Bob Moesta is an adjunct lecturer at Kellogg, a guest lecturer at Harvard and MIT, and a research fellow at the Christensen Institute.
In this episode with Bob, you’ll learn about…
“Consumers don’t care about features and benefits, they care about outcomes.”
READ FULL TRANSCRIPTI’m super excited to be in Grosse Pointe, Michigan sitting down with Bob Moesta again. Bob, thank you so much for being back on our podcast.
Thank you for coming to visit. This is, as you’ve seen the office, it’s more like a house or more like a home and the whole aspect is that, I love to be able to host and so as we have a glass of wine after 4 o’clock, we can kick back a little bit and have some good conversation about marketing stuff.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you if you’re gonna Airbnb parts of the office out. It is very homey.
No, no, I don’t do that. I let my friends stay here for free.
Alright, well thank you for your hospitality and the wine is terrific. In a prior episode, we talked a lot about the disconnect between marketing and engineering and what I kinda wanted to do is talk about another disconnect that we see often with a number of our own customers and a problem that I think a lot of B2B organizations are grappling with and that’s around aligning sales and marketing but why don’t we start with actually sales because I think we both agree that there seems to be a little bit of a fundamental or a foundational problem, if you would around sales training and education. Talk about that.
Yeah gotta remember, I grew up as an engineer, wanted to develop products. Took input from other parts of the organization and then eventually realized okay, I gotta go talk to real people about real stuff and eventually, I took a position as a head of sales and marketing somewhere [chuckle] which is a really odd thing for an introvert to do but to realize okay, how does this really work? And so, first thing I did is try to go get sales training and you start to realize that the training that you get, it’s a very interesting… First of all, there are very few if not any sales professors. I know one, he’s at Northwestern and he’s phenomenal. Craig Wortmann, he’s just… He’s like the… It’s the only place… It’s one of the reasons why I actually decided to teach there, it’s ’cause “Wow, they have a sales professor.”
But the reality is, most of the big business schools treat sales as if it’s accounting, well, we don’t teach accounting here. Like you gotta take accounting before you go get your MBA at Yale or Harvard or Stanford. I mean, it’s like we don’t teach that stuff. It’s like yeah but sales is really important. So when I went out to learn it, it felt like it was more of a statistics and probability class and trying to figure out how do you find prospects and how do you actually… It was like a hustle game and as an engineer, I was like yeah but people just don’t randomly buy stuff.” And their answer will be like “Yeah, they do.” If I get… Like talking, I build homes and you talk to real estate agents, well if I get 50 people to see your home, I can guarantee we’ll sell it. Yeah but why? Why 50, why not 10?
Well, how do you know that? And so you start to realize that most sales people work on this correlation notion and just hustle and there’s nothing wrong with it but you start to realize you burn out both consumers and customers at the same time and so, for me it was taking a step back and really trying to understand what cause people to buy and that’s what actually gave me the click of “Oh! I’m actually saying the wrong things. They don’t care about these features and benefits, they care about this outcome.”
And so the whole aspect of the language they use and it was just really, really different. So to me, I had to go to the streets to figure out my learnings and then from there, came back to causality again, like what causes people to buy and that’s not random and it’s very pattern-based, it’s irrational but it’s predictably irrational and so, all of a sudden you start to realize, the seasoned salespeople are good because they’ve had so many years in but when I didn’t have as many years in and I was actually doing as well as they were, they’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?” I’m like, “I’m an engineer.” And they’ll be like, “What does that mean?” And I’m like, “Well, I just look for causation.” And so, that’s where I think the difference is when you start to look at education as that they’ve treated it like it’s almost a magic and it’s been tainted by the bad apple syndrome of, nobody wants to sell.
Or nobody wants to be sold to.
Well, that’s the other part but if you think about the disconnect between sales and marketing, who ends up in sales, right? The interesting part is like Clay and I spent some time where I said, “Have there always been no sales professors?” He goes, “No, no, there were sales professor” when he went and so we had a researcher go look at it and it turns out that in 1984, ’85, there was a significant event, I think it was where RJR Reynolds bought Kraft for way more than cashflow, right? Just ridiculous multiples and it was because the brand of Kraft was worth so much and it was like at that moment it’s where I think sales was king and marketers were the helpers of sales to where in 1986, it flipped and said, “Nope, sales are order takers and marketers own the company ’cause they’re the ones building value through the brand.”
And so you started to realize that most sales people, sales professors went away and it became an order taking thing but when you really think about most entrepreneurship and most startups, sales is the hardest, most difficult thing. I mean, you’ve done a startup, I’ve done several startups and you just realize, it’s very hard.
Yeah it is but at the same time I think sales will be key though to growing a business. I mean, I always say that revenue is like fuel for the car, it’s fuel for your business so if you don’t sell…
It’s blood for the body.
Yeah.
It’s oxygen. I think of sales as actually like the oxygen and cashflow is the blood and the reality is, if I don’t have any cashflow I’m done but if I don’t have any air, I’m also done too and I gotta have both and I gotta be able to figure out how to sell and I remember, to me you’re infamous for being the mattress man, right? We did the mattress interview and it’s like… The whole thing was like, how long hadn’t I slept? Well, I haven’t slept well for two years. Well, what do you mean? And I had these really big meetings coming up ’cause I had to close these deals and I went and bought a mattress. I feel like we both learned on the street of how to sell and it’s like, why is that? And then you start to add the second part in which is like holy moly, nobody wants to be sold to.
No and there’s a lot to unpack from what you said and I know we’ll dive deeper into just a few of those for sure because I started my career specifically and was hired in sales in a fast growing software company and I remember then that they brought in these sales coaches and they trained every rep the exact same way and they trained them as if everyone bought the same way and then years later, when I actually started a marketing group I said, “Hey, I may not be “in sales” but I’m, as the founder, the chief salesperson still.” So I went back and I found myself getting trained by a lawyer and she was terrific but she was a lawyer teaching negotiation skills at work and then it was not just “Oh, everyone buys the same” now it’s this is all about the negotiation and you have to win.
That’s right, it’s all about winning and losing and it’s like okay, that doesn’t feel right either and so this is the whole thing is when I got to a certain point I’m like I don’t feel good about this. I really don’t think I’m good at this. I don’t wanna push product on other people and I felt in a weird attraction to plaid jackets. Like I wanted to be the used car salesman. I’m like okay, this isn’t right and so in doing my product work, I started to realize well, why don’t we just approach sales like we approach product? How do people buy? What do they struggle with? How do we actually understand what they value? How do we understand the…
I don’t wanna know about your features that you want, I wanna know about what’s the outcome you’re seeking and we started having these completely different conversations and you just start to realize, I’m not a salesperson or a sales… Yeah, I’m not a salesperson but what I am is I’m actually helping you make progress so let’s sit down and talk about where you wanna go and why you wanna go there and why even change and all of a sudden you start to realize crap, I just closed that sale and then you say, “Well, I closed that sale.”
I feel like I’ve stumbled onto something through the jobs-to-be-done kind of framework but the aspect of understanding forces, what’s pushing somebody to say, “You know, I should consider a new CRM platform.” There’s not 100 causes, there’s like three or four and it’s like “Well, what are you hoping for when you get this new CRM packages?” Again, there’s not 100 outcomes, there’s like four and five and then there’s a bunch of anxiety and habits but using the forces to actually help people buy is actually way more fun and way more empowering than trying to sell stuff to people that, “I gotta meet my quota tonight. If I give you 10% off tonight, will you close it?” and it doesn’t help anybody. The only people it helps is I call it the Church of Finance. This aspect of we predicted we’re gonna close this much and we gotta meet our quota for the week. I just remember Deming yelling, “Quotas are the wrong thing! Build quality things and the quotas… You’ll never have to worry about quotas.” And I was like, “Yes.”
And it’s unfortunate though that’s baked into sales culture though because as you were talking about the real estate example earlier of; hey, if you just show this home 50 times, you’ll sell it.
That’s right.
So then sales management is like, “Bob how many showings did you have this week?”
That’s right, that’s right and it’s like if I show somebody 50 homes, I can guarantee they’ll buy one of them because they just get tired and it’s like again, is that the right way to think about this? How about helping me figure out a better way to live? Oh, that’s hard. I’d rather just show you a bunch of stuff and tire you out to buy something. It’s like wow!
And a problem that again, we spend a lot of time trying to advise some customers on, we have a number of software, high growth tech companies and it seems to be that they’re all still trying to push and speak a language of feature function and you just showed me, when you were showing me around your nice office here, you were just walking through an exercise that you were just doing today with a customer and it was interesting to me because you said “Hey, if they can just change some of the language, it’s gonna make the sales job so much faster.” and I feel like it’s no one wants to be the company that’s gonna break away from: Bob, this is what the features are and this is why you should buy them and it’s the people that are willing to take that leap and say, “What is that struggling moment? What is that defining thing? And what’s really motivating?” And you just said it with the CRM example, there’s only a few of them but people, I don’t think, are talking in the way that it’s… It’s not about the buyer experience, it’s always about the selling experience which gets back to that the whole you have to win, it’s a negotiation game.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s right, that’s right and so I think the game is set up improperly and the systems that are setup in larger companies force people to play that game that way but the reality is that it’s getting to the point where it’s fundamentally changing entire industries. If you… If we could just go back to the mattress for a little bit, you’d realize the fact is when you bought your mattress, you went to a store but there’s somebody who’s popped up out of nowhere called Casper in the last three years and they’re actually a billion dollars and they have no sales people and what they’ve done is they’ve studied people, they’ve studied what causes people to say, “Today’s the day, I need a new mattress.”
Take the complexity out of it and to be honest, people are willing to buy a mattress they’ve never touched rather than going and interact with the salesperson who’s like, “Let me show you this one over here.” and “Let me show… ” Think about how just ill-equipped you are to figure out, “I can’t sleep. How do I pick one of these 48 mattresses in the store?” It’s like, “Well, lay down on it.” I know that two seconds is not gonna… Oh this one’s comfortable and you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, get me out of here.”
And I don’t know if you remember but I was also talking about how I have a little bit of OCD when it comes to…
Oh very big and the grossest like, “I don’t wanna lay down on any of that stuff.”
And I think it may have been Jason ’cause we were at base camp who was also saying just the idea of laying down on all these mattresses in a store is all so weird. It’s funny that you mentioned Casper because what you probably don’t know since our last con…
You bought a Casper ’cause you bought actually a topper. I remember you bought a topper and it didn’t really work.
Yeah, but we… Our entire house is now Casper mattresses and they’re fantastic.
And you are the mattress man.
[chuckle]
Yes.
We’re gonna get you a plug on Casper for you like “and the mattress man sleeps on Casper.”
Yeah, if only I could somehow monetize that but you said something right before we also started recording, which I also thought was interesting and you just talked about oxygen and blood and some of that too and I think what a lot of people don’t realize is, even if you don’t have the title sales, part of a lot of what you have to do to do your job is selling and you mentioned a really interesting example in the healthcare space.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like as a nurse. Well, first of all there’s a great book. It’s called To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink and he just… His whole notion is he outlines the fact that what you’ve said is we all sell whether we believe it or not and that you have to actually understand how people consume and so if you have an idea or you have something, you have to actually understand the receiving side of the equation and so the notion of the nurse like, “No. I need you to sell this program to this patient to help them get better. It’s like, “I’m a nurse. I don’t sell.” Which he said “Hey, can you actually help this patient make progress?” “Well, yeah, I can do that. That’s part of my job.” So you start to realize that if you frame it not as selling but as buying, help them buy this program or help them make progress in their life on these things, you start to realize, you’re the chief salesman ’cause you actually have to sell employees, right? And you actually don’t sell them, you actually help them, to be honest, employees hire you.
And so the reality is, is you have to realize that at some point in time, most people think companies hire employees but most employees are at will and they hire the company and so even the CEO has to know how to sell investors, they have to know how to sell clients, they have to know how to sell employees and it’s really about helping people make progress in their life and so this is… I have a couple of books coming up. One of them is this whole notion of what causes employees to fire their old company and hire a new one.
I think HR does the worst job in the world to help people make progress and they literally take the view of like, “I’m the company and I’m hiring you.” And most people are going like “Yeah, I’m actually here to interview to see if you meet my standards, if you’re good enough for me to work here.” and it’s like it’s this weird win thing and you’re like, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” And so this is where everybody’s negotiating in the wrong dimensions. It’s actually a really fun space because I just think everybody’s so disconnected they don’t know what to do.
Yeah and we won’t name any names, but we were just talking about an organization that seems to be… That we both have some experience with. It seems to be slow to adapt to change and you’re absolutely right on the HR front. You’re seeing this massive shift in people’s individual lives where they’re realizing that “Hey, work isn’t a place. It’s a thing.” and they want to interview the company as much as the company wants to interview them and in the traditional HR sense, you have a lot of people that are trying to say “Okay well, I’ve got my standard questions. I wanna be sure that Bob checks these boxes… “
That’s right.
And then I might decide…
I need to see your resume.
And I might decide if then I will then move him over to the business unit manager.
That’s right.
And he or she probably has a much greater sense on actually the job that they need solved than someone in HR.
So, I just interviewed Jason Freed at the industry conference out of Cleveland and one of the things I asked him “Dude, you have five positions and you’ve got 5000 applications, 5000 and he’s like… “And so, who does that work?” He’s like, “Well it’s not HR.” I’m like, “Who does the work?” He goes, “The team.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” “They filter through, they look at a fit, they understand the work, they then bring in different people and talk about the context that they’re gonna be in and can they work. The resume is kind of the thing that people want to say but it’s usually not real. It’s a fabrication of what they’ve done and so we frame a project for them and we pay them $1500 to do real work and then we interview them after that.”
And so the whole aspect is… He goes, “We interview over the real work because everything else is the imagined work or glorified work that they usually can’t talk about any of the details and so, this way, we can actually see the work they do and understand the logic that they’re using and the project is geared around the core skills that they have to have in order to do this job.” and I’m just like, “That’s the way stuff should be done.” My favorite is “Yeah, I just hired a Head of Marketing and he has… He never said marketing in his resume or he’s been an entrepreneur, he’s done all these things but he literally was the one who was thinking out of the box where everybody else had… I gave everybody a million dollars to spend and it turns out… ” He’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t think I need to spend a million. I think we need to start with 100,000 and do these things and everybody else spent a million to the dollar and here’s what we should do… ” And he’s like, “Too big, too complicated.” It’s like they had an equation and they just dumped it on top of what we were talking about and they didn’t listen to the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know and you feel like you know but this other guy who they hired Andy, he’s basically like, “We’re gonna find out together.” and that’s who they ended up hiring.
So it’s a very interesting notion of just hearing people realize that employees hire companies as much as companies hire employees and it’s a two-way street and that, to be honest it’s a crazy notion to think about how to go find a new job and most people are talking about everything, the grass is greener and you actually… Nobody ever talks about the context they are gonna be put in. They talk about, “We need you to have three years experience in Excel and PowerPoint, Can you demonstrate that for us? And you’re like, “Okay, Is that really a job you want?” [chuckle]
Right. It’s interesting that you asked Jason those questions, because he’s obviously super transparent that our whole organization is very transparent.
Very transparent, yeah.
And I think a lot of people, myself included, that we’re not gonna be submitting a resume for that job, but we’re fascinated to kinda see how they were going about doing it.
Of course.
And it doesn’t surprise me that at least they’re willing to pay someone for the trial, because that’s the other thing though that I do see organizations then do bad, is if they do want…
If we put…
If we put the work…
Yeah.
He’ll say, “Hey, now go do this.” And it’s kind of like you’re using that almost… I wanna try to bring it back to sales, because it’s almost like they’re using that as a negotiation tactic…
Yeah, yeah.
To say. “Hey, Bob, if you wanna work here… “
Yeah.
Show me that you’re willing to work for free for a bit and then I’ll decide if that makes sense or not.
Yeah. That’s right. Right. And, if we haven’t had the discussion, free is always bad. There is nothing good about free. Nothing ever happens good from free. Like free trial, yeah, I can try it but the reality is it forces me not to do my homework to actually figure out whether I wanna buy it. So yeah, “I’ll try… You know, I’m not sure… ” And you don’t commit enough time and effort to learn enough of it because it’s free.
But when you have to say, “Hey, here’s a $29 trial. Well, I better spend at least $29 worth of my time to figure out whether it’s worth it or not.” And so what happens is half the time free trials go bad. It’s like lots of people download it but they actually don’t use it because it’s free. You get the value you put in, which is free. [chuckle]
I’m literally just going through that experience right now. So, we use a number of different tools and one of the tools that I wanted to try to take a new look at is something that would help me personally, and then if I felt it worked, well I might roll it out to the team as a productivity tool.
Yeah, yeah.
And…
Was it free?
So, a bunch of people recommended this one, and I went and I looked at it, it looked good, I signed up for a free trial, and I even was suspect because I was like, “Well, we don’t… We’re not in the business… AE Marketing Group is not in the business of giving anything away for free.” So, that jumped out at me, but more importantly, I thought… What was interesting then, is the minute I downloaded it, I thought that there was going to be a little bit of a tutorial based upon the way that it was kinda sold to me. And then I realized, “Oh, I’m completely on my own now, and now we don’t have all the time… “
It’s free. What do you expect for free? [laughter]
Well, and that’s the thing, right? Because I was like, “Well my time’s too valuable to dink around with this.” They didn’t even have an explainer video baked into the process. But right away, who do I get notified from a customer service sales person saying…
How do you like the free download?
Yeah. Yeah. How do you like the download? Is there any questions I can answer about the evaluation process? And so… And not once did they say, “Brian, tell me why you need… [laughter] What is it that you’re hoping to get out of a productivity tool?”
Right. And what in the world were you struggling with to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna take time out of my busy crazy day to download this free tool.” There’s something you can’t do that you wanna do, what can’t you do? And so, the whole thing of frame is like, what would you like this to do for you? I don’t know, but I know I don’t want it to do this. And so, most people don’t even know how to answer the question of what you want it to do, but I can tell you what I don’t want it to do. I wanna stop doing this crazy behavior. Ever since… I think we talked about before the time box.
I have counted the days down that I’m gonna die, I’ve picked my death date. But the reality is like… I realized that free is never free because free is about time. And so the reality is, I’d rather pay for something that gives me the tutorial so I can learn it in 15 minutes and realize, “Yes, this is the right thing or not the right thing,” and cancel it than literally say, “Oh, it’s free for 90 days and oh, by the way, we’ll start charging you if you don’t actually come back and do it.” Dude, I’m never gonna remember that, and to be honest it’s worth $29. Free is just danger… I don’t know what I’ll say is dangerous for me.
And I know that my most precious resource is time, and time is way more important than money. It’s like the number zero. Everything behaves different around zero. You can go from one to two or two to one and, that’s predictable… But, as you get close to zero, stuff goes to infinity. It just doesn’t behave the same way. And so it’s like almost a different state. So zero to me as a math guy and an engineer, I don’t like zero.
Well, and I think it gets back to that moment of truth because there was a point in time where I was focused on career goals, then there was a time where I was focused on making a lot of money.
Yeah, yeah.
And then I started to realize, “Well, none of that matters without health and time.”
Yeah, that’s right. Well, and family and all those other…
Yeah. And all those other things. But if I’m not healthy and I don’t have the time, I’m not even there for the family and so…
That’s exactly right.
Yeah, and it’s funny because you try to talk to people or, I wish I could go back to my early Brian and be like… “Trust me, time is far more valuable than what your W-2 is gonna be this year. And so you need to think about that.
That’s right. There’s choices but the fact is this… What I would say is, the things that got to your W-2 the way it is, that 20% of the work got you to 80% of that check. And the reality is there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you do that literally is not valuable, and it’s wasting time that you should never do. But the reality is we think that that’s the little thing that makes us different. And the reality is, to be honest, I’m actually working less and making more. Because it’s like I’m just very choosy on who I work with. I’m very choosy about what projects I wanna take on, and so you just start to realize, “I don’t need all the stress and the hustle, and to be honest, I can actually do better with both my clients, and they can do better with me if I have time to focus on them and I’m rested.”
A lot of people know that I’ve just… I’ve spent the last couple of years just focusing on sleep, and two really good books that have influenced me is ‘Why We Sleep’, and the reality is, is to know how your frontal cortex suffers from not sleeping. And so you are in the middle of it when you got the new… And it was just one of those things where it’s like, when you get eight hours of sleep, and your body is rested, and your mind is rested, you actually can work way more productively. This is Jason and David and all the guys at Basecamp they’ve been talking about this for a long time.
But the reality is there’s science behind it, and there’s all this other stuff, and you start to just realize, “Man, I don’t need to get in at 6:00 AM, or I don’t need to be here until 10:00 PM at night. And, I work in a really different schedule than you work, and just ’cause I send the emails, doesn’t mean you should be sending emails. It’s like I’m trying to work when I’m most productive, and I have my windows of time. And let’s be clear, after four o’clock, a glass of wine kinda helps.”
Right? And so it’s one of those things and I realize I only save for after four o’clock things like podcasts. I don’t do podcasts at 7:00 AM in the morning or 9:00 AM in the morning. Those are my prime times for me to be thinking. And this is… There’s no script here, we’re just kinda talking, but this is easy for me to do where the real problems of the world that I’m trying to solve, I need my 7:00-11:00 to really figure those things out.
So why don’t we come back and just wrap up at least what we had hoped to accomplish.
Yeah, we’re a little bit all over the place and it’s not the wine, it’s just… You know what happens every time we get together.
No, no, for sure. And it’s always insightful. And again, we could go off in six different podcasts on this one, but I think one of the things I know we wanted to talk about because I know it’s something that you’re passionate about and it’s on the horizon in terms of a book around jobs and sales.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So when you think about an organization that is maybe having some struggles in sales, or maybe it’s an individual that’s embarking or trying to improve his or her sales career, what’s maybe one… And I know that, that might be hard.
No, no.
But what’s maybe one thing that the “Jobs To Be Done” approach could kind of help to ignite that?
I think it’s the fact of flipping the lens from what I call the supply side of thinking about like, I supply a product and who wants this product, and why would they buy it perspective to the demand side, to figuring out, what do people struggle with, what progress are they trying to make, and how does my product or service fit into their life? And make sure that it’s put in perspective ’cause I feel like most people see their consumer only through their product. It’s like they gotta lift the product up and say, “Alright, I’m looking through the mattress, who buys mattresses? And oh, you buy a mattress.” But it always is looking through the mattress to find the consumer, as opposed to saying, “What’s going on in your life to say you need a new mattress.”
And then, so instead of trying to not looking through it as like, what else is going on, and you start to realize it’s a lot broader, and the timeframe of how people decide is a lot longer and there are causal mechanisms, but it’s just trying to see it from the buyer side, as opposed to the product side, who’s gonna buy it, and how do I get their money, and how do I move on to the next? I think that’s the bigger shift. And again, it’s the nurse trying to help a patient say like, “How do I help you get better?” As opposed to, “Do it my way.”
Right. And I know we talked on that prior episode, that’s also a slightly different lens, but that’s also the same mistake that marketers will make because they’re always looking for the correlation. They’re looking for the… “Well, our product or our service or our brand’s demographic is this. Therefore, everyone looks like this age, this household income, this, this.” And they’re not really looking a layer deep to say, “What’s actually causing someone to want to engage our brand, or buy our product or hire our service?”
So I wanna just highlight two really good examples of that, which is like… So I’m doing some work right now in vacations, right? And if you go to Expedia or you go to really any vacation site, what’s the first question they ask you?
Where do you wanna go?
Where do you wanna go, right? It’s the wrong question like, “So Brian, where do you wanna go?” [chuckle] You’re like, “I don’t know.” And what if I said like, “So Brian, why do you need a vacation? What’s going on in your life that says to you… ” And then, “What do you wanna accomplish from the vacation? When you come back, what do you want it to be like?” It’s like, is this about building relationship? Is this about actually reconnecting with the family? Is this actually about resting and recovering ? What is this about? And nobody’s asking those questions, they’re literally like, “You can go to Cancun for $4,000.” You’re like, “What am I gonna do there? And the problem is, is you usually never go on vacation alone. And so it’s the trade-off you have to make between the family and the partner and your kids, and you’re just like, “How do I navigate that ?” And it’s like, “Where do you wanna go?” And it’s like, that is just the wrong question to lead with, right? And so, it’s like… And a travel agent, most of the time, doesn’t lead with, “Where do you wanna go?” It’s like, “Why we going on vacation this time?” And everybody’s gonna miss that.
And that’s sad because I have two kids that are a little younger than yours, I believe. And then, one of the things that I’ve really tried to do, we’re living in this digital world, but I try to keep them as much as possible off of devices. They don’t have phones, they don’t have iPads. We play still a lot of board games and one of them is Life, and I swear the game hasn’t changed since we were kids.
Oh, no, no, no. It’s the spirit is like…
And the kids…
“I can go to college, not college.” And then you realize, you look back and like, “God, I wish I went to college, I could’ve made so much more money.” [laughter]
Yeah. And they love to get the travel agent card. And they’re fascinated by the fact that though that there aren’t a lot of travel agents anymore. And I said, “You know, it’s sad because those people were all about building relationships.”
Right. Well, and to be honest…
They weren’t transactional.
At some point, our life’s so busy like, “How do I figure out where to go?” And what’d we just like, “So where have you gone on vacation? We just listen to everybody else. And we’re trying to draft behind everybody else of, “Oh, you went to Cancun, I should go to Cancun.” “cause if he had a good time, I’m gonna… ” And you realize, nobody’s spending the time to design a vacation at all, at all.
It’s so funny that you say this because my family was recently in Italy and we had some neighbors…
Okay, can I interview you on this? This would be…
Yeah.
We’ll end this and we’ll do another podcast just to interview on your trip ’cause you’re gonna laugh like… She’s gonna go like, “Oh my God.”
Well then, let me just tee it up with this, that I thought was pretty funny. So we were all in Italy and turns out we have some neighbors. I literally live a stone’s throw away from base camp. I don’t know if you knew that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’m literally two blocks away. I walked by it last night with my son. And, so we have a neighbor in the West Loop that said, “Oh my God, we’re going to Italy too. Can you give me the name or the location of the Airbnb that you stayed while you were in Rome?” And so, it gets handed off. Next thing I know, I get a message, which again, I appreciate, but I get a message from the Airbnb host saying, “Thank you, so and so has now booked our Airbnb.” And I immediately… It was contentious in my house because I said, “You have no idea what they wanna do in Rome. You have no idea why they’re going. You have no idea what they would look for in an Airbnb.”
Well, here’s the worst part. And if it’s not good, you’re gonna get the… You’re gonna get the load on. So you just took… You have social capital on this girl.
Oh, it’s ridiculous.
And you’re just like, “Oh god, we are not doing that again.” And everyone’s like, “No, we want people to share.” I’m like, “Yeah, but there’s consequences with free sharing.” Now, all of a sudden, I have a liability against like, “Well, Brian recommended him, it’s gotta be good.” Is like, “But it wasn’t good for me ’cause look, I was there to do some other stuff than what you went to do.” And it’s like, “Uh-oh.” This is the thing and that nobody is spending the time to dig deep. So I have one more example of this, which is when you finally realize you need a car and you’re like, “Okay, I should go look for a car.” Most people are… And we’re here in Detroit so it’s pretty much, a lot of people know about cars. But you go to cars.com, right? What’s the first question they ask you?
What kind of car do you want?
What brand do you want? Not even what kind, what brand do you want? And like…
Well, yeah that’s what I… Yeah. Yeah.
I don’t know. I don’t even know brand like Chevy. And then they’ll say, “Alright, great, which model do you want?” “I haven’t even bought a car in three, four years, you’re kinda like… ” And nobody’s asking me like, “What do you do with the car? Why are you getting a new car? What’s wrong with the old car?” There’s just like… Can you just ask me five questions and say, “Here is a Nissan Rogue. Here is a Ford Escape. Here’s like… ” Serve something up to me as opposed to make me realize what are the brand like, “Oh, God, which brand do I need? What’s the quality? I need consumers report. It’s this whole aspect of why are we not just asking the right questions? It’s just so crazy to me.
So I know we’re trying to wind this one down, ’cause I’m almost afraid…
We’re gonna take 20 minutes to wind it down.
I’m almost afraid to respond to what you just said because I think that would open up a whole other chat.
You took the train here and you bought a new car recently, haven’t you?
No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t recently buy a new car, but I bought a car a couple of years ago. And the reason why I bought that has nothing to do at all with the formula of how…
That’s my point.
Yeah, exactly, whether it’s CarMax, cars.com, any dealership…
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because of…
Yeah, and it’s a crazy because if someone had actually done a jobs question on me to get at some of that stuff, it would have been a faceted. That’s why I’m afraid to say that.
But this is where what I say is everybody has… Again, I apologize for the phrase, but it’s the thing that I’ve come up where I’ve been using for years, which is everybody has the guy. You have the Car Guy, you have the Trip Guy, you have the Sock Guy, you have the Clothes Guy. And to be honest half the time you don’t know you’re the guy on whatever you’re the guy on, right? I’m the Watch Guy, but I didn’t realize I was the watch guy. And so the thing is is that we have these people who are curating things for us and we just don’t realize how much we’re dependent on each other because we suck so bad at sales. [chuckle] We’re literally counting on each other who are the least educated about any of this stuff to say like, “Yeah, you need to buy a Porsche.” [chuckle] “Okay yeah, I’m gonna go do that.” Crazy, crazy. So as usual it’s always fun.
We’ll see if we can sneak in that other interview around going to Italy because it’s one of those things where you don’t realize it’s probably a nine-month decision making process. It’s ridiculously complicated. There’s so many trade-offs you made and everybody’s like, “Yeah.” And literally you don’t know what to expect. I actually think people are so excited about vacations because the expectations are always so low. [chuckle]
I would agree with that actually, so… Well, pretty usual this was a fun and good conversation. I know one of our goals was to at least try to tackle some of the missteps within sales and some of the missing dynamics of things like getting at really what’s driving sales, how sales people are trained, how sales people should do a better job of making it more about the buyer, using insight and approaches like the job’s to be done mindset to be able to get at some of that stuff and really identify which you’ve done well in a fun way with or without the wine to show how people are asking the wrong questions.
That’s right. It’s about questions.
And it’s also, it doesn’t have to be Brian wins, Bob loses game either.
That’s right. That’s right. And the thing is is you win when the consumer makes progress and they buy your product to do it because they’re willing to value the money they pay you because they’re doing something they couldn’t have done before. And so real good sales is always win-win. And the reality is is that too many people approach it as a negotiation and it’s backwards. So I guess I wanna thank you ’cause I think of you as the Jimmy Fallon of business and the fact is is you’re… That I can sit down here and we can… Everytime we watch Jim Fallon, it’s just a blast whoever the guests are. And to me, it’s like, love to go out come on the show. I’ll come on the show any time ’cause no matter what it is, we’re gonna talk about something and we’re gonna have fun and people will be entertained.
Yeah. Well, thank you, Bob.
Thank you.
Tags: B2B, B2C, Technology, Brand and Marketing, Customer Experience, Employee Advocacy, Entrepreneurship, Technology
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