Boost Sales: Tackle Low Win Rates

If there’s nothing that measures your effectiveness as a salesperson better than win rates, why do we keep ignoring them?

In this episode of “How to Sell More,” host Mark Drager talks about the benefits of understanding and improving win rates with prominent sales strategist Andy Paul,  the voice behind The Win Rate Podcast. Andy breaks down the reasons win rates are a true reflection of how effectively a salesperson meets customer needs and why regular analysis is key to identifying areas for improvement.

• Effective time management: Prioritizing high-potential leads and nurturing them effectively can significantly impact win rates.
• Improvement through reflection: Regularly analyzing win rates helps in identifying areas for improvement and tailoring strategies for better customer engagement.
• Delivering real value: By offering insights and solutions that genuinely address the client's concerns, you create a lasting value.

“The biggest factors that influence the buyer's choice of vendor are not the product or the price, but their experience with the salesperson.” -- Andy Paul

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Links to This Episode

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Audible

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Key Takeaways

• Win Rates as Performance Indicators - Win rates are a direct reflection of how effectively a salesperson meets customer needs and how well they resonate with their audience.
• Strategic Client Selection - Salespeople have a limited amount of time and attention. Focusing on prospects whose needs align with the seller's strengths leads to higher win rates.
• Building Strong Relationships - Establishing trust and rapport with clients is key to selling more. Win rates will only increase if the salesperson can move past a product's basic features and benefits to understand the client's unique challenges and needs.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Balance sales technique with personalization: Boost your win rate by integrating systematic selling techniques with personal touches and relationship-building skills.

Dig deeper: Move past a product's basic features and benefits to deeply understand the client's unique challenges and needs.

Look at the big picture: CEOs need to understand how many selling hours it takes to move a deal from the initial point of contact to win. Only then can they effectively measure their capacity for producing revenue.

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Follow Andy Paul on Social

Website: https://www.andypaul.com/

The Win Rate Podcast: https://www.andypaul.com/podcast

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandypaul/

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More About Today's Guest, Andy Paul

I help fix your broken win rates | Advise CEO/CRO on win rate strategy and execution | 1:1 & group coaching on win rate improvement. | Host of The Win Rate Podcast

Andy has become recognized as the go-to individual for fixing broken win rates, despite nearly failing to pass the sales training class in his first job post-college. His employers initially doubted his suitability for sales, citing his lack of "salesy" demeanor and considering him too introverted and analytical for the role. However, over three decades, Andy has carved out a successful career as an author, sales leader, speaker, and consultant by embracing his uniqueness, thinking differently, and adopting unconventional sales approaches.

He has significantly improved the performance of teams selling a wide range of products and services, from complex multi-million dollar communications networks to collectible professional sports memorabilia. Andy's expertise has benefitted raw technology startups, Fortune 1000 companies, and everything in between, covering nearly every sales channel, including franchise networks, retailers, dealers, distributors, VARs, and OEMs. His sales footprint spans nearly every corner of the globe.

Currently, Andy is focusing on what he enjoys most—imparting his distinctive insights on sales strategies and team building to companies, business owners, executives, and sales professionals, aiming to assist them in achieving their objectives.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So, Andy, you are the host of the Win Rate podcast. Naturally, as I'm the host of How to Sell More, I care a lot about how to sell more. You're the host of the Win Rate podcast. If you're going to name your podcast, write books about this, keynote on it, and get hired by all these corporate companies to help B2B businesses sell more and win more business, you must be passionate about win rates. What are they? Why have you dedicated your life to them? Isn't a win rate just a KPI?

Andy Paul: Yeah, it's surprising. There's been a change in perspective over the years. I was brought up in sales thinking this is the metric, right? Because what your win rate tells you is the buyer's vote on the value and the quality of their buying experience with you, full stop. And there's no other metric that measures your effectiveness as a seller as accurately as your win rate does.

Mark Drager: But is the win rate fair to place at the salesperson's feet when it could be influenced by timing, product-market fit, quality of leads, or the prospects you're working with? It could be all of these things, right?

Andy Paul: Yeah. The reason it's appropriate to put this on the feet of the salesperson is because you choose who you're going to sell to. You have a limited amount of time and attention. It's up to you to decide where you're going to invest that time and attention. If somebody's not a fit, don't sell to them. If the time is not right, you're not going to sell to them. You have that choice. And if you're saying as a seller, "Well, geez, I don't have enough prospects that fit what I need," then go out and find some.

Mark Drager: Okay, so what are we getting wrong about win rates? Why are we ignoring them as business people? Why is this the thing that we should be focused on more than anything else?

Andy Paul:  Well, for the reason I said before, there's nothing that measures your effectiveness as a seller better. Meaning, in the moments when you're interacting with the buyer, you are helping them make progress toward making their decision. What's the buyer trying to do? When you ask sellers what the buyer's job is, they often say, "They're trying to make a transformation in their business model." Sure, that's the outcome of the job. The job is making a decision to make a change in their business. And the reason they're talking to you as a seller is not because they want to, but because they need to. If they could get it done without you, they would.

Mark Drager: So, you've just quoted, I don't know if you're familiar with the book "Think Like Your Customers." I have this on my desk all the time. Yeah, by Bill Stinnett. He wrote this like 20 years ago, but there's an amazing quote in there that is like, "Hey, if your prospect can do this without you, they will cut you out in a second."

Andy Paul: Right. So this is the thing that sellers freak out about because Gartner and other companies publish research saying, "Oh, 75% of B2B buyers don't want to talk to salespeople." My rebuttal to that is, first of all, that's completely wrong. The figure is that 100% of buyers don't want to talk to salespeople. So if they're engaged with you in a conversation, it's not because they want to, it's because they need to. In those moments, what do they need you to help them do? They need you to help them gather and make sense of the information they need to be able to make an informed decision. Pure and simple. And we know from research by multiple companies like Gartner, Corporate Executive Board, and many others that have done buyer research, that at the end of the day, the biggest factors that influence the buyer's choice of vendor are not the product or the price, but their experience with the salesperson. So, ultimately, your win rate is just that – a measure of how effective and how valuable that experience has been for the buyer.

Mark Drager: And how many understand this I'm not sure that I do. I want to get specific on this. Is this similar to close rate, where you basically just decide at what point a lead becomes qualified and then measure your close rate off that qualified lead? Yes, or like, is that it? So, you get to decide and define what is a qualified lead or a non-qualified lead. And then you can play with your numbers this way, or?

Andy Paul: You're saying, "Well, this is what my forecast, my pipeline looks like this month, and we're at the end of the month. I've got a final disposition on 10 of them. Because of that 10, right, and 10 go to 'close won' or 'close lost.' You know, what fraction of those did you win? That's your win rate."

Mark Drager: Now, I don't normally jump onto something like this, but the subtitle of your podcast is 'The Science and Art of Great Selling.' And I don't know if this is just a marketing line you've come up with because it is a science and an art. Or if you spend time really digging into what aspects of managing this win rate is the science—whether this is following up in a certain time, a certain sequence, psychology, or whatever that might be, or influence. And what of this is an art, like adding your own voice, your own flair, your own follow-up, your own connections with people. Is there a cheat sheet that you've developed over the years that can help me understand the difference between these two parts of it, or what we should be doing to increase this win rate?

Andy Paul: Yeah. So, the most important thing you can do to increase your win rate is to make a choice about where you're going to invest your attention, right? Some of that is going to be, I'd say, probably upfront, a bit of intuition through experience, right? If you're a manager, you're working with a seller, and the seller says, "Look, this is a qualified opportunity that's come into my pipeline, and is going to come into my forecast." As a manager, ask, "Why? Why are we going to win this deal? Now, it's early stages. But unless the seller has some understanding as to why you are uniquely qualified to win that business, why they feel they're uniquely qualified to help the buyer, then why are you investing your time in it?" So, really, it comes down to discovery qualification. And we know this is not news, you know, a lot of people say, "Hey, you know, help me out." And I do this. I go into a company, and they need help, saying, "What's wrong with sales?" You start with discovery qualification. Now, the big problem with discovery, and this is again where the science and a bit of both come in, is that most sellers approach discovery by asking questions to determine whether the buyer is fit for the product.

That's not the purpose of discovery. The purpose of discovery is to understand what's most important to the buyer, in terms of the outcomes they want to achieve by making this change in their business, and the challenges that are preventing them from making that change. Two different things. But I would say most sellers walk away from sales training and sessions with their managers remembering, "Look, here's the playbook. Here are the questions we ask. Ask these questions." And they're all geared around what the seller needs from the buyer, not what the buyer needs from the seller. What the buyer needs, the reason they're talking to you in the first place, is to some dimension, they need help understanding what they can achieve by investing in your product and service and implementing it. They need to get your insights about whether they really understand the scope of the opportunity and the scope of the problem they're trying to address. That's why they're talking to you. So as a seller, is that science? Well, sure, it's science, but it's really the art as well. It's about being there for the buyer, helping them as opposed to what you can extract from them to help you move forward in your process, to meet your exit criteria for discovery, which is an illusion in and of itself because the buyer doesn't track to your sales stages. And discovery is not a one-and-done event. Every time you interact with the buyer, one of your goals is to deepen your understanding of what is most important to them.

Mark Drager: And how often is the buying journey completely different from the selling journey?

Andy Paul: 100 percent of the time.

Mark Drager: I wasn't going to go that far. But I thought, as marketers and salespeople, and as strategists, we could at least get a little bit of overlap there. But every time...

Andy Paul: I've spent a lot of time looking into this recently, especially for my next book. It's one of the topics I'm covering. You look at the typical stages in a CRM system; they're all about the seller, not the buyer at all. No buyer delineates where they are in their process by saying, "Oh, I'm in Discovery now," or "I'm in qualification." Not at all. In fact, most sellers really have no understanding of what buyers are trying to do. The buyer's job is to quickly gather and make sense of the information they need to make an informed decision, really, with the least investment of their time and attention. What does that mean they have to accomplish? Gartner took a stab at it about five years ago, with this buyer enablement flowchart. It's sort of a Rube Goldberg diagram with all these back-and-forth lines, the opposite of a linear stage process. But at the core, they said there are some tasks the buyer has to accomplish. They were sort of right with that, in my mind. I believe, and my experience has shown, that buyers have three tasks they need to accomplish in line with your selling. These three tasks are really very simple. The first task is what I call the 'What' task: What are we trying to achieve? What's the most important thing we're trying to get out of making this change? What's the opportunity we're trying to address, the problem we're trying to resolve? And what are the challenges standing in our way? As a seller, you have to look at it from a design perspective. If you can really understand, and even influence, the buyer's conception of the outcomes they can achieve, then you've put yourself at a competitive advantage.

Once the buyer gets to that stage, the next thing they're trying to decide is, "Okay, now we've got our 'What,' so how are we going to achieve this most important thing?" Again, there's a huge opportunity for sellers to guide the buyer through the trade-offs. Any decision a buyer makes is a result of trade-offs. It's not just, "Oh, that's great, I want that." It's more like, "Well, you could do A or B, or you could have A, B, and C." Your job as a seller is to guide the buyer through these trade-offs, helping them to complete their vision of how they can achieve their most important objectives. And then the third task for buyers is to decide who they want to make the change with. That's probably the third-order decision for the buyer. But most sellers come in pitching their products, saying "Choose me, choose me, choose me." In the mind of the buyer, that's really the least important thing at the moment they're going to decide.

But that's what Gartner was talking about in research they published in April this year, in 2023. The nine most important factors influencing a buyer's decision in the choice of a vendor: number one was trustworthiness, not product or price. Number two was the adaptability of the sellers to be able to help the buyer in the way that they need to be helped. None of the nine factors were really about product features and price at all. This has been echoed by another company, Trinity Perspectives based in Australia, which has conducted thousands of win-loss interviews around the world with enterprise buyers. About a year ago, the CEO summarized what they learned from all these interviews: nine reasons why you win, nine reasons why you lose. None of the 18 reasons were product features or price. The only time the price was mentioned was that your price is too cheap.

Mark Drager: So what I love about the three steps that you mentioned, where your prospect has to decide what the challenge is, the goals, how they will approach it, and who will help, very much overlaps with how I think more from a marketing or brand positioning point of view in terms of the five stages of awareness, and being able to drive people through it. As you're speaking, I think this sounds like a very insightful and consultative selling technique, which I appreciate. That's how I like to work with people: give me your challenge or your opportunity, and let us work together on the same side of the table to figure out how to overcome this in the best way and create a business case for it. We even develop pros and cons for each potential option or a risk profile for each path we can move forward on. But I've always felt, perhaps due to my corporate or enterprise background, that salespeople, quote-unquote, drive conversations more forward, pushing people ahead, maybe using the stick more than the carrot, so to speak. It seems like I've always been too passive in my approach because I just want to be there to help people arrive at the best solution and hopefully position us as that best solution. When the budget aligns and the client is delivered a great experience, the rest takes care of itself. But it feels like a passive approach compared to a more aggressive selling style. How do you respond to that?

Andy Paul: Yeah, that's just not true. The fact is, that buyers talk to sellers because they need to make a decision, not because they want to. This idea that you have to push buyers, that if you don't push them, they won't make a decision, it's not true. It's just not true.

Mark Drager: Like, sometimes we run into situations where they don't have the budget this quarter or this fiscal year, and it wasn't planned, so no one in the C-suite is going to open up a budget for it. I say, "Great, let's circle back when this is something we can win." But again, I've always felt very passive in that approach, like somehow I'm supposed to figure out some kind of way to convince them to free up a budget that doesn't exist. Do you know what I mean?

Andy Paul: Right. There was a study that came out, from purchasing managers, over 10 years ago. I remember seeing it, it said only 21% of large purchases are budgeted at the beginning of the year, specifically. Meaning, that a need came up, something identified a need and opportunity, and they made a business case for the use of capital. And the company said, "Sure, let's do it."

Mark Drager: Oh, so in that case, you're proving the point that I'm not doing a good enough job of creating a dramatic enough need to warrant finding the new budget to move forward with this?

Andy Paul: Sure, that could be part of it. Absolutely. But on the other hand, that's really part of defining the 'What,' as I call it. You have to define the rationale for making the decision to make a change. Most sellers think, "We're going to do this business case at the end, right? Like, our closing thing, this all makes sense." And my approach is, well, no, actually do that upfront. If you

don't do it until the end, and then you wonder, "Okay, why do so many deals end up in no decision?" It's not because the buyer is making the decision to stick with the status quo. They're making the decision not to buy from you. Right, because you didn't make the case for change. Make the case for change upfront, before you invest all your time and energy. Sure, you're going to invest some time right to help understand what's most important to them. You're going to explore the objectives they're trying to achieve and the challenges they have internally. And then, you'll do the business case. The general business case should be upfront. You're not going to be afraid to talk about your price upfront. You can't talk about value if you don't talk about price because value has no meaning in the absence of price. So, you're going to do whether it's a payback calculation or an ROI calculation. Running payback is what most CEOs and CFOs like. You do that upfront before they've invested the remaining three-quarters of their time and attention to get the deal done. Then, the buyer is saying, "We're committed to making a change, this makes sense, and we're going to continue to invest our time talking with you to make this happen."

Mark Drager: And by going through this, in my experience, you're also arming either the senior leader to be able to have a rationale to explain why this investment of time, money, and effort is being made, or you're giving a mid-level person the ammunition they need to sell through, to sell up, to get approval on these things.

Andy Paul: Yeah! And it's, you know, you want to know early, right? What do you invest? I'm talking to this one client, they're celebrating this big deal they've won. And they did a really good job of documenting all the time and effort they spent on it. And I looked at it, and I talked to the CEO, and I said, "Well, you could do one more of these this year." And he's like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, you just took so much time to get this one deal. One deal! Can you imagine going through that process and the customer saying no at the end? It's gonna be devastating, right?" So don't do that. Don't wait until that point. Have them say, "Oh, no, maybe it's not the right time for us," now. You have that decision near the beginning. So...

Mark Drager: So I know this might change, you know, specific to specific, but let's imagine a perfect world. Are you doing trial closes? Are you asking for some kind of small commitment step by step? Are you breaking out scoping into its own sub-project on its own P.O. so that you can be paid to consult before you actually develop the scope? Like, how are you winning people over and how specific should we be?

Andy Paul: Yeah, yes, you certainly can do small projects, and you should charge the customer to do that scoping.

Mark Drager: That's my favorite approach because they're gonna do the work either way.

Andy Paul: I've done that. And it really depends on the buyer. It depends on your sense of their openness to it. It really depends, in part, on how you approach it. So, it sounds like you approach it more from a consultative basis, which is really, you know, we talk about consultative selling, but no one really thinks about it as a consultant does, right? And so, one of the ways you're able to sort of work successfully through the 'what' stage of things is doing what I call 'selling without a product,' meaning you show up and you're just there to understand how you can help. And this, something I started doing years ago, was I worked for a company where they hired me as, you know, our startup, and they've done some work in the defense business, and this is, they hired me to start a commercial side of the business. And they had some technologies but no products. And so my job was, according to the CEO, he says, "Well, you can go sell to whoever you want. But, yeah, they just need to pay for all of our development and manufacturing costs, but you can sell to whoever you want." And so I had this experience where I went out to companies, it's like, "Well, geez, I don't have a product. Right. And I know the companies that, you know, I had a series of companies that might be interested in something they might build them. Great. I had no idea what that would be." And so you just had to engage in conversations with senior people about opportunities that maybe they're looking at or challenges they had. And it's really kind of liberating, we didn't have a product behind you that you're trying to...

Mark Drager: What are you using, in that case? What, this is a great case study, what were you using in that case to earn the conversation, the initial conversation?

Andy Paul: Credibility and trust, I mean, it's just... Yeah, I'm trying to remember a specific instance of what things I'd said because that conversation was a long time ago, but it was...

Mark Drager: That's... I can imagine, you know, like curiosity, perhaps, you know, "We come from this defense space, we have these technologies, we have these great things and we're looking at... And like, would you explain that we're simply reaching out because we believe that this technology can be applied in your industry? And I'd love to explore these things with you."

Andy Paul: That's okay. So it's like, "Look, yeah, I have an idea."

Mark Drager: "I have an idea I want to run by..."

Andy Paul: "Yeah. And, you know, is this something that would be of interest to you at all?" And yeah, you find the right person, they want to talk about it. And you're not pushing anything, not pitching anything, just exploring an idea. And one thing often leads to another and rarely does the idea that I was triggering the conversation with end up being the one we ultimately worked on. But that wasn't the point, right? The point was just to engage in the conversation, and then to be able to build a level of trust, where they said, "Look, they're not wasting my time." I also relied on resources. This is a very technical product. So I relied on resources in the company to help me on some of these conversations, where we could sort of brainstorm, and then we can have the customer. Maybe they have an idea about something; maybe helps them think a little bit differently about that idea. You know, sometimes we were doing deals with companies that were building products for multiple companies that had more employees, more engineers in their department than we had in our entire company. But you had a different way of looking at the world, a different sense of credibility with getting things done, and ultimately trust. So that's sort of the approach that sellers have to approach customers with this idea that I'm here really to identify what's the thing you're excited about? Could it be an opportunity? Do you want to see it? Is there a particular challenge that you're facing internally? How can we help you think differently about it, and perhaps find a way we could work together on it? But it's not about the product sitting on your line card that you want to sell.

Mark Drager: And I imagine, it sounds to me that this is very much focused on lower volume, higher margin work, enterprise work, or account-based selling techniques. Is my assumption correct? Or does this actually start to work even in a higher volume, lower margin type sales situation?

Andy Paul: Absolutely. And it's a little more account-based, though. But I think this is something that we've really strayed away from in general in B2B sales. You can focus on that high volume, low margin product, whatever. But we don't start from the position of really getting to know the businesses and the companies that are in our patch, right? Because we're so focused on let's outbound them. Spam, let's send a bunch of emails, as opposed to saying, "Hey, you're an AE, here are these 100 accounts that are in your patch. Whatever that patch is, it's your business, build your business." And we've taken a lot of that autonomy away from sellers, as well, which I think is hugely important. I mean, this is, you know, it's way top, but sellers thrive with autonomy, but I think we got to extend it even to more people. Give people responsibility, saying, "Look, this is your business. Grow this business." And if someone's conversational with me a couple of days ago about sort of a 'Back to the Future' moment, I think this is going to become more what people, and sellers do. And companies do, is yeah, we've got these. We're trying to build this business for the long term. We want to do business with these types of companies, if not the specific companies. Let's go invest the time to get to know the people at those companies. Yeah, let's meet them at conferences. Again, that's because people are going to conferences. Let's see. Let's meet them at networking events. Let's go travel to their office and just do a lunch and learn, do these things that just sort of faded away as they work, right? It's a human business. And yes, there are lots of ways that AI is going to be able to help. And I'm, I use it, I'm excited. But my great fear is that by and large, in the sales world, it's that they're going to use the power of this technology to do like what we do with sales engagement platforms and so on, and just automate shitty sales behavior.

Mark Drager: I'm so excited about that. I want everyone in the world, but me, to just jump on board with AI and produce mass piles of garbage, right? Because it'll be so much easier for me.

Andy Paul: You can see it already, right? You can see the content. And I can't say I can do it with 100% accuracy. But yeah, I follow a lot of thought leaders on LinkedIn, and you probably do as well. I can tell the ones that have leaned into AI.

Mark Drager: As we delve, that's... that's not the language I use, but every AI writer says, like, "Let's delve into this."

Andy Paul: "Let's delve into this," right? So yeah, and it's... there's one guy in particular, very prolific in general, but you just look at his content now in the last several months, it's like, you're losing 'you' in there, buddy. And the reason people followed you. But I think that's... that's the thing, there's not gonna be able to use it. Well, you've seen some companies come up with applications to help sellers prepare for meetings, and so on. But even then, you know, the advice often comes across as very generic. I was talking to a friend yesterday, there are several people creating templates and prompts you can use for call preparation, and so on. He took this one prompt, a relatively well-known person put together, and put his name into it, right? "How would you prepare a call on me?" Not me, but himself, saying himself. And his business, the CEO of a good-sized training company, just couldn't get it to do anything really good. Everything was just bland, and generic. He was being very thoughtful about, you know, each rev of saying, "I'll try again, try this, focus on this one." Yeah, not there. There were some tidbits in there. But, you know, my fear is, you know, sellers are gonna lean into this and just sort of take the generic and run with it. And it's gonna be the same generic experiences buyers have had forever.

Mark Drager: So if I can just give our audience one quick tip, if you're using ChatGPT or other AIs, I've seen the best results when I draft something, I bang something out, and I literally go to ChatGPT, and I go, "How's this?" and I just copy and paste it in there. It will automatically review it, break down the rationale, offer suggestions for word changes, and give you a full breakdown. Then I quickly make some changes and rewrite, "How's this?" And it does the same thing. That has helped me out so much, because I've had to do like, we were working with a professional association on a qualitative market research study, right?

And it was a very professional service for a Professional Services Association, a nonprofit in the health space. So I had to be really careful with how we were approaching the outreach and the language for the study. And we just kept running it over and over again through ChatGPT, like, "How's this? How's this? How's this?" until finally, we were like, "Okay, we think we have something buttoned down," and it made suggestions that I would never have even considered in terms of risk profiles or explaining things. And we do this for Board of Director meetings as well, before we send out notes for clients who are presenting to boards. I just don't have a ton of experience with the formal way to present to a board. We do all of that stuff.

Andy Paul: I love that suggestion. I wrote it down. It's one of the things I think a lot of people just aren't recognizing with ChatGPT is that you're really having a conversation with it. And you're fundamentally asking it questions. So one of the real problems with sales these days, as we talked about discovery earlier, is most sellers are accustomed to their 10 questions, sort of scripted. And I ask these questions. But it's always the second, third, and fourth follow-up question that gets you the information you need.

Mark Drager: Five levels deep, seven levels, right?

Andy Paul: And this is where sellers struggle. Because they're sort of in a hurry, right? They're under pressure to do these number of activities, instead of really making the decision to dive deeper. If you don't, it's that same lack of curiosity that will hold you back from using ChatGPT effectively. And so I think that's why we see a lot of very superficial, generic content and other things being put together because people aren't unleashing their curiosity. They say, "Well, that's not the first question. What about the second, third, or fourth question that really gives me what I need?" And until sellers understand that, they're going to struggle to the same degree.

Mark Drager: Andy Paul, you are the host of the Win Rate podcast, and you're also the author of the book Sell Without Selling Out. I have one final question for you, but I wanted to thank you for just opening up and sharing this time with us. You talked just now, and I love the fact that this led into it, about the importance of asking really smart questions. I'm kind of obsessed with questions and collecting them. So I'm curious, what is your number one go-to or favorite question you love to ask during a discovery call?

Andy Paul: It's a type of question. It's not a specific question, because it'll vary from situation to situation. I write about it in the book, Sell Without Selling Out, a whole chapter on question types. I've got six laid out. But yeah, my favorite type is what I call an insight question. And so it's asking the client something they should reasonably be expected to know about their business but probably don't. So, in my case, if I'm talking to a CEO or a CRO, and they're having a sales issue, and we're trying to diagnose what's going on, my insight question typically is, "Okay, well, tell me, how many selling hours does it take you to move a deal from the initial point of contact to win?"

Mark Drager: Of course, they don't know that. I mean, some might have gone and they might be running all the software and all the analytics...

Andy Paul: And they don't track that. Go figure. Because unless you're charging hours to a timecard, you really don't know. Now, consulting firms do that. But very few sales organizations do. And I ran sales...

Mark Drager: Let me tell you, my lawyer does that. They charge in 10-minute increments.

Andy Paul: But from a sales perspective, the reason it's important for CEOs to know that the thing you're most limited in resources is time. So unless you understand the revenue you're generating per hour of selling time, you really don't understand your capabilities or your capacity, let's say, as an organization for producing revenue. So it's really, really critical.

Mark Drager: You've just given me a metric I haven't come across before: revenue per hour of selling time.

Andy Paul: So that's always a conversation starter. And you know, it varies based on industry and client to client, and actually, yeah, I've been playing around this week with ChatGPT. I say, "Okay, yeah, help me create insight questions." I haven't quite perfected it, but I'm sure I'll get there. Still a little more investment of time. And then I'll share one thing I can master, but yeah, that's a potential use for it. Those are great questions and conversation starters. "Why is that important to me? Why should I know that?" And then if you're the seller that asked it, they think, "Oh, a pretty smart person asked that question. What else do you know?"

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Resources & Go Deeper

The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow

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This article explores how winning B2B companies leverage a mix of traditional, remote, and self-service channels, with a notable preference for digital ordering and e-commerce. It highlights the importance of hybrid sales teams, hyperpersonalization in marketing, and the deployment of advanced sales tools to increase market share. The piece underscores the shift towards digital channels and the strategies companies employ to adapt and thrive in the evolving B2B landscape.

Global management consulting | McKinsey & Company

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How to Radically Improve Your B2B Sales Win Rates

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This comprehensive guide dives into techniques for improving B2B sales win rates by focusing on the buyer's journey, value stack, and creating a compelling business case. It details the importance of understanding and meeting the unique exit criteria of each decision-maker and stakeholder. By emphasizing the AIR (Awareness, Interest, Relationship) model and identifying four value drivers (Business, Experiential, Aspirational, Personal), the article offers actionable insights for sales professionals looking to enhance their approach and outcomes in complex sales environments.

How to Radically Improve Your B2B Sales Win Rates - MikeKunkle.com

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How B2B sellers will use digitalization to transform their go-to-market strategies

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This article delves into the challenges B2B sellers face in realizing gains from digital transformation efforts, despite significant investments. It highlights the importance of delivering personalized experiences across digital and traditional channels and outlines eight key digitalization capabilities that organizations must master. These include Activation, Analytics, Customer Strategy, Content, Digital and Sales Operations, Omnichannel Data, Orchestration, and Organizational Transformation.

B2B sales: Fueling up with go to market digitization strategies | ZS

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