About the speaker

Michael Randazzo is VP of GTM Strategy and Sales Enablement at Challenger, a global leader in sales training, technology, and consulting leading the way in sales transformation. Michael has helped sales organizations implement the Challenger Approach to B2B sales across many organizations around the globe. He shares his insights on how the Great Resignation is affecting sales organizations and the importance of recognizing and rewarding the Challengers on your sales team.

What is Challenger?

Barry: Michael, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? How you came to Challenger and what Challenger is?

Michael: I started my career a number of years ago in sales. I was a sales associate, essentially an SDR, and then got into some account management roles. Then after a while, I was working for a company called CEB at the time, formerly Corporate Executive Board, which was later acquired by Gartner. It’s sort of the story of a big research company getting acquired by a bigger research company.

But after some sales roles and revenue roles, I kind of switched over to that research and consulting side of the business. Right around the time I was starting there, the sales and marketing practice, the research practice, was putting out a study kind of ranging from 2008, 2009, 2010 in sort of the Great Recession environment. The global financial crisis of 2008-2009.

The study was all about the fact that there are certain B2B sales professionals that are having outside success even in the most complex financial and economic environment in recent memory. What is it that they’re doing differently? What’s making them tick? What’s leading to that success? You’ve got this big research company essentially profiling thousands and thousands and thousands of sales professionals around the globe and ultimately the output of that is what ended up being published in 2011 was a book called The Challenger Sale.

A couple of years later I joined the consulting arm of that business that actually helps organizations go out and implement the Challenger Approach to complex B2B selling. Arms and legs consulting and lots of change management and sales transformation. Those big buzz words of course.

Fast forward to 2018. The arm of our business that was doing consulting and Challenger implementation spun off. We stood up our own company and for the past three years we’ve been working with clients around the globe as Challenger the company, not Challenger the book, but Challenger the company, to help implement the best practices and strategies across global organizations that were first written about in that book over 10 years ago.

My job, now, as I fast forward then, I’ve been in, again, sales roles, consulting roles, I’ve helped implement Challenger across many organizations around the globe. More recently the last couple years I was responsible for helping stand up and build and now lead our own enablement function. Our go-to-market strategy and enablement team here at Challenger helps our teams successfully practice what we preach, tell the Challenger story to the market, works closely between sales and marketing from an integration standpoint, making sure the conversations our people are having are Challenger-esque and always leading with insight. That’s been my role across the last couple of years.

Oh, and I also started a podcast so that’s why you’ve got me on here today. A couple of podcasters talk a little bit about the world of sales. Yeah, that’s my history in a nutshell.

Winning the Challenger Sale Podcast

Barry: Amazing. What’s the name of that podcast?

Michael: That podcast is called Winning the Challenger Sale and the promise of that podcast, our commitment is essentially taking all of those Challenger concepts first written about 10 years ago and putting them into action and helping people say, “Hey, look, the book was great, it sort of reframed the way I think about my job as a professional seller and what leads to success. I believe that teaching, tailoring, and taking control, building constructive touch, I believe that, that resonates and it works. How do I really break this down into bite-sized, tactical, actionable insights to help me execute in the day-to-day?”

What we do in our podcast, my co-host Jen Allen and I, we break down a lot of those concepts first revealed in the book and we apply them to specific activities or jobs in the typical B2B sales notion. Whether that be research and prospecting new opportunities and new potential clients and stakeholders to running discovery calls or demos to managing complex negotiations. We take Challenger as a concept and help sort of align it to those key issues that sellers deal with every day and hopefully leave them with a couple of next steps they can take to better execute on an upcoming call or deliver a compelling presentation in a meeting.

Barry: Absolutely. That sounds awesome. I also love that Challenger the book was written more than 10 years ago and it’s still relevant in everyone’s life that’s in B2B sales and that people also still need help implementing it. It’s two parts. One, that people still use it but also just because people have been using it for 10 years doesn’t mean that everyone’s an expert at it. Very relevant, very cool, especially for our sales professionals listening. Our podcast is for our revenue leaders, revenue operations professionals, so we can also talk about not just how it’s important for sales but also for the rest of the organization.

Michael: Absolutely.

How is the Great Resignation Affecting Sales Organizations?

Barry: Before going into some of the sales frameworks, I wanted to discuss the macroeconomy right now. There’s the Great Resignation happening in high tech. In software and sales, B2B sales organizations. From every function. Not just marketing but also sales.

What are your thoughts about the Great Resignation? Then we’ll bring that into the Great Re-evaluation and what companies and sales leaders can do about that. But let’s start talking about the general thoughts about the Great Resignation.

Michael: Sure. There have been a number of, I think, interesting studies or even just quick surveys or online polls that the output’s been published across the last 12 to 24 months, I think. Since the beginning of the pandemic, as we started to kind of move from the global health crisis into this new era where a lot of things have changed.

One of them, of course, being the way people make decisions in terms of whether they stay at their role or whether they look around. There’s so much, sort of, flexibility that’s been afforded to them by remote working environments and the Zoomification of the day-to-day work. Knowledge workers in all kinds of functions but sales as well, right?

I remember at the beginning of the pandemic the big concern was how do we sell virtually? We’re 99% live in terms of our sales meetings with our customers. Are our customers going to adapt to this? Are they going to want Zoom meetings with us? Are we going to be able to be as effective presenting or as compelling and engaging in a virtual environment? I think a lot of those questions have been answered across the last year and a half or two years. A lot of companies have retooled and people have found that they can be effective, but it takes some work.

The other thing though, hand-in-hand with that, with this virtual environment that we’re now selling in, there’s more optionality. There’s more flexibility in terms of where I can work, who I can work for. I don’t need to be in the major metropolitan area that houses the headquarters of a certain tech company anymore. Most organizations offer remote opportunities.

As I think about this through the lens of sales professionals and the impact this is having on the sales world, “great resignation” is an interesting term. I’ve also heard the term “the great reshuffle” in some cases. We’re either leaving the employer that we have, that we’ve been working with, or we find ways to do something different inside that company.

In any case, my perspective is this, and I think our perspective at Challenger is this, from a sales professionals decision-making criteria standpoint if the concern is keeping your top talent and keeping them happy, keeping them engaged, and keeping them productive, there have been good studies as I mentioned before that have been put out recently. Exactly put out a good one. LinkedIn has some good stuff out there.

Compensation and Career Growth are the Most Important Drivers in Sales Talent Retention

Michael: What we’ve observed, what I’ve observed, is getting paid, really, is still and likely always will be the most important retention driver for high-performing sales professionals, but while pay is number one it’s not sufficient on its own. I think we increasingly start to see sellers need to feel that, “The company I’m working for has a mission. The company I’m working for has a vision. There’s a culture here that fosters and prioritizes personal growth, professional development. I have a clear line of sight in terms of my career trajectory and various paths in front of me. I’m not going to be an individual contributor, sales professional, forever. What are my options three, five, 10 years down the line?” That is nearly as important as compensation at this point and the great resignation or great reshuffling environment is only going to bring those two closer together.

Where the rubber meets the road with all this, from my perspective, is when you’ve got personal and professional growth as a priority combined with feeling good about compensation, feeling good about the fact that you’re getting paid for your work, that’s the really powerful combination if you’re hoping to retain your top sales talent. And those two are very much connected, right? If we’re investing in the development of our sales reps across our teams and we understand where they need support, whether that be a skill development or process improvement initiative that we can deploy to help them, or even just tool provisioning.

Making sure they’ve got the right resources to get their job done in the day-to-day from an operations perspective. If you have visibility into what they need they’re more likely to achieve those performance targets and, of course, once they achieve those performance targets the money follows. It’s really understanding what individuals need right now that ultimately leads to increased likelihood of them being able to achieve success in the role, which leads to the number one driver of them getting paid.

Sales Enablement to Achieve Performance Targets

Barry: All right. Awesome. That was a great answer. I could unbundle that whole thing but let’s go to something specific. The last thing you mentioned, actually, was that sales reps need to be enabled to achieve performance targets. How do you determine that piece? Is it technology? Is it process? Should it be obvious what needs to be worked on?

Michael: That’s a great question. What we at Challenger are really laser-focused on right now is just that. It’s helping people gain visibility into what their gaps are, what their own personal, individual gaps are, and then helping organizations provide the right answer in terms of helping those people work through it. That’s the ah-ha. I think a lot of organizations think that because they’re doing an annual sales kick off with a big sort of flashy rah-rah event and some organizations are moving back to doing those live, others are investing heavily in trying to recreate that excitement and enthusiasm in a virtual kick-off this year and some are in-between with hybrids. But they’re using that event to roll out a global scales training program or introducing new methodology or they’re rolling out new tools.

They think that they’re meeting the needs of people across the entire organization in that way, but what they’re missing is standard, uniform programs rolled out at the corporate level and available to everyone in the same sort of sequence and with the same roll out plan often fail to account for the fact that individuals across the organization are just that.

They’re individuals within individual needs. They all have different, what I’ll call, bottlenecks that they need to work through in their day-to-day work. So when you’re investing in training, for example, just to take one component of that, to show to your organization that you’re committed to their professional development you invest training.

Say you identify a gap in the aggregate around negotiation skills. You say, “Okay, we’re going to invest a couple hundred thousands dollars in negotiations training for our entire field this year.” It may absolutely be the right answer for a certain portion of that team, but is that the most pressing and urgent need or process bottleneck for everyone on the team? No. You’ve got a certain portion of that population that’s saying, “That’s nice, that’s interesting, but what I really need help on right now is getting better about delivering insight-led presentations to C-level executives in the early stages of a sales process.” Not so much the back end.

Gaining Visibility into the Needs of the Sales Organization

Michael: Leadership teams need to figure out how they can gain visibility into not only the needs across the organization in the aggregate, which they’ve always been very good at, that’s why they’re senior executives, but now in this environment, I think it’s increasingly important to think about, “All right, the teams that we’ve got, that we’re managing, they’re made up of individuals, and all of those individuals are very different in terms of where they struggle, where they execute at a high level. We’ve got to identify those bottlenecks at the individual level and we’ve got to find ways to deploy personalized learning. Personalized development. Training paths specific to the individual so that each of them can work through their own bottlenecks.”

There are a number of ways to go about it. We can talk more about that, but there are opportunities to assess through surveys, to use certain diagnostics, figure out which of those bottlenecks are most acute for individuals by thinking through what your process is asking them to do in the day-to-day. You can train a lot of the stuff in a uniform way, but again where the rubber meets the road is in the day-to-day. You’ve got to have your frontline managers reinforcing these things, you’ve got to have them first observing, understanding what to look for, knowing what good looks like, and then effectively coaching to all of it.

And I guess the last thing I mention is once you successfully identify a bottleneck and resolve it for an individual, another one’s going to pop up. So you may have addressed the most pressing need, but there’s something else that they’re going to be working on next. Making sure we’ve got sort of a running list and visibility into the top needs, the next needs, and then the far out future needs that might arise as things change in the environment that you’re working in. That’s just a little bit of a sort of primer on how we think about it and ultimately what we believe is critical in this world of personalized development.

Barry: Is this something that companies would be working on even without the pandemic or without the great reshuffling?

Michael: Yes. Should be. I think what the Great Resignation, what the pandemic, what the reshuffling, whatever we want to call it, has done is simply just accelerate and increase urgency around the importance of it because these sort of macro trends, these sort of external drivers have put companies in a difficult position in terms of, “Hey, my workforce is now much more mobile. They’ve got more options. They have choices in terms of where they work, when, how they work, and who they work for. They’re not tethered or tied to a geographic location.”

It’s really raised the bar on employers in terms of being thoughtful and being as tailored or personalized as possible in terms of the programs they roll out so that they resonate with individuals and not just one standard, uniform sort of approach for an entire organization. It’s not a one size fits all environment anymore and I think the backdrop that we’ve been dealing with for two years has simply just accelerated leadership teams’ need to recognize the need for change.

What Drives Companies to Seek out the Challenger Sales Process?

Barry: When companies go to you is it a subconscious thing like, “Oh, I realize a lot of people quit, let me do this because it will help,” or they’re saying, “It’s very clear to us we need to do this because of the macro change. We need to add some extra value.”

Michael: I wouldn’t say the number one driver of, “Hey, I’m reaching out to Challenger to engage with you because our sellers are leaving,” that’s not the primary driver for a company to seek out Challenger as a new sales model for their organization. What is though is we’ve been disrupted in our industry. Our organization is now losing deals. Our sellers are now losing deals to emerging competitors or to the status quo.

Our customers are realizing that, “Hey, the solution that I’m considering from XYZ Company is great, but I don’t necessarily feel as much urgency. I feel like we can continue to run our manual processes internally and be just fine. Nobody’s really brought the cost of the problem to light for me so therefore I’m good with not spending half a million dollars on this new complex solution.”

Those are really the entry points. Companies come to us when they’re feeling disrupted in their sales motion. I would imagine we’ll start to see more companies that are saying, “Hey look, we’re doing a pretty good job of engaging our talent, but some of our high performers are leaving because they’ve got more options. What we need to do now is try to figure out how to replicate more of that high-performance motion that our top 10% of our sellers are exhibiting regularly. How do we port a lot of that profile back to the middle of the bell curve, the core of our sales organization where we can take high potential sales professionals and put programs in place to turn them into consistent high performers.”

Recognizing the Natural Challengers in Your Sales Organization

Barry: It’s turning those who have the potential to be high performers into high performers. Is that correct?

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. If you’ve known Challenger for a while you know one of the common misconceptions around the research is that we made up this profile. We made up the fact that there are certain sellers out there that are doing a certain set of things consistently and that’s leading to their performance. One, it wasn’t made up; it was observed across a large population of sellers, across all industries and geographies and we simply codified. We codified a profile of a seller that seems to have outside success according to a decade plus of research in complex B2B selling environments. 

Now, the real trick is to recognize if you’re a sales leader or if you’re in rev ops or if you’re a CEO, the real trick is to recognize that you have a certain proportion of natural Challengers in your organization. You have a certain proportion of natural Challengers who are more likely to be high performers than not.

Now, they won’t always be high performers and all of your high performers are certainly not exclusively Challengers, there are different ways, paths to high performance. What we’re talking about is playing a numbers game here. High performers are, the exact data point changes every year, but we’ll say 4.7 times as likely to be a high performer. Challengers are 4.7 times as likely to be a high performer relative to other profiles or other sorts of selling majors if you want to use the majors/minors analogy from university.

What we find is really that there are certain skills, behaviors, traits that those high performers, those Challengers exhibit, that are absolutely trainable, learnable, teachable and we can port some of those learnings to other profiles, to a core population of sellers. Give them a leg up and help them master a skill, an activity, or a behavior one at a time, for instance, to help them realize full potential.

It’s not just a, “I was born with it,” kind of thing. There are innate, natural Challengers out there, but it can also be trained.

B2B Seller Profiles in the Challenger Sales Strategy

Barry: Just to give some context to our listeners, you’ve mentioned the Challenger sales framework as a like a major/minor, but it’s also more of a persona. Maybe it’s my marketing hat. Where Challenger’s a persona and then there’s other sales personas or other sales profiles. Can you maybe just educate us on what other profiles there are in sales situations?

Michael: Yeah. The very early finding in the original research was that, take performance out of it for a second and likelihood to be a high performer. In the Challenger Sales Methodology, there are five profiles of B2B sellers out in the wild. The Challenger’s one of them, but you also have four others, right? Relationship Builder, Hard Worker, Problem Solver, Loan Wolf. We won’t get into the gory detail.

5 Profiles of B2B Sellers

1. Challenger
2. Relationship Builder
3. Hard Worker
4. Problem Solver
5. Loan Wolf

You can certainly read the book, check that out, or just do a Google search to understand the five profiles of B2B sales reps. But the way the analysis was done from a research perspective it was effectively factor analysis which takes a number of different traits or behaviors that tend to cluster together within these various profiles and what you come out with is every rep that we studied in the analysis, again through global surveys, wide-scaled surveys, had a major. Had sort of a strong leaning towards at least one of the profiles. Now, they also had traits and characteristics and behaviors that resembled other profiles but what you effectively find is that everybody leans towards one predominant profile.

You can be a Challenger major and a Problem Solver minor. You can be a Problem Solver major and Hard Worker minor. You’ve got a propensity to exhibit certain traits and behaviors but each seller in the study sort of gravitated towards one primary major, if you will.

Barry: When you start working with your clients do you send them a survey to try to figure out who on their sales team is a Challenger or it’s more just, “Tell us about each person?”

Michael: In some cases, yes. Some companies want us to go out and assess their field and figure out, “Hey, what do we have across the team?” In other companies, in other cases, they do a lot of that on their own and you can actually find that in the book. You can find some guidance in terms of what to look for if you’re going to run your own surveys to try to get a pulse check on what’s happening in your company.

But yeah, we absolutely will if our clients want, run the original Challenger study, so to speak, on their company and help them understand what they have going on across their business. But the bulk of what we really do is say, “Okay, now that you understand where you’re starting from, the real reason you’re with us here is because you’re dealing with some sort of disruption. You’re dealing with some sort of growth stall. You’re having trouble seeing how you’re going to get to that next level of growth, your sort of ambitious three-year out target of three x growth. Let us help you introduce a program that ultimately transforms the way you speak to your customers.”

And I’m generalizing here. Being super solution-centric, talking a lot about who we are and what we do and the value we deliver and then asking you, “So what are the things that you’re worried about right now? Give me some ideas of priorities on your list. What are some problems that you’re trying to solve?” The consultative sort of approach to selling, which we know in this environment struggles because everyone should actually have the ability to develop a hypothesis through comprehensive research and preparation before you reach out to a customer.

It’s flipping the script on the messaging, it’s helping these people inside the organization, sales professionals, sales managers, and sales leaders themselves, identify what those core Challenger behaviors and attributes are, and incorporating those into training and development programs that you’re deploying.

And then it’s also process frameworks and thinking through how we go about designing our sales process or perhaps, refining our sales process to better align to the needs of our customers. Being conscious of what the buying journey looks like for our customers so that we can mirror that with our sales process and I think that’s the glue that really holds it all together. We can develop great sales messaging that’s insight-led and doesn’t talk a lot about us but rather focuses on unpacking the problem.

We can develop and deploy world-class sales training programs for sales reps, helping them master those skills that our research proves lead to success more often than not. But unless we’re conscious of what our buyers need throughout their journey towards making a purchase decision and incorporating that into our day-to-day execution plan and process, that’s all going to fall apart.

Our value proposition, Challenger as a company, is bringing all that together and helping organizations transform the way they go to market and ultimately manage customer interactions throughout the entire cycle.

What is the TEMPO Sales Process Framework?

Barry: What is the TEMPO sales process framework?

Michael: The TEMPO framework is an acronym for Target, Engage, Manage, Plan to Close, Operate and Grow

One of the more recent updates or, I guess I’d say maybe a little bit of an innovation on our work at Challenger over the last couple of years has been. I kind of alluded to this with the podcast, but how do you take the concepts from the book, teach, tailor, take control, build constructive tension, and help individual sellers trying to practice that motion, apply it to the day-to-day in a very tactical way? We created what we call the TEMPO framework, which is an acronym for target, engage, manage, plan to close, and operate and grow. What it is, it’s effectively a tactical framework for sales professionals to follow in their day-to-day as they go about executing certain tasks.

Again, all the way from target is really all about conducting comprehensive yet efficient research, identifying the right people to engage, prioritizing efforts. We don’t have unlimited time, especially if we have some sort of green field territory. We got to know who we’re going after and who we’re spending our time with. Target is all about helping sales professionals conduct that research, prioritize their pursuits, and then get them ready for sort of outreach and engaging customers for the first time.

Whereas engaging, you start moving into this idea of, “Hey, we got to schedule the meeting.” How do we schedule a meeting with a new prospect with cold outreach in an effective way that doesn’t come off as just spam? Whether that’s spam verbally or spam via LinkedIn or spam via Outlook, email. And then you move into manage and plan to close and we’re starting to get into more complex themes and topics.

Manage is, “Hey, we’ve got interest with a stakeholder or two, but now we’re being introduced to the senior leadership team and we’ve got a buying group or we’ve got a purchasing committee in front of us and we’ve got a big presentation coming up and we’re trying to facilitate consensus in that group with six, seven, eight, nine different executives involved. How do I do that? How do I show up at that group demo next week and effectively present not only the scope of the problem but also how our solution is uniquely differentiating and can solve that problem?”

Plan to close is just as you’d think. This is, “Do you have a close plan in place that’s going to help you work through the final mile of a deal? That’s going to help you avoid unnecessary delays? Work through corporate red tape if we need to? Can we help guide folks to the final mile tasks that they’re going to need to accomplish if they’ve never made a purchase like this before? How do we go toe-to-toe with procurement in a negotiation?” For example. All that’s covered there.

And then operate and grow, the last sort of stage of our five-stage framework is, if we are a new logo hunter, for example, and we don’t manage existing clients. What does that hand-off need to look like as I’m passing this customer along to a customer success team or an account management team? Or if we are hybrid in our role and we sell and we manage existing relationships and we stay close over time, how do we ensure that there is consistency in terms of voice and the interactions that my team has on the new business side versus the customer success team or the account management team is having on the existing customer side?

All of that to say TEMPO outlines a set of activities or tasks that translate across most industry verticals and those leverage points or, we tend to call them, moments that matter, if you can execute those consistently and at a high level you’re more likely to be able to achieve higher levels of performance but if you’re not conscious of these moments, if you’re not conscious of these jobs across the TEMPO stages you’re likely going to struggle and perhaps not even know why. You don’t have visibility into what’s working, what’s not, and if you don’t have visibility you’re not quite sure what you should be doing differently. Right? And neither is your manager, frankly, in terms of how they should be coaching or developing you further.

It’s a lot of tactile guidance aligned across this five part framework that, again, is very focused on executing in key sales moments.

Barry: Awesome. I knew you’d be a great guest on this podcast. You are a wealth of information. One thing, the P. Remind me of the P in TEMPO.

Michael: It’s a plan to close. We could have just called it negotiate or that would change the acronym, obviously. We could have called it negotiate or just close. Most sales processes, if you look at your CRM, there’s probably a close stage. What we’re implying here is that it’s not just the close itself, it’s your plan in the run up to that. It’s final scoping. It’s making sure that you are thinking critically about where some mystery stakeholders might come from in the final mile, back office operations and admin type folks who might come from legal or HR or IT who you’ve never had to deal with, now you need to be conscious of what their needs are and what the process looks like on the back end to get these things done. You’ve got to have a plan in place to get to close.

That includes, but it’s not limited to, the negotiation. It’s not limited to procurement or dealing with having to defend the value of your solution in the final mile. It could also very much be about who else is going to get involved here that might delay the closure of this deal a week or even more? And we know how important that is when we’re dealing with end of quarter or end of fiscal year deadlines in order to hit our quota. Yeah, that’s a plan to close.

Barry: Okay. So it’s not like the deal is already done and you only just have to do the paperwork and how do you make that quicker. It’s the whole stage of getting from you’ve got your champion but now you have all these other new people.

Michael: The endpoint I’d say the dividing line between manage and plan to close is, let’s call it the verbal yes. You’ve been chosen. You’ve been selected as the vendor or the solution provider. All right, now how do we get this done? In many organizations that’s just the beginning of the process. Once you’ve been verbally chosen or selected there’s still a lot of work to do because, as I mentioned before, still every opportunity here for a mystery stakeholder to pop up at the 11th hour and stall things out or worst case bring them crashing down, right?

You may have that verbal yes from, hopefully the entire buying group, but in some cases if it’s just a couple of stakeholders are you sure that everybody’s weighed in who needs to weigh in? How do you start exploring inside that organization to make sure everything’s wrapped up?

And most importantly, maybe most tactically, it’s like, “All right, what are those things that tend to get in the way in the 11th hour?” Not just people, but process, timelines, legal reviews, IT security reviews, all of these things. You’ve got to be conscious of that timeline because say it’s December 15th and I’m expecting to get a deal done by December 31st and I just got my verbal yes, if I didn’t know that there’s a four-week administrative review process that needs to happen that’s going to be very disappointing when I look at 15 days left in my fiscal expecting I’m going to close it just because I got that verbal yes.

As a seller, you’ve got to have a plan for how to manage that final mile because things can still go wrong, or at the very least things can be delayed unless you’re conscious of everything that’s happening. And this helps with your full stage, full cycle, and full-year planning as well. Knowing what that final mile looks like and preparing for it with your customer.

Barry: That’s very interesting. Do you have a ballpark figure of what percentage of companies, before they talk to Challenger, lose those deals after they get a yes?

Michael: Gosh, I don’t know. No, I don’t have that. That’d probably be an interesting thing for us to study. We are always doing ongoing research so I’m going to take that, Barry, and I’m going to recommend that we go and seek out that data point.

Barry: All right.

Michael: One thing I can tell you is maybe if you’re looking for one interesting data point that might sort of bring the importance of a framework like this to life. We actually found, in a study that we did like two years ago, it looked at B2B purchase behavior and the B2B buying journey and how that evolves continuously. We actually found that 38% of buyers in this study that we did, 600, 700 buyers who had made recent purchases, or decided not to make a recent purchase, why did they do so? 38% of buying groups who had gone through a purchase process within the past year actually decided not to purchase. They actually decided not to purchase anything. It wasn’t just, “Why did you choose this supplier versus this supplier?” It was, “You had one supplier in mind and it was either them or nothing,” and they chose nothing.

What that translates into from the sales perspective is that 38% of opportunities you’re pursuing, that could potentially end in no decision, go closed, lost, status quo, or close lost no decision in your CRM. That was a huge finding for us and that’s actually what spurred a lot of this work. It was like okay, on paper and in our CRM it looked like we were moving through stage one, two, three, four, five swimmingly, but for some reason in that final mile the customer informed us that, “You know what? It’s not you, it’s us.” Or, “You know what? We’re not going with Competitor A, we’re staying put. We’re going to stick with what we’ve got internally. We’re not ready to move forward with this.”

This was incredibly frustrating, I think, when we found it but it really sort of put a name tag on this phenomenon that I think we’ve been observing for a number of years and it helps us understanding the importance of certain stages of TEMPO to say, “All right, did I lose that in the final mile? Or was it perhaps what I was doing or not doing early on in the engaged stage? Did I find the right stakeholder or champion? Were they a champion at all? When I got to manage did I do enough to drive consensus in that group or were there certain people who were just kind of nodding their head on the call, seemed to be in agreement? But we didn’t find out until two months later when we thought we were ready to close, that oh, actually, we never really won them over and there was still significant disagreement to the point where they couldn’t reach consensus.”

This framework is really helpful for looking across the whole process and saying, “All right, those deals that look like they’re late-stage losses, there’s probably a portion of them that were actually lost much earlier and we just wasted a few months because we didn’t know that.”

Visibility is the name of the game with this framework.

Final Thoughts on Retaining Sales Talent

Barry: Visibility. Love it. What’s one piece of advice you would give to sales leaders to help retain their top sales performers?

Michael: To help retain your sales talent I would say, well, I kind of mentioned it before. One, got to gain visibility into individuals across your teams. Individual bottlenecks. Individual needs and gaps in execution. Once we do that we’ve got to think beyond just the one-and-done training or the big bang training, and we have to think about whether we have tools, resources, and support to help people in the day-to-day resolve those bottlenecks. Oftentimes that looks like frontline manager one-to-one observation and then coaching. That’s the second piece you need to nail. Beyond just training, do you have a coaching culture in place and do you have managers who are prioritizing it and willing to execute on that coaching initiative? That coaching culture.

I think the thing to remember here is many of your managers, if not most of them, got that job because they were rockstar sellers. They didn’t necessarily have much managerial experience going into this and so one of the things that tends to lag behind, for first-time managers, or even tenured managers, is the time it takes to get better at coaching but then just sort of the commitment to doing it on an ongoing basis.

And then the last thing, as I mentioned before, is once you see the bottlenecks you’ve got coaching programs in place to help resolve those day-to-day. Just be conscious of the fact that new ones are going to pop up. So have a measurement system in place and an observation system in place to help people across the team or your centralized surveys, assessments, diagnostics, picking up on those seemingly tactical sort of bottlenecks in the engaged stage, or the managed stage, for example. Shine a light on them and then recognize the fact that once one bottleneck is resolved another one’s going to pop up. Continuously asking your teams what they need help on at the individual level.

That would be my advice. If you can help them execute in the day-to-day it is likely that they’re going to feel supported. If they feel supported and the investments you’re making are aligned to what they need to improve upon the money will follow for them, and of course that’s the number one driver of retention for sales professionals.

Barry: Cash money. All right, well, Michael thanks again for joining.

Michael: Thank you, Barry.