Bruce Hamilton: Thank you. And good morning, everyone. I appreciate whoever is joining in. Appreciate you being out there. I've been in a number of different careers in business, started out actually in sales promotion and spent seven years there. And I loved that position actually. And oddly, my interest in problem-solving led me to IT. So I spent seven more years in IT thinking that some of the issues we had in sales and marketing would be solved through IT.

Bruce Hamilton: And so the bad news is it's not really a panacea. I learned a lot about IT, however, and those kinds of problems. While information technology has changed remarkably since I was in that position, a lot of the thoughts behind computer systems have not so much. It's more or less has to do with the speed and scale that we have today, but the basic algorithms, as we say, not remarkably different. But systems led me into materials management. I worked in a manufacturing company and at the time we were implementing MRP and it was not actually doing much for us. And so I ended up transitioning from a computer systems to manufacturing. Never spent any time in manufacturing, not even in the manufacturing building. So this was an eyeopener for me, definitely. It was a world of pain with many problems. Some of them actually caused by the computer systems that I was involved with. And that brought me to the Shingo prize incidentally.

Bruce Hamilton: We were a company that had a lot of issues. We couldn't deliver on time. Like many companies back in the '70s and early '80s, our profits were flagging and we were trying to find ways to get around that. When I was in sales and marketing, we raised prices twice a year. And we Pat ourselves on the back about how our sales were increasing, but they actually weren't, we were just printing prices. So now I suddenly found myself on a different side of the coin, still with that thinking in mind from sales and marketing and focused on the customer. But I noticed I joined an organization that actually was shielded from the customer. We had very little to do with the customer. And this created its own set of headaches. But Shingo prize and particularly the ideas of, shingo and some of the others...

Bruce Hamilton: And they're not all Japanese. A lot of them came out of the US, but a lot of that thinking was critical for me? And it was just my good luck that since I had no background in manufacturing, I had no biases. And therefore I started to study this and that led to award of a prize for our company in 1990. And there were some remarkable improvements. We were still awful, but we'd made an awful lot of improvement. That in fact, led to some attention back in 1990 from Toyota, who at the time was for purposes of trying to be a good corporate citizen and trying to overcome an image of taking jobs, which killing American auto manufacturing, which they didn't really need any help. They were kind of hurting themselves.

Bruce Hamilton: They helped us out for or five years. And it was exciting, very exciting. They felt like as they like to put it, being dragged through a keyhole. So there was this technical knowledge from Shingo and some lot about behaviors of people. And then dealing with the folks from Toyota, understanding what management's role was in this. because I was not totally clear about that, about how the whole thing fit together. It's a whole system. It's not just one thing or another. One piece. We often talk about lean is a bunch of pieces and that can create a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Because unless you're looking at it as a whole, you don't really get a decent understanding. That finally led me into general management. And at that point I was back actually working with sales.

Bruce Hamilton: So I started out in sales and I ended up in sales. Then 20 years ago, hard to believe, 20 years ago I quit my job. Loved the company, it was doing okay, but I got so excited about continuous improvement. And actually I think it was my interaction with the Shingo prize and the Shingo Institute and getting to go out and visit other companies, not just in manufacturing, but in lots of kinds of different businesses. It was exciting to do that. So I became a consultant and that's where I am today. I worked for a, not for profit organization that's been around since 1994 and it's our mission to keep good jobs, predominantly here in the US. We're parochial that way. Don't begrudge anyone else but we liked the idea of overcoming challenges that we have and particularly in our own region. So that's me and happy to be with you today.

Michael Webb: Looking back on that, a couple of points, I guess, to ask about, because I'm similar age to you, right? And so I went through different... Coming from the sales background, but during this period of time when first mainframe computers and then mini computers and then microcomputers were upending the way businesses managed themselves. And I remember observing, and I wondered if you did this to back in your days of IT, the IT department... I remember realizing, wait a second, if you're going to have a computer, that's going to be able to do all these real fast calculations and make reports. And people from all over the company are putting information in them. That means everybody has to define their terms exactly the same way. And that's not the way it works right now. That's a revolution to help over smplify things. Because that's one of the reasons that computer systems didn't work.

Bruce Hamilton: That was true back then and it's still true today. Different parts of an organization. We talk about language barriers, sort of the English versus Spanish or Vietnamese, but there are huge language barriers between engineering and sales. And when I was in sales that released. We would say it was released in sales promotion, that meant that there was a concept on paper and we were going to take it to a trade show. Whereas released in purchasing meant we purchased all the parts. Released in engineering meant we've finished the prototype. So every part of the organization had a different definition. They were all wrong. The computer system then tries to codify this, but the codes are all messed up. One of the better parts of MRP that I participated in was that it actually forced us to ask the questions. Ali White , who was an early leader, liked to say that it's a people system which utilizes a computer and he emphasized all people. This is probably the first time I think in my company where sales felt they had any connection to what was happening in operations.

Bruce Hamilton: And that was pretty reluctant too, it was like, they felt that you're putting us on the spot. Forecasts are very difficult because of the, let's say, less than friendly relationship between sales and operations. They're immediately on the defensive. So a lot of those conditions persist today. Organizations are, siloed, is a popular word. I used to say compartmentalized. We're all in our own little cubbies and we don't get out much. Even if there aren't physical walls, we just don't go to certain areas.

Bruce Hamilton: So the language is kind of messed up. Computer systems take that language and they make it look official. And once it comes out of computer, it must be right. I honestly did not have a conc...

Ardath Albee:                    Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to join you.

Michael Webb:                 And I think it would really be helpful for my audience if you could spend a few minutes and just tell us where you've been in your career and how you got into doing what you're doing now.

Ardath Albee:                    Sure. So I come at this from, not a marketing background, so I ran companies in a past life, mainly hotels and country clubs, so on the B2C side. And then one day my sister called and asked me to move to Minneapolis and help her build a software company. And I kind of laughed and told her to go get funding, thinking that she would go away. And she got funding. And so I moved to Minneapolis and we built the company. So this is back in the year 2000. So think, the first-ever iteration of marketing automation software designed to also run your website that marketers could use without IT. And back then, of course, it was a big heavy lift, a custom install, because we didn't have SAS. And corporations at that time had basically taken their brochures and put them online and turned them into websites, remember? Back in 2000.

Michael Webb:                 Oh yeah, right.

Ardath Albee:                    So they've moved that content into the new technology and then they'd say, Well, nothing changed, nothing happened. And so I started going out and looking at their websites and thinking, no wonder, who wants to read this. And so my background is, I'm a writer, I always have been, have a degree in English as well as a degree in business. And so I started helping them rewrite their websites, and focus on their customers more so than their products, which was a fight kicking and screaming a lot of times. And they started seeing change and they started asking for more and more help. So in 2007 when I realized I could make a living doing something I love, I jumped and became a consultant, and that's how this all got started.

Michael Webb:                 Interesting. So there's a pretty famous study that's been going on by CSO Insights. You might be familiar with that. For the last seven years in a row, the percentage of B2B salespeople making their quotas has declined, seven years in a row, in a time of recovery in the economy.

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah. I think even more frightening than that is that what's the percentage right now? 50, right around 50% of sales reps are to make quota.

Michael Webb:                 Yeah. That same company said it proved that a CEO of a company might be better off taking the capital they invest in their sales and marketing organizations, especially with sales organization, and putting it on the craps table in Vegas because the odds are better.

Ardath Albee:                    That's just terrible.

Michael Webb:                 Why? But why is that happening in your view?

Ardath Albee:                    Well, I'll tell you what I see and I've been doing work on both the marketing and the sales side, but what one of the things that I thought was really interesting was something that I heard a lot about at the Gartner conferences this year.

And one of those things is that buyers used to say nothing's relevant to them. We're not producing content that speaks to them. It's all about our products or whatever. Now they're saying, Hey, 85 of them are saying, we go out and we find quality content, but you know what? It's still not relevant to us. And then they say, and it's confusing us because there are no apples to apples comparison between what all the different vendors say. And as buying groups get bigger, every one of them goes out and does their own research, and they all bring back this information that conflicts with each other. And so these buying groups are now struggling to deconflict all this information.

In fact, Gartner says it adds another 20% of time to their buying process if they even decide to buy at all. And as many deals are ending in no-decision as companies or vendors are losing to the competition, which is frightening because buyers can't figure out how to even move forward. And so-

Michael Webb:                 Wow-

Ardath Albee:                    It's difficult. It's changed a lot. Buyer expectations have increased exponentially, just because they're business to business doesn't mean they forget about their consumer experiences when they're going into the office, right? So they have expectations of instant information and being able to find things that are relevant to them. And we're not, as B2B companies, really following through with that. But the other thing that I find really interesting is a lot of what I hear is go forth and provide value, but nobody ever defines, what exactly does that mean. What's considered valuable, right? And so what I find is that companies really still don't know their buyers. They don't keep up with them.

In fact, a lot of times they do the research or some of it creates a persona and say, okay, great, check the box. And they put it in a folder. And they don't use those insights or that information to inform their strategies, their go-to-market strategy, their marketing strategy, their sales engagement strategy. They just say, okay, we did that work, file it away. And they don't understand how to use it. And so what we get is content that yes, arguably is high value, but it's not doing anything to help orchestrate the buying process. And your buyers don't care whether they're getting stuff from marketing or from sales, they just care that it's relevant to them, that it matches their context, that it provides some kind of valuable insight they can actually use.

Michael Webb:                 There's a wonderful quote from one of your blog posts. It was, "We need to start looking at the buying process as a continuous experience that sometimes plays to the strengths of marketing and other times to those of the sales team." So are you saying that the prospects are looking for conversation? Help us understand how that issue of figuring out, how to give into relative chats applying to this desire for conversation if it does?

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. And one of the things that I find really interesting, it's one of my favorite parts of building personas, is understanding all of the questions that they have to get answered i...

Drew Locher:                     Thank you Michael. And thank you for having me on your podcast. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to your colleagues and constituents. So a little bit of background. Basically I grew up in the 1980s in a corporate management development program at the General Electric company. And it was there that I got introduced to, what we called at the time, world-class enterprise and quality management concepts. And we were expected to apply those concepts in whatever management role that we had.

 I was with GE for seven years. I left in 1990, went back to school for organizational behavioral science. Up to that point my background was in engineering, several engineering fields. And at the same time I went out and started working with different organizations in different industries trying to see how these world-class and quality management concepts applied in different environments. And that's what I did throughout the 90s, working with typically smaller and medium size organizations. That kind of grew into working with larger organizations by the end of that decade.

So I've been working with all kinds of different industries over the last nearly 30 years on my own, including healthcare as well as manufacturing, financial service companies, even higher education. They're currently trying to apply these concepts to their operations. And I've been kind of doing that for 29 years, 30 years. And wrote a few books, which kind of gets you some notoriety as you know, in the field. Mainly focusing on the application of the concepts, what we would now call lean concepts to non-production environments. Three out of my four books are on that topic. So how do we apply the concepts to finance and accounting, sales and marketing, designing, product development or any development really. And that's what I've been doing for a long time now.

Michael Webb:                 Excellent. Excellent. Unlike me, you sort of started off in management and got introduced to this and have been in the quality and productivity sciences of management for almost your entire career. I started out in sales and I had to go to three different industries. So very interesting and a really deep background. And maybe that's why you write such a good newsletter. I love following you.

Drew Locher:                     Oh, thank you.

Michael Webb:                 I've been following it for a while now. And in April you wrote about a topic, it caught my eye, The Science of Management. And you reflected on your training as an engineer and you observed that there's principles or laws that explain how reality behaved, and that some of them also apply to management of organizations. I thought it was really insightful. So before we drill into them, I thought maybe I would just cover an overview of the ones that you introduced and then we'll kind of dive into them.

 The first one you used as the example was a Newton's first law of motion, right? An object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion. The second one was the second law of thermodynamics, right? That energy or order decreases without effort or work. And third, you introduced the idea of a system, that feedback is necessary to keep results in the desired range. And then fourth was a reference about learning in organizations, and that seemed to be more about the human mind than about a principle of physics. But we'll get into that.

So these are fascinating topics. I promise you there are people in the audience who might think, "Oh my God, you're talking about physical properties, this isn't going to apply. How could this possibly apply?" But it really, really does in a fascinating way. So Drew, let's start at the beginning. This first law of motion, an object at rest stays at rest. Tell us how that applies in the science of management.

Drew Locher:                     So I only chose four, I'm sure there's more. But those are the four that came to mind when I wrote the piece. But that particular one, it dawned on me as soon as I went back to school in 1990 for organizational behavioral science because there was an expression they used, organizational inertia. And I'm like, "Oh, I know a little bit about inertia." And so it caught my attention early on that one. And as organizational behavioral science folks have recognized, the application of that theory for a long time now, at least decades.

The second one, the second law of thermodynamics, that was something that sort of dawned on me as I was studying organizational behavioral sciences. And I've seen subsequently people also referring to it, entropy in particular, and not always applying it or citing it or referring to it properly. So that for the last few years has been in my mind thinking I need to write a little bit about this at some point just to kind of clarify things because I've seen people refer to it and not always correctly.

Michael Webb:                 So let's take those two, right there. As it applies to management, what does management have to do as a result of the law of inertia?

Drew Locher:                     Well, they just can't leave things be. They've got to inject energy into any system. And an organization is a system. A closed system. And we've seen evidence of that in any... pick a topic. I think in the newsletter, I refer to Five S. I often hear organizations or leaders of organizations kind of complain that it can't sustain Five S. And I'll talk to them about, "What is your sustain model?" And they kind of look at me puzzled and maybe they do periodic audits or maybe they used to and they got away from them, or maybe they did them, but they didn't really do them properly. They didn't engage people in participating in them, so it became like a police action when people did the Five S audits.

 And it's true really of any organizational change. You have to continue to follow up for various reasons, not just injecting energy but really making sure new habits are formed. One of the other things I studied in the early 90s was habit forming. What does it take to create habits or overwrite existing habits? And that all takes effort. It takes energy really on the part of leaders in particular.

Michael Webb:                 So you're saying that management needs to recognize that in order for things to change, they can't just issue an order or tell people what to do, they have to plan that people aren't going to be able to keep it at that level or keep that change in place unless they have a plan that keeps it in place. What would be an example of something that managers and executives would need to put in place to keep a change in motion?

Drew Locher:                     Well, in lean terminology, it's just go see. We always say go to the gumbos, as Toyota calls it. But you need to have a focus when you go see. So...

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I'm delighted today to introduce you to a fellow I just learned about about two weeks ago with a fascinating background and a very fascinating and important topic. His name is Oscar Trimboli. Oscar, welcome to the podcast.

Oscar Trimboli:      Good day, Michael. I'm looking forward to speaking to you and listening to you as well.

Michael Webb:     Oscar, if you can't tell from that little snippet of his voice, he is currently speaking from Sydney, Australia. And so it's in the morning his time; in the afternoon, my time. And our topic today is going to be listening. Everybody knows in business to business, listening is a crucial topic, not just interpersonally but inter-organizationally. So Oscar, please give us a little background about your career and how you got into this fascinating topic.

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, I'm on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners before I leave this planet. I think I'm obsessed with the commercial cost of not listening. Every employee that's ever left an organization, every customer you've lost to a competitor, every supplier that's not giving you their best, has all come about through a lack of listening. Every project that's run over schedule and every pipeline that's blocked in the middle, like a plumbing system where the surges is backed all the way back up, it's all a result of not listening.

A lot of us think that our pipeline should have this mythical shape that's a beautiful wide funnel at the top and it comes narrow towards the end. And then these crazy people, the customers, get in the way. And the reason most of us have this really wide funnel right in the middle where it should be narrowing is because we're not listening.

And the most important thing we're not listening to is what's not said. Too many of us are listening to what is said and not enough of us spend time exploring what isn't said. So if you take one thing away from today, it's the 125-900 rule. I speak at 125 words a minute, but I can think up to 900 words a minute. So that means the first thing out of my mouth, there's an 11% chance that what I'm saying is what I'm meaning. And for most people in sales, what they do is they only listen to what's said. Great sales leaders, great sounds professionals, listen for what's unsaid.

Michael Webb:     You have a background in B2B you were mentioning before, run through that for us. I think my audience would... It would help them understand where you're coming from.

Oscar Trimboli:      I started off as an audit clerk in an accounting firm. And six weeks in, we were working on manual spreadsheets in those days. A3 pieces of paper with pencil, so I'm dating myself here. And my manager discovered six weeks in that I had this thing called dyscalculus, which meant I transposed all my numbers, which kind of ended my career in accounting very, very quickly. And as a result, I was kind of on a cadet ship where they would pay for my books while I was studying and working full-time. And I was completely devastated because my dad had always said to me, "There's one job that will never get done awy with... You'll always have to have accountants. So become an accountant."

And my managing partner of the accounting firm came up to me and says, "Well, Oscar, what do you know about computers?" And I said, "Well, Bill, I know absolutely nothing." And he said, "That's fantastic. We'll never lie to each other going forward. You will now install the accounting software in this organization or you'll need to leave. So the choice is completely up to you." So that started a journey of installing, implementing, and selling, doing the professional services and installations and implementations, training beyond in accounting software, whether that's sort of small accounting practices or large corporations. And I spent two decades doing that.

Then I went into work in product management inside a big telecommunications company and spent a lot of time intersecting between engineering, marketing, and the sales organization. And then finally 11 years at Microsoft doing a range of roles from sales, product management, operations. And even rebuilt the graduate program while I was doing my day job there as well. So most of my life has been stepping into lobbies inside buildings, going and visiting reception, and having conversations with customers who want to buy software of some kind.

Michael Webb:     Okay. So now you speak and you consult about listening, which is the Jack of all trades tool that you need to have in your pocket if you're trying to deal with and influence people. So what experience did you have that caused you to make this big transition from being part of an organization and helping them succeed to an independent person helping people with this tool or method? What experience was it or trials caused you to do that?

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, many people often said to me, "Could you teach me how to do that?" And often I'd say, "What do you mean 'do that'?" And they said, "The way you listen, you hear things that no one else in the room is hearing." And I kind of often brushed it off, but then a vice president at Microsoft said to me after a very tense negotiation we had, at about the 20-minute mark, I asked a question, which was simply, "What assumptions are we really holding tightly that could be completely false?"

The room shifted, the change in dynamic was very noticeable, and at the end of the meeting the vice president said, "Can you stay behind?" That's kind of like when your wife says to you, "We need to talk." It's not a good moment. All I was doing in my head was calculating how many weeks of salary I had left in my bank account. And Tracy said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. She said, "Oscar, you didn't notice what happened at the 20-minute mark, but if you could code how you listen, you could change the world." And all I could say out of my mouth at that time, Michael was, "Do you mean code or code code?" And she said, "No, I mean code code," which is turn what I know into software, which eventually I guess I'll do. Code just meant make it into a methodology and put it out in steps like we've done with a book and like we've done with the playing cards and the jigsaw puzzles and all these other things we use to teach leaders how to listen.

And during that time I came across a really interesting statistic. By the third decade of a corporate career, you will have had up to 15 training courses in how to speak, yet no training whatsoever in how to listen. Now, if we believe that communication is 50% speaking and 50% listening, with only 2% of us having any training in how to listen, I think that's one of the big productivity hacks of the 21st century. If you want to stop doing back-to-back meetings, if you want to stop having conversations about opportunities that are slowing down, I think it's listening ...

Michael Webb:   Hello, everyone. This is Michael Webb and I'm excited today to have on the phone a friend of mine from many years ago, Brian Carroll. Brian, welcome here.

Brian Carroll:        Thanks for having me.

Michael Webb:   It would be great if you could tell the audience a little bit about your background and then how we got connected, oh, I guess it was probably 15 years ago, or 14 years ago.

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, yeah. For everyone, my background, I've focused primarily on the intersection of marketing and sales. I wrote a book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. I've worked with the who's who of technology, really forward thinkers. I had an opportunity to work with some of the largest, most well-known brands. SAP, Google, the marketing tech world, Eloqua, Marketo.

Brian Carroll:        So as you think about all the changes we're experiencing today, very early on, we were implementing technology to connect with customers and develop leads for sales teams, and so, Michael, you and I connected around your work with sales process and the notion of Six Sigma and continually optimizing. That's where I came from. We'll talk about a little bit, but I had this Jerry Maguire moment, 2014, working with my own team and how we connect with customers, so I shifted my work and focus around not just looking at how do we get more leads and higher quality leads and driving pipeline, but just really recognizing that we no longer have an issue around conversion in the same way we did. It's actually harder now to connect with customers. That's what I've been doing for the past three years is seeing empathy as a sales and marketing super power.

Michael Webb:   As you went from your own firm, which was, Leads to Sales I think it was called, and it was acquired by MarketingExperiments group, right?

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, so MECLABS owns MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments, and you know, I admired both of the brands so much. I was speaking at a conference and just the things we were focusing on, what I wanted to do is bring more science and more research, because in best practices you take something you learned and you apply it to another customer base and it doesn't work. Experience doesn't always determine you're going to be successful, and what I wanted to understand is why.

Brian Carroll:        Most people focus on how do you get marketing working. And what I've always wondered is why isn't it working. That's why I really loved being able to sell my company to MECLABS because we were trying to understand what really works and why by understanding how customers make choices. While I was there, we saw the motivation, the customers, the most important thing. After I left MECLABS to do my own work, I've really focused on this notion of customer motivation, because neuroscience, a breakthrough happened in 2014 where it had been previous to that, but just finding... Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist that found we aren't thinking machines that feel, we're feeling machines that think.

Brian Carroll:        So, that's how all the focus I had previously done on value proposition, and messaging, and specific channels and cadences, what I realized I was missing is this deeper understanding of how emotions drive all of our decisions. That's the important thing that I'm working on today is how do we better connect to what people care about.

Michael Webb:   So, that's why you're so interesting because you understand the scientific mindset, and then you're also into this, your new positioning is around empathy. How do other people feel? What are they thinking? What motivates them? Which is traditionally thought of as a soft fuzzy, you know, you can't measure that kind of thing. So let's start out with what is empathetic marketing? Is that what you're calling it?

Brian Carroll:        Yeah, yeah.

Michael Webb:   What is that, empathy-based.

Brian Carroll:        So, why it matters. I always start with why. Why should you care about this? What I saw is today we have more ways of reaching our customers. Every few months we have a new channel we can reach our customers through. The other thing is we have more data about our customers, behavioral data. I just went through an experience with someone on their own website where I knew that they have my behavioral data, they have my chat data, they have information about who I am because Clearbit and other tools and discover.org tell them personal data, and so there's all this research around persuasion.

Brian Carroll:        Cialdini's work around how do we use behavioral economics and tools to connect with people. We have all the stuff, and what's happening though is that it's still not working. The issue has shifted from focused on conversion that the gap we have is connection, connecting to what our customers care about. Ironically. So you have more ways and more data, but actually connecting what your customers care about has never been harder. So when I talk to marketers, that's the struggle. And what empathy based marketing is, is moving your focus from if I were the customer, how would this appeal to me? Most people think, well, I'm already empathetic. I already care about my customers. I'm already curious about them.

Brian Carroll:        But the issue is, is that what science has shown is that we think we're being empathetic. We think we're thinking about the customer, but we're using our own bias, our own preferences. We're trying to get what we want, and we actually aren't connecting to what our customers care about. So what do they do? They read in-boxes to delete things, not to read them. They ignore messages. They are immune because what's happening is that they got to care about it. We got to connect with the care about. And then the shift is, is no longer about funnels. It's about becoming a Sherpa.

Brian Carroll:        So, here's the way to sum up what's empathy-based marketing. It's being your customer to understand what they care about so that you can create messages that resonate and focus on what matters, either problems they have they don't want, results they want they don't yet have, not only that, but you're like a Sherpa helping a mountain climber climb the mountain. You know, they still got to climb, but we now are moving to this mode of you can't make someone do something, but what you can do is equip and enable them.

Brian Carroll:        You can bring science to this process. It's just you have to appreciate, it's the emotion. Even in complex sales that's way bigger now because the stakes are higher. It's riskier to make bad decisions.

Michael Webb:   So when you say, "Shifting from conversion to connection," by connection you mean something that is valuable to them in their activity goal, mission, someth...

Michael Webb:   B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste.

Michael Webb:   My name is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:   Hello, this is Michael Webb, and I am excited today to introduce you to someone I've known for a number of years. His name is Cliff Ransom. Cliff holds a very unique position in the industry. I'll let him give you his background, but he has this unique position between the investor relations and management community and the lean community. And what we're going to talk about today, I think is going to be illuminating and quite interesting, especially for the senior executives in the audience. So Cliff, welcome here.

Cliff Ransom:       Thank you very much, Mike. It's fun to be here.

Michael Webb:   Yes. Yes, we're going to have some fun today. So, if you could give 30 seconds or a minute for the audience so they can kind of get the idea of where you've come from and where you've been and what you're doing now.

Cliff Ransom:       I'm going to try to put 47 years into 60 seconds. Here we go. I've been in the investment business, almost exclusively, with institutional investors for 47 years. Almost 30 years ago, I became deeply involved with Danaher, which became my prototype investment and my prototype corporate mentality. I have a very unusual, I can't say unique, but unusual business model, and then I have three legs on my stool. One is 47 years of connection support for learning from institutional investors, portfolio managers, analysts, at some of the biggest and best firms in the world, quite frankly. The second leg is that I have very consciously built a deep presence in the lean community. That includes practitioners, the authors, the consultants, gurus like yourself who have very specialized knowledge of lean applications. And then perhaps most importantly, I've worked with several generations of C-suite corporate leaders, and they understand what it is that I do and make sure that I get the access that I need to learn, because I learned by going to the Gemba; going to the place where the real work is done. And we can elaborate on that later if you'd like, but that's, in essence, what I'm doing today.

Cliff Ransom:       For the last 15 years, I've run Ransom Research Inc., which works with a deliberately constrained group of senior investors, because they're the guys who can afford me. And they want me to exercise those three legs of that stool. And I think, in a nutshell, that's about as close as I can get.

Michael Webb:   Okay, super. So, obviously you're on a first-name basis with senior executives at the Shingo Institute, at the Lean Enterprise Institute, and a number of corporations.

Michael Webb:   Tell me about why you think the senior executives don't quite realize the power of lean, because I agree with you, but it's hard to describe.

Cliff Ransom:       Everything you ever say in this business, you're changing constantly. There's a webinar or up on the LEI site that I've been trying to get them to take down for 15 years because I say, "Guys, I don't believe any of that stuff anymore." This continuous improvement has to be applied to your intellectual thinking, as well. In the '90s, I counted the number of Kaizens. That's how simple-minded I was.

Michael Webb:   Yeah.

Cliff Ransom:       And that was way before I understood that what Kaizens you did are really indicative. They pertain to how you think about lean. You can do 10,000 Kaizens and have a minuscule benefit. They'll all benefit, but minusculely. Or you can do three things that have a profound change on your employees, your customers, your suppliers, yourself. I became quite adamant that this had to be a cultural transformation because particularly as an investor, the last thing I want you to do is to start on this course of action, start in collocating these mindsets, and then give up on them, because you'll only confuse your employees, your suppliers, your shareholders, your regulators. It's the worst thing you can do, is to start and then kill it.

Cliff Ransom:       I was the Chairman of the Board of Shingo, so I love the Shingo Model.  I used to get in trouble with the professional staff because they would ask me to give speeches all around the country, all over the world.  I would say, “I don’t give a damn whether you ever apply for the Shingo Prize, I just want you to live by the Shingo Model.  And I think everybody should understand the model.”  And then the staff would turn to me and say, “Uh Cliff, you know we make our money by helping people apply for the prize.”  I would say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Cliff Ransom:       It’s like a friend of mine I ran into on the street this morning and she said, “We were one of the 12 finalists for the Deming Prize.  We got interviewed and we just missed it.”  I said to her, “Good” and she looked at me with a stricken look, she works at a hospital.  And I said, “The Deming Prize is not what you want to do.  What you want to do is live up to the Deming Philosophy.  That’s what you want.”  She said, “Okay, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it.”  I said, “If you want me to come out to chat with your folks about why that is an important distinction, I will be happy to do it.”

Michael Webb:   So to me, this is about helping companies learn to think more critically. All the people inside the company need to be enrolled in that effort. And most especially, the senior people. They have to lead it by how they ask questions, how they respect the accomplishments and failures of the people who work for them.

Cliff Ransom:       You know, you talk about inquiring minds; an inquiring mind, by definition, requires the willingness to listen to alternative VCs, to gather data. Toyota says the data will speak to you, but you have to do it with an intention. I was working with LEI, they were doing sort of one of these CEO seminars. By the way, nobody in the lean business has yet broken the code on how to get CEOs to go to seminars. But I said, "You know, John," to John Shook, who's ... Been a dozen people who have been incredibly patient and generous and giving of their time and sensibilities to me, and Shook's one of them. I said, "You know, John, this business about asking questions really comes hard to me. My line is humility does not come easily to me. The idea of asking questions rather than barking orders; I always succeeded in life from the military on up by ... " You know, they'd say, "Take the hill," I'd go take the hill. I might hire a bunch of North Korean mercenaries to do it, but I wouldn't tell them that until I had the flag up there.

Cliff Ransom:       But I said, "Just asking questions is hard." I said, "But I'm really working at it. I'm really trying to do it." And he said, "Yes." He didn't quite say, "Wax on, wax off, little grasshopper," but he said, "Yes, Cliff, I can tell you're w...

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have known for many years and who has brought an amazing insight not just to business but to measurement problems and statistical analysis. Bill Bentley, welcome here.

Bill Bentley:                        Thanks Mike. Glad to be here.

Michael Webb:                 You just have this most fascinating background. I want to kind of walk people through it. You got an engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic and then you began as an automation engineer for Procter and Gamble and Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right. I was at Procter and Gamble for quite a while. Then went to Frito-Lay from there.

Michael Webb:                 As a manager at Frito-Lay, right?

Bill Bentley:                        Right.

Michael Webb:                 And then when we met, you had been hired by Rockwell Automation. Tell us about why they hired you.

Bill Bentley:                        They hired me because I had just lost a job during a downturn. I was in charge of all the industrial automation and electrical engineering at Nabisco and when KKR bought them, they kind of dissolved the company, broke it all up, and Rockwell was a big supplier to us and they called and offered me a job in their sales force to help the sales teams sell to people like me or people who had jobs like the one that I had just left. So it was very interesting. My first reaction to that job offer was actually, "No, I'm not interested in that. I spent my whole life avoiding salespeople. Why would I want to be one?" But after a few weeks, realizing that I was unlikely to get any other work, I called back and changed my mind and that turned out to be a very interesting job and lot of fun and I enjoyed it.

Michael Webb:                 And likewise, I was hired by them in around, trying to remember, I think it was '81 or '82, not at the level where you are at. I wasn't an executive, but I was a sales manager and I was brought in to help their large vaunted sales force of degreed electrical engineers to make this shift. The president of the company, his name will come to me in a moment, was trying to turn Rockwell from a manufacturer of industrial controls sold in brown boxes through industrial distribution, limit switches, push buttons, PLCs, stuff like that. And he wanted, instead of selling the pieces in parts, he wanted to be able to sell integrated systems with all the margin covering the labor and all that, he wanted them to be able to sell solutions. And so I was in the field sales force in the St Louis branch and I met you as one of the guys at corporate who was helping us.

Rockwell had made it's success in the automotive industry. It was a way to automate and better control systems of relays. And now they were trying to move from that on off digital kind of manufacturing environment, into a more higher level control system environment, especially with continuous controls. So that was a fascinating, fascinating time. We worked on, and I think you were involved in, we made the first proposal to a large brewery, Anheuser Busch in St Louis, to use digital automation controls for what had always been controlled in the past by a distributed control system, which was a continuous analog factory control. That was a $20 million project that we bid, we proposed, you remember working on that Bill?

Bill Bentley:                        I do remember it and I remember the sales guys make a whole lot of money, maybe I should do that rather than be an engineer.

Michael Webb:                 Yes indeed. Yes indeed. So from Rockwell, after that, you were a general manager, senior executive at least one engineering firm, right?

Bill Bentley:                        I was, I was general manager of a contract engineering firm in Tennessee and we were actually a captive engineering group for a Procter and Gamble plant, a very large Procter and Gamble manufacturing plant. So I had about a hundred engineers and designers and programmers working for me at that plant.

Michael Webb:                 And then when that tapped out, a lot of us had some difficulties after 9/11, the economy kind of went South and then there was the financial crisis in 2008, so you founded a successful Six Sigma training company for yourself. Tell us about that.

Bill Bentley:                        After that stint, I came to Atlanta to be the CEO of a software company and that's the company that folded when 9/11 hit. So I worked again. And I did start my own consulting business and training business and that business lasted for 18 years. It's still going at a low level, but 18 years is the longest I've ever spent in any company. And it was my own company. So I was happily self-employed and I loved it. It was quite interesting. It started as a community service project to teach people who are out of work, how to do Six Sigma and ended up being a national training and consulting business.

Michael Webb:                 Which is a fantastic outcome. Not many people would be able to make all of these transitions in their careers and then a few years ago I was surprised, shocked and interested to see what you did next. Tell us what you did.

Bill Bentley:                        After 18 years of doing what I was doing, I started to get itchy feet, it started to become routine and I could see that business going down hill slowly. So I actually went back to grad school. I've got a new degree, a masters in applied statistics. I picked a bunch of other courses online and declared myself a data scientist and now I had the credentials to back it up. Went looking for a job and I took a full time job as a data scientist for a very large company here in Atlanta.

Michael Webb:                 And that's fantastic. I don't know, just because you had a passion, you really like the way, the analytical part and the creativity involved in the mathematics of statistics, if I understand that right.

Bill Bentley:                        I did. Right. And what drove me to do that and choose that is sort of my retirement job, I guess you could call it because the stuff that was ...

Michael Webb:     My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb, and I'm pleased today to bring to you a guest that I have not spoken with before, but because of his background, as you'll see, I'm very excited to have this discussion, and I think there's going to be some pretty interesting discoveries that come out of our conversation. I'm on today with Tripp Babbitt. Tripp is the president of a firm called the 95 Method. Tripp, welcome here.

Tripp Babbitt:         Thank you Michael. Thank you for having me on.

Michael Webb:     Now you're also... Have been involved with the Deming Institute, and remember my audience is mostly executives who are focused in on sales and marketing. Most of them have heard of Deming, but could you just kind of share your background, because as I understand you came from a place very different than people who come into a sales and marketing career typically come from. So tell us where you've been and what's the journey you've been on.

Tripp Babbitt:         Interestingly, I actually started in sales, but-

Michael Webb:     Really? I didn't know that.

Tripp Babbitt:         Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I worked for an industrial distributor in the midwest. Then I got my MBA. I was a manager for an industrial distributor, and I got invited once I became a manager to a seminar by W. Edwards Deming from Allison Transmission, one of his original four-day seminars that he did across the US.

Tripp Babbitt:         I had just completed my MBA and I was expecting kind of more of the same types of stuff with the education I get out of the seminar, and what I got instead was a big smack in the face. Dr. Deming's seminar was pretty much the opposite of everything that I had been taught in my MBA program and is still being taught today in MBA programs throughout the US.

Michael Webb:     Parenthetically, my son just signed up for a very expensive, very prestigious MBA program. I tried to talk him out of it and I couldn't, so we'll make the most of it that we can.

Tripp Babbitt:         Very good. We could talk about that too if you like. But I was really intrigued by the Deming philosophy, so I eventually started my own consulting business and I used the Deming philosophy. It's based off of his system of profound knowledge, which is systems thinking, which I know is near and dear to your heart, theory variation, which is the data, theory of knowledge and psychology.

Tripp Babbitt:         I use that as kind of the basis of what I call, and you mentioned, the 95 Method. That's kind of the short and long of it I guess so to speak, of kind of my story and how I got into this.

Michael Webb:     Many of the people who are in my audience, they've learned about process improvement or process excellence and the Deming philosophy. They got to it through being trained in Six Sigma or in Lean. So it would be great to get your perspective on this I don't know what you would call it, this operational excellence marketplace, because there's several different flavors, and I'd love to understand your perspective of where you sit compared to, for example, people who go at it from a Six Sigma orientation or a Lean orientation or the Shingo Institute.

Tripp Babbitt:         I think you have to have a little bit of history in order to kind of understand. The Deming philosophy in Japan... When Dr. Deming went to Japan in 1950, he basically started a whole new program, and some of the things in his system are profound knowledge. It was the beginning of what would be later called Lean, and I would even say an offshoot of that would be Six Sigma too, because he used Walter Shewhart's control charts.

Tripp Babbitt:         So the base philosophy of Deming to me is what is exactly missing from Lean and Six Sigma. I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, so I went and did that under a lady by the name of Dr. Frony Ward, and I also worked with Dr. Don Wheeler for a little bit in order to get my data smack.

Tripp Babbitt:         So I believe these are Lean, being the Toyota production system in essence is what it's based off of. You got to remember, in Japan Dr. Deming worked in a number of industries, not just the auto industry, and just within the auto industry he not only worked with Toyota, but he also worked with Nissan and... Well, it was Datsun at the time, and then Honda, and then a number of of other companies throughout.

Tripp Babbitt:         So to me Lean got off I think for a long time focused on tools, and the Deming philosophy is just that. It's a philosophy. It's not a method. It's a way of learning, and one of the things I always challenge Lean folks to is so what new tools have you developed, because I always hear about the same old ones.

Tripp Babbitt:         Deming's philosophy was set up for us to continually update and innovate the way that we think about work and product and everything else, and management for that matter.

Michael Webb:     Let's dig into that a little bit, because I agree with you the Deming philosophy, the four fundamental principles, seem to me to be at the root of the tools of Lean, the method of Lean, right, focusing on flow and distinguishing value from waste, and using that as sort of your North Star.

Michael Webb:     But they're also unpinning the tools of Six Sigma, which is much more measurement oriented and statistically oriented, and it also is underpinning the ideas of the Shingo Institute, which is way more management focused. Would you agree with that?

Tripp Babbitt:         I don't know much about the Shingo Institute. I know a little bit more about Six Sigma. I think there are some tools in there that they use, statistical tools, that are unnecessary, matter of fact most of them. But the one tool that I often find even new Green Belts and even Black Belts on occasion, they aren't with Shewhart's control charts, and that's a shame, because that's a very primary tool.

Tripp Babbitt:         As a matter of fact, any organization not using Shewhart's control charts that Dr. Deming made famous are really missing out on an opportunity to look at their data in a refreshing way, and gets to some of the things that you talked about in this podcast about using systems thinking so you can understand what's attributable to a system versus attributable to social causes or the individual.

Michael Webb:     Yes. Absolutely right. What I understand about the Shingo Institute, it's very interesting and it's very compatible with what you're doing, as I understand it, and we'll get to i...

                                                Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and I can't tell you how excited I am to introduce you to my friend, Bud Hyler. Bud, welcome here.

Bud Hyler:                           Thank you.

Michael Webb:                 Please tell the audience a little bit about your background so they have an idea where you're coming from and why I'm so excited.

Bud Hyler:                           Well, it's a combination of two forces. My early training was in physics, so it taught me to be more structured than average. And then my second training came from an MBA with Stanford, which taught me about the customer. So it was combining the structure of physics and the customer orientation of MBA really caused me to bring those two things together. We want to keep the customer focus but add structure. Without structure you can't scale. You can't compete or replicate.

Michael Webb:                 I was going to ask you, why is this important to a CEO, but that word structure says it, because CEOs are about scale. They're about making the organization work, not just make the product work or make the sale work or make the manufacturing work.

Bud Hyler:                           A lot of companies I go see, they had a really bright revenue officer, either marketing or sales, who instinctively got the principles and he was doing the right things. And they got the company humming, so revenue is going up, productivity's going up, but then they left. I mean, the average life expectancy for a job in sales and marketing is what, three to five years or less? So the guy whose instincts were right left. With him left all the principles. Then they hire another marketing and sales person who's more average, who may not get it. And so things start falling apart, because there's no structure in place. They were following the instincts of the leader, and when they left there was no momentum to keep the growth going. If you can't repeat it, then you can't leverage it. And the structure [crosstalk 00:02:41].

Michael Webb:                 Yeah, if you can't articulate it, you can't grasp it. Right. Before we lose this issue, I asked about your background, can you tell us a little bit about some of your business experience where you began to learn how to apply these thinking principles from physics into business problems after business school?

Bud Hyler:                           One of my managers told me, you can tell how fast you're learning by how far back in time you have to look to realize you were stupid. I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of good company experiences, starting with Digital Equipment Corporation, where I ran marketing and sales for the commercial group marketing. There were no constraints. It was a free group, so you would go talk to sales people all the time, and we had a great arrangement. It was so good that the salesmen would introduce me to their accounts as the supervising manager for the company, simply so that when the the account got angry at the salesman due to some mistake, they'd call me. They thought that was the way to lash out. That was great. I'd much rather have them call me than call a competitor.

                                                The first time DEC was selling to a bank, salesman in making a sales call to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and it wasn't going well, because DEC was an engineering company. As he was being asked to leave, he said, "I'm sorry, maybe I just don't understand enough about what you do. Could you explain what the leasing department does?" And as the customer was kind enough to explain it, the salesman said, "Oh, you do financial engineering." "Well, you're right. I engineer financial instruments." "Oh, well I can tell you how to do engineering much better." So it created a tie between DEC products and the customer. When the salesman called me and told me that, it took two days to get it out to the rest of all the salesmen calling on banks. So that's how I learned the power of the linkage between sales and marketing.

Michael Webb:                 This is back in the days when computers were sold as a product, right? And there was a market for computers. People would buy them. I was in that business too, worked for a company a little bit later than the early days of Digital Equipment Corporation, but I remember those days. When I got hired, they trained me to sell computers. They said, "Here's what you got to do. First of all, here's all the features and benefits of our product, this disc drive and this operating system and these interactive terminals and stuff. Now here's what you do. You get a phone and a phone book. Call people up until you find someone who is going to buy a computer."

                                                Because I remember this diagram they had. It was a bowl of water. It was boiling, and the little bubbles would start to reach. When they get to the top, at the top of the water, they burst, then they buy something. You find one of these bubbles on the way up and show them your product and you're likely to get an order, because our product was better than IBM's. And that's as sophisticated as it got, but that company almost went out of business a few years later, and they had to teach the whole sales force how to begin learning and understanding what customers really, what problems they were trying to solve and attach our value to that. And that was a huge transition.

Bud Hyler:                           Yeah. I learned so much at DEC. I remember we had a great salesman. His name was Ken Cannizzaro. He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He had just inherent people skill, communications capability, people trusted him, so he made quota easily in the first part of the year. Well, I was so stupid that I put him in front of the branch in New York and said, "Here, do what Ken Cannizzaro does. Well, that was so stupid. That was like telling me to become an NBA basketball center. I don't have the skills to do what Ken Cannizzaro did. There I learned the hard way that I can't simply replicate what the best salesman does, I have to transform that into something the average salesman can do also. And it can't be all skill-based. We had a lot of those.

            &nbsp...

Michael Webb:                 Hello, this is Michael Webb and I am thrilled today to be able to introduce you to Bob Lambert. Bob is the president and I believe co-founder of Samurai Business Group. Is that right, Bob?

Bob Lambert:                     Yep.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. Boy, we've known each other since my days back in Chicago more than 10 years ago. Please tell the audience what Samurai Business Group does and how you got to this point.

Bob Lambert:                     Well, thanks Michael, first of all, for having me on. You're right, we've been friends and trying to conquer this thing called sales and metrics and all the rest of it, but Samurai Business Group was started up in '01. It was my fourth startup company, which is no longer a startup, and for the last close to 20 years what we've done is flipped the coin on the whole sales process, and that is about how people buy versus how you sell them. I jokingly tell people today, I feel like Willie Nelson, that it a 25 year overnight hit. Because all of a sudden he was a big ... We've been talking about this for over 20 years and all of a sudden we're seeing the direction of things starting to change at the buyer's journey.

Bob Lambert:                     It's about the buy and all that stuff. But what we set out to do, Michael, back then was to change really what classic sales training had been. My partner and I had been through a lot of sales training, a lot of leadership training, and we just kept thinking it was going against what we really basically want to do, and that was relationships with human beings. Because when you boil it all down, and the whole essence of what we're talking about here is exactly that, because human beings are buying something. And so through neuroscience and behavioral science and a lot of studies, not our own stuff because it wasn't self-serving, is taking the viewpoint of the buyer when they're making this decision to buy. What that really started to manifest itself in, there is a process. There's a system people go through all over the planet pretty much all the same type of way that they go through it, but there's no two people that do it the same way, and you won't do it the same way a second time.

Bob Lambert:                     So there's a discreet way that you go through this process and we blocked that out in our buying decision model. We've had the privilege, the honor now of being affiliated with DePaul University for over 18 years and their Center for Sales Leadership, that is the number one sales curriculum in the country now, has been for some time leading the charge. When we started with them only 30 colleges and universities had even a sales class or curriculum. Today there's over 160, so we're very proud of the fact that we were invited in to be a part of that curriculum and then also invited in about six years ago to put together a semester-long case based on the buying decision model that we created.

Michael Webb:                 It's a very successful track record. I've already got three questions here in my head I want to ask you about. Let's start with this one that we had mentioned before we got on the show here. The idea is, there's been some substantial sea changes in the market, in the economy in the last 20 years, and as you're pointing out, the way that you sell seems to have changed. What are the big changes that you've seen, and why are they such challenges?

Bob Lambert:                     Well, without question, 1995 was a pivotal turning point. When we published the book in 2010, How to Put the Wind Back in your Sails, it really was an introduction of how the internet has impacted sales. It's really mitigated the whole sales process, the whole upfront process. Up until '95 if you want to buy something, generally speaking a buyer would ... I'm talking about the marketplace and corporations. Business to business, they would have to invite salespeople in to get the information because they had the keys to the kingdom.

Bob Lambert:                     That turned dramatically with the internet, with all the Google and the information that's available now. Buyers know more about you, your products, your services, your competition, your pricing before you even walk in the door. So you better be prepared when you're walking in there to find out through a discovery process what is it that the buyer is really looking for? They'll tell you, if you'll let them. Our method facilitates that. When you start thinking about focusing on human beings and not on products or services, that was a big tipping point, because buyers today want to understand what you're going to do for them. What's in this for me if I do business with you? They're not doing any business with anybody they don't trust. So fundamentally what we get to is the relationship, because corporations don't buy, people do. They buy for their own reasons and they buy in their own self-interest.

Bob Lambert:                     And so through the body of research and the work we've done, and of course thousands of people we've had through the program, this becomes really a self-revealing thing, once people start to realize when you get on that side of the table and you make this a joint thing, it's not a we/they thing, it's us versus them, it's we together are going to help to find some kind of a resolution, a solution to some of these issues you're having. What we've identified is three apparent reasons why somebody will even have a conversation with you that lead to three what we call compelling reasons why they'll buy. We know now through empirical data and also studies now that people buy do buy emotionally; they intellectually justify that decision. What that looks like is basically that when you are emotionally connected to something and you can talk about any of a number of things that you're emotionally connected to, even the most hardcore procurement agents I've interviewed and been with will relate that, because when I start to share with them, the salespeople have called in, the ones you bought from what is distinct about them?

Bob Lambert:                     Invariably it's a human connection. It's an emotional connection that they go to, why they buy from these people. It could be that they've got my back, they always have my interest at heart, they bring me new information. They are constantly thinking about us and ways to improve the business, outside of the scope of what they may even provide. I published an article. This is a freebie for anybody who wants it, called Beyond Trusted Advisor, Becoming a Trusted Asset. In...

Michael Webb:     Michael Webb here, and I am excited today to bring two very interesting people to your attention. We have Adrian and Tiffani Figueroa, and Tiffani has founded a firm called Improv It Up that is devoted to using the skills of improvisation to help B2B salespeople to improve their performance. So Adrian and Tiffani, welcome here!

Tiffani Sierra:         Hi!

Adrian Figueroa:   Hi Michael.

Tiffani Sierra:         Thank you so much, Michael, for having us.

Michael Webb:     Well, you're quite welcome. I think this is going to be really interesting since improv is something that always fascinates people. And how it's connected to B2B sales. Could each of you take like 30 seconds and help the audience understand just a little bit about your background, and in your case especially, Tiffani, go on and say how did you get started in doing this?

Tiffani Sierra:         My background is as an actress. I spent my whole life as an actress in the theaters, San Francisco and New York and L.A. I started teaching an acting class out in West Hollywood, and I was working with actors mainly, because improvisation is vital if you want to audition. It's really important that you're able to be able to think on your feet and just pick up things quickly. But what started to happen was, I was getting non-actors coming into my workshop. So I started to get engineers, scientists, business owners, priests. I'm being honest when I say that. You can imagine that you know all of the jobs they've probably come through our workshop. What was happening was all of these students that were coming to my class were saying that improv was really changing their lives.

Tiffani Sierra:         Just to kind of backtrack just a bit. I went to the Second City, which is a huge improv school based in Chicago, but I went to the L.A. location. And improv really changed my life. I went through a really tragic family situation and improv really became my therapy. It was at that point that I really realized that the therapeutic elements that were happening in improv, that I could help others. So what started to happen was that was translating into people's lives and obviously really translating into the workplace, no matter what job they had. It was helping them to be more confident. It was helping them with so many other skills. But I realized that this was something not only for actors but really for anyone, that these skills could be used.

Tiffani Sierra:         So really Improv It Up was born in West Hollywood through my experience of working with non-actors. Then really we just grew the business over the past several years. We also work with middle and high school students, we have programs. We're a social enterprise, and what that means is, I like to think, is a for-profit business with heart. So the heart part of what we do is our school programs and then we have our corporate and business programs as well.

Michael Webb:     Okay, wow, what a fascinating background. So real quickly, Adrian, your background's quite different, right?

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, significantly. Tiffani's story's much more exciting than mine. For me, it's going the path of the engineer. My background, engineering, mechanical engineering, then the MBA. Working in the industry, being a part of building products in aerospace, those being my strengths in industries. Then through there just getting certifications with Lean, Six Sigma, supply chain, and so just growing the process side of it. Tiffani and I met each other and she had this business going, and I started sitting in on all the workshops years ago then became a facilitator alongside with her.

Adrian Figueroa:   It was marrying both of our loves and passions where, we like to say, I'm the left brain, right? I'm more methodical and a little cool. Probably tending more toward the hard skills. And then Tiffani comes in as the right brain, being more the creative artistic and the soft skills. What we offer businesses is you get the best of both worlds. Hard, soft skills, left brain, right brain. We kind of complete each other.

Tiffani Sierra:         We're very opposite.

Michael Webb:     Yeah! So some neat people who listen to my podcast regularly may remember Adrian. We did an interview a month or two ago, I think, and your day job is Lean facilitator at Cadence Aerospace, as I understand.

Adrian Figueroa:   Right.

Michael Webb:     So you've been able, it sounds like, to use some of these improv skills in your leadership at the aerospace company, is that true?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yes, every day.

Michael Webb:     That's amazing.

Adrian Figueroa:   Where I'm most effective is being able to use that soft skills side to actually commit to and bring forward the hard skills. Profits and results.

Michael Webb:     Okay, all right. So Tiffani, why did these men and women off the street who are not theater majors, why did they want to attend your improv class and what did you give them that made it so valuable?

Tiffani Sierra:         Well, I think a lot of these non-actors, salespeople, entrepreneurs that have come to our class really have come because there's a lot of fears. You might have the fear of public speaking. We have a lot of students that come to us, believe it or not, that even work in sales. They have fears of public speaking. Or fear of failure is a huge one. We actually, Adrian and I, facilitated a workshop called Fail Into Success. It was really obvious, them trying to get comfortable when they're uncomfortable. So that's something that we see a lot. I would say those two things, and building confidence, really, the confidence to be you. I can't tell you. It sounds so simple. But when someone can have such ownership of who they are and really be their authentic self, I just believe that helps to draw authentic connections with other people. I think that's just such an important piece of being a salesperson, coming across as authentic and genuinely connecting with people. So I would say those are probably some of the top things that a lot of people have come to our classes for.

Tiffani Sierra:         How improv works is, just so your listeners can kind of understand, a lot of people who have maybe never seen an improv show might think that you just make up whatever you want. That there's no structure. But believe it or not, if you watch shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway, have you seen that show, Michael?

Michael Webb:     Yes, I have and it makes me laugh because those guys are funny.

Tiffani Sierra:         Okay, well, they're great and wonderful improvisors. Actually a lot of them went to the Second City, the school that I went to...

Michael Webb:     I'm excited today to introduce you to Claude Bardy. Claude is a consultant in France. Claude, welcome here.

Claude Bardy:        Thank you, Michael. I'm excited to be here.

Michael Webb:     So we have only talked a couple times in the past and I'm really interested to learn about your background here. The audience will see why here as this unfolds. But tell us about your background and what has led you to what you do today.

Claude Bardy:        Okay, yeah. Thanks, Michael. I am a French national, born in France, lived in France and Europe, and the US of A. I consider myself an international French person. Multi-culti, speak five languages, so I've been around in various environments. And from a work perspective, I trained initially as an engineer, so technical background. I hold an engineer's diploma from one of the French schools. But I moved to sales almost 30 years ago. No, more than 30 years ago, sorry, and haven't gone back. I've been doing sales since 1987. It's a decision because I wanted to concentrate on relationship, on helping businesses grow, and I thought my contribution was best in the sales, and I like the challenge.

Michael Webb:     Okay. So out of curiosity, what was it you were selling in the very first sales job?

Claude Bardy:        I was selling CAD CAM systems.

Michael Webb:     Okay, cool.

Claude Bardy:        Computer aided design. It's one thing led to another, my first job was a technical job with the software company called Dassault Systems, which produces or designs the software called CATIA. And from there I tried selling it and started my sales path using that, or based on this CATIA software, CAD CAM software. And I've sold that to small businesses in France. I've sold that to larger businesses in France, but that was only France. And after, how is it? '93, so six years, I moved to selling telecom systems, international.

Claude Bardy:        So there I did a couple of, no more than a couple, seven, eight years in the telecom and payments field. So my customers were international operators, telecoms, banks, all over the world, all over the world. As I say, I lived on in C 66 K in a Boeing 747 flying all over the world.

Michael Webb:     All right, and so what what led you then to what you're doing today?

Claude Bardy:        I stopped my sales career as an employee in 2009. I'd been selling managing sales team and running sales organizations, business units, focusing on sales. And since 2009 my employer and I split up in 2009. And I set myself up as a consultant, still interested in sales. I like sales, I like sales teams, I like trying to improve and help a sales team sell better. And so I set up shop as an independent consultant in 2009. And now I help businesses develop sales projects usually related to new businesses or restructuring and changing a sales organization.

Claude Bardy:        And along the way I have acquired a bunch of other competencies. I'm a certified coach because I felt this was needed. Sales is also a people thing. So new products are important, processes are important, but people are also very, very important. And coaching was, to me, obvious as a set of skills which I needed to be successful.

Michael Webb:     So what kinds of principals in the process oriented world, operational excellence, systems thinking, lean six sigma types of things. What sorts of principles have attracted you, and especially with respect to how they apply to sales?

Claude Bardy:        Right. You can imagine the situation in 2009 when I started my consulting business. I said, "How am I going to go from a wish to a business in helping a sales organization?" I had been exposed to very primitive sales processes, or in-house self developed mom and pop CRMs. And I thought there must be some better way to do that.

Claude Bardy:        So I simply honestly very directly Googled, "Sales process," and came across a guy called Michael Webb who you might be familiar with, and I liked what he said. So I bought his words, read that and try to apply that to my consultancy cases. And to come back to your question, principles, I think that there is not a single component which explains sales performance. I think it's, sure, product a little bit, pricing. It's like the three or four Ps of marketing, product, pricing, sure. But people, and process, and also how you manage the sales team. I must make, let's say, define a little bit the scope or the field I'm working in.

Claude Bardy:        I work only on B2B and usually B2B to C kind of businesses. I don't do B to C. It's a different set of principles and rules. But in B2B, face to face complex, remember I'm an engineer. I like complex solutions, complex situations. And selling in those environments are ... Well, you need a process approach. But success doesn't come just from having the right process. You need to manage the thing.

Claude Bardy:        And just to give an illustration, I believe in the power, lots of Ps today, in the power of a sales review done as quote, "Coaching kind of sales review." I have seen with my customers, and I must say I've been slightly guilty too, sales reviews which are just and only focused on the weighted expected revenue shown in the pipeline. I think that is a partial approach, and the reason is the following. Salespeople, sales managers, sales directors, as we call them here in Europe, have a lot of pressure to meet the numbers.

Claude Bardy:        This is all over the world, and not just in France or in Europe. But this pressure, number one. Number two, human nature being what it is, people tend to too easily move an opportunity down in the funnel. And with the weighted average, the pipeline looks like nice. The weighted year and revenue looks nice. Whereas the sales, I told the process, the real sales just does not reflect the actual chance of reaching that forecast revenue. Do you see what I mean?

Michael Webb:     Yeah, I do. So, I'm hearing two things in there. I'm hearing, it's sort of like if you've ever seen maybe a young adult or a teenager, sometimes an older adult, and they get a dog as a pet. And the dog gets out of the house and is starting running outside. And they don't want that to happen so they start yelling at the dog, "Come back here, you." And he'd chase the dog. Right? "Come back here," and that's just going to make the dog go the other direction. Right?

Michael Webb:     And so sort of our human nature is if you want more sales, you go push for the sales, and the sales people are going to tell you what you want to hear. I mean, it's-

Claude Bardy:        Absolutely.

Michael Webb:     Right? So that's on...

Christian Maurer:     Thank you for having me.

Michael Webb:         Well, so this is going to be really, really fun. Now a couple of preparation notes here. Christian and I are talking on a recorded line, and we have the best audio quality we can get, but something is amiss in it and so I've asked Christian... and Christian has a slight accent, although he's an excellent English speaker, to my ear anyway, some of the stuff that seems to have been a little hard to understand, so we're going to kind of overcompensate. I've asked him to speak especially slowly, and I may even interrupt him, re-enunciate or confirm that I understand what he's saying. And we're not doing that because ... we're just doing it because we think there's an issue in the audio quality. So, I apologize for that in advance, but this I promise you is going to be worth paying attention to.

Michael Webb:         As we begin here, Christian, could you tell us 30 seconds of your background, and what kinds of things did you do, and what are you doing now?

Christian Maurer:     Thank you. Well, I started out as an electrical engineer. I have a degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and then I went into engineering in the sense of product manager and project manager. Then, I got into selling very complex systems, and from there my career took me then more into the corporate world where I was the director of strategic planning for a whole corporation. That's when I came to France. And then after a while, I had enough of the corporate life, and I was headhunted by a little boutique consultancy specialize-

Michael Webb:         Who is this again? I'm sorry. Who you were headhunted by?

Christian Maurer:     By a little boutique consultancy.

Michael Webb:         Okay.

Christian Maurer:     And this boutique consultancy was specialized on sales trainings and sales consulting. So, I started a second career as a sales trainer and sales consultant, and this little private firm then was gobbled up by a large CRM company which was gobbled up by a very large software company, and at the end the software company thought that we were a very interesting, special team, but we would strive more if we will be taken private. So, we got a private investor.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Hang on one second. I'm hearing ... I hope it's okay if I do this, but I'm suspecting it was target account selling, was purchased by Ceba, was purchased by Oracle. is that right?

Christian Maurer:     You got it.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Christian Maurer:     You got it. Spot on right. And then-

Michael Webb:         Because I worked with IMPAX Corporation. I was, I was a competitor. When I was a sales trainer with IMPAX Corporation, I was a competitor to target account sell. One of the guys who founded target account selling started out his sales training career at IMPAX working for Dave Matlow. So anyways, small world. So, go ahead-

Christian Maurer:     Small world. So then, you also know how the story then ended that we became the task group for the private investors. Today, this company still exist. It's called [inaudible 00:04:08]. But after about a year or two, I found out that probably there was only one person who should think in this company and that was the CEO. So, I start become working on my own. But I continued into Royal Golf sales consultancy and sales training. Then a little later, I was approached by two universities in Germany if I would take some courses in the postgraduate level. So, I teach now graduate courses for master classes.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Very good. Very good. So, now we get to the fun part. In our conversations over several years, I've learned about Christian that he made some of the same observations I did as a salesperson, sales manager, sales trainer. And what we observed in being in those environments was that there was something amiss, something funny, odd, not right about the way that we were being managed, about the decisions that our sales department heads, sales vice president, sales and marketing executives, and CEOs were making in regard to resources, and people, and how to run things. And there was something wrong. Christian saw some similar things.

Michael Webb:         So, let's start there. Christian, what are some of the things that you saw during your time in sales that led you to start saying what's going on here? Why isn't this right?

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. You certainly know the old saying to have more feet on the street will make more sales.

Michael Webb:         To have more feet, yeah, on the street will make more sales. Oh, yes.

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. Right. Okay. The only trouble with that is that there is the law of diminished return on effort. So, if you have a territory which is saturated, if you put a second salesman in there, the only thing you do is that you have two salesmen who can no longer make their quota because there's not enough potential.

Michael Webb:         Right. So, you saw that happen I guess?

Christian Maurer:     Oh, yeah. That was always what was told, and then afterwards people wanted to ... Another one which is very funny is the must-win deal.

Michael Webb:         Cool.

Christian Maurer:     Today with CRM systems. If there's a big fish in system that goes up to the VP of sales, maybe even higher, and guess what? It's declared a must-win deal. Now, things are not sold. Things are bought. Now, if you want to force to buy before it's ready, the only way that maybe has a chance to is you lower your price, right?

Michael Webb:         Right.

Christian Maurer:     So, if you lower your price, guess what happens to the quota of your sales force?

Michael Webb:         It goes up. So, you discount your way out of making your quota. Not only that, you rob the company of profitability.

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. Or taking another way, sales managers going in at the last moment as the rebate uncle, he's counting deals, right?

Michael Webb:         Right.

Christian Maurer:     And in sales management trainings, I sometimes made a little thing and said, okay, you have four deals and you discount by 20%. Now, if you still want to make quota, you need to have a fifth deal, don't you? And you get people staring at you like ...

Michael Webb:     I'm pleased today to have a fantastic person on our show. His name is Robert Tripp. He has a very long career as a consultant and a trainer and a master black belt. Robert, welcome here.

Robert Tripp:          Yes, thank you Michael. It's good to be here on the call with you.

Michael Webb:     Robert is with a firm, Argo LLC. Robert, for our audience, please provide a little, you know, where did you come from and how did you get where you are and what does Argo LLC do?

Robert Tripp:          When I began my career a few decades ago, I never would have thought that I would, I guess, evolve into a space that allowed me to concentrate in process improvement, and process excellence, and quality management systems, but it all really began back in 1995. I had been working in the finance community in a manufacturing organization back in 1995, and I got tapped on to engage in a Six Sigma training effort to become a black belt. I thought it seemed new and unique and different, and I thought yes, let's give it a try.

I started down the path in 1995, which eventually certified as a master black belt. Soon after that, and by 1998, I was consulting, and that was just at the time when the industry was really starting to become active. There were a couple of small deployments early on, starting with Motorola and then it moved into a little bit with Texas Instruments and ABB and then Allied Signal. I was working at Allied Signal at the time.

But then beginning in 1998, I was able to begin working with a lot of different clients and that's when my consulting career started, and I started down the path of designing deployments, creating content, delivering training coaching projects, developing people and leaders in the organization to drive Six Sigma within their own communities.

Somewhere along the line there was a merger between the whole concept of Six Sigma and Lean and the ideas around both and how they really compliment each other and so. I'd say around the mid-2000s it became more of an effort around marketing and involving myself in Lean Six Sigma, and really that's what I've been doing since then. For the last few years I've been working with a number of different clients, but really in a small cluster of course partners, and in the last six months I've been independent, so it's been an interesting path.

The company that I have created is Argo LLC, and we basically work with organizations, large, small, and medium size to deploy continuous improvement tools. It ranges from grand corporate-wide deployments, which I'm working on right now, to smaller deployments, which just involves training and coaching a few project., You know, the landscape has changed, so the versatility and being able to apply the tools in different environments is important, and based on the, you know, the history I think we're able to argue that.

Michael Webb:     You've been at a perch where you could watch the industry sort of unfold and watch the changes that have taken place, so what have you observed?

Robert Tripp:          Well, I think one of the most interesting things that I've observed, it's really in the late nineties, early two-thousands, Six Sigma was a foreign concept. Winning was an important concept and well, maybe, you know, maybe organizations coming out of the manufacturing arenas had great familiarity with similar tools, if not tools of the same name. The broader scope of the industries, including financial services, health care, a lot of different government offices, things like this, they did not have exposure to Six Sigma. But as we sort of evolved and developed through the two thousands and in the last, you know, five to 10 years, it's really becoming ubiquitous.

Almost everybody you run into certainly has heard of Lean and Six Sigma. In addition to that, they've had some exposure either in terms of participating in Lean Six Sigma deployments, or former employer or being part of the projects or even maybe taking classes through collegiate courses and things like that. It's been interesting to watch the general level of awareness increase, but with that also comes a level of lack of awareness in the same way, so in other words, that people are getting exposed to it at a very superficial level. They know conceptually what it is, but they are not familiar still with how to deploy it and how to execute to really drive results for the organization.

Michael Webb:     What is the percentage of Six Sigma deployments that actually achieve the goals that their companies start out with?

Robert Tripp:          You know whether it's the stated goals as they are put down on paper and published to the rest of your organization to justify the resources being the time and effort being spent to deploy it.  That may be a little bit different than the vision and the hopes than the people who deploy it who want to achieve, so just starting with the stated goals, you know, it's 90 to 100%. I don't think that, you know, the payback on Lean and Six Sigma is never, or I don't think it's ever a negative payback. The challenges, you know, are you really reaching the cultural, you know, DNA of the organization and that's where things fail, and it takes time to do that.

It takes patience and persistence to make that happen, but in addition, that sort of cultural transformation is difficult to measure so to say that there was a specific goal in that arena I think is a little bit difficult, but I would also say that there are a lot of people that are not satisfied with the way that their deployments are, I guess sustained within the organization's management system over time.

Michael Webb:     I have heard statements not just about Six Sigma deployments, but about also other kinds of deployments, Lean deployments and so forth that, you know, it's typical in the industry that more than 80% of these initiatives they end up being disappointing, they end up not actually achieving the goals and objectives. Have you heard that?

Robert Tripp:          Yeah, I have heard that sort of thing, and we agreed to the extent that they have not achieved the sustainability and the cultural transformation that the proponents are looking for. However, what they do achieve is certainly bringing some level of improvement in customer satisfaction and the level of improvement of internal, the process quality performance, and with that financial results that pay for the resources invested in the deployment. That being said, yes, no question there are a lot of deployments that do not exceed, or might exceed, but achieve the overall goal, but I would not say that they were a waste of time.

Michael Webb:     Let's examine that dark side there for a minute about not achieving the cultural, I mean, I have heard the term even Six Sigma Nazis inside of a big company. The Six Sigma department ends up attempting to enforce some standards on how projects are do...

I'm excited today to have a guest, an unusual person. This is Charles Chen who has followed a career that has had transitions that make him uniquely insightful in our quest here to improve sales processes around the world. He was a mechanical engineer, and then he transitioned to being a Six Sigma Green Belt and an engineering project manager at, I think he worked at Ford and then GE and then a bank and then ultimately became a master Black Belt at Microsoft. And has worked on customer-facing projects in sales and marketing. So Charles, welcome here.

Charles Chen:    Thanks, Michael. It's great to be with you.

Michael Webb: So it would be great, I did a little bit of a thumbnail sketch there of your background. I mean, tell us how you got to where you are and what kind of motivated you along the way. I know that readers would like to hear a little color commentary on why you're here.

Charles Chen:    Oh sure, sure. So my background, you touched the right two points. I started my career a long time ago at Ford Motor Company. Also, an engineer, graduated from University of Michigan with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. After three years I went to Yale business school. Upon graduation, I started work at GE and this time was not in engineering, it was in sales enablement. So it was there that I earned my Green Belt, but we did a project fundamentally enhanced the productivity of that sales organization.

After two years there, I went to Washington Mutual Bank as a corporate officer. I ran the Black Belt project over there, ran the team as well. Saw that bank was about to tilt a year before it finally did and went to Microsoft. At Microsoft, I've been here for 11 years. This is my fifth role with the company. What's most profound in my career at Microsoft has been when I was in our internal Six Sigma consulting and teaching group and I focused our efforts in sales and marketing. So I personally ran multiple projects at the global scale focused on sales and marketing, improving revenue, either conversion rate or win rate or velocity.

And I personally coached 11 folks on Microsoft to earn their Green Belt, Black Belt certification. Half of them were from sales and marketing as well, even a few from our incentive comp organization. So yeah, that's my background, my last role with ... yeah, that's my background. Thank you.

Michael Webb: So Six Sigma has a reputation for being very doctrinaire, very jargony. Not everybody from a sales background. In fact, a lot of people from sales background get turned off as soon as you say Six Sigma, but there are some very valuable underlying principles that apply in sales. And I don't want to assume that the audience knows the jargon and stuff.

And so I thought I would ask you to tell us on example, two steps here. The first step is, tell us an example of some problems that were taking place when you first started doing Six Sigma work. What were the problems that were taking place in the business that couldn't be solved without taking this Six Sigma approach? So what were they struggling with? Why couldn't they fix it on their own? What did this DMAIC, right? Define, measure ... this Six Sigma. Why was that needed?

Charles Chen:    Yeah. Yeah, totally. Let me use an example from my very first project, even at GE. This division at GE is GE Equipment Services. GE Equipment Services they own a lot of assets. And this division in particular own billions of dollars of tractor and trailers. So Michael, if you're going down the highway, you see a 46-foot or 53-foot tractor going down shipping something, that tractor in the back, a huge percentage of those in North America are owned by General Electric. Pretty profound, right? They built aircraft engines, but they also own assets like that.

One thing very, very fundamental about that sort of asset I think everybody can appreciate is how do you make money on that asset? You make them money, you own the product itself, you own it. The moment it sits on your lot it's depreciating. It's just like an airplane, a commercial airplane. The moment it sits on the tarmac you're losing money. You've got to get that thing flying all the time. The same thing with these tractors and trailers.

So what typically happened when I joined that part of GE is, they have hundreds of thousands of these tractors and trailers, spontaneously, suddenly, a whole fleet of them shows up at the GE site. Then the salespeople are running around with their heads mad, trying to get them out the door again. Some of them sit there for months. Every month is losing money. So that was a fundamental issue. It's like their barely making it and everything was reactive, and how do we know that these things are coming back and make sure they don't come back? Or if they come back as barely a touchpoint and then boom, they're back out with the same customer, or with a different customer, or the best part is they don't even come back in the first place. So that was the fundamental problem they're trying to solve. Yeah. So the project how I got involved. Yeah, go ahead.

Michael Webb: Why couldn't they solve it? I mean I'm sure there was lots of people who could see the problem. Why did you have to do Six Sigma to solve it?

Charles Chen:    Yeah, I think there's a combinations of that. This division of GE was fairly recently acquired. So a lot of the folks in the senior leadership chain came from GE. So they have a Six Sigma background. And in fact, most of them were Black Belts and Master Black Belts. At the same time, you still have the traditional folks on the site who got acquired with the company. So there was a culture change in the first place. How do you get everybody to recognize that we got to solve this problem together and look at it from a different way?

Michael Webb: And as opposed to everybody, you stay in your own lane, I'm doing a good job. Leave me alone.

Charles Chen:    That's right. That's right. As long as I'm making money, as long as I am a seller, I make money, I meet my quota, I'm good. But the cost to the company, which this eludes to, is very real and very material. And to really bring up the margins, you've got to worry about both. And there has always been complaints from the sales team that when they want to get trailers out, they don't have enough trailers. Or they're being bombarded by requests from managers to, hey, I got you to find a way to find homes for 4,000 new trailers. So that added pressure and friction is very real for the company.

Michael Webb: Okay. All right. So that's the problem. And it's pressure and it's not being solved and people aren't cooperating. What does Six Sigma bring?

Charles Chen:    Yeah. So I was ... so Six Sigma, actually approaches in the very traditional DMAIC approach, but let's take a step back and not go into the extreme technical details of that. Fundamentally, as a salesperson, as a senior manager, you want to have a pulse on all your assets, all these expensive assets. You want to know sometime before they have a tendency to come back, you already know about them. You want early warnings, early signals that any one of these trailers could be coming back to the company.

So what I did was I work with the executive management chain and the sales leaders...

Today, I'm thrilled to have a guest, Adrian Figueroa, of Cadence Aerospace. Adrian has a background as an engineer leading manufacturing organizations, leading continuous improvement and lean initiatives in several different companies. From our little chat here before we got started on this podcast, I'm really excited about the kinds of things he's going to be able to bring to us.

Adrian, welcome here.

Adrian Figueroa:   Hi Michael, thank you for having me on your show.

Michael Webb:     It'd be great, can you just give us a minute of background and tell us how you got to be where you are, and what you do at Cadence Aerospace?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, so my first start was a Manufacturing Engineer in the aerospace industry, and there I was learning just the principles of achieving the numbers. All I cared about was doing my job well. From that point, I started getting a little bored with what I was doing, and I went back to school. I ended up finding a new job which gave me more opportunity to grow. That's actually where actually I fell into Lean Manufacturing.

Lean ended up opening my world, up until this point in my life, where the expansion from being able to use those tools, methodologies in manufacturing, but then in other industries. It just became so at first overwhelming, but so exciting at the same time. From my first job going to my second, beginning to implement the Lean principles, I ended up…

Michael Webb:     This was in a roofing system, not the first company, but the second company was roofing products is that correct? DECRA Roofing Systems?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, I should say I moved from the aerospace industry to the building and industrial building industry.

Michael Webb:     Okay.

Adrian Figueroa:   From there, that's where I started, again, implementing Lean tools mainly, because I was excited about doing that. Just in general, I love working with people. Over time, it was very, I would say, easy for me to be implementing these tools and talking to the people on the floor. About four years later, after being a Lean leader, I was given the opportunity to move into the Manufacturing Manager role. At that point, I didn't do a thing really within the first month of new large projects, doing all this data analysis, where can we go to next, you just saw a jump in the performance of efficiency and motivation, and I could say morale within that first month to a point where nobody really understood what was going on. They thought maybe I was tweaking the numbers.

Over time, it seemed like... Even I had to get some self-reflection, where I was looking at it and saying, "How did that happen?" The more I was looking into the second half of Lean, or it's respect for people, I started reading more about that. Reading that, hey what I was doing by just listening to others, and working with them on their project teams no matter how big the issue was, I was there to be able to help where I could. Over time, that created a connection with all the individuals on the floor.

By the time I jumped into the role, I had supported everyone along the way that look like they're mirroring that back to me. Now, in my new role they wanted to support me so the motivation was on two sides. The results just jumped, like I said, enormously. It was fun after that point.

Michael Webb:     That's the sort of thing that people might call the Magic of Personality, is that right?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, I mean that's part of why I do what I do now. I'm mainly focusing on the people side, still within the continuous improvement realms of either Lean or Six Sigma. But, I'm more heavily concentrated on behaviors in people rather than tools.

Michael Webb:     That is the field of the sort of thing that people consider to be soft, unmeasurable, subjective. You can't really replicate it. You don't really have any way of knowing what's going on. Do you agree with that position?

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, I think soft skills are very hard to measure and see your gains from that. I think that's why a lot of businesses struggle with actually giving any kind of trainings, or really focusing on that side of it because where are the results from it? That's the type of thing that actually is probably the most time consuming aspect for showing the results. That's what I actually like, is I try and position myself in businesses that are in for the long run instead of a short term gains, because on the behavioral side unfortunately it does take a while to gain that connection with others, and to build that stability with those people and the processes they're working. Because when you-

Michael Webb:     Go ahead.

Adrian Figueroa:   I was just going to say because you have your process that's built for the employees, or created for the employees, and you can only do so much with them. They come in, they have a bad day, they come in... There's so many variables from the human aspect that can make that process fail, that the more you can in a sense control, but not really, but you're creating that set safe environment for them to work on and have more enjoyment at being at work, the easier flow it is for them to follow those process steps.

Michael Webb:     Okay, but would you agree, because I'm going to push back a little bit to one of the things that you said a moment ago. Would you agree that the principles of process excellence, operational excellence, this idea of respect for people and all the ramifications of it, doesn't that provide a sort of repeatable or a framework... So, for being able to tell if you're making progress in those relationships with people.

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, you definitely need both, from both sides. One can't work without the other. From where I see it, it's that too many businesses are just focused on the tools only, and then wonder why they can't see these gains or they see it for a short period of time and then it goes back to normal. You're definitely correct. I'd agree with the framework’s definitely there from operational excellence let’s just say you have to understand where you're at in the business, assess it, measure it, and then implement for whatever journey the business decides to take, go through with those steps, learn from it and make your adjustments as you go. As long as everybody's on the same path towards the same targets or goals.

Michael Webb:     Years ago I was a Sales Trainer with a company called IMPAX Corporation. That doesn't matter. There's lots of good sales training outfits out there. One of the things that we did that we focused on with the client, was to help the sales people learn to conduct interviews, questions, conversations, to have a skill at active listening in conversations so that they could learn more about the debates, and arguments even, going on inside their aspect company, their client companies. Because, there is a debate that always goes on inside those companies, where people are trying to figure out what are the right decisions to make? What are the right priorities? What a...

This is Michael Webb, and welcome to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I'm delighted today to introduce you to Greg Helfrich. Greg is the national operations manager at ELRUS Aggregate Systems, and he's the operations manager not just for Canada, but also for the U.S. Welcome, here, Greg.

Greg Helfrich:                    Thank you. Glad to be here.

Michael Webb:                 Yes. I wanted to invite you here because ... I wanted to invite Greg here. He has a story that I know a lot of the audience are going to be interested in. Greg had purchased my book, Sales Process Excellence, and as I chatted with him on the phone, he started describing a way that ELRUS has sort of a sales process, a method of selling value, and it's very well thought out. I knew that a lot of people would like to hear about this, so Greg, give us a little 30 or 45 seconds here of your background, how you got to be where you are.

Greg Helfrich:                    Sure. I got into consulting on an operations and lean perspective after leaving the food industry back in the late 90s. I was trained in Six Sigma and SERD Consulting, and I was doing some supply chain consulting for ELRUS. They just said, "Well, we'd really rather have you just work with us." I joined as national operations manager in 2008, and the position has evolved from being really strictly working in manufacturing and process supply chain and engineering to now being responsible for sales and marketing. My education is in marketing.

But, as we expanded into the United States and grew, my role just basically evolved with it, and so, I wasn't necessarily in charge of marketing all that time, but just got more and more involved. And because I was a buyer, I just had insights into how our customers were thinking, and I could bring something to the table. This is where it just basically evolved from.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. In your role here as national operations manager slash sales VP, I guess, right?

Greg Helfrich:                    Pretty much. I'm essentially chief operating officer, is really, if you had to give it a conventional title. We're not huge on titles here, and so we just haven't changed much.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. You serve the mining, rock quarrying, road construction industries up there?

Greg Helfrich:                    It's primarily, yeah. We like to say that everybody needs to make big rocks into small rocks in mining, everything, like concrete, they surround us everywhere and all that rock has to be quarried or mined out of a sand and gravel operation process and it looks simple but the specifications for rock for say, asphalt or concrete are really quite tight. The shape of the rock, how it has to hold together within that mix is really quite defined and it's getting harder and harder to make those specifications. The equipment evolves over time to make the product that's required to make the roads and the houses and what have you that we live in. The consumables or the parts of the machine are also very complex in terms of how they sort the rock into different sizes and what have you. Everybody, when they look at somebody else's industry always thinks, "Well that's kind of simple" but there's usually a lot more to it then we think. This industry is one of those. On the outside it looks simple but rock is not just rock.

Michael Webb:                 I really like your opening there, making big rocks turn into little rocks because I learned a ton from a fellow a long time ago who is an expert in continuous improvement and he would say that's what we're doing in continuous improvement companies. We're helping people take the big rocks, big problems that they have and break them down into little, manageable problems so that it all adds up.

Greg Helfrich:                    I listened to a fellow the other day who set the world's treadmill record for 12 hours and I can't imagine running on a treadmill for 12 hours. I think he ran 80 some miles in 12 hours on a treadmill. One of the people said, "How can you do that?" At 3 seconds in I'm thinking to myself, "I've got 11 hours, 59 minutes and 57 seconds left." He said, "Anybody can do anything for 5 minutes."

Michael Webb:                 There you go.

Greg Helfrich:                    "That's how I did it." The rock analogy, I'll have to use that because that does make sense. Anybody can do anything for 5 minutes or when you break big rocks into small rocks, anybody can figure out how to do it.

Michael Webb:                 Right. Looking at sales, trying to figure out how to get your customers to buy and pay enough to be able to make money off of them, that can be a big rock also. That's kind of the problem we are trying to solve here. Tell us what you faced when you started into this part of the business there at ELRUS. What did it look like to you as the operating executive that lead you to develop this program?

Greg Helfrich:                    Let's go back to what triggered it. In Canada, we're an incumbent in Canada. We basically were part of the founding of the industry back in 1975 portable crushing equipment was a very undeveloped industry and Roland, the fellow that founded the company was that typical entrepreneur. He saw a problem because he was a crushing contractor and he was really unhappy with what he was dealing with and he solved the problem. He went and built, he built equipment or had it built for him and wound up selling it before he could get to use it. He never really got to use his own equipment. He built some equipment, showed it to a friend, the friend said, "I want that" and then after three or four episodes he's like, "Well, hang on a second here. I might as well get into the equipment business here because I'm building something people want." This business got started. It never really needed a serious marketing and value proposition work or marketing work because Roland sold it and he knew everybody in the industry and life went on. We expanded in the United States, after Roland's death in 2013 and we probably underestimated or overestimated our reputation and brand equity and things that people automatically do when they enter a new marketplace, they assume it's underserved and they assume that people know about them.

We had some difficulties in getting going and people to understand who we were and the differences we made. That was our big rock. How do we get people to see us as different or see us as a viable alternative to who they use now and I always come back to a process. If you're having a failure of results, it's your process. Sometimes it's your people but yo...

But in the B2B context, brand is very different. And, as Andrea Fabbri of Branding Business explains, creating a brand identity is not some vague, touchy-feely process.

An effective brand that can guide sales and marketing – even operations and product development – is based on cold hard data and evidence, both from the company doing the selling and the prospects in their target market.

Andrea talks about his approach to building a brand, as well as…

* Why salespeople are vital to this process

* The key differences between marketing and branding

* How to test a new brand identity almost risk-free

* One of the most underestimated – yet most important – activities when making changes in a company

* And more

Mentioned in This Episode: www.brandingbusiness.com

No, they’re looking for value. And that exists only between their ears, not in your product. This recognition fundamentally changes how you approach sales and marketing.  Burke reveals the best source to determine this value – it’s closer than you think – as well as how to implement it. And we also talk about…

• The two elements that must be in your customer engagement process 
• Learning a common language with your prospect
• Using salespeople as “spies” - and market researchers
• How to identify advantages you’re not exploiting fully (we all have them)
• And more

Bob points out that the "silos" bedeviling many organizations can't be avoided without disseminating this knowledge from the frontline to the back.

Tune in to discover…

• Why the Ideal Customer Profile goes beyond demographic and geographic details
• How sales activity-based sales management sabotages revenue goals
• The right way to use a CRM – it’s almost useless “out of the box”
• The metric investors miss when looking at putting money into start-ups
• And more

20+ years as a six sigma trainer and master blackbelt led Bill to analyze specific areas where leaders fall short. He uses a structured approach for incremental improvement that takes the emotion out of the process and sets down actionable – and measurable – steps.

It is unusual for Six Sigma methods to be used in leadership training. We talk about why and how that methodology creates new behaviors that drive business results.

It works 95% of the time.

Listen in to find out…

• Strategies for ensuring that failures point the way to your next step
• The single hardest change every leader must make to improve
• Why it can be difficult for leaders to get honest feedback – and the best source to get it from
• A daily ritual that takes minutes but leads to measurable improvement
• And more

 But that doesn’t mean Bob is a huge fan of process in sales… at least the rigid way many organizations approach it. He favors more of a flexible approach, where salespeople can react to conditions on the ground.

He explains how that works in practical terms, as well as…

• The spaghetti bowl that is the customer’s decision journey
• Why individual strategies like training, comp, CRM, etc. don't work
• Creating value versus adding value
• Making the best use of intelligent analytics
• And more

Following a rigorous method, he's showing salespeople how data they collected reveals small improvements they can't see on their own.

We get to walk along with him in looking at factors that go into the sales interactions, and see some of the results that stand out. For example, the blog post includes an illustration with some live data from the client's sales funnel.

In the conversation, you'll hear a way to identify where and, perhaps, why people are dropping out of your sales conversations.

We also cover…

• When are listeners (prospects) most open to new information and willing to continue a phone conversation
• The ‘compound effect’ of improvements to stages of a process
• What one thing good and bad results have in common
• And more …

Listen now...

George Bronten, founder and CEO of Membrain, has an idea what’s causing the downward trend… and how to turn it around.

Management has to create a standardized “sales environment” that offers guidance and support. And, says George, if you think salespeople hate process and systems… think again.

We also explore…

• What makes a sales process complex – it’s not price or the size of deal
• The difference between efficiency and effectiveness (and which one is better)
• Where today’s CRM systems fall short
• The surgeon’s secret for more sales
• And more

Consultant and author Amir Ghannad explains how to become the type of leader that gets buy-in from employees… and inspires them to do their very best work.

It’s a process that often includes removing some mental blocks you might not know you have.

We also explore…

• The role of tools and systems in leadership
• Why – and how – to earn employees’ trust
• How to identify a system problem versus a people problem
• The difference between commitment and attachment
• And more

We talk about the techniques and strategies he uses to give his clients a boost, including in the sales and marketing departments.

Lean and Six Sigma can be part of that, says Joseph. But he cautions that those systems are just the first step. We talk about how to make sure they have a company-wide impact, as well as…

• Strategies to get buy-in for your vision of the future
• How to ensure your team measures success the same way
• Why it’s hard to follow a CEOs vision – and what to do about it
• Determining the true value of a salesperson
• And more

We explore the different sales systems and methodologies you must implement in order to spur continued growth as you go from startup to well-established market leader.

We talk about the role of data in all this, as well as…

• What many VCs overlook when looking for acquisitions
• The support team you need to crack multimillion-dollar sales
• 20+ mistakes companies make with regards to their sales team
• How marketing can change a product
• And more

• How businesses can listen to customers before they engage with them, and how they use marketing research data to improve the sales process.
• How voice of market research illuminates unmet needs, pain points, and purchase decision factors to provide better-qualified leads and more predictable sales outcomes.
• How voice of customer research can help you to focus on high potential prospects, overcome obstacles and objections, and win more decisions in favor of your brand.Learn about how you can apply these ideas right away to improve your sales performance. Plus, learn about exciting new capabilities that can make research faster and easier to conduct, and far more impactful. Listen now…

Consultant and lean manufacturing expert Bill Waddell says before you do anything to your process, you have to look at how critical aspects of your operations are handled, including some you might not expect.

We discuss what exactly to be looking for, as well as…

• What your best customers will give you – and it’s not just more money
• Why distributors should be worried
• The danger of marketing not matching value
• Identifying the balance point when a company is most profitable
• And more

Every business has its own issues, of course. But, says Bill, there is definitely a common thread he almost always sees… a misconception about what an effective sales culture looks like.

We shatter that myth and talk about the alternative: a unique assessment tool that identifies the best role for each employee, including your salespeople.

We also talk about…

• How to address the difference between personality and behavior
• Identifying the people who always do well in sales, even in recessions
• Why best practices can’t be exported
• Capitalizing on Emotional Intelligence
• And more

As a CFO of several companies, consultant, and now president and owner of industry leader BMA, Nick has seen first-hand how this new approach has impacted marketing and sales and… compelled the creation of a lean approach to accounting.

You can create an environment where people close to problems understand how to boost productivity and quality while reducing waste and controlling costs… and use a “customized” accounting strategy to monitor results.

Nick gives us a roadmap to get there, including…

• The two types of accounting – and how lean fits in
• Why “old school” financial statements get in the way
• How to overcome complexity to control costs and increase revenue
• The simple measurements you need to uncover the root causes of problems
• And more

Josh shares strategies for distilling what top performers do into a process that everybody can follow, which results in more sales success across the board.

A big part of that revitalization is recognizing that not all prospects are created equal.

We talk about how to determine the accounts worth going after, as well as…

• Why sales training won’t stick unless you do this
• How to keep the right potential deals moving forward
• What happens when a salesperson does “too much”
• The 5 Dials of your sales process you must watch

By examining data from every part of the sales process, the Burr Oak team was able to eliminate wasteful practices and identify the “best of the best” customers.

And while drastic change like this often doesn’t stick, they’re still going strong.

• Tim tells us how they’ve sustained success, as well as…
• A little-known cost of “bad customers”
• The numbers behind your best prospects
• Rethinking your sales relationships
• Why you can’t neglect post-sale service
• And more

There are some obvious ways of doing that… but others that aren’t so clear says Dave DeSantis of negotiation training company Camp Systems.

Dave shares his insights into the typical prospect’s decision-making process – and how a salesperson fits into that.

We also talk about the strategies you can use in any business negotiation to ensure a fair outcome… and the one behavior you must avoid because it’s guaranteed to kill a deal.

Tune in to find out…

• When to walk away from big – even huge - deals
• The foundation of impactful sales and marketing strategy
• The surprising way systems lead to productivity
• How to make your prospect comfortable in the sales environment
• And more

But in today’s super-competitive environment you have to use a more scientific approach, says Michael Darrish. Michael’s background as an IT developer made him receptive to instilling logic in sales.

And these days, as a process improvement consultant, it guides his work with clients as he helps them understand why using a sales process is more profitable than personality or instinct.

We dive into…

• Why process improvement needs this element – or it’ll never work
• Using the scientific method to refine best practices
• The danger in customer relationships
• How to follow the why, why, why trail
• And more

As a business development rep for a tech company, Tobia has found that building structure in all his interactions with prospects – as well as seeing things from their perspective – has allowed him to create more value for his customers, his employer, and himself.

We talk about the process of “guiding” prospects to the sale, as well as ways to identify those who are worth your time and effort.

We also discuss…

• The dangers of “one-sided” conversations
• Why technology can’t solve sales programs
• The 4 things you must do when communicating with customers
• The prospects you must always avoid
• And more

That’s part of it, says Todd Youngblood of the YPS Group. But if that’s all you have, you’re seriously limiting your potential.

Todd is a big believer in a methodical approach for continuous improvement in sales – for both individuals and the rest of the sales team.

It involves some tools and tactics that the typical salesperson has never seen (or if they have, they’re afraid of). But, says Todd, a little discipline and accountability isn’t anything to fear. We explore all the steps in this “scientific” mindset shift.

We also discuss…

• The sales stats that help you gauge the health of your business
• Knowing your product inside-out isn’t enough to sell it
• When sales people should become business consultants
• Why increased revenue shouldn’t be the #1 goal
• And more

Listen now…

They’ve defined “sales” the wrong way.

This has a domino effect, impacting the whole company. And, no, the sales department isn’t to blame, stresses Rich.

What is sales… really?

And who should take part in figuring it out? Tune in for the answers, as well as…

• The 3 Ps that must work together or revenues stall
• Why you need “hunters” and “farmers” on your team
• How to approach change top-down and bottom-up
• The must-have you need to implement lasting growth

Listen now…

But Jeff gives you the tools to find the right answer too… and make sure your whole team knows it too.

You’ll be able to see through your prospect’s eyes… adopt the right mindset to recognize their pain points… and then tailor your approach in sales and marketing to address their most pressing needs.

We dig deep into how to adopt that strategy and also explore…

• Why great sales talent is necessary but not enough
• When you must change your entire sales strategy (it happens more often than you think)
• Techniques for low-cost but fast-moving growth
• How to use mistakes as a vital ingredient to your company’s growth
• And much more

Listen now…

This is especially true in sales and marketing – the lifeblood of any business.

By collecting the right data, getting feedback from those involved, and making employees part of the solution, you’ll not only improve individual processes but also create a culture of continuous improvement.

Steve and I dive deep into this topic during the interview, covering…

• How to eliminate friction between your company’s departments
• The role of systems thinking in sales and marketing
• Strategies for overcoming “Initiative Fatigue”
• Ways to get buy-in from employees to create momentous change
• And more