Bringing Humanity Back to Seller / Buyer interactions

[0:00] What it means to be a buyer now has become so remarkably difficult. We don't want to waste our time on a process that's not qualified for us as a buyer. But if you look at the way that most sales methodologies and processes are designed to run, they're designed to push the demo back to the second or third call. They're meant to withhold details on pricing until deep into the process. They're all built around the convenience and the benefit of the seller. A buyer just has lost tolerance for that.

[0:36] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. If you are listening to this, you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue. Purpose of Full Funnel Freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your funnels consistently reliably full. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. I am absolutely delighted to have Phil Putnam as my guest on the podcast today. Phil just wants to take care of you. A lifetime of obsession with communication and caring for people is the engine of his work as a workshop leader, speaker, coach, and business strategy consultant. His human-first, common-sense approach to generating business outcomes has supported enterprises including Adobe, Apple, Bloomberg, and Salesforce. Force, you might have heard of some of them, in getting top performance from their people by focusing on what people love most, themselves. Phil, welcome to Full Funnel of Freedom. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. I'm delighted that we get a chance to share your ideas and insights with the audience. I know when we first connected, I was absolutely blown away by some of the things that you had to say. But before we get to that, I've given the audience the 30,000-foot view of Phil.

[1:50] Bill, tell us your story from where you started to where you are today. Sure. I mean, I'm basically a therapist that didn't want to go to grad school.

[2:00] So I studied music. My background is in music. I had a music career. But I paid the bills for that with tech work.

[2:09] And so eventually the music wound down and my love for teaching and for coaching found a home within tech. So that sort of became the primary thrust of my work. And the two most common, the constant threads across my entire life, regardless of what the job was, was that I do love taking care of people and I'm obsessed with communication. So these two things have really found a great home within being a speaker and a teacher and then also a coach. And the other thing I love so much is solving revenue mechanics problems, operational problems, mismatches, misalignments of tactics to business needs, all that stuff. As I grew throughout my 30s and I'm now into my mid-40s and really understood what a revenue operation needs to be, to now be able to apply that as a consultant to help other companies is just so satisfying.

[3:11] What a cool journey. And I love the phrase revenue mechanics. I don't think I've ever heard that one before. And that actually, I think, probably ties into something that we were chatting about offline, which is this idea around how focus on your internal processes, methodologies, systems, however you want to term them, is not actually going to fix the problem of buyer experience. So what do you mean by that? Well, I think the bottom line is that the buyer has the money, so they win.

[3:40] Like in the tug of war of whose experience is going to get the priority in the decisions that we make and the activities that we prescribe, if it's going to be our business needs or the buyer's needs, the buyer wins because they've got what we're trying to get. We're trying to get them to hand us a huge pile of cash. Yes. But what I find so interesting, especially in SaaS tech, which is the world that I really swim in most of the time, is that when the market got really hard in 23 and still today.

[4:11] Everybody naturally got scared. It's a very natural response. And when humans get scared, we go to our comfort zone. Totally. And the comfort zone is the things that we can control. Role. And so for a revenue leader, that is the sales process and the activity of our people. So you see this stampede back to MEDIC as a methodology or to other methodologies. People are changing their operations pretty significantly. And the thing is, that's great for giving a new structure for your sellers to behave within, but that doesn't solve the problem of what the buyer needs to experience. And again, the buyer wins because they have the money. And so I see so many senior revenue leaders fixating almost exclusively on their methodology, but not actually perceiving that a methodology is only a piece of your internal operational infrastructure. It has nothing to do with the buyer. And so I started reflecting on this as I was entering the ranks of consulting and thought about my experiences as a buyer. I actually, near the tail end of my time in-house as an executive, I finally got so fed up.

[5:27] With having every transaction that I poured hundreds of hours of time and effort and thousands and thousands of operational dollars into be rejected by the Internal Financial Approval Committee. The failure rate for a buyer right now is remarkably high.

[5:48] So I thought, I'm going to set some ground rules. The first time that I talk with a seller, whether it's by email or phone, I'm going to tell them what needs to happen. And I have three ground rules as a buyer that I now enforce. The first is, your process is your problem, don't make it my problem. The second, really important, I will see your product on the first call, or there will not be a second call. So whatever you have to do to make that happen, make it happen. And the third, and and this is just very particular to my preferences, is do not invite me to a digital sales room until I have told you that you're my vendor of choice. Because until I am fully invested in the deal and I've picked you, the notifications from DSR activity, just annoying crap in my inbox, doesn't mean anything to me. So the reason why I share these ground rules is because what it means to be a buyer now has become so remarkably difficult.

[6:54] That we don't want to waste our time on a process that's not qualified for us as a buyer. But if you look at the way that most sales methodologies and processes are designed to run, they're designed to push the demo back to the second or third call. They're meant to withhold details on pricing until deep into the process. They're all built around the convenience and the benefit of the seller. A buyer just has lost tolerance for that these days. That's why I think it's so important.

[7:28] That revenue leaders and sellers pivot from trying to solve the problems of their numbers through their internal operations and think about how do we use those operations to create a buyer experience that will make them want to hand us a huge pile of money. That's brilliant. And we could probably talk for two more hours and still not unpack everything that you shared in there, Phil. So I'm going to go back to one of the very first things that you said, if that's okay, because I definitely want to get to the rules and unpacking the rules, because I think that's going to be really fascinating for the sales leaders listening around the world. One of the things I heard right up front was going back to our comfort zone of process and data and activities and things like that. And this might be a no-duh answer for some of our listeners and for you in particular because you're living this. What have you seen as the knock-on consequences of a revenue leader walking down into thou Thou shalt do as it relates to internal processes and activity levels. Well, you don't hit your numbers. So really?

[8:34] Yeah, because here's the thing. Like, let's take a classic example. Let's say that by account segment, the majority of your revenue is in mid market. It's not an enterprise. So we're talking like five figure and low six figure deals. And what you need to accomplish to hit or exceed your goals this year is to run as many of those deal sizes on a 60- to 90-day deal cycle as you can. That's the velocity that you need. Well, if you are reaching for MEDIC or another very complex, heavyweight methodology that was designed to manage the complexity and duration of an enterprise sale, what you are actually doing is making it less likely that you will hit your numbers. You're adding weight. You're adding friction to your seller's behavior and your operational success by mismatching the tool to your needs. Now, I understand why we default to reaching for enterprise-sized tools and tactics. It feels sexier. It feels hotter. It's something we can brag about to our friends and say, I've got a great enterprise account segment, or I've got a great enterprise operation.

[9:47] But if the reality of your business is going to find its greatest success in mid-market excellence, then enterprise tactics and tools are actually going to stop you from meeting your goals, and succeeding, and keeping your job. So it's this trick of humanity where, in our fear, we reach for the thing that we're most acquainted with or that we're most hopeful about.

[10:14] But oftentimes we end up reaching for the wrong tool for the job. Brilliant. Sales leaders, I want you to go back and listen to that like 17 times. And especially because what Phil just laid out there for me is, do we actually understand our velocity and our deal size needed to get there? Yeah. Whales land out of the sky sometimes. Got it. Love it. Yes. Squirrels and rabbits and mice and they all live around, but that's not what's

[10:40] actually going to get us there. And then focus equals freedom. freedom so the better we know what our numbers are the better we can be focused in supporting our sellers so phil thank you for that advice to our audience right now so let's now let's go to your rules because i saw a post about this on linkedin i absolutely adore them uh and because ultimately you just use this word friction right i believe we need to be friction less with our buyers and that doesn't mean that we're lay downs right it doesn't mean that we just like share Share everything right up front because there are certainly unqualified buyers. And it does mean that, as you said, we want to be supporting our buyer getting from where they are to where they need to be. So let's unpack these rules. Rule number one, why is that important to you? Why is that one of your three rules? Sure. So rule number one, don't make your process my problem. It's your problem. This is why it's so important because there's that incredible Gartner B2B buyer experience study that I just want to cuddle with. I want to buy a house. I love this study.

[11:42] One of the best things that tells us is that buyers are spending around 45% of their buying time in self-service learning and decisioning before the first interaction with you as a seller and then throughout the entire buying experience. Experience, which means if I'm a buyer, my team and I, again, have invested tens and tens of hours and tens of thousands of operational cost in labor alone. Right. You as a seller, you are going to honor that work if you want me to hand you a huge pile of money. And when I get on the first call with you and you enforce your process on me, which takes me back over a ground that I've already covered so that you can check boxes within your CRM. Bye-bye.

[12:31] Because here's the other truth that I think a lot of companies need to really wrestle with is that you're not as unique as you think you are or you used to be, right? Yeah. Most products are commoditized to a greater degree now than they were three to five years ago.

[12:48] So you cannot differentiate on the strength of your products and services as effectively as you used to be able to. And also, there's less money to go around. True so if you're going to differentiate you need to differentiate on a different axis than your products and services and your buyer experience is going to be the most effective way to do that because again the buyer has the money so that's why i'm so passionate about not feeling the impact of your process as a seller my number one way of handling this is at the start of every call throughout the process, I will ask the buyer, where are you currently at in your buying experience? Just tell me where you're at and we'll go from there and I'll figure out the rest on my own. Oh, Phil, I love you. Thank you. What an absolutely beautiful, beautiful, simple question that demonstrates respect for the buyer. And the respect, that's the key, right? Because again, Again, we want them to do what we want them to do as a seller. We're trying to influence their behavior that puts money in our hand and makes them our customer.

[14:04] When we honor their experience and what they've invested and we show that to them, they are so much more willing to respond in kind. It's just a form of pattern recognition in human behavior. It's like when someone says thank you, what's the most natural thing to say in response?

[14:23] You're welcome. You're welcome. them. It's just pattern recognition. So in the same way that when someone shows us regard, we naturally reflexively show regard to them. So brilliant. So brilliant. So simple. Sales leaders, again, go back, pull that out, put it in your playbook, coach your sellers on asking that question. As Phil said, you're going to have a much better selling experience and probably get more money. Maybe. Number two is you want to see the product on the first call, All non-negotiable, if I get that the right one. Always. Tell us more about that because, yes, there is plenty of like, well, I can't show that to you yet, Phil. So walk us through that a little bit more. Both as a buyer and a seller, I want to qualify out as quickly as possible. Totally. That is the name of the game in this market because scale and efficiency does not mean getting more activity from fewer sellers.

[15:18] That's a misunderstanding. understanding what actual scale and sales efficiency is in this market is having your sellers spend less time on things that will

[15:30] not yield for your business. So I think any great revenue leader right now is actively encouraging their sellers to qualify out as quickly as possible because you need the time to be spent where it can yield. The buyer version of this is this rule for me. Like, I know that if I'm going to try to sell this through inside with my organization and get everybody up to my CFO to give me the money for this transaction, I'm going to have to really do like a gladiator battle. I'm going to have to go through a really extensive process. I'm going to have to compete with every other potential purchase that my company might make this year. And I know that in reality, that CFO will probably only make three to five meaningful investments in a calendar year right now, maximum, right? So I'm not going to go down very far down that road of investing my time and my team's time and spending my company's operational dollars. If I don't know that your product can solve my problem. And if I don't know that your pricing is within range for my budget for this transaction.

[16:47] That's why I will see the product on the first call or I will go to your competitor.

[16:53] Right. Makes a ton of sense. It goes back to that thing about respect that you've been talking about and how the world has changed, right? I just learned CFOs these days are making fewer. Let's call it fewer. They are, yeah. And that's what it means for them to really do their job, right?

[17:12] Becoming a buyer has become so difficult. And it was difficult before the tech market got difficult in 2023. To me, buying sucks. Sucks.

[17:25] Buying software is my least enjoyable part of being a senior leader, because it's just such a massive amount of labor with such a high failure rate.

[17:36] And, you know, being a seller, that's the same thing. It's a massive amount of labor with a high failure rate. But the buyer is not incentivized in the same way the seller is. So you're in this transaction together, but you don't want the same things. And you're not motivated by the same things. And so for a seller to be successful today, if you really key into what the

[18:01] buyer is motivated by, you're going to have a much stronger chance of getting the win. I love that idea. And that, I think, ties down into the rule three about these digital sales rooms. Now, some of our sales leaders may not be familiar with the digital sales room. So if you wouldn't mind giving a thumbnail sketch of what that looks like, And I think you kind of explained this about like the alerts and all that. So tell us more, you know, explain the digital sales room and then tell us a bit more about why these are being forced on buyers to the degree that it became a rule. So digital sales rooms or DSRs, I think are a wonderful tool when used effectively for the buyer. What they are is essentially a microsite. Imagine a one-page microsite where all the documentation and the collateral and the selling assets for the transaction are stored and are available and where you can communicate between the buyer and the seller and the various stakeholders, deal status and such.

[18:58] And even you might have a seller who will give brief video updates to the buyer. So there's a lot of really great things that they can do. Where the notifications come in is oftentimes if you know there's a deadline by which the seller wants the msa to be done or they want the infosec review to start so they'll they'll put those documents in and they'll create a task like a project management task within the room and they'll assign a date to it a due date and then um that will generate automatic email notifications that will come in to the buyers inbox saying hey you know we want you to finish this by by this time and.

[19:40] Can you please get it done? So that's kind of the basic anatomy and function of a digital sales room. The thing, though, is that any buyer who's been around for longer than five minutes knows that that is almost entirely about the benefit of the seller. And not just the seller, but it's about their sales leader. And it's about forecasting. It's just a forecasting tool. And it's a function of the predictive revenue model. And basically, what happens is on the back end, the seller or the sales manager is going to go look at the activity within the DSR. What is the buyer completed? How much are they doing it on time? When was the last time they visited? What documents have they opened? And they're going to determine how healthy the deal is, how engaged the buyer is, based upon their interaction with this digital sales room. True. So breaking the third rule for me also means you're breaking the first rule, which is your process is your problem. It's not mine. So we know, like, this is the thing, guys and gals, the jig is up. We know the digital sales room is about you. It's not about the buyer. We get it. It's totally fine, right? But.

[21:00] If I'm talking to three or four vendors, and they all have digital sales rooms, I don't want that. Because the thing is, until you're my vendor of choice, I don't care when you want the InfoSec review done. Sure. I don't care that you made me a video update. Honestly. I just don't. All of that will become important to me as the buyer once I decide that you're my partner for this, and I'm going to go to the mat for you. Right?

[21:30] That's when those notification emails in my email inbox matter to me and are a help rather than an annoyance so all that you're sharing here phil and i gotta tell you when you talked about these like they set a reminder i actually had a negative reaction to that right like yeah oh good so you're imposing a deadline on me that's that's lovely thank you i don't have lots of other things to do so phil what i'm hearing in all

[21:54] of this is it feels like we've forgotten the humanity in buying and selling. And so from your perspective, because this is something I mentioned in your bio, how do we add the humanity back into a sales interaction? Sure. Well, this is the first thing. It may sound like I am sort of negative towards sellers or sales leaders. So I want to turn that around and just say, it's remarkably hard to be a seller and a sales leader. And I I could not honor the work that we do more highly than I do. It's also a really scary time to be a seller and a sales leader, especially in tech.

[22:35] And so I think the first thing, the first way that we bring humanity back is we start being kinder to ourselves. It is okay to be scared.

[22:45] It is completely natural and normal to be scared. If you're a CRO right now, you're probably feeling hunted every day. You're probably feeling haunted by that stat on your shoulder of like the average tenure is 13 months or 18 months or whatever, right? It's completely okay to be scared and it's completely okay to ask for help. But the best thing that we can do as sellers and sales leaders is stop our isolation from help, right? You know, it's so weird. I experienced this myself as I rose up the ranks and title throughout my career. It really does become isolating.

[23:26] And even though intellectually, I know that it's completely okay to ask for help, I found myself doing it less and less often as my title rose. So that's the first thing, is giving yourself permission to be human and ask for help from people that you trust. The second thing is simply ask a buyer where they're at, what they need, how do they want to be related to, what is going to make them feel comfortable, what is going to give them what they need, what is going to make their life easier. What that requires us to do is oftentimes subvert or dismantle our sales process. But that's what you got to do, because you know what, the buyer has the money, they win. If you can make the selling experience or the buying experience just more of a series of human interactions and less of a following of process that's imposed on the buyer by the selling organization, then you're going to have that kind of differentiated buyer experience that makes you successful in this really difficult market. That we're in. Those are the first two things that come to mind for that question.

[24:39] Love it. Love it. And so again, sales leaders listening, take Phil's advice, give yourself permission to be a human being. Give yourself permission to be a human being.

[24:49] Yes, it is a tough job. And that's one of the reasons I started Full Funnel Freedom, right? It's because of that average tenure and all those things that you're sharing about. So Phil, I could certainly chat with you all day long, and I would certainly love to have that opportunity at some point in the future.

[25:04] And as we are wrapping up, I got a few questions for you to take us home. Question one being, if you could go back and coach younger Phil, go back as far as you like and go, hey, younger Phil, in the future, you're going to have had this great career, consultant, great company clients. You're also going to have a lot of scar tissue and bumps and bruises. What would you say to younger Phil to say or do differently to get to the same place, but with a little less scar tissue and maybe a couple of less bumps or bruises? So it has to do with my relationship with failure and my relationship with success.

[25:37] I can fail all day and be comfortable and laugh about it and tell you all about it. Like failure is my comfort zone. I was not raised to believe that success was for me. I was raised to envision a small life. And I know that it was an expression of protective love from my mother. But it did form a certain type of relationship with success for me. So it's actually much more difficult for me to imagine and pursue and process success at any level greater than whatever low limit that I'm working with. So I think what I probably would have coached myself to do earlier in my life was contend with that sooner and get to the place where I'm at now, which is that, you know, whatever I can imagine, the greatest limit of success I can imagine, that's my limit. Sweet. I can also raise my own limit because I can imagine further if I'll just give myself the permission to. So that's what I wish I would have worked out younger. What a beautiful sentiment to pass to your younger self. And I'm so happy to hear that you're at a level of success and you are envisioning even greater levels for yourself.

[26:58] So if we look back in your career, you are clearly someone who is very deep in your own personal and professional development. What have you read, watched, listened to either recently or in the past you would recommend the sales leaders listening check out for their own development? Sure.

[27:14] So it may sound a little silly, but Survivor. Okay, tell me more. Huge Survivor fan. And the thing is that I actually spend the majority of my time reading and watching things that are really about the mass culture at large.

[27:32] I actually favor that for business development and business wisdom more than business books or business content.

[27:42] The reason why is that mass culture is the ocean that all of us are swimming in. And so that forms the points of references for my buyers and for my colleagues and for myself and again shaping buyer experience for the win is very much about those points of reference it's about understanding and being able to ascertain the perspective that your buyer is coming from and so things like survivor or things like the oscar race every year i religiously follow the um the tv and film awards circuit every year but i don't and i watch a lot of them but i'm more interested in what succeeds and which individuals succeed and what the narratives are because again mass media is the primary mirror of our culture to ourselves so i watch survivor still to this day you know um there's a there's a podcast from vanity fair magazine called little gold men which is about awards and the oscar race and it goes year round but i'll listen to that every week you know things that.

[28:53] That tap me into culture at large that's where i find the greatest uh greatest business advantages uh what a what a cool answer i've never heard uh had a guest share that with us and and very much that's again think why we vibe so well is what that really aligns with with uh with my thoughts and i'm certainly going to check out those two resources is that you just mentioned.

[29:14] Last question for you, Phil. You've already given us some incredible ideas and insights on how to create buyer safety, how to, you know, the three rules that you have as a buyer for a seller to engage. What do you have as a closing thought, a final bit of wisdom or something to

[29:30] plug? The floor is yours. This is what I would plug. It's the wisdom and the plug together. Results come from your people. They do not come from your numbers. Numbers are the outcome numbers are an inert object your products are inert objects your strategies are inert objects they have no life of their own they are a parked car, Your people are the input to those items that generate your business results.

[30:03] Therefore, if you need to drive performance, which all of us do right now, right? If you are struggling to drive top performance from your people, you must understand what those people want. Because that is what motivates them. And I promise you, what they want most is not to make your business successful. Successful what they want most is to get the life they want in exchange for the work that they do and so that is really the whole ethos of what i teach about performance management and performance driving and then also my whole ethos of the way that i coach so i do do i do offer workshops as a teacher and a speaker about how do people leaders drive top performance from their people, but how do you do it in a way that your people will actually care about? How do you do it based upon what they want most, which is the life they're trying to get?

[31:00] I also do a presentation skills workshop specifically crafted for how do you use presentation to solve revenue problems? So it's not just about tone of voice and body language. It's about how do you how does a seller or a sales leader use presentation skills to solve a bottleneck in a deal how do you do it to move your buyer closer to a favorable business decision for you and so those are two workshops that i do and i'm available to do in really any context and as you might be able to tell from this conversation i love to teach i love to develop people and so So when I'm able to do that, I'm just the happiest kid on the playground. Amazing. What a great way to wrap up the episode today. Phil, I've learned a ton. Thanks for being a guest on Full Funnel Freedom. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15 minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[32:27] Music.