960: International Sales, with Zach Selch

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But you know what the customer does know? Again, talking about what people think. People think the customer Knows what their pain is, but the customer doesn't know their timeline. The customer knows their timeline, right? So you can't go to the customer and say, I need you to put in a purchase order by the 15th of January, right? Doesn't work that way. The customer knows when they have money available, when they can buy something. And with that, you have to play by their rules. You can, you can influence whether they're going to buy your product or not. I I find it very difficult to get a customer to buy on my timeline.

Hi friends, welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Zach Selch. Zach's an expert on international sales and the author of a book titled Global Sales: A Practical Playbook on How to Drive Profitable Growth for international sales and marketing leaders. And in our conversation today, we're talking about something we probably don't talk about enough here on the show, which is international sales. So we'll get into why selling internationally is not the same as selling domestically. Zach also talks about the problem he's encountered in companies where people in the company who don't understand what he was trying to do selling internationally— I know personally I've experienced this— and they didn't understand the steps you need to take to do it properly. So we dive into how and why a strong international sales strategy can help drive new sources of revenue, how it's a way to grab market share less expensively than fighting it out domestically, and also boost the overall value of the enterprise. And then we dig into one of the prime challenges and decisions that companies have to make if they want to sell internationally, and that is whether to sell direct or sell through distribution. And Zach shares some of the challenges of going either route and gives some good tips about how to help you make the right choice If you choose distributors, how to choose the right distributor. So all of this and much, much more. But before we get to Zach, I want to remind you to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to it. And if you subscribe, we'd certainly appreciate it if you could also give us your feedback about how we're doing in the form of a review. So thank you. All right, let's jump into it. Zach, welcome to the show.

Thanks a lot, Andy. I've been looking forward to this.

Yeah, me as well.

Thanks for having me.

Me as well. Yeah, we had some schedule difficulties, mostly on my end, to make this happen. So glad we're able to do that.

That's great.

I'm excited because we're going to talk about a topic we don't talk about much on the show. In fact, I don't think we've had an episode devoted to this at all, which is international sales.

Yep, that's what I do. So cool.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you get into becoming this expert on international sales?

I've been doing international sales for about 35 years and I basically, I'm just one of these people who sort of, Um, fell into selling as a young person. I realized I really liked it. I realized I was good at it. And I also had a real desire to see the world and travel. And then I started to put the two together and I realized, you know, I remember when I was a kid, I was actually working in a flea market when I was about 11. And I thought, you know, if I can sell I was selling factory-second welcome mats, right? I was like, if I can sell factory-second welcome mats to tourists, I could probably sell something anywhere in the world and then I could see the world. That was sort of like this thing that hit me when I was about 11.

Well, so wait, wait, wait. Let's go back for a second. Factory-second welcome mats to tourists. Now, where were you living?

So I was living in rural Pennsylvania.

Like Amish country or something?

Yeah, Amish country. Yeah, yeah. Smoketown, Pennsylvania. And my family, we were not affluent. So we actually lived in a trailer. And down the street from the trailer park was a flea market. And I met this guy who was an ex-outlaw biker. So picture like in the '70s, this guy with like facial tattoos and he's missing the front teeth.

So outlaw biker, Amish country, flea market. Great story.

And he had all this crap which he sold, and he had 4 stands in the flea market. And, um, he put me to work selling factory-second, uh, welcome mats. And, you know, tour buses would come in from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore and Philadelphia, and I would sell them, uh, welcome mats. And, um, you know, I got really good at it. And, um, and then I— it was sort of like it sunk in. I was like, I am doing something everybody else on the, you know, in the flea market are adults. They're doing the exact same thing I am, and I'm doing it pretty well. I could do this the rest of my life. And then I thought, but if, you know, instead of selling a $3, you know, uh, welcome mat, I could conceivably— and at the time I was thinking the biggest thing I could think of were like airplanes and trains and stuff like that. And I thought I could be selling transportation equipment or something giant. That was my dream. I never actually got to selling airplanes, but I basically realized that I could sell medical equipment and I could sell different things. I worked my way through life figuring out what I could sell.

Well, you did a lot of You did a lot of medical device sales, but I mean—

Right.

I mean, you're not—

I'm not locked into one thing. I've sold a bunch of different things.

You're not an engineer, or you're not a scientist?

Not at all. So again, it was sort of like— it was sort of a little bit lucky. I was in the military, and I got an opportunity to sell used military hospital equipment. And I did that for a little while. I was doing that in Africa back in the early '90s.

Well, let's not go so quick through this. So you were selling used US military hospital equipment to whom in Africa?

To governments, so their militaries. And because what happens is stuff that you get from the US, It's pretty good stuff, right?

Sure.

And we stop using it. Essentially, we want our soldiers to have the absolute best stuff.

Right, right.

And as soon as it gets a little old, a little dirty, a little whatever, we're done with it. And if you are the government of Zaire, then you're perfectly happy to have some 5-year-old field surgical tents and stuff like that, right? So, um, that was—

who are you working for?

Um, I was working for an agency, like a, um, distribute— a distributor. It was basically— it was one of those things where somebody knew me and said, hey, would you like to do this? And it was sort of like, well, I'm young, I don't have any family, this is a cool idea. And so I spent some time pretty much like running around Africa and also, um, the ex-Soviet Union because it was right when the wall came down, right? And they were in the same position. They had nothing, right? So they would buy, you know, a 10-year-old hospital bed or a ventilator or something. They'd, they'd buy it without even thinking about it. So mostly I was dealing with ministries of defense, dealing with their medical equipment needs. So, and I did that for a few years.

I mean, and the reason— I mean, It's not just fascinating because of where you are and what you're— but the fact that, you know, we get so bound up in this world thinking that the world sort of stops and starts with SaaS, right? Or, or yeah, something, right? It's like there's so much that's sold and so many interesting places.

And I'll tell you what, it's like we don't even think about it where, you know, we're done with something and somebody else will find it perfectly good to use.

Yeah.

And you can't— I tell people this all the time. Everybody says, well, how do I get into sales? And I say, sell something that nobody else wants to sell, right? You know, if you're 22 years old and you have a degree in art history and you go to, you know, a big successful SaaS company and you say, hey, I'd like to be a salesman, they're not going to give you a job right away, right? What are they going to do? Maybe they'll give you an SDR job or something.

Yeah, you'll be an SDR, right?

You can do that for a few years or in my case, it was like somebody said, hey, we have a sales job that nobody else wants. It's going to be running around to cheap hotels in Africa, sitting in the waiting room of the Minister of Defense for days at a time. Would you like to do that?

In Kinshasa.

Right, exactly. Would you be willing to do this? I thought, well— I'll tell you what, like I say to people all the time, if I hadn't done that, I would probably be like the regional salesman for a beer company in Western Pennsylvania. And I'd be wearing a shirt that says Miller Lite on it or something, right? And not that that's a bad thing.

Oh, that's, that's honorable profession. Yes.

But I've, I've, I've gotten a different path. And I've done stuff that I really found interesting. And I made a little bit of money. And I've seen the world, right? So—

Well, yeah, and I think that's one of the great things about what you're doing. And for me, because I spent The better part of 15 years doing international sales. And, you know, I like to say I've sold on every continent but Antarctica.

Right.

And yeah, you have a set of experiences.

Right.

And the people that worked with me had a set of experiences. Yeah, I remember getting a call from a guy that— one of the guys that worked for me. He says— he called me from Manila. I said, well, what's— how's it going? He goes, well, You know, I'm lying on the floor of my hotel room because the attempted coup is going on and there's bullets flying outside.

Right, right, right. Yeah.

Or I think of, I think of some of the hotels that I've stayed in and out of the way places that, you know, I would do when I was younger, but there's like, you know, you almost like, can I sleep with one eye open tonight?

Yeah. But I'll tell you what, that's the thing some people don't get is everybody wants it really, really easy in their 20s, right? And they're like, well, what? I have a great degree, you should give me a great job. And you have to pay your dues, you have to work hard, right? And that's the way I sort of looked at it. So yeah, I worked hard in my 20s, I learned a lot, and then I was able to apply that to do other things. But if you don't pick up these skills, You know, one thing with what I do with international channel sales, nobody— there's nobody really teaching it, right? You can't— you can go and you can get a degree at Thunderbird or something like that. Thunderbird is— and nothing against any school or anything, they aren't going to teach you how to run a sales organization internationally. You have to pick it up from somebody like me or doing it yourself or something like that, right?

Yeah, no, it's learning by experience. Absolutely. I mean, no one I was running around Asia setting up distributors, and I didn't have a guidebook or a playbook.

And you had nobody to ask, right? I mean, that's the—

The company hadn't done it before. In fact, one startup I went to, the founders were actually kind of pissed off that I was— we had a product that was designed to be sold overseas. The market was primarily overseas. They didn't want to do it because it seemed expensive, right? Of course, you know, we tripled the size of the company quickly, but they didn't like it.

Right.

It's like, right, but that's what we're shooting.

And that happens all the time. And then what happened when you left? You probably didn't hang— they didn't ask you to teach somebody or write a playbook and leave it for somebody, right? And that's what happens.

I was recruited to go somewhere else. Yeah.

Right. But, but that's what happens, that all that knowledge you picked up probably left the company, right? And nothing against you, but this is what happens over and over again, is that, you know, the, the people start out in a job like that, they don't have anybody to guide them, they have no real, you know, institutional knowledge. You know, it happens. International sales is like the hard— it's sort of funny. It's the glamour, you know, everybody thinks of it as glamorous. It is the hardest thing to learn because there's no institutional knowledge around typically.

Yeah. And also, it's, it's, you're just, you're in situations that are so different. And if you're not, if you're not open-minded, if you're not adaptable, if you're not, you know, if you're not gonna be able to go with the flow, if you aren't able to connect with other human beings, which is, you know, that's really the heart of it was just like, you know, everybody talks about— I remember when I first started international business, there was always these books about business protocol and don't be an ugly American and so on. And what I found is the books are really full of crap because what people really wanted is they just wanted you to be yourself, right?

Right.

I mean, I had one fellow that worked for me. He was, you know, he was a great person. He was funny, warm, but he was very Southern and wasn't afraid to speak his mind. And, you know, people would travel with us sometimes, like the bosses, and they'd be so horrified. But everybody loved this guy, right? Because he was authentic. And so, yeah, it presented— doing international sales for me was fantastic because it was just a set of experiences I couldn't have gotten anywhere else. You learn so much.

I lived in India for 3 years and I thought I was pretty good when I got there, but I learned so much from doing business in India, just from negotiating. It was such a— it was the toughest 3 years of my life, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot about negotiation.

Nobody negotiates price like that.

Nobody negotiates like the Indians. Brutal. And if you can survive and thrive, then you're gonna, you know, you're gonna do well anywhere in the world after that, right?

Yeah. Well, again, it's also, it's just one of those environments where there's, it's so different. I mean, I— oh yeah, yeah, you know, you have the experiences. I said my one salesperson worked for me that was, you know, in the midst of a coup attempt.

Uh, yep. And, and that's, that's, I was thinking about that. I was talking to somebody the other day about that, a guy who worked for me He landed in Lebanon and he said he had been there a dozen times before. He landed in Lebanon and the airport was quiet. He gets to the hotel and the guy at the hotel says to him, why are you here now? And he goes, well, I have meetings. And the guy at the hotel says, no, no, I mean now. Do you understand there's a civil war going on? There's, you know, the government forces are fighting with Hezbollah. And my guy was stuck for 2 weeks in his hotel and he hadn't realized coming in, like— And after that, I set up a protocol. Always check the news before you go into a country. Just check to make sure, you know, there hasn't been some type of a political upheaval or something. You know, these things, they don't happen when you're going to Cleveland, right?

No, no. I, I was with a couple of my people who worked for me in Bonn when the Berlin Wall came down.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And, um, you know, the next day we're going to a meeting with The German government, and my technical guy's not there, right? He'd gone to Berlin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it was the thing to do, right?

Yeah, stuff was happening. The wall was coming down, and, uh, he, he was there. He says, did you watch the news? I, I was there.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and that's, that's the interesting thing. It's like you, um, you get You're in the right place at the right time. You see interesting things, you know. And not that other people— not that selling— you know, selling is an honorable profession wherever you're doing it. I just enjoy the fact that I get to see a little bit more interesting things, right? And I always have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I tell people, going to and from was no fun, but being there was a lot of fun.

Yeah, but going to and from is sort of like part of the business, you know. If you can do it in a cost-effective way, because basically I say, okay, if you, you know, you have— I went into a job once and I did the math and I'm like, you know, you are costing us an average of $20,000 per meeting you go to. And we really have to push that down to about $2,000, right? You have to go to more meetings and you have to do like— because what he was doing, he was traveling about 30 days a year. But he was traveling, he was traveling, resting, doing a meeting, traveling, resting, doing a meeting.

Dude.

Yeah. And I said to him, I was like, you know, we, we need, you know, between your salary and the cost of travel and everything else, we are not getting enough. And, and I, I, you know, so you have to sometimes look at that of like, how do we work to make this just more effective, right?

Yeah. Well, and I think that's one of the things with with doing international business when you have constraints. So I always worked for startups and we didn't have a lot of money to spend on travel.

Right.

It ties into a point you wrote about in your book. So you'd written this book, you've written this book called Global Sales: A Practical Playbook on How to Drive Profitable Growth for International Sales and Marketing Leaders. I mean, it's huge, as you and I have talked about. So it's very comprehensive. And, but one of the things you talk in there about is that— I was just looking for the quote here— is you said, well, one of the many over the recent months, meaning during the pandemic, many of the basic tenets that you consider sacrosanct concerning the importance of face-to-face meetings have been turned on their heads. And, you know, there's been so much written about virtual selling during the pandemic.

Right.

But I think back to, you know, I would— the years I was doing international sales, I was selling large complex communication systems, working for startups, we didn't have money necessarily. So as I was talking to people, it's like, well, that's almost all we did was virtual selling, right? I mean, for me to close a multimillion-dollar deal with somebody in Europe or in Asia, I'd visit them once. Sometimes twice. Um, and most we're doing virtually. And this was decades ago.

Right.

Um, that's why I find it interesting. People think like, this is so new. And it's like, well, yeah, if you've been doing international sales for any period of time, you'd know that's how you're selling.

Right. I think it's about— it's an interesting balance because here, here's the way I look at it. There, there's an element of establishing trust and rapport. Right. And then there's an element of what I call helping the customer internalize that you solve his problem, like the information side, right?

Right.

Now, the information side is relatively easy to do remotely. Establishing rapport, depending on the culture, can be impossible, or it could be relatively easy depending on the person, the technology, etc. And that's The killer. So you basically say, okay, if I can get over there once and have a meal with this guy, then the rest of it I can do remotely, probably. Or you have to find a way to say what I, what I like to say, borrow somebody else's rapport. If I can get an agent or distributor who has good rapport, right, to work for me, then I don't have to be there. But there are just people in different cultures, in certain cultures, that are— it's impossible to get a purchase order out of them without establishing some type of trust, which is almost based on some type of face-to-face connection.

Yeah.

And that really becomes— I think that's the hardest part now of finding the right balance. And it comes down to— I mean, there are ways around it. Like I said, The best way around it is to find somebody on the ground and say, look, I'm going to give you X% if you are my guy on the ground and establish this rapport. I did some things during COVID I hired people that I found through like Fiverr and I said, go to this guy's office, hand him a cell phone because he isn't answering my calls. Right. I love it.

Yeah.

You know, and that's, that's worth $100 to me, right? If you, if you'll do it, sure. You know, because I can't get him on the phone and I need to talk to him, right? Um, you know, so you say we, we had to be really, really imaginative, but I closed a lot of business during COVID that a year before, if you had told me I could have done it with so little face time, I wouldn't have believed it, right? So, so I think everything's evolved We're figuring stuff out, which is interesting.

Yeah, well, I think one of the things that I'm interested to get your take on, because, you know, if you look at sort of classic domestic sales, especially these days, is if there's going to be sort of a face-to-face, and this is, you know, now coming back again after COVID, but let's say even before COVID especially with the advent of inside sales and so on, it was, what we're gonna do is, you know, we'll connect at a certain level, we'll work you up the chain, Right. We're going to have— by the end of the sales process, we're going to have a bake-off presentation. We'll come in, we'll meet you, and so on. See, I think that's completely opposite. I think if you're going to invest in having a face-to-face meeting, you do it upfront.

Right.

Because if I can connect and build that rapport and establish that relationship and others are going the opposite way, I'm always going to be in the lead.

I'll tell you what, I agree. If you look at it, So here's the thing. I'm a very— I like to think of this in sort of strategy, and I sort of look at it graphically in my head, which I know a lot of salespeople don't. And I'm basically looking at it and saying, I have to establish rapport. Now, the better that rapport is, the better my customer is going to accept the information I give him, right? The better he's going to internalize it.

Of course.

So if you think about it that way, then when do you want to establish that rapport? At the very end? or at the very beginning, because if at the very beginning I establish rapport, he is going to accept my info. Because otherwise, he might be looking at it and saying, who the hell is Zach? Why should I trust what he gave me?

Yeah.

On the other hand, if he says, oh, I love Zach, right? I trust Zach. He just gave me 25 pages of material. It must all be good stuff because I love Zach, right? So if I can get in that position, I'm much better off. And I hate the idea of these bake-offs because a bake-off assumes that the 3 of us are on equal footing. I don't want to get to that point where I'm on equal footing with my 2 competitors.

Yeah.

I want, I want basically the guy to say to me, hey, Zach, you know, my boss asked me to write specifications and I'm not quite sure what to do. Do you think you could help me with that?

Right.

And then, you know, I'm writing the specs around my product. And when the bake-off comes, the other 2 guys, they're like, well, this— we don't fit this.

Exactly. I mean, because when you build that rapport, again, we're talking in the context of international, but applies across the board, right, is that when you build the focus on building the rapport and the— well, let's call it the connection. That's why you build that connection upfront. Is what's the first thing the customer needs you to help them do?

They need you to help them understand what they need, what they're trying to do, right?

Right.

The problem is they're trying to solve. And, you know, sellers make this assumption the other way, which is that in the conventional way of looking at sales is, well, they know what their problem is.

Oh, and that's—

we're trying to be this— we're trying to be the solution to that problem.

Right.

And that's completely backwards.

Exactly. I hate that. I was having a conversation with somebody a while back and he was like, Well, I really only want to spend my— invest my efforts on people who have already decided that I can solve their problem. I'm like, well, how is that going to work? Like, how really? How are you going to sell?

Yeah, that's a very small universe of people.

Yeah, exactly. Let me tell you a story about when I said I was in India for a while and I was selling communication systems and there were a limited number of telephone companies in India at the time, right? And I knew this was a problem. Like, I knew identifying new customers was a big issue. So I set in place this idea where every meeting we would talk about people who had disappeared and we didn't know where they had gone. So if somebody left a company, the account manager in charge of him had to be able to say where he had gone. And if not, he went on a list. And one day we had this meeting and like 8 people had disappeared and we didn't know where they had gone. So I said, okay, So somebody is starting a new company, because that's the only real explanation, right? And there are only so many big corporations in India. So I went to a few companies that didn't have telephone companies. And I said, I'm here for a meeting with the telephone team. And the second one said, oh, they aren't in this building, but they gave me the address of where the telephone team was, right?

And you knew all of them.

I did. So I walk in and they're like, Zach, what are you doing here? Um, we're way too early. I said, I know, I'm not here to sell you anything. I just wanted to say hello. Anyway, for 3 years, once a week, either somebody from my team or I was there every week talking to these people. And we, we said, we're not here to sell you anything. We're just here to— we want to keep up, you know, keep up the relations. We'd bring them cookies, we'd talk to them, we'd walk around. And in the end, they act— We specced Wow. Every element of their system because they said, oh, you know, Zach, we have to do the prepaid engine. Can you help us with that? I was like, yeah, sure. I'll get you a spec for that. We need to do the voicemail system. Oh, yeah. I can help you with that. It was a $30 million PO, but it took time, but everybody trusted us. At no time during— I wasn't saying, hey, I really need to close the quarter. You have to give me some money this quarter. I never said anything like that. I just said, you know, we're here, would you like some cookies? Let's chat. And in the end, we sold them everything, you know.

Yeah, no, I know, 100%. I mean, did that many times myself where it's— people feel like these days in sales, like they get this impression from people that, well, you know, I just don't have time for that, right? I just don't have time to make that connection. I don't have time to invest And again, it just— that perspective stems from a misperception about your customers. Because if you think your customers understand what their pain points are, understand what their problems are, understand what the most important thing is for them, right? I say, you know, I like to summarize sales by saying, you know, selling is really simple. What you got to do is you're just going to listen to understand what's the most important thing to the buyer and then help them get that.

Right.

Yeah, right. That's sales. Yeah, that's all you're trying to do. So if you don't have that connection to the point you made earlier, you're never going to learn what that most important thing is.

But you know what the customer does know? Again, we're talking about what people think. People think the customer knows what their pain is, but the customer doesn't know their timeline. The customer knows their timeline, right? So you can't go to the customer and say, I need you to put in a purchase order by the Right. It doesn't work that way. The customer knows when they have money available, when they can buy something, and you have to play by their— with that, you have to play by their rules. You can influence whether they're going to buy your product or not. I find it very difficult to get a customer to buy on my timeline, so I always try to avoid getting into that game because that's a game you can't win.

Yeah. Well, I largely agree with that. I mean, I think there are lots of things that go a long way.

I mean, there's room to play with that, but I see a lot of people who are like, you got to push them, get them to buy faster. We need it now. We need the PO, right? Exactly.

But that's because they don't understand what causes a customer to make a decision faster.

Right.

And that's a whole separate conversation, but Right. It's been researched. Somebody's won a Nobel Prize based on this. It's like, yeah, customers make decisions when they find a solution that meets their needs, that's good enough. And when it's good enough, they make a decision.

Right.

And that's not gonna be on your timeframe.

Right.

And I mean, there's, yeah. Like I said, whole separate conversations. Yeah, I talk about this in my new book coming out early next year. It's—

I love talking about all these little theoretical issues of sales because I, you know, I really feel in the end of the day they all tie to money, right? It's not, it's not like we're talking about our favorite artwork or something. In the end of the day, all these little things are going to tie up to actual sales on the ground, purchase orders, right?

Yeah, well, absolutely. Well, yeah. And that's one thing that sort of gets me is that people think— so like this concept about customers make the good enough decision. This is grounded in research, is grounded in science. It's not theoretical. But it's also not tactical in the way that sellers, you know, tell me what to do. It's like, well, no, it's not. That's not about that, right? What I'm gonna tell you what to do is, is you need to get in early, make that connection, be curious about the buyer, make sure you truly understand what it is that's the most important thing to them. And then give them value that helps them decide and influence the decision about how they want to solve their problem, which is you. As you said, they spec you in. That's not, you know, it's not, that's not an ABCD type thing. But it is sort of because it's very simple steps that you go through.

Yeah.

But they'll represent themselves differently for every customer to the point you made before.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

It's, yeah, as an early boss told me, he says, yeah, here's the thing. Selling is really very simple. Not easy, right? Not easy. But it is simple. And I think too many sellers lose sight of that, even in big complex deals. Because, you know, largest deal I ever sold was north of $100 million. Yeah, complex, right? Still pretty simple. I wasn't doing anything different than I was doing with a deal that was a million-dollar deal.

Right, right, right. And a lot of the other— one of the other things I say, I think that really separates people who understand sales from people who don't is this idea of listening and empathizing and understanding the point of view and the position of the customer. And it drives me crazy sometimes when you talk to people who don't, and they really are not thinking about the perspective of what the customer needs. And I think in the end of the day, that's the one thing that makes you not be able to sell, right? You can, you can teach people to— you can teach a lot of different people to figure out how to sell. If you can't get them to understand or try to understand the perspective of the buyer, they're never going to be good at it.

Well, okay, glad you brought that up because I, I agree 100%. And let me phrase it for listeners a little bit differently, right?

Oh, yeah.

Is that in sales, there's this emphasis on gathering information, right? So I'm going to do discovery. We've got a playbook. Here are the questions we ask typically. And so I'm going to gather this information. So I know this information. The problem is, I don't really understand it. And this gap between knowing and understanding is to the point you just made. This is the gap That too many salespeople fall into.

Well, and I'll tell you something. Okay, so I'm gonna tie this into international sales for a second.

Sure, sure.

Okay, so here's where you— we as Americans are— we have the highest level of situational trust of any culture in the world. And by that, I mean, you go into Best Buy, somebody's wearing a blue shirt, you hand them your credit card, right? Um, you know, and what do we do as Americans if you go go to Cleveland for a sales call, you go and you say, I'm the VP of Sales, and everybody says, oh, I trust Zach. He's the VP of Sales. Right? Now you go to Nigeria or Japan or Korea and it's totally different. You have to establish trust no matter what your title is, no matter what shirt you're wearing, etc. Right? Now that includes discovery. We think of— we say, well, we want to understand the customer. Again, if you're an American and somebody says, hey, Andy, tell me about Tell me about your dream car. Tell me about what would you like— as an American, you think, ooh, that's cool. He wants to know about me. If you go to somebody in Nigeria, you say, hey, I'm Zach. I'm the VP of sales. Tell me about your budgeting cycle for this. He doesn't trust you. You are now asking him for something of value without establishing any trust. rust and you're dead. You just burned yourself. And Americans don't get that. Now, the other part of that is very often people say, well, I have a channel partner. Ask him what the— and they'll come up with a very specific either technical or clinical or statistical number and they'll say, ask your channel partner what that is. I'm like, Do you understand that if you ask your channel partner that question, he is simply going to tell you what he thinks you want to hear because he doesn't know the answer and he doesn't want to tell you he doesn't know the answer, right?

Mm-hmm.

So very often, American companies, in trying to do international discovery, totally screw it up because they just don't get the whole concept of what's involved. And this is a disaster for a lot of companies because then they're basing their strategy off of very bad information, right?

Well, but I think that this works— not to disagree, but I think absolutely what you said is true. When it applies to, in my experience, and do customers domestically as well as internationally, is I believe the same thing is true, is that when I delve too deeply before building credibility and trust with a potential buyer, I'm not going to get the right information, right? I'm going to get— I'll get a superficial level of information. I'm not going to get to that most important thing.

That I agree with you.

Yeah.

And this is one of the critical things with discovery that sellers routinely miss, is that there's always one thing that's more important than all the others. Until you learn what that is, you're not in a position to really help the customer achieve what's most important to them. And, and They're just not going to tell you off the bat.

That— you know what, you're true. I was oversimplifying the domestic market, but you're right.

No, but I think you're right in general though. I think what happens though is that those exchanges in our culture are very superficial and we accept them, to my point before, we accept them as, oh, well, that's it, right? Right.

Yeah.

And maybe because I spent so much time in international, but I look at what the customer tells me and Don't accept any of it at face value.

Oh, definitely.

And because it's not because I'm a skeptic, though I am a little bit of a skeptic, but it's, it's, I just know I haven't earned the right yet to get the real information. So I just don't take it for what it is. It's, it's not the truth. It's not they're lying to me. It's just not the complete picture.

That's exactly it. But I think, again, you know, you talked about like the startup world, very often you get people in the startup world, who are in upper management and they've read a sales book, and then they're like, well, discovery is really important, Zach, you should ask this question. I'm like, okay, if I ask that question, I'm not going to get a good answer. Are you going to base our strategy off of this? They're like, well, of course, because you're asking. Like, so I'm not going to tell you— like, let's go back. We have to base our strategy off a better source of information, right?

Yeah, and of understanding, not just Knowledge, right.

Exactly, exactly. And you get, again, very often you get people who don't necessarily understand things from the customer's perspective, or they have trouble understanding. And, and this, this becomes a vicious cycle in terms of strategic planning, right? Because, you know, you, you come out and you have a product and you say, okay, this product is going to save 14% off of this This line item in the Ministry of Health budget, that's a great benefit. And you go, okay, but you do understand that there is nobody who gets rewarded for saving money within the Ministry of Health, right? So this isn't a benefit to anybody. And they're like, no, no, Zach, this could be millions of dollars, but nobody cares, right? Let's find something that people really care about. And you go around with stuff like that on a regular basis. It's just, you know, that's, that's the world we live in sometimes where managers are managing sales organizations and they don't quite get that part of how things work, right?

Yeah, well, that's a great example because, yeah, especially when you're dealing in certain overseas markets, yeah, there's no incentive to save money as you talked about. There might be no incentive to be profitable to a certain level. You don't know. In some markets, you don't know how many hands are in the pie.

Right. But you do have to understand what drives them, why they do what they're going to do, what, like you said, what their single most important thing is, and try and identify and isolate that and talk to it.

Yeah. In the absence of that, and that's why, again, sellers, we have these playbooks, and they can be very useful. But unless they drive you to a point where you understand, really understand, and I'll keep focusing on that word, the most important thing is not enough just to know an assortment of facts. Oh yeah, this is how they do this. This is how they do X. This is how they do Y. They do 100 of these a day. You've got all your discovery questions. It's like, it tells you nothing.

And that, okay. And to tie this up to the whole idea of sales enablement, right? I think Sure. You pull together, you know, very often you pull out a laminated card and it has 5 things on it. Tell them this, tell them this, tell them this, right? But it doesn't give your salesperson any understanding. One of the things that I love about tech, about the technology of today, and I'm not the most advanced person technology-wise, is the ability to do things like put together short videos for coaching and training your remote sales force, where you can help get to that understanding. So instead of saying, tell them it's blue, you can basically say, okay, let's talk about why this might be important to them. Talk it through. If you have any questions, shoot me a question on Voxer or WhatsApp. We'll talk about it, that kind of thing.

Right.

And you can help achieve this understanding at the far end of the sales organization much better with some of the tools you have today than you used to be able to before, or that, you know, especially for small companies without a lot of money, you know, if you need to be coaching, you know, if you have 200 salespeople working for your distributors in 100 countries around the world, how do you get that information to them and help them understand how these discussions are supposed to go with the end-user customers? Those types of tools help you out with that, I think.

Yeah. Well, Zach, we're going to have to have you come back and get into details about the book because I think, again, we sort of— it was a great conversation and covered a bunch of stuff for international, but I think there's some detailed stuff I wanted to get into and we can do it on a second conversation about—

I would love to do that, Andy.

Yeah, because setting up distributors, how do you command mindshare of your distributors? So many people get into international sales and think, oh, well, just, you know, we'll set up some agents, distributors.

I could talk about that for like 2 hours because people are like, I have 45 distributors, I'm doing great, but I don't understand why I'm not selling very much. But do you have any mindshare? How much mindshare do you have of your distributors?

Exactly. And this is, this is a critical question. And it's— and yeah, people who don't deal with channels don't understand that You've got multiple sales that have to execute within one sale. We'll have you back. We'll talk about that. Meantime, people, check out Zach's book, Global Sales: A Practical Playbook on How to Drive Profitable Growth for International Sales and Marketing Leaders. Like I said, it's very comprehensive. I've already urged Zach to split it into 5 books. You assured me you're working on that. If people want to connect with you, what's the best way to do that?

I have a website. It's called globalsalesmentor.com, and you can reach out to me. I have a Clubhouse Thursday mornings. I have a podcast of my own also.

But really, I didn't know that.

I do. It's just not anywhere near as well known as yours, so I'm building my way towards there.

Bring me on, we'll talk about it.

I would love to have you on.

That'd be fun.

Um, it is— so it's basically called Conversations That Drive Global Sales Growth. And it's all about global sales. But if you want to reach out to me, this is what I do. I train and coach and help people achieve their global sales goals. All right.

Perfect. Well, Zach, thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Andy.

Well, I look forward to doing this again.

I would love to.

All right. Take care.

Thanks.

Okay, friends, that's it for this episode. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. As always, so grateful for your support of the show. And I want to thank my guest, Zach Selch, for sharing his insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, Sales Enablement with Andy Paul, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can do all that on your phone in less than a minute as soon as this episode is over. So thank you for your help. And as always, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone. Hi friends, I have something really exciting to share with you. We're launching a new podcast called the RevOps Podcast as part of the RingDNA Podcast family. Today's leading B2B companies are embracing revenue operations as the answer to misaligned people, processes, and data that lead to recurring sales inefficiencies. However, many people still have critical questions about RevOps. What processes and tools do I need? How do I structure my team? How do I measure outcomes across sales, marketing, and customer success? And what are the best practices for doing that? So join Jordan Henderson, Jonathan Stephens, and Brandon Redlinger, and some of the world's leading revenue operations leaders as they tackle the important questions many of you face today when building a RevOps function. From RingDNA, the company that transforms sales teams into high-performing revenue drivers, comes a podcast guaranteed to go beneath the surface-level conversations and dive deep into the world of RevOps. Your hosts deliver unfiltered, thought-provoking discussions and actionable takeaways on every episode about the ideas, processes, and technology changing the B2B sales landscape. Visit ringdna.com/revops to learn more or subscribe now on your favorite podcast player. What if your sales team could know the moment a buyer arrives on your website and talk with them instantly? With Qualified's conversational sales and marketing platform purpose-built for Salesforce, that's all possible. It's not rocket science, it's common sense. Conversations move deals forward. Live chat, voice calls, and meeting bookers accelerate sales conversations without a single email exchange. Capture prospects in that magic moment when they're most interested in learning about your business. Head on over to Qualified.com to chat with their team and learn more.