Your Best Sales Reps Don't Know Why They're Winning

The cost of knowledge is going quickly to zero. The value of expertise is going through the roof.

So when we're still able to get ahead by just outworking the person next to us, we're still going to be able to—I think we're reaching the apex of that because as agentic solutions become more prevalent and people figure out how to prompt Claude, Code, and others to actually do the work that they want to do for them. With a quick sidebar here: once they know the work that actually needs to be done, because that's another big blind spot that most companies won't admit. Once everybody has these tools, there's going to be no competitive advantage there. And we're going to have to reconnect with the thing that makes us unique, the thing that makes us valuable.

Meridian Fastener Group—they're a $42 million industrial distributor that just closed its best year in company history. $61 million in trailing bookings, which was an 18% jump. The board, as you'd imagine, is thrilled. Then the CRO does something almost no one does after a good year. She asks her top five reps to write in one paragraph each exactly why their best customer bought from them instead of the other three distributors that were bidding the same job. She gets five different answers. Four say some version of "they trust us" or "we have the best relationships," and not a single person can name what earned that trust or hand it to a new rep with no history on the account. Two of the five reps are over 55. One is retiring next year.

Meridian just had its best year ever and still can't tell you why they won a single deal. What happens to a company like that after a great year?

Those sales executives that are ready to retire, they ride off into the sunset because they've earned it. They may stay on in some sort of advisory role. They may get some panic calls, but the team then struggles over the next couple of years to figure out why those people were so successful and they try to piece it together without actually understanding or being willing to ask the questions necessary to figure that out. This happens a lot, and ultimately the result of that—and here's the punch line—a lot of people lose their bonuses or miss out on their bonuses. There are a lot of people who might lose their job because now all of a sudden we get into this panic mode where we don't know what to do here, but it's not going well, and maybe we need to make some changes. And there's a lot of unnecessary strife that comes from just not being willing to ask the questions that need to be asked.

Dale, doesn't this remind you of a particular client that we have with very similar situation? And it's funny, Geoff, when this was written, it actually wasn't with that client in mind. But now that I'm sitting here thinking, like, very similar, right? You know, the sales folks are tenured, and when you ask them why we win, it's typically, "Well, we do a better job," or "You know, I've built this relationship for 15 years. They like me. It's great." But why do we really win? And they have a great operations person, but one of the things he's famous for saying is, "Well, if we're winning because we do a great job, we don't really need salespeople. They're just going to keep coming back to us because we keep doing good work." So why do we really win?

I think this is a lot more common than people want to admit, and it ties to someone we were speaking with yesterday. Like, we do so much loss analysis. Why do we lose? Let's really dig into why we lose. But do you think people are doing enough analysis and can really articulate why they're winning?

No. I hope that's not a surprise. I mean, that's literally the concept I'm building my business around, right? But I think success—

Welcome to the show, Jeff. Welcome to the show.

Success is historically a terrible teacher.

Yeah.

And it's a terrible teacher because we want to keep moving. We don't like to ask questions that we feel we already know the answers to intuitively, even though we can't clearly articulate them.

Adam loves asking questions he knows the answers to or he thinks he knows the answers to. It's the only time he's right. But you know, the discomfort of having those conversations is enough to keep people away.

And look, you guys do this all the time. You spend time in rooms with great sales people. You've both been great sales people for a long time. And there is a moment in the conversation where it's easier and more preferable to just wink from across the table and say, "You get it."

I was actually linked to this recording today because I was talking to my first sales boss, and one of the things that we talked about was: I said, "Look, when I was maybe three months into my career, you came and rode along with me, and we went into this meeting where this person was unknown to me. I was having a little bit of trouble. I was getting a little bit of static trying to move a deal along. You came in, had this meeting, we walked out of there with some kind of next step, and I looked at you and I said, 'What did you just do?' Because I saw where we started and I saw where we finished, but the whole in-between part was completely foreign to me."

He said, "You know what? You'll get it. Just get out there, keep swinging, keep doing the thing."

And we talk about luck in this industry like you work really hard and you get really lucky, right? There's no such thing as luck. You put yourself in position to win. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. But there are some ways to engineer luck if you just know the right things to be doing.

And I'm a guy that for several periods of my career has been very consistent, very hardworking, very diligent about doing the wrong things—stuff that felt like it was going to work but wasn't. And did I get lucky along the way? Yes. Do sales teams get lucky every day? Yeah. Because sometimes you're just the right person at the right time with the right price, right product, right availability. That's fine.

But how do we understand what we do well and what we do differently? How do we understand why our best customers buy and how do we make those two lists of data overlap more often on purpose? And that's the thing. You have to ask yourself the questions that you didn't want to answer before because they're hard to answer. And you also have to get vulnerable with your clients and your customers and ask them the questions that you really need the answers to. They're happy to tell you if only you're willing to ask. But there's resistance to asking the questions that we feel we should already know the answers to instead of just being willing to say, "You know what, can we talk about this?" And it holds a lot of sellers back.

It's a lot of fear, right? Through fear, which doesn't make any sense, and the answer is always no if you don't ask the question. Like, you're never going to get it.

Jeff, so you back in May of this year, you wrote that if we asked a hundred sales reps why their best customers buy, five of them would know. Fifty to 15 of them would guess right just because they kind of know the industry. They're a bit smarter than Adam. And 80% of them would be shocked to learn the truth.

What's the 80% cost in that company? And why are we guessing at that 80%? I believe you that I published that in May, but I've been saying that for 10 years. I think that explains, you know, in rough numbers, I mean, that's your 80/20 rule, right? 20% know. 15 of those 20% are really guessing, right? Because they just pay close attention. Five have been willing to ask. 80 are just dragging their feet, going through the motions.

And I think, by and large, no one's ever—I've never formally studied that. I've never collected enough data to verify those numbers, but no one's ever argued with me either. So I'm going to keep going with it until maybe you or Adam will argue with that.

But that 80%—there's a certain percentage of those that probably will never get it. And there's, I mean, that's going to happen in any profession. But I mean, what if you could take half of that 80%? What if you could take 40 of those sales reps and actually teach them?

What if you could take 40 of those sales reps and you could increase their performance by just 10%? I mean, what does that do to your sales team? What does that do to your number? What does that do to Meridian Fasteners? That's literally how they go from having their record year this year to their record year the year after that.

100%.

Yeah.

And then probably after that, right?

And it's very difficult because we don't do enablement well. Like, I don't think I've seen many companies do it well.

You mean you don't do enablement well, or like the space doesn't do enablement well? I just want to be clear what we're talking about here.

I do enablement very well. The space doesn't do it very well.

Got it. Understood.

You look at companies like ADP. They've always done enablement very well. Like, there are companies that do it really well. I think the training houses, the ADPs, the Cintases of the world—

World, the ones that people go in, get trained and leave.

Right? And so, but then the interesting part about that, Adam, is that the people that get trained really well don't necessarily know how to replicate that training very well when they go out and do it themselves. Like, we're hiring people or we're promoting people that aren't real great leaders because there's a whole leadership coaching aspect of this thing. Like, we're putting that statement or that message on the reps. You just lead the number. You just promote a leader because they're the number one seller. We all know that, right? That's what makes a good leader, right, Jeeoff? I'm kidding, y'all. I'm kidding.

Hey, when has it ever gone wrong?

How many names do you want me to give you? So on this topic, every sales team right now, every success team, every marketing team has AI writing like a faster version of messaging, right? And it typically sounds like everyone else's. You go to the website and it's "we build great relationships, we're gold standard, we're best-in-class, we care about results." Does AI make that sameness worse, or is it finally going to force someone to fix this and actually have a value proposition or a differentiator statement that actually says why I should do business with you instead of someone else who's also the gold standard? By the way, if everybody's the gold standard, then is anybody a gold standard?

I think we're going to see both of those options. I think it's going to continue to get worse. It's going to have to get worse before it gets better. I think, especially given that so many companies have made these investments into AI without any clarity about what the return is going to be. But if we don't say we're AI native or AI forward, then we're going to lose ground to those people who are. I think it is going to get and unfortunately probably a lot worse than we hope it does before it gets better. But at some point the pendulum is going to reach its apex and we're going to have to come back to reality. And not that AI isn't going to be an integral part of our careers, our lives for the foreseeable future. But I think what AI has done is championed mediocrity for everybody.

You know, I think I don't know if I'd say for everybody, but it's championed it for a majority.

Well, it's made it available. It's made mediocrity more widely available, which, if you think about it, just makes it more mediocre, right? Has it elevated the standard of mediocrity? Yeah, it's brought a lot of people up there. I mean, think about how many people thought that "I hope this email finds you well" was actually an upgrade over what they were sending. And for some reason, the least favorite thing on the planet. And my initial takes on AI were when I saw that these AI go-to-market companies were out there saying, "Oh, we'll write the emails for you." I'm like, "Okay, what do they say?" And I remember there was one tool in particular. I don't recall which one it was. Wouldn't be fair to that company for me to say this out loud anyway. But he drafted three emails and they all started with, "I hope this finds you well." I was like, "Okay."

I mean, there's tools that still do that, which blows my mind. But what's even more troubling now, and I think the emails are part of it, right? Like, I think we've gotten so much email slop. And I do believe in the next six months cold email will truly die because I think with what Google and everyone are doing with their filters, just like even mailbox warming now, like they're on to alternate domains and domain forwarding and they're flagging it as alternate. Like they're getting hip to these tricks.

Yeah. But what I find more troubling is, and I won't call them out, but there are two companies that compete in the space that if you go to their websites, like they were clearly both written and I have listen, I have no problem that you build your site in cloud code. Right, hell, we built ours in cloud code, but it was very, very, very specific to us. But these were clearly a prompt that was something to the effect of like, "Go build a website for insert company type here." Like identical. And it is like, "Oh, we're the gold standard and like our customer service, you get a one-on-one CSM relationship and we're going to deeply know you and blah blah blah blah blah." Insert company name. Like it's got to change because otherwise you are in this space where everyone's the same.

Well, let's think about this. Where is mediocre an upgrade for you in my business? It's in bookkeeping. It's in tax filing. It's in some admin stuff that I don't want to do. Like I'm happy to outsource somebody who's mediocre that I don't have to do it, and mediocre's better than me.

Hell, yeah.

Is that why you have me do our stuff, Dale? Because I'm mediocre at it, but that's still better than when it comes to ops.

It's important.

I've been uncovered. You were thinking it. I didn't have to say it.

We think about this though. The cost of knowledge is going quickly to zero. The value of expertise is going through the roof. So when we're still able to get ahead by just outworking the person next to us, we're still going to be able to and there's still going to be some value to be found there. I think we're reaching the apex of that because as solutions become more prevalent and people figure out how to prompt cloud code and others to actually do the work that they want to do for them.

Well, with a quick sidebar here, once they know the work that actually needs to be done, because that's another big blind spot that most companies won't admit. It's like, okay, once everybody has these tools, there's going to be no competitive advantage there, and we're going to have to reconnect with the thing that makes us unique, the thing that makes us valuable, the thing that gets into our zone of genius, right? I mean, what AI has done and these tools have done allowed people to play in spaces where they weren't playing before because they weren't very good. Now, all of a sudden, they're good enough at it to make a few bucks, but they're going to be found out really quickly because when everybody has the same competitive advantage, there's no competitive advantage.

So we go back to why do you really win? And then, based on why you suspect you win, do you go and validate those hypotheses with your best customers so that you actually get the truth? Because, you know, we go back to that 80/20 stat, the 5/15/80 stat that you mentioned there, Dale. Like five people really know because they've asked and they hold on to that information with everything they've got. They leverage that information. It is the best go-to-market language you will ever have when you really have product-market fit and you can get that confirmed by your customer. You know, like you take that message and you run with it. It also helps you to make sure that you are doing only the things that you need to do to move the needle, and you can stop it with all the other stuff that you maybe want to try or maybe you're just guessing at and getting lucky with occasionally.

And you can also take those lessons and you can distill them into standards that can be trained on. You can distill them into standards that can be coached on. You can remind your reps and even your best reps of the stuff that was working with them before that maybe they haven't stayed so disciplined with. Right? It becomes this home base of like, man, I know this works. And until something in the market changes where this doesn't work anymore, because that does happen, I need to make sure that I'm always doing these things.

And so when we talk about best reps being consistent, when we talk about them being diligent and disciplined and everything, you find that you can't just do everything all the time. You have to be really clear about what you need to be consistent with. And that clarity is the diff. It's the gap in performance. I don't care if it's selling, I don't care if it's professional sports, even amateur sports, like anything you do, knowing what to focus your resources on, that is some of the most valuable knowledge you can ever get.

It is interesting. One of the things you mentioned was mediocrity getting better. I actually see it inversely. I see mediocrity getting worse because if everyone's in the middle at mediocrity and they're one prompting Claude or they're one prompting ChatGPT and they're taking that result and then maybe just sending it out like a one prompt and they're not putting their own vision into it, then actually mediocrity actually goes down and then there's a bigger divide because the people that are actually going through the iterations and using the LLMs as a thought partner with them are actually distancing themselves from that mediocrity. Like that gap gets bigger.

I won't argue with that. I think what I meant to say and maybe I just didn't say it the right way. There are so many people who were subpar who now with access to mediocrity can raise their game.

Yeah, that's where I, and maybe the math is wrong, but I think if the bottom starts to meet closer to the middle, that undeniably raises the level for everybody, but I'm not interested in arguing. Maybe I just thought about it wrong, but I, until they crashed, like you said after that, until like, hey...

Now, they get found out on engagement too. Like, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Well, I remember talking to a mentor one time, and it was just during a particularly bad day. It was just like, "Okay, was I lucky? Does my career mean anything, or have I just been lucky?" And he said, "Jeff, maybe you were lucky to get the first engagement, but if this client has hired you consistently for the last five years, it's more than luck. They like what you're doing. Figure out what that is."

100%.

And do more of it, right? But you're absolutely right. Like, you can get that engagement. If you're out a little bit over your skis, it's not long before you get found out. So either catch up and figure it out, or find some place where you can really be in your zone of genius. That's the thing. When people know why they're really good and they get that validation, they can stay there. And that work is remarkably fulfilling.

I love that. And I want to say one thing though. I want to make sure people get out over their skis because don't have that fear. Take that risk because in that risk is potentially a different lane of genius than you even knew that you had before. Don't get comfortable with just one lane of genius.

We did a family PowerPoint night there today, and one of the things on my daughter's slide—she's going to be a senior at USF—was her continuing education that she wanted to run and all the things that she wanted to do in the education space. I think we forget about like, there's so many resources, free resources to learn on YouTube, you know, all sorts of places to figure out how to be better at things. But it just takes effort. And back to one of the things you said earlier, like you got to run effort. If you don't run effort, then forget about the rest of it.

Totally agree.

I love you. You got me at family PowerPoint night.

I was going to say I need to learn more about that. I said to both Dale and his wife Kristen, who I love much more than Dale—I want a copy of this because his kids are incredibly high achievers, and I would love to see it just to motivate my kid.

Yeah, we had a sidebar here. Amazing PowerPoint night. My son's going to be a freshman at USF. He's going in. My daughter's a senior. For my birthday, we did PowerPoint night. If money was no object—not unreasonable, but if money was no object—what would you want and what would you do today? Top 10 things. And we built a PowerPoint deck on it.

That's cool. I love the idea of PowerPoint because I don't know, and your kids are at an age where they're going to start needing to communicate via deck at some point, as much as we love or hate that. But the conversation itself—I worked on this. I'm fortunate to have a wife that's a coach, and we made this regularly. One of the exercises we did last week was, "What's your ideal day like? What does that look like? What does that feel like?" And it seems a little hokey, but again, it gets you to daydream in the best possible way.

100%.

You know, if money were no object, what would this look like?

If money were no object, and my kids are a little younger than yours—I have an incoming 12th grader and 10th grader—and their generation thinks a little differently about AI than ours does.

Yeah.

There's hesitation there. Like, "What's it doing? And is this like the end of everything we know? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?" And one of the things that I am actually—I talked about it as being a summer project, and I never quite got off the ground, but it was: "Okay, every week on Sunday when we get together for dinner, what is one problem that you noticed this week that you could come up with a solution for?" Right? Like, I believe that these tools are out there. So what are we going to do with them? Right? It's about entrepreneurship. Not that they have to be entrepreneurs, but I think the fortune will favor the flexible. Fortune will favor the people who can act quickly instead of deliberating over it forever. Fortune will always favor the people who can go out there, can see problems, can see solutions, and are willing to take a couple of steps to marry those two things.

Yeah. And whether it's AI or not, when you think about it that way, AI doesn't become a threat. It becomes maybe the tool by which you can solve some of those problems that make the world a better place. And I think there's a part of your brain that needs to be exercised in order to really do that. And I'm working really hard to get better at it. And there's one of those things where I wish I would have engaged that muscle earlier in my life.

Yeah. So very similar to what you're doing, although I think my kids would still kick the idea of PowerPoint, but we're at least having the conversations.

I have a 10th grader, and I was telling Dale like, I can't imagine what his reaction would be if I asked him to do a PowerPoint.

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Let's talk a little bit about your frameworks. You build a framework around two circles: what your best rep does and why your best customer buys.

Yep.

Which is harder to get a straight answer—the reps or the customers?

Oh, that's a good question. I'm going to say the reps. And the reason I'm going to say the reps is because when you do this kind of work, it feels more like homework and less like selling. And most sales people—I'm painted with a broad brush here—but most sales people, they don't want to do homework. They want to be active. They want to be out in front of people. Even if they're sitting still in their car for four hours to go visit a customer, that still feels like active to them, right? You want me to identify and articulate something that is uniquely mine? I don't know.

Whereas if you sit with a customer and you create the environment where you can meaningfully have this conversation and you underscore the value of the conversation for your customer, they are more than willing to help. There's a stat Dale Carnegie put out there. I think it's 90 or 91% of customers would be willing to provide a referral if asked, and there's only like 11% of sales reps are willing to ask. And that is a startling stat. And then we can get into why sales reps won't ask and the psychology behind that. But the fact of the matter is what that stat does for me is say the environment is ripe to have these conversations. We're just not willing to have them.

And so the framework that I teach—and I think the biggest reason that we're not willing to have them is that there's a vulnerability issue there. And so the framework that I teach, I call it "Five Great Questions for Killer Customer Conversations." And it's really straightforward.

One: "Why did you buy from us the first time?" That's a very surface level question. It breaks the ice. A surface level question gets a surface level answer. You're going to get an answer you can't do a whole lot with. So this is your opportunity to say, "Adam, I really appreciate the relationship we've had over the last 10 years working together. You're one of my favorite customers to call on. I feel like you really know what is in my best interest. I feel like I've done a pretty good job of understanding your best interest. Here's why I'm asking this question and why I'm going to ask you to get a little more specific. It would be a dream for me to be able to recreate our relationship with a handful of other customers like yours or like you. Can you help me by being a little bit more specific about why you chose me in the first place? Because that would help me."

Customers want to help you.

Yeah.

I know that blows people's minds. They want to help you, but you have to get vulnerable. You have to let your guard down so that they can let their guard down.

Right? Because we're both sitting across the table from one another, having dinner, having coffee, having whatever. And there's this like, "Okay, this chess match of who's going to go first? Who's going to like, who's going to lower their guard?" You lower your guard, they can lower their guard. Now you can have a real conversation. And the second answer to "Can you be more specific?"—they're going to tell a story. They're going to give you some insight into what they were thinking at that time. This is gold.

Are marketers right now listening to this podcast that are like, "Oh my god, this is where? Sign me up. Where do I find this information?" Right? So first question is, "Why did you pick us?" Second question is, "Why? You know, can you please be a little bit more specific?" The third question is, why do you continue to do business with us? Why was this not a one-year engagement? Why is it now a ten-year engagement? And what you're going to find is that their answers to this third question are different than the answers to the first question. Because the reasons they started are not the reasons they stay. And now what are we learning about? We're learning about the things that have gone unsaid that we can't put on a website because they're so specific, but we can distill lessons from that. We're learning about the things that we definitely need to do more of. We're also finding out that donuts every other Friday isn't really moving the needle.

Right? And they can beat back to my field sales days, man. Like I literally had managers who were like, "Just stop in Friday morning and bring them donuts. They don't want your donuts."

No, they don't. They never will. They'll eat your donuts. They'll say thank you. And that gives you happy ears like, "Oh, this is really moving the needle." Right? So we understand what: One, we have the messaging that we've always wanted and have never really had access to. Two, we know what to keep doing and what we can stop doing. Three, and really this isn't third on the list—these are in no particular order. There has never been a relationship that didn't get better when both people lowered their guard. You get vulnerable with somebody, that relationship gets tighter. So this is a loyalty-building exercise at its core, right? So those are the three primary benefits. We haven't even gotten to questions four and five. Question four is, Adam, do you know anybody else that might appreciate this kind of value? And five runs on the heels of that: would you be willing to make the introduction?

Absolutely. And it's right here, like, and people won't do it. And what's interesting is one of the things that I do for my clients is I interview their top performers, try to understand what they're doing well so I can help transmit that to the rest of the team. I offer a service where I will have these conversations with you with your best customers. I will facilitate these conversations for you. Most people don't take it. Most people don't.

Yeah, so even though the—I believe, and your question earlier was which is easier to get the information—I believe your customers, in the right environment, are very happy to give you that information. People still won't ask. So let's piggyback on that. You spent time as an interim CRO, Chief Sales Officer, before doing this work full-time. Good. What did you get wrong about why you were winning back when you were the one carrying the number?

What did I get wrong about why we were winning? I'm going to flip that question a little bit. I did not take the time to properly understand why we were winning, and that is what made those engagements not go as well as they should have or certainly could have. I have cried on the Revenue Reimagined therapy couch before about fractional projects and what are you guys? What am I missing? What is going on? And you know, one of the things that I go back to and think about is, and it's one thing if you're a startup and you really don't know anything about anything yet and you're just trying to figure it out. I get it. I work with established companies that, even if things aren't going well right now, they've been going well enough to keep your business open for the last 25, 30 years.

We have this conversation all the time. And so it's like, where I've made mistakes, it's been not paying attention to the stuff that has led to the sustained success that got us here. Even though we're dissatisfied with where here is right now, there's usually something good. And so my mistakes have always been assuming that there needed to be a fix and coming in with the fix before I really knew what good looked like at that.

Well, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And like, listen, we have a company we're working with and this resonates so much with me because I'm leading sales for them right now and they're a give or take $55 million company. Like, you are clearly doing something right that you got to $55 million. That does not happen by happenstance. It's not a mistake. Like, you're doing something right. But at the same time, what got you here in today's day of GTM is not going to get you there.

So let's study what got you here and keep the good because there is certainly good. Let's figure out how we compound on that and get you there versus the tenured rep who will say, "Well, I've done it this way for 24 years and it's always worked well." That's great. Let's look at your sales numbers for the past three years. It did always work until when it didn't.

Well, and I think about this too from a succession planning standpoint. Bob and Sarah, maybe at Meridian Fastener, Bob and Sarah are well-tenured. They're crushing it. They're ready to ride off into the sunset. You are hiring Matthew and Olivia to take their place. There's a one or maybe two generation gap between those professionals, let alone the fact that the business world has changed, right? Bob and Sarah could take their clients to golf. They could take them out to dinner. They could buy concert tickets. There was probably season tickets to the local sports team or something like that. They could do a lot of entertaining. They could wine and dine. They could do that stuff. And there is still a place for that. We see evidence of that everywhere else. But the executives today, guys our age, for instance, where historically, look at the Mad Men days, which predates where Bob and Sarah are anyway. But sometimes people just didn't come home.

Well, are you kidding me? I want to spend time with my kids. I want to spend time with my wife. I want to have power.

Oh yeah. You know what I mean? I would much rather give my time and attention to my kids and my family than some stranger who just could. I can pay for my own steak. Like, what, you know? So the way that we built relationships in the past is different from the way people build relationships now. And so along with that migration, how is the next generation of salespeople going to find that same sustained success? It's going to be different. And if we do not understand the principles behind why dinner works, why concerts worked, what was it? You...

It wasn't the steak. I promise you that.

It wasn't the steak. No one remembers the steak. It was the opportunity to lower the guard, right? Opportunity to get a little vulnerable. People have always talked about, "I got to get them out of the office." Yeah, because you got to get their real persona, not the office persona. But and that attention is really harder to buy now. You have to give them a really good reason to pay attention to you. The attention was the thing. The environment was the thing. The vulnerability was the thing. Bob and Sarah got it one way. Matthew and Olivia need to think in terms of how do I get them vulnerable? How do I get their attention? How do I tie to or tie into their motive? Even though that motive is different, there is still a motive. And so I think about it in terms of taking and understanding methods, distilling those methods into a process, and then helping reps find their own methods that will still fulfill the process. If that makes sense, you know, without having to or being able to diagram it out.

Well said. You and Mike Simmons could have diagrams all day. You guys like drawing circles and like...

Mike's so much better at it than I am. Like, I've got a whiteboard over here too, but like he's...

He's the best.

He's so good at it.

I do not have that skill set. Dale's going to embrace his whiteboard skill set in Tennessee this week. I have no doubt. Let's shift to the Monday Morning Moves. So this is a practical takeaway that our listeners can test this week. You have two roles here, Jeff. Rule number one—and I have been on a roll lately, so do not let me down, my friend. Rule number one is you are going to score how I did on this from one to ten. One being the worst, ten being the best. You could guess where Dale wants you to score me, and you could guess where I want you to score me. I will say I did get a perfect ten yesterday. Number two is I want you to tell me what you would add, change, or push back on.

Cool. All right, here we go. So if I were to give you... so my role is to give you a score from one to ten. And if it's a seven, I need to give you feedback on how to get it to an eight or a nine.

You got it.

Okay. And when it's a three, you really got to give them a lot.

Oh wait, wait, wait, wait. What's that button? Oh, it's the mute button. Okay, here we go. This week, sit down with your two best reps separately and ask them one question: Name the specific moment in your last closed one deal where...

The customer decided you were the safer bet than the competition. Not the moment they signed, the moment before that. Don't let them answer with something like they trusted us or you're the best. Push past it the way Jeff would and write down what they would say, what they said in their own words. Then find 15 minutes with that customer and ask the same question. If the rep's version and the customer's version don't line up, you have just found the gap between what your team thinks it does and why the customer actually bought. That gap isn't a coaching problem you fix with a new fancy slide deck. It's a clarity problem and it's already sitting in the room.

That's pretty good. Here's why that's so good: because it is, you just identified how simple that is. But again, you crystallize the example of how simple that is and still most people aren't going to do it. 95 plus percent of people aren't going to do it.

How would I make it better?

Redo the whole thing.

No, I do need a number 10. A number one through 10. I'm going to give it a nine. I don't think you can get that. I think that's a really, really good start. And if people did that, they would be exponentially better than where they are today. I do think it takes a little bit more time. Here's where I would improve it. Here's how you take it from 9 to 10. You get your two best reps and maybe your third rep who is less tenured but is just doing a lot of things right and they're really sharp and they might add some value to the conversation. You get them in the same room. And just like with many executives that you work with, if you have four people in the room, you often get five or six opinions. If you have two or three sales reps in the room ping-ponging ideas off of each other, that creativity is exponential and additive. And so I think you will learn more that way. That's the only criticism I can give. I can't criticize anymore.

I love it. I think what we need to add to the show on the show page is a running tally of Monday morning move scores that just updates per show. And then where Dale would like Adam to be, where Adam is, and we could figure out some way for you to pay me the higher the score. Anyway, moving on.

And I think then I'll have to sabotage the Monday morning move, which probably isn't the best thing to do. So that probably wouldn't work very well.

I love the Monday morning move though because what did we just do? We distilled the last 35 minutes of this conversation into: okay, what do you do with this? That's a really good thing to take away from because I listened to a podcast earlier today, started last night, and it was 90 minutes long and it was great. But what am I supposed to do? I'm going to have to listen to it again and take notes this time and maybe put together a PowerPoint deck for my kids. But like the idea generation that podcast created, it gave me a really good dopamine hit but I didn't have clear next steps.

So Jeff, you've run through the GTM gauntlet. We've given you a bunch of hard questions. Now it's going to get a little harder. So we're just going to turn up the heat a little bit. And we do a section called uncensored questions. They're a bit of rapid fire. So the first one I have is Artisan AI ran billboards last year that say stop hiring humans. Is a founder who says it out loud lying about what he believes or is it just an early prerequisite to the rest of the industry and what they will say in the next five years?

I think that person is trying to capitalize on some emotion and some vitriol and trying to do some really clever marketing. I don't think he either believes that or that's what's going to happen in the next five years.

Name a sales training company or framework that you think is actively making its clients worse at knowing why they win.

Yeah, let me say this, and I'm not hedging here. Okay, I'm probably hedging a little bit. When you look at all of the modern methodologies, they have a lot of things in common and they also take a lot of things for granted. I have always looked for the things those companies have in common and that's where you find real truth. I also think that any kind of sales doctrine that you must follow verbatim will get you into trouble. So again, and maybe there's some bias here because my trademark is "rethink the way you sell," but when you remove the thought process from the selling, you're exposing yourself to all kinds of stuff that you shouldn't have to. You're leaving yourself really vulnerable. And your customers, regardless of the industry you're in, will appreciate your ability to think on your feet. They'll appreciate your ability to get creative and not just pull some line from some textbook that sold a lot but doesn't always apply in every situation.

Jeff, when was the last time a client's leadership team lied to your face about why they think they win and you knew it was a complete lie?

I'm going to say never because they always believe it. What they usually lack is clarity. And look, I get the same kind of responses that we've already talked about today. We have great relationships. We have a ton of industry knowledge. People trust us. I'm a good person. I've been doing this a long time. Okay, great. But what does that actually mean? You're saying a lot of things, but you're not really saying anything. And so it's not a lie, but it's a half-truth because it's not specific enough to be the whole truth.

They do believe it. If a VP of sales can't answer why their best customers buy from them in one sentence or less, should they still be the VP of sales next quarter?

Yeah, provided that they do the work. I believe we have a problem as a profession with perfectionism. And the idea that we might get something wrong is so terrifying that it precludes us from getting a lot of things right. So I don't think anybody should have to have all the answers. And actually, the CEO that I last worked for, one of the things he told me, and he told me this more than once and I had a hard time believing him—and I see it now that I don't work for him—it's like, "Jeff, I don't need you to know everything. I need you to ask the right questions. I need you to be constantly seeking for that next thing. I want you to dig into this kind of stuff." So should that VP of sales be the VP of sales the next quarter? Yes. But when you know the right thing to do and you don't do it, that says something different.

Everybody's got room for redemption. It exposes something else when the next step is clear and you don't take it.

Awesome. Take us home.

So we've given you all the hard questions. We'll give you a layup for the last one. Dream vacation destination.

With my family or without it?

You pick.

It's funny. My wife and kids and I just booked something last minute the last week here in August, and we're going to go to Hocking Hills in Ohio, which is, if you've never been there—I didn't know this place in southeastern Ohio even existed growing up in Michigan my entire life. It's really kind of magical. But for real, I mean realistically it's just a cabin in the woods with my wife and my kids. We'll do some day hikes and stuff like that, but I don't care where we are. We're not beach people. We're not cruise people. We just love those people and I like those people a lot too. So really anywhere with those three people.

My dream vacation myself, I think if you gave me a week at Bandon Dunes in southern Oregon, I'd be really, really happy.

I like it. I like it.

Awesome. Jeff, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for sharing the knowledge. Other than LinkedIn, where can people learn more about you, the work you're doing, your company? Where can they go to hire you? Shameless plug, man. Shameless plug.

I am going to tell you to go to jeffporic.com/gtm. And what that will do is send you to a little quick self-assessment that helps teams, reps, and leaders understand how well they understand how they win and how well they understand why their best customers buy. It's a very simple little assessment there. If you're into those kind of things, but other than that, like LinkedIn, shoot me a note. Say you follow me on this podcast. Tell me what you love most about Dale and dislike most about Adam, or vice versa. And we will balance the scales at some point here, guys. Fair enough. And let me know that you found me here and let's have a chat. I answer all my stuff. I don't have a team that does that stuff. I love talking to salespeople and sales leaders. So yeah, just reach out.

Reach out.

>> Love it. Jeeoff, thanks so much for joining, man.

>> Hey, Jeeoff.

>> This was great. Looking forward to seeing you guys next week.

>> Likewise.