743 - Measuring the Buyer-Seller Experience, with Carl Cox - podcast episode cover

743 - Measuring the Buyer-Seller Experience, with Carl Cox

May 13, 20247 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

Collin Mitchell and guest Carl J. Cox delve into the importance of measuring and improving the buyer-seller experience in sales. They discuss the significance of data, self-reflection, and customer feedback in enhancing sales performance. The conversation highlights the impact of timely responses to leads and the value of learning from closed loss deals to drive sales success.

Follow the Host:
Collin Mitchell (Partner, Leadium)


Our Episode Guest:
Carl Cox (CEO, 40 Strategy)

Sponsored By:
Leadium | The leader in outbound sales appointment setting

*If you'd like to be a guest on the show or have any questions, email us at [email protected] - Just tell us why you're reaching out and we'll contact you as soon as we can!

Transcript

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Sales Transformation brought to you by Ledium. I'm your host, Collin Mitchell. And today I've got Carl J. Cox on. He's the author of Stuck at CEO. He's also the CEO of Forty Strategy. We recently had Carl on the show where we talked about what KPI you should focus on. Lots of good nuggets there. Definitely recommend

you checking it out. We'll drop the link in the show notes. Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing here is the experience, the entire experience, whatever that looks like, which is different for every organization, like you said, but it's the experience between the buyer and the seller. And so how do you measure that? How do you measure the experience? How do you make sure they're getting a world class experience versus a

Well, this is where you got to measure, right? You know, this is actually data, this is where people you have to measure those different parts around that. So that's, that's number one, right, you're gonna have some real clear data around it. Two, there has to be self reflection. after doing these things. Like we know when we've given our best. Like we know when we've crushed it versus when we know when we've just showed up. Right. And so that has to be

a self-measurement behind it. Three, when you're fortunate and they're actually ever willing to respond, it's best if they can tell you. Right. And what's even best is follow up the people who didn't end up buying your product or service and say, why didn't you buy a product or service? Yeah. They're going to probably tell you why they never didn't buy from you. Right. They're going to say, well, this person didn't call me back for three weeks. And my two other competitors

followed up two hours later. You know, what did they say? It's if somebody connects with you online, if you do it within the first, like, what is it, 45 minutes, you have about a 70% chance of increasing the sale. It's funny. I'll admit with this, Colin, this is a problem I had recently. A well-known Fortune 500 company reached out related to our StrengthsFinder Gallup thing. I didn't know it was sent out to everybody. It was like a Friday afternoon. Our

team didn't respond to it right away. We responded on Monday. By Wednesday, we get this email saying, oh, thank you for the million people responded back. We already had a conversation with them on a Friday, deal is done. Oops, right? Like, I mean, we lost that because we didn't respond when

And there's some interesting data out there. I mean, I've seen a lot of it, even specifically around like tech and SaaS companies of people requesting a demo, you know, and it taking 48, 72, even up to a week for people to even get in touch with them, which is mind boggling. You know, that they say, you know, I mean, if you're the first one in, a lot of times you win, you can kind of set the tone for what the narrative of, you know, how

we're going to solve this problem looks like. There's a lot of benefits. I mean, best practices is responding to leads within five minutes. You know, and but I want to go back to something else you mentioned, because I think it's a really important point. I talk about it a lot, actually, is that feedback from closed loss deals. So valuable. It's the one piece that is a little bit hard to track because no salesperson wants to report that they were the reason why the deal got lost.

So that's one area where the data can be a little bit flawed. The other area where it can get a little bit tricky is a lot of times people you know, the buyers aren't always like, completely honest with you of why they didn't go with you, right? You know, I say price or budget, right, which are kind of the easy go tos, and they might not give you the real reason of like, hey, Carl, it just wasn't a world class experience

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things we like to say in strategy is strategic planning is a hypothesis, not a fact. And we say that because we want to be learners. We have to recognize that a plan we went in with, we have to change and be nimble and react appropriately based on the data that we have in front of us. So the same thing happens in the sales process. We have to be aware that sometimes the thing that we thought was going to work, we have to adapt and

change and learn. And so I think one of the biggest challenges, right, is in sales, it's, we all know, it's tough, right? It's tough, because we're gonna have failures, right? So just like you said, baseball, you know, it worked in the previous episode, you know, if you're heading down a 200 Mendoza line, you know, it's like, you're not going to keep your job. And in baseball was same thing is going to happen potentially as a salesperson. So it's hard. But,

you know, where does strategy come from? It came from the military, right? Sun Tzu, Art of War, many, you know, thousands of years ago, that book was written. Some of the great books today is, once again, all military training. Why do they care so much? Because people die, right? You know, people die, you know, we get a sale, we just, we don't put food on the table, we don't get to buy that extra thing or have that extra bonus. Right? You know, but, but at the end of the day, they are one of

the best at after action reports. Like the SEALs are known, notorious for being very critical and learning, even when they have a successful mission, because what can they do better the next time? When you could create a sales organization that is a learning organization rather than a gotcha organization, you're going to have much more success to crush it. And then you're going to really learn your campus visit and, you know, keep on doing a

Absolutely. Carl, it's been awesome having you on again. If you missed the first episode, we'll drop the link in the show notes to make it easy for you. Any final thoughts? Where's the best place for people to pick up the book and get in touch with Yeah, so you could pick up Lost at CEO at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, we also have an audible version as well. So feel free to go out and catch it on that. You could find us on LinkedIn, we put a fair amount of content

out there consistently at Carl J. Cox. And then also, of course, our website at 40 strategy.com. If you have any questions or thoughts, love to hear from you. And also to your guests, Colin, we're actually getting ready to close this out here soon. But if they talk to us, and they say we heard on your podcast, you could do this for the first and second, by the way. So, you know, if we didn't catch beforehand, we

will actually provide a free, free copy of the book. Um, and so send, send an email, Carl J Cox at 40 strategy.com. We'll send you a free copy of the book and hope you enjoy that. Otherwise you can go Awesome. There you go. Make sure you take them up on that. If you enjoyed today's episode, please write us a review, share the show with your friends so we can reach more sellers and sales leaders to transform the way

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast