B (25:38)
when we try, it sounds like this, what if I give you a 15% discount? Like what is it about 15? We just always think like 15 will do it. It's the way to do it. Right. So what if I just make this thing that you don't think you need a little bit cheaper? No, it's still too expensive. Okay. I'm going to note that as a salesperson, well, what if I show you all these ROI studies? Look at all this value everybody else got. Don't you, don't you want to be like them? As if we are not all picking our best customers and putting that in the roi. Like we're never being like, this was like a mid tier rollout. But they were, they enjoyed it. This is how we respond. And then when we get a no, we come back to you and we say, well, it's because we're too expensive and it's because we don't have enough ROI stories. Please, just show of hands on my own weird curiosity, like how many times have you heard we knew more ROI case studies? I'm sorry, on behalf of the people that I work with. Okay, so first $0 exercise, a close loss audit. Now, as a salesperson, I used to do this on my own territory. It is much better when you do it across the board. But if you have a tricky relationship with your sales team, maybe go to your best salesperson, start there, get them to be your groundswell. It's very simple. All you're going to do is you're going to take any deal that has been closed, lost between January and September 11th and you're going to include the pipeline value that was forecasted for that. So you got the, you know, the deal pipeline value and you're going to filter it by anything that sounds a little bit like status quo. So unresponsive budget, no champion value, which is the weirdest closed loss reason ever. Like, of course value was always in play. You're going to take those and you're going to filter that list for anything that kind of Sounds like status quo. It's not an exact science, but that will give you a rough estimate of how much we are currently losing to Status Quo today. And the reason that matters. So back in January, I was working with a really large company, Martech Space. Everyone would know, and they had never looked at their closed loss data that way. So I said, why don't you go back, look at 2024 data through that lens. And they came back and they said, we found $53 million of close lost opportunities due to Status Quo. And the most frustrating thing about that is the marketing team was absolute hammered of, we need more pipeline. We need more pipeline. We need more pipeline. Meanwhile, you got all this pipeline over here. We probably could do something with it. But the reason I did this with another legal tech company, they came back with much smaller. They came back with 15 million. It's not to say we make those that go away, but if you make a 10% dent in a $50 million problem, I'm no mathematician, but I think that's like $5 million. Like, that is a sizable opportunity. And so the way that I've done this with organizations, but you don't need me for it, is to say, listen, I've been thinking a lot about our pipeline generation problem. I've been thinking about the opportunities we brought in. And I did some analysis to look at where I think we might be losing the status quo. And I'd like to just kind of go over it with you. We don't have to talk at them. I think a lot of our problems in sales and marketing alignment is talking at. But let's look at this together, because what happens, what I've seen happen time and time again is it gives us a common enemy to fight against. Right? And I don't think anybody wants the answer to be like, let's just go build more new pipeline. We got this much sitting on the shelf today. So this is an exercise that can spark a really productive conversation with the sales team. Because the sales team doesn't want the answer to be build more pipeline either. I can tell you that right now. And so if we can come together and say, let's size it, see how much status quo might be hurting us, that gives us the opportunity to think differently about our messaging and how we go to market, which is part two. So you can't solve, like, there's no point in solving a problem. Don't even do this section if you can't get alignment with the sales team, that this is costing us first. Like, that's why that part comes first is because you need alignment there. Once you get alignment now, it causes us to probably think a lot differently about our messaging. Now, I am not sure if you are aware of a very serious epidemic that is affecting everyone in sales, marketing, product. It is an epidemic that I refer to as the we we problem. Okay, now the wee wee problem. I am a one person sales trainer. I am not like any of you in this room. You're way more important. You're way more like. Your titles are sexier. This is my inbox. And the most common words you see in this preview text is I we our or company name. Which means when we go to build pipeline, we are just wee weeing all over our prospects, all over them. Okay? We're talking about wee wee. We're talking about dog feces. This is my talent. We are wee wee ing everywhere because that's what we've been led to believe that we need to do. Show how we have a better way and why we are so much better. Meanwhile, our competitor that we're trying to fight against is Status Quo. Status Quo doesn't care if you're better. You can win the argument that you're better and still lose the deal. And so this means, in my opinion, we have to think differently about our messaging strategy when status quo is a competitor. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give us a fictional scenario where you all work for me. Now, this is the power trip that I have being on a stage. And I'm going to walk you through how you go from a very we, we focused message to a message where you don't talk about your company, your solution, your product at all. And then I'm going to organize it around the four questions that I don't care who you sell to, how you sell what you sell, everybody in this room can take back and answer. On behalf of your organization, I would highly encourage you to answer it with sales, with product, with executive leadership. Because if you all do this in your little tight cozy rooms and then come back and say it, we're all going to organ reject it. So this is meant to be an exercise that we do together. So you work for me now you work for Jen's Packable Raincoat Company. Now Jen's Packable Raincoat company is a product where we have a raincoat like this big, fits in your bag, never have to remember to pack it. It's always there, keeps you drier. Unlike an umbrella. Your umbrella like inverts in the rain. That never happens. So in this scenario, we have a better way to stay dry. Now, side note, nobody in this room I don't think is selling raincoats and competing against umbrellas. But you are, because raise your hand if you own an umbrella. I'm just looking for the weird. You don't own an umbrella. You're like, you just like stone colded me too. You're like, no, I don't. Yeah, sorry. Okay. Most of us own an umbrella. Most of us have a way to solve the problem. Just like your prospects. Like, people get this idea of we're gonna talk about cost of inaction a bit. People get this idea of cost of inaction somehow means like cost of doing nothing. That's offensive. If someone has a known problem, they're not doing nothing about it. There's something they're doing. And so for many of us, if the problem is staying dry, we have an umbrella for that. Just like your prospects, if their problem is generating pipeline, they've got some taped together method for doing that. So what do you think happens when you pitch your very sexy better way to stay dry raincoat that costs $100? What are most people gonna say? I have an umbrella and yeah, so cheap. This is expensive, right? This is too expensive. If I was a salesperson selling this raincoat, I would be like, clothes lasting all my deals. Like, oh, too expensive. Budget pricing. It's not me, it's them. So what we tend to do, and I can say this confidently because where I spend a lot of my time. Brendan loves this line. I am a pervert for cold email. I read cold emails from sellers all of the time. And I will tell you, maybe not as extreme, but most emails I read don't look that far off from this. So I just asked ChatGPT to generate an email to sell this packable raincoat. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I will tell you some highlights. Don't let inclement weather disrupt your outerwear workflow. Rocket ship. Because we always need a rocket ship. Hope this message finds you well. At Gents Packable Rain Company, we're revolutionizing the precipitation preparedness landscape with our next gen AI adjacent Packable Rain care solution. Built for scale, optimized for ag. We understand your problems with surprise downpours and jacket inefficiencies. These are all our features and we would just love to hop on a demo to talk through the raincoat and share our recent white paper Disrupting Drizzle How Outerwear Is Eating Umbrellas. Stay dry Zach the Drizzle Disrupter Enterprise rainwear evangelist. The future of dryness is now. Okay, not every cold email is this bad. But I still swear to you, y', all, there are sellers on your teams right now that are sending crazy shit like this. Because if I don't have to write it and someone else will, I can be like, well, this thought it was a good idea. So the. The choreography of this email is what we need to stop, right? The choreography is. Hi, I'm Jen. I'd love to talk about myself for the next, like, 500 words. And here's all our features. And this is why it's better than the alternative. And I would just love to get your time on a demo. How many times do you get outbound that sounds like that, right? I feel for this group, right? Because I feel like you're at the brunt of it. As we talked about before, you might have the best damn raincoat in the world. If it's $100, it's too expensive, right? And so this is this in play. Like, better raincoat, better way to stay dry. Does not mean I abandoned my umbrella, because quite frankly, my umbrella is free because I already own it. That's a tough thing to overcome. So the missing ingredient, the thing that when I read outbound emails, I am craving, is something called perceptual curiosity. Perceptual curiosity is defined here. It is a very specific type of curiosity, which is, like, when you hear something that contradicts what you think you know or believe to be true. And they describe it as like, an itch you need to scratch, right? Because you now are on this mission to seek out information. So I told this story recently, but there is a study that was done of public bathroom stalls. This is disgusting. And I'm clearly. Toilet humor is my shtick. There is a study of public bathroom stalls that shows most of us when we go to a public bathroom, we go to the middle stalls. No reason why it's subconscious, but they're actually the dirtiest stalls. It's the end stalls you want to use, because so many of us go to the middle stalls. Now, when I heard that, I freaking told everybody I knew. I was like, guess what, you filthy animal? Because we as humans love to feel smart. We love to feel funny. Like, we love to be perceived that way. And that, I would argue, is what exactly we want out of a message. We want someone to start thinking about what they think to be true, what they believe to be true, and start seeking out why is this different from what I know, because that sparks this match, right? If you can get someone to say, wow, that's different than what I believed, they now want to go and tell everybody, which is, I promise you, everything, what your sales team wants that prospect to do. And so I'm going to show you the four questions to get to this. And I think this is an ingredient. When I see this in a cold email, it's very rare, but it looks and sounds different from every other cold email I read. So question number one seems crazy obvious, but I can tell you, most sales teams don't do this. Who is most likely to have the problem that our solution solves? When I was a seller, I was like, let me prioritize my territory by sexiest logos, most fte biggest revenue size, right? And let me find a way in, because if I can win that deal, man, I will be the boss. I chased deals for years that had no business chasing because they didn't have the problem that we solved. So in this example, if I'm selling this raincoat, I'm not going to focus my time on Phoenix. No shade to the Phoenix people in the room. Thank you. But I'm going to focus on the cities that have the highest precipitation rates. Now, I'm from Chicago area, so I'm going to pick Chicago for this example, 119 days of rain a year. So who in your prospect universe is most likely to have the problem that you solve? Question 2. Now, how do those people solve the problem today? And more importantly, why? So for an average human being, most of us own about two. Two umbrellas. It doesn't matter if you own three or 20. That's weird, but, like, more power to you. But the reason we own them is because they're so cheap. Right? It's like an umbrella costs, I don't know. I haven't bought an umbrella a long time. Umbrella doesn't cost that much. So, yeah, I'll pick one up and I'll keep it in my car. So we have to be able to empathize with what makes status quo attractive. This is not where we're judging. We're not saying, well, you just don't know there's a better way. I don't think that's true. We like status quo for a reason. We've got to understand that. Because question three is now, what is the unintended negative consequence as a result of how we're solving the problem today? So, as it turns out, only 5% of us remember to pack an umbrella on days it's supposed to rain. I am 100% part of the 95% that forgets. Does anybody else? Yeah. Is anybody part of the 5%? Like, you just, like, got your umbrella right here. Yeah. Okay. I like it. There's always a couple 5%. All right. I'm Dutch. I'm Dutch. Yeah, it's fair. That is a fair reason. Now, when we forget, most of us, not all of us will do what we order an Uber or Lyft. Like, if you're in the lobby of your office building and you've got a huge client meeting and you were planning to walk and it's like 0.6 miles away, most of us are going to order an Uber to get there because I'm not going to show up looking like a wet rat. But here's what Uber does. Uber knows you need us, and so they are charging you probably $40 for a ride that should cost you 15. It's a negative consequence, but in the moment, I'm like, this is the best answer. Just like your prospects in the moment are making the best possible answer for this moment in time, but often aren't looking back at the negative consequences of that. And step number four is who else took a different approach? The line that I see in cold emails all the time that drives me nuts because we've all been told we have to do it, is we helped this company solve the world's problems, right? Like, we did it. It was us. You are all here probably not to hear from me, but probably to learn from each other, right? It's why you come to events. It's probably why you're part of Exit 5 community, because you are very interested in knowing. What do you know that I don't yet? When we are in an outbound motion, our messaging style is to talk about ourselves and how awesome we are, when that's not often, particularly as you go more senior in the organization, what people care about. So there's an innate curiosity. And what's everybody else doing that I don't know? So let's take those four things and let's put it together into an El Nino cold email. This is a cold email. Some of you will hate it. That's just the game, right? The idea here is instead of pitching a product, which is what 99.9999% of cold emails do, and by the way, you could use this on a phone, you can use this on LinkedIn. It's not specific to cold email, but most emails pitch a product instead of prompting that kind of perceptual curiosity to think differently about themselves. So here's how I wrote it. Subject line, super boring. Uber bill. Not sexy. But I'm like, did I get overcharged? Let me open it. Saw you commute to work in Chicago. Looks like Chicago gets about 119 rainy days a year. The average American owns 2.1 umbrellas, yet only 5% of us remember to bring an umbrella on days it's supposed to rain. At this moment, what I'm capture is like, are you in that 5%? Are you in the 95%? If you're in the 5%, cool. We're never. You're never buying my raincoat anyway. Just want to get to who you are when this happens. How often do you end up ordering an Uber? Thanks to surge pricing, we end up spending 40 bucks for a ride that should cost us 15. Betty commutes to the Loop from Bucktown. She found a way to cut her Uber bill by $200 a month. Are you open to hearing how she did it now? What am I not talking about in this email? Raincoat. There's no mention of raincoat. Because as silly as this is, people don't buy solutions to problems they don't think are important. But in sales and marketing, often we pitch our solution in the hopes that we'll make someone suddenly have this realization it's important. My intention of a message like this is to get someone thinking about their own behavior before I ask them to start thinking about me. Like, I want you to do the mental math, because if you're only taking one Uber a month, you probably don't have a big enough problem to solve. You probably don't need it, and that's okay. I am intentionally alienating people. Problem I see a lot with sales teams is we're trying to appeal to everybody. And that's why we end up talking about ourselves. Because we're like, I don't know how to talk about you, but I do know how to talk about my product. And so in the initial situation, our unhinged cold email, the buyer read that and thought, man, I click into it, this thing costs $100. That's too expensive. Now we flip the equation, because Whether you're spending 200amonth on Ubers or $100 a month or $150, that is always going to be more expensive than the 1Time100. So it's the same product, but we change the messaging, recognizing that we know an umbrella is going to cause a status quo problem. Just like in your businesses, you know, that there's ways that your prospects are solving the problem today without you. They will win if we don't preempt this. And so these are the four questions we went through. This is genuinely an enjoyable exercise to do. I know sometimes spending time with sales is not enjoyable, but if you go through this together, you will have different perspectives. You will butt heads, you will bash together. But I have yet to work with an organization who has gone through these four questions and said we're not better off on the other side thinking about our messaging by not having this. And so this is something again, like we don't want to do in isolation. You want to get product leadership. You want to get sales in the only way sales is going to give you time for this, though, is if you do step one and if you help them understand that there is a problem worth solving here. And it's what's in it for me? We all know that's like the love language of salespeople. What's in it for me? You don't have to build as much new pipeline. And so what this is really about, if anyone's heard of the term cost of inaction, is like in cold outbound. In our messaging, we tend to lead with roi. Like ROI by definition is a maybe if you do something, which is the hardest part, you might be rewarded with a positive return. Might, might not. That's a high risk. If outbound and pipeline generation was as easy as me blasting emails saying ROI to everybody, sales would be the sickest job ever. But I think we've all sent those emails and saw nothing on the other side because everybody else is sending those emails too. So instead, I would argue there's absolutely a place for roi. We need it. But job number one is the prospect has to decide they have a problem worth solving and we're solving now, they have to perceive that there's a cost of staying the same, not a cost of doing nothing. Again, I can't reiterate this enough. They're doing something but staying with that something. If they don't perceive that there is a negative consequence to that, it doesn't matter how shiny our ROI is, they're not going to buy it, particularly in an outbound motion. So my next and final $0 exercise is a really fun one. Again, cold email pervert. So what you're doing is you're asking everybody in the business, everybody on the sales team, or if you're feeling funky, do the marketing team as well and say, I want you to write a cold email to an account that you really want to win or expand on the expansion side. And I want you create a shared Google sheet. It's very free. And you ask them to write the name of the company, the name of the prospect, the prospect's title, their subject line, and their cold email. And then you bring everybody together and you ask them to stand up and read that cold email in front of the room. And then you ask everybody in the audience, all the other people that are there, to clock at what point they check the fuck out. And I will tell you, I've had so many clients do this. I do this when I do workshops. It is so fun because you can see it on the seller's face. I've had sellers stop and be like, you're clocking out right now, aren't you? Yeah, you are. Okay. But the reality is sometimes when we're writing and we're doing the job and it's just like so mundane, we're not actually thinking about this is what the person on the receiving end is hearing in their head. And so to solve a problem, first sales has to be aware that there's a problem. The old way of writing cold emails. Again, I can't reiterate this enough. It worked in 20, 20, 21 when like everybody had money to spend and we didn't have as much. Custom optimization, like all that stuff Shiny object era is really making this stuff ineffective. And it's not that you just haven't uncovered the magic channel or the magic like template. It's not that it's we've got to go in recognizing that buyer status quo is going to win a heck of a lot more than we do if we're not preempting it with our message. So step one to get sales buy in. It is a powerful story to say we actually probably need to stop pushing so hard on new pipeline generation and fix this closed loss, status quo problem we have. Get both of us looking at the problem the same way. That's the common enemy. Step two is now let's realize like we're actually contributing to it. The way that we are writing these messages, whether you're giving me a cadence or a seller is out there doing it on their own is making the problem worse. And until we do that stuff, sales is gonna think like, this is just how we sell. This is the way we've always done it. It's really hard to make movement. So that's why I focused on these two areas first, because I think half the battle is just like, how do I get sales on the right page, so Tommy wants slideies. If you do, you can email me or I'm sure Dave will send them out. But I want to say a very sincere thank you. I know we've got a few minutes for Q A. Thank you for welcoming me as a sales.
