Sales Process Excellence Podcast

Michael Webb: Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to bring you my guest today, Bruce Hamilton. I met Bruce several years ago at a Shingo conference and Bruce has... Well, Bruce, let me just give you a chance to explain your background to my audience. It's largely sales managers and company presidents. Many of whom may not be familiar with the kind of work you do and much less the Shingo Institute. So take a couple of minutes and describe your background.

Bruce Hamilton: Thank you. And good morning, everyone. I appreciate whoever is joining in. Appreciate you being out there. I've been in a number of different careers in business, started out actually in sales promotion and spent seven years there. And I loved that position actually. And oddly, my interest in problem-solving led me to IT. So I spent seven more years in IT thinking that some of the issues we had in sales and marketing would be solved through IT.

Bruce Hamilton: And so the bad news is it's not really a panacea. I learned a lot about IT, however, and those kinds of problems. While information technology has changed remarkably since I was in that position, a lot of the thoughts behind computer systems have not so much. It's more or less has to do with the speed and scale that we have today, but the basic algorithms, as we say, not remarkably different. But systems led me into materials management. I worked in a manufacturing company and at the time we were implementing MRP and it was not actually doing much for us. And so I ended up transitioning from a computer systems to manufacturing. Never spent any time in manufacturing, not even in the manufacturing building. So this was an eyeopener for me, definitely. It was a world of pain with many problems. Some of them actually caused by the computer systems that I was involved with. And that brought me to the Shingo prize incidentally.

Bruce Hamilton: We were a company that had a lot of issues. We couldn't deliver on time. Like many companies back in the '70s and early '80s, our profits were flagging and we were trying to find ways to get around that. When I was in sales and marketing, we raised prices twice a year. And we Pat ourselves on the back about how our sales were increasing, but they actually weren't, we were just printing prices. So now I suddenly found myself on a different side of the coin, still with that thinking in mind from sales and marketing and focused on the customer. But I noticed I joined an organization that actually was shielded from the customer. We had very little to do with the customer. And this created its own set of headaches. But Shingo prize and particularly the ideas of, shingo and some of the others...

Bruce Hamilton: And they're not all Japanese. A lot of them came out of the US, but a lot of that thinking was critical for me? And it was just my good luck that since I had no background in manufacturing, I had no biases. And therefore I started to study this and that led to award of a prize for our company in 1990. And there were some remarkable improvements. We were still awful, but we'd made an awful lot of improvement. That in fact, led to some attention back in 1990 from Toyota, who at the time was for purposes of trying to be a good corporate citizen and trying to overcome an image of taking jobs, which killing American auto manufacturing, which they didn't really need any help. They were kind of hurting themselves.

Bruce Hamilton: They helped us out for or five years. And it was exciting, very exciting. They felt like as they like to put it, being dragged through a keyhole. So there was this technical knowledge from Shingo and some lot about behaviors of people. And then dealing with the folks from Toyota, understanding what management's role was in this. because I was not totally clear about that, about how the whole thing fit together. It's a whole system. It's not just one thing or another. One piece. We often talk about lean is a bunch of pieces and that can create a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Because unless you're looking at it as a whole, you don't really get a decent understanding. That finally led me into general management. And at that point I was back actually working with sales.

Bruce Hamilton: So I started out in sales and I ended up in sales. Then 20 years ago, hard to believe, 20 years ago I quit my job. Loved the company, it was doing okay, but I got so excited about continuous improvement. And actually I think it was my interaction with the Shingo prize and the Shingo Institute and getting to go out and visit other companies, not just in manufacturing, but in lots of kinds of different businesses. It was exciting to do that. So I became a consultant and that's where I am today. I worked for a, not for profit organization that's been around since 1994 and it's our mission to keep good jobs, predominantly here in the US. We're parochial that way. Don't begrudge anyone else but we liked the idea of overcoming challenges that we have and particularly in our own region. So that's me and happy to be with you today.

Michael Webb: Looking back on that, a couple of points, I guess, to ask about, because I'm similar age to you, right? And so I went through different... Coming from the sales background, but during this period of time when first mainframe computers and then mini computers and then microcomputers were upending the way businesses managed themselves. And I remember observing, and I wondered if you did this to back in your days of IT, the IT department... I remember realizing, wait a second, if you're going to have a computer, that's going to be able to do all these real fast calculations and make reports. And people from all over the company are putting information in them. That means everybody has to define their terms exactly the same way. And that's not the way it works right now. That's a revolution to help over smplify things. Because that's one of the reasons that computer systems didn't work.

Bruce Hamilton: That was true back then and it's still true today. Different parts of an organization. We talk about language barriers, sort of the English versus Spanish or Vietnamese, but there are huge language barriers between engineering and sales. And when I was in sales that released. We would say it was released in sales promotion, that meant that there was a concept on paper and we were going to take it to a trade show. Whereas released in purchasing meant we purchased all the parts. Released in engineering meant we've finished the prototype. So every part of the organization had a different definition. They were all wrong. The computer system then tries to codify this, but the codes are all messed up. One of the better parts of MRP that I participated in was that it actually forced us to ask the questions. Ali White , who was an early leader, liked to say that it's a people system which utilizes a computer and he emphasized all people. This is probably the first time I think in my company where sales felt they had any connection to what was happening in operations.

Bruce Hamilton: And that was pretty reluctant too, it was like, they felt that you're putting us on the spot. Forecasts are very difficult because of the, let's say, less than friendly relationship between sales and operations. They're immediately on the defensive. So a lot of those conditions persist today. Organizations are, siloed, is a popular word. I used to say compartmentalized. We're all in our own little cubbies and we don't get out much. Even if there aren't physical walls, we just don't go to certain areas.

Bruce Hamilton: So the language is kind of messed up. Computer systems take that language and they make it look official. And once it comes out of computer, it must be right. I honestly did not have a conc...

Michael Webb:                 Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb with the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have followed for a long time. Her name is Ardath Albee. And she is the author of two revolutionary books in marketing. The first one, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. And the second one is a book called Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies That Drive Results. So Ardath, welcome to the podcast. I really am glad you're here.

Ardath Albee:                    Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to join you.

Michael Webb:                 And I think it would really be helpful for my audience if you could spend a few minutes and just tell us where you've been in your career and how you got into doing what you're doing now.

Ardath Albee:                    Sure. So I come at this from, not a marketing background, so I ran companies in a past life, mainly hotels and country clubs, so on the B2C side. And then one day my sister called and asked me to move to Minneapolis and help her build a software company. And I kind of laughed and told her to go get funding, thinking that she would go away. And she got funding. And so I moved to Minneapolis and we built the company. So this is back in the year 2000. So think, the first-ever iteration of marketing automation software designed to also run your website that marketers could use without IT. And back then, of course, it was a big heavy lift, a custom install, because we didn't have SAS. And corporations at that time had basically taken their brochures and put them online and turned them into websites, remember? Back in 2000.

Michael Webb:                 Oh yeah, right.

Ardath Albee:                    So they've moved that content into the new technology and then they'd say, Well, nothing changed, nothing happened. And so I started going out and looking at their websites and thinking, no wonder, who wants to read this. And so my background is, I'm a writer, I always have been, have a degree in English as well as a degree in business. And so I started helping them rewrite their websites, and focus on their customers more so than their products, which was a fight kicking and screaming a lot of times. And they started seeing change and they started asking for more and more help. So in 2007 when I realized I could make a living doing something I love, I jumped and became a consultant, and that's how this all got started.

Michael Webb:                 Interesting. So there's a pretty famous study that's been going on by CSO Insights. You might be familiar with that. For the last seven years in a row, the percentage of B2B salespeople making their quotas has declined, seven years in a row, in a time of recovery in the economy.

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah. I think even more frightening than that is that what's the percentage right now? 50, right around 50% of sales reps are to make quota.

Michael Webb:                 Yeah. That same company said it proved that a CEO of a company might be better off taking the capital they invest in their sales and marketing organizations, especially with sales organization, and putting it on the craps table in Vegas because the odds are better.

Ardath Albee:                    That's just terrible.

Michael Webb:                 Why? But why is that happening in your view?

Ardath Albee:                    Well, I'll tell you what I see and I've been doing work on both the marketing and the sales side, but what one of the things that I thought was really interesting was something that I heard a lot about at the Gartner conferences this year.

And one of those things is that buyers used to say nothing's relevant to them. We're not producing content that speaks to them. It's all about our products or whatever. Now they're saying, Hey, 85 of them are saying, we go out and we find quality content, but you know what? It's still not relevant to us. And then they say, and it's confusing us because there are no apples to apples comparison between what all the different vendors say. And as buying groups get bigger, every one of them goes out and does their own research, and they all bring back this information that conflicts with each other. And so these buying groups are now struggling to deconflict all this information.

In fact, Gartner says it adds another 20% of time to their buying process if they even decide to buy at all. And as many deals are ending in no-decision as companies or vendors are losing to the competition, which is frightening because buyers can't figure out how to even move forward. And so-

Michael Webb:                 Wow-

Ardath Albee:                    It's difficult. It's changed a lot. Buyer expectations have increased exponentially, just because they're business to business doesn't mean they forget about their consumer experiences when they're going into the office, right? So they have expectations of instant information and being able to find things that are relevant to them. And we're not, as B2B companies, really following through with that. But the other thing that I find really interesting is a lot of what I hear is go forth and provide value, but nobody ever defines, what exactly does that mean. What's considered valuable, right? And so what I find is that companies really still don't know their buyers. They don't keep up with them.

In fact, a lot of times they do the research or some of it creates a persona and say, okay, great, check the box. And they put it in a folder. And they don't use those insights or that information to inform their strategies, their go-to-market strategy, their marketing strategy, their sales engagement strategy. They just say, okay, we did that work, file it away. And they don't understand how to use it. And so what we get is content that yes, arguably is high value, but it's not doing anything to help orchestrate the buying process. And your buyers don't care whether they're getting stuff from marketing or from sales, they just care that it's relevant to them, that it matches their context, that it provides some kind of valuable insight they can actually use.

Michael Webb:                 There's a wonderful quote from one of your blog posts. It was, "We need to start looking at the buying process as a continuous experience that sometimes plays to the strengths of marketing and other times to those of the sales team." So are you saying that the prospects are looking for conversation? Help us understand how that issue of figuring out, how to give into relative chats applying to this desire for conversation if it does?

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. And one of the things that I find really interesting, it's one of my favorite parts of building personas, is understanding all of the questions that they have to get answered i...

Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. Today I have a guest that I've been looking to for quite a while. My guest is Drew Locher, a management consultant par excellence. And I've been following Drew for quite a while. Drew, could you tell us about your background, introduce yourself and how you got into what you're doing today.

Drew Locher:                     Thank you Michael. And thank you for having me on your podcast. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to your colleagues and constituents. So a little bit of background. Basically I grew up in the 1980s in a corporate management development program at the General Electric company. And it was there that I got introduced to, what we called at the time, world-class enterprise and quality management concepts. And we were expected to apply those concepts in whatever management role that we had.

 I was with GE for seven years. I left in 1990, went back to school for organizational behavioral science. Up to that point my background was in engineering, several engineering fields. And at the same time I went out and started working with different organizations in different industries trying to see how these world-class and quality management concepts applied in different environments. And that's what I did throughout the 90s, working with typically smaller and medium size organizations. That kind of grew into working with larger organizations by the end of that decade.

So I've been working with all kinds of different industries over the last nearly 30 years on my own, including healthcare as well as manufacturing, financial service companies, even higher education. They're currently trying to apply these concepts to their operations. And I've been kind of doing that for 29 years, 30 years. And wrote a few books, which kind of gets you some notoriety as you know, in the field. Mainly focusing on the application of the concepts, what we would now call lean concepts to non-production environments. Three out of my four books are on that topic. So how do we apply the concepts to finance and accounting, sales and marketing, designing, product development or any development really. And that's what I've been doing for a long time now.

Michael Webb:                 Excellent. Excellent. Unlike me, you sort of started off in management and got introduced to this and have been in the quality and productivity sciences of management for almost your entire career. I started out in sales and I had to go to three different industries. So very interesting and a really deep background. And maybe that's why you write such a good newsletter. I love following you.

Drew Locher:                     Oh, thank you.

Michael Webb:                 I've been following it for a while now. And in April you wrote about a topic, it caught my eye, The Science of Management. And you reflected on your training as an engineer and you observed that there's principles or laws that explain how reality behaved, and that some of them also apply to management of organizations. I thought it was really insightful. So before we drill into them, I thought maybe I would just cover an overview of the ones that you introduced and then we'll kind of dive into them.

 The first one you used as the example was a Newton's first law of motion, right? An object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion. The second one was the second law of thermodynamics, right? That energy or order decreases without effort or work. And third, you introduced the idea of a system, that feedback is necessary to keep results in the desired range. And then fourth was a reference about learning in organizations, and that seemed to be more about the human mind than about a principle of physics. But we'll get into that.

So these are fascinating topics. I promise you there are people in the audience who might think, "Oh my God, you're talking about physical properties, this isn't going to apply. How could this possibly apply?" But it really, really does in a fascinating way. So Drew, let's start at the beginning. This first law of motion, an object at rest stays at rest. Tell us how that applies in the science of management.

Drew Locher:                     So I only chose four, I'm sure there's more. But those are the four that came to mind when I wrote the piece. But that particular one, it dawned on me as soon as I went back to school in 1990 for organizational behavioral science because there was an expression they used, organizational inertia. And I'm like, "Oh, I know a little bit about inertia." And so it caught my attention early on that one. And as organizational behavioral science folks have recognized, the application of that theory for a long time now, at least decades.

The second one, the second law of thermodynamics, that was something that sort of dawned on me as I was studying organizational behavioral sciences. And I've seen subsequently people also referring to it, entropy in particular, and not always applying it or citing it or referring to it properly. So that for the last few years has been in my mind thinking I need to write a little bit about this at some point just to kind of clarify things because I've seen people refer to it and not always correctly.

Michael Webb:                 So let's take those two, right there. As it applies to management, what does management have to do as a result of the law of inertia?

Drew Locher:                     Well, they just can't leave things be. They've got to inject energy into any system. And an organization is a system. A closed system. And we've seen evidence of that in any... pick a topic. I think in the newsletter, I refer to Five S. I often hear organizations or leaders of organizations kind of complain that it can't sustain Five S. And I'll talk to them about, "What is your sustain model?" And they kind of look at me puzzled and maybe they do periodic audits or maybe they used to and they got away from them, or maybe they did them, but they didn't really do them properly. They didn't engage people in participating in them, so it became like a police action when people did the Five S audits.

 And it's true really of any organizational change. You have to continue to follow up for various reasons, not just injecting energy but really making sure new habits are formed. One of the other things I studied in the early 90s was habit forming. What does it take to create habits or overwrite existing habits? And that all takes effort. It takes energy really on the part of leaders in particular.

Michael Webb:                 So you're saying that management needs to recognize that in order for things to change, they can't just issue an order or tell people what to do, they have to plan that people aren't going to be able to keep it at that level or keep that change in place unless they have a plan that keeps it in place. What would be an example of something that managers and executives would need to put in place to keep a change in motion?

Drew Locher:                     Well, in lean terminology, it's just go see. We always say go to the gumbos, as Toyota calls it. But you need to have a focus when you go see. So...

Speaker 1:               You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence podcast with Michael Webb.

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I'm delighted today to introduce you to a fellow I just learned about about two weeks ago with a fascinating background and a very fascinating and important topic. His name is Oscar Trimboli. Oscar, welcome to the podcast.

Oscar Trimboli:      Good day, Michael. I'm looking forward to speaking to you and listening to you as well.

Michael Webb:     Oscar, if you can't tell from that little snippet of his voice, he is currently speaking from Sydney, Australia. And so it's in the morning his time; in the afternoon, my time. And our topic today is going to be listening. Everybody knows in business to business, listening is a crucial topic, not just interpersonally but inter-organizationally. So Oscar, please give us a little background about your career and how you got into this fascinating topic.

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, I'm on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners before I leave this planet. I think I'm obsessed with the commercial cost of not listening. Every employee that's ever left an organization, every customer you've lost to a competitor, every supplier that's not giving you their best, has all come about through a lack of listening. Every project that's run over schedule and every pipeline that's blocked in the middle, like a plumbing system where the surges is backed all the way back up, it's all a result of not listening.

A lot of us think that our pipeline should have this mythical shape that's a beautiful wide funnel at the top and it comes narrow towards the end. And then these crazy people, the customers, get in the way. And the reason most of us have this really wide funnel right in the middle where it should be narrowing is because we're not listening.

And the most important thing we're not listening to is what's not said. Too many of us are listening to what is said and not enough of us spend time exploring what isn't said. So if you take one thing away from today, it's the 125-900 rule. I speak at 125 words a minute, but I can think up to 900 words a minute. So that means the first thing out of my mouth, there's an 11% chance that what I'm saying is what I'm meaning. And for most people in sales, what they do is they only listen to what's said. Great sales leaders, great sounds professionals, listen for what's unsaid.

Michael Webb:     You have a background in B2B you were mentioning before, run through that for us. I think my audience would... It would help them understand where you're coming from.

Oscar Trimboli:      I started off as an audit clerk in an accounting firm. And six weeks in, we were working on manual spreadsheets in those days. A3 pieces of paper with pencil, so I'm dating myself here. And my manager discovered six weeks in that I had this thing called dyscalculus, which meant I transposed all my numbers, which kind of ended my career in accounting very, very quickly. And as a result, I was kind of on a cadet ship where they would pay for my books while I was studying and working full-time. And I was completely devastated because my dad had always said to me, "There's one job that will never get done awy with... You'll always have to have accountants. So become an accountant."

And my managing partner of the accounting firm came up to me and says, "Well, Oscar, what do you know about computers?" And I said, "Well, Bill, I know absolutely nothing." And he said, "That's fantastic. We'll never lie to each other going forward. You will now install the accounting software in this organization or you'll need to leave. So the choice is completely up to you." So that started a journey of installing, implementing, and selling, doing the professional services and installations and implementations, training beyond in accounting software, whether that's sort of small accounting practices or large corporations. And I spent two decades doing that.

Then I went into work in product management inside a big telecommunications company and spent a lot of time intersecting between engineering, marketing, and the sales organization. And then finally 11 years at Microsoft doing a range of roles from sales, product management, operations. And even rebuilt the graduate program while I was doing my day job there as well. So most of my life has been stepping into lobbies inside buildings, going and visiting reception, and having conversations with customers who want to buy software of some kind.

Michael Webb:     Okay. So now you speak and you consult about listening, which is the Jack of all trades tool that you need to have in your pocket if you're trying to deal with and influence people. So what experience did you have that caused you to make this big transition from being part of an organization and helping them succeed to an independent person helping people with this tool or method? What experience was it or trials caused you to do that?

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, many people often said to me, "Could you teach me how to do that?" And often I'd say, "What do you mean 'do that'?" And they said, "The way you listen, you hear things that no one else in the room is hearing." And I kind of often brushed it off, but then a vice president at Microsoft said to me after a very tense negotiation we had, at about the 20-minute mark, I asked a question, which was simply, "What assumptions are we really holding tightly that could be completely false?"

The room shifted, the change in dynamic was very noticeable, and at the end of the meeting the vice president said, "Can you stay behind?" That's kind of like when your wife says to you, "We need to talk." It's not a good moment. All I was doing in my head was calculating how many weeks of salary I had left in my bank account. And Tracy said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. She said, "Oscar, you didn't notice what happened at the 20-minute mark, but if you could code how you listen, you could change the world." And all I could say out of my mouth at that time, Michael was, "Do you mean code or code code?" And she said, "No, I mean code code," which is turn what I know into software, which eventually I guess I'll do. Code just meant make it into a methodology and put it out in steps like we've done with a book and like we've done with the playing cards and the jigsaw puzzles and all these other things we use to teach leaders how to listen.

And during that time I came across a really interesting statistic. By the third decade of a corporate career, you will have had up to 15 training courses in how to speak, yet no training whatsoever in how to listen. Now, if we believe that communication is 50% speaking and 50% listening, with only 2% of us having any training in how to listen, I think that's one of the big productivity hacks of the 21st century. If you want to stop doing back-to-back meetings, if you want to stop having conversations about opportunities that are slowing down, I think it's listening ...

Michael Webb:   You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict, and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:   Hello, everyone. This is Michael Webb and I'm excited today to have on the phone a friend of mine from many years ago, Brian Carroll. Brian, welcome here.

Brian Carroll:        Thanks for having me.

Michael Webb:   It would be great if you could tell the audience a little bit about your background and then how we got connected, oh, I guess it was probably 15 years ago, or 14 years ago.

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, yeah. For everyone, my background, I've focused primarily on the intersection of marketing and sales. I wrote a book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. I've worked with the who's who of technology, really forward thinkers. I had an opportunity to work with some of the largest, most well-known brands. SAP, Google, the marketing tech world, Eloqua, Marketo.

Brian Carroll:        So as you think about all the changes we're experiencing today, very early on, we were implementing technology to connect with customers and develop leads for sales teams, and so, Michael, you and I connected around your work with sales process and the notion of Six Sigma and continually optimizing. That's where I came from. We'll talk about a little bit, but I had this Jerry Maguire moment, 2014, working with my own team and how we connect with customers, so I shifted my work and focus around not just looking at how do we get more leads and higher quality leads and driving pipeline, but just really recognizing that we no longer have an issue around conversion in the same way we did. It's actually harder now to connect with customers. That's what I've been doing for the past three years is seeing empathy as a sales and marketing super power.

Michael Webb:   As you went from your own firm, which was, Leads to Sales I think it was called, and it was acquired by MarketingExperiments group, right?

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, so MECLABS owns MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments, and you know, I admired both of the brands so much. I was speaking at a conference and just the things we were focusing on, what I wanted to do is bring more science and more research, because in best practices you take something you learned and you apply it to another customer base and it doesn't work. Experience doesn't always determine you're going to be successful, and what I wanted to understand is why.

Brian Carroll:        Most people focus on how do you get marketing working. And what I've always wondered is why isn't it working. That's why I really loved being able to sell my company to MECLABS because we were trying to understand what really works and why by understanding how customers make choices. While I was there, we saw the motivation, the customers, the most important thing. After I left MECLABS to do my own work, I've really focused on this notion of customer motivation, because neuroscience, a breakthrough happened in 2014 where it had been previous to that, but just finding... Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist that found we aren't thinking machines that feel, we're feeling machines that think.

Brian Carroll:        So, that's how all the focus I had previously done on value proposition, and messaging, and specific channels and cadences, what I realized I was missing is this deeper understanding of how emotions drive all of our decisions. That's the important thing that I'm working on today is how do we better connect to what people care about.

Michael Webb:   So, that's why you're so interesting because you understand the scientific mindset, and then you're also into this, your new positioning is around empathy. How do other people feel? What are they thinking? What motivates them? Which is traditionally thought of as a soft fuzzy, you know, you can't measure that kind of thing. So let's start out with what is empathetic marketing? Is that what you're calling it?

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, yeah.

Michael Webb:   What is that, empathy-based.

Brian Carroll:        So, why it matters. I always start with why. Why should you care about this? What I saw is today we have more ways of reaching our customers. Every few months we have a new channel we can reach our customers through. The other thing is we have more data about our customers, behavioral data. I just went through an experience with someone on their own website where I knew that they have my behavioral data, they have my chat data, they have information about who I am because Clearbit and other tools and discover.org tell them personal data, and so there's all this research around persuasion.

Brian Carroll:        Cialdini's work around how do we use behavioral economics and tools to connect with people. We have all the stuff, and what's happening though is that it's still not working. The issue has shifted from focused on conversion that the gap we have is connection, connecting to what our customers care about. Ironically. So you have more ways and more data, but actually connecting what your customers care about has never been harder. So when I talk to marketers, that's the struggle. And what empathy based marketing is, is moving your focus from if I were the customer, how would this appeal to me? Most people think, well, I'm already empathetic. I already care about my customers. I'm already curious about them.

Brian Carroll:        But the issue is, is that what science has shown is that we think we're being empathetic. We think we're thinking about the customer, but we're using our own bias, our own preferences. We're trying to get what we want, and we actually aren't connecting to what our customers care about. So what do they do? They read in-boxes to delete things, not to read them. They ignore messages. They are immune because what's happening is that they got to care about it. We got to connect with the care about. And then the shift is, is no longer about funnels. It's about becoming a Sherpa.

Brian Carroll:        So, here's the way to sum up what's empathy-based marketing. It's being your customer to understand what they care about so that you can create messages that resonate and focus on what matters, either problems they have they don't want, results they want they don't yet have, not only that, but you're like a Sherpa helping a mountain climber climb the mountain. You know, they still got to climb, but we now are moving to this mode of you can't make someone do something, but what you can do is equip and enable them.

Brian Carroll:        You can bring science to this process. It's just you have to appreciate, it's the emotion. Even in complex sales that's way bigger now because the stakes are higher. It's riskier to make bad decisions.

Michael Webb:   So when you say, "Shifting from conversion to connection," by connection you mean something that is valuable to them in their activity goal, mission, someth...

Speaker 1:             You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence podcast with Michael Webb.

Michael Webb:   B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste.

Michael Webb:   My name is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:   Hello, this is Michael Webb, and I am excited today to introduce you to someone I've known for a number of years. His name is Cliff Ransom. Cliff holds a very unique position in the industry. I'll let him give you his background, but he has this unique position between the investor relations and management community and the lean community. And what we're going to talk about today, I think is going to be illuminating and quite interesting, especially for the senior executives in the audience. So Cliff, welcome here.

Cliff Ransom:       Thank you very much, Mike. It's fun to be here.

Michael Webb:   Yes. Yes, we're going to have some fun today. So, if you could give 30 seconds or a minute for the audience so they can kind of get the idea of where you've come from and where you've been and what you're doing now.

Cliff Ransom:       I'm going to try to put 47 years into 60 seconds. Here we go. I've been in the investment business, almost exclusively, with institutional investors for 47 years. Almost 30 years ago, I became deeply involved with Danaher, which became my prototype investment and my prototype corporate mentality. I have a very unusual, I can't say unique, but unusual business model, and then I have three legs on my stool. One is 47 years of connection support for learning from institutional investors, portfolio managers, analysts, at some of the biggest and best firms in the world, quite frankly. The second leg is that I have very consciously built a deep presence in the lean community. That includes practitioners, the authors, the consultants, gurus like yourself who have very specialized knowledge of lean applications. And then perhaps most importantly, I've worked with several generations of C-suite corporate leaders, and they understand what it is that I do and make sure that I get the access that I need to learn, because I learned by going to the Gemba; going to the place where the real work is done. And we can elaborate on that later if you'd like, but that's, in essence, what I'm doing today.

Cliff Ransom:       For the last 15 years, I've run Ransom Research Inc., which works with a deliberately constrained group of senior investors, because they're the guys who can afford me. And they want me to exercise those three legs of that stool. And I think, in a nutshell, that's about as close as I can get.

Michael Webb:   Okay, super. So, obviously you're on a first-name basis with senior executives at the Shingo Institute, at the Lean Enterprise Institute, and a number of corporations.

Michael Webb:   Tell me about why you think the senior executives don't quite realize the power of lean, because I agree with you, but it's hard to describe.

Cliff Ransom:       Everything you ever say in this business, you're changing constantly. There's a webinar or up on the LEI site that I've been trying to get them to take down for 15 years because I say, "Guys, I don't believe any of that stuff anymore." This continuous improvement has to be applied to your intellectual thinking, as well. In the '90s, I counted the number of Kaizens. That's how simple-minded I was.

Michael Webb:   Yeah.

Cliff Ransom:       And that was way before I understood that what Kaizens you did are really indicative. They pertain to how you think about lean. You can do 10,000 Kaizens and have a minuscule benefit. They'll all benefit, but minusculely. Or you can do three things that have a profound change on your employees, your customers, your suppliers, yourself. I became quite adamant that this had to be a cultural transformation because particularly as an investor, the last thing I want you to do is to start on this course of action, start in collocating these mindsets, and then give up on them, because you'll only confuse your employees, your suppliers, your shareholders, your regulators. It's the worst thing you can do, is to start and then kill it.

Cliff Ransom:       I was the Chairman of the Board of Shingo, so I love the Shingo Model.  I used to get in trouble with the professional staff because they would ask me to give speeches all around the country, all over the world.  I would say, “I don’t give a damn whether you ever apply for the Shingo Prize, I just want you to live by the Shingo Model.  And I think everybody should understand the model.”  And then the staff would turn to me and say, “Uh Cliff, you know we make our money by helping people apply for the prize.”  I would say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Cliff Ransom:       It’s like a friend of mine I ran into on the street this morning and she said, “We were one of the 12 finalists for the Deming Prize.  We got interviewed and we just missed it.”  I said to her, “Good” and she looked at me with a stricken look, she works at a hospital.  And I said, “The Deming Prize is not what you want to do.  What you want to do is live up to the Deming Philosophy.  That’s what you want.”  She said, “Okay, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it.”  I said, “If you want me to come out to chat with your folks about why that is an important distinction, I will be happy to do it.”

Michael Webb:   So to me, this is about helping companies learn to think more critically. All the people inside the company need to be enrolled in that effort. And most especially, the senior people. They have to lead it by how they ask questions, how they respect the accomplishments and failures of the people who work for them.

Cliff Ransom:       You know, you talk about inquiring minds; an inquiring mind, by definition, requires the willingness to listen to alternative VCs, to gather data. Toyota says the data will speak to you, but you have to do it with an intention. I was working with LEI, they were doing sort of one of these CEO seminars. By the way, nobody in the lean business has yet broken the code on how to get CEOs to go to seminars. But I said, "You know, John," to John Shook, who's ... Been a dozen people who have been incredibly patient and generous and giving of their time and sensibilities to me, and Shook's one of them. I said, "You know, John, this business about asking questions really comes hard to me. My line is humility does not come easily to me. The idea of asking questions rather than barking orders; I always succeeded in life from the military on up by ... " You know, they'd say, "Take the hill," I'd go take the hill. I might hire a bunch of North Korean mercenaries to do it, but I wouldn't tell them that until I had the flag up there.

Cliff Ransom:       But I said, "Just asking questions is hard." I said, "But I'm really working at it. I'm really trying to do it." And he said, "Yes." He didn't quite say, "Wax on, wax off, little grasshopper," but he said, "Yes, Cliff, I can tell you're w...

Michael Webb:                 B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision-makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have known for many years and who has brought an amazing insight not just to business but to measurement problems and statistical analysis. Bill Bentley, welcome here.

Bill Bentley:                        Thanks Mike. Glad to be here.

Michael Webb:                 You just have this most fascinating background. I want to kind of walk people through it. You got an engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic and then you began as an automation engineer for Procter and Gamble and Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right. I was at Procter and Gamble for quite a while. Then went to Frito-Lay from there.

Michael Webb:                 As a manager at Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right.

Michael Webb:                 And then when we met, you had been hired by Rockwell Automation. Tell us about why they hired you.

Bill Bentley:                        They hired me because I had just lost a job during a downturn. I was in charge of all the industrial automation and electrical engineering at Nabisco and when KKR bought them, they kind of dissolved the company, broke it all up, and Rockwell was a big supplier to us and they called and offered me a job in their sales force to help the sales teams sell to people like me or people who had jobs like the one that I had just left. So it was very interesting. My first reaction to that job offer was actually, "No, I'm not interested in that. I spent my whole life avoiding salespeople. Why would I want to be one?" But after a few weeks, realizing that I was unlikely to get any other work, I called back and changed my mind and that turned out to be a very interesting job and lot of fun and I enjoyed it.

Michael Webb:                 And likewise, I was hired by them in around, trying to remember, I think it was '81 or '82, not at the level where you are at. I wasn't an executive, but I was a sales manager and I was brought in to help their large vaunted sales force of degreed electrical engineers to make this shift. The president of the company, his name will come to me in a moment, was trying to turn Rockwell from a manufacturer of industrial controls sold in brown boxes through industrial distribution, limit switches, push buttons, PLCs, stuff like that. And he wanted, instead of selling the pieces in parts, he wanted to be able to sell integrated systems with all the margin covering the labor and all that, he wanted them to be able to sell solutions. And so I was in the field sales force in the St Louis branch and I met you as one of the guys at corporate who was helping us.

Rockwell had made it's success in the automotive industry. It was a way to automate and better control systems of relays. And now they were trying to move from that on off digital kind of manufacturing environment, into a more higher level control system environment, especially with continuous controls. So that was a fascinating, fascinating time. We worked on, and I think you were involved in, we made the first proposal to a large brewery, Anheuser Busch in St Louis, to use digital automation controls for what had always been controlled in the past by a distributed control system, which was a continuous analog factory control. That was a $20 million project that we bid, we proposed, you remember working on that Bill?

Bill Bentley:                        I do remember it and I remember the sales guys make a whole lot of money, maybe I should do that rather than be an engineer.

Michael Webb:                 Yes indeed. Yes indeed. So from Rockwell, after that, you were a general manager, senior executive at least one engineering firm, right?

Bill Bentley:                        I was, I was general manager of a contract engineering firm in Tennessee and we were actually a captive engineering group for a Procter and Gamble plant, a very large Procter and Gamble manufacturing plant. So I had about a hundred engineers and designers and programmers working for me at that plant.

Michael Webb:                 And then when that tapped out, a lot of us had some difficulties after 9/11, the economy kind of went South and then there was the financial crisis in 2008, so you founded a successful Six Sigma training company for yourself. Tell us about that.

Bill Bentley:                        After that stint, I came to Atlanta to be the CEO of a software company and that's the company that folded when 9/11 hit. So I worked again. And I did start my own consulting business and training business and that business lasted for 18 years. It's still going at a low level, but 18 years is the longest I've ever spent in any company. And it was my own company. So I was happily self-employed and I loved it. It was quite interesting. It started as a community service project to teach people who are out of work, how to do Six Sigma and ended up being a national training and consulting business.

Michael Webb:                 Which is a fantastic outcome. Not many people would be able to make all of these transitions in their careers and then a few years ago I was surprised, shocked and interested to see what you did next. Tell us what you did.

Bill Bentley:                        After 18 years of doing what I was doing, I started to get itchy feet, it started to become routine and I could see that business going down hill slowly. So I actually went back to grad school. I've got a new degree, a masters in applied statistics. I picked a bunch of other courses online and declared myself a data scientist and now I had the credentials to back it up. Went looking for a job and I took a full time job as a data scientist for a very large company here in Atlanta.

Michael Webb:                 And that's fantastic. I don't know, just because you had a passion, you really like the way, the analytical part and the creativity involved in the mathematics of statistics, if I understand that right.

Bill Bentley:                        I did. Right. And what drove me to do that and choose that is sort of my retirement job, I guess you could call it because the stuff that was ...

Michael Webb:     You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste.

Michael Webb:     My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb, and I'm pleased today to bring to you a guest that I have not spoken with before, but because of his background, as you'll see, I'm very excited to have this discussion, and I think there's going to be some pretty interesting discoveries that come out of our conversation. I'm on today with Tripp Babbitt. Tripp is the president of a firm called the 95 Method. Tripp, welcome here.

Tripp Babbitt:         Thank you Michael. Thank you for having me on.

Michael Webb:     Now you're also... Have been involved with the Deming Institute, and remember my audience is mostly executives who are focused in on sales and marketing. Most of them have heard of Deming, but could you just kind of share your background, because as I understand you came from a place very different than people who come into a sales and marketing career typically come from. So tell us where you've been and what's the journey you've been on.

Tripp Babbitt:         Interestingly, I actually started in sales, but-

Michael Webb:     Really? I didn't know that.

Tripp Babbitt:         Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I worked for an industrial distributor in the midwest. Then I got my MBA. I was a manager for an industrial distributor, and I got invited once I became a manager to a seminar by W. Edwards Deming from Allison Transmission, one of his original four-day seminars that he did across the US.

Tripp Babbitt:         I had just completed my MBA and I was expecting kind of more of the same types of stuff with the education I get out of the seminar, and what I got instead was a big smack in the face. Dr. Deming's seminar was pretty much the opposite of everything that I had been taught in my MBA program and is still being taught today in MBA programs throughout the US.

Michael Webb:     Parenthetically, my son just signed up for a very expensive, very prestigious MBA program. I tried to talk him out of it and I couldn't, so we'll make the most of it that we can.

Tripp Babbitt:         Very good. We could talk about that too if you like. But I was really intrigued by the Deming philosophy, so I eventually started my own consulting business and I used the Deming philosophy. It's based off of his system of profound knowledge, which is systems thinking, which I know is near and dear to your heart, theory variation, which is the data, theory of knowledge and psychology.

Tripp Babbitt:         I use that as kind of the basis of what I call, and you mentioned, the 95 Method. That's kind of the short and long of it I guess so to speak, of kind of my story and how I got into this.

Michael Webb:     Many of the people who are in my audience, they've learned about process improvement or process excellence and the Deming philosophy. They got to it through being trained in Six Sigma or in Lean. So it would be great to get your perspective on this I don't know what you would call it, this operational excellence marketplace, because there's several different flavors, and I'd love to understand your perspective of where you sit compared to, for example, people who go at it from a Six Sigma orientation or a Lean orientation or the Shingo Institute.

Tripp Babbitt:         I think you have to have a little bit of history in order to kind of understand. The Deming philosophy in Japan... When Dr. Deming went to Japan in 1950, he basically started a whole new program, and some of the things in his system are profound knowledge. It was the beginning of what would be later called Lean, and I would even say an offshoot of that would be Six Sigma too, because he used Walter Shewhart's control charts.

Tripp Babbitt:         So the base philosophy of Deming to me is what is exactly missing from Lean and Six Sigma. I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, so I went and did that under a lady by the name of Dr. Frony Ward, and I also worked with Dr. Don Wheeler for a little bit in order to get my data smack.

Tripp Babbitt:         So I believe these are Lean, being the Toyota production system in essence is what it's based off of. You got to remember, in Japan Dr. Deming worked in a number of industries, not just the auto industry, and just within the auto industry he not only worked with Toyota, but he also worked with Nissan and... Well, it was Datsun at the time, and then Honda, and then a number of of other companies throughout.

Tripp Babbitt:         So to me Lean got off I think for a long time focused on tools, and the Deming philosophy is just that. It's a philosophy. It's not a method. It's a way of learning, and one of the things I always challenge Lean folks to is so what new tools have you developed, because I always hear about the same old ones.

Tripp Babbitt:         Deming's philosophy was set up for us to continually update and innovate the way that we think about work and product and everything else, and management for that matter.

Michael Webb:     Let's dig into that a little bit, because I agree with you the Deming philosophy, the four fundamental principles, seem to me to be at the root of the tools of Lean, the method of Lean, right, focusing on flow and distinguishing value from waste, and using that as sort of your North Star.

Michael Webb:     But they're also unpinning the tools of Six Sigma, which is much more measurement oriented and statistically oriented, and it also is underpinning the ideas of the Shingo Institute, which is way more management focused. Would you agree with that?

Tripp Babbitt:         I don't know much about the Shingo Institute. I know a little bit more about Six Sigma. I think there are some tools in there that they use, statistical tools, that are unnecessary, matter of fact most of them. But the one tool that I often find even new Green Belts and even Black Belts on occasion, they aren't with Shewhart's control charts, and that's a shame, because that's a very primary tool.

Tripp Babbitt:         As a matter of fact, any organization not using Shewhart's control charts that Dr. Deming made famous are really missing out on an opportunity to look at their data in a refreshing way, and gets to some of the things that you talked about in this podcast about using systems thinking so you can understand what's attributable to a system versus attributable to social causes or the individual.

Michael Webb:     Yes. Absolutely right. What I understand about the Shingo Institute, it's very interesting and it's very compatible with what you're doing, as I understand it, and we'll get to i...

Michael Webb:                 You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

                                                Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and I can't tell you how excited I am to introduce you to my friend, Bud Hyler. Bud, welcome here.

Bud Hyler:                           Thank you.

Michael Webb:                 Please tell the audience a little bit about your background so they have an idea where you're coming from and why I'm so excited.

Bud Hyler:                           Well, it's a combination of two forces. My early training was in physics, so it taught me to be more structured than average. And then my second training came from an MBA with Stanford, which taught me about the customer. So it was combining the structure of physics and the customer orientation of MBA really caused me to bring those two things together. We want to keep the customer focus but add structure. Without structure you can't scale. You can't compete or replicate.

Michael Webb:                 I was going to ask you, why is this important to a CEO, but that word structure says it, because CEOs are about scale. They're about making the organization work, not just make the product work or make the sale work or make the manufacturing work.

Bud Hyler:                           A lot of companies I go see, they had a really bright revenue officer, either marketing or sales, who instinctively got the principles and he was doing the right things. And they got the company humming, so revenue is going up, productivity's going up, but then they left. I mean, the average life expectancy for a job in sales and marketing is what, three to five years or less? So the guy whose instincts were right left. With him left all the principles. Then they hire another marketing and sales person who's more average, who may not get it. And so things start falling apart, because there's no structure in place. They were following the instincts of the leader, and when they left there was no momentum to keep the growth going. If you can't repeat it, then you can't leverage it. And the structure [crosstalk 00:02:41].

Michael Webb:                 Yeah, if you can't articulate it, you can't grasp it. Right. Before we lose this issue, I asked about your background, can you tell us a little bit about some of your business experience where you began to learn how to apply these thinking principles from physics into business problems after business school?

Bud Hyler:                           One of my managers told me, you can tell how fast you're learning by how far back in time you have to look to realize you were stupid. I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of good company experiences, starting with Digital Equipment Corporation, where I ran marketing and sales for the commercial group marketing. There were no constraints. It was a free group, so you would go talk to sales people all the time, and we had a great arrangement. It was so good that the salesmen would introduce me to their accounts as the supervising manager for the company, simply so that when the the account got angry at the salesman due to some mistake, they'd call me. They thought that was the way to lash out. That was great. I'd much rather have them call me than call a competitor.

                                                The first time DEC was selling to a bank, salesman in making a sales call to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and it wasn't going well, because DEC was an engineering company. As he was being asked to leave, he said, "I'm sorry, maybe I just don't understand enough about what you do. Could you explain what the leasing department does?" And as the customer was kind enough to explain it, the salesman said, "Oh, you do financial engineering." "Well, you're right. I engineer financial instruments." "Oh, well I can tell you how to do engineering much better." So it created a tie between DEC products and the customer. When the salesman called me and told me that, it took two days to get it out to the rest of all the salesmen calling on banks. So that's how I learned the power of the linkage between sales and marketing.

Michael Webb:                 This is back in the days when computers were sold as a product, right? And there was a market for computers. People would buy them. I was in that business too, worked for a company a little bit later than the early days of Digital Equipment Corporation, but I remember those days. When I got hired, they trained me to sell computers. They said, "Here's what you got to do. First of all, here's all the features and benefits of our product, this disc drive and this operating system and these interactive terminals and stuff. Now here's what you do. You get a phone and a phone book. Call people up until you find someone who is going to buy a computer."

                                                Because I remember this diagram they had. It was a bowl of water. It was boiling, and the little bubbles would start to reach. When they get to the top, at the top of the water, they burst, then they buy something. You find one of these bubbles on the way up and show them your product and you're likely to get an order, because our product was better than IBM's. And that's as sophisticated as it got, but that company almost went out of business a few years later, and they had to teach the whole sales force how to begin learning and understanding what customers really, what problems they were trying to solve and attach our value to that. And that was a huge transition.

Bud Hyler:                           Yeah. I learned so much at DEC. I remember we had a great salesman. His name was Ken Cannizzaro. He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He had just inherent people skill, communications capability, people trusted him, so he made quota easily in the first part of the year. Well, I was so stupid that I put him in front of the branch in New York and said, "Here, do what Ken Cannizzaro does. Well, that was so stupid. That was like telling me to become an NBA basketball center. I don't have the skills to do what Ken Cannizzaro did. There I learned the hard way that I can't simply replicate what the best salesman does, I have to transform that into something the average salesman can do also. And it can't be all skill-based. We had a lot of those.

             ...

Michael Webb:                 B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision-makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:                 Hello, this is Michael Webb and I am thrilled today to be able to introduce you to Bob Lambert. Bob is the president and I believe co-founder of Samurai Business Group. Is that right, Bob?

Bob Lambert:                     Yep.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. Boy, we've known each other since my days back in Chicago more than 10 years ago. Please tell the audience what Samurai Business Group does and how you got to this point.

Bob Lambert:                     Well, thanks Michael, first of all, for having me on. You're right, we've been friends and trying to conquer this thing called sales and metrics and all the rest of it, but Samurai Business Group was started up in '01. It was my fourth startup company, which is no longer a startup, and for the last close to 20 years what we've done is flipped the coin on the whole sales process, and that is about how people buy versus how you sell them. I jokingly tell people today, I feel like Willie Nelson, that it a 25 year overnight hit. Because all of a sudden he was a big ... We've been talking about this for over 20 years and all of a sudden we're seeing the direction of things starting to change at the buyer's journey.

Bob Lambert:                     It's about the buy and all that stuff. But what we set out to do, Michael, back then was to change really what classic sales training had been. My partner and I had been through a lot of sales training, a lot of leadership training, and we just kept thinking it was going against what we really basically want to do, and that was relationships with human beings. Because when you boil it all down, and the whole essence of what we're talking about here is exactly that, because human beings are buying something. And so through neuroscience and behavioral science and a lot of studies, not our own stuff because it wasn't self-serving, is taking the viewpoint of the buyer when they're making this decision to buy. What that really started to manifest itself in, there is a process. There's a system people go through all over the planet pretty much all the same type of way that they go through it, but there's no two people that do it the same way, and you won't do it the same way a second time.

Bob Lambert:                     So there's a discreet way that you go through this process and we blocked that out in our buying decision model. We've had the privilege, the honor now of being affiliated with DePaul University for over 18 years and their Center for Sales Leadership, that is the number one sales curriculum in the country now, has been for some time leading the charge. When we started with them only 30 colleges and universities had even a sales class or curriculum. Today there's over 160, so we're very proud of the fact that we were invited in to be a part of that curriculum and then also invited in about six years ago to put together a semester-long case based on the buying decision model that we created.

Michael Webb:                 It's a very successful track record. I've already got three questions here in my head I want to ask you about. Let's start with this one that we had mentioned before we got on the show here. The idea is, there's been some substantial sea changes in the market, in the economy in the last 20 years, and as you're pointing out, the way that you sell seems to have changed. What are the big changes that you've seen, and why are they such challenges?

Bob Lambert:                     Well, without question, 1995 was a pivotal turning point. When we published the book in 2010, How to Put the Wind Back in your Sails, it really was an introduction of how the internet has impacted sales. It's really mitigated the whole sales process, the whole upfront process. Up until '95 if you want to buy something, generally speaking a buyer would ... I'm talking about the marketplace and corporations. Business to business, they would have to invite salespeople in to get the information because they had the keys to the kingdom.

Bob Lambert:                     That turned dramatically with the internet, with all the Google and the information that's available now. Buyers know more about you, your products, your services, your competition, your pricing before you even walk in the door. So you better be prepared when you're walking in there to find out through a discovery process what is it that the buyer is really looking for? They'll tell you, if you'll let them. Our method facilitates that. When you start thinking about focusing on human beings and not on products or services, that was a big tipping point, because buyers today want to understand what you're going to do for them. What's in this for me if I do business with you? They're not doing any business with anybody they don't trust. So fundamentally what we get to is the relationship, because corporations don't buy, people do. They buy for their own reasons and they buy in their own self-interest.

Bob Lambert:                     And so through the body of research and the work we've done, and of course thousands of people we've had through the program, this becomes really a self-revealing thing, once people start to realize when you get on that side of the table and you make this a joint thing, it's not a we/they thing, it's us versus them, it's we together are going to help to find some kind of a resolution, a solution to some of these issues you're having. What we've identified is three apparent reasons why somebody will even have a conversation with you that lead to three what we call compelling reasons why they'll buy. We know now through empirical data and also studies now that people buy do buy emotionally; they intellectually justify that decision. What that looks like is basically that when you are emotionally connected to something and you can talk about any of a number of things that you're emotionally connected to, even the most hardcore procurement agents I've interviewed and been with will relate that, because when I start to share with them, the salespeople have called in, the ones you bought from what is distinct about them?

Bob Lambert:                     Invariably it's a human connection. It's an emotional connection that they go to, why they buy from these people. It could be that they've got my back, they always have my interest at heart, they bring me new information. They are constantly thinking about us and ways to improve the business, outside of the scope of what they may even provide. I published an article. This is a freebie for anybody who wants it, called Beyond Trusted Advisor, Becoming a Trusted Asset. In...