Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sales is not a game of perfect. And what that means is that we can't be in a position where we build a pipeline that is fragile, where even if one or two things goes wrong, we're going to fall short of achieving our sales objectives for the year.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: I'm Dennis Sorensen and this is the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Today I want to talk to you about having an ambition mindset and developing that mindset. The key thing that we've covered to this point in the previous three episodes of our podcast series, we talked about being process driven. We talked about developing a plan, preparing, practicing, and then we talked about playing the game. And when we think about being process driven and those four Ps, there are really three pillars that underpin the that process. Ambition is the first of those pillars and an ambition mindset is what I want to talk about today. And so when we think about planning, we're talking about developing that ambition plan, developing that view of the total potential of our opportunities. We talk about then converting that plan into a strategic account or territory plan, and then we carry our goals and objectives from that strategic plan into our execution plan or a ghost plan. When we talk about ambition, what we're really talking about is having a process driven mindset towards competing for the total potential of our accounts. So if you think about the process driven framework, we have our ambition plan and then we develop our strategic account plan and then we carry that forward into our execution plan or our ghost plan. What we want to be able to do is when we develop these plans, we want to build once to use many. We don't want to build many things that we only use once, because what we want to be able to do successfully in sales is to be able to put so much of our effort into actual selling activities. And those selling activities in my mind are planning, preparation, practice and play. And so when we start to think about how that flows into the framework, we think about being process driven. We think about then the flow of ambition to a counter territory to execution into and attaching to our pipeline that carries into the forecast and ultimately into our results.
And in ambition thinking, what we want to do is we want to think about a quote that I read from Roger Enrico, who was the former CEO and chairman of PepsiCo, where he talked about beware of the tyranny of making small changes to small things.
Rather, make big changes to big things. And when I think about this, when we go into our customer accounts or into our sales territories with the mindset of making small changes to small things, what I think happens to us is that I think our customers see us as small. If we want to increase our importance and we want to be able to play for big things inside of our customer accounts and to compete for big opportunities across our sales territories, we have to be looking for the opportunity to make big changes to big things, because that's how we'll build our business. We need to understand that sales is not a game of perfect. Dr. Bob Rotella, who wrote How Champions Think, also wrote another book called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. And since I listen to and read things through my sales lens, I think about and how I translate that into our profession, into our sales profession, is that we can't set ourselves up as sellers to have to play a perfect game. And what that means is that we can't be in a position where we build a pipeline that is fragile, where even if one or two things goes wrong, we're going to fall short of achieving our sales objectives for the year. So we need to build for strength. We need to make sure that we're not building things that are fragile, where only if anything happens, because it will, right? Because sales is just human beings, and human beings make mistakes, and we have errors and we have things that go wrong. And so we want to make sure that when we build, we build for strength. And we want to be able to be in a position such that even if we have modest success in our sales efforts, we will have a really good outcome. And so when we think about ambition, it is truly a choice. Ambition thinking is truly a paradigm. It's a different way of thinking. It's a choice of choosing big dreams over small dreams. It's a choice of choosing big changes and big outcomes over incremental changes and small outcomes.
President Kennedy talked about the way that the United States was going to choose to go to the moon. We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And we want to set big ambitions. We want to choose to go to the moon. We want big goals that lead to big outcomes for us. This takes courage because it is often very hard to make this kind of shift in thinking. But if you make this shift in your thinking and you play an ambitious game, it's what changes the game? When I think about the process that I've talked about being process driven in those three pillars, ambition, strategy, and execution. It is really the pillar of ambition and the pillar of execution that changed the game for me and for my sellers over the years. It's about changing the way that we think about and go and compete for our business. We don't want to be placing any limits on our achievement. We want to reimagine and change the conversation that we have with our customers, with our clients. We want to think about the way that we position ourselves inside of our customer accounts. We want to be positioning ourselves as a partner to our customers who can help them do big things inside of their business and to make big changes that they need to make. We want to tie to the very most important outcomes from a business standpoint that they're trying to achieve. So we want to look for every opportunity for us to be able to do that. And when we reimagine that conversation, we can become a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to our customers. And that's how we have to think about it when we go out there, is that we can be a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner. In order to do that, we've got to own the story and we've got to own a big story about the types of outcomes that we can deliver, that our solutions, that our products that we can deliver to the market, that we can make big changes, we can make their lives easier, we can make their business outcomes better.
We can deliver better, faster and stronger than our competitors can. And that's how we have to be able to do it. We have to be able to refuse incremental growth and bad outcomes and poor results. We have to compete for things that are going to be game changing for our customer and therefore game changing for us. One of the things I would see in my career is that playing that small and incremental game is a difficult game because again, we're leaving ourselves very little margin for error. And when one or two things goes wrong for us, we find ourselves slipping as sellers back into desperation mode. And in desperation mode, we begin to slip back into pitching products, features, leading with product features, benefits, leading with technical features. If we sell technology and really not competing for the game, changing outcomes that we can deliver to those customers. And when that happens, we find ourselves in a very fragile place based on trying to compete for hope and not ambition. So when we think about competing for ambition and competing for really that total potential, what we want to do is we want to divorce our ambition from our quota. We want to get our quota and just accept the fact that quota is. Quota is a fact of life, or sales objectives are a fact of life in sales. And we just have to take that quota and we have to acknowledge it. And I would just say put it in a drawer and forget about it. Because what we want to be able to do is we want to understand what it is that the total potential of our accounts or our territory is, and then we want to go compete for that potential or a big portion of that potential. And when we talk about doing this, what we're talking about when we want to be able to take a step back and we want to be able to really understand what is real versus realistic, what we want to do is sort of imagine that we're looking at a mountain. What we want to know about that mountain is what its real height is. Not the height that we think we can realistically climb to today, but where the real height of the mountain is. That's the first thing we have to know. We can deal with realistic later. We can deal with realistic through our strategic account planning or strategic territory planning. But the first thing we got to understand is what is the real potential, what is the real height of that mountain?
That mountain might be a single account. It might be a collection of accounts. It might be in our entire territory. But we need to know what that real height is or the real potential of that mountain is for us to be able to assess how we start to climb it. One of the advantages of doing this is that if we look across our accounts and we understand that the real height of various accounts, once we know what the real height of those mountains are, we can begin to assess then which mountains might actually have the best path for us to pursue. Immediately, they give us the perspective of being able to say, okay, well, this mountain, even though this one might be higher, this other mountain that's slightly shorter in size or slightly smaller for us to be able to actually has an easier path. And so we can begin to evaluate how we might be able to approach all of the potential mountains that we have the opportunity to climb. And so when we think about it, we want to again, think about it in terms of the real height and not what we realistically think we can accomplish right now. So the way we define ambition is that ambition is the total potential of an account. What we want to do when we think about ambition is we want to take a step back and say, if we looked out three years, we looked out right now. Through the end of 2028. And if this customer or this territory was fully leveraging all of the solutions or products that I sell today, what does that look like at the end of three years, if every one of my competitors is gone, if every possible homegrown application for whatever the solution is that I sell is no longer there, if I could make a wish and wish away all the barriers, all the things that keep me from winning 100% of what's possible, what does that look like at the end of three years? So at the end of 2028, if I had 100% of the opportunity, leveraging my solutions, my products, my capabilities, what does that potential look like? What does the revenue look like from that type of an opportunity? And that's what I want to be able to understand.
I want to be able to know what that total potential is, because then I can begin to assess how I'm actually going to be able to, to go out and capture a very large portion of it. Because what I want to do is I want to get as as much of that in play as I can in year one. What I don't want to have is a plan that, that says I'm going to go and compete for a very small part of it this year, and then I'll capture another small part of it next year, and then I'll build on that and I'll capture the rest in the third year. Because that hockey stick that we create for ourselves in doing that leaves us in a position where of having an insurmountable ways that we have to go in order to even have a large portion of our total potential captured by the end of year three. What we want to be able to do is understand what that total potential is. And then we want to try to get 50% of that total potential in play in year one. And by doing this, what that does for us is it has an impact downstream in everything that we do. When we get larger portions of our total potential in play from the outset, we can begin to change the game because it puts us in a position to have to ask different kinds of questions. Who are the people that we need to know that we don't know right now? Who are the owners of the business or the executives in that business that we don't have a relationship that we would need a relationship with in order to be able to achieve our total potential? It puts us in a position to have to ask different kinds of questions. In our discovery. We have to understand much more about what the customers, what Their outcomes are what they're looking to accomplish in the next three years, five years, what are the things that they're trying to do that we can have a big impact on? And how can we help them understand at the highest levels that we can inside of that company, what can we help them to understand that we can have that kind of an impact? And so we want to be able to understand what that total potential is in order for us to have a chance to be able to go and play for it. Once we do that, then we can begin to think about what's the path that we can identify to be able to go and get there. What has to be true? When we talk about ambition, one of the key things that we think about sometimes is we might just take a step back and say, well, what would have to be true just to double the business with this customer in the next three years? What does that look like? What are the solutions that we would have to provide?
What are the products that we would have to sell in order to just double the business in the next three years? What does that look like? Because once we know what that looks like, we can begin to think about how we establish the path together, get there. And so when we think about it, that's how we might think about approaching it a little bit differently. Because then we can say, well, now that we know what it would take to double the business, what would it take to triple the business or quadruple the business, or to grow the business by 10x? What would have to be true? What would have to be true becomes a really key statement because it helps us to think about how we might be able to then go and make those changes inside of the customer's account or in the relationship that we have with that customer in order to make those things true. What would have to be true is also a really important question when we're doing our discovery work. Because when our customers are talking to us about the things that they want to accomplish, what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to truly understand what they see in their eyes has to be true for them to reach their goals, and when we can attach ourselves to helping them to achieve their goals, and that's when we can have the biggest impact. That's when we can make big changes to big things for them, and in doing so, make big changes to big things for ourselves and for our company. And so it's a very important thing that we be able to understand that that total potential allows us to begin to shift our thinking in terms of discovery and allows us to begin to shift the way that the customer thinks about us. If you're on a sales call and the customer identifies a particular problem area that you know you can solve, we have to resist the temptation of immediately running and chasing that particular problem. If we're there and we see this little problem squirrel that runs through the room, we can't chase that squirrel. We have to be able to understand that what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to uncover the entire nest of those squirrels, that we want to go and identify how all the problems that we can solve for that customer. And so when we have to resist the temptation in discovery, that's the one place in our sales process that we really want to slow down is in discovery. And we want to make sure that we ask all the questions, that we uncover all the problems that the customer has so that we can begin to think about how we can come to the table as a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to them in making big changes to big things for them. And that's how we can change the game. When we do that across our accounts and across our territory, we can begin to identify then what's the right mix of our time that we invest in those opportunities. When we have a really good understanding of what the total potential is, we can begin to think about how we stack, rank our opportunities. Whether it's within a single account or it's across a number of different accounts that we have responsibility for. We want to be able to stack, rank those opportunities, and begin to think how we're going to invest our time. My friend Mike Weinberg, who was on episode one with me, he really talks about one of the. The key, important aspects that he talks about is that salespeople have to be productively selfish. They have to take control of their calendars, and they have to carve out the important time in their calendars for the work that is the most important work for them to do, which is to sell. And when I talk about being process driven, I'm talking about carving out the time in our calendars to do the work that we need to do in planning and in preparation and in practice, so that we're best prepared as possible to out and play on that field, because we've done all the work that we can do, the things that we control 100% in planning, preparation, and practice, we take that onto the field with us. And ambition is an important part of that planning and preparation. And so what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to understand then once we have that understanding of the total potential and we stack rank those accounts, we can begin to think about how we might divide our time across those accounts. So if I'm a sales rep and I've got 10 accounts assigned to me, what I'm going to think about is if I've stack ranked those accounts the best that I can. I don't have to be perfect in my stack ranking. I just want to be directionally correct in this. And what I want to be able to do is then think about, okay, I've got my 10, so I'm going to take my top three and that's where I'm going to invest 80% of my time is in my top three account opportunities where I see the greatest total potential for me to win over the next three years. And then in that middle section, the next three of my accounts, I'm going to invest 15% of my time in those accounts. And then those bottom four, I'm going to put 5% of my time. And I want to be disciplined in controlling my calendar about the way that I invest my time into those accounts so that I can make the greatest impact that I can across the best opportunities that I have. I'm not neglecting anything, I'm not leaving anything out, but I'm also making sure that I focus on the areas that I have the greatest opportunity to make big changes to big things for my customers. And as I go through my work, I can adjust my, my rankings. I can move an account that I hit in that, that middle third bucket. I can move it to the top third, or I can move it to the bottom third. Wherever I think it is, it belongs based on the discovery work that I do. But I want to make sure that I'm being productively selfish with my time and that I'm putting my time towards my best opportunities. In order to do that, I've got to have an understanding of what my best opportunities are. And the way that I believe that we do that best is through an ambition plan. Developing an ambition plan. And we do that ambition plan. Once we build it, we then come back and we'll refresh that ambition plan once a year. Because what we do is we then bring in the next year. So in the case that I just described, 26, 27 and 28, once we do our ambition planning at the end of 2026, we'll bring in 2029 and I'll talk more about this in the next episode, when I talk about white space and white space planning, the white space becomes a key foundational element for how we do this.
So we want to be able to target our efforts at the areas where we have the greatest opportunity to have big changes to our customers business and therefore big changes to the outcomes we can achieve as sellers. And so in our next episode I will talk more about white space and the importance of doing white space analysis is a key part of our ambition planning. That ambition is planning is something that we want to do on an annual basis and then we take that ambition plan and we carry that ambition plan into our strategic account or territory plan. And that's where we go about the work of defining how we're going to do it, how, where we develop our strategies and the ways that we're going to go about competing for this business. But ambition is really important pillar. It is the key pillar that I think is the game changing pillar for how we change our business for our customers and for ourselves. And so with ambition in the next episode, we'll continue talking about ambition. This series that we'll talk about these next three episodes is about really ambition and we'll talk about how we get to ambition and then what we do with that before we pivot into really our strategic account and territory planning. I hope this was helpful to you and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Until then, thank you very much and I'll see you on episode six. Thank you.
