Ian Altman: Now in most businesses, people are less likely to catch fire than they are to face pricing pressure. However, when I asked professionals and I say, okay, so how often do you face pricing pressure? Is it like once every 10 years or is it once every two conversations? Oh, it's all the time. Okay.
So what are the three things that you do when you face pricing pressure and people just stumble and they don't have an answer and fundamentally, someone usually shouts out well stop, drop, and roll, which is kind of true because what they do is they stop what they're doing. They drop their price and they roll over.
And so that notion of stop drop and roll becomes this common theme.
Barrett Thompson: Hello everyone. My name is Barrett Thompson. I'm the General Manager of Commercial Excellence at Zilliant. And I'll be your host for this special 50th episode of our B2B Reimagined podcast. I'm joined today by Ian Altman, who will also be delivering a keynote address at the upcoming Zilliant MindShare event in June. Ian's background and expertise are [00:02:00] a perfect fit for us.
He started sold and grew his prior companies from zero to $2 billion in value. Over the past 15 years, he's been helping other companies to grow their businesses through the principle of competing based on results versus price. He's also conducted research with over 10,000 leaders on how they make and approve decisions.
He's co-author of the bestseller, Same Side Selling, now in its second edition. And he hosts the podcast of the same name. You can read hundreds of his articles on forbes.com and Inc.com and he is perennially recognized as one of the world's top 30 experts for sales and his Same Side Selling Academy is rated one of the top five sales development programs globally.
Ian welcome to B2B Reimagined.
Ian Altman: Barrett, thanks for having me on, looking forward to the discussion.
Barrett Thompson: While I've just highlighted your background and qualifications, and I can see we're in for a great talk, but before we jump there, Ian, I'd love it if you could share one surprising or interesting [00:03:00] fact about yourself that doesn't generally get included in the professional bio.
Ian Altman: As a child, I grew up in Southern California. And I spent time as a child actor. Now I never went into rehab or anything as a result of that, but I did about 50 commercials and all sorts of TV shows and movies and things like that as a kid growing up. And the darn shame of the entertainment industry is that once you get to a certain age, if you look like you're 18, but you're 14, they don't like that because they want to hire someone who's an adult and they don’t have to worry about any child labor laws. So by the time I was about seven until the time I was about 14, I did a ton of professional acting. It's funny. There's probably some level of that influences my comfort on stage, but I don't know.
Barrett Thompson: Yeah. Well, it sounds like maybe your own success kind of worked yourself right out of a job there. When you look more mature than your years…
Ian Altman: Yea I think looking older is rarely an attribute, but [00:04:00] I'll take it. Only in acting.
Barrett Thompson: Exactly. So I have to go see if I can find you on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes or something like that. So I'll do that as an exercise. After we're finished with the podcast today.
Ian Altman: I'm sure it's on Rotten Tomatoes.
Barrett Thompson: Well, we're speaking to Ian today about how we can better train and develop our salespeople, both via technology and coaching and enablement. And Ian I thought maybe a way to get started, to ask from your point of view, what are the common pressures that are faced by salespeople, no matter the industry or market, or are there certain ones that you find always come up?
Ian Altman: The ones that are most prevalent come down to the notion of commoditization and pricing pressure so we can call it whatever we want. But the bottom line is pricing pressure is usually a function of people, perceiving, whatever you're selling is a commodity.
And the notion of being perceived as a commodity is often a function of selling skills. And there are in fact, many people who sell true [00:05:00] commodities. And guess what? At that point, you either have to deliver a better service or better pricing. There's not much else in between there, but those are areas where people really it's a common theme that I hear across businesses.
And there's another aspect of that, which is people who don't necessarily see themselves in sales, playing a role and how those people get more comfortable. But fundamentally pricing pressure is probably the biggest area that most organizations focus on.
Barrett Thompson: What's the common way that a rep is dealing with price pressure?
Ian Altman: They don't have a common way and that's the beauty of it. So there are scenarios that come up every day, like pricing pressure that they have no skill, no plan to deal with, but there are things that will never come up that they know exactly what to do, and they've got a formula for how they deal with it.
And the classic example is what are the three things that everyone is supposed to do if your clothes catch fire? What are the three things quickly Barrett? What are the three things you're supposed to do?
Barrett Thompson: Stop, drop and roll?
Ian Altman: So, [00:06:00] stop, drop, and roll. Everybody knows. Okay. If my clothes catch fire, I stop what I'm doing, I drop to the floor and I roll around. So a child knows to do that. Now in most businesses, people are less likely to catch fire than they are to face pricing pressure.
Barrett Thompson: I’d say so.
Ian Altman: Yeah. However, when I asked professionals and I say, okay, so how often do you face pricing pressure? Is it like once every 10 years or is it once every two conversations. Oh, that's all the time. Okay. So what are the three things that you do when you face pricing pressure and people just stumble and they don't have an answer. And fundamentally someone usually shouts out, well, stop, drop and roll, which is kind of true because what they do is they stop what they're doing. They drop their price and they roll over. And so that notion of stop, drop and roll becomes this common theme that people have. And instead what they want to be able to do is[00:07:00] think through a consistent process, I refer to it as stop, swap and trade. So when someone says, gee, your price is too high. First, we need to stop and understand.
So when you said it's too expensive, do you mean your total cost to implement it, your cost of delivery of incorporating into your systems. Now we start getting clarifying questions, then we want to be able to swap. So we might say, well, I realize you're looking for a less expensive solution. If we didn't include X, Y, and Z, we could do that, but we feel that that might put our client's success at risk.
So we tend to not separate that out. How do you think that would impact your business? So now I'm talking about things that I can swap, because if I give what's called a unilateral concession, meaning, if I agree to sell you the exact same thing at a lower price. I'm teaching some dangerous things to our clients. First I'm telling them that we didn't really believe in the price to begin with. We were ripping you off before you questioned it, but now I'll sell you that same thing for less trading
Barrett Thompson: Trading on your ignorance, so to speak.
Ian Altman: The second [00:08:00] thing that I'm saying is we don't really think it's worth that. And the third thing is I'm conditioning you that anytime I give you a price, you shouldn't really believe it.
Because if you push back, you don't have to give anything up to get something in return. So the swap makes it so that we're swapping something else. And ultimately, if you feel you're compelled and you're dealing with a purchasing person who says, look, I got to come back with at least 1%, then what can you trade with them?
It might be that you get their participation in a case study, you might be speaking at an event together, something like that. So when you're dealing in an environment where it's not fully automated, where it's not just a transactional sale, Then we can have those types of discussions about other things we can get.
But fundamentally, if I've got a customer service center and people call in, they need to know how to do something other than stop, drop and roll.
Barrett Thompson: I find this fascinating Ian on two fronts, one is I've never really asked for all of the many salespeople and sales customers that Zilliant has served. I've never asked them, like, what is your [00:09:00] methodology?
What is your plan to borrow your word for responding to the inevitable price pressure when it comes? That's an omission on my part. Didn't even have that perspective. And you're deep in that. Secondly, Zilliant has built a practice around informing the sellers, what the price should be, but not necessarily equipping them to defend that.
We know what the value of the offering is in the market. We can quantify that through the data and the science, but that's distinct from communicating and defending that value isn’t it?
Ian Altman: It absolutely is. And there's a distinction here because there are certain things that are just transactional purchases. In that context, you need artificial intelligence, you need technology that's going to give you a sense of where do I need a prices in the market to be relevant, but the danger with, if I just sell everything based on price, It's a race to the bottom that unfortunately you might win. And so eventually you get to the point where there's no margin, you can't make money. So that's not a good sustainable model.
And what we need to figure out is [00:10:00] where are those exceptions to the rule, where are those parts of our business? Where if we ask the right questions, people might be comfortable spending a little bit more with us than with somebody else.
Barrett Thompson: I think this a very useful asymmetry. I mean, I see this pattern play itself out over and over that there's just not one way to treat the entire book of business or all customers or all products. But if you can understand when to apply what outlook, this might be a commodity situation, and this might be a premium discussion. And knowing which field you're in is maybe job one. And then what is the value when I'm there and how to defend it?
So I think that's great.
Ian Altman: So how do you get there? How do you know if what you're doing is something that's important or not important? Well, in this research I've done with over 10,000 leaders around the world on how they make and approve decisions, I put them through an exercise in deciding whether to spend money on something.
And in essence, the scenario is someone comes to them and says, I need to buy this thing. One of their direct reports, I need to buy this thing. It's $20,000. It takes [00:11:00] 45 days for the vendor to deliver whatever we need. It could be a product or a service requires no resources on their part. They give us a 10 year guarantee.
What are the five questions you have to have answered in order to make an informed decision? And then I have them narrow it down to their top three questions. And the fascinating thing is people ask the same three questions, whether it's a multi-billion dollar multinational, a small startup everywhere in between, I've done this research everywhere except for the African continent and Antarctica.
So those two areas you're on your own. I have done it in the middle east, but not the main body of the African continent. But the fascinating thing is people ask three questions. And if you want, I can share with you what those are. The questions that people ask the first question is, what problem or problems does this solve for us?
So the employee that I need to buy this thing, they're like, okay, what problem are we trying to solve with this thing? The second question is, why do we need it? Namely, what happens if we don't solve this? And then the third question is what's the likely [00:12:00] result or outcome, namely, what happens if we do this?
What are we likely to see as the ROI for our business if we actually do this? Now there's a fourth question that never makes the cut, but often comes up, which is what are the alternatives? And many people who are faced in a commodity world think to themselves, well, that's everything we deal with all day.
But when I asked people, why didn't that make the cut? Why is that always a common fourth question, but not in the top three? What they say to me is if we have a vendor and we're in complete sync with them about what problem we're trying to solve and why we need to solve it. And if this is also the vendor we feel has the highest likelihood of delivering the best return per invested dollar, then that's our vendor. So if I address those three questions really well, the fourth one becomes implied. What that also means is that if we're not selling aligned with those questions, we're actually lengthening and complicating the sales process rather than making it shorter. [00:13:00]
Barrett Thompson: This all makes sense to me. And what it suggests though, is that we're teaching a new set of skills to a sales team and maybe a sales team that's been conditioned to operate in a certain way, or they inherited these practices.
They might've even observed them in the top sellers in their organization. You know, people who are legendary, so they might be imitating wrong behavior, but it's the most successful behavior the business has seen to date. What are your thoughts on, how do you teach these new skills into a sales org? I'm sure you've been through this many times.
Ian Altman: Absolutely. And it's interesting because we're now going in our third year of my digital platform called the Same Side Selling Academy and I jokingly say to people, well, so I've got three years of mistakes and what we thought was going to work and didn't work that, now it's a highly regarded platform, but there are a lot of things that weren't in there.
And it's not about my system. It's about any system. And what I found is that there are three components that make things work or not work. The first one is a consistent [00:14:00] process in language. So your team has a consistent way of communicating about opportunities and a consistent process they follow with potential clients and how they interact.
So when someone calls in, they don't say, oh, let me tell you about our products. They say, oh, what piqued your interest? What prompted you to call us today? So we're immediately talking about them and not us. Now you would think that just having that process would be fine, but when we're teaching it, what I found is that if I create a course, which we have many, if I create a course that had lesson one to 10 and each lesson had a worksheet, each lesson had a quiz. I would have thought people would have just started less than one, gone to lesson 10. Each person would have opened it up, watch the lesson gone through the worksheet on their own and completed the quiz.
I would be wrong because people didn't do that. So we actually have to guide them through and say, here's lesson one. And here's what you do in lesson one. And then when they're done, Hey, here's a big shocker here's lesson two. We want you to do that next. And oh, you've watched lesson two. Here's the worksheet associate with lesson two. And we have to [00:15:00] be very prescriptive in how we walk people through that. So the first part is having this structured process and a common language. The second step or component that people need is what I like to refer to as playbooks. And a playbook basically says, what do I do when this situation comes up?
So when someone pushes back on pricing pressure, how do I deal with that? When someone says, oh, just deal with my procurement people, how should I respond? When someone says, oh, we like your stuff, but you're more expensive than the other people. How should I respond to the situation? So it's little micro lessons to deal with common challenges that come up all the time in our world.
We call those the objection clinics, but basically you need prescriptive instruction that says here's how to deal with these common situations. Because in any organization you might have 30 reps. One or two of them are great at dealing with a certain scenario, but the other 28 aren’t. So what if we all follow the model that worked?
And the third piece is coaching and [00:16:00] reinforcement. Basically the notion of, if I don't give a mechanism for coaching or reinforcement, then people could spend time practicing bad behavior, and then they reinforce something that we really don't want them doing. So those three components together, having this common process and methodology and language, having these objection clinics as I call them to deal with common scenarios and then an environment to practice and get feedback and coaching, those three tend to move the needle and generate pretty positive results.
Barrett Thompson: I can see that. And I want to call out too. We've long held the vision that it is possible and I think sort of obviously desirable to get the majority of your sales reps performing like those top few. And you call those top few out a minute ago. So what does that take? So you've outlined the three parts of structured process, the playbooks, the coaching and reinforcement.
Let me ask you, can you overlay on that where technology plays a key role in any one of those three pillars? And which [00:17:00] parts really are the best left in the domain of humans? Don't inject technology here. Use the humans for this part, use the technology for that part. And maybe by marrying those together, we get the best for each of these components.
Ian Altman: It’s really a combination. I think it would be naive for any of us to feel like in today's day and age, there isn't a place to use technology intelligently. And it's a shame because too often you have a rep trying to figure something out instead of the rep could be guided that says, any 5% of the people who buy this also buy this other thing, this client you're talking to, isn't buying something that everyone else is. So I need to know how to ask the right questions around that. There are also ways with technology to have accountability. So one of the things that when we launched our academy that was not there.
That is there now is we didn't really have a big accountability loop. So there was no way for a manager to see what people had done and not done, where they had practiced and where they hadn't now all that's visible. So very [00:18:00] often someone will say to me, yeah, I mentioned one of my reps, Hey, you were having the problem with this issue with this client. I know there were a couple lessons in the academy. Did you go through those? The rep says, oh yeah, I did. Okay. Because I'm looking at the dashboard. It says you haven't. Oh, I mean, I was going to go through it tonight. Oh, okay. That's fine. And it's just a little bit of accountability that covers that. But if I look at, for example, the notion of Gee, I'm dealing with a client who normally buys this and also these other things, if it's in the food business, it could be somebody who's buying certain ingredients. Like they're buying pepperoni and peppers, but they're not buying the cheese from you. And you could say, oh, well, Hey, I know that you're not buying that. Do you want to buy that from me? And now it sounds like you're selling something.
Or you can say, okay, when you get that type of guidance, a good way to present that is to say, “You know, I feel like I may have dropped the ball. Many of the people who I work with when they buy pepperoni and peppers these other ingredients, they also buy cheese from us because they know that we've got amazing [00:19:00] quality cheeses. And really they're getting often a better quality product for the same price they're buying elsewhere. I notice you're not, which tells me I probably dropped the ball and didn't mention this to you. Did I mess up there?” And let the clients say, no, you didn't mess up. In fact, I just didn't know you guys had this, but instead if you said, well, I notice you're not buying this from us.
Well, there's a lot of stuff I don't buy from you. And now it becomes adversarial. So we don't want that adversarial attention, but without the underlying technology, you might not have known to even ask, but the technology gives you a prompt. And if you combine that with the right training, now you get the multiplier effect.
One plus one equals three or seven.
Barrett Thompson: This is great, because in Zilliant solutions, for example, we are producing those guided selling recommendations. We have the fact or the nugget, if you will, the 85% of the customers like this one are also buying this missing product. But I hear what you're saying, the conversation and the context and how you present that, the story that you tell, or the engagement with a [00:20:00] customer, you've got to get that right too.
Or the recommendation may not land at all. It might actually be off putting. It might be offensive or sound accusatory. When you say, how come you're not purchasing such and such from me. And that's not at all what the salesperson means by bringing that up, that they could well, need that coaching and context on how to present.
Ian Altman: Exactly. And so the idea is to make sure that we combine the two together so that if I just share the information that you're also not buying this, it almost sounds like a bot, but I'm talking to a human. If I had all these great skills, but didn't know what other things might be complementary, I may not know how to present those.
So this gives us insight into how to do that.
Barrett Thompson: And there's something else you said that I want to draw out a little bit. You used the word accountability and in the context of checking to see if the sales rep has completed the training needed to know what the structured process is, understand the playbooks, develop their speeches and cadence.
We also have an accountability angle, and I think it's interesting because it goes back [00:21:00] to those very prescriptive recommendations that we delivered to the sales rep to begin with. So the conversation that many of our customers have around accountability, once they've put our technology in place is to go to a rep and say, in the last three weeks, the technology was able to identify these four dozen very specific recommendations for you to explore with your customers. And I'm looking here at the closed loop tracking, and it seems that you've only discussed a third of those with the customers. What's up with that or what happened when you discuss them? So I get it. There's an accountability and tracking at the meta level.
Are you equipping yourself? And there's a tracking and accountability at the execution level. Are you in fact, taking those great insights and then applying them in the way you've been trained and then what's happening in the account? What's happening in your portfolio? What's happening in the development plan for each of your customers as a result of what you have or have not done with those recommendations.
Ian Altman: Sure and Barrett, I would just take a guess that if we saw people [00:22:00] who had executed and completed the right training and the people who actually were accountable for presenting the right information to their clients, we would probably see a pretty high correlation between those two events happening and people growing their business faster than their peers.
Barrett Thompson: Yeah, almost inevitably. One of the most interesting analytics that we produce that goes right to the heart of that idea is we will produce a leaderboard, if you will, that shows who is growing year on year with some measure of performance, it might be year on year revenue growth. It might be quota attainment year to date, something like that.
And when you stack those sales leaders and then you put right next to that what percentage of the recommendations that they're getting from the system, have they taken action on? There is a direct correlation, so self-reinforcing that you almost don't have to evangelize around the value of the guidance.
They can look and see. Man, the people who are at the top or at the top for a reason, [00:23:00] and one of the key things they're doing, that's different than what I'm doing is they seem to be taking these recommendations to heart and running with them fast and long. Maybe that's what I need to be doing. So it's very reinforcing when that's the case.
Ian Altman: It's interesting. For a number of our clients who are members in our academy, the leaders can see everyone's activity and which coaching sessions they attended and how many lessons they've gone through. And very, very often what I'll hear from them is: So I sat down with my reps and I said, okay guys, here are our top five performers from a revenue standpoint. You guys all know that. Yeah. Where do you think they sit on the ranking of the people who have completed the most exercises, who have consistently been to all the coaching sessions? Same list. So I'm not saying you have to do this stuff and keep in mind. The point of this is not that people should belong to my academy.
The point is that the building blocks that I gave you are things that if people did it on your own, guess what? [00:24:00] It's not that, oh, it's gotta be same side selling. It's more, I just want people to do a better job in sales. So it's more integrity based. And if they get the right skill. Whether it's my system or someone else's, there are a lot of phenomenal systems out there.
If you use those three building blocks, you're going to have great success and it doesn't have to be with my system, it can be with any system. Just you give people those tools. They're going to do better.
Barrett Thompson: Without a doubt. Ian, as we're speaking about KPIs, measurement, I'd love to get your perspective on what I often see is a fairly common disconnect in sales, between activity and accomplishment.
And sometimes that's evidenced through the KPIs by which the sales team is measured or the way their incentive and comp programs are built, or even the way that recognition and glory is earned on the field of play. So I wonder what you've seen out there.
Ian Altman: Yeah, that, that comment about activity versus accomplishment.
I think it was John Wooden who originally that quote gets attributed to is don't confuse activity with accomplishment. So it's the notion of people will often say, [00:25:00] look, we got to grow our numbers. So I want you to have, make more phone calls, more meetings you got to do, 60 dials a day. Okay, that's great news. I thought you needed me to increase revenue. If all I have to do is call people. That's great. Oh, you want more proposals? Yeah, I can do more proposals with people who weren't qualified and what I see time and time again is the top performers are often A)curious, because they're asking great questions and B) in addition to being curious, what they're doing is they're actually being very judicious with their time.
So they're not about broad numbers. It's more finding the needle in the haystack, qualifying and doing the research before they contact people because let's face it. If it's in a transactional model, it tends to be more inbound related. And it's more about, look, I'm using social media, I'm using technology to attract people.
That's fine. It's the outbound side that too often people take a shotgun approach and it doesn't necessarily generate results. [00:26:00] And often can just make your reputation horrible. We've all been on the receiving end of horrible pitches on LinkedIn where it’s this blanket statement. So instead we want to think about who are the right people to talk to? Where are those people hanging out? How do we get to those people? And then how do we make it so that we're differentiated when we get to those people, instead of measuring these meaningless metrics that don't necessarily matter. And then reward people, look, Sally made 300 calls last week, Sally hasn't sold anything, but she made all these phone calls. It's like, look, if she worked with a phone company, that'd be a great attribute. But she doesn't. So we need to focus on that. We need to focus on the right metrics.
Barrett Thompson: Ian what message would you leave with sales management or executive team? What do you want them most to be thinking about?
Ian Altman: There’s two key things that you should think about from a business standpoint, and then one from a leadership standpoint. From the business standpoint, you have to look at what are the problems that you're good at solving and for whom. So you're focused on [00:27:00] who do I serve and how, in essence, think of it that way. And then it's about differentiation that says, how do we differentiate what we do from the rest of the market so that we can stand out compared to the competition. From a leadership standpoint, it comes down to give your team the right training and guidance and then instead of sitting in a meeting and saying, well, let's go through a pipeline review and tell me about this deal and that deal and what's going on. Instead we want to be asking better questions. So what happens is if we asked our reps, what happens if the client doesn't solve this? Well, the first time they say, I don't know.
Okay, the second time they say, wow, you asked that question last time, the third or fourth time, they're like, well, I better get this information. Cause they're going to be asking me every single meeting. And so then we get to focus on the things that actually move the needle instead of these metrics that may not move the needle.
Barrett Thompson: I want to pick up on a better question that I think you put out for us right at the beginning of this podcast, [00:28:00] which would be to maybe ask a rep, how will you respond when you get the inevitable price pushback, what are you going to do there? What are you going to say there, contextually, and this situation for this customer, maybe that's a thing to rehearse.
Maybe that's a thing to preview and get validation on. So we know that those people are armed to, go out and win the battle.
Ian Altman: And you know what, it's that and part of it is asking your teams questions like what are the biggest questions that you hear that you stumble on? And let's put our heads together and come up with what we think is the best response to that, and then let's practice so we can all deliver that really well. Because if I asked rep one, what are you going to do when someone hits you with pricing pressure and they give us an answer. And I asked 20 reps, my guess is one or two are going to give us a great answer, and the other 18 are going to leave us holding our head in our hands.
And so what we want to do is just kind of crowdsource and coach through the best answer and then be prepared to deliver that consistently across the organization. [00:29:00]
Barrett Thompson: Ian, before we leave, why don't you give our listeners a little preview of what you'll be covering at Mindshare in June?
Ian Altman: Well, we're going to seek some input from people as well to make sure that we're tailoring what we're talking about, the things that are most important for the attendees, but fundamentally it comes down to giving you insight into how you can engage your customers in a way that everybody can embrace, especially them. And how do we present ourselves in a way that differentiates us from our competitors in a non-adversarial way. And makes it so that we always show up as someone who's there to solve, not someone who's there to sell.
And there are a whole bunch of themes we're going to cover across these topics, but the idea is to make it so that you actually have actionable things that you can apply to move the needle in your business and help you stand out compared to the competition.
Barrett Thompson: Ian it sounds great. I want to thank you again for taking the time to have this conversation today. I really appreciate you sharing your perspective with us.
Ian Altman: Great. Thanks so much Barrett. And I'm [00:30:00] looking forward to seeing everybody at MindShare.
Barrett Thompson: I want to thank each of our podcasts listeners for being with us today. Be sure to click on the link in the show notes to register for MindShare 2022 in Austin, Texas happening June 13-15, where you can see Ian onstage delivering what I know will be an enlightening and powerful keynote.
At Zilliant, we're committed to your success. And if you need any assistance, please reach out to us. Would you do me a favor and please rate and review the show as it helps us to continue to put out great free content until next time have a great day.
