Latest / Selling AI / A Champion Isn't a Person — It's a Behavior That Shows Up When There's Good Friction
Transcript
- Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into deal management, specifically why the way most sales teams think about champions, competition, medic and deal risk is a bit flawed. I have David Weiss on the show today. David has been a CRO, a sales leader at Outreach and Seismic, ran his own sales training company, and now he's building DealDoc and literally writing the book on deal management. Here's what makes this conversation interesting. He doesn't just... tweak existing sales methodologies, he challenges the foundations. He'll tell you a champion isn't a person, it's a behavior, and that your competition isn't one battle, it's four gates that you have to beat, kinda in order. In today's episode, David and I get into why separating functional roles from behavioral signals changes how you run deals, and the neuroscience behind why you need to re-trigger your biosphere in almost every single conversation. So let's dive in, looking forward to it. David, welcome to the show. David Weiss: Warren, thanks for having me, man. Super excited for this conversation. Warren Kucker: Same here, same here. So let's jump off first. Give us a bit of your background, how things evolved for you in your career and where you've kind of landed on this deal management space that you're in now. David Weiss: Yeah, man. So I've been in sales and sales leadership for 20 years, ⁓ kind of split evenly between tech and services and A and leadership. ⁓ And, you know, I have a long time ago, this was like in my 20 year journey, call it like year like two. I had a sales leader coming into an office for QBR. ⁓ They were ⁓ challenging me hard about, you know, my numbers and about deals and things along those lines. And You know, honestly, up until that point, I just was kind of selling on, you know, vibes and winging it. And they started to, ⁓ this was back at Aramark, which is really well known for like sales training and methodology. ⁓ and they really just start challenging me a lot to think about sales more as, a, a profession versus, you know, something I just fell into and decided to, you know, do, cause I was extroverted and just graduated college. And at that point, like I literally made a conscious decision saying there's way more to this profession than I originally thought. I'm going to become a student of sales. And so I went to work for companies like ⁓ Career Builder and ADP, where they're very well known for like really, really deep, deep sales training. And I like to think I got like my PhD in like sales and sales theory and things along those lines. But at one point in my career, and this is now fast forwarding like, you 10 years, I got out of bed and I said, look, you know, selling payroll or advertising or all these things, like they're cool. But at At end of the day, I really just geek out about professional selling. I just like this as a legitimate thought-provoking profession. I said to myself, all right, what I really want to do is just help salespeople sell better every single day. That's when I left and joined companies like Outrage and Seismic because foundationally, they were technology to help salespeople sell better. Then that evolved into sales training and deepening my understanding. you know, methodologies like Medic and frankly all commercial methodologies. And, you know, that led me to opening my own sales training company and to being the chief services officer at Medic and then eventually saying, whoa, hold on a second. I can now see the matrix. I can see the forest through the trees. I can see all of these things. And it's no longer about like one methodology versus another. It's how to like synthesize this all down into an operating model that bridges all the gaps and actually teaches salespeople how to, you know, operate with habits and rhythm and to blend all of those commercial teachings. and do a single way to run deals. And that's really the foundation of deal management, is the zero point of the book. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. That's a really good ⁓ way to think about it. think too often in people's careers, they don't think, could I get a PhD in this almost, right? Like how do you get behind the layer, right? I was in shipping for 15 years. didn't necessarily, I just kind of like backed into every experience I had. didn't think about if I was deeply ingrained in this, what would, how can I get this deep into the theory and the practice as possible? So that's really interesting. And then you ended up in like the result now, at least probably not the final result is that. Now you're putting that PhD to use in a different way. So and coming up with new ideas in this space, right? Like which I think is really interesting and I'm excited to dive in. So you make a sharp distinction that most methodologies don't. You say that champion is a behavior, it's not a person and that can evolve throughout your sales process. So walk us through that. What's the difference between a coach and champion in your framework? Why does the conflating the two kills deals? And what do you mean by champions, not a person? David Weiss: Yeah, so you've got like functional roles and like core functional roles are people like economic buyer that like hold, create, steal budget. You've got ⁓ folks like executive sponsors which like own priority and prioritize inside of like their business unit and or major function. You've got problem owners. Those are the people you're typically working with day to day in deals, VP director level. They own solving the problem. And then you've got technical buyers that are gonna work with you with security and integration and more of like, know, specific decision criteria. Then you have end users, people who actually use the thing. So like, I don't care what deals you're running, you have these functional stakeholders. Their titles will change, but they run and execute against these functions. And then you have the behaviors that these functional people are demonstrating. And so those behaviors really are then four key behaviors. One of them is blocking. They're like stopping you, they're getting in your way. That's often because they really like what they have or they're just, you know. don't wanna make a change. Then you have contacts. Contacts are actually like your most common. That's what most people are. Most people are just a contact. They're neutral, okay? They're not supporting you. They're not necessarily supporting your competitor. They are just there to give you and everyone else the same information to make sure that the business can successfully acquire the thing they wanna acquire if they're gonna change or stay status quo if they're gonna stay status quo. Then you have coaches. Coaches have chosen you as a category and as a person. as who they think is the best solution. And so they are not coaching everyone the same, that would be a contact. They're coaching you uniquely, because they want you to win. Then you have champions. Champions do everything that coaches do, but they are fighting externally for you. They're mobilizing people, they're getting things done in between meetings, they are actively fighting for you. And you really can't see whether someone is truly championing until there's a degree of friction. Because when friction hits, a coach will shrink back and say, yeah, you're right, it isn't a priority, or yeah, I can do other things with my time, or yeah, you're right, there are maybe some other stakeholders in the space that we should look at. A champion's like, whoa, this is a priority, we need to do this now, this is the right vendor, I've looked at everybody, no, that. Like, that is the difference, and that comes from being challenged internally in friction. So those are really like, every single deal you work will have those functions and those behaviors demonstrating themselves. and you need to apply the appropriate label to each person to understand where you stand. Warren Kucker: Yeah, so in that vein, you wrote in your book that you feel like that we're over labeling the champion. And so what really hit home for me is that I think everyone knows that it's hard to have a champion and like it takes a little while within a deal flow. Let's say there's 120 days sales cycle. You can't have a champion in the first five days, right? You can, but like it's just rare, right? But then we're okay with calling people a champion with the general understanding that like, they're not a champion, but they could be a champion, they're probably my champion, so I'll call them the champion. But when we say this, we don't say this out loud, we just kind of walk around and say, we have a champion, with some acknowledgement that they're not quite the champion yet. I think you make the point that like, don't call them a champion. Give me more on that, like what should we call them? Why shouldn't we call them the champion? Am I correct in what I'm saying and what's wrong about David Weiss: Please don't. Yeah, no, you're spot on, man. Like a couple things, just let's, as humans that are listening to this, let's just critically think for a second. A champion needs to be fighting for you. That means they need to be spending political capital. That means they need to be sticking their neck out. I'm not gonna do those things right after I meet you. And I'm not gonna do those things until I've looked at the field, all the other options. I've looked at the business case for change. I've looked at... what else I could be doing with my time and money and priorities and yada yada. I look at all those things and I'm like, this is the time, it's now, and the vendor is them. And I need to consciously make that decision. And once I've constantly made that decision, I can now go fight because I'm vested. Like, yes, I'm beating my chest that this is the right thing, okay? Now, think about when does that happen in the course of any relationship? It's not after one meeting or two. It's after I've seen all the options and all the things. So that means it needs to happen later in the sales cycle. So that's when a champion arises. And we don't want to just call people champions before they are because champion means I've got someone fighting for me when I'm not there. And if I have that, I have strength and power and leverage inside of a opportunity. And if I don't, I don't. And that is like a massive freaking distinction. And so instead... like instead of creating like a false sense of security, just say things like, have a coach if they're giving you inside information or just call them what they are if they're neutral and say, I've got a contact and call them a contact. And that's okay. acknowledge the risk and acknowledge the reality. Cause then you can actually go do something. Warren Kucker: Interesting. So in that vein, let's say, how do you think a rep and a sales leader should interact when they're talking about contacts, coaches, and champions, turning contacts into champions? How should that discussion kind of go? David Weiss: It should be like, hey, this deal right now that we're looking at, help me understand who are the stakeholders. Do you have an economic buyer, an executive sponsor, a problem owner, a technical buyer, a end user? Who's the field? Cool. Like, let's now like look at the field and say, do we have enough of the right players to unlock the required, you know, stakeholder gates? Because each of those players unlock something unique inside of a deal. And then we need to label them behaviorally. Cool. of those players who are contacts, who are coaches, who are champions, and is there a strategy and what is it to go from contact to coach to champion with each one? And can we even get there? And if we can't, let's just be honest and acknowledge the risk that we are accepting inside this deal, that we have done certain things and we aren't getting certain places and therefore we have risk. And risk is not bad. Like we can accept it, it just means it's risk and we can win deals. that are risky, it's just there's a lower probability of doing so. Warren Kucker: Gotcha. Yeah, that's really, really helpful. I mean, let me distill that. So as a sales leader, it's silly for me to ask if you have a champion after our meeting, right? Cause you don't. So like we shouldn't even talk there, right? So let's, let's move it upstream a little bit. Great. I have six stakeholders that I've engaged with that on a particular opportunity. ⁓ I'm having deal inspection. We've had like four meetings, right? Great. So I have like five contacts and maybe a coach because I this coach, there's one person who's given me inside information, right? The conversation back and forth is about great as a sales leader, should I ask how do you get that coach to champion or is there somebody else a contact that you think has the potential to be a champion? How do we get them there at this stage? And that's the back and forth you think the rep and the leader should be having? Yeah. David Weiss: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Like, let's look at where the deal is. If we're getting into later stages, and I mean, we're like about to submit a proposal or something like that, like before we do that, we should have an executive sponsor that is championing. So if we're late in the deal and we don't have an executive sponsor who's championing and we have identified an executive sponsor, the conversation should be like, hey, you know, awesome. We have this individual that is involved, actively engaged. They are at this level of behavior that we can observe. What is the plan to move that? And so if there are contact and we need to move them to a coach, we should be setting up one-on-one time and just simply asking them like, hey, where do you think we stand in the deal? And what do you think our differentiators are? And can you explain certain buying processes? We're asking them for information. And if they're willing to share that information with us uniquely, then we are seeing coaching behaviors happen. If we then feel like they are a coach, then we should be asking them to do more things for us. Hey, know, really appreciate you sharing that. Would you be willing to like help us co-create the business case and like then like really pressure test it and then bring it up in the next meeting with your CFO or whoever you feel like the economic buyer is? Would you be willing to, you know, ⁓ rally, you know, all the people that you feel like need to be part of this buying process and get them together for us to do some finalist presentations and make sure that we're. super aligned on each of the problems and what each person needs in a solution and that we are presenting the right solution. Like you start asking them to do things for you. And if they do things for you, then they are starting to demonstrate champion behaviors and then you ask them to do more. So it's really just like having these conversations with these people and asking these things and seeing what you get back and then choosing action from there. Like one of the ways that I've built champions over the years is taking people to dinner. Like, cool. Like let's have a few drinks. Let's break some bread. Warren Kucker: Yeah. David Weiss: and let's get to know us as people. ⁓ One of the ways is by doing what I call a surround the castle play by if I want to get an executive sponsor to really start thinking about me, who do they go to for advice? What ⁓ customers do we potentially have in common? What people are they going to inside the business that they're looking to say, hey, is this the right change and is this the right vendor? Warren Kucker: Yeah. All right. David Weiss: you wanna start surrounding them with information and people and things like that. And as they start hearing your name over and over and over again, they feel more confident in you. And so they're more willing to fight for you and demonstrate again champion behaviors. So you just wanna be thinking about all these factors and choosing those actions and executing those things. Warren Kucker: That's good like practical frameworks for like a complex, let's say qualitative discussion, right? Behavior is hard to quantify, but how do we get to a point where we're actually in these things? You talk about how like behavior shifts throughout a deal cycle, especially longer ones, and people don't. Your director of IT is usually director of IT throughout your entire deal cycle, but like how they're interacting and who they are in your deal cycle shifts. How does a rep or a sales leader coaching a rep stay vigilant to that shift throughout a sales cycle? David Weiss: Yeah, I mean, to me, this is a process and this is an order of operations. these are just all relationships, man. Like, it's no different than like dating or like making friends. Like every person you initially meet is just, you know, just another contact. They're just ⁓ random. Like we just start having a conversation. And then at some point, you know, hey, I like this person. They're kind of cool. I want to hang out with them a little more. And then, you know, that evolves. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. David Weiss: There's no different in a business to business relationship. Like you're going to start out, everyone's going to start as a contact and if they don't like you, they're probably, or they don't like what you're proposing, they're going to turn into a blocker. And if they do like you and they think you can help, they're going to start turning into a coach. And as they become more more convinced of the thing that you're offering and you as a human and the trust builds and the solution builds and the alignment builds, they are maybe willing to start championing. And so, you know, the thought there is as you progress through these cycles, you should have like ⁓ baseline check-ins, checkpoints, ⁓ where you're like, cool, in discovery, we likely just all have contacts. As we continue to loop discovery and loop demonstrations, we should start building coaches because they're seeing the field, seeing us, seeing how we compare, seeing our point of view, and they're starting to help us. And then as we move into the more linear stages of the sales process, which is aligning on the solution in the business and the proposal and the impact, then we can start saying, cool, like now there should be a degree of conviction that you are the right vendor. There should be a degree of conviction that this change makes sense and it makes sense now. And now we should be at a stage where we're champions or appearing and are they? And if they're not, what's the intentionality that we can start putting behind it to get. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's again, a really useful kind of like breakdown, again, of a complex problem to actually action these types of things. Have you gotten to a point where this is innate when you're in a selling process for you? I probably loaded question. Let me take a one step further. Have you like just met reps that innately do this and haven't missed or even thought about it, but then manage this innately? David Weiss: it's interesting. I have not seen a lot of people work stakeholders with this level of intentionality without being taught. ⁓ It's, really, ⁓ there really is a strong emotional versus evidence-based bias ⁓ inside the sales process where if I feel like, and I'm using I proverbially like the group I, if I feel like ⁓ someone is at the right level and they like me, they're a champion. like that is not, again, evidence-based, That's not necessarily true. It might be true. It's just not proven. Warren Kucker: I'd say like I asked that question in that way because so we'll use the term vibe selling as like the way that I don't see most people sell I sell that way. I don't say if I was being honest right. We try to pull people out of that from an enablement and training standpoint but I think we try to pull them out the wrong way and what I mean by that is we give them like process infrastructure right like this is medic This is how you run a proper discovery with, you know, Sandler methodology. This is how you fill out your CRM. This is how you run a forecast call. This is how you talk about this feature. This is the problem in that industry, right? It seems to me that like we need to flip enablement and training on its head. And it's almost like teaching this behavior like management or behavior analysis and driving people towards a set of behaviors that'll help you close a deal or not. is actually what the core enablement should be and you pepper in the other stuff later on. Do you feel like the first stuff I talked about is table stakes and this is advanced or do you think we're doing it wrong? Would be the summary of that question. David Weiss: No, think, I think fundamentally we're doing it wrong. ⁓ every sales methodology promises to solve the sales problem and they all really just solve a piece of the problem. And it's one of the reasons why I fell in love with medic. And then when I started seeing the gaps in medic took it one step further and went beyond it with what I'm building with deal management. And it's really. I don't care what commercial methodology you want to use. I look at things really in two ways. You have ⁓ sales methodologies and you have deal management methodologies. And these are separate. Deal management methodologies look at where you are inside of a singular deal inside of that process and then help you see risk and how you're managing the deal. When you see that and I like to see it through color coding. You then layer a sales methodology on top of it to say, here's how we're going to solve for the risk. Okay? And that could be Vibe. That could be, you know, Sandler or Challenger or, you know, ⁓ any of these other methodologies. I don't care which one you want to use. I don't care if you use any. What I want you to do... is use a deal management lens to identify where you see risk in the process and then based on where you see risk, choose how to then solve it. And that is the area that I feel like ⁓ most enablement organizations have missed. They've taken MEDIC, which is a deal management methodology. Again, I feel like I've evolved it into a stronger deal management system that I'm building, but regardless, it is a deal management methodology. And then you have sales methodologies and what they've done is they've blended the two as the same thing and they're not the same fricking thing. Okay. One helps you see risks. The other helps you take action inside that risk. And so what I really think the biggest failure of most enablement programs is they haven't separated these two things. They've blended them and that has fundamentally caused a lot of the problem because one does not necessarily solve for. Warren Kucker: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. think this like dovetails with something I thought about a lot recently is that most of what we've done to salespeople, and I say to purposefully, over the past like 15 to 20 years with tech and methodology, isn't actually to help salespeople close more work. It's more about giving the organization information about what's happening in terms of like your sales process. So you implement MEDIC and you have a framework that you want to... If you make your reps think about medic and strengthening your champion, then you close more work. And that's true. But it becomes much more about I have 80 deals and like, where am I at in terms of medic so I can come up with a forecast number? Right. And we've done that with tech a lot as well. would argue that until now, tech has done very little to help reps close deals. I would also argue inflation adjusted quotas are the same as they were in 1988. Right. So like, but I think what you're talking about really like changes this on its head, right? And I think there's an organizational problem where like, we actually aren't geared towards making reps better at selling. We're geared towards making the organization understand the sales process better. Tell me where I'm like off the mark there ⁓ or not, right? David Weiss: Yeah, so CRMs inherently are a system of record. They're not a system of action. And we try and make them a system of action by layering in fields and gates and exit criteria and all those things. But what that really just turns into is theater and checklists and checkboxes. And if I'm a salesperson and I feel really good about my deal and you're like, you can't advance this deal from stage one to stage two. without checking these 19 boxes and filling in these five fields. Well, ⁓ I have a meeting coming up that's called demo and I need to be in demo stage to do a demo. And I may not have all that information but I'm gonna check the 19 fields and five boxes because I need to move the deal. And then they just do that. And then that's just what happens. And so where that's where I layer in color coding because I don't... Warren Kucker: Right. David Weiss: want exit criteria and I don't want stage gates. What I want to do is allow people to sell, but as they're progressing, start seeing where they have risk and take action. And that's the whole concept of system of action. The biggest problem with all the tools that try and do this is, and it's hilarious to me, what they do is they judge deal health and forecast accuracy by simply the boxes being filled out. So they put you green, they say you're good on metrics. when you simply fill out the CRM field called metrics, but it doesn't actually mean you've turned those metrics into a business case that a CFO will approve. It doesn't actually mean that there are any metrics in there the client even freaking cares about. You as a salesperson may have figured out that they have 30 % turnover and you put 30 % turnover in the metrics field. You don't solve turnover problem. So congratulations, you have an unimportant metric that you captured. Warren Kucker: Yeah. David Weiss: They're in conversation and got filled into a field. That's what most of the tools actually judge right now, which guess what happens? False signals, false positives, bad data, bad action. That's the type of stuff that's happening right now versus actually being able to like turn things into useful information. Warren Kucker: No, I think we've tricked ourselves to thinking that we could use this framework, this checklist system, CRM framework to actually drive behavior for the rep, right? Like in an ideal world, I can understand the foundation of that, right? Like, yeah, okay, sounds good. Like if I ask these three questions of a rep, they're gonna think about those three questions going into the call and they're gonna drive a deal more effectively. I've come over these ethos over the past year, I think we need to give up that ghost. I think we need to stop asking, I think... whether you're strong in metrics is relatively a statement of fact, right? Like that we should assess separate from judgment of a sales leader or a sales rep. That's not the skill anymore. If you focus on the skills that you're talking about, like understanding behaviors, driving behaviors in a way that's positive or time to close the deal, because we're not going to get there, ⁓ pulling on pain centers, which we're going to talk about in just a minute, right? If we train in that, and then we automatically assess where we're at from a deal and highlight those gaps so that we could also continue to train them in the right way. That to me seems like a revolutionary, much better approach to sales than what we're doing over the past decade. David Weiss: I believe that it's literally why I get out of bed every single day and like beat my chest to this drum. Cause it's like, it's, what I feel like is the answer. And I've, I've sat through a lot of things that were supposed to be the answer. And I've rolled out tons of tech, all the, I've, I've used every major tech platform, like the big names that are out there right now. And I've worked for most of them. I've, I've worked for the major methodology companies. I've deeply studied. Warren Kucker: Right, sold some of them. Yeah, right, yeah. David Weiss: any of the ones I didn't work for, like I've built my own, I've seen the field, I've implemented them, and I just keep coming back to the same answer over and over and over again after doing all of that, which is you need to have a set of criteria. You then need to take that criteria and turn it into action that you work with the client on, that you get them to sign off and agree to, and then you need to look at what's happening inside the process. I keep going back to color coding. It's really simple concept that's incredibly powerful because it allows you to see risk really fast because we humans see an imagery, show the image of where the problem is and then force action. And then, you the other side of it is like people put so much on sales to do all this and they don't actually teach leaders how to coach through it. And that's the other side of it is there needs to be rhythms that both sellers and leaders agree to leading through those agreements that sellers come prepared. Warren Kucker: Yeah. David Weiss: with this information to any sort of internal deal conversation. And then leaders can quickly look at deals and say, ⁓ wait, we're this way through the deal. We should be red or yellow or green in these areas. We're where we shouldn't be. What's your plan seller to close that? How can I help you? Let's look at this together and strategize and coach as opposed to what normally happens, is a seller's leader says, where are we at on this deal? And a seller just like spends 30 minutes throwing up everything about the deal in the latest meetings. the leader just gives him like broad advice like you should probably multi-thread more and like no one actually knows what the hell's going on. So like that is the behavior that kind of needs to change a lot. Warren Kucker: No, I'd argue even like that the way we've set up the leadership structure is ineffective in this, right? Where like VP, Director of Sales, VP of Sales, CRO, is primary, has to a revenue target every quarter, right? Not like one out of, like two out of four, three out of four, every quarter, that's what they're driving towards, right? It's very short-term thinking. The type of training and behavioral work to do with reps to actually get them to the stage, I think is not suited for that same. person in that same role. The person who's here to move deals along and help deals close is not the same person that should be developing the rep, right? We have this idea of sales enablement, but we don't go far enough. Do you feel like that, like in a world where that's not going to happen and you're going to have a sales manager, how should we positioning who that sales manager is and like who the best sales manager could be and what they should be doing with their reps on a day to day to kind of drive this big wheel forward? David Weiss: Yeah, there really needs to be like one of two fundamental shifts. either need to, sales enablement needs either shift to leader enablement and actually teach leaders how to coach because that's where the biggest gap is. Salespeople don't need more training. They need leaders prioritize what's important and then like actually show up appropriately to help salespeople accomplish that. Warren Kucker: Right. David Weiss: ⁓ I kind of look at it like, you know, a parent and a child relationship, not that salespeople are children or leaders should be parents, but like I have a child. My job is to set standards and agreements with my child, teach my child how to survive in this world, allow my child to go try and survive in this world, and then me be there to coach and support him as he's trying. Like, it's not to berate him and beat him and like all these things into doing this. And me as a seller, or sorry, me as a leader, as a parent, I need as much help as I can get to properly do that because I can't just like, you know, essentially just yell at my child all day long that he's doing stuff wrong. I need to actually coach a guide. And so we, don't think enablement spends enough time with leaders on how to be good parents, how to be good guides. And that is the big problem. they, like, that's one, like they either need to, you know, fix that or... They need to have two roles, two roles essentially, which is sales enablement is working way more one-on-one with reps identifying competencies and behaviors and what's actually happening and working with individuals to skill up at an individual versus work level. And then leaders can continue to do what they're already doing. Those are really the two solutions. And I think the way more scalable one is actually focusing more on leadership enablement. Warren Kucker: Yeah, so let's pull the structure there. think the analogy works really well, excusing the connotation that there's a parent-child relationship. Ignore that. when something's not working well in the parent-child relationship, you don't get a book on how a child should change their behavior. You get a book on parenting, right? And you figure, I'm having this issue. How can I change what I'm doing to influence? David Weiss: Thank Warren Kucker: the my child, right? Like you wouldn't I shouldn't pick up a book that's like how how AEs could be better people, right? Like at being AEs, that's not how it works, right? So but that's how we enable, right? Let's go down the leadership enablement route. Who the hell could be a leadership enablement person though? Like we were like who could be that? Your sales enablement person right now should be focused on the leader? ⁓ Or do you think that role would have to fundamentally evolve? Like you'd need a former VP of sales to be that. that VP of sales enablement person. What do think that might look like in this fictional world? David Weiss: Yeah, I think that or look just sales people just need to study leadership more and help leaders be better leaders. mean, ultimately like we're all humans and we can all learn and enablement is often, you know, a learning and development type role that is, you know, evolved into, know, applying tech and some of other things. But ultimately the job of the sales enablement person is to look at the business and say, where do we have deficiencies and how do I close the gaps in those deficiencies? Warren Kucker: Maybe, yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. David Weiss: And the thing is they always just stare at sales and they don't spend enough time staring at leadership. But, and some do, and I've worked with some great ones that do, but the other part of this is that leadership, CRO level, senior leadership, second, third line level, doesn't let them do that. They say, focus on my salespeople. They don't actually say focus on my leaders, even though that's really where the bigger part of the change happens. And they protect their leaders from that. Warren Kucker: Right. Yep. Yeah. Right. Agreed. Yes. No, right. Yeah. David Weiss: And to me, if I was to make a bet on which would have a bigger impact on organization, leadership training or sales training, I would bet on leadership training every day because that is the thing that cascades more. Warren Kucker: No, 100%, right? So like you either have to have sales enablement be in charge of the development of the sales team and that's their goal and it's removed from the hierarchy of the head of sales and the VP of sales. Or you have to, you should have sales enablement. The dotted line isn't from AEs to sales enablement, the dotted line is from your head of sales and your VP of sales to sales enablement, right? Where they're, in particular, I say the forefront, the biggest, to me the biggest gap in sales is that we don't chain. trained sales managers, we promote them and then they just do, right? So like, in that scenario, like the sales name of the person should just be talking with the head of sales about how they can interact with their reps to make their reps better, rather than being this like training guru who develops programs based on direction from the head of sales and the VP of sales and then makes sales reps take trainings. But I've been talking too long on that. Give me your thoughts there. Yeah, yeah. David Weiss: No, spot on. I look, at the end of the day, one of the greatest definitions I've ever heard of defining a leader is a leader is someone that helps an individual get where they couldn't get without them. And that's ultimately what a leader should do. A leader should empower someone to accomplish a goal they couldn't do by themselves. And how much are we actually ⁓ doing that? So, no, think you're spot on, man. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. No, I took a phrase. Yeah, think I always saw it's a better way to put, thought like part of what I could do is I could get it, put you in a situation where you can continue to get raises and promotions. But I, a leader, what I get in exchange for you, like working hard for the organization is I'm the steward of where you want to go with your career. I'm here to help. Whatever you want to do next, I'm the one that's job is to help you get there. So we'll work through that together. So I like your, I like your phrase better. That's awesome. ⁓ David Weiss: I didn't come up with it. ⁓ Warren Kucker: No, that's all right. We won't accredited whoever made it up. Sorry about that. We'll come back to it. So let's dive into one more topic that I think is just really important. I think you have a really unique angle on it. So let's talk about like the neuroscience and sales. You talked about like the amygdala, how triggering fear is actually the only way, maybe not the only way, but most of the time, triggering get buyers to take an action. How do you do that? repetitively, I think you told me in particular some good advice is you need to be triggering that fear in almost any interaction you're having and a fear might be an over overused word there. But how do you do that? How do you action that? Why do you need to do that? And how do you do that? David Weiss: Yeah, just for context, there's two really critical parts of the brain that salespeople should understand. It's the amygdala and the neocortex. Amygdala is the emotional, fear, urgent, driving side of the brain. ⁓ It's the oldest part of your brain. It helped us escape scary animals. And then you have the neocortex, new brain, new cortex, neo, new. that processes logical information. There's a saying that we probably all know that it's like, we make decisions emotionally and justify them logically. Amygdala neocortex, that's where that actually comes from. And so why this is so critical for salespeople understand is that if I'm sitting here processing data through the neocortex, I'm in this fairly calm, just logical center of my mind. I'm not really, you know, urgent. I'm more like processing logically. So like I'm comparing options and I'm thinking through and I'm like, you know, we're weighing risk and like, do I really want to do this and all of those things? But none of those things are actually driving emotional change. It's actually the opposite that's happening. And so us as salespeople, our number one job, regardless, and I've said this for a long time, our number one job in sales is to drive a business to make a change. Hopefully they make a change with you. But if not, I like to think my job is to help a business make positive change. And I literally have always approached sales this way. Like, I don't care whether you buy from me or not. I genuinely don't. What I care about is at the end of the day, are you better after meeting me because you chose to do something that helped you. And I feel good about what I've done if that's the end result. And so it's to drive change. But just like anything else, to drive change, you need to get someone in a mindset for change. And the way you do that... is by triggering the amygdala. And so the amygdala can be triggered, you know, actually quite easily and almost instantly by just raising some degree of fear ⁓ is the often most common. But, you know, it's just essentially reminding people of the problem that we're here to solve. And so the way you do that across your entire sales process is starting every conversation, like in discovery, I like starting discovery with a hypothesis. Hey, I did some homework on you, I did some research on you. Based on your industry, here's some macroeconomic conditions that are likely impacting you. Based on your role, here are likely some challenges that you have. Correct me, tell me where I'm wrong. That type of thing. Then getting into pain and implications of that and metrics and what happens if it doesn't improve and cost of delay and things like that. All of those are amygdala triggering. When you get into solutioning, that's all neocortex. That's like, do we accomplish this goal? Then as you progress through the sales process, it's just constantly bringing that back up. Hey, before we start on this conversation today, the reason why we're all here is because of what we just discussed a second ago. And is that still true? Has anything changed? Do we have any new people in the room that see or feel or are impacted by this differently? Let's account for that and then let's move on. And you're constantly doing that and you're sharing information between cycles and between meetings that continuously essentially trigger the amygdala that drives. the urgency versus just keeping people in their head the whole time. And that's one of the, from just a neuroscience perspective, a great way to continue to drive urgency inside of deals. Warren Kucker: Yeah, it's a really good call out when we talked about this. I think too logically about sales in particular, right? So I'm here to solve a problem and here's the process along it. The emotional piece needs to come along for the ride and not come along for the ride. I'm actually gonna restate that. It needs to be the driver, right? So like it needs to be part of why we're doing this. Otherwise, getting into a logical discussion about someone to make a big change just doesn't work along the way. So that's really interesting. Cool, maybe last question then. Obviously, have some big technological shifts happening right now in the market. What do you think? Is there anything in particular you feel like from a sales process buyer's journey over the next like two, three years that you think will fundamentally change in how we're selling our buy? David Weiss: Yeah, so people know buyers have more information than they ever had. Like that's like said every single day, it's getting to a point of like cliche. And it's true. And tech is evolving faster than it ever has. So buyers have even more options than they ever have. I really feel like the role of the salesperson, and I want to say Gartner coined this, is sense making. And I feel like they're right about this. you know, when we say sense making, what I mean is buyers do not need more information. ⁓ They actually need either less information or they need you to help them distill all that information into what's important. So they need deep domain expertise from you. ⁓ It's kind of like many years ago when if people were selling in like the early 2000s, ⁓ big data was like this like huge topic. Everyone was talking about big data and people were creating these like data lakes of like all this information and like trying to consolidate it. And what ended up happening is Companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars storing all of their data and creating all this lakes of information, but nothing was necessarily done with it. A lot of it actually didn't meet the end result because more data wasn't the problem. It was actually the insight from the data. And now AI is coming along and now people can apply AI to that data and actually get insight from it. And that is what people really need. And so the more that salespeople can deeply understand. the problem that someone's trying to solve, the criteria and shape criteria of like how they're trying to solve it. And then the competitive landscape and field that a buyer is going to look at and then be able to quickly like distill all of us down to say, whether you buy from me or not, based on what you want in a solution, these are the players you should be looking at. This is why, this is where exactly we differentiate. This is what makes us specifically different, nuanced level, contrast level than them. are these the things that you specifically, a buyer, care about? Or do you really care about this other stuff? Because if you do, let's just be honest, they can do that better. And just painting those clear pictures, making sense of all of that data for buyers, the more you can enable them from that perspective, like, oof, that, to me, are the salespeople. Warren Kucker: That's fun. I always say this, it's a much more fun way to sell, That way than trying to convince people to use your product would be the opposite approach in my mind. I love the buyer enablement ethos. This is really drives me to enjoy doing what I do on a daily basis. So that's a really excellent positioning of that problem. So awesome, David. Well, I appreciate taking the time. Where can people find you? What are you working on right now? ⁓ This is your time to plug something. David Weiss: Oh yeah, cool. Thanks man. I, I, I, I'm normally the guy who doesn't do the shameless plug. So I'll just keep it really like really short, deal management.co on LinkedIn under, you know, David Weiss and deal doc. Like, look, if you like some of the things that I'm saying, I write almost a blog a day. I'm constantly, like I said, trying to help the sales community sell better. So I put a ton of like just free content and resources out there. So if I can be a resource for you or help you just. Warren Kucker: good. Awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you the time. It a really thoughtful conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks. David Weiss: Yeah, thanks for having me on Warren. Appreciate it.