How High-Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today is Matt Dixon. He's a founding partner of DCM insights, the customer understanding lab. He is also a frequent contributor to Harvard business review with more than 20. And that's probably gone up since then printed online articles to his credit, his first book, which he came on the show for the challenger sale sold more than a million copies worldwide was the number one, Amazon N wall street journal bestseller, but he's got a new book out to, depending upon when you're listening to this, it'll be out in September of 2022. It's called the jolt effect. How high performers overcome customer indecision. So Matt, welcome back to the show.

Matt Dixon (01:28): Hey John, great to talk to you again. It's been a long time, but I'll be back with you.

John Jantsch (01:33): So I do recall of the challenger sale. You did exhaustive research to come to a somewhat counterintuitive conclusion. I think you've done that again in this, in this book. Can you talk a little bit about the research that you did to prepare for the Jo effect?

Matt Dixon (01:48): Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things is you remember John and listeners may familiar with the, the research that went into the challenger sale was based on survey data. We did a large scale global survey. Now I'm a bit of a research geek and I've always been kind of jealous of what professor Neil rackum did way back in the day. Remember he, when he did his spin selling research, he and his team traveled the world and they sat in on like 30,000 sales calls and I could never get anybody to wanna foot the bill for that. so I, so, and you know, because the problem with studying sales conversations as professor Rakin found out is that the really important ones always took place in the customer's office, but that all changed in March of 20 20 20 when the pandemic rolled around and sales went virtual literally overnight.

Matt Dixon (02:36): I mean, we were all doing some zoom and teams and WebEx calls, but it flipped to a hundred percent virtual overnight. So we actually partnered up with several dozen companies and collected about two and a half million recorded sales calls starting in spring of 2020, and then using machine learning platform from a company called tether to do the, a analysis of that data. And we'll talk more in this show about what we found, but that was, I think, think I, I saw this as an opportunity. I said, this is the one time I'm gonna get to study sales the way it's meant to be studied where the rubber hits the road.

John Jantsch (03:06): Yeah. That's fascinating not to get too off track. I wonder if we'll that behavioral stick.

Matt Dixon (03:12): Yeah, yeah. I think it will somewhat. I, so I, you know, pre 2020, I think if I were to guess, I would say, you know, for some companies, they were already a hundred percent virtual selling like a, you know, startup sta SAS businesses that, you know, armies of headset wearing, you know, young sales people, they were already selling on zoom for the rest of us. I think we were also doing some calls and some interactions over zoom and WebEx, but it was probably to the tune of maybe 30%, 40% of the sales process. It went to a hundred percent overnight. Where will it settle to your question? I don't know. I'm guessing it's gonna be probably around 70 to 80% because I think customers actually like it too. It's quite a convenient way to engage with suppliers and vendors and it's actually, you know, quite a productive way to sell too. But I think sales leaders know, and sales people know that, you know, some of those critical interactions still better to be face to face if you can make it happen.

John Jantsch (04:06): Yeah. So in this book, based on the subtitle, and of course in your previous work as well, you don't take on closing, you take on attacking indecision. And in fact, you go as far as calling indecision, you know, dangerous, I mean, why for you is indecision such an important sales topic?

Matt Dixon (04:21): Yeah. So one of the things that we've been monitoring over the years, you know, when we wrote the challenger sale, the big problem we were writing about was this phenomenon of customers learning on their own, you know, and boxing the boxing, the sales person out and forcing them to compete on price. We wrote the challenger customer that was about the problem of consensus buying, you know, more and more people showing up at the buying committee and having to forge that consensus, which would be very, really difficult around complex purchases. This the store, the problem we're writing about in the jolt effect is about this problem of indecision or, or sales people. I think call it no decision losses. What we found in our study is that anywhere between 40 and 60% of all opportunities are lost to no decision. Now, what's really fascinating is why that is and how that breaks down. But if you just think about that number, if you're a salesperson listening, if you're a leader running a team or a CEO, or, you know, somebody running an organization that is a massive productivity loss for all of us to pursue deals, and these are deals to be clear where the customer will go through the entire purchase process only to do nothing. So just a huge time suck in loss for our organizations.

John Jantsch (05:31): I remember the sort of classic work from David Sandler. You know, it was like quick, no, right. You, the indecision was the worst place to be. Oh yeah. It was like, I want a yes or I want no, so I can move on. Right.

Matt Dixon (05:41): And agree more that's fast. No is what we all should aspire to. Yeah,

John Jantsch (05:44): Yeah. Yeah. So, so it used to mean, and I say used to, because you're going to suggest otherwise that the customer just doesn't have enough information. They can't decide on the value or they haven't equated the value they're gonna receive with the cost. And so we had a whole set of tools to overcome that, but you're gonna suggest that maybe is not the, your research I guess, is gonna suggest that might not be the most productive approach.

Matt Dixon (06:08): Yeah. You know, so what we found and I think sales people around the world are very familiar with this idea of, you know, beating the customer status quo. And I think if you read any sales book, and by the way, I would include the sales books, we've written of the challenger sale. And otherwise a as well as all the great work that's been done over the years has all been centered around this idea that if the customer gets cold feet, if they start showing signs of winding up in that wasteland of no decision, it's the only possible reason is that you either haven't proven to them that what they do today is suboptimal. Right? Right. It's not good enough. You haven't created that burning platform. You haven't, or you haven't demonstrated the value of your solution relative to what they do today. So they don't see enough daylight maybe may, might mean that.

Matt Dixon (06:53): They say, Hey, your solution, John, your solution's great, but it's not that much better than what we do today. What we do today is good enough. Or it might be that the change journey is too difficult. Right. I, I totally see the daylight, but life is short and we have other priorities in correct. We just don't have the time and resources. But so it's always been taught that it's gotta be that you did not put the status quo to bed. You know, the customer is still in the grips of the status quo or their preference for the status quo. What we found in our research is that is a big reason. Deals are lost to no decision, but it turns out it's the lesser of two reasons. The second reason actually has nothing to do with the customer's preference for their status quo. It's their own inability to make a decision which we call customer in decision, which itself is driven by three things.

Matt Dixon (07:39): The first is the customer not knowing what to pick. We call those valuation problems. Like if we think about all the different configurations of our solutions, and we think about all the options, the partner integrations, the roadmap items, all these things we put in front of the customer, it's the customer looking at all those options and saying, they all look good and I'm not a hundred percent sure if I pick option a maybe I should have picked B or C and that might become a irreversible decision. The second source of indecision is a lack of information, or this is really the customer seeking more information feeling like I haven't done enough homework. There's so much information out there. You know, so many white papers, so many webinars, so many podcasts to listen to so many experts to consult. And I just am not smart enough about this decision.

Matt Dixon (08:20): And it's a big decision, right? And then the third source of indecision is what we call outcome uncertainty. This is where the customer feels like they might be left holding the bag. I've got no assurance that this is all gonna work out for me. And yeah, your ROI projections look great on paper. And the demo was awesome. And the proof of concept was great. But if this thing goes sideways, you know, heads are gonna roll. And it's usually gonna be the person whose heads rolls first is the person whose name is on the contract. And that's me. So those now those things, you know, I don't know what to pick. I haven't done enough homework. I might be left holding in the bag, have nothing to do with a preference for the status quo. It's a different set of things that the customer struggles with, that we as salespeople need to learn to deal with and to manage through.

John Jantsch (09:02): Okay. One of the challenges as I listened to you, describe that is, it sounds like indecision looks a lot like status quo. right. I mean, it's like, because otherwise I'm admitting, I'm afraid

Matt Dixon (09:14): A hundred percent. You are, you nailed it. So the problem with peeling, these things apart is they end up in the same outcome, which is the customer does nothing. Yeah. But I think, again, we've always assumed the customer does nothing cuz you haven't proven the math of like, you know, the ROI or that the, what the pain of same as we talk about in the challenger sale, but that other set of things, the customer will get wrapped around the axle around. And what we found was, again, this is the bigger source of no decision losses is these indecision drivers, customers are not comfortable talking about this stuff. You know, no customer in the history of customers, certainly not in the two and a half million calls we analyzed, there were exam. There were exactly zero customers who said, Hey, you know what, John, I gotta tell you, I'm a really indecisive person.

Matt Dixon (09:55): Like I can't pick what to watch on Netflix. I don't know what to order for dinner. You know, like nobody says stuff like that because these are concerns that are personal. And you know, what it's rooted in is a fear of failure. That is very personal. It's a worry that I might be sold on the a, to B that the status quo stinks in your solutions, better in the change journey is worth it, but I'm still worried that I'm gonna make a mistake. And you know, what we found is it, the psychological research which we delved into pretty deeply, as you know, is pretty clear here that customers at the end of the day, fear messing up more than they fear missing out. And so many times salespeople will go back and they'll try to dial up the paint of same and paint this picture for the customer of what they would stand to lose if they do nothing.

Matt Dixon (10:37): But what they don't realize is the stuff that's keeping the customer from moving forward is their fear. Not of doing nothing but of actually doing something and making a big mistake in the process. And that is not stuff that customers are comfortable talking about. So, so a big part of the book is actually, how do we learn how to listen for those signs? So signals of indecision. And then when the customer's not giving anything to us, what are the ways we can elicit the responses from the customer for us to gauge that? Or as we say in the book, judge, the level of indecision

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John Jantsch (11:38): So you and you obviously the book presents a methodology. I shouldn't say obviously, but all good books do. And so a lot of what I'm hearing you say is part of getting past indecision is figuring out how to dial down fear, the fear purchasing.

Matt Dixon (11:52): Yeah, you're absolutely right. We, the shorthand we used in, in the book was this, your, the fear award is key here. So when we talk about beating the status quo, which again, just to be very clear, no salesperson's gonna sell a thing. If they don't beat the status quo, it's like passing, go in collecting $200 in sales. Like you have to do it. If you don't do it, you're not going anywhere. The indecision is a secondary problem, right? If you don't beat the customer status quo, but after you beat the SaaS quo, what starts to creep into their mind are these fears of making a mistake. And what, the way we describe this is that sales people have always been taught to believe that they only need one playbook, just beat that customer status quo. And what we're saying is you need two playbooks. You've gotta beat the SaaS quo, but you also have to overcome in decision.

Matt Dixon (12:33): And the difference between those playbooks is this beating the status quo is all about dialing up the fear of not purchasing. So here's what you stand to lose by not acting. And salespeople have been taught by many great trainers and writers and speakers for many years on, uh, all the techniques to do that. So keep doing that. But after you do that, the second thing you need to do is overcoming decision. And that playbook is all about dialing down the fear of purchasing and that's really different. Right? And it's exactly what you said. It's about dealing with those fears, which are kind of the butterflies in the stomach, the voices in the back of the customer's head saying, boy, nobody ever got fired for maintaining the status quo. But a lot of times people do get fired for changing it. If it doesn't work out right.

John Jantsch (13:17): They'll forget it. They'll forget all about it if it works out. Right, right. so it's almost like the new, and you say this specifically is one of the steps in the jolt method is you almost have to be able to figure out a person's ability to make a decision

Matt Dixon (13:34): A hundred percent. Yeah, you're right. In as sales people, we've always been taught, you know, we all know great sales people, don't chase garbage trucks. And your point about what Sandler said, you'll get that early. No, you know, disqualified those bad fit opportunities right away. But I don't think we realize until now that great sales people will qualify and disqualify on the, of course, on the customer's ability to buy, use case fit, industry, attractiveness, things like that, but not always or not until now, do we appreciate, they will disqualify not just on the ability to buy, but ability to decide. And that comes down to a few things. One is it's understanding this person as a decision maker and are they displaying tendencies that are associated with indecisiveness? And so we, in the book, we talk all about those markers, what they look like, what they sound like in a sales call.

Matt Dixon (14:22): Second, where is that indecision coming from? So not just this person, but what specifically are they worried about? Are they worried about making the wrong choice? Not having done enough homework? Are they worried about being, not having no assurance of success? What's the source of the indecision. And then third, are there amplifiers out there, right? Is this a, is there time pressure? Is this a really big decision relative to other decisions this person or this company has made in the past that, that amplify, that latent in decision, all of this stuff is gonna tell us, how do we apply our jot playbook, our overcoming indecision playbook? You know, in what way do we deploy it second? How do we forecast this opportunity? Third, should we disqualify this opportunity? Is it worth our time?

John Jantsch (15:03): Does this particularly in this step, does do we run the risk of kind of the cliche, like trial closes of, you know, if we were able to come to decision could next Tuesday, could you know that kind of, I mean, is that what we're advocating here?

Matt Dixon (15:16): Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, but I would, I think the parallel I would draw is, you know, because of what you said before, which I think is spot on that indecision is not a thing that people are comfortable talking about. Right? It's personal and our customers are people and they're not comfortable talking about it either. And they lose face when they talk about how they struggle to make decisions. And they're feeling a lot of pressure. And gosh, I, I don't, what if I get fired if I sign this contract? And so we've gotta do a good job. We talk, we talk about this kind of, uh, sonar metaphor, which is if you're a Boda on the surface of the water and you know, there's a submarine lurking down below, we've got two ways to go find that summary.

Matt Dixon (15:53): And one is we can passively listen for it to make noise, right? We can. So that's all about listening and trying to pick up on those cues that the customer's showing behavior associated or emotions associated with indecision, but sometimes the customer's gonna play it close to the vest. And when that happens, we've gotta engage active sonar, which is sending out pings, right. And listening for those echoes. And the way we might do that is, and this is the parallel of what you said, John it through kind of what we call is powerful articulations of what we think is going on in the customer's head. So it may not be, Hey, can we get this done on Tuesday next week? But rather, you know, John, my sense is this is a really big decision for you. And you're not feeling completely confident that we've we've, you know, eliminated all the other options and you were settled on the right package or I'm just, I'm feeling like you don't think you've done enough research here and you're a little bit in the dark still. Can you confirm, am I misreading the situation? Yeah. So it's a little bit different, right. But it's designed to articulate what we think is going on in the customer's head and then get them to respond to that and have a

John Jantsch (16:52): Conversation. Yeah. So, and in fact, instead of pressuring a decision, it's more like I'm gonna invite some empathy.

Matt Dixon (16:57): You're saying. Yeah. Well, well said.

John Jantsch (16:59): Yeah. So, so as I listened to you talk about the reason, some of the reasons one of them would suggest that maybe we should slim our options down. Like here's you want a, or B you know, and not put all the bells and whistles and all the possibilities is that, are you advocating for that as well?

Matt Dixon (17:15): Yeah, we're sort of working our way through the playbook with the Jay. We just talked about a little bit, was judging the level of indecision. What the second one is the O what you're talking about is offer recommendation. And, you know, this is a double edged sword because I think having lots of options feels really good for our customer. And it feels really good for us as sales people and as marketers and, you know, there's product, people love it. It's just, there's a time and a place in the sale for a thousand flowers and let them bloom. And you know, the world is the customer's oyster and it's exciting, right? You go to your website, you come buy the demo, buy the booth of the trade show in those first demos, talking about all the possibilities. It's really exciting. But what is exciting early on can actually end up leading to the customer, ringing their hands about what seemed like equally attractive options, right?

Matt Dixon (18:00): And so best sales people know there's a time from, to shift from asking the customer what they wanna buy and throwing all these options out there to actually telling them what they should buy and making a firm and personal recommendation saying, you know, John, we've talked about a lot of options, but based on what I know about your company in other organizations like you, I think you're gonna be really happy with this package. We can always add those other options later, but I don't want to, I don't wanna waste your money. And I don't wanna waste your time thinking about things that I know having seen this movie many times before are not gonna pay off for you guys. So let's focus in on this, forget the other stuff, and let's move forward. And that is a really powerful technique to get the customer through that, that struggle to have of like, I've got 10 options and they all seem awesome. You know, which one should I pick?

John Jantsch (18:42): It's probably a bit of a trust builder, too. Particularly if you are steering somebody to an option that's less complex, maybe less expensive, but right. Yeah. Should be quite a trust builder. Right. This is a little simple example, but I remember when I first got started in my marketing agency, and one of the things we would do a lot of times with a new client is design or redesign a logo that was such a classic thing. And so, you know, first off, I'd start off with six variations and we got nowhere cause they just, you know, so then finally learned is like, here's a, and here's B and here's why a is so much better than B . I was like, OK, we're done.

Matt Dixon (19:16): Yeah. Learn through experience. This is the thing. I mean, you know, people who've been out there. I mean, they look back on that every time I tell people about there's like, oh, that's why I do that. But it, you know, the research here is really clear that again, options are cut both ways. They can be great upfront, but they can crate the customer. And cause this, this indecision, this Val, these valuation problems later, and it is about providing a limited set and providing that personal seal of approval to make that customer feel like, okay, this is where I should go. And you hit on something really important underpinning. All of this stuff is the ability of the salesperson to overcome the agency dilemma, right? Because they've gotta be trusted. And one of the things you pointed out is key. Sometimes making a recommendation that's cheaper than the one, the customer wants is a phenomenal way to, to build that trust and that credibility with the customer.

John Jantsch (20:03): So, so we are working through J O L T. And so I think we're up to L and I think that's limiting the ability for them to have to go out and research, I guess. So unpack. Yeah.

Matt Dixon (20:13): Limiting the exploration is the L and this one, again, back to that, you know, overcoming that natural distrust that often exists between customers and sales people. You know, last I checked Jedi, mind tricks still don't work in sales, but so the likelihood of customer who's, who could say to us, our salesperson could say to a customer who is, you know, swimming in information and wants to read every white paper and wants to wait for the next Gardner magic quadrant report to come out and all this stuff and talk to their LinkedIn network and all this stuff. The last thing a salesperson can pull off is saying, you know, you don't need to consume that information. That's not any, I have all the answers. They've gotta build that trust, but they've also gotta demonstrate subject matter expertise. And I think this is where in our analysis, we find a lot of average sales people go wrong.

Matt Dixon (20:55): You know, they tend to bring in other people to do the demos. They tend to, you know, they, they act as almost glorified admins and what best sales people do is they try to own that conversation as far down the path as possible. Now, look, they don't get over the tips of their skis. If they need to rely on somebody else to provide an answer, they'll do it. They'll bring in their head of product. They'll bring in the solutions engineer, but they carefully orchestrate that call. So it doesn't turn into a, you know, Hey, I brought John's our head of engineering, John, take it away because by the way, John hates, when you do that, first of all, cause he's not the sales guy. And second of all, it diminishes your credibility as a seller. So, you know, things like that. We also talk about anticipating listening between the lines, when you rebut an objection, the customer has the way they respond, looking for those signs of implicit non-acceptance and proactively suggesting objections to the customer.

Matt Dixon (21:46): They haven't even articulated yet. Which again, instilled that confidence that, okay, I'm talking to somebody I can trust, but also somebody who really knows their stuff, you know? So I don't need to be an expert. I can put my myself in the hands of this person. It's almost like if you or I were to go plan a trip to an exotic location where we had never been, think about the confidence you have talking to a great travel advisor or travel agent who's planned a thousand phenomenal trips for people, just like you to say, you know what? I know enough about what you're looking for. Here's the itinerary I recommend. It's like, boy, that is awesome.

John Jantsch (22:19): Yeah. It's an interesting analogy because I certainly would rather go that route as long as I trust that they understand what I want. Right. And once I, yeah, once I know they get me, then it's like, I'm gonna take your recommendation. So great analogy. The, the last one, since we've been talking about fear and fail, you know, I'm gonna fail T is to actually give them a bit of a safety net. Right. So now is that something that you're gonna go in selling? You're gonna realize, Hey, they're gonna want this assurance or is that a sort of a last ditch thing?

Matt Dixon (22:48): You know, it, it's interesting because I just had this conversation with, with the sales leader recently. And I think this one, you're just based on our analysis, this concern about outcome uncertainty, you know, I trust you put myself in your hands, I'm with you, but there's still this voice saying like, what if it doesn't work out? Like what if I, we don't get the ROI they're projecting? And what we found is that a lot of this stuff creeps up late in the game. It's like I described it as the distance between the tip of the customer's pen and the contract, and that's made up of outcome uncertainty. Right? And it'll, so it'll manifest it rears its head late, but there are ways we can get ahead of it. We can get ahead of it by not, you know, not duping the customer with like GDI ROI projections, but instead setting reasonable expectations and then saying, Hey, anything beyond that, which we've seen before is gravy, but I want you to be focused on this cuz if we're focused on this and build the business case around that, I know you're gonna look like a hero.

Matt Dixon (23:41): And by the way, I'm pretty sure we're now perform things that you see high performers doing early on, but then late, you know, when the customer's like, boy, this is a huge John, this is a huge decision for our company. I just, what if something goes wrong? There are creative confidence givers we can provide as well. Everything from, you know, on the formal end, I'll give you one example. A company that I spoke to recently sells high sales, highend robotics to manufacturing companies. And a lot of these companies are going through automation, shifting from manual work to automated lines, you know, for the first time. And one of their big concerns is buying expensive robotic equipment. And then having folks on the factory floor, you know, break it. And so they created an insurance policy that you can buy with your robots, that for, you know, small percentage of the total contract value, you know, for a low deductible, if something goes wrong, you're not gonna have to buy another a hundred or $200,000 robot.

Matt Dixon (24:31): You can for a thousand bucks, get it replaced. And so that's a formal version of taking risk off the table, but there are lots of informal ones too, showing our customer the rollout plan that we've used with other customers, the milestones, the KPIs, the dos and the dons that show them. But you guys have, you've done this before. You know what you're doing? You know, where the bodies are buried and the landlines are, and the pitfalls are, this is great. But also things like executive sponsors. I mean, this can be a really powerful tool to use in certain instances where you can say, Hey, my CEO personally takes on 10 new customers a year and I would like to nominate you to be one of those accounts. And if so, he's gonna be he, or she's gonna be on the QBR. They're gonna, you can have that person's mobile number. You can call 'em day or night and they will swarm the problem. So like things like that make the customer feel like, okay, I'm not jumping out of a plane without a parachute here. I you've got my back.

John Jantsch (25:20): Yeah. Awesome. Speaking with Matthew Dixon about the Joel effect and Matt, but you wanna tell people where they can catch up with you. And obviously I know the book will be available anywhere that books are sold.

Matt Dixon (25:32): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Check out the jolt effect.com and we've got lots of free resources on there. Events we're running different ways. You can learn about putting some of these ideas into practice in your own organization and continue the learning journey. But you're right. Wherever book books are sold, you can, uh, you can pick up the book and then if you do, if you did, pre-order the book, please send us your receipt at pre-orders at JOL de fact.com. And I will invite you to a special event we're hosting in early October with some guests. So

John Jantsch (25:58): Awesome. And as always, we'll have the links in the show notes. So great catching up with you again, Matt. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road soon.

Matt Dixon (26:06): Perfect. Thank you, John.

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