Matt Dixon, Chief Product & Research Officer, Tethr
Matt Dixon is the Chief Product & Research Officer of the Austin-based AI venture, Tethr. Prior to his role with Tethr, he was the Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness Solutions at Korn Ferry Hay Group and, before that, held numerous global leadership roles in research, product development and management for CEB, now Gartner. An accomplished business researcher and writer, Matt is known for his frame-breaking and provocative work in the areas of sales, customer service and customer experience. He is the author of three Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestsellers—The Challenger Sale, The Effortless Experience and The Challenger Customer—and he is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review with more than 20 print and online articles to his credit. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor to management teams around world, having presented his findings and insights at a wide range of industry conferences as well as to hundreds of senior executive teams, including those of many Fortune 500 companies.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewxdixon/
https://tethr.com/
https://dixonspeaks.com/
Grab Matt’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Sale-Control-Customer-Conversation/dp/1591844355
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Matt Dixon. And Matt is co-author of The Challenger Sale. And he's also chief product and research officer at Tethr. We're going to talk a little bit about that. I'm excited for this man who's been in the whole kind of how to run sales, how to make sales effective sales strategy for a while. I've read his stuff for a long time. A lot of things that I've used in my businesses and the businesses that I've worked with has been highly effective. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Excited to learn more with that. Matt, welcome to the program papers.
[00:01:28] Thanks very much for inviting me.
[00:01:30] So why don't we actually kind of go back to your story and your background before Challenger Sale, before you got into this space of being a thought leader in this area? What was your background? What got you into looking at sales, looking at sales effectiveness, looking at customer service and all of those things? What's the back?
[00:01:48] Yeah, really? Just dumb luck. Actually, it was I was studying. I went right from college into a Phd program. I was actually training to be an academic. So I went to get my Phd and political economy, which has very little to do with the sales and service effectiveness, as you know. But what it did teach me and I think I kind of got through as I was maybe two thirds of the way through, I sort of soured on the idea of being a college professor for the rest of my life. And my research and my interest started to veer more towards business and actually started shifting from the political science and econ department, started taking more classes over at the business school and got, you know, more into how companies make decisions and why they do the things they do and how they can improve their operations and ineffectiveness and customer experience. And so that sort of led me to after I left, I finished my degree and after I left I decided I want to go into consulting or kind of for profit research, which led me to a company called CREB, which was acquired a couple of years ago by Gartner Group. And, you know, when I when I joined, we were maybe two hundred something. People when I left, we were like five thousand people.
[00:02:54] So as I was there for 18 years and I started it was basically Seabee was a for profit think tank. So we did our research for companies on sales and customer service and legal and H.R. and finance and, you know, you name it. And I came in and I actually started in our I.T. research group, which was probably a bad fit just because I could barely operate my own computer. So, you know, the perfect fit the reshoots and maybe. Maybe, yeah. And I shifted from there. I did a tour and our new product development group for a few years. And then when I went back to the research business, I started running our contact center in customer service practice. I did that for a couple of years and then I picked up our sales practice. And so I had sales and service then really for I guess that that was back in two thousand five 2006. And right up until when I left CB in 2017, I had those practice areas night. Towards the end I picked up our financial services vertical as well. So, you know, again, it was sort of a circuitous journey, but I will say looking back on my experience that the most fun I had and the most interesting area and the things that really resonate with me were around sales effectiveness and customer service.
[00:04:02] Knight I think for them the reason is that it's such a relatable thing for all of us and we've all in business with all had experiences, good and bad with sales people. And then as consumers we've had experiences. I was a largely bad with customer service organizations and call centers. And there's just there's such a database world. But the irony I think, is that there's very little database research done. Yes, it's funny. Neal Rackham once told me in one of his big regrets in his career and he was kind of on a question and still is to sort of change this is that there is very little science and very little quantitative research done of around selling, even though it's such a metrics driven in numbers driven function. A lot of what's out there around sales tends to be a lot of personal opinion kind of stuff. And the same is true of customer service and customer experience. There's just a lot of conventional wisdom. There's a lot of anecdotal kind of wisdom and advice passed around by very few organizations out there actually bringing data to bear to test assumptions and say, hey, we've always believed X, is that actually true?
[00:05:04] Does actually benefit our customers, benefit our business. Is that are our best salespeople, our best service reps actually do. And so I've always been very careful when I've been out there talking about sales or service. They look, I'm not a salesperson. I join a lot of sales calls as a product guy, but. I nor my service professional, but I bring a lot of research to bear in a lot of what we've done. You know, Challenger is a great example is not us kind of imposing a point of view and saying, hey, we think you should sell this way, but instead studying what actual best salespeople are doing and then we just give a name to it and wrapped a story around it.
[00:05:40] But I would say, look, I didn't invent this stuff. Your best salespeople were already doing this. And we just we discovered it. And we gave a name to it.
[00:05:47] So that's a really good point. I think is very true. Wheatly use a lot of analytics and metrics and measures to manage sales. We don't use a lot of them to really sort of diagnose and figure out what was happening and what's working, what's not working and why and how do we recreate it from a positive point of view. So this Jolanda a little bit. I think it's something we've talked about on a program a couple of different times in different ways. But why don't we sort of go back a little bit and understand the kind of the research or the the Y challenge or the challenge or single concept that was birthed?
[00:06:23] And what was the impressions and how you got to the. What was the situation that you saw that led to the the idea of doing this kind of research and identifying these kind of sales types or sales situations?
[00:06:34] Yeah, it was so back in 2007 that was there was a little bit of, I would say almost a prequel to to Challenger. So we did that. The research around Challenger, we actually did in 2008 and we debut did in the spring of 2009. So you can imagine that was a really tough time to hit sales, right? People were not spending a lot money. And so I think we there was a we did a prequel kind of study the year before where we sort of stumbled on this notion. We were studying a bunch of things, but we stumbled on this idea that it was a little bit of a head scratcher to us that what customers were really looking for from the suppliers they do business with was a great sales experience. And specifically they were looking for a sales experience that brought new ideas to the table and brought insights the table. And it was it was interesting to us because we had we'd gone out to study. It was a study of customer B2B, customer loyalty that we did. And we were we had hypothesized that sales mattered more than most companies give it credit for. You know, most most companies would say, well, it's all about the product differentiation, it's all about the brand, it's about the price and what we actually found. If you recall from the book is that actually 53 percent of business customer loyalty was a function of sales.
[00:07:43] So it's actually more a function of how you sell, not what you sell. And the reality is, in a world where many suppliers there, their offerings are seen as kind of commodities by the customer and in none, no, not really a bad way. But if you look at the companies who make the short list and any solution selling or complex sales effort, they're all pretty, you know, pretty compelling suppliers offering really great solutions. Some are a little bit better in some respects and others are better in other respects. But the thing that breaks the tie is the sales conversation. So we we came upon this in 2007 and then all the wheels came off and on the economy. And so we're gonna continue studying this idea of customer loyalty. And we kind of pivoted a little bit. We said, well, why don't we go out and do a study of what best sellers are doing? Because really, you know, we were as a business in CB sales research. Right. And then when when the going gets tough and people are cutting budgets, that's not a thing that people are going to keep a discretionary product. Like really? Yeah. Meetings and research like I can get smart later. I think right now. Right now I'm really just worried about keeping my job and keep my people gainfully employed.
[00:08:43] So we decided the best thing we could do for our business is actually write a study. We did one big study per year and we decide that you're in 2008, we're going to do something about. I think it was something about creating the right sales culture, but we actually ditched that and we pivoted and went and studied salespeople and said, we've got a we've got to really try to crystallize what is at the best sellers are doing, because if we're going to help our customers sell more in this really tough economy, if we want them to actually keep renewing their subscription with CB, we got to give them some really good stuff around and good insights around what best sellers are doing. The research was informed, though, by that study the year before because we already had this insight that is kind of the ability to bring insights that really makes, you know, that's the difference between the first place finisher and the second place finisher in a complex sale. And so we brought that to bear. We found was, as you know from the research, five types of reps in the winning wrap. The challenger was the rep who brought the note, those new insights, the table. So we had this study of salespeople and we could draw a straight line to the study we done the year before around business customer loyalty.
[00:09:40] And we're like, holy cow, these things were telling the same story here. We kind of we brought him back together and it was it was funny. Remember the first the first time we presented that research? The way the way we did the research, we go to a lot more detail in the book is we went out to add to the initial study was like six thousand salespeople went out to about one hundred companies. They gave us lists of sellers ranked by performance. And we had the managers out of the sellers actually evaluate them on a one to seven scale across like 50 or 60 different attributes. You know how good they are, a negotiation, how willing they are to risk disapproval or put forth, you know, go the extra mile. Like how goal oriented are they? Are they good at solutions selling? You know, do they bring new ideas to the table, things like that? And we found was that. Five types of rap, some of the data washed out as noise, but the ones the data that was leftover are kind of clumped together in five buckets. We came to call those the five profiles, the salespeople in the winning profiles. They said the Challenger profile was the rap who brought new ideas to the table. And the first time we presented it, it was pretty telling. We knew we were onto something because we're sitting in a room in Washington.
[00:10:40] This was the spring of 2009 and we had we always did this kind of debut or we used to call a preview meeting where we brought some of our longest, the longest tenured members into our offices to hear a daylong presentation. The research really poke holes in it and know beat it up and tell us what we got wrong. And these are good friends of ours. It totally. Exactly. That's exactly right. The idea is we're gonna take it out to the rest of the world that some of whom are not as friendly as these guys. So we we wanted a group of friendly customers who were gonna give us really kind of feedback in. And they did. It was great. They helped us refine it. But there were a couple of big aha as one was the head of sales of Dupont at this time, a guy named Dan James, who is one of our kind of guru longest tenured members. I remember him saying we kind of brought back a little bit of this this idea of, you know, hey, it's mostly about how you sell, not what you sell. And it's an inside baseball. And by the way, that's what your best salespeople are doing. Check out this profile analysis we did on this new this emerging profile called the Challenger. And he said at time, you guys didn't understand what you guys were talking about last year.
[00:11:41] Now I get it. Like it really illuminated this idea of bringing inside the year before. It just sounded kind of theoretical and it didn't make a lot of sense. But when you brought it down to what these best sellers were actually saying and doing in sales conversations, the light bulb went off these heads of sales. The other the other great moment was when another one of our long term members, a guy named Kevin Hendrick, who was head of sales at ADP Dealer Services at the time, I remember him saying in the front row in my my co-author Brent Adams, and was the guy presenting. And Kevin was kind of a huge shuffling by pulling papers out of his briefcase during the day during the big reveal. We said, hey, there's this profile. It's called the Challenger. Check it out. They win, you know. And Kevin's kind of going through shuffling papers around. Brent says, Ken, what are you doing? And Kevin said and Eli kind of slams his hand on the table. And he goes, I just looked at my. This is my stack ranking. As of yesterday, of my salespeople by goal attainment, I'm looking at the top people. And I just did a quick like, who's a challenger, who's a relation? He's like, now I know why these people, you know, kick butt and these other people don't use like I just never had a name for it.
[00:12:43] But you guys just criticize it. And so for us, that was like that was a really eye-opening moment. The other thing that the other thing that happened, this was kind of cool, too. And this is I give the guys who ran this business a lot of credit. We had a sales consulting group at CB. It's mostly a research business. But we had this consult like a services group, like many of your listeners. Right. We were trying to develop base services component to our business as well. And so these guys had always focused on, you know, time and productivity assessments and coaching effectiveness engagements and things like that. The guy who ran that business, a guy named Nathan Blaine, who in that meeting, that first meeting said we were gonna burn the boats and we're going to rebuild this entire business around Challenger off of one meeting, writing. And was we had no idea. But he was like, this is it. And after that, it was like, let's write a book about it. We partnered with HP are we did a blog series around it that really blew up that said interest in the book. And then Brent Knight spent the next like two or three years traveling around the world, like telling everyone the story in that business really to not go.
[00:13:38] What do you think that is like? What was it about the way out of this and frame this that really resonated with us?
[00:13:45] So I think, again, I think part of it was locked. I think it was, but it was a good time for it. So I think, you know, you're you're looking at a hungry audience, right? You're looking at an environment where selling was really tough. And later on, this wasn't in the book. But you've probably seen us talk about this idea of, you know, the customer buying journey is like a purchase journey. Fifty seven percent complete before they talk to a salesperson. We actually discovered that after we published Challenger was in the follow up. Yeah, we use it whenever we do keynotes on it now, but it helps explain us a challenge. It turns out was less a story about selling into a downturn. It was actually more a story about selling to buyers who are self educating and who are empowered with information or boxing. The salesperson out in that story was one that every guy and every salesperson I've ever spoken to that resonates with them. This idea that I get called in late. I sit down the customer. They've already decided how I fit into their world. What we can do and it's really hard to undo that teaching, you know, and or I do that learning that the customer's already done. And so we saw I think there was that.
[00:14:46] So I think it was a systemic thing that customers were learning on their own. Selling was really tough. I think the other thing is a lot of companies were candidly frustrated with the returns they'd gotten from kind of classic solutions selling, you know, open ended needs diagnosis. I think most companies would say my very best salespeople were the only ones who could ever really master that approach to selling because it's really, really hard. The idea that a salesperson could sit in front of a customer and just by dint of the the incisive ness of their questions, they could get the customer to say something that, you know, they could then hook their value proposition to or customize a solution on. Fly is a really high end skill. I'm certainly the best sell. Sellers are very good at that and they continue to be very good at that. But it's something that companies really struggle to get everyone to master. And so companies have gone down the solution selling journey and this needs diagnosis stirring for a really long time. And I think a lot of them were just frustrated with the fact that it's not paying off the way we thought. It's just been a bear to get it up, you know, get it up and running.
[00:15:43] Then I guess the third thing is what I said before, that, you know, we we brought science and data to a function that you have to study, a function that a lot of people hadn't studied with science and data before. Most of the most the other sales books and sales research out there, which are written by people who have, you know, decades of experience and tons of personal experience in sales that I don't have. But a lot of them really start from that perspective of, hey, my 30 years of sales perform, you know, sales, sales experience. Here's what worked for me. And now I'm sharing my secrets with you, which is fine. But but it's not a database study. It's sort of an end of one kind of experience and it has its place. But I think what we're able to bring is this idea of like, hey, we studied this with data. We're not we're not salespeople were researchers. And then I think the the last thing I would say is the counterintuitive nature of it, the fact that we said actually it's this profile of the challenger and it's the one who finishes dead last is the relationship. And by the way, that's what you're telling everyone to go do, is be a be a better relationship either.
[00:16:39] So you couple all of those things together. And it was a little bit like, you know, it was it was kind of this moment, a moment in time, I think, that created this excitement around this specific piece of research. And then now there's been a lot more work done by other folks. You know, John Doar, Mike shows over a brain group, have done a really interesting book around Insight Selling. You've got the guys at CBI, Tim Restorer and and his his colleagues put out great work around messaging and how you think about know message differentiation. And it's just been there's been this groundswell. There's still a ton of work out there needs. I guess as a solution song, of course. You know, we've always said this is this is a little bit like the next tool in the tool belt. Right. So it's always your best sellers are going to are going to be really good at these psychoses. But what's next? You know, when I tell in a ditch what what got them there. But we're telling them they need to add a new set of skills to get them to the next level. So I think it's all those things that kind of.
[00:17:30] And I love the irony that in order to increase your sales, you focus on sales.
[00:17:36] I mean. Well, I mean, it's funny because we had never a sales practice that CBO was founded in like ninety seven I think. And and from ninety seven till 2007 or 2008 had actually never studied salespeople, which is kind of interesting. And I think it was always we'd always looked at that said we're going to study issues of sales coverage or channel partner management or key account strategy as customer segmentation. And we always tried to stay at a very strategic level. And I think we found was and we were always a little bit antsy about studying salespeople because there's so much out there on on salespeople. Right. And we just didn't know what we could add.
[00:18:16] And we kind of were forced into it and it worked out pretty well. But, you know, it was it was not necessarily ah ah, our bread and butter. You know, a good point since then. That's just that's what the sales practice and that GARDNER That's what the sales practice continues to study is, you know, one year they're setting sales people next year saying sales managers, next year the saying customers and they go back to sales people again. So we've realized that that's, you know, the other day that's that's what heads of sales want to know about is what are my best salespeople do then? How are my customers changing the way that they buy and how do we adapt to that?
[00:18:44] So, you know, I think the one of the nice things or the really effective things that I found about Challenger is that it does it gives you much more of a toolset to to identify out of the people that I have and the people that I'm thinking about writing. How can I identify future potential performance based on on this model?
[00:19:01] But it also is I like it because it's a it's kind of a manageable, trainable developable skill like you can taking this approach and thinking through how I'm going to build a sales organization. It gives me some tools that actually allow me to do that versus and we can step through the different types in a minute. But I think the, you know, the lone wolves kind of model has always been effective. And I think everyone's been out there looking for, you know, just that master salesperson who he or she can, you know, just like all of a sudden make it rain. And you don't know exactly what they're doing. And they show up late one day with, you know, six orders. And, you know, it's just it's great. But it's not something that I can build an organization around. It's not something that I can manage. And I think to challenge your model gives me a lot more tools as a as an organizational chart of strategists and designers figure out how to really create sales. What do we walk through this time just for those people that are not super familiar with with the research and the five times. Walk us through those and then let's talk about the challenger and a little more detail.
[00:19:54] Yeah, sure. So we five touches the sellers. We we always are careful to make sure that people think about these in terms of kind of college majors. Right. So they're not mutually exclusive. There's a lot of bleed. And the important thing is that there's an important message for salespeople, which is you might when I go through these, you might say, oh, I'm a hard worker or I'm a relationship builder. I'm not a challenger. But we found is across all the people in our study. And as as that we could do, you know, we did. Consulting with companies, we collected more data. We continued to validate model. I think what I left Seabee those data on a quarter million salespeople and we found that every single one of them could be statistically placed into one of these five profiles. But the important point is nobody's 100 percent of one profile. They've got elements of the other four. And so for salespeople, that's good news, right? I've got a little bit of challenger in me. And what you're telling me to appoint before is let's up the levels on Challenger. Let's let's exercise that muscle. We've gotten really good at being related. Go there now. Let's exercise the southern muscle. Set those two together. We really powerful combination. So it's a it doesn't come across, I think, to sales salespeople, hopefully. Sometimes I guess it does. But but we try to avoid this as a personality based thing, but more a learnable thing. So the five types are hard workers.
[00:21:02] They're very focused on kind of, you know, get a lot deals in the top of the funnel. Execute against the sales process. And I should have my number. By the end, there is some sort of a throughput management approach to sales or mechanistic approach to sales. You know, they place more made more phone calls and answer more emails. Anybody else on the team you've got your challengers and challengers are kind of the sharp elbowed, opinionated, know it alls of the team. They're always up for a good debate. They like debating their colleagues, their manager, the senior leadership of the team, the product organization. You know, they they like to get into debates with the customer, too. They live for it, actually. They love that moment where, you know, they convince the customer that they're doing it wrong and that they need to think about things differently. You've got relationship builders. These are not really I don't want to be careful because we've been accused, I think, of creating kind of a straw person argument here. But we don't mean sort of the gladhanding sycophant or the five martini lunch or the round of golf we're talking about.
[00:21:56] Really, salespeople are very good at doing what what we've taught salespeople to do for at least the last 30 years, which is go in, diagnose the customer's needs and address those needs. So it's a much it's a very reactive posture. It's a very kind of servant based posture that these these relation builders take. You've got your lone wolves. Lone wolves are the, as we say, the prima donnas of the sales organization. They don't follow your sales process. They don't use the marketing materials that you invested in creating. They they sell stuff that your company doesn't even make and then they ask for forgiveness later. And you know, what we find in the results is there's a selection bias because the people ignore the rules and miss their number, are usually shown the exits or told to get in line. And they get line or they they're forced out. It's the people ignore the rules and kill their number that we love and get away with it. Unless you're if you're in a regulated business, you probably wouldn't like med devices, pharma or your financial services.
[00:22:45] You wouldn't see this. But everywhere else, you do find a lot of the lone wolves in the high performer population because you know where they make it rain. To your point before then, you got your problem solvers. Problem solvers are sort of more of a customer service rep in salesperson's clothing. They're more focused on post-deal execution than getting the next deal signed. So they know customers love that posher. They love that the person who sold them the solution for the service is going to be there to make sure that it gets delivered in the right way and delivers a value. The customer sales managers would prefer that the salesperson hand that off to somebody else in the company and they get back to selling the next deal in the funnel. So yeah, so those are the five types.
[00:23:19] And I think hopefully people are kind of digging through their teams. Retail sales are going to be going up. And I think your point is really important.
[00:23:27] I'm not sure we when we originally kind to start sort of talking about it may have come across someone with. These are not fundamentally the personality types. It's rather kind of the skills or approach or frame that, you know, you kind of have and that you can kind of adjust and change those, you know, through coaching and training and know.
[00:23:44] And that's why I say this. This is a great framework for people that are looking to develop their sales organization because it gives them the tools to do that.
[00:23:53] What are some of the things that companies are trying to or looking at training around this? What are the types of things companies can do to accentuate or to help people behave, interact, you know, use a challenge or a strategy more than some of the other ones? Like, what is that process?
[00:24:09] Yeah, it's a great question. And I think your point, it really can't be overemphasized that this is this definitely is a learnable set of skills. It doesn't mean that everyone can or will learn it, but it's not unlike anything else. And you're going to have some people who opt out of the journey. But we've always found, you know, companies who are committed to this. They see about a 70 to 80 percent success rate in getting people to up to the levels of challenge or ness in their sales approach or at least, you know, play there, even if they're not a natural born challenge or play the role of the challenger women when called upon to do so in a customer situation. The people don't make it. It's usually reasons of will not skill. And they just say, Hey, now what got me here? I'm comfortable selling this way. And I just kind of Oregon reject this idea of, you know, creating tension in the customer relationship and in challenging customer thinking. I don't need more of this kind of salary to go somewhere where they're going to value that that sales approach. And, you know, and so they'll leave. But we found in terms of developing the skills, there's a few key parts. One is to remember that Challenger needs some of these skills and talk about challengers in the book, The Skills of the Challenger.
[00:25:13] The three the three key skills are teaching. So bringing new insights to the table are tailoring those insights because as we know. Selling services today, selling complex solutions to customers. It's a game of herding cats. Right. So you're not selling to one stakeholder or you're selling across the organization. All up and down the organization as well. So you got even if you have a great provocative idea, you got to use that idea and apply it in different ways to different stakeholders. And then lastly, we talk about the challenger as being assertive or that they take control. And really the idea there is that they're not obnoxious or aggressive or, you know, rude people. We call that the sixth profile, the jerk. And that's not because we never advocate for that, you know, but but these folks are they're assertive and they know they create they purposefully create tension at key moments in the sale. They they get the customer to squint to to to lean forward to, you know, furrow their brow and say kind of or heard it that way before or maybe I don't even agree with what you're saying. Let's get into it a little bit and talk about whether your idea has merit to my business. But they create that engagement, but they do so by actually creating some positive or constructive tension in the dialogue.
[00:26:19] So the first thing you would assume or you'd maybe conclude if you look at those skills teaching Taylor and taking control or being assertive. Those are not things that you learn in a, you know, a one day training session or, you know, it's not the same as, you know, if you and I we're going to be trained on Salesforce or we're going to be trained on Marketo or any number of systems, if we're really trained on new product or a new comp plan or something like that or even a new sales process, that those are things that are kind of rote. These are very nuanced behaviors. And so what we always say is you can expose people to it in the classroom, but they're not going to learn how to get good at it in the classroom. So the second piece is the importance of coaching and manager led development or leader led development. You know, to get good at this stuff and to get comfortable with with the idea of creating tension in the sales conversation takes a manager who a knows how to coach. And that's the truth. As most sales leaders and sales managers confuse coaching with performance management, they're two different things. So, one, they know how to coach the two, they know what to coach to.
[00:27:18] So they they themselves can demonstrate and really understand the deep level, this idea of teaching, tailoring and taking control. What that looks and sounds like, what it what it is, what it isn't, how to practice it in a safe way, how to get good at it, learn from your mistakes, et cetera. So coaching is absolutely critical in the Challenger business. And this actually, as an aside, you know, that business was sold by Gardner actually last year. So it's an independent company now called Challenger Inc. And what those guys will always tell clients who are going down this path. Is it the best thing to do is first exposure managers to challenge or get them really have them go through the training, get them like drinking the Kool-Aid, Kool-Aid, get them ready. And by the way, make sure that they understand what good coaching looks and sounds like and then how to coach those challenged behaviors. Because when you send those reps to training, which you're going to want to do after you get the measures proposed, you need those managers right to catch them as they come out of training and work with them to get better at those skills. The third piece, I would say, and this is absolutely critical and we've seen this is the pride.
[00:28:15] Biggest failure point we see with Challenger is that Challenger itself is a as much in organizational capability as it is an individual skill. So if what I mean by that is if you're going to go out and challenge customers with new insights, if you don't have something to challenge with, then you're actually just annoying. You're not challenging. And so in order to teach Taylor and take control effectively, you've got to have a really good insight. And with the book, we talked a lot about what a great insight sounds like, how how is it put together and literally a pitch deck for kids. How's that conversation unfold? What are you looking for from the from what cues, what responses? But the job of creating that stuff is usually the job of marketing, sales, leadership product. And it's the job of the company to build that stuff in. So one of the other things that the folks at challenging would tell you, if you really want to do this right, get your managers on board, get them, you know, comfortable, you know, teach them how to coach and then get them comfortable with the idea of challenge and ready to cash those reps as they come out training. But more importantly, get marketing in the organization. Busy building those insights, because what really makes that training rock for the reps is when it's about your insight, not about some generic insight.
[00:29:20] So if you don't give them that stuff, you know, this whole thing could fall flat. I mean, I I still get asked a lot to come out and speak about Challenger. And I always caution people. I say, look, it's just so, you know, it's I like to think I'm entertaining, but it's not entertainment. So I'm going to leave it when I leave. All of your people are going to ask you, hey, when am I getting trained on that? And by the way, that guy told me that having insights is really important and why I'm looking at my pitch deck right now. It's not very insightful. It's all. It leads with what makes us unique. It doesn't lead to what makes us unique. It's very generic. It makes us sound exactly like our competitors. So when is marketing and fix us? It's all you have happen is the sales force puts a lot of pressure on the organization to act. So I always help people like bring me on and have me speak about it when you're ready to light this candle and go, but it's if you want, somebody is just going to motivate people and entertain folks. Like there's lots people who can do that.
[00:30:13] I've seen it. I've seen it happen so many times.
[00:30:15] And on the single side, you train the sales people on this process.
[00:30:20] Kind of the way to do this, but then there's no system and there's no data, there's no insight, there's no materials that they can actually use, and now they're they're falling flat because they just might be able to execute the moves, but they don't have the material, essentially make those mistakes and be impactful for the actual sales process. Now, this is great. I think folks that are listening, you know, that have been struggling with sales reboot process, I highly recommend kind of digging into it and understanding how this works. And I think certainly if you're dealing with a fairly complex sales, which I think service all service sales at some level, this is a great way to to create some structure and create some strategies around how do you actually sell and how do you train people to sell effectively.
[00:31:00] So why don't we talk a little bit about what you're doing now? So I know your Tethr now would give us a sense of how you've kind of transition, what parts of your background are using, what are you focused on now is predictable.
[00:31:11] Sure. Yeah. So I work at a company called Teather. We are in I based voice analytics company. We're based out of Austin, Texas. Although in all fairness, I think I actually my home is like C, 3, C or whatever that whatever United flight is traversing the country. So what we do as a company is we help organizations basically mine their existing voice of customer data. So by that I mean the recorded phone conversations, what your call center based phone conversations, chat in email interactions, wetbacks zoom, go to meetings, Skype calls that you might have as a salesperson with a customer. All this data that companies are recording their conversational data with their customers. We help them mind that for insight. So a couple of use cases. We we work with a lot of call centers to help them improve productivity and improve the customer experience by reducing the level of friction and effort in the call center interaction. And, you know, call centers are very good at creating a lot of friction and effort. So we help them mind those and understand what are the things that are driving escalations, driving customer frustration, getting customers to threaten to call the Better Business Bureau, fire off nasty tweets and understand those things so they can coach and train their folks on eliminating them.
[00:32:23] We work with a big global trading desk, commodities trading desk, and they use our product to actually do compliance at scale. So they've got a team. Yeah. They've got several thousand traders around the world and they've got a team of a few dozen compliance managers who kind of spot check calls, make sure traders are not engaged in bad behavior. That's going to get the company in trouble and customers at risk. And so we can we've actually got a machine to go in based on `listen at scale for all the bad behaviors and then surface up the bad stuff to the good people so they can take action on it. We work with some product organizations where they're kind of moving away from our trying to move away from surveys, which is the primary way they get feedback on their products. And now they realize that, you know, a lot of the product, the rich product feedback is actually coming in through the call center. And so with work with S-E-X leaders and product leaders, mind that voice, that customer data, get feedback on products and value proposition and pricing and messaging and marketing campaigns.
[00:33:18] Then in sales, you know, we're doing work with companies who are I think what we found is, is more and more companies are selling over the phone or over WebEx or go to meeting resume or Skype. You know, its sales is coming inside even. You know, there's inside sales, but everyone's really an inside sales person. Even the old salespeople are kind of inside salespeople. So most of the selling effort is actually happening virtually. A lot of companies are recording those interactions and they're not doing a whole lot with it. I mean, you might have managers go back and listen to a call from time to time for coaching purposes, but there is a ton of data trapped in those calls. So what we do is we we will go in and work with a B to be sales organization. Maybe they have a, you know, 100 reps or something. And they say, well, why is it that these 20 raps are, you know, kicking butt, but these other folks are kind of lagging? And what is it that they're doing specifically? How are they positioning our product? How are they handling customer objections? What's the timing of the call? How does it unfold? How are they using the insights that we created? Are these and the insights we created on the challenge? Are we? Are they even using the sales training that they been trained on? And that's you know, that's been a real pain for sales leaders for a long time, is being able to quantify the returns on transformation, on training, on new collateral, on, you know, pricing and so on, so forth.
[00:34:28] And we can kind of demystify all of these and say, OK, of your 100 reps, here are the ones who are actually using the skills that they were trained on six months ago. Here are the ones who are not here, the ones who are trying but struggling. And by the way, these insights you built, they aren't really resonating with the customer because you're getting feedback, you know, or they you guys all think your competitor is company A, it's really company B. That's the one that's coming up more often. Or, you know, it really it takes a lot of the the gut instinct kind of out of sales and brings more data to bear. So it's fun. It's fun work for a researcher. It's it's cool because it's for me, you know, we vote challenge ourselves off of surveys. And this is like, you know, the next step of going to raw conversations is sort of the next step frontier in sales research.
[00:35:09] After this, you have to have like scanners on people's brains, messaging.
[00:35:15] I joke. I joke. But I think it's by coming at some point.
[00:35:19] This is. Pleasure. If people want to find out more information about any of this stuff we've talked about today. And I know we're talked going go to bed. What are some of the good resources or what are some ways to get more information?
[00:35:28] Yeah. So a couple of things. One is I always make an offer to people to reach out to me on LinkedIn. If they if they like, it's Matt Dixon, D.I. So when I feel free to shoot me a link to an invitation, if you have questions or you want to just follow up or just be connected, I always encourage people to do that. Sometimes these these things can just leave people confused at a higher level. So I say follow up if you have questions and let's keep the dialogue going. And then if you'd like to learn more about Teather, our company is at Teather dot com and that's because we're a startup. We we misspell it purpose because that's what that's what startups do. We didn't buy the extra vowel, so it's at te t-h r so like Tethr but without the last e dot com. And again they were based in Austin, Texas. And let's tell you more about the work we're doing.
[00:36:13] Um, well I will make sure both of those links are in the show notes so people can click during it. But now there's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks. This has been a really fun conversation.
[00:36:23] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.