Operations with Sean Lane | Why Agile Sales Reps Win More Deals with Michelle Vazzana

So Sean, we started really just focusing on sales managers because we felt like they were a very underleveraged and under-attended-to population. They were basically getting ignored. Sales people were getting all the time and attention and training and support, and sales managers were basically just said, 'Here, go get them, tiger.' And we didn't feel like that was the best way to treat a role that is one of the most important leverage points in the sales force. So we started really doing a lot of research in that area. We had some findings that were pretty innovative at that time and started developing training programs based on those findings. So for the first, I guess, seven years, seven to eight years of our existence as a company, we just focused on sales management and sales leadership. Did all kinds of research around sales metrics, sales management practices, new sales pipeline, and how the sales pipeline is managed. And then that ended up with our two books, "Cracking the Sales Management Code" and "Crushing Quota," the first two books, and our series of training programs and frameworks aligned to that. So we really honed in just on that layer within the sales force for the first eight years of our existence, because for two reasons: number one, we wanted to make sure that everything that we did was based on quantitative research of high performers. Right, so we do research first and then we develop frameworks and training based on the research. We don't do it the other way around. And since we're so dedicated to research, we just focused on the sales managers. Number one, because we could research them fairly easily, and number two, they were being ignored. We stayed away from salesperson training for a long time because, quite frankly, we felt like there was nothing really innovative out there. You know, we weren't really horribly impressed by anything that we had seen, and we didn't want to create another flavor of vanilla. So yeah, that's where we started, and that's really our legacy, quite frankly, is in our sales management research, our sales management training, and our first two books.

Yeah, so we were finding some very interesting patterns, Sean, when we did the research on sales management. And we thought that we were going to identify what's the one best way to coach and manage, what's the one best way to use sales metrics. And we didn't find any of that. What we found is patterns. And we found patterns in behavior, and one of the patterns that kind of jumped out immediately was there's no one-size-fits-all. So there's patterns that high performers exhibit that average and low performers don't, but it doesn't unfold exactly the same in different organizations or in managing different sales roles. So we learned that you can't just teach a manager this one way to use data, or this one way to manage the pipeline, or this one way to coach your sellers, because that just would not have been accurate and representative of what high performers really do. So this whole idea of no one-size-fits-all was important. And the other thing that became really obvious to us is that the best managers were the best decision makers. They were maniacal about prioritizing the effort of their sellers and their own effort, and they didn't try to do everything. They honed in on what they felt were the highest leverage points, and they managed and coached the heck out of those. And those leverage points, of course, differ by organization, by sales role, by go-to-market strategy. That's why there was this sort of no one-size-fits-all. So that was a big theme that we had noticed. Now, what was interesting is I became aware of a researcher, Dr. Leff Bonney at the Florida State University Sales Institute, because at that time I was doing my PhD research and he was a professor at FSU. And one of my former colleagues said, 'You need to meet this guy because you guys are saying a lot of the same things.' I said, 'Well, I'll be glad to talk to him.' So we had a call, and he started sharing with me some of his research, and I thought, 'That's fascinating. That's the most innovative thing that I've heard my entire time in sales.' And so you could basically take our messaging around no one-size-fits-all, but you know, it depends. Sales managers are agile. And he was saying all the same things about sales people. So he had done a series of studies, number one in sales methodology, and then on adaptation, adaptive behavior in sellers: who does it, does it matter, does it lead to higher win rates, and if they do flex, what do they do? So we started comparing notes and realized that there was a lot of similarities in the research, in the findings and the themes. So I became extremely interested in that research. We ended up bringing that research into Vantage Point, along with Dr. Bonney for a relatively short period, and he went back to teaching, which he loves, which he's really good at. But he's a phenomenal researcher. So we thought, okay, this is really fascinating. And his findings were: there is not one best sales methodology out there. You know, people think it might be SPIN, it might be some other flavor of consultative selling, it might be Challenger. And the answer was no. There was not one methodology that actually kind of rose to the top as sort of the one way to do it. And he found that the highest performing sellers actually flex between four different patterns of selling behavior, not one. And they flex based on the situation they face. Like a really successful quarterback, they don't necessarily run the play they were going to run. They check out the defense, and you know, sometimes they call the audible, right? Because it's all situational. And the most successful sellers do the same thing. So they're constantly scanning the environment, looking for changes in the buying situations they face, and adjusting their behavior accordingly. Average and low performing sellers basically use the same approach regardless. Right? They run the same play every time. And so that was kind of a fascinating finding: that there is not one methodology that's far superior to the others.

There's a lot of people out there, Sean, that have this perspective that you can either you're born to sell or not, you're either agile or you're not, right? And that's just bunk. And there's so much research that doesn't support that. I mean, if you take a look at Anders Ericsson, who's one of the most prolific researchers—he's no longer with us, I'm sad to say—but he did some phenomenal research into expert performance and what actually leads to expert performance. And a lot of his research was published in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers." So he's the one that came up with the 10,000 hours or 10-year principle for gaining expertise. And what he said was, experience is almost—there's almost a negligible correlation between experience and expertise, which is kind of shocking because you think, 'I've been selling for 20 years, I must be an expert.' No, as a matter of fact, you're probably not. And so what he found is that people that actually go beyond amateur status to expert status in any domain practice differently. And they practice in ways where they attend to the task, they do the practice, they get immediate feedback, and then they push outside of their comfort level. So they're constantly going to higher levels of complexity in their practice. Musicians, chess players, you know, professional athletes, you name it. They all practice. They have similar characteristics in the way they practice. So yes, you can learn this agility behavior, but you have to codify it first. So one of the things that Dr. Bonney did that was really fascinating is he said, 'This is what high performers do versus everyone else: they switch between these four different sales strategies depending upon the buying situation.' And it took research to figure that out because one of my colleagues that I talk to a lot is the consulting firm Forrester. Eric Zines, he and I chat a lot about this sales methodology thing, and he said, 'You know, high performers are the ones that are least likely to adopt your standardized methodology.' Wow. And so it's really problematic because you spend all this money and time and effort training your sales people on SPIN selling or Challenger sale or, you know, you pick your one. And your high performers only use it sometimes. And so they're not compliant, and yet they outperform everyone else. And the problem with high performers is they have a very difficult time articulating to you what they do. So you have to study them, and you have to get very granular in how you study them. And the reason they're the least likely to adopt your methodology is because they know that you can't use the same approach in every situation. Just like when you're in sports, you can't run the same play every time, or your competition would quickly figure that out and you'd lose the game. Right? So he was able to initially codify: number one, there is no one best methodology. Any one of the methodologies that he studied—there were four patterns actually of these behaviors, I'll talk about those in just a moment—but none of them emerged as a clear leader most of the time. Each of them was effective about 25, maybe 30% of the time, depending upon the nature of the sale, depending upon the competitive market. I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into that. But he identified this sort of switching behavior, which really fit with what we had learned about sales managers. And so the reason that you can learn it is because through research and then real strong effort at making this operational for the day-to-day salesperson, we've discovered how to actually teach not only how to identify a buying situation, but then how to match the right strategy to the right situation at a point in time. And so we can teach that. We do teach that. And we've seen significant uptick in organizations that teach this, even with highly experienced sellers, which is kind of interesting because they're the ones that are the most resistant, right? One of our clients, who we're actually going to do a webinar with in February, he's in the agricultural business. And he said, 'You know, when I first started introducing this to my sales force, the idea of this to my sales force, one of my most tenured guys came up to me and said, "You know, this is really not the way we do things. You know, we're consultative sellers, and that's what we do. And you want to talk to me about this sales agility thing?"' And so the sales leader said, 'You know, I want you to just suspend judgment just for a bit, and I want you to try this on for size. And if it doesn't fit for you, then you don't have to use it. But I want you to at least be open to trying it.' And when they got through the training, that senior sales guy said, 'This is the best, most relevant training I've ever had. He goes, now I get it. Consultative selling matters, but I can see how this adapting and switching will really up my game.' And they had about a 65% increase in revenue year over year.

The first thing that sellers have to understand is that agility is a mindset and a skill set. And we have to work on the mindset first, because otherwise there's not going to be any adoption of the skill set. The mindset says, here's how high performers behave. And here's the surprising thing about high performers: they're insanely curious, and they're always looking for ways to up their game, to sharpen their saw, to improve their craft, right? The average performers are the ones that get to a certain level of skill and they say, 'Yeah, I'm as good as I'm going to be, and I know how to do what I'm doing, and I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.' They're not as curious, they're not as open-minded. High performers, they're willing to be wrong, right? They're willing to learn new things, they're willing to reevaluate their approach. And this agility mindset—there was a woman named Carol Dweck, she's a PhD, and she wrote a book called "Mindset." And in her book, she talked about two different kinds of mindsets: there's a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And you've probably heard about this, right? The growth mindset is we can change. You know, we're not just the way we are. We have the ability to change at any point in time if we choose to, if we see an opportunity to get better at what we do. The fixed mindset says, 'Yeah, I'm already good at this. I already know how to do this. There's no reason for me to learn new stuff. It's only going to get in my way,' right? And so fixed mindset people tend to be more risk-averse. They're afraid of being wrong. You know, they want to constantly just prove how much they already know. Growth mindset people are ones that are just all about learning and growing and curious. And you know, they're adaptable. They want to get better. And so the first thing that we do is we help people understand that a growth mindset can be learned. It's not something that's set in stone. In fact, there's not much that is set in stone. And if you have a growth mindset, you can pretty much learn anything you want to if you're willing to apply yourself. So we start by talking about the mindset and the willingness to look at things in a different way, to reevaluate your assumptions, to not hold anything sacred, right? The other thing that we do is we really examine the skill set that's involved in agility. And when this research was initially conducted, the researchers looked out across the sales training marketplace to find out, well, who's actually teaching agility? Now that we know that sales people adjust and adapt, who's really teaching this? And there was nobody teaching it. So they had to look outside of sales at other domains. They looked at first responders, they looked at the military, particularly fighter pilots and how they're trained. And they looked at professional athletes, particularly football, professional football teams. And what they identified—they didn't exactly term it like this, but essentially they identified three components to sales agility, or to agility in any domain, whether it's sales, whether it's the military, whether it's first responders, whether it's sports team, whatever it is. And these three pillars are basically the way that we talk about them now. You have to have situational intelligence, which means you need to be able to assess and make sense of the situation you're facing. You have to have situational readiness, which means I have a variety of options of how to address this situation. What are the characteristics of the situation that indicate that one choice is better than another? So they need to have sort of a tool bag, if you will, of different tools they can pull out based on the task at hand. And then there's—and that's called situational readiness. The last piece is called situational fluency, and that's gaining the expertise and the sort of muscle memory to be able to assess and make sense of the situation, evaluate a variety of possible choices, choose one and execute that well, and then monitor changes in the situation, right? Monitor feedback, moderate changes in situation. So it's a decision-making framework. And that decision-making framework was gleaned from these domains outside of sales. So what we were able to do at Vantage Point is take this decision-making framework and actually incorporate it into a sales language and into sales behavior that reflected all three of these sort of pillars of decision making or agility, into an executable decision-making framework for sellers that allows them to learn, practice, and become competent at this mechanism of agility.

Right, right, that's right. And you know what's interesting is researchers observed this agility, right? They observed this happening and were able to codify it. So what an SDR says to you in an interview process, 'I'm really good on my feet, you know, I can move with the customer as the customer moves, I can blend and move with that situation.' A lot of people think that's inherent, right? It's some kind of inherent trait that drives that. But it isn't. I mean, some people have some inherent traits that make it easier for them than others, like I'm pretty athletic, so I can pick up a sport pretty quickly. But I'm not good at a lot of sports. I'm fair in a lot of sports. If I want to get good at them, I have to actually practice them in a certain way pretty consistently, right? And it's that practice and consistency around sales agility that gives reps or sellers the confidence that says, 'I've done my homework. I have a sense for what I'm walking into, but I'm really constantly scanning the environment and gathering additional information to be able to know what does that mean about how this has changed, and what does that mean about the choices I need to make in order to align with that buyer.'

So you can watch people and observe it, but that's kind of hard to quantify. So they observed it through different research studies. I should have said that more clearly. Now, the thing with research is that you have to do the research in such a way that you avoid bias, you avoid having people answer the way that they think you want to hear. So you have to create instruments that are not as—that don't allow this idea of bias, right? And so those research instruments tend to be just very fact-based. 'Tell me about the buyer. What was going on with the buyer? Which of these attributes was true of that buying situation? Then tell me about your overall sales approach. Did it look like this? Did it look like this? Did you look like this or more like this? And then which tactics did you use and to what degree?' And this is where the four patterns of behavior became really important, because this idea of 'we choose one strategy and we run that the entire time' isn't true. Sales people are constantly moving between these strategies, between these tactics. So at any one point in time, a tactic may be relevant from one strategy and a tactic from another strategy, right? So it's not as clean as the researchers initially led us to believe, right? So we validated the research. We found out, yes, there are multiple buying situations every seller faces. Yes, these four patterns really do exist. But there's more to the story. And so in order to gather the data that allows you to determine how sellers behave, you have to gather qualitative data, but in very granular terms and in ways that don't promote bias. And then you have to analyze that information, finding trends and patterns to see if something meaningful emerges. And that's how that happened, and that's how we were able to validate that and then extend that research through the same types of instruments and tools and the same sort of very granular data gathering at the deal level.

The most dominant pattern is consultative, right? And that's what most people learn. When you first learn how to sell, most of us learn some sort of consultative strategy, right? Another one is disruptive. Think Challenger, think insight-driven, think having to change someone's basic perspective about how they view their situation, right? We also have a financial approach, which is much more about building a business case, really understanding the ROI, and allowing the buyer to financially justify a purchase. And the final one is really more of a competitive or product or service-driven sale, where the customer already knows what they want, they're looking at some of your competitors, and what you have to do is you have to align and differentiate more effectively, improve your capability to meet their needs better than somebody else. So there are these four discrete patterns, but a seller doesn't choose one pattern and use that all the way through, right? And we did additional research into this because I thought, you know, I'm not convinced that these four patterns are as discrete as the researchers at FSU had originally led us to believe. They do exist—we were able to validate that—but I thought, you know, there's more to the story here. So we did some additional research into deal-level data and salesperson behavior, and what we learned there is that consultative selling isn't just one of the four; it actually forms the foundation and pivot point for the other three. And the consultative selling tactics were highly used in every deal, regardless of whether their primary strategy was consultative, disruptive, competitive, or financial. So it wasn't just one of the four; it was the foundation that paves the way for one of the other three. If I pivot off of consultative for some reason—something happens during the selling cycle that leads me to believe that I have to switch my approach, let's say a new decision maker enters midway through the selling cycle, and this new entrant to the buying team is really sold on one of my competitors or doesn't think agility matters or something like that—I'm going to have to probably shift to a more disruptive approach and provide insight to be able to shape that person's thinking. Now let's say another person enters the mix later in the sales cycle, and that person is a very financially driven person. That means I'm probably going to, in addition to creating insight, building needs, building urgency, delivering insight, I'm probably going to have to build a business case, right? So consultative selling isn't just one of the four; it's sort of the launching point that says, 'I can use this approach to understand the situation I'm facing, particularly the buying journey and where they are in the buying journey, and I can use that information to then help me pivot to one of those other three strategies, or stick with consultative if that's the best fit.'

Yeah, it's a great question. In fact, one of the biggest pushbacks we get when we talk about sales agility, especially with sales enablement folks—God bless them, they try so hard to get their sales force doing what they want them to do, and they're just so non-compliant—they'll say things like, 'We can't even get them to use one approach, and you're telling us we need to use four? Really seriously? This is not doable.' And in actuality, if you take a look at most sort of consultative or one-size-fits-all training programs, whether it's a consultative selling program or a value selling program or a Challenger selling program, they tend to be over-engineered. They tend to be highly complex because they're made to fit in any circumstances, right? So if I want my consultative selling program to work in any situation, I've got to allow for all the different contingencies. So by design, they tend to be over-engineered and overly complex. That's one. You say you have one, but you really have 20. One and not enough of the others. And that's why sales people get turned off to sales training, because my God, number one, if I've already had SPIN and I've already had another version of consultative selling, why do I need a third or fourth or fifth, right? It's just a new flavor of vanilla, you know? And how many times do I have to learn the same thing? The other point is, if there's a new methodology that's kind of interesting, like Challenger, yes, I want to learn that because that's a new set of arrows in my quiver. But you've heard the same thing about the Challenger sale: highly complex, hard to deploy, right? And so what people learn when they really dive into sales agility in our sales agility framework is they can learn four patterns of behavior in a way that's easier than learning one, because they're not over-engineered. We have a philosophy not only about research but around what we call the minimum effective dose. So any of our frameworks and training programs hit the really critical points of any one of these strategies or any one of these frameworks to equip people to be effective, and we don't over-engineer anything. So literally learning sales agility in those four patterns of behavior, we often hear, was actually easier and more relevant than when I took consultative selling or when I took Challenger or something like that. So we take the complexity out of it. And that's been one of our other principles: not only research-based of true high performers, but what's the essence of this? What are we left with when there's nothing more that we can take away? Put simply, how do we make this enablement thing as simple as possible?

The first thing we have to do with managers is to get them to understand how to accept their job. Whether you're coaching a specific methodology or not, does it matter? The first thing that matters is, am I creating clarity of tasks for my sellers? Do they know what they need to be executing, and why, and when, and what good looks like? And that's this idea of creating clarity of task or alignment. And then once managers understand those two to three really critically important activities that sellers have to effectively execute consistently in order to drive the KPIs that they want driven and the results they ultimately want, once managers can create that for their sellers, then it makes making the decision of what to coach a little easier. So if these are the three most critical activities or two most critical activities my sales people need to be executing, then what should I be coaching? Duh, those activities, right? Of all the things I could be coaching, what should I be coaching? And so through the research, we've learned that—I've talked about prioritization a lot earlier—the most successful sales managers are maniacal about prioritization, prioritization about seller effort and about their own effort. So the best coaching is aligned to these high-impact activities. And let's just say early stage qualification is a high-impact activity. Then if a manager is coaching early stage qualification, let's say twice a month for an hour per rep, and they're coaching maybe three early stage deals, whatever methodology they have in place, they can lean into that methodology and coach that methodology around qualifying that deal, right? And so the methodology only assists if it's relevant to that high-impact activity, whether that's account planning, whether that's opportunity pursuit, whether that's prospecting. There's—I mean, the activities are almost endless, right? But if I can orient my coaching in a consistent rhythm that's structured to create maximum impact, then I can ensure that I'm coaching the right things in the right way at the right time. And that's what managers don't do. Most coaching training teaches a manager to do one of two things: either have a very powerful interpersonal conversation that's collaborative—good on you—or coach to the specific methodology. 'Yeah, here's how to coach to consultative selling, here's how to coach to disruptive, here's how to coach to financial, and here's how to coach to competitive.' That matters. There's a whole bunch of decisions that have to happen in order for that coaching to land and be able to be embedded into the flow of work. And then once managers create that clarity of task for sellers and then for their own coaching effort, they then monitor which metrics need to move by how much in order to know that this is working. And if the right needles aren't moving, even though the activities are happening, even though the coaching is happening, then something needs to change. Maybe we need to adjust the activity, maybe we need to adjust the coaching. Something needs to change. And that ability to continually make those decisions is what equips sales managers with the agility to ensure that field-level execution is aligned to both organizational goals and marketplace realities. That's the fundamentals of good sales management and how coaching finds its way into that in a very powerful way.

Right, right. So we find that in order to really leverage the sales management layer, they have to learn, number one, what are the core elements of how I manage my job day to day with my sales people before you layer on any methodology. So you've got to get that core. It's almost like foundational agility in consultative selling is necessary and understanding the buying journey before you can move to situational agility. You have to have a management framework about kind of how you approach your job, how you approach creating clarity of tasks for sellers, how you decide what you coach, when you coach, and how you coach, and how you know if it's working. And then the methodology just becomes a support of those efforts. So if I'm coaching opportunity pursuit as a sales manager—which most sales managers do, not every sales manager, but most sales managers do—then that's when the methodology becomes relevant. Whether that's sales agility with these four patterns of behavior, or whether an organization is just leaning heavily into consultative selling, right? The methodology becomes an enabling ingredient to my coaching rhythm in order to drive the outcomes that we want, as long as it is, and to the degree that it's relevant to those activities that sellers need to execute.

Well, there's different levels of agility, right? And not everybody does all three levels. Some of our clients do all three levels. And this is kind of new, so it's not like we've been teaching sales agility for 20 years like most of the sales training companies out there have been doing what they've been doing for a very long time. We have not, right? We're continually innovating and learning new things and updating. And so what we have seen is we've seen win rates improve pretty dramatically. We've even seen revenue per seller improve dramatically. What was interesting is that in the client that I told you about that we're going to do the webinar in February, this agricultural client, the most tenured sellers were the most skeptical, but they had the biggest lift. Average revenue per seller in the tenured ranks improved 10% more year over year than prior to engaging in the sales agility framework. So they had even bigger gains than the newer people, the less experienced people, who had a 5% year-over-year gain in revenue. That's amazing. So I mean, it's—and there's other effects depending upon what level of agility you're leaning into. We see dramatic improvements in pipeline health overall, win rates. And when managers pay attention differently to the deals that their sellers are pursuing, sometimes they realize we need to change our targets. One of our clients, when they were really leaning into organizational agility, they were only closing 25% of forecasted revenue. And this is a very large global company with very deep pockets and very good training. And they trained their managers on five different courses on coaching over a four-year period, about 5,000 hours out of the field. And at the end of all that effort, they did a survey with the sellers, and over half of them said, 'I'm almost getting no coaching.' And these managers have been trained on how to coach and how to coach and how to coach, and videotaped and audio taped. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And so what they didn't understand is how do I incorporate coaching into my day-to-day job in a way that works for me, is helpful for sellers, and drives better outcomes? In the same organization that was only closing 25% of their forecasted deals—not just their pipeline, but their forecasted deals, the ones they thought they were going to win—once we put this framework in and they were able to really hone in on coaching to those activities that mattered most, and one of those was early stage deal qualification, within at the 18-month point, which is kind of where the rubber meets the road—you're going to get a lift initially in the first six months just because people are doing new stuff, but it's really the sustainability that matters—at the 18-month point, their close rates of forecasted revenue had risen to 54%. Wow. They had more than doubled. And when we dug underneath the hood and said, 'Tell me more about that. We know that this works, but what other changes did you make based on getting better insight into the deals that your sellers are pursuing?' They said, 'Well, initially we were targeting very large clients, very large prospects. And when we analyzed our pipelines more fully, we realized that we don't win as many of those. Our sweet spot really is the mid-market.' So they completely adjusted their targeting, and the deals they were winning were smaller, but they were winning many more of them. And so their overall revenue improved, their close rates improved, and they stopped targeting prospects where they had a low chance of winning. So those are the kinds of things that happen. You get more insight into what your people are doing, what works, what doesn't work, and then how do I make adjustments sort of across the board.

It's not a business book, but let's talk about it, please. It was by a guy named David Hawkins, who was a psychiatrist and psychologist. And it was called "Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender." Very powerful book. Because when you're old like me, you know, you want to kind of dig in and you want to give back and you want to pay it forward. So my interests tend to be a little broader. "Letting Go." All right, love it.

I think my favorite part about working with operations is they love standardization and they want to see efficiencies, and we're able to provide that, right? So they have a lot of skepticism about a lot of the sales stuff because they've been there, they've done it, they didn't get the lift they wanted, and they love data. And so what I love about sales operations is I can show them real results, and I can show them how their own data supports that. So that makes their stocks go up. And now we actually have a proprietary algorithm called the Agile Edge that allows us to use client data to identify what are the management practices that high performers are engaging in, and how is that different than everyone else? Are they the ones you want them to be engaging in? Are they leading to better performance? What types of buying situations are your sellers facing? What are the factors that matter most? And which sales approaches win in each of those buying situations? We can even tell them what's the relative capability of your sellers in these areas. And they're like, 'Oh my God, that's such a deep dive into my organization. No one's ever been able to give that to me before.' So they love the data-driven offerings that we have.

They're so skeptical. I mean, they really are. I agree, I agree. They're guilty as charged. And they're so rational and logical, and sales people are so emotional, right? And trying to lean into both sides of that to come up with a workable engagement plan that meets everyone's needs—that's the hardest part for me. Their level of cynicism, I guess.

Probably the single person with the most influence has been Neil Rackham. He was the one that started Huthwaite, he did the original research on SPIN. And I worked directly for him for quite some time. I had the pleasure of working with him directly. And it was hard to keep up with him intellectually sometimes, I gotta be honest. But he was such an outside-the-box thinker, and he was fearless. And I engaged with him very early on in my career through his work versus Xerox, because he deployed all of his research with Xerox. And then I worked directly for him after I left Xerox. And it set me on this entire trajectory around research and sales effectiveness. I mean, he was the one. If I were to say anyone that influenced me the most, it was him.

Well, first of all, don't get a PhD. That was really painful. All right, last school, got it, got it. But if you do want to be a leader in this field, you have to be willing to be wrong. I've been wrong so many times, Sean. I mean, I've been wrong probably more than I've been right. I've had so many hypotheses that did not pan out. But you have to be incredibly curious and willing to be wrong. And if you have those two things, you'll figure out really good stuff, and you'll be able to innovate and bring new insights. If you're not willing to be curious and wrong, you're not going to do something really new.