Sales Management Podcast
71. Sharpening Sales Management Mastery with Justin Michael and Julia Nimchinski
In the business world, some slow down or stop their professional development, while some push it forward. The latter tend to see outsized success. In this episode you'll hear some specific examples from folks who work with senior leaders to push it to the next level.
In the business world, some slow down or stop their professional development, while some push it forward. The latter tend to see outsized success. In this episode you'll hear some specific examples from folks who work with senior leaders to push it to the next level.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Today's the first time I've had two people on the show. I'm really excited to welcome the co-founders of HypeCycle and the CXO Games, julia Namchinsky and Justin Michael.
Speaker 2:Welcome folks, sunday, sunday, sunday, you actually got it right. Thank you, corey.
Speaker 1:I actually got it right. Wow, there's a lot of confidence. They're starting out the show. I do like Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. So who's your favorite? Is it Grave Digger?
Speaker 2:I haven't been to a monster track rally in a long time. How about you, Julia?
Speaker 3:Neither I.
Speaker 1:Oh, I haven't either.
Speaker 1:I think, I went maybe 10 years ago, which I guess is a long time ago. But there's a. If you don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about the monster track rally Sunday. Sunday, sunday, it's Grave Digger, anyways, fun things for the kids. We're here to talk about sales management. I want to really get into this idea of how do we continuously get better and make sure that we're pushing ourselves, because if we look at the world I was just listening to this weekend startups and Darmash Shah was on there One of the topics that they were talking about was how do we consistently make our folks better and push some boundaries?
Speaker 1:And you've got this world of elite athletes and elite athletes who are winning. They don't just have talent, they have talent plus work ethic. They're competing, they're winning and they're learning from their losses, and I think that's something that I really like about what you all are doing. I recently had the pleasure of coming on your CXO games, where you compete against other folks on specific topics. So can you tell us a little bit about why you think this is a good thing for the world of B2B and a little bit about how it works?
Speaker 3:Have it a start and then pass the mic to Justin Corey. I haven't wrote nine books yet, but after working for 10 years in B2B, I figured that people get comfortable and the innovation stalls and it's very comfortable to get that way and to stop thinking. So we're trying to create a lot of projects and experiences to put people in comfortable ways and to see how it goes. How about you? Have you experienced GTM games, CXO games? How's the uncertainty?
Speaker 1:Well, I thought it was great. I think what you say about the innovation stalls. So for folks that haven't seen the CXO games, it's a competition, so you get on there with other folks. And last I think I was on there two weeks ago. So the first one is there was another guy that I was competing against and they would have a host that would ask me a question. They'd ask us a question and we'd both give our responses and then they would grade our responses and pick a winner and then the winner of that, which I was fortunate enough to advance to the finals same situation we're now. We have four people, so the winners from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday come together in the finals and they ask a series of questions and we all give our responses and we can chime in and give commentary on other folks' responses. It's kind of like a presidential debate, Only we're talking about things that can make us money instead of things that can just entertain or annoy us, because none of us have any power over federal policy. The. I guess we have our vote. You should vote, everybody should vote, but the.
Speaker 1:The thing I really took away from it was it made me think. You asked the question. You give us some time to prepare and I could think, and then I gave a response, and then I could watch the other person's response and really calibrate where was I at? Where was I coming from? Which? Which things were I applying? Was I applying what I knew, or was I missing the application of what I know? And then the other piece of it is are there things that I didn't know that I should have known? And it really pushed me to be a little introspective there.
Speaker 3:I would just say it. I was reading this ideal article about C-suite and the reimagination of the role in a recession especially, and so we all kind of used to you know, using what we already know and operate from that place. And if you want to get innovative and if you want to really, you know, continue like just operating in your place being a sales manager because I assume that sales managers are listening to this you have to write the, you have to ask the right questions and the way you do that is actually go through experiences like that. So we saw you doing that in front of them. You know just cybersecurity. We see, I don't think you have any experience in cybersecurity. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:No, I've sold to a couple of cybersecurity companies, but I've definitely never worked at one. Yeah, that's a great point. And so this experience Julie and Justin brought us in front of a person who was coming from a completely different background and perspective and he was asking us questions based on his world and he was interpreting our answers based on his world. And guess what? That's what the real world's like, because everyone you're talking to whether it's one of your prospects, somebody you're dating, whoever it is they're coming to you through the lens of their life experience. And that's, if you're able to adapt to that and get better at it, then you're going to build yourself up and be a better person, which is what I really like about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:We've been telling this story for a couple of years and I think you know it's given me a lot more respect for marketing because I was a VP of sales. I kind of ran ops for a business and it's just been really interesting to watch the birth of go to market as a category and as a strategy, because nobody was talking about go to market two, three years ago. It was really REM ops actually when all this started up. So it's just been really cool working with Julia to see some of these trends unfold. And I'm loving the CXO games because it's like getting into a boardroom with a variety of sea levels, like going to some kind of networking event and listening to them to debate what's actually going on. I feel like it's like a viscid worldwide meetup that I'm like have a seat at the table or something. It's just it's really different content. It's unique.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because the topic was derived from actual board conversation and the types of responses were those that you hear in an actual board conversation. So you're giving the. This is the other cool thing. You're taking people from the audience and giving them insight and experience into what's going on. And then you're taking folks that are in the role and pushing them to do something on a stage in front of people that can make them better.
Speaker 1:And I think anybody coming into that has to do some prep and some thinking, which is great, and then as they execute, they're going to do certain things while they're going to struggle and they're going to get better coming out the other end. So I think the big theme here is ensuring that you don't get comfortable in your career and wake up years later and say, well, gee whiz, I'm not happy with where I'm at, and I think that's happened to a lot of people. And so if you consistently push yourself to get better, the risk of that is less and y'all are giving folks a forum to actually do that. So tell me a little bit about what's the what's the future of the CXO games.
Speaker 3:Well, the future of 6-0 games is just the bigger picture of Corey, and we're all familiar with the quote. You know, the world is a stage and we're all players, but I feel that it would be to be to forget that and forget what's the play and that we are playing and it plays the survival and we've run out of money pretty fast, and then I go to my life then and it turns into an Instagram and a lot of shows that you're listening to know this one have no content and that's the part that I'm trying, you know, to just let slide and at least address with the projects that we put out. So, yeah, hopefully that's the future.
Speaker 1:So LinkedIn's Instagram? In the sense that it's interesting, click, click, read, read, laugh, smile, disagree but it doesn't give you anything that's really going to help solidify the foundation of your career, build it up to the next level. Is that the takeaway?
Speaker 3:So I started my role in like my road to marketing for copywriting Corey, and you learn pretty fast the difference when copywriting and writing and I'm sure you know that. And then is a bunch of you know copycat writing.
Speaker 3:So, I love it, yeah, and you I don't know. I mean lots of likes, shares, comments, but I don't see a lot of companies that are, you know, strikingly succeeding. Or if you go to G2 and you look at, you know the top three competitors in a given category. They all look the same, they all sound the same, they all compete with each other and raise money. But I'm experiencing the products. I mean their teams are not using the products that they're putting out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've definitely seen that. It's fun. One of my fun activities when I'm bored since I don't watch the Kardashians is to read glass door reviews, and it's super entertaining if you haven't done that.
Speaker 1:You're laying in bed at 11 o'clock at night and you're like I could watch the Kardashians now. Well, I'm not going to do that, because that's I think watching the Kardashians is worse for you than smoking cigarettes. I'd love to have a debate on that with somebody. But the whole idea of the glass door reviews is fascinating because, yeah, the marketing team says X and the company doesn't actually use the product. Well, it almost feels like what you're doing through the CXO games and giving people a chance to compete, forcing them into a competitive venue with peers. It solves for a lot of the problems that we see on those glass door reviews. Oh, the company culture is not great. The senior leadership doesn't know what they're doing. You read that. Go read 20 glass door reviews at random. I guarantee you, through a forum, say that leadership doesn't know what they're doing. Well, maybe they don't and maybe if they're forced to compete against their peers and really dig into it, that could make everybody a little bit better. And that trickles downhill. Justin, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:So we ran into this thing called the learning pyramid by the national, the NTL, the national training learning. Anyway, it's been debunked but the concept is great. I think some enablement leaders are very strict about this stuff, but the static nature of scrolling through feeds or even reading books or sitting on webinars or listening to podcasts or sitting in clubhouse when you're not interacting and thinking and then actioning on the thinking and then analyzing and responding and there's pressure there, it's not really business, because business is a world, it's war. Right, you sit there and you get a. I don't know.
Speaker 2:You read the Nike documentary where the competitors were like finding the tax issues to try to stiff fill night with the bill, like that's the reality. It's a dynamic. It's more like Napoleon is the movie you should watch, right? So simulating things safely where competency can transfer. We had the CISO on who had been the CISO for Mass Mutual, etna, jp Morgan Chase and this serious heavy hitter and he's getting a kick out of actually just the crowdsource thought experiment of okay, here's some smart people, how would you do this?
Speaker 1:It's just really interesting conversation there's no one probably ever pushed him on that. That's the other thing. You take someone outside their company, all the political barriers are gone. You don't care who he is. Oh, chairman of the department got to be respectful and can't challenge in public. But if you put somebody in front of peers in an arena, that takes the politics out of it, makes it more open and people can actually get better and push each other.
Speaker 2:We wrote this book together, reinventing Virtual Events, and Julia says you do the sales chapters. So I said, okay, let's get customer centric. Here's my sales plan. A great white shark. Imagine the force for it to breach the surface, catch a sea lion in its mouth and then it's fully airborne. Imagine the torque and horsepower on that animal. And Julia is like, yeah, that's not customer centric, oh.
Speaker 3:I'm just not in the same frequency with Justin sometimes, but it's a good balance score.
Speaker 1:Balance is definitely important. So the great white shark Now you got me thinking about great white shark. Oh my gosh, I'm just reaching the water into a predator.
Speaker 2:In JAWS Spielberg, the shark broke and so he couldn't film the shark, so most of the scenes are shark lists. Julia, let's get back to B2B.
Speaker 3:Well, back to B2B, back to movie script, corey, and you write movie script. I read biographies and I feel that that's your point, justin. On Napoleon, and I mean I can just stack up Steve Jobs, larry Allison to the same category. People often get them wrong and misportray or misunderstand out of context what these people are trying to do and whether it was good or wrong or bad or just give some color to it. So Napoleon was great, you know, screwed up in history, and that's not what happened in reality with Napoleon.
Speaker 3:Complex was actually the opposite, steve Jobs, the whole premise of just putting out great products. We still we. I don't know how many years passed, but we are not there. Because B2B, because C and whatever other company. So the evolution of the human, like 20 year old, you know, running a company and you go into a 40 year old man, it's quite on the road. We're all judging and lots of issues there. Larry Allison, same thing, you know, fact-based advertising, it's beautiful. So that's what we're lacking B2B, that kind of, you know, strategy and good products and really good products and advertising and sales that is aggressive but to the point, but it's it's funny.
Speaker 1:you bring up the war analogy because the first place my mind went as I said oh man, some people are going to say, oh, this isn't war. But then you bring up Ellison and Jobs and they truly treated their market as a battlefield because there was no place for third. There could be a first and there could be a second, but third was going to be left behind. And that's where compact computer oh who, that's not around anymore. And then it's Travis from Uber same thing. It was like I've got a battle against regulators and this incumbent industry, and then foreign governments and all it, and then labor laws and things like that. And if you're going to get really big, it truly is war.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're trying to start a business that does a few million dollars a year, it doesn't have to be like that, because lots of people can make a few million dollars a year as an organization. But for somebody to truly come in and say I'm going to take over this category, take over the space, that is a much more competitive situation than just trying to get something off the ground. That's more of a lifestyle business. And if you're going to go to battle, if you're going to play a game you got to train, and I think that's what I'm really interested in digging into a little bit more. So let's say that not everybody can be on your show, not everybody can be in your program. What are some things that you recommend for sales leaders to do, kind of on a week, week and week out basis, just to push themselves to get better?
Speaker 3:Justin, let's start with you.
Speaker 2:Well, the thing, the biggest learning I've had in the past two years is a service-based mindset which dovetails into what we do because it's customer-centric. So I was just kind of listening into this conversation and thinking there's so many amazing products and vendors I think there's something like 1,000 SaaS companies for enterprise sales and the Nancy Norton grid and then 1,000 and the Dave Delaney grid, matrix. There's 20,000 on the Loom Escape and we don't really see a lot of customer stories. We don't see case studies. We still see NASCAR slides, a lot of self-serving behavior. A lot of salespeople are focused on building their brand and releasing their cohort course.
Speaker 2:So the positive is study your customers. Read the obituaries, understand how business works, how the language of finance, profit and loss, the balance sheet, their 10 case, 10 cues. Don't just read it because they told you, they trained you at Oracle to do it. You should actually become curious about your customers and how business is done. And huge hat tip to Julia, because if I hadn't met her, I wouldn't see business this way and it's unlocked a lot for the way I approach this thing. That's my vote.
Speaker 1:Pushing people outside their comfort zone. So with the case studies customer stories that's a great example. I often ask folks if I got a room of people and we're doing some kind of cohort with managers trying to figure out how to diagnose and prioritize what's worked with their teams on it inevitably comes to the point where someone says something along the lines of, well, they don't understand the customer. I say, all right, well, if I went to the team and I said how many customer stories can you tell, how many would they be able to say I say, raise your hand if you think five. Okay, what about 10? What about 15?
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever seen a hand up when I get to 15, which is insane, because with most people's quotas, especially in SMB and mid-market and even with enterprise, they've worked with more than 15 companies. You don't have to have closed the deal to be able to tell the story of why they came to you. Now, if you've closed the deal, you can tell the story of why they bought. And if they've been a customer for a while, tossing some metrics around well, how's it going today? And really forcing yourself to get good and smart around that. Everyone knows what mitochondria and photosynthesis and all this other stuff that we're never going to use as, but they can't tell you 10 to 15 customer stories that are good and in depth and presented well. That's crazy.
Speaker 3:I love that you said that, corey, because there are different levels to customer stories. And level one we're talking about it for a decade or so. Let's put our customers on stage, let's make the stories, you know just, let's put them out on the website, on the prospectuses and everywhere we can. But the level two is really, how good is this story? Sometimes you just turn and you can't even read the story or listen through it, because you understand it by your. It's just, you know it's sponsored or there's politics behind it. And I think that the level two, the customer stories, to stop treating the customers as if there are some kind of idiots, pardon me.
Speaker 1:So give me a little bit more around. What makes a great customer story?
Speaker 3:I will. So with the events it's harsh. And it's hard because what we did to transition to the second level is with this type form and we sent it to the whole community asking hey, how is our content actually helping you solve your business challenges today in a recession, or whatever? The sponsors, the demos that we're showcasing after the events do you consider these solutions to actually use them? Do you talk to these partners after the events? And it's not much just like really for questions, but it shows, it checks you pretty well and grounds you and really makes you put out great content that your people can use. How many webinars are out there, corey? Then? Just I mean, there's nothing to listen to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, I think that that's. The other thing is, when you're hosting an event, or whether it's a webinar or anything, or even if it's an internal thing, you're competing against a lot of things that are way more entertaining. I love it when folks hire Homan and I for keynote speeches at sales kickoffs, because we're usually plugged between the CRM upgrade meeting and the business process adjustment meeting and then we get to come in and do something that's fun and so, by default, we're already one of the better sessions, just because of who we're next to. By the way, if anybody needs a keynote speaker, homan Story is one of the best keynote speakers in the world. Check him out HomanSorycom or find him on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:H-i-l-m-o-n-s-o-r-e-y. Yeah, I think that's definitely a big piece of it is being able to tell the story in an entertaining way, and it doesn't have to be like entertaining, like fun or jokey or anything like that. It just can't be dry and boring. And whether it's something that's in a video that's well produced, a piece of content that's approachable with the eye and not seven font with four pages of PDF with some images from the 70s. I think that's a big piece there and I think you all have done a really good job with your books, to present it in a way that's actionable, easy to read, easy to scan, things like that. So I don't know, it seems like such a basic skill, but we just stop learning things with rigor when we turn 22 or 23 or 24, depending on how much fun you have in college.
Speaker 3:It comes back again to practice, corey, with the events for two years we're trying to experiment with formats to really like oh, it's going to be sales marketing, cross training, t-shaped GTM. Let's do this innovative thing. You know every removed the roles and hierarchy. Let's democratize it all. It was great, analysts loved it. But this year we were just after doing it for such a long time. We were thinking, hey, where's the best practitioners that we know Someone like yourself, corey, and a lot of other people that we're featuring lately, and let's just make them talk. The format doesn't like we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Let's just put them together and benchmark their strategies and create this competitive environment where they can compete. It's so crazy. We are putting out industry-wide different webinars that are all staged, predictable and sponsored, but what about just creating a little competition? You know it's interesting for you and correct me if I'm wrong. Can we just feature you with like wellings or you know someone as badass as you are?
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for that, and I think that the analogy here is what we're seeing with the presidential campaigns, and I'm not going to talk about any specific candidates or politics, but I think we can all probably not hate each other if I just make a comment about politics in general, which is that this is going to be the last election cycle where any candidate can stand behind the wall of a prepared speech, of limited access and anything like that. You're seeing that the top two candidates for the election are not doing this, but everybody else is going on these long format podcasts. They've gone on all in, they've gone on Joe Rogan, they've gone on Lex Friedman, they've gone on the top podcasts that do one to four-hour interviews, and they're able to talk at length, not in soundbites, and what it enables them to do is the host can then start going deep onto topics and get past that 30-second media sound by where they can position the person to either be hated or like, just depending on what the media, the host's position is. If you talk to somebody for an hour and a half, the audience gets to make up their mind, and so, after there's no more Biden and there's no more Trump in 2028 or whatever that is. Maybe it's going to take us to 2032. Who knows? I think that we're going to get a lens into these people and that's going to become more of culture.
Speaker 1:Now, when it comes to B2B, the same thing. You don't get the people that are doing the same things at the same level to have these open and honest conversations. Yeah, they do it in the boardroom, they do it at the country club, they do it at the bar. They don't do it in front of an audience, and that's so cool that now we're getting insight into that. It's like it's so cool that you can watch a bunch of the candidates talk for three hours and then get a good picture of what they actually really think on things past the 30 second soundbites.
Speaker 3:Yeah, from politics to business and the most politicized businessman, Elon Musk. I don't know if you watched Elon Musk talking for like one hour straight, you Corey or you Justin, but it's painful. If you actually like listen to the content like a lot of the YouTube content they just do this soundbites oh, here's a motivational, like go get it kind of compilation of Elon Musk and all the greatest but then if you actually listen to the guy, or two hours straight, it's just you want to kill yourself. It's really, it's really hard, but the content is good, yeah, and then you can catch that content. And similarly with kind of joking behind the scenes about Mark Zuckerberg but we all know that the guy did it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:No for sure Elon is. He does have. I don't know. I don't ever want to make fun of how someone talks. He has a little bit of a discussion about impediment, but yeah, the guy it's. He's also just so entertaining because he's the richest. He's probably not the richest person on earth Putin's probably the richest person on earth, but he's probably the second richest person on earth and and he just says what he thinks and he has fun with it and it's. It's interesting and it's crazy that he's politicized. By the way. I'll just throw that out there.
Speaker 1:I mean the guys I don't understand the whole people don't like him for all these different reasons. It's not so if you ever want to have some fun, go back and watch videos of news anchors declaring the end of Tesla, and you can find these all the way back to 2008. And then on your other screen, pull up the stock chart of Tesla and see what it was trading at that day versus what it's trading at today and it's like he said he's done, it's the end. It's the end. And then the last thing I'll say on Elon, just because I personally really like Elon. If you don't like Elon and you want to come debate me about Elon. Shoot me a note free stuff at coachsearmcom and we can have a debate on the Sales Management Podcast about why Elon Musk is or isn't whatever he is.
Speaker 1:I think the last thing is, if you watch the Elon Musk interview on Joe Rogan and listen to the whole thing and then go watch the media clips summarizing it, it is insane. They took four minutes of a three hour interview and put a spin on it, and it was also really hilarious because one of the takeaways that they had I don't remember exactly what it was, but the main media takeaway coming out of the Elon Musk interview was literally the opposite of what they ended the show with, and we're both saying in agreement. So, anyways, I think that's just whatever. That's why we're here doing Long Format Podcast. All right, justin, sorry, you're gonna say something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess, if you really think about presidential candidates, dwayne the Rock Johnson scores. I think he scores higher than both of these, so that's an interesting take for 2028.
Speaker 1:I'll just throw that in. You're thinking the Rock for 2028?. Yeah, going from monster trucks to wrestling, I think that's where Ballers is one of the best shows ever.
Speaker 2:It's great. And then you had Jesse Ventura. Was wasn't he a governor? I forget which state.
Speaker 1:Governor of Minnesota. The governor and former professional wrestler.
Speaker 2:It's important to note.
Speaker 1:Arnold Schwarzenegger is a.
Speaker 2:Austrian citizen and Elon is a South African citizen, so they can't actually run.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, trump was a professional wrestler, which is also a fun fact If anybody has seen those videos?
Speaker 3:Oh man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think that's. But this is the big thing, right? The competition, the ability to showcase what you know in front of an audience. So folks aren't following hype cycle or the CXO games. How can they check out what you all are up to?
Speaker 3:For a monthly, every second week of the month, so anyone can join and anyone can listen, and we just love to, as you'll notice from all people from the audience, and make them. You know the host and then just we're trying to to be on the background of this thing, corey, and I don't know if it's good or bad, but we don't want to be the controlling you know figureheads when the show is about the founders and not about the content. So we're trying to just facilitate the flow and let the conversation get out there.
Speaker 1:I love that. What's the biggest pushback you've got from people wanting to compete in public?
Speaker 3:It's funny, I never got any pushback from C-Levels.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Only timing, only August and all of the vacations can be to be, but other than that, nothing.
Speaker 1:So they want to know nobody's pushed back on it. Justin, have you heard anything where people say I don't want to do that in public?
Speaker 2:Well, the thing about these decision makers they like to prepare and it's really no prep is the key. There's no prep at all. You just you show up and you kind of try to apply what you're learning. So that's the. That's the only element there's. We put 300 people through this and the format's so interactive. You just you show up and you think and that does scare a few people, you have to just improvise. There's no, you know, death by PowerPoint to hide behind.
Speaker 1:No, you improvise, and it was funny. Julie mentioned this earlier. The one I was on was about cybersecurity and I'm a business guy so it's cool to put people in these, but at the same time, it was about cybersecurity. It was about product launch, pricing and packaging and strategy around which personas you're gonna target with what messaging. So it's yeah, the subject matter is technical, the subject matter is niche, but if you zoom out, I think that's something that's interesting, that you're focused on C-level folks.
Speaker 1:C-level folks that are good, are great at zooming out and they're not gonna get caught up in the idea oh, it's a cybersecurity, so I don't know what to do. Who cares? It's all the same. You make something, you sell it to somebody, they give you cash, you hire people, you do that more. That's business, that's B2B, b2c. I don't understand at all Y'all B2C people out there crazy and I love you and you're great, but I don't get it how you get somebody to go from Instagram to your site to give you the credit card and then say something nice about you on the internet. That is so hard and so amazing.
Speaker 1:For those folks that do that successfully. B2b it's like all right, cool. So there's a problem. I've got a solution. It's two to five X better than the incumbent solution, and then people buy it for me and give me money, so I think that's pretty cool. And then on the prep side, yeah that's. We were on the first episode that I did a couple of weeks ago and they wanted us to prep for 10 minutes. So got the prompt and then Julia said y'all, can y'all get up 10 minutes to prep? And the guy was going up and goes. It's like I don't need any prep, I'll just go for it. I thought that was awesome.
Speaker 3:C levels have more time, I think, corey, just to like experience and realize that nothing is perfect and go to market is by far not perfect. Yeah, an execution tool. So the more mistakes you make, the faster you learn. And the goal of it is not just you know. Oh, we're crazy people. We want to showcase like and then bank everyone and like, put you in an uncomfortable situation and like, make you look stupid. No, what we're trying to do is to really break this perception that a webinar has to be perfect, staged, with a perfect topic and slides, because, corey, like being a marketer, those kind of webinars, they don't bring anything, people don't watch them.
Speaker 1:Why do they do that? They multitask them. Why do they do it that way?
Speaker 3:It's convenient to fool yourself. I think it's basically you know what Instagram is built on. You want to look a certain way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's your professional makeup.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but people like yourself and there are a bunch of people very talented and brilliant and B2B that we're featuring monthly. They get drive from this experience because, wow, like I get to you know, debate what I believe in and to question what I believe in with people, peers just like me wow, it's great. What do you think, justin?
Speaker 2:I think the value is this idea of benchmarking your GTM approaches. Where do you compare your go-to-market strategy to other people? Yeah, who are your peers? I love that word, julia, the benchmarking style. I don't know if it's used in that way, but people love to compare what they're doing and it's a lot of how we sell into companies right, like creating FOMO. So hopefully there's a synergy. You put smart people in a room and something innovative will happen and we just get out of the way and let people debate. And that's interesting. They're all very evenly matched and sometimes they disagree, like we've had games where you know the whole idea is to promote a certain angle or model and then someone comes in and just questions the whole thing. So I mean, everything we're gonna do cold calling and it's like don't do a cold call, we're gonna promote text at consolidation and then it's just everything about that was the people right.
Speaker 1:So oh, that was like, yeah, why? Here's the thing I have realized that there are lots of right ways to do something. Within those right ways, there are hard right ways and there are easy right ways. The race is to this nice happy medium between doing things as good as you can and as simple as you can. That's the trade-off that needs to be made, because if it's not simple, people aren't going to do it and change management is really hard. Then I think, Julia, going to your point on the webinar, which is why this point to me is just resonates so much, Is it a lot of times? The reason why people do the webinars is the same reason why they put so much effort into onboarding programs or so much effort into vendor evaluation. It's because that's the easy part.
Speaker 1:The hard part is after the event making it stick and making sure that you're getting because I was having this conversation with someone last week around the roll out of a sales methodology we're going to do a vendor evaluation. We're going to go out there and look at all of them triangle selling and 10 others Then we're going to get proposals from every five of them and then we're going to vet the proposals. Then, who knows, maybe we'll do an RFP on top of that, just for funsies. Then eventually we're going to select one and then we're going to customize it to our business and then we're going to schedule it. We're going to do all this logistics stuff, Then we're going to have the event and then we're going to move on to the next project Insanity.
Speaker 1:Pick one that works, get it on someone's calendar and then put all that effort and then making it stick. You could literally take the top 10 sales methodologies in the world, put them all in a hat, pick one, send a wire transfer to that company and take all that effort that you did on the vetting of the vendor and put that into the reinforcement and plan to make it stick. You would be in a much better spot than you would if you did a complete vendor evaluation on the front end, because that's the easy stuff. It's so simple. Making it stick, making it work that's the hard part, and I think getting folks to push themselves to make things simpler is just a phenomenal thing that you all are working on.
Speaker 3:You make things simpler, corey, and again correct me if I'm wrong by asking the right questions. We don't tend to do that. We tend to just do what people tell us to do in B2B. So webinars are done because everyone does webinars. Yeah, no one does business simulations. No one does like. Think about it. How crazy. There is not a single one business competition in the whole industry, but us. Why we are not too smart. It's a simple format, but it's crazy that no one practiced it or no one done it before.
Speaker 2:And we released the book ReinventingVirtualEventscom. Hold the blueprint, take it, do something. Nope.
Speaker 1:I love it. Reinventingvirtualeventscom Is this something that you think companies should do internally as well?
Speaker 3:Justin, what are?
Speaker 1:you thinking Competition.
Speaker 2:Well, it springs up sometimes. Sometimes one of these enterprises says hey, can you run like an Olympic Games or CrossFit internally here within our different teams, cross-functionally? We had a couple visionary leaders. Look to our agency for that.
Speaker 1:I love. That Beats the heck out. Of trust falls.
Speaker 3:I think that internally, people have to just literally simulate what happened during your event, Corey, and how you can promote it on the post that you'll put out there. They should just question the task, and that happens rarely because I don't know a lot about you know just you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but okay, Within this study benchmark report, how often people switch sales methodologies in B2B and so guess the answer?
Speaker 1:I'd say every two and a half years.
Speaker 3:Two and three months. Oh, two thousand people, yeah, so that's insane, it's so dumb.
Speaker 1:That's like saying that, oh, nikes aren't good anymore, now we're doing a re-box or Adidas, you know whatever. Like, yeah, did Helmut and I create a sales methodology? Yes, why did we do it? Because we thought the ones were outdated and too complex and incomplete. Because if your sales methodology doesn't cover demos, land and expand, I'll stop there. There's lots of other things that I could say.
Speaker 1:Hiring Does it cover hiring? Is there a training framework that your sales methodology uses? No, it doesn't use it. So we built one that has all this stuff. Well, why? Because if it's all complete and in one place and easy to remember and easy to learn and easy to do and easy to coach, then people will actually use it. But if it's super complicated and needs a hundred page user manual, guess who's not going to read the hundred page user manual?
Speaker 1:People are doing it, and if they read it once, are they going to remember it? Nope. So I mean people can't even remember a joke they heard at standup comedy last night. If I take you to comedy show, I'll bet anybody anything. I like to gamble they can't remember three jokes the next day. And actually, and if they can, they certainly can't perform them well. Their timing is going to be screwed up so that I mean it's nuts. It's the whole idea of put all the energy into all the easy stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm going to start just pounding the table on this Like, yeah, vendor evaluation is cool, whatever. You know why your technology needs to be consolidated. Not because you picked the wrong vendors, because you didn't freaking make it stick after it was rolled out. That's the issue. And to this point, about CXO games, I'm just on one this morning. This is great. It's Monday morning here in Austin, texas. The last thing I'll say on this is that the inability for folks to be confident, to engage senior leadership, to make programs and things like this stick are just nuts, and so I think that getting the CXOs in front of the audience and things like this in a competitive way, maybe it'll make people more confident that hey, this is a person, this is a person that I can engage to help make my projects get better. All right, we're hitting up on time here. Check out Hypecycle, check out the CXO games, check out the book Reinventing Virtual Events. Justin, julia, great having you Any parting words.
Speaker 3:Yes, common sense is. I'm coming. Let's make it more common Corey.
Speaker 1:Make common sense common. That sounds like a t-shirt to me, I don't know. Parting words.
Speaker 2:I mean, what's the secret to writing nine books? Have you written nine or six?
Speaker 1:Well, I published eight, nine's late draft. The secret is hard work and if that triggers you, then don't write nine books. There's some really bad books coming out. Oh my gosh. I read one the other day. I actually read them a note and I was like I'll give you notes. So they took me up on it. I gave them notes, they didn't respond. So holy chat. Gpg is going to ruin the book business, but that's OK, because James Patterson's been mass producing books for a long time. There is a way to do it. It is a tool. Good authors will continue to have good content and we will continue to push out episodes of the Sales Management Podcast. If you'd like a free version of Coach CRM, go to coachcrmcom Free version, not just free trial. And if your sales managers are struggling to get the most out of their teams and you're worried that 2023 needs a good back half and you don't know how you're going to get there, click the request to demo button CoachCRMcom. We'll see you next time.