Sales Management Podcast
70. The Dunning-Kruger Effect with Mike Kunkle
The Dunning Kruger effect is something all managers should understand. A pre-mature illusion of mastery is dangerous, as is taking advice from people on social media who are confident they have it all figured out...when they've just in fact started their journey.
Join us and think about how you can insulate your team from this power force that's ever-present in today's workforce.
The Dunning Kruger effect is something all managers should understand. A pre-mature illusion of mastery is dangerous, as is taking advice from people on social media who are confident they have it all figured out...when they've just in fact started their journey.
Join us and think about how you can insulate your team from this power force that's ever-present in today's workforce.
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. Fun, spicy conversation. Today I'm here with Mike Hunkle, VP of Sales Effectiveness Services at Sparks IQ. We've been trying to do this for a long time, mike. We're finally together. How are you today?
Speaker 2:I'm awesome, corey, and yeah, I'm really glad that we get to do this today and dig into some fun topics.
Speaker 1:Fun topics. So one of the things that we're going to talk about is the Dunning-Kruger effect and its impact on your sales team. We're also going to talk about the state of the world. We're in December 2023 right now and we're looking at things that are challenging in many segments of the market, and we're going to weave this common thread of this Dunning-Kruger idea, look back to how things were in 2021, how they've evolved to 2023, and really give some insight into how you can help structure your sales leadership organization, your sales teams. Going forward into the next 12 to 24 months might be a rocky ride, so let's get started. So, mike, to kick us off, what the heck is this Mr Dunning and Mr Kruger thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so these guys are two psychologists who studied this effect. Psychologists who studied this effect that people who really are competent often doubt their competence or not what I would call. I think everyone now is talking about imposter syndrome, right, every now and then we all have a doubt, right, not like a full-fledged imposter syndrome, but they think about their own competence, they wonder if they're doing the right thing. They sometimes doubt how competent they really are. And on the other side of the spectrum, people who aren't as competent very often overestimate their abilities or are overly confident in their abilities. And there are people now who are pushing back on some of that research. But there definitely is a common theme of you don't know what you don't know and people who are not really highly competent overestimating their abilities. And I see this a ton on LinkedIn. I know you and I sometimes have DM chats about stuff that we see.
Speaker 1:Is this guy serious?
Speaker 2:Yeah right, I mean, it's unbelievable, the stuff that you see out there and I have even seen some people who are pretty well regarded publishing stuff that I thought, well, that's not even ethical. I wouldn't do that to a buyer for all the tea in China. And yet people are jumping on this bandwagon saying, oh, yeah, man, what a great tactic. Yeah, I'm going to start using that. It's like my God, why would we jump on something like that? I called it out, and others did as well, and then 10 minutes later, the post was down.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what they do. They go out there and they do it for reach first, so they can build their following, and they say things that are sometimes they say things that are controversial so they can get people talking. But it's funny because a lot of times, the things that you and I talk about right now is they're trying to give advice that they think is right, but it's not meant to be controversial, and then the minute we pile on that, maybe it casts doubt on their competence, and then all of a sudden, they either block us or they delete it and they pretend like it never happens, or they do the thing that's the most hilarious thing in the world, which is why don't we just agree to disagree, mike?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I have to admit, I've eventually got so frustrated with conversations on LinkedIn that I've just said that myself, right? So you know, there is a what is that old saying? You know, don't cast pearls before swine. And not that I'm calling anybody swine, but the idea that sometimes you're just not going to break through. You know, I used to try, when people were prospecting me, right, I would try to provide some advice, and there were a handful of people who wrote later and thanked me and said, hey, I tried what you suggested and, wow, it worked a whole lot better.
Speaker 2:But nine times out of 10 or more, what I get is pushback that the lousy thing that they're doing is working. And I think there's a really interesting behavioral phenomenon, I think, that causes that is that if you do this one thing, no matter how lousy it is, sooner or later it's going to work. And we've proliferated from years ago the idea that selling is a numbers game. So if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, eventually a noodle sticks and then you get that noodle on the wall and it's like, yeah, it worked, let me go do more of that.
Speaker 2:And, man, I can't imagine how many leads these people are burning with seller-centric product pitches with a Calendly link at the end, expecting me to book their meeting for them. And they've said nothing about what my problem might be and the outcomes that they might deliver to help me solve that problem. And what's even worse is that most of them are selling to me and I'm not their ICP, and so I'll go back and tell them that. And I did this just yesterday. I went back and told somebody hey, I'm not your ICP and here's why. And they came back and still said well, why don't we get together and let me tell you what I do? It's like you know, and I kind of looked at the screen with my head tilted like my dog looks at me. It's like I can't even believe that just happened.
Speaker 1:And this person, I'm sure, thinks that they're doing the right thing and are highly Because they were told to book meetings with adults and you're an adult, so they're trying to book a meeting with you, and that's what they've been told by their manager, who's probably one year older than them, that has never been trained in how to manage people and it's just saying, hey, we need to get points on the board because CRO told us to get points on the board, so do what you can. And this is their translation of what you can't.
Speaker 2:And so if you were a competent person on this Dunning-Kruger spectrum and you are always wondering, always looking for a better way, always trying to improve, maybe you're A-B testing some of these things and you're figuring out hey, this one works a little bit better. Okay, let me experiment with this. Oh, now, this one works a little bit better and you're trying to improve, you're trying to figure out what works. You're reading as much as you possibly can, you're talking to people who are actually getting results, you're learning about buyer-centric selling, you're learning how to be problem focused and you're learning how to analyze gaps. But if you're not that person and you're on the middle or the left side of the bell curve, then you are just running these same lousy plays over and over and over and over and over. And when you get that spaghetti on the wall, you get that win. You're like okay, it's working, let me just keep plowing ahead. And I think that's one of the ways that this concept of Dunning-Kruger plays out in the sales forces. And it is again like you've mentioned, corey. It's one level higher. It's these sales managers who maybe just got promoted into this role. They were doing that, they're coaching their people to do that and it's like fraternity hazing, almost right. We are proliferating this horrible behavior. Rather than taking the experiences of people who have succeeded, rather than looking for the best ways to do that, rather than flipping to a completely buyer-centric approach and figuring out what's going on in the minds of my buyers, doing buyer persona research, building what I call buyer acumen what are the challenges and opportunities they're facing, what are the impacts they're feeling right now? What are the outcomes they're looking for, what are the problems or the priorities of those outcomes? Then you do a gap analysis, meaning what would it take to cross that chasm from that current state which the challenges and opportunities and impacts to that desired future state with the right outcomes and how they prioritize them, and then you'd have the needs of what they need to close the gap. Then you can do an impact analysis, right, what would the impacts be if I get them there? What's the cost of my solution? Now I can start thinking about ROI analysis.
Speaker 2:This stuff is absolutely not rocket science. It has been around right since the dawn of sales. I mean, what was it? 52, 54? I can't think of how long ago it's been now, but Mac Hannon wrote a book called Consultative Selling over 50 years ago and it was all about being buyer-centric, value-centric, finding out what matters to your customers, helping them get what they want. 35 years ago, zig Ziglar said you get what you want by helping other people get what they want. This stuff is not new, it's not rocket science and I'm. It's like watching grass grow or a glacier move Right To try to get people to to catch up to this stuff.
Speaker 2:And I worry about. I worry about the state of the profession right now, with as many people in this sort of Dunning Krugerruger bucket doing the same crazy stuff over and over and over again. Because now along comes AI and I think a lot of the transactional roles eventually will get displaced. And if you're going to succeed in sales, you're probably going to be doing either complex B2B, multiple decision makers, probably somewhat more complicated products where buyers need guidance. We see the research from Gartner and others. Buyers are actually trying to avoid us, but yet then, when they do avoid us and make a purchase decision, there is at least a good number of them who have purchased regret because they didn't get counsel from a good salesperson who could have helped them make a great decision.
Speaker 1:But for the transactional stuff AI can handle that because it's just information asymmetry reduction. They want to make sure that they know what the vendor knows and AI can get them there for a single product, single buyer type situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's absolutely coming. It's probably close to being here. The thing that's going to slow that down, unfortunately again kind of the Dunning-Kruger bucket is the incredibly poor use of AI and how I see it being used with poor automation right now, and part of that is the same kind of I'm not your ICP thing where in my past I worked for a B2B insurance company supporting their sales force. So in my LinkedIn profile or in my resume the words insurance are in there, and so I get approaches from people trying to sell me things that someone who runs an insurance agency would buy. Oh wow, I know. When I get those, I know that is somebody just scraping my profile to pick up on the word insurance and then I am bombarded with these messages and you know, once again, remember Money for Nothing with Dire Straits. You remember that song?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, I'm not your ICP, I'm going to rewrite that song with that lyric, right? You know, instead of what is it the MTV lyric? You know I'm not your ICP and for all of your listeners, I'm not going to try to sing that of your listeners, I'm not going to try to sing that. But that's the crazy bad implementation of AI and automation right now and that's going to slow down, I think, the effective use of AI and automation for the masses, the people again right side of the bell curve or that power law distribution, they are using AI very effectively, right? I have gone to some AI tools and you know asked about companies and asked about personas and you know, talked about trying to get messaging right and you know it spits out some pretty interesting things. I don't think there's once I've actually taken it verbatim without using my own brain and trying to customize it or personalize it or ask other questions. But the amount of information that generative AI can spit at you and the time it can save you from writing things or looking things up is really pretty compelling. But there are so many poor uses of it right now that again we are. If you look at B2B buyer research, buyers are really getting sick of salespeople and our approaches. And what kills me, corey, is that means that there is such an opportunity to create competitive differentiation in your company.
Speaker 2:If you can just get your Salesforce to operate differently, if you can teach your managers to manage and coach more effectively, you can build a real revenue machine, and I see companies do this.
Speaker 2:I've got a client who God bless them they have taken almost every bit of advice I could give them.
Speaker 2:They've also done their own research, but then they execute like mad. In last year they closed their best year ever and this year they're going to beat that client who I have given all of the same advice to sales management operating systems and getting your managers engaged in training and figuring out what are the management activities they should be doing, what are the best practices for each, what's the cadence they should get into teaching, the difference on training and coaching and feedback and when to use each. And then, how about we teach managers what to do with the report? I remember at GE they had a massive amount of reporting and data as they started to talk with managers. Everybody had their own thing that they looked at, but nobody was thinking about how do I take this data and figure out what this means in terms of what my sellers are doing and where they might need help to do better, and so we actually created training around how to interpret reports and how to use it to diagnose your people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's huge and they don't. And people don't learn that mechanically now or as part of a process. They just say, hey, here's a bunch of reports or you can go ask operations to build you something or anything like that, and then they're bombarded with all in a haystack. But if you're looking at the report and win rates, stage duration, conversion rates from stage to stage, whatever you need to look at from a metrics perspective then you can go into the call and surgically look for something instead of just be like oh, look at me, I'm listening to calls, I'm coaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've always been so aligned on that. I don't know if I can have this make sense without a visual, but imagine a report that has the sales stages, the number of opportunities in these stages, and think of it as a look back report maybe two or three times looking back of the average sales cycle, whatever that is for the company. And then imagine you've got the conversion ratios for each stage. Now take an anonymous group of top performers, people known to produce at high levels, and put their stages, their numbers of opportunities in each stage and the conversion ratios on the top of the report. Then take an anonymous group of people that are known to be middle producers and do the same thing right under it. And then do that same analysis on a manager's team, with the team averages and then, below that, each person's stats.
Speaker 2:Now you can start with the people, put your finger on a stage and run up that report and say how is this person, what's the number of opportunities and number of leads that they're generating in this stage, how many of those are converting to stage two, and you could compare it to the average and this anonymous group of top producers and, all of a sudden, where this person probably needs help is almost glaringly obvious. This person probably needs help is almost glaringly obvious. You can look at that and say, hey, you know, bob has got a ton of opportunities in stage two. He's doing just as well as the average and almost as good as some of the top people, but his conversion ratios between stage two and stage three are almost 20% less than even average. What's happening there Now? Imagine you have conversation intelligence reporting and I can't imagine with conversation intelligence using it the way that I hear people talk about it Managers just like randomly listening to calls and all that.
Speaker 1:It's so dumb.
Speaker 2:It's so dumb right, if you have a library of these things and now you need to go hear what's Bob doing in stage two to move deals forward to stage three, I can go hunt that down in that library and listen to a couple of calls and then I can say to Bob, rather than what the average manager says hey Bob, I'm free next Tuesday. Where are we going? You can say hey, bob, I want to meet with you when you're meeting with clients in stage two. When can we arrange that? What have you got coming up?
Speaker 2:And now surgically to use your term, right, I am surgically figuring out where Bob probably needs some help. I'm listening to some calls to get a sense before I even go in and then I'm going in on a live call to see what's really happening. Now I can begin to assess does Bob not know what, why and how to do something? Because if not, then I can field train first. If Bob knows what, why and how, but just needs to do it better, I can start to coach. If he thinks he is doing it, but he isn't, I can provide some feedback and help him see that I can start to do things as a manager that will help Bob develop better behaviors and habits and skills.
Speaker 2:And then that moves the needle across all of Bob's deals, not just one deal, and you know very well how most managers manage or how they coach right, how most managers manage or how they coach right, if they fire off rapid fire feedback about one specific thing and one specific deal, rather than step back and take a developmental view of the data, of the behavior, of the skills. And then who actually gets people to practice? Oh my God right. Wouldn't that be horrible if people had to role play and practice and do deliberate practice and developer skills again, because it raises the water level across all their deals, not just opportunistically helps them in a one given situation where you have fired off quick feedback. Wouldn't that be a neat world. Maybe I should talk to somebody who uses code CRM, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, practice, man. I'm telling you that every high-end profession practices. You actually call it practicing law and practicing medicine. Yeah, Isn't that funny. And then what do all the football players? What is everybody doing today? They're reading their, not everybody. What are all my friends doing today? They're reading, not everybody. What are all my friends doing today? They're all reading their injury reports, trying to figure out. The guy I'm playing in fantasy this week has six guys on his team hurt. Five of them are questionable. So I can guarantee you right now he's reading his injury report, trying to figure out if the guy practiced yesterday or not. Because if he didn't practice yesterday, if he didn't practice today, then he're probably not going to play on Sunday.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Well, you let your salespeople play every day. Are they practicing?
Speaker 2:Of course they're not, because we wouldn't want to be like musicians, pro dancers, olympians, sports pros or anyone else in the performance profession. We just want to go out there and wing it, anyone else in the performance profession, we just want to go out there and wing it. And that whole mindset again, we could probably bring that back to the whole Dunning-Kruger conversation right, that whole mindset is what really holds us back.
Speaker 1:Oh, here's the one that gets me. I know you've heard this phrase before. Tell me if you've heard it as often as I have. You know this would have really helped when I started. Yeah, absolutely, I hear that so much. I'll hear that from people that are six months into a role. I'll hear it from people one month into a role. I'll hear it from people one week into a role, like when you started a week ago. But now you're good, you made it.
Speaker 1:That's the Dunning-Kruger effect, and so if you've got people on your team out there and they're saying things like that, that's a great symptom that they're struggling with some of the things that we're talking about. And if the management team isn't well positioned to what Mike's talking about, which is really run a strong diagnosis and leverage the data tools that you've got available to you to pinpoint what the root cause of the problem is, instead of just nitpicking some little things that pop up here and there, because you can nitpick anything, that's easy. You can look at anybody's pipeline, anybody's call, and you can find something wrong with it. But is that going to move the needle on something material? And if you go nitpick, how does that feel when your boss nitpicks. You Sucks. Nobody likes it. So how does it feel to them? It doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Well, you've said two of my favorite words, although they're hyphenated. Right, root cause. Right back to critical thinking, right back to diagnostics. Right, if you can use the 5Y technique, if you can use what I call Rome analysis, what are your results versus your objectives? Right, and whatever the results are less than the objective, then you have to make an assessment. Is it enough that, if I fix it, it'll matter? But that starts to give you a place to go poke in. You're not even making a hypothesis yet. You've just identified where Then you can look at the activities they're doing in that where, whatever it is, are they doing the right activities with the right people in the right quantities?
Speaker 2:Maybe, if it matters, are they doing it at the right time, like you know, in the right location? Right, but you're looking at what they're actually doing, how much they're doing it and with whom. You can often fix a problem by fixing their activities or their activity level or who they're working with. But if you can't, then you go on to methodology, and that's the ROAM. What's the methodology? You can find it in there and then you can again determine do they not know what, why and how to do it? Then you train them. Do they know what, why and how, but need to do it better? You coach them. Do they think they're doing it, but you train them? Do they know what, why and how, but need to do it better? You coach them. Do they think they're doing it, but they're not? You can provide some feedback and explain it better.
Speaker 2:And then there are a whole host of other things that training and coaching won't fix. Are they getting rewarded for doing something that isn't producing a result? Well then, you have to play with consequences, right? You know there's a whole series of consequence things. Is there some other constraint? First of all, is it a goal that no one could meet? Is you know? Is there something else in the organization that is preventing them from being successful? Are there other types of constraints? Is it a capacity problem for them? Do they just not have the capability to do it? You can look at other factors. Training and coaching won't fix all problems, but you have to identify the root cause so you know what the right solution is.
Speaker 2:And again, I just don't broadly see that kind of critical thinking and diagnostic thinking across our sales management force, and that to me, if I were running a sales force today I often joke on webinars. If I had a buck to spend on sales training, I'd spend 75 cents on the managers. If you can get the managers to operate at a higher level of effectiveness again, it's going to raise the waterline across the organization. I'm not saying don't focus on your account executives. They need onboarding and they need training and they need content materials and probably to understand their buyers a whole lot better. They need all those things that we do in sales enablement. But if you're not also enabling your sales managers, you're missing the entire boat, because they're the lever for performance, they're the lever for change in any organization and they're the ones who are going to help the reps get where they need to go. So that's to me. They're just that. It's that performance lever for change in any organization.
Speaker 2:Frontline sales managers Tell me how often you've seen this. So much stuff is thrown at these frontline sales managers. Tell me how often you've seen this. So much stuff is thrown at these frontline sales managers that has nothing to do with actually diagnosing or improving the performance of their team, that they use the battle cry I don't have time to coach or I don't have time to do this, and that's a failing of senior leadership, that we, that we do this yeah, that's crazy, there's too much, yeah, there's too much stuff.
Speaker 1:And and then time management isn't trained or coached by the second line leaders. And so I think there's there's a couple things right. So one you look at their calendars. I'm sure you see this a lot, where you've got oh, I've got one-on-ones that I run Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays they're all over the place. And then you've got, oh, I've got one-on-ones that I run Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays they're all over the place. And then you've got these product marketing meetings and something with marketing and some of those sales developments. So they don't do a good job of time management, so they're at a deficit out of the gate.
Speaker 1:And then you talked about the analytics. You know there's skill set issues around. How do we do things like that? How do we identify root causes? And then they've got this pressure that's outside of the methodology, for example, of I don't care how we get there, we just need to hit the number this month, because you know somebody above me told me that and then all of a sudden you just throw everything out the window and you just run after, and I think that there's a couple of shortcuts that I've been working with people on recently I say, look, there's a lot of stuff because a lot of these people going back to the Dunning-Gruger piece coming out of 2021, everyone was a hero. You could. You got people that couldn't close a door that were written quota.
Speaker 1:And then they think they're great, like, oh, look at me, I'm a great salesperson. And then all of a sudden that doesn't work anymore. So and some of those people are managers now. So what I'm saying is like if you can get the managers just good at diagnosis and if you get the reps just good at pre-meeting prep, like just go do that in december and then you can come back in january and go, do, go, do everything else.
Speaker 1:But if you can diagnose the root cause of a problem as a manager using analytics, using your crm qualitative data, using what you're seeing in the calls and what you're hearing from people, you can diagnose the root cause of a problem as a manager using analytics, using your CRM qualitative data, using what you're seeing in the calls and what you're hearing from people directly Great. And as a rep, your manager's hearing all these things, seeing all these things. Well, you're not going to coach on five things at once, but you can take five things and incorporate that into one thing that you're coaching, which is pre-meeting prep around customer stories, anticipating objections, discovery, questions that you want to ask, competitive positioning, setting your next steps the line with your process, whatever. So those two things are just what I've been working with folks on to just simplify the now and then be able to build on later. Curious your thoughts there.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you're spot on, and one of the things that I've always respected about you, corey and I'd say this about Hillman too is the really clear thinking and cutting through all of the noise to get to the things that matter it. If you can get a rep to do call planning and then you can have them do phenomenal discovery, you can screw up almost a dozen things after that and still win the deal, because a phenomenal discovery will actually help the buyer make great decisions. If you do it well, If you're doing that current state, desired future state, if you're helping them see the impacts and the outcomes right, buyers will connect the dots on their own, even from that point forward, if the salesperson can't help them connect them right. And that to me, if you get pre-call planning, if you have an objective and a backup objective, if you're incorporating what matters to your buyers, if you're starting meetings and then running them effectively so you can execute against your plan and then, at the end of it, have time to talk about what we talk about, what decisions got made, what are the open issues, what are our next steps, who's going to do them, and then, ham-bam, have a meeting book, a meeting to keep momentum.
Speaker 2:If you can plan calls and run calls and do great discovery, it takes care of so many other things downstream. You can still learn how to do those things more effectively and you could over time right. But if you can get that stuff right, so much of rest of it will take almost take care of itself. So I know what I want to. I want to.
Speaker 1:I want to highlight one thing you said which I love, which is this idea of the backup objective, because I also see a lot of times where, okay, so one of two situations happens either a salesperson goes into a meeting. It doesn't go exactly how they thought it would, so they get frazzled and lose control, or there's these four-legged meetings where the manager wants to come in and do the job, do the rep's job for them, and the minute something goes a little off plan, manager jumps in and takes over and rep just sits there and smiles and nods the whole time, which is a. Players don't tolerate it, so they leave. C players love it, so they. So you just end up with the TMC players.
Speaker 1:But if you have a backup objective, you say, look, here's what could go wrong, here's where and I'm not talking about simple objection handling like your price is too high, I'm talking about things that could legitimately derail the meeting. Well, what are those in your business and how would you react to them If you plan for them advanced? That's what NFL teams are doing today on Friday, as they're waiting for Sunday, their assistant coaches have the game film out there, they understand what the opposing team's defense looks like and they're getting ready to run these plays. And when defense shifts formation, how do we shift our offense in response to that? And if your sales team's not doing that again, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right, and I'd agree on the manager thing as well. Right, if you can teach them diagnostics and how to get the root causes, again, you can fumble some things after that. Maybe you don't do the training perfectly, maybe you don't help from when you're coaching, you're not as much trying to draw things out from them. Maybe you bumble some of those things. You can get better at them. But if you hit on the root cause and you can help them fix that thing, then you're going to help lift their performance, as opposed to coaching opportunistically, which again is okay. If you happen to see something, you can coach it, but then basically you're doing performance improvement by luck. Yeah, and that's not how you're really going to produce repeatable, replicable, scalable, predictable results, right, then you're just rolling the dice Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can have the best executed coaching conversation in the world on the dumbest topic and you're not going to move the needle on anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. So knowing where to focus and getting salespeople doing great planning and great discovery. I don't know if I ever shared this. I remember a company and I can't remember for sure. I think it might've been IBM. I don't know if I ever shared this. I remember a company and I can't remember for sure. I think it might have been IBM.
Speaker 2:I was at a conference and I was watching this presentation and the two folks presenting said you know, we noticed something in our company. We have these two guys who were probably 250% above everybody else in the company. They were just like so far outperforming and we thought, well, we should study these guys and see what they're doing differently. So they study them and they watch them and they look at people in the middle of the pack and they can't find anything. And they can't find anything and they're like starting to scramble. And then they noticed this one thing these guys did an inordinate amount of sales call planning and then executed their plans.
Speaker 2:But they did a lot of planning. They researched the buyers, they researched the company. They were even looking at company mission, vision, values and trying to incorporate the company's language in the conversations. They did all of this planning far more than anybody else in the organization, two hundred and fifty percent ahead of everybody else. There was, like you know, you look at the stack of performers and all of a sudden there's this massive gap and then there are these two guys in. One of these guys trained the other, trained the other, oh wow. And so they started teaching what these guys were doing sales call planning across the organization and the lift they got was phenomenal.
Speaker 1:And it was planning and that was the single differentiator for these two really top. It makes a world of difference. I had a meeting the other day. That was a pretty big meeting. It was eight executives from the prospect organization for an hour and a half going through some stuff in pretty great detail. I was planning it down to. I had three phrases I wanted to make sure I got out of my mouth at some point in that meeting Not common things that I say, it's really things just meant to plant the seed of urgency and it worked. So we got a deal done this year where originally the conversation was to do something next year.
Speaker 1:So it's funny, the Dunning-Kruger piece. The next day I was working with a sales management team and they were telling me oh yeah, my team's not really planning for meetings. Well, what's your win rate? 20 something, percent, okay, well, is that concerning at all? It drops to win rate. You know it's just like a higher gross margin drops to net income. I hear pre-meeting planning efficacy drops to win rate, which then translates to good financial metrics. But I mean again, do these people know accounting? Do you understand that there's so much in it? And then you get the. I love the. The guys are our friends the the one day sales training consultants that are like people shouldn't have to go to college. You know, just blah, blah, blah, slogan, slogan, slogan. Like dude, there is so much that you need to know in this world to be really good and you're not going to pick it up.
Speaker 1:Watching the real housewives, yeah, maybe. Maybe if matt cannon named his book the Real Housewives of Consultative Selling, more people would understand it.
Speaker 2:Amen, brother. Yeah, there are two things that really puzzle me. Well, that's not true. There are a bazillion things that really puzzle me, but two that stand out hearing that story are the stunning lack of business acumen in most sales forces and the complete lack of training in most cases on even how to negotiate. Now, I'm not a believer and some people are that every time you're eyeball to eyeball, belly button to belly button, toe to toe with another human being, you're negotiating. That might be true in some cases in life in general, You're negotiating where you're going to go to dinner and what movie to see, and blah, blah, blah. But in a business situation, if you don't finish the selling job first and understand value and connect needs and solutions, and if you don't do that first and you let a buyer push you into negotiating, you're almost always gonna be giving away things money, time, whatever that you don't need to give away.
Speaker 1:You're negotiating against yourself at that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Right, so finish the selling job. But then you do have to understand how to negotiate effectively and the two things that I consistently see that sales leaders don't seem to give a hoot about business acumen and negotiating skills. Yeah, and that is incredibly puzzling to me, because I don't know how you would sell into even director level but certainly executive level buyers without having the business acumen to talk about their language or to even understand what their value drivers are. Are they the business value, financial or operational metrics? Is it an experience? Is it experiential value? Customer experience, candidate experience, employee experience Is it something aspirational, mission, vision, values, dei, sustainability.
Speaker 2:And what are the personal drivers? Some people don't trust you enough to share them, but everybody has personal skin in the game and something that trust you enough to share them. But everybody has personal skin in the game and something that's either going to help them or hurt them. Is it all the jolt research right now about fear of messing up actually being greater than the fear of missing out? What is it in there for this person? If you don't have any sense of those value drivers, you can't communicate to people in a way that resonates for them or is compelling for them, right, and you figured out with this particular client what were some of the key phrases and things that you wanted to come out of your mouth, and I can guarantee you did that because you knew that that was something important to them or that would resonate with them based on conversations, right. And so you tied into and honed in to their value drivers.
Speaker 2:And if you're in a meeting with five executives and you're in stage two, they might all have the same value drivers and they might also have this other geeky thing the same exit criteria, right? Or? What do they need to see, hear, feel, understand or believe in that stage to move forward to the next, so they all might have the same. And then in stage three, those, those people, based on their roles, might all have different value drivers and different exit criteria. All have different value drivers and different exit criteria.
Speaker 2:What does the average salesperson do? They sell the same way, the same time, to everybody in that stage, hoping that that's going to work, and they don't figure out what matters to this person in this stage. What are the things they need to see, hear, feel, understand or believe to be comfortable, to move forward to the next stage and treat them all as separate individuals. And then you've got to uncover, clarify, get to the root cause, deliver something that you believe will satisfy their exit criteria, and here's the thing they miss actually confirm with them purposely, that you did in fact satisfy it. And I have seen that simple concept of exit criteria alone make a massive difference in managing complex opportunities. But I just don't hear about that happening very often. Do you run into people doing that?
Speaker 1:No, I mean the best people, but yeah, the people that come to me crying that the world's on fire and shaking little, say, and the sky's falling and I need help. No, they're not doing that, they're, they're back at. We need to figure out how to do discovery and get our managers coaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so again that you have to get.
Speaker 1:Or they say when it comes to negotiation, you know people will say stuff like oh, they want a discount. I was like, cool, who's they? Oh well, you know, whoever asked me for it, okay, cool. So if that person gets a discount, what's in it for that person, I don't know. Well, they're not getting a bonus. I know that they're going to go brag around and be like, oh, I beat up a little Timmy for 30% on the software. I just like what's? Why did they want a discount and what can we offer in exchange to protect our price? Like, what else do they want? What they actually want?
Speaker 1:Because I guarantee you someone that is not getting bonused on procurement doesn't care if the company spends x dollars or y dollars. It truly just doesn't matter. Unless there's some kind of status thing in there or something like that, well, I don't want to ask finance for money this year, okay cool, can they get some of it this year? Or unless there's some kind of status thing in there or something like that, well, I don't want to ask finance for money this year, okay cool, can I get some of it this year and some of it next year? I didn't ask. I swear when you go inspect this stuff. The most common answer by ninefold is I didn't ask.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a rep once in an IoT group that was talking to a retailer and the retailer's primary goal was reducing shrinkage, which is the retail plate term for shoplifting right.
Speaker 1:The San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, leaving the store with stuff that they hadn't paid for, and so their goal was to reduce it by 3%. And so the rep comes out of this meeting and I said, well, that's really interesting, the 3%. What does that mean to them? How's that translate into money, I don't know? So you think that would be an interesting thing to find out. It turned out to be some astronomical millions of dollars figure, and their solution that would help them do that was $250,000. Now, $250,000, right, sounds like a lot of money, but when $250,000 saves you $12 million, it's pretty much a no brainer. And but 3% doesn't help you do that, right, yeah, what does? What the hell does 3% mean? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Can't buy a boat with 3%.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, so that's. That's the stuff that I'm, I'm, I'm seeing out there, and no surprise that we're seeing the same stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the common theme is that there's always more, and it's one of those things where you look at everyone. You know everyone went to school for at least high school. That's 12 grades and a lot of people to college for another four, and a lot of people did more after that. Every year you show up and there's this thing that's harder, that's new, that's printed out in some 600 000 page book. Well, what happens when you stop showing up every year and having that experience? The content still exists, it's still out there. Somebody's not spoon feeding it to you. And all the things that we're talking about today are not hard. It's not rocket science.
Speaker 1:I always ask people what one of the things things that I like to do when we're doing sales training with Closed Loop is. I'll start it off and I'll say does anybody know what mitochondria is? And then they're all like, oh yeah, powerhouse itself. Does anybody know what photosynthesis is? I'm like cool, like all right, well, y'all learned that stuff a long time ago and it's way more complex than what we're doing today. So does it make sense that we're going to lean in, use the same learning method that you applied to learn all that really hard stuff and somehow remember it for years and not get flustered that there's new content being thrown at you and all of a sudden it just knocks the room down a level and they're like, okay, yeah, maybe I have done this. Just my, my employer has failed to teach me anything new for the last four years that was outside of a sentence or two of content, so maybe I haven't worked those muscles recently. I always find that to be humorous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is the concept of a lifelong learner and someone who's constantly trying to absorb new things is, I don't know statistically, but it seems to me that there were fewer people who were really hungry to learn and really hungry to absorb things and want to apply that on a daily basis. I'm just talking, or LinkedIn, talking, to Dave Curlin today, one of his posts, and you know, dave was a trumpet player, one of my mentors, dave Stein, who's retired today. He was a trumpet player. I have two degrees in music.
Speaker 2:I was a trombone player and when I first got into sales my first job I got out of music. I said this isn't what I want to do with my life. I'm not sure what it was and I answered an ad in the Allentown newspaper, the Morning Call. This was so long ago that I was looking at classified ads in the newspaper that I was thin and had hair and I took this job that talked about answering telephones and helping customers and it turned out to be an inside sales gig and I sucked. I mean I had just spent, you know, like eight hours a day in a practice room to music school and was playing professionally and in, you know, dance bands and symphonies and you know, talking to people and customers on the phone and doing anything relative to selling all foreign concepts for me. But God bless this guy, jeffrey Walden. I owe my career to him. He's passed since, but he saw something in me and put me under his wing and he trained and coached me and what I did was I applied everything I had learned in music and they didn't use this term then, but really it was deliberate practice. So I bought an audio cassette player and I bought a big VHS videotape player Remember the kind you used to have to carry around on your shoulder and I bought a big VHS video tape player Remember the kind you used to have to carry around on your shoulder and I bought a tripod and I practiced and drilled and rehearsed. And I bought all these Nightingale Conant tape sets and listened to them and listened to them in the car. You know Dennis Waitley and Zig Ziglar and Mike Wicket and you know all these tapes. And I practiced Const and I practiced constantly. I practiced by myself, role play with other people and I got good and this guy's training and coaching really, really worked for me and eventually I ran his business forum for a couple of years. He was sort of became an absentee owner and then I realized you don't get promoted to owner.
Speaker 2:And I got in corporate America and got into a sales office. That was one of the lower performing offices in the division and I did two things in that office. I gave everybody a day protected from walk-in traffic. I was running a branch and on that day they did nothing but prospect all day long. Didn't relieve them from prospecting on other days, but they had a dedicated protected day prospecting. And the other thing I did was that sometime during the day sometimes twice morning, lunch near the end of the day, we role played and they hated my guts for about three months and at the end of three months they started doing so well that we became the most improved branch in the division and we ended that year 600% year over year improvement, wow. And then the company said, hey, can you teach other people how to do that? And I said, sure, I can. And that's how I got into training love it.
Speaker 1:That's a great story yeah.
Speaker 2:So the practice, drill, rehearse piece, and then this guy taking me under his wing and training and coaching me, which really stuck with me about the importance of training and coaching. I was really lucky to get that start. The other thing I think that shaped probably the rest of my career was this first corporation that I got into where we did the year-over-year improvement. When I got into training these guys said look, you blew us away in that office. We want you to help other people learn to do this. They gave me a lot of free reign on what to do, but the one thing they said to me was look, we need to know that we're getting a return on investment for what we're putting into. Whatever you develop and start training. I said, okay, and the first training gig that I ever had 1991, I had no idea that most of the training world wasn't actually producing bottom line business results. I just thought, oh, this is what I have to do. So I started researching training and development and coaching and how you measure ROI and do that kind of analysis and put all that kind of stuff in place and started to build some things and sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't, but it was like a learning laboratory, so I kept tweaking things until I figured out how to get results. And, of course, the one thing I learned was training itself wasn't enough. You had to have coaching and it had to be reinforcement.
Speaker 2:Managers had to actually know what you were teaching people, because at first we had this onboarding program, people were like leaping out of it. We actually had them in a phone bank selling the last three days of this two-week program and they left with stuff in their pipelines they go back to the office. They took off like a rocket. In 120 days they were outperforming a control group of five years. But then this weird thing happened they started to level off and the performance started to dip down to average. And so I got on a plane and I started going around the office as they were in and I figured out that the managers that we were sending them back to didn't know all of this new stuff that we were teaching them, and they started to coach them back to the level of performance of everybody else in the office. Wow, and that was a light bulb moment for me as a young person in training, where I realized I have to teach all of these managers what we're doing differently and have to help them be able to train and coach, and so we created a program to do that and we got the managers involved and engaged. We lifted the performance back up for those people and everybody else in the branch and that got me promoted to run this program for the whole company and that experience was really eye-opening for me, and the first gig forcing me to figure out how do you move the needle and then how do you track it and prove it shaped the whole rest of my career.
Speaker 2:So that's why I can talk to you about this stuff today and we can have cool conversations like this, because I guess I was really lucky in the beginning, but I also worked my butt off to figure this stuff out and I would like to see more of the people in our profession being able to have these stories and talk with you or the next generation about this stuff, really starting to understand how do you get results with sales enablement or whatever we call it, how do you move the needle on the metrics that matter most in an organization and how do we learn about organizational performance improvement. I mean, I think about the sales enablement profession almost feeling like they're hatching an egg in doing this stuff for the very first time. And there's business performance BPM, business performance management. There's organization design, organization development, lean in, six Sigma, total quality management. I could go on. All of these performance improvement disciplines have existed for years. You can get a degree in organizational behavior, organization development, organization design, and most of us in sales enablement aren't really exploring all of these things Just now.
Speaker 2:I'm really starting to see somewhat of a surge around the concept of managing change and enablement being change management. That's the stuff I've been doing for 30 years. It's how I got the results that I got, and so I'd love to see us find a way to raise the water level on these things to help managers better understand performance improvement, the diagnostic stuff we're talking about. If we can do that and you're doing a ton through your podcast and the work that you do but if we could somehow find a way for all of us to kind of lift the water level, I'd love to have that kind of impact kind of on the time I've got left in my career. We could just figure out how to get more people doing these things that we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, I love it, mike. That's a great, great vision. I think you're doing it and, to wrap it all up, we're taking people from that left side of the Dunning-Kruger and we're pushing them all the way over to the right. If people want a visual for this, just Google Dunning-Kruger model. There's a bunch of diagrams on Google Images. I almost said, yahoo, wow, what century am I living in? Jeez, google Images. And then no, this has been awesome, mike. How can people reach out to you? Is there anything that you want to plug as we let go today?
Speaker 2:Sure, thanks. Yeah, I mean LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. It's Mike Kunkel K-U-N-K-L-E. If you Google my name and the word sales, I think I own the first 10 pages of Google at this point. I've been around since the dawn of time. So you know I work at Sparks IQ and you know we do sales training and sales coaching training and you know, help people think through performance improvement with advisory services. So reach out, happy to get connected, and even if you don't need anything or don't want to work with me, reach out on LinkedIn and I'd be happy to connect with anybody who's interested in this kind of work and likes to talk about these kinds of things. So thank you, corey, it's been a real blast today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks a lot, mike, and check us out coachcrmcom. Follow us on Apple Spotify Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time, thanks,