6 Reasons Sales Departments Fail

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Winning It Selling Podcast. I'm Bill Hellkamp of Reach Development Systems, and with me is Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute. The Sales Department is built on relationships and operations. Both are needed to generate the desired results. However, if your sales team fails, your organization could be a jeopardy of maintaining and growing revenues. If this is a case, leadership must identify the threats and change the sales culture.

0:31 If you want to transform your culture, create more opportunities and leverage the opportunities you create. Stay tuned as Bill and I discuss the six reasons Sales Departments fail and other interesting information on Episode 628 of the Winning It Selling Podcast. We'll figure out why we fail is always going to be important to all of us. So I have a list of why I failed on things that's pretty long. So do I. And I heard Warren Buffett said, I study failure and I learned from it.

1:06 That's right. Well, you know, one of the areas that I'm kind of failing sometimes is more sales less time by Jill Conrad. So let's hear what she has to say. We're going to go over Part 5 A, Chapter 22, 23, and 24. We are coming to the end of this book. So I think she's getting a little bit more philosophical and less driven towards specific things we can do. She calls Part 5, Add the Secret Sauce. These are strategies to energize, enhance thinking and impact productivity.

1:39 So kind of the things that happen around us that impact our productivity and getting things done. And attitude is such a big one. So she starts off in Chapter 22. She calls this work worth doing. And I have a story about this, Scott. I was working in advertising for Be Dalton when Be Dalton was an actual company. I remember the Dayton Hudson Corporation. And my job consisted of helping put books, little pictures of books on a big piece of paper and setting out to newspapers when newspapers were something that we actually read.

2:16 And those would have prices on them and they were called display ads and the book companies would pay to have an X number of books on our advertising. We'd send it all over. It was kind of a fun job. So a friend of mine came to visit me from out in California and I went to pick him up at the airport and he said, Bill, tell me what you do now. So I kind of described to him what you just described and he said, Oh, what good is that?

2:46 Yikes. And you know, it really got me thinking, Scott, what good is it? It really wasn't a whole lot of good at all. I was just trying to get the advertising books and slapping things on a page and making sure the prices were right and a lot of little detail work, but it was nothing that was going to change somebody's life. And fortunately, well, not fortunately, they got, they got bought out and we got six months severance.

3:13 And I thought, well, this is good. What am I going to do with my life? And then I got into training. And I started to do work worth doing. So how about you? Do you feel that you had went away from something that wasn't as valuable and you're doing something that's more worthwhile now? I had a sales job that I really enjoyed and I was very interested in polishing up my sales skills and getting to some good habits. And I took a class. I went through a Sandler class and I really loved being a student.

3:40 And I really loved the content. And I took an assessment and they said you would make a good counselor, teacher or a school bus driver. So I'm going to leave the school bus driver to my Twilight period. As long as I can still see, I'll do that. But it was kind of an assessment that brought out my calling and I felt like this was what I really love doing. And I'm emotionally committed to it. And that's how I got to where I am and feel like I'm doing worth, you know, matter work that matters.

4:07 Yeah, I think that's really it. So, so for our listeners out there, if you're doing a job and you don't really believe in the product or you don't really believe in the people that you're doing, you know, you're doing it. You don't really believe in the people you're working with. Or as I say, if their values aren't your values, or they don't value what you do well, you know, there's nothing wrong with looking for something that's more fulfilling for you.

4:30 I think you'll find that that when you hit upon it, as Scott and I have done, you can do it for 30 years and not kind of dread Monday. Right. So, you might be doing the wrong thing. How about that? Yeah. And sometimes you have to do a few Mondays to get to loving what you do. I mean, sometimes you do a little work. But if you're new for five years and you know, you're like, yeah, it's Friday. Oh, yeah, Monday. You know, that's that's a lot of your life that you're wiling away and something that isn't really fulfilling.

5:05 You're going to do it your whole life. Your mind would be fulfilled. All right. Chapter 23 is called a real wake up call. And what she talked about in this was you need to get proper rest to be productive. For most people that seven to eight hours of sleep. And what she started to do is logging her sleep time. And she found when she got that seven to eight hours, she was more productive. So here's four suggestions she has to get that seven to eight hours of sleep.

5:33 So, first of all, set a specific bedtime. So my bedtime, you know, used to be midnight one o'clock in the morning. I have a wife that goes to kind of crashes at nine thirty. That's about, you know, her limit. Actually, I was doing something. So I started to change my ways to be more like hers so that we were on the same time cycle. Now I go to bed at nine thirty to ten. I wake up at six. I get a lot done between six and eight. And I like that a lot.

6:01 How about you? What's your what's your time routine? I'm the same way. I like to get in bed at least before ten o'clock and get up. My alarm starts going off at five fifteen. And I like to simmer. I just like to just lay in bed and just simmer for an hour or so and just think about the day and have that creative time. Not a lot of stress and just think about stuff that I want to do. And that's where I kind of have my creative times during that hour.

6:24 Yeah, you're simmering time that would be going back to sleep time for me. Oh, yeah, I can't I can't meditate or sit with my eyes closed without falling asleep. So anyway, her second suggestion. Avoid blue light emitting devices for two hours prior to bedtime. Studies have shown that if we were sitting right at our computer, we're looking at her, we're looking at our phone or a TV. Then we go to bed. It's it. Our brain is too active. Right. Blue light affects affects our brain. I tend to work on my computer till I go to bed.

6:59 But I do read for 15 minutes or 20 minutes usually as part of my bedtime routine reading more sales last time. Yeah, well, right now I'm also into this book we've heard of before. How to win friends and influencer people. The annual read the annual read and it's it's funny because I have it memorized. So I don't have to read it slowly. That's great. All right. Number three, don't work right up to bedtime. And I think her point in this is your brain is is just doing all these activities and you're thinking of things and it's all roiling about and sometimes that work can be challenging.

7:33 And I know a lot of people I heard a lot of stories Scott about people who started to work from home. And they started to work a lot more in the evening. Yeah, because the work was there. It makes a lot of sense. It's convenient. It's close. Sometimes we'll also maybe do the laundry or empty the dishwasher during the day to. But work is right there. It's easier for us to do it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of my wife's complaints about me. You know, you're always at your in your office.

8:03 Yeah. So anyway, okay. Number four, keep a pen and pad by your bed to write down thoughts so then you can sleep without worry. So then those, you know, during that time where you're, where you're getting yourself ready for the day or when you're getting ready. To go to sleep. You have an idea comes into your mind. But if you don't write it down, that idea can disappear or that great phrasing. That's what I find. I have this great way of saying something that comes to my mind when I'm getting ready for bed. And if I don't write it down, I can't, I can remember this.

8:35 No, he never remembered. Never remember. Never. Never. I do the voice memos on my phone. So I'll just get the recording and I'll just do a quick seven second voice memo and then I get up in the morning and listen to them and transcribe them and put them in my notebook. But you do it with your eyes closed so you don't see the blue light. Right. Well, I get stuff to do. I'm not quite a real point yet on my iPhone. I'm a blackberry. I could do it on my blackberry with it.

8:59 You made those little clicky sounds when you hit exactly. All right, chapter 24. Get your oomph back. Are you doing everything for yourself? Perhaps a different type of volunteer activity can invigorate you. Get yourself involved. And, and I think this is good. You know, we, if we miss something in our lives, it's the opportunity to give back to the community. I've coached baseball. I've one of the things I did for 10 years was was our boys theater group. So we had a homeschool theater. We homeschooled our three sons.

9:33 And we had a theater group back then until they got through their senior year in high school. And I did it for 10 years and I can't believe how much time and effort I put into that. But it was very fulfilling. Very fulfilling for me to do that. And it adds a different dimension to your life to do something on a volunteer basis. If you're a volunteer for anything, I knew you've done some things with NSA National Speakers Association.

9:56 Yeah, I was on the board of the NSA. I've been involved on the board of the Optimus Club. I mean, you and I have both been leaders of PSA and you're the current leader of the Professional Sales Association. And I also ran SME sales and marketing executives. So a lot of my volunteer was in kind of the corporate work with it being kind of related to my business. Right. In most cases. Right. Yeah. It tends to be business related. And I think, you know, you don't have kids. So sometimes the kids cause you to do more of the coaching or other things that you that you want to do. They're kind of pulling into that. So, all right, good. So, so I think what she's saying in this chapter is there's other things in life.

10:36 There's other ways to go about it. It's not just making a list and checking it twice and trying to follow your to do list. There's a lot more to life than than that. And I think we've got three or four more sections on chapter five here or part five. So. Yeah. And we'll announce our next book. How about at the next episode? No. That'd be great. And we can get people started on it and order it. We were hoping to get the author on. So that's why we were kind of delayed on it. Yeah. Yeah. And we have had the author on. So a little tease.

11:04 But we're going to get the author on again over the next. So hopefully the next. Maybe as we get near the end of the book, we can have him coming on and help us summarize it. Main points. So before we get on today's topic, let's listen to a sales tip from Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony Enorino, a highly respected international speaker, best selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader.

11:31 Hey, it's Anthony Enorino. There's something that I noticed that most sales organizations don't do. They go out and they look for insights. They do research. They do some reading. Those sort of things. Very, very important. I love that work. I enjoy doing it. I hope you do too. But I need to tell you something. Inside your four walls. Now, I know you're probably working at home. You're probably not in an office. But let's pretend like this sales organization has four walls around it.

11:58 And we have all of our people inside those four walls. Okay, you have all kinds of insights. And you haven't mined them because nobody tells you to mine the insights that you already have inside your company. So if you could get a group of people together, let's say eight people and you're going to sit down for an hour and start talking about who knows what. What do we know about this industry? What causes people to change right now? Which of our competitors are catching up to us and what should we do about it? If you would sit down and just have this conversation about who already figured out how to get this done? Who figured out this strategy and how to make it work for big companies?

12:44 And if you would ask those questions and just say, what do we know that if we would all think about this and practice it, we would get better, faster, and we would win at a much greater rate. See me at the salesblog.com or come out and say hello at LinkedIn. See you soon. So he talks about mining insights. I used to do something. Well, I'd actually still do it when I have the opportunity. But I work with organizations on what I call nuggets. I like the word nuggets because it kind of thought about gold, gold, and mining for nuggets.

13:23 And he calls it mining insights. And what it is is that everybody in the organization should be listening for little nuggets of information that we can learn about our client that can help us. And one example I had of that real quickly, I was working with a company. We had taught him this. We taught the whole organization as nuggets. And a guy working on the loading dock was loading their product on to their customers truck. And the customer said, boy, sure is good to come here because you guys always have the order already. When I go to your competitor, they have half the order.

14:03 It's never ready. And the dock worker got that information to the salesperson. The salesperson was in the middle of negotiations with that customer. Wonderful. About they wanted to lower their price because they said your service wasn't as good as we expected. Wow. And they said, no, we're not going to lower our price. And they were able to hold their price because of that nugget. Yeah. That said, and they were extolling the virtues of the competitor. Right. Right. And really the truck driver told them that your competitor is not that bad.

14:35 So these nuggets are floating around there, but unless you have a process to bring them together, that idea that information could have died with that dock worker. Right. If he hadn't thought, hey, maybe I should tell this to maybe this is important to get to the salesperson who runs this group. Yeah. And that's internal communications. I think also external communications like sales meetings. Sales meetings are a two way street. Sales reps must report what's going on in the marketplace to leadership.

15:03 And the leadership then needs to be able to position themselves in the marketplace to have the greatest advantage, offer the best service, value, et cetera. And this is why I love the term market ambassador. When salespeople are market ambassadors, they're representing the company within the marketplace. They're being an ambassador for prospects on the best choices that they have when it makes them making a buying decision.

15:26 Well, if maybe if we don't communicate and mine for insights, maybe maybe there's seven reasons why sales departments fail. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know your list yet, but it might be number seven that we want to get into the six. Let's go into the six though. This was a fun topic to prepare for it in my experience, Bill. I'm interested in hearing some of your experience and your findings over the years as well. But here are six reasons why I think sales departments fail and again, no particular order.

15:54 And there are many, many more. And sometimes, sometimes an organization is just too broken to fix. And that can be very frustrating for the sales team, the leadership, anybody that comes in and tries to turn it around. It can be very frustrating. But let's start off. I don't know if they're, I mean, I don't know if they're too broken to fix. You've got to fix them or the company's going to go down. The sales is the engine.

16:17 And sometimes the problem is there's an individual sales leader or the sales, the vice president sales and marketing who's stepping on that information hose and not letting things happen. I think the demands of upper management can screw up sales departments more than just about anything else. And maybe go into some of the same. I think you explained that very well and you're absolutely correct. I mean, there are ways of fixing it. There's some are probably more extreme and some of them are maybe more operational or relational, like in the opening, you know, it's relational and operational.

16:50 Find out which one is the challenge. And as we go through these six, maybe those, you know, our listeners, some of our listeners will be able to relate to it going, Oh, that's what I need to really work on. But number one is no process, no selling system. And everybody follows something different. And you know, we can't manage what we don't measure and we cannot improve the sales processes. Everybody is doing their own thing.

17:13 I think that is so crucial, Scott. I've seen that so many times. There's no consistent sales process. Everybody does what they want to do and kind of jiggers it into sales force or whatever their CRM is. And the sales manager has no idea how he's being lied to or how he or she is being lied to by their team. Right. Right. And I've seen this in companies where you got a broke sales person. They're out there, you know, they're bringing in, in some cases, maybe 40% of the revenue.

17:43 And they're number one, but they're doing their own thing and they're not sharing it with anybody else. And the leaders in the company going, wow, we can't really have too much of an impact because we're getting all this revenue from them. Why do we want to change that? Let's just let them go. I mean, they're not doing that much damage right now. Over time, though. Oh, man, does it create a real impact in the challenger sale? These are called lone wolves.

18:04 And they can be very tempting for managers to hold on to these high producing sales people, but they don't follow the same process. Everybody else. And that's a challenge. Well, what, what, why can't they be lone wolves? Why can't we separate them kind of from the herd, let them do their thing? Well, I try to make changes with the newer people coming up. Because they're representing the company and their reputation and they're not focused on some of the long term goals. They're focused more on short term success. They're more focused on commissions now versus growing the business later.

18:35 They have different motives. I mean, we did the episode, where are they coming from? We think about what are the different motivations that cause people to do what they do? What are some of the fears? What are some of the uncertainty? What are the doubts that they have when it comes to making an investment? Or not making an investment? And what are their motives? Why are they doing it? What's in it for them? Yeah, but I think, I think, you know, I can see why a company would say, I can't lose 40% of my revenue.

19:02 Right. By getting, by getting rid of Larry, Larry's a bit of a wild card here, but now do I need to learn from Larry? Do I need to figure out what he's doing and try and duplicate that through the whole program? Because he's doing 40%. Well, it's how did Larry get off the tracks and so far, and there was probably no tracks. Right. That's what you and I have found. There's never been a track. That's true. Yeah. And Larry went out and found a way to make himself successful. And while he's a lone wolf, you know, maybe we need to learn from Larry instead of trying to rein him in.

19:39 Yeah, that's another approach. It's another approach. And I'll summarize this, you know, first one with, you know, sales leadership is spending more time being reactive, reacting than leading. Oh, I think that's true. And when there's no process and leadership is reacting, they're not leading. And then, you know, there's people are on their own and they're surviving in some cases and they all have a different system of surviving.

20:02 Right. Well, and I know it's very difficult, you know, for that sales leader to go and work with Larry. And Larry doesn't want him around. Right. And so, you know, you're kind of running into the problem of I can't, I have no way to manage what he's doing. Is this rogue person saying the wrong thing? Are we, are we spending a lot of time and money fixing revenue problems that he creates? I don't know. You know, there's a lot of things going on there. Yeah. Yeah, there are. So that's number one.

20:33 Number two is the, there's no sales philosophy. You know, what do they believe? What's true? Why do people buy? What has the greatest impact on making a purchasing decision from a prospect? The sales process needs to be supported by a philosophy. Behavior is supported by beliefs and our behavior is determined by our beliefs that gives us the results and the outcome that we want. So I think having a philosophy of prospects by for their reasons not ours, if that's so, then we've got to create another step or a bigger step in a sales process to be able to ask more questions.

21:07 And, you know, do we believe that prospects buy on value and not price? Then, you know, then maybe we need to be able to show a comparison about the cost of inaction and the price of the solution. And then that shows value. So there's has to be a philosophy of, you know, where does the business come from? Does it come from customers or new customers? I think also the philosophy is what kind of company do we want to be? Right. Do we want to be the low price vendor? We want to be, you know, do we want to be the Walmart of whatever our program is and build on on cost cutting? Do we want to be the value leader where we, while we have a moderate price, we give extra benefits for that moderate price? Do we want to be the technology leader where we're always on the cutting edge of technology?

21:53 Our product is going to be pricier, but you're always going to get the newest technology. Right. Right. And you'll stand behind the product too. You have an excellent warranty. Your product is easy to repair and maintain and manage. And that's another philosophy, right? It is. Yeah. They're all different things, but everyone should be selling the same thing. And marketing should be tied in with that philosophy. So the message they're putting out is the message that sales. And that's one of the problems we see with marketing. They're putting out one message.

22:26 They think is interesting. And sales is out putting out another message. And as you say, because there's no overriding vision or philosophy. Exactly. Everyone's looking through a different colored lens. Right. Right. And getting into philosophies, you also get into objectives. Do we want to sell some sort of, I call them gateway products like a gateway drug is a cheap product that you might lose money on, but it's a way for you to attract a customer.

22:54 And then from that customer, you end up selling them other products that you offer that are a little bit more specific and maybe a little bit more competitive on the price, but they're also generating more of a profit too when you sell those. But that's a philosophy of marketing and sales working together. Yeah. And I think that a lot of that philosophy comes from above. I just watched a little video on what they call the Schlitz mistake.

23:15 Yes. And Schlitz beer lost its dominance to Budweiser. And so what they decided to do instead of trying to get their market share back was to lower the cost of production. And as they continued to lower the cost of production, they lowered the quality of the product and they were a different type of business than they were before they were trying to make more money. We've seen this all often when a company is bought out maybe by venture capitalist firm.

23:41 Right. They try to maximize the profits and lower the quality or lower the service or lower something that the customers were used to. And then they're hoping to turn this around and make their profit really quick. And what they end up doing is destroy a good brand. Right. Right. And those philosophies are coming from way above. They are. But you need to get consistent on it. Right. Right. And it starts at the top. Number three is no reinforcement. Repetition is the mother of learning. Tell me, show me, let me needs to happen. Let me do it. And sales leadership needs to reinforce and follow up on sales training and sales development.

24:19 We don't see that enough with the training in a weekly sales meeting and ongoing development of adapting to the marketplace, you know, complacency neutralizes growth. And once the market passes you by, it takes so much more time and money to get caught up, not to mention the lost opportunities in the meantime. So really creating those daily goals and establishing the reinforcement and manage the distractions. I think very few sales leaders that we've worked with actually train and continue to grow their people. They're much more likely to monitor and admonish than they are to ride along and advise.

24:59 And so they tried to manage from afar. They don't really know what's happening in the sales call. They're not always that good at fixing what they saw in the sales call because they didn't listen any better to the sales training than their their people did. And they just don't make the change. It is so crucial for that sales manager. They are the linchpin of making new ideas work. Right. So often they just let their people we call it, you know, put their book on the GoodBinder Shelf. They go to a sales training program. They get a nice binder. They put the binder on their binder shelf and they go back to their old ways.

25:41 And it is crucial for that sales manager to help them make the changes and work with the commitments they made during that program. Right. And I hear it all the time from sales people. Oh, stop micromanaging me. You're micromanaging me. No, no, I'm proactively managing you. Sales managers have to do a few things. They need to hire. They need to train. They need to coach. They need to recruit. Always be recruiting. Always be recruiting.

26:08 And then you're not doing the training. And I would say one of the one of the keys and you know, I've talked about this before. Whoever you hire for inside sales or customer service, make sure you're hiring somebody that has a potential to be an outside sales person. Right. That is the best growth area for them. They'll they work there a year. They know the company. They know the product. They know the problems. Now you don't have to train them on that. Now you just teach them how to sell it. They've got the desire and the potential. Move them on. If they don't have the desire and potential, get rid of that person and bring somebody new in.

26:46 Right. Because that's your training ground for your next sales person. Yeah. So true. Number four is there's no accountability. So if goals were missed, what happens? Oh, well, you know, better luck next month. I'm going to be here. Something needs to change. Somewhere, something needs to change and sales people need to start debriefing their goals, learn what worked, what didn't create a new practice, apply it, measure it, and look at the outcome.

27:15 And, you know, I love the goal of creating more opportunities and leverage the opportunities that you create that accountability is so relaxed sometimes on a month to month or week to week basis within a sales team. And it's just kind of frustrating to see you get off track one degree. Over time that one degree ends up creating a 90 degree, you know, direction where you're not even you don't want that plane you're taking from LA to be one degree off on his way to New York, because you're going to end up in Buffalo.

27:47 You know, you're going to end up really far off. And the and the problem is that the managers don't want to address it on a weekly basis. Right. You want to wait till what's what's your end of the month? You didn't make it. Okay. What are you going to do? You know, even if they're working on it, they're doing it month by month. It's too late to make the changes. Exactly. And the issue is you've got to work on activities, not on final results. We've talked about leading indicators versus lagging indicators.

28:16 Exactly. Sales is a lagging indicator. Yeah. Leading indicators is activity. What are the activities you're going to do to be better and make more sales by the end of this month. Every week I should be checking your activities because that's what's going to fill your funnel. Exactly. Exactly. And sometimes salespeople need to use their calendar to enter in past activities. What did you do during this hour? Look at it and go, boy, you know, is that how your performance is being measured? Talk with leadership and say, I'm spending a lot of time in this particular area that does not generate or more revenue for the company.

28:53 And it does not compensate me directly through a commission. Can we work on how I'm trading my time and what activities I have so that I can generate more revenue, create more opportunities and leverage the opportunities I create? I heard a quote or somebody said something that really stuck with me. It says your day is your life. Yes. If you can't control your day, you'll never change your life. Wow. And I thought that was really powerful every day. And I know that managers can't intervene every day, but every month is too far.

29:25 So salespeople control your day. Yeah. Yeah. I love the term time trades. We're trading our time for a greater value every single opportunity that we have. Every decision that we make, we're trading our time. Well, we're goofing off. Exactly. Exactly. Number five, we see this a lot. No competitive value proposition. When I start working with a company, I usually ask them, you know, describe the problems that you solve. And often I hear the solution. I don't hear the problem that they solve. There are great solutions. I've worked with some fabulous companies. Great. Innovative solutions. Can I tell you about my drill? Yeah. Let me. Can I tell you what problem they solve? Yep.

30:08 How can you be a problem finder as a salesperson? You should be a problem finder. If you don't know what problem you solve, what you end up becoming as a problem solver where you go out and talk about the solution and hope that it sticks to a problem. If you do that, you are not talking to the best fit prospect. You're getting very, very frustrated. You're irritating the prospects that you're talking to because it's not relevant. You're irritating yourself as a salesperson because you're constantly being rejected.

30:37 There's no competitive value proposition. Because you're just talking about everything. Exactly. Exactly. And we talked to somebody the other day, Scott, you and I. And we said, tell us about your sales process. And this individual said, well, the brochure has pretty much everything in it. So I just go over the brochure with them. That's the first step in my sales process. And that is a step in the process that says, let me tell you everything. And when you see something you like, hit me with a piece of paper or something and shut me up. And that's when you don't know what the pain point is. When you don't know what the problem you're solving is,

31:14 you just start throwing it out and hope they can attach a benefit to the problem. Here's a question that I love to ask companies when they get invited in. I said, what does the prospect experience and the absence of the value your solution provides? Tell me about what the prospect experience is if they don't buy your solution today. What's going to happen to them tomorrow if they don't have what you sell today? That's the question to ask. Think about car insurance. Think about homeowners. Think about your cell phone. If you didn't have your cell phone with you all of the time, think about what you would experience without having your cell.

31:54 Now that's value and that's a value proposition. Yeah. All right. Well, it's number six. Number six. Last one is no improved process. Companies really have two cultures. I call it one is the Dead Sea and nothing lives in the Dead Sea. You float in the Dead Sea because there's nothing that lives in it or the Sea of Galilee. Everything thrives around the Sea of Galilee. Markets change, buyers change, solutions change, and how buyers buy solutions changes.

32:23 The knowledge base doubles every five years and too often companies spend thousands of dollars on sales training systems that are outdated. I think they should have an expiration date. My advice should have an expiration date. It's only valid for the next three years. After that, there is no guarantee or warranty that it'll work. Please come back and see me. I may have an updated version for you and I've had people come up to go, Oh, I heard you speak at the chamber 20 years ago. I said, Oh my God, tell me what I said.

32:48 Oh, really? Because I got to walk it back because it no longer works. It was it was a good idea at the time, but we just don't, you know, just don't get the information from newspapers anymore. So it's different. Yeah, I think that one of the things that's happened since Scott and I started working together. We've been doing this podcast together for four years, but in the last year, we started going on sales calls together. And what is really caused us to do is improve our practice.

33:17 Very much. And we've started moving to a system where we do a sales strategy as one of our first steps and it tells us so much about what's going on in that organization and really informs that organization about what's happening inside that they didn't understand. And so we cover a lot of these different things when we talk about their sales strategy, things that we don't see working together well. And they're always amazed at how much we can find out. So I know that's a little bit of tooting our own horn, but find somebody that that sharpens you as you say, you know, iron sharpens iron and and we're forcing each other to go to a better level of quality. And I think that's been fun.

33:57 Yeah, it really has bill and it's certainly caused me to learn more and to grow and to be able to feel like I'm not bored by any means. I'm not being complacent. No way, not a chance of that. And the reason I've finished on this topic is because of our commitment with the podcast is to stay relevant in the marketplace. And that's the obligation that we've done. Bill and I have taken on for our listeners is to be able to share stuff that you can use today that's relevant in the marketplace. So improved practices are listening to podcasts and Bill and I are committed to our listeners and we're really grateful when we hear from you about what worked or when we get those emails back going, you know, I tried, but you guys said it didn't work and it blew up in my face.

34:39 Let's talk about it. You know, let's have a conversation about, you know, what was the environment that caused that to happen. But we need to constantly be evaluating what we're doing and what we're not doing and improve our process. So, right, the points for listeners for listening to the podcast. So let's review all six of the six reasons why sales departments fails. Number one is no system. There's no process. Everybody's doing their own thing following their own separate process. Now, I know that sales people have style.

35:06 Style is different. Everybody has their own style. Hey, man, that's just the way I roll. That's my style, but I can follow the same process. Number two is there's no sales philosophy. And we go through without alignment with the vision and our beliefs and our behavior and everybody is following something that has a different system to it. No reinforcements. So we were not getting it completed. We're just kind of a one and done. And it's not being reinforced at all. Number five is there's no accountability. Oh, well, you know, better luck next month's, you know, something will change.

35:42 You know, we need the debrief, learn, apply something new. Number five is no competitive value proposition with the company within the marketplace. And then number six, we just talked about no improved practices. That's a great list, Scott. And I'm sure there's other ones that we can think of if we keep putting our mind to it. But if you can fix these six things and not have these happening, you're, you'll just give rocket fuel to your sales team to your sales process to your sales department.

36:10 Yeah. So look for them and try to fix them as soon as possible. All right. So if you go to our winning at selling show page, you'll find Anthony and arena's link the sales blog.com. And as we wrap up, our golden nugget is from Elbert Hubbard, who was a author. I think he died on the Lusitania. The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. Oh, true. Yeah. And avoiding mistakes is, you know, a bad way to go through life, son. Right. Exactly. You attract kind of what you think of too.

36:48 That's right. So everything we talked about winning at selling calm. And where this is episode six, 28. Next week, six strengths of a superior sales person. So we're going from six failures to six strengths. Book Club is still more sales less time by Joe Conrad part five B. Four chapters this time, 2526 27 and 28. Please subscribe. Share the podcast with your colleagues and on your social media. Go out and get better one skill at a time.

37:20 Joyful selling.