Becc Holland: Discovering the Difference Between Pain, Problem and Impact

Sales super teams aren't built overnight. They require unicorn-level talent, endless training, huge budgets, and lots of luck. Or you can just try Sales Hub from HubSpot. It's an all-in-one platform built with all the tools for your success. Smarter prospecting? Check. Faster revenue? Yep. Scales with you? Sure does. Are you ready for your sales team to reach all-star level selling status? Visit HubSpot.com slash sales to start selling with Sales Hub today. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us.

And this is a great conversation with a good friend of mine, Beck Pollard. Now, Beck is the CEO and founder of Flip the Script. And she has been doing prospecting. I bump into her all the time. She's got such a fantastic formulaic approach and has been doing this for almost as long as I have as far as educating people on how to fill that funnel. But she's made the shift recently to discovery, which is huge. She has actually this whole new discovery diagnostic selling program that she's working on right now because she understands how important discovery actually is and how it needs to change from typically just asking the typical band or medic questions and then stuffing a solution down somebody's throat.

So we talked about how to flip that script, if you will, and take discovery in a different direction so we can build trust and how we can do this both offline first, even before we talk to the client, and then the types of questions and how we bring the client through the process here to make sure that we are uncovering that true pain, that true problem that we can make a real, real difference for. So you've got to listen to this one all the way through. She gives tons of great nuggets and gems here. Let's make it happen. Beck Holland, welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How have you been? I am so excited to be here. I've been really good. How are you? I'm doing well.

I will tell you right now, I am ready and eager to leave 2023 behind us because that was such a fucking dumpster fire of a fucking year, at least for me as concerned. And I am excited about 2024. What was the hardest part of the year for you, out of curiosity? Oh, by far. I mean, the first quarter. So everything fell apart. I mean, you know, right? I had 20 employees. I was up to about five and a half, six million revenue. But the problem was 95% of our clients were SaaS. And so everything, like between the Sell Better team and the training, everything literally came to a screeching halt. And my burn was so high that I couldn't get away from it. So I ended up having to cut the company in half, give the other side this.

Chris offered my trainers 1099s and went off on my own and said, all right, I got to go figure out how to work this. So that all happened. That was probably the most stressed I've ever been in from a business standpoint. 2021 was the worst personal year I've had because of my dad passing away and all that shit. But 2023 was by far the most stressful business. Now, I will say Green Lights, Matthew McConaughey, I do believe that there's, you know, Green Lights is all about looking for the silver lining no matter how bad shit is. And now that I'm back on my own and being me again and able to kind of really take off the filter and not have to ask for permission and not have to be responsible for other people, it's where I should be.

And so it all did. I don't want to say everything happens for a reason because I think that's really insensitive to say in a lot of ways. But I do believe that Green Lights, you know, there's a reason for a lot of stuff if you look hard enough. So you think Chris was filtering you? No, no, not Chris. Well, the sponsor. Do you get a square word quota? No, actually, sometimes. But more along the lines of like the sponsors and the, you know what I mean? I mean, we had some pretty heavy sponsor deals. And so for me to be out there being like, fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like that's not going to fly too well. So it was more the growing responsibility. And what I realized was I built a business because I could, not because I wanted to know.

And that's was when I realized that I was like, and I got caught in the hole. Everybody grow at all costs. You know, everything's going great. And the opportunity was there. So I took it, but I got lazy. I wasn't paying attention to the details and it all caught up in Q1. And it was a, it was a real big wake up call for me. Well, you're through it. You're on the other side. You look, you look a lot happier. Yes. That's what it's worth. For, for, for what? Yes, I am. I'm in a much more optimistic position now. Let's put it that way. So how about you? You're in, you're in France now. Like you made the switch for what back. How many months ago did you move there? March. March 1st, March 1st, March 1st, March 1st, 23rd.

So I've been here just coming up on a year. Nice. In Paris too, right? You're not just in France. You're in Paris. I'm in Paris. I'm in Paris. I love it. Yeah. We've got a Paris twice and absolutely love it. Actually, you know what? I need to connect you with my great friend out there. Who's basically the mayor of Paris. Dead serious. Yeah. Great friend of mine. And literally knows every person in Paris. You could, he's like the Doug Landis of Paris, basically. So remind me to make that introduction for you because he's somebody you absolutely have to know. I would love to. I would love to. I would love to. The mayor of Paris. It sounds very Jacques Lejeune. Yeah, right. So, so talk to me. Well, we're going to talk about discovery, right?

And, and, and kind of your newfound focus on this because, you know, you spent your life really focusing on prospecting and top of funnel stuff. But I think we're all realizing that AI has taken over the majority of that. Really discovery is where it's at, but there's some conflicting conversations about discovery and what it actually means these days. So we're going to get into that and I've been, you know, go through kind of what you're thinking about these days. But for whoever is, is, is, is stuck under a rock here and doesn't know you, just give the backgrounds, just, you know, where you're coming from, what you've been up to and where are you doing now? Yeah, so hi everyone who I have not met, who's either watching or listening.

My name is Beck and I work with a, a, a sales media and consulting company and training company called Flip the Script. So basically the TLDR of it for the prospecting side is how can we turn into something that's more meaningful, actually on salued or prospects, how can we prospect and pivot the, the dial back to where people are actually producing and clients are making wins because of it. And then on the selling, I'm kind of the same, same mantra and same TLDR. But yeah, from your comment earlier, I was based in the U.S. for a very long time, then moved out from San Francisco over to Paris about a year ago, but still working on U.S. clients, basically just living a six or seven hour gap ahead of time.

Yep. How is that, by the way? Do you like being ahead or do you like being, you know, behind? What's the, what's the preferred approach? Oh, I love it. I love it because your mornings are protected, not to make everyone jealous, but your mornings are protected because everyone you talk to is asleep. Yep. I love it. For all of my non-warning people out there, like Paris is the way to go. Yeah. Because people don't even wake up and start firing emails until two in the afternoon for you, three in the afternoon. Nice. I like it. Yeah. The time shift is definitely advantageous for me. I love it. Yeah. That's why I, that's why I kind of like being on East coast in Boston because most of my clients are West coast, California.

So at least it was first few hours in the day I get to nice quiet. My inbox is quiet. I can get to shit and shit done, but I can see where six hours. It's all, but the flip side for me on like sports, for instance, I used to be like all West coast sports. That's terrible. Like watching football at 10 o'clock in the morning. And the older I get, I'm like, oh my God, I would love to watch football at 10 o'clock in the morning. So I don't have to stay up until two o'clock in the fucking morning watching something. Totally. I have no, I have no example in my head because I watched close to zero sports, but I will say a lot of like series that are released on Netflix and blah, blah, blah, they're released ahead of time for me.

And I just start training at 7 a.m. in the morning when I was on, I was in San Francisco. So I just started at 7 a.m., which means I had to get up at four, go for a run, convince myself for an hour that I'm not an introvert, but I could do that, get coffee and then start. So now my training is I'll start to like four in the afternoon. Love it. Afternoon, which is nice. Penny. Awesome. Well, look, let's dive into this because there's a lot to unpack here with discovery. And I'll set the stage. There's a couple of different things that I've noticed, right? I mean, you know, the difference between discovery and qualification, we can get into that. But, you know, Doug Landis actually came on recently and actually did a workshop for, like we were talking about for the members here on hypothesis selling.

So his whole thing is he's screaming from the mountaintops that discovery is dead. Like traditional discovery of asking a bunch of questions and then, you know, coming up with a solution and firing it off. That's dead. You have to come with a perspective. You have to come with a hypothesis on how you can help this client, right? So, and especially when it comes to executives where like if I'm an executive right now, the last thing in the world I want is to be qualified, right? Ask me a bunch of dipshit questions. And so you need to come to me with something that I haven't heard before or some insights that get me to think differently about where I'm at right now. And so he goes through this whole process of how to create that hypothesis based on research and everything else.

I'm still on the side of, I don't think it's a good idea to just walk right into somebody and say, hey, I don't want to solve your problems. And let me show, look at all this research I've done and all that other stuff. Cause you could have wasted a ton of time coming up with a hypothesis that the dog shit. So I still do think discovery is obviously part of the process here. But I, you know, one of the things that dawned on me a little while ago was, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but relatively recently, the difference between discovery and qualification, I kind of always bucketed them in the same. I was like, yeah, whenever I'm asking questions, right? But now I'm very distinct. Like qualification is, is just like literally a set of questions for me to see if I can sell you something, whereas discovery is more about you and trying to figure out that pain.

So kind of what's the, what was the epiphany for you on, on, cause you see, you, and we were talking before this, you talked, you started pulling on a thread of discovery and started to realize, holy shit. So with all the work that you've done on prospecting, right? Cause that was your niche and you and I kind of talk a lot about that. Where did you start to see discovery starting to be more and more important? And what was that thread that you started to pull on? And then we can get into unpacking all the different components of it. Yeah. So I think that the thread that I, when I started to, uh, candidly, and I, I, uh, you know, want to give a shout out that the thread that I started to pull on, uh, was essentially, I had, uh, been talking back and forth Keenan from gap selling and I had, I knew that he was always yelling about there's differences between pain and problem, but I can never understand.

You can never understand. Like what are the finite differences? Why does that actually matter? What the fuck are you talking about Beck, Beck, fuck you, fuck Beck, fucking fuck, fuck. I'm like, that's, that's Keenan, by the way, for those of you listening, that's, that's basically my, my rendition of Keenan. I love him like a brother, but holy shit. And he, he, he's been experiencing the rooftops of like, there's a difference between pain and problem, but from, from my learning and from reading through, I'm like, I can't really understand the finite differences and why there's like, what is the impact of the difference? So I honestly, the thing that, that caused the revelation to me as I went in the tank and he told me I couldn't do something.

The thing he told me that I couldn't do was you can't scale it. You can't scale gap selling. You can't sell finding a scale, finding problems. So I'm like, hell with you. You can scale anything. You just have to find a system. You don't have to be committed. Like there's always a right answer. It's just, do you take the time, attention and detail to find out what the right answer is? So I basically went through a period where for six months, upwards of a year, I started studying, studying, studying differences between pain, the differences between a problem. Like what are the, what are the differences between a pain, a problem, an outcome, an impact, a lateral impact, vertical impact, or, you know, like I wanted to know all the intrinsic differences and how do people buy and what has to tip to make them actually mobilize to make a purchase?

Because I knew in my head at the time, I'm like object emotion stays emotion, object to rest stays at rest. If you're going on outbound, your prospect's at rest. So based on what they know, even if they admit to pain and they're like, these are the five things around pain, they aren't in motion because in their head at that point, it's not big enough. The impact's not big enough based on what they know. So I went into a very intrinsic process and I actually went to like doctor's appointments to ask them questions on how they ask questions, you know, like how are they diagnosing in the room? How are they eliminating choices? You know, how are they going about that kind of that hierarchy? And it really busted open to me the role of a seller and the role of a prospector and what actually adds value to the prospect in the room and how can I find out, you know, double down and unpack something for them that they didn't know?

Because you said it earlier, you kind of alluded to it of like, if you can't teach me something that I didn't know, and it's like, generally speaking, yeah, okay, great. Industry is such a secret benchmark is going to be great. But if you can't find something that like is in my day to day that I didn't know that's currently hurting me, currently adding to the impact, currently a root cause that I didn't know about or going to cause an impact in the future that I didn't know, there simply put up was no value to the seller being involved. So that's what kind of caused it, like to answer your question, TLDR along the short of it, six months to a year and ongoing of upwards of two years of really from a medical perspective, understanding how doctors were diagnosing and then nearing that process onto a seller so that a seller finally for the first time, you know, has a rule.

Interesting. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving to close. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off.

Let's make this happen together. It's interesting, the doctor analogy, because I agree, like diagnosing the problem and trying to figure it out. But I'm thinking of all the different doctors that I've worked with. And a lot of them are like, it's almost mirrors the sales process. And a lot of them are just too quick to prescribe something, right? So like I've gotten high blood pressure recently, right? And I've been on, oh, try this pill, try this pill, try this pill. What's that? Here's a medication. Yeah, exactly. And I'm kind of like, tell you about all the great things about this medication and how it's better than these other, you know, and I'm just like, what can we maybe take a step back?

Could you maybe take a look at my diet? Could you help me understand what my lifestyle, you know, if my lifestyles contribute, like they were so quick to jump to, oh, here's like a three, you know, why don't you try this? And I mean, it was a remote session too. It wasn't even like I went in there and, you know, had the guy go through a bunch of tests with me. It was okay. Yep. You got a high blood pressure. This is what you do. And I'm like insanely frustrated with that approach because now I'm thinking of dumping it because none of those pills are helping, by the way. So now I'm going to take it upon myself. I'm going to diagnose myself. I'm going to see what my eating habits are and go into the details there and figure out what the issue is.

So, so we're there, when you talk to doctors, I'm curious, what was there like, it was there a common way that they are, that the good ones are taught to diagnose problems. Do they have a structure to it or is it, did you find that each one of them was just just a little bit different in how they diagnose things? Yeah. So it's a good question. So I think it, it doubles down where kind of the infrastructure. So I'm, I'm doing what I'm in, in, uh, publicly if facing calling diagnostic selling, but essentially I anchored around the difference between a pain and a problem, like, okay, there's square one. So pain, the problem, pain's just a negative experience and a problem is something someone's going to solve or solve for.

So kind of the difference there is all pains aren't problems, meaning all things that are really annoying. There's probably a thousand in our tape. We don't prioritize them because the impact's not big enough or the level of pain's not big enough. And a problem is something you're going to solve for. So I, you know, kind of first case scenario, whenever I was thinking about the doctor and kind of the rule of a seller, from my perspective, the role of a seller and the rule is simply put, or I'll ask you a question. So patient wants a medication. Why can't they just go get a prescription medication online without talking to a doctor? I mean, because I'm worried that if it's the right one, you know what I mean?

Like I, I, I want to make sure that an expert, you know, and right now the trust factor of online stuff versus still feeling comfortable being in front of somebody and being like, Hey, you know, you know what you're talking about. Could you give me some advice here? Specifically my primary care who I've had a relationship for a long time. Oh, nice. There's one. Yeah. You're not sure whether it's the right one. And so it's illegal to obtain medications because the legal perspective, you know, you don't have simply put, don't have the quote unquote expertise or the knowledge of the education to be able to self-diagnose. There's a second one that I found of like, you go to the physical, you know, go to a physical once a year and they're testing for a whole bunch of non-P related symptoms.

Sometimes in there, they'll find something that you didn't know that existed the whole time. Like, Hey, you know, you have stage three, stage four, you know, habit of forbid cancer. A person hasn't done anything about it because they simply put like, it wasn't pain-based. So they didn't know. So from my view, the role of a seller is to do two things to validate and understand if the solution that the person had in mind, because I mean, it's no secret for a citizen and punch of reports that people study basically upwards of 20 different variables before they come in found, you know, they go peer to peer influencers review X, Y, and Z, and they go to your website. The last thing that they want to visit is a seller because they think they're just going to get the pressure.

And like, basically all these BS questions that are just leading them to buy and they don't want to turn someone down, you know, but they do want the, the, the knowledge. So the first thing that a seller needs to do from my perspective is I want to ask a certain amount of questions to understand. Did you diagnose correctly? Did you diagnose the problem, root cause, current impact, future impact, current event trigger, future event trigger, and solution correctly? You know, or did you make a misdiagnosis? You got the problem right, but you got the wrong root cause. You got the current, you know, problem right, but you got the wrong current impact, you know? And then the second piece I'm, I, I think a seller should be into, which is the, I would say 95% of the time someone has misdiagnosed something, meaning they believe something that's not correct.

But then to their credit as a buyer, it's not their job to be correct. It's our job, right? But then the second bigger bucket is in the medical profession, there's a misdiagnosis, meaning something they believe that's not true. And then there's a missed diagnosis, meaning something that they missed entirely. So I'd say 95% of the time, my buyers have a, like a misdiagnosis. They believe something that, you know, statistically speaking, is just not true. But a hundred percent of the time they have missed something. They've missed something that's currently incurring, you know, happening to them. That's going to have a net, net huge impact in the future if they don't relieve that today. So I think the biggest missed piece of the equation, and I hear all these discovery calls over and over and over, and they're asking all types of questions, but they all wrote down to the same quote unquote, in my opinion, two litmus tests and mistakes.

So your self-diagnosis questions, what do you think the impact is to you? What's the root cause? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Why'd you come in here today? Which are not bad. They're only bad if they're standalone, because I don't need, like from a buyer perspective, I don't need to know, I don't need to know that you know what I know. I need to know what I don't know, essentially. So it's either a self-diagnosis question or it's a leading question. What would the impact to you be if I were to supply you with 15 more leads a month? I'm like, piss off, man. Like the thing that's wrong in my head, you know, or at least from my perspective, when I switched to this model, these calls just became so sweet and rich.

But the thing that's wrong in my mind is I've heard like, okay, the outcome of the seller should be, oh, well, I need to find the painter. The outcome of the seller should be, oh, I need to, you know, define their current state. Or the outcome of the seller should be, oh, I need to get the narrative why they're buying so that I can, quote unquote, hold my Quavos in pricing. But I'm like, but that doesn't help them at all. The outcome shouldn't be I detach from it or I have no outcome in the room or no agenda or I'm just sitting here like, you know, what keeps you up at night? The outcome and the problem behind the whole thing is a mindset. It just needs to shift. My job in this 30-minute conversation is to find as many things as they didn't know beforehand that are currently hurting them or are going to hurt them in the long term.

And the more of those that I find, whether I can solve them or not, it's going to build instant credibility and it's going to build and build and build the reason that they're or the likelihood they're going to do something about it. It's going to build buyer intent. It's going to build urgency. But it's going to build their trust in you that you have their best interests in mind because that's what they're trying to do. Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark Roberge, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, host Mark Roberge, founding CRO at HubSpot, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets, strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth.

His most recent episode, How Do Diligence Marketing and Sales Leadership, with one of my good friends, Sydney Sloan, is a fantastic listen. It talks about how we do a ton of due diligence on founders for CEOs, but not as much due diligence on the CMOs or VPs of sales. So they dive into all the challenges around those roles, especially those first hires, and you're going to want to listen to this if you're in the startup space. So listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts. So how do you walk through that? So what is your structure for a conversation like that? Because there's that mix of science and art, right? Where there's the questions you ask, the agenda that you have, and the flow that you try to keep, and then there's the art and how you do it.

So setting the stage, walk me through kind of what your typical, quote unquote, discovery call looks like with that framework. So, and then let's kind of dive into some of those questions that you would ask that are different than, hey, what's the impact, right? Those types of things. Because one of the things that I really recently was highlighted, you know, corporate executive board, right? They're challenger, challenger customer, and then they were just wrote jolt effect. And jolt effect was all about the fact that it's not no decision, it's indecision. Because there's too many choices out there, things are moving too fast, and people are afraid to make the wrong decision. And so, you know, I've kind of shifted a little bit to de-risking, right?

Now I ask, you know, hey, when do you want to get the go live on this? Great, by this date, great. What happens if you don't? Like, what's the impact if you don't? Just to make sure I'm clear on this, and hopefully I figured that out earlier. But now I'm even asking, hey, like, what's a bad decision look like for you? Say you make the wrong choice here. What does that look like? Which is a little counterintuitive to most sales, because we're taught to teach the, you know, paint the beautiful picture and then back into it. But nobody believes that beautiful picture anymore. So I sell to what, like, I try to get you in the mindset of like, hey, Beck, you know, for an SKO or something like that.

Like, what if you choose the wrong trainer? Like, what happens if that trainer content or personality-wise is a dud? What does that do for you? What does that mean? Right? And then I start to get more of like a therapy session where people come up and watch, man, if I make one more, if I bring one more shitty trainer in here, if I would do it, right? Now that's where I tend to focus my efforts on. But it doesn't uncover the pain that they haven't or the problems that they don't even know that they have. So walk me through how you run that conversation. Yeah. So I, in, in, in my opinion, there's only really three steps of what I'm after. The first is uncover their self-diagnosis. What do they believe and why they believe that?

What's the fact that supports it, that supports it for it. And I would say 80% of sellers get some form of that, you know, what the person believes. It's important to know what the person believes and why they believe that because that's going to help you stack up into your own expert diagnosis. Yeah. But the second step is developing my own expert diagnosis and kind of a litmus test here. If you take a look back at your deals and for more than 60, if more than 60% of them, hell, I'm going to say more than 30% of them, what the customer believes and what you believe isn't different, net net, there was no point of you being on that call because they could have just checked out with cart, right?

But that's the second piece is developing your own expert diagnosis. I can get into how to do that in a minute. Now, the third one is diagnosing problems that they didn't know about. So there's only really seven different pieces within each of those three and it's problem, root cause, current impact, what are the extended effects beyond the metric that they will incur because of not hitting the metric, future impact, current event trigger, what's the last thing that happened that made them want to buy, a future event trigger, what's the thing that's happening in the future that's making them want to buy today, solve a problem today, and then the solution. So how I go about it is when I get in the room and I'm going to leave it like any kind of doctor, doctor, you know, gets a whole bunch of questions before him.

They know weight, they know history, they know cholesterol, they know, and then they usually start a call off for the same way that I would suggest starting a call. It's like, what brought you in today? And the person's going to leave you to the pain, right? And they usually are going to go in one of three buckets, but I would say the two most likely is they're going to leave the solution that they believe they should have. They're like, I need cold email training or I need prospecting training. I'm like, there's a self-prescribed solution, you know, or the leave of the root cause. Our emails are really, really terrible. And so at that point, I know in my head that I have one of them. I don't have the reason of why they believe that, but I have one of them.

And so it's my job to sprint over into the other buckets. So from a high level, the problem is always a problem is only a problem in the presence of a metric. So what I see companies getting wrong is they'll say like, I sell the sales enablement, sales, SDRs, marketing, you know, and ops. And they're like, the problem that we solve is X. And I'm like, it depends on your persona. If I'm in say, and I'll hear this all the time. So good to see your expression. I'm like, when I hear this all the time, people say, I don't know how to sell the sales and enablement. And I'm like, it's because you don't know their metrics. Their metrics are merging into closed one. Their metrics are training adoption, product adoption.

So it's like tech adoption, you know, so they're after, quote unquote, a centralized methodology, you know, because their problem they're trying to solve is I can't get people to adopt this. And one of the root cons is it's too difficult. They want a centralized methodology to solve their problem. They'll see people rush in and they'll say, what's your conversion to closed one? And they're like, I don't give a crap. Like, yes, I do. They do. But my butt's on the curb, not when the closers can't close. My butt's on the curb, whenever something's not adopted. What are you going to say? No, no. I think it's interesting because this follows a little bit of the gong framework that I adopted a little while ago, where it's like the best sales reps.

I think the stats, you know, talk about three to four problem oriented topics. And then they ask 11 to 17 questions within those topics. And so when I talk about it with reps, it's like for me and for us, right? VPs of sales, VPs of enablement, CROs. Well, to a VP of sales, I'm going to frame my conversation around top of funnel, forecast, accuracy, and rep motivation. Whereas for enablement, it's going to be onboarding, ramp time, and adoption. Whereas CROs, it's going to be sales, marketing, and CS, and alignment, right? So each one of those personas, I'm going to frame my conversation around different quote unquote problem oriented topics that I'm familiar with as far as that space is concerned.

The questions that I ask are going to be slightly different, obviously, based on each one of those problems. For sure. But it's a good framework to talk about the problem of that persona versus this persona. And it's never the same. Totally. I'm like, if I'm thinking about a VP, like an SDR leader, let's take an SDR leader and be simple. You know, their problem or their metric is booked meetings that have become qualified. Do they care if those closed? I mean, you're starting to see, I will say, so now I'm asking the question because a lot of them are now saying, right? So now they're saying, we've gotten a bunch of top end, but none of them are converting. So we have to do a better job discovering qualifying further down the pipeline so that we can hand it off to a higher closed one ratio.

Because I mean, three conversations last week, our closed one ratio for new outbound stuff is less than 10%. And they had to get it to 20%. So walk me through, let's use that example, right? They've identified the problem that, hey, I got, you know, my closed one is less than 10%. I need sales training on, you know, yes, prospecting, but also discovery so we can get it further down, right? Now that's their self-diagnosis here. How do I uncover a problem that they don't know as it relates to that or a root cause? So at that point, like I'd be thinking at that point of the conversation, okay, you'll sub 10% basically, you know, conversion rate to close one and think that you need sales training.

So I know that you have a self-prescribed solution of sales training and I know you're conversion to close one, but I don't know what percentage they're like, we're really bad on quota team. And I'm like, how bad is that? Like, this is a great example. Here's a misdiagnosis that I see people go for a lot of sales, sales industry. The industry statistic, quote unquote, is that the conversion to close one is 20%. And people have been tweeting that for 25 years. I'm like, yo, if we take a step back, here's kind of a crash course on statistics. I mean, it's a whole number and it doesn't change over 30 years. It's not correct. Accurate. Like, I'm like, it doesn't just stay at 20% or like half couples end in divorce.

I'm like, that's not true at all statistically, if you look it up. So what I found is over the course of studying thousands and thousands of programs is that inbound conversion into close one is 35%, but outbound is six, but people falsely hybrid and they say it's around 20. It depends on your industry. They're going to suck. It's going to be lower for FinTech than it is for more tech. So the first thing that I would be after, if you told me that information, I'm like, I know the self-prescribed solution of he thinks that he needs sales training. I know that he thinks that his conversion is a litmus test of that he's closing low. And it doesn't matter. Well, I mean, if your conversion was 4%, your entire team of 300 reps was past quota.

Yep. Would it matter to you? Absolutely not. Because you're past quota. So I'm like, okay, his conversion is 6% or 8% or whatever it is. But I still need to know what is the raw volume of quota? What is the, like, how much is he behind? What's the ASP? What's the sales cycle? So I can do out some self-calculating of how far is he beyond quota. So that's just the problem set. The second set is going to be around root cause. So simply put, there's only going to be about 7 to 10 root causes for any problem. So for prospecting, for instance, the problem is going to be around meetings, in meeting quota, you know, or accept a quota into SAL. The 7 root causes, 7 to 8 root causes are going to be quality of the messaging, quantity of the messaging, time of day, person they're sending it to, company they're sending it to.

Are they sending it multi-thread, email deliverability? You know, are they sending it in a way that's preventing it from even showing up in their inbox? Voila. Like, those are going to be the leading indicators, the root causes. So when they say, like, my email quality is really low, I want to understand why didn't they believe that? So they say, oh, well, I really believe that because I've taken a look at our messaging and it's just really dumpster fire. And I'm like, can you give me an example of the message? And I'm like, okay, quality might mean one of them. But here's the thing. It's the last lever that I'm going to choose to pull if I were choosing to impact the result. So a great example of a very big unknown in prospecting is email deliverability.

So I ask the question, I don't ask, John, do you have an email deliverability problem? I ask the question of, what's your open rate? And they'll usually even make a misdiagnosis then. They'll say, ah, it's around 40%. And I'm like, that's not possible. Industry statistics is 15 to 25. So I'm like, can you do me a favor? Can you click into your sales engagement instance? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, do you mind sharing your screen? 100% of the time, they say yes. And at the campaign view for sales engagement, it will give you a falsely, no matter what provider you go with, it will give you a falsely high open rate. Because whenever the rep makes a call and longs the manual disposition, that's like, call connected, call voicemail, whatever, it says that it's an open and a reply.

So I'll basically have them click into each email. I did this yesterday, for instance. They're like, it's a 45% reply or open rate. I'm like, maybe, but not probable. So I have them click into each email. And then I just read the statistics out to them at loud. I'm like, okay, email one, it's an 18% open rate, you know, 0.2% reply. Email two, it's a 28% open rate. And their eyes are already bugging out of their head. They're like, my open rate's not 45. My open rate is actually 27. I'm like, hey, to your credit, here's the thing. Like, sales engagement doesn't make it easy. And this is what they're doing. And this is why you thought that that was where it was. But the point of it is, if they have less than a 50% open rate, like if you're listening to this, and you have a less than 50% open rate, you have an email deliverability problem.

The emails are not landing in the inbox. So they think, if I just tweak this quality, then all of a sudden people are going to start responding. I'm like, Brendan, not if they don't get it. So point being, I'm asking those types, I'm not asking, John, do you have the email deliverability problem? I'm asking the question of open rate because you're like, I don't know. And what would it look like? Or I thought closed one of 10% is really bad. I'm like, industry average says that it's actually quite good. 6% is the average. What were you going to say? I didn't mean to take a lot. No, I think it's interesting because I've done the same thing, but almost out of, you know, without. I think, you know, if there's anything I have a little bit of a superpower on, it's curiosity, right?

And I think for me, it's not the process. It's my genuine curiosity. And I'll walk you through one that I think fits this mold, which is when people come to, you know, both you and I and say, oh, we got, you know, top of funnel. It's brutal, conversion ratios. We need training. And I'll say, why do you need training? Yeah. And they're like, well, because my reps, the emails are shit and, you know, blah, blah, blah. They just don't know how to write emails. I'll be like, okay. First of all, AI can write better emails. So why is this a training problem? Well, I got to upskill my team. And it's all these vague, like, I got to upskill my team. Well, what does that mean? And I'll say, just especially right now, because I think we're in such a transition of the old and the new.

I genuinely think we are all right now in a legacy model of sales, period. Last year is when it broke. And this year is when it's going to just get shattered. There is a legitimate argument right now to rip and replace every sales team. Like, literally burn it to the ground and burn your tech stack to the ground and start AI native with AI tech and AI reps. Like, there is an absolute argument. So what I tell them is, hey, how do you know it's not a rep problem? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, have you done an assessment of your team to see if your team is actually the right team to be taking whatever training you think you need, right? Because if they're not coachable, if they're not in the right seats on the bus with this model moving forward, you can throw as much training at this as you want, but it's not going to make a difference.

And that's where you start to see them, you know, the wheels start turning. Now, the challenge with that is then bringing them back to how you can help if you have diagnosed a problem that really you can't solve. Like, a lot of times I've diagnosed a problem. I'm like, no, your problem's over there. But they're so far down in their self-diagnosis that they're convinced that this is the thing. And by the way, this is the easier thing to check the box off for than doing it the right way. So walk me through how you change that dynamic, right? Because a lot of times, yeah, we get to the executive, but the executive sees kind of a service level problem and they're like, fuck it, we need training, go get it.

And the enablement runs around like chickens with their heads cut off and try to come up with a solution. And then they come up with one and then they move it back upstream, right? Yeah, the euphoric state, you got the champion and your VP is always in it and you're engaged and all the data and insight, but that's just not real world. So how do you get somebody to, once you, it's almost like when somebody these days looks at you dead in the face and says, Beck, I agree with you. Your solution's way better. I'm still not going to do it. And it's because the fear of risk, right? Jolt effect. But with this, where you diagnose and you're looking at them being like, I could do what you want me to do and I'll take your money and that's the easy route here.

But this is really where your fucking problem is and you should do it. So how do you get somebody, like for you personally, right? When you see the money's there, somebody will give you 30, 40, 50 Gs to do a training for a group, but you know that that's not the problem and you know that this is the right thing to do. What's your approach to that scenario? Yeah, so I think you bring up a really interesting point. Well, point blank and then I kind of go into it. But if I believe that someone's trying to purchase something that will not solve their problem, like I'll walk away from the deal. I've done it before. But I will say what's interesting is even when I have, they try to fight me to buy, if not this thing, something from me.

Yeah, yeah. Because they're like, the value in me finding out and I think why people don't believe most sellers is because, kind of to your point earlier, they come in with a hypothesis or whatever. But I'm like, there's a certain inherent amount of questions that I need to know that I cannot find out online. But if I'm not asking those questions, I simply don't believe that the seller knows if they're correct or not. So I'm like, it's always going to be the same amount of questions or same types of questions. I'm going to be after email quality, I mean, open rate, reply rate. What's the goal? What's the goal based on? Is it a certain amount of criteria to make it over to SAL? Is it usually banned?

How many webinar leads do they get? How many content downloads do they get? What's the click-through rate? How many emails are they sending out per day? Is there an activity metric? Are they hitting that? How many cold calls are they making per day? Are they hitting that? What time of day are they making it? And a lot of these answers, they don't know. But like, for instance, if I'm seeing something, they're like, yes, we're sending out 200 emails a day. I'm like, ooh, I bet that caused the deliverability problem. If anything over 50 is going to cause deliverability problem. In my experience, like to the brilliance of Joel's effect, everyone was talking about status quo for so long. I even see influencers still talking about it.

And I'm like, this is a misdiagnosis, bro, because you haven't kept reading. But point B, the difference between status quo and indecision, for anyone who's listening who hasn't read the book, great book, I definitely recommend it. Status quo is, they say out loud, this problem isn't big enough to solve. Indecision is, they say it is big enough to solve, but they still don't move forward. If I had to guess why they still don't move forward, it's not because the problem's not big enough to solve. It's because they don't believe that you can solve it. And so, how you increase that ability, in my view, like their confidence that you're going to be able to solve it and eradicate that impact is simply put by demonstrating your expertise by asking a bunch of questions that helps you tack up things that they didn't know.

Because I believe in my head, like in my core, when I buy something, if I'm not careful about it, this seller is going to leave. So, I'm going to have to be reduced to, like, self-implementing this entire thing. But I'm like, the grand point of the thing is, I'm like, everyone, when they come in, let's say they think that the problem is the state of the size of Texas. The problem is really the entire United States. Even though Texas is a big state, I need to ask a certain amount of questions to validate what they think and why they think it. And I'm like, is the problem Texas at all? Then in that room, I'm after finding three, four, five, six, the more, the better, things that they don't know that I'm like.

They weren't willing to do something about it as is. That's why you get a bunch of tire kickers and help out. But once you find this impact that was coming that they didn't know, all of a sudden, that plus the core problem, they're going to mobilize to buy. They're going to stay put based on the former product set or the former problem in their head. But once you tack in these three other ones, they're like, this is a big enough deal that I have to do something about it. So in my opinion, at least, how you influence the sale is you have to find something that they believe that was incorrect, to your point, that would have hurt them if they did something about it. But more importantly, finding a whole new set of causes like demo request conversion.

People who request a demo actually get one, it's from the highest I've ever seen is 22%. The average is nine. Right. Right. Totally. People who are asking for a demo, like hand raisers, the max is 22% that you've seen get an actual demo. 100 programs and the lowest I've seen is four, the max, and it was by far the outliers, 22%, the average is nine. People are raising a hand to get just getting a first call at the AE because what happens is they request a demo, SDR follows up several days later, you know, and then by the time that they get back to them, and then it's just an email chain. And then when they actually get the email, they actually connect with them, and then it's a whole bag of goods to get the meeting scheduled, then they ask a band questions, they schedule an AE, then the AE, so they haven't listened to anything.

And the stats will not only show you that 22% is the highest that I've ever received, but also 70% of buyers will not only like entertain the conversation, but will ultimately buy with the person who gets back to them fast enough. Period. Like if I can find one of those, it doesn't matter that I don't solve for demo request conversion. All of a sudden the VP of sales is like, thank you, let's talk about, you know. Right, let's talk about anything else, like what else you got, right? And I think that's the challenge, right? I think there's the depth, the challenge that I see right now for like, at least customers, my gut feels, is that they know there's problems, they know they want to fix them, but just like everybody else, they're not genuinely willing to put in the work necessary to uncover the root cause, the real problems, and the real impact of all this other stuff.

They're looking for the quick fix, just like everybody else is. And I feel good at night, you know, giving that quick fix every once in a while, even though I know it's not the perfect solution, because I know 10 to 20% of the reps in there are going to have that light bulb go off and it's going to make a difference for them personally. So therefore, it's going to ultimately benefit the company. So that's how I can sleep at night when I sometimes, like when I say literally, I'll take your money, but this isn't the right way to do it. Because I know I'm going to drop fire on them and at least a few people, at least a few light bulbs are going to go off, but it's not going to fix the root problem.

It's not going to fix the actual problem or even uncover it for that matter, unless we go through this diagnosis. So I always play this kind of middle ground of like, all right, like I'm pushing hard enough and I'm uncovering shit, but I can tell this person is literally not willing to admit that they are an alcoholic, if you will. You know what I mean? To do the real work, to support themselves as an alcoholic. So it's a weird spot right now because you have to do all that stuff, but then there's that short term like, all right, I got to like, fuck it. I'm going to go get paid here because this is something that I know I can do and we do it well and it might not be, but maybe, maybe, and this is where I look at it, is I'll get some credibility by doing that.

That'll open the door for the other stuff so that I can go get some cool shit. Nothing else you can help with. People will be like, what question do I ask? And like, I had a trainer call here and they were like, hey, I didn't get a second conversation. Like, what happened to this deal? I'm like, let me ask you a question. What's the problem they're trying to solve? They're like, uh, and I'm like, you gave them pricing? You demo, you can't, you know, that I'm like, if you don't know, like you're going to know a certain amount. And I would say a quick, quick pill. Like if people want a pill, then I'm like, here's the pill. It's not a silver bullet, meaning it's going to take some time. But I'm like, you have to know about your buyer.

You have to know what the lagging indicator is, what their leaning indicators are, like open rate, reply rate. You have to know what the root causes are, industry statistics on performance. You need to like, you need to go learn about your buyer because if you, and it's like to anyone who's sitting on the line, it's like, hey, that's a lot. Here's the thing. Anyone who's listening to this is big. I would guess it's because you're in the role of sales or sales development, et cetera, leadership. But you realize that you don't know everything there is to know about that role. So here's the great news about that. Everyone's in the same boat and it doesn't matter, right, to your point, whether I'm a CTO or CIO or CISO or HR, there is a multitude of things they don't know.

So your job as a seller is to learn all that information. It takes three years to be a pharmacist, 12 years to be a doctor. Because the hard part is to diagnose, like my sister's an ER doctor and I'm in the past, actually, she's an ER doctor. Like, you know, she sat, she killed me for saying this, top one for the nation. She's like, when people come in there, I said, let me ask you a question, Mandy. Do you ever ask them the question when they come in the ER of like, what's the impact to you? She's like, are you nuts? She's like, no. I'm like, what's in your system? What have you had to eat? She's looking up stats because if she misprescribes, she had a patient, a kingdom, bleeding all over the place and she had diagnosed it to one of two things.

It was either a blood clot or an aortic dissection. And the problem with that is the solution for a blood clot is to thin the blood. Solution for an aortic dissection is to thin the blood. And so this patient was pregnant with two kids. Oh my God. Jesus Christ. And so she had to release the tests in their system, but the physician who released the, basically the contact solution released at the same time. And they said, it's neither one of them. She's like, I'm positive it's neither one of them. There's a cost to that test. She said, run it again because if I give her, you know, basically. For our ones, she'll die. Everybody will die. All three kids will die. They're dead if it's wrong. So she runs the tests again, found out it was an aortic dissection, prescribed correctly.

And that woman lived and one of her babies, only one of her babies lived because of questions she asked. So I'm like, when you're in sales, you have a very serious rule that if you prescribe the wrong thing, it could be in the end of their job. So you have to have confidence that what you're prescribing is correct. And the only way that you can do that is by knowing information, but then asking some questions as quickly as you can in the room to help them, to save them from doing something that would hurt them. Well, look, we need to let's do a workshop on this because I think you need to I need to I need you to walk me through this and and and because I because I'm facing similar challenges that that all the other reps are right now.

As far as, you know, people who admit there's a problem or thinks there's a problem and there's not the different factions within the organization that think the problems are different and and how to uncover it without giving up. Like, and I'm look, I'm always a what goes around, comes around guy. So for me, I walk away from farm. I mean, the amount of shit that I've referred to Keenan because of discovery is off the charts. Like when somebody comes to me and starts all we need prospecting, we need conversion ratios. And then I get down to where, like, if discovery, like real deep discovery is the true problem. I tell them, I'm like, I'm good at that. But, you know, and you'll notice because I've finally gotten to this point, but I'm not great at training on discovery.

I'm more holistic with the process. And this is a component to it. If you really want deep discovery, go talk to Keenan. Now, with that, I'm a big fan of what goes around, comes around. I believe it's going to come back around. The problem is these days pipelines are so empty. Deals are so hard to come by that it's really fucking hard to walk away from revenue that is right in front of your face with a client who thinks that they know their problem and is willing to has a budget for it. But it's only this much, even though they need this much because the problem is a lot bigger. So let's walk through that. I'm going to tease it for the audience here. If you're listening to this right now, on the workshops that we do on the membership, we do these workshops where we bring in people like Beck to teach me.

And I'm learning out loud. So if you want to actually learn how to do this, first of all, go directly to Beck. Beck, where can they find out more information about you? Flipthescript.com. I'm at flipthescript.com, not co. Got it. Dot com. Yeah. So flipthescript.com. I have a bunch of different training sessions, but go ahead. Yeah. And you do remote and on-site. Like, what's your structure these days when you work with clients just to make sure? I do remote. I do on-site. I do. Okay. See, it's funny because you just ask me a solution question already. My heart sank. I'm like, I need to know the problem. That's right, right? Well, just to give the broad. Give the broad. You're the sweet here.

I'm sorry. I have a number of different free training sessions. Flipthescript.com. If you go to flipthescript.com and click free sales training, I have a bunch of different one-sheeters if you want to get that. Yeah, I actually have. I think I still have. They're in my books. I got the big laminated things that you brought with all the different stuff. Yeah. Love it. Awesome. So flipthescript.com and then just where else can they come? I connect with you. I'm back on LinkedIn, but I, you know, I've been, I'm bad about posting. I, you know, I'm not good on social. Yeah, that's all right. So for those of you listening, it's Beck, B-E-C-C, Holland, H-O-L-L-A-N-D. Flipthescript.com. Flipthescript on LinkedIn.

That's much more active. A lot of different videos, tips, you know, coming out four or five times a week. But yeah, there's 204 hours of recording content on the website, 204. So if you have a problem with sleeping, not anymore. This will help you out. And you'll sleep like a baby. Love it. Awesome. Yeah. And let's do this workshop. Let's find a time in the next month or so to kind of dig through this in detail. I got to tell you, John, it is a privilege to get to talk with you. Like you're such a legend at tight-knit the space that I don't like, even you're open to a conversation. Oh, of course. Look, you and I have always respected your approach to this and same thing. So I look at us at the same level, trying to do the same thing and elevate this profession in every way we can.

So through conversations like this, through training, whatever it might be, I genuinely appreciate your approach and everything. And always have. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. All right, everybody. Well, look, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Go check out Beck's stuff. It's fantastic. And like I always say at the end of all of these, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is or how bad you think it's going, we could all use the little smile these days. And the world needs a lot more of that. So thank you all very much. And I will see you all on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now.

And I can't thank you enough. Now to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, check out my new website, jbarrows.com, where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content, and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day just like you are, and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends in sales and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and make it happen together.