E283 | Why 60% of Sales Evaporate and How to Stop It with Matt Dixon
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CastBoxIs your sales team performing at their best? Do your sales managers have the right skills for the role? Are you following the best approach when hiring new salespeople? If your answer to these questions is no, or even hesitation, this episode of The Melting Pot should be a compulsory listen for you today.
This week, we have the immense pleasure of listening to and learning from Matt Dixon, one of the world’s leading experts on sales, customer service and customer experience. Matt is also the founding partner of DCM Insights. With a background in research, he brings a distinctive approach to understanding customer buying behaviours and the strategies top salespeople employ to meet evolving needs. Matt’s extensive tenure at the Corporate Executive Board and bestselling book The Challenger Sale firmly establish him as a leading figure in sales expertise. His unique persona as a “sales anthropologist” offers valuable insights into the scientific and psychological aspects of successful selling, making him a highly sought-after thought leader in the industry.
In this episode, Matt dives into the best approaches to getting top talent in your sales team and the difference between a great salesperson and a great sales manager. He also shares why coaching is, for him, the most important trait of a sales manager. Then, he gives his own view on paying your salespeople commission, how to help your buyer overcome their ‘fear of messing up’, challenging the status quo and making the right decisions.
If you are running a business, or you are in sales – even if you’re not in sales and you run a company – or if you’re frustrated and you want things in your business to run differently, this episode is for you.
Download and listen to learn more.
On today’s podcast:
- Mastering sales strategies to engage customers effectively.
- How to attract the right talent to your sales team.
- Why the obsession with paying commissions to sales teams?
- Dealing with customer indecision during the sales process
- Effective sales techniques to address emotional factors and drive sales.
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Who is Matt Dixon
Matt Dixon is one of the world’s foremost experts in sales and customer experience. Known for his ground-breaking research, Matt is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and is the author of some of the most important business books of the past decade. He is a founding partner of DCM Insights, a boutique consultancy that uses data and research-backed frameworks to help companies attract, retain and grow their customers.
His first book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller, sold nearly a million copies worldwide, and translated into a dozen languages. The Challenger Sale has won acclaim as “the most important advance in selling for many years” (SPIN Selling author Neil Rackham) and “the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade.” (Business Insider).
He is also the author of The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, which introduced the concept of customer effort reduction and the Customer Effort Score to companies around the world, as well as The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results, the celebrated sequel to The Challenger Sale. His newest book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, was released in 2022. Matt’s work has been published in the print and online editions of Harvard Business Review on more than twenty occasions.
What you’ll learn from Matt
06:01 – What does Matt Dixon do?
07:15 – Why Sales As a Topic for Research
09:35 – Sales Data and Lack of Training and Curiosity
13:00 – What is True and Not True About High-Performing Sales Teams
14:30 – The Truth Behind Effective Communication in Sales
17:00 – How To Better Organise Sales Teams
19:31 – The Role of A Sales Rep Then vs Now
20:41 – What A Job Ad Should Look Like If Hiring A Salesperson
24:30 – Different Examples Of Salespeople Interviews
25:35 – Why Commission-Based Compensation Is Not The Right Approach
28:22 – The Impact of Removing Commissions
31:30 – Good Ways To Motivate Salespeople
33:17 – Diving Into The Role and Traits of Good Sales Managers
35:20 – The Crucial Element of Good Sales Managers: Their Ability to Coach
37:34 – The Gift of Coaching
40:08 – Finding The Right ‘Span of Control’ For Sales Teams
41:48 – The Jolt Effect: Leveraging Data from Virtual Sales Interactions
43:30 – The Power of Sales Call Recordings
46:09 – Understanding Closed, Lost and No-Decision Deals
50:00 – No-Decision Loss Rates Across Different Sales Environments
56:38 – Challenges in Selling Complex Solutions
55:18 – How To Respond To Customer Hesitation
57:08 – Dialing Up Customer’s FOMU (Fear of Messing Up) and The Omission Bias
01:02:10 – Customer Perception of Decisiveness
01:06:28 – Pings and Echoes Technique
01:08:00 – Helping Customers Make The Right Decisions
01:09:00 – Transparency in Sales
01:13:56 – What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently
01:15:50 – Book Recommendations