Ep: 26 - The Secret to B2B Success- Don’t Fall for This Sales Trap!

In this episode of The Sales Edge Podcast, host Celeste dives deep into the challenges and misconceptions in B2B sales with special guest Mike Mulfelder, a seasoned fractional head of sales and Gap Selling advocate with over 35 years of experience. If you’ve been stuck in the same sales cycle or questioning why your pipeline forecasts are off, this episode will hit home.

What You’ll Learn:

• Business Acumen Blind Spots: Why understanding how your customer makes money is the ultimate sales advantage and the key to building trust.
• Pipeline Purge & Rebuild: How Mike has taken underqualified pipelines, reduced them by up to 90%, and rebuilt them into revenue-driving machines.
• Stop the BANT Obsession: Why traditional qualification methods like BANT don’t work and how to shift your focus to uncovering actionable problems.
• Tech Won’t Save You: The pitfalls of relying on AI and technology to mask broken processes, and why fixing the fundamentals is essential for scaling.
• The Competitive Replacement Myth: Why trying to replace a competitor is often a trap that distracts teams from truly winnable deals.

Key Moments:

• [00:05:00] Business Acumen 101: Mike shares the importance of understanding your buyer’s financial ecosystem and how it influences purchasing decisions.
• [00:10:00] The Catalyst Question: Why identifying the catalyst for change is more critical than tracking surface-level pipeline metrics.
• [00:19:00] Competitive Replacement Realities: The hard truths about why most competitive replacements fail and how to approach these deals more strategically.
• [00:29:00] Call Coaching & Accountability: How a single bad sales call can derail progress—and why leadership must prioritize coaching and honest accountability.

Takeaways for Sales Leaders:

• Don’t confuse pipeline volume with qualified opportunities.
• Technology isn’t a fix-all; it amplifies your processes—good or bad.
• Focus on foundational strategies that align with your growth objectives, rather than flashy shortcuts that won’t move the needle.

Mike’s Sales Edge:

Mike’s unyielding honesty and commitment to empowering others set him apart. He shares why being straightforward, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the true mark of a sales leader who wants their team to succeed.

PS: Check out Mike’s recent article on the “Magic Bean” myth in sales to dive deeper into how tech obsession is steering teams off course.

This episode will challenge the way you think about sales strategy and leave you asking the tough questions about your own processes. Don’t miss it!

The Secret to B2B Success- Don’t Fall for This Sales Trap!

[00:00:00] I've been in a fractional head of sales for 18 months. Uh, I've been in B2B sales for 35, 36 years, which means I've been doing it longer than most of the people who are watching this on the planet.

In your experience, what specific aspects of business acumen do salespeople lack? You need to understand. The business you're selling to how they make money, because how they make money is the language that they speak and why or how they will buy whatever it is that you're selling. I genuinely want people to be like wildly successful in whatever it is that they're doing, whether it's sales or HR or writing books or playing baseball, whatever it is, I, I, I want people to be successful.

So nobody walks away from a conversation. I don't think from me and says, I don't think Muhlfelder was being straight. What sales myth [00:01:00] would you like to bust?

Hello, it's Celeste on the Sales Edge Podcast. I'm joined by someone who's going to have an amazing, drop some, uh, probably what would we call, um, like mirror moments where you're going to be looking at yourself in the mirror asking, what's going on? Is this me? This resonates with me and I need to change.

I'm joined by Mike Mulfelder. We met on LinkedIn. You've been a longtime Gapselling supporter. Sometimes when you write, I feel like it's he in my brain. We share, we share a lot of common beliefs. I wanted to bring you on because what you've recently been posting about it has resonated and I felt like everybody needs to hear it.

So tell us a little bit about your fractional work, where you are, um, your own self intro, and then I'm going to dive into some questions. Thank you. Yeah, [00:02:00] we, uh, we, we do seem to share a brain, uh, because the same thing I'll watch your videos or see things that you that you and and the folks at ASG post It's like yeah, right, of course um So I am I've been in 18 months.

Uh, i've been in B2B sales for 35, 36 years, which means I've been doing it longer than most of the people who are watching this have been on the planet. I recognize I'm the oldest person on every single call that I'm on now. Uh, I'm even older than Keenan. So, um, I've been in sales leadership roles for about 20 years and in tech for 30.

So all that means is that there's not a lot that happens there that like lands on in front of me that is new or surprising. Kind of, you know, I haven't seen before. I haven't seen before. Yep. Um, and when I do, it's exciting by the way, because that means I get to learn something. I love, and I love learning things.

Uh, I've been working, [00:03:00] uh, with a range of clients, again, mostly tech SAS tech companies between, uh, pre revenue and about 30 million in revenue, uh, very focused on sales process, sales acumen, um, how deals are qualified. Almost remedial in the approach. I don't mean that in a in a derogatory way. But what we found over and over and over again is coming into these these organizations and the pipeline and in forecast is way off.

And it's way off because the deals aren't qualified. So we had, we have one occasion where we took 90 percent of the pipeline down, rebuilt it in six weeks, by the way, which was awesome. Uh, with qualified pipe, we had another one where it was like 70 percent had to take it all down, rebuild it, but you build a better mechanism and doing that and get people working on winnable deals.

And then of course, uh, to your point, I write a lot. [00:04:00] Um, Um, and lately I've been writing a lot about kind of the state of B2B sales, and I feel largely responsible for it because I've been doing it for so long. I was in, uh, I was a pioneer in CRM before it was called CRM. It was technology enabled selling when I started, which became Salesforce Automation, which became CRM.

Um, And, and I think that we have created a generation or now two generations of sales leaders and salespeople who we drifted away from the fundamentals. And we need to get back to that to fix the underlying process problems before we layer technology on it. Yes. Love all of that, and we are going to dive into it.

So my first question for you is, isn't around. is around business acumen for salespeople. You often emphasize the importance of business acumen for salespeople. So in your experience, what specific aspects of [00:05:00] business acumen do salespeople lack? Like, why is this so lacking this business acumen for salespeople?

It's rudimentary thing. Hey, we know all about our product, but when it comes to our customers, we have very surface level. Um, Information for our reps, for our teams. And it translates to not having that business acumen and therefore customers don't take you seriously. They don't look at you as a trusted advisor because you're not speaking a language.

So tell us about your importance or your emphasis on the importance of business acumen for salespeople. You need to understand how a business, the business that you're selling to, how they make money because how they make money is the language that they speak and why or how they will buy whatever it is that you're selling.

When I started in sales, I sold payroll for ADP, right? And initially it was, you know, small, medium businesses. So I like, I knew every single. Pizza shop in in and [00:06:00] around Manchester, New Hampshire, and I knew the ones that were opening the ones that were closing and I knew how they made money. That's easy, but now fast forward many years later, and I had a team that was selling to higher ed and I said, how does how does a college university make money?

I don't know. Well, they have tuition, financial aid, if it's a, you know, D1 university, they've got television rights for their sports. They've got research grants, they have alumni funding, and it, so all, there are all these ways that the school makes money, and you need to understand all those different ways and that the constituency that you're selling to, which of those ways is important to them.

Like, Oh, Oh, I hadn't thought about that, but that's how they're going to buy. And, and, and that goes, that, that is all part of business acumen. Um, and by the way, we now have these amazing AI tools like chat, GPT, perplexity AI, [00:07:00] where I can say, how does, you know, how does general motors make money? General Motors doesn't make money selling cars.

They make money from financing, right? At least they used to. Maybe that, that may be wrong now. The point stays the same. It's not about, it's not about the car. It's about the financing. Yeah, so I'm finding, I'm finding one of the number one things that reps are asking me, aside from What questions do I ask during discovery?

Isn't around the business acumen of the problems they solve and what their buyer's environment looks like. So Every day someone reaches out to me and asks me about the problem identification chart And when we take a step back, it's this underlying lack of business acumen And I i'm here to tell you like in an active seller seat.

I don't sell into one industry So every single call I have I am learning about like msps Ease Uh, civil engineering. Now I'm over here [00:08:00] in digital marketing. So I'm having to up the business, my business acumen. If you sell into one persona, one industry, it becomes a lot easier because there's a common language.

And as you stated, the tools out there are at our fingertips, but what I'm finding is reps have no clue. I had one reach out in property management and, you know, I'm spinning my wheels thinking, okay, what is, um, an owner of an apartment complex care about? Well, probably turnover. Uh, their occupancy, but probably profit margin, , really all of these things that relate.

Relate to, yeah. To their p and l and what they're looking for and investors, but getting reps to that higher level, there's this like block, and it totally stems from this like lack of business acumen and this lazy approach that we take of, well, if they have an interest, I'm going to be able to sell them something.

Right. And that, well, that, that just isn't, [00:09:00] I, I don't like using, um, words like always and never, but I will here. It never, that never works. Right. You, you have to understand if the buyer is in a situation where they have a, have a problem and is the problem untenable or heading to a place where it is untenable.

Because if not, they're not buying anything. And this is what I think for me is, uh, I think one of the hardest things to get sales, marketing, everybody to wrap their head around. So in the simplest form, and this is all part of my own personal journey. We don't change because we're in pain. We don't go to the doctor when we're in pain.

Businesses can be in pain for decades. without taking any action. So it's our job [00:10:00] to diagnose. Is the pain untenable? Is there something that there's a market I can't enter? There's a, there's a competitor that's pushing me out. Um, that, you know, my revenues have dropped to the point where it's impacting my stock, whatever it is.

And I absolutely now must address and fix the situation. And that has to be diagnosed at qualification. And confirmed discovery. Otherwise you end up with this mess in your pipeline and no amount of AI is going to fix this, by the way, it's not, in fact, and I wrote about this recently. So when I first started selling tech back in 19, 1995, um, again, everybody on the calls, like 1995, my parents hadn't even met yet.

Um, That's not cool. I was a sophomore in high school. I mean, uh, you're, you're old. Um, so there [00:11:00] was a consultant. I can't remember which of the big firms he worked for, but he wrote, this is when we were automating workflows and he wrote that, um, automating a bad process will just make you worse faster. So you have to fix the process.

And this was like ERP stuff. Well, now fast forward today to AI. If you don't fix the underlying process, you'll get worse at hyper speed. You'll actually like just blow this whole thing up. You must, you have to fix the process, which means you have to fix what's an MQL legit. That means working with marketing.

It means understanding and teaching your sales team what the ideal opportunity profile looks like by persona by problem by Industry sector how they qualify an opportunity. And by the way, if you're using bant or anim, please i'm I'm channeling [00:12:00] keen and I know this please stop right now. Do not use it bant is 70 years old It's older than me.

Stop using it. Just don't medic is wonderful For the sales process, but it doesn't qualify an opportunity. I'm happy to help. I have a very simple methodology. We put it into eight different companies. It works to qualify the opportunity and make sure that you're talking to somebody who can and will buy not solving personal pain.

They've been directed by an executive to actually fix the problem. We don't ask budget because you know what, when you ask somebody budget, you're asking, well, you're asking them to lie to you, right? Cause they're either going to take everybody in sales, right? You know, what's your budget. They're either going to say, I'm not allowed to tell you that, or they're going to make up a number.

Because they don't want to say, well, if I tell him it's 100, 000, Celeste is going to tell me that her training is 100, 000 like that. So they make up some bogus number. So don't ask them [00:13:00] if, if the problem, if we confirm the problem, that there's a catalyst, something significant that happened. To the business that made the person talk to you and they were directed by a senior level executive unless they themselves are the senior level Executive stop because you're not selling anything and if you're looking at pipeline right now or you're doing the forecast call Ask your rep what happened that put this person in contact with us not the business problem What happened meaning celeste went to mike and said?

Sales people don't know what the hell they're doing. They're screwing up every deal. Get your shit together. And if you don't have it together in 30 days, you're done. Boom. I have it. That's a catalyst. Now I can get into the why, which is the business problem. Who told, who above Celeste said, yeah, you got to fix this or we're going to [00:14:00] start firing people all over the place.

Got to be a C level officer, SVP, maybe the investor. And then when do you need to be in production? Not what are you buying? When do you need to be in production? And then you get the, Oh, we need to fix it yesterday. I don't have a time machine. You don't have a time machine. Realistically, when do you need to be in production?

It has to be an approximate date. Preferably with something that happens if you miss the date. That's what a qualified opportunity looks like. Otherwise, you're not buying anything. So when you're doing your forecast, ask those questions. If your average sales cycle times are 63 days and you have a deal that's 117 days old, that's a red flag.

If it's 370 days old, whoa, like how, how is that in the forecast? And this is what I see over and over and over again. And by the way, I was that guy. I was that sales leader until I, until I got. [00:15:00] Same. So this is what I'm seeing as well. And it's, it's a lack of inspection because as you know, when you start peeling back the layers.

It becomes real shitty and then it is very hard for a sales leader to determine what has to take precedence. How do I fix this? It's almost like you're learning to fly the plane while it's in the air. And that's difficult because it involves you rolling up your sleeves, getting really messy, having some hard conversations, having to make change.

And it totally disrupts what is happening within the organization. What is a temporary disruption, which is what I come up against of like, Ooh. I don't know. That's a lot of change. And if this, if the senior level, like you said, isn't on board with that, it's not going. Yeah, it's, it's actually, I, I don't think it's a, a problem of inspection necessarily.

I think it's a problem of inspecting the wrong things. Well, it's a surface [00:16:00] level discussion of. Why should this, why is this person here? Why should they buy? Oh, they don't have our product. And the sales leader taking it at face value of like, okay, all right. Versus whoa, whoa, whoa. What is happening in the organization?

Because they don't have our product. How is that showing up? Talk to me about their business. What are their goals? Where were they? Where did they want to go? I mean, it is having, I just had a discovery this morning where we are all over the place because it's not cut and dry, it is really getting in the weeds of like now, like.

So microscopic. I think the problem is conversion by stage, but I need to figure out what stage and is it just a few reps? Like it's getting that nitty gritty to figure out where those tiny tweaks are that are going to have the most impact for a specific metric. Yeah. So my, this has become my favorite story, if you will.

Because I think it resonates across industries and it's the competitive replacement. [00:17:00] And again, I carried a bag for 15 years. I, so I did, I did this. And then I managed teams where I had deals in my pipeline that were competitive replacement. And the light bulb kind of went off. It was a few years ago. So I'm still VP of sales.

And we actually started to change the way we qualified competitive replacement because, and especially in the, in the SAS world. We know, no, like empirically. That there's very few situations where somebody will really change. I mean, churn rates are like, yeah, it's like 10%. Right. So you're not talking about companies that were there where it's like 30, 40, 50 percent sure it's a small number.

So when you're, when you're talking to someone who's like, Oh, well, we're using a calm ocean sales and you know, we don't, they're not doing a great job. So yeah, we're going to change their, their support's not really good or they're very expensive. And the rep goes, [00:18:00] Ooh, Yeah, I have a deal. And they, and then they go and they talk to everybody in the team.

Hey, who's, who's done a replacement at CalmOcean sales. And you know, now they're on the forecast call and the VP say, Hey, anybody on anybody done CalmOcean sales? Oh yeah. I saw them here and they did this and this, and this is like, but nobody says, Hey, just out of curiosity, what's going to happen when your contact goes to the CFO and says, Oh, we're, we're changing off a CalmOcean sales for CFO says, let me call CalmOcean sales and let them know that in CalmOcean sales is.

No, no, no, please don't go. I'll give you 30 percent off. CFO says, cool, 30 percent off and I don't have to incur any change costs. Done. I don't care. Oh, my, my team's unhappy with support. Could you guys do something about that? Great. Thanks. So they don't change. They use your quote to reduce the price of the current vendor.

And I know everybody's going to come at me like, Oh, Mike, let me tell you a [00:19:00] story about the competitive replacement that I did. Okay, tell me the story about the 10 that you lost. Because that's what's happening. And that's what happened that I, I, I've sat in those meetings. In the executive meetings where someone says, Hey, we have a proposal to change this.

And we talk about it in the executive meeting and we go, Well, why are we changing? Oh, because of this problem, this problem. Okay. Hey, um, Joe, can you take that problem? Sam, can you take that problem? Hey, CFO, can you call this vendor and let them know that if they don't fix it, we're going to, we're, we're ripping them out.

And the problem goes away.

It's fun. It's, it's, it's what you inspect in the pipeline. And by the way, you can have an AI tool that says it's going to close because we've, uh, we've had 10 activities in the last three days and we've got all these emails back and forth and, and, and, you know, we delivered a proposal and they said the proposal looks great and we've got procurement involved.[00:20:00]

So all the, all those signals are there. Hey, yeah, we could, we can forecast that deal, but nobody ever actually said, yeah, but has anybody talked to the CFL yet? Or does anybody like, does anybody know what the relationship is between the CEO of this company and the CEO of the vendor or the competitor? Hey, did anybody look to see that they're owned by the same, controlled by the same PE firm?

I know you're laughing. This is, Celeste, this is, this is the story. I know, I know, I see it and hear it every day, and it's, sometimes I want to crawl under my, under my covers, but I think you have a good segue into the who. Is supposed to be doing this. So common sales leadership failures. You've shared insights on how many sales leaders are failing their teams today, especially when it comes to a lack of coaching.

So talk to us, like, what are those key mistakes you see sales leaders making as it relates to [00:21:00] just this? The big, the biggest one? They buy into the bullshit. I'm sorry. Like, and again, I, I, I, I can say this because I are one. I've done it. I sat in the chair until I realized, hold on just a second. My job is to be as unemotional about the deal as I can possibly be.

To look at it and say, Celeste, you don't have a deal here. You need to stop, go somewhere where you can sell something. And if you, now, maybe we talk about it, we come up with it. Yeah, there's one more, one more play that we can run before we walk away. So yes, go run that play. But when I say you're done, you're done.

It's one of the first things I tell my teams when I, when I start in a business unit or an organization. My job is to tell you when you're done in a deal and to send the breakup letter. Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it for the following reasons. We can't continue from when we're done.

The job of the sales leader is to look [00:22:00] as unemotionally as possible at the deal and inspect the things that will get the prospect to buy. We're determined there is no deal here. We, it was not properly qualified. I'm not indicting anybody. It's not the SDRs AEs fault. We, we, we will retrain them, but until we get to a point where we're working on qualified opportunities and we have, we can solve the problem through our technology, not through making it something that it's going to do in the future, but like we can actually solve the problem now.

We have to stop. And by the way, if anybody's like really not sure if this is like really what's going on in the world, we've, we've, we're, we've gone through a two year experiment, if you will. Sociology, business sociology experiment where we've laid off tens of [00:23:00] thousands of salespeople. Theoretically, if I lay off a thousand salespeople in my organization and I redistribute their territory.

Then I should see sales reps All making their number right fewer sales people with more opportunity more territory And instead we're still seeing close rates of their own 25 percent or less Which by the way before there wasn't before we had technology when we were working off of pay phones and manila folders 25 close rate would get you fired.

Just saying. Uh, so so that's one And, and the second is that we see sales teams still making like 47 to 62 percent of the teams making quota. So the problem has to be somewhere underneath. It has to be in the process itself. So we have to actually step back and say, okay, how do we fix the process before we start layering on more technology to this, [00:24:00] because all the technology does is it continues to hide the problem.

Yes. It is like the band aids that my daughter, my five year old is obsessed and My daughter was like that. She had band aids on everything. She has hundreds and it's just band aids. Masking it, right? And I'm, I'm totally masking. I have a hip injury. It requires surgery for a second time. And I'm over here band aiding it because six weeks on crutches, when I walk my daughter to school to and from is like not, not in the cards for me.

So I will continue to limp if I run, which I don't do. So I'm band aiding the situation because it's not. Like, I'm not mobile, I'm not, it's not intenable or intolerable. And so I use the fixes, the salves and the bombs and the CBD and Aleve, whatever it is. But in a sales org, especially those that are trying to scale, which is always interesting in my [00:25:00] conversations, like, all right, you're at 30 million.

Now you want to get to 60 next year, but we're not even going to attain the 30 this year, and now you want to get to 60. Oh, and 90 and now your exit because you have to have a certain valuation. Like, help me understand. We're not even performing down here to get, like, to the 1st rung. But we just have these lofty goals and if we add more AI and training and oh, now we're coaching.

Coaching what? Coaching to what? Listen, I, I, I, I don't remember, I, I think it was one of my friends used to say, I can want all I want, but it doesn't change what I want. Like, you act like you're actually going to have to do the work. I don't know. I I, I know you, you can't lose weight going to the Chinese buffet.

You can't. It doesn't. You just can't. No, you can't. People often say, so my husband's a Ironman tri triathlete. Oh, good. Perfect. T typically in Ironman every year. This year I told him, Hey dude, this is my year. Like I'm [00:26:00] focusing on my business. Uh, so you're gonna, this is a no Ironman year, which he was fine with.

Um, he still trains very hard. Yeah, but that's the point. Like he puts in a training path and a plan. I mean, we both do, we're both athletes and you very rarely see change. It is like so incremental, but then all of a sudden it's months go by and you've lost a pound, you've lost body weight, your endurance has changed because all that repetition adds up.

But he's like, not going to go out and do 140 mile race tomorrow. He has to build up to that. He hires a coach. He has a nutrition plan. Fuel, all of that, the weather, the bike, the equipment, the data, the stats that he looks at. And it's like, we're we sales leaders that I talked to have all these shiny bells and whistles, right?

All the sales force dashboards and the reporting, and this is where we are. And I'm like, what [00:27:00] about deeper? What about deeper than that? What is actually happening on a call? Like, Ooh, I don't review calls. We just look at their deals, right? And if you're gonna buy a piece of technology, buy the technology for call coaching and listen to the calls.

You have to listen. You don't have to listen to every call. You don't have to listen to the entire call. Get a script, the script, get a tell you a keyword. Like I just wanna hear every time that, that they say, dog, okay, boom. Every time it comes up, I want to hear it. Every time they say the, excuse me, say the word price.

I I'm gonna keyword in on price and see what was the conversation 10 seconds before, 10 seconds after. How did my rep handle it? I will tell you, I I, I had a, uh, I won't disclose the company. We had a BDR. Um, he was not very effective at his job, and we had a call coaching tool and, um, I used to, I love, I used to love listening to calls on the air, on my, on the airplane.

Right? Because it's tech talk. What else are you going to do? What else? [00:28:00] Watch a movie? Um, so I'm listening to a call. And when I tell you this is the worst sales call I have ever heard in my life, it was the worst call I've ever heard in my life. And I'd already told his boss, I mean, I wanted him off the phone.

I landed, and I was 20 minutes to the office from the airport. And I said, when I get to the office, If he is on the phone, I'm going to fire him. And maybe you, I was serious, get to the office. We sit down the three of us. It turns out he didn't want to be a BDR. He hated being a BDR. His friend got him a job at the company, and that was the only job that was available.

You know what he wanted to do? He wanted to sit with his, with his earbuds in, listen to music in QA code. That was what he wanted to do. So we said, awesome, you know, we have an open, an opening in QA right now. We walked him across the office, sat him down, he actually already knew how to do it, [00:29:00] put his earbuds in, and he went to work.

Two years later, he was still doing that job. Do you, I, I, I shudder to think of how many calls he had that we didn't listen to. How many deals we lost. So where does this stem from? Like this. Leadership accountability, because we've kind of gone up the rung, right? Kind of at the skills layer. And now we're at this middle, what's happening with the coaching, but this like leadership accountability, like you've talked about the need for leaders to take accountability when teams underperform.

So who's holding those leaders accountable or how do you hold yourself accountable as a leader? Well, a lot of it is self accountability, right? And as a leader, that, that should be in the first or second thing we talk about when we describe ourselves. Um, We bow to pressure. And you know the pressure from the investors or the shareholders or from the CEO or whatever Board, yeah, and the [00:30:00] board right instead of saying you want us to grow 50 Nobody in our industry has ever grown 50.

The most we've ever grown is 20 I'm not saying that I can't grow 50%. However, if you want me to grow 50%, here are the things that I'm going to have to have for that to happen. I'm going to have to have this in the product. I'm going to have to have ASG train all the salespeople and have it built into I'm gonna have to have noted analytics.

Yeah, i'm doing i'm doing shameless plugs for you guys totally I have all of these things have to be There I have to have. Um, Uh, both my my my regular bdr team and an outsource bdr team. I have to have 500 000 a year to do events We have to do better keyword searching and actually change our entire SEO.

Like all that [00:31:00] stuff has to happen. And if we stick the landing, we can grow 50%. But I'm not going to grow 50 percent because I hired 10 more salespeople. In fact, what will probably happen is instead of growing 20%, I'll probably only grow 10 percent because now we're all distracted on training people and we've divvied up territories and my top two reps quit because I, because I brought in new salespeople and they can't make money and, and, and.

So it's like, But that's our job as leaders to say, listen, this is the reality of the situation. And yeah, maybe, maybe the investors don't like that answer. Maybe the board doesn't like that answer, but I would much rather face the consequences of being honest about that than face the consequences of saying, I'll do 50 percent and then deliver 20 percent and getting fired.

And I had a CFO, by the way, who, who tried to come back to me on this because I missed my growth objective. Again, I won't mention the company and I and he said [00:32:00] you signed up for this number. You said you were going to do this I said yes, and I said here are the things that we needed For that to happen.

We needed customer marketing. We needed dedicated Uh customer sales reps we needed like these three things marketing needed to deliver these objectives They didn't none of that happened. None of it So if none of that happened, how are you holding me to account? He got with, uh, the technical term is a homina.

Homina, Like he didn't have an answer to that. It's, it's interesting. I spent a lot of time in discovery and because I peel back so many layers, often the initial outreach is if it's inbound, we're looking for straightening. And I'm like, Hmm. I'm going to set that aside. So on a recent call, right? I looked at the [00:33:00] website.

We're looking for training. I think the online option and I'm like, we're going to put that on a shelf over here and then I dive into discovery and I get to a place that you're talking about, which is. Oh, marketing doesn't know your ICP. So that's not built out. You don't know what personas you sell into.

There's no marketing spend that's actually happening to drive inbound. Your website isn't aligned to your ICP or any business problems. You don't know what business problems you solve. Like it just keeps going. And all of a sudden it shifts to a people process strategy structure. And now we're talking about consulting.

Which is a very expensive, but as you were saying in the kind of this whole conversation, if that found date, nobody builds a house and like starts top down. Nobody does that. Can't do that. Build the foundation. So people usually have sticker shop or like, I didn't, I just came here for training. I was like, I cannot sell you training that is not going to solve where you're looking to go, which is the exit in five years, this growth strategy, bringing [00:34:00] on new people.

Like you do not have a foundation built against any of this. And I think it goes to what you're saying, but that leader being able to take that and say, Oof, they're right. I am not capable of building all this. This is not in my wheelhouse. I've not done it before. I don't have the resources, et cetera. And to sell that internally with the impacts of, I'm not going to get to this number if I don't build a foundation.

Yeah. But people aren't, I think people are scared to have that, like come to Jesus with themselves of because I'm the CRO or VP of sales, head of sales, it should be my responsibility to have known and to have built all of this. Right. But, but you, and I love, and I like the house analogy, right? And this is what, again, I, I, I, this is, I've lived this, there's water in the basement, so we're going to put a new porch on the house.

We're not going to fix the, the hole in the roof that's making the water come into the basement. No, no, because we want to be able to sell the house. We're going to put a porch on and the house is going to look even [00:35:00] better. Yeah, until they do the inspection and they see water in the basement. So you actually, you have to fix these problems.

You can't, businesses that scale. I mean, yeah, there's the occasional business that catches fire. And I mean, but that's like, those are rarer than rare. They're not even unicorns. They're like unicorns with leprechauns riding on them, under the rainbow. Right. And I think about like when I was at Siebel, Siebel was a rocket.

Yeah. For early, early CRM company, 1997, 1998. Everybody in that company was aligned. Everybody was aligned on the mission of the company. Everybody followed the sales process. Everything was put into the system. It was like, there was no variability to that. Oh, you don't want to do it because you're the number one rep.

Great. Mike, thanks for staying. We'll bring in somebody else. Like that was how it was done. And [00:36:00] when you look at company after company, after company, the ones that are successful are the ones that are almost maniacal about the process. And everybody follows the process so that we can get data that's that that's actually logical.

We know what the anomalies are and we don't just buy technology because we think it's going to fix the problem. Technology doesn't fix the problem. The, the, the human fixes the problem and then we apply the technology to it. Yeah. And by the way, as it relates to training, find me the, the, the professional anything athlete, actor, I don't, whatever it is that, that got to their level without trainers and training and a c, cfo, CFOs should be a CPA.

How do you get to be a CPA through training and, and by, and then you have to actually have to [00:37:00] do the job for a while before you get to be a CFO. Like you have to, you like it seems so basic. And then when I, when I hear, and I, or when I've had people, you know, my training budget cut, it's like, well, how do you, how do you want me to get these people better?

Well, Mike, that's, you know how to do this, so you should be training them. Well, that's great, but you want me to train them and be on sales calls? And do forecast calls and do one on ones and and and it's like yeah, but Something's gonna something's gonna hit the floor and it's probably probably going to be training.

Yeah, definitely And a shameless plug you recently wrote something about the magic bean concept So I will link it in the show notes here so people can go and read it a heavy stance on what's happening when um leaders Focus on technology and it won't fix your sales problems. So very much in line of what we're talking about here.

And I've loved our conversation. I know we could talk for hours and hours, but I always end on two questions that I didn't [00:38:00] prepare you for off the cuff here. What sales myth would you like to bust? Uh, I think you said one earlier. We'll see if you say it again. Sales myth. I would like to bust. Well, one of them is the, is the myth of the blue bird.

That's that. Tell us about this myth. Tell me more. What do you mean by blue? The deal? Yeah, I, you know, the deal, the lead just came in and I'm gonna close it. Yeah, it's not when you start digging into it, you find out that somebody talked to them two years ago, delivered a proposal. I've worked on it before or it's a former employee and they've now landed somewhere else.

Like there's, so there's no such thing as a, I don't think there's really much of a bluebird, but I think the other myth is that you can do a competitive replacement consistently. I think, I [00:39:00] think that's a, we should stop that myth right now. Yep. All right. And then the second question is, you've been in the business for a long time.

You got a lot of experience behind you, seen and done a lot of things. What is your sales edge? Like what is unique about you that you would call your sales edge? I haven't really thought about that. Um, I think one of them is that, um, I'm never unkind ever, ever. I, it's not, it's not in my makeup to be unkind, but I also, when somebody asked me a question, I give them an answer.

I don't have an, I legit, legit don't have an agenda and, and, and people I've learned people find that intimidating sometimes. But I genuinely want people to be like wildly successful in whatever it is that they're doing, whether it's sales or HR or writing books or playing baseball, whatever it is. I want people to [00:40:00] be successful.

So nobody walks away from a conversation. I don't think from me and says, I don't think Moffat was being straight with me. I, I, I feel that that's, that's what I owe to people. And I, and I appreciate when people give me honest feedback like that. I, I had a meeting last week where, um, as part of the process, uh, for, for this, for this role, I had to do a role play.

And this was fabulous. I wrote about it briefly on LinkedIn. After I did my presentation, they put me on mute. And they let me listen to the banter on the of the observers on what I did right and what I where I needed improvement. And then they came back to me and gave me the feedback. I was like, this is amazing.

Nobody gives executives feedback. It was awesome. So feedback is often hard to take because we've placed an emphasis on it. That [00:41:00] it's like something personal instead of looking at it as a place of growth, an opportunity to learn. You got to check your ego too. And I, I mean, I've been humbled. anybody else.

Tell me about it. Imagine working with Kenan, that direct feedback, but it comes from a good place. It does. He's got a heart the size of Colorado. He lives in the right place. Got it. I got it. And so do you. It's been a pleasure being on this wild ride together. I'm grateful for your friendship and camaraderie on LinkedIn when it can often seem like a sea of sameness.

And also, where are these sales leaders who are open to diving into what's broken? building that foundation versus Putting the band aids on with all the tech tools. So I will link your information so individuals can continue to follow you or if you're new to [00:42:00] them can weigh in on all of your Uh takes on things you definitely don't hold anything back, which I appreciate Listen, I I love I love this sales has afforded me a life that I never imagined In my wildest dreams imagined, I would have as a kid outside of Boston, I'm not making this up, barely graduated high school, barely got into and graduated from college.

My first car was 50 bucks because I bought it from my dad. The junkyard offered him 35. I offered him 50 that like, that's where I came from. So I never, ever, ever thought I would get to this and I, I just, I just want to help. I want to pay it forward and I get to meet awesome people along the way. That's the win.

Likewise. Likewise. Well, thanks so much for having, for being on the show. Thank you for having me.