Decision Intelligence Selling, with Scott Roy and Roy Whitten [Episode 821]

Scott Roy and Roy Whitten are co-authors of the book, “Decision Intelligence Selling: Transform the Way Your People Sell.”

In this episode, we dig into what companies need to do to transform their selling using their RACE transformation equation. Plus, despite all the talk about the “revolution” that has hit sales in the past 10 years, nothing could be further from the truth. Sales is stuck in the past. And all the technology in the world hasn’t changed that. We get into why and possible fixes.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Scott and Roy. Welcome to the show.

Scott Roy: Thanks.

Roy Whitten: Brittany. Thank you very much. Good to be here with you, Andy.

Andy Paul: And so tell us where you guys are sheltering in place. I know you’re in separate locations.

Scott Roy: Right. Well, this is Scott. Um, and I’m in, um, I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, uh, been, been here for about two months now and, uh, separated from my wife and daughter who were over in London, England, in our other home. So, uh, it’s been a strange period of time.

Andy Paul: I can imagine, but you’re getting familiar with using zoom though.

Scott Roy: Well, you know, it’s really funny. Uh, Andy Zoom is the platform that we use all the time.

Anyway, I’m I spend six to eight hours a day on Zoom, pre COVID just be, we work with, we were at globally. We work all over the world and, uh, you know, speaking to our clients or speaking to prospective clients or our staff, you know, we’re constantly using Zoom. So that’s not been a big adjustment for us at all.

Andy Paul: And Roy, how about you? Where are you?

Roy Whitten: I’m in Sacramento, California. And, uh, we’ve been indoors as well. Victor starting. I think we’re starting our. 10th or 11th week here. Um, my wife’s here with me and fortunately our children and grandchildren are just door’s way. We’ve all wound up on the same street.

Andy Paul: Oh, wow.

Roy Whitten: So we do get to see our four grandchildren show up, keep their distance play in the backyard, play in the driveway. And we’re able to have some hangout time, uh, which really makes this easier.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or we’ve got kids this here in Manhattan. We’ve. Get together for socially distance walks occasionally, but that’s about it, right? So yeah, life has changed.

Roy Whitten: indeed.

Andy Paul: So tell us a little bit about the work you guys do, uh, just to start off, cause yeah, you do some really interesting things, especially in other parts of the world.

Scott Roy: Yeah, we’re um, we’re a sales consultancy. Um, we’ve been going now with, I think this is our 12th year. Um, we, we launched right at the height of the, of the global financial crisis. So, um, always good timing. Well, actually it was as a result of that, you know, and Roy and I. Uh, we’re um, looking to join forces. We’ve been working. Uh, together, uh, working for another consulting firm in London, and then this opportunity came together for he and I to work together. And, you know, we’ve known each other for donkey’s years. And, uh, and so we’ve, you know, we basically are a sales consultancy. We have our roots in the commercial world in London and, uh, and in Europe and then for the last 10 years or so, we’ve, uh, we’ve actually, uh, worked all over the world in. Um, places like Cambodia and Zambia and South Africa and Brazil and 40 different countries like that, actually bringing our sales consulting transformative saless consulting practice, uh, to organizations that, uh, that are selling very important products to the poor, uh, worldwide things like water filters and latrines and things like this that, uh, are serving the poorest of the world.

Andy Paul: Well, tell us about that. So how do you, how do you, how do you get involved in that business and who are the organizations that you’re, you’re training, how to sell?

Scott Roy: Sure. Well, I mean, that’s a, that’s a, uh, thanks for asking. I mean, it’s completely by accident. This all happened. I, uh, when I was turning 50 about, uh, about 15 or 13 years ago, um, I’d, uh, I’d retired and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, the second half of my life, you know, and I was in London and working, uh, not working at all, but reading the times every day because my wife was working and uh, I saw this article in The Times, it said, that they wanted CEOs that wanted to make between two pounds, 30 and five pounds, 10 per day. And I, it just caught my interest. Does that mean a CEO making that kind of money? And it was all about a volunteer program, similar to the Peace Corps, but for, for older folks, it called Voluntary Service Overseas.

And so I, it just caught my eye and I thought, wow, well, w. You know, why don’t, you know, why don’t I look into this? And so I did and I qualified for the program and then I went to Cambodia, uh, to work as a, as a livelihoods advisor for the program that was there. And so that’s, that’s what took me into the developing world. And then from there, I learned that the selling skills and knowledge I’d accumulated over 30 years, uh, in the United States primarily, uh, and then in London actually worked beautifully in Cambodia and, uh, you know, selling very inexpensive packets of seeds and things like this, you know, to smaller farmers. It’s same thing as, you know, closing multi-million deals in London. So, and then, and then we got hot in, you know, it’s taken us all over the, all over the, all over the planet.

Andy Paul: Yeah. So, I mean, are they typically, are these commercial organizations, are they like NGOs or, or both?

Scott Roy: Sometimes it’s NGO is what, what basically happened about about 15 to 18 years ago is that philanthropy and, um, you know, these, uh, organizations like USAID that give millions and millions of billions of dollars to poor countries used to just give this stuff away in the form of relief. And so what they decided about 15 years ago was, Hey, you know, instead of just giving this away, why don’t we, you know, the proverbial, uh, why don’t we teach it?

Person to fish rather than just giving them the fish. And so essentially they began forming organizations that would then market these products to the poor. They would develop the products or market products for things like solar lights that replaced a kerosene lamps or water filters, you know, where people die of diarrheal disease.

It’s very simple fix if they just get their water filter. So, um, so these products and services are oftentimes, you know, 20 to 50 or a hundred or dollars or maybe $200. Yeah. That are very affordable and they needed to build a sales organization or sales organizations to deliver this. So we work with NGOs, we work with private sector players.

Um, we work with organizations, commonly known as social enterprises, uh, that are, that have a social good and are also doing business. They’re using business principles to actually a builder, build their, uh, you know, build their influence and deliver the mission.

Andy Paul: Hm. So how it’s so fascinating when I was reading about this, this is so how do the concepts translate into something that first of all, you’re selling something that’s very, every day, right? You’re talking about lighting, you’re talking about, you know, sanitary facilities and so on, um, to people that don’t have much to spend?

Scott Roy: Right. Well, basically all of these products, I mean, these companies that are selling these products, aren’t trying to profit off of the poor. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to be sustainable entities. So therefore they need to have some profit. And then in what they’re really trying to do is to create change in people’s lives.

They’re trying to get people who have no, never used a bathroom, for example, get them to use a bathroom. So it’s not just selling the product, but it’s also transforming their behavior. Which is, which requires more than just a product pitch. And this is what I noticed when I got out there and I was starting to watch what people were doing is they were just sort of pitching a product at people like a, like a door to door salesman.

You know, the typified door to door salesman does, you know, sort of, Hey, you know, you need to buy this and here’s why you need to buy it. Here are the features and benefits, et cetera. And when I saw that,

Andy Paul: Or most salespeople…

Scott Roy: yeah, exactly untrained salespeople. And this is the point is that they were just literally pitching at people and they weren’t engaging in any sort of conversation.

So, you know, this sort of fast paced pitch really was a mismatch for what they were trying to do, which was getting people to buy into a different behavior. And so we, we, we took, um, right out of our tool box of all the sort of complex selling skills and deeper consultative skills that we do, what we call DQ or intelligence that we were doing in central London. And we took it out and we put it into the rice fields of Cambodia. And actually that process, the four step process is exactly the same. It’s just delivered in a much shorter period of time, like 20 minutes, rather than. You rather than 20 months. So, but the principles, the principles, all, all apply. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and if you really want people to think deeply about their, about the problem, that’s the point you want them to think deeply about the problem they have. Oftentimes people don’t even know they have a set of problems. And so therefore you need to engage in conversation, uh, that helps to draw that out of them so that they begin to realize that the problem they have is bigger than they thought it was.

And so therefore it sets up an opportunity for them. To you know, to discuss solutions to that problem.

Andy Paul: And how do you, sort of last question on that, that part is, is so how’d you guys make money on that?

Scott Roy: Well, we, you know, we, we make a lot less money on that. Let’s put it that way. The rest of our business, we scale our rates so that, uh, so that it’s affordable. Uh, for organizations that are in places like, uh, you know, like the, what we call the developing world or the global South is what it’s now being called.

And, um, and so we, we just charge a fraction of what we normally do in the Western world.

Andy Paul: No, I love it. Yeah. It’s so unusual because you know on this show. I talk to all these trainers and thought leaders and consultants and it’s it’s, you know, this never comes up now. It’s, they’re always concerned about, you know, what’s happening here in the United States and, and it’s um, yeah, you never get the sort of consideration about.

Yeah. What are other people doing? I mean, sure. It’s certainly Europe. Yeah. But I mean, in the developing world or the Global South as is they have the same concerns. I mean, the scale might be different or the type of product might be different or could be the same, but yeah, we’re so sort of Western Centric and Eurocentric and all that we do.

Roy Whitten: Hmm.

Scott Roy: Sure. It’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see, uh, you know, life in, you know, in Nigeria. I was just in Nigeria in the beginning of, of March actually. Um, just before they closed the country and to work with people that are very, very poor farmers. And when you can show them how they can literally triple their income by being a part of this organization we were working without there. Uh,  the, the, the, you know, the, the light on their faces is just amazing. But at the same time, the same process that we do in Nigeria is exactly the process we do in London or New York, or, you know, with our commercial clients, because we also have our commercial clients as well.

And, and so, you know, it’s, it’s the same process. It’s the same quality of, of a deep look into how people actually are transacting business and driving the sales within their companies, whether it’s mission-driven or it’s, you know, purely commercial driven.

Andy Paul: Well, I wonder get in and talk about. Yeah, your book and Decision Intelligence. So Decision Intelligence Selling, um, you’re having a, another Q two or the lexicon there’s, you know, E Q and there’s been a sales intelligence, sq there’s and it was all sorts of RQ relationship coaching. So now we get DQ, which, you know, could be dairy queen as well. My wife’s a huge dairy queen then. Those blizzards are very, every time we pass one, she wants to stop. She is very good about not, but, um, but, but before you talk about that, I just wanted to, I mean, it was a very smartly written book. You guys, you know, in my mind get it. And in many ways, yeah, a lot of people don’t is I just want what sales improvement in general. Um, and I just increasingly have this feeling that, you know, we’re just attacking the problem in the wrong way. And, you know, we spent $20 billion a year United States on sales training, um, and millions more in sales technology, whether it’s CRM or a whole new generation of sales tools that are out there. And yet the data is showing us that we really haven’t moved the needle at all. In terms of sales performance. Uh, in fact, the reports that are out say that may we’ve gone the opposite direction. And certainly when we look at overall increase in productivity across our economy, um, you know, productivity is up just marginally right? About one and a half percent a year.

So, and obviously some of that skim has to correlate to our selling ability. So, um, I was wondering, what, what should we really change? Right. That, I mean, I always think about this, this quote from Deming, Edward Deming about every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Roy Whitten: Yup.

Andy Paul: Which seems to be the, the rut we’re stuck in in sales in spite of what has been this fairly dramatic changes, certainly driven by inside sales, or we’ve got very specialized sales roles, you know, SDRs, BDRs, AEs, and so on, which makes a ton of sense in many situations, But it’s like, yeah, it’s just still not happening. And it seems like we put all this $20 billion into a very small return.

Roy Whitten: I think you’re exactly right, Andy. This is Roy. And, um, one of the things that we’ve really benefited from is, uh, um, our immersion into what’s called transformative science or transformative learning and change. And when you apply the insights of transformative science to the very things you’re mentioning.

What you find is that there’s, there’s two fundamental reasons that things aren’t changing in the world of sales, whether it’s in the commercial world that we’ve sold in, or also in the, um, what’s been called the developing world of social entrepreneurs, that Scott was just been talking about where the two things are first, what people actually think selling is.

That is what transformative science calls, the paradigm, which is like, it’s like the one question fish never ask each other is where’s the water. Theydon’t know their written water because that’s how they live. There is the paradigm of selling that we’ve noticed is that if you look at the way that companies sell the way people prepare, pair of sales reps prepare to sell the way they conduct themselves, what they do when the pressure’s on. And they’re near the end of the quarter, they’re not hitting their targets. You look at what they actually do. What you find is that commercial world people sell the same way that Scott described the developing world, people selling, which is a view of selling that selling is fundamentally trying to persuade people to buy something, especially if they don’t want or need it.

You know, the old saying he could sell ice to Eskimos, it’s like, that’s supposed to be a good thing. And you know, this view of selling that it’s fundamentally about convincing people to buy. That is one of the reasons that things aren’t working. And this is why we’ve developed decision intelligence selling. What DQ selling is about? It’s not trying to convince the customer to buy it is leading the customer to improve their decision intelligence, their DQ, so that they can make best possible decision for their business. And if, as a sales person, if you can do that, and refuse to maneuver persuade, cajole, and instead focus on helping your client really make the best possible decision by raising what we call their DQ or decision intelligence. Even if that client doesn’t buy from you today, they’re going to be back tomorrow and they’re going to be back with a few friends. And so to shift selling you first need to have a different frame of mind about it. And then the second thing is you need to know how to transform yourself. And as a sales leader, transform your people in order to sell that way. Instead of the old habitual ways to go about this, that we’re all locked into.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And I want to dig into those, but I was, I was sort of thinking more broadly in terms of what has to change as you know, one of the things that, that, and this Deming quote, I’ve been reading this book up Upstream by Heath and, um, and it’s just like, okay, you know, are we, are we not approaching even how we analyze what the problem is from the right perspective? Because, you know, a lot of data exists that says that perhaps some of the most important way you can try to affect seller individual seller performance is through more effective coaching. And, and yet we invest no money at all virtually and trying to train people how to coach, you know, even with the methodology you lay out what the erase methodology is, is somebody still needs to coach that. And so I think, you know, I was thinking the other day I was just having this conversation with someone was like, well, maybe we’ve got it all backwards. You know, maybe what we need to do. And I just, by way of background, I’m a huge soccer fan. And so, you know, Liverpool fan and so on and love Premier League Soccer. But you look at the way they’ve structured, how they manage and coach those teams. And it’s not just soccer, but professional sports in general is they have these roster, very specialized coaches with specific knowledge about performance improvement, mindset improvements, you know, nutrition, health, uh, you know, even the point of Liverpool has got a, a coach just for throw-ins, right? We don’t do anything analogous to that. In, in sales, you, we still assume that the VP of Sales and his small cadre of team are experts on all this stuff, which they’re not.

Roy Whitten: Nope, they’re not. And is one of the big mistakes companies make is trying to hire that expertise instead of learn how to develop it and then train their people in it.

Andy Paul: But do we have to like, change the structure of how we manage sales? I mean, I look on the sales side and said, you know, we’ve just talked about, we’ve made some pretty radical transitions and that are sweeping through sales and the specialized sales roles. Yet we still fundamentally managed sales the way we did 120 years ago. No, we still imbue this, you know, these mythical managers, you know, thinking that, you know, Hey, they are the end all be all of knowledge about sales and they feel oftentimes, you know, VPs, and maybe you’ve seen this in your business, I certainly didn’t mind when I was doing more consulting, was last thing in the world a VP would do is raise their hand and say they need help because that was a sign of weakness.

Roy Whitten: Such a good point. You know, the real job of sales management is to do exactly what you’re describing, which is first of all, to design a selling system that raises the DQ of their clients instead of just tries to persuade them to buy. And then secondly, they need to know how to literally transform their people.

Not just how to coach them in general, but how to help them lift. Uh, you mentioned the form transformative formula we use R = A plus C plus E. Um, which means that if you’re going to really transform somebody, you’ve got to go after three things, their attitude, their competence and the way they execute and you got to do it in a holistic fashion. And it starts with transforming and giving people the ability to literally recognize their mindset and shift it, not wait for it to shift, but shift it themselves. That is part of the magic sauce. And if you, as a sales manager, you can learn to do that. You are going to be able to build people in a way that you never could before.

Andy Paul: But my point is why should a sales manager be the person to do that? Why shouldn’t there be a coach? We’ll call it a mindset coach or a transformation coach on staff. And that’s, that’s all they do. We let the manager, let the manager manage the, the, developing the capacity of the organization and, you know, hiring and putting the right process in place. But when we develop individuals, why don’t we imitate what professional sports are doing, which is a performance activity, just like sales is a performance based activity. Why should that be a sales manager responsibility? Why shouldn’t that just be, that’s a staff position. This is a person, this is what they do. They coach, you know, this aspect, say of the attitude that you talked about. They’re the attitude coach.

Roy Whitten: Um, part of it’s function of numbers, you got one coach and all these people out there whose attitude is slipping and sliding all over the place.

Andy Paul: Oh,

Roy Whitten: And especially

Andy Paul: That’s the problem.

Roy Whitten: When they’re on the job and therefore the way to really make it sustainable is show the manager how to do that. We happen to think that’s the manager’s job, because if you really want to build your people’s capacity, learn how to help them manage their attitude.

Andy Paul: exactly, but my point is, I think the knowledge to really make it happen is so specialized that we shouldn’t have the managers do it. There should be, we should staff up these positions. As I said, using proteins as a sports teams, as a comparison, and I, and I just see this, there’s a reluctance somewhere, either at the C level or whatever to say, change their mindset about, you know, we’re so archaic in the way we, we try to manage sales. That’s it’s mind blowing.

Scott Roy: Well, I think a lot of it has to do Andy with, with, you know, the, the actual channel structure you have and, you know, what is the product you’re selling, et cetera, because you, you know, you’re not always following it, you know, certainly not following the same distribution system, you know. Where some companies might really benefit from having specialists in those areas. You know, you’ve got geographic concerns, you’ve got, you know, all these various different things that are going to going to be a matrix of different decisions to make. And maybe you do have several managers who are involved in this or several people that have specialties, whereas another, uh, another product that you’re selling or service you’re selling might not require that kind of a specialization. So, um, yeah. I agree with you that, you know, in, in the right situations, maybe it does make sense to have a, that sort of specialty.

Roy Whitten: Can I add a lot to that, Andy? Um, one is we’ve noticed because we face this with every client that we, that we work with. And we often do find kind of attitude management champions, people that get really good at this within a given company. And they kind of take on that role, but you’re talking about, and it’s very valuable and I wouldn’t slight it. And I think that is something to learn from professional sports. The reason from however, to really get managers to be good at it, and in fact, we require our own managers to be masters at doing that, or they can’t manage. The reason is that managers can screw things up faster for the sales team. Then the management coach can get to them to help fix it. You know, managers with one email or one, one to one conversation or the way they set targets or the way they jerk people around in targets or, or, or they can do more damage in five minutes than one attitude coach just can’t be there to fix it. So we think that what’s needed is a transformation in management attitude. Coaches will be helpful with it. But I think it’s time for managers to learn how to manage attitude.

Andy Paul: Well, okay. I mean, so we can take my analogy of the sports teams. You know, if you want to become the manager of a premier league soccer team, there’s what four different coaching certificates. You need to have A through D or A through E something like that. I mean, You got to go through some serious training, you know, I find it interesting. And I’ve, I’ve posed this question to other people I’m interested in your response to this is so if we took that $20 billion a year, In training that we spend on sales training and United States of which may be also generously say 5% of it is spent on training managers. And I don’t think it’s that much.

I mean, it’s interviewing an author a couple weeks ago and he said that there was a study he quoted that showed that at least in the US, you know, the average age of a manager, is that when he gets his first leaders or he, or she get the first leadership training. Age 42.

Roy Whitten: Wow. Wow.

Andy Paul: So, so what if we took this $20 billion and flipped it on its head and spent, you know, 18 of the billion training managers and 2 billion training salespeople.

Roy Whitten: is interesting. Scott, do you want to speak to that? About our latest break downs about how we do training?

Scott Roy: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re really speaking my language here, Andy. Because, uh, because as you know, as sales consultants, you know, we, we go into organizations and they’re, you know, we’re not there because they’re doing well, they’re there because they have a problem and they can’t fix it for themselves.

And so, um, you know, generally speaking, um, we can do all the fixing at the sales rep level and get the systems right and everything. But if management fundamentally is not aligned with that and supporting that and creating the context for that, then we’ve just wasted our time. We’ve wasted their money to do that. So we, you know, number one for us always is to absolutely be sure that when we get in with a client is the number one person we got to get on board is the person who has the say, who is the leader to make sure that they realize it’s their sales transformation and their leading it, we’re supporting it. We’re going to do the hard work, but they’ve got to lead it. And then secondly, we need to work with a management team to get them right before we can actually begin working with the sales team. You’re saying because the managers are the ones who are going to be the, you know, the ones who are going to actually create the framework or support the framework and then transform how they’re actually working with their people.

So I couldn’t agree more with you. I think it’s a great point. You’re making

Andy Paul: Yeah. And not to belabor it. Cause I just, it’s a conversation I’m trying to have more and more in the industry. It’s just like it’s relating to this Deming’s quote right. It’s you know, we, we get the results we deserve. Basically what system we have is.

Roy Whitten: Exactly.

Andy Paul: Everybody said, oh, we’ve got, you know, our typical Parado distribution and sales results of 80/20. It’s like, yeah, but we set it up that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. Not every system falls to an 80/20. We designed it that way to the point Roy was making before, as you know, uneven treatment of sales reps, all these other things that go on. So yeah, we just, we need to change the paradigm, that particular paradigm.

And I know you guys love talking about paradigms, but, um, do move on from that. I want to go back to a point, Roy you had made earlier, which I, you know, so few people talk about, I talk about it. It’s nice to see other people talk about, is it, sales is not about persuasion or convincing. It’s about helping somebody make a good decision. This is the, I think to your point in the book and what you’re talking about was such a fundamental shift in attitude or mindset or whatever you wanna call it that I think pervade sales is people are fundamentally confused about what their mission is.

Roy Whitten: Well, I think you’ve, you’ve got it right on the nose Andy. The, um, you know, you’ve been selling for what 40 years.

Andy Paul: Well, if you have to say it publicly. Yeah.

Roy Whitten: Sorry, we’re talking,

Andy Paul: I just, I just got outted here, but yeah, go ahead.

Scott Roy: 42 years myself. So I.

Roy Whitten: I’m on to 50 something. So we’re talking about generational equals here when you’ve been at it a long time and you, you know, and you’ve gotten through the early terribl training about, you know, the five opening questions on the five ways to close and how you tighten the screws. And, you know, we all learn to sell like that.

And, you know, and we, I did it for a long time. And for a long time, the job of sales management has been just trying to keep the pressure on your people to do thatand the problem with it is that nobody really likes to sell like that.

Andy Paul: No.

Roy Whitten: And if you, when you do run into the few people that do like to sell like that, they’re not the people you’re going to invite to your next Sunday Family Barbecue, you know, they just tend to be jerks.

And so the, the, you know, the really good people in selling after a while, either quit or they carve out a position for themselves so they can sell like they want to sell. Imagine when a company just takes that on as a company and says, we are not going to sell like this anymore. We’re not going to sell as if it’s all about convincing the customer to buy.

Once they get that at the top, then all sorts of things begin to change. You know, just one example. We’re working for a large multinational telecommunications company and I was sitting down with the guy that was in charge of the whole software system and the training system that took all of their sales reps through what they needed to do before they ever talked to a customer.

And there was a whole bunch of computer screens they had to work through. They couldn’t jump screens. They had to stay with what they were doing. They had develop, you know, cost benefit analysis, a risk analysis, at least three value propositions, a comb through their products and services. Pick the five that looked like they could work, develop a pitch for each one. Three Power Pointdecks before they even went and talked to anybody. Now

As

Andy Paul: a first call, you mean before

Roy Whitten: that’s the first call. Yeah. Now I’m, you know, you’re familiar with that with your background and that is all because everybody thinks that this is what selling’s about showing up and establishing your credibility and your trustworthiness by showing how much, you know, And what are the benefits your client can get in pitching them.

It’s all about pitching. And once you get that, that is not a way to sell, but it’s about raising the client’s DQ that all gets turned on its head.

Andy Paul: But we’ve we’ve, you know, we’re in this phase though sales, especially in software, as a service companies where. Yeah, it is all about first call let’s set up a demo.

Roy Whitten: Did you know that the problem is that everybody thinks selling’s about pitching, including the client. So they ask for a demo. They expect you to show up with it.

Andy Paul: Right. It’s gotten worse is my point is, and this is, you know, again, back to the Deming quote, as we’ve created these systems, especially in the Saas world where, where, you know, they, they function on low win rates and it’s all about volume through the funnel, velocity through the funnel. And there’s sort of two problems with multiple problems with that. But one is to the point you made earlier is that these systems they’ve implemented are all about compliance because it’s about the process dominates. Therefore we want people who are going to sell according to this process, and we don’t give people as much of an opportunity to develop this, their individual strengths, right.

To become the best version of themselves. The way that, that I was given the rope to when I was coming up. Yeah. I was making 30, 40 cold calls a day. I was out in the field making that many cold calls first number of years I was selling, but I had the freedom to do it within our system to the way that fit my skills. And I wasn’t like everybody else. I was, I told the story numerous times here about you after the first sales turning, I worked for Burroughs. You buys both remember Burroughs.

Roy Whitten: Sure sure. They had a great sales training program

Andy Paul: Sure I got back from my first two weeks sales training class and the recommendation from the instructor was they should fire me.

Roy Whitten: Based on what?

Andy Paul: Because I was too analytical. Because everybody else in the class was, Hey, how you doing right now? Sort of the glad hand and that wasn’t me from personality standpoint or, or inclination at all.

Roy Whitten: Yeah.

Andy Paul: But for my entire career I’ve carved out a way to sell that, that aligned with and successfully with a way that it comported with who I was as an individual. Um,

Roy Whitten: Yeah.

Andy Paul: It seems like it’s sort of getting away from that and it’s harder. It’s even harder for people to do it.

Roy Whitten: There’s some good news on the horizon. Um, the good news are the people that Scott has worked with on our behalf in the developing world, the social entrepreneurs who trust the value of a for profit business and developing the innovation behind it. But who also don’t want to do it simply for profit, but want to do it for the public good. And that is now just recently, I’m sure you caught last August, the Business Roundtable. the 180 some top executives in the US and every year they issue fourth stuff about purpose of a business. And in August of last year, their contribution to what the purpose of a business is eliminated short-term profitability from the list. And their list in first place was the wellbeing of their clients and then their employees, then their suppliers, then the communities in which they work. And lastly was not short term profit, but longterm profit for stakeholders. And you know, that was, the first time I’d ever heard corporate anybody, corporate America, corporate Europe, come down and say, what we’re doing is not working.

And I agree with you. It’s gotten worse instead of better. As businesses are chasing short term profits to satisfy the streets, the companies, the commercial companies we’ve worked with, or just suffering under this. They’re losing good people right and left because they don’t want to work like this. So, I think it’s getting worse, but I think it’s like, COVID, you know, it’s, it’s pushing it to a breaking point. And I think with that announcement from the business round table with the social entrepreneurs we see who are always a few years ahead of corporate. Um, I think we’re coming to point where people are saying, look what we’re doing, isn’t working. And if you’re going to change it, you’ve got to do two things. The first is you’ve got to go to the fundamental of what is selling. DQ, not about persuading them to buy. And the second thing is you got to get good at transforming the human being and realize that the reason people take 20 billion worth of sales training a year and don’t change is they spend a lot of time on autopilot. They spend a lot of time doing things the way they’ve done them before, and they don’t know how to get out of that rut.

Scott Roy: And their leaders, and the leaders of these companies, uh, you know, Andy, they, they really just, you know, they, they, they may say, look, we got to stop selling this way, but oftentimes they don’t know what to change to, you know, and that’s yeah. A fear, you know, it’s like, let’s keep doing more of the same that we know doesn’t really work that well, but we don’t really see an alternative to it.

You

Roy Whitten: If we just change the structure a little bit or change the pitch or change the software, you know?

Andy Paul: That’s why we were talking earlier about let’s make radical changes to this. Right. Cause

Yeah,

We’re just trying to fix it around the edges and you know, it’s not working. It hasn’t worked for a long time-

Scott Roy: Yeah. That’s one of the things that I love about working with a lot of the younger companies we get to work with because they’ve got younger executives, they’re not so set in their ways, et cetera, you know? And, uh, and so, you know, they’re very open to new and different ways of going about something.

And so therefore we’ve had some great successes with that and true in the commercial world too, but oftentimes it takes a very visionary leader. Uh, and I’m sure you saw that in the book with some of the stories that were in there about people we’ve worked with is that kind of visionary leader that says, look, I am tired of it being this way and I do want to change. And so therefore they, you know, they put in, you know, they, they, they put in place the protection to protect the teams and shield them from other departments or other leadership that wants them to snap back doing it the old way, you know? And, um, and so, you know, I think, I think we’re in very interesting time to think COVID is going to play a very big role in really shaking companies and get them to think differently.

You know, certainly the ones that are relying on, you know, face to face visits with customers in live and in person, uh, you know, that’s shaking those folks up quite a bit. Hope, hopefully there’ll be a big enough change that we’ll get some people to really begin thinking differently about what selling really is.

And, you know, it’s not just the lip service of, of saying, Oh, you know, we want to make sure clients make the very best possible decision, you know, for themselves or their family or their business or whatever. We really mean it. You know, it’s, it’s saying, you know, and, and I’ll tell you when I learned how to start doing this about 20 years ago as a professional sales, uh, sales person and sales manager. When I learned how to do this, all of a sudden selling became easy, uh, easier, dramatically, easier, and more fun and less stress and all of that. And, uh, It becomes

Andy Paul: simpler..

Scott Roy: it becomes simpler.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s really, that’s really the key. All right. Well, unfortunately we’re running out of time and so we’ll definitely have to have back and talk about your book. Cause we really haven’t touched on the book and it is a very smartly written book and I want people to be exposed to it.

So we’ll make sure I have you back for too long to talk about that. But in the meantime, tell people how they can connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing.

Scott Roy: Great. Yeah. Well, the best way to get ahold of us is at a, at our, our website is www.wrpartnership.com. And you can write an email to contact@ or info@wrpartnership.com and we’ll be happy to have a chat with you.

Roy Whitten: And the, um, the book you’re mentioning will be out in the fall and between now. And then if they go to the website, there’s a little ebooklet, we’ve just written about part of how to make it an attitude shift happen in the face of the COVID pandemic and that’s available now. And it’s actually, you can get it from. You know, just a couple of bucks on Amazon, or you can get it for free by going to the website and getting a link to a distributor called BookFunnel is something we worked together in the last few weeks just to help people through the pandemic.

Andy Paul: Alright, well, gentlemen, thank you very much. And I said, I look forward to talking again shortly.

Roy Whitten: Thanks, Andy. We look forward to it. Thanks so much.

Scott Roy: Nice to meet you.