221: Simon Mulcahy and Karen Semone On The Art, Science, and Magic of Selling

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and this is the latest episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Gong, Vidyard, Chili Piper, Intro Hive, and our newest partner, Salesforce Sales Cloud. We appreciate everything you guys do. JB Sales is looking to impact teams of all sizes in 2021. Continuous learning for teams has become a need the world over, and we've risen to the challenge and delivered with JB Sales On Demand. Teams in the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, and especially right here at home in the US have all taken up arms and started learning with JB Sales On Demand. Invest in yourself and gain the skills and processes you need to adopt to hit quota no matter what comes your way.

Join us today at ondemand.jbarrows.com and become more than what you were yesterday. I'll see you there. Today, JB is joined by two innovation leaders at Salesforce. Karen Simone and Simon Mulcahy are here to talk all things innovation, thought leadership, content, and invention. There's a wealth of knowledge to be learned from these two dynamic leaders with tons of free thinking skills that they'll share with you here today. The building blocks of this conversation will be rooted on the art, science, and magic of selling. Great topic. Sure to be a good one, so strap in and let's go. Here's JB, Simon, and Karen to get us going. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows making up on Monday.

Hopefully you had a fantastic weekend. The weather here in Boston is getting so much nicer, so my weekends are getting better and better, and I'm excited even though I'm still stuck in my basement right now while we go through renovations. But that said, I am very interested in this conversation for multiple reasons today, and we'll get into those, but I would like to introduce two individuals here. We're going to have a really cool conversation about innovation and where things are going right now. So Karen Simone from Senior Director of Innovation over at Salesforce, and Simon Mulcahy, Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce. How are both of you? Thank you so much for coming on. I'm great. Thank you so much for having us.

Very excited, big fan of the show, first time on, obviously. So I'm super pumped to be here and sharing a book of work today that I'm super privileged to be a part of and working on Simon's team, which is always a pleasure. Yeah, this is great. Thanks so much for inviting us. Yeah. And thanks for coming. And just for some context here, I mean, those are some pretty heavy titles in a very well-known company here. So maybe Karen, if you just explain a little bit of your journey of how you ended up getting to where you are right now, so we can have some context for this conversation. And Simon, if you could just give me that same thing on your end, and then we're going to get into what you've learned and where we're going with this.

So Karen, you want just a little bit of background for us? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I came to innovation here at Salesforce by way of storytelling. The red thread of my career is I've done digital content experience. So I came here three and a half years ago from the agency side, feels like a decade. It feels like a century. Salesforce years. It's like, right, exactly. You measure how many dream forces you've been to. But, you know, what I do is lead a book of thought leadership for the C-suite and thought leadership is kind of a lame buzz term. What that really means is like, what is our unique perspective? And specifically right now, I'm focused on the future of selling and growth. So when you talk to the C-suite, I think it has an application for sales leaders and sellers in general, you better back it up with research.

You know, you really have to pull from that sort of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing that's going on right now, post-COVID, across industries and geographies. You really have to sort of be able to apply one industry's pains and learnings to other industries as you go. And then I think with what I do every day, there's a little bit of humility in it. You know, I mean, we love to talk about ourselves at Salesforce as being, you know, market leaders in the magic quadrant. But we are all figuring out how to do that together. And I think a lot of the leaders we talk to feel that way as well. So that's a long-winded way of saying I'm creating amazing content for the C-suite. I love it. Yeah, it's funny.

You know, you talk about, you know, the humility factor. It's like thought leaders, right? People, anybody who I say labels themselves as a thought leader isn't a thought leader. But the people who are actually out there doing the work and looking at the insights and sharing those insights, those to me are thought leaders, even though they might not be the loudest voices out there. I think the data is driving so much of what we do right now, which is why I'm excited to have this conference. Because I mean, I talk all about art and science when I do my sales training. And I actually believe now more than ever, we need to be scientists. We need to be scientists. We need to look at the data and then make decisions.

And then our art is what kind of rounds it out. But before we get into that, Simon, I mean, Chief Innovation Officer, talk to us a little bit about how you got to where you are right now and what you're excited about. Purely accidentally. I'm in fear every day of waking up and being discovered. 12 years at Salesforce, came from the World Economic Forum. Before that, I was an army officer. So clearly straight line, all my life has been built for this moment. Done a bunch of stuff at Salesforce, ran financial services, built product, was Chief Marketing Officer, and now Chief Innovation Officer. Spent a lot of time talking to customers about transformation and warning them that they cannot leverage technology, pouring new technology over old thinking.

They have to think differently as well. So we spend a lot of time helping people think differently. And I think that's, if nothing else, you know, COVID has almost forced it. You know, I think there's, it's funny whenever I hear somebody saying, oh, I can't wait till the things go back to normal. I just shake my head. I'm like, you've already lost, right? I mean, if you genuinely think that things are going, I don't know what normal was for you, by the way. And I talk a lot about agility and how the most successful companies move. I think the number one competitive advantage right now is agility. But you've done, both of you have done a lot of work in kind of, like you said, consolidating and synthesizing a lot of the information that Salesforce has about your go-to-market strategy and those type of things and are now sharing that with others.

And you've broken it down into the kind of science, art, and magic approach here. So we talked right before we were getting on this about kind of what was the driver for it. I think obviously, you know, the COVID is, but Simon, do you want to kind of talk a little bit about the framework here, about what we're about to get into? And then I'll be very specific with some of the questions that we got. Absolutely. And maybe this is the last thing because I think Karen deserves all the credit for the work. So the genesis of this is quite simple. And I'm sure everybody listening to this is feeling it. And that is the pressure on the sales organization just has continued to mount. Even before COVID, it was mounting and mounting and it's all brute force.

You have to just do more with less and it's just hard work. It's really hard work and customers are changing how they buy. And yeah, you can get some new tools, but it just gives you more to do rather than less. And what happened in COVID was everybody realized that the tools that they had were just not fit for purpose for this world where we've been thrust into. And in every single industry, people have been reaching panic moments of, oh my God, my distribution engine is not fit for purpose. How do I sell in this new world? Well, I can't pour more gasoline on top of this thing. I need to think this differently. So we've just had so many customers come to us and say, listen, we need your help.

We need to rethink how we sell. And it turns out that 22 years of Salesforce having 20 plus percent growth year over year, that's a lot of what we've been doing. So we spent the last while really, frankly, taking everything that we do across all the different parts of Salesforce and distilling it down into three little bottles of the science of selling, the art of selling, and the magic of selling. And that's really what we've been doing. And insane insights as we've gone through that journey, because a lot of it is fit for the world that we're now moving into. And so it's kind of an exciting moment for us. It seems like. And Karen, you know, those insights, I always try to, I always have to take myself out of the equation a little bit, because most of my life is spent in San Francisco, well, working with San Francisco companies in Silicon Valley area, hyper growth, and the tech bubble of San Francisco is always just cracks me up, because usually you take one step out of that.

And it's like sales 1985 all over again, in a lot of ways. So how much, I mean, I think like the most innovative companies in the world, and I think there is a level that there is a group of companies saying, we see this and we're going for it. We're changing everything that we do. But how much are you seeing with the, I don't want to say laggards, but the rest of the non-tech world and how they're evolving right now based on what you've been seeing? Because that's what I don't see. I don't see a lot of the non-tech companies evolving the way that they do things or need to for a lot of ways. Well, depending on the industry you're talking about, there's a lot of pain out there right now. And what was interesting to us when I just recently set out on some of this research, it was, we found that while, yeah, there's been a lot of change in the last 18 months, a lot of the trends, the macro trends have been building for 20 years.

So it's not new. I mean, as an example, a few of the things that we started thinking about was distributed digital for selling. Clearly right now it's reaching a sort of crazy tipping point with everybody, remote learning, virtual selling. But that was happening before. I mean, it really was. Like the teams were distributed. There was this need for a globally integrated enterprise where you could connect with people all over the world and harness their expertise. Second trend, high-touch, high-tech buying experiences. We see more and more B2B buyers demanding kind of to be met on their level and their channel of choice and also doing a lot of homework themselves, self-serving them homework, right?

And so you have that sort of high-touch need for the trusted advisor that knows your business really well, that's an expert, but you also need a really high-tech, seamless, friction-free buying experience and increasingly self-service in B2B. So that's kind of this trend, this high-tech, high-touch. And then finally, and while this is not new, this is sort of represented by our magic and our framework, just the rise of outcome centricity, right? This shift from selling features and benefits of the product to solutions to actually solving a problem, and consultative solving has been around for a long time. However, actually being able to do that in a time of so much great change feels very critically important right now.

And really, you need the science and the art to be able to set yourself up to be able to do that is kind of what we found. Yeah, and that's what, like, you know, so one of my first jobs was Xerox, right? And solution selling, they invented, you know, late 70s, early 80s, and it still amazes me to this day when I do sales training. I have sales leaders asking me, hey, John, you know, I really need to transition to solution selling because my reps are just still feature function dumping, and I'm like, where have you been for the past 30 years? Like, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. This is why I kind of bring up, like, I see where we need to evolve to, and I just, I fear that there's a lot of companies that are so stuck in the way things were, the way things used to be, and making little adjustments because they see it, that they're really going to have, there's going to be a reckoning.

And I think COVID was it. I mean, one of the positive things on COVID's side was, you know, nobody ever, there was always the argument where, oh, you can't sell a multi-million dollar deal remotely. I have to go on site. I have to meet with you. I have to meet, right? And literally overnight, everybody figured out how to sell multi-million dollar deals, right? Yeah, more as well. Yeah, right? It's like it's laid down. Well, I mean, and Salesforce is a great example of that. I remember you all broke the mold when it came to selling SaaS. There was a perception for a while that, oh, you know, yeah, SaaS is cued up to a couple million, you know, up to, you know, a few hundred thousand, that type of stuff.

But if you really want, you know, a real solution like the Oracles, then no, no, you have to go with, you have to go with Oracle. And then all I think, I think it was like State Farm or something like that. You sold like a hundred and fifty million dollar deal at State Farm. And it just was like, oh, well, apparently, apparently SaaS is. Apparently that's not the rule. So help me understand a little bit, and I want to go back to what we had talked about before, which was, you know, the predictable revenue model. And I personally am very curious about this because predictable revenue is the segmentation of roles and how that has allowed companies to scale and bring in different specialties and allow us to quarterback a little bit.

That was a huge catalyst to Salesforce's growth, right? You bring in SDRs, you put them behind, you get them grinding, and then you get them a BDRs, you make the phone calls, and then the AEs, and they start SMB mid-market enterprise. It provides an awesome growth path for sales executives and organizations. How do you see that in this change? Because I think that, I personally think that's going to change right now. But how do you see the model of sales having to change right now with where we are? So if you think... Oh, you go ahead. Well, I'll just start and then throw it to Karen. We're not through, you can't throw away predictability. It's fundamentally important to our business. We have to land an enormous business on a forecast which is finally landing on like a fly on top of a pinhead or an aircraft on top of a pinhead.

So to get that right, we've got to hit every week, every month, every quarter. And frankly, the analysts expect it. But the problem is that that's just not good enough in this world in order to achieve all the other things that Karen said. So we need to go over... So take that as a core. But then how do you really build on top of that? And that's what took us then to, I think, probably where Karen's going. Yeah, I think the predictive model is all about the science of selling. That's how we think about it. It's incredibly important. And I've actually learned a ton, as Simon says, rifling through all the sock doors at Salesforce, like talking to people in so many pockets. I've learned a ton about really how we think about the science of selling and how to predict.

I spoke yesterday to Ari Shmorek, who is executive president here. And he runs sales operations and strategy for basically a lot of our sales and customer success groups. And we had a great interview about this and talking a little bit about how he thinks about predicting pipeline and forecasting. And it's really like there's three fairly simple metrics that he's looking for. Are we going to make this quarter's numbers? Are we going to make next quarter's numbers? And do we have enough pipeline into the future? And so when that is built in to every single process and every single sales person's brain, what you end up having is a well-oiled machine of being able to not just identify and predict where the gaps might be, but also solution.

So Simon, I remember you telling me early in this process, like you have to sit in on the Monday morning global forecast call, which is a pretty frequent cadence to have every single executive leader in our company meet every single Monday rain or shine. And look together at the pipe and some of us. And there's a ton of analytics that go into it. We have our favorite dashboards. Everyone uses sort of their different formula for it. But what's interesting, I've learned about that conversation that happens every single week here at Salesforce is that it's not just about inspecting the pipe and looking at the forecast. It's also about solutioning. It's getting the best brains in the company together in the service of growth, which I think is really powerful.

And there's a shared mission there. But you need the data. You need the science there. You need the behavior. You need the culture of transparency. You need to have every single seller putting everything in the org and not having pipeline calls outside of it. You need to commit to mean something. Because that's what I was going to ask. Sometimes the data does lie, right? You know, I mean, if you just look at the pure science, I mean, again, I talk about knowing your equation, right? When I was doing my first startup, I had to make $1,600 a month, got me eight meetings a month, got me four proposals, got me two pieces of closed business and average deal size of $3,500. And I ran that equation like you read about, but I look back on it and that was pure brute force, right?

It was, I was making $400 a week and I was just playing a pure numbers game and it shook out. And back 20 years ago, I could kind of get away with that right now. My fear is right now that we're still in this transition world, right? Where, and I almost do this from a generational standpoint. I'm a Gen Xer, right? So when, when I grew up in sales, it was a numbers game. It was hit your, hit your dials. I think everybody fundamentally understands right now that, that quality is the answer, right? Account-based marketing, artificial intelligence, you know, the buyer's journey, but managers like me, it's really hard to coach on quality. It's really hard to get an understanding or my arms around quality.

You know, what's easy for me to coach to numbers, hit your 50 dials, send out your sequences or your cadences, whatever it is, because I can push a number on a dashboard and I can see, Karen, you didn't, you know, you only made 42 dials today instead of 50. So I'm now going to put you on a PIP. So where is that balance of, first of all, what are, what are the number, what numbers should we be looking at? And then where is the art that allows us to understand the quality within those numbers as opposed to just the quantity? Yeah, it's a great question. Every company has their own metrics. I think one of the things I think that we have that we are religious about is participation and it's really important metric for us.

And it basically is a, literally is every single AE, is every single salesperson participating in our shared growth. It's essentially the, at the highest level, but the way that we measure that is, is quite scientific and has actually changed even, I think in this, in this, you know, post COVID period of time. We did something really interesting, I think, was it last April, maybe Simon, with the, with a million Zooms where we, where we suddenly realized that, you know, everybody had that one quarter where it was just like, what is even going on? Let's not even talk about it. And we realized we needed to talk to our customers in a different way and connect with them on a different way and not be so, not be those rhinos about like, let's close deals.

Cause really right now we need, we were all solving the problems together. And so we came up with this concept of let's have a million Zooms. And then that became, let's have 5 million Zooms. And it wasn't just conversation for the fact, you know, for the sake of having the conversation, it was really like problem solving, getting in their head and understanding, you know, getting in their hearts and minds and understanding what that business needed. So it was a sort of macro effort to get smarter on behalf of our customers' outcomes. And we were able to measure that. We were able to measure how much every seller is participating in that effort. And so that's been really important. I mean, we have a global AE participation dashboard we look at.

We can look at a quarter end, weekly snapshot. We can look by account, by geography, by person. There's a tons of ways that we're slicing and dicing the data. But I think what you're getting at is that you can't, that in and of itself, right? That data in and of itself is not enough, which is, I think, where the art comes in. You know, the human touch is so critically important. And what is actually said and how you're actually showing up on those zooms, that's really the art of selling. And that's what kind of scares me a little bit about what's happening right now is because I'm seeing a lot of these kids come in, you know, out of school, they're taught to the test, you know, and they come out and they're being given scripts, they're being given cadences and all these different things that they're pressing play on.

And they're literally just going through the motion. Yeah. And I talk about what I'm trying to search for personally is there's two thresholds that as a trainer, if you will, I'm trying to help expedite for kids. One is to get to what I call the give a shit factor, which is the day you wake up and you stop thinking of the person on the other end as a number or an email address. And you actually start thinking about them as a human being and start to have true empathy for them and try to understand what their situation is all about and be genuinely curious about them. So that's kind of the first threshold there. And then there's the unconscious competence threshold where I've done enough, you know, I've done my 10,000 hours or whatever it might be.

And now I just, I know how to run a call. I know how to manage a meeting because it's just, I've done it for so long. So those two thresholds are really what I'm trying to figure out a way to expedite. And I guess I'm curious from your perspective, how do you see that? How do you see the, the let's, let's get from the science and let's lay that strong foundation to make those numbers so that we can have some metrics to look at to then, how do you get those kids to make those million zooms, but, but not just make those million zooms because I'm on a dashboard and I'm going to get in trouble that I didn't get my 10 today, but it's an actual genuine conversation. Like, how do you facilitate that?

Well, I mean, we're not, I'm not going to be the first person to say soft skills are more important than ever, obviously. But it's been really interesting talking to some of our executives and top minds around how you actually, what is the intangible human connection that you're looking for? This is going to be, this is going to sound completely trite, but like listening is, is an art, right? And so many there's, there's actually some tactical tips I heard from some of our sales leaders about how we coach on this particular topic, which is different remotely too. I mean, right. You, you don't have, I mean, closing is different now because you used to go to a two day session and the closing would happen at dinner in between the two days, right?

Like where the, they really let their hair down and talk through things. We obviously don't have that right now. So how do you listen and truly care? I mean, I think you nailed it. Like you have to really be curious. You have to be a curious person. You have that quality. One of our... Can you take, sorry to interrupt. Can you, I'm going to, cause I ask a lot of people this and I'm still searching for the answer. Um, can you teach genuine curiosity or is it something that you were born with? Gosh, that's a good question. Simon, what do you think? I, I, it's hard for me to say I'm such a curious person. Well, me too. That's why, like, that's for me, it comes naturally. Cause I think I'm, I always knew I'm not the smartest kid in the room.

You know, I went to a state state school, drank my way through college type of thing. And so I actually, the reason I started my podcast was because this is how I learn. I don't learn by reading a book. I don't learn by going to a seminar. I learned by getting people who are smarter than me and asking them questions. And because I'm genuinely curious, cause I know I don't know everything. And so Simon, like what, what are your thoughts on, on that dynamic? It's like nature nurture type of thing as well. Right. But I think you can facilitate it. The, the issue is that the selling experience is intensely complex at times. There's a lot that you've got to do, especially if it's manual, especially if you've got a checklist, you've got your boss beating you up with like 10 things that he or she needs.

Suddenly you've got an enormous amount of things you've got to achieve in a day. So you end up basically stacking your work into, into kind of buckets of actions and you try and hammer through it. And, and you think that by being productive in that manner, you're being highly, you know, your outcome will be high. So the first thing is how do you remove effort? How do you make things easier? And the part of it is like the sales system should go, Hey, why is Karen doing all of that donkey work? Let's just get rid of that. Let's take it away from her. Let's automate that away from her. That should be magicked away. And that should be space airtime that you've now got. And then now you're in front of the customer and you've got more airtime, but you should also be augmented even in that airtime.

So you should have the system going, here's the top three questions you should be asking. Because by the way, this customer is not an unknown or shouldn't be an unknown person. The system should know enough that the system should be saying to you, here's what the, here's what the customer has. Here's some other context. And by the way, here's three smart questions. And then now you're going, I really want to know what their answer is, because that's going to trigger me to put more stuff into the system. And the system is going to be providing me with better clues to what I can do next. So now you're, you're hunting for clues and that is a great place for a salesperson to be. It's just really difficult if you can't, cause you've got your eyes closed.

You're not even listening. You're just swinging that ax and hoping you hit gold. So we, we have this idea that, that the future salesperson, uh, John is not, is, is not a rhino. And some of them to Simon's point have been trained to be rhinos. It's like the focus is on process admins, making the numbers, question, the quota. It's not on deal strategy, how to listen, how to be a good partner. And so it's really not their fault. And, but the future seller needs to be a unicorn, right? They need to be able to orchestrate the whole organization, be strategic, you know, bring everything together, have complete and total recall of conversations. So active listening is not, this is a mistake that one of our, um, one of our research, uh, threads found was like so many sellers think that active listening is just getting through the call.

You know, it's like, no, you have to remember you have to get, you know, so whether or not you can teach genuine curiosity, I'm not sure, but I do think you can teach how to listen and how to sort of string those things together. And what to listen for as well, because if you, if you think that you're the salesperson, you're wrong, you're not, you're just the person in charge of orchestrating the full power of your company to get. So you want to make your executives dance, let them sell for you. You want to make your experts dance and sell for you. And you just need to be the best person at getting the right person to the right place at the right time. Genuine curiosity is such a big conversation in sales.

Hunting for clues is such a better strategy than just hoping that you hit a pain point or that one reveals itself. There's a ton of value in this conversation. Here's what's headed your way from JB sales. I'm collecting your sales wins to share on make it happen. So send me those wins at jamesatjbarrows.com today to be featured on next week's episode. Today, we're giving a big shout out to Raj Singh of Avanti Software. After training with JB sales, he went from booking four meetings a month to setting 16 plus meetings a month every month post-training content. He was suffering from a bit of cold call reluctance since COVID-19 hit the scene. But then after changing his opener and earning permission to keep speaking, the results changed for him big time.

Way to go, Raj. Change brings progress. That's true every time, all the time. JB sales training is proud to offer well-rounded sales training content that's anchored in data-proven sales techniques that yield consistent results. From prospecting to demos to negotiation and proposals, JB sales on demand will shed light on what's working, why, and how you can leverage new sales skills to achieve your sales goals month after month. Sign up and become a member today at ondemand.jbarrows.com. Let's get back to Simon, Karen, and JB to help keep going with this growth conversation. I've always said that. I've always said that sales reps do not need to be the industry expert. They need to know enough to be able to pull the right people and coordinate the conversation.

Right? People, and that's why I think a lot of engineers, you know, sales engineers, and they're like, oh, I want to be in sales. It's like, it's almost like the more you know, the worse you are in sales because you end up going down rabbit holes and you try to solve problems, like actually fix the problem as opposed to identifying the problem and bringing the right people in place to solve it. And, you know, engineers go so deep on the problem that they'll sit there and look, there's part of that. But that's, I think, bringing in not the quarterback of this. And Simon, you brought up some things about like giving time back to people to be able to think. I think that's so critical because what's the stat out there?

Something ridiculous. Like sales reps only spend like 27% of their time actively selling or something absurd. Yeah. Right? It's like the other is all admin crap and all these other things. So, Karen, help me with that because I think there's probably a lot of people out there saying, okay, this all sounds great. Okay. And in my world, let's get artificial intelligence. Let's get some cool stuff. Let's automate all the crap that I don't want to do. And let's put me in a position to be the last mile as the sales rep. You know, I actually, my analogy towards what I think this future sales rep needs to be is, is Iron Man. Right? So you have, you have the person. Iron Man or woman, absolutely. Iron Person.

I just using the movie title. So, but, but it's, you know, you have, you have the person. So you have Tony Stark, right? He's, he's smart. He's rich. He's funny. You know, he's got the whole thing. Right. But without the suit, Tony goes out and fights the aliens. He gets killed, but the suit doesn't work without Jarvis. So you have the artificial intelligence now. So it's almost like you have Einstein, Salesforce, and the rep. And that becomes Iron Person to go out there and fight this fight. So, so, so, but that's Salesforce. That's all these cool tech companies. I'm sitting here listening to it. And I'm a, I'm a CEO of my own little 10 person company here who's scraping by and saying, uh, yeah, I don't have that kind of money or intellect or insights to be able to implement those technologies to offload that 30, you know, that 73% of what my sales reps are doing.

So how do I even approach this now? Do I fundamentally shift and just hire totally new and, and, you know, like walk me through that. Cause that's why I think a lot of people are so stuck right now. They're scared of the investment that it's going to take to make this monumental shift. Let me, let me try, I'm going to try and see if I can tie science and art together to answer that question a little bit. But you mentioned like, what are some of the dashboards that we're really focused on? And we're, and we are religious about like the golden rule. If it doesn't exist, it's not in the org. And one of the, one of the dashboards we look at is white space optimization, right? Which is a, is a way that data can actually give you some ideas on how to kind of like basically generate leads and kind of drive, accelerate deals, right?

Kind of where are the gaps in the pipeline? And that dashboard is a pretty simple, very, very scientific dashboard. It has, you know, it has sort of accounts on one side, it has solutions on the other side, and it shows where people have bought from us and what they're buying from us. That's a great example where without art, you would find that white space and say, I've just got to go. I've got to sell, sell, sell. You also might need to be able to kind of think about that. Okay, here's the white space I want to be in. How do I actually listen well? And I have two, I have two very different pieces of advice that have come out of this art of selling research that might be helpful for the audience.

One is that one of our sales coaches is Darren Levy here at Salesforce. You might even know him. Yeah, he mentioned, I asked him, what are the biggest mistakes sellers make at Salesforce? And he was like, one of the ones, I thought this was interesting. I see so many sellers bringing everyone into the meeting, just bringing everyone, their leadership, everyone into the conversation, just in case a question gets asked, they have the right people in the room to answer it. Well, that does not create a good environment for, and then they don't prep them, right? Like, you bring everyone, but you don't prep them. So now you're not coordinating the conversation. You're not actually creating a forum for trust.

You're not creating a good way that co-creation of an idea or a problem being solved can happen. The other piece is even more simple. I think Polly, who's one of our favorite executives, we work together with her all the time, Polly Sumner, our chief adoption officer. She said, every time I take a first call meeting, what I would do is go to, I take the time to go to the website, download the annual report, read the letter of the shareholders, take a highlighter, and highlight phrases that the CEO uses. You have to speak in the customer's language. You cannot speak in your own language. You have to, like, speak in their language. And I like to, I mean, I think that's really part of it. It's like, how do I take this white space and then bring the right people together, get them coordinated, organize it, and then stop talking.

And, you know, speak in their language and then listen actively. Well, and I think that's what I'm fascinated with right now. So the psychology of sales to me is far more interesting than any sales tips or techniques. And I don't know, so, you know, like, disc profiles and Myers-Briggs and those type of things. So there's not only speaking their language as far as, like, how do they, what acronyms do they use and how do they think about their, but it's also literally, how do I connect with you? And how do I adjust my style towards yours so I can get you to open up a little bit more to me? Because we've lost the ability now to kind of do what most sales reps used to do at the beginning of a face-to-face meeting, which is, hey, oh, I see you're a fisherman.

That's a, oh, look at those books over there, Simon. Oh, have you read that one? That's fantastic. And literally the first five to ten minutes of the meeting was me kind of feeling you out. You know what I mean? They say, okay, is this person, like, straight to the point or is this a conversational? Do they like small talk? And then adjust. And the best reps would adjust accordingly based on two or three questions. We've lost that now. We've lost the ability to develop that rapport and make that connection to get people to open up to us. I mean, there are some, I don't know if you're familiar. Have you ever heard of Crystal Nose? Yes, AI-driven. Yeah, it's awesome. It's one of my favorites. Oh, I know, Crystal.

Yes, yes. Yeah, the LinkedIn install is amazing, right? It's so accurate. And it's so scarily accurate, right? And so the beauty is that helps me skip the line a little bit because I can say, all right, I'm meeting with Karen. She's a high D. I need to come straight at this with this conversation as opposed to Simon maybe is a high C, so I need to be a little bit more, you know, analytic, whatever it is. That art to me is something that's lost. That's almost like I would rather read psychology books now. I mean, I'm rereading the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. I don't know if either one of you read that one. That's one of my favorite books because it talks, the one thing that isn't changing is human psychology.

Yeah. Tips, techniques, technology. I believe that technology can make us more emotionally intelligent. I think it can. And I think that we think about our product roadmap that way too. I mean, we have Einstein call coaching right now on the service side that basically, you know, uses sentiment analysis to understand the emotions on the other side of the call. I think that's definitely, that's there in AI is really powerful. You know, but yeah, there is an intangible human connection, I think, that you really sort of do need to drive forward. The other thing is that most people still think of the sales experience as a human influence experience. It isn't. Or it is in part, but not completely.

The sales experience is, do I trust this organization? And is it easy to do business with? And a lot of it is also down to how you enable the organization, your customer, to connect with you, which is synchronously and asynchronously. Because some of it will be digital. They just don't want to speak to a human. How do you enable that? And then when they do speak to a human, that human, yes, it'd be great if that human can connect with them and they end up talking about their grandparents and their hobbies and they're both fishermen. Phenomenal. But they should at least be able to understand, you know, what I've bought from you in the past and have that information and introduce other people to me who are other experts in the company and those people be armed with the same information.

And I think there's this expectation now of if your customer can't, if you can't even understand the customer, they're going to be kind of disappointed. And then a lot of these people, everybody was selling to, we're all trained now by the last great experience we had, probably not in our industry. And so the high bar or the low bar now, you've got to jump over. It's probably not set by your competitors, but by somebody in another industry. Amazon. Yeah. I mean, seriously, you know what I mean? I mean, I bought a Tesla online. You know what I mean? It showed up at my house. You know, I bought a $100,000 car online, which I never thought I would ever be buying something that expensive over a line.

But the experience was seamless. You know what I mean? It was like, okay, cool. And it showed up at it. And trusted. So how much do we need to lead versus follow right now? And Simon, I'm curious from your perspective, from the innovation standpoint of like, I think so many people are sitting here waiting and saying, okay, what do I do? And then solution selling was, I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions based on your answers. I'm going to tell you, I have a solution for you to solve that problem. But I don't think a lot of people even see what their problem is right now. I think they might see it today. But I think with how fast things are moving right now, I don't think that they, a lot of them, see a year out, two years out.

So how much of the sales motion right now is based on educating people out of their current state and where they need to go versus solving whatever problem they have right now? So there's a phrase that's used a lot in the tech industry. It's called job to be done. And the whole idea is, do you really understand what your customer is ultimately trying to do? Now, if your customer is on the market for something with very specific feature and feature functional requirements, it's only after that. Help them get to that as quickly as possible and as effortlessly as possible. It's all about effort. Now, if they're actually in the market for solving a problem and they've got to stitch together the answer themselves, then you as a salesperson, your job is to help them understand the easiest path, how you can show them the easiest path to them getting their job done.

Not buy a product, but get the job done, which is achieve value, go faster or whatever. Typically, you talk about, you know, when you have to go and buy a drill, it's not because you want to own a drill, it's because you want the hole in the wall. So what's the best way of getting the hole in the wall? And it's that type of mentality. And we're finding more and more that you've got to spend the time to really understand what the customer is actually trying to do and ask them that, not saying what do you want, but what are you trying to achieve? Different words, massively different outcome. And I've made the mistake too of basically asking people what they want and they tell me what they think they know, what they think they want based on their poor understanding of the situation.

But as soon as you change the question and ask, what are you trying to achieve? They then tell you that and you're like, oh my God, I could really help you. It's a really powerful difference in the choice of words. And that brings me up because it's like, was it Henry Ford who said, if I listened to what the market said that I just build faster, you know, I'd make faster horses, right? Whatever it was, I would have never made the, you know, well, he didn't invent the car, but he mass marketed the car. So, you know, Karen, what kind of what's your thoughts on, on that as far as getting them in the right mindset, the problem. And I think there's transitions to the magic part of what you're talking about, right?

Which is the outcome focus. Yeah, let's, let's talk about that a little bit. I, I, I 100% think that's right. That it's not even about what solution they're looking to buy. It's about, it's about the outcome. One thing that I think is really interesting right now in the, in the magic piece is that to really drive outcomes, you have to build trust first and foremost. That's, that's not a new concept, but what is new, I think is that more and more in B2B selling that trust is being built on values, like values alignment. And what I mean by that is we're seeing trends where people care about the sustainability and the diversity of their supply chains. Our own chief procurement officer is making big commitments and big, you know, to, to work with vendors who share our core values.

And that's a, that's a really good thing, right? That's like where capitalism is a, is a beautiful thing in the, in the world. You know, our team does a lot of work with sustainability just generally in our partnership with Worldwide Economic Forum. And sustainability is huge, right? And my wife's a sustainability consultant. She has her own company. She does sustainability, looks with work. I mean, the value piece is so, I mean, look at what, uh, Elon Musk just came out with, uh, he stopped supporting Bitcoin because of the energy suck that Bitcoin has of mining those things. And I did the same thing. Like I was like, oh, Bitcoin, I can make a bunch of money here. And then as soon as I heard that basically the amount of energy it took to mine one Bitcoin was like, could power Greenland for, you know, six months.

I'm like, uh, no, like I am going to take my money out of Bitcoin. I'm going to put it in, you know, a little bit more traditional thing and wait for ETH 2 to come out. Right. Whatever the hell it is. I don't know. I mean, what is going on in the world right now with Dogecoin and everything? It's a total joke. But no, that, that I think values line is really one important aspect of magic. I think, um, another aspect is like, how do you actually create a mutually reciprocal relationship? And what I mean by that is I think a lot of sellers young early in their career might, might mistake rapport for relationship, you know, like to your point about small talk and like how to read the room and everything.

And especially now in zoom, where we're moving into this, where we're going from kind of wine to dine to more fast and factual. And like, just don't make me, don't make me have three zoom meetings. If I can accomplish what I need to do in one, um, relationships are about really caring and co-creating a solution together. So there's, there's this idea of like partnering differently with, with your buyer, you know, it's like, we're seeing this happen in our industry. We're seeing it happen with our ecosystem changing and literally who are we partnering with and how are we going to market? Who are we bundling products with? And that type of thing. I think that's happening a lot more kind of thinking about the magic in like this ecosystem and going to market in partnering in different ways.

There's coopetition happening right now, right? How did two competitors maybe help their mutual customer share data in a way that would, that would serve their mutual customers. One of the great quotes that I heard, uh, in this research was one of, from one of our customers, who was a CEO of a European based, uh, food manufacturing company. And the CEO said, you know, I've seen a lot of the same research B2B selling has changed. Like every vendor is coming at me with the same data points and you're right. B2B selling has changed. So just for once, make it easier for me to buy, you know, and it was like, we need to be thinking about that. We need to be actively seeking ways to do that. And I think that's where outcomes-based selling and, um, you know, caring as much about your, your customers numbers as it were, or goals than your own, I think is, is really important.

Here's a way of describing it. The, um, products, the feature, there wasn't a, there was a time not long ago where basically getting a great product was, was what differentiated you. So it was all about building an amazing product and distributing it at scale. And you could win then on the feature and function of your products. And most organizations were set up to do that. Um, but the scarcity was the ability to deliver an amazing product. And if you could do that, you'd win. The scarcity no longer is your ability to deliver an amazing product. The internet and globalization has made that basically commoditized. The scarcity now is the customer's attention. And how do you get the customer's attention is by being relevant, not just relevant, hyper relevant.

And that's where you need the art of selling and the magic of selling. Well, I think that I, so I, um, I had Dave Cancel. I don't know if you're familiar with Dave Cancel over a drift. Um, he's a friend of mine and, and, and he said something that I firmly believe in, which is it, everything's commoditized except for the experience. That's the sales experience, the buying experience, the, the, you know, experiencing the product that, because if you think about airlines, right? I mean, we were talking before we got on here, right? Um, you know, I was 6,000 miles away from a million miles before everything shut down. I couldn't be happier. Every airline has the exact same stuff. They all have planes.

They all have seats. They all have, you know, staff and all that other stuff. But you look at, you know, here in the States, JetBlue, which decent experience, right? Versus like Spirit Airlines needs a little help here. You know what I mean? So those two experiences and, and because of that, I'll pay more for that experience. And I think the same thing holds true with, with the sales process. It has nothing to do anymore with what we sell. It has everything to do with how we sell. Yeah. And I think that, that hopefully that, that people understand that, that, that quarterbacking, that magic, if you will, to bring it all together is really what is going to differentiate us moving forward here.

Absolutely. We talk about in our, in our own company, in our industry selling software, um, in a subscription model, we always talk about, you know, hitting the how button, you know, the, the, the worst thing we can do is sell technology to a company who, that they don't use that and they don't use it the right way. Um, so I think that's also where sellers need to be service people as well, right? Like the deal, the deal closing is not the end of the job. That's just the beginning of it. Yeah. If you, if you buy something, um, and you pay money, is that the end of the transaction or is it the moment that those, uh, those, those sneakers arrive, is that the end of the transaction or is it when you're, when the person's wearing them and happy with them?

Is that the end of the transaction or is the end of the transaction when you've reached out and said, did you like them? Did they fit? Yes. Yes. Solve for any problems. And, oh, by the way, here's a second product. Is that the end of the transaction? These are really interesting questions. And the answer 10 years ago was when they paid for it. It's a transaction. The answer now is more like there's no end to it. Well, especially with the reviews online. I mean, one, you know, you, you have one little bad experience and that review gets out there and that snowballs into a pretty fast decline, right? I mean, you, you get, you get one, you know, a hundred attaboys will get knocked down by one bad review, right?

I know on G2, we have like 99% of our reviews are like five stars and above. And I got one. That's one rep that was, had a little bug across his ass and he gave us one star and we're like down to like 4.3 and I'm like, ah, it was just that one. So, but that's, we all have to be conscious of that because it is a consumer based world right now. The consumer is driving everything. And, and I guess that's what we can finish up on here is, is, you know, and maybe a few more things from the art, science and magic piece, but we are in that consumer driven economy, if you will, here. And so how do we balance that again, taking what the client is asking from us, but also kind of leading them in a direction that based on your insights, based on what you're doing, for instance, where, you know, they need to go for almost for their own good, you know, for their own good, but might not know it right now.

So is there a balance there that we can come to that, that lead versus follow with where people are right now? That's a, that's a tough one. I mean, I think, I think it does go back to just listening to the customer. I know this is super simple, but this was one piece of advice that was so simple. I thought it like actually kind of served both science, art, and magic, all three, which was, this one was a, one of our executives in our enablement group and said, whenever I'm talking to a customer, I picture on their forehead, the words, wait, and it's an acronym and it says, why am I talking? And it's just this idea of like, get them to talk and share their vision. I don't know if that answers the question, but.

Oh, I like it. I mean, I think it is. And I think that those, those questioning skills, I think your point is valid. I don't necessarily know if we can teach genuine curiosity, but we can teach people to ask better questions and, you know, to maybe listen a little bit more effectively. And if we can do that, then we can figure out what that balance is. Because if I ask you a bunch of questions, Karen, and I can pretty much tell that, and this is challenger sale and all that stuff. It's like, uh, wait a minute. You know what I mean? Like, I, I, I appreciate the way you're looking at this. Have you thought of it this way in a way that isn't coming across as condescending of I'm smarter than you?

Um, but that, but that collaboration. And I guess that's what I'm trying to get at, which is how do you break through that trust barrier upfront so that you can get them to be open with you? Right. Cause I think that's the goal there is, is that I want to somehow that crystal knows understand you, but my whole goal with all of this rapport building and whatever the hell you want to call it is to break that you're the buyer. I'm the seller. We're at this dance right now. And we're literally just having a conversation and it's an open, transparent conversation about your challenges. And it's an open, transparent conversation about what I can and can't do. And I think that mentality of almost disqualifying more than qualifying.

Like, why shouldn't you do business with us builds a little bit of that. But Simon, have you seen anything to kind of break that barrier, if you will, to get to that real conversation? Uh, the first is that you're not selling as a person, you're not selling what you can do yourself. You're selling, uh, how you can intermediate the whole of your organization helping. And, uh, I think that's a, that's a big thing is like, you're representing a whole organization. You're just saying, listen, I'm a front person to activate this incredible organization I have behind me to basically solve your problems. So here's what we do. Here's how I can bring all of that to bear. I need to understand like, what is it that you're trying to do?

Let me really understand. And I can tell you stories of what others have done. And storytelling is therefore one of the most powerful assets that you have in your toolkit. When it's a skill that every salesperson needs to get 10 times better, no matter how good you are, you're 10 times worse or 10 times lower than you should be. Yeah, I agree with that. Um, so storytell and then, and then introduce and get out of the way and let other people, because you're, you're asking questions because you want to basically make money. That's the salesperson's job. You need to introduce people to the customer who ask questions with a different mindset. They're asking questions because they want to know how I fix it because they're techie or they want to know, Hey, how, how, whatever the question is, I can't think now, but you want to introduce the right people who've got a different way of looking at that customer based on that.

And so you become effectively the orchestrator. I think that's kind of the way, a good way of thinking about it as well. I like it. Awesome. Well, is there anything, any major thing that we missed as far as your insights with the, with the science, art and, uh, and magic that, uh, that you want to share with the audience here? No, I mean, I'm, and we're obviously so grateful for the opportunity, John, love the show. It's so cool to be here with you and the audience. Um, I will say that we are going to be sharing some of the insights, uh, online coming in June. Uh, so salesforce.com. It's easy one to remember. Um, yeah, we'll be able to share those. And also, if you know, if you know anyone, you know, if you, if you're curious and you do business with Salesforce, ask your account rep and you can learn a little bit more from the research, but it's been an awesome journey.

Thanks so much for having us on too. Thank you so much, John. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of that content. I know we're in that little, uh, influencer group with, uh, with Tim Clark. So we're going to be pushing a lot of that out there. Uh, and I'm, that was actually one of the reasons when, when Tim said, Hey John, do you want to be part of this influencer crew? Um, he was like, well, you know, we want to add value as much as we're getting value from the influencers. So what can we do to bring value to you? And my direct answer was the data. The more insights that, that you, because Salesforce has such access to information and resources and all this other stuff that I would never have access to.

And because I do believe we are more science than art now than ever, this data should be driving people's decisions or at least being used as baselines to compare their situation to. So the more data we can put out there about trends and, and sentiment and those types of things to help people make better and more informed decisions, uh, the more, I think we're going to all kind of raise the, raise the bar here and, and kind of keep this profession moving in the right direction. So I appreciate what both of y'all are doing. Awesome. Brilliant. Thanks, John. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks so much. Thank you. And just, uh, for everybody out there, if you want to connect, it's Karen, K-A-R-E-N, Simone and at S-E-M-O-N-E.

You'll find her on LinkedIn, obviously. And Simon Mulcahy, M-U-L-C-A-H-Y. Connect with both of them. Uh, and look, I hope you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And it got you to think a little bit about where things are going and what you might be able to do now to prepare for where things are headed. And just like I say, at the end of all my podcasts here, no matter how bad your day went or how bad your day is going, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause if you make somebody smile today, you know, I had a good day and we all need a lot more of that these days. So thank you all very much for listening and I'll see you on the other side. All right, y'all that's a wrap.

So much of sales is education, but we're living in a time when feature dumping is a no-fly zone for many buyers today. Understanding what the clients and prospects are trying to achieve is a finer point to focus on. That's usually much more outcome driven than anything else. There were a lot of language changes to be gained from this episode. Thanks, Karen and Simon. We appreciate you guys coming out and sharing your knowledge. Before we sign off this week and get back to work, let's remember to make our conversations customer and prospect focused. 2021 is an active listening selling environment and it's on us as sellers to facilitate conversations where prospects feel comfortable looking at you for value and solutions.

It's all about the experience from start to finish. The science, the art, and the magic all work together to deliver a winning equation that helps you sell better. Become a member of JBSales and learn how today at ondemand.jbarrows.com and follow us on Instagram for daily tips and sales techniques at JBSalesTraining, all one word. We'll see you there. Be sure and subscribe to Morgan J. Ingram's newest podcast, The One Up Formula, on Spotify or iTunes. This show is all about the next level and how to get there. So go get it and go live it. We'll see you next time when we bring you another stellar guest to help you sell better. Make it happen, everybody.