Becoming A Growth Leader With Scott Edinger

Sales training is often ineffective without strategic leadership and broader organizational support. Mark Cox sits down with Scott Edinger, CEO of Edinger Consulting, who shares how he successfully drives sales by becoming a strategic growth leader. He presents his Five Flags Start framework to elevate your sales approaches, create value that goes beyond tangible products, and achieve your very own idea of success. Scott also discusses how to harness the power of AI and technology in shaping the current world of sales, all while keeping the human sales experience alive and intact.

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Becoming A Growth Leader With Scott Edinger

Team, we've got a great show for you. We've got Scott Edinger on the show. Scott is the CEO of Edinger Consulting. He's also the author of the book we're going to be discussing, The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines. It's a great book. It is a New York Times bestseller and a USA Today bestseller. There are also interesting and a couple of great things that come out of the book.

First and foremost, this is a book with facts and data backing it up. I like that, as anybody who tunes in to the show knows. There's this opportunity for a few more facts: data research backing up the profession of B2B sales. Scott's book is chock a block with that kind of research. It has a lot of data points I hadn't seen before, some of which knocked me over. One of the key ones was the percentage of a company that doesn't understand the business strategy of the company. There were some stats in the book that talked about somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of employees not understanding the core business strategy of the company they work with.

When we start to think of sales, it is so important because every sales call communicates the core business strategy to that client or prospect, because that's our value proposition message. If we don't understand the strategy, we can't communicate it. A lot of this book is about the alignment between leadership and the sales organization, and this discussion about the sales organization being almost the personification of that business strategy. That tight alignment was so important.

One of the things that we get into in the episode is that we talked a little bit about Scott's amazing background.  He started with the Huthwaite Group, which is Dr. Neil Rackham in SPIN Selling for those who remember that back in the day. He was with that organization for seven years. What a great start. We also talk about multiple different HBR articles that Scott's written. A couple of interesting ones come out in the episode.

As part of this book, we do get into his Five Flag Start model, where we say, “For leaders today, thinking about how we start to better align the strategy with the sales organization to make sure everybody's enabled to execute in the field.” We talk about this Five Flag Start process where we first define success, and then identify the power play. We talk about understanding your competitive advantage in the marketplace, communicating that very clearly, and leveraging that to win.

We talk about identifying the ideal customer profile for you and the customers, creating value, and then number five, execution. Define success, identify your power play, identify your customers, create value, and execute. Scott takes us through each of these components in detail in this episode. This is a super interesting discussion.

I enjoyed my conversation with Scott. I enjoyed reading and studying The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines. You're going to enjoy this episode, too. When you do, please like and subscribe to the show. Thanks for doing that. That's how we get great guests like Scott. Folks, here he is, Scott Edinger, author of The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines.

Scott, welcome to the show. What a pleasure chatting.

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here talking with you.

You've written multiple books, but we're talking about The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Line. Right off the top, there are a couple of things I loved about the book. First of all, one of our pals, a friend of In The Funnel, and certainly a friend of this show that people will recognize, Frank Cespedes, a senior lecturer at Harvard, wrote a glowing introduction to the book.

I am very grateful to Frank for doing that. It’s wonderful.

Everybody on this show knows he's a hero and a mentor of mine. When I got down to studying for this episode and I read that, I got keyed up for the rest of the book when I saw Frank's introduction. The second thing that I thought was amazing was this warning or suggestion at the top of the book that says, “If you're a sales leader and you receive this book, The Growth Leader, because your CEO gave it to you, give it back to the CEO.

Scott Edinger’s Career Adventure

Tell the CEO he or she should read it, and if they need another book, I’d be happy to send another book.” You said, “Make sure they're not trying to absolve themselves of the responsibility of sales and growth.” That is a great move at the beginning of the book. We're going to get into that. Maybe for the folks tuning in, I wonder if you could give us a little bit of the short story of your career adventure that's brought you to this point here.

I struggle to make it short because it's long and winding, but I started my career in human resources at a Big Six firm. I date myself. Now, there are four. It was a firm that ultimately became PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC. It was Coopers & Lybrand before that. I was in human resources there. I got into human resources for all the right reasons, which were people development and wanting to help others do great work. The partner who recruited me talked with me about it. I helped to manage the most strategic assets of the firm.

What I realized, and I mean this with no disrespect for the human resources people who work strategically, is that most HR is not strategic. Most HR was administrative. It was going to be a long haul for me to get to do anything strategic. I did not like that. The more I explored, I looked for opportunities to combine that desire to help people do good work and be more successful in their careers with an interest in being on the revenue side of a business. I found that in the sales training business, where I spent about a decade.

I joke with clients that sales training might be the most frustrating business on the planet because executives are, even if they're happy with the results, still a little bit disappointed at best. They are very disappointed with many sales training companies because the reaction is, “I sent them away for two days, and they didn't come back as different people.”

Sales training might be the most frustrating business on the planet. Even if they are happy with the results, many executives are a little bit disappointed at best with sales training companies.

It’s like, “We didn't grow sales by 40% even though I sent them away for 2 days, and I have no idea what they went through.”

You'll hear the rootstock for The Growth Leader in this. When I talk to salespeople, they're frustrated. I hear things like, “This is great, but it is hard to do this. Nobody realizes in my company how hard it is, and we're not managed this way.” The consultants are often frustrated because we are frustrated that nobody is exactly in leadership doing what we suggest in order to drive the kind of growth that sales training could bring you. I love the work, but I got out of it and ultimately started my own strategy and leadership firm.

I love that work, too. Back in the day, I went through strategic selling probably 4 or 5 times. We've had one of the Heiman ladies on the show. Alice Heiman has been on the show. Her sister's coming on the show. Their dad was Robert Heiman from Miller Heiman Strategic Selling. I love the model. I love the methodology originally. I thought there was huge value in it. We all know about the forgetting curve out there. Nothing sticks unless it's reinforced, managed against, and coached continually. One-time training never works. It never sticks. There's no evidence of it a year later.

You mentioned the introduction of The Growth Leader, where I very clearly say CEOs don't delegate this book. My experience on that is that the thing that makes any initiative around revenue growth, particularly in SALESGO, is that it's got to be connected to strategy. It's got to be driven by leaders. When you put sales in something, like sales enablement, sales training, sales coaching, anytime the word sales appears in something for executives, it gets delegated. It gets pushed to sales. Sales can never make those kinds of strategic shifts on their own. They need broad, based, high-level leadership support in order to drive change. That's why I wrote the book.

Selling Well Matters

First of all, this is a great book to pick up. We put people on the show where we've read the book, and then we go find the person who wrote it to try and get them on the show. One of the things that is generally missing with a lot of sales advice, direction, or thought leadership is facts, assessments, research, or surveys. This book is a chock block full of them.

We have facts to back up the opportunity in front of us. There was one great piece of research in here where you talked about growth companies, the difference within industries, and how you sell could have a 20%, 30%, 40%, or 50% difference on the impact on your organization based on industry. It is this concept that selling well matters.

You've been published in Harvard Business Review multiple times. One of the ones we always point back to was, back in 2012, teaching sales. It was a July-August issue of Harvard Business Review. The whole issue was on B2B sales, the entire issue for a change. They had the stat from the Chally Group that said 39% of the time, a B2B purchasing decision favors the company that sells better versus the company that has the best price, quality, or service features. We reference this stat all over the place because we believe, like you, that selling well matters.

There is a forgotten, unknown, discarded fact about what I will call here the sales experience. Your customers' interactions with your prospects or even your existing customers' interactions with your sales team, in my book that I cite, are 25% as great as 53%. Your 39% stat in here. We're saying that somewhere between a quarter and a half of the decision is based on the experience the buyer or prospect has with your company before they even become a customer.

That's more than price alone, more than brand alone, more than service alone, and second only to the actual things they're buying. When you think about looking for ways to develop a competitive advantage, a way to stand out in the market, or a way to separate yourself from the competition, this factor of the sales experience is almost never talked about.

Isn't that amazing? It’s flabbergasting. It's also not taught in most business schools and most MBA programs. Far more than half of those schools in the US, when you go through an MBA, you're not getting more than 1 or 2 courses on sales.

It is amazing to me because what you hear a ton of is that we differentiate on customer experience or CX, which is the popular term. I did an interview for a Harvard Business Review article. The paraphrasing of what I said was customer experience is great, but in the world of CX, if the sales experience is the first mile of the customer experience, and it's not good or not even better than the competition, then your prospects will get off at exit one and they will go have a customer experience with someone else. This is a massive differentiator often not thought about in the boardroom and the executive team meeting. It's delegated to sales as, “Go do it.” That's not enough strategic direction, and it's not enough strategic support.

Business Boards Not Understanding Their Own Business

Let's touch on the strategic direction. That’s so well said. At the beginning of the book, you focus a lot on this issue that most people walking around a business don't even understand the strategy of the business they're in, let alone the salespeople that are tasked with articulating that business strategy in front of clients and prospects. I found those stats flabbergasting. The one that kicked me in the tummy was there was a board that doesn't even know the strategy.

Too often. There is are lot written about strategy. The litmus test for me is if you ask sellers, “How well do you understand the go-to-market strategy of your firm?” When I did that, the average answer on a scale of 1 to 10 was under a 4, like 3.7 or something. That is dangerous. If you consider this, and not enough leaders consider this, sales is the execution of your strategy in the market. Every sales call represents success or failure.

I write in The Growth Leader that this is either a massive accumulation of wins or it is death by a thousand cuts. That's a leadership issue because if you think about your strategy, where does it show up? Not in the boardroom and not in internal meetings. It shows up at the client meeting with the prospect. Are they the right kind of prospect? Are they the right level? Are you having the conversations that would lead them towards your best solutions, not whatever the sellers are comfortable pitching? Are they achieving the right kind of results there? All of the elements of strategy show up on the sales call hundreds, sometimes thousands, of times a day for companies.

You touched on this as well. You start to think about the impact not only on the top line, as you say in the title of the book, but the bottom line. In your HBR article, you define value. We'll get to it in a second. The value is the impact or the benefit minus the cost. If I'm targeting the right client, and this is so important for medium-sized enterprises, like In The Funnel, they pay for the value we provide. When our team targets the wrong client, we're going to the wrong market, they don't have the problem we solve for, or they don't want the benefit we provide, then we get into this cost battle.

Getting A Tighter Alignment On Core Business Strategies

Whenever those cross my desk, we're walking. We're professionally out. We know it's not the right fit for us. This connection between the company's strategy clarity on the company's strategy and making sure the sales team is enabled with that strategy is so critically important. You identify the problem, for sure, in the first chapters of the book. What are some of the solutions? For the folks and leaders who are tuning in, how do we get tighter alignment on the core business strategy, to start with?

This is the heart of the matter. Think about your strategy. It probably addresses key questions about your objectives, competitive advantage, target markets, or ideal client profile, but nearly all strategy models are missing. That is the one that's in The Growth Leader. All strategy models are missing this essential question. How does our sales experience create value?

I'd suggest to you that if you are a leader and looking to grow your business, then the answer to that question might be almost as important as what you offer and who you offer it to. The ability to make it part of your strategy that says, “Do you know that 25% to 50%-ish of the decision is based on this piece of sales experience? We're not going to push that off to sales and say, “Go sell. Sell more. Sell better.” We're going to say, “This is important enough.”

We're going to make it a part of our strategy. We're going to define it. We're going to get precise about how we create value above and beyond the products and services that we offer.” When you can do that, it's a downhill roll from there. It's hard to get that boulder up the hill, get executives to do that, and recognize the value of that. Once something's in your strategy, you do a whole lot more to resource it, to pay attention to it, and to drive success in that.

Once something is in your business strategy, you do a whole lot more to resource, pay attention, and drive success into it.

What a great approach. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read in the book that a great question to ask our leaders is, “Would your client or prospect pay for a sales call from one of your people? Are they getting that much insight, value, knowledge, or help? Are you uncovering problems they have? Are you uncovering issues they don't even know they have?

Are you bringing outside insight and knowledge, not just about you and your product, but about their business and their industry because you have a line of sight into hundreds, if not thousands, of other clients that look like them?” In this day and age, anytime you interact with anybody, the number one goal is, “Are they better off because of this discussion?” If we start there, then good things are going to happen for us down the road, for sure.

That is a critical element to this. I credit one of my early bosses and a mentor of mine, Neil Rackham, who is the bestselling author of SPIN Selling and Rethinking the Salesforce. If you're tuning in to this show, you probably have heard of his name. I worked for Neil for seven years. Neil used to ask us this question, “Would your customer write you a check for the sales call?” In my smart-alecky 30s kind of way, I'd say, “It's hard enough to get him to write us a check for the actual services we're selling, let alone the sales call.”

That question and this idea of sales calls or a sales experience, if we update that a little bit, that your customers would be willing to pay for, then that's a provocative question that starts you thinking, “What do we do that's valuable here above and beyond what we're offering, but how we offer it?’ In that way, they're not writing you a check for the sales call, but that negotiation becomes easier. You probably get a higher margin. They're willing to recognize, “They may cost more, but I want to work with them instead of this other team.” That's where you get your money. If you're looking to expand margins, they're hiding for you on every sales call.

My mistake. At the beginning, you mentioned the Huthwaite group, and I went to strategic selling. It's  SPIN Selling. That was Neil's company. Neil Rackham's company was the Huthwaite group that did the research with Mike Bosworth and Xerox originally back in the day.

If you trace the origins and the history of sales training, for anybody who cares about that, which is probably less than three people who are tuning in, you, me, and maybe one other person, all of that research is powerful. Neil was a real leader in that.

It is so great to think of it. Back in those days, it would've been hard to do that research. It was all manual.

I had the good fortune to work for seven years at Huthwaite. I joke with people that it was like dog years in selling working for Neil and doing that.

The Five Flag Start

Let's touch on a couple of the models that you've brought up. This is a very interesting read with good examples. It's a book where a fact comes up, and there's some data to back it up, and then there's a bit of an approach and a solution. In Frank Cespedes' very gracious introduction of the book, he said, “You've got this amazing model to convert any good idea into execution.” It's the Five Flag Start. It talks about define success, identify your power play, identify your customers, create value, and execute.

Let's talk a little bit about each of those, if we could, because that's something that would be a great takeaway for many of the people reading. They could capture that and start to think of the way they've got to go to market model. I loved your explanation of this in the book where you talked about the flags at a NASCAR race. You're covering every nationality. You got the folks in loving NASCAR. You got some folks loving hockey with the power play. You covered everything here.

When I said all strategy models leave out this idea of the sales experience, except for the one in The Growth Leader, that strategy framework is called the Five Flag Start. The notion of this is that any good strategy ought to answer a few key questions that establish a framework that allows leaders to make decisions, take actions, and make choices within that framework to drive their strategy forward and move their business forward. That's the Five Flag Start.

Let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about them, if it's okay.

We’ll dig right into that.

The first flag is define success.

Ever since Stephen Covey wrote to begin with the end in mind, we've always thought, “What is the goal here? What's the objective?” In the Five Flag Start, flag one is about how you define success. What are you aiming for? Is it revenue? Is it net income? Is it the number of products per customer or wallet share? Is it market share? Is it a measure of customer loyalty? Whatever it is. Growth of some kind in all of those is probably important, and for leaders to do a good job of identifying what that success is.

There's nothing necessarily revolutionary or revelatory about that first flag. What I'd offer is this, and most leaders don't think about it. The success that you are aiming for as a company is the result of every individual sales call. You can draw a clear line of what's happening in that sales call. Are we moving toward that objective? Part of this is about how you get a clear line of sight from that C-Suite all the way straight through to the customer and the front lines. Here's part of how you evaluate that throughline. Is it happening there? If it happens there, it'll happen on your balance sheet.

The success you are aiming for as a company is the result of every individual sales cost.

After this, we'll get into how we track and understand if it's happening there. Let's finish with the five flags because these are so good. The next one, which is speaking to my heart, is identify your power play.

The notion of competitive advantage is common in business. I use the term power play because I was always fascinated by this idea of an unfair advantage where you genuinely outnumber the competition. All of this is about how you align your strategy with sales. It's done in a way that says, “What do I want to show up in the sales call?” Most people think about competitive advantage, and it's like a laundry list of everything their company does. In truth, there are probably only a few or maybe one reason customers are choosing you.

If you think about that in terms of what you offer, that's what you want discussed in every sales call. Make sure that you're explicit, precise, and crystal clear about that so that your sales team can be asking the kinds of questions that surface the need that draws to that. When companies aren't clear, precise, or pragmatic about what that is, then salespeople pitch whatever they can. The Growth Leader is all about how you affect this kind of change, not by micromanaging sales, but from the leadership side. Getting clear on this part of the strategy is a big part of it.

Strategically, the executive team needs to be able to articulate the value proposition. We believe the value proposition is, “What do you do? What desired outcome do you provide clients? Number three, what's your competitive differentiation?” The competitive differentiation has to be fact-based and relevant to the client, and then relative to competition, including the number one competitor, which is to always do nothing or make no change. It is the status quo.

I find it so difficult to capture that. You talked about how many companies go through a laundry list. The reality of it is, in any communication, your client is not going to remember a laundry list of anything. They're going to remember, “These are the two reasons clients pick us over anybody else.” It is the Mark Twain, “I wrote a long letter. If I took more time, I would've written you a short letter.” I was saying we need the short letter.

Leaders, sellers, and everybody in between ought to understand the notion of argument dilution. That is the more stuff you throw and you've got a competitive advantage at, the more skepticism you create. As soon as I can find one of them that you're not as good at, then that calls into question everything else. These long pitches from sellers are less successful than ever for that reason.

I've never heard that before. That is such a great takeaway. Argument dilution. Do the hard work. Decide on the 2 or 3 things that you can defend that are fact-based.

I almost went to law school. That's where I learned that term.

It's coming out. There are the facts, evidence, and data.

That's the old lineage.

HR. Law. You did everything around sales.

I was doing everything I could to avoid sales, truly.

Per your HBR article, get over your fear of selling. Get over your fear of sales.

That's right.

Keeping on the Five Flag Start, number three is identify your customers. This one seems self-evident.

I want to highlight some nuance or subtlety, and I would hope for differentiation here. The point I drive home hard in The Growth Leader is to be clear about who you're walking away from because that's what's going to make a difference in your market success. All of you who are reading, you'll cringe if you knew how much time, money, and energy your sales teams are spending pursuing business you wish you didn't have.

All in the service of trying to make a number for a quarter that you're pressuring them on, they are experiencing the unintended consequence of pursuing the wrong kind of business. Every leader I talk to, from a venture-backed startup to a Fortune 500, is pissed off about that. If you do the Five Flag Start right, you'll get clear on this.

Bravo. The reality for the salespeople tuning in is that this is hurting you because the wrong clients are harder to sell to. Your productivity dramatically increases. If you've identified your ideal client profile and your value proposition resonates with that client, they're easier to sell to because they value the unique things that you bring to the table.

Let's face it. They're the ones who are making your life miserable anyway. You'd rather not, but you're doing so because you feel like you have to in the absence of something else when you would be better off allocating that time towards someone who's more likely to buy, even if you're to lose it.

Beautifully said. Five Flag Start number four is create value.

This is the centerpiece of the Five Flag Start in my view. The real point of differentiation is the executive saying, “We win on what we sell, which is our competitive advantage and our power play, but we also win on how we sell.” We create value in the sales experience. It's not just lip service. I tell the sales managers, “Get out there and do it.” It's part of our strategy. Get it in there. That's flag four of the Five Flag Start.

Finally, execute. You've got a bit of a catchall here for execute.

Most good strategy models leave execution out. If you're reading, see if this fits somewhere. “We had a great strategy, but the execution sucked.” There's a professor at the Rotman School of Business, Roger Martin. He has also written a few different books on strategy. He says, “I'm a believer that that is a cop-out.” His example of that was when have you ever heard of a brilliant political strategy where the candidate lost, or an amazing film with a great marketing strategy tanked at the box office? Execution and strategy are linked. Within strategy, you have to create the mechanism to execute it.

Execution and strategy are linked. Within strategy, you have to create the mechanism to execute it.

The last part here is to answer this question. What do we need to improve, build, or acquire if we're going to execute this strategy? Answer that question, and that gives you your bridge to what you're going to need to do to execute. If all of the strategy is forward-looking, then your ability to say, “If we're going to make these objectives true in this part of the market with this advantage creating value this way, then there are things we got to get better at, and there are things we don't have that we need that we either build or we got to go get them.” If you broadly look at that, that will give you your roadmap for what you have to do to win in your strategy.

Roger Martin is somebody else who's been on the show. Of Roger's strategy books, back in the day, he was writing those with the CEO of Procter & Gamble, whose name escapes me.

A. G. Lafley.

Keeping Up With Changes And Innovations

Thank you. A lot of that is making those decisions that we’re not to compete. One of the core tenets of his strategy, the same thing with one of the core tenets of your five flags, is the ideal customer, deciding where we don't want to compete, and make sure we're spending all of our time where we do. You are seeing salespeople train thousands, probably on a given basis, in a given year. There are lots of amazing things happening in B2B sales.

If we believe social media, the whole business discipline is failing, and there are all these issues. Frankly, I don't buy it. We come across so many organizations where their values have dramatically increased. The insight and opportunity value they put into the world has increased. That's all on the backs of the B2B sales organizations. They're driving revenue. There are some amazing things happening in B2B sales. What are you most excited about for B2B sales moving forward? What are you seeing out there? What are you excited about in terms of the future?

The thing I'm excited about is that the more companies try to use technology to substitute salespeople, the less consumers seem to like it. The thing I am most excited about is that the value of the sales experience when it's done well becomes even more powerful than it has been. I don't know about you, but all of the AI chatbots that I'm involved with, the telesales robots, and all of these mechanisms where technology is looking to insert itself in place of the sales experience, I know that there are places where it does work. There are elements of it, certainly, if they are transactional sort of stuff. If you're selling anything where the interaction with the seller and the buyer matters, things are getting better for you because, roundly, I don't hear people saying they're having great experiences with anything that is a technology substitute.

It’s a great productivity tool for salespeople for research and planning.

I will offer this on something I'm excited about. I do see the use of AI, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or any others as a means to doing good research so that a salesperson can show up with greater knowledge about the company. They can say, “Analyze the last four quarters of earnings calls from this company and help me summarize the issues.”

The ability to become more quickly knowledgeable about your prospects and clients is wonderful. It's like back to the early days of Netscape. It's like, “I can go download a 10-K.” Now, I can have an analysis of the last couple of years of them in less time than that. If you consider the ability to use technology to get better, not more efficient.

How do you stay current with what's happening both with business and in B2B sales? Favorite authors and sources of information? The folks who tune in to this show are growth-oriented. They want to get better. There are lots of other places in addition to this show where they can continue their learning. What are some of the sources for you?

For business, I try to keep a relatively low information diet because there's so much available. I do read the Wall Street Journal. I get a summary of pretty much every article there every day, and then I can click and look further into it. In terms of business, I tend to look at the people whom I like and what they write, their blogs, and their articles.

The people you've mentioned here, who have been on your show, be it Roger Martin or Frank Cespedes, are a couple of luminaries in my mind. The place where I tend to learn the most is when I'm in the field with clients and I get to watch them in action, see what's happening with their customers, and then what's happening in the boardroom, and connect those two things. That's where I tend to learn the most.

The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines

Get In Touch With Scott

Scott's book is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It's also a USA Today bestseller. The book we've been talking about is The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines. It's been great having this first conversation with you. I have a feeling we'll be chatting again, for sure.

I'd love that.

Thank you so much for joining

Thank you so much for having me here. It's been a real pleasure. I enjoyed the discussion.

Thank you. Folks who are reading are going to want to learn more about you. How else can they learn more about you or about Edinger Consulting?

First off, I do hope you get the book, and I hope you like it enough to write a review. Beyond that, I do my best to make it easy to find me. My website is my name, ScottEdinger.com. On there, there are over 100 articles for free that I have written for Harvard Business Review, Chief Executive, and Forbes. I hope you can go to those and learn more. I've got a new video series that's coming out soon on every part of The Growth Leader. You can learn about that and the announcement for it if you sign up for the monthly newsletter. I know everybody wants another newsletter.

They want good ones. We're in.

My promise is always two things. Number one, it'll be short. Number two, never commercial. What I hear from clients is that it's always got good insights and stuff I learned. I'm on LinkedIn. Follow me there. I do a once-a-month live stream event, like a podcast with guests. That’s better than reading an article or watching a video. You can interact. We can figure out how the ideas work for you. Those are the places you can tend to find me, and I hope you will.

That’s awesome. Our special thanks to Scott Edinger. We've been talking about The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines. It is a great read. I'd also like to thank you for tuning in to the show. We run this show to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales because we think that in doing that, we improve the lives of professional salespeople.

Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate everybody's support. We also know we can continue to improve this show. We're growth-oriented. If you've got some constructive criticism for us, please send it to me, MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's my personal In The Funnel email, so I respond to every bit of constructive criticism. We love constructive criticism.

Some of the guests and the way we run the show have been a result of the feedback you've provided, so thanks for that. If you like this episode, please like and subscribe to the show. That's how we get great guests like Scott, so that matters to us. In the meantime, good luck to everybody. We'll look forward to seeing you all next time.

Important Links

• Scott Edinger

• The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines

• Scott Edinger on LinkedIn

• How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing with Frank Cespedes

• Professional Sales with Alice Heiman

• A New Way To Think with Roger Martin

• SPIN Selling

• Rethinking the Salesforce

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Scott Edinger

Clients in the Fortune 50 and across the globe trust Scott K. Edinger as their premier consultant for leading business growth. Scott has worked with CEOs and senior leaders to develop pragmatic strategies and execute approaches to drive top and bottom-line results. He has written three books and over a hundred articles in Forbes and Harvard Business Review, among other prominent publications.

As a consultant, author, advisor, and speaker, Scott creates positive change for clients and is recognized as an expert in the intersection of leadership, strategy, and sales.

He is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today national bestselling author of The Growth Leader: Strategies to Drive the Top and Bottom Lines, as well as the bestselling co-author of The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness Within Your Company and The Inspiring Leader. His Harvard Business Review article “Making Yourself Indispensable” has been called a “classic in the making.”

Scott has served as an affiliate faculty member for the University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler. School of Business. He received a B.S. in Communication Studies and Rhetoric from Florida State University, where he sat on alumni committees including the Board of the College of Communication and Information, as well as the Seminole Torchbearers. 

Going Along The Customer’s Buying Journey With Matt Heinz

Many businesses are doomed to fail because they focus too much on developing a strong brand but blatantly ignore the customers’ buying journey. Without understanding their behaviors, needs, and interests, there will be a huge disconnect that could lead to huge losses. Mark Cox sits down with Matt Heinz, President and Founder of Heinz Marketing, to discuss the right way to build trust and credibility with your target market. Matt explains how to leverage today’s technological innovations, particularly AI, to swiftly adjust business strategies to the ever-evolving world. He also stresses the importance of proper collaboration and teamwork between sales and marketing teams to perfectly capture the attention and interest of the public towards their businesses.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Going Along The Customer’s Buying Journey With Matt Heinz

Matt Heinz, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Introducing Matt Heinz

It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I think our past should have crossed sometime sooner than this. It's always helpful for our gang to maybe give us a little bit of that short story of your professional journey. It's interesting to hear how a Journalism major ended up doing marketing for Microsoft and the Seattle Mariners and then running Heinz Marketing. How did you get here?

It's been a giant mistake, Mark. Imagine when you started with a Political Science and Journalism degree, I started my career doing exactly that. I was a state government beat reporter for a suburban newspaper outside of Seattle. I made my way to a PR firm, went to Microsoft, marketing for a couple of startups in Seattle, and developed a fondness over time for the complexity of the B2B go-to-market.

I realized very quickly that you can't just send an email like a lot of consumers' transactional performance marketing tactics. Those don't apply to complex sales situations. I decided sixteen years ago to try it on my own. Over time, we've built a team. We have clients all around the world, helping companies with complex sales situations to create more predictable repeatable pipelines. It's been a lot of fun along the way.

You're right. It's spectacular fun doing this. When you go in and help companies, are you going in as a consultant? Are you going in as trainers? What would a typical engagement look like? How would a company identify if they need your help?

We're project-based consultants. I think there are a lot of companies that do ongoing retainer and agency work from the tactical campaign side. Most of our clients have great product market fit but don't have a repeatable scalable engine to drive growth. We have developed over the years a methodology around building a predictable pipeline. We bring that methodology to clients. We customize it to their unique go-to-market motions, their industry, and their culture.

We create and install the systems that are going to drive that predictable pipeline, and then we teach them how to run it. A big part of our focus is to drive client independence. Our clients want to do this on their own. They want predictable pipelines to be part of their DNA moving forward as a core competitive advantage in their business.

We get calls from companies that don't have that engine that have grown maybe organically because of that strong product market fit, but have reached a ceiling and are not growing because they don't have the systems to drive that. We have companies that have outgrown their current marketing functions and are not reflecting the complexity of how go-to-market works today.

We also have clients that as they grow, their outbound marketing efforts are strong, but their ability to orchestrate that work internally starts to fall apart. Gartner calls that collaboration drag. It is a real thing. As companies get to 2025-plus employees on the marketing side, agility speed to market starts to deteriorate unless you put a real focus on how that gets done. Over the last few years, we've developed a real focus and expertise around helping companies better orchestrate the very act of doing marketing and go-to-market work, to be more agile, to increase speed to market to get more of the right work done.

There are so many great things to unpack there. As you were speaking, it dawned on me that with the hundred or so episodes we've had, we've had sales thought leaders, coaching thought leaders, mindset thought leaders, and all those kinds of good things. Some folks talked about mental health. I don't think we've had somebody who grew up with this core marketing expertise. We haven't had enough marketing thought leaders. In a little while, you and I might end up chatting about this collaboration and integration between sales and marketing. Maybe that's why. Maybe I've been ignoring marketing.

Role Of Marketing In Mid-Sized Organization

You touched on organizations that have not stayed current with what's taking place in marketing. Frankly, when you start to think of big data, automation, AI, social selling, quantum computing, and all these things that have continued to evolve over the last hundred years, it's tough to stay current. If we took it from base principles today, this might be an overly simplified question, but what is the role of marketing in the typical mid-sized organization? A SaaS company has $25 million in ARR, and they have a marketing team of 15 people.

It's a good question. A lot of people would say it's to drive demand, which manifests the leads, but I think that's too narrow. Even in a small growing organization, marketing's function is to manage the product market fit, to manage how well, if you're developing product strategy, meets and matches what the market needs. A great marketing leader needs to know more about the customer than anybody in the organization and develop a go-to-market plan that reflects that.

A great marketing leader needs to know more about the customer than anybody else in the organization to develop a go-to-market plan.

Sales teams say they want leads and they do need leads, but what the sales team needs is a market that needs what they're selling. They need a market that's receptive to their message, that knows who your company is, but more importantly, understands why they need the conversation. They understand the problem, they understand what's wrong with their current situation, and they are seeking solutions to make that better to achieve a better outcome, and that is fluid. As your product evolves, as the market evolves, and as capabilities evolve, that's fluid. That's why I think a marketing leader's job to manage product market fit and drive market demand and all the manifestations of what that looks like is key to success in the short term and long term.

What an interesting approach by the way because a lot of times, you see these silos between we have product over here, we have marketing. Usually, there's pretty good integration between marketing and sales, but you'll hear a lot of sell what you have on the truck instead of having that closed loop. We're saying sales is in front of clients, marketing is in front of clients, who understand what the client needs, and what's the process for feeding it back into the product group so we help with that core value proposition to the market.

Turning Lead Into Sales

If some of the folks listening today, by the way, that's a real big one on this product market. If CEOs are tuning in to this and they start to think about their marketing efforts, what's a basic framework that they can think of outside of product market fit? What should I be doing to try and help create and turn a lead into an opportunity or turn an opportunity into a sale? How do we think about how marketing supports that effort?

I would start with a very simple two by two matrix. On one side, it says brand on demand. The other side says short-term and long-term. There are short-term and long-term things you can do to build a strong brand and build and drive repeatable predictable demand. I bring that up for a couple of reasons. One, I think a lot of companies that are thinking short-term prioritize demand over brand. I get it. You need leads and they're like, “Brands are expensive.” Not necessarily.

You and I are doing this podcast. I know we're recording one on the sales pipeline on your podcast. Except for a couple of streaming services and our time, this is free. It used to be you had to get a publisher to publish your book. Now, you can do it through Lulu. Building a brand is more about your ability to be creative and be proactive at doing it. I don't know any strong, predictable, sustainable demand programs that operate with efficiency that aren't supported by a strong brand behind them.

They have to go together, but your short-term and long-term strategies may differ. You have to invest now in the things you want to impact your business long term, but you also have to invest in prioritizing now the things that are going to drive the pipeline this quarter. Brand demand, short and long-term, and have an approach and a strategy for each of those. Revisit it on a regular basis. This is a quarterly conversation to decide what's working, what's not working, what's having an impact, and what are we ready for next.

Ideal Marketing Executives

When you start to think of that, it feels to me that the marketing professional today has to be part data scientist, part visionary, and part creative designer. What are some of the skills and attributes even of the members of your team, when you're looking at somebody and say, “They're the right fit for our team,” will part values for a second, so who they are. What do you look for when you're looking for marketing executives today? What skills and capabilities?

I don't want to say researcher because that feels too narrow, but I think fundamentally, all of this begins when a deep and ongoing understanding of who your customer is. Let me define that in a couple of different ways. One, part of product market fit is you need to understand the subset of the subset of the market that you're selling to. Saying you are selling them in market healthcare is way too broad.

Part of product market fit is understanding the subset of the market you are selling to.

By narrowing your focus, you are not excluding those other companies from buying from you, but you'll still take their money. What you're doing is emphasizing and prioritizing a subset of the market that based on a variety of attributes is most likely to buy, and is most likely to have the need for what you're selling because buildings don't write checks. We got to talk about the people in the building. You probably read the book Selling to VITO. It's back here somewhere.

Back in the day, I did. Yeah.

Very Important Top Officers are still important, but not sufficient. There's this concept of the buying committee. Very rarely if ever would they describe themselves as the buying committee, but there's a group of people in every company that have a vested interest in the outcome that worked together to build consensus. Sometimes formally, sometimes organically. Our job as sellers is to get that buying committee to commit to change and commit to that, to the point where they choose and implement a solution. That's it.

That's hard. Let's imagine there are five members of the buying committee. Four of them have said yes, but one is a soft no. The deal is dead. Our ability to orchestrate consensus and movement inside that buying committee is the core of the job for sales and marketing teams. Back to your question, the better I understand motivations, the better I understand needs, the better I understand not just intent but needs and evidence of needs, and how those correlate to a message I should get in front of someone to help them better understand, to unlock, to challenge and reframe a status quo, that's it. That manifests itself in messages, campaigns, sales playbooks, and trade shows, but it all comes from that buying journey understanding.

Mapping The Buyer Journey

I like that idea. I've heard you on other podcasts while I was prepping for today. You talked about mapping the buyer journey out and making sure that you're adding value, insight, and knowledge through collaterals or a point of view or third-party research to somebody at every stage along that buyer's journey, which I think is magnificent.

The stuff on the consensus, a friend of the show is Alice Heiman. Miller Heiman from back in the day when probably both of us had beautiful heads of hair. It still hasn't changed. There were groups of people buying back in 1987 or ‘89, whenever it was. They had personal needs and professional needs. You had to make sure how you navigated that. I still love that framework.

They've sold the company twice. It's now Korn Ferry. I think the brand is disappearing, unfortunately, but I love that framework for doing so. Understanding the buyer, how can that be a mistake? Having the business acumen, the industry acumen, and having that point of view in terms of a better future for them, how can you help them? How can that be a mistake?

Yes, and. A lot of companies talk about themselves and don't talk about their customers’ needs. A lot of founders out there say, “I don't need to research the customer. I founded this company based on my understanding so I know what they need to hear.” There are a lot of companies that are so enamored with their product and assume that the buyer is going to do the value translation on their own.

They were just going to throw a bunch of features and product conversations to people and trust that they're going to understand what that means. There is no build and they will come. Even if you have a great product market fit, you still have to think about that narrative. You still have to connect the dots or the customer to be not only more efficient but more predictable and scalable.

Even if you have a great product market fit, you still have to connect the dots with the customer to be more efficient, predictable, and scalable.

I've heard you on a podcast. You're a super positive guy. I'm a super positive person too, but I have to ask this question. That concept you shared about making it about them is nothing new. Dale Carnegie in 1939 said, “You can make more friends in two months by taking an interest in them than you can in two years by trying to get them interested in you.” Why are we still struggling with this in professional B2B sales and marketing in 2024? It doesn't make any sense to me why we still have to go through this.

I think it comes down to at the end of the day, we don't want to take the time. You look at examples of what happens out there today. Let's take the proverbial white paper. Let's say you create a white paper that is written with some insights for the customer that helps them address and understand a need and a problem. You get someone that downloads that white paper. What we typically do is have a 23-year-old, call them, and say, “Thanks for downloading the white paper, Can I schedule you into a demo?”

I'm not even being facetious. This happens all the time every day. We assume that because they have asked for the white paper, let alone read it, they're ready for a demo. What do we want from our sellers? We want meetings. What do we want to do in those meetings? We want to talk about our product. We want to show them all these great things we can do. Once they see it, give me fifteen minutes, sir, and I will show you how I'm going to do it.

Instead of saying, “Would you like to demo?” What If you said, “Thanks for downloading the white paper, of course, you have not read it yet. Why did you do that? What's going on in your business right now? Why was that topic of that white paper pressing to you right now?” Maybe they have an answer for that. Maybe they don't. If they do, great. You go down that line if that helps you.

Otherwise, say, “I don’t get a chance to talk to people in your seat all day long, and when I ask them about what is frustrating them in their business right now, I hear the same three things.” List those three things quickly and then say, “Which of those made you a little sweaty thinking about it,” because that is something you're dealing with right now, or maybe even better, “What's one of the things on that list that you weren't thinking about that all of your peers are losing sleep on? Would you like to know why?”

There's an insight there and you can teach a 23-year-old how to have this conversation. You don't have to be a sales rep. You don't have to be a deep product expert but to know how to ask questions and get the prospect thinking and aligning the time with something that they showed interest in, then the next step you are not doing a demo, but your chances of earning the demo after that conversation go up dramatically. Sometimes three steps are faster than one. Back to your original question, a lot of sellers in a lot of companies don't have the patience and discipline to do that.

It's such a great point. It's harder to teach somebody business acumen and industry acumen and effective discovery than it is to say, “Let our product do the talking for itself.” To me or you, frankly, that's a nightmare scenario. Can you imagine as a salesperson, I'm going to jump on a call because we scheduled a demo? Everybody out there faces this.

The person who scheduled the demo is not the person on the other end of the Zoom call. There are six people. They're all staring at you bold-faced. I have no idea who they are. I don't know why they're on the call. Three of them have no reason to be on the call and are not going to influence the decision in any way. Somewhere, they go, “Dance like a monkey.”

For those listening, the best thing you can do is say, “Great to meet everybody here. Today, we'll take it through a demonstration if that’s what you like at the end of this thing, but first, can I start, can you go around the room? Let me know who you are. What are you doing here?

“Why are you here? Don’t you have something better to do? Why did you choose to come here instead of the thousand other things you can do? What were you hoping to hear? What were you hoping to learn? What did you want to get out of this conversation that you thought, going in, might be the reason why you're here as opposed to something else? Let's have that conversation first.”

Even if you forget the demo, forget those presentations. If you can confirm and deepen the need and understanding of the need with that audience, they will blow through the end of the meeting and stick around. They will enthusiastically take the next meeting to see how you understand them so well, what could you possibly have built based on that understanding that’s now going to fulfill promises made, and promises kept.

Getting Attention And Interest

Great stuff. We switch gears. At this point in time of the sales getting an opportunity, we think on this podcast, we've had lots of great conversations. We probably have some frameworks and thoughts that are helpful. If we go a little bit upstream in this day and age, let's say we do understand our buyer and the problem, our solution solves for, or what's going on in their business and their industry. We have this point of view and some value. How do we get attention and interest in this day and age where 45% of what's in my inbox today is spam?

It is not easy. It isn't done quickly. You are not starting from zero. You're starting from a negative position because of what everyone else is doing to disrupt, ignore, and disrespect the time of your prospects. Our efforts to get someone's attention, our sales and marketing, outbounds, our blog posts, our podcasts, our sales emails. This is driving by your prospect's house at 35 miles an hour, trying to get something in the mailbox. You're going to miss a lot.

 When you do get something in there, I don't know about you, but literally like the other day, my wife and I were sitting out on the porch. We asked our youngest son, “Will you go down and get the mail?” He brought the mail to my wife. She sat there and without even opening anything, took 80% of it, and gave it right back to him. Without a word, he put it in the recycle bin. It was just sales. That was irrelevant, not something I don't spend time with. It didn't even make it in the house.

Know that if you have a great message that is relevant to that audience, you're probably going to end up in the recycle bin initially. Following my mailbox analogy a little further, eventually, maybe they look at something like that. That was interesting That didn't waste my time. They didn't spend a lot of time on it, but that didn't waste my time. The next time they see something from you, that sparks interest as well.

Even if you have a great message relevant to your audience, it will probably end up in the recycle bin initially.

Eventually, they start recognizing that car that drives by their house, throwing something in the mailbox, “I should check what that is.” I don't mean that in a stalker way but I'm trying to say that you are competing with a massive amount of information from everybody else, and over time, by being consistently valuable, you earn the right for someone to say, “I'm going to keep this piece of mail,” or “I don't have time right now to read it, but I know there's usually value here. I'm going to put it on my list and get to it eventually.”

That is a process. It is not a single email. I see people all the time. I bought a list, I sent them an email, I got no response, and apparently, the email is dead. No. Your prospects are just inundated. They don't know you and they don't trust you. That is a process. I run a business. I got to close deals. I wish I could call CMOs and close consulting projects more quickly. It doesn't work that way. Again, back to my matrix of the brand on demand, short term, long term, there are tactics, and there are priorities you can put in place. If you want your prospect to read all of your mail, you have to prove that your mail is worth reading.

We’ve learned a lot of this the hard way. The same thing for us. Matt, you've been in business longer. I think you started in 2006 or 2007, right?

2008. It’s coming to 16 years.

2008. Nice timing.

Thank you. It was November 2008. The market had just crashed. My wife is finally pregnant with her first child. I quit my job. You don't need benefits when your wife is pregnant. Now it sounds worse than it was. My wife is a teacher. Her benefits are way better than mine. I had a couple of clients lined up. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, but it was a time.

That's a great conversation for another podcast about entrepreneurship. We both lived through that. Going back to this getting this time and attention. We lived through a period of time when I outsourced our content on LinkedIn, Facebook, or social posts. In the early days of our business 10 or 12 years ago, we had marketing interns. Every once in a while, I'd read something and go, “I would never say that.” They were trying to interpret it. We gave them an impossible task.

The truth of it is now we write it. We have GPT and AI tool that helps us and starts to get to know us a little bit, It starts to get better and better and better, but I'm completely with you, anything that has our name or brand on it has to be adding value because the number of people who come to us and say, “I've been following you for two years on LinkedIn.” I go, “It worked. It was slow but it worked.” Make sure you're consistent with the brand.

Improving Practices And Collaboration

I've heard you talk about this and you read about this a little bit. Tell me a little bit about some of the best practices for the sales leaders out there, we have far more sales leaders listening today than we do have marketing leaders. What can they do to improve the collaboration or bring some best practices to the table by working with their marketing teammates?

That’s a great question. I think first is to know and appreciate that it is a team sport. You can't do this if you don't do it together. There is no successful marketing without sales. There are no successful sales without marketing. Full stop. Also recognize that the old way of thinking about the pipeline, where marketing owns the top and sales owns the bottom, is insufficient in most modern B2B selling environments.

Setting the funnel horizontally, We need to split it vertically, maybe with a diagonal band, where marketing has most of the jobs at the top, and sales may have most of the jobs at the bottom. I am thinking more about jobs to be done. One of the best examples of this is the BDR, the business development function where lead management takes the leads, turns them, and qualifies them. Is it in sales or marketing? I don't care. What is the job to be done?

In some cases, it's better if it's in sales because your BDR is the future AEs because they feel like they're part of the sales culture, but in some cases, that means they get that “Thanks for downloading white paper, would you like to see a demo?” Sometimes it's better if they're in marketing. Marketing is responsible not for leads, but the opportunity of creation. If you think about it in marketing, all of a sudden you’re saying, “I got a group of people that are on the phone.” The phone is another channel, just like LinkedIn, email, podcasts, or trade shows.

What's the conversation I want someone to have when I can get them on the phone that further qualifies and drives interest with the right person at the right company, and now it's worth spending time on? It's the same process and I don't care who does it. I think the lines have been appropriately blurred between sales and marketing and that sort of messy middle. If you can take ego aside, you can know that some of the mattresses we look at are leading indicators and or ingredients to the end results.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about when a deal gets closed and someone makes their quota and someone goes to the president's club. Increasingly, I have clients talking about who gets to go to the president's club. Is the AE that closed the deal? What about the BDRs that did the follow-up for months? What about the marketing team that builds the product market fit and makes them interested? What about the copy who wrote such compelling copy based on a deep understanding of that audience?

I think it's it's increasingly becoming insufficient to have AE that closed the deal to go to the president's club. That's a whole nother podcast as well. We have an entrepreneurship podcast and a president’s club podcast. The healthiest most successful programs to drive demand and sales are when sales and marketing work closely together. They check egos at the door. They have an integrated scorecard. They know that everybody wins or everybody loses. The metrics that matter are the numbers that you can buy a beer with, period.

Buying Journey: Sales and marketing teams must work closely together. They should check egos at the door and keep integrated scorecards to know when everybody wins or loses.

Money in the door, money in the door. When you start to think of it as this team sport, I think it's critically important today because you probably know matrix as well but the tenure of these sales leaders is so short. Frankly, the tenure of anybody in sales is insanely short, but a sales leader is like eighteen months these days. BDR, SDR same thing, about eighteen months, a little bit less.

This idea of saying if I'm a CRO as I've been in the past if I'm going to jump into somebody's organization today, I'm looking to build as many people closely in the team and link arms with the team because I believe in collaboration. I believe in the power of the team. By the way, it's also a survival mechanism. If we don't have a team around us, we're going to have a short stint of eighteen months is insane.

Exciting Things In The Future

Let's look at positive things. If we turn the table a little bit and say a lot of challenges out there getting attention and awareness, but I don't think we've ever been at this stage of the world where we're so well enabled, big data, quantum computing, AI, automation, technology, the ability to get more productive and effective.

I love those tools that help do a little research for me so that before I'm going to speak to Matt Heinz, I can get a DISC profile on Matt Heinz pretty quickly. What kind of person is he? How does that compare with me? Analyzing your digital footprint out there so that we can have a more engaging conversation. What are you excited about now when you start to think of the next couple of years in marketing?

What I'm excited about is flipping that, where instead of using all the tools to research you before I make the call, I used the data to figure out who to call first. Based on my understanding of the target audience, understanding of the ideal customer profile account, and understanding of the individual you need to be speaking to, that's a model that can be that inherently include an understanding and prioritization of data.

The level of data we now have access to through a variety of means is incredible. It's like the Library of Congress. Every book ever produced, but they're all on the floor. Where do you find the books you need? I think the better you understand your audience, the better you can prioritize the data you need and use that data to decide, “Who do I call next? What do I talk about?”

You hear the phrase intent signals a lot these days, a lot of the big data companies, a lot of the database vendors, a lot of them are producing what they're broadly calling intent signals. I'd break it down even further. I think intent signal means you have someone who is indicating interest in your product or showing evidence that they're seeking a solution, phenomenal. This is a later-stage buyer that hopefully you build some brands and some credibility with, so you're not a commodity at the last part. You don’t call them further doing the deal, but that's great.

Behind intent signals are need signals. It's prospects and customers that are researching or exhibiting needs that you know relate to your solution. You're still not going to offer in a fifteen-minute demo but you can respond to that need by giving them educational content, by teaching them what other people like them are doing with that need. The need before needs is evidence signals. Evidence of need that your prospect hasn't translated into a need.

They are on this journey maybe for the first time. You've seen the movie countless times, but you know that oftentimes evidence of need Is a way to accelerate that path from evidence to need to commitment to change. If you are the trusted advisor who helps them on that path, you're the incumbent in the deal now. That evidence signals and needs are early in the buying process. These are not sales-qualified leads yet. These are not people that should be in your immediate pipeline.

Your ability as a marketing organization, as a selling organization to identify and engage with prospects at that stage with the right channels, to make sure that it's not a bunch of people on the phone. The economics of that has to be right, but knowing you can break up the data into those three areas and respond accordingly is helping a lot of companies' brand and demand with that long-term play.

In simplest terms, I completely love this by the way. I think everybody out there is using Zoom for intent data or cheap and cheerful versions of Zoom for intent data. Lots of different technologies, but there's a certain sign of, for example, a software company. How long have they been in existence? Who's on their executive team? What's the solution? Who are they selling to? I could tell you with certainty, just getting those attributes, 80% of the time, they're growing less than 10%.

Staying Current

They came out of the gate and so they need what we would sell, which would be sales training and development for their team to elevate performance. I love this idea of getting smart in this space. In that area because this world is so broad. I know you get a chance with your podcasts and your blogs and your writing and your guests on everybody else's podcast. How do you stay current in this very confusing world these days? It feels like that sales leader or marketing person got this chameleon-type role where it's so hard to stay current with everything. What are the sources that you go to or how do you stay abreast of what's going on?

Episode Wrap-up

A couple of things. The easiest answer is you have to prioritize constant learning. You have to be a constant student of things you know you need to know and things you're just interested in, where your brain will make correlations. Some of my best insights into how we could be a better business, and how we can better serve clients have come from other Industries and random other situations where I'm like what happened there could happen with us too. What happened there could be part of our sales process.

You have to prioritize constant learning. You need to be a constant student of things.

I buy too many books. I don't see every one of these cover to cover, but I'm reading way more because I make it a priority. Honestly, as a marketing person for most of my career, the marketing stuff I get, I read a lot more sales books than marketing books because it's an area that I did not grow up with. When I started this business, I didn't carry a bag. I hadn't been a seller, but so I think to be hungry, to be interested, to make it a habit, and there are so many different formats.

If you don't like reading, watch videos. If you don't like videos, download a bunch of podcasts and listen to them in the car, listen to them when you go for a run. Put them in the background when you're doing something else easy. “Matt, I'm not actively listening to it.” At that point, you have information that you are consuming subconsciously even If you're working on some other tactical easy thing. I do think there's no simple answer other than you have to put in the time and make it a habit.

You almost sled there too by the way. Thank you for that. You sled to Lencioni's humble, hungry, smart thing in terms of what you're looking for, in terms of top people, and great thought leaders. In all 100 podcasts, we asked this question frequently. It does come back to being a lifelong learner instead of a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. The most successful people in the world have driven that appetite to keep learning, be prepared, and be ready to go. The best athletes in the world are always looking to tweak 2% or 3% to get a tiny bit better because it has a massive impact.

Given your time, I'm going to maybe wrap up a couple of things here by saying thank you. Thank you for joining me today. I'm sure so many of the folks listening to this podcast are going to get enormous value from what we've heard today, but this will be the start of the process of them getting to know you. Where should they go to learn more? Where should they go to learn more about you?

HeinzMarketing.com is our company's website. You can learn about what we do. Click on the resource section and its sixteen years of blog posts, and best practice guides. We do a ton of research in go-to-market motions and a lot of that is up there as well. It's all free. Most of it doesn't have a form. It's take it and use it and benefit from it. You're going to be a guest shortly on our podcast as well, Sales Pipeline Radio. We named it that years ago on purpose. We are marketing consultants but the output of this is a sales pipeline. That's what that is about. Check that out.

I write a lot on LinkedIn these days. I used to write every day on our blog and now our company blog is written by our consultant and it's so much better. I can brag about it because I have nothing to do with it, but I spent a lot more time on our podcast and LinkedIn. You can check me out on LinkedIn as well, or if you don't find what you want, or want a shortcut to the library, it’s Matt@HeinzMarketing.com and I welcome anybody curious and has any questions.

We didn't get into curiosity today, but that's such a great topic. First of all, thanks, Matt. Thanks again for joining the team. I'll tell everybody that in preparation for today, I did go and check out the white papers, and the resource section. There are a ton of extremely well-written white papers. They're clear, they're good-looking, core messages you can pull from. I took a look at a CMOS guide to marketing orchestration, and from data to deals. Before we got in, I downloaded it and read two of them. I learned things. Teams, you will too. Please jump on to the website and download those things.

Thank you, Matt, so much for today. Team. I want to say thank you to you for listening. As everybody knows, we run this podcast because, at a high level, we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we think we improved the lives of professional salespeople. Thanks for listening today. We're growth-oriented and we know we're not perfect at doing this. If you have some constructive criticism or some thoughts as to how we can make the show more valuable to you, I want to know about them.

I'm MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. Some of the things we do on the podcast came as a result of the great feedback you gave us. Keep it coming. That's my personal email. I respond to your notes and we respond to everybody who gives us an idea. Thanks for listening, team. If you enjoyed today, please tell your friends and like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast because that's how we get great guests like Matt Heinz. We'll see you next time on The Selling Well.

Important Links

• Matt Heinz - LinkedIn

• Heinz Marketing

• Sales Pipeline Radio

Understanding Heartificial Empathy With Minter Dial

Many businesses employ cutting-edge technology to hit their biggest goals. However, one important factor in achieving business success is often neglected – empathy. In this conversation, Mark Cox sits down with Minter Dial to discuss how empathy is the key competitive advantage in the 21st-century marketplace. Minter breaks down the two styles of emphatic understanding and the two things that hinder empathy from growing in workplaces. Minter also explores how artificial intelligence can be employed to help people render more emphatic messaging and build more inclusive teams.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Understanding Heartificial Empathy With Minter Dial

Thanks for joining us on The Selling Well podcast. Before we get started, we’ve got a really special offer for you as a listener of the show. We’ve launched the next generation of our In The Funnel Sales Academy. The leading online training platform and B2B sales community that helps companies optimize their sales and generate unpredictable revenue growth. For the show’s listeners, we’re offering 50% off your first month for any of our subscription plans. Just go to SellingWell.com/podcast and then use the promo code PODCAST. That’s Sellingwell.com/podcast, promo code PODCAST and you get 50% off your first month. Looking forward to working with you. Now, on to the show.

Because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand. What you do without understanding can be compassion, sympathy, or other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible, and it's certainly impossible for a machine.

I’ve always said that salespeople are bleeders. We’re almost like independent businesses at times managing or entrepreneurs managing our territories. Today’s show, it’s really relevant to us because we’ve got Minter Dial on the show. Minter is a professional speaker. He’s a storyteller and author, and he’s a consultant who specializes in leadership, branding, and transformation. In his court career, he enjoyed 16 years spent at L’Oreal including being managing director Worldwide at Redken. He’d authored four books.

The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II, Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption, Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, and then the book that we’re going to talk to him about, which is You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader, features weekly podcast on leadership and branding. He’s got over 436 episodes. He’s a great guy and he’s a deadhead. We’re going to talk to him a little bit about that is the love of a grateful dad. I hope you enjoyed today’s show with Minter. I certainly did. If you do, please like and subscribe The Selling Well podcast. Enjoy.

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Minter, welcome to the show again. It's great to see you.

Mr. Cox, it's great to have you in my line of vision.

How's the pickleball? I've been noticing a lot of involvement with pickleball online with you.

Pickle less paddle more. My Sport is paddle tennis. Both of them are greatly ascending sports in the United States. Paddled behind pickle for now, but I was just on the phone with the commissioner, the professional paddle league and he says watch out.

What were you doing on the phone with the commissioner of the professional League? Are you a professional player?

No. I'm 60 years old, so that isn't possible anymore. Of course, I play maybe in the veterans, but I know let's say a deep long-rooted aficionado pal. I've been playing since 1974. Spreading the word about the sport that came of age in the last 10 years was helped in part by the pandemic and a lot of well-known football and soccer players who have come inside. This is the sport of the future.

Thank you. I'll do a deeper dive into that.

I'll send you a link to some hot dog points. It is so entertaining to watch and the beauty of the paddle. I've just started the podcast called The Joy of Paddle Podcast. The beauty of the sport is that it's a deeply social sport. Easy to start therefore easy for beginners to wail and hoot and have fun on a pedal court right from the get-go. Then as you get better, you have to learn new tricks and trades and it gets all sorts of sophisticated and nuanced. Anyway, that's my thing these days.

Yes, I will take a look into it. I was an avid tennis player. I played a lot of table tennis. That was something we did a lot of growing up. Love racket sports. By the way, Minter, one of the reasons I was so excited to chat with you, outside of the fact that I enjoyed Heartificial Empathy, the book we're going to be talking about today. Of course, you've been on the show previously when we talked about your prior book You Lead.

Having this conversation, you strike me as over in North America here we have a commercial about Dos Equis beer. There's this interview with the world's most interesting man. You always strike me when I read your books and we have these conversations. You strike me as a real Renaissance man, the world's most interesting man. I know our discussion today is going to go in lots of different areas. Hey, thanks so much for joining again.

My great pleasure, and I'm guessing and embarrassed by the idea of the greatest Renaissance man. Definitely like lots of topics though. I can say that.

Writing The Book

Today's topic a Heartificial Empathy putting hard into business and artificial intelligence. As we jump in and do a little deep-diving, do you want to read a couple of the testimonials of this book? Right off the top, we hear in our Heartificial Empathy, Minter Dial, masterfully makes the case for why empathy is not only learnable but a requirement for success in business and life that came from Charlene Li bestselling author and founder of Altimeter. Another one empathy will be the key competitive advantage of the 21st Century.

Dial captures the full essence of that one special quality that makes us truly human. Nell Watson, AI and Robotics faculty at Singularity University. We talk about singularity a lot on this show. Then a third one, they're all over the book but a third one, I jumped out at me and in a texture-driven society empathy is an increasingly rare and valuable skill. That came from Dorie Clark author of Entrepreneurial You and Stand Out.

Artificial empathy lays out this business case and a path for putting more heart and heart and empathy into business and machines for a healthier and more profitable future. Given the diversity of some of the other books you've written. I think there's some tie of course into You Lead. What prompted you, Minter, to go down the path of this topic? Of course, we're on the second printing of the book. I think the first printing was in 2018, if I'm not mistaken.

That's correct. There's the let's say nominal reason which I will more often than not talk about which is that my observation was having worked in business working with lots of people and this is pre-pandemic that there was a constant failing in businesses with regards to the humanity of management. It was a great focus on productivity, efficiencies, effectiveness, and all that at the cost of how you speak to each other, and how you listen.

That's the nominal reason. The actual reason which is much more personal was that my best friend killed himself. At that time, I was writing another book, it became my therapy to figure out because I accompanied him through the last six weeks about empathy and how it can be also extremely pertinent, practical, and important in person not just in work.

I'm so sorry about your friend. You said you accompanied him in the last six weeks.

On the phone mostly. I mean obviously in person as well in interspersed, but that was it.

Wow. What an experience that must have been. Hopefully from something like that, when we read this book some great good can come from it. Minter, I really enjoy your writing style. I find it so engaging and so interesting. Frankly, it's just so smart being someone who's writing a book right now and having a pretty tough time of it. At some point in time in the first chapter, you say, “Continue reading if.”

If you think satisfying customers is important or you think you want employees to be more engaged or if you're contemplating or implementing an AI strategy or you want to improve your innovation pipeline or design a new product website or office space? You go five or six other things here?

Defining Empathy

Anybody listening to this show should maybe turn up the volume because frankly, you identify at the beginning of this book this ideal client profile for the book, which is virtually everybody in the universe. I can't believe there's anybody in business technically today small, medium, or large enterprise who doesn't want to do some of these things. Let's start with the core of this topic empathy. All of us hear about sympathy and we hear about emotional intelligence and we hear about compassion and all these different things. Let's define empathy. What is empathy?

Right, so there are lots of misconceptions and certainly there's no single definition because in the empathy activist world, there's lots of jiggling and realigning as to what what empathy really might be. For me, the way I define empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking, feeling, or experiencing. It breaks down into two styles of understanding. The first is cognitive where I understand what your situation is. I see where you are and I hear what you're saying. I observe your feelings.

The second type is emotional or affective empathy and that's when you feel what the other person's feeling. You have absolutely can feel the sadness of the other person when they're feeling sad, and this is an important distinction because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output really are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand.

What you do without understanding compassion, sympathy, and other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible and it's certainly impossible for a machine.

Which we’ll get to and I think it's a good example instead of clarifying you just shared this unfortunate personal story of your pal. Automatically, I would default to this cognitive empathy or almost sympathy where I don't know what that feels like, but I do have sadness or concern for you having gone through it. Is that cognitive empathy or is that sympathy?

If you feel sadness, that is affective empathy. Where you're reflecting or mirroring my sadness which is deep. Of course, it's now been six years but every time I talk about the book. It is an opportunity for me to think about Philip and I love the idea of giving pause to be present in the moment even with some past figure. I'm writing a new book about conversation and one of the amazing conversations I had was with a Native American Indian who had the presence to speak to her ancestor seven generations ago. That's where my monkey brain just took me. The idea is being present with conversation you can do with trees, you can do with ancestors. In this case of my dead pal.

To whom you dedicated the book.

Yes. Actually, the second edition, I also dedicated it to a lovely fellow empathy activist who unfortunately died of cancer Jackie Atro. She was just a light in my life. Unfortunately, she expired too early.

Learning Empathy

Circling back now to empathy, we've defined it. Then you did talk about. Hey, I think maybe we can develop and learn cognitive empathy. I'm not sure that we can do the same for emotional empathy. When you were talking about, can it be learned in the book? Being a sales trainer and a consultant, I immediately aligned with this thought that you can't teach anybody anything if they don't want to learn it. There's nothing worse than running a sales workshop where there's 10% of the class just doesn't want to be there. We always try to make them optional when clients engage in our services because we just don't want that person in the room. How do we learn it?

Like you say, you need to want to learn it. Once you have that appetite, then there are various ways you can improve your empathy. The key point is what willingness and curiosity to learn about the other person. If you don't have that, in other words, you might be looking from above who pooing certain status of people. Then it becomes difficult to be believable in terms of the empathy from the receiver. I have an example of just talking to strangers, complete strangers not someone you have a common link with but a cashier, a bus driver, and talk to them.

We're not looking for you to have a sort of deep philosophical conversation because generally they don't have the time either but try to observe and completely understand what the other person says. Stay with them. Don't just bring it back to you. Stay with them and keep ties to their lives. Obviously, not in a way to exploit their privacy but this idea or the second great way is to read great fiction. The important part of this is great fiction.

What I mean by that is well-written dialogues, and developed characters such that if you are a man, you could read Madame Bovary by Flaubert or whatever so you can learn about the psyche and the things that happen, the thoughts in a woman's mind. Obviously, there's a little bit of a generational gap there, but in general, the idea is reading good fiction. The last piece is really just to make sure you make the time.

This is perhaps the more practical element when you want to have empathy you need to have time. It must be a time when you are able to evacuate all your other concerns and worries and be fully present with the others. If you don't do that, then you need to start with the basics, which is who are you and who you want to be, and help you to understand why this is important to you. If you don't have a why underneath it, it becomes like, I really want to learn another language.

What language? Italian. Why? Because it sounds nice. Not enough. You need to have a stronger route. My grandfather spoke to me in Italian and I never knew how to understand him. That's why I want to speak to Italian. Okay, that sounds a bit more plausible same goes for this idea of learning to be more empathic. If you can attach it to a reason, in other words, the type of person you want to be maybe in your legacy or the type of manager you want to be in your company, then that will help you to sort of find the time, the energy to read, talk to strangers, give the time to your companions and so on.

By the way, the reason I asked the question, I thought the reading fiction really jumped out at me when I was reading the book. Hey, that's a way of developing empathy and it was part of these five items you listed how do I build that muscle? You covered a couple of them. Listening actively, exploring differences, reading fiction particularly classic fiction, doing mindfulness, and knowing and going to the why and so many roads end up leading to this why in life and in business really these days.

Empathy In Business

If you do come back a number of times in the book, Minter, and say, “It's so important for business.” We're going to have lots of CEOs listening to this show mostly of mid-size enterprises or we have sales leaders of large enterprises, so they're running big teams. Why is empathy such an important thing to make sure is front of mind for management at the executive team and really a driving force in terms of how we run our businesses today? Why does it matter so much?

First of all, this is merely an opinion, which is that I'm convinced will help drive your business. There are various studies that show with varying degrees of strength that empathy increases shareholder return in spades. The challenge with those studies and to be real is that it's very different to measure empathy and to isolate the specific skill of empathy as the real reason why my share price might be going up.

That's to be real with the story because I'm a businessman after all and I don't think it's about being idealistic. The key point here for me is that empathy doesn't need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to think about strategically what's important for you. Where are your strategic apps? This is really relevant when you're a mid-tier manager.

Empathy doesn’t need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to strategically think about what’s important for you.

When you want to bring in the idea of empathy maybe hire a coach to help your team be more empathic, if you can link it to what the CEO has dictated as the strategic imperatives of the next year or two, then it's an easier sell. This is what we're doing we're hiring a coach who's going to help satisfy this need which might be higher productivity which might be more innovation, which might be greater motivation. Whatever that issue is has been identified at a corporate level.

You want to participate in that and if you can lean in on empathy in that specific area that will help you to focus on when you need to really listen. It'll give you a reason why everybody should want to improve their skills. The last thing I'm going to say is that one shouldn't just think of empathy as a skill towards the outside. The real juice happens when you have congruency within your organization and the way you are dealing with your customers. Don't expect your salespeople to treat your customers with golden gloves if you don't do the same with them.

Interesting one. I want to come back to that I made a note on Amazon. Just back to the coaching on empathy. Not all roads in this show lead to sales. We talked about so many broad topics. I will say this idea of having empathy for the buyer today is so critically important having that skill of empathy. Where we understand what they're going through because what we're seeing folks the direct causal connection here is the percentage of deals that go to no decision right now is skyrocketing.

Somebody investigates something, multiple different vendors pull in resources to fulfill an RFP or some review and at the end of the day what's happening is the buyer is doing nothing. Somewhere between 40%, and 60% of the time they just go. I'd rather miss out than mess up. One of the things I think we're having a difficult time is truly putting ourselves in the shoes of the buyer. Then understanding this. I'd rather miss out than mess up. After they've decided they've found an opportunity, we've earned that right to have a positive business case.

They then literally just get cold feet. If I move forward with this, I'm putting my neck on the line. There may be some benefit to my company, but I'm really concerned that if it fails I'm going to look terrible and I could lose my job. There's this real switch. Again, Matthew Dixon who wrote The Challenger Sale articulates this in his new book called The JOLT Effect but there's this switch. We have to stay close to our buyers and understand what stage are they at. The empathetic understand what they're going through and that's a real risk, by the way, if you sell anything material enterprise software of any time, the chances the project tanks are surprisingly high and the stakes are pretty high.

It's frankly it's just good business as a seller. If we can understand our client, their business, the environment, the trends in their Industries, the pressures they're under, and how that changed its month to month or quarter to quarter. The more we understand them and then can truly understand how to try and get them to a better future somehow professionally maybe even personally, the better our chances of being successful. The skill of empathy is so critical.

Two things to respond to that. One is to reference a friend of mine Guillermo Di Bisotto who talked about the fact that a buyer is also a salesman because the buyer needs to then sell this project, this whole time and that's really an interesting perspective to take as you're selling into. If you can recognize how you can help this person not necessarily assuage their fears because that's going to be hard to do but at least give them all the knowledge, the tools, and the information class in a way that satisfies their company's strategy.

The second piece mark is around really the upscale of the up funnel piece which is trust. Empathy is maybe a conduit to trust but really what you need to have is trust upstream because that's kind of allow you to have the data to understand the situation for this person. They might tell you we don't need any business or I like this product about its offering. What is it that's not for me? Having them explain the objections if you will or lay out what their personal fears are or maybe look under the hood of actually how the business is going. What can they or can't they afford and what's happening within? Getting that information is gold. In order to get it, you need to have their trust.

Empathy is a conduit to trust. But what you need to have is trust upstream. This will allow you to gather the data to fully understand every situation and individual.

You do. You need to have their trust and you have to have credibility in their eyes. You're earning that this whole way along. Frankly, your number one point on developing the muscle a lot of that comes from actively listening after being able to ask great questions where you're proving to them. You actually already know a little bit about their world. When we're having this discussion, we have context here. I don't know you specifically but I know 50 people who run businesses exactly like you this is what they've been experiencing suddenly that you're going to go.

Dealing With Disengaged Teams

This the buyer goes, “I think this person gets.” It actually understands my issues, my challenges, my opportunities, and you're earning the right to get them to open up and to build that relationship. Let's go back to the importance before we get outside of the business. Minter, you spend a great deal of time, but the first 4 or 5 chapters on inside the business and I really appreciate the fact it's hard to measure how empathetic a company is but of course, you’d be increasing employee engagement, you'd be reducing churn, unwanted churn if you've got an empathetic organization.

I have this really interesting experience right now because I often deal with CEOs who are not empathetic. Lots of good and logical reasons that a technology CEO in a mid-sized firm is just insanely driven and not highly empathetic. I've had this really unique experience with a client recently where the CEO is very empathetic. Anything we're doing from a consulting perspective they're very cautious of how is this going to be perceived by the sales team. What are they going through? These are the kinds of things, the fears they have, and all of these kinds of things.

It's really interesting. I think there's this balance but we had Tiffany Bova. You might know Tiffany Bova from Salesforce. Her recent book is called The Experience Mindset. She was on the show a month ago, let's say. There were two stats that just blew me away. I should know this, maybe you do but her research had proven that both 70 where she pulled from research that said 17% of employees today are actively disengaged, so 33% are engaged. A whole bunch are disengaged but 17% are actively disengaged. I said what's the definition of that?

They actively want their company to fail. They'll do things in sabotage, which blows your mind because you go, you're working for the company don't you know, you're going to be impacted. They don't make the connection. They just want bad things to happen to the company, 17%. Then she pulled a stat that'll just make both of us fall off our chairs. The cost to businesses of actively disengaged employees globally, is $7 trillion annually, $7 trillion annually. Huge issue obviously. Just a massive problem.

Even if we could do anything with a quarter of a percent feels to me that in the environments I've been most comfortable with, I think I'm reasonably empathetic. I think I relate better to leaders who are still tough but empathetic. Are there any stats or comments there for the folks listening? I think what we try and figure out is outside of the business, a lot of the CEOs who might be listening to this are going, “Why would I do this?” You bring up a good stat in some of the research you did that said 77% of CEOs feel that if they're too empathetic they'll be seen as weak or ineffective. I forget the exact quote.

It is 77% fear that they will lose respect if they are more or too empathic. That is a good starting point for commenting because at the end of the day it reflects on the one hand a misunderstanding of what empathy is and two, it spells out something that I have seen in other statistics, which is that CEOs that are successful tend to struggle to change because they are successful. That's how they got where they are. If you are successful and wealthy, tall and male there are other studies that have shown that those are also other things that hurt you in your empathy development.

This is a misunderstanding. The key point here is to at least think that being empathic can also be a tremendous driver of the business when applied and done with authenticity. There are two of the things that need to be made aware of in terms of reasons why we still suffer from a lack of empathy in business and you talked about the lack of motivation of everybody. There are a lot of things that go into that but there are two things that specifically are troublesome with regard to the development of empathy in a business and a culture. The first is a lack of time.

The number of times that I go and see or talk to a CEO and their agenda is 100 booked up, 100% booked up. That's absolutely posse. To give you a specific antidote to that. What I did when our CEO is that I had 50% of my day barred off free and that was work that I would do with my assistant in order for me to make sure that I had the time and it might be to go listen to a client, walk down the aisle, listen to an upset or some challenge that an employee has in my team. By having the time, then you are enabling the ability.

If you don't have the time, you're never going to really develop it. The second thing is also very relevant in the context of economics, like you're saying the long decision times or the no decision times are that we are in a very sketchy economic situation here. When we are stressed for business, stressed for performance, stressed for our career, are we going to get fired? All the stress levels will not be a good factor for developing empathy.

When we are stressed about business performance, we cannot develop empathy.

Right. Well, bring up the details and reference you being a CEO, that was when you were CEO of L'Oreal and Redken. A lot of that by the way folks documented discussed in You Lead of being yourself makes you a better leader and I'd encourage you, you'll see the link here, but we have a great show with Minter from maybe your goal where we discussed it. I enjoyed that. I've gone back and listened to that one a couple of times. That's where we learned that Minter was a deadhead, by the way. That was the original clue that Minter was a deadhead.

Empathic Bot

We think we understand what empathy is. We understand thinking about it for our business. We absolutely know why it's important to treat our clients and prospects with empathy to improve the customer experience. The cases made that unless we have an organization that's empathetic, it's very difficult to actually have your brand be after that or your customer experience the empathy from us have a great customer experience. A good half of the book is dedicated to artificial intelligence and empathy and artificial intelligence and you were one of 500 people that participated in the empathetic future experience. Tell us a little bit about that one.

That was a gorgeous opportunity. It's an organization based out of Germany Berlin that wanted to see how human beings would interact with an AI that was empathic. They went about creating a path over five days where you were 24/7 in touch with an empathic bot. The notion was to sort of evaluate the emotional frequency resonancy of each of these 500 people about 1/3 of whom were German, the others were English-speaking and then there was a larger proportion of men than there was women but I did get a chance to talk to the team afterward.

In any event, the thing was this living experience. What's it like? How does that make you feel? What does it make you think when you are talking to a bot that appears to really understand me? By gum, that was the feeling that I got. By the third day, I had generated an attachment to this spot. It became a figure in my mind and it struck me about how much we are thirsting for someone to listen to you. In this case, it was me wanting to be listened to and the bot had endless time was totally there for me the way I felt it and it was a wake-up call to think that actually it's not so difficult to start that feeling for a bot.

Just like in the very first rendition of Eliza back in the ‘60s where they had the primitive AI. All the engineers completely fell in love with already put another way. We're deeply engaged with Eliza for many hours despite them having lots of other things to do and only because the bot had a rogerian type of Eliza, had a rogerian style of answer that made you just continue to dig into your what you're thinking. Why do you feel that? How's that important to you? And so on, next thing, you're just spewing out your guts.

Alexa and Siri engage voices in some cases and so you start to get used to speaking to somebody and maybe even forget what's taking place. You make some great references to where chat GPT is and all of those things but this is so relevant folks because all of us, are bots on her website and many of us are migrating the leveraging AI for some data analytics or for responding to basic inbound customer queries. Where are we today with those technologies showcasing empathy? How much did you like the Dead Song that Chad GPT wrote for you when you asked Chat GPT to write a song? I think that was unbelievable, too.

Right now, we're in the stage where empathic AI does not exist. The real stage rat is, huh, how can we identify empathy within certain actions and words expressed by machines? Which essentially means that we certainly can't go deep and we can't go wide either because we haven't developed the sophistication to have a long string of conversations where empathy is being imbued. There are a couple of really important points. First, another way of looking at empathy is thinking about it as the emitter and the receiver.

Let's say you and I are having a conversation and I am trying to be empathic with you. I am trying to emit empathy and understanding what you're saying and formulating back, observing your emotions, and then you are the receiver and you may or may not be receiving and feeling that there's empathy and the other side. Typically, we measure empathy from the feeling sign, the receiver side. In the case of business in particular, but in many cases, empathy may not be so obvious. Empathy may not be observable. Therefore you won't be getting any receiver bonus points.

As you look at the emission of empathy, there are many ways that machines could help people. To render more empathic their messaging so in the emission version. It doesn't mean that when Mark receives my email he's going to say, “Minter is so empathic,” but he might open it. He might click on it because underneath that is empathy. If you went back I said, “How empathic do you think Minter was Mark?” Again, back to the measurement thing.

The last piece is that when you are looking at embedding AI and even more empathic AI into business, the key thing is to think about where you are already. What level of honesty do you have about empathy in your culture? Because you're not going to try to delegate to your AI. A behavior that doesn't reflect who you are internally. In other words, you be really empathic Mr. AI because we don't care about that. We don't think it's important. This notion of honesty with regard to where you are in the culture.

The ambition really should only be to be more empathic than that which brings up the idea of how you measure it before and then that there in the future. Having that discussion about how you want to measure where you are today as a culture is a victory because rarely is this topic ever discussed in boardrooms. As may be tactically speaking, oftentimes when I'm talking with teams who are developing AI and I talk about going in with empathy with it, what is empathy? For you, how do you categorize that?

What you're going to have to do ultimately with your large learning model and your data set is to be able to tag and rank if you will, what type of phrases you believe in your culture, in your organization with your clients, for example, or your employees is empathic? That ability to tag within your data set, your personalized data set, that would say reflect all of your emails, all of your websites, all the things the company have been doing and interacting with as a way to understand what is actually your particular culture your version of empathy.

Folks keep nodding and frankly my slow wheels, but the wheels are just churning internally so much. There are these fundamental messages that come across we all want to feel like we're understood. Actually, we and the funnel are no different than anybody else. I want somebody to land on our website. Within milliseconds or seconds, they go these guys actually get it. They understand what I'm going through. We have coaches and partners, one of them's called Strategic Coach, and they're the largest entrepreneurial coaching program in the world.

In about 25,000 of them, most successful entrepreneurs have been through their program. Every time I go to a quarterly workshop, I'm sitting there going they know nothing about sales training. They know nothing about my consulting business. Sitting beside me was somebody and a manufacturing business two seats over. We all sit there and go these people understand the life experience of an entrepreneur. They know what we're going through. Suddenly, there's this exactly what you've talked about this trusting immediate connection and you're right. That is what's going to get somebody to click through or to engage with you or you're making it about them and you understand them.

If I could Mark, there's nothing like the experience. If you've had the experience of being an entrepreneur, it's not very difficult to imagine what it's like to be an entrepreneur at that level. You are finding shared experiences and that is a beautiful way to connect with people. When I was running at Redken, actually, and all my life at the professional hairdressing division of L'Oreal, there's an incredibly important piece within the mix which is education. These are the best versions of them.

Finding shared experiences is a beautiful way to connect with people.

We're training hairdressers how to use the products from hairdressers. Hairdressers teaching hairdressers makes so much more sense. The interesting thing is not the credibility goes up to the extent that they're not employees. When they individually contract with you to be independent contractors as hairdressers to talk in your name, then it is literally the best word of mouth you can create.

Testimonials, right? It's the same thing as a testimonial with somebody says, “I'm likely one of the best salespeople for Strategic Coach,” would do humility to the team at Strategic Coach who's listening today, but when they'll have me speak some people considering the program, let's just say talk to Mark to see what he went through. Of course, I'm unbiased. I'm a third party.

You don't have to say what you're saying.

Upcoming Book

I don't have to say what I'm saying. The person on the other end of the Zoom call knows my intent is only to tell the truth. I'll tell the truth and by the way, I'm validating the truth with my own checkbook or with my own money because I'm a member of it. Excellent. While I'm on it before I lose it you said your next book is about conversations. If you're comfortable, without hurting rollout or anything, tell us a little bit about that book, Minter. What is the book about and where are you with it?

It absolutely comes on the heels of the book about empathy and leadership because at the end of the day, what I would have observed is societally, we are in deep due. The ability for us to have free easy and strenuous debate where we can disagree and learn to disagree and learn to be civil in that manner. The ability to listen and so on is deeply failing. From a societal standpoint, from a personal standpoint, and from a business standpoint, while I largely talked about empathy in the same way, I think we need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations.

That means freedom to use words that we feel are appropriate and not be so worried about the speech that we're using. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be attentive. It just means we need to come back a little bit to reality. My new book I can talk about all the more, Mark, because I did something really crazy. I set myself the task of writing it in the manner of Charles Dickens.

We need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations. We have to embrace the freedom to use words and not be worried about the speech we are using.

Seven months. Yeah, for my punishment watch this. Nine weeks on Thursday at 5:00 PM, I published a chapter so between one and 10,000 words. I have a corpus of 400,000 words through those 79 weeks and I'm now in the process, and I published them and I would have conversations around conversations, online, offline, and that participated in the wiggly waggly room because I moved down my 79 weeks.

I'm sorry. Explained to me, Minter, because how Charles Dickens wrote his books, he actually published a chapter at a time.

This is called serial publishing and it was made popular at the end of the 18th century entering the beginning of the 19th century. In many countries, Charles Dickens is the one who's most credited for it, but it happened before he started writing. It happened in America. It was actually a cheaper way to publish a book if you will and to test it out. What they would do typically those days, is that they would publish it as a chapter in a newspaper, and that was a weekly newspaper. It became the serial chapterization and people would read it week after week and really stick with it and Dickens's most well known for doing that. I don't think he wrote every book like that but he wrote many books like that.

I think I get smarter every time you are on the podcast. There are a number of people on my team who would have encouraged me to speak to you every two weeks.

Thank you.

Where did you publish your 79 chapters and 400,000 words? Is this on your website? Is this on a blog somewhere?

In my inevitable fashion just like when I started podcasting in 2010, blogging in 2006. I wanted to use a new platform. It's called a substack if you haven't come across it. It's a place where they encourage freer speech and it's really a writer's platform that helps you to create subscribers paying or free. I ended up with something like 700 subscribers. About a tenth of them were paying subscribers so gave me a little bit of a stipend for writing. I'll call it an advance.

Closing Words

By the way, I think after this publishes, maybe we should be targeting more than a thousand subscribers on that when Cisco's live. A couple of things we've identified there. Those will obviously be in the show links. Minter, how else can our listeners today connect with you and learn more about what you're doing?

One of my mantras is to provide valuable content every day and I do it in very different manners. That would consider my podcast a one-way Minter Dialogue. It's in English and French. I have The Joy of Padel a new podcast that talks about the joy of playing my sport paddle tennis. That all is on my main portal site, MinterDial.com so you can find my books, my film, my documentary film, and anything. Also, I'm out there on social.

One particular thing I like to say is I don't accept people just randomly connecting with me on LinkedIn. I think it's important to spell out the reason which is I'm not interested in a large number because if my connections don't reply to me, I don't know them. I don't know them and I don't trust them. It's not that I should take it personally, but I just don't accept because it doesn't serve a real network.

Everybody should be reading Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence. By the way, everybody should check out You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader. I enjoyed both of these books enormously. This is one of the true joys of doing this show. It actually forces me to read the books of the guests, and so we therefore only pick guests that we actually want to talk to. Minter, thank you again for joining us. It's always such as pleasure speaking with you.

My delicious delight. Thank you very much for having me on and promoting my work and the friendship that we're developing.

Thank you for listening today. The reason we run In The Funnel in the show is we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. What elevates to the profession it truly is? In doing so, we believe we're improving the lives of professional salespeople or anyone in sales. We run this podcast to help give you tools, processes, topics, and best practices ideas that you can apply immediately. We know we can get better at this.

You're such a great source at this, so if there's something we can do to make The Selling Well podcast even more effective for you, please let us know. You can reach out to me personally at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. I check that email personally and we respond to everybody who gives us a nice piece of constructive criticism and we love constructive criticism. Thank you for the feedback you've already given us. If you enjoyed today's show, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast. That means a lot to us as well. That helps us get great guests like Minter. We'll see you next time.

Important Links

• Minter Dial on LinkedIn 

• In The Funnel Sales Academy

• SellingWell.com/podcast

• The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II

• Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption

• Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence

• You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader

• The Joy of Padel

• MinterDial.com

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Minter Dial

Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, elevator and a multiple award-winning author. Minter's core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the Worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division (PPD), in charge of Digital, Communications, Education, the Eco-Salon and Business Development. Previously, he was MD of L'Oréal PPD Canada and CEO Worldwide for Redken.

He's the author of the WWII biography and documentary film, The Last Ring Home (2016) and three business books, Futureproof (FT Press 2017), You Lead (Kogan Page 2021), both of which won heralded Business Book Awards, and Heartificial Empathy, 2nd edition (Digitalproof Press 2023). He also runs three podcasts, Minter Dialogue in English and French, and The Joy of Padel. www.minterdial.com @mdial