Why do some salespeople switch jobs every nine months?

Published: Wed, 10/19/22

October 19, 2022

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back. The economy appears to be in a really strange place – stocks are struggling, yet employment numbers remain fairly strong. One thing remains certain though: no matter what happens, salespeople will likely get most of the blame. In this week’s issue of The Quota, we interview The Challenger Sale author Mathew Dixon about his new book, The Jolt Effect (it’s really good), and give some advice to a rep who can’t seem to stick with one job. Let’s go.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

32.7

Emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages.

Source: Backlinko

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

Yesware, the company that pioneered the (sometimes heartbreaking) technology that allows you to see when a prospect opens your email, has been acquired by Vendasta, a Saskatchewan-based technology company. Boston-based Yesware was founded in 2010. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. You can read more about it here.
In the latest episode of sales reps with cool side-hustles, People magazine recently profiled Jordan Moore, an award-winning bodybuilder, a rising country music star, and, still to this day, a sales manager at a Nashville-area car dealership. If you want to feel even less productive, you can read the profile here.

FEATURE

An interview with Mathew Dixon, author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 12 years (doesn’t sound so bad), then you’ve probably heard of the book (and methodology) The Challenger Sale by Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Well Dixon is back, co-authoring a new book called The Jolt Effect along with Ted McKenna. We reached out to Mathew and he agreed to sit down for an interview, which ended up being one of our favorites so far. (note: this interview has been condensed for length and clarity).

1. Your first book, The Challenger Sale, became a sales publishing phenomenon. Why do you think it resonated so much with the sales community?

I think it resonated for two main two reasons . I think that The Challenger Sale kind of came in at a time when the market, and by the market I mean sales leaders and heads of sales, enablement, sales effectiveness etc. were looking for a better answer.

The first big trend was around solution selling, where you go in and diagnose customer needs, find out what's keeping the customer up at night, and then prescribe a solution - was generating lower win rates. Salespeople had mastered that approach, but it was yielding diminishing returns over time. Customers were growing tired of it.

The second big trend was the phenomenon of customers learning on their own. This had been happening for decades really, but I think it had reached a kind of crescendo right around 2011.

When we did the research. We actually found that customers are almost 60 percent of the way through their buying journey before they ever engage with a salesperson. When customers are learning on their own they don't see a lot of value in a sales person coming in and asking them questions like what keeps them up at night, and other classic solution selling approaches.

The reason is that they’ve already figured out the answer to that question, or they think they have. They’ve already researched vendor solutions.They’ve already benchmarked different suppliers.They’ve kind of put you in a box, and then they reach out to you and ask you to compete on price. They’ve already created a shortlist and want you to compete for their business.

When this is the case, the solution selling approach doesn't have a lot of resonance with customers, if they’ve already diagnosed their problem and understand the available solutions. They have already figured it out, or think they have, and have done a ton of research on their own.

At this point, what has a lot more effectiveness is coming in and showing them what should be keeping them up at night. In other words, what is the thing that they couldn't learn on their own? This is the core of the Challenger Approach.

2. Tell us about your new book, The Jolt Effect.

For The Jolt Effect we studied two and a half million sales conversations.

We’ve long been admirers of Neil Rackham's work from the late 70s and early 80s - SPIN Selling. Professor Rackham and his team spent a decade traveling the world and physically sitting in on and taking notes on over 32,000 sales conversations.

We'd always aspired to do something like that, but we could never find anybody to pay for it and part of the problem was pre-pandemic: a lot of sales weren’t happening in a virtual setting. The important sales meetings as we all know, at least pre-pandemic, still happened in the client's office.

And so it was really hard to study those at scale without flying all over the world and sitting in on those sales meetings and again we couldn't find anybody willing to pay for our plane tickets, but in March of 2020 all that changed.

Sales became 100% virtual overnight and so that meant that all of the sales conversations in a sales cycle from the mundane ones, to the really critical ones, were happening on virtual platforms. Which meant they could be recorded and studied using modern technology, natural language processing and machine learning.

So it was a moment in time that we could study sales at scale. We recruited several dozen companies, harvested data from those companies (two and a half million recorded sales calls), transcribed them using a transcription engine, and then studied them with machine learning.

3. A major focus of this book is customer indecision. Why is indecision such a deal-killer?

We found in our study that anywhere between 40-60% of the average salesperson's total opportunity set is actually lost to no decision. These are customers who go through the entire sales process only to end up doing nothing.

These are the prospects that ghost you. They start going radio silent. Eventually, you stop putting effort behind them and declare them as closed in the CRM system but tag them as ‘no decision’. So it's not that the customer bought from a competitor, it's that they chose to do nothing. It’s a huge productivity suck for the average salesperson.

When a prospect is showing signs of ending up in a no decision wasteland, every salesperson has been taught that the reason that's happening is you haven't beaten their status quo, right?

And the way we’ve been taught to beat the status quo, is you dial up the fear of missing out (FOMO).

When you try to dial up the FOMO, you show them the pain of staying the same is worse than the pain of change. What we actually found is that this approach backfires way more often than it works out – there's an 84% probability that doing that actually increases the odds that the customer does nothing.

They're not concerned about missing out, what they're concerned about is messing up, so it's not the FOMO. It’s the fear of messing up (FOMU). There are three specific ways we’ve found that customers are worried about messing up.

The first one is they're afraid of picking the wrong thing. We put lots of options in front of them as salespeople, and they're looking at all those options, and they're worried they're going to pick the wrong one.

The second thing is the customer being concerned that they haven't done enough research. They look at the market, your technology, and they feel hesitant. They may have never bought a solution like yours, and want to do more research. What will happen is they’ll endlessly consume content and end up in analysis paralysis.

The third sort of thing that they're worried about messing up is that they won't get what they're paying for. That specifically pertains to their fear that while you're projecting a great ROI on the purchase, or great cost savings, or top-line revenue growth, or market share increase - that they might not actually realize those benefits and that they have no guarantee from you as a vendor that they're going to get the returns that you're promising.

4. What are some things sales reps can do to overcome customer indecision?

The JOLT method. JOLT is an acronym that stands for four behaviors, which we found in the two and a half million sales calls we’ve analyzed.

The first one we studied is that salespeople need to be able to Judge the level of customer indecision. The problem with indecision is it’s everywhere. We found that almost 90% of opportunities had customers with moderate-to-high levels of indecision. The problem with indecision is it's like carbon monoxide. We have no way of identifying it, because customers don’t openly admit to being indecisive. Nobody raises their hand and says, "I struggle to make decisions".

The O in JOLT is Offering a recommendation to customers. As we talked about before, they're worried about what to choose and when you throw a lot of options in front of customers, they worry about what to choose. It sounds exciting to the customer early on, but then they start to worry about it. Don’t put too many options where the customer has to decide what not to buy.

The L is Limiting the exploration. Customers left to our own devices will do research until the cows come home. They will never be satisfied, which is a real danger for salespeople. When the customer asks for another demo, another reference call, another whitepaper, it feels good because it feels like making progress. But what the best salespeople know is all you're doing is increasing the likelihood that the customer will get wrapped around the axle, and they will get analysis paralysis.

What you need to do is put a stop to their research. You can't tell them to stop doing research, but the way you do this is you get them to shift from trying to be an expert themselves to seeing you as an expert.

The T is Taking risk off the table. This is all about you de-risking the purchase for the customer. This can be as simple as offering an opt-out clause or a pro-rated refund opportunity, but it could also come down to a suggestion from the customer. You need to lower risk around the purchase decision, often a consideration added to the contract, that makes them feel like they're not jumping off a cliff without a safety net. Let them know that you have their back.

Those are the four behaviors. We like it because it's an acronym, it's memorable. But it also speaks to what's happening here: we're jolting our customers forward, we're getting them to move forward.

TOGETHER WITH QUOTAPATH

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MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

What was tech giant Oracle originally called?

A. Cyberdyne Systems Incorporated
B. Paradigm Development Corporation
C. Larry’s Software Funhouse
D. Software Development Laboratories

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

“I sell marketing SaaS (shocker, I know), and my customers are usually CMOs or other heads of marketing. Last spring, I was working on a deal that I was pretty excited about because I had sourced it myself through a cold-call to the company’s head of demand gen.

We had multiple rounds of conversations, presentations, and a lot of back and forth over email. What started out as a deal that I was certain would close became one of those zombie deals that doesn’t seem to want to die, but refuses to close. Basically, when they brought it to their CEO, he wouldn’t commit to buying our software, but wouldn’t say no either, so my champion at the company had no new information for me.

Finally, after quite a bit of pestering, my champion (head of demand gen) started looping their VP of marketing into our direct communications to try to speed things along. The VP kept asking questions (over email) that I had already answered multiple times, so I was starting to get frustrated about the whole thing.

And here’s where it kind of went off the rails. What happened was this: the VP sent an email asking if we had a feature that really had nothing to do with our product and was (in my opinion) a question that showed he wasn’t paying any attention to us. I took that email and forwarded it to my boss, who had been asking about the deal, and said something like “There’s no way this deal is going anywhere.”

Here’s where I messed up. Instead of replying to the original email from the VP (with the champion copied on it), for some reason, I replied all to the email I had forwarded to my boss, then added the VP and champion to the email. I think the reason I did this was because I was already swamped with other stuff and wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing.

But my email, saying that the deal wasn’t going anywhere, went to the VP (our prospect), and the champion at the company, who didn’t respond for a few hours. Finally, the champion sent me a separate email profusely apologizing, but saying that they didn’t have the budget for it anymore. I’m not sure it would’ve closed anyway, but I definitely guaranteed that it wouldn’t.”

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- October 2022

WORTH A PEEK

One of our most shared sections is the number of the week, which we find each week by combing through the latest sales data. If you want to see that section multiplied by 85, you can check out HubSpot's 85 key sales statistics for 2022. There are some great nuggets in there that might help you close more deals. You can check it out here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I have been in sales for almost five years, even though it feels like I just started yesterday. In that time, I’ve sold cars, manufacturing equipment, tried staffing, and just started my first software sales role as a business development rep.

Here is my problem (if you couldn’t figure it out already): I always start off enthusiastic, ready to take on the world, and optimistic about my chances to make a lot of money. But eventually, after about nine months (I went back and thought about it, it seems to happen around the ninth month almost every time), I am completely disillusioned with the company and industry I’m in, and start looking for something better.

I’ve done this at least four times now, and there were another two instances where I quit without having anything lined up and lived off my savings until I found something new. When I think about working in sales, I get motivated, but when it comes to the day-to-day, I start to lose faith after a few quarters, or find something wrong with the company or people I work with.

Is there anything I can do to make sure I stay enthusiastic, or am I destined to be one of those salespeople who hops around their whole career, because if that’s the case, I’m probably better off finding a salaried job so that I’m not stressing myself out every time I get fed up. I appreciate any feedback you might have.

Noncommittal in New York

Dear Noncommittal,

We definitely agree that if you can’t learn to stick it out, then you’ll never achieve enough success or make enough money in sales for it to be worth all the trouble.

Without knowing much about you, it’s hard to say what the problem might be. If you’re on the younger side, the “big picture” view might only come as you get a bit older and gain more perspective. There’s not much in life that can be achieved overnight, and success in sales takes long, grueling commitment, though it does pay off relatively quickly, especially considering that doctors and lawyers have to go to school for years before they ever see a dime.

Here’s our advice: the next time you hit that nine month mark and start thinking about leaving, don’t. Instead, just stay and see what happens. Consider it an experiment. Stay at your company and put in some effort, and see how far you can take it.

Here’s the thing about success: small wins give you the confidence to keep going. And eventually, you’ll get a big win, and before you know it, you’ll have an entirely different perspective on the daily grind that so many people can’t seem to stomach.

But the only way to get there is to tough it out, put in the effort, and keep track of all your wins. If you can’t make it work at four different companies, it’s probably not about them, it’s about you. The good news is that you can change – you just have to ignore that little voice in your head that tells you it’s time to quit. Good luck!

Quiz Answer: D

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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