Sales Transformation

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Sales Transformation brought

to you by Ledium. I'm your host, Collin Mitchell. And today

I've got Carl J. Cox on. He's the author of

Stuck at CEO. He's also the CEO of Forty Strategy. We

recently had Carl on the show where we talked about what KPI you

should focus on. Lots of good nuggets there. Definitely recommend

you checking it out. We'll drop the link in the show notes. Yeah,

I mean, I think the most important thing here is the

experience, the entire experience, whatever that looks like, which is

different for every organization, like you said, but it's the experience

between the buyer and the seller. And so how do you measure

that? How do you measure the experience? How do you make sure they're getting a

world class experience versus a

Well, this is where you got to measure, right? You know, this is actually data, this

is where people you have to measure those different parts around that. So that's, that's number one,

right, you're gonna have some real clear data around it. Two, there has to be self reflection.

after doing these things. Like we know when we've given our

best. Like we know when we've crushed it versus when we know when we've just

showed up. Right. And so that has to be

a self-measurement behind it. Three, when

you're fortunate and they're actually ever willing to respond, it's best

if they can tell you. Right. And what's even best is

follow up the people who didn't end up buying your product or service and say, why didn't you buy a

product or service? Yeah. They're going to probably tell you why they

never didn't buy from you. Right. They're going to say, well, this person

didn't call me back for three weeks. And my two other competitors

followed up two hours later. You know, what did they say?

It's if somebody connects with you online, if

you do it within the first, like, what is it, 45 minutes, you have about a 70% chance

of increasing the sale. It's funny. I'll admit

with this, Colin, this is a problem I had recently. A well-known

Fortune 500 company reached out related to our StrengthsFinder Gallup

thing. I didn't know it was sent out to everybody. It was like a Friday afternoon. Our

team didn't respond to it right away. We responded on

Monday. By Wednesday, we get this email saying, oh,

thank you for the million people responded back. We already had a conversation with them on a Friday, deal

is done. Oops, right? Like, I

mean, we lost that because we didn't respond when

And there's some interesting data out there. I mean, I've

seen a lot of it, even specifically around like tech and SaaS companies

of people requesting a demo, you know, and

it taking 48, 72, even up to a week for people to even get in

touch with them, which is mind boggling. You

know, that they say, you know, I mean, if

you're the first one in, a lot of times you win, you can

kind of set the tone for what the narrative of, you know, how

we're going to solve this problem looks like. There's a lot of benefits. I

mean, best practices is responding to leads within five minutes. You

know, and but I want to go back to something else

you mentioned, because I think it's a really important point. I talk about it a lot, actually, is

that feedback from closed loss deals. So valuable. It's

the one piece that is a little bit hard to track because

no salesperson wants to report that they were the reason why the deal got lost.

So that's one area where the data can be a little bit flawed. The

other area where it can get a little bit tricky is a lot of times people

you know, the buyers aren't always like, completely

honest with you of why they didn't go with you, right? You know, I say price or

budget, right, which are kind of the easy go tos, and they might not

give you the real reason of like, hey, Carl, it just wasn't a world class experience

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things we

like to say in strategy is strategic planning is a hypothesis, not a

fact. And we say that because we

want to be learners. We have to recognize that a plan we went in

with, we have to change and be nimble and react appropriately based

on the data that we have in front of us. So the same thing happens in the sales

process. We have to be aware that sometimes the

thing that we thought was going to work, we have to adapt and

change and learn. And so I think one of the biggest challenges, right, is in sales,

it's, we all know, it's tough, right? It's tough, because we're gonna have failures, right?

So just like you said, baseball, you know, it worked in the previous episode, you know,

if you're heading down a 200 Mendoza line, you know, it's like, you're not going to keep your

job. And in baseball was same thing is going to happen potentially

as a salesperson. So it's hard. But,

you know, where does strategy come from? It came from the military, right?

Sun Tzu, Art of War, many, you know, thousands of years ago, that book was

written. Some of the great books today is,

once again, all military training. Why do they care so much? Because people die, right?

You know, people die, you know, we get a sale, we just, we don't put food

on the table, we don't get to buy that extra thing or have that extra bonus. Right?

You know, but, but at the end of the day, they are one of

the best at after action reports. Like the SEALs

are known, notorious for being

very critical and learning, even when they have a successful mission,

because what can they do better the next time? When you could create a

sales organization that is a learning organization rather than a

gotcha organization, you're going to have much

more success to crush it. And then you're going to really learn your

campus visit and, you know, keep on doing a

Absolutely. Carl, it's been awesome having you on again. If

you missed the first episode, we'll drop the link in the show notes to make it

easy for you. Any final thoughts? Where's

the best place for people to pick up the book and get in touch with

Yeah, so you could pick up Lost at CEO at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com,

we also have an audible version as well. So feel free to go out and

catch it on that. You could find us on LinkedIn, we put a fair amount of content

out there consistently at Carl J. Cox. And then also, of course,

our website at 40 strategy.com. If you have any questions or thoughts,

love to hear from you. And also to your guests, Colin, we're

actually getting ready to close this out here soon. But if they talk

to us, and they say we heard on your podcast, you

could do this for the first and second, by the way. So, you know, if we didn't catch beforehand, we

will actually provide a free, free copy of the book. Um,

and so send, send an email, Carl J Cox at 40 strategy.com.

We'll send you a free copy of the book and hope you enjoy that. Otherwise you can go

Awesome. There you go. Make sure you take them up on that. If you enjoyed today's episode,

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we can reach more sellers and sales leaders to transform the way