EP166: The Sales Cycle: Lengthening is Not Always a Bad Thing
In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn’t about predicting anything but rather bringing people together. He compares the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris Beall adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There is even a reference to fortune tellers, who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. They guys agree that while the game of sales has not changed, the tools available to do it have improved, and the ability to access and share information has greatly increased, making sales performance level much higher today than in the past.
If you haven’t listened to the first half of this series, we highly recommend you to check it out, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”
Full episode transcript below:
Announcer (00:06):
Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49.
(00:22):
In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn’t about predicting anything, but rather bringing people together. They compare the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There’s even a reference to fortune tellers who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. Listen to this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, The Sales Cycle: Lengthening Is Not Always A Bad Thing.
Barry Trailer (01:19):
Now, I’ll just say this. It took me a while to get to this place, and I think it’s worth saying. Way back when, when I was at Oracle giving that talk, one of the things that I was saying then and still say is, “I think business is just an excuse for us all to hang out together.” And people would hear that and they’d say, “Oh, you really are from California.” And it wasn’t until I was invited into Salesforce around 2015 to give a talk on innovation that I came up with a second part of that, which is, “Hang out together to do what?” And I think the answer is to do good, to make this a better place, to establish and elevate relationships over time. That’s our definition of selling. And if you can make a difference, if you can connect folks, add value, move this thing along, I think that’s a job worth doing.
Corey Frank (02:16):
For sure. No, that’s beautiful. I like that a lot. I think, Chris, you certainly in your team with the Flight School, to what Barry is talking about, you’ve probably been part of many organizations and many individuals that maybe have been in sales one year five times or one year three times. And all you do is teach him the basics of Flight School, that it’s okay to have turbulence. It doesn’t mean you did something wrong to have an objection or to have a stall. Maybe you talk a little bit about that and how it ties into what Barry’s saying, because you see that I understand it now and I can actually fall in love with this profession after so many years of doing it poorly.
Chris Beall (02:59):
Yeah. Flight School’s been interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is I’m an educator by background. My degree is in education and physics. People tend to think of me as more the physics type, but then they go, “Well, how is it you do this other thing?” Well, sales and education are highly intertwined, both in the training part of sales, but also just in doing it. I mean, you’re bringing people together. If they’re not having new thoughts and they’re not thinking about doing new things, no sale is going to occur.
Corey Frank (03:27):
There’d be no sale.
Chris Beall (03:29):
So, it’s essentially an educational discipline in that sense. And it’s also, and I’ve told you before, Corey, why I in this particular situation I’m in, I believe that sales done well is how we reduce the friction at the bottleneck of the innovation economy, and its innovations that allow us to live together peacefully. And so that’s the essence of the society we live in, is that we innovate in order to bring sufficient convenience to many people that they can psychologically, sociologically, and economically coexist with people that aren’t perfectly like them, like are not in their family.
(04:15):
With the dissolution of the village throughout most of the world many, many years ago, we have to figure out how to live with each other. And interestingly enough, it’s innovation that does that, that gives us the ability to do that. And sales is what brings innovation from idea back there in the lab somewhere to reality and actually being used. So, to me, it’s a sacred trust to pursue. When I think about things like Flight School, I always think about cycle times. And I come out of the world of manufacturing where we had to think about stuff like cycle times and quality and throughput.
Corey Frank (04:15):
And scrap rate.
Chris Beall (04:57):
Yeah. And then you try to figure out what can be addressed. And it’s always, if you’re a theory of constraints guy like me, it’s always the bottleneck has got to be identified, characterized. You have to understand it’s investability, and then you make the investment and then you sit back and watch and you see where the bottleneck moves. That’s the cycle of business improvement that some people believe in, and I certainly deeply believe in. The beauty of Flight School is all of that happens within four sessions. And so you have short enough cycle time to know what happened because you’re tying causes to affect when you can observe the actual intermediary, which is the actions.
(05:38):
In sales, I think, one of our biggest problems is deal cycle times themselves are long, but that’s not what is interesting to me that creates the problem. It’s also the opportunity. I’ve been measuring cycle times between conversation and pipeline build and first conversation, and the average cycle time, “Oh, I can do it this way,” I went back and looked at one month, the first conversation was from January 1, 2019 to January 31, 2019, and asked, “What percentage of the post-2019 pipeline for all of our customers was built in conversations that started 11 months or before ago/” that’s an interesting thing to look at, and the answer turned out to be 64%.
Corey Frank (06:25):
Really?
Chris Beall (06:26):
So, when you look at that and ask, “Okay. So, now how long is that compared to the anticipated tenure of the people who are going to be in there making the sales,” you realize the most of the making took place well before their time, and they’re unaware of the connection between that conversation that took place on January 17, 2019 and the deal that was won or lost or whatever in November of 2022. That connection is not understood. And when you combine it, it’s not measured. We’re measuring it, I think for the first time, actually. I don’t think anybody’s ever seen it before because you have to actually have machinery that says, “The conversations are all delivered through the machine so that I can measure the damn things.”
(07:15):
So, you combine that with the short duration of employment, which I think is a consequence of that, by the way, and then you combine it with the agency problem, which is that most folks in sales are agents, not owners. And so their responsibility is to their own future, not to the company’s future. Most of what they’re working on will benefit the company in a future that they will not personally experience, and therefore they compress it down to the number. And there’s a lot of luck involved. What I think’s so interesting is how much luck is involved, because these timeframes don’t come together in a way where you can make the connection, close the loop and make predictions.
Barry Trailer (07:58):
Well, you said a couple of things that I think are pretty interesting. One, I didn’t know you came from manufacturing, but one of the lines that we used to use all the time was, “If the head of manufacturing took over the sales organization, the first thing he or she would do is shut it down because the scrap rate is unbelievable.” I mean, the scrap rate is ridiculous. The outcome of forecast deals is less than 50%, and that’s a fraction of the stuff that was accepted into the plant to work on in the first place.
Chris Beall (07:58):
I know.
Barry Trailer (08:30):
So, the scrap rate is nuts. And the other thing is this whole notion of cycle time. I mean, I don’t disagree that we haven’t measured it before, but I also don’t think it matters. Everybody thinks reduced cycle… In manufacturing, reducing that is a good thing. But in sales, we’re not just talking about machinery. And if the deal is closing this week, whether it’s been in process for six months or six weeks or six hours doesn’t really matter if it closes this week. If you had to work on it for six months and nurture it along, then that’s a reason to reduce cycle time. If you are vulnerable to competition coming in and snatching this at the 11th hour, that’s a reason to reduce cycle time.
(09:22):
Let’s just imagine that instead of four months from blissfully unaware through awareness and education and deliberation before we get to negotiation, let’s just say if that takes four months and we’re constantly pressing people to, “Let’s get to a decision, let’s close this baby out,” what if it turns out that just leaving the buyer alone for a month yielded higher close rates? I mean, that could happen.
(09:59):
They actually play with it for a month and say, “This is awesome. How did we ever live without this? Boom. Let’s do this thing.” But we don’t have that because we aren’t measuring in a consistent way, in an accurate way, and everybody’s trying to jam it and get it done and get it in this quarter and all that nonsense. But it may be that lengthening the sales cycle in some cases is great if it doesn’t increase your vulnerability and it doesn’t increase your cost of sales and it does increase buyer satisfaction and all the I’s are dotted and so on. What the hell? It’s closing this week. Celebrate.
Chris Beall (10:35):
Yeah, celebrate and broaden your portfolio. I love long cycle times, but I love variable cycle times by their nature because they represent reality. Everybody should realistically be working at their own pace, so to speak, with regard to making big change decisions. And if you’re selling anything less than a big change decision, go get a better job. So, if you encounter early, like our friend Henry Wojdyla… Henry runs a business called RealSource and he’s been a guest on the show and he’s one of my customers. And what Henry does is he buys medical office buildings way, way off market way early, and he builds relationships in order to do that. And he has conversations to initiate and sustain and nurture those relationships, and to gain intelligence that allows him to make good decisions as to where he applies his time. Interestingly, here is a guy who works in 15-minute increments that are precisely managed for maximum productivity because he is the machine.
(11:39):
So, we provide the Iron Man suit for the machine, but he asked us, and nobody’s ever asked us this before, “What are the exact 15-minute intervals on each day of the week when I should be talking to investors or developers or physicians or nobody?” And Thomas Young built him a beautiful chart and he works to that. So, here’s a guy running huge cycle times, highly variant, no control over them. You can’t make somebody want to sell a medical office building. “I’m sorry, you’ve got to do this today.” He’s trying to get them well before necessity and succeeding at it, and yet he’s managing his own day with very tight time constraints because he knows that that’s the cost element that is going to run as it runs also.
(12:29):
As we say, overhead is a race horse. It eats while you sleep. And so you are that racehorse when you’re a lone contributor out there doing this stuff. So, it’s always fascinating to me that somebody like Henry, who is a genius, looks at that and says, “Therefore, broaden your portfolio.” His instinct and his math is exactly right, which is don’t push what’s in front of you. Get more going on and let it flow and make sure that your closed loop with regard to the information flow coming back from all of those elements of your portfolio. That is, keep an eye on it, but don’t spend too much doing that. And I think that his theory is superior to most.
Barry Trailer (13:56):
Well, to me, the heart of all of this, back in the day when I was running and teaching Miller Heiman programs, the only concept that was in every program was win-win. And I’ve done, if anybody goes to our site, salesmastery.com, we have all these videos, no charge, you can just watch them, and the four parter is Win-Win. The first part is introducing the idea and then the rules for playing win-win and then how to make it operational. But the last part is coming from abundance rather than scarcity. To play win-win, you need to have both courage and compassion. And to do that, you need to be coming from abundance. When you’ve got to have it, when this is the only deal and this is either going to make or break you and it’s all or none, you’re screwed because you’re desperate.
(14:51):
And I talk about, in the video, it’s kind of this perverse law of nature. When you need it the most, you get it the least. And when you need it the least, you seem to get it the most. And part of that is winners want to go with winners. And so if they feel, sense, smell your desperation, they start asking more questions like, “What’s the matter with this guy?” If it’s like, you know what? No wine before it’s time. If you’re not ready, we want to make sure that you’ve got all your questions answered, that you understand why we’re doing this. You understand the risks of delay. But we understand the risk of you not having your questions answered. So, let’s get there together.
(15:31):
And if you’ve got tons of deals you’re working on called pipeline and you’re in touch with folks and you’re staying in touch and you know that people will call you when they need you, then it’s a pretty good living. And most people universally, their pipelines are anemic. They do not have enough good stuff going. And so they drag all this other crap along hoping against hope that somehow it’s going to turn into business, and it doesn’t. And everybody’s like fingers crossed and voodoo dolls and whatever. It’s just nuts. It’s nuts.
Corey Frank (16:08):
Yeah. Well, you talk about those, I believe in one of your research works, talking about world-class firms. And I think, again, I think the number was about 94% of the world-class firms that your firm talked to and surveyed agreed with an understanding of what good looks like, best practices, similar. Chris, I think certainly what ConnectAndSell and what Flight School does is flush out probably more of these best practices that should be informed to the world, such as looking back when the pipeline originated. That meant that’s a good best practice. But Barry, when you look at these 94% that they know what good looks like, and I think what you were saying before we jumped on air here was that less than 6% of actual firms flush out as being world class.
Barry Trailer (17:02):
Well, 6% of our survey population.
Corey Frank (17:05):
Granted. 6% of your samples said that.
Barry Trailer (17:08):
We had 900 firms in that survey. So, yes.
Corey Frank (17:13):
Well, that’s still a pretty large sample set though. I would-
Barry Trailer (17:15):
Yeah, I think it’s a reasonable reflection. And they have an externally informed definition of what good looks like. In fact, I think it’s Kevin Dorsey. K.D.
Corey Frank (17:25):
Yep.
Barry Trailer (17:26):
Kevin Dorsey, aka K.D. He’s a funny guy. I like his stuff. Anyway, he calls it WGLL. What Good Looks Like.
Corey Frank (17:38):
Yep. Yep. Good Looks Like
Barry Trailer (17:38):
W-G-L-L.
Corey Frank (17:39):
And then everybody knows what better looks like too, right? It’s like, “Hey, this is what good looks like, and I know what my better looks like.”
Barry Trailer (17:39):
No.
Corey Frank (17:39):
No?
Barry Trailer (17:46):
No, I don’t think they do.
Corey Frank (17:48):
No? So they-
Barry Trailer (17:48):
I don’t think they know what either of them looks like. And also-
Corey Frank (17:52):
Well, here’s the question. So, if I struggle with knowing what good looks like and I just want more. It could be more pipeline, as you were saying. It could be better quality sales people. It could be having my recruiting team get better people. It could be, “I need better systems. If only, if only, if only if I had X.” When you look at those things, those requests from those 900 in that sample size from your most recent survey, which one stands out in your mind, and Chris, I’d care to get your impression on this when Barry tells us, of the one that casts the widest swath, the biggest net, to fix the biggest thing? Obviously I need to figure out, listen, there’s 12 World Class criteria in the sales mastery world. Is there an 80/20 where, “Hey, this one thing will ameliorate 80% of what ails me”? Is there one that stands out more than another?
Barry Trailer (18:47):
Well, did the SPS survey and we had 850 responses to that, and it’s a year newer than the World Class. And when we looked at all the variables and all the permutations, we weren’t running AI on this, I don’t want to make it sound like more than was, but we looked at dozens and dozens of combinations. The winning combination that got the highest revenue attainment I think was 106%, had the highest percentage of reps meeting and beating quota was over 70%, had the lowest turnover and so on. There were four things they did. Number one, they were coaching. Their managers were coaching in a consistent manner. So, I’m going to say a coaching culture because that doesn’t happen. And I’ll tell you, the room always gets quiet when we ask who’s coaching the coach. So, a coaching culture says everybody is on the journey.
(19:42):
Everybody has a coach, including the sales leader. So, number one was coaching, consistent coaching. Number two, they were formal sales process or above. So, we have formal, agile and customized. They were at least formal, which means, “We have a sales process. Managers and reps are exposed to it. They’re expected to use it. That use is reinforced and enforced. It’s the way we do business around here.” And there are other things that can add to that, but that was number two. Basic sales training was above average or exceptional. That is they had sales training, basic sales training. And training on the usage of the technology they had was above average or excellent. You have these tools. Why not train people on how to use them?
Corey Frank (20:34):
Yeah, gotcha.
Barry Trailer (20:35):
What a concept. Those were the four, and that blew everything else away.
Corey Frank (20:39):
Chris, what do you think of that? I mean, I listen to all these here, Barry. And Chris, we’ve had many guests over the last three years, four years on Market Dominance Guys who are certainly key practitioners of their craft. Is it wrong, Barry, that none of these blow me away, that I’m thinking there’s got to be one elusive, mountaintop Kilimanjaro that I’ll never be able to attain to hit the world class status? And instead, it seems to be things that, Chris, certainly you teach these in Flight School. You’ve been a CEO for a while.
Barry Trailer (21:13):
I just gave it to you. I just gave it to you.
Chris Beall (21:15):
I mean, what you’re saying is what? There’s no silver bullet?
Barry Trailer (21:19):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (21:20):
By the way, most people, they don’t know where that comes from. It was The Long Ranger. He always had silver bullets, the latest bright shiny object. This will do it. And if that one didn’t, the next one will. And I think that, by and large, and we have lots of friends, we have sponsors that are solution providers, but I think by and large, the conversation has been hijacked by solution providers who are providing technology. And the answer is, yeah, technology is an enabler. It’s an augmenter. But coaching, training, practice, these are all elements of mastery. That’s why we call it that. There are five keys to mastery, and coaching and practice and surrender, those are all part of it. And here’s the thing that I say all the time when I’m giving the sales mastery presentation. In fact, I’m going to record it and put that up on our website. I’m going to go back. I’m going to close on what I talked about earlier, the big lie. You are your number.
(22:32):
I got into an argument one day with the VP of sales that 90% of reps don’t know how they’re doing. And he said, “That’s crap. They absolutely.” He said, “That may be true in other areas in McKinsey’s study, but not in sales.” And I said, “Okay, fill me in.” He says, “Come on, bear. 60% a plan. You’re doing lousy. 120% a plan, you’re golden.” And I said, “That’s good information, but it’s not the answer to the question, how are you doing? 60% a plan, 120% a plan or whatever percent of plan is how you’ve done so far. How are you doing? And the real question everybody really wants the answer for, how are you going to do? What’s the forecast?
(23:16):
We say forecast accuracy is an oxymoron because people are still just shooting anywhere. But here’s the deal. Quota is a company’s best guess at an account or a territory’s potential. Quota, the number, your number, is the company’s best guess at an account or a territory’s potential. It has nothing to do with your potential. So, I hear plenty of people say, “I’m 110% a plan.” I’ve never heard anybody say I’m even 100% of my potential. That’s the big deal, Corey. That’s the amazing thing. People are amazing. And if they would just focus on that mastery, self-mastery, who knows how great we could get here?
Corey Frank (24:13):
Wow, that’s a beautiful thing, Chris. And it’s a beautiful way to look at any profession, whether you’re a ditch digger or whether you’re serving Starbucks, or whether you’re slinging cold calls, or whether you’re a politician. That ties in that approach to the higher value. So, I tell you what, Chris, we got to have Barry on here at least once a quarter, I think, if anything. Because all the other guests and all that we’re so lucky and blessed to have on board, but our profession, you’re the oracle. That’s where you started back in the day. But truly, Barry the oracle to see… I love that differentiation of how are you doing versus how are you going to do? And I think, Chris, certainly having Barry on regularly, he can tell us how is our profession going to do, not just a reflection of what we’ve done, but where we’re going to go. So, Chris, any final thoughts here as we come to the close of another powerful episode of the Market Dominance Guys?
Chris Beall (25:14):
Well, yeah. Here’s a final thought. Sales is similar to a lot of other stuff where there’s high variability in outcomes even if you have low variability in performance and inputs. It just is. In that sense, it’s something like being a batter in baseball. You have a lot of control over what you do, but you don’t have that much control over what’s coming at you. And the difference between good and terrible is an eighth of an inch or a quarter of a second or whatever it happens to be. And in worlds like that, what we find is that those who do well apply mastery over reasonably long periods of time without a great deal of good feedback. That is, there’s an element of belief that they have to have in order to stick to something sufficiently to be either a good coach or to be coach-worthy, and to be somebody who can take training or give training without getting an instant attaboy out of it.
(26:26):
When you think about sales, folks are hoping to be able to predict outcomes. There’s no evidence that outcomes are individually predictable, and there’s not an awful lot of evidence among honest people that outcomes are even generally predictable. Try predicting the outcome of Q3 2022 in Q3 2021. Just give that a whirl sometime. Go back and ask people what was going to happen. Those outcomes were not particularly predictable. And try it again in 2020. Same thing, go Q3 to Q3 the year before. Your predictive ability is pretty shallow. Your ability to maintain a buffer, a financial buffer, so that you can go from here to there because you intend to actually get there, and a buffer of will and willingness and camaraderie and friendship and the stuff that keeps you going, that’s really what’s going to determine over time who is left standing, who is doing well, who is admired.
(27:35):
And it’s just the nature of the beast. And this desire to come up with predictability, it’s a universal human desire. We believe in fortune tellers. Have somebody read your poems sometime who is very sincere about it, and you’ll find yourself believing stupid shit that can’t possibly make sense. And you’ll believe it a year later and five years later and 10 years later because of our deep, deep inherent desire to be able to predict what cannot be predicted. Sales isn’t about predicting anything. It’s about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. That’s kind of it. That’s kind of it. And if you’re not doing things that bring people together, you’re probably not going to be able to do very much good in this profession. And it’s simpler than we think, and it’s subtler than we think.
Barry Trailer (28:36):
Well, I think if you use baseball as the analogy, and there are a lot of it, if you hit 300 you’re in the Hall of Fame, which means you were out 70% of the time. Well, maybe if you hit 400. Ted Williams is the only guy who did it for a full season, 400. But still, one and a half times you were out as you were successful. But I think if you look at any sport, baseball included today, and now they’ve got all these stats with exit angles and velocity and everything else, it’s just amazing, they’re playing at a higher level than they did 50 years ago and 100 years ago. Same game, but Moneyball and all the rest of it, the sabermetrics, everything that’s been brought to bear.
(29:26):
If you look at gymnastics today versus the sixties, particularly women’s gymnastics, it’s unbelievable the difference in performance. And I think the same is true in sales. I think the ability to access information and to share information and the speed at which it’s happening, and it’s still the same game. It’s connecting people. It’s establishing and elevating relationships over time. But how you do that and the tools available to do it, and all of the-
Corey Frank (29:58):
We love the stuff, Barry, this is phenomenal. Again, I think we may boost our couple of listeners with this kind of insight that we’ve had over the last hour.
Barry Trailer (30:09):
Maybe both of them.
Corey Frank (30:09):
Both of them.
Barry Trailer (30:10):
Double them up.
Corey Frank (30:12):
So, Barry, thank you again so much for the time. We will absolutely have you back in the hot seat here. We can listen to you all day, get a state of the state of our profession. So, for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank for Chris Beall and the ConnectAndSell team. Until next time.
Links from this episode:
Sales Mastery – https://salesmastery.com/
ConnectAndSell – https://connectandsell.com
Branch49 – https://branch49.com
Sales Education Foundation – https://salesfoundation.org/
Barry Trailer on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/
Chris Beall on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/
Corey Frank on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/
