A rant and call-to-action for sales and marketing professionals

I read a study recently that really pissed me off.

Actually, if I’m going to be honest, I only read the headline of the article before I got pissed off. Once I read the actual article, their findings made a lot of sense. Which pissed me off even more — after all, I’m only human (that will be funnier when you’re done reading).

The article was about a company called Conversica that did a massive study a few months ago:

Now, I spent about half my career in sales before I switched to growth marketing, so I was offended on a deeply personal level. Conversica’s study said that conversational bots were more prompt and much better at following up with leads than real humans.

They did this by demonstrating exactly how terrible humans are at sales, and pointing out that bots don’t suffer from any of those deficiencies. Conversica pretended to be a great lead and requested to be contacted by human sales reps from 548 different companies.

• A third of those companies never responded at all.
• About half of them made only one or two attempts to follow up.
• And only half of those actually responded quickly.

That’s a pretty poor performance by the human race. We know from years of research that calling a lead in the first 5 minutes increases the probability of connecting by more than 9 times and the probability of a sale 22%. The probability of connecting with a lead decreases rapidly after just one hour.

We also know that the 80% of sales require 5 or more follow-ups before they close and other studies have corroborated that sales reps only make an average of 2 attempts per lead.

Although, with a third of “Contact Sales” leads being ignored and the average response time for new leads being 42 hours, let’s focus on problem at a time.

Bots obviously have nothing better to do than respond right away.

They’re never getting coffee because they’re too busy closing.

They don’t take bathroom breaks.

They don’t sleep.

They don’t have the physical limitations we humans have.

Bots are going to have an enormous impact on our lives. I’m torn between thinking that some people are hyperventilating unnecessarily over “AI” and thinking that most people aren’t nearly worried enough about the impact bots will have on our economy.

We have bots that are diagnosing cancer and running military missions as part of their own hive mind. We have bots that are winning Jeopardy against some of the most educated people our species has ever produced (that’s actually an old trick now). We have a bot that can win Go, where there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe and you can’t just build a machine that projects out all possible combinations and selects the best (less than a year old, but an old trick now).

Our newest trick is we have a bot that can win at poker — a game based on incomplete information and occasionally irrational behavior.

So I was willing to buy that piece. Okay, they’re faster than we are and can do some of the same things we can.

But the persistence piece really bugged me. I used to train arguably the most irritating and persistent sales reps in the world. You know those people who harass you in the mall while you’re walking with your family and try to sell you cell phones? Yeah, I trained those people.

We didn’t care if you actually needed the phone. If you came within shouting distance of our kiosk, my reps started closing you. It didn’t matter who you were. A thousand people walked by every day and we would close maybe 5, but that was fine because the per rep quota was 5 phones.

It turns out that hard closing like that was really terrible for our company long term, but I’ll get back to that later.

Our persistence was really annoying. But for some reason, even though bots are more persistent they still feel less annoying to people.

Human salespeople have a big reputation problem. We conduct a massive study of our own at HubSpot every year asking the simple question, “Who do you trust?” At the top, as you’d expect, are doctors and teachers. Further down you’ve got lawyers and journalists. A little further you’ve got coffee baristas and pro athletes. And then there’s this little itty bitty teensy weensy sliver at the very very bottom, narrowly beating out politicians and lobbyists, where our profession sits.

In 2016, sales and marketing were considered only slightly more trustworthy than politicians and lobbyists.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

This isn’t exclusive to outside of our companies either. Our professions aren’t even respected by each other. In a survey of sales and marketing teams, 87% of terms they use to describe the people who are supposed to be their partners in business growth are negative. Marketing gets pissed off when sales cherry-picks leads or fails to follow up enough, and sales gets pissed off because they think marketing “just gets in the way”.

A salesperson actually said that to me recently: “Marketing just gets in the way”.

Yet we know from even more research that companies with tightly aligned sales and marketing sell more.

Bots, on the other hand, are perfect growth partners. They never cherry pick. They never give up. And they never, ever, fail to pass data back to the marketing team.

So you and I are not as good at the mechanics of sales as bots are, and on top of it, other humans don’t trust us.

Right now you may be thinking one of two things:

1. I’m way off, bots will never replace real people, and this article is stupid

OR

2. You’ve heard this before, you’re worried about a robot taking your job, and you’re trying to find a way to call John Connor to stop the Rise of the Machines™

Either way, we need to face some hard facts. The good old days when sales and marketing were easy are over. Every year from here on out will be harder than the last. And it’s not just because of bots. The fundamental way that people buy has changed, so we have to change the way we sell.

Humans have magic freaking powers

I’m not here to give you another “the sky is falling” write up on how bots are going to take your jobs. If you’re in sales, I’m here to give you hope.

There are two things that only humans can do — things that can only be described as freaking magic. We have no idea how to make bots do magic (yet). If you listen to Ryan Block, we’re 15 Nobel Prizes away from being able to do make bots do this magic.

But just because we have magic doesn’t mean we know how to use it productively. I’ve always thought it was funny that the witches and wizards in Harry Potter, for example, had to go to school to learn magic.

They’re magic, right?

They can sort of randomly do magic even when they’re little kids. But they go to this school to learn how to master their human magic so that they can use it intentionally. Without defining and being intentional about how they use their magic, their magic is useless. In Harry Potter, the danger of having magic and not knowing how to use it intentionally is so great that they don’t actually let you do magic if you don’t go to school.

The fact that we have human magic that bots don’t isn’t good enough. We have to use it intentionally.

So, let’s talk about how to use our human magic, because that’s the edge that we have over bots.

How do you compete with a never sleeping, relentless army of sales and marketing Bots?

Human Freaking Magic #1: The Serendipity of Teamwork.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Moneyball, you know the story. The Oakland A’s were a terrible baseball team. They had less than a third the salary budgets of elite teams like the Red Sox or the Yankees. If you were an Oakland fan, you had a 50/50 chance or less of seeing a winning game.

Their General Manager, a guy named Billy Beane, decided they were going to try something new. They weren’t going to use things like gut feelings of scouts and coaches or which players had hot girlfriends — I kid you not, according to the story that was a real dimension they used to rate confidence.

Instead, they were going to figure out what measurable dimensions of a player had the highest correlation to the team winning games and then hire whatever players they could afford who had those skills. They looked at games that teams won and lost, and broke it down by every possible thing they could measure to figure out what was important. Then they recruited the best player they could to do that one thing, even if they had a low batting average and no significant other at all.

And it worked. Their win percentage increased by almost 50% and they made it to the playoffs, finally winning the American League in 2006.

It turns out that baseball and business aren’t all that different.

To my fellow sales and marketing folks: each of you is here to help your team win by influencing specific statistics. Instead of on-base percentage or slugging percentage, you go for connect rate and close rate or views per blog or recommends per Medium article (click the ❤ below…) or whatever.

Marketers, you’re the coaching and scouting staff. You’re doing your job well when you set your sales team up to be successful.

At HubSpot, for example, we know that the probability of closing a lead doesn’t diminish until the sales rep has made 7 connect attempts between voicemails and emails.

That’s interesting for us to know, but it’s only useful if the marketers feed that information to the sales team and hold them accountable to it.

We also know an incredible amount of information about our team’s lead. We have a pretty good idea what their problems are. We have a lot of other information we can pull in from other sources and feed to you.

The marketers help you know which leads you should be calling and what content the lead is most interested in so that you can spend less time hitting your talking points and more time listening to prospects. It’s as if the batting coach could tell you exactly how that next pitch is coming in by analyzing the weird signals between the pitcher and catcher in real time.

I know that sales reps don’t want to spend time logging data, but without that data your team can’t help you win.

Every time the Oakland A’s saw someone swing a bat and watched what happened, they got one step closer to winning. Every time you log data for your marketing team, that is money in your friggin’ pocket.

Now, if you’re a techy person, right now you’re thinking that any time you can define the components of a model like that you’re actually making it easier to automate it using bots.

You are correct.

Bots can look for patterns in data and track variations, but cannot yet create random serendipity. We all have that friend, let’s call him Random Randy, where when we say something he says “Oh that reminds me!” and then goes off on a completely unrelated tangent.

That can be annoying. That is also human freaking magic. That’s something we have no idea how to program because we don’t even know how humans do it. When a computer talks to another computer it can take inputs and process them into outputs. But when someone in sales talks to someone in marketing, you can create something wholly new that barely resembles where you started.

When a salesperson talks to a marketing person, that marketing person can use human magic to create a wholly new insight to test. Every time someone on your marketing team asks you to run an experiment with them — such as trying a new follow up sequence or positioning statement or selling to a new kind of lead — that’s a bit of human magic that no bot can yet create.

Once you pull apart the sales and marketing model enough, you find the second bit of human freaking magic that bots can’t do.

The best salesperson I ever met sold flowers

Ten years ago, I had a friend who owned a flower shop, and they complained to me that there was another flower shop growing way faster than they were and taking all of the customers.

Their competitor had the same suppliers and the same price points, so it wasn’t just that they were undercutting them on price. But somehow they were spending an absurd amount of money on marketing.

My friend hadn’t been too worried at first because they figured that the competitor was just hemorrhaging money and would eventually be bankrupted by their own stupidity. That sadistic satisfaction never came, because they just kept growing.

So I went over there and checked out their competitor’s store. I was looking for some special weapon that they had that was helping them grow so fast. They had an okay selection and a nice store but it wasn’t anything special. The woman behind the counter , though— she was special.

Now, I’m no expert in buying flowers. I admit this. I’m not even great at remembering when I should buy flowers, which has gotten me in trouble more than once. At the very least, I’ve missed out on some potential brownie points.

She didn’t wait for me to buy or ask, “How can I help you?” When she saw me wandering around, looking confused as I always do in flower shops, she asked, “Who are you buying flowers for?”

“My wife,” I said. “It’s her birthday tomorrow.”

She asked me if I knew what she liked, I said “Of course I don’t know”.

Rather than thrust a generic bouquet upon my clueless self, she led me through some other questions about my wife’s favorite colors and things she likes. In the end, she made a great suggestion for an arrangement.

That’s a solid consultative sales process that’s built around one thing: empathy. Not to be confused with sympathy, which is feeling compassion or pity for a person. Although she probably pitied me a little because I was completely clueless. Empathy is the ability to feel the feelings of someone else. To look out from their eyes and see the problem the way they see it. To understand why they’re doing something.

In business jargon we call that the “job-to-be-done”. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”

This woman was able to understand me, tailor her questions to understanding why I was buying flowers, and help me make sense of the incomprehensibly large number of options before me.

That’s human freaking magic.

That’s another thing that we don’t even know how it works in humans, so we definitely can’t make a bot that do that. It’s also something that people like the ones I used to train to sell cell phones sail right past. My people were good closers. Bots are even better closers. And closers suck at selling (data on that later).

Takeaway #1: Help the prospect define their problems and then help them solve it. Help help help wins more deals than sell sell sell.

I felt bad because of my friend, but I actually did buy those flowers. They were perfect. If she had just waited until I asked to buy, or if she had “Always Been Closing”, I would have walked out which was my original intention. But I did buy.

That is when something even more special happened. She asked me “Do you want me to remind you next year when your wife’s birthday is coming up and suggest something different?” Hell yes! I trusted her suggestions and I did not trust my ability to remember dates. She knew that. She could look out through my eyes and see a problem I hadn’t even brought up.

“Is there anyone else you buy flowers for?”

“Well, I’d like to buy some for my mom on mother’s day.”

“Would you like me to remind you then? I can send you some questions to ask her on the down low that will help us pick something perfect.”

Uh, YES? Are you freaking kidding me?

So much yes.

Please do.

Flowers are weird gifts, because you buy them and they eventually die. Which obviously means that I have to buy more and more and more — and every time I buy, the company learns more about me. My favorite business models work this way, where the longer you’re a customer the more value you get from staying with that company.

What that flower shop had managed to do was get really good at keeping me as a customer, which meant that they could spend more on getting me as a customer. They could pay that young lady enough money that she was happy and motivated at work and they could spend more money on marketing. My back-of-the-napkin math estimated that they probably broke even at best on the first set of flowers I bought for my wife. But they were able to keep selling me flowers, so breaking even on my first purchase meant they got a free customer for life.

This is an incredibly powerful point of growth leverage for them. My friend’s shop was more like the yellow curve. They were more like the green or yellow curves below:

If you have confidence that your customers will return, you can outgrow your competitors while still building a better business and making more money long term.

Remember when I said earlier that my people selling cell phones were hurting our company? That’s because our company was designed to be the green curve but we were selling as if we were the red curve. We closed deals but didn’t care if they stuck around.

Recurring revenue models like cell phones can lose money to acquire a customer just like that flower shop, but because all we did was close anyone who didn’t say no fast enough our customer retention was awful (like 50% churn in the first month awful). There’s a reason that if you walk through the malls now those people are waaaaay less irritating — even though those people now are paid way more than my people back then were. The customers they sell to stick around much longer. They’ll sit there talking to you as long as you want to make sure they understand how you use your cell phone so they can sell you what’s best for you.

I was always really interested in how that young lady sold. She wasn’t pushy. She didn’t really sell at all. She just asked me questions and answered my questions and asked me new questions based on my questions. She looked out through my eyes and saw the problem they way I saw it — and she was one of the most helpful people I had ever met. She was doing inbound sales long before we had a name for it.

Takeaway #2: She knew that if she could figure out the who and the why behind my buy that she would close me. This is human magic that comes naturally to us. But you have to be intentional about it.

She may not have rated highly on a rubric of conventional sales skills. She wasn’t a closer. She wasn’t trying to identify and overcome objections. But she understood me. She could see the flowers the way I saw them. She knew that I couldn’t care less about the flowers. I was buying smiles. I was buying hugs. Her empathy enabled her to be the most helpful salesperson I’ve ever worked with. Ten years later, I’m still talking about her.

Don’t worry about my friend, by the way. He closed that shop and opened a cigar shop so he could use chemical addiction to aid with customer retention. You buy cigars, light them on fire intentionally, and then have to buy more. A business model with great customer life time value, although it may shorten the overall customer life time.

I don’t know if that flower shop was run that way because their owners were nerds with advanced customer acquisition and retention models that showed the Moneyball benefits from it or just because that was the culture that they had, but either way, it was working.

Obviously, we at HubSpot are nerds with advanced customer acquisition and retention models, so we studied this in much greater depth.

We had sales managers rate sales reps starting in the interview process on traditional dimensions like closing ability, ability to overcome objections, and other things that we thought might make a sales rep great. Then we tracked over time whether or not those sales reps hit quota.

We all say to ourselves that being helpful is nice yadda yadda but at the end of the day it’s all about the closers, right?

What we found was that people who were good closers absolutely sucked at hitting quota. I mentioned this earlier. Closers. Suck. At. Selling. They were great for short term sales, but they weren’t successful in the long term. It had a negative correlation to hitting quota. You were less likely to hit your quota long term if you were a good closer than if you were just mediocre at everything.

The same was true for needs identification, convincing, and objection handling. All the things I used to beat into my sales reps had actually been hurting them.

What mattered most? Preparation. How much information they had gathered ahead of time to help them understand the prospect. Next was adaptability — making the sales process about what they were hearing from the prospect. After that was domain experience — meaning that they really understood the prospect’s life. The sales rep could empathize with the person they were talking to, because they had been there before. They could look out from the prospect’s eyes and see the product the way the they saw it. At HubSpot, our customers weren’t buying sales and marketing software — they were buying business growth. They were buying vacations with their families. They were buying self-reliance and self-respect.

Takeaway #3: Take the time to deeply understand your prospect. Empathy is the key to helping, and helping is the key to closing.

There’s a fourth takeaway here as well: Winning doesn’t necessarily mean coming up with an amazing invention or innovation. If the only thing a competitor does is measure the exact same model more precisely and work each of those pieces, a baseball team with objectively worse players can still beat you.

My call to action for fellow sales and marketing people:

Salespeople, every time you send feedback on a lead to the marketing team through the CRM — that’s money in your pocket. That’s you hitting quota in the future. Every time you use the obscene amount of information that marketing can collect on a lead before you call them and before you try to close, that is money in your freaking pocket.

But this only works if the sales and marketing teams work together. One team, one fight.

Marketing was always important, but it’s never been more important than it is today. Now, by the time a salesperson talking to a lead, they’re up to 60% of the way through their purchase process. We’ve lost control over a huge part of the buying process.

Hello… Internet!

The internet has changed the sales process forever.

Prospects arrive in the sales process already armed with more information than they can possibly process.

They can access testimonials, reviews, video, content, charts, metrics, anything and everything about what you’re trying to “sell” them.

This changes the sales job. Your job is not to close leads… your job is to help prospects make sense of all the information they’ve already consumed before you even got on the phone with them.

This is your new source of strength.

You DO NOT need to control the process.

You’re their guide.

You’re their trusted advisor.

Most prospects actually have too much information. More information than they can possibly use to make a decision. What they need is someone to help them make sense of it. Just walk them through it. That’s it. You’re coaching, not closing. A sales leader I admire greatly always explained to me that “You don’t close a sale. A closed sale is the inevitable result of a well executed process.”

Where all that information they already consumed comes from?

Your marketing team.

Marketers, you’re the voice of your sales reps during that 60% of the sales process where they have no control.

You’re creative.

You’re helpful.

You educate.

You create content that changes the way your salespeople work. How annoying is this?

*ring ring* “Hi, this is Sam from HubSpot — I just wanted to take a few minutes of your time and explain how our software helps companies like yours grow.” *…click*

Screw that. Thanks to your marketing team, your connect call is now “Hi, this is Sam from HubSpot. I saw that you downloaded some information from our website on how to use sales and marketing alignment to help your company sell better. Was it helpful? We have a lot of research on this, and I’m happy to help you make sense of it all. Tell me why you’re trying to work on this now.”

As someone who has had to cold call leads in the past, I can’t tell you how much better the second call is. It’s more valuable for the prospect, it’s more enjoyable for me as a sales rep, and it’s more likely to close a deal.

But marketers, please hear me. You need to constantly be reading the notes your salespeople enter into the CRM (assuming your salespeople are putting notes into the CRM) or none of that matters.

One of the most impactful pieces of marketing advice I ever received was a VP who told me that the key to her success was to always remember that the sales team was her customer. Your sales team is your customer. You have the incredible advantage that your customers work in the same building you do.

Talk to them. Listen to them. Ask them questions. Listen to what they have to say.

They have the inside scoop on the questions prospects are asking. Their struggles. Their objections. What confuses them. What delights them. All of it. Salespeople have human magic that can tell you more about your customers than any amount of big data analytics. No analytics software or bot yet made can replace the human freaking magic of their empathy and understanding.

Marketers, if you’re not constantly having conversations with sales, asking them questions, getting their input on your next campaign, and reading their notes, you’re just winging it. You’re not helping your team win.

Sales, if you’re not feeding information back to your marketing team, then you’re leaving money on the table. Marketing is going to feed you, and if you don’t like the way it tastes you have to tell them why. Only then can they change up the recipe. Just complaining that you don’t like what they’re making or throwing the food on the floor is a giant fucking waste of everyone’s time, including yours.

Sales and Marketing need to Moneyball — together — or none of the rest of this matters.

You each need the other in order to out-help your competitors and win deals.

Now, let me wrap up with some final comments on bots.

Humans have historically taken on big changes that happened slowly pretty well, with some rough spots. But this change isn’t going to happen slowly for long. Computing power doubles about every 18 months, which means that everything seems to be going really slowly until suddenly it’s over.

My father is from India, and — like most fathers — he likes to tell me the same stories over and over. In particular, he likes to tell me the story of how chess was invented.

The great king was so pleased with his palace wise man who invented it that he offered him a reward of his choosing. The inventor was as wise with math as with game theory, so he asked for a seemingly humble request: One grain of rice on the first square of the board, doubled to two grains on the second, 4 grains on the third, and so on. The king laughed it off as a trivial prize for such a cool invention.

But when the king tried to deliver their prize, he soon found out that it was beyond his power as a human. By the twentieth square, he was obligated to give a million grains of rice.

By the end, the 64th square, the king would have to have given 210 billion tons of rice. That’s a pile of rice as large as Mount Everest. It’s enough to cover the entire country of India in a one meter thick blanket of rice.

MotherJones mathed this out for bots versus our brains. The capacity of lake Michigan in fluid ounces is about the same as our brains can handle in calculations per second. With exponential progressions, things seem to be changing very slowly — until suddenly nothing is the same.

The idea that we can learn the foundations of what we need to be successful in 4 or 6 years of college and then make marginal improvements in our skills throughout our careers is over. The knowledge you have right now might keep you running for another 15 years. Maybe closer to 5. Maybe less.

But this goes even deeper than that. This goes into whether or not the sales profession will exist in five years. This goes into whether or not you will have a job at all. Because I’ll tell you right now, if you follow that same Glengarry Glen Ross, “put that coffee down coffee’s for closers”, lone wolf, win or lose on my own approach to sales that people like me probably taught you…

…you won’t.

This isn’t just an exciting period of time in history because marketing has suddenly started measuring things and consumers are more educated. We’re on the precipice of a fundamental change in the way we work and compete.

Artificial intelligence sounds like something out of science fiction, and to an extent it still is. But we’ve come a really long way in just the last few years. Once IBM Watson really cracked the ability to understand what we call “unstructured data”, like written articles or conversations, the genie was out of the bottle.

People haven’t taken enough time to stop and think about that.

Computers like Watson can read and understand vast amounts of normal writing and then answer natural language questions that people ask about it.

Fortunately, that’s not your job anymore. Your job isn’t to understand your product’s spec sheets and answer your customer’s questions based on them. Leave that to the bots. They’re better at it and that stuff is boring anyways.

Your job is to understand your customer and use the products you have to create solutions to their problems. To understand them and empathize with them.

Bots are getting better every day at qualifying and closing. “AI” can do those repeatable tasks much faster than any of us. Bots have nothing better to do than follow up with our leads. They can already understand questions. Real language. They’re getting better every day. They can understand the meaning behind a question, and create real answers from a body of knowledge that may just be your company’s blog articles or tweets about your industry.

But we’re a whole slew of Nobel prizes away from being able to automate empathy.

We cannot automate human freaking magic.

Empathy and the serendipity of teamwork are the two magical abilities that only humans have. Use them well.

If you rely on persistence and speed, closing and convincing, you’re in a position of weakness. You’re going to lose.

But, empathy — seeing the problem through your customer’s eyes and talking to your marketing partners to out-help your competitors — that’s your new source of strength. That’s what the woman at the flower shop understood, and that’s how we’ll keep winning.

Rant over.

I’m part of the team too. If you read that whole rant and found it at least a little thought-provoking, please click the ❤ to help me help my team win.