168: If Your Win Rate Is 20%, You’re Doing It Wrong | Dave Brock

What’s going wrong in sales today?

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we're experiencing the worst win rates in B2B sales in atleast a decade Reps are demoralized leaders are anxious

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quotas keep climbing while results keep declining And whatare sales organizations doing about it more calls

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more demos more pressure But that's not the solution It'sactually the problem

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Welcome to the Learn It All Podcast the show for today'sleaders who want to get ahead and stay ahead because we believe

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great leaders aren't born or made They are always in themaking I'm your host Damon Lebby two-time best-selling author

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and CEO of Learn It a live learning platform that has helpedupskill over two million people over the past three

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decades I'm super excited about my guest today His name isDave Brock He's a globally recognized B2B sales leader a

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go-to market advisor and author of one of my favorite booksof all time The Sales Manager Survival Guide He's here

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to break down what's broken when it comes to build and leadsales teams and what modern leaders must do differently

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if we actually want to win Part of what I like to do is Ilike to talk to as diverse a group of people that I can and

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pick up their ideas because then I can take it to my clientsand say this is

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some of the stuff that they do in their business What if wetried applying some

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of this in your business in a moment Dave and I will getinto why most sales organizations confuse activity with

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progress why teaching reps to think is more valuable thanteaching them what to

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say how coaching fails when it's treated as an event not ahabit and why underperformance in most cases is a

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leadership problem not a rep problem You said "In whatworld is a 15 to 20% win

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rate acceptable?" And you're not being rhetorical hereYou look around teams are missing quota all over the place

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There's high churn for sales reps and sales leaders What isreally going on in the sales world these days it's

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astounding to me to see this and all is is that we have seenyear-over-year

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declines in performance around virtually every major iswe've seen win rates

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declining to right now the the acceptable win rateparticularly

Why win rates are declining and panic is missing

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primarily in technology businesses but at least to otherbusinesses as well is

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uh 15 to 20% we've seen declines in you know fewer than 40%usually the data I'm

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seeing right now is 37 to 38% of people are making goals Uhyou see

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organizations not making their goals So we've seen kind ofthis year after year erosion Um and you know in in you know I

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don't see the panic factor setting in uh is is you I don'tsee the panic factor

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in salespeople or leaders saying uh what do we change to dothis uh the what you

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see really are the behaviors really oriented around well weknow the formula

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Let's just 2x 4x 10x the formula Now that we have the toolslike AI it's

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really easy to 10 50x those kinds of things But in spite ofall those things

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that we've been doing results aren't changing They'replummeting And so you

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know you kind of want to grab people by their shoulders andshake them and say

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if it isn't working why don't you try looking at a differentway of doing things and why do you think we're stuck

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in doing things the same way because you're right I mean youkeep doing it over and over again and if the results

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don't happen you got to make some kind of change And Davelet's face it with the state of the economy and the world

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right now sales is not going to get any easier in 2025 Ithink there are a

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number of contributing factors There isn't any kind of onefactor that that has driven this Um I think uh uh over

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the years we've seen an evolution to the what I'll call themechanization of uh

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selling and so and you go back to it was a great book whenit was originally wrote it but predict written uh about I

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guess 15 20 years ago now predictable revenue uh by AaronRoss and it it it

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mapped out what was interesting at the time for Salesforceand its evolution

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But as you started looking at some of the limitations ofthat it took a

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manufacturing mindset to how we manage the sales process Sowe you know we

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create this manufacturing line We put customers on themanufacturing line and run them through the SDRs the BR BDRs

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the AEES and so on And we've been doing that The problem isis if you really

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understand lean manufacturing that's not how leanmanufacturing works And so we

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started with a flawed business model but we've keptreplicating that model So one

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is we have this this series of I think flawed business modeland flawed

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assumptions around lean and agile and how we apply that tosales two is I think we're facing a world of of just a

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mounting disruption overwhelm and overload So what I see is

Are people losing their drive to achieve?

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well-intended human beings at all level just struggling withwhat do I do and

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how do I cope um you know you see the complexity roll

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increasing and you see with like the the announcements thatwe've seen uh over the last week or so the economy is going

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to get much much more difficult and so you start seeing thatas uh human beings

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we tend to withdraw We tend to go back into those thingsthat we know and those

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things that work for us in the past and even we're somewhatirrational

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about it but even though they don't work they bring uscomfort because it's the familiar and

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when you have large groups doing the same thing that tendsto reinforce each other so it takes a tremendous amount of

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courage I think for somebody to say break out of that andsay this isn't

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working it won't work anymore What do we do and how do wechange yeah And change

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is tough And one of the things that you and I spoke about onour pre-call which I think we were both passionate about is

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it also kind of seems like part of this is related to peopleand organizations

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have kind of lost their drive to work hard as well Yeah Andand that's

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something that just stuns me is and I've had a bunch ofconversations I think since our our conversation It's it's

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funny how you know the same conversation keeps popping upwith different people

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but you know I remember when I first started working is Iwas just compelled

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to you know to achieve uh and I was compelled for a numberof reasons

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whether it was for income or promotions or that kind ofthing but I think underlying that is I was just compelled

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to achieve so that said you know I wanted to win everythingthat I head uh

COVID’s effect on employee disconnection

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and so on and you know and at the time you know and what Isee in in so many

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other high performers is that they do everything possible toachieve and when

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it isn't working they figure out what they need to do Butwhat I found so much

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recently is this is where I go and get my

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paycheck I don't care so much about my company I don't careabout my business

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about my customers and their business I'm doing what I canto get by and get

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my paycheck and I live my life somewhere else Uh and youknow it most jobs I know

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right now we spend so much time in it it seems like atremendous waste of time that we aren't living our life in our

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work and and doing well there I've got a couple questionsaround that but do you

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think this this has even accelerated more because of thehybrid work and everything uh with COVID where people

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feel less connected to the organizations they work with ithink it's accelerated or sometimes I think we use it as an

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excuse because we saw the signs of this happening before COWe saw signs of

Culture, belonging, and why people leave

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declining employee engagement We saw signs of decliningtenure of kind of revolving doors of um of at all levels

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of management of uh individual contributors and so on Ithink uh co and

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the the work from home kind of thing kind of acceleratedthat and and

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accentuated that But we saw the the the leading indicatorsof that earlier and I

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think a lot of that have to do with things that we talkedabout before is is

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around are we creating uh workplaces where people feelvalued and contribute

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uh and where where people want to stay Belonging is soimportant these days right you know people want to feel like

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they belong that they that their organization uh understandswhat their purpose is How

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does that purpose tie into the organization so is this whatyou're seeing high performing organizations

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doing differently is it around a stronger culture one of thethings that I measure when I start looking at

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organizations is culture and purpose and the alignment ofculture and purpose in

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the organization And you see I mean this isn't all kind ofyou know u you know

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kumbaya type stuff I mean I work with some organizationsthat have very very

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tough cultures uh and very aggressive cultures but

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everybody's aligned around the same purpose and around thesame value system

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that it works for them I see other corporations with verydifferent cultures but people are aligned uh and

What great leaders do differently

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they work very well there And I think you know I'll go backto what you said is is this we all want to belong What's

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happened is somehow in in corporate cultures is people don'tget their need

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for belonging satisfied at at work So they're searching forother places

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whether it's it's games that they play in group social uhmedia groups that

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they join whether it's outside work kinds of things They'researching for belonging in other places and so the

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organizations and corporations are losing on that becausethey aren't creating an environment where people

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want to belong and want to stay and you know fundamentallywhere people feel feel valued and heard So if I'm in an

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organization I'm a leader right now and I'm like you knowwhat these guys are probably right I think we are a little disconnected I meanyou can't broil the

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ocean and get it all fixed uh right away but what is onepiece of advice where could they start i I think I think be

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very very clear about what your purpose is What is it thatyou here as a

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corporation are trying to do and then it's beyond you knowwe want to make money and want to scale at 200% a year

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and that kind of thing but is who is it that we're here toserve what is it that

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we're trying to achieve as an organization um and then andthen you

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start looking at how you achieve it and then you startlooking at how you start achieving that and executing it every

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day And that day-to-day action starts setting your cultureand and from that

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you start attracting people that are more aligned with thosethings than not

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uh and in your recruiting process you have to be verycareful that people are aligned You know we work with a lot of

The math doesn’t work: ramp time vs. tenure

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organizations in developing competency models What should welook at and most people look at skills experience

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background and and and those kinds of things What we foundis the biggest

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determinant is cultural values and purpose and that thoseare aligned So

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for instance I have uh some clients where if you look ataverage uh tenure is somewhere around

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11 to 18 months in any level of sales related roles Um Ihave uh clients with

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average 10 years of nine years 15 years I have h a clientthat's about a$ 15

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billion dollar organization that if you look at their salesorganization voluntary and involuntary

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turnover within the year is less than 3% I don't want tojust pass it over

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because you said it one of your client has uh the tenure is11 to 18 months

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That's horrible That's the markets the industry If you lookat at industry in general we look

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at 11 11 to 18 month turnover So you look at kind of themechanics of that in

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complex B2B sales So you look at if I'm a new salesperson ina complex B2B type of

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marketplace how long does it take me to ramp up you know inin in in uh you know

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when I started selling it was you know the formal rampperiod was a 12 to 18month period uh and I guess maybe I

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was slow and also they they'd made it longer for us but isum you know and

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here today if I look at you know say ramp periods aretypically six months to

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a year so I start running the math and I say say let's takethe low end of it It's 6 months for me to ramp up and

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understand what to do and what we're selling blah blah blahNow I got to start developing pipeline Well I got to

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start developing pipeline and maybe we get all this a lot ofinbound stuff and

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we can do this So I can start developing pipeline over 3months maybe six months

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So now we have about nine um to 12 months elapse Uh and thenwe start

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saying sell buying cycles buying cycles in complex B2B salesare 9 12 18 24

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months So I start adding that all together and somehow themath doesn't

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work you know if I'm only around for 11 to 18 months

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uh how do I look at that math and say how am I building anycompetence or any

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business and whatever success these people are having areprobably based on

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the work that their predecessor or their predecessor'spredecessor did If I look

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at it from a management point of view I come in and I workfor about 11 to 18 months say I'm a

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hyper aggressive manager and and say I'm going to hit theground running I know

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the changes I want to make But in any large organizationthat it takes some time to

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change So you look at any massive change initiative is goingto take 3 to six

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months and it takes you a few iterations to know that you'reon the right track So again you start running the math on

How short-term thinking hurts everyone

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that and you scratch your head and said "Well withaverage 10 years of 11 to 18

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months none of this math works out Something's not break notworking."

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And and what you see is the behaviors you see of salespeopleis they just keep their

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heads down They know this tool will pass The behaviors ofmanagers is that they

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are changing their playbooks to say what can I do and havean impact on

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in 11 months knowing that I'm going someplace else afterthat and the

Why most sales cycles end in no decision

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problems that they're attacking are probably not the mostimportant problems

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impacting their growth So you have this kind of death spiralof behaviors that

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that are built up around this Yeah So you have this deathspiral of behaviors around on the individual rep level on

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the leadership level and even it seems like if you bringsomebody into the

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organization they feel like hey I may not be here more than18 months So instead of coming on board and kind of

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seeing what the culture is like and what's going on I got Igot to make changes right away which we all at least

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I think isn't the right way to go about things So um withall that being

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said you mentioned that they're not making or they're notlooking at the right areas What should they where

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should they be focusing their attention well is you know somuch of what we've done is is and and again if you you had

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Matt Dixon on before and you start looking at at how howmuch we miss and

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and how late we're getting involved So now sales typicallyis not getting involved in the customer buying process

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until there's somewhere around 80 to 85% through Sobasically sales is becoming a

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version of an order taker um you know by the time thecustomer

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gets to that point they have uh developed a short listthey've

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developed their ideas and their requirements which may bewrong uh and they go through that So we so we have

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these very very short sales cycles where solving thesmallest part of the customer problems and and any of the

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solutions they choose can solve their problems So how do wewin well we win by

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discounting um uh uh and that kind of thing If we

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start looking at getting involved earlier then we startlooking at how do

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we help shape the customer's decision-making process how dowe help

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shape their buying process to help them do the right thingand to help them develop confidence that they're doing

18:54

the right thing and in you know in your interviews with netyou learned that over 60% of budgeted buying

The key to building trust: problem-first conversations

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efforts end in no decision made It's not because theyhaven't been able to select

19:09

the right product They don't know whether they're doing theright thing for themselves or the organization So

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how do we help build their confidence that they're doing theright thing we have to get involved earlier in the

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process So we do some things like we call it businessfocused selling We say

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how do we get involved with the customer much earlier on andtalk to them about their business

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and about their problem and never mention our product orsolutions at all

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even if they ask All we care about is helping them

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better understand the change initiative and what they'retrying to do

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and better understand what questions should we be askingourselves how do we look at really what the impact of the

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problem is how do we look at the risk of not changing andthe risk of changing

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who else should be involved how do we learn more about theproblem so if you start working with the customer and

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helping them with that one of the things you're doingnaturally is you're building trust and you're building confidence with thecustomer They're

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viewing you more as a partner two is what you see uh themdoing is is that

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you're building actually a bias to them because they keepcoming back to you for help and then at some point they say how

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can you help us and so you start talking about what yoursolution is and how you can help them So you go through this So

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what we've noticed when we have clients doing this is theirwin

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rates at least double We have like one client and it's hardto believe their

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win rates have gone from 57% to 92% Uh we have other clientsin the 60

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70 80% win rate ranges So when you compare that to 15 to 20%that just

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skyrocketed performance and this is all on existingopportunity Then two is when rates

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skyrocket We've started seeing since Matt wrote his book andI started becoming more sensitive to this We've

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seen no decisions made So far we're seeing by about 25% Butthe most remarkable thing we see

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is buying cycles are reduced by 30 to 40% And why is thathappening because

The pitch is dead—long live collaboration

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customers don't know how to buy and they wander They startthe stop They shift

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directions They shift priorities They start and stop againand wander around and 60% of the time they just stop and

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abandon the thing Uh with us asking acting really asorchestrators and

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helping them or um them move through the buying process wehelp them move through

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very very efficiently and very very con uh confidently Sowhat we get at the end

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of this is more than double win rates um reduced nodecisions made in 30 to

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40% reduction in sales cycle and all it is is done bystrictly focusing on the

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customer It sounds simpler than it is be um Dave because alot of sales reps are

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so trained to think about features and benefits uh first andthey can't wait to

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pull up their slide deck and and and tell you about alltheir features and benefits And what you're saying is the

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approach needs to be around how to serve the customer eithersave uh pain points or help them achieve the outcomes they

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want And it sounds like it's all about curiosity problemsolving right and and

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really communication to build that trust Well underlyingthat one is it it starts with

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curiosity It starts with kind of critical thinking andproblem solving It start it it is collaborative

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conversations Uh I was talking to somebody earlier todayabout how we need to purge the idea of a pitch from our

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language The only place that I think the word pitch shouldend up being is in uh

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in baseball Uh a soccer pitch or a cricket pitch orsomething like that But

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but other than that pitch is related to sales should bebanished and all we should be looking for collaborative

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conversations But underlying that you really need businessacumen How do I

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hold a a a high impact conversation with a customer if Idon't understand the

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business and all our people are done trained to do isthey're trained in our products and how to pitch the products

Why salespeople lack business acumen

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They don't necessarily understand how the products they

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understand the problem the products help the customer solvebut they don't understand the

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problem itself So they don't understand how to talk to thecustomer about the things that are most important to them

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So if you just start with some basic business acumen andlearning about the customer

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and learning about their problems and learning about whatthey think about and

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talking to them literally in their language um it's the theit's it's amazing how

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quickly you change your results and how quickly you buildtrust and confidence

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with your customers two reasons for the lack of business uhacumen One goes all

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the way back to what we started at the beginning where youhave so many different segments of sales you know

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like the SDRs does this the uh sales manager does this andalso relying too

The real role of subject matter experts

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much on the subject matter expert that you bring in right soif you bring in a subject matter expert then the

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salesperson sometimes feels like well it's not myresponsibility I could just pivot over and let this person talk

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about it But what I hear you saying is great sales peoplethese days and sales leaders need to build up that big

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business acumen be curious and spend more time learningabout their customers which there's no excuse for these days

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especially with chat GPT and other tools to learn about yourcustomers Yeah I I think so I think there there are a

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couple of things there that that I'll dive into a little bitOne is is one

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when we look at subject matter experts typically what we'relooking at is subject ma matter experts are product

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experts product experts not business problem experts So thatsubject matter expertise

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that we're developing is fairly useless for customers untilthe very very final

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stages of the buying process and that's the easiest part oftheir buying process

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So we need if we're going to have subject matter experts weneed experts

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in the problems that our our customers are facing andexperts at helping them

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navigate those problems Um we go earlier on SDRs you know alot of people I talk

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to about SDRs I say who your your SDR is supposed to contactwell the decision

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makers They're going to have conversations with the decisionmakers about uh what their needs are and

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convince them to have a meeting with an account executive Sowhere do we get our SDRs you know we get them fresh out of

The $500k SDR: a credibility case study

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college programs They may have had some sales training andall that kind of thing there but we trained them to call

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on uh directors vice presidents senior

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vice presidents maybe CEOs Um I remember a number of yearsago I had an SDR call

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me up and he said "Dave um we really

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think you're underperforming your business potential andthat you should be doing a whole lot more Can I talk to

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you about it?" And I said "That's interesting Whatam I doing wrong?" And

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he said "Well we'd like to schedule you for ademo." And I said "No no no wait." I

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said "Um you said something that's very intriguing tome What am I doing wrong?"

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And he said "Well we'll talk to you about this in thedemo." And and I kept going back I said

27:24

"You said something interesting What am I?" And hecouldn't answer that question He didn't do that So we had the we

27:31

trained these SDRs to have these conversations I wasn'ttrying to trick

27:37

the guy or be a jerk or anything like that He brought it upHe brought up this very interesting premise and he couldn't

27:44

support it I created a lot of controvers to several hundredpeople a

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number of years ago and we were talking about the sameissues SDRs and I said I love

27:57

SDRs I had uh back when I ran a business unit at a verylarge technology

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corporation I hired about uh four of them I paid them each$500,000 a year

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And all of a sudden people look at me and say "No SDRsare 60 to 80k maybe

28:18

100k if they've gone really over this." I said "Ipaid them $500,000 a year."

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And what I had is my SDRs are very different My SDRs weresenior design

28:31

engineers They were senior manufacturing managers Some ofthem had had direct

28:37

director and vice president titles And I said because thecustomers they need to

28:43

talk to are the CEO of Boeing Aerospace the chief engineerof General Motors you

28:50

know the chief product officer of of uh InternationalHarvester

28:57

and all those types of things And to do that they had to becredible They had to really understand the business And so

29:04

you know with those four people that I paid $500,000 eachwithin two years we built over $20

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billion of pipeline uh because they had this credible um uh

29:21

engagement with with people Uh they could get them reallyexcited in

Where to find your next great SDR

29:26

imagining new possibilities for the business think we built$20 billion of pipeline and we closed 70% of it Um and

29:36

uh and so I'm all for SDRs but I want to get the right SDRsAnd if we're

29:41

targeting SDRs that are uh looking at mid-level or higherlevel managers then

29:48

they have to have a little bit of business background orbusiness acumen So I look at a career path I'd say I

29:54

want to take one of my best AES and I want to move them intoan SDR

29:59

role because imagine the hit rates they'll get if they havethat experience

30:05

and can really engage people credibly Now besides moving anAE into an SDR role I'm sitting here thinking what are

30:12

some other roles in an organization that a leader might belooking at like okay

30:17

this makes a lot of sense Um maybe I should pull somebodyout of product or somewhere else Do you have any other

30:23

ones you recommend you know a lot of people in productmanagement I mean

30:28

presumably product management has been deeply involved inunderstanding the customers and the problems that they're

30:34

trying to solve with the products So they can bring a lot ofproduct expertise Um um you know those SDRs I I

30:42

I I hired uh decades ago in in this one business unit a lotof them came from

30:50

product development and product management It happened wewere selling engineering development and design and

30:57

automation systems So they were using those tools every daySo it helped but but um you know pull them out of product

31:05

development pull them out of strategy you know people thatunderstand kind of

31:10

the business and those kinds of things Um take some of yourmost senior and

Brand damage from bad conversations

31:16

experienced salespeople Uh you know what I found again in inthat past experience

31:22

is I had these very senior very expensive people uh um

31:30

creating such pull that the expertise I needed to actually

31:36

manage the deal after they had gotten the customer all hotand lthered to change was much

31:43

less Um and and so we could do things very efficiently andvery effectively

31:49

but what we had to do is in incite people to change to givethem a new

31:54

vision of things and to be credible in how we do that And Ithink what's important you're saying too is like that

32:00

company with the 20 billion in pipeline you think about SCRSand you're like "Okay we need to keep throwing on the

32:06

pipeline." But if your win rate's only 15 to 20% Ahidden factor in there is

32:12

you're really hurting your your brand as well because you'reprobably have some garbage conversations Imagine the brand

32:18

damage that you're doing So uh an exercise I I I take peoplethrough is

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imagine two salespeople We have um Dave and Damon Both ofthem have $10 million

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quotas Both of them have $5 million pipelines Damon's winrate is

32:41

40% Dave's win rate is 20% So I tell managers this scenarioand

32:47

I said "What do you coach them about?" Naturalreaction

32:53

is they need to go out and prospect They need to go out andbuild 3x

32:58

pipeline And I'd say "Well let's think about thatDamon's a pretty good salesperson

33:05

um he only needs a 2 and a halfx pipeline to make hisnumbers And also if

33:12

you force him to spend the time to build a 3x pipelineyou're going to be diverting his time from the stuff that

33:18

he's really good at and you'll probably decrease his winrate All you need to do

33:24

is coach him in how to prospect and develop an additional50% to his pipeline so that he has a two and a an

33:31

additional two and a half million to his pipeline So so hehas a 12.5 million and he'll probably be very good in that kind

33:38

of thing So again he only needs a 2 and a halfx pipelineDave

33:45

sucks Um Dave you know Dave if he built

33:50

a 3x pipeline he needs a 5x pipeline to make his number Andif he's so bad at

One-size-fits-all coaching doesn't work

33:57

doing these deals imagine how bad he's going to be at

34:03

prospecting And imagine how much brand damage he's going todo to your company

34:10

because he just sucks So what do you do to help Dave

34:15

well what you do to help Dave is how do you get Dave betterat competing with the deals that he's doing right now

34:22

qualify the deals better Help him win the deals help him winhis raise his win rate then his pipeline

34:29

dynamics change quite a bit and then he starts becomingalmost as good as you Damon Uh probably not quite as good but

34:37

uh um but he becomes almost as good as you He the pipelinedynamics change He

34:43

can go out and prospect and do much less brand damage But wedon't see how all these things fit together and we have

34:51

kind of these one-sizefitsall solutions for everybody thatwe do and we fail 100% of the time

What frontline managers get wrong

34:59

when we do that What I think is so key that you're talkingabout here Dave is that you don't have this oneizefits-all

35:06

when it comes to coaching uh people need different things onyour teams in different areas which is kind of leads

35:14

me to where I wanted to go with this which is uh your greatbook that you wrote in 2016 Sales Managers Survival

35:20

Guide uh which was first referred to me by Mike Weinberg oneof my favorite um

35:25

New Sales Simplified He told me "Damon you have to readthis book You're going to really connect with it." And it's

35:30

great And a lot of the uh things we talk about here is likethe frontline sales leaders managers they really don't know

35:37

what their job is Right Right So how do we help themidentify what their job should be well I I think the first

35:44

problem we have is are we putting the right people into theright roles of P frontline sales manager 100% Is so so

35:51

much of the time we take our very top performers and saybecause you're our

35:56

top performer you'll probably be a great sales sales managerAnd 90% of the time

36:01

that's wrong is they're probably the worst sales managers inthe world And so we've gotten a double whammy Not only

36:08

have we lost their individual productivity but they'reinfecting the rest of the sale the team that they're

36:14

managing and and doing that So one is we have to make surewe get the right people into those roles Then two is we

36:22

have to say make sure that they they are very clear aboutwhat their job is And

36:28

when I go talk to a lot of frontline sales managers not justnew ones but experienced frontline sales managers I

36:34

say "What's your job?" And they say "It's tomake the number." And I said "No no no no That's your people's job

36:41

Your people's job is to make the numbers Your job is to doeverything you

36:47

can to enable them to do that So whether that's getting themthe right tools the right support

36:54

um the right training the right programs and mostimportantly the right coaching that's your job is to is to

Directive vs. non-directive coaching

37:02

enable your people to achieve their goals And if theycollectively achieve their goals then you'll achieve your

37:08

goal and contribute to your boss achieving your their goalYeah And you

37:14

said most importantly is getting them the right coaching Sowhat does the

37:20

right coaching look like uh from for for from a frontlinesales manager to their

37:26

individual reps There's a whole there's a whole I mean wellI wrote a whole book

37:31

about it and I'm writing another book about it but uh whatwe'll do is is we'll shorten it is is is one is is it's

37:40

um how we coach and there are different techniques betweendirective and non-directive coaching and and and so

37:48

you know the way people learn is more through nondirectivecoaching is is we

37:53

ask questions and we get them to think about this um and youknow the best way

37:59

to liken um nondirective coaching is the old

38:06

proverb that says uh feed a person to fish they they eat fora day teach a

38:12

person to fish and they eat for the rest of their lives Whatyou're doing in coaching is you're maybe using a

38:18

specific opportunity or a specific thing to help them thinkabout doing it

38:23

differently to develop their skills so that they're applyingthose same skills in every other situation that that they

38:29

face So we really want to leverage nondirective coaching asmuch as possible There are some people that

38:36

say that's all you do that you can't do directive coachingBut if I'm sitting in

38:41

a car with you and you're do going 80 miles an hour towardsa telephone pole

38:47

I'm going to get directive really quick I'm going to say"Damon slam on the brakes." Um and all So you have to

38:54

balance that So it's the balance between directive andnondirective coaching Then two is it's knowing what to coach and

Coaching inside every conversation

39:01

and so I've evolved my philosophy on that a little bit So umwe have to be

39:08

typically if we look at how we spend our days as managersand business management

39:13

we do pipeline reviews we do deal reviews we do accountreviews we look at

39:18

prospecting and all that and we look at have one ons Theobjective of each one of those

39:26

meetings is very different the underlying principles that weuse for coaching applying nondirective coaching

39:33

to that are very much the same but we lose track of that Soevery pipeline

39:39

review I've ever sat in before I've kind of infected themwith with my my thinking is uh it's always turned out to

39:47

be a deal review We start looking at the pipeline Somebodylooks at a deal and we spend 15 minutes going into that deal

39:54

then we go you know look at the pipeline again we go to thenext deal So we do

39:59

really bad deal reviews and we never get the pipeline reviewSo we have to be very clear about the objective of each

40:06

meeting that we have Um so that we coach to those objectiveswithin each meeting

40:13

The objective in a pipeline review is to look at qualityvolume

40:21

velocity The objective in a deal review is to say how do wemaximize our ability

40:27

to win and move this forward as aggressively as possible Theobjective of account uh review is to say our

40:34

god-given right is 100% share of customer How do we achievethat how do

40:40

we expand our reach to the rest of the com customers so wehave all these different objectives So those are the

40:46

ways we use our normal business management meetings Thething that I've become a tremendous I had

40:53

underestimated a number of years ago is the value of ad hoc

40:59

conversations is when we're standing in a line at StarbucksUm um you know how do I get

41:08

into a coaching conversation with somebody even though itmay be a minute

41:14

long or 90 seconds long How do I start developing somethrough things of what

41:20

am I going to do to coach Damon and improve his ability todo his job and so

41:29

I have you know there are two or three things I really wantto focus on with Damon So when we're going out to lunch

41:34

or we're driving up to meet a customer or when they'restanding in the Starbucks line if I get these little

41:41

intermittent kind of sound bites of a minute 90 seconds Iwant to have

41:49

some use that as a coaching opportunity to help them learnAnd what we're seeing in in some of the you know everybody is

41:58

time pressured right now As much as somebody wants toallocate the time to

42:03

sit down and do the one on co one coaching they can thereality is they

42:09

simply don't have the time So what we're seeing is theability of people to think of every interaction I have with one of

42:16

my people represents a coaching opportunity and not how do Ijump from

42:22

this to this to this to that and confuse people but what'sthe underlying through line of two or three things I want to

42:29

work with that person now on and then the next two or threethings that I want

Using improv to teach collaborative coaching

42:34

to work as I develop that individual Do you have anyinsights to help frontline

42:40

leaders or leaders at any level to kind of switch thatmindset around so that they uh can unlock some of those

42:47

coaching moments whether you're at Starbucks or as we usedto call it all day window time so you're not just BSing

42:54

about the weather during that time I have kind of a a 12stepthing to uh you

43:00

know establishing collaborative conversations and coachingconversations One of the things that we've been doing

43:06

a lot recently is uh applying lessons from improv

43:12

um interesting into this and if you look at the basicprinciples around effective

43:18

improv it's the yesand kind of approach and how do you howdo you in improv you

43:24

always have your partner's back You want to make yourpartner look good and your

43:31

partner will want to make you look good and you establishthis thing of how do you build this scene and the skit with

43:38

that uh through the conversation and you have these variousapproaches Yes And

43:43

and and those kinds of things that allow you to do that Ifyou look at that those are fundamentals to good collaborative

43:50

conversations and good coaching conversations So we actuallyuse uh use

43:56

improv um in uh in a lot of our workshops and and sessionswhere you

44:02

know people get up and you have a little bit of fun with itBut you start learning about how to apply these

44:08

principles of working together to a solution uh rather thanjust do this do

44:14

this and come back to me when you have it done That'sinteresting It's making me think about maybe I I should uh we we

44:20

have one of our facilitators on our team who's an improvinstructor Uh have him

44:25

start working with Joe Little I'm thinking of you buddy Havehim start working with the the sales team or in customer success team about howwe could

44:32

connect those two Yeah I have a good friend uh Rob Petersonwho's a professor at at a university in in uh Illinois and

44:40

he happened to have gone through workshops at Second City inChicago Mhm Uh and he actually teaches in his class

44:48

a lot of improv Um and you know he and I you know in ourconversations we try and

44:54

one up each other with our sick jokes and our bad improv Andhe just tells me Dave you need to either stop this or go

Coaching in “cracks of time”

45:01

to Second City and learn a lot more But uh you know thoseprinciples again they're

45:07

they're principles of how do we work together to achieve acommon goal and that's what coaching really is And so

45:13

what I hear you saying as well is that coaching doesn't haveto be this formal one hour session here one hour session

45:20

there It's try to work it into so-called the cracks of oftime with individuals

45:25

May even be more effective with uh people's um attentionspan You still need to where you can have those formal

45:32

sessions that are very objective driven like a pipelinereview or deal review or those kinds of things But in the reality

45:39

is fill in every crack you can as a coaching opportunity andthen

45:45

cumulatively this has a massive massive impact on you Isthere anything from you you mentioned that this is something you

45:51

thought differently since your book came out in in 2016 wasthe ad hoc Is there anything from your book now that's

What’s changed since The Sales Manager Survival Guide

45:58

almost 10 years that you no longer subscribe to like wedon't we don't I don't recommend that at all anymore No

46:03

actually it's um and you know I'm not doing this to sellmore books I think

46:10

it's more relevant now than it was 10 years ago becausewe're

46:16

seeing where the problems back in 2016 you're seeing theemergence of some of

46:22

these things and all example um win rates you know back thenwin rates were

46:30

uh you know much higher usually in the 30% range I used tojoke not really a joke because I did it uh you know I'd

46:37

fire people whenever their win rates went lower than 30% ifI couldn't coach them to improve and they consistently

46:44

had 30% win rates you know I'd fire them and 30% was way toolow uh you So back

46:51

then win rates were higher Back then um average tenurs werelonger and and

46:58

things like that So what we've seen is the precursors to theproblems that

47:04

existed when I I was writing the book have become moreaccentuated right now

47:10

For instance time available for coaching is just gone downthe tubes If you look at

47:16

how much people are interrupted with things and and all thatand I think back

47:23

then what I didn't see was that the enormity of that timepressure and the

47:30

enormity of the kind of disruption pressure and and

47:36

uncertainty and I underestimated the the value

47:41

of filling in every crack you can with ad hoc coaching andyour new book is

47:47

coming out um sales executive survival guide sometime in2025 and is this like

Preview of Dave’s next book: Sales Executive Survival Guide

47:55

an evolution of uh the last book the sales manager survivalguide focused on

48:02

the frontline sales managers and how to maximize theperformance of each individual on the team Um the sales

48:10

executive survival guide focuses on the top executives inthe organization and

48:15

how we build organizational excellence So if you look atsome of the things that we talked

48:22

about earlier in this conversation of of culture purposevalues building those

48:30

kinds of things uh how we deal with massive disruption howwe deal with

48:37

uncertainty uh how we innovate and how we change Those arethe central themes in this

48:44

book One of the reasons it's been pushed behind a little bitis now we're

48:49

starting to look at how do we leverage AI and very nextquestion Okay Yeah Yeah

48:55

How do we leverage AI in very impactful ways and what haveyou found so far not to

49:00

give away all your secrets but what have you found so far ishow from an executive sales executive perspective

Using AI as a debate partner, not a crutch

49:06

start to start leveraging AI so much of the the what you seefashionable with AI AI

49:15

right now is what it does for us And what we need to do isreally twist our

49:20

mentality to say what we do with AI and how do wecollaborate with it um is I I

49:30

wrote a blog post a few weeks ago that stirred up somecontroversy I said at the top of the blog post is AI really

49:37

that good or are we that bad um and what you discover

49:45

is a in this sense terribly arrogant and negative andperhaps I mean it that way

49:53

is AI will be as stupid as we are or AI will be as smart aswe are you

50:01

know So when I see people at very s you know at whateverlevel using AI and

50:08

going through very fascinating prompt scenarios and goingthrough I I'm not

50:14

trying to get AI to give me the answer I'm g I'm using AI tohelp me think

50:19

about things differently Uh I use chatpt or cloud uh I kindof isol we jump back

50:28

and forth between them is I use them as debate partners youknow I start saying

50:33

here's an idea I have you know let's expand on the idea soI'll go through

50:39

and expand on the idea quite a bit and I said what are theflaws in my thinking uh you know and we'll go through the

50:45

flaws in my thinking and then say well what are 10recommendations for going forward you know what's wrong with each

50:52

one of those recommend you know and we'll go back and forthand I don't ever accept what it gives me but it helps me

50:59

think very differently and helps improve the quality of mywork in just tremendous ways And if you look at the

51:07

real kind of top people in AI itself

51:13

um I'm doing a project right now with the the guy the seniorvice president Microsoft who runs all of AI development

51:21

in in what's called customer service and customer care Sothey're developing

Learning faster through collaborative AI tools

51:26

products to offer their customers They're developingproducts within their own organization And the way this guy

51:32

thinks about using AI just blows me away Uh and it's not youknow can you write a

51:39

thousand emails to me to this kind of persona It's it'sreally in that kind of

51:44

critical thinking problem solving mode Yeah It it kind ofthe theme of our conversation is around curiosity

51:50

critical thinking and problem solving Now you're tying itinto AI And what I hear you saying is that you want the AI

51:59

should be not a thought leader where you just put somethingin and you and it just spits it out and you agree to it

52:04

but more of a thought partner you know somebody you candebate with And I'm stealing that from Jeff Woods who is on

52:11

my show who wrote a fabulous book called AIdriven Leader Umwhich which which I

52:16

thought was fantastic And I'm also kind of curious on theside do ChateBT and Claude give you much different answers

52:22

is it worth uh challenging it through both week by week myanswer changes because they're both stairstepping each

52:30

other in what they do Um uh Claude has much more of apersonality in its

52:36

interaction Uh I have learned how to prompt chat GPT to havemuch more of a

52:42

personality um uh on this but Claude naturally is is

52:49

trained to have much more of a personality and to providesome push back and some things like that You can

52:56

get chat GPT to do that But again you know this week chatGPT has some has

53:04

more of a personality than it had last week Uh yeah I seethat I see that Yeah

53:09

Yeah it's actually I um I have a master prompt that I startwhether I'm with

53:17

Claude or with with Chat GPT I have a master prompt that Ijust load into it

53:25

saying I'm you know this is who I am This is how I thinkThis is what I do

53:30

This is what I expect of you and how I want you to interactwith me Uh and so I

53:37

start every conversation by preloading that before I've evenstarted talking about the issues I want to talk about So

53:45

I set its behavior for me as a thought partner before I evenstart asking it

53:51

questions With all your success over so many decades what isit about you that

53:58

keeps you still curious and interested in learning where itcould be very easy

Dave’s master prompt strategy for ChatGPT and Claude

54:03

to just kind of settle in and say I've already accomplishedall this I who cares about AI or any of this new stuff

54:09

i actually started out I was training as being a theoreticalphysicist and I was

54:15

going to do research in theoretical physics at Berkeley andteach classes and all that So that curiosity and

What keeps Dave curious after decades of success

54:22

natural problem solving kind of thing has always been partof me and I can't

54:27

imagine life without that You know as I look at right now Ihave met so many

54:33

interesting people I've gotten so many interesting ideas youknow and I've gotten ideas and as I said I I do

54:42

sometimes hang out with improv actors and I get ideas andtalking to them that

54:48

I say "Have you ever you know I go to a business andsaid "Have you ever thought

54:54

of doing something this way?" Or years ago I was doinga bunch of work with some companies on innovation I was

55:01

working with one large semiconductor company and uh I wasworking with a

55:07

small I had a side business in extreme sports Um and it wasnot that successful

55:13

but it got me to hang out with cool people and got me freemotorcycles and free surfboards and cool gear and all

55:20

that kind of stuff But I was doing um um

55:26

an innovation project for a small extreme sport manufacturerand I said geez it's innovation why don't we slap

55:33

these two people together so we were in the boardroom of oneof these semiconductor companies and you can

55:39

imagine along one side this was about 20 years ago were allthese people in

55:47

powder blue shirts and cockis on the other side were peoplein

55:54

leathers torn t-shirts full sleeves of tattoos and thevisible piercings were

56:00

in really interesting places Uh and they were looking ateach other Then they'd look at me and you'd

56:07

see them kind of saying "What the Yeah Uh and uh so wejust

56:14

started talking and uh I said you know tell me about howinnovation and change

56:20

works in extreme sports in your industry And then I'd saywith the semiconductor guys tell me about how it works in that

56:28

All of a sudden I just backed off They started talking toeach other And what

56:33

they found is ideas that were commonplace in their

What extreme sports and Wu-Tang taught him about innovation

56:39

industry when adapted and tweaked for say extreme sportswere groundbreaking

56:47

and vice versa Some of the ideas and things that they weredoing in extreme

56:53

sports when adapted and tweaked for the semiconductorindustry were just innovative and

56:59

groundbreaking you know So part of what I like to do is Ilike to talk to as diverse a group of people that I can and

57:09

pick up their ideas because then I can take it to my clientsand say "I was

57:15

talking to," and this literally was it I was talking tothis

57:20

um hip-hop band that has this really great reputation Uh andthis is some of the

57:26

stuff that they do in their business What if we triedapplying some of this

57:33

in your business and the band it happened to be Wuang Ispent some time with Wuang a

57:40

number of years ago And you must have good stories aboutthem You don't have to tell me now but yeah what they were

57:45

doing in their business Uh and I could go to some you knowbig industrial product manufacturers or big

57:51

professional services firms and say they're doing somethings to reach and connect with their customers in very

57:59

intriguing ways How could we do similar things in thisbusiness i think that that's

58:05

incredible and it's so smart Get out of your bubble Don'tyou know don't go looking at what you're already doing

58:11

internally or even your competitors look at completelyseparate uh industries or

58:18

in this case music acts or sports teams and figure out howcould I take a piece of what they're doing and maybe leverage

58:24

it for oursel or for our customers Yeah super importantRight now I'm

58:29

mentoring uh junior in high school I'm mentoring some peoplein college I'm

58:35

mentoring some very young people And actually I learned morefrom them because you

58:40

know they you know I'd become an old fart and you know theyteach me some new

58:46

things and help me look at things differently and they claimthat they're learning a lot from me So it's really I

58:52

mean you know get way outside your bubble both in terms ofgeneration in terms of uh um however diverse you can

59:02

get You'll always learn something new I'm with you on that II you know I'm I'm in my 50s and I love having

59:08

conversations either high school kids or or even people intheir 20s and and just

59:14

being open-minded to what they're having to say and and Iand I just try to enjoy mentoring people as well because it is

59:20

reciprocal both ways Dave I mean you're you're awesomeBefore we close out is there anything else we haven't spoke

59:26

about that you wanted to talk about well we could go on forhours and hours It's it's we're just doing some fascinating

Why mentoring high schoolers keeps him sharp

59:32

things in AI right now Uh and I'm just really excited withsome of the pilots

59:38

around helping people

59:44

learn What we're doing is we're developing this really I Italked a lot

59:50

about our business focused solutions uh type things and werun a lot of workshops a lot of coaching sessions and

59:56

things like that We've taken major parts of that and putthat in AI

1:00:03

Um and we have these inter very collaborative problemsolving

1:00:08

conversations that AI goes through with the person That justblows me away Um is

1:00:17

that AI can the AI tool can calibrate how much you know Itknows the end goal

1:00:25

that we're trying to help our our our our students getthrough It can calibrate where you are right now

1:00:33

and what it needs to teach you to get to that end goal Soevery course looks very

1:00:39

different for each person And then they can also startcustomizing it by bringing in their their uh sales

1:00:46

experiences or particular deals and and so on And we've justbeen testing this

1:00:52

and what people are seeing from this is is really g we'vehad a few expert

1:00:59

opinions that um nobody in is leveraging

1:01:05

AI learning tools the way we are right now And I expectthat's I mean part of that is it's hard to know what

1:01:11

everybody's doing but there are only a small number ofpeople starting to do that I mean once it becomes visible uh

1:01:18

it people will figure out how to do it but it's justexciting to see how you can engage people and how you can get

1:01:25

them to change so quickly and learn so quickly and plus it'syou know they become the cool kids on the block

1:01:32

They're leveraging these tools in really profound ways SoI'm really excited by

1:01:39

uh what we're starting to see from that And are thosecourses through your your organ your your company yes Yeah Right

1:01:46

We haven't We're about to launch them Um and what's the nameof it i want to make

1:01:51

sure I put the I'm gonna I'm not in the link in the um Iknow you haven't launched them yet but just where the courses are in generalThe there'll be

1:01:58

uh two initial courses that we we do in our our um uh we'vebeen doing for a

1:02:05

long time These things like these uh what I it's called thecustomer focus

1:02:10

Brock questionnaire and the problem focus Brockquestionnaire What I did is I developed a technique watching I don't

1:02:17

know if you watch Steven Coar but Steven Coar every once ina while has this

1:02:22

thing he calls the Cobar questionnaire uh and it's 15sentenc 15 questions that

1:02:29

completely characterize somebody and so uh he gets an actoron and says we you

1:02:35

know I interview but I really don't get to know you let metalk to you let me ask you these 15 questions and the first

1:02:42

question is what's your favorite sandwich Um you know andone of the questions is "What number am I thinking

1:02:48

of?" And people are always wrong but it's interestingwhat you get in those questions how well you get to really

1:02:54

understand somebody because the questions stimulate thisconversation So

1:03:00

I years ago developed this concept around how do we reallyget to know our

1:03:06

customer and it's how do we go talk to them about what youknow what's what's your work week look like who do you

1:03:13

depend on who depends on you how are you measur you know allthose what changes have you seen so there are 15 questions

1:03:20

that we completely calibrate uh a person in a role We'vedone thousands and

1:03:26

thousands of interviews So the analytics we get from thatare really kind of interesting Recently we discovered that

1:03:32

was insufficient that people understood what questionspeople do And now we're

1:03:38

starting to say how do we understand the problem how do weget people to really understand not what their product does

1:03:46

but the problem itself so we've developed a 15 question uhuh problem

1:03:52

focus questionnaire uh and we've been doing that So thisrecent thing is we've

1:03:57

converted both to AI uh and so we've converted it to this AI

1:04:04

discussion where in 90 minutes we can teach somebody how

1:04:09

to do that and do their first role play Uh and it's veryvery deep Um and we can

1:04:16

do it Uh I was talking to a friend of mine uh uh early thismorning Um is he

1:04:24

happens to be in Tel Aviv and he said "Dave do you knowI interacted with it

1:04:30

in Hebrew and it changed its whole language to deal with mein Hebrew Incredible." And and it says it's pretty

1:04:37

good And so we're doing that We'll roll I'll roll those twoout within probably the next 45 days Okay so this is we're

1:04:47

this episode will be out in early May Uh so probably byAugust at least it should

1:04:53

be out probably by the end of May June you'll you'll be ableto see it Yeah No

1:04:59

that's awesome Well I mean Dave this has been a a wonderfulconversation To recap

1:05:04

some of the things we talked about is we talked about thedecay in sales with whether it's a win rates or uh you know

1:05:11

team quota being less than 40% We discussed the importanceof

1:05:16

curiosity critical thinking problem solving and how to shiftfrom thinking

1:05:22

about things from a a feature base to a you know helping outwith the outcomes

1:05:28

you're looking for So many great things We talked about therole of the frontline manager and finding out

1:05:33

finding ways to do ad hoc coaching which I think is criticalcritical and this

1:05:38

discussion around AI that you're obviously very passionateabout So thank you so very much Where can our listeners

1:05:45

connect with you at they can connect with me on LinkedIn Uhthey can uh the

1:05:50

the uh website is partners excellenceblog.com

1:05:56

uh and uh and you can publish my email address uh it's uhand all but uh no I

1:06:03

look forward to the feedback I've really enjoyed thisdiscussion Thanks for putting up with me for such a long time

1:06:10

Uh it's been a fun discussion It's just an honor to be ableto learn from somebody like you and I really mean that

1:06:16

I really mean that from the first time I heard your namewhen Mike Weinberg told me about the sales manager survival

1:06:21

guide to now So thank you Dave And for our listeners outthere do me a favor If you're in sales especially if you're a

1:06:29

frontline sales manager you got to check out uh Dave's workPlease send this

1:06:36

episode to your friends who can get value out of it Thereyou go Look you got the book there He's got it right there I want my autographcopy I I'll

1:06:42

pick it up when I come see you uh up north And until nexttime everybody stay

1:06:48

curious keep learning and have a great day Thank you Or canyou get into a

1:06:54

company doing what you used to do but but stay but networkand try to connect with the area that you want to go into

1:07:01

and and know it's a company Do that

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