- Hi friends, we are getting ready to record episode seven of the Celebrations Podcast.

- In the previous episode, I had the pleasure to speak with one of the Challenger Evangelists, Jen Allen. We learned about Challenger and how it's evolved over time, and most importantly, how the successful implementation of Challenger requires the adoption of a Challenger mindset and not merely doing training or following prescribed steps in a process.

- Today I'm going to up the ante even higher, by bringing to the discussion no one other but the author of "The Challenger Sale" book himself, Matt Dixon. Many of you may already be aware of Matt's new bestselling book called "The JOLT Effect." In his typical fearless researcher fashion, Matt had embarked on a remarkable journey that involved using AI and conversational NLP to analyze more than 2 million sales conversations.

- We will discuss his latest research findings about customer indecision being an even bigger enemy to sales than sticking with a status quo. We'll connect the dots between Challenger and JOLT. We'll also dwell on the topic of how marketing can support sales in overcoming customer indecision.

- I'm truly honored to host Matt Dixon on this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's get started.

- Hi Matt, how are you?

- Hey, Emil, how are you? Thank you for the invite to your show.

- Oh yeah, absolutely, thank you so much. I'm really honored to have you on the show, I've definitely been following a lot of your recent online appearances on different webinars, and I'm super excited to have a conversation with you today. And before we get started, I'm just gonna push here at the bottom, a quick call to action for everyone, to go to Celebrations.info! to find out a little bit more about you and maybe some useful links that they may wanna explore, and also to see the roster of other podcast episodes that I have in case they're interested in learning more about this podcast and what the topics there've been so far. But anyway, I think in general, there's not a lot of need for real introduction because most of the viewers of this podcast probably already know everything about your best-selling books. But in terms of just a quick context, can you... You've been doing sales research for decades, can you tell me what motivates you to keep exploring more?

- Oh gosh, it's a really good question. I don't know if I've gotten that one before, I guess, Emil, I would say maybe two things. I think one is that... or three things, three things. So you're gonna regret asking this question. I think the first thing is, we find a lot of... in the research, we find a lot of answers, but I think in the process, we also uncover new questions that we hadn't thought of before and new questions that were unaddressed. I'll give you an example, so I think many listeners are familiar with "The Challenger Sale," when we wrote that book, one of the things we realized after we wrote it was that in many respects, it's about the story of a first sales interaction, but as we know, especially in B2B sales, going from getting one person excited about your vision and your solution, to getting the whole buying committee on board is a very... that's a long journey. And so we took a second, we did a second study on what do best salespeople do to manage the consensus buying environments, as when you have to get a group of stakeholders together, so it's just one example and I think "JOLT Effect" is no different. I guess that's the first thing, we uncover a lot of questions, the second thing is I've been excited about the advances in technology that now allow us to do sales research in very new and different ways from the way we once did it. All the books I've done before, have all been based on survey research, a lot of interviews, case profiles, "The JOLT Effect" as we'll talk about was a machine learning-based study of 2 1/2 million sales calls, which is totally different, a different scale, a different... a whole set of new tools and capabilities that get me excited as a researcher, and then I think the third thing I would point to is the customer buying environment is not changing anytime soon. As soon as we think we got the customer pinned down and we understand them, they go and change the way that they engage with us, and their expectations change. And I think that's going to continue to change and to evolve, and so I'm just waiting to see what's next, I think on all of those dimensions.

- Great, I mean, I am a researcher at heart as well, and I think you just hit the nail on the head that research is tied to reality and in real life things change all the time.

- That's right.

- The more research you do, the more questions you uncover and you just have to keep on peeling that onion and find more, so thank you for clarifying that as well for us. So you mentioned already JOLTs, and I know that people may have already familiarized themselves with it, but just for the sake of quick introduction here, what exactly is JOLT and how did you come up with the main premise of your new book?

- Yeah, if I take people back to the origins of the study, we always wanted to do a study using modern technology, now, when we really wanted to do a study, actual recorded sales conversations, the problem of course, up until March of 2020 is that those, many of the important conversations happened in the customer's office, but when the pandemic hit and we all went into lockdown, that changed overnight, as you remember, and so we partnered with several dozen companies, collected 2 1/2 million sales calls and used a machine learning platform from a company called Tethr, to bring structure and meaning to that data. So that was kind of the occasion of the why now. Now in terms of the topic, JOLT deals with this question of no decision losses, which are really, really painful for salespeople, for managers, and for the entire commercial organization, sales and marketing, to have customers go through the entire sales process only to end up doing nothing. And you think about these customers who spend so much time with us, they eat up a lot of our time, the time from our team, subject matter experts, solutions engineers, executive sponsors, and not to say nothing of the customers' own time investment that they make, sometimes this can go on for months or even years, and then for the customer to do nothing, has always been a really puzzling thing to me. Like what would possess somebody to invest so much time and energy to just do nothing? And then more importantly, what do the best salespeople do to overcome that? What do they do to avoid that happening to them? So that was the topic that we chose to study with this big dataset, and then to your question, Emil, what we found was... and this will be the Chris Nodes' version of what we found, and I definitely encourage all the listeners to go check out the book, there's also an HBR article maybe we could link to as well, called "Stop Losing to Customer Indecision," which we wrote this summer, it's a good summary of the arguments in "The JOLT Effect," so check that out as well if you're pressed for time, but here's what we found in a nutshell is, we all know this in sales and marketing that when the customer... there's a point where sometimes the customer gets cold feet, they say they're into, they wanna lead from, depart from their status quo, they wanna move forward with us, and then they start to talk themselves out of it, they start to disengage from the sale, and we've seen this movie many, many times. What ends up happening is they stop responding to our emails in the wonderful ways they once did, and now they offer us very cut responses very intermittently, they don't show up to our calls, they start ghosting us and going radio silent, and the salesperson continues to chase them because salespeople are very hopeful and they think hope springs eternal. So they keep chasing those opportunities and eventually we mark them as closed lost decision. Now, what salespeople have been taught for a long, long time, is that the reason a customer starts to disengage and get cold feet, is that they're still in love with their status quo. And we talk about this in "The Challenger Sale" as well, that the best salespeople are very good at showing the customer the pain of same is worse than the pain of change. They're very good at breaking the gravitational pull that the status quo has on the customer, which we know, is very, very powerful. And so what they do is they go back and they hammer the status quo. They try to dial up the FUD, the fear, uncertainty and doubt, create the burning platform, talk up the benefits of the solution, how great it's going to be, if you just bought our solution, you can totally solve all these problems in your business, or maybe they just hold a disappearing discount in front of them. It's only good, this price is only good this quarter, you have to buy now or the price goes up, and what we found is it was very surprising, we found, I call those FOMO tactics, fear of missing out and what we found is that those techniques, especially with a customer who's already articulated their preference to move forward with you, to leave the status quo behind move forward with you and your solution, those techniques when they start to get cold feet, actually make things worse, they don't make things better. There was an 84% probability that doing that stuff will actually drive the customer to no decision, it will actually increase the odds they do nothing. And when we dug into the data, what we found is that no decision losses are actually born of two different things. On the one hand, you've got customers who prefer the status quo, and that was about 44% of the no decision losses, but the bigger chunk of no decision losses, were losses due to indecision. These are customers who are convinced that the status quo is suboptimal, are convinced that you are the right supplier to move forward with, but nevertheless, they struggle to make a decision. And those specific struggles come down to three fears that they have. The first one is, have I chosen the right thing? You've put a lot of options in front of me, in this final version of your platform, the final version of your solution, have we made the right decisions, contract length, how broad we're gonna go, bells and whistles and integrations and partner solutions, all these things that could go in, those are hard decisions and my fear as a customer is, did I pick the right product, actually the right solution to buy? I know you're the supplier I wanna work with, but did I buy the right solution? The second thing is, the customer are fearful that they haven't done enough research, that they don't feel like they're smart enough about this big decision you're asking them to make, and maybe it's the next white paper, the one they didn't read, that has all the answers that they should have gotten before they bought the solution. Then the third one we call outcome uncertainty. This is the fear the customer has that they might not realize the benefits that you're promising from the purchase. They might not see the cost savings or the revenue growth or the risk mitigation, and then that's gonna be a bad look. And Emil, if you think about the current environment, those are decisions that could get you fired, and where budget is decisions, even low level decisions now are so heavily scrutinized. And so customers, if I were to summarize, while we've told salespeople for years and years, when the customer starts to hesitate to dial up the FOMO, what we actually should be doing, is dialing down the FOMU, FOMU is the Fear of Messing Up. And it turns out that the Fear of Messing Up is actually the bigger problem and it's the bigger driver of no decision losses. So JOLT is a playbook, it's four behaviors, it's an acronym as those of you who've read the book know, judge the level of indecision, offer your recommendation, limit the exploration and take risk off the table, that together comprise a playbook, not for beating the status quo, but for overcoming customer indecision. Now, because again, after you've beaten the status quo and put it to bed, what the customer start worrying about is, did I pick the right configuration, have I done enough research about this, do I have any assurance of success from this vendor? And those are the things that end up causing them to get cold feet and not move forward, and so we need to deal with that as salespeople. And those behaviors, just like Challenger, we didn't invent them, we found that these are things that top salespeople are doing right now, they never read a sales book about it, they never got a sales training on it, they just they're best salespeople, they figure out how to navigate around obstacles when they see them in the buying environment.

- Yeah, that's great summary. Thank you very much for the Chris Nodes as you said, but I think it's very necessary for everyone to kind of align one more time, even if they've already heard this from another webinar. I'm actually gonna touch on the importance of understanding the nuance a little later in this podcast, but before that, I wanted to share with you an anecdote personally that really impressed me. So around the time when I first saw your posts on LinkedIn about the upcoming book, it wasn't even published, we had an experience at my company with a vendor that was chasing us for six, seven months, I would say they did everything according to the book, nothing that I would personally advise them against doing, and they pretty much, they showed us testimonials that allowed us to understand what kind of upside potential we have in front of us, in terms of like gains, of benefits from using them, in terms of reviews, they showed us that they're best in class, followed for years, and I was the main decision maker, they've picked me correctly, they knew that I have the budget, I've told them I have the budget for this, I brought in the head of sales who actually would've been pretty much the main user of that together with the sales team, and then on the last call when they... I could see in their face, they were smiling and they thought they were gonna ring that bell and say, "We have a deal," and we just looked at them and we said, "Sorry guys, we just think we're not ready. As a company, we're not mature enough, our team is new, we just hired a bunch of new sales folks and we right now, we can't even get them to use the CRM correctly, let alone use something else, so sorry, we are not gonna buy it." And it was a huge disappointment, I could see on their faces, they were just not...

- Oh, yeah, you just get out of the room.

- And that happened just a few weeks before I read what you posted on LinkedIn when you started talking about JOLT and I was like, wow, it resonates so much, I just read one sentence and I got it immediately. But I just think that that's happening all the time, I see it happening so much...

- That's a great anecdote, Emil, because what you're describing is not... it doesn't sound like, at least, in this case, again, I was not part of that buying experience, but it doesn't sound like there were really any questions from your side about that this would represent a better way of doing things, that the solution that the vendor would propose was great, their customers love them, that things look great, but at the end of the day, I think you had some questions about like, what if we don't get full value out of things?

- What if our team cannot not use it, they don't know how to use it, what are we gonna do?

- It's not even the vendor, it's you, right? And it's like, I just don't know that we'll get the benefits and who wants to have their name associated with a big purchase and then not realize the benefits? Like that's a bad look, nobody wants to do that.

- Yeah, so I just thought I'll mention this anecdote here, because I feel like with most people, nowadays when I try to explain, people ask me, "So what are you so excited about these days?" And I tell them, "Well, I just started reading JOLTs and been following Matt on all these webinars," and most of the times they're like, "Okay, so what exactly does it mean?" And then I give them this anecdote and I tell them, "This is what it means." Think about what happened on the other side, the vendor, they had the head of sales, not some junior salesperson there and he was totally surprised listening, on like being witness to what was happening on the call. And you mentioned earlier Challenger a little bit, so I have to ask you, is JOLT a natural evolution of the Challenger methodology or are you observing a complete disruption in the buyer's journey?

- Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think it's a little bit of both actually. So I think I've had this discussion with so many people about whether this problem of customer indecision is a new problem or is it just a problem we've only found now? And so on the one hand, we think about... we see these on the news, these wonderful images from the Webb Telescope that there's like a million miles past the moon and it's allowing us to view the universe in ways that we never could before, but those things were always there, we just didn't have the technology to find them. So in some respects, I think indecision is like that, it is everywhere, but we've never been taught to look for it or to study it, and now with modern technology to study 2 1/2 million sales calls with machine learning, we have like that big telescope out in the million miles past the moon, we have the technology to find it. But I think the flip side of that, the counterargument is that, in fact, it's a new problem, and I think if you look at the things that... So take the downturn aside, so I think it's easy for everyone to agree that yes, no decision losses are going to spike for every supplier and every vendor out there over the next couple of years, especially if the economy hits the skids a little bit. So I'm not talking about that, but what I'm talking about is, if you look at the things that drive indecision, the number of options, every vendor out there is offering more and more options, partner ecosystems, bells and whistles, roadmap items, different configurations of their platforms, we all love, especially in marketing and above the funnel because it attracts people in, but when we put more options in front of people, as we know, and Barry Schwartz writes about this in "The Paradox of Choice," it makes it harder for them to pick something and it increases the odds they do nothing 'cause they don't wanna make a bad choice. And so the number of options most vendors are putting out there is only increasing, like very few of us are going the opposite direction and simplifying, most of us are making our options more complex and numerous. The second thing, the amount of information and you know this very well working with marketers, the amount of information on any use case, any market, any technology, any industry today, is orders of magnitude greater than it was yesterday and tomorrow will be even greater than it is today and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle, we are just... There's so much content coming at the buyer that is impossible for them to consume it all. They'll never consume it all yet they want to deeply consume it all. So this struggle that like, have I done enough research? Well, what if that is like running a race where you'll never get to the finish line, but the customer feels like I've gotta get to the finish line or I'm going to be making a decision about which I'm not well-informed. So that's the second one, and the third one, even this valuation problems of feeling like I might not get what I'm paying for, I think as suppliers shift from selling simple transactional products that can be swapped in now to selling more integrated, value added, sticky but also expensive and disruptive solutions, not just the product but the layers of service, the long-term transformation, we're all selling transformation, right? And as we embed ourselves in the customer organization, that becomes a very, very risky decision for the buyer and we're amplifying the likelihood that they will get cold feet and worry about not getting what they're paying for. And so I think those are all secular trends that even if you put the downturn aside, I think the drivers of indecision are getting worse. And so one of the things I would say though with respect to Challenger, remember, if we go back to the earlier point, 44% of no decision losses are because we didn't beat the customer status quo, that is the first thing a salesperson's got to do, and in marketing, we've got to equip our salespeople to be able to overcome the customer status quo, the status quo is a very, very powerful enemy, you will not sell anything if you cannot convince the customer to part ways with their status quo. And we know people are lazy, they're genetically engineered to avoid energy expenditure when they don't need to. They don't like to change and they will pass up an obviously better options in order to just keep doing what they're doing today. So that is a powerful enemy, it's job number one. But once the customer agrees to move away from the status quo, and they agree to move forward with your vision, then they start worrying about, have I chosen the right thing? Have I done enough research? Have I any assurance of success from this partner? And those are the things we now need to deal with. So the way I think about JOLT is it is not a replacement for anybody's sales methodology. So if you're a Challenger shop or maybe your company is a MEDDIC shop or it's a Sandler shop, it really doesn't matter, I happen to be part of the Challenger for obvious reasons, but there are lots of methodologies. All of those sales methodologies are predicated on beating the customer status quo. There are no methodologies out there until we produced JOLT, to deal with indecision. But I think about it this way, is that a salesperson needs two playbooks. They've gotta have a playbook for beating the status quo, that is your current sales methodology, you should get absolutely, exceptionally you are talented in terms of... in high levels of execution in terms of being able to deliver that and execute against it, but the flip side is you also need a playbook for overcoming indecision, which nobody's really equipped to do, and so think about JOLT as an overlay to whatever you do today. That's good, so it's not a forget Challenger, it's a do-this-on-top-of Challenger because Challenger solves for half the problem, it solves for the status quo problem, it does not solve for the indecision problem.

- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks for clarifying things. So I've watched many of your recent webinars, I've already mentioned that several times and I'm really impressed. There's been a lot of very interesting discussions, you did this webinars involving different guests and also just the audience has been very active on all of these, raising a lot of questions, but I have to admit that from my point of view, a lot of the discussion that I've seen has been focused on the implications of your research findings on sales, and it makes sense, it's a book primarily meant for sales. But at the end of the day, not only because I'm a marketer and because this podcast is trying to balance between sales and marketing executives, but in general, there's the proverbial sales and marketing alignment that everyone is talking about. So does marketing need a JOLT? What should marketing do to support sales or overcome customers' indecision?

- Yeah, it's great, another great question. So what I would say, we talk about this with Challenger and I think the same is true of JOLT, that Challenger was about individual salesperson skills, but it was also about organizational capability. Challenger doesn't work unless marketing is helping to develop those insights that Challengers can use to challenge customer thinking. If you don't have insight, you're not a Challenger, you're just annoying, and so it doesn't work. It has to be both sales and marketing and alignment. And I think JOLT is the same, and I think you're quite right and this was probably a function of like we had to hit a deadline with the publisher, so we stayed focused with the tactical sales side. But certainly, as I've had conversations with folks and we knew this as we were writing the research, it is also, JOLT is also an individual skill and an organizational capability. I'll give you a few ideas here. So think about offering recommendations, how do we chop the field for our customers and then recommend an option? 'Cause it turns out that's what best salespeople do to overcome this paradox of choice. Who figures out what those packages are, those pre-built configurations? Well, that's probably marketing in partnership with product and sales leadership. What are the use cases, the ICPs, the target needs-based segments we're selling into, and how do we configure pre-built happy meals or configurations that map to those use cases and those buyer types? That's a great role for the organization, and arguably, it's not something you want your salespeople doing because they don't have the breadth of perspective across the entirety of what's working out there. What are our best customers doing? What do they buy and how do we guide everyone else to buy the same thing? Second, we think about the amount of information. I steer your listeners to an article that my Challenger co-author, Brent Adamson wrote, "Sense Making for Sales," was in HBR, I believe, earlier this year, and in that article, Brent talks about the idea that marketing plays a pivotal... in a world of abundant information, marketing plays a really pivotal role to structure a learning journey for the customer. Every customer, you can't wave a magic wand and tell them, "Oh, you don't need to read any content, just trust me," because A, they don't trust you, and so they will, they do wanna be informed, but there's a point where they engage in analysis paralysis. But if we can feed them enough content that gets them to feel like they're conversant and knowledgeable and they're not... it is not a situation in which they're taking a leap of faith, but they feel like they've been well-informed, how do we structure that learning journey? Some of it is probably our content, maybe it's some of our competitors' content, third-party analyst reports like Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester analyst reports, et cetera, but as marketing, we are in a great position to say, if you want to get like the five articles, two podcasts and YouTube video that you need to consume to go from the... I wanna say 101 level, but even below that to like a 201 or 301 level of understanding, here's what you should consume. That's not something that salespeople should come up with either, they probably have a sense of things they recommend, but you probably have one salesperson over here recommending for people to read that article and then these other salespeople saying like, "No, that's terrible," they should read something else. Marketing should be really the arbiter of what that learning journey looks like, and then finally, taking risk off the table. These are... What we don't wanna have happen, we know best salespeople will come up with creative ways to de-risk the purchase for the customer, but we don't want salespeople knocking on finances door, their managers door asking for permission every time they're trying to structure a contract in a creative way or bundle in professional services in a certain way, let's pre-build those de-risking options and train sales people and equip them with content so they can deliver them and use them in the moment with the customer. So again, the role of the organization is very clear in JOLT, just like it was with Challenger, it's probably fodder for a bonus chapter if I... but I still have to get this book in the room here, but it's next on my to-do list I think, 'cause there's a lot to write about in that area.

- Great, yeah, no, I'll be anxiously waiting for something like that, I think it'll be a very interesting read for me at least personally and a lot of my colleagues. I mean, let me ask you, when you talk about de-risking, in the traditional sense when we talking about status quo, overcoming the status quo, some of that is, let's create some customer testimonials just to show the impact that we've had on the customer. We increased by 30% whatever, or we reduced the cost by whatever, 30%. On the other hand, right now as you're talking about the de-risk of the indecision, de-risking the indecision, I started thinking, well, what if marketing focuses on creating testimonials, where the focus is on how to move the process of implementation was, how customers were managed, how they were managed by us so that they can go down the easiest path, is that something that we should be focusing on as well?

- I think so. I actually think... So there's one thing that I think have case profiles that point to the return that a customer saw from buying your solution. I think it's a different thing to be able to architect or roadmap out like, we call it a value roadmap or benefits capture roadmap, but here's how we go from contract signed, to capturing benefits and capturing value, here are all the moving parts, here's who needs to be involved, here are the KPIs and metrics we look for and here are the gotchas. Here are the pitfalls we want to avoid, and this by the way, this roadmap is built back from one, the experience of customers who've gotten tremendous value, way more than they expected from our platform. But it's also informed by those companies who've made missteps and lessons we've learned about how to do this well, that's different from a customer case study, but that's a great, it's almost like a safety net, right? To show the customer you've been there before, you've done this before and you have a high success rate because it's like you're going on a journey through the woods or the jungle with a guide and they say, "I know exactly how to get there, by the way, we don't wanna go that way because there're some lions over there, we don't wanna go this way there're some poisonous snakes and you wanna go this way, and here are the things to watch out for," so that is a huge confidence giver that you're working with a vendor that has been there before and they've done this before successfully, that's a great role for marketing to play.

- Great, so that's a good point. From my point of view, from a... I'm focused on healthcare technology at the moment and they're the big elephant in the room is Epic as an EHR system. And a lot of hospital systems have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, close to a billion dollars sometimes on implementations of Epic, and the CIO, who most likely is driving that, for them this is basically their whole career trajectory, it's a make or break experience.

- That's right.

- So anything you can do to basically alleviate the concerns that implementing an extra system is gonna jeopardize Epic or is gonna ask for more resources, it's definitely gonna help, so I can definitely relate to what you were saying earlier.

- Absolutely.

- So a similar question that I was gonna ask you, and you mentioned earlier a little bit so it kind of prompted me to wait until later in the episode, but I've had recently a lot of conversations with CEOs and heads of sales, and one thing that I noticed that is kind of interesting to me, also a little discouraging, they're all nodding in agreement as I describe to them the JOLT's findings and basically, the main premise that we discussed earlier. And when I tell them, let's focus on overcoming the indecision, they say, "Yeah, okay, yeah." But then they start commenting and basically providing me with their ideas and I start hearing things that relate more to overcoming the status quo, not so much overcoming indecision. So what do sales and marketing executives often get wrong about JOLT? Like why is it so easy for them to just kinda say, "Yeah, I got it," but that's exactly what we've been doing?

- It's so interesting because I've seen this as well, Emil, is that you will get a lot of nodding heads and it's like, "All right, we need more case studies, we need a sharper ROI calculator, we need more proof points," and these kinds of things and customer case studies, profile success stories, reference clients, all these kinds of things, and it's like, no, no, that's what you need to beat the status quo, you should keep doing that, but remember your customers, that's all about how the customer can win by buying your solution, the reason they become indecisive is their fear of failure through buying your solution. Solving that is a very different category of things, but you're right, I mean, why does this happen? I mean, I think it's the same reason that when salespeople go through sales training and it sounds like this far apart from what they do today, they slip back into what they're already doing 'cause they have a false positive, "Oh, I already do that." And so I think there's a real danger and you've gotta create that sort of chasm and that cognitive dissonance so that they see what they're doing as clearly distinct from what they should be doing. And in this story, we're not saying to stop doing that, so again, you've got to beat the status quo, but overcoming indecision is a fundamentally different thing, but again, as human beings, I think we have confirmation bias and we are grooved to look for what we already know in things that we're encountering for the first time even. So when they see indecision, people go immediately to, oh, well, it's a value problem and you didn't convince the customer to move forward so we need to dial that up and sharpen that, but it's actually not, it's not a value problem at all. And again, I think the realization oftentimes for folks is that you can easily have a customer who will hand on heart say, "I totally believe your ROI, I absolutely believe our status quo is terrible, it's very suboptimal. It's leading to lost revenue growth opportunity, cost leakage risk for our organization, or lost market share, whatever it is, it's horrible. What you guys are talking about is great, the ROI looks terrific, your reference customers love you, these case studies, these are companies just like us, I'm in, I'm with you." But they will many of them still not buy because you haven't solved for the other stuff that they're worried about. And as we talk about quite often, because it results in the same outcome, which is no decision, and because we've all grown up in a world, sales and marketing have grown up in a world where we've only ever believed and we've only ever been taught that the only reason a customer does nothing is because they still prefer their status quo, it still comes down to value, and so we've gotta sharpen our value articulation. This research now unveils that that is part of the problem, but it's less than half of the problem. The bigger problem is their fear of failure. And at the end of the day, look, no customer ever got fired for maintaining the status quo, people maintain the status quo all the time, it happens every day. And the status quo has many parents in an organization, many people have their hand in the status quo, but people do get fired for changing the status quo and to go down a different path and to try to change it, and if that doesn't work out, that usually falls down or comes down on some person and it's usually the person whose name is on the contract, and that person is desperately fearful of failure. Customers as we say, are okay with missing out, they are not okay with messing up. And so when you try to go back and sharpen your ROI calculator and put more case studies and proof points and reference customers in front of them, all you're doing is trying to help them realize the cost of the inaction. Here's what's gonna happen to you if you don't do this, you're gonna miss out on these great opportunities. Don't you want this ROI, don't you want these opportunities? But that's not what they're worried about. They're not worried about the loss from inaction, they're worried about the loss that might occur from action, from actually doing something and having it be a big mistake for them and having it rest on their shoulders entirely.

- Yeah, that's a very good teaching point, I guess, for everyone because I think we just oftentimes have the tendency to scratch on the surface and not really try to dive deep enough to understand what really is driving some of these comments that we hear on the other side, and it's easy to confuse the fear of messing up with the fear of missing out. So yeah, it's a good point. I mean, that kind of leads, it's a good segue into my last question for today, and I always ask the question of all my podcast guests, this is supposed to be educational. So I want for the viewers and the listeners of this podcast to learn something, what are the key takeaways from this episode? What are the two or three things that you'd like to really drive home?

- Yeah, I think there's one I would point to that's I think really important, is to... again, we just talked about this, but to recognize the difference between missing out and messing up and recognizing that our customers, what keeps them from moving forward is not because they don't buy that they're gonna miss out and so much of what we do in sales and marketing, whether it's better ROI calculators, better proof points, better success stories, so on and so forth, that is all about dialing up the cost of inaction, but the customer's not worried about that predominantly, what they're worried about is messing up. That is the bigger thing and so we've gotta solve for that. We've gotta solve for that in sales training, in coaching we've gotta... in enablement, we've gotta solve for that at the organizational level, marketing, product finance, to equip people so that they can overcome indecision. But I think the big takeaway, what I will tell you is, again, it is part of the reason that people get head-faked about this and they say, "Well, I have no decision," well, clearly they still prefer the status quo, so we gotta convince them to leave the status quo. And I think the head-fake for salespeople or the knee-jerk reaction is when the customer gets cold feet, as I suspect, with that vendor you were talking to, who was trying to sell you this deal and they were all excited 'cause you're... and you pulled the wind out of their sales, and said, "No, it's not the right time," my suspicion is they probably went back to, "Well, Emil, you must not, like you're gonna miss out on this opportunity. Like look at the ROI, look at the proof points, look at all... we're working with all your competitors, by the way, they're seeing tremendous gains" and they try to make you squirm a little bit, or they say, "Well, I totally understand, but it's a lot cheaper if you buy it today than if you wait six months," or "There's an implementation window that we can offer you a slot right now, but if you don't buy now, it could be a year before we could roll this out 'cause we have so much demand." And what happens in that moment is, and the reason it backfires, is it sounds like you were already convinced that this vendor solution would be a better option, and when they start doing these things, what they're using is scare tactics to try to sell to somebody who's already afraid, but they're afraid of something else. And in your case, we're not mature enough, we're not at the level where we can capture the full benefits here and I cannot afford to waste scarce budget dollars and resources on an investment that doesn't fully pay off. That is your concern, it's not that I don't believe you about your solution and how great it is. So it rings hollow at best and at worst, it actually, again, it gives you more to be worried about and not only am I worried about not getting full benefits, it's also gonna be more expensive when we do decide to buy it. So now I'm worried about that too, that is a recipe for doing nothing. So the less and the big takeaway I think is for salespeople to hit pause. Before you go back to the FUD, before you go back to dial up the ROI, before you dangle the 10% discount, as you said earlier, Emil, dig deeper and ask yourself, what do you think is really keeping this customer from moving forward? Is it 'cause they don't believe you and they don't understand, they don't think this is a compelling enough alternative to their status quo? Well, you may have a status quo problem, or is this something else? Is it fear of failure? And if it is, how do we not... What we don't wanna stop doing is dialing up the cost of doing nothing, of inaction, we wanna start dialing down the fear of failure or dialing down the cost of action, like dial down the FOMU, and that's a different approach. And simply pausing and asking yourself that question, I think can help avoid the situation where your knee-jerk reaction is to make it... turn the screws and as we see in the data, oftentimes make it worse.

- Yeah, that's very much true. Thank you very much for summarizing at the end, the key takeaways, I think that's helpful for everyone. And once again, I really appreciate you having on... like having you on this podcast, it's been a pleasure for me to speak to you about JOLT and an honor to have you on this podcast, so thank you very much, Matt, thanks for your time...

- Thanks for having me.

- I appreciate all your insights and I hope to host you on another occasion and for another episode in the future, but I really would like to thank you for everything you did today.

- Thanks, Emil.

- Have a good day.

- You too.