on the ambulance, my favorite part was putting on those lights, riding on the other side of the road, loved it. Now, the reason it's an almost story is that I ended up being on vacation that week. I was in Utah and saw it on the news, and I was devastated because I literally lived 2 minutes away from the hospital, so I could have gone over there. I could have helped out, it would have been awesome. But what I found about medicine as it relates to sales is that there is a surprising amount of overlap. The reason that I switched gears is you get a lot more control doing what you're doing right now, being entrepreneurs, solving problems. So what I'd like to share with you is some of the insights that I learned along the way of what does the modern sales profession actually look like. You as founders, you're gonna be the number one salesperson. But you also have to inspire the next people to follow you. How do we teach them how to sell? So before we get started, is there anybody in here that comes from a traditional sales background? Diana, what kind of sales did you do? Okay. What have you learned about selling? What are some of the insights that you could share with everybody? Ah, selling is a personal development. That's absolutely right. So the first thing that I'd like to share with you, how sales Has changed. I think traditionally what we've thought about is that sales is always us pitching to somebody. We're always taught that we need to maximize our elevator pitch, but what I have found is that it's much more influential to share a story about somebody similar. Even if I'm doing B2C sales or B2B sales, the idea behind influence is still the same. Now, what are some of the negative connotations that we associate with salespeople? Cheap. Oh, pushy. Pushy. What else? Annoying. Okay. In the back, what do you guys think about salespeople? Ooh. Why do you say boo? You don't like being told to buy stuff. And this is the fundamental issue that we have. We all love buying, but we hate being sold to. If you ever go up in San Francisco and you go to Second Admission, there's always those guys or girls with the red vests on or the green vests on, save the children, save the whales. I love sales, and I hate talking to those people, because I feel like they're just gonna pitch me. I feel that salespeople, all they care about is the money. They don't care if it actually works for me. I hate being told what to do. The modern sales approach needs to turn that on your head. The best way to inspire somebody is to make them feel like what you are going to deliver to them will help them solve problems. It is no longer about pitching. So I wanna have you go through a new sales funnel, so whatever your solution is, you know how to apply that. What is the first thing that a customer needs to have before they ever buy something from you? Knowledge. Well, of course they need money, but they have to have a problem. Usually if the problem is big enough, they'll figure out where the money comes from. What fundamentally changed in 2000 with how people bought software solutions? The internet. The internet. Well, that happened before 2000, but what about the internet aligned to selling a solution happened? Did anybody hang out in San Francisco last week? Salesforce. Salesforce. First book recommendation I'll give you, there's probably gonna be a couple peppered in here. First book, Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff. Has anybody read that book? He describes what has happened to fundamentally shift as the first public company to have a SaaS model, what had to shift in the mindset about how we buy things. Today, we all buy things like that. The most simple example of this would be Netflix or Spotify, some B2C that we go online, buy something $5, $10, That is the traditional SaaS model. For anybody who has bought Adobe in the past, you can get real frustrated that you used to own the software. It would be really expensive, $600, but you get that for life. Now, does anybody know what the Adobe Creative Suite costs per month? Say it again. $20 a month for students. Yes, but somebody like me who is no longer able to claim studentship, it's like $50 a month. And if we think about that, that adds up real quick. So in one year subscription, I now pay what I used to get for life. This subscription model is something that can help on the short term, but depending on the solution that you're delivering, there's going to be trade-offs. So I want to think about this in terms of the traditional sales model versus the modern sales approach. Everybody show me with your hands, what does the traditional sales model look like? Sales funnel. Sorry, not sales model. What's the sales funnel? What does it look like? Show me with your hands. Absolutely, something like this. What's at the top of that funnel? We got leads. It's prospects, suspects. These are all the people that we think could be a good fit. Why does it narrow at the bottom? We gotta disqualify some people, maybe they disqualify themselves. Either way, people fall out, and this is natural. Ultimately, there's not gonna be everybody that we win at the end. They're gonna come down to the bottom. Now, that is the traditional flow. Think of a used car salesman. They got a bunch of people walking on the lot, a few of them will turn into customers. This is why I was so scared to tell my mom Hey, Mom, you know I thought I was going to be a doctor? Going into sales. I always thought about that used car salesman approach, and it has a lot of negative connotations to it. Now, the problem with that approach is that used car salesmen— where did all the money come from? Where do they get their commission? When you have signed that contract, you get the commission on that deal. This completely flips over when when we talk about the SaaS sales model, recurring revenue model. We now know based on that Adobe example that money comes a lot later. So now I want you to think about the new funnel not as top-down, but as left-to-right bowtie. We'll still have leads come in over here, but just like we described, the first thing that they need to have is awareness of a problem that they need solved. We will never have customers that buy something just to buy something. They always are buying something to solve a problem. Our job as founders, and really as salespeople, is to make sure that we set the stage for whatever problem they have, we can help them solve it. It's not about our features, about our benefits, that's pitching. It's about what can we do to help you?
