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GrowthPulse - The B2B Sales Podcast

The B2B Sales Cheat Sheet - Downloaded over 10,000 times by Sales People worldwide! | GrowthPulse The B2B Sales Podcast Ep9 with Anton & Miro of Epicbrief

July 28, 2023 • GrowthPulse • Season 1 • Episode 9

On this episode of GrowthPulse - The B2B Sales Podcast, we are talking to Miro & Anton from EpicBrief.

In June 2023, they shared with the global B2B Sales community, the B2B Sales Cheat Sheet. It went viral and over 10,400 people contacted them directly in a 24 hour period to get their own copy of the cheat sheet.

Anton & Miro share their story and take us through some of the most important part of the doc.

This a must see episode for all sales people. This episode is built for sales people by sales people, to make you a better sales person each and every day!

If you want your own copy of the cheat sheet, jump on our linkedin page,
https://www.linkedin.com/company/growthpulse
Give us a follow and a quick inmail and we will send it right over in HD.

You can connect with Miro & Anton down below:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/miroputkonen/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anton-dobrzhanskiy/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielbartels/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonpeterson/

[Dan Bartels]: 1:02:13

Welcome everybody to the latest edition of growth pulse, the B2B sales podcast. I'm Dan Bartels and I'm joined as always by Simon Peterson. Simon, welcome back to the show.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:02:23

Thank you. G'day Dan, how are ya?

[Dan Bartels]: 1:02:26

made I'm really excited. We have got some superstar guests on the podcast today, um, all the way from, uh, Finland, um, they've joined us with, uh, and look, you know, we reached out on the back of what I've think is one of the most, uh, amazingly viral pieces of content that I've seen, I've seen hit the market. Um, they've reached over 10,000 sales people and execs in almost overnight. Um with uh, the b2b sales cheat sheet and I want to welcome to the podcast Uh, anton and miro boys. Thanks for joining

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:03:02

Hello It sounds really good the mode one of the most viral

[Dan Bartels]: 1:03:13

Look, it's not an area that you normally look at, pieces of information or posts that genuinely go viral in amongst salespeople, but I'll check up some stats and I'll put them on the screen, but you guys reached, I think it was 10 and a half thousand people almost overnight. Are those numbers about right?

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:03:36

Yeah, I think the, I don't really. So it's funny because what you see on the post is doubled with what we also see in the inbox.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:03:47

Yeah,

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:03:47

So

[Dan Bartels]: 1:03:47

right.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:03:48

Thank you.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:03:48

an interesting experience is, is that the amount of people who sort of request it to get access, um, to the cheat sheet or that we send it was pretty much the same, that amount of people just decided to reach out, um, and. Yeah, this was, it was a fun three weeks of no sleep and replying to everybody on, on the, just on the emails and inbox. I think so far so good. We've actually replied to everybody. Everybody got their cheat sheet in high definition and PDF. And there's still coming people for requesting it. So every, every day about, I think, 5-10, even after a month. So that's, that's exciting.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:04:33

Yeah,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:04:33

and turn

[Dan Bartels]: 1:04:33

absolutely. And look, you know, I should sort of, you know, give you guys a bit of a chance to do an introduction to the team. Look, you know, if you want to give you sort of your backgrounds, you know, where you've come from, and obviously, a little bit of a spiel on Epic brief, your new business, that'd be great for you jump into looking at the cheat sheet itself.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:04:52

Yeah, so I can give a little bit background on mine on myself. I was born and raised in Spain. So by the beach in the south of Spain, my parents are actually Finnish. So it's been an interesting journey life journey for me. I've lived in maybe seven countries in the last 10 years. I'm married to an American, I got introduced to B2B sales in the US. So I was living in Utah, which is really known for some of the best salespeople in the world. So that was an interesting journey for me. Then I had a baby and the company I was working for got acquired and my wife and I decided let's go back to Europe. Have worked as a sales leader over the last five years, now in Finland. And then Anton and I met during our MBA. And it's funny because A sales guy knows another sales guy. So immediately on the first day when we were in class, we, uh, we were both being very, let's say loud during the class and, uh, Anton always tells a story that I, uh, when he, when he heard me talk, he's like, ah, that's another sales guy. And then we, uh, we, we became good friends and that's basically

[Simon Peterson]: 1:06:17

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:06:17

that's the story. So from my end. Yeah, I'm currently the CEO of Epic Brief.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:06:25

Yeah, perfect. And Anton, a bit of your background, mate, we'd love to hear.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:06:29

Yeah, no, sure. It's my background comes I'm originally from Russia. I moved to Finland. What is the 1516 years ago, so it's been a long time. And yeah, I was a professional athlete. I was a I was a swimmer for most of my life. I think I stopped competing when I was 25. And yeah, then I did some coaching and at the time when I started coaching, I started working as well. So I was, but I wasn't in sales. I was, I was an accountant. I was doing accounting. I was studying accounting. Then I was doing accounting. Then I was a controller. Then I was a CFO. And the way I was introduced to sales was... I literally bought NetSuite. So I had a problem. I had the spreadsheets and I wanted to replace it with the system and I bought NetSuite. And then they reached out and said, hey, do you want to be the first person on a team in the Nordics or in Finland? And I was like, I've known nothing about sales. I don't, what am I supposed to do? They're like, don't worry. We have enough resources, nine months ramp time. I was like, okay,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:07:51

Easy.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:07:51

that sounds cool. So, yeah, obviously like, and then I learned sales there from, from an Australian, the start, Andrew was my, I think one of the, one of the, one of the people who really helped me understand sales from execution standpoint. And then he also had a lot of knowledge about like, you know, he's, he's also, he'd been in sales for a long time as an enterprise rep. So you can learn a lot from a top performing rep. And. And then I'm at Miro. at MBA, we joined a previous startup together. Um, and that's an experience of working at that startup where, um, you know, what we realized is, is as a salespeople. Like how to explain, so if you, if you, if you think about like, when you're working as a salesperson, you don't really feel the, the price of information or how important the formation is for the rest of the organization, because you're working, you're working on deals. What's important to you? you is getting that information, making notes, you know, so that you can push the deal forward. But what we experienced at that company is that is that price of information and the speed of getting it out to other people and like getting to product getting it to other kind of orgs. And, and I think that's where it's sort of connected to us two dots of like, there is a problem of me as an individual of performing those tasks to myself but then if I manage to help myself very efficiently that also helps organization as the whole a lot and that's where like a mental note was created I think at that point where we started thinking about Epic Rift.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:09:38

So tell us before we jump in, tell us a bit about Epic Brief. You know, we'd be remiss not to sort of, you know, give you guys a bit of a spook, but look, what's the problem that Epic Brief helps solve? Cause it's targeted at salespeople, is that correct?

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:09:53

Yeah, I think there's a study that we reference a lot that Salesforce came out with this year that found that 72% of a sales rep's time is spent on non-selling activities. So That's both a problem for the sales rep and for the organization that they're working in. Right.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:10:15

Massively, yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:10:16

salespeople want to want to be having conversations with customers, solving problems, strategizing, closing deals. And if they're spending 72% of their time, like doing admin, doing all these things that we as sales people, we know we, we either not very good at. Um, or we don't really love doing, um, yeah, that ends up, you know, you end up spending all your time where you're not supposed to be, or you don't want to be spending. And so our mission as a company is to, um, make human work in sales more meaningful and valuable. And how we're doing that is using AI to basically eliminate those parts of the job that. that we don't want to be doing or we're not very good at. From an organizational perspective, if you start top down, there's a lot of issues that you as a sales leader see, you know, are there sales reps delivering the pitch the way you think it should be delivered? Are the sales reps just, do they have a structure? Like you often see sales reps operating a little bit like headless chickens. You know, they're going from

[Dan Bartels]: 1:11:40

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:11:41

one thing to another, trying to manage things, but they have absolutely no project management skills whatsoever. So, you know, we're providing an AI system that allows organizations and the reps to structure the way they do things. One of the cool features that we have is let's say you have a methodology like medic and you want sales reps to fill the CRM with medic you want them to keep notes about medic we allow you to build like templates in our system and then after the call you get a an AI generated summary of medic fields that you. basically had in the conversation and we will automatically update your CRM fields for you, provide you that with that report which is just your notes in summary. Personally, Epic Brief has been a bit of a personal mission for me. I have ADHD, so for me like the idea of taking notes on a call is really difficult. because and it has to do with what happens after the call or going into a follow-up call. I often can't remember things so I'll jump over call and I just can't remember I can't remember the exact details so when I'm getting ready for another call I start to panic because

[Dan Bartels]: 1:13:14

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:13:14

I just can't I can't remember and so Because of that, I have a choice I have to make. Either I focus really intensely on a conversation and try to take really good notes, but then if I'm trying to take good notes, I'm not focusing on the conversation with the client.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:13:35

Yep.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:13:35

So we just want to eliminate these kinds of trade-offs that are happening in the organization and just make the lives of sales reps easier so they can just do what they love. So long

[Dan Bartels]: 1:13:48

So

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:13:48

story

[Dan Bartels]: 1:13:48

I mean, that's, yeah, that's something we've talked about so many times in our working careers, you know, like the cardinal sin of a rep is going by yourself because you can't write notes and think and talk to someone at the same time. And, or even worse than that, you're in that scenario where I'm waiting for you to finish so I can talk and tell you what I remembered from three minutes ago. But in the meantime, I've not captured anything of what you just said. Right. So I think what you're trying to solve is amazing.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:14:17

And by the time you write it down in the CRM system, you know, some of the content you've completely forgotten and

[Dan Bartels]: 1:14:24

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:14:24

you end up making it up and then that becomes gospel.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:14:28

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:14:29

Yeah, yeah, I think one of the use case I know, I know Dan and Simon, you worked in enterprise B2B SaaS companies. I think one of the most stressful situations for reps in the larger companies where you have a resource pool of pre-sales, that conversation of trying to get a resource from pre-sales with the fact that you've made bad notes. That is an extremely stressful situation because you're going to be given a question here and say, is this filled in? No, go back to discovery and you go,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:06

You

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:06

oh

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:06

don't

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:06

my

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:06

get

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:06

God,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:07

the engineer.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:07

I cannot go to discovery, I already done it, I just do not remember.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:13

Yeah, and there's something, you know, pre-sales managers love not giving resources to AEs that can't get their

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:20

Hahaha

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:20

details right. That makes them happy.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:15:23

Yep. And then even worse, you have the other side of the equation where you've got reps who'll say, because I can't, the, the essays won't trust me in my notes. You've got to come in on meeting one. Well, we know we'd have, we don't have enough resources for them to come in on meeting one. So how do we, how do we balance this out? Right. So it's, it's a real problem.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:15:41

Absolutely.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:41

And it's, it's a, there's a crazy amount of meetings that you

[Dan Bartels]: 1:15:46

Yes.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:15:46

do. SDR to AE handoff. It's a meeting. Sure. The SDR, you know, manager will say, just send a note and then the AE will be like, yeah, can we have a meeting? Like, I want to know what's really, what was this? What happened? Right.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:16:01

What did you not

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:16:02

Or there's

[Dan Bartels]: 1:16:02

write down?

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:16:02

the, yeah, AE to pre-sales or worse yet, like. AE to customer success manager handoff. And, and, and there's all of these like touch points in the sales process, just that are the breakdown and they're also inconsistent, like there's just lack of consistency. There's some reps that we know, uh, just to tell you that there are reps in this world that we have met, and I think it's maybe 12 to 15% that are excellent at filling the CRM. uh, taking notes, uh, being that quarterback who's just a great project manager, but that's maybe 15% or less than 15% of, of sales reps. So

[Simon Peterson]: 1:16:51

Yep. You can call it that.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:16:59

you said

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:17:00

Yeah.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:17:00

you said you made the comment earlier, right? That it's, you know, reps are not doing it well. I think the, like the piece that jumped out for me, looking at the number of reps or people in sales that, that grabbed your B2B cheat sheet is it's not that they don't want to do it. They don't know what to do. It's not that they've actually been shown a good method. Maybe they've been shown two or three parts of this whole system before, but they don't have an overall picture of all the different aspects. And okay, if I'm to do this holistically and properly, what are those pieces? So it's probably a good segue for us to jump in and start talking about the cheat sheet, right? And let me just chuck it up on the screen for everybody. But it's...

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:17:44

Well, before we jump into that, I think

[Dan Bartels]: 1:17:46

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:17:47

you guys want to hear, do you want to hear what it's like to go viral?

[Dan Bartels]: 1:17:52

Please, that would be amazing. Tell

[Simon Peterson]: 1:17:54

we'd

[Dan Bartels]: 1:17:54

us.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:17:54

love to.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:17:56

Well, I'll just share parts. It's a shared story, mainly Anton's story, but, um, you know, it was a Tuesday, just a regular, regular Tuesday, right? Yeah. And Anton's actually been posting quite religiously, like every day, every day consistently, just like, just a grind, like every, every day, every day. And he can talk about like, like secrets to, you know, to success on LinkedIn. because he's really an expert.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:18:29

I see you shaking your head back there.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:18:33

But it was a regular Tuesday. He's like, I was thinking of posting this and I was like, yeah. Like every day we talk about what are we doing? It's like our content strategy because sales reps are on LinkedIn. So that's where we want to have the conversation. So he makes his post and it was like 11 a.m. in Helsinki. And you know... pretty good. Like it got some good engagement. Three hours into three hours into the into the post. We were just like, this is so bizarre. Like what is going like what is going on? Like I don't know, it had like every five or three to five seconds you hear, ting,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:19:22

Ding ding ding. Wow.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:19:27

because LinkedIn just turned off the notifications on comments, likes, it just turned it off because it's, it's constant. So all you hear is just like, ting, ting. And I was like, I can't take it. It turned off the turn off the sound and how not to make them pop up, you know, like when they

[Dan Bartels]: 1:19:44

Yeah.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:19:44

get new messages that they don't pop up, they just stay there. And then

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:19:50

it was about around four o'clock, I have two little kids. So the reason why I remember this is because, you know, as a startup founder, we unfortunately, if my wife is listening, like I'm sorry, honey, for all the time I'm away from my family, but You know, that was the day where I had promised my wife. I had promised her that I would go and have ice cream with the kids. I would spend the evening with my children. So I'm out at four, typically my day ends at six or later. And I'm out there with my kids. And I just I'm looking at Anton's post and I'm like, it was going like it was going nuts. And I remember calling Anton. like, yeah, we need to get back in the office. Like, like, you know, there's this whole idea in life of power laws too. So like, you know, one hour of your life could have more impact on your life than like all the preceding hours in your entire

[Simon Peterson]: 1:20:56

I'm going

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:20:57

life.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:20:57

to take a few

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:20:57

And I started

[Simon Peterson]: 1:20:58

minutes

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:20:59

thinking like, could this

[Simon Peterson]: 1:20:59

get

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:20:59

be

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:00

this

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:00

like a

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:00

done. So,

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:00

power

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:00

I'm going

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:01

law moment?

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:01

to go

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:01

Like,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:01

ahead and

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:02

what

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:02

get

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:02

if

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:02

this

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:02

we're

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:02

done.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:21:03

actually, like, could this be one of those moments where we can't really Every other day would have been fine for me to go home at four, but like that day, that day is like maybe the day where I would regret like going home early. So yeah, that was a moment where we went back in the office. And, uh, I think we were, I think it was like a two week. It ended up being, I think. You know, Anton and I were basically working around the clock every day until four in the morning, every day. We wanted to because the way the

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:21:47

algorithm works is you have to keep answering, you have to keep

[Dan Bartels]: 1:21:51

the

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:21:52

doing that. And our strategy was until four or like three, four, so that you guys in Australia actually wake up.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:21:59

Yep.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:21:59

and kick in

[Dan Bartels]: 1:22:00

And

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:22:00

the

[Dan Bartels]: 1:22:00

it

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:22:00

algorithm.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:22:00

keeps pushing, yeah.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:22:01

So then it goes to India and then we can sleep while it's in India and we have to wake up and give it a push to Europe and then the US wakes up and it's sort of like going this way. Yeah and a lot of people asked us, there

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:22:13

was maybe a few people who said why don't you just share a link? Why don't you just share a link? Why are you engaging with all these people? And we thought to ourselves like yeah it makes sense but we wanted to build like an actual relationship with everybody. And our engineering team, very logical, was like, this doesn't make any sense, guys. Like, just post a link, let people download. But like, for us, we're like, do you know how many cold calls it would take to have this kind of a relationship with all of these amazing people

[Dan Bartels]: 1:22:52

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:22:53

and like, have conversations, you know, we're on the, on, on Anton's LinkedIn and just having conversations with people and, and that, you can't put a price on that. Like you cannot put a price on, you know, we could always do a, a post and people download it, but like having actual conversations with our, you know, who we've been building Epic Brief for, you, you just can't.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:23:18

Priceless.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:23:19

So it was, it was, it was painful for two. Yeah.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:23:24

Absolutely. It's interesting. It kind of begs the question because I think naturally you two are sales people and I can tell by the fact that you just didn't put a link you wanted to engage. I mean, that tells me that you sales 101 engage. But what is it about? the post that or what does it say about sales people in general? Do we just not know what we're doing and we see a diagram that simplifies b2b

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:23:53

Yeah.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:23:53

sales and we jump all over it? Does it mean that nobody in sales knows what they're doing and it took a very simple link here to define it for people? What is it that resonated do you think?

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:24:06

I think it's very fundamental to go. So we talk with Mir a lot and that's the reason we connected on this whole topic when we met is unfortunately, sales is not seen as a profession in many, many circles. And when something is not seen as a profession, you are not expected to study it, to learn it. If you're an accountant, even if you're not doing debit credit at your job, you're expected to know what is a debit and what is a credit, right? But if you're a salesperson and you are going into, and you're getting your first job or you're getting ready for the job, nobody educates you what is pain and value, you know, which is debit and credit in many ways, right? So... I think that is the fundamental kind of issue of why there are a lot of salespeople and there are a lot of sales leaders as well who are just kind of they're yearning for information, they're yearning for some structure, they're yearning for something which will help them. kind of put the complexity of b2b sales in something consumable, even if it's not, you know, some of the things might not be actionable, but it just helps you understand or helps you map things out. And I think that is maybe the reason why it was, people were kind of, they were responsive to that type of content. It just fundamentally... It's not that they are not willing to study the profession, it's just that they're never expected to study it because it's not really seen as a profession.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:26:03

Yeah, I think you're right. That's a really accurate assessment of it. Simon and I have talked in the past about one of the challenges for salespeople is that there's no degree, there's no certification you can have to prove to someone other than your previous roles. So, you know, you can, you can, everyone talks about, oh, is it the gift of the gab that someone has? No, there's so much more to sales than just being able to talk. In fact, you know, the first lesson you learn as a salesperson is you've got two ears and

[Simon Peterson]: 1:26:32

Mm-hmm.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:26:32

one mouth and use them in that proportion, right? Like it's about listening to your customer. It's about listening to their problems and their challenges. So look, you know, I think what you guys have built really shows a... an understanding of the challenge of sales and salespeople. And maybe we should jump into the tool, the sheet itself and have a look at kind of, what it uncovers and let me just share it on the screen and we'll kind of talk through some bits and pieces. But the, there we go, should be up. So there you go, 10,000, as of a few minutes ago, there's 10,000 comments on a post from salespeople talking about... Hey, can I get a copy of this to understand more about my profession? Can I understand? And even if I, and when I looked at this and, you know, thanks so much for sharing the content with me and Simon, but there wasn't anything in here that I didn't know, but so many of the graphs that you put together gave me a way to look at what I already knew in a framework. And to your point, Anton, around understanding debits and credits, I understood those, but I hadn't thought about some of them. Some of them I knew and had a much better understanding of, but others I knew instinctually, but I didn't have a model for. And that's what really helped me. But I mean, look guys, for any piece of B2B salesperson content firstly, 416 reposts, that's out of control. It just,

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:28:09

you.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:28:09

it shows how influential this content is already. So, Let's jump in and talk about some of these pieces. And I think, you know, even just discussing these, the four of us, I'm sure we're all gonna walk away with a whole bunch of knowledge from it. So let's have a look. So B2B selling types. You know, you guys, you know, pull this together. Where do you think people get this type, understanding

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:28:31

I think the first thing that like, one of the hardest things that salespeople have is understanding just the type of selling that they're doing and recognizing like, like is applying the right type of approach. to the type of selling that they

[Dan Bartels]: 1:28:58

Yes.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:28:58

are doing. And that conflict is manifests itself in strategic issues. For for example, for me, I'm a big fan of spin selling. Super simple, foundational, Neo Rachman's work on spin foundational work that a lot of other sales, methodologists, or books based their, their thinking on. And, and, and what one of the things that I experienced, when I was working at Qualtrics, was that the first book that people gave me was the Challenger sale. And it's a little bit like giving someone the like, like an advanced book on sales and say start here. Like, like, do challenger when you don't know anything about spin, you don't even know how to ask the right questions. And you're supposed to show up with this level of confidence that the challenger you know, be a challenger that in itself is a challenge. When you give a new rep this book and you read it and you're like, how am I ever going to do this? And the problem isn't challenging, is the fact that there are just fundamentals, like spin, that would be maybe better to first understand how to ask people really good questions before you teach people how to approach calls. And for me, I see it more like uh, like spin and then like, uh, provocative selling or, or challenge or sells on top of it. Once you understand spin, then you can add the, you know, uh, the world is shifting, you know, the,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:31:07

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:31:08

you know, there's a big change in the world. Uh, it's shifted. There's a problem. You know, you, you create like the provocative sale on top of just spin. Um, But if you, when I talk about strategic issues, if you just go into challenger sale mode without teaching spin, deals, what I've noticed is that deals don't have just like fundamental, they don't have the fundamental like gasoline or energy to get closed because you're not able to. actually, you're talking really high level. I see this in organizations that are able to book a lot of meetings, you know, we're building a new category, so forth, and they book a ton of meetings on the on the top of the funnel, with really like new category type of messaging. But then sales, the sales cycle stall, they don't move forward. And it's because sales reps are not able to tie the situation to problems, are not able to quantify those problems. They just, these deals just don't have any fuel. And then the sales operations or sales enablement leadership team is like, what's going on? Like, like we have this cool message, but then, and then it's booking us a bunch of meetings, but then, you know, the middle or lower end of the funnel, it's just, there's nothing, nothing is moving, moving forward.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:32:48

Yeah. It's got a flat end. It doesn't

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:32:50

Yeah,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:32:50

have

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:32:50

it

[Dan Bartels]: 1:32:50

a

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:32:50

flatlines. And,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:32:51

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:32:52

and, and I am serious. I have talked to hundreds of sales leaders and, and many of them have the same situation. They're implementing something like challenger and, and they're, they're wondering what's going on. And it's fundamentally from this problem of just not understanding spin. And the reason why no one understands spin is because no one reads It is one of those books that is just exhausting to read. It's a bit old school, you know,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:33:27

Yes, it is. Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:33:28

but it's one of those books once you get it, you know, like what is the difference between implicit and explicit needs

[Dan Bartels]: 1:33:35

Yes.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:33:35

and understanding differences? And that's a lot of the really exciting posts that I see from like sales influencers on LinkedIn. They're just basically saying what is in spin, right? They're saying, hey, just because someone says there's a problem doesn't mean they're gonna buy. There's different types of problems. And that's all that Neil talks about in his book. What are the differences between these things, right? So, you know, I maybe went a little bit off tangent here,

[Dan Bartels]: 1:34:09

No, I get it.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:34:10

but the whole point is like. This to me is also a strategic document. So it's understanding, you have to understand what type of selling you're doing. Are you doing the type of selling that's appropriate for the type of products that you're selling the price points that you're selling. And so like, not only strategically, but also, I'm trying to express the, you know, the issue that you as a sales rep have. when maybe you as a leadership team haven't aligned your price point with the sales approach because from a sales risk perspective, you're actually kind of doing the wrong, you're applying, you're putting the wrong medicine on the problem, right? You're prescribing, what is it? Prescribe without prescripts? Yeah, we say this right prescription without diagnosis is malpractice

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:14

Yeah.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:16

We tell our reps to think that but

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:17

Yes.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:21

then on our own sales organizations We're just like let's do challenger.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:22

That's

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:22

Let's

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:22

a challenge.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:22

do like

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:23

It's

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:23

whatever and we're not prescribing

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:25

I saw a post the other day from a girl who's

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:35:28

Heh.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:35:28

a couple of years into running her own software company. They've been trying to build a PLG, a product-led growth company, and completely misunderstanding. Great. You can... run product-led growth just be prepared for and one of the columns you possibly left out of here is that the quantity of pipeline that you need to get to the deals that you'll close out of that. So some interesting stats that Winning by Design have pulled together is if you're running PLG, which in this graph is the self-service line, you typically require up to 8x pipeline. Whereas if you're looking at that challenger, provocative, almost account-based marketing strategic engagement, You might only require two and a half to three X pipeline to get to those numbers. And your deals are much larger, but your sales cycles longer. Now, if you've got to build eight X pipeline, that's hard. That's a lot of emails. That's a lot of understanding different customer bases. There's a lot of people downloading trials and engaging in and spending money that you haven't possibly got. And that's the same if you're a salesperson, if your business is driving and saying, Hey, listen, let's push a whole bunch of your customer basing to self-serve. Well, okay. Are we expecting that a hundred percent of these self-serve deals are going to close because that actually isn't what the data tells us. If you go back and do the research, do the reading, understand what's going to happen, you want to give all of our license upsells to a customer to do themselves rather than us when they come and say, I might want some more licenses. Actually go and sell them that. So like there's all these pieces back within that cell type, even once you've understood where you are. that salespeople don't necessarily do the research or the study to understand what is it you're actually trying to do. You know, if you're a B2B sales, but you're not selling software, you're selling services, then you're absolutely gonna be in solution or consultative. Because even though if you've packaged it up, the service delivery is different for each client and their needs. So, you know, it's not a transactional engagement unless potentially what you are selling is, you know, there are lots of... Um, so the security companies that are just selling the hours of people, well, that's, it's not consultative. It's I'm just selling the, I'm a body shop and I'm selling the transactional hours. So it's actually understanding the different models. And as a result of that, what should I roll out to my team? So I think

[Simon Peterson]: 1:37:49

I look

[Dan Bartels]: 1:37:50

like, this

[Simon Peterson]: 1:37:50

like

[Dan Bartels]: 1:37:50

is an amazing

[Simon Peterson]: 1:37:50

I agree.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:37:51

overview of it. Yeah.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:37:51

Yeah. I think it's, it's an interesting one down because I look at this and I think that I would give this to the sales enablement team before I showed that the salesperson, cause I think, you know, I've spent years rolling out sales methods. Um, way back in the day when I was at SEP and the, the enablement function often looks at the shiny new object, not the problem they're trying to solve. And I love. the comment there around spin as being a foundation. I mean, that was probably the first methodology I learned. But it was interesting because I went from spin to solution selling, to consultative selling, to challenger sale, but it was never put succinctly. It was almost like the new methodology replaced the old methodology rather than building upon

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:38:37

Yes.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:38:37

it. And I think if I'm a 22 year old, I'm a BDR, I'm just getting my sales, you know, motions going, it put me in front of an executive and asked me to do challenger sales. A, I don't have the background and experience. I'm just not gonna be credible at it. So I love the idea of, it's almost like you guys are defining the university course for sales that doesn't exist. I mean, sales 101 might be some spin selling. By the time you're doing your PhD, that's when you're starting to do challenger sale.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:39:16

Yeah, it's a lot about like I used to be coaching swimming, I was coaching teenagers who were going into like teenage or sort of like youth national finish team. And one of the things I found in and it's especially true in countries where some sort of sports are not sort of very strong historically, like you know, in us like, you know, his historical sports where the country is just very strong in and they have very good base of coach coaches and the culture of coaching. But in Finland for us, I'm assuming is not one of those sports. And you can see how I always was saying like why people are watching at how Michael Phelps is training and then applying the same training methodology or training pro programs to a 12 year old. There's a certain path how you get to some level and from, if you get to the level of Michael Phelps, how he got there, right, then you apply the same things what he is doing today. You're not taking stuff from there and saying, you know what, this is a new thing. I'm going to teach my 12 year old or 16 year old or 18 year old to do that.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:40:32

Yep.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:40:32

It's a completely different path. There's a certain way how to get there, but somehow people always search for shortcuts and I don't understand why. this is in every profession everywhere there is a talent can get you to the result right like you can bypass it you can shortcut without knowing things but at the end of the day if you want to consistently produce Michael Phelps's right like you're not training them on what your current Michael Phelps your current top rep how they are training you're not gonna you should not be training your junior or low performing reps on the way they're doing like it's it's just

[Simon Peterson]: 1:41:12

You've got

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:41:12

not

[Simon Peterson]: 1:41:12

to take

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:41:12

gonna

[Simon Peterson]: 1:41:12

them on

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:41:12

work

[Simon Peterson]: 1:41:13

the journey.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:41:13

in many ways.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:41:14

Yeah.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:41:15

Yeah.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:41:17

I want to jump forward in our conversation here a couple of the slides and we'll put this up in a link for everyone to download and have a look at. But I thought this was a really interesting addition to the overview of the cheat sheet, which is the first 19 months of a failing VP of sales. And the reason I think this is super interesting, right. In my recruitment process, when I've looked at reps and again, Simon and I have worked together for a long time. I've been a huge proponent of actually looking at people who've failed. And like, have you been managed out of a role? Have you taken a job where it was beyond your capacity? And I'm just going to, I'm going to share this for everybody here. Cause I was cleaning up, I moved house recently, right. And I, um, I, I found my first performance improvement plan. That's, that's it there. Um, from when I was about 20 and I looked back on that plan and I was horrendous. I, and to your point before Anton, I didn't know how to sell and I hadn't been through, you know, 10, 15 years of, of knowing how to sell. So I'm not surprised when I read through all the things that I couldn't do. I'm like, yeah, I had no idea what those things were. And when I look here at the, you know, the first 19 months of, of failing as a VP of sales, you know, I've been through. so many of the aspects of what you've called out here in, in like the first 12 months that I had as a VP of sales. Simon was actually my boss at the time. I was pretty awful. And some of my reps or former reps who are listening to this will laugh, but it is absolutely this journey that you go on and expecting that anybody stepping in to be a VP of sales is going to be successful in the first, when they land in the ground, it's just not, it's just not how it happens. So I'd love to hear a bit of kind of your background, thinking around sort of the detail in here. And we're not gonna read through all the bits and pieces, but like, what was your experience to getting kind of to this map?

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:43:13

Yeah, I think. I think the thinking was we talked with Mirro when we were working together at the previous company is this idea of benchmarking. You're so like, you know, as a salesperson, you typically benchmark yourself to something or you know, you can benchmark yourself to other people. And this is all says like sales professionals, salespeople are highly competitive. Like you just want to know how you benchmark to others. And at some point, I think Mir and I were on like on a on just on a rampage of trying to find how to benchmark what are we doing? You know, like at the previous company versus what are the best in class? Like, what are they doing? Like, what is what does it mean to be the best to be the worst? Like how to identify that? Because nobody really. It's like we didn't see, we didn't know how to define a great sales leader, you know, or how to define a failing sales leader. So we went on a search of, is there, is there any content which can help us and just combining, you know, all that is basically, I think there's another post which, which we put together, which is about what are the best sales leaders are doing. And this, and that post was. asked like well what is great like I understand I can benchmark myself if I'm failing I can diagnose but where should I kind of try and strive for and this is this is just from our personal sort of like insecurities or just willing no wanting to understand are we doing good or are we doing bad you know and that's one of the Yeah, that's the, those are just one of the things where you went on a, on a, on a research path for a couple, probably a couple months or a couple years, you know, and then, uh, and then that's, yeah, you found something which works

[Simon Peterson]: 1:45:23

That's

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:45:23

or at

[Simon Peterson]: 1:45:23

amazing.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:45:24

least which kind of works for you to, to diagnose yourself. Yeah, I- Ahem.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:45:32

It's a look, I should probably put a big, big picture of this up in my home office and just every day, just have another look at it. And am I falling for any of those traps? Am I seeing myself in any of those? And I think that's, that's all part of it as well. Cause no sales leader is ever perfect. Right. I've met lots of sales leaders in my life and I've never met perfect ones. So I think constantly looking at something like this is really very reassuring.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:46:01

Yeah, I think the fundamental question to me around failure is it's a how we think about failure is a diagnosis around the type of company or working in. So as a VP of sales, if you're failing, the real question is trying to understand, like, Failure is only failure if you're in a company that doesn't support failure. You know? So the question really is about like, are you in an organization where are you playing to lose? You know, is it really is it about are you playing to win? Do people do you work in a company where people hedge? And make bets in that way where they hedge their risk or are people playing to win?

[Simon Peterson]: 1:47:10

Yep.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:47:11

And if you're playing to win, it's OK to fail because in order that there's a book by strategizer. where they talk about two types of companies. One is where two types of strategies in a business, one on one end, their companies where they want gradual growth. Gradual growth is in numbers, it's like 10% improvement. Right? I hear from my friends that are, you know, McKinsey consultants, and they tell me like the deep dark secret about consulting and they tell me you know what as long as we can get 10 growth we'll renew the contract we're not here to give you 50 growth we don't go there to give it if we can get 10 we're good whatever we do we wash our hands we go to the next project but it has to be 10 and that's just gradual improvement If you want disruptive growth, like disruption, that's measured in 50% growth. That's where disruption, the number is 50%. And so if you want 50% growth versus 10% growth, you better fail. You better understand. You better, you better teach your company not to hedge their bets, to play politics, to do all this. Um, and so that is the failure question. Like, tell, if you ask somebody, tell me about one of your most recent failures that you've had in your role. What happened? And if they say, if they say, if they're comfortable saying, you know, I made a mistake, I failed because of these reasons. It's a good sign that you're in a company where people are trying to get disruptive growth. But if they say, well, I didn't hire the right team, I didn't, and it's externalizing everything. The team wasn't right, the product market fit wasn't there, the product wasn't good, whatever you're externalizing,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:49:37

Marketing didn't give

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:49:37

you're

[Simon Peterson]: 1:49:38

me enough leads.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:49:38

a company, yeah, you're in a company, it's not your fault. I'm telling you, it's a systemic issue. You're in a company where you're being taught to hedge your bets. You're not in a company that is... And that's where there's this weird discrepancy, especially in startups, where you're being told, we are in a company where we're trying to find, you know, 3X, 2X growth. But the culture, if you assess your culture on failure and you ask them, to talk about failure and they're not being self-critical about failure. You know you've created a company where failure is not a… and you're never going to… trust me, you're not going to get disruptive growth that way. It's not happening.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:50:32

It's a thing as salespeople, right? And great salespeople get really comfortable with the fact that they will lose more deals and they'll win. And they learn from failure and failure becomes a badge of honor rather than it becoming a problem with their identity or the way that they operate. And it's not about you being one step closer to the next winner, any of those things. It's about, I know I have to go through this process. You know, you gave the example before Anton of Michael Phelps, like Michael's lost plenty of races. He lost races at the Olympics before he won any, right? And along the way, he learned how to swim. He learned how to race. He learned how to train. You know, he went through that journey and people put those efforts in and got the out. You know, he stood on the shoulders of others, but he had to do the work and he understood how to learn from failure. And I do want to jump to the next part of this. We won't go through all the slides here, but I, this is a piece that, that everybody looks for when you join sales. And I think you guys have done an amazing job here at showing the, the optionality around like what a sales career looks like. And. The one bit that jumps out of this diagram to me is there's no straight lines. And I don't know whether you do that intentionally or it was just your software, but there is no straight lines in a sales career. Both Simon and I talk about this on a regular basis around our careers and I'm sure you guys gave descriptions of how you got to doing what you're doing today. Anyone who is looking for that. you know, step between I've joined sales and how do I go from here to being an enterprise AI and earning millions of bucks? There isn't a straight line. How do you wanna go about it? How do you wanna find the outcome? So again, is this diagram here based on kind of your experiences, you know, any additions or changes now that you've seen this for a little while that you put in there? Simon, love to get your thoughts on this model as well.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:52:40

Yeah. Look, it's an interesting thing. Obviously, SAS sales career, any sales career in B2B sales is a winding, tripping up journey. You join the wrong company. It's got bad culture. You take two steps backwards before you go forwards. It's trial and error. And I think to the conversation we were just having before, making mistakes, oh my god, it's painful at the time, but boy, that's when you learn. And I think that the last sort of 10 years or so for me in SaaS, that career ladder at some of the biggest SaaS companies has become overly prescriptive. And I think that's a shame. I think that... It's always nice to hire people into roles because you know they can do the job and you see a spark, but they don't necessarily have to have followed the exact career path. I've hired people that are new to sales, but based on their curiosity, based on their life experience, you know they're going to be great salespeople. But the traditional inbound to outbound, SDR, BDR, inter-junior sales rep, SMB, mid-market commercial enterprise sales leader, I don't think that's necessarily the only way you can go. I do think it's a varied and interesting way to do things. And I mean, look, me personally, my sales career didn't follow that path. I've never been in a BDR and SDR, but other people will swear by that path. And I think everybody's different. So there is no standard career path. If I drew this diagram for me, it'd surprise the hell out of you some of the things that I've done. I've worked for software companies for 30 years. I started as a coder, ABAP coder, and did that for six months. I hated coding, but it gave me a taste for getting in front of a client and solving their problems. Then I spent 10 years in consulting. I moved into sales leadership before I moved into any direct bag carrying sales role. So I'm certainly not the typical, but I think we're all different.

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:54:58

Yeah, I wish I wish we could take credit for this view this is a found in a in a book by I think it was like a sales enablement playbook book I can't remember. I've, I've even connected to this guy Hillman sorry Corey Bray these guys, they write a lot of good content. And I found this because I was hiring SDRs. And the guys were, and I remember this stuck in my head because I had an SDR, really good friend, Matt, and he, he was just asking me career advice. And I was like, I have this, I found, remember this content and I sent it to him. And just having it might, you're right, Simon, it's not, it's not a linear path. Um, I think most people, most salespeople that you talk to. They didn't like plan to be in sales. I'm one of the rare ones that did plan to be in sales. I can tell that story. But like, most, it's not a linear. It's, actually Anton is a good example of that because he was a CFO, he was a financial controller. And then he's in sales. So, swimmer.

[Simon Peterson]: 1:56:26

I'd

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:56:26

Yeah, I think it's...

[Simon Peterson]: 1:56:27

some of the best sales guys I've ever worked with came up through consulting, came up through accounting because by definition they've got empathy for the other side of their sales equation. They've been in roles that you're now selling to. So they really genuinely understand what it feels like to go through the pain of a massive software-induced change effort within an organization.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:56:52

Yeah, yeah, I think when you mentioned Simon, you mentioned consulting, I think. or one of the things I, for example, didn't know about three years ago, I was always thinking about consultants that, and I was always wondering why don't they have any sales people, you know? And then there was this realization when we were working for a company who was in transfer pricing technology and you start researching consultants and you just have to research how it works. And then we figured that, you know, actually partners are salespeople,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:57:29

Close there.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:57:29

you know,

[Simon Peterson]: 1:57:30

Yep.

[Anton Dobrzhanskiy]: 1:57:30

and that's the, and that was the craziest part of me. I was like, I was like, wow, actually it makes sense. The highest paid person is the one who lands the deal, you know, and assembles the team and quarterbacks the team. And it's, it made sense because I never really understood before that, that is like why in so extremely highly paid. You know, and the reason why is because they're sales people.

[Dan Bartels]: 1:58:02

That's it. Absolutely. Well, boys, if we're getting to the top of the hour, so we'll, you know, pull a halt there. We are genuinely thankful for you joining. I know the time zone has been a bit challenging. So I really appreciate you guys. jumping on early in your day. But look, we do ask everyone as a parting thought for our listeners, look, what's something you give people other than this amazing cheat sheet, as I press stop there, what's a parting thought you give to listeners? You've got this amazing product coming out that I think is gonna solve a whole heap for people. So, I mean, we'll drop a link in there if they can join, in the description see if to join the... the waiting list, et cetera. But what would you guys lead listeners with?

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:58:50

We're both waiting for each other to speak now. Who comes up with it? Who comes up with

[Simon Peterson]: 1:58:56

That's a wise lesson

[Miro Putkonen]: 1:58:56

something good? Yeah. No, I think my hope is that... The thing that's been driving me for many years now is that I actually, I do believe, and you mentioned like winning by design, like Jaco. Um, a lot of these people who are really investing a lot of time, I do believe there is, um, a science behind sales. I do genuinely believe that there is a way there, there are parts to sales which never can be automated. Um, you know, we talk about at Epic Brief that what we want to solve is, let's say there's like a ladder of things that we can solve. We want to solve the art, we want to solve the manual work. So we want to offer automation. We want to augment salespeople in terms of their needs analysis, problem solving, strategic thinking with AI. The stuff that that the X factor, the thing that makes us conscious humans is our emotions, our understanding of one another. I have a hope that never gets underestimated, the importance of the human, the emotions in sales, because it's a game of trust. I hope that is like AI becomes more mainstream, that sales leaders and organizations who are already making the mistake of underestimating sales as a profession, that they don't think that they can automate sales because you cannot automate human, the emotions. You should think of augmenting salespeople, helping them. But I think we have a bit of a problem in our hands because people don't understand what salespeople do and they don't understand that sales is complex. But if they did understand it, then they could actually solve a lot of issues. I have a belief that if you understand sales, you actually can solve product market fit issues because the key to innovation is actually understanding sales.

[Dan Bartels]: 2:01:29

Okay.

[Miro Putkonen]: 2:01:29

So there's a lot of things that I hope that people actually spend time understanding sales, that this notion of this perception about sales will go away, and that then the people understand that the complexity and the value of salespeople is ultimately in how a lot of salespeople are very in tune with their. with understanding humans and psychology. And I mean, there's a whole field of economics called behavioral economics for a reason. Right. So I really hope that that's my hope in the for the for the future. And, and given that hope and that vision for the future that people can reach out to us, we can continue like in a conversation. We obviously hope people join our waitlist because it will help with those for first four steps in the ladder. But the people have an open conversation with us and like we were doing today. That's my hope. Now Anton's had a second to think so. Oh, we're done.

[Dan Bartels]: 2:02:38

Any parting thoughts, my friend?

[Miro Putkonen]: 2:02:41

No, I'm not going to try and beat that.

[Dan Bartels]: 2:02:47

That was, that was, that was, I think that's the best party thoughts you've had. So I appreciate that. Well, Anton, Miro, thank you so much for joining us. Simon, as always, mate, thank you for joining, joining us as well. Um, I, that was just an amazing conversation. You guys have got a wealth of knowledge around sales. You know, what you're doing with Epic brief is, is I think is setting salespeople up to take the next step. Um, so for all of our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. If you've. listening, if you're watching us on YouTube, please click down below, subscribe and like, uh, share the video if you can. If you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple, uh, please give us five stars and put some comments in until your friends are at the podcast. Uh, mate, give us a comment. Let us know that you're listening. Is there any feedback? Um, we'll give some links through to, uh, the guys at Epic brief, uh, so you can connect with them and get a copy of this. Um, we really do appreciate everyone for your time. Thank you so much for joining us.

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Daniel Bartels

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Simon Peterson

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