Kevin Dixon is a sales leader turned sales platform founder of Boxxstep. Boxxstep's mission is to help sales teams improve how they manage their important sales opportunities by using a more buyer-centric approach. During this episode, Kevin expounds on his changed approach in B2B sales and explains why all you listeners out there should change too.
Kevin focuses on the irony of salespeople constantly selling change; despite the sales industry being the most reluctant group of people to change. He explains that salespeople have a very fixed way of doing things and they see things in a very seller centric way.
A massive gap exists in what sellers know about who the buyers are, what's important to them, and how they're going to make decisions. Sales is not one size fits all and 80% of sellers do not identify everybody involved in the buying decisions. So, there is a lot of groundwork that salespeople need to do. Shortcut selling does not help.
So how do you bring about a more buyer centric approach?
First, you focus on buyer enablement. Buyer enablement is about providing the right information at the right time to help with the job or task at hand for each buyer. To achieve this, you must begin to understand more about the buyers, the buyer personas, and each person involved in a typical decision for what you are trying to sell. Kevin acknowledges that a team usually decides collectively, however, everyone on that team is an individual with their own opinions and concerns. The goal is to make that experience more relevant to them as individuals and as organizations. Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy.
When you begin to think about the buyers as individuals, you are enabling a more buyer centric approach. If sellers bridge the gap between the buyer and seller and become more mindful of the buying requirement, they can turn previous losses into wins and those no decisions into wins as well.
Greg Dickinson: Hello, everyone, this is Greg Dickinson with the convenience factor podcast. I just welcome everyone today. Great, great, great guest Kevin Dixon is going to join us today. And I'll let him introduce himself. But what I'm really enthusiastic about is is Kevin is I've read a lot of his stuff, he's got out there on the on the web, a lot of articles he's published, he really is, you know, kind of got his his head wrapped around this fact that the convenience factor, the fact of the buyer is becoming more digital and doing more on their own. And he's got a great software company that helps buyers buy so let me get Kevin introduced, and we'll get started the podcast. Kevin, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Kevin Dixon: Well, firstly, three greats. I don't often have three greats in an introduction. Great. So thank you for that. So, yeah, like you, I've been around a while and we've seen how sales has changed because from the 90s, and the naughties, etc. We've been involved in selling. And so my sales career started way back in the 80s. For Erickson, so I've been in technology for a long time. And, and during that long time, you learn a lot. And a lot of what you do becomes irrelevant. And and I'm seeing a sort of acceleration of that now, people have talked to me about their 25 years of experience, and they go well, okay, great, but 20 years of that is no longer relevant anymore. So you know, I spent a career in large corporates like Ericsson, I did startups, even prior to box that, like yourself, you sort of, you learn different ways of doing business and startups, and you're doing corporates. And ultimately, I think what I learned in the businesses I've worked for, but what I learned, and what I've seen in the market led me to build and create box there. So now it's a case of trying to educate our peers in the sales industry that you and I have worked alongside in the past, to try and get them to wrap their heads around the fact that like, like us, they need to change their thinking.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah. And yeah, Kevin let us a little drill on that for a minute. Because it's one of the things that absolutely mystifies me is that if you if you ask somebody point blank, would you buy from your company? Would you follow your buying the process you've outlined with an, you know, an inside salesperson calling you and asking you a bunch of questions. And then the SDR gets on the phone and ask you a bunch of questions, and then turn it over to sales. And no one talks us and every rep starts over again. Would you buy through that process? They go no, but yet when but when they go to work? Right? They insist that that's the process, right? It really is conflicting to me to think about the fact that when we when Kevin, Greg and a million other people go and buy, we buy on our own right, we want to do some research on our own, I don't care if it's 30% 40% or 80%. And then we want to engage with sales. But why the enterprise sales company said no, if you want to buy from us day one, here's our process follow it. Why Why is that? Why don't people Excel?
Kevin Dixon: It's one of the things I preach a lot. And the irony of selling is that we sell change. Everyone knows that selling creates change management for the people that buy from us, they would do something differently, or use in different ways, etc. It's change management. The irony is, is sales industry is the most reluctant group of people to change. We have a fixed way of doing things, we see things in a very seller centric way. And that there's a great book called "sell the way you buy" by David Prima, and it really starts to try and highlight this. It is trying to think about how you buy as a consumer. Yeah, consumer markets moving into the b2b market, you know, there's a lot of correlation between how it's done in consumer market now. So we're buying differently as a company. And yet we're not adapting to that change particularly well. And it amazes me when I talk to sales leaders and sales teams day in day out, and really trying to get them to think differently and be different is really challenging. And one of the reason I tried to say, look, did you have challenges in in product differentiation? Absolutely. Nearly to person, they're saying, Yeah, it's tough to differentiate. And I said, Well, there's an opportunity differentiating the buying experience, and they sort of get it. And they sort of start to do stuff, but it's a real cultural change for any business.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah. No, it just amazes me because it, you know, to your point, if you think of like one of the proxies, I always uses like, think about, you know, when Amazon came out in early 2000, right all online won't work, ecommerce, shipping is hard. Oh, payments are hard. Oh fraud is bad, right? And slowly but surely right Amazon overcame those one or two little, quote unquote, objections. And now all of a sudden, all the people say well, I'd never do that I would never buy that way. Now, everyone buys that way, right? Even to the point where retail stores do, you know, almost 50% of their business online, right? The Walmarts of the world or the, you know, even your food, you know, your restaurants, if it's, if it's convenient, people will go do it, right. I always say to people listen to how do you order your pizza on Friday night? Do you? Do you call up? Or do you go online and order it? 90% of people say go online and order it. Why? Because there's less friction, it's convenience, easier. People don't, you know, people can make mistakes, etc. But yet, you know, you and I can have those cmo conversations CRO conversations with people and they'll say, oh, man, yeah, you're right. And then they hang up the phone and you try to get him back on the phone later. And they're back to their normal process of measuring the metrics mqls. conversion rates are 1%. Why Why do I track something that's got a 99% failure?
Kevin Dixon: I wouldn't want to be starting my sales career now with those sort of stats in my mind. But I think let's back up, let's back up. Because there might be people listening, going, what's all this about? I'm comfortable selling what I'm selling. And you know, there's a lot of organizations saying product led growth, where it is doing fantastic hockey stick growth, but that's because the product is driving it not sales yet. But for the vast majority organizations, they're not seeing that. So the big question, when we back up is why, why you and I having this conversation? And why anybody's listening should they care? Let's start to look at some of the facts that justify the reason why we're having this conversation. The number of salespeople making quota is down massively, the number of deals that end in no decision is up significantly. If you start to think that the sale cycle's becoming longer, and buyers are saying they find buying hard and difficult, things are changing all the time, more people involved, and the more people you get involved, the more complicated it becomes to make a decision. The seller has got to start thinking, Okay, this is a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. And the opportunity is to think as a helper, not as a seller. And that sounds super cheesy to hardcore salespeople I am, I'm a sales professional, I'm not helper, I'm not in the market of trying to help people. The reality is we're all trying to help people have that mindset of saying, If buying is difficult, what can we do to make it easier?
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah, no, Okay, listen, and I hit one more fact. Right? It was a price intelligent, we did a survey of CAC, customer acquisition costs. last five years, customer acquisition costs are up 70%. 70%. Right. So that that means if that's your, for those that don't know, CAC is sales and marketing costs, right? what it cost to acquire a customer? Well, if the cost went up 70% means whatever you're doing is not working. If you're buying all this technology, all this sales enablement, all this, you know, lists and, and technology that your salesperson be better to jump. It should be easier, less expensive, not more expensive, but you hit the nail on the head, bigger buying teams more complex back in the 90s, Kevin and Greg, go find a decision maker that with the Signing Authority, the budget authority would ask those questions, we'd find that person and they would sign off on the deal. People don't buy that way anymore, they get buy in, they get internal buy in is as Gartner says you only get 60% excuse me, you only get 6% of the buyers time the rest of time is internal work. It's not the same process. So you were a great salesman 20 years ago, because the buyer buy the certain way. You are in control the data.
Kevin Dixon: You're educating the buyer, they didn't know they didn't have access to digital information they have today.
Greg Dickinson: Now it's more of a guided approach, right? It's to your point of helping is I use the word guided right you the sales that we as people are going to navigate a buying journey on our own your job as a salesperson is to help them navigate that and influence them where you can, but you're not going to get 100% of the time anymore, you're only going to get 6% of their time.
Kevin Dixon: There's a most sales organizations are picked up on sales enablement, sales enablement is pretty common now in most organizations, everyone's thinking about how you know, what can we do to enable our sales teams to be more successful? And logically, buyer enablement evolved as a terminology, it probably was Gartner that came up with it. But if you start to look at what what do they mean, when they started talking about buyer enablement, it was really about providing the right information at the right time to help with the job or task at hand for each buyer. And I think that was a great starting point that's pegging the ground. But for me, it's sort of misses a little bit in that front because when you get straight to that level, it makes some assumptions that sales teams have understood what they need to know about the people involved, what's important to them, because content And the application of content and time and contents only relevant if you've got all the front end, what I call buyer discovery. And buyer discoveries, if you've got this expanded team, then you've got to identify who that expanded team is. And there was, maybe it was probably Gartner again, but they said, I think it was about 80% of sellers don't identify everybody involved in the buying decision. Though, if you haven't identified everyone in the buying decision, you're you're leaving everything to chance, because there'll be people in there making decisions without knowing you without hearing you. So try to make sure before we start thinking about our collateral and our insights that we want to share with the buyers, understand who the buyers are, and what's important to them, because everyone's an individual, yes, they make a decision collectively. But they all also have individual opinions, criteria concerns. So there is a lot of groundwork that salespeople need to do. shortcut selling does doesn't help. Sales enablement, I my feeling is it focused an awful lot on top of the funnel prospecting. And it focuses an awful lot on content. There's a massive Gulf in what sellers know about who the buyers are, what's important to them, and how they're going to make a decision.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, I think I think besides Listen, I don't think there's anything wrong with sales enablement to the point of it has made the content discovery easier internally, right. It's a lot of marketing to find out a repository to put you know content that sales can get their hands on you get new sales, people etc. But I think, I think to your point, right, this perception or idea that that Greg as a sales person knows what the five or 10 or 15 buyers want, and when they want it, it's just preposterous, right? I there's no way I can do that. Right? And so providing me, right providing me with the tools to be oh Greg based on where they are, there's what you should be giving them for content. Why don't you flip it on its head and let and let the buyer right, let the buyer find and self discover information and then use a salesperson based on that intelligent that insight, take action to continue to augment that and guide them along the journey. I call it digital trust. Right here we say if you think about you as a person, if you're getting ready to plant a garden or you get ready to build a house, you're getting ready to buy appliances, and you can go to someplace and get answers to your questions. Right, unobstructed. Just I have a question on cleaning a garden, how much fertilizer, what kind of plants but when the day comes, I'm gonna buy fertilizer, I'm gonna buy the plants. I go there because they've allowed me they've educated me, they've guided me to that from the Hey, I'm thinking about doing it till now I'm doing it. I think that's what you said earlier with, you know, sales is kind of more into it's a partnership now there's, there's clearly even the sales enablement leader at seismic said that there's now no longer 100% sales cycle. There's a sales cycle and a buying cycle. I think the sales job of buyer enablement is how do we make those two
Kevin Dixon: Games for sellers, though, to think about buying cycle, but let me I want to go back a while back in gosh, how long ago this was, well, 15 or so years ago, I did a start up which was delivering content to mobile phones. And there was this element of subscriber profiling. And the idea of being and this is, you know, 15, 16 years ago, is the on someone's mobile phone. As you start to understand more about the types of buyers you have or types of users you have, you only present content to them, for them to choose from, that is relevant to them or of interest to them based on on what they might have put in their profile. And what you might have learned from them is the same as like, let me give you another example is that, you know, I don't eat meat, I haven't eaten meat for a long time. I go to restaurants, they give me a menu, where it's full of absolutely everything. Now, if my buying experience was that my menu and I saw the fish, the seafood and the vegetarian dishes like wow, what a buying experience. And that's why I suppose when you start looking at Omedym it is you got all these different buyer personas involved in a buying process. But guess what? They're not all interested in absolutely everything you've got to say as a salesperson. Yeah, they will be guys and gals that will be focused on saying, well, this is my area of the decision making process. And I don't want to sit in all the functional demonstrations and all those elements. I want to sort of just understand about these parts. So we have to start thinking we have to understand more about the buyers, the buyer personas, and each person involved in a typical decision for what we sell. Yeah, to make that experience more relevant to them as individuals and as organizations. Which is one of the reasons that I love your product.
Greg Dickinson: I couldn't agree more. I mean, you think about it, right? Because it used to I heard someone say the other day that you have if a person doesn't see you demo something, they assume you don't do it, because that was important to them, right? You demo all this stuff, workflow and analytics and adding a user and all stuff. And this is a person in the back of the room that's worried about, you know, something and they leave the room. They go, well, Greg didn't demo that they must not do it well, because he dealt with everything that was important to Mary, important everything that was important to john etc. Right. So so that buying team has made it harder to your point, you need to map is compliance engaged? Is procurement engaged? Is that IT department engaged? Because if they are, you're right, that IT person does not want to sit through the hour and a half demo on functionality of the business. They don't care about the business, what they care about, is these three or four things that are important to IT. Is it scalable, right? Is it secure? Do you encrypt data in a certain way, right. And that's to your point is being able to use your technology to map even if you don't know who the individual is, at least know the role, because now you can, you can be a smarter seller. Right?
Kevin Dixon: You and I remember the days when we would turn up at a customer's premises. We would be shown to a meeting room, we plug in our PC, fire up PowerPoint, a whole bunch of people would come in gradually a mix across the organization and we would present to them. I mean, one size fits all. Here's the company the da da da and some of you know, I got involved in some of these things that went on two three hours. But you knew that people in that meeting room were switching off in aspects because it's not relevant to me. That no longer happens for a reason is that people don't have the time to sit through all of that they want to focus on their relevant, relevant aspect of what you're talking about. Yeah, it falls down to the buying experience and the buying experience is what buyer enablement is focused on.
Greg Dickinson: Exactly. Buyers to buy I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Dixon: And that is typical. Every sound salesman saying it's tougher to sell, what is tougher to sell? Because it's it's more complex to buy. So what can we do to grease the wheels of buying? And believe it or not, we can do stuff, although sellers don't think that's their responsibility? Or they don't presume that they should try and interject in that part of the process.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, it was it was I listened to a, you I know you're a fan of him as well. Brett Adamson from Gartner did a keynote address for their sales conference, and he put a stat up, that blew my mind that the the, the average person will spend 20 seconds 20 seconds on a website. They don't have the attention we used to have, they're not your people are not trained to say, hey, if I want to know information, I'm going to go to your website. And I'm going to talk to Kevin for an hour or two or three or four and Kevin's going to educate me, I do it on my own I bought it was point was between your phone, your tablet, your TV, and your PC, your you've got a bunch of devices going your attention span. So So think about your example you just gave, in a room they check out when you're in the conference room, and you're there, they check out, think of how they're checking out when you're doing things virtually, which is about 90% of how we sell to that, right? You need to be able to provide that buyer with an experience to your point that makes it easier for them to buy.
Kevin Dixon: Yeah, I mean, you and I both to do online customer demos day in day out. We will never get everybody we need to get on that same call it just doesn't work in their calendars everyone's more busy time time is valuable. So but we can't decide what we'll share the recording to that person because they're not going to plow through a recording of an hour's demo. So if there's so much change, people have a low tolerance level, time has value as I said earlier, they want to cut to the chase and focus on what they need to focus on get to the information. We're all impatient. You have 20 seconds in a website. That I mean that's that's scary. It's truly scary. But every I'm one of the most impatient people going.
Greg Dickinson: That's what Brent said. He said, he said what people are forgetting about buyers today is it's us. And he said people are shallow. We no longer do a long research project. We no longer go very very very deep we skim we skim across the top we we go on our phone we get quick tweets, quick news articles, quick headlines, right. He said Why do you think all the headlines on YouTube, they want you to watch our five top reasons too, because he catches your attention, right? And you go, Oh, good. I can watch this for five seconds. You get the five five top reasons instead of having to watch two hours we we don't give the attention. So salespeople need to be cognitive. I mean, think about you as a buyer, right? How do you behave? You don't go to a car lot anymore and spend three hours with the salesperson, you do your research, walk in test drive and decide you're going to buy yes or no, you're in and out in a half hour.
Kevin Dixon: That's another way all sales sales people everywhere are using LinkedIn. If you go back a couple of years long form articles were the way forward everybody wanted to get known and show their their expertise would write long form articles. They will get engaged now. They're crashing. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to read a long form article and the number of people that read them is much smaller. They want bite sized information that they can make a quick judgment call on is this relevant for me? Yes or no? And if it is I'll read it but don't expect me to read too much.
Greg Dickinson: Yep. So our one of our customers called it called Are software and at first I was kind of Well, that's not really a compliment, but I thought about it more. But he said, what Omedym does for his customers is provide snackables quick, I have a question I get an answer, I have a question I get an answer. Not I sat through 16 minutes hoping you're going to answer my question it's snackable right. It's just that and you think about a snackable it's that little, you know, quick little, you know, answer to your hunger. This is a you know, it's it's pretty, pretty cool. Hey, so So where are you guys on your on your technology? You know, tell the audience a little bit about what you guys are up to? Because you're helping the buyer buy?
Kevin Dixon: Yeah, I think it's we try and bridge the the helping the sellers to take a better approach, mindful of the buying requirement. And so CRM, everyone uses CRM, it's there, we'd love it or hate it, it has some value if it's deployed properly. It's a fundamental part, but it is a seller centric platform, it focuses on you, your process, your pipeline, your forecasts and your reporting. And is it customer relationship management? I'm not sure about the relationship part. In fact, I'm I'm adamant, it isn't really focused enough on relationship. So what we did is I looked at customers are out there involved in complex or enterprise sales, from my own experience. And guys, like you sort of build an understanding, okay, what extra does CRM need, so we are a standalone platform, but it's so much better when it's plugged in CRM. And what we try and look at is the concept of the buying committee. And the buying committee, some people call it decision making unit, the power base, whatever you want to call it, it's the group of people who are now involved in the deciding and buying. And the scary part is, and wonderful people have gotten this done all their extensive research, the typical number of people involved in a buying committee now is 11 and plus, it is 12 to 14, if we you sell is technology, most sales leaders and sales teams don't realize this, they think it's probably about half of that is because they don't broaden their horizons that they're engaging with the active buyers, not the occasional ones that are popping in and out of the process. So what I looked at saying, what can we create that helps CRM enter and sales teams involved with engaging with buying committees? So we looked at originally, just the the engagement, which is relationship mapping, map out who's involved, what's important to them? What's the dynamics internally? Where are they going through their own buying process? You know, what do you need to do to help these people move forward and one of the business drivers of the organization they're trying to deliver upon. So that was what we call engage. And then we're sort of thinking, Well, hold on, man, you've now got them. So what are the things we can do to help them in the buying process? Historically, there was the closed plan, it's very seller centric, it evolved into the mutual action plan. We call an outcome enablement plan, because that's more customer centric, which is really mapping out all the milestones, providing the content, really sort of collaborating between the buying and selling team to help them achieve the outcomes that the project is designed to get to. So that's what we call collaborate. And so we've moved from engaged to collaborate relationship mapping to mutual action plans, and ultimately the customer is going to make a decision. Do we have won it, lost it? or it's a no decision? And everyone says, Yeah, we know when loss analysis is useful, and we need to do more of it. But time and cost means we don't do it. Well, we've made it simple and low cost, because every single decision is an opportunity to learn. What do you do well? What do you need to improve upon? From the buyers perspective, and win loss analysis historically done when, you might, I was gonna say interrogate but interview, one of the buyers that made the decision, and most people end it when they've lost a deal. But if getting feedback from one person is one person's perspective, but they made a decisions committee, you've got to try and get opinions from across the committee because they will vary. Sellers have different performance level with different personas, there were technical, financial, legal, whatever trying to understand what your sales people have done in the engagement win lose on their decision. It gives you the insight to make the buying experience better by training your salespeople to deliver differently.Yeah, that's that's where we're at. We're trying to sort of say, a bunch of tools that really help salespeople to help the buying committee.
Greg Dickinson: I think what you what you hit on, right, is what we've we've talked about a little bit is that, you know, fundamentally, there's no denying that the buyers change, the buyers had more control, and it's not argue that it's, you know, 10% or 100%. Right. The fact is that the buying journey is now real, and the buyers doing more work on their own before they engage with sales. And so what you're what you're advocating and saying that buying team is 10 or 12 people and your ya know, 20 years ago, you get the decision maker and you were done. Right and that decision maker would be making the decision now, you know, you can have one lone wolf one or two lone wolves out there that don't like your technology or don't want it to happen and the deal doesn't get done. That's why the report showed that you know only 40% of all deals end in no decision.
Kevin Dixon: If you look at that no decision, I mean Gartner has come up with 53% in the past, but you get all sorts of different research agents to come up with stats, but that's why I sort of stick sticking around. So it's about half. somewhere in there or there abouts.
Greg Dickinson: And it's not because your software is no good. It's because they couldn't reach an internal decision. Yeah. Because the buying team is. Listen, lineup 12 people, Kevin right now and ask them what color the sky is. You won't get a you won't get consensus, you won't get them to get buy in, right? Ask him if this technology will help us lower our costs. Ask them it's gonna help increase revenue to all these different opinions. Gosh, the world we live in today, right? So So I think what you're doing is trying to say, hey, let's map that let's not map and decision maker and gatekeeper and influence and all this stuff that used to be in targeted account selling. This is more about real life, the buyers have a different perspective, they have a different job to do they have a different reason for or be, or whatever reason to be a for or against your software. And then I love the idea of of helping that, at the end say, hey, why did we win? Why did we lose? Right? Why did we draw? Right? And because that helps your organization? Right? I listen, I've gotten feedback from customers and got a slap in the face at my previous company. I was a CEO, I'd go out and talk to customers, and they tell me things I go, wow. Boy, do I gotta change? Boy, does my company have to change? Right? Yeah. You're like, Wow.
Kevin Dixon: Well, you know, I get you may have seen or you see these things? What's that TV series? Undercover Boss? Guys go out there. And they learn things from their own employees that they did that their own employees, and they didn't realize what was going on. So that's internal. So if you imagine what you can discover from your customers. Now, that's the key thing. I sort of say that. Sometimes, you know, how can you turn losses into the wins? How can you turn no decisions into wins? And that's the reason that the the argument is, understand why there were losses or why they were no decision because then you're better position. And here's the interesting thing, a lot of the time and from from some of the research we've done about a third of time, even when you want it is despite the selling, the selling was terrible. So your salespeople can believe that done a great job, but they haven't. And we're not trying to create data to beat people up with because I don't want to see, you know, sales, sales tenure has really shrunk the journey in sales people sales leaders is at an all time shocking number, you know, the speed of change. So, and changing salespeople is painful, it's time consuming it's risky. So if you can take what you've got, and if there's any chance of making a better to deliver, that's so much better. Such a better way of doing it. Yeah. Instead of saying ah give up, move on, Next, please.
Greg Dickinson: No, I'm with you. But I think I think what you know, what we both hit on for both of our companies is the fact that there is a change. And if you can then enable the buyer right and make it easier that chart that Gartner showed it says 77% of all buyers say it's their last purchase was frustrating, hard and complex. I don't know about you. I run from challenging hard and complex, right. So you know, you're you're hurting yourself. So I think what you guys are up to, hey, listen, we can do a lot, you know, 40 hours of this stuff, but people won't listen for more because we already talked about the fact that over 20 minutes, right? They're going to move on to something else. So Kevin, let's pick a chapter two in a bit. And thank you very much for joining me today. It was a great conversation, your insights were were truly valuable.
Kevin Dixon: Thanks, Greg.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai