Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: A thousand things, if done very well, will never add up to something big. But a few big things, if done very well, can change the game.
[00:00:09] 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.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Today we're gonna continue our discussion from episode five about ambition and ambition thinking. We're gonna talk about mapping white space and how white space is a key to helping us to reach that understanding of what the total potential of our accounts and territory is and how it becomes a key element in really beginning to set the foundation of what our ambition and our ambition plan should be. In the last episode, we talked about ambition thinking. Ambition thinking being a paradigm shift. It's a paradigm shift in the way that we think about our business because we want to be able to get ourselves into a place of competing for a big portion of the total potential of the opportunity that's in front of us. We want to understand what that total potential is. And we only need to be directionally correct. We don't need to be perfect. We just want to be directionally correct in the way that we think about what the total potential of these accounts are and how we might begin to think about how we go and compete for it. Because that allows us then to prioritize, to stack rank our accounts and opportunities, and to begin to focus 80% of our effort on a top third of our opportunities, 15% of our effort on the middle third, and then 5% of our effort into the rest of our opportunities while we make sure that we get a lot of focus into that top group. And the importance of this is when I've seen reps who have a number of accounts in their territories, when they try to spread themselves too thin across their territory. They're very busy, they're very active, but they don't get a lot done. And they certainly don't get a lot of big changes to big things made across their accounts. And they don't realize those big outcomes. They've. They've effectively spread themselves so thin, and they're playing a game that really puts them in the position of having to be a play a perfect game in order to have any kind of a good outcome. And so again, what we talked about in the last episode is that we want to put ourselves in a position of being able to have a lot of potential in play, such that even a modest success allows us to have a really good outcome. And sometimes we find that that modest success can lead to even great outcomes, because sometimes we actually underestimate what the total potential of an account might be, and it actually turns out to be much, much larger for us. We found that to be true in a number of the different opportunities that we've worked on with, with my sales teams over the years is that sometimes when we've done our ambition planning work, we've well underestimated what the opportunity truly was, and we've seen dramatic outcomes to happen as a result of our efforts. And so in the last episode, I gave a quote from Roger Enrico, the former CEO and chairman of PepsiCo. Roger had a number of great quotes that I really loved. And so one of his other great quotes was a thousand things, if done very well, will never add up to something big. But a few big things, if done very well, can change the game. And that's what we want to do. We want to change the game. We want to change the game for ourselves as sellers so that we don't have to play the same kind of incremental small game that we've been playing. We want to play a game where we're pursuing big changes to big things for our customers. And by doing this, we also create big outcomes for them for our customers. And if we keep that customer first in our mind when we're thinking about the impact we can have on their business, the result for us is very, very good as sellers. And so we want to be thinking about how we can make big changes to big things, because that's how we can change the game for ourselves. One of the things that I saw a few years ago when I saw the movie the Legend of Bagger Vance, it was really interesting movie to me because through my sales lens that I sort of read and, and hear and watch things through, I took some really key lessons from that movie and from an ambition standpoint, thinking the way that I think about it is that what we really have to do and what, what, what was happening in, in that movie was that Bagger Vance was trying to get the golfer to be able to see the field, to see the total potential, to see what was there and not just get so caught up on what was happening, you know, right then in that second in the game, but really to see the total potential of the field, to see the field. And one of the things that he said to him is that he, he can't see that flag as some dragon he has to slay. And I think in sales we have to think that way about our quotas. We can't see our quotas as some dragon that we have to slay because if we do, we find ourselves really fighting an uphill battle all the way, reacting and fighting uphill all the way to get to our quota number. And what we want to be able to do is we want to step back, we want to be able to see the entire potential, see the total possibilities that exist for us. And that's what we want to be able to get into play. So if you think about it, right, ambition for our accounts or for our territory is really the version of our maximum value and impact that aligns with the customer's goals, our unique strengths and what's truly possible. If everything breaks right for us, that's what we're looking for. When we talk about ambition and the total potential, that is our authentic shot. That's the authentic shot that we want to be able to take when we play our game. It is the full opportunity that's already there waiting for us. We just have to see it. And so that's going to be the key of what we talk about when we continue to talk about ambition, right? And the other thing that's important about ambition thinking is to understand that ambition isn't only a rational exercise, it's a creative one. It's an intuitive exercise. You've got to feel it. You got to feel and then see the future and then believe it right before it can exist. And that's the key thing, is that you got to be able to bring your creative mind. This is sort of the art of sales being brought together with the science of sales in terms of ambition thinking. We want to imagine the impact that we can have on our customers and then we want to reverse engineer a path to achieving that impact. So one of the ways that we do that in ambition planning is, is we do that with kind of an old school white space exercise, right? And that's where we're really trying to envision what the future can be. And we do that through a white space exercise. And white space is really about identifying the untapped opportunity within an existing account or territory. Areas where we could and should be delivering value, but we just aren't yet. And so what we want to do is we want to use wide space because it reveals the revenue potential that's really hiding right in plain sight. It helps us to map our full solution portfolio to a customer's needs. It helps us to identify the areas where competitors or internal tools or solutions or other products dominate. And it helps us to fuel account growth and strengthens our executive engagement across our accounts. If we're not in these areas, what's stopping us? What's stopping us from getting there? And then we want to be able to realize the value of that opportunity of getting there. So what we want to do when we make white space work for us is right. We want to analyze customer functions or use cases, all of the different areas and initiatives where we can focus on how we can bring value. And we want to be able to map those then into this white space mapping tool. And it's a very simple tool. And the way that we would do it, we would take essentially an Excel spreadsheet and across, down the left hand side, across the rows, we would list all the potential buying centers for our solution. And then across the columns of that spreadsheet, we would list out all the solutions that we might be able to sell to the various buying centers. And then we essentially go through an exercise of going through each one of those cells. And where we have a cell where we're currently selling a product or a solution, we simply shade that cell in. And then once we shade that cell in, we can then go in and we can input the amount of revenue that's being driven from that particular solution, that's being sold to that particular buying center. And we repeat that across each one of those columns for each one of the buying centers. And so we have a really clear picture of what our current sales are across that. And so if you've got a greenfield territory where you're selling, if you're a pure new account hunter, well, most of your white space is just going to be white. And so you've got a lot of opportunity across those accounts. But if you've got existing accounts where you know there's more potential for you to be able to sell more of your solution inside of that account.
This is what we want to use the white space exercise for. For those types of accounts, we want to be able to get a really clear picture of all the different buying centers, all the different areas that can buy our solution, and that might be within a single account, or we might be mapping a white space exercise across the sales territory where we're listing essentially buying centers across the sales territory. And then all of our solutions that we could sell across each one of those columns that move out over to the right of those cells and so once we go through that and we've got our existing business listed into the white space, then what we do is we have another column that's next to each of the existing business columns. That's effectively the white space column. And what we do there is we begin to fill in as we do discovery, and we understand what the total potential of the opportunity might be. We begin to fill in those buckets with the amounts of revenue that we believe can be generated from that solution to that buying center, but we haven't yet sold it. So, again, what we're trying to do is just be directionally correct here. We're not looking for precision, just directional correct. And so we can get more precision as we work through our white space exercise on an ongoing basis, because we keep this as a living thing that we continue to work in as we do our discovery, we refine these numbers, we continue to expand, and as we do more discovery, we might uncover more white space, more opportunities that we didn't know exist when we first started doing the work. And so we want to be able to map that, and we want to be able to have a visual picture of what the opportunities look like. One of the things that I think is really true in sales is that writing things down makes them real. And this is why it's so very important that we write. We write this white space out because once we can visually see it, it's really amazing the impact that it can have on our. On our thinking. Right. It really helps us to begin again to think about how we prioritize how we. And prioritize our time. So when we carve out our calendar and we be selfishly productive with our time as sellers, we want to make sure, again, that we're focused on those areas that give us the greatest opportunity to make the biggest impact. And so that's what this white space exercise allows us to do. And so what we do is we continue to build out those columns, and we have the white space identified for the different solutions or products that we could sell across these buying centers. And then we begin to work to fill in all of the numbers in each of those cells so that we have a real clear picture of what our existing opportunity is, what our current revenue is in those existing sales areas that we're making, and then what our white space values are. And it's important once we do this, because then we can begin to look across all of these buying centers, all of these potential accounts, or all of these areas within an account, we can begin to identify which are. Which buying centers represent the greatest opportunity to us. And then as we look across our solution columns, we can begin to look at the totals there and see which of our solutions represent the greatest opportunity across multiple buying centers. If we're talking about a specific account or across territory, which of the solutions represent the greatest opportunity for us as well? If we're talking about a specific single account and we're mapping white space for that account, what we can do is once we have the white space then built, we can begin to think about then, okay, what are the most important initiatives for this, this particular account? The things that the CEO of the organization says matters the most. And if we look across multiples of those different columns of our solutions or products that we can bring to them, how do multiples of those columns, when added together, potentially impact the customer's own outcomes, the things the customer cares the most about? Because that's how we can begin to build a big story about the impact that we can have at a much bigger scale. That's how we can position ourselves as a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to our customer, and not just a vendor for a single use case or product solution that we might sell in an individual cell on that particular spreadsheet that we were talking about. And so white space becomes an important tool for us in first establishing what we think the total potential is. We talked about in the last episode, we talked about the real height of the mountain, not what's achievable and how high we think we can get up that mountain right now, but what is the real height of that mountain. And white space helps us determine how high the mountain really is, because it allows us to begin to put numbers onto our white space and begin to look at what those values are. Because when we can visually take a step back and look at it and we can evaluate this white space with our sales leader or with other members of our team, we can begin to see things that we couldn't see when we didn't have it written down. And that's why it matters. That's why it's so important. So white space should be a part of. Of every single ambition plan for every account, and it should be a part of ambition planning for every single sales territory, because that is how we begin to visually see what our possibilities are across these accounts. And so doing a wide space analysis is very important. I talk about, you know, writing things down makes it real. That's why we want to have a written ambition plan. We want to have a written account plan. And we want to have a written execution plan. And so making writing these things down really matters, and then it carries forward into other things that we do in our sales, right? When we write our sales story, we want to write it down, because writing it down makes it real. That's what this white space does for us inside of our ambition plan. And so we go through and we create that white space. And when we do that, we want to make sure that we're thinking about all the potential areas inside of our accounts that we could potentially sell. So think about all the different, maybe operational centers that this particular cat has and all the different locations that they have. And so think about all the different areas and all the different geographies that they might operate in, right? So make sure that we've captured those inside of our inside of our white space. And so that we're thinking about everything that's possible and beginning to capture and make our white space as full as we can, right? To make sure that we can really visualize what the total potential really is inside of that account.
So we think about things in terms of account scope, we think about them in terms of strategic alignment. So again, aligning to the things that matter the most to the customer. And then we want to make sure that we have a real clear understanding of the value and begin to write that value in terms of what matters most to the customer. And so white space becomes a key part of what we do in ambition planning. And then what we want to think about is, again, we want to be putting ourselves in a position and ambition to be competing for big things so that we don't have to play a perfect game. We want to be able to understand what the total potential of our accounts are, and we want to be able to get as much of that potential in play so that, again, even modest success can lead to great outcomes. Initially, when we first started doing ambition planning, we would take an initial approach of just setting a target objective and saying, well, what would have to be true for us to be able to just grow this account by 50% or by 100%?
What would have to be true? And we began to break that down and identify it. And as we went through that process, we began to uncover things, and it would put us in a position of having to do discovery with individuals that perhaps we'd never spoken with. And as we did that, we would uncover more, and we would uncover more, and we begin to learn more and more about our accounts. And that's one of the really important things about pursuing and Building an ambition plan is because it really puts us in a position of playing a different kind of game because it kind of compels us as sellers to have to think differently. One of the other key aspects of ambition that we talk about is that once we see the total potential of an account or territory, it's something that we can't unsee. And that's a really important point, because the other part of ambition that I found that was really powerful for us was that once we understood what the total potential of an account was, we really brought our subconscious minds into the game because our minds were working on this problem even when we weren't consciously thinking about it. And I've had some of the clients and some of the people that we've done these workshops for, and one of the individuals, one of the young ladies in one of the classes came up to me afterwards, and she's like, dennis, once I saw that particular account's total potential, she's like, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And that's exactly the point. The point is, once we see that potential, it begins to be something that we completely think differently about. The way that we approach the way that we go about selling to that account. We begin to think about a different level of story that we need to tell. We think about the different level of work that we need to do, and we think about the different relationships that we're going to have to build across the organization. We talked about early on under Process driven, right? Going high, wide and deep and high, wide and deep is really important, right? How high are we? What are the highest level relationships we have in an account? How wide are we? How many different functional areas of the business do we have relationships in, and how deep are we? How many relationships do we have in each functional area, and how strong are those relationships? And as we form our ambition plan, it really helps to inform how high, wide and deep we need to operate inside of our accounts or across our territory in order to be able to go out and pursue the total potential of these accounts and of that territory. That's the key aspect of this from a white space perspective as we go into our planning. The other thing that I would just add to this is that there's a certain magic to large numbers in sales. When I was in school and I learned the law of large numbers, right? So the law of large numbers tells us that as the size of something gets bigger, the tendency for things, small errors to occur to impact that large outcome is minimized, right? And so the magic of large numbers for us in sales really works a couple of different ways. One is in our ambition planning and the other is when we're talking about the ROI and value selling that we want to do with our customers. The law of large numbers or the magic of large numbers and sales really begins to work in our favor because what it says is that it gives us the opportunity to have great confidence in the outcomes that we can deliver because it gives us lots of room for error in the work that we're doing in order to still have a really great outcome. And so in ambition and strategic planning, the bigger the opportunity, the more room for things to go wrong and for us to still succeed. In ROI and value selling, a large ROI gives us built in resilience. When the value is massive, it anchors the transformational impact of what we can do right for the customer, the customers, executives that we're gonna be talking to. It anchors that impact with them. And even small imperfections or unknowns or variances aren't going to undermine the business case of what we're bringing to the table for our customer. And so that's why large numbers matter in terms of ambition and really getting into a play enough for ourselves that we can compete and play our game. And also in the roi, when we're, when we're developing ROI for our customers and the impact that we can have, the magic of large numbers is really important.
And so those were the areas that I wanted to cover off in today's episode. So this is episode six. I'm really glad you could be with me and I look forward to having you back in episode seven where we'll continue our discussion on ambition. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you next time. Time.
