Why Platform Sales Are Breaking Traditional B2B Sales with Zachary Gropper

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. My guest this week went to an all-boys Jesuit school in D.C., and the only time he got to be around girls was when he was in the school play. So he did the plays. Then he studied theater and acting in college because he wanted to be a film producer. Now, Zach Grobber did not end up in Hollywood. He ended up stuck in Lithuania waiting on a visa, and he took a job with a company called CEB, which is Corporate Executive Board, almost by accident, and then spent the next 15 years on the team that built the Challenger sale model.

He'll tell you to this day, he still thinks about directing actors when he watches sales calls. We get into a ton of stuff on this conversation, including where the industry got Challenger badly wrong, including all the companies that just mailed out the book to their reps and called it transformation. It drove me nuts when I was watching this happen real time. He also walks through a stage of the buying process that did not even exist a few years ago, why forcing customers into a pilot is backfiring right now, and the one question reps have stopped asking now that buyers show up already loaded with AI research. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Zach Grobber, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend.

How are you doing today? Very good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on. This is going to be an interesting conversation. I mean, the corporate executive board angle with Challenger sale and what's going on right now, I have a lot of curiosity around that as it relates to your background and then what you're doing today. But as we always do here on the Make It Happen Monday podcast, we go back a little bit before the LinkedIn days, talking a little bit about your origin story. Where'd you get your influence as parents growing up, all the fun stuff? And I noticed you went to college for theater, so we're going to get into that too. But walk us through a little bit, kind of where you're coming from.

Yeah. So, I mean, I live in Barcelona, but as most people can tell pretty quickly, my accent. East Coast, you know, New York parents grew up in the D.C. area, which comes back to haunt me later when I accidentally found out there's a company called CEB right on our doorstep. But, yeah, so, I mean, as far as, like, background motivations, like, my first jobs were always outside of restaurants. I started, my first sales job ever was actually selling luggage on, like, Greenwich Avenue in Connecticut. Nice. One summer at my dad's place when I was staying up there. He was a serial entrepreneur, but never could quite get past the single franchise scale thing, so I learned a lot of lessons from that side.

And then my family, actually, in D.C., quite international, involved in politics in some way, so I learned I never want to be involved in that. But at the same time, I went into work with the State Department and overseas, and so a lot of my brothers and sisters, I come from a family of, there's eight siblings, got to grow up, you know, in Portugal and traveling the world. And so I saw that a little later in life, so that kind of motivated me. I've lived and worked in about 20 countries before I settled down in Barcelona, so if you'll be able to see some of the threads of, like, doing international business, like, scaling things globally, is always more interesting to me, you know, for a lot of different reasons.

But, yeah, so that's, yeah, so that's off the top. Where would you like me to start? Well, I guess, why theater, right? Like, so James Madison, and it looks like you graduated in 98, which is around the same, I graduated the same age, so you and I are the same age here. But why, I mean, with the background that you had and the travel and the experience, and why theater? What was that kind of itch that you wanted to scratch there? Yeah, I mean, like, to be honest, probably the reason I got into theater in the first place was I went to an all-guys Jesuit school in D.C., and the only time we were allowed to actually interact with the women was actually through the plays, like, in the high school.

And so I got, like, you know, I was deep into, I went into theater, I did a lot of acting, I actually did a lot of singing, I was in a lot of bands, I mean, I got really into film. And when I went to JMU, great school in-state since I grew up in Virginia, obviously much more famous now, I find out, many years later. But I, you know, I bounced around in a bunch of different courses and ended up doing basically a double major. So I'm a Bachelor of Science, I did Media Arts and Communications, which became, which used to be Mass Comm, is what they called it when I started. And then at the same time, I wanted to be, I decided I wanted to be a film producer. And so I didn't have a film school, so best thing was to do a theater, theater basically major, doing acting, writing, stage design, all those different things.

And then also study TV production, multimedia production, and sort of the two of those schools together was my cobbling together my path to, at some point, going out and working for a studio. So it didn't exactly play out that way, but that was the idea. But I mean, it kind of looks like it gave you a pretty solid foundation of kind of science and art, if you will, of right, the art side of the theater side, but also the business and understanding how communication. So any of those translate for you as you kind of evolved in your careers? Well, actually, let me ask you, did you ever do like improv or anything like that? Because you hear a lot of people from a sales and a business standpoint say how much improv actually helps.

But were you more on the kind of the production side of the theater versus the actual, you know, theater side of it? No, so I did. Yeah, I actually did a lot of acting and acting classes and those kinds of things and directing actors. I'll tell you. Yeah, like, as far as how that translates to, you know, it's a cliche to say the world is a stage and like sales is about as much as it gets as a performance art. Like, when I think about now, like we do a lot of work where we're observing, you know, like just sitting down with managers and having them look at call reviews and how they look at the psychology and the human behavior and even the physical aspects of it. And it is like directing actors on the stage.

And that experience was really, really formative as far as orchestrating and running sales teams and also just making sure that you're kind of making a connection with the right audiences and things like that. So I guess, yeah, there are some common threads to it because it has, you know, and then I have to do keynote speeches. I'm sure you do millions of them. I'm like, going on stage was never an issue for me after college, being in front of thousands of people at that point. So it was like, okay, I can go, I can go, you know, in front of a big committee, I can facilitate, I can do those things. And they come more naturally because I was actually trained to do them. And so I understand that that's not something everyone's born with and how to kind of teach that and develop that is obviously important.

Yeah, that was one of the things for me is like, I never took presentation skills training or anything like that up until I started doing this. But I didn't take it until like five or six years into doing training and standing up on stage and doing keynotes. I just kind of did it. And I thought it was fine, right? Until I took a presentation skills training. And then I saw myself on camera and almost threw up in my mouth. I was just like, oh, my God, you know, like my body language, the way I was holding my hands and, you know, my presence and all of that. Once you put that mirror up, it gets pretty frightening pretty quick. Yeah, absolutely. I know I probably forgot most of it by now if I go back and watch this video.

But yeah, I remember like when I did a class on, you know, I was tested on it in school during a presentation class. And I remember, why am I just grabbing like the side of my leg like over and over and over again, what is that? I'll tell you, my most horrifying realization was, you know, again, five, six years into standing up in front of, you know, thousands of people over and over. And, you know, we all have our little hand fidgets things, you know, you ring or whatever. But mine was I used to hold my hands like this, but I used to hold them right where I was framing myself under my belt. And it was like, I would, I was like, hold on a second. I've been doing that for five. I'm like, I must have been offending every woman in the room for crying out loud, because I was basically framing myself the entire conversation.

I'm like, I was horrified. So you start to learn, pick up small things. From a coaching standpoint on your end, you know, it how much, especially in the world of of Zoom and all this stuff, how much do you coach on kind of the physical presence versus kind of what you say versus how you say it? Yeah, I think this is an interesting question that comes up a lot, because like if we have in my in my day job, we work with a lot of clients and do, you know, training, coaching, development. And so when we get a request that says like, oh, like, can you teach executive presence? Right. Like we don't teach a class in executive presence. We don't really do any of the common like modular training things.

It's all kind of more orchestrated methodology. And so you think, well, what does that mean? Right. And so I'll have the debates. My co-founder is actually the ex head of research from CV. And so we're come from very like, you know, very different spectrums as far as personality and background. And it's great because like we'll debate like, well, what does it mean? What is the best practice for executive presence? How do you develop that? And so we're just having this conversation. I'm like, well, for me, it starts with, you know, what a client really says that to us. It's like it starts with confidence, right? Like, can they sit in front of a C-level, a VP, and actually be confident that they deserve the right to be there?

And so if you look at even threads through some of the, you know, challenger research and things like that that we worked on, it's like, well, what gives you the confidence that you belong? And, you know, it's, can you actually have something to say that's worthwhile? Do you bring any value? Are you just there to be like, we have a client who's, they work with, they work with, you know, very senior people all the time. In fact, a lot of that's in person at like, you know, boxes at events and things like that. And it's like, is my job here to like run and get coffee and like respond to everything you need? Or like, you know, what am I doing when I'm just hanging out versus when I'm in a formal meeting?

And I think it still all comes back to the fact it's like, it's mindset, right? Like, what's my job here? Am I here to just react or am I here to make them better? The second piece is like, well, then what is it that I'm bringing that is of value and how is that contextualized for them? And then at some point, then it's like, all right, you've got to be able to carry that forward. And so the presence of like, do you need white hair? Do you know how to put on like a nice suit? Like, I think that's all like very tertiary to this kind of stuff as far as just like the sense of confidence that you belong and being able to, you know, add, add something. And so that's going to kind of lead me to the lead with insights component of challenger.

But let's, let's, before we get to that, what led you to the corporate executive board? Like what, what, uh, talk to me about how you came across that opportunity and why you took it. Yeah. It was actually really by accident in many ways. So, um, not to get into too much of a, of a backstory, but so I was, I, I lived and worked overseas and in many, many different countries. In fact, my wife is Lithuanian. We met in Lithuania. So I was living, um, so when we got engaged to be married, I didn't realize this, but, uh, if you want to move to the States and you're already engaged, you have to actually wait for the whole visa process to get completed, which takes up to not, well, probably not even longer now, but more than nine months.

So I started like hunting for jobs as a, based out of Vilnius and Lithuania. Um, and I, I've done a lot of different things at that point and a lot of entrepreneurial stuff as well. I actually wasn't, I did get that. I was a TV producer at one point for a program on CNBC. So I kind of scratched the itch a little bit, but I was like, what, what am I going to do now? Um, and so long story short, shorter, um, a, a person that I knew, uh, when I was working in Portugal actually said, Hey, you should check out, uh, this, this company in London. That maybe you should, and it was CB and a CB had a smaller presence in London at the time. And I didn't, we couldn't quite figure out like how would this work with the visas and everything like that.

And then, um, just somehow like by accident, as I was applying, I realized that the headquarters was in Arlington or near Arlington DC where I grew up. And so at the time I was actually, um, looking at a much different job, like running international, uh, advertising for the wall street journal and staying in media. And then I was in DC staying with my family and I, I realized like see that CB is right there. And so I go in and meet this guy's name, Sean Carr, who's, uh, starting up the solutions division, the implementation division of CB. And for me, it was cause like, I don't see myself in like a research organization and like, dude, like I love the fact there was research, but I wanted to like build things and be more of an entrepreneur.

And it was a big company. Um, and he kind of said, Hey, you give you the keys to a business here. We are a startup on the side of this bigger company. And so we're actually here to try to take science, but also apply that to like real world business. And it's a pretty unique opportunity. And I had never gone to grad school. I never saw myself going to business school. Uh, I always kind of wanted to just go out and work right away. And so learning while doing, but at the same time, CB, you had access to all the greatest research on earth and like how the biggest companies and best companies run. And so suddenly, like, I was like, okay, cool. I always thought it was great at sales, but like, I wasn't, I didn't feel like I had a sophisticated sort of maturity around it.

And so I actually, I just absolutely love that. So I just voraciously was always, uh, reading all the research across all the different functions. And then I love the idea that we're going to build this new professional services practice. And, and, um, you know, I thought I was going to do that for a few years and go start my own business again, but, uh, that ended up being like 15, 16 years later, staying in that company. Well, so, so would challenger sale, you know, I think when was that, by the way, when was challenger sale? When did it come out? Oh man, I should have all these dates notched. So I started at CB in 2006. The most important pieces of research came out around 2009, 2010. Okay, cool.

Out of the great recession, global financial crisis. And so it's interesting. So Tim Moore was actually the guy doing all that research, my partner in crime now. And so he was kind of behind the curtain and he did that loyalty study that said like, oh, sales experience is more important than brand and price and these other things. And then the, the challenger study came after that. The one that became super famous around like the reps, right? Like the rep profiles. And, um, we had to, then when that research came out, I had clients, I was a sales guy when I started there and I had a territory and I had clients that were like, Hey, we want to implement this research. And I was like, no one's ever done that before, but it's really cool.

So I remember there was like a few clients I had. So the first kind of handful of companies that ever tried to formally implement that research were actually my clients at the time. And there was, you know, I had to grab consultants together and people on the team were like, well, how do we build something? Cause we've got 300 salespeople going into a hotel in three weeks and we're going to do it. Right. And we'll do it better than anyone else, but we're going to probably make a lot of mistakes along the way. And so that's kind of how it all, it all started. So the book came later, right? So we were, so a lot of people know the book, the red book. Right. And so that came out later. And so at that time we were still just trying to figure out like, what does this all mean?

Obviously there's a lot more chapters of the story and the research that have come later, but yeah, that's how it all started. And then, you know, from there, those first handful of companies that tried to implement the challenger rep to like, you know, the growth of that business, obviously it's gone through multiple main name changes, ownership changes, et cetera, over the years. But it was a, it was an amazing, amazing journey and very entrepreneurial, which was fun. Yeah. And it sounds like it within a, within a really cool construct too. What, so would challenger sale, right? There's, there's the two sides of it of one is lead with insights and the other is, you know, challenge people. Like as far as their assumptions and kind of push back on them a little bit.

And one of the things I always said, you know, had a challenge with challenger sale was that I thought it was great, you know, from a mentality standpoint, from an approach standpoint, especially for more kind of senior reps who have been there, done that with all the other methodologies. Right. And it was kind of one of those, Oh, cool. You know, I am the industry expert here. I do know what the fuck I'm talking about. And so I kind of gave me the, without being arrogant about it, it gave me the ability to kind of like have a mental shift of how I engage with my clients is no longer solution selling. Let me ask you a bunch of questions and give you an answer. It's now challenging your assumptions, digging deeper and also leading with insights.

I want to get to the leading with insights after, but the first one, as far as the challenge component, where do you think it went right and wrong with an implementation of teaching people how to be a challenger? Because the challenge I had with it was, you know, when it first came out in the, you know, 2000, whatever the book came out, you know, and everybody was teaching it. And I was like, could we just calm down for a second here? There's a time and a place, just like every methodology. You know what I mean? There's, there's pieces that are good and bad, but especially like teaching like 22, 23, 24 year old kids how to be a challenger when they don't have the business acumen, they don't have the understanding of even what it's like.

And so I saw a lot of reps getting themselves in trouble by basically pushing back to executives who would look at them like, who the fuck are you trying to tell me what to do with my business? So where do you think that it was the right fit? And where do you think, you know, through dilution of corporate executive or somebody reading the book and just saying, Hey, you got to be challenger sales. Where do you think the disconnect was on that part of it? Yeah, I think, so I try to distill this down to like what the research actually said. And then the data, the data, like we, it wasn't, I mean, you always spin a little bit to make a, you know, or to brand a conclusion. Like the name challenger wasn't an accident, right?

It was supposed to be a little bit to drive the conversation. But I think it's how people take those words and then they, they, they put their own meaning to them. And then it actually, it's like, well, where do I go back to where it's more and I go back to, it's like, well, what did the data really say? And so, and also like any data, it's not looking at a universal truth in all situations. It's looking at the, you know, the most frequent result, if you're going to place a bet is going to end up doing this. And then we look on balance, like, you know, over, if you look at over 140, I think over 160,000 salespeople in Japan versus the U S versus in Italy versus all these places. And you see these common, common threads and patterns.

And then the interesting thing is when you actually look at how they meant man, how they manifest themselves in each company. Right. And I think that's, it's kind of like to get past the inspiration of like the idea of, of challenging to like, what am I really trying to do? And so to your point, and it's God, it's gotta be even, I mean, it's so much worse now because somebody can press a button and actually do all their research with AI. And then they have come up with something that sounds really good. They don't understand at all. And then imagine they're trying to go and push the thinking of the customer using that. And if the customer just pushes back a little bit, like they can show there's, it's just so superficial.

And so I think if you, if you really get to the root of it and it kind of leads to like, what are the discoveries we've made recently in the last few years about what we did right in front is, um, it's first of all, a, a young sales person who's supposed to come in with a great point of view on a customer's business, like they actually need help from the company to do that. Then that, that leads, cause we're the idea of insight, which actually is what is driving. It's not challenging, personally challenging them. Right. It's saying like, Hey, I've seen what you're trying to do, um, through the lens of like 20, 30 other companies. And like, this is the things that we tend to see, like, and these are the things that go wrong, right?

That's the most accessible level of insight, but who's going to tell them about those stories? Like, especially now there's no water cooler conversations. And so senior guys, experienced people, high performers, they'll hear things, they'll pick them up, they'll use them, they'll reuse them, they'll repackage them. And, and, um, and great is the best thing you can find when you hire a new person. That's an indication that they're going to do really well is they're actually going out and they're so curious to learn those stories and cobble this story together themselves. And the story is about the customers, not about you. Right. Right. And so, I mean, that's kind of where it starts. And the problem with the challenger rep and the challenger story, first problem was everyone thought like, you know how many companies went out and just sent the books out?

That's what I'm getting at to, right? Like, oh, cool. If you call and talk to them, you'll be like, well, like, oh yeah, yeah, we were a challenger organization. We did the challenger model, like blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh yeah. It's like, well, what does that mean at your company? And when did you do it? And what did you do exactly? And it turns out like, for the most part, they sent out books to a bunch of people. And it's like, oh yeah, well, salespeople, you know, that's totally how you get salespeople to change their behavior is send them a book to read. And even though they may even read it, right? You read it on a plane. Like the idea that a core performer in your organization, and especially one in their first few years is going to suddenly then be able to know how to translate that into the discovery meeting they're having the next day, how that connects to your company strategy.

And so this is where the biggest friction point I, you know, we always started to have was, well, this insight piece is an organizational capability. These teach, tailor, take control. And this tension, that's a individual, those are individual skills. And so the idea that like one without the other is going to work really well and be scalable like, that's kind of a, it's a bit of a fool's errand, right? If you, if you expect your team to go out and teach, but then you don't actually help them with like what they're supposed to be teaching, you can't expect them to go and just kind of figure this out on their own. That's very dangerous. And it's also setting a, an expectation. So somebody is going to go out and do it.

They're going to fail. They're just not going to have any help. And so then they're going to go back and say like, all right, well, I'm going to just keep doing what I was doing. Because most people don't want to just be assholes. Right. Well, I mean, well, most people, but yeah. So present company excluded, right? Yeah, of course. But well, you mentioned something as far as the danger of where we are today and how easy information is, right? And, you know, on one hand, I find that it's, it's never been easier to, to lead with insights, to, to be valuable, to bring value to an organization. If you know how to use AI the right way and what to look for. Right. But on the other hand, it's never been easier to look like an idiot because, you know, what I'm trying to go back to, for instance, with, with what, from a training standpoint is try to get back to just like core fundamentals so that the reps understand the output that AI is giving them.

Because the challenge that I see right now, and I've said this a lot, it's, you know, we've gone from the search engine to an answer engine. And that's a dangerous thing for people who aren't curious. For people who are curious, like you said, like when, when you're looking for new hires, like, are they, you know, looking for, or do they want to talk to customers? Are they curious about the stories and the impact and all that fun stuff so that they're, they're doing it on themselves? Or are they just taking whatever the output is and regurgitating it in a way? And then when you do that, the customer asks one pushback question and you fall apart and you actually lose all credibility because you might even lead with some decent insight.

And they're like, oh yeah, let's talk about that. And then if you can't have that conversation, you're, you're dead in the water. It's the same thing with even, you know, an email where you hear this personalization at scale, it's like fantastic. But if you've never, for instance, like if you use like a trigger event, right? Like a merger and acquisition, somebody going through a merger and acquisition, and AI is going to write you a beautiful email that to the uneducated or the, to the unexperienced sounds fantastic to send at this point to a VP of sales going through a merger and acquisition. But if you've ever been a VP of sales going through a merger and acquisition, like, you know what's going on and you're scared for your job.

You're trying to figure out a million different things. And that stupid email that comes about how we can operationalize all your shit is not going to land at all. So how, how are you now coaching and helping people figure out how to use AI the right way to gather and research and everything else, but also keep the business acumen and the human component to this viable? Yeah. There's a couple of parts to it, because you're right. Like, I think part of it is if we're going to maintain the value of having humans interacting with humans, like on the buying and the selling side, right? It's going to have to be because we can actually look at these things and make connections that are not at face value.

And so I think it starts in my first thing that I see happening a lot these days is, is even with proposals. And I've fallen prey to when I started, everyone started playing with AI and be like, Oh God, you like create something and you don't know how to edit it because you didn't create it, but it's all your ideas, but it's completely wrong. And so you just put it in front of the client and you're like, we hope that they read it and it sounds good and they'll divine what the meaning is and connect it to their business because you read it and it's saying a lot that sounds good, but it actually doesn't mean anything. And so this is this kind of absence of meaning. I find part of one of the things as we've evolved our view on methodology is it used to be when, when the economy is doing really well as a challenger, you can come in like a stat and some insights.

And like, if you, if it's done really well, it has this momentum, especially at the, you know, in the good day, good old days, that momentum can carry you through a lot of sales. But that momentum doesn't carry you through much anymore because there's all these different elements of buying that are more complicated and selling that are more complicated. And there's more people. And so as you start to get into this idea of like, wait a minute, this story is not in itself valuable. And we, one of the mistakes we met at CEB all the time was like, we go out there and talk about our research as that was insight. Now I'm sorry, but like that was our product, right? So like we weren't actually a lot of times doing what we were telling customers to do because it's hard.

And so when you actually define what, what is this, what is this data and how is it reflected in their business, that's the collaborative nature of what sales needs to be. And where there's so much value in having humans on both sides, because at the end of the day, sales is about change management. And so for you to be able to, you know, drive an impact with a customer and for that customer to be able to like drive the change inside their own organization, you've got to help them change you. Then they've got to go change other people. And so taking these great concepts, which, you know, teaching and the right kind of research will do for you. And then being able to kind of hold up those mirrors and say, hey, like, but what does this mean to you?

And ask really deep discovery questions and then start to paint a picture of like, oh, wait, this is really the story for this organization. And I'm not making some broad assumptions on who they are by saying, oh, you look like everybody else. So this must, no, it's like, I've seen a lot, but like, what does ugly look like? And what is the friction of how you adopt things in your organization? What happened to the last three times you tried to implement AI or software? What went wrong? Who gets affected by that when things goes wrong? Should we be talking to those people as well? Like those kinds of questions, actually, we find build, not only do they build knowledge, but they build trust because it shows it's like a different kind of curiosity about like what success is going to look like versus a curiosity around like, where's the money hidden and who's the buying group and like all the things.

I mean, graining medic in everyone's head, right? And it's like on Facebook, it's like, of course you'd want to ask all those questions, but how do I show that I care and you can trust me because that's where the robots, I mean, we can't trust the robots either, but the idea that I know some stuff, I'm still curious, I'm going to stick in and dig in with you to help you with the hard stuff, I'm going to steer towards the no when it doesn't make sense, if there's not a good fit, and then I'm going to help you like build that coalition. Like that's what they're looking for and they almost never find it, right? And so that's why then why they basically say like, here's an RFP and fill that out.

And then they don't even read the RFP because the RFP was created by AI and then they use AI to summarize the RFPs that come back. And it's like, well, that I mean, ultimately, yeah, ultimately, that's my fear of, you know, when everybody talks about all these AI tools coming for sales, I'm like, I'm not actually worried about all these AI tools automating sales. I'm worried about when the client wakes up and realizes in their head, at least they don't need us because you know, what's stopping AI crawler from looking at the infrastructure, marrying it up to your 2012 to 24 month business plan, sending it out on RFP to all the vendors that fit them all of the tools that they need and then evaluating those, right?

So the nuances definitely matter, but it feels like we're getting there fast because of the lack of value that sales reps bring to the equation. And that part of me, there was some interesting stats that I came across recently because, you know, Gartner, you know, I used the stat a while ago that talked about how, like, I think it was 43% of, you know, B2B buyers want a rep-free experience and that's gone up to 67% now. But the stat that flips that is that 69% of clients want to talk to a sales rep to validate the knowledge from AI. So they get, they use AI to a point to educate themselves, but they don't fully trust it. So now it's that last mile of the sales rep being like, hey, not teach me all this stuff.

It's almost validate or give me a different perspective of this knowledge that I just gained. And so does that shift? Because it sounds like challenger customer was an answer to the problem that you just articulated with, with challenger sale was, it was like, hey, no matter how much of a challenger you are to the client, if internally they can't build consensus, it doesn't matter. You can challenge me all day long as an individual here. So you kind of had to gather that consensus now. Now though, is it shifting? Cause, cause you know what it was a jolt effect came out and kind of identified that problem as well. Yeah. Challenger, but jolt effect with indecision versus no decision and how actually challenger is a little bit challenging right now.

Cause you're adding fear on top of somebody who's already scared. And so our, our job is to de-risk the solution. So how does this all kind of mesh together with where we are? Cause even jolt effect was, you know, a few years back and that, that really wasn't when AI was, was, was what it is now. Yeah. And so we're actually to, um, it's really interesting. We've done, we've been in business as insight revenue for a bit over three years. And so we've done three years that one of the advantages of having one of the best, you know, sales researchers on earth is we actually get to do our own sales research. We don't try to sell it and build that kind of business model, but we just use it to improve our own stuff.

Right. And so watching the evolution over the years and sort of seeing like what's changed and what's different and also having implemented with so many different companies, insight driven, value driven models, you start to see this kind of picture emerging. I'm not going to oversimplify it, but yeah, if you look at, there's kind of a three, there's three stages now of the buying process when there probably used to be two, right? There's kind of the, the, the inspiration phase. If you want to, if you want to call it that where it's like, all right, whether it's, it's you inspiring someone or a customer inspiring themselves to actually want to go and do something differently. Right. And then it used to be like, okay, if you could inspire somebody and be considered, then there's the evaluation phase.

Right. And I think when you start chipping into a jolt effect and Brent Adamson recently put out a book, I guess a year, about a year ago on like confidence, right? Like the confidence of the sale. And so if you look at it, there's a third stage, which is now emerging and is, is kind of the thing. If you talk, you see all this data on deals stalling out. Yeah. It's not just fear of change. And it's not just fear of like getting it wrong, which I think Joel stripped into it actually is this idea of like, we've got to do this validation or verification phase, if you'd like to think of it that way. And this is a third phase that happens almost when an old deal used to be done and you kind of hand kick everything over to you, you sign up.

And then like somebody else's problem who has to actually go like to the AM and CSM and implement implementation teams. But now all that validation has to happen. Otherwise they just don't make a decision or don't, or don't actually seal the deal. Or this really weird trend we're seeing is a lot of companies are forcing people into pilots or signups or signup tiers. And then what they're seeing is, it's like, oh crap, like we rushed them into the thing, but it never leads to them buying the platform or it never leads to them utilizing everything that we have at their disposal. And in fact, if you rush that process, because you thought it was easier, like product led growth, well, it's completely backfiring that we're seeing in our new research is actually like, that was a surprise to us.

Like, oh wait, no, that actually is giving the opposite effect, which is like, you're never going to sell them the other thing later, because guess what? The conversations already happened and it stalled out and you've been pushed down in the organization. So imagine trying to go back in and being like, oh, why didn't you guys adopt this? Or why didn't you see the value in the proof of concept? Like, give us more meetings so we can go talk to more people and re-explain it to you and then figure out like why you should do it the right way now. It's like, they'll never do it the right way after that. And so it's like the slowdown before you speed up. So not only is it like, it's not just you have to challenge on this great, and that the momentum carries through.

Then you've got to do all this work to actually get that coalition of the willing together and de-risk and all that stuff. And now you actually have to prove, you know how this is going to work and be honest about the things that aren't going to work. And then the buying group will be like, okay, so this is the partner who we trust. And if they don't see anybody they trust, they just slow down and stall out. And so it almost sounds like, oh God, like now we have to have a PhD in sales to get it done. But actually, that's what we've been distilling down is like, how do you execute that easily? Like, how do you make it practical and pragmatic? Because on face value, it's like, wait a minute, like this is a, you know, how do we even a salesperson within three years do this right, let alone somebody with experience?

And a lot of it has to do with, yeah, it is teams. In a lot of cases, you know, you're narrowing down to the higher potential, better fit clients. And then you're rallying more resources around those instead of what everything else is like this kind of frenetic sales machine that most companies have. So then like, so, cause I'm right. I mean, I experienced it a while back. I mean, I have a, you know, I long time ago, I created an on-demand portal that has all my content and all the fun stuff. Right. And I remember early days, I would just give that like sales call. I would ask you a bunch of questions, would get uncover pain. I do all the right things. And then, you know, I was like, oh yeah, you know, look, don't, don't take my word for it.

Just go look at the train, you know, just go watch the video. Like that's my training. And if you like it or you like it, if you don't, you don't like you can make the decision. And what I realized, I thought it was a sales tool because it'd be like, look, you're, you're seeing, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. You either like my style and my content or you don't. But I realized deals were taking longer. I was actually losing more of them. And it was because I was giving them everything and, and, you know, and not putting any time. I wasn't guiding them through it. I was just like, here it is, check it out. And so I stopped that. My deal cycle shortens, you know, I was able to sell the value more instead of showing it.

So with what's going on right now though, with the validation of like, I almost have to use this because I'm not going to just take your word for it, but this is a good product solution, whatever, especially in the world of AI right now. Right. I mean, if you're selling an AI solution, an AI platform, and I want to get to that conversation as well. You know, the whole idea of, yeah, sure. Let's light this thing up and let's roll this out to everybody is, is, is, is a disaster. I mean, you've seen the stats, you know, I think it was MIT 95% of corporate IT, you know, AI initiatives fail and all this. So how do you balance that in today's world? Is it a kind of a SWAT team? Is it a small subgroup that is like really interested so you can prove the value and then roll it out?

Is it PLG? Is it, you know, dedicating customer success more towards sales? Like where are you seeing the most success, especially when trying to roll out a quote unquote platform for, as opposed to an individual point solution, which I think it might be a little bit easier, even though the argument is tougher? Yeah. The thing we're finding with the, so our, the, the main theme of this year's research was the platform sale, obviously, because it's so ubiquitous a strategy, but we've seen it go wrong in so many different ways. And so it is like, you're very often moving from a collection of point solutions or a point solution to what you're now calling an AI enabled platform in most cases. But like when I started at CEB like 20 years ago, the, one of the first studies I looked at was shifting the performance curve and it was like the study on how do you distill what high performers are doing versus the core?

Because high performers are like 300% better or more, which is a huge problem, but also great. And then how do you like figure that out, put it in the middle, move the middle. And so that, that, that gap was getting much bigger because so many companies were trying to do solution selling at the time. Right. So if you go back to like, you know, and this is, this is the trend, like Neil Rappen was talking about at the opening of the, of the, of the challenge for sale book. And so if you look at that, like the trend, isn't that different, right? Cause it's like how many companies now have acquired other assets, how many companies now are including way more professional services in their offerings?

Because they realize like, Oh God, like if we can't help make this thing get adopted, right? Like it never works. So like, actually we need to go overboard, whether you charge for it or not. So there are these, all these blended of like, whether you call it SAS or an AI platform with services, maybe there's hardware, we, we work in like every single industry, but you see this platform approached almost every industry. And so it's like, how, how do you get a team that doesn't know how to do that, to do that? Because most sales teams, what we see now, it's like they, the, the, the, the story happens at the kickoff of the year and they'll be like, this is all the cool stuff. Now you go sell that.

Right. And then they, what they are selling typically is this like collection of, it's kind of like, you know, throw spaghetti at the wall. It's like, Hey, can't wait to tell you about all these things. And like, which of these things are amazing to you? And then by the way, Oh, you don't even have to choose, like just buy all of them. And they're like, well, wait a minute. First of all, the existing clients are absolutely furious. Cause it's like, wait, you're going to make us, we don't even use barely the stuff we have now. And I'm sure you're pushing this like, Oh, but don't worry. There's going to be a period of time where the price is going to remain the same. Like everyone knows now, like, look at all the, the price increases with AI.

It's like, no, that price, that price change is coming. And so you're, this is a pivot of your business. It's a change for your clients, all this stuff. And going back to that theme of change management, like you're not building a team that knows how to do change management. You're just building a team who now is like being spun up on new products, new features. And then you're expecting them to actually go out and pay attention to the customer and not just talk about your products. Like it just, it's completely blowing up. And so what we've, the thing we're trying to, we've actually realized is that isn't, it comes back to, it isn't as hard as it sounds in that it's like asking the hard questions earlier, but doing it in a way that you're not asking the hard questions to qualify the customer for you.

You're asking the, you're presenting the hard questions. The customer needs to be asking themselves earlier in that process and how that, and how it is affecting those people and how does it affect the processes and the workflow of how they do business. And a platform most likely is going to disrupt the workflow of the company internally. And so that is a different thing to sell. It doesn't matter how much they love what you're selling. And this is like when you get all the forecasting where the deals just stall out, it's like they agree with you that it's better, but they don't see how that bridge is going to be built from where they are now to that, to, to that bridge, the other side. So we actually not to schlock our, like an acronym, but we, we, we call it a bridge approach, which is actually like, how do you essentially your job is to go in and like, how do I unpack and uncover this customer strategy?

And then how do I build a bridge, which is kind of us and them working together to get to the outcome. And in the midst of that, it's not just a bunch of empty promises. It's literally identifying all of the failure points with them openly during the sales process. So they, they're like, oh, okay. Like they're actually being honest with us about like the good, bad, and the ugly and why this might not be a fit for them. Right. And so then early on, you have to discover it's like, oh yeah, like this truly isn't going to work out on their side or our side. So we can cut bait and send them somewhere else and they'll respect you for it. Or it's like, let's do the hard work, which means maybe it's pulling in a lot more different people into that process and actually tooling and building a plan of like, how is this going to work after it's signed off?

And that's what we found. Yes. Like what's the one clear difference in the question? It's like, if you have that plan in place, when the deal signed, like that board has confidence now and realistic objection, uh, realistic expectations, right? They're not like, oh, we'll promise you a 200% ROI. Like, no, it's like, oh, okay. They've actually talked about like, Hey, here's the upside. Here's the downside. Like, you know, a lot of it's on you, not us, but also there's, it's on us, how we're going to get through those hard spots together here. Let's put some milestones along. Let's map it all the way through. And then that team is set up to go rock it, right? From that moment when the deal signed, if you don't do that at all, and you expect it to happen later, that's where everything goes, you know, so how do you coach correctly, correct term to say of when everything blows up.

Yeah. Um, so how do you coach reps? Cause I think it's, it's being more and more gated now with, you know, non-decision makers throughout the sales process, like go look at this and they're empowered more and more with AI and all their, you know, perceived knowledge of, uh, what the potential solution is, but not necessarily what the problem really is. You know what I mean? In your and I world, it's like, Oh, you know, we need sales training. We need to upskill our team. And it's like, well, what's the problem where, well, yeah. Okay. We missed our forecast, but you know, or, uh, and I'm just, I need to get some training for my team. We have a sales kickoff coming up, but you know, they're not the decision maker.

You know, they're not the, you know, the committee buyers and, and they're, they're gating all of that information from you. So, because all that stuff that you talked about, as far as the business case and understanding mapping out, like that takes real multi-threading, real involvement from the executive squad are from a qualification disqualification standpoint, when you talk about, I do a lot of more disqualifying than qualifying, you know, like once you kind of look like a duck, smell like a duck, my, my whole job is why, why shouldn't you do this? Right. And so I'm trying to find that, but how do you coach, um, sales reps that you work with to break through that barrier of kind of the non-decision maker holding the gates to everything?

What are some of the tactics that you use to help address that? Yeah, it's, it's, um, a good example is, um, we, we ended up working with a lot of, uh, maybe it's because coming out of CEB world, a lot of people went into L and D tech, HR tech. Um, but we worked with a number of companies in that space and they would always complain like, oh, HR buyers, like, oh, they don't get respect in the business. And it's, it's crap, like having to sell through them because they've already like, they're running an RP process and then we hand it down and they don't understand all these other things. And it's like, great. Right. So when we went and we, we did it, we wrote a piece on, um, on H we, we kind of looked at different buying groups and different industries and started doing some work around that, which we thought would be interesting.

And when we looked at HR, like I thought when we started that research, it was going to be like, how do you navigate around the HR buyer? Yeah. Right. Like what's the secret. And a lot of our clients really, how do you do that? And what we started to find when we looked at the high performers is, is they, they sort of did the opposite of that is, which is they empowered that buyer. They gave them confidence and trust. And then they, what they realized was in a lot of times they were not armed at all to go into that CFO meeting and present a business case and show due diligence. And that was their frustration. And so I think right away, what you can do is you can test, like, is this person a check the box person?

And is this a check the box initiative? And if you're a premium provider, right? You're upselling on like, we have a team and a dashboard and we have all these things. And the other person's only selling you this, the point solution. Like you already know, like this is being run in a transactional way, probably not a good fit for us. But if you find somebody who's actually like, they care about the outcome, they're just not, they're not, they haven't been supported to drive it. Then suddenly you, and so it was really cool. I think it was that kind of end twist on, on what the conclusion was. It's like, here's some ways to go in and actually empower them to get, then they want to bring you into the meeting with the other people because they trust you.

You, they, first of all, you have to, you have to show them that you actually care about. So, so one example was, and this is a weird one, but we found out, so like I had, one of our first clients was a company called Preply and they're like one of the biggest online marketplaces for language tutors, right? There are a million different ways to get a language tutor in this world. And in fact, a lot of the time you don't need a person to do it. Like how many different apps are there that have completely eliminated that? And so they're this premium provider and they're selling into HR. And so we were looking at, so part of what we do is like, look at how to come up with these ideas and make these connections.

And so we looked at like a manufacturing plant in the U S and they're like, okay, these people have like a small budget and they're chopping around and they really like what we're offering. And it's like, well, what's the problem that HR manager at a factory in the U S is actually trying to solve. And it's like, well, there's a lot of people in that factory who don't speak English very well. They speak Spanish, a lot of them. Right. And it turns out, so they hire these HR managers to speak, who also speak Spanish because they become then the translator for the factory. And so not only are they doing all this job, they also have to be a translator on any issue and any problem. And then, and then they're going out and buying like this language learning to try to somehow solve for it.

And so we started like unpacking into it. Like, what is the real problem that person is trying to solve? Well, ultimately the big problem they're trying to solve is like, if somebody can't read the safety manual and like gets injured in a workplace incident, like that plant can get shut down. You can have your licenses, you can have picketing outside. You can, so that's all like, if you're looking for these kinds of insight, challenger type concepts, like that's when we look at it. But the simplest thing you can do is actually say like, wait a minute, like your job sounds really difficult. Like you're doing all these things and now you're a translator for these folks and like what can go wrong?

And so you build some empathy and you make a connection with them. And this was part of like, when you looked at the teaching and tailoring, it was like this emotional component. And that was always something that was like, oh, this is interesting and important. I think when you think about the age of AI, like that piece, like being really, really aware of like, no, like it's not going and say what keeps you up. And it's going and say, like, say, ask thoughtful questions and like dig into their world and show them you then understand your world. Because by the way, then go call another factory and then you'd say, oh my God, I just talked to this. Like, is this happening to you? And they're like, yeah, it sucks.

Like nobody gets it. I'm trying to tell anybody they won't listen. And so like going back to some of the basics of sales, right? Like we used to have to work hard to show empathy and like try to get in that way. But now you have to have kind of this process and discipline to go that extra mile. So I don't, I think I answered the original question. I mean, that's really part of it. It's like, it's using that to build confidence, but then also that you get in there and then you start to make, make them look really good in front of that buying group and show them where all the pitfalls are going to be in advance. And they're like, oh my God, thank you that I was about to do X and you told me to do Y and like that actually saved my ass.

It's funny. Cause I was like earlier in my career, kind of the, the launch pad when I joined Basho, the sales training company and got Salesforce as a client, you know, Doug Landis, a good friend of mine. And now, um, like that was actually, I was, I was very, a lot less polished than I am now, even though I'm not really all that polished now. But, uh, you know, I just straight up asked him at a certain point, I was like, Doug, how do I make you look good in this process? You know what I mean? Like that's ultimately we can talk about the results and I know your team needs this and skills and your executives told you that they want this, this way your sales reps to prospect, but ultimately, you know, how do I make you look good through this part?

Like, what are you going through right now? And he was doing onboarding and all that. And that I could, I could legit like feel the shift in his perspective, perception of me. Right. It went from, okay, vendor, my boss told me to evaluate this vendor. What, okay, let's go through this process to wait a minute. I could potentially use this kid to, to make, you know, to get to the next level of my career. And that's why I always look for change agents within organizations. Like you don't have to have the title. You don't have to have, you know, the VP or the, whatever I look for the person that's on their way up period. So like, if I look at their LinkedIn profile, right. Have they been in the same exact role for the past 10 to 15 years?

Okay. Probably not somebody I'm going to hitch my, you know, saddle to, to, to, to ride up through this, but Doug, I looked at, you know, he'd been at Oracle. He had been at Google. He had been at Salesforce and every single job, every couple of years he was moving up. And I kind of looked at his disc profile and was like, that's somebody who, if I can, if I can't get to the executive executive to, to get this thing signed and develop that, then this is the kid that I want to ride up there. And it, and it ended up working out. So a little bit more crass approach. Cause I just straight up to ask him, how do I make you look good? But I think to your point of like actually giving a shit about making somebody look good is, is a key factor here.

Cause it's the one thing that AI can't do. It can't care. I can pretend to care, but it just can't genuinely care. Yeah. And then, and then like, if you look at the layers behind it, cause I know you like the, the mobilizer research, right? Yeah. Yeah. The idea that like, when you find out what, what they want to make them look good, if that's in their interest in versus like the interest of the company, then you may at least you're like, oh, okay. So like, I'm going to end up like attaching myself to this person and everyone else is going to see right through it versus like, oh wow. They really care about the outcome and they're a bit objective about this and they may be a bit difficult about it, but like they're testing me and I'm, it's a reciprocal thing.

So yeah, sometimes what's old is new again. Right. It's like, well, I mean, I think that's why I keep going back to, it's funny. I put this post on LinkedIn about like what in this age now, what's more important AI fluency or fundamentals and you know, you can kind of argue both sides because AI fluency when used the right way can build fundamentals faster than I've ever seen. But if you don't have the fundamentals, then you don't really understand the outputs that the AI is giving you. So where's your perspective on kind of what, you know, let's, let's talk to the 22, 23 year old kid coming out of school right now, who I think has all the opportunity in the world to leapfrog guys like you and I, you know, in our 30 years of experience, just by being curious enough to ask questions and like learn and business acumen.

But, but they're, but you know, so many of them use it as the answer engine to just give me the answer so I can copy paste. So where are you on fundamentals versus AI fluency? Um, I think it's, yeah, you could argue like you have to know what are the right questions to ask, um, so how are you, for me, it's more like, cause I see the, like the, the, the tools we have now are going to change dramatically. Right. And like the idea of like, oh, should you be able to build an agent and should you be able to do all this yourself versus like utilize, um, a lot of that. And this goes to the argument around like, how are any of these platforms going to defend themselves from the foundation models? Right.

Like at some point everyone. So I don't know how much you actually have to know how to be like a, like having the curiosity, I think everybody should be playing around and building and seeing how things tick simply because that helps your brain. But at some point it might be super easy to not have to know much and have it all at your fingertips. Right. And the question is, is how are you using that information and interrogating it and second guessing it, um, with yourself and with your customer to actually have a thoughtful dialogue. That is where you continue to see the difference because inevitably the information you get is going to be wrong because if it's 1% wrong, it's wrong. But a lot of times it's far from 1% wrong.

And so I don't see that there's a, in the next few years, there's ever going to be like a situation where what you get from AI is actually going to not have errors in it. And what that, those errors, if somebody sees those or you don't understand those, you are putting yourself, the business at risk in potentially like a lot of things at risk because it could be a really important error. Right. And this is where we all get nervous about AI being used for a lot of things in our government and our military and like healthcare and all these other things. So I think that's, it goes back to that critical thinking, that ability to say like, okay, whatever information you're given, now you're going to have the access to be able to extract this and by the way, like, yeah, like whatever methodology training company you work, they're going to give you prompts.

They're going to give you a model or a pattern they believe in. And then, and then as you grab, gather the information and get prepared to talk to a customer, like how are you actually going to keep thinking strategically and critically about like, yes, but right? Like, yes, but like, what is the context of this person, this company right now? Because the context is never right. I can't tell you how many times I get great information from Claude to prep for a meeting. And I'll ask them questions and they'll be like, no, that's not at all because it's either outdated or it got something wrong. And so your ability to sort of test, being willing to fail, right? Being able to test things and say like, what does that mean to you and reflect, but draw them out.

And so you, then you're sitting around, this is kind of, if I was to simplify one thing and I just heard the, there's a church across the street that always lets me know when the hour is. So it's how do you get around to the other side of the table and look at the problem with the customer? Yeah. This is the whole process. You start here and you try to put some information on the table and you try to get a bounce off it. But slowly, slowly, you need to be able to go around the table by the time you're in an evaluation process to look at the problem together and say, Hey, let's put our information together and really see like, and that, when you see that happening, that is what great sales is today.

And so like, however you teach that and make it scalable, like that's the key. And so you will hopefully have better and better and more true information, but at the end of the day, like never shut off the critical thinking and the curiosity and then the empathy with the customer to want to do that together and not just kind of say like, Oh, okay. I did a, I did what used to take three days in one second. Now I get, I throw it to somebody else and make them do the work and figure out what it means, which is kind of where we are today. Well, and then they have their AI thing evaluate your, it's like even like summary emails. It's like, here's this great summary of our conversation. And the client says, great, put it into their LLM and says, here's our record of this information and send me an email that I could send to that rep that I can then review.

Like it's, it's longer, but the time that anyone spends reading them gets shorter. It's like, it's, it's, it's insanity right now, but I think you're right. I think the, I mean, that's why I recommend a lot of almost every company, if they don't have like an internal SE GPT effectively, right. So like their sales solutions architect or something like that, at least they can ask questions because if 69% of people are looking to sales reps to validate information that they're finding on AI and they're all looking at it now before they have conversations with us, A, we need to figure out what that information is. And B, we need to then have an asset to your point of like, instead of me using AI to surface some insights in my glasses so I can ask the perfect question to you or say, Hey, you know, Zach just crossed his arms.

He's not really interested in the conversation anymore. Make sure you do, you know, say this right then like, or, Hey Zach, you know what? That's a great question. You know what? I'm going to screen share here. We have an, we have an internal, you know, AI tool for all of our SE and SA stuff here. Why don't we ask that question together? Cause I, you know, maybe I can give you a different perspective, but what's your context on this? Let me show you my context. Let's see what it says. Nah, I'm calling bullshit on that, man. Here's why, here's where I think it's right and wrong. But again, the whole learning out loud factor here as opposed, as opposed to pretending like we're the smart ones, but AI is really just feeding us the information.

But the, the, the, the one thing that I see over and over and over again, which is still this is again, like I find this inspirational that if we fix this, it's not the sales machine that we're talking about. It's going off the rails. It's the customer comes to you with all this stuff now. Yep. And what I see salespeople doing, even experienced ones is they say, oh man, they, they're on their way. They've got this figured out. So like start having that discussion about like, yeah, is it this, that, the other, and they don't ask why. Right. And if they just ask like, oh, why did you gather this? And why is that important? And like, what do you like, no, people are afraid to do that now because now it is, it's like, it's this battle to show, you know, more, but instead like that person needs to stop and if they can't, and they probably don't know a lot of the answers themselves.

And that's when it's like, well, somebody sent me this and somebody sent me, so this is what we're talking about now. It's like, but why, why is that? Why did you look for that? Like, why did you look for this? Like, what did, if, if, if the RevOps person comes down to your office and gives you this and finance is giving you that, like, why, why is that the right path? Is that actually going to work out? And then it's like, no, actually, no, that probably isn't what we should be doing. It's like, okay. And the salesperson who does that is going to be the one that they remember. And they'd be like, okay, like, yes, like let's, let's get back to the thing. That's the thing that matters. Then they're going to trust that.

Oh, well, maybe these people actually can help us instead of like, yeah, they're sending us another like 65 page thing that got spit out. And then it's like, well, who's going to do it the cheapest? Which is exactly where it ultimately ends up. It still does, right? Oh, just look at the price. I'm sorry. Cause it doesn't get to that point. What's, uh, let's end on this one to, to, uh, cause we don't have to time to go too much into this, but you did the state of revenue, 2026. Any surprise, what was your biggest surprise of this one compared to previous years? Was, did anything really stand out from you from this research on this one? Uh, I think it was more of the build. Um, I was surprised about like counterintuitively, like I thought the world was going to have to move towards a BDB PLG kind of thing where it was like, oh, you have to touch and feel it.

And that's how you do risk. That was, that was, and actually it's, it's, it now it makes total sense. It's like, no, slow them down. Don't, don't throw them in the, the progression of we, if you look at 2023, like everybody was in chaos about front end of the pipeline and they're doing everything they can to just sort of retain and grow what they had. And then 20, that was 2023 to 24, 2024, 25, the state of revenue was like, oh crap. Like there's not, we've done everything we can with the front end. Right. And there's a million answers on LinkedIn every single day on like how to solve it, but it doesn't solve it. So now we know, like we've actually got to have a continuity when a deal goes in the pipeline and fix conversion end to end.

Right. And that was what that was all about. Like, how do we actually build this motion that is connected versus trying to focus on here for new business and here for like growing existing. Cause that's like, it's too expensive otherwise. Yeah. Now we see this kind of picture of like, how do we actually do the high quality business with high quality customers? And so that's where there's everything that's kind of shifted the platform. I think the thing, the thing that, um, Timor would probably say is the biggest surprise when you look, we actually spliced the data for those who see that actually read through this. There's some, there's some eye charts in there, uh, which we love, but there's one that looks at like, where, where are high performers and core performers different based on all the things hard about a platform sale.

And the interesting thing was there's a lot of areas where high performers and core performers struggle with the same things. And so it's like, Oh wait, like this just is a problem, which is, it is hard to do this. And so that's like a big, more of a strategy thing. But then there were some like major differentials between where, where high performers are not worried about as much the same things. And these are the kind of things we're talking about. Like, Oh my God, like everyone can say no and nobody can say yes. And like, how do we validate for them to give, to build trust? And like, so all the things that made hyper, like all the things that were these blinking red lights for core performers around this deal is going to die.

We don't know what to do. Like they knew what to do to actually get those deals over the line. And so there's, I'm not going to oversimplify those, but that, that to me was, I was surprised there were so many common problems. Yeah. Right. So there, yeah. So, you know, for those like, yeah, give it a read. And, and, and yeah, like to the extent, like it's, there isn't a silver bullet, right. But there is definitely some, some defining patterns on how you get this right. And the, and the, I think the disconnect you see is a lot, a lot that leadership is kind of oversimplifying, like just go and figure it out to the sales teams. And it's really unfair to sales leaders in their teams right now that there's some, somehow supposed to translate this great big strategy, which is self-interested strategy, right?

Cause they're not, most of the time they're not telling the team, like, why is the customer want us to do a platform? It's like, I don't care. Like, this is what we need to do. So you've got to make them want it, want it. And now it's like, so like, that's the other part is like the internal kind of connectivity between strategy and execution. Yeah. And I think that that's the fear I have. It's like, almost everything is becoming custom now for the client. You know what I mean? Cause the, cause there are some, or wants to be custom and needs to be, but then there's the balance of like what the platform can actually do and the scope creep and all the other wonderful things that come along with saying yes to what a client actually needs versus what your platform actually does.

And I think that's where it's a, the, the AI mess is the build versus buy conversation is back in full effect. You know, everybody's like, well, you know, some idiot like me can vibe code a, an app. And so therefore I'm in the decision-making process being like, well, why can't we just do this ourselves? And it's like, yeah, so let's wait. And also let's just wait and see. Cause in three months, they're probably gonna be completely different. That's the, and that's the big, that's the indecision factor. It's like, wait a minute. If I make a decision today in three months, it might be irrelevant. And so that's the fear that I think a lot of people are dealing with right now, which is why the indecision is a real issue.

It's just getting them over that hump is, is, is we're in the quagmire right now trying to figure that out. So awesome. Exactly. Appreciate the time here, my friend. Where can people find out more information about you, about the state of sales report and everything that you're doing? Yeah. Insightrevenue.com is the website. Insight to values are sales methodology. On the website, there's tons of our research. Everything's, you know, easy to, easy to download. Come check us out. Come talk to us. If any of these problems resonate and yeah, for those watching the world cup tonight, go Spain. That's my home team. Nice. There you go. Love it. Yeah. But the U S we, we, we, they were at a very unceremonious exit to the, to this.

It was, it was such a, it was such a great high. And then they showed up like that. It was like, Oh God. Like I, I knew within the first 10 minutes of that match, I was like, Oh, this is, this isn't good. Do we do? We don't belong on the same. Well, it's, it's cool that there's a lot of people in America talking about, uh, soccer, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, but you know, we'll see if they can capitalize on the momentum here because you know, every four years it does come around. I was like, Oh, look, but I mean, the fact that it was in the U S I think got a lot more people in engage. So hopefully it has a long tail to it this time. Yeah. Well really enjoyed it. Thanks, man. All right, Zach, thank you very much.

And everybody else. Hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile, you know, you had a good day in 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, thanks again for listening to the show and for all your support throughout the years. This is one last reminder to check out my training programs at jbarrows.com or leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform or G2. If you've already gone through my training or sign up for my newsletter, any of those will help ensure I can continue to bring you free content and great conversations like the ones you just heard without having to annoy you with sponsors.

Again, let's make it happen in 2026 together. Bye.