Hey listeners! Are you ready for another exciting episode on Limitless? Tune in now to listen to Matt Dixon, the author of The Jolting Effect, as he takes on how to jolt customers out of their last-stage indecision. Matthew Dixon is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of three of the most important business books of the past decade: The Challenger Sale, The Effortless Experience and The Challenger Customer.
Matt is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review on sales and customer experience. He is a founding partner of DCM Insights, a boutique consultancy focused on using data and research-backed frameworks to help companies attract, retain and grow their customers.
Previously, he has held numerous global leadership roles at organizations like Tethr, Korn Ferry Hay Group as well as the research firm CEB (now Gartner). He is a sought-after speaker and advisor to management teams around the world, including many of those in the Fortune 500.
Get his latest book: https://amzn.to/3T6f0uK
Hey all, welcome to another episode of our Limitless Podcast series. I'm Nisha, a product marketer at Hippo Video and your podcast host. We have with us today Matt Dickson. Hi Matt. Welcome to Limitless.
Hi Nisha. How are you? Thank you for having me.
Oh, it's great to have you here. And I'm good. I hope you are too. Okay. So a little about Matt. Okay, Matt is the founding part of DCM insights, the Customer Understanding Lab, and accomplished business researcher. He's a sought-after advisor to corporate leadership teams worldwide on topics ranging from sales and marketing effectiveness to customer experience and customer service strategy.
Matt is the author of three Amazon and Wallstreet Journal best sellers, the Challenger Sale, the Effortless Experience, and the Challenger Customer. He is also a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review with more than 20 print and online articles to his credit. His latest book, which he co-authored the Jolt Effect, How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision was released in September 2022.
Today Matt is speaking on the topic that he is no stranger to, which is, Jolting Customers out of the Last Stage of Indecision. Okay. So to the questions. So, Matt, here's my first question for you. In your latest book, you talk about a problem hampering says that's much bigger than the last stage of indecision, is customers unwilling to change the status of quo. What is that problem?
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So take a step back, and we maybe think about the problems we've written on in the past. So the Challenger Sale, which I think some listeners of the podcast might be familiar with was about a problem that, about 10 years ago, was just becoming apparent.
I think it's still a problem, but it's a problem of customers learning on their own, . They go to the internet, they learn all about you and your competitors, and they do all their research before they ever talk to a salesperson. And so by the time you reach out to the customer, they've really made up their mind about what they need and also how your company might be able to help them, which puts the salesperson in a very tough spot.
The second book we wrote, the challenger customer, was about a different problem. That was the problem of what we call consensus buying, which is when more and more people show up on the customer side show up at the buying committee, and everybody has an opinion about whether to move forward or not with the purchase and it becomes very difficult for the salesperson to navigate all of that consensus, those buying groups often won't agree on very much, even though they work for the same company.
Yeah. and so how do the best salespeople manage that now the new book, the Jolt Effect which comes out here is September 20th is about a new problem that we've been tracking. I think it's a problem that's been going on for some time, but I think that's gotten a lot worse in recent years and I think it's going to get worse moving forward, especially if the economy takes a turn for the worse in the next couple of years.
And this is the problem of no decision. So think about, all of those deals that salespeople will pursue. Where they spend a lot of time with the customer. They may go through the entire sales process, the customer, consumes valuable salesperson time, all the time of our, our team members.
Not to mention all of their own time and the time of their colleagues, only to end up at the end of the sale and do nothing. And so the conventional wisdom has always been that the only reason a customer would do nothing after going through the entire sales process is because they must still prefer their status quo.
They must believe what they do today is good enough or maybe it's superior. They may not believe that your solution is a compelling enough alternative or maybe they don't think it's worth the change effort. It's not worth the journey to go from right. What they do today to your platform. It's just going to be too time-consuming, too resource intensive, too expensive, et cetera. So we've taught salespeople for a very long time that the way you get the customer out of no decision, the way you get them to move forward. As you go back and you hammer the status quo. So you need to really paint the rosy picture of the future state.
How great things will be if you buy our product or our service, or you invest in our solution, or if the customer's not motivated by that, then we need to kind of scare them into action. So we need to dial up what what's called the FUD fear, uncertainty, and doubt. We need to make the customer feel like.
They're on a burning platform and they have no choice but to move forward. So the goal has always been for salespeople to show the customer what they stand to lose by not acting by not making the purchase. Here is the cost of your inaction and what it's going to mean for you and for your company.
And what we found in our research was that this is the approach that almost every salesperson takes, especially when the customer starts to show signs of kind of cold feet. They start to talk themselves out of it. They start to wave and waffle and back pedal. We go back and we try to kind of beat the status quo.
And what we found is that that approach actually backfires more often than it works out. 84% of the time doing those things, trying to re-litigate the status quo actually makes things worse for the customer. It actually leads to a higher likelihood that the deal will be lost to no decision.
And so what we were stumped by this. It was a really puzzling finding from our research. And when we went back and dug into it, what we found was that there are two reasons, salespeople have always been taught. There's only one reason a deal will be lost to no decision.
And it's because the customer prefers the status quo, or maybe doesn't believe your solution, your product, or your service is a superior alternative to the status quo. So they stick with what they do today, but it turns out that's one of two possible reasons a deal can be lost to no decision the status quo accounts for about 44% of no-decision losses, but 56% of the time.
These are customers who prefer, would prefer to move forward with your solution, but instead, they're grappling with some other source of what we call indecision now. When we unpack that in a bit more detail, we find that indecision is driven by three specific things. One, it's the customer who doesn't know what to pick.
So they're looking at all of your options, should I pick package A, B or C. Should I pick configuration X, Y, or Z? Should I go for the two-year contract? The three-year contract? Should we roll the solution enterprise-wide or should we roll it out in a small more narrow use case or deployment?
There are so many decisions a customer has to make when it comes to buying a product or service. And this is the customer who's, who feels like all of the options look good. And they're worried about picking the wrong one. And if they pick the wrong one, they feel it might be an irreversible decision.
Something they'll be stuck with. Right. Second, customers will become indecisive because they fear they haven't done enough homework. They haven't done enough research about the decision they're being asked to make. And that is something that's just getting worse as there's more and more information out there for customers to consume.
And especially as the products and services we're asking them to buy become more expensive, more risky, more disruptive while that customer's going to want to do their own research, to make sure that they're a smart consumer. Before they spend valuable time and money, and resources on a big purchase.
And then the third source of indecision is what we call outcome uncertainty. So outcome uncertainty is where the customer feels. They have no guarantee of success and yes, your ROI projections look fantastic. And all of your reference customers sung your praises. They love you. And yes, the pilot or the proof of concept was fantastic.
And, we have broad-based consensus in our company to move forward. But what if we don't achieve the benefits that you are projecting? And if that happens, I might get fired because it's my name on the contract or we, or maybe not as bad as that, but it might just be that I look like a fool to my colleagues.
I didn't do enough homework. I picked the wrong thing. I didn't get any assurance. And, and now I've got, as the expression goes egg on my face and I don't, I look, I look a bit like a rub to my head, to my colleagues, and nobody wants that. So if you think about those things, I might pick the wrong thing.
I haven't done enough research, or I might be left holding the bag. I have no assurance of success that outcome uncertainty. If I think about those, if you think about those things for a moment, the status quo doesn't appear in any of those things. So you could easily have a customer who is committed to leaving the status quo, but instead is worried about again, have I picked the right configuration?
Have I done enough research? Do I have any guarantee? This will work out for me. And when we go back as salespeople, and we just hammer the status quo, when every indecisive customer looks like a nail and we take our status quo hammer, and we hammer every single one, but the customer is instead worried about something different.
Well, we can make things worse and that's what explains the findings that came out of our research. Okay. So basically, they're scared of screwing up the customer's scared of screwing up and being blamed. That's the reason. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So Matt, why does this tend to happen only in the final stages of the pipeline?
Like, why not, in the middle or even in the beginning, like since, I mean, they've gone through the stages, so that means they must be interested. Right. So why do they back out at the very final stage?
Well, it's interesting because initially we in the book, we talk about how the best salespeople do exactly what you are, you are saying, which is they don't wait until the final stage to figure this out.
And that's actually a hallmark. Of average-performing salespeople. They think they have the customer on the hook. They think they're gonna close the deal. And then they only find out in the 11th hour, the final stages, that in fact, the customer has, is struggling with some source or depth of indecision.
And this is gonna take a lot longer to close than they have thought. And so that is the hallmark, again, of the average performers that they're surprised by these things very late in the game, but your best salespeople are actually, again, doing what you said, which is they are qualifying and disqualifying opportunities based on their, not just their ability to buy, but their ability to decide.
So how indecisive is this customer? Are they struggling with multiple sources of indecision? Is there some sort? The factor going on some time emergency or some, some other social pressure perhaps inside their organization that is gonna amplify their latent indecision ends gonna make it very hard to close a deal.
Those are things that high-performing salespeople are listening for. And they're probing for even in the very first interaction. So you are 100% right. Is. Indecision is not a final stage thing. If it is, if it comes across as a final stage thing, that means you're, you're doing it wrong if you will. so you're not, you're not doing what high performers do, which is to detect the signs of indecision much earlier in the sale.
All right. Okay. So what exactly can salespeople do to help customers overcome this? Like even during the initial stages, like, as soon as the customer gets the slightest hint of doubt, what can a salesperson do to classify them or convince? That's as we say the $64,000 question. so that's the big question, right?
Let me say at the highest level what the book and what the research teaches salespeople is that for as long as sales have, as we've been doing sales for and certainly for the last 40 or 50 years, we've always been taught to believe that the status quo is our only enemy in sales.
It's the only, it's the most important thing to overcome. But now, we know it's very important to overcome the status quo, but it's actually not as important as sources of indecision and what we need to understand. As salespeople, we need two playbooks. We need a playbook for beating the status quo, which is of course, still very important.
If you don't convince the customer to move forward and depart from their status quo, they will never buy anything. but we need a second playbook as well. And that playbook is about overcoming indecision. Now, if I were to describe those two playbooks at a high level, what I would say is this beating the status quo was all.
Dialing up the fear of not purchasing. So you've gotta help the customer see the cost of their inaction. Here's what you stand to lose by doing nothing. But as the research points out, Customers care a lot more about, or they're much more worried about messing up than they are about missing out. And so, yeah, while that is important, the second playbook for overcoming indecision is not about dialing up the fear of not purchasing.
It's about dialing down the fear of purchasing. So how do we get the customer comfortable? That they are making a great decision. They are picking the right configuration. They've done plenty of homework, and they're working with a subject matter expert. Our salesperson is going to guide them to a great decision for themselves and for their business.
And you are not jumping off a cliff without a safety net. We are going to have your back and we're going to support you and make sure that we achieve those benefits. We've talked about it. So we've done this many times before you're in very good hands. So these are fears that customers have and their personal fears in many respects.
And so that overcoming indecision is all about dealing with those fears. Now I think the big question is, okay, so what's in that playbook, and we call it the jolt playbook? Jolt is an acronym, so it stands for four specific behaviors. And so very quickly, what those are.
The J is judge the level of indecision. We talked about that a little bit ago. We've gotta be very attuned as salespeople in listening for and probing for the customer's ability to make a decision. And we've gotta constantly factor that in to our forecasting factor that into whether our deal qualification. And into our playbook, right?
How are we going to engage this customer? What are the hurdles that are out there? It's all well and good to get budget lined up and get consensus built and check the box with legal and procurement and everyone else on the customer side. But if the customer's struggling with indecision, you're gonna find yourself in the 11th hour with the customer.
Who's not willing to sign the agreement because they're still scared of messing up. So we've gotta be judging that level of indecision all across the sale.
The O is Offering a recommendation. Now it's very important, and it's very beneficial. I think for salespeople to put lots of options and choices in front of customers early on, but right over time, what seems like a good thing can actually become a bad thing for the customer that when, especially when they start to feel like all of the options, all of the bells and whistles and partner integrations and starts getting overwhelming, right?
Like after, yeah, it becomes overwhelming. Right. And you're worried about choosing the wrong one because they all look great. What we've got to do as salespeople is not just ask the customer what they wanna buy. We need to tell them what they should buy.
And we need to offer a personal recommendation based on our experience that provides a seal of approval to that choice. It makes the customer feel like, ah, I am being guided to a good and smart decision by somebody who has sold this solution many times before they know where the pitfalls are. They know what customers like me get value out of.
And they're guiding me to a great choice much in the way, a travel agent. Who might help you visit a country that you've never been to before, by making great recommendations on things, you should see activities, you should do places you should stay, how you should get there, how you should travel around, things to watch out for.
That's the kind of feeling we wanna give our customers. The L is limiting the exploration. So customers, left to their own devices. They will wanna do research endlessly and they will engage in what's called analysis paralysis. Do that. They don't make any decision. Right. What they're thinking is all of the answers must be in the next white paper.
I'm going to read or the next Gartner report or the next Forester report. And so they will wait and wait and wait and consume and consume and consume. And so we've gotta get them to stop. In stop trying to become an expert themselves and start trusting us as an expert. Now, how do we do that as salespeople?
Well, we can't do a Jedi mind trick and just tell the customer, oh, you don't, you don't need to read that content. Don't worry about it. We've got to instill the trust that, that the customer we need to the customer to feel like they are in good hands. They are working with somebody who is not trying to oversell them.
Who's not trying to hide the ball if you will, and not trying? hide the bad news, but is open and transparent and honest. And then secondly, they need to, we need to convince the customer that they are talking to a subject matter expert. How do we do that? That means, oftentimes, we as salespeople, need to learn to do our own demos.
We need to lean less heavily on subject matter experts and solutions. That was actually the next question I was going to ask you. I mean, in most organizations, salespeople are into solution experts, right? I mean, they, they are in one person implementation part, like they role just ends with, making the sales.
So how do they bring in that confide? Yeah, it's, it's such a great question. And I, I find an issue you're right. That when I talk to salespeople and to sales leaders, in particular, that is one of the parts of this playbook that they really struggle with actually. And it's because, as you said, they, they in their sales organization, They have lots of people who do the demos.
They have lots of people who answer the technical questions. They have product people and engineers and security folks and customer success, people, and they're salespeople. They just want them to focus on selling, but there's an old adage in sales that is very, very true, which is. you get delegated to the person you sound like.
So if your only value in the sale is that you are a high-priced or a high-end administrator. So your only value is that you can get other people who know the right answers and who can go deep on the product and can answer the customer's questions. Your only value is getting them on the phone.
And then you kind of throw the call to them. Yeah. then the customer doesn't see any value in engaging with you. And what that leads to is a customer who feels. I'm being sold to by somebody who doesn't know much more than I do about this. So I need to do my own research. you only stop doing that when you feel like you are engaged with somebody who is an expert.
And so it is a challenge to sellers and sales organizations to actually stop leaning so heavily on all of the third, additional experts we bring onto the phone into in part, upon our salespeople, a level of expertise. It doesn't mean they need to be as deep on the product as an engineer.
Or as a product, manager, but it does mean that they need to speak confidently. They need to be able to walk the customer through the product at some level, and they need to lean less heavily on all of those other people. and when they do bring those other people onto calls, it means that they need to do so.
In a carefully orchestrated way. So what, what I'm not going to do is say, Hey, I brought a long mission. She's the head of product. You should take it away. And then I, I let you run the call by the way, you hate that because you're the head of product. You're not the salesperson. And also, yeah. what, what signal that sends the customer is that I don't know what I'm talking about and all I can, my only value here is that I got you on the phone.
Yeah. And so instead, what we need to do is sit down in advance and I say, okay, Nisha, you're gonna get this question. And I want you to answer it and I please let's rehearse it and make sure that the answer is less than five minutes. So you hand it back to me because it's really important that the customer comes to me with questions and that they don't just start going to you.
Right? So there are a number of things we can do to show our customer that we are actually subject matter experts. And then just to finish it off, the T is taking risk off the table. remember the customer. They're going to, they may look at your ROI projections and nod and say, yes, those look great.
They may say yes, those reference calls were wonderful. Yes. That proof of concept or the pilot we ran was fantastic. everybody is aligned, but they'll still fear. That they may not get the benefits that they're paying for. And so we've got to de-risk the purchase for the customer. We've got to show them that they're not jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, but they actually, there is a parachute there, right?
They've got a parachute and a backup shoot, and there's lots of ways we can do that. In transactional sales, we may have the option to offer an opt-out clause or a prorated refund period. If the customer doesn't like what they bought but in more complex sales, there are things. For, for instance, pulling the customer success team onto the call earlier and showing them the rollout roadmap.
And here are the KPIs and the milestones, and here needs to here's who needs to be involved to instill that confidence that, okay, these guys have done this before. They're experts. They know what could go wrong. I'm dealing with somebody who's gonna help guide us to the right outcome. So again, there are lots of different ways, both formal and informal, that we can instill that confidence.
But what I find is that one that, that outcome uncertainty, that's the one that actually crops up very late. In the sale. some of the other ones will come up earlier, but that outcome uncertainty is, I like to say, the kind of gap between the tip of the customer's pen and the contract. And every that space is filled with outcome uncertainty.
Am I really gonna get what I'm paying for here? And if I don't, I'm gonna look foolish, or I might even get fired for making a bad decision. Okay. So Matt mentioned bringing in the customer's access team earlier on in the process, right? So does, sharing, like customer testimonials, and case studies of customers, similar to the customer that you're dealing with now and showing like the ROI that they have seen with your product help in this case?
It, it does. I think it does. I think it helps, first of all, it does two things, I think It helps demonstrate it helps beat the status quo, for sure. So if the customer still believes what they're doing today is, is fine. And then they see reference customers or case studies or success stories from customers like them achieving better results than they are achieving.
Well, that, that helps me realize that what we do today is not good enough. In fact, it's the gap between what we're doing today and what our competitors do are doing is actually quite large. And we should close that gap or we might be left behind. It's also important, I think when it comes to overcoming indecision, because if I can produce examples of reference customers like you who have achieved outcomes that are impressive, That helps alleviate the outcome uncertainty, but it won't eliminate it.
because what the customer knows is. You are only showing me reference customers or case studies from those companies that have achieved fantastic results. But every company has customers who hate them and haven't achieved very good results. And no salesperson is gonna share those bad customer stories with a cus with a prospective customer.
So the customer is always gonna worry that they might be the one company where they don't achieve those results. And so, managing those expectations is very important. helping the customers see. It's not just these, these wonderful success stories that we put on a pillar, but also we've got a plan to make sure that we're going to achieve the outcomes because we've seen this, how this goes right.
And how it goes wrong. And we're very transparent about what could go wrong. Right? We are not hiding anything and we're walking you through that. And so I think it's important, but I don't think it in and of itself, I don't think it solves for the indecision problems that customers will struggle.
Okay. Okay. Because this is something that, most customers, I mean, most salespeople do, like, sharing case studies and testimonials to build that confidence. So. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they should still do that, I think. But, you remember if, if we've got a customer who says, yes, Nisha, I'm ready to move forward.
We, what we do today is not good enough. I see the benefits of working with you. You are the best provider in the market. But then they still hesitate going back and showing them those proof points and success stories and saying, no, no, you must have missed how great the returns are that our other customers are achieving is actually not going to convince them because they're, they're worried about something else.
Remember I, maybe I chose the wrong configuration. Maybe I haven't done enough research. Maybe I have no assurance that this is gonna work out for my company. So those, again, those it can help, but it won't completely solve for those by themselves. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. And also Matt, a few minutes ago, you mentioned like how salespeople should become solution experts themselves and guide the customers through the whole process.
Right? So this means they'll have to put in more effort for each customer. And in this case, the number of prospects or customers that they deal with will come down. So do you think they should focus more on quality over quantity in that case? I do actually, I was with a company recently that had done its own research, and they found that.
The best salespeople in their who use their solution produce, not surprisingly significantly better results than the average performing salespeople who use the same exact solution. And one of the big differences was surprising differences. It wasn't just that they did better.
It was how they achieved those results. It turned out that The be the top-performing salespeople spent 10% less time actually in front of customers selling, they had fewer prospects in their pipeline. They had fewer opportunities. Right. And, but what it meant was they were investing more time in each one.
And so that was clearly. A quality over quantity play, right? They were spending a lot more time almost building the relationship with the customer before they even sold to the customer, but really getting to know the organization, doing plenty of research on that customer and competitors reference customers different use cases.
And, carefully qualifying and disqualifying opportunities in the early stages. So what you found is, and we found this in other research too, is that an average performer's pipeline looks kind of like that classic funnel shape, right? A lot of opportunities early on, and it gets smaller as you get to the closing stages.
The high performer funnel shape looks quite different. It actually looks a bit like a nail tipped over on its side. So there's just as many opportunities early on, but high performers disqualify aggressively, and then work a smaller number of opportunities but end up closing them at higher rates and, and typically higher deal value than what average performers are doing fewer opportunities.
But ultimately better success and greater outcomes at the end of the day, cuz by focusing on quality, not quantity. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. So that's what I was looking for. Thank you for answering that. So with the world moving towards a recession, that will impact of this customer and decision.
I think there's two ways to think about it first. Okay. Yes. I think as the budgets become more scrutinized as companies pull back as cash is king, and companies really start to hunker down for maybe some tough economic times in the next couple of years. then bigger decisions, especially big decisions are ones that produce more indecisions.
So. More homework is done, more consternation about, are we picking the right configuration more worries about whether we're gonna really get what we're paying for, because that those do become things that you get fired for when when budgets and big decisions are being hyper scrutinized in tough economic times is as we say, in the book, nobody ever got fired for maintaining or perpetuating the status quo.
But people do get fired for trying to change it. And when it doesn't work out. And so that is, it becomes a time where people don't wanna stick their necks out, and they kind of wanna kick their heads down. They don't wanna rock the boat. They don't wanna, they don't wanna draw attention to themselves for having to, waste their company's money or resources on something that didn't work out.
So decisions get kicked down the road or avoided entirely. Now what I'll also say, though, is. Aside from the recession. I think all of these sources of indecision are getting worse. So if you think about any. So I think this is probably true of any listener of the podcast. They probably work for companies where they are, and their companies are offering more and more options, right?
More bells and whistles, more options, more partner integrations, more roadmap items, no more versions of the product. So we are putting more and more options in front of our customers. I don't think any company. Out there certainly not any company who's in growth mode is offering fewer options to its customers.
Then second, think about the amount of information out there. there's more information today about every technology and use case in industry than there was yesterday and tomorrow there'll be even more than there is today that increases the feeling the customer has that they haven't done enough research.
And then think about those the outcome uncertainty, I might not get what I'm paying for as vendors increase the cost. Of their solutions as the riskiness of those decisions goes up outcome uncertainty goes up as well. So I think these are kind of three genies that we can't put back in the bottle.
These are three things that are secular trends that are gonna get worse. Irrespective of the downturn. I think the downturn may accelerate some of these things and may, may amplify them in the near term. But I think, we found in our research that 40 to 60% of deals are lost to no decision. And I think those numbers are likely to get much worse in the next five to 10 years, irrespective of a downturn.
Okay. Got it. Okay. So we are almost at the end of our session. So any final words of advice to all those hopeful salespeople out. Yeah, I think that, I think the one thing I would encourage all salespeople to do is when that customer you're selling to starts to hesitate, right. And when they start to backed, when they start to waiver a bit on their decision, when they show that those signs of hesitation or confusion or uncertainty, or doubt or skepticism, It's not always, it's not definitionally because they prefer what they do today, or they don't believe your solution is superior.
It may be. And in fact, often is the case that they agree that what they do today is suboptimal and your solution is a much better alternative, but they're worried about something else. So rather than try to bludgeon the customer with, the fear of missing out on the cost of their inaction, dialing up the FUD, pause for a moment and think about what's really going on and maybe probe for that a bit, what's, what's really causing this hesitation, is it that you don't believe us?
Is it that you think what you did today is just good enough or fine? or is it that you're worried about something else and let's get that on the table because if you don't get it on the table you are not gonna solve for it. And so that's, that's my piece of advice for salespeople. And then of course, for listeners, If you're looking for more information about this research, come visit us at jolteffect.com.
And there's a whole host of free resources there. Coaching tools, um deal qualification tools and scorecards, et cetera. as well as a number of other ways that you can bring these jolt effect skills to your sales organization, if you're a manager or a leader. Okay. So Jolteffect.com. I'll make sure to add that to the landing page when we publish the podcast.
All right. Great. Okay. So I think, yeah, so this is my last question for you, Matt. And this is something that I ask all our podcast hosts. So I mean podcast speakers so what are some books or podcasts that you recommend every salesperson should read or listen to? I mean, other than your own, of course, which I'm sure every salesperson has to as you mentioned previously, so other than your, yeah, I think So I think a lot of what, what we found in terms of what great salespeople do can be explained by, a deeper understanding of human psychology and behavioral economics.
And so I'm a big fan of podcasts and books that help us as salespeople. Delve more deeply into how people make decisions, and why they make the decisions they do. And so I might recommend things like Daniel Conman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, or Freakonomics, Steve Levitin Dub, Levi Governor's book all the books by Dan Pink and Dan Heath and, and those folks who help.
Social Science and Human and Cognitive Psychology and behavioral economics are understandable for us. I think these are really, if you, and when I talk to some of the most thoughtful salespeople out there and sales leaders, they, yes, they consume sales books and listen to sales podcasts, but I think they take a step back and try to understand why humans make the decisions that they do.
And a lot of, when we talk about indecision, We read about 30 to 40 years of social science research to try to explainthe findings in our platform. And so I think it's, it's really important that we take a step back and just think of it's not salespeople and customers, it's human beings and why people do the things that they do.
Yeah. This is stretching beneath the surface, right? I mean, just sales forecast is just starting the surface. So this is going, as you said, going a step deeper. Yeah, exactly. In psychology. Okay. Okay, Matt. So I think that brings us to the end of this. Thank you again, Matt, for your super insightful advice on joining customers out of their I'm sure all salespeople listening to this podcast would now have many items that they can immediately incorporate into their processes and conversations and see much better conversions.
And thank you listeners for tuning in today will be doing many more of these podcasts with more such stellar sales leaders from around the globe. So stay tuned into our upcoming episodes. We are on apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher as. Subscribe to get notified when a new episode is out. And please, don't forget to leave us a review of your own apple.
Thank you for listening. And bye-bye. Have a great day. And you too, Matt. Have a great day