Ted McKenna: JOLT Effect and addressing the Challenge of Indecision

So people are clear on jolt, right? It's judge the indecision, offer your recommendations, limit exploration, and take risk off the table. Yeah, those are the four key behaviors we found in our study that high performers were doing differently than their peers. So executing those behaviors, executing those skills gives you a much better chance at higher close rates in those high indecision moments. 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 we got a good one here. If you've been listening to me for the past, I don't know, probably six months, you've been hearing me talk about Jolt Effect and how much I'm a fan of this book.

Again, it's the third in the succession of Challenger, Challenger Sale, and now Jolt Effect talking about indecision in the issue versus no decision. And Ted McKenna is the co-author of Jolt Effect. And so we dove in deep. I had a whole bunch of questions about what they go over and Jolt Effect and how to really change from a sales perspective, right? I talk a lot about no decision. Yeah, we all know that. But really today, it's about indecision because people are scared to make a decision. And so we dove into that. We talked about omission bias and the principle of energy conservation and how we're all wired to be lazy and what the negative impact of our sales approach is having right now when we keep pushing on fear.

And so you're going to get a masterclass in Jolt Effect. If you have not read this book yet, I highly recommend you do, especially after you listen to this conversation. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Please read this book. This is where we are in sales and this is what we need to do to evolve. So let's make it happen. Ted McKenna, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. I have been looking forward to this conversation. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. And if you've been listening to my podcast for a while or gone through any of my trainings or even send some of my social posts, you know how much of a fan I am of the Jolt Effect. And we have one of the co-authors here, Ted.

And I am looking forward to diving into this, some of this stuff. But before we do, Ted, give us a background because I was looking through your LinkedIn profile and it's, you know, a lot of research, right? One is I'm curious kind of where sales, where you cut the sales insight bug, right? Where to look at that. But do me a favor, just back up. I always love to know people's origin stories, kind of where they're coming from, where they grew up, parents, that type of stuff. Kind of what influences did you have on your life to get you to where you are right now? So if you just give us a little context there, we can dive into some of the content. Yeah. Going back to the original source, I suppose.

So born in Chicago, raised in Chicago, still live here in the Chicago area. And yeah, sort of, I guess my parents, neither one of them are researchers by trade. My dad was an entrepreneur and small business owner in the financial services space. I did a little stint at this company early in my career. But, you know, for me, I've just always been interested in, I guess, in the details, if you will. But also, you know, I was a major in economics in college, always very interested in sort of supply and demand and demand creation in particular. I've always felt like it's really interesting to study, you know, how do you create demand from nothing? And how does how does a company go about doing that?

I studied in college, some antitrust and generally just like competition and how do companies, you know, compete in a more robust manner. And so when I started to learn more about how companies operate and how demand is created by companies, it just felt like a natural extension of some of the things that interested me most. And I think B2B sales is I think one of the hardest things to do in the corporate arena, you know, to scale a team who's looking to build and create demand from nothing. And it's one of the things I think it's always should be, you know, one of the issues that CEOs and boards should care more about, you know, they care about growth, but they don't always put two and two together as to the extent to which that they stink at sales.

And that's one of the reasons why that might not be happening. I think more broadly, I kind of grew up professionally at a company called CB or corporate executive board, which is now a part of Gardner. And what drew me to CB at the time was they had this ethos that ideas themselves have economic value, which I think also really struck me, um, as, as not only being right, but kind of struck a chord in general with, with what it felt like were the power of insight and ideas and research at the ability to influence and ability to help, uh, people, uh, to perform better. And that's true. Of course, moving all the way down to the front line, the individual seller was just out of college and trying to figure out, you know, how do I make a career out of this?

Um, or not, maybe I just, I'm learning about how companies make money and how the I can help them and then use that as a way to find myself into product or, or executive leadership roles on down the line, uh, all the way through to senior leaders as they think about, you know, helping themselves in their career and, and, um, learning how to manage teams and organizations and all the complexity that comes with it. So it's just been a fascinating area of, of, uh, of, of study for me. And, um, you know, that's where you, I guess you find a 20 years plus of, of kind of looking at these, uh, for some people, boring subjects for me, rather interesting subjects. I love it, man. Yeah. Well, somebody has got to do it, right?

Cause there's the detailed people and then the not so detailed people. My, my education comes through conversations like this from people who are way smarter than me and actually put in the work to figure it out. So I just read a lot, you know? Yeah. It's funny. And it's funny. A lot of the things you bring up in, in Joel's effect, I, I do see myself just naturally doing it a lot of ways. Um, and some people not. So I'm kind of curious nature nurture as it relates to sales, but let's back up for a second. Cause you know, this is the third in the group of books that you wrote, right? Like, or you coauthored was challenger sales, the first one challenger customer. And then this is the, this is the next one.

Jolt effect. Um, what's changed since then? Like what's changed since challenger, right? Cause that was what 20 ish years ago at this point? 15? Uh, not quite. Yeah. About 15. Um, we started, and to be clear, I wasn't a coauthor on those books, but I was a researcher on those, those teams. Um, no worries. Brent Adamson was a coauthor of, of the challenger sale. And then a couple other colleagues on the challenger customer as well, but I was on the research teams and working directly with sales organizations as they were taking action on those insights, learning how to, how do we make more challengers? How do we, um, develop a challenger based organization? Uh, but yeah, that started in, in kind of like 2008, 2009 timeframe.

The book came out in 2011. Okay, cool. So fundamentally, I guess if you, if you're looking across those, cause I look at challenger sale and I think at the time for the right sales rep challenger was fantastic, right? It's like, Hey, you know, you lead instead of follow you lead with insights or, you know, you kind of push back. Hey, you know, I hope people make this decision every day. Let me show you that, how people make good decisions, bad decisions. But then there was like the four other five other, uh, types, you know, the hard worker. I've definitely identified as more of the grinder, the hard worker. Um, is challenger still the predominant successful rep these days, or has it, has it fundamentally shift?

And if it has, what are those shifts that, that are causing that not to be as effective or if it is. So I have a research based point of view there, and then I have some, uh, hypotheses and some things you haven't fully tested. I mean, at present, we don't have any data that would say that challenger itself is not the sort of winning rep out there. And I think more generally, um, everyone would acknowledge that the role of insight in the sales experience and our ability to teach customers new things remains a very relevant aspect of engaging. And, uh, I think specifically differentiating sales experience, helping them see you differently, helping them with selection between you versus competitor, uh, whatnot.

Of course that manifests in the behaviors and skills that that sales rep might be comfortable with or not. Um, with the jolt effect in the study that we did around customer indecision, there was a couple of things I think we learned about how buyers are evolving and the role in specifically that emotion is playing in the, these conversations that it's, it's, it's true. And we've seen it, um, both in our research and separately that indecision itself is on a secular rise over time, uh, for a whole bunch of different reasons. And that has an effect as you might expect on the way that buyers evaluate purchases and how sales teams might work with them, uh, more directly. There's a chapter in our book called becoming a buyer's agent, which is very much about trying to demonstrate to the buyer that, you know, I have your best interests in mind that I'm not trying to hide anything.

There's no skeletons in the closet that you can trust me along in that process. And if I had to pinpoint any specific thing that feels like it has shifted from a buying perspective, you know, over above some of the big shifts we talked about in the challenger sale. If you remember, you know, highly informed buyers who were pushing the seller further and further out in the decision process, more and more people that they have to sort of build consensus with inside these buyer organizations. Those are the two big shifts that we talked about in the challenger work to the extent that we've observed more changes there. I think it's very much about the fact that the buyer themselves has become overwhelmed with the number of options and information.

Um, and that has created some hesitancy partly because I think if you were to survey buyers these days, a lot of them feel like they've been oversold or that they've been over promised in the past. And that's created some, some hesitancy that now sellers have to kind of navigate through. And so that, that ability to establish trust, build trust, be seen as that buyer's agent feels more relevant today. Now there are things that challengers do. I think that absolutely demonstrate that buyer's agent, you know, I think leading with ideas and, and being sort of supplier agnostic and how you approach those individuals, not feeling like you're doing it just as a way to position yourself only as the potential solution there.

I think challengers, like great challengers would consider themselves to be buyer's agents. So in that respect, I don't know that there's anything big that's changed from a behavior perspective, but you can see some, some themes that are, are starting to pop up across our research that might cause you to wonder, Hey, you know, if we went to study this again, would we find the exact same thing or would it, would have evolved a little bit? I think probably the latter probably has evolved a little bit. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. 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, which are filling the funnel and driving a close to cover all aspects of the sales process.

It also includes monthly workshops that'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process. Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to JBarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. Okay. And how much do you think AI has an impact on this as far as options and indecision? And the reason I ask is because I'm a pretty quick decision maker, right? One of the things, I'm not a detail guy.

I usually, you know, my strength to a certain degree is I look at, you know, two or three data points and I make a very strong, educated guess to be like, hey, let's do this. And I go. But even for me, when I first saw ChatGPT come out, I immediately knew I was in trouble as a trainer, as a consultant and all these things. And so I went all in on trying to find a partner to develop an AI coach for me, right? And with all my content and everything else. And as I would get down the road with one of them, and then all of a sudden ChatGPT would like launch some new feature, whatever it was, or somebody else would be doing something like, holy smokes, hold on, take a step back. Now let me find somebody else.

And it took me over a year to make a decision on who to partner with. And that is about as far from my decision-making process, you know, as it gets. So do you think that the unknown, right? So there's one thing about the, hey, there's a ton of options right now. There's always been a growing amount of options. But AI feels like there's an unknown factor of what it's going to do to this industry, to this tech, to whatever. So people are now even more hesitant, because next week, something else could come out that that's much better. Do you think this is going to basically put this on hockey stick growth as far as the indecision factor? Almost definitely, yes. The distinction I might draw is whether the buyer is buying AI, or whether they're using AI.

So if you start with buying AI, I think it's very fair to say that partly because there's a lot of buyers who felt like that they've been oversold, or they have overpurchased in the past, enter AI into the picture. And there's all sorts of incentive for vendors, and companies, and sellers to position their AI as being the best, or the newest, or the most powerful. You know, slapping AI onto things that don't even seem to really fit into AI. You know, a funny story. I'm a golfer, and I was watching some golf this weekend. There's a commercial about a putter that was designed by AI. And that's like, okay, but even if that's true that it was designed by AI, does that actually, like, improve my ability to putt?

It's the most ridiculous thing. And that type of example, I think, often will apply into B2B sales arenas, where it's like, you're just saying AI for the sake of trying to get my attention. And I think, from a buyer's perspective, absolutely, that's going to cause some degree of hesitancy. It just sets off alarm balls from the beginning. But I think you also make a good point that, as exciting as the AI capabilities are, it creates lots of uncertainties from the buyer's perspective. They're unfamiliar with the technology. They're not sure how to use it. They're not sure who in the organization can take advantage of it. They're not sure. You know, they've, of course, bought lots of tech before they never fully used or fully, they felt like they've fully taken advantage of.

And I think AI has the very, very possible chance of making that even worse. And I think there's a separate story about buyers using AI for their own purposes. And I think that story is just beginning. Actually, I think it's, it's just kind of playing out. And I think the simple way to think about, and maybe the scariest part from a seller's perspective of a buyer using AI is, I mean, if you think about the potential for using, you know, I don't know what chap GPT version it's on now for, or something like that, imagine chap GPT 10, you know, which version 10, which probably isn't all that far away. And now I can start having that bot tell me who to buy from. Like, I don't need to go and read a bunch of reports.

You know, Gardner's not going to tell me, hey, pick this vendor over the other one, partly because they want to sell to both of those vendors. But that's a, as a separate story. But point being like, oftentimes these are subjective, you know, jump ball things. This vendor is a little bit better than that one. The bot's not going to care about that. They're going to, they're going to make predictions, right? It's going to say, we predict you should pick and select this one. That has an interesting effect on buyers who already are a little overwhelmed. Do they trust the bot? Do they trust the salesperson coming in? There's, there's a whole set of follow on implications there. That again, I think that's a story that still is being written as to how often people actually use bots as opposed to other means to, to learn about, uh, vendors.

But I do think it'll happen. Yeah. I've been saying to people a lot, like, you know, there's still human, you know, that'd be the last mile, right? Like let the tech do a lot of the heavy lifting, but before the email gets sent, before the proposal gets written, whatever it is, just make sure you humanize it. Because as long as there's a person on the other end of that, we have a chance. But to your point, once computers start buying shit, that's what it's going to be. I don't know where we fit in because I'm, because I'm seeing quite frankly, uh, marketing come further and further down into the sales world because of the AI and the personalization and those types of things. And then this customer success almost coming further in because customers want to be educated, not sold.

And so the, the, the, the true sales rep is getting squeezed in the middle. And I think almost has to do a lot of this stuff that you outlined in this book to even stay remotely relevant with how fast things are moving right now. I think the, I would be surprised if B2B purchases anytime soon are completely offloaded to the bot and to the machine. I think it's possible they'll use bots and the machine and models as a way to cut through the noise and select at least the finalists, if not the actual vendor and for X, Y, Z reasons. Um, but I still think it's the person at the end of the day or the set of people who's going to be making that decision. And because of that, you know, because I think it is humans buying, I don't see a world anytime soon when the salesperson and the selling organization isn't also very critical.

We know just how important the seller is. And frankly, in the emotional process that B2B buyer is going through in that. And I don't see that ending anytime soon, but for some of the more transactional stuff, if you're just, you know, fulfilling a broken, you know, uh, part, um, or, you know, you're just like, it's a replenishment of goods that you continue to buy. I could be a potentially, I could see that. Yeah. I wasn't going to ask this, but you brought up an interesting point. I would love your perspective on this, which is, do you still believe that people fundamentally buy on emotion and back it up with fact, or are we moving more towards a factual objective regardless of emotion? So I don't have any hard data that would tell you one way or another.

I mean, even back in the challenger day, if you guys are familiar with the challenger choreography, there's a part of where you're trying to appeal to both the rational and the emotional, um, uh, aspect of, of purchasing. I think what we've learned is that that box on the challenger choreography that is about emotion is far more important than we ever would have thought. Um, and it's, and you know, those of you that have read the jolt effect, we talk a lot about not just the fear that the buyer might have of missing out, which is an emotion, but also the fear of messing up. And if this thing were to go wrong and the consequences of it going wrong, it ended up blowing up in my face as being as, or more important as a different set of emotions and quite powerful with respect to their willingness to move forward and move forward.

Now, I think facts of course, are always going to play a role in the degree to which you can prove and, and, and show that, you know, you have, um, confidence in the fact that this is going to work in the way that you're saying to, and you can point to specific data that, that helps them to believe that that's true. Absolutely matters. I think what's fascinating to me from a, from a research standpoint is to, to think about where this starts to go with respect to the emotion continue to grow for buyers. And when you try to use facts as a way to solve for that emotion, because I think that's the, that's the common instinct for a lot of sellers is the buyers asking for proof of ROI. They're asking for all these different updates in the ROI model.

They must not believe that I'm telling the truth, right? They're asking it. And it's not coming from a place of your facts don't matter to me, but rather I'm not so sure the implications has for me and my organization. It's, it's far more of an emotional response and throwing more facts that it doesn't actually change the equation for the buyer. And so I think that interchange of like, where's the objection coming from? Is it coming more from a rational place or an emotional place and responding accordingly is probably the best path here. And, and I think, you know, until I learned differently, you know, until we learned differently through research, I think it's always going to be a mix of facts and feelings.

Yeah. So we're talking about the difference and this is why I was so interested in this book because, you know, everybody talks about no decision is, you know, that's our biggest competitor, right? And we, we try to sell against no decision and, you know, it's like, okay, reverse timeline selling. You need to go live by August 1st and we need to sign today. But then the question of like, Hey, what happens if you don't go live, you know, August 1st and what's the implications and the impact of the business. And then you talk about in the book, the FUD factor about how we lean in on that. Not that they're, they're missing out of they're in their situation. We've convinced them that current state is not tenable anymore and they have to move to future state, whether they like it or not.

But once that happens, then it turns into, you know, the, um, indecision factor. It's like, now they're scared to make the decision. So a couple of things on this to just to, for the audience here, could you talk a little bit more about omission bias and what that is and why it's so important for us to pay attention to from a psychology standpoint as it relates to sales? Yeah. So, um, this is a big factor that we found, you know, we, we saw all these instances in our, uh, we did a big study of two and a half million sales conversations as part of this, uh, this research project. And we saw all these instances in the study of places where the buyer clearly wanted to purchase, felt like they needed a purchase and the seller was doing all the things you would have thought they would have needed to do to create that burning platform from change and drive urgency against the decision.

And they were still getting stuck. And when we dug into those, it was, it was surprising how many of those situations were, again, it wasn't so much that the buyer didn't want to change, you know, wasn't that we hadn't overcome their status quo. They were very excited about that change. You know, we had overcome their indifference to that change and that they were still getting stuck. And when we dug into why this might be happening, we took some inspiration from psychology and behavioral economics. Cause you know, for us, this was, it was just surprising how much it felt like buyers seemed scared and they seemed sort of indecisive about things. And there's a, there's a whole set of, of, uh, studies, decades worth of studies from psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are probably the most famous and most, uh, prominent and, uh, brilliant people to state the obvious.

Uh, Kahneman won a Nobel prize. Unfortunately, he passed away recently, um, but wrote a terrific book called thinking fast and slow. They are most famous for prospect theory and loss aversion. And that's a, uh, uh, set of studies in a phenomenon that I think a lot of people are familiar with, even if you don't know that you're familiar with it, because that's why that FOMO appeal, the fear of missing out appeal works so well, because in general, humans are just wired to want to avoid loss. Like we care more about avoiding loss than we do about the upside gain potential of something, but there's a wrinkle in their research that turns out to be really important with respect to how buyers evaluate purchases, which is there's actually two types of loss.

So there's, oh, there's an era of omission and there's an era of commission. An era of omission is I did not do something. And as a consequence, I missed out, right? So let's assume a couple of years ago, your buddy invested in crypto, got super rich, bought an island in the middle of Caribbean, and now you're feeling left out because you didn't do that. And, and so that's the era of omission, right? It did not do something. And as a consequence, I missed out an era of commission is I did do something. It went horribly wrong and I got blamed, right? I did do something. And because I did that, something went wrong. And therefore I get the blame for it. It's a very personal form of loss. And they found that actually that's a bigger, that weighs heavier on us more so than the era of omission.

So that's the omission bias is, is this era of commission. So that, you know, translates to in sales is that the FOMO appeal, the fear of missing out matters, but it gets beat every day of the week and twice on Sunday by FOMU. That's the fear of messing up, which is an acronym we made up, but, and that's the safe for work version. The not safe for work version is FOMU, which I'll let your listeners figure out what that is. And so that's what we've been studying for a couple of years now is the effect that FOMU or FOMU has on buyers. And how can we overcome this fear with them? How can we work with them to help them feel better about the potential consequence if this thing were to go wrong? What are the skills that the seller might need to do so?

And I think that's why, I mean, I think I read this in the book, but it just makes logical sense of, you know, the decision maker these days, there's no singular decision maker because nobody wants to be the one holding the bag if that decision doesn't go well. So they, that's why they're bringing in far more people into the sales process than they ever have, because it's almost plausible deniability. It's like, well, I wasn't the only one who made this decision. So did Sally. So did Jim. So did Bill. Like we all checked off on this, but that actually compounds the problem because indecision gets even worse, the more people you introduce into the equation, right? Yeah, I think that's true for sure.

I mean, you definitely don't want your champion or your advocate or somebody, whatever you might call that person to be the indecisive person, the highly indecisive person. Yes. If you have a group that has lots of dysfunction with respect to how they make those decisions and the indecision sort of multiplies as well, look, that's all true. But at the end of the day, there typically is one person's name on that docusign or the Adobe sign or whatever. And so it does kind of come back to that for perhaps for related reasons, we're seeing an increase in clients asking about sort of elevating the conversation to that C-suite type individual, which of course has been a thing for a while now, you know, trying to break into that corner office, make sure you can kind of sell up to the senior individual.

I do wonder if perhaps this indecision phenomenon is heightening that a little bit, because again, at the end of the day, I can sell great to that team. But if I can't win over that senior person who might be signing on the dotted line, you know, that is sort of a multi-threading outcome that I haven't yet nailed. You can imagine why you then want to turn the dial up a little bit for that very senior person. So with indecision, there's something that people are genetically engineered to be lazy, the principle of energy conservation. Talk about that briefly. And then I want to relate that to the previous point, which is if people are predetermined to be lazy and whatever for all the way back in history to conserve energy, why do they put themselves through such a lengthy, complex buying product?

Like, where's the balance there of I'm lazy, I'd rather stay with status quo, but yet I'm going to talk to 15 vendors to try to make this decision. Like, that doesn't seem lazy. That seems like just doing extra work. I used to get to a point with a client where I would ask like, well, you know, L, we're looking at other vendors. I'd be like, why? Why do you want to look at other vendors? What did you not hear in my conversation that didn't solve your problem? And try to get them to stop talking to other vendors because they fundamentally don't. If it was, if the decision was easy, done, like I'll take it. That's lazy. So how do you balance, I guess, give a little bit of context on the principle of energy conservation, but the length that people are going through to make decisions and the pain that does not seem lazy to me at all.

Yeah. And I mean, nobody said it was all that rational that they're doing that, right? Going through that exercise and then still deciding to do nothing at all. Why would anyone put themselves through that? And look, change is hard and change is annoying and all things equal. I think in general, people and companies would prefer not to engage in that. On the other hand, they're also ambitious and they have, you know, plans and that's true collectively as an organization. They've got growth goals they're trying to hit. They've got big problems they're trying to solve. There are some purchases that are compelled, like they need to buy something in order to do their job, a piece of technology or whatnot.

Like I need a CRM system. I can't operate my team unless I do. And so it's just a necessary evil of doing, uh, doing my job. Um, but also even individually, people are ambitious, you know, they're trying to make a career on things. They're trying to do transformative things in the organization. And so those are counterbalances to the, to the, you know, laziness factor, if you will. And I think for, for our, uh, from our research, we would kind of categorize that laziness into more of a status quo problem. You're still overcoming indifference. Like if you haven't overcome their, you know, um, instinct for laziness, they probably don't care enough about you or they don't care enough with a problem that you're still trying to sell.

And don't get me wrong. Like our research is very clear there as well. We absolutely still have to overcome the status quo and you're not going to sell anything until and unless you do. What jolt effect tells us is that that's necessary, but insufficient. We also, unfortunately, that's kind of bad news, right? We also have to overcome indecision, which can sit totally separate. So even after I want to change and feel like I need to change and I'm trying to change, I still like, just as one example of, of indecision problem that sits aside from status quo is I see all these options and things I have to choose between, and I can't make sense of what's what, like which path is better and for what reason and what proportion and where do I start?

So even though I'm willing to change, even though I want to change, I just can't make sense of where to change and how to change. And so I just stopped, you know, as, as being one example, but you know, you're right. Like that buyer's instinct to do nothing is quite strong and it manifests in lots of different ways for the seller. So talk to me about where we are in the sales process when we have to switch from no decision to selling against fear, basically against indecision, because the, the, my ignorant view of this is, okay, you go through the, you uncover impact, you figure it out, you differentiate yourselves over the competition, right? And now I'm the pseudo selected vendor, right? They're like, yep, we want to go with you.

And now, you know, the logical part there is in the book, you know, then you shift to making it, making them make this decision easy for them, make it less risky for them and, and reduce the downside there. But inevitably we're still in, I wish that was the case where I got the John, your selected vendor and it was that clear cut that, okay, now I need to shift to jolt effects selling now. Right. But how do you do that while selling the clients on that impact and the problem? Yeah. I mean, I wish I had like a super clean answer to this, but the world, the world is messier than, than that, you know, um, not only is it true to your point that it's not always a clear handoff between, okay, you're now willing to change and have one selection.

So let's move on to the indecision problem. Um, indecision can even exist on a win as well, you know, which is a confounding problem for a customer success person or account manager as well. You know, for whatever reason that, that purchase still might've went through, maybe it was a compelled purchase. Maybe there was budget that was going to disappear. Maybe the boss just made them do it and it just got through, but that doesn't necessarily mean the indecision itself went away and now it's a downstream problem. So indecision is kind of all around us, um, early, middle, and late, even post a purchase at the same time. And so that's one of the challenges in working with indecisions. It can sit side by side with some of the same problems you're trying to deal with early on.

Like, can they make a purchase? Will they make a purchase? Do they care enough about us, um, as the preferred supplier? I do think it's fair to assume that as you get closer to closing stages, the buyer starts getting more explicit and becoming more aware potentially of their own indecision. And so therefore it might become more obvious for the seller to start treating it, you know, at that point. But we, when we work with sales teams, we talk all the time about trying to treat this as early as you possibly can. And granted the proportion of you treating that relative to, you know, early stages, I'm pitching value. I'm trying to help them understand why change is necessary. The proportion of you treating indecision might be lower relative to all the other things you're doing there, but that doesn't mean it should be at zero.

Uh, and if you think about it on a, on a hundred pennies basis, maybe it's 10 or 20 or 30 pennies I'm devoting to indecision. And you could start detecting indecision from the very first conversation you have with a buyer. And at that stage, you're just the, the activity the seller is doing at least at minimum is qualifying and disqualifying based on that level of indecision, right? So if I'm hearing all sorts of things that set off alarm bells in my mind about this person, never being able to come to a decision that should play into my forecast, it should play into how hard or how, how much I want to prioritize this deal. And again, you can start hearing some of those things early on, partly based on just this person I'm dealing with and their, their personality and how they consume information.

Um, but also a series of things that are related to the purchase as well. This is the stat that jumped off the page to me was that it, you know, we're taught to sell, like, you know, when somebody starts to drag their ass, when they, when it's pretty evident, they're like, yep, we know we need to do this. And then they start hemming and hawing or whatever it is. We go back to selling FUD, right? Well, again, for every day you don't do this, you're losing $10 million, like that type of stuff. But what the stats say are just ridiculous that if you do that, if you lean back in on fear, if you will, after they've consciously made that decision that it has, it generates a negative impact on sales outcomes, 84% of the time.

Yeah, that's right. Yep. Like, yeah, that's not a huge stat to pay attention to and understand. That's why I'm trying to dig into when is that moment that a rep should look for or recognize to literally stop selling FUD and start selling against the risk of transition. Well, yeah, well, the reason that's happening is because very often the seller misinterprets that hesitation. You know, they misinterpret the fact that the buyer is backtracking or they're hemming and hawing or they're going dark on them and they're not showing up to those calls. They assume that that's because they just don't want it enough. You know, they're saying they do. They're saying they want it, but they're not showing up for these calls and they're not making the case.

And so therefore, and if they did want it, they would be doing these things. They'd be showing up for the calls. And so therefore, they must not want it enough. So we go back to the well. We try to relitigate that case for change. And what you have to understand is there's a point at which the buyer, the job is less about convincing them that this is a necessary thing and more about that they can do this and they're not going to fail doing so. And in that place, that buyer is already fearful. They're already fearful that, you know, yes, like once they're past indifference, once they're past the point at which that they actually do want to sell, they in fact have enough, in fact, a healthy amount of fear of missing out.

That's why they're willing to move forward. And so then throwing more fear on top of that already fearful buyer, which is what we're doing when we use that flood and we're trying to drive urgency and throw the discount at them and try to create like turn the screws up and turn the dials up and all the bad things that will happen to their team and their organization if they stop and they don't do anything. It's just like more fear on top of an already sort of fearful situation. So that's why it backfires. Again, I wish I had like a perfect, you know, way to say this is the point, but the easiest way we can, we've found to make this distinction is does your buyer care? Are they more indifferent or indecisive?

You know, and if you feel like you've crossed that bridge on indifference, either for the problem you're trying to sell or you as the preferred supplier, then more likely than not, the bigger deal is indecision, but they can coincide and you have to think about that ratio, I think at all points. Yeah. Yeah. And I, it's just more of a conscious factor of, you know, I've started to ask the very, I break down a very basic where, you know, get a reverse timeline sell and every sales rep is decent. Well, most sales reps are decent at that, but then asking, okay, what happens if you don't go live? That's no decision. And then I'm starting to ask because of the book very bluntly. Hey, Ted, what's, um, what happens if you make the wrong decision here?

What happens if you choose the wrong vendor, implement the wrong solution? Like, what's that look like on the other end for you? And when was the last time that happened? And let's talk that through. Like, um, then it almost becomes like a therapy session where they're like, oh man, Jesus, you know, we implemented something a few weeks, you know, years ago and it was absolute train wreck. And this is what happened. That's what I'm now selling to, right? I'm selling against that fear. Um, so I don't know when that happens, but you know, there's a lot of different ways I think we can do this to, to de-risk the solution for the purchase for the client. You mentioned three in the book, set expectations after a safety net and down, uh, downside risk protection.

Let me ask you about this one, which I think most reps don't have control over. Um, because I think a lot of them would say it. I can, you know, I'm a business owner. I can do whatever the hell I want. I can offer money back guarantees and those types of things if I want to, but they average 22, 23, 24 year old rep can't change what they can offer the customer. Or if they try to offer the client an out clause, which would be a nice way to de-risk it, their boss would literally chop their head off because that's the worst thing that most people want to give away. So of the three setting expectations offer safety net and downsides, assuming that, and it'll tell me if I'm wrong, I can't control much of the safety net component to it.

With the stuff that the rep can control, where should they be focusing their efforts? You know, should it be clear expectations? Should it be product plans? Where, where should they, where can they really help tangibly reduce the risk for the client when they don't control some of the variable? You're right that this is the most common reaction we get from sales teams when we talk about taking risk off the table is, Hey, I'm not permissioned or authorized to offer any sort of safety net. And so what do we do? Almost nothing. And we just hope and pray that even though there's lots of indecision and even though we start to get sort of later stage in that process, maybe it'll just go away or treat itself.

And that's of course not the best, um, best reaction either. Two couple, a couple of quick thoughts here. So expectation setting as a skill in our predictive sales model was the number one skill, most powerful skill in the, in the ability for the seller to set proper outcome expectations with that buyer. That's especially hard. I'll grant you when the buyer themselves are talking them into huge transformative, perhaps outsized expectations beyond the, beyond the, the, what their ability they can actually achieve as an organization or what any customer has achieved. You know, they're talking them into things like all of a sudden this would be your best customer that's ever existed. And you have no evidence that they can actually get to that point, but they've talked themselves into it.

The average seller, when that happens, they're probably, their reaction is, well, this is tremendous. Like they're so excited. They're going to spend so much money on this. And this thing's going to fly through the pipeline, right? For the jolt seller, alarm bells are going off like, okay, at some point in time, somebody around the organization is going to start asking, wait, hold on, how are we going to achieve this? And can you show me evidence that this has been achieved? But also we as an organization struggle with change and this is hard and this is hard. And there's, there's variables and dependencies and unforeseen circumstances. Have you thought this through? Somebody's going to say that and they're going to tap the brakes and, and hit pause.

And that's why, you know, it becomes even harder to sell those very transform, transformative outcomes. So a jolt seller is setting expectations early, as early as they can in a proactive way. And they're grounding buyers in practical, achievable, and believable outcomes all along the way. And so then hopefully you then don't have to go to great lengths to break out, you know, the best and biggest safety net late, late stage, because the buyer's already kind of grounded in those practical outcomes. But there will be times, plenty of times when absent some form of safety net, you might not get that buyer across the line. You know, that if the indecision is that high for a given buyer, I might've argued if it was that high, you might've walked away from this deal a while ago.

If you could have, can't always do that if it's a key account or what have you. But in that case, the guidance we give to the teams are get creative and brainstorm, work with your manager to find ways and avenues for it. There are some more informal type of safety nets that address more perceived fear of messing up. You know, sometimes the buyer perceives that the mess up frequency or the consequence of it is higher than it actually is. You know, their imagination starts to run wild. And in those cases, there are times you can point back to mutual action plans or executive sponsors or other things you can do just to make them feel better about the process. You know, I've got somebody to call, I've got someone throat to choke, if you will.

And then other times you do need something perhaps a little more formal and there where you might need to work with your sales team and, you know, or your sales managers, like starting small is one example that isn't like a perfect example. I don't want teams feeling like the only way to sell against indecision is to sell small deals, but sometimes, you know, something is better than nothing. And these are the calculations I think senior leaders are making when they address the very, very highly indecisive buyers late stage. And I think that works in, you know, in your, in the article that you wrote, um, what the rainmakers do different, right? Professional services groups like lawyers and those types of things where they control the full cycle, right?

They, they network, they business development, they get the client, they customer success, right? But in the world of tech and SaaS, right? The predictable revenue model of segmentation of roles. I think this is why it's so hard is because the rep is being, uh, comped or targeted on that deal, right? So for them to sell a small deal, they wouldn't, they won't get, you know, they might not get credit based on how their comp plan creates. So is, is the segmentation of roles a big problem here as it relates to selling effectively or does it matter? Like, you know, uh, uh, uh, SDR and my, you know, sales development rep who's making those cold calls could be a jolt, could practice jolt as well as a senior in complex deals.

What do you think that the segmentation really has challenges that all sales, all models, all ability to add value? Yeah, I hear two questions in that. So to the question, I think I heard last, which is, is jolt applicable for all types of roles? The answer there is yes, there, there are things in SDR can take away a customer success manager and AE, you name it, their sales engineers, solutions architects, uh, all of them, uh, have implications for how they're going to handle and work with, uh, the sales team or the buyer in overcoming a decision. Your other question that I heard though, which is an interesting one, which is that does role definition hamper the ability for sales teams to work with buyers on that front?

I don't know that I know that answer. And it's an, it's an interesting thing to ponder that the way we've potentially overly narrow, uh, like sort of narrowly built, um, job specs and roles. If that plays a role in the buyer, um, handling a decision, I don't know that it necessarily, I mean, I think the same thing I do with org charts, like there's no silver bullet, you know, org chart and there's no, or go to market model. There's no silver bullet rule definition. I don't think, but I do think what I know to be true is that most salespeople don't know enough about the post-sale experience. And the more you can pull that knowledge into the sales experience, the better for the buyer, the more you can demystify, you know, the seller, sorry, the buyer is always going to assume that there's some skeleton hidden in the closet.

You know, that there's some surprise hidden around the corner and they're going to keep wanting to explore until they find that skeleton until, or until they open up that closet and turn on the light. So we talked to sales teams about is do that for them, open up that closet, turn on the light, demystify that experience for them, help them understand, you know, what's going to happen day one, day 90, day 120. Um, and one great way to know that is to go spend time with and sit next to the customer success team or the account manager and learn about what makes customers really happy, what makes them unhappy, you know, and bring that honesty, bring that candor into the sales process. Don't make the buyer feel like the only thing you're willing to tell them is that every customer is super happy and no customer's ever had a bad experience.

Help them learn from the experiences of those things. Bring some of that scar tissue in the sales experience. I think you'll earn credit from, and trust from your buyers. Absolutely. Actually, there was a model I had somebody on the podcast a while back where I loved, cause I I've been kind of railing against a predictable revenue model for a while. I just do not think it's customer centric. Nobody likes to be handed off 15 times before they actually talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. But the, the model he had was SDR, right? All right, still an entry, just, you know, get your teeth cut on sales, whatever it is. But then instead of being promoted to an AE and do full cycle sales, you actually get promoted to a customer success or account management to work with a book of clients to understand use cases, get empathy, you know, understand what happens when a sale is bad and what the client has to deal with.

So that to your point, then they elevate to a full cycle sales to that, that can bring in those stories, knows what's good and what's bad and can have real honest conversations about what the product can and can't do. Yeah. What's, what's more believable, a seller telling a customer that every single one of our customers said a perfect experience and there's never been a lesson learned or yeah, like we've learned a lot about what makes for a good and what makes for a bad experience in doing this. And I'm going to help you understand what we've learned on that front. And I'm going to be an open book on that front, because that's my job is to be a good steward of you and your organization. Why do you think reps are so scared to be honest?

This is, this goes back to chicken and egg. Like I always wonder who, who I do first to the sales rep lie to the client, client of the sales rep, but we are where we are. Why do you think it's so hard for a sales rep to be honest? Is it lack of education, just too much pressure, you know, because I think, and I think there's a maturity to this as well. Obviously you get to a certain point in your career where you realize that when you tell everybody, everything's great, none of them, and they don't believe you, but do you think there's an indicator of why reps are, or reps are scared to be transparent with the client? Yeah. And I don't know that I would say it's lying necessarily. I think there's, there's information that is maybe withheld or positioned in, in ways that's only meant to sort of show the good light.

And it's not always bad intentioned either, or, or even they might not even be aware that they're doing it. Right. Let's assume good intent on that front. But look, when a supplier is dealing with a buyer, naturally there's going to be information asymmetry. And, you know, some of it could just be how much time I have with, with the buyer. Right. There's only so many, so much information I can convey in that short period of time. And look, at the end of the day, the, every buyer has to make some leap of faith, you know, at some point. Right. And I think too often we've come to assume that that's, that's easier said than done for the buyer, that the leap of faith is, is going to be done on faith rather than with a little bit more, um, proof and evidence that this is, um, this experience is going to go the way you're saying it's going to go.

Cause the one thing all buyers believe to be true to them is that they're different. And we know this, right. Um, that's what drives me crazy. It's like, no, you're not like, I've, I've gotten to the point with my career. Cause I'm just a one man show and I can have the conversation. I'm like, Ted, I appreciate you looking at this, but I've seen literally the exact same scenario 500 times. I appreciate it. But, and so it's kind of breaks that barrier down, but you're right. They all think they're special. And I think people just like, it's, it's hard to admit weakness or, or it's, it's seen to be admitting weakness. If you're talking about the faults of your product or, so of course you have to be careful in how you position it.

I'm not, you know, make no mistake. I'm not out here saying that we should lead with all the worst parts of our product or that, you know, we should be trying to help buyers understand all the weak underbelly of our, that's not, that's not what we're talking about here. Um, and so, but I do think like there is, there are ways that you, if done wrongly, you could open up those questions. And so better to just avoid those topics altogether than to start creating doubt where there doesn't need to be doubt about these things. Right. And, you know, in a world where I'm based, I'm selling, uh, in an incentive based world where the more I sell, the more I make, you know, you have, you do have some incentive to try to sell the big thing, to try to, to, you know, quite frankly, like oversell them.

And I, to me, that's the bigger, more serious thing is, you know, the incentivizing to, to sell the buyer more than they actually need, you know, in those places. And the, the follow on effects that has at large across the economy can get quite big. One of the things that comes out as high performers in the book is that the most important thing a new salesperson can do is invest time and development expertise on their company's product, competition, and market. Right. So effectively what I've been umbrellaing as business acumen, like if you can improve, prove your business acumen, because the days of not knowing enough, right. Or just being the quarterback to bring people in. Like if I, if you have my undivided attention, you caught my most valuable asset, which is time.

And you can't give me this answer. I'm going to go find something. I'm going to go to somebody else. Could you compare that to the way we build trust? Because I think of the, one of the points that I think is chapter seven brings up is one of the ways that you can build trust is, is admitting when you don't know something. So I guess how much there's, there's two different trains of thoughts on this. One is sales reps need to be the product expert all the way through so they can go down and they don't need to pull in all these depending on the solution, obviously complex sales, those types of things. The other is they really only need to know a little bit and be curious enough to ask questions, but also be resourceful enough to pull in the resources.

And obviously the answer is both, but is there a line of, of information or of depth that you think of rep needs to have for their product so that they can be valuable in that scenario? Yeah. So we talked to sales teams about striving for expertise, which is how I would talk about it. Nobody expects any seller to be the perfect expert. And there's going to be lots of mitigating circumstances that affect that. You know, you're new to the job, new to the role, new to the industry, all those things are going to impact whether you can actually convey expertise, but I think it's worth striving to. And so what does that mean? Learning from different parts of the organization about the customer experience, about the products and so forth, making sure you're taking note of places where the buyer does catch you flat footed in a question and learning that so you can come back next time to answer that question on your own.

We talk about, you know, striving to try to run as many demos for those in the product, sorry, the technology world and software world where demos become so much a big part of the sales experience, striving to try to run as many of those as you can yourself. And, you know, very often that's out of your hands. Like the sales leader tells you, no, don't do that. Or, or perhaps it is a highly technical product that requires the involvement and collaboration with those individuals. And that's totally fine. Like, even though in that setting, a lot of it comes down to how you might define expertise, you know, you, you are, as the, as the seller have to find your source of authority and your source of authority often is what's the experience that my buyers are going to have.

It's not the first time you've ever sold this very likely, but it's probably the first time this buyer's ever bought something like this. And so your job is to help architect that experience for them, play that quarterback and, and orchestrate it for them across the way. So even when I'm working with other experts to synthesize different points of view or to add color about specific questions, I have to, the way I'm conveying expertise there is by quarterbacking that, right? I'm prepping for those conversations with, with my core partners, helping them understand the role they play and the role I play. I'm bringing them into the conversation and taking them out of the conversation. And so even though I might not be the one talking and I might be the one answering the question, you still come across as a, you come across as an expert on the process for that buyer.

And in the absence of that, the seller, sorry, the buyer is just going to feel like, why is this person even here? They just set up the conversation and receded into the background. I'll just go around them or even worse because they're not an expert. I now have to become an expert on my own. So I'll see you in three months after I read your whole user guide, because that's how long it's going to take me. And so again, there's different ways to think about expertise and how it's demonstrated to that buyer. I like that because that's why a lot of reps, they, you know, sales engineers, for instance, and I used to fall in this bucket. I used to abuse sales engineers like you read about, you know, I'd walk in, I'd be like, hey, Ted, thanks for your time.

Anyway, so Dylan, I'd let Dylan talk for the next 45 minutes to an hour. And then I'd be like, all right, you know what? We're going to put together a proposal. Actually, Dylan's going to put together a proposal for you. And here's a cell phone, call him on the weekend. Or have a manager come in and without structure, a manager or an executive tends to take over the entire conversation. And you are just now relegated back to a note taker. And the psychology that does to the buyer, looking at that scenario, it's like now you have just completely put yourself in a subservient role here. And not just to your peers, like to your people on your side, but now to me, because if I can't get that answer from you, and you constantly have to be reliant, then that's the person I'm just going to go get to.

So there is a line for all you sales reps out there of being lazy when it comes to using an engineer or an executive resource versus controlling that, and knowing where to fit them so that you still maintain that perception of control. But also to your point, a lesson for leaders and sales managers that helicoptering in in those places and taking over undermines the authority and the expertise of that seller and the relationship they look to build there. So we all play a role in kind of helping that along. Absolutely. Awesome, man. Well, just to finish up here, because I could, I got about 500 other questions. But just so people are clear on jolt, right? It's judge the indecision, offer your recommendations, limit exploration, and take risk off the table.

Yeah, those are the four key behaviors we found in our study that high performers are doing differently than their peers. So executing those behaviors, executing those skills gives you a much better chance at higher close rates in those high indecision moments. And there is, you know, this is kind of a learned, some of this stuff is experience oriented. You've seen that before, you've seen that uncomfortableness, whatever, like somebody backtracking, or as you go through a demo, they kind of go, yeah, you know what I mean? Just literally the verbal or the, you watch them happen. And I guess the last thing I'll say is how much harder it is, is it now in a virtual world to pick up the indecision triggers than it is in a, in a, in a, in a face-to-face world?

Because I had the benefit of face-to-face selling. And if I said something weird, I, I could literally watch your body language, you know, your feet shuffle, your, your leg bump a little, you know, whatever it was. And now most reps are getting into this world, like into this world. And I can fake it till I make it in this world. I can pretend like I'm interested here. So how much do you think the remote selling, uh, world is having an impact on the reps' abilities to pick up some of these cues? Matt Dixon and I, my, my coauthor, Matt Dixon and I have had this conversation about, you know, we, we started this study right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Um, and we're not sure we could have done this study absent that opportunity, just because so many calls were happening virtually overnight that weren't otherwise.

Plus the advantage of, of this technology is we can use machine learning and AI to pick up on nonverbal cues and pick up on, uh, well, they would be verbal, uh, but, but also sort of implicit signs that these things are happening. And, uh, so, so that's one advantage of this type of technology is that you're right. I think all things equal, you can pick up on nonverbal cues and on body language and things like that easier in a, in a live setting. Uh, but the, what remote and, and technology like zoom and teams and, uh, and what have you allow you to do is look back or let the machine spot some of those things. And so you have some of that advantage. I also, I've heard somebody else say something interesting about the road setting is when you think about that, that zoom window or the teams window where you've got the multi boxes, you know, and you can, you can sort of watch multiple people react at the same time, which is an interesting, different way to think about it.

But having said all that, yes, I do believe that in general, um, you have a, you have a no pundits had to leg up, uh, in spotting some of these, these, uh, implicit signs, uh, from, from, uh, how did this person react? How did they, um, what are the sort of hot or cold signs you're getting from them when you're live in a room? So many challenges, so little time, uh, you know, I think reps right now, I'd, I'd tell them, and I think you, you reinforce this, you just, there's no option, I think to be average anymore. Uh, the, the, the days of the zero value interaction between sales rep and client are, if they're not over, they're dwindling fast. And so every single moment of a conversation, you got to be ready to add value.

And, you know, for me, for, you know, somebody who's been in sales for 30 years, give or take, you know, I can pick up all those cues. I know where to go, but I got to figure out, and that's why I'm, I'm, I'm promoting this so much is for the younger generation who's coming into sales to say, Hey, look, you got to start paying attention to things differently. Now it's no longer just going through the motions of your cadences and asking your band questions and droning through demos, which we could get away with early in our careers to then pick up on those cues and learn. I think now the, the, the tolerance for that is zero. So we got to figure out a way to skip the line a little bit and get to that real value oriented conversation where the client looks at you as, Hey, this is worth this.

This is worth the conversation though. Yeah, for sure. Awesome, man. Well, thanks for this. This is a, I really appreciate it. I told you the way I learned is by talking to people who are way smarter than me. So, uh, I think this is, this checks off that box and, uh, and I appreciate you putting this together. Where can people learn about more about Jolt and some of the others, some of the other work you're doing too. Well, go find us at jolteffect.com. Um, you'll find, uh, not only information about the book itself, even Reddit, you'll be able to find a link to, uh, to go purchase the book, but also some free tools down there, uh, for, for people, um, lots of other, uh, podcasts and, and, uh, and articles as well.

And then for those interested, we have a full course as well. So you can, uh, you know, check out our, our self-paced course that you can earn certification on becoming a Jolt sales organization, Jolt seller. Um, and then of course, we work with full sales organizations as well to help them along. Love it. Awesome. Ted. Well, thanks again for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Fun conversation. Absolutely. And everybody hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I do. Go get that book, read it, listen to it, whatever is your fancy. Uh, we got to level up here. And like I say, at the end of all these podcasts all the time, go out there and make somebody smile today.

Cause no matter how bad your day went, or you think it's going, make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. 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, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to jaybarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today.

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