Bob Moesta
SUMMARY
What served as the motivation for Bob Moesta's "Demand Side Sales"?
Although there were no sales professors and sales is frequently taught as a supply-side concept (build product and sell it), Bob Moesta was inspired by his experiences in seven startups to write "Demand Side Sales." He wanted to bring a demand-side perspective to sales and make the sales process mimic the way people buy, which is emotional and drawn out.
What significance does it have in sales to pay attention to customers?
The best way to learn about a customer's challenges in sales is to listen to them, comprehend their words and tones, and ask perceptive questions. After a customer has completed speaking, taking advantage of the pause and pausing to consider the following question might help you learn more about their wants.
What steps are involved in convincing a customer to buy a product and making sure they are satisfied?
First Thought, Passive, Active Looking, Deciding, First Use, and Ongoing Use are the six stages of the consumer buying process. During each stage, the customer requires input and education, must make decisions based on trade-offs and expectations, and must develop a habit with the product. To address new challenging times, all departments (marketing, sales, and customer success) need to be involved in the full customer experience.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
Marcus Cauchi: Hello and welcome back to the Inquisitor Podcast. Today I'm genuinely delighted to have as my guest, Bob Moesta. Uh, Bob is the author of Demand Side Sales 101, which is about how you can stop selling and help your customers to buy. Bob, welcome.
Bob Moesta: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent.
60 seconds or so on your background and how you got to write this book?
Marcus Cauchi: Bob, could you give us 60 seconds or so on your background and how you got to write this book?
Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in a million years, I'd never think that I'd ever write a book about sales, but, uh, I'm a, I'm an engineer. I basically have been breaking things for 50 years. I've been, uh, fixing things for about 45, and I, I've been building things for over 30 years.
I've, I've helped, uh, develop and launch over 3,500 different products and services over a range of industries from, uh, uh, high tech and, uh, software to, uh, food products and, uh, medical devices, and you name it. I've pretty much worked on it.
And what was it that inspired you to write demand side sales?
[00:01:00]
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Thank you. And what was it that inspired you to write demand side sales?
Bob Moesta: So, so I've done seven startups and one of the things that I, I realized that the hardest thing of any of, of building any business is sales. And the first kind of clue that I got was like, at the time, like I, I, I went back to school. I went to school and basically got an MBA. And, and what I realized is there's no sales professors.
I'm like, why? Why aren't there any sales professors? They have marketing, they have, uh, finance, they have HR, they have operations, they have strategy, but like sales is like the hardest part of all of this. And they, there's no. Nobody there teaching it. And if they are, it's like, I've got lawyers teaching negotiations for sales, or I've got HR talking about compensation for sales.
But like the hardest part is selling. And so part of this was, was like somehow we need to get sales into, uh, kind of, uh, at least the academic realm. I think the second part is [00:02:00] that when you go to incubators and you like having done so many new products and helping people with products, people don't realize they sell all the time.
They sell like investors. They, they, they, they, they have to sell. And new employees, they have to sell founders, they have to sell customer. Like there's selling happens all the time. And to be honest, I, I kind of came to the aha that selling is actually, uh, what I call a supply side concept, which is we build a product and we figure out how to sell it or push it to the market.
But the reality is, is like on the other side of the world, it's like there's, there's people have to buy things and it's like, why do people buy things? And so this was this, this aha, what I, I made in, in the innovation world. But then I realized like, why not apply this, these concepts to the sales world to help people understand like the sales process is almost like it's been assumed what it is. And we have a funnel. But the reality is, is our funnel or our sales process should actually mimic the way people buy. And we think about the buying [00:03:00] part as very transactional, but the reality is, is buying is very emotional. It's emotional, and it's long.
And we think about the moment that people ask for a demo and then sign a contract and we install. It's like that's, that's, that's the, the, the degree of engagement. And it's like, no, no, no, it's much longer than that when you look at it from the buying side. So it was really about kind of bringing, if you will, uh, either a fresh perspective or a, or the other side of the world, the other side of, uh, demand side to kind of, uh, the sales process to help people become better at helping people make progress.
Marcus Cauchi: It's interesting my pal Mark Schaffer says that you should, should think as the customer, not about the customer. What customers want is better outcomes. Uh, in, in your book, you make, uh, the point, you know, people don't buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole. And the, the problem is that very often with most sales methodologies, traditionally we've been taught [00:04:00] talk about features and benefits, which I don't think has ever really worked.
And then there's the emphasis on pain, uh, which is fine, but most of the customers already ex uh, understand what the symptoms are, even if they don't necessarily understand the cause. And the journey happens way, way, way before your marketing ever touches them. Colinshaw talks about the customer journey of going to McDonald's and the customer journey begins when your kid screams that they're hungry and you go through the battle of driving through traffic with them, uh, committing World War III in the back, and then the fight to get their order, and then they change their mind, and then, yep, they give the order through the score box, and then you have to give it twice, and then they change their mind again.
You have to give it again. Then you get to the payment window, then you get to pick up and do you check it there and then, or do you risk it cuz you've got 600 cars, the carloads of people behind you, then you've got milkshake all over the car, and then you've got indigestion and vomit, and then you've gotta get rid of the packaging. And that's the customer [00:05:00] journey. So let's explore that side of things first of all.
Bob Moesta: Well, let me, let me just elaborate on, let me elaborate a little bit on that one, because I think the fact is, is it's, it's not just McDonald's, but it's like, like think about at what point does somebody start to realize like, God, we need a new CRM system.
Like it's not typically it's gonna be years of people kind of, uh, working around and frustrated and then something has to happen. And so it's one of the dominoes that have to fall to actually get people to, to, to say like, Hmm, I think we're gonna buy a new C, we're gonna buy Salesforce. Like it, it, it's not a 90 day buy.
It's like, the thing is, is, so part of it is to actually take this, this step back. It's the same thing with a mattress. Right. At what point do you kind of say like, today's the day I'm gonna buy a new mattress. Well, the reality is, is the, the competitors to a new mattress are things like scotch and working out late.
Are, are you working out late in the evening so you get tired or staying up late or, or Zzzquil. And, and so there's these other [00:06:00] things that we don't realize are, are competitors or workarounds that are part of the, part of their process to actually get to basically a new product. And so this is the thing where we've been so myopic and focusing in on that transactional side that we think like the demo and then they buy
Marcus Cauchi: Well, it, it couldn't be further from the truth because what you're describing there is a shared collective experience. And the analogy I like to use on that is the idea that you have a bond night bombing rate. And every time a bomb drops, uh, there's a little flash of light and a little sound of an explosion.
And those are the collective frustrations throughout the organization. And they're lobbying these problems over the wall to procurement. They're collectively experiencing all these different frustrations, but they don't necessarily join the docs. And eventually, uh, they uh, think, ah, right, this is maybe what we need.
And then they go out to market. But this has been going on probably for [00:07:00] months or years, decades even us, a seller, have to be way, way more strategic than the average salesperson because most of them are tactical, selfish, and focused on making the transaction in order to hit their quota for this month or this quarter.
How they have to shift their thinking so that vendors are no longer selling that badly
Marcus Cauchi: The buyer doesn't give a damn about any of that. So let's start with the mindset of leadership within the vendor organization about how they have to shift their thinking so that vendors are no longer selling that badly?
Bob Moesta: I actually think this goes all the way back to how do we actually describe job descriptions for employees,
Because when you think about it, when we're looking for a new employee, it's like, well, how many years experience do they have? Do you know these? Do you have these skills? But we don't tell them anything about the job. We tell them nothing about what they're supposed to, like, the progress they're supposed to be making.
And so to me, it gets back to not only being able to understand the [00:08:00] situation or the pain of the, what's going on, what I call the, the push of the situation, but the, the, the desired outcomes and the trade-offs you're willing to make in order to make that progress. Right. The, the, the whole aspect is, is everybody wants, everybody wants every feature and edit every benefit until they run out of time and money.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah.
Bob Moesta: Right? And, and so it's that whole thing of like, oh, we can do this, we can do this. Oh yeah, we, we'd like, we, we want it all. And it's like, oh, it's that much. Oh, it's gonna take that long. It's like, oh, okay, so what are we gonna give up? And so part of this is to realize like, part of the sales process is trade off.
and being able to understand. And so, so again, coming from the innovation space or coming from the product development space is like how do we prototype scenarios for them so they understand the trade-offs. They like, we can do this quicker, but it's gonna be more expensive this way. Or we can actually do this customized, but it's gonna take longer and be this much.
And, and so what happens is we usually give people one thing to choose from, or we force them to choose one [00:09:00] from us and one, one from somebody or two, two from other people. But they actually need contrast to make choices like most people choose by actually eliminating, I call elimination theory. So what happens is if I give three options, the first thing they do, they go, they'll tell you which one they don't want, and it goes to the side.
And then what happens is people look at the other two that are left and they don't compare 'em to each other. They actually compare them to the one they threw out. And so they actually choose by eliminating the two. They don't want.
Marcus Cauchi: Very interesting.
Bob Moesta: Right? And so you start to realize, like all of a sudden it's like, well, I need to give 'em the best deal.
The only language they have is like, I just need a better deal. Cuz they can't even articulate what they want or the trade-offs they have to make. And so like, like I've seen some numbers where people go like, well, you know, the, the, there's like 47% of people, you know, go all the way through the process and don't make a decision that's a sales problem.
That's the thing because we don't actually enable them to make the trade-offs [00:10:00] because we're too afraid to get no. That we actually don't want them to say no, but they have to say no to something.
Marcus Cauchi: Well, corporate visions did some research and they put it as high as 60% and that
Bob Moesta: Wow.
Marcus Cauchi: Precisely because of lack of contrast.
They're unable to see the white space between what one vendor is offering.
Bob Moesta: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: The status quo and all of the competition. And the single biggest reason they go for the status quo is they just can't see the difference.
Bob Moesta: Well, so the, I, so in the framework, I talk about this, uh, quite a bit, and I say that, that it's not just the status quo, but it's the anxiety of the new solution.
Like any one of these solutions, what do we do with our old data? What do we do with the, you know, how do we actually train everybody up? There's like all this anxiety about moving to the new, and so part of it is, is they're not prepared to make the trade-offs and what I call the push of the situation isn't great enough that for them to overcome the anxiety of doing something different.
And so it's [00:11:00] not the features and benefits that get people to go, it's the reduction of anxieties that get people to, to actually make these decisions. And so, We keep thinking we need to add more features to get people to buy. And I just think that's a false, very bad notion that we, when we add more features, we actually add things that people don't want and then they want a discount because it's like, why would I pay for this whole thing if it's, if this whole thing's a hundred thousand, I only need 20% of it?
How about you gimme a discount? And it's like, because we're not listening to their world.
Are you listening to your customers?
Marcus Cauchi: And you, you've touched on the fundamental question here is, are you listening to your customers? And, uh, one, one of the things that frustrates the living hell outta me is how few organizations actually genuinely listen to their customers.
Marketing doesn't even speak to customers. The R & D people very often engineer in isolation and my pal, Jerry Lemberg, who was one of the four original founders of Fairchild [00:12:00] Semiconductor and one of the first investors in Intel and Oracle and Microsoft. Used to describe entrepreneurs as people who produce elegant solutions to problems that don't exist.
You only have to look at how overengineered you look at Word, for example. I mean, how many people use anything other than the font size and, uh, maybe using bold, italic and underline. I mean, that's pretty much it. You know, I've been using, uh, word processors for the now on 40 years, and that's pretty much all I ever used.
Why do I need all other functionalities? Some people do I get it, you know, why would I pay for it?
What's the progress you're trying to make?
Bob Moesta: I, I think that's right. And the thing is, is that what they would say is, well, you don't know you need it till yet, till we have it. And my whole thing is, is like, what's the progress you're trying to make? And what you find is people who are really good writers, they actually have a very, very stripped downward processor.
It's like part of the job is to get the stuff out of my head, and I don't need to worry about bullets or [00:13:00] indents or like any of the formatting because it's, it's, it actually slows me down in my thinking. And so what you start to realize is like, not only does word over-engineered, but it hinders me from actually being able to accomplish what I want to do.
And so this is where we're not paying attention. So it's not only just listening to your customer, this is where, so I've been, uh, you know, I've been trained in both criminal and intelligence interrogation because at some point I realize that customers lie to me and they don't actually know what they want.
And it's not their fault. I'm not trying to say they lie on purpose. It's protect themselves. Right. Well, part of it's protecting, but part of it's like, like, I really don't know what I want right now. I know that I have this problem, but I, I'm not smart enough to even know how to describe what I want.
What's possible, right. The reality is like, it's not only what they say, it's how they say it. So like when you ask quote, so, so one of the things I, I like, I teach a lot right now. And one of the things I'm teaching is like if somebody says, God, you know your product's, it's, it's really, it's, it's good.
Versus your product's good, right? Same [00:14:00] words on the transcript, but very different meanings. The next question on the first one is, so what's not right with it? Cuz you know, they went down at the end and they paused and they stuttered a little bit on, on being good because it was like, well it's almost like it's good enough versus when it was really, when they say it's really good, it's like, oh, what'd you like about it?
And so what happens when we pre-program the questions, we pre-program what we're supposed to say. We're not actually listening cuz all we're worried about is the next question I try to teach. This notion of like, I don't think of the next question until I've heard the answer to the previous question and people are like, how do you do that?
I'm like, I listen.
Marcus Cauchi: Again, I couldn't agree more. But if you are a seller and you are thinking about your next question, well the prospect or the customer is still talking. You do them and you are disservice because very often you miss the golden nugget, which comes at the end. And also you need to learn how to revel in the silence.
If you, uh, [00:15:00] yeah, four to 11 seconds after a prospect is finished speaking, very often they will continue to speak and they will give you more insight. Also, if you use the silence to then think about your next question based on the response that you have had previously based on not only what they say but how they say it and the intent and meaning and the motive behind what their response was, then you start to ask insightful questions.
But very few salespeople do. Most salespeople ask questions to gather information if they're bad. If they're slightly less bad, they ask questions to gain understanding, but very few deliver questions that offer insight to the prospect of the customer. And so you never really get to understand what the, their struggle is.
How do you get to understand and solve the customer's struggle?
Marcus Cauchi: So talk to me about that. How do you get to understand and solve the customer's struggle?
Bob Moesta: Well, so the first thing, so to, to be honest, it's like, it's one of those things where you, you, you, you ask the VP [00:16:00] of sales or the VP of marketing of any company and say like, tell me about the customer. And they know everything.
Like they know, like age, they know income. They, they have like all this segmentation about, and then, and then I ask the question like, what causes somebody to say, today's the day you're gonna buy new windows for your house, and they just look at you like deer in headlights. What do you mean? Like, uh, well you, you know that there are 14 million people who say that you need new windows, but only a million buy what co, what causes the 1 million to say today's the day?
Well, we know who they are. I'm like, yeah, but I need to know why. And so part of this is that I start with actually like a postmortem of sales. We go talk to people who recently bought, we talk to them to say what things had to happen in their lives. So we actually don't talk about the product at all.
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely.
Bob Moesta: So if they say, well, you know, boy, the, you know, the windows is like, oh, they were, you know, they were triple painted. I'm like, why's that matter? I know why triple paint is there, but I actually have to play a little bit dumb [00:17:00] to get their words of why they think it's there. It's like, well, it's gonna keep me warmer and save me energy.
Well, why is that important? One of the things is that when I was very young, I was able to travel to Japan and work in Japan and learn a lot of different Japanese development methods. And one of the things they had as the five why's, and it's like they had this notion of how do you get to product agnostic requirements?
I don't even know what that means. And they're like, how do you actually, how, how do you figure out what the customer wants without talking about a solution at all? . And that's where a lot of this came from was this notion of like having to actually take a step back to understand, not about my product, but how do we fit into their lives.
So the reference point is their lives, and then how does something fit into their life versus this product and how does this product fit into them? And so to me it's the difference of I'm trying to go from the consumer out to the product as opposed to the product out to the consumer. And so it's flipping that lens in a very different way.
And so [00:18:00] part of this is understanding like we don't change unless they're struggling moments. So to get to your, your initial question is how do you find this is struggling moments are the seed for all innovation and it it's on both sides of the world. Both sides. The meaning the, the supply side of, of companies, when they struggle with something, they need to innovate, but customers innovate as
well.
Bob Moesta: We have to actually find these struggling most. We are actually more creatures of habit than anything, and we'd rather do the same thing over and over again than actually try to change. So when we change, there's energy, there's emotional energy, there's social energy, there's functional energy, there's things that say, today's the day I need a new mattress.
And that's what you have to go find out is what are the dominoes that have to fall in people's lives? What are those struggling moments that have to lead up to them saying like, yeah, today's the day we need a new mattress. So we start by talking to people who bought, not people who want to buy. People who want to buy are actually call 'em fakers, right?
They want all this stuff, but they haven't had to [00:19:00] make all the trade offs. So the reason why we talked to people recently bought is it's not only what they say, let's say early in the process, but ultimately what are the things they gave up in order to make sure that they could get, make this happen?
Speak to people who've stopped buying.
Marcus Cauchi: I think it's also important to speak to people who've stopped buying.
Bob Moesta: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: Find out what you've done wrong and well change their behavior.
Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: Buying, they're buying on a regular basis and suddenly there's a shift in behavior pattern.
Bob Moesta: Yes. So it's all about that. So it's really in, in the engineering terms, it's a boundary problem. Right? So here's the, here's, here's like the things that blow a lot of salespeople's mind.
When somebody doesn't buy you, or if somebody fires you, they're still making progress. They have found something else. And so what you need to understand is at what point in time, what are you not doing or what are, is not what, what's changed in their lives that basically say, you know, they need to actually stop using your software and use somebody else's software.
So churn is a combination of like what, and what's kind of crazy is you start to realize [00:20:00] sometimes it's the same reasons why they come and why they leave. And so you have to be able to understand the, the, the sets of things. So that's one, one other important point is that most people are trying to find the root cause.
The one thing that caused somebody to say, today's the day I'm gonna buy, or today's the day I'm gonna leave. And what I will tell you is it's not never one thing, it's, it's root causes, it's sets of things that, to your point, add up is brain highlighting all these different things that kind of add up and they, they accumulate to actually give the energy to basically make the change.
So part of this is to understand, and again, I used the word space and time, but like when and where do these things happen that cause people to say, today's the day I'm gonna hire you, or today's the day I'm gonna fire you. And when you understand that process, now you're actually ready to sell.
Marcus Cauchi: It's about understanding clusters of motive, cause and intent.
Bob Moesta: That's right.
Marcus Cauchi: All [00:21:00] aggregating up one moment in time that say today is the day.
The language they use
Bob Moesta: That's right. The other thing is the language they use. So for example, when you start to hear things that those clusters and people say, oh, I wanna be healthy in one cluster, healthy means like, I don't wanna die. Right? Another cluster healthy is like, I wanna actually go skiing and another cluster healthy means I wanna look good in the clothes that I'm wearing.
And so they all use the same word, but they all have different meanings. And so if you don't actually understand these sets, you end up saying, Ooh, everything's about healthy, and there's like 22 things I have to do to make it healthy, but I can't do all of those healthy things. And so which one are we really targeting?
So we end up saying like, well we're, we're looking for the healthy eater. It's like, what? What does that mean?
Marcus Cauchi: And again, what we understand healthy means may be very different from what a customer
Bob Moesta: Oh yeah.
We've gotta be patient and understand that human beings are not rational creatures
Marcus Cauchi: Understands. When I set up my training business, I thought I sold sales training. And what I didn't realize was that people [00:22:00] would come to me because they wanted IVF treatment cuz they desperately wanted a child.
And I, I know that there are at least two sets of twins out there that came as an indirect result of the training work that I did with them. There is a horse called Jacob running around fields today because his owner didn't want to turn him into glue and dog food. And 14 years later he's still jumping around fields, leaping over fences because there was an 80 grand vets bill and this was somebody who had lost his business because of a customer or not paying on time.
And he ended up going into liquidation. But actually his priority was the horse. Now, who would've thought that someone would be so emotionally attached, but that wasn't, you know, that getting back onto his feet wasn't the issue. It was how does he save Jacob? So we really have to be savvy and we've gotta be patient and understand that human beings are not rational creatures.
Bob Moesta: No.
Marcus Cauchi: We are creatures of [00:23:00] emotion. And to paraphrase Mark Twain, when you understand the whole world is mad, everything makes sense.
Bob Moesta: That's right.
Marcus Cauchi: Everyone's a messed up sick puppy.
Bob Moesta: Yeah. Yeah. I, here's the thing is I always think about the fact is the irrational becomes rational with context. And so what happens is you actually don't know, right?
Like when something seems like it doesn't make sense, it's like, okay, you don't have the rest of the story. It's not that they're crazy, it's the fact that you can't actually see through their eyes. And so you start to realize, like, this is a long time ago, but I was doing some work and just trying to study basically what caused people to say, today's the day we're gonna buy home gym equipment, right?
And so we'd go in these houses and we'd talk to people and they'd show us their refrigerators and they'd show us all these other things and they'd tell us how they worked out. And it's like, and you could see what was going on. And, and I just remember at one point where we're just getting ready to leave and I'm like, oh, you know what?
I haven't seen the freezer can, do you mind if I just take a quick picture of the freezer and, and you see the gasp on the, on their face going like, [00:24:00] uh, okay. And you just like, the head goes down and they look and it's like, and they open the freezer and there's five gallons of ice cream, and all these different ice creams.
And I and I, and I finally go, you showed me all these other things you do, and then there's this, and they're like, well, this is really why I work out all the time, because I love ice cream and I know that there's this trade off between I can't eat it all the time and I have to work. So I work out every day, so at the end of the day, I can have my bowl of ice cream.
I'm like, what? And you start to realize like, nowhere did that come out. And nowhere were they willing to actually art articulate that until we actually kind of discovered it. And so part of this is when you're doing it, you're not trying to be judgmental, you're just trying to understand. And so this is the other thing is that, that this is where you have to have these techniques of like dumbing up and being able to say like, look, I, I, I don't understand.
I'm confused. And they'll be like, all right, let me tell you what's really going on. This is where your point of being emotional is. As much as people would say is like, I'm doing an RFP the first thing I would say is if you're actually in the [00:25:00] RFP business, you're probably already too late. The second part is when you actually see how people make decisions and you do a postmortem on how people decide, they always say, well, we picked the lowest price person, right?
And it turns out that they rarely actually pick the lowest price person, but they never tell anybody that until you actually do this postmortem. And so part of this is to actually take the time to go back and understand why you won things, why you lost things. What were the real decisions and trade-offs they made, and what caused them to basically say today's the day, and what were they really hoping for?
The interesting part is like people will say like, I wanna do one thing. Like, so this, I did some interviews this week where somebody said something to the effect of like, you know, I struggle with printing, so I need to add a printer. But when you actually understood what they, why they were printing, it was really about I need to proofread and I don't know how to proofread any other way besides printing it.
And so the moment he actually learned a new way to proofread, he didn't have to print anymore. And so it's this notion of not focusing on just [00:26:00] what they say, but taking that, that almost that wide angle lens and taking a step back to understand what part of the process is really what's really going on.
And all of a sudden you start to realize that there's way more opportunity for innovation and to, to actually help people beca beside them saying like, he needs a new printer.
If you want to generate sales, you have to partner with the customer and understand that journey in order to deliver success in the customer's eyes
Marcus Cauchi: Well, I, I, I think this leads very neatly into, uh, part of the book that I thought was really very interesting, uh, which is how you map the difference between the demand buying side against the supply sales side and understand how those two things aren't necessarily compatible. And if you want to generate sales, you have to partner with the customer and understand that journey in order to deliver, uh, success in the customer's eyes. Otherwise, what you end up with, you might get a transaction, but you end up with a dissatisfied customer.
Bob Moesta: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And then you're back to square one. Cuz not [00:27:00] only have you now got an upset customer who fires you, but now you've gotta go out and prospect again. I think there's a forced economy here, and again, I bring it back to leadership and to management and to investors because so many of them. Spend their time focused on hitting this month's or this quarter's target, getting the deal over the line.
The customer doesn't give a damn about your target. They don't care about what revenues you're trying to bring in. They don't care about your share price. What they do care about is, can you fix my problem? And
Bob Moesta: That's right.
Marcus Cauchi: Is this going to be a solution that I'm not gonna regret investing in? Because anticipated regret and blame, another big reason why people don't buy cause they don't believe you, they don't trust you, and you need to make this easy for them.
It's gotta be a safe investment.
Bob Moesta: And especially if it's a big problem, they wanna make sure that this is gonna solve it. Like one of the worst things you can do is say like, Ooh, it's the end of the quarter and we're gonna give you a 20% discount. If you actually do it before the [00:28:00] end of the quarter, you're okay.
Three days, three weeks later, they're gonna buy. And the fact is, is they're actually thinking it's the value it can be. And the reality is you just gave a discount because of a guess you made 12 to 24 months ago about numbers that you had to hit. And the reality is, is I call it the church of finance.
Like we all have to bow and give homage to the fact that we gotta hit our numbers. And the reality is, is like at some point we're destroying value because we have to hit our numbers. Right.
Marcus Cauchi: And just creating a problem for yourself down the line.
Forces of Progress
Bob Moesta: Oh, it's, yeah, because now you have behavior of like, think of how the automotive business or the furniture business has destroyed themselves because every week we got a sale now. Who's gonna buy anything at full price? Like, I will tell you this, when I'm buying high quality furniture, I know that I'm gonna pay full price. And I, I'm okay with that. But otherwise you just wait, right. What I've done is basically, so I've been doing this method of, uh, called jobs to be done for a long time, and that people don't buy products.
They hire them to make progress in their lives. And one of the things that we talk about is [00:29:00] there's something called the Forces of Progress that push the pull, the anxiety and the habit. But the other thing is this timeline, and that they have a timeline that they follow. And it doesn't matter whether you're actually, you know, buying a, you know, a, a, a cord of strawberries, a new cell phone, a house, a new piece of software, they all, all these six phases happen and they happen in a very systematic way.
And that, to be honest, customers have their own system to make progress. So the first thing is, is the first phase is basically what we call first thought. It's like creating the space in the brain for a solution to fall into. If there's no space, they actually, whatever you say, just bounces right off their head.
And so part of it is as you as, as part of marketing's role, is to actually provide inputs to the customers so they can create the space that they can see solutions or see the problem, to be honest, right? So you do that by asking questions. How long haven't you been able to sleep? You know, or basically stay in the office.
Why do you look so [00:30:00] tired? , right? Those are the kinds of things, or, or stating the obvious, like how many bottles of Zzzquil are you gonna take before you realize like, that's not working , right? There's things where you have to do, but here's the other part is you don't actually offer your solution. You just get them to think about it.
Think about it as it's the space that you create in the gut that basically starts to fester. It starts to actually, you know, mold or it starts to ferment where it's, it's creating energy that causes them to do the next phase, phase two, which is basically what we call passive. Which is really about learning.
They don't know enough about it, whether it's a real problem, whether it's whether they should do anything about it. It's almost educating themselves to literally figure out how to go out and look or even talk to peo other people in the company about it. Right? And then you move to phase three, which is active looking.
This is where they wanna see possibilities. They at least have some language, they know what's going on, but they, but it's almost like, uh, I, I, I think of it as like magic. It's like, well, what, what about this? And could we do that? And they, they haven't really pieced anything together. This is where it's like, I, I [00:31:00] want it all, but I, and, and I have no idea what it costs.
Right. Then there's phase four. Phase four is this deciding piece. It's the aspect of framing and making trade offs about spending the money. What's the timing? Does it meet all the security responsibility? Like all that stuff that now they're actually connecting dots, and now it's about making the tough decisions.
And so we, we confuse the fact of active looking, of seeing possibilities and the heavy work of actually deciding. And most people try to merge it all to one. I show 'em the demo, they ask me some questions, and then I close. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. There's a lot more to do there. The thing is, is that at deciding, when they finally decide, that is actually where satisfaction is locked in the expectations to actually deliver.
So they might have said some stuff in passive or active looking, but by the time they get down to to deciding they've made trade offs, that then set the expectation for what, what progress they're trying to make, what delivery means, and what satisfaction means. [00:32:00] And so then you start to actually worry about first basically the phase five, which is first use.
It's like, how do you actually install, how do they actually feel like they're making progress with what they've decided? How do they, how do you know that this is helping them? And then phase six is really about how do you build it into a habit and build it in a way that makes it, uh, sustainable. By the way, as they do first use and ongoing use, there are new struggling moments that come up that you have to address.
So this is where I keep thinking. We, we have marketing then passes, leads off to sales, that part, uh, then pass things off to customer success. But my belief is they actually all have to be part of the entire process of, of the customer's journey. I need marketing to help me on board. I need marketing to actually tell, help people realize what are those new struggling moments.
I need sales actually upfront to help ask questions. I need customer support to actually help people understand how they have to change their systems. Like there's all this stuff and we, we end up trying to do these [00:33:00] handoffs in between and you're much better off building teams that work together with customers as opposed to handing things off between functions and being efficient, but not necessarily effective.
Marcus Cauchi: This raises a really interesting question and I dunno whether or not this is something that, uh, you can help me with. I have a fundamental belief that most compensation systems in sales and marketing actually generate unintended negative consequence.
Bob Moesta: Oh, for sure.
How do you believe compensation schemes should be structured and not necessarily a final working prototype?
Marcus Cauchi: And what I'm curious about is if we apply your model, how do you believe compensation schemes should be structured and not necessarily a final working prototype. But it, it strikes me that marketing, sales, customer success, operations all need to be compensated so that we drive the right behavior.
That there is a reason for marketing to speak to the customer. There is a reason for customer [00:34:00] success to feedback to sales and marketing. And we have to drive those behaviors so that we get uptake and we get a utilization of the product and we get satisfied customers who then go out and do our marketing for us.
I think if we can come up with compensation scheme that drive that kind of behavior, then everybody wins. Right. But it's complicated. Have you got any thoughts on,
Bob Moesta: So, so, so one of the things, so, so I don't, I don't have a complete solution to it, but I'm very aware of the problem. And so, so I have, um, two books that are kind of, uh, I'm in the midst of developing as a follow up.
So the, this is a demand side Sales 101. Demand Side Sales 201 is I'm partnering with basically marketing experts, sales experts and uh, and onboarding and customer success experts to say like, how do these tools that everybody talks about fold into this timeline? And so it's a more of like the how to manual of like what are some tools, techniques, methods that you should be doing. And 301 is about [00:35:00] actually changing the way we run metrics and measure the process of sales because I think it's actually very fundamentally flawed and, and it's not really sale's fault or marketing's fault, like the, like the funnel. We tend to measure things that are easy to measure and then make them meaningful as opposed to understand the meaningful things, uh, that are usually hard to measure.
So for example, one of the things that we're working on right now is this aspect of leads. And the way leads are distributed are either distributed by segments, right? Or basically they're a big company, they're a small company, they're in your region, somebody else's in somebody else's region. It got to be about, about proximity or some demographic attribute of the company.
But what we're figuring out is one is can we actually understand, do some very preliminary conversations, and then understand kind of which job they're in and where they are in the timeline. And then what we're doing is we're actually giving, if you will, chips to the salespeople and have them bid on the leads.[00:36:00]
Right? And so it's having people really, cuz at some point it's like almost the luck of the draw of who gets, which lead to basically who will close faster. And there are people who are really good at nurturing people through that timeline. They end up because of quote quotas, they end up being pushed to the point of like, well, you know, they're not a good salesperson cuz they can't close, but they're actually very sensitive to how people buy versus somebody else who literally gets things that are where they're in deciding already and it's like, oh boy, they cl close them fast, but it had nothing to do with them and had everything to do with where the customer was.
And so by building a betting table for the leads and having a better vetting process, I now actually most people say they need more leads. I always say I want less leads. I want actually more qualified, less leads because at some point if I have 10,000 leads and I gotta follow up o on all of them, the reality is, is like at some point I'm actually wasting my time and theirs.
And so part of this is being able to understand like where are people in the timeline? Are they literally like, I [00:37:00] don't, I don't, I know I have a problem, I don't know what to do. And so you start to realize, you have to be able to qualify these people, not from will they buy our product, but what is their problem?
What progress are they trying to make, where they are in the timeline? And then how do you help them? What things can you provide them to help them make the progress they need to make?
Marcus Cauchi: Thi This is really fascinating and I'd love to talk to you again on another, um, podcast, if I may specifically about this subject. Because I think success in the future will be dependent on an individual and an organization's capability in collaboration.
Collaboration, internally, collaboration with the comp, your own competition. Particularly in Yes, because a vendor of a firewall or a password solution is just one tiny moving part, right? In overall security stack, which is one part of [00:38:00] their overall IT stack, which is part of their overall business strategy.
What we see is the hardest part is to get collaboration going within your own organization
Marcus Cauchi: And unless you're able to collaborate with your competitors, I think you're gonna find it very difficult in the future. You need to be able to collaborate with your partners, and above all, you have to be able to collaborate with the different moving parts within your customer. But more often than not, what we see is the hardest part is to get collaboration going within your own organization.
Bob Moesta: That's That's right. That's right. That's why I, I see actually more energy. If you think about the energy of the organization, there's more energy between the and friction inside the company than there is to go help customers give me better leads. What did you sell these people? To be honest, as we, as we head down this path, and I'm sure we're gonna have more than one conversation, over time, I'll bring on some guests who I'm working with who will be more than happy to kind of talk about how they're actually changing it from a, like a FinTech company or a hearing aid company of like different people who are willing to least share kind of like how they're thinking [00:39:00] about sales differently, or sales leaders who are thinking about sales differently.
And these are seasoned people who've been at five, four or five, six companies and now they're ahead of it and going like, I knew all these things. I had no language to talk about it. And now we have the ability to kind of experiment, innovate, prototype, to try different things. But the reality is like I kept thinking somebody else had the answer and I realized nobody has the answer and we have to go figure it out.
I'm like, that's right. That's what I'm willing to work with somebody is, is that, that the answers are very specific to context and that people are looking for a generalized answer because of the way we teach sales. It's just a process. It's just a generalized process that everybody follows and it's more about product than it is about customers.
That's why we're in this, the, the state we're in, which is where we started the conversation.
Marcus Cauchi: You've touched on so many crucial issues and I'm delighted and I definitely would love to take you up on that. I'm collaborating with an old friend of mine, Anthony Willoughby, and he's spent the last 45 years working [00:40:00] with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea, the Mongols and the Maasai.
And his premise is that if you don't understand the territory in which you, uh, that you occupy and you don't understand the map and you don't understand the predators competing tribes, the landscape, then you find it almost impossible to see all of this together. And I think part of the challenge here is that people come at a problem from where they are used to seeing it and from, uh, where they've, uh, grown up.
You know, you've mentioned the Church of Finance and a lot of metrics are driven by quarterly reporting ROI, and in sales it's activity based behavior. But again, none of that serves the customer. That's int uh, that's an audit function in terms of
We need to be able to understand the limitations of how we do it
Bob Moesta: Yeah, but you, yeah, but you need some, you need some way in which to kind of, uh, you know, I I, I, I don't wanna go overboard on it.
I just think the fact is we [00:41:00] need to be able to understand the limitations of how we do it. Like when we set quarterly quotas. So in my office here, I have, uh, uh, hold on a second. Oh. In my office I have four mentors. Let me just switch screens for one second so you can at least see it. Right. So this is, this is my office and where I'm at, but my four mentors, one, the one, the one on the, on the, on the right there is Dr. Deming. And he always say like, you need to get rid of quotas because it just causes really, really bad behavior. And people actually, once they reach the quota, they stop and they don't actually focus on helping people make progress. And so to me it's that notion of being able to say like, there are certain kind of concepts to, to your point where we compensate people on a yearly basis, right?
And if they reach that quota, they actually get a bonus. And so the bonus structure is set up in a certain way. And so all of a sudden you start to realize like, but it's all arbitrary. And what we can say is, well, it's worked well, it has worked, but, but now it's getting to the point where it's, it's, it's co like you see the, the, how it's changed people's [00:42:00] behavior.
And, and we need a different way to think about this. At some point what, what I'm actually trying to do is rally the people, rally the right set of people to sit around the table and talk about how sales theory has to evolve because it's literally been reduced to a, to almost like a mindless process of a order taker as opposed to the sophisticated profession that it really is, because at some point in time, it's not as easy as everybody, anybody who doesn't sell.
Most really good salespeople are the smartest people in the organization
Bob Moesta: So in the book, I have this, uh, this, uh, uh, thing from Teddy Roosevelt about the, the man in the ring. And the reality is, is this whole aspect of like, most people look in at it and go like, well, that seems pretty easy. Like it's just they do this and this and this. They don't understand that. The salesperson has to know costs.
They have to know actually, uh, price. They have to know timing. They have to know the customer. They have to know psychology. They have, they're like the hub of the company as it relates to helping the customer. At the end of the day, most really good salespeople are the smartest people in the, in the [00:43:00] organization.
That's why usually founders start out as the salespeople because they know everything.
Marcus Cauchi: Salespeople are conductors of an orchestra.
Bob Moesta: Exactly.
Marcus Cauchi: If you have the violins playing out of sync with the basoon and with the harp and the, uh, the timpani, you're gonna end up with a cacophony if they're not working in concept.
And the way I like to look at it is as either an orchestra or captain of a ship. Only one person is captain, everyone else's crew and the salesperson should be coordinating to make sure that the right conversations are happening at the right time, in the right way with the right people. And there is a natural sequence which is driven not by the seller, but by the buyer.
Because as you go through your process of those six different stages, unless we meet the buyer where they are, we will create unnecessary friction and resistance, and the orchestra will play out of [00:44:00] tune and it will just make a terrible noise. And we'll end up in free consulting. We'll end up wasting a lot of energy on proceeds.
We cannot or should not win. We will be pushing them to try and make a decision prematurely. I, I have one client that I've been working with this past year and at 220% of quota, his boss was giving him grief. He wasn't getting enough quotes out. Now everyone else in his team is struggling between 60% of quota and he has about one eighth of their quota ratio.
So he's sending out far fewer quotes, but 90% of them convert because he's doing a proper job. He's working.
Bob Moesta: But that, but that, that's, yeah, that's my exact point of I don't need more leads. I need better leads. And the fact is like I only write a quote like, so in my business I actually don't write a quote until it's like we've already agreed the quote is the final thing that, that you literally helps people get everybody else on board.
So I don't actually write a contract, but I'll actually do [00:45:00] presentations. I'll sit down and give them a draft of things. But the notion of actually before I put in the pipeline, cuz I don't know, at some point in time in passive looking, I really don't know when they're gonna close and they want me to put a number on it.
This is exactly the point. So now the one who's closing 90% of his quotes is like, well, he's cheating cuz he's not doing as many. And so his close rate is way better than everybody else's. His numbers are 200% above quota. His close ratio is through the roof. His number of quotes is down. And it's like, and they're measuring all the wrong things.
They should be measuring the pounds of cash that he brings in. Yes. Right? Not these intermediate metrics that were set up, because I can measure him and it's like, ooh, you know, he's, he's really not that good. And it's, it's, it's this cut your nose off despite your face kind of thing that you just realize and it's like, we have a policy.
It's like, what policy is that? ,
Marcus Cauchi: Just because you have a policy. One of my favorite posters comes from a company called despair.com, my third favorite website on the planet. [00:46:00] And it's a picture of the Pamplona Bull Run and the headline is tradition. And the caption underneath says, just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid.
Bob Moesta: That's right.
Marcus Cauchi: The, the problem is that so often people are trapped by their tradition, by their policy, by their bad habits, and they don't spend enough time in reflection. I've been so blessed that I've been able to interview some of the world's best young salespeople, you know, five to seven years experience.
And these are people who are hyper self-reflective.
Bob Moesta: Yeah.
Aligning with the customer
Marcus Cauchi: And they spent time asking themselves the question personally taking responsibility and asking what did I do or failed to do? What did I say or failed to say that caused that outcome? They're not afraid to ask for help. They're not afraid to challenge the status quo, and they go through quite a lot of grief, uh, because management, uh, pushes them and says, well, that's not the way we do [00:47:00] things around here.
Well, why the hell not? That's the first question that should people should be asking. They should also be asking, well, what is it that actually works? Let's look at the best in the world. Who can we go to to find out what they do that works consistently? I have another client eight months into his new job.
He's not expected to generate a single cent for 14 months, and at eight months in, he's 200% a quota. Why? Because he's doing everything against the book. He's aligning himself, and these are enterprise sales, so they're not small. They're seven figures, and he's knocking the ball out the park. Why? Because he's aligning with the customer.
He's paying attention. He's listening. He's understanding their motivation. He understands their why. He understands how they've got there because he's taken the time to have them tell their story, and making sure that he's coordinating all those resources to arrive at [00:48:00] that point where they can make the decision today.
Sales is the digestive system muscles
Bob Moesta: So one of the ways I think about it is sales is like the, from a human body perspective, it's like the digestive system in muscles. Like it's the things you have to go do is basically sales. Blood is the cash flow. If I don't have blood, I, I, I don't, I can't live. And, and, and the management system's like the, the, the, the brain, it's the neurological systems that, that basically tell us when to do things and basically, uh, takes the data in and decides what to do and what not to do.
Right. But the thing is, is that, that what we, we, we, we keep thinking the blood and the, and the brain are the most important organs. But the reality is like, if I don't eat, I will die . If I don't move, I will die. And so part of this is to realize like, this is a give and take across these things, and no one of them is, is is more important than the other because they don't, you don't survive without having all three.
And so part of this is to realize like what's the give and take? So most people say, well, you know, there's a financially run organization and [00:49:00] there's a, a sales driven organization, or there's a kind of a, a operational driven organization. My thing is, is the best companies are balanced between these and that the executives can have the open discussions, not from a political perspective, but can have these discussions to know as the environment changes, what do we need to do to compensate or to cope or to adjust to get there.
But if we listen to, for example, the financial side of it, we literally, in the time of a pandemic, you basically lean back, you literally cut everything back and you basically say, we're just gonna wait to till things come back. But the salespeople are like, look, there's no food. We gotta pivot the business.
What else can we do? How are we actually gonna do it? And so you, you start to realize like the muscles in the digestive system, they lean in because they're hungrier. And so part of this is to realize they actually need some blood to actually go figure out how to pivot the business, but yet there is not.
And so it's this whole aspect of realizing it's a system and it has to work together and there's [00:50:00] trade-offs. And that we d if we don't think about things this way, we end up trying to isolate or say like, we've gotta do this or we gotta do that. And it's like sometimes we have to do both or sometimes we have to do neither.
Marcus Cauchi: Sadly. We're coming to the top of the hour. We've still got quite a few things I wanna talk about.
Clearly defining the differences and necessary interdependencies between sales and marketing, sales and customer service
Marcus Cauchi: One of the things in the book that you talk about, which I think is really interesting, is the def clearly defining the differences and necessary interdependencies between sales and marketing, sales and customer service.
Do you mind spending a couple of minutes on that?
Bob Moesta: I think the, the aspect here is that the metrics by which we run marketing in this and quote the funnel, the lead funnel, right? In most cases they're correlative and they're, uh, triangulating meaning, anybody who raises their hand, we know who they are. We know kind of the company they work for the size of it, but we actually don't understand why.
And so what you end up having is people in the goal of, of the funnel is to generate more leads. [00:51:00] And if you start to rethink this, you start to realize that leads, leads become a point in time, not just a a person or a organization. And so part of this is that, that this is the part that then causes the friction with, uh, the, the sales, right?
And so part of this is actually spending the time. So what what's interesting is the, one of the companies I'm working with, the marketing people go on sales calls. They literally share different perspectives on it. And, and you start to realize, like at some point the marketers understand they can, they almost can see it from the outside, but they don't feel the pressure to, to one to close.
But they don't, oh, they also don't understand like how the customer's gonna make the decision. They, they almost feel like, as soon as I know what the features are, I'm done. I just gotta communicate that. And the the reality is, is how do we actually move it through? So to me, there's a very large interdependence between the three org parts of the organization, and yet we don't allow market, we don't give the space, we don't give the time.
We don't enable people because we're trying to be so [00:52:00] efficient to understand how the three should interact together. My belief is that by loosening up and enabling people to interact more, you'll actually build a way better system. Because at some point there is this interdependence and we're trying to design it to be very modular, where it has a very standard interface of, I just give you leads, but the lead quality and the conversion rates like, I'm working with one company where the conversion rate is like two and a half or 3%.
I'm like, how is that acceptable on any front?
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely.
Bob Moesta: All that does is breed like, well, I don't wanna give anybody my email because at some point they're gonna call me forever and I'm gonna get harassed the entire time. And it's like, how do I get off the like, and you start to realize like, how do we actually rethink, like this whole notion of the lead funnel.
When are people ready? How are people ready? And you start to, when you reflect these kinds of questions through the timeline, you start to realize like, oh, that's what I should be doing. Here's how I should do it. So it gives you a frame to start to think about marketing, a sales and, and customer [00:53:00] success.
But it also starts to identify kind of the interdependence between them and the, the things you have to, we still have to create in order to actually make the, the, the system as a whole better to enable people to make progress as opposed to how do we make marketing better? How do we make sales better?
How do we make customer success better?
Marcus Cauchi: Well, the sacrifice I'm seeing is, people are sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency.
Bob Moesta: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: And this is where the massive growth in some fabulously well thought through tools in marketing automation, sales enablement, all of that kind of stuff. A good tool used badly is probably worse than doing nothing.
Yeah, for sure. There are a couple of examples of this came across. Uh, one client in mind, they were doing 600 free downloads a month and they converted one every two months from those downloads. So their system actually were, wasn't serving them because they were doing demos to people who could not buy.
And they were tying [00:54:00] up salespeople to have 1200 conversations with people who were not in a position not willing or not able to buy. Came across another company and they had 125 million pounds worth of marketing qualified opportunities, of which they converted 7 million.
How on earth can you possibly believe that that is a good way to run a business?
Marcus Cauchi: Now, how on earth can you possibly believe that that is a good way to run a business? That strikes me as complete idiocy.
Bob Moesta: Yeah. So that's one of the things where I feel like as, as a little bit of an outsider to the sales, I've run sales organizations, I, I would consider myself more, uh, an innovator and an engineer than a salesperson. But at the same time, the fact is, is like somebody from the outside has to start calling people out on this stuff.
And so it's people, it's very hard to call people out from the inside. And so what I wanna be able to do is, is start to have these conversations from the outside and people go like, you know, we have that problem, or we, that's exactly where we're at. We need to think about it that way. Cuz, cuz nobody's actually having these kinds of [00:55:00] conversations.
And, and at the same time it's like, well it's always been that way. It's like, yeah, but maybe we need to change the way we generate leads. Maybe it, maybe we actually have to think about things in a different way. Like it's, it's one of those things where they just accept it because it's there. But then here's the thing is when they start to change, they actually don't know what to change to and they don't know what better really means.
And so the fact is, is that this is what holds them to say like, well it's too much work cuz I, I have to run the process. They don't give people time to work on the business, they just work in the business. And so this is where I wanna, I wanna start to have people take, you know, where every company I've built, I've given people at least 20% of their time to work on the business as opposed to just work in the business.
In the book, I have this, uh, technique we use all the time. It's called Game On, Game Off. Game On is where we talk about the content. We're talking about working in the business. So we'll be in the middle of a meeting, we'll be talking about something specific, and I'll say, game off. Game off means. Now let's talk about the process we're [00:56:00] using to do this.
Do we need to change it? Is this not working? Is there a better way to do this? Okay, game back on. Let's now, now talk about the content this way. Very interesting. And, and so it's this aspect of enabling people to talk about the process as opposed to just bitch about the outcomes.
Marcus Cauchi: One of the most valuable lessons anyone can ever learn is that if you want better answers, you have to ask better questions.
And I think part of the problem is that if you come from a particular perspective, there was Einstein's definition around this, which is you, you cannot solve a problem by tackling it from the position that created it. And you need to be able to step back and you have to ask yourself challenging.
Why do we do it that way? When did we start and was it ever relevant? And is it still relevant today?
Marcus Cauchi: Difficult, uncomfortable, often naive questions. Basic question is, well, why do we do it that way? When did we start and was it ever relevant? And is it still relevant today? I have found this conversation incredibly enlightening, and I would love to have you back [00:57:00] to go through 201 and 301 as they're evolving.
Bob Moesta: So let's do this. Why don't we, why don't we, uh, um, kind of end it here, but let's ask the listeners to prompt you questions to say like, based on, on our conversation today, what are the things that are, you are now questioning? What are the things that are making you think about kind of how you run your sales organization or your marketing organization differently?
What problems did we actually kind of help highlight? And what new questions do you have because of our conversation?
Marcus Cauchi: Fabulous. You took the words right outta my mouth. Um, Bob, uh, two, uh, three very quick questions.
What choice bit of advice would you give to your 23 year old idiot self?
Marcus Cauchi: First of all, um, And this isn't about regret, but if you had a golden ticket Yeah. And you could go back to your 23 year old idiot self.
Bob Moesta: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: Who probably would've ignored this advice, what choice, bit of advice would you give him?
Bob Moesta: Yeah. I think the, the biggest thing is, is, so I'm dyslexic and one of the things that I did is I, I, my mom basically, uh, taught me a lot of [00:58:00] ways to kind of hack. But one of the things was never to let people know that I was dyslexic.
And so I took a, an hour a day to learn how to spell, and I did it for almost 35 years where I finally realized like, okay, I'm not gonna learn how to do this. So, so I got back almost eight hours a week and I realized, like my whole life, up to 35 people kept telling me, like, to work out my weaknesses.
You're good at this, but boy, you really need to work on that. And my, my advice to myself would be is like, screw it. Don't worry about your weaknesses. Go find some other, other people who are good at your weaknesses and double down on your strengths. That's what I would tell myself. Fabulous advice.
Marcus Cauchi: Again, work on your strengths. They are your best development. Putting me in a room to study Excel. You can put me in there for a month. I'll still be sure. Okay. Next question.
Books that have inspired you or podcast videos that you'd recommend other people would pay heat to?
Marcus Cauchi: Books that have inspired you or podcast videos that you'd recommend other people would pay heat to?
Bob Moesta: Yeah, so I think the biggest one for me is a book called The End of Average by Todd Rose, where he literally talks about [00:59:00] how we end up creating the system around this notion of the average that actually doesn't exist.
Marcus Cauchi: Mm-hmm.
Bob Moesta: And so what it does is it forces us to think about statistics and, and metrics and numbers where a larger sample size of a bad question doesn't make the question better.
Marcus Cauchi: Right? Yeah, absolutely.
Bob Moesta: And so I think, I think that that's one of them. I think the other one is the notion of how to fly a horse by Kevin Ashton, which is this notion of like, that he, he debunks a lot of the, a lot of the notion of innovation to say like, we all innovate, we all innovate every day in our lives.
We need to be not afraid of it, but we need to actually embrace it. And, and he talks through kind of like, um, you know, most people think you have to be smart to be, uh, uh, uh, an innovator or you have to be kind of gifted in some way. And what he, he, he basically comes back and says, to innovate, it takes hard work and lots of reps.
And the fact is, is that like, that is the number one reason why most of these people, when you look at it, even when people say they've had an [01:00:00] aha moment, they did a thousand hours of work before that got to the thou, the aha. There wasn't just a outta nowhere, the aha came.
Marcus Cauchi: And so excellent.
Bob Moesta: It, it's hard work. And, and that, that's the other book I would recommend.
How can people get hold of you?
Marcus Cauchi: Brilliant. Bob, thank you so much. How can people get hold of you?
Bob Moesta: Through LinkedIn? Bob Moesta, M O E S T A. Can, uh, on Twitter, I'm @bmoesta. And then, um, yeah, I have, uh, the Rewired Group, uh, is the, is the name of my firm and then bobmesta.com. In my book, uh, I have a couple books, but the book that I'm talking about now is mostly, uh, demand Side Sales, and it's at Amazon. Excellent.
Marcus Cauchi: Bob Moesta. Thank you.
Bob Moesta: Thank you. This is been a joy.
Marcus Cauchi: This is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from the Inquisitor Podcast. If you found this conversation insightful, then please get in touch with your questions and Bob and I will have several other conversations. I hope, where we will address those questions directly.
And if you feel that you'd be a good [01:01:00] guest or you think you know someone who would be, then email me at marcus@laughs-last.com or get in touch with me at uh, via LinkedIn. In the meantime, stay safe and happy selling and get hold of Bob's book Demand Side Selling. Bye-bye.
