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Hey everyone, Jason Marks here.
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Welcome to a bonus episode of the Technology Economy.
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I went back into the archive for this one.
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These are two excerpts from my Take 45 interview with Cisco, recorded during the early pandemic.
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We've trimmed the conversation to focus on two ideas that still matter.
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Doing discovery before you start pitching, and connecting what a technology actually does to a business outcome.
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You'll hear some references to that period and some older product examples.
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This is an archival conversation, not a current product guide.
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First, why asking better questions matters?
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Then, why understanding the solution is part of understanding the customer's business?
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Let's get into it.
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Yeah, I mean that's a big question.
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So let me let me start with this.
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The sales process has changed in some ways, but I want to even talk about before COVID, right?
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Before COVID, if I could say, well, what's the biggest issue you see with IT sales, just in general, I would tell you that no one, almost no one, had a very formalized sales process.
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And here's why I think it is.
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You know, there are all of these great sales trainers, and they are exciting, and they do have this, you know, way of getting you built up, but every one of them has their own little tweak, their own little sales process.
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I've read about, I think I'm up to like 73 different sales books at this point.
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And what I have found out is everybody kind of says similar things, but there's definitely spins on it, and it gets really confusing as a rep.
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And none of it, none of it, is actually put into our language.
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None of it would be like, you know, ask me the discovery questions to sell a multi-factor deal.
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You know, what are they?
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What are those actual questions?
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What are the objections I'm gonna hear?
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How can I handle that objection?
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What's an EA?
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How do I sell it?
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What's financial selling and our business?
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That is to me, you know, kind of the thing I've seen forever.
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So even with COVID, I think some things haven't changed and some things have.
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Let's start with what hasn't changed.
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You know, just best practices that if you've been in a training with me, you know that I preach this stuff because I believe in repeatable sales process.
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So, number one, biggest thing is you take a training with me, you're gonna find out I'm a big believer in discovery comes before selling.
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Now that may seem obvious, but I'm telling you, I observe salespeople all day.
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Most people actually sell before they, you know, ask the right questions.
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So it's getting people to understand things like, hey, here's a customer, and I really want to understand all the things they have from a technology footprint perspective.
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I want to do that first.
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So I'm gonna ask questions like tell me about your IT infrastructure, tell me about your security environment.
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But then I need to get down into the specific questions like, oh, you mentioned you have these types of firewalls.
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Well, how long have you had them?
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How many do you have?
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Where are they located?
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What version is this?
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And essentially, what we do is I'll teach this discovery process.
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We build it into a heat map, which I know a lot of the partners out there have seen or they have.
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My heat map, though, to be to be clear, it takes you across all the things that your customers buy.
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So, one of the tricks I do in a training, um, often in a training, I'll get somebody who kind of comes in like this.
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You know, they're they're a little grumpy, they're like, oh man, it's another sales training, this is gonna suck.
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So I have to kind of get in their face a little bit.
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And what I do is I'll take that rep, uh, you especially the senior rep, the person who thinks, I know everything about sales, and I'll ask them a simple question.
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Give me the name of your best customer.
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And they pick a customer, and then I'll go through and I'll go, okay, well, what type of access layer switches do they have?
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Um, what's their licensing on those?
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What's their core switch?
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What do they have for network analytics?
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What's their sim?
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What's their multi-factor solution?
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What are they doing for call center?
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And the point is, very quickly, I'm gonna tell you every time, every time, they don't know something.
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We get to a point where they go, actually, I don't know what they have for that.
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I don't know why they're doing that, I don't know what version that is.
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So here's the problem with that.
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I call that the white, the I don't knows in your heat map.
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How hard is it, guys, to sell something if you don't know what the customer already has for it?
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It's impossible.
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So when I say this to people, even senior reps, I go, you know, that is pretty obvious.
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So then I wonder, well, why is it that they haven't gotten their arms around it?
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And there's a lot of reasons.
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Some is they're very siloed in an account.
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Two, they don't know what the questions are.
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Three, they're not comfortable with the technology enough to even ask some basic questions.
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So in a training, when I figure out that that's where my group is, those are some of the first things I try to fix.
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And I'm just talking to every salesperson out there.
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You want to sell more Cisco?
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Find out first what your customer has across all the different things Cisco sells.
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Cisco has about 70 different types of solutions.
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Now, are you gonna do this in one meeting?
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No.
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But discovery is like a journey.
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Every time I show up for a meeting, even if the meeting's project based, like the customer's like, hey, we're here today to talk about that wireless project.
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I'm always thinking, well, here's my heat map.
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I don't know what their phone system is.
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So somehow I'll ask a question to find out that info.
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Like, I'll I'll kind of work it around.
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I'd be like, so is the wireless going to be used at all for your phone system?
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Do you have any wireless handsets?
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Is that a consideration?
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What is your phone system, by the way?
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Point is, I'm leaving the meeting every time, I'm finding out new things.
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And as you ask these discovery questions, lo and behold, you find more opportunities.
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This is where I think specifically, why if I go back to a partner who's done a training with me, their numbers go up.
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Does this mean that everybody who takes a training with me leaves and follows my sales process?
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No.
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Um, I wish, right?
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But when I go into a training, if I had a group of 100 people, my mindset is I just want to affect change with 10 of them.
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Just 10 of them can make a massive difference, right?
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One new deal pays for their time to be here.
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And that's how I think about it.
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But this stuff takes practice.
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You know, it's easy on the surface to say here's a list of questions.
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But you got to get good enough at it to understand the technology, to make it sound relatable, to make it conversational.
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So that is one thing on the sales process that has not changed.
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When you're engaging with somebody who is in a remote work situation, especially an IT team, the process of asking discovery questions before sales questions is super critical.
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Um, and here's a list.
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Let me just give you a couple examples.
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So here's discovery questions, and then here's a list of opportunity phase questions, or what I would call sales questions.
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So, discovery question would be tell me what your firewalls are.
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Uh, how long have you had them?
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How many do you have?
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Now, let's say the customer says they're five years old, they're seven years old, I don't like them.
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Most salespeople, before they've been in training with me, will immediately jump on that opportunity and they'll say something like, Well, have you thought about refreshing this?
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That's wrong.
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I just want to be clear, that is wrong.
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That's what a lot of people do, but it's wrong.
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Why is it wrong?
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Because I can prove this out to you.
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Statistically, you've now drilled into one opportunity and you really don't understand the whole landscape.
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So you're limiting yourself and you're also psychologically showing your customer that you just care about selling something.
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You don't really care about their environment, you don't really care about getting your arms around the whole thing.
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So we got to make sure we've done a good enough job or we get the customer hint that it's time to move on with discovery before we move into the opportunity phase.
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And that does take practice, but I promise you, if you could just take this nugget away from today,
you're gonna be talking to customers remotely.
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We gotta find out more about them.
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We are not asking enough.
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We need to find out from a sales process perspective, down to an end user, what device they have.
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Those are questions we didn't even ask before, think about.
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How's that device connecting to their internet?
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Is it wireless?
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Has their company provided that internet connection at their house?
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Is there some kind of mandated bandwidth?
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Are they doing VDI?
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Are they mostly doing SaaS?
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Are they doing VPN?
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Is it a combination of them all?
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Then we got to talk about the connectivity at the site, the main site.
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How are we getting back into the headquarters?
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How are we securing that?
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How are we securing that end user?
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In a much more detailed way than I think most people are comfortable with.
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But when we ask these, most of our customers, especially our IT customers, they're fine answering these questions.
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In fact, I had people tell me all the time, like, oh, I was a little worried about this, but they told me everything I asked, and it was no big deal.
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Um, and I found more opportunity.
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So that's how I think sales process should have always gone.
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Now I think the only difference is during this time, it is absolutely more critical to follow these things and do this the right way than it ever has been before.
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Okay, I don't think it changes it.
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I think it puts more emphasis on what they always needed to know.
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I'm gonna tell you this, um, and I like to kind of be in your face a little bit.
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I'm a guy that challenges people in my trainings, and not everybody likes me.
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That's cool.
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I'm here to help people, not to necessarily always make friends.
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Um, so I do, I push people, I challenge them, and one of the things that I often do is I'll say to people, So, what's your biggest strength, what's your biggest weakness?
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Across the board with salespeople, I'm gonna say more than 80 to 90 percent of the time, because I have a slide that gives a list of 20-some sales skills.
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Here it is.
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A lot of people, I think almost 80% of them say product knowledge.
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And then I ask a question, like, well, how important do you think product knowledge is?
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Here's the answers I get.
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I get things like, well, it's not that important, you know.
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I have engineers that do all of that for me.
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Or, well, I guess you gotta know it a little bit, but not that much.
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Or, look, man, I'm just the dumb sales guy, I got engineers for that.
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Which, by the way, can we all just like never say that again?
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Like, I hate when people say, I am the dumb sales guy.
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You are the masterful relationship builder, you should be a business expert, you should be a financial selling expert, a negotiating expert.
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It takes a very high level of intelligence.
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So maybe technology and engineering isn't your thing.
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Here's the deal: people keep saying, Jason, they gotta sell the business outcome.
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I did this training on business outcomes training, and here's what I found out.
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You can't sell a business outcome if you don't know what the solution does, if you can't describe it in three words, and if you can't tell me the business problem that it typically solves.
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If you can't do that, you're not selling a business outcome.
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You're not.
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Um, and you need to be able to do this yourself, not your engineers.
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So here's how we can elevate ourselves.
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Stop taking trainings that are an hour long on one product.
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That is an absolute waste of your time.
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Find a way to do this.
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Take your line card or take my heat map, look across the top of that heat map, and go, okay, here's a solution, like let's say network analytics.
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Can you describe it in two sentences?
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Sure.
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Um, network analytics is a tool that will give you visibility to the traffic flowing inside your network so we can discover where there is malicious or abnormal behavior.
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Oh, okay, it makes sense.
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So it's inside the network, like cameras inside a bank.
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I can see my traffic, I can see where there's abnormal behavior.
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Okay, so now you know that part.
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What's the common product we sell for that?
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Well, if it's Cisco, it could be a product like let's just throw out Stealth Watch, right?
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Okay, what's the business problem?
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The business outcome.
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Well, the business outcome for that is it definitely reduces risk.
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So that's one of them.
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But another one is just efficiency and productivity, right?
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We find that with these tools, it can actually save your IT team about an hour a day from more manual tools.
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How much is that worth?
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And that's a soft cost sell, right?
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So let's pause here a second, okay?
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So product knowledge is kind of like a house of cards.
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You don't need to know all of it, but you gotta know that like shallow knowledge because that you need that first, so you ask the right discovery questions, which then lead to selling a business outcome, which then lead to bigger deals, which you know, etc.
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etc.
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Right?
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So a house of cards.
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If your product knowledge is all screwed up at the bottom of your house of cards, you can't convince me that you're not missing opportunities.
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And this is why I emphasize so much, it's not that I'm bashing any of my competitors.
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I just think that when we get the fancy sales guy in who's like, oh man, Rob, everybody's so excited.
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That sales philosophy blew my mind.
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I go back and I go, Oh, you took challenger sales?
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Pretty expensive training.
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How'd your numbers go up?
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It didn't really go up, but everybody loved that training.
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Like, okay.
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So we need training, but we need training that's gonna drive a number, or we shouldn't do it.
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Period.
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We shouldn't do training if it doesn't drive a number.
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What is the point, right?
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If you could just take two or three of my things from today, I think it'll help you drive a number.
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But better yet, get into an interactive training where somebody's gonna really put you through the paces on these things.
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And I promise, that little bit of shallow knowledge tied to the right discovery questions, tied to a business outcome.
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When you can do that for your line card, holy crap, will you sell more?
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Everybody.
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There's never a day that goes by they don't get an email.
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And you can look into my LinkedIn.
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I don't even solicit this.
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I'll put something on LinkedIn, and somebody from five years ago will go, Jason, I best training I've ever been in.
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I still use that stuff, and it's helped me sell tons of things, right?
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That is why I do this.
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I don't do this for the the glamour or the money of it, right?
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There's I could go be a VP of sales somewhere, probably uh making quite a bit more than just a trainer.
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So the point with that is I want to help people, but it's hard to help people because they have these ingrained notions that they've had for years that I don't need to know this stuff, dude.
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And that is wrong.
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It was wrong then, but let me tell you, things that we need to do different now, you better get better at these things because it's all gonna be about a business outcome.
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You won't sell in this market.
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People don't have budget.
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You will not sell if you cannot show me how this makes me more money, saves me money hard cost savings, saves me money soft cost savings, saves me money by reducing my risk over time, or helps me consolidate my sites or things because that's the thing that's gonna be happening.
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You need to be able to black and white, talk through it, prove it out.
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A lot of our engineers they can help us with this, but I believe that good salespeople create opportunities and great engineers react effectively to the opportunities that have been created.
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That would be a perfect world.
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That's not what we often do in this industry, but that's what we need to do.
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So I'm here to say, A, we all have to up our game on this.
00:14:21.679 --> 00:14:29.600
Everybody, every Cisco executive, every Cisco Pam account manager, and every partner leader, manager, everybody.
00:14:29.679 --> 00:14:32.480
We all have to take what I'm saying right now seriously.
00:14:32.720 --> 00:14:33.919
We all have to up our game.
00:14:34.080 --> 00:14:35.840
In fact, the numbers prove it.
00:14:35.919 --> 00:14:41.519
You know, when I go around and I without listing the names of the people, but they know who they are on this training.
00:14:41.679 --> 00:14:46.960
In the last couple weeks, I've been reaching out to my high performers, the people who they probably never need my training.
00:14:47.039 --> 00:14:50.159
I think I make them better, they would tell you, oh no, it still really helped me.
00:14:50.320 --> 00:14:52.320
Maybe we're productive or I'm better at negotiating.
00:14:52.480 --> 00:14:55.039
But they're already doing crazy tons
of GP.
00:14:55.200 --> 00:14:56.879
What do I consider crazy tons?
00:14:57.120 --> 00:14:59.360
I think eight million plus, right?
00:14:59.519 --> 00:15:05.039
So, in in this country, you know, how many people really do eight million in GP?
00:15:05.200 --> 00:15:09.279
Well, less than one percent is the answer of our sellers.
00:15:09.519 --> 00:15:18.240
So I talk to those people to find out what do they do that's different across the board, whether they realize it or not, they know the solutions and the business outcomes.
00:15:18.320 --> 00:15:20.240
They do for almost everything they sell.
00:15:20.399 --> 00:15:24.240
They might not be that technical, they might not be able to go mile deep, but it doesn't matter.
00:15:24.320 --> 00:15:30.240
They at least know here's what it is, here's what it does, here's the problem it solves, and they can articulate that.
00:15:30.559 --> 00:15:42.080
Most people, I'm gonna say 99% of people I encounter in a training, can only do that for maybe, maybe 15% of their line card, and not to pick on it, but even the Cisco reps.
00:15:42.159 --> 00:15:44.000
So don't feel like you're alone in this.
00:15:44.159 --> 00:15:46.320
I just think we've never been taught this way.
00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:49.679
We've never been really shown what's the value of this and how to learn.
00:15:49.840 --> 00:15:52.080
The way we're taught is often all wrong.
00:15:52.320 --> 00:15:57.039
So that's gonna be important because again, you're gonna hear all the time, I don't know, budget.
00:15:57.200 --> 00:16:03.279
This is how we get around it by by understanding business better, by understanding how our solutions solve business problems.
00:16:03.600 --> 00:16:05.600
I I do this, right?
00:16:05.919 --> 00:16:08.799
I do technology sales my whole life for one reason.
00:16:09.039 --> 00:16:14.000
One, I believe in technology, um, but more importantly, I believe in business.
00:16:14.080 --> 00:16:21.360
And when I can combine the two of them together, I understand that what we do is when I sell a solution, it is making your company better.
00:16:21.519 --> 00:16:24.320
It is making your people better, it is reducing your risk.
00:16:24.559 --> 00:16:27.360
So, look, we all talk a lot about business outcomes.
00:16:27.440 --> 00:16:29.200
Here's a quick slide I want to show you.
00:16:29.440 --> 00:16:32.399
There's really only five business outcomes.
00:16:32.559 --> 00:16:34.159
People get so confused.
00:16:34.399 --> 00:16:37.279
They go, Oh, I took this how to sell business outcomes training.
00:16:37.360 --> 00:16:38.320
I go, well, tell me about it.
00:16:38.399 --> 00:16:39.360
What does that mean?
00:16:39.440 --> 00:16:40.960
Um, and then I get specific.
00:16:41.039 --> 00:16:43.840
I'm like, so here's a deal uh you're working on.
00:16:43.919 --> 00:16:44.879
It's for SD WAN.
00:16:45.120 --> 00:16:46.159
What's the business outcome?
00:16:46.399 --> 00:16:50.159
People don't even know they can't articulate it
because trainings are too confusing.
00:16:50.240 --> 00:16:51.519
So I make it really simple.
00:16:51.679 --> 00:16:56.879
In our industry, there's only five outcomes, and they are the most important ones that companies care about.
00:16:57.039 --> 00:16:57.679
Here they are.
00:16:57.919 --> 00:16:59.759
Number one, hard cost savings.
00:16:59.919 --> 00:17:02.720
I sell this solution and it saves you money.
00:17:02.799 --> 00:17:03.120
Okay?
00:17:03.600 --> 00:17:05.519
Number two, growth.
00:17:05.759 --> 00:17:11.359
I'm selling these things because it's gonna help your company acquire, add people, do these kind of things, growth.
00:17:11.440 --> 00:17:12.240
It's gonna happen.
00:17:12.559 --> 00:17:13.680
Number three, risk.
00:17:13.839 --> 00:17:17.119
I'm selling this solution because it's gonna help reduce your risk.
00:17:17.440 --> 00:17:19.759
Number four, revenue and GP.
00:17:19.839 --> 00:17:23.759
I sell you this solution and it has been proven to increase your revenue and GP.
00:17:23.839 --> 00:17:24.559
And here's why.
00:17:24.720 --> 00:17:27.680
And then number five, efficiency and productivity.
00:17:27.839 --> 00:17:32.319
I'm selling this solution, it's making your employees more efficient and more productive.
00:17:32.400 --> 00:17:37.119
Now let's talk about how that helps with soft cost selling or soft cost analysis.
00:17:37.279 --> 00:17:39.359
So that those are the five business outcomes.
00:17:39.440 --> 00:17:39.839
That's it.
00:17:39.920 --> 00:17:41.119
Nothing more, nothing less.
00:17:41.279 --> 00:17:44.319
I want you to think about a deal right now in your pipeline.
00:17:44.640 --> 00:17:45.359
Think about it.
00:17:45.599 --> 00:17:46.480
Got the deal?
00:17:46.720 --> 00:17:47.039
Okay.
00:17:47.359 --> 00:17:54.559
Now that you have that deal, I want you to think about how that deal relates to one of those outcomes or multiple outcomes.
00:17:54.720 --> 00:17:55.920
Do you really know?
00:17:56.240 --> 00:18:02.559
People always think, oh, this is easy, of course I do, but you know, training, I'm telling you guys I put people on the spot, they don't always know.
00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:04.160
Now I want you to take it step further.
00:18:04.240 --> 00:18:08.720
Let's say it was SD-WAN and you said it was hard cost savings and efficiency and productivity and risk.
00:18:08.799 --> 00:18:10.160
It was all three, okay?
00:18:10.559 --> 00:18:17.440
So who in your company, your customer that you're selling to, besides IT, cares about those outcomes?
00:18:17.599 --> 00:18:21.599
That's how we start to connect the dots then to a line of business selling.
00:18:21.759 --> 00:18:24.799
You know, here I always say this funny kind of analogy.
00:18:24.880 --> 00:18:30.400
I'll ask people like, who is your uh IT director that you would hire as a salesperson?
00:18:30.880 --> 00:18:37.039
And maybe once in a while people go, I know this one guy, but usually the answer is I don't think I'd hire any IT director as a sales guy.
00:18:37.279 --> 00:18:38.880
That's what we're doing though, guys.
00:18:39.119 --> 00:18:44.160
When we're selling to IT, they have to go sell it to someone else almost always.
00:18:44.319 --> 00:18:46.640
And you've now signed them up to be your salesperson.
00:18:47.200 --> 00:18:54.240
So we need to scrape, bite, try harder to get from okay, he's convinced.
00:18:54.400 --> 00:19:00.960
Let's get in a meeting with these other people and let me convince them in their language, in their outcomes, the things that matter to them.
00:19:01.039 --> 00:19:04.559
Let's put pen to paper and let's show them where the dollars are at.