J.O.L.T. The not-so-secret way to unblock sales

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes 

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
You're listening to Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom horse. Welcome back to part two of our interview with Matt Dixon, who is the author of the Jolt Effect. And that is the book we're discussing today. Now, in part one, we defined the problem. Now we're going to look at the solution. Let's get right to the studio. So, Matt, in part one, you've framed the problem really well, and I've prompted unicorns to think about solutions, which is where we're going to go now. So let's start looking at that solution. And the obvious place to start is by defining the key principles of the jolt effect. And let's see if we can lean it, please, towards both sales and marketing as they're supposed to work together.  

 
00:42 
Matt Dixon 
Anyhow, that playbook for overcoming indecision is the Jolt playbook. And Jolt is an acronym. It stands for four behaviors, judging the level of indecision, offering your recommendation, limiting the exploration and then taking risk off the table. We like it because it's memorable, and it also speaks to what's happening here. Right. Our customers stuck, and we're trying to kind of jolt them into action to get them to move forward. But it is a fundamentally different playbook. And I think if we go back to that finding earlier, that dialing up those fomo tactics with a customer who is intellectually committed to the change, but then starts obsessing about what might go wrong, why do fomo tactics fail in that scenario?  

 
01:21 
Matt Dixon 
Is the reason is that you're fundamentally using scare tactics to sell to somebody who's already afraid, but they're not afraid of the thinking you think they're afraid of. They're not afraid of missing out. They're afraid of messing up. And that's a very different set of fears. And so great salespeople, in our analysis, figured this out for themselves, just like they figured out that challenging customers is a much more effective way to break the customer status quo bias, which we wrote about in the Challenger sale. And it's always been really interesting to us as researchers and fascinating, really, because these high performing salespeople, we didn't invent challenger, we didn't invent jolt. We just studied what the best salespeople had naturally figured out on their own and then tried to give language to it and create a framework that other people could follow.  

 
02:04 
Dom Hawes 
So step one, the J of Jolt. I was interested also when were talking about Challenger sale, and you're talking about issuing or going on a global apology talk. So I think about sales and marketing combined and I come at it, I mean, I'm a marketer, I guess I'm a salesperson too. But I come at it from a marketing and soft influence, if you like, not face to face with the customer, but all the things that then sit around it and helping colleagues close a sale. The challenge of sale was an amazingly good playbook for marketers too, because it informed a lot of the marketing communication that could support that process. And it strikes me that sales and marketing working together, once you understand what indecision is, certainly on an individual account basis.  

 
02:46 
Dom Hawes 
But if you are using ideal customer profiles, icps, or you're using Persona, if you start to understand some of the problems and some of the reasons for indecision, the marketing team can probably help too.  

 
02:58 
Matt Dixon 
Absolutely. In fact, I will say honestly, when I look back on that, I think that is my biggest regret actually, of the jolt effect is that we didn't, and I blame the publisher because we had to finish the book, but was that we didn't spend enough time actually exploring some of the roles for marketing to play. And as you said, Challenger was a book that was intended for sales, but was sort of accidentally also for marketing. This is a book that is really written for sales. But as we look back on it, were we to write a bonus chapter or a second version? Absolutely. We would focus a little bit more on the role of marketing.  

 
03:32 
Matt Dixon 
So I think as we maybe go through these, it's interesting to think about what is the, because there certainly is a role at every single step of the jolt effect. So the J, this idea of judging the customer's level of indecision for sales, we talk about different techniques that you can use to suss out what is the buyer's personality when it comes to decision making. What about this decision is weighing them down, what's going on contextually. But those are also things that if you think about marketing and or sales enablement, where you can actually apply a pattern recognition lens. Right.  

 
04:06 
Matt Dixon 
If we know that certain types of customers who might have had certain prior experiences or be in certain spaces or have certain dynamics at play, we know these customers are going to come to us and take a lot longer to close, if they close at all. And so at the very least, that is something that we can equip our sellers with, is that insight and that knowledge. And then when the seller gets into the conversation, one of the things we talk about in the book is the techniques they can use to get indecision on the table, which I think is normally actually an embarrassing topic for buyers. And they don't like talking about being scared about what's going to happen to them if this doesn't go well. The higher you go up, the more angry it'll make them.  

 
04:48 
Matt Dixon 
The suggestion that they are indecisive and worried about failure. But it turns out, again, it's a deep seated in a very natural fear that we all have. So how do we do it? And one of the techniques we talk about in our work with sales teams is not relying so much on the classic techniques of kind of open ended questioning or needs diagnosis, but instead using a technique that high performance developed on their own, which derives actually from submarine warfare. We call it pings and echoes. So just like a surface ship would ping the water, send, quite literally a ping, a sound into the water to generate a reflection back, which would tell them there's an enemy submarine, it's heading towards us, it's about to fire torpedo, et cetera, indecisions quite like that. We can't see it. We can't identify it.  

 
05:35 
Matt Dixon 
We don't know what's going on beneath the waterline, and so we've got to ping the water to see what lies below. And the way we do that is we try to articulate the fear, quite literally articulate the fear we think our buyer is struggling with in a way that is not confrontational, but gets the elephant in the room acknowledged, recognized, so it can be dealt with. So it might be something like this. Dom, we've been talking for a while. We've had some great interactions with your team. We had some great demos. We've ran a pilot. I think we did quite well. You guys were happy with the results. One thing I'd love to understand is I know we've got some way to go, but I want to do kind of a quick gut check.  

 
06:18 
Matt Dixon 
If were to make a decision today on what should be in the proposal and what should be up, because we showed you a lot of integrations, a lot of ways to deploy our solution, do you feel confident that you and your team know exactly what you want and almost as importantly, if not more importantly, what you don't want right now, because you told me early on this is a big decision for your company and you want to make sure you get it right now, what I do know is that almost every customer I sell to, and this might be my fault, is that they find themselves a little bit inundated with too many options, and they're all in the similar situation that you are. Budget is tight, is a critical decision. They've got to get it right.  

 
06:54 
Matt Dixon 
And so I may have done you a disservice here by showing you too much. If you are struggling with what should be in and what should be out, what's nice to have, what's need to have, I'd love to be a guide to you and help you navigate through that and show you what other customers like you guys have gotten value out of. And if that's not a concern, please set me straight. And what ends up happening is you get that reflection back, which is the customer says, yeah, actually, everything you've shown us has been amazing. And every time we talk about this, our wish list gets longer and the price tag gets bigger, and I need your help pairing it back right, and we've got to get this right or there won't be any expansion for you guys.  

 
07:31 
Matt Dixon 
And this won't be a long relationship for us. And I may be out of a job, so I need your help making that decision. I'm glad to hear I'm not alone in how hard this is because you guys do a lot of cool stuff or the customer might say, no, actually, were just being polite. There's a lot you showed us that we are not interested in at all. So I'll tell you right now what we're not interested in. But you know, what we are concerned about is this ROI projection that I don't know that I can sign up for, because it's not you guys, it's us. I've never seen any investment like this pay off in that way at our company. And again, I think it's probably our fault, but I can't put my name on a proposal that promises that kind of return.  

 
08:07 
Matt Dixon 
So again, what it does is it gets that fear of failure on the table so that it can be managed and dealt with. And again, I think the organization, especially marketing, can play a key role in helping salespeople. And then we'll talk about the olt, where I think marketing's role is even more pronounced, if you will. But that pattern recognition, we know a customer that was recently a customer of this vendor, that is going to be a really hard, because a lot of those customers bought that platform. They didn't have a great experience. They churn out. And even though that is not our fault, we've got to deal with that baggage. So let's understand that, or even let's disqualify that opportunity out or deprioritize them, because these are very hard opportunities to close.  

 
08:47 
Matt Dixon 
And we know that because we've seen it time and time again.  

 
08:49 
Dom Hawes 
Have you got the transcripts of my sales call from last week? Someone has obviously studied your material, because that was almost a conversation I had last week. So judging indecision is really important, of course. And it strikes me that, as you say, although marketing probably plays more of a role in the OLT, if there's good open communication between the sales teams and the marketing teams, and marketing's got the data of the other areas that the customers are interacting, maybe they can spot some kind of correlation and as you say, build a pattern to try and inform them in the future. But that takes us on to o.  

 
09:21 
Matt Dixon 
This one is critical for marketers. So o is about dealing with that problem of, remember I said one of the things about specific decisions is choice overload, having too many options, and what we know from the decision science, not research, that we've done, but you look at people like Barry Schwartz or Sheena Eingar, Mark Lepper, you talk about the fact that when we put too many options in front of people, it leads to a lot of decision making dysfunction. First of all, it leads to a lot of procrastination, decision avoidance. If people make a decision, it leads to a lot of post decision regret, people trying to backtrack on their decisions, et cetera. And what's interesting is choice can be a bit of a double edged sword. And I think this is a particularly tough message for marketers, because marketers love lots of options.  

 
10:06 
Matt Dixon 
I love when my customer comes to the website and they see all the integrations, they see the partner ecosystem, the implementation partners, they see all the different configuration possibilities, the roadmap items. We just love saying yes to our customers. And what's interesting is the research is pretty clear, the psychology is pretty clear that lots of options is actually a good thing, but it's a good thing early on when we're trying to pull somebody in. So when we're on the website, when we're at the trade show, and a customer stops by our booth for a conversation, let a thousand flowers bloom.  

 
10:38 
Matt Dixon 
But the psychology is also very clear that if you want somebody to actually not suffer from decision dysfunction and the overwhelming option, or the paradox of choice, as Barry Schwartz calls it, you've got to actually call the set of things from which to choose. So a good example of this. Now, by the way, what many marketers are guilty of is just letting 1000 flowers bloom and never really helping salespeople with weed whackers, which is like, look, these customers sell them this package. Those customers sell them that package because we know from prior experience it leads to value a lot faster. It's an easier sale to get done. It's based on the fact that other customers like them get value out of that package as well. But we kind of leave it up to salespeople to figure that out.  

 
11:24 
Matt Dixon 
The other thing is that salespeople don't like helping or guiding customers around decisions very much either. So when customers start to wring their hands about what they should choose, many salespeople will go back to needs diagnosis. Well, why don't you tell me, Dom, what is most interesting? Why don't you tell me? Got you to reach out to us and fill out that demo request form on the website, or what really intrigued you when you came by the trade show booth. So they try to put the decision back on the customer's plate. And when we do that, our win rates are actually quite low because you're not actually helping the customer at all. You're foisting more problems on them. What we found is what best salespeople do is they offer guidance and advocate for a specific course of action.  

 
12:03 
Matt Dixon 
It's actually quite similar to what a wait person might do. A great wait person in a restaurant where you look at the menu and you're struggling with what to choose and where. Imagine if the wait person said, you said, wow, gosh, everything looks great. What do you recommend? And the wait person said, well, sir, what are you in the mood to eat tonight? That's so unhelpful. But in fact, that's what a lot of salespeople do. No, I'm not going to help you. You decide on your own because they don't want to be blamed. But what great weight people will do is they'll say, this is my favorite dish. It's our most popular. We sell out of it every night. We still have it. I highly recommend it. It's a lot of food, though, if you're in the mood for something lighter.  

 
12:38 
Matt Dixon 
I also like this other dish, too. I get rave reviews, compliments from our diners about that one. But everything we make here is delicious. You really can't go wrong. If something else intrigues you, go for it. Now, what happens in that moment is that we enact what's called the delegation effect. And the delegation effect is when the burden of a bad choice is now shared between the decider and the recommender. Because if you order the dish the wait person recommended and you don't like it, technically it's your fault because you ordered it. But they are also partly responsible because they recommended it. Now, it's a simple example, but it works the same way in b two b sales. If we can actually say, you don't need to look at all 20 of these things, let's look at these three.  

 
13:19 
Matt Dixon 
I think that's really what we should be focused on. Here's why. Suddenly that choice overload problem goes away, and the customer feels a lot more confidence that you are helping me in this decision and you are rationalizing the choice set. But again, it's something that both marketers and salespeople are very uncomfortable with. So I mentioned this before, but for marketers, you do want to think about, yes. What is the full spectrum of options we can lay out there? But how do we equip our salespeople so they don't have to figure it on their own with those pre configured packages that align to different needs based segments or icps or use cases, and then train and equip our salespeople to say, don't look at all this stuff. Look at this. This is exactly what I think you should be thinking about right now.  

 
14:06 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, I think a great many people suffer from not being ruthless enough over the focus they take and not understanding the reason that someone's going to buy something from them and really just selling them that or marketing that at them. But, yeah, we've covered that in previous podcasts, so I'm interested in the next one. So once you've judged the reason for indecision and you've worked out and you've recommended an offer that should help ease the path, the next task on l is to limit their exploration in other areas.  

 
14:35 
Matt Dixon 
This is a tough one. I mentioned to you when were talking before the show that I had this experience recently with a company that told me they'd won a huge deal. After they closed the deal, maybe a month later, the Gartner Magic Quadrant came out. And that magic Quadrant showed that this vendor was kind of in the middle of the pack. They weren't a leader, they weren't laggards, but they're kind of know.  

 
14:59 
Matt Dixon 
And what ended up happening was the buyer, who was so committed and had know, great process, great proof of concept, built the consensus, ran all the traps, did the reference calls, negotiated the agreement, and they were set to deploy the solution, suddenly started backtracking on the decision because he was getting reined on by all of his colleagues who were forwarding him the magic quadrant, saying, hey, did you see the people we just signed up with are kind of, Gartner thinks they're middle of the pack. Have we talked to these people? Did we even know about this vendor? Why didn't we go with the market leader? Now, of course, he had spoken to all of those vendors and evaluated them and made that very principled, rational decision to choose this particular supplier. But that didn't stop the whole decision from getting unwound.  

 
15:40 
Matt Dixon 
They ended up actually backing out of the contract, not employing the solution, and going with somebody else. Oh, my God. That is a scenario that leads to endless information consumption and analysis. Paralysis is the fear the customer has that there will be some new piece of information that comes to light after the decision is made that makes that decision look like not a great one after all. What's particularly tricky about this one, I would say of all these techniques, I think this is actually the hardest one for salespeople. The L. What's really hard about it is that you can't tell your customer, Dom, you don't need to read that gardener magic quadrant. Like, just take it from me, we look good. You don't need any reference customer conversations. You don't need to see any proof points or case studies.  

 
16:21 
Matt Dixon 
No customer is going to agree to that. They all want to do their research because it's on them. Now, what's interesting is that some amount of research is natural, but beyond a certain point, it becomes overwhelming and it creates this analysis paralysis kind of doom cycle that the customer will never escape from. And actually the win rates are quite low beyond a certain point if all you do is continue to indulge the customer with their endless request for more information or data. Now, this is particularly difficult for average performing salespeople because they will perceive the customer's request for another demo, for another reference call for another pilot as a good thing. They think that's a customer moving towards a decision. But what great salespeople know is that beyond a certain point, that customer is actually now moving away from the decision, not toward it.  

 
17:08 
Matt Dixon 
And they're starting in this endless cycle of information consumption. So you got to put a stop to it. Now, the key to doing it is you've got to get the customer to stop trying to become an expert on you and your technology and your solution in your market and start trusting you as an expert. And the key there is, I know this is going to sound crazy, but we found great salespeople do to shift that dynamic is actually quite early in the sale, is they are ruthlessly transparent with their customers. So they will say things like, dom, I'm wonderful that you reached out to us. I'd love to count your company as a customer, but just based on what you're looking for, I actually don't know that we're the right vendor for you.  

 
17:46 
Matt Dixon 
In fact, I think our competitors do a better job at that. Would you like me to put. I know people who work there. I'd be more than happy to put you in touch or saying things like, I know we've been talking about this integration or this feature. I just want to be honest with you. That is a brand new feature or integration for us. It's not quite ready for primetime. Some of the early adopters have had some hiccups. Now, in three to six months, it's going to be a thing of beauty. Right now, it's a little bit bumpy. I just don't want us to build our entire business case around that.  

 
18:15 
Matt Dixon 
Those kinds of moments of transparency and honesty, what they actually are doing is showing the customer they're overcoming something called the agency dilemma, which is the customer's belief that you have more information about this decision I'm about to make than I do. But you are paid as a salesperson to hide the bad news and only show me the good news. And this gets amplified when salespeople just say, yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do this. Oh, we're best at that. We're best at this. Which, it's not all roses, it never is. But once you become a bobblehead doll to your customer on this call, it amplifies their fear that they are not dealing with an honest broker of information. And so what they're trying to do is research to try to figure out what you're hiding from them.  

 
18:56 
Matt Dixon 
And they feel like they've got to become, get themselves to a level footing where they have the same amount of depth and expertise that you do, because you're not going to be an honest broker. So by resetting and having those moments of truth and transparency and honesty, we're actually doing is teaching the customer that your primary objective is not to put one over on them or oversell them or hide the dirty laundry. Your objective is to get them to a great decision. Whether that is buy our product or don't buy our product or stay with what you're doing today, it makes no difference to me. My only objective is to get your team, and your company to the right decision for you.  

 
19:28 
Matt Dixon 
Once that happens, the customer stops trying to become an expert, and they start trusting you as their expert, and that's a very powerful thing. Now, when we think about for marketing, what's important to recognize is, again, the customer is going to do research anyway. And what we need to do is make that upfront research process as streamlined as possible. There's a great article written by my co author on the Challenger sale, Brent Adamson, called Sense Making for sales was in HBR, I believe, a couple years ago. And in that article, Brent talks about how marketing teams can actually create structured learning journeys for customers.  

 
20:06 
Matt Dixon 
Because a lot of our customers come to us, they don't know the first thing about this space or this, especially about new technologies like AI powered technologies like, boy, nobody knows what they're buying, and it leads to endless amounts of information. So what great marketing teams will do is build a structured learning journey, which is if you're coming to us and you're a novice to this stuff, here's a buyer's guide we've written. Here's a podcast from an expert we really respect. Here's the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Here's some white papers from some of our competitors. In fact, here's some third party information. But if you want to get smart quickly, here are the five or ten information assets that you and your team really should consume. It'll really keep you from just doing endless Google searches and trying to find the right stuff.  

 
20:48 
Matt Dixon 
This is a curated set of content for you.  

 
20:50 
Dom Hawes 
And if the marketers are smart, as most marketers are, of course, they will be using exactly the right techniques of influence along that structured learning path. So they'll be making sure that any reference customers or case studies are coming from the type of company size, market geography, culture that the target company will respect. So they'll go, oh, look, if they bought it's probably going to be good for us. A little bit more focus in case studies, a little bit more focus in content. So we've managed to limit expiration a little bit. We haven't hit someone with a large amount of information right at the last minute. Go, hey, look, we made it into the magic conduct. Here are seven more competitors. The last stage, I think is really interesting, the t taking risk off the table, because that really speaks to overcoming fomo.  

 
21:36 
Matt Dixon 
This is a big one, and I think oftentimes sales teams will immediately go to this as like now we tell them to focus on all of it, but I think that's the one that people tend to zero in on, that I've got to create a safety net for my customer. Right? They're suffering from this expectations overload and they're not blaming us as a vendor. It's not that they're saying we don't believe you, that you can generate those returns. It's that they don't trust that their own company is going to be able to pull that off and then the blame will fall on their shoulders. And so there are two things that we see great salespeople doing here. The first one is upfront setting proper expectations.  

 
22:10 
Matt Dixon 
And here's something that, again, I find that marketers are often, this is a double edged sword, which is we love that case study or that success story or that proof point, splashy return, phenomenal case, massive ROI, tremendous benefits, and we love showcasing it on the website and in a case study, and pulling that customer onto the podcast and bringing them to the customer conference and pulling them up on stage and having them sing our praises, that's great. But it is a bit of a double edged sword, which is oftentimes those are kind of pie in the sky.  

 
22:43 
Dom Hawes 
The best case, right.  

 
22:44 
Matt Dixon 
It's the best case, right. And when our customers come in, and this is a very clear kind of divergence between average salespeople and high performers, when customers come in and they say, we saw that presentation at the conference, or we heard the podcast, or we saw that case study, love it. That company is just like us. If we can get the kind of return, this is a slam dunk for us. The average salesperson is like, well, I'm not going to talk you out of it. If you're really excited about that, and that's going to get you to buy you, let's do it. But I think what we see great salespeople doing is under promising and over delivering. So they won't refute those claims. They can't. Right. And they will say, look, we're very proud of that case. Obviously, it's one of our signature customers.  

 
23:24 
Matt Dixon 
Marquee customers love the returns they've got, and they're raving fans of ours. We got them on you, on the phone with them. They would tell you the same. But I would also caution you to reset your expectations. Here's why. Those guys had total planetary alignment, no system conflicts or workarounds. They resource it to the hilt. Everything went perfectly. And we know in implementations, implementation land, it doesn't all go perfectly. And so what I would counsel you to think about is that those outcomes are certainly possible, but I would encourage you to set the benchmark a little bit lower. And here's why is that we see that outcome in 95% of our implementations at least hit that kind of return, if not better. And so I think what you're doing is you're setting yourself up for success because you're going to go in the CFO.  

 
24:12 
Matt Dixon 
And by the way, the benchmark, that floor is very attractive to cfos. I guarantee you're not going to get pushed back on that. That is an investment they would make every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and we're setting you up to overperform. Everything beyond that is upside, and I think we're actually captured some of that upside together. But I don't want you to set your expectations so high that you begin getting hard questions. If things slip a little bit early on, which sometimes they do. As you know, you've implemented systems before, you know it doesn't all go seamlessly. So doing that upfront is really important. Then I think what we've also got to do is we've got to create a safety net for our customers that can come in many forms.  

 
24:48 
Matt Dixon 
So a couple of examples might be if you're selling a technology solution and your customer wants to implement it themselves, insisting, or almost as much as you can, that they include a bit of professional services support anyway, not because you're trying to goose up the size of the deal, but because you want there to be a team ready and waiting in case there's any slippage that can come in swarm the problem and make sure the customer doesn't lose any ground. The a team lined up to swarm the problem and fix it, or things like mutual value plans. So this is a great role for marketing the number of salespeople.  

 
25:22 
Matt Dixon 
This is quite interesting, who would actually, even before the signatures gotten on the contract, would pull forward a conversation with the customer success team or the implementation team say, look, Dom, I know we're working through legal and procurement. I'm going to let them do their thing. But what I'd like to do is get your customer success manager on a call so that we can walk you through our mutual value plan. That is how we are going to go from signature to value. It's got milestones, checkpoints, owners resourcing from you and from us. KPIs we're going to look at. And actually it's got a number of lessons learned that we call out as well, which we learned the hard way back when were a startup. Things that go wrong if we follow this roadmap.  

 
26:01 
Matt Dixon 
I know we are going to overperform that benchmark in the business case, it's kind of our recipe for success. So let's start planning that now. Who's going to own what and what the cadence of interaction is going to be and so on and so forth. Those kinds of things which cost nothing are just good hygiene. And that's a great role for marketing to play, to really document what that looks like, instilling that safety net for our customers. And then the last example I'll give you, encouraging our customer to start smaller than perhaps they want. I mean, average salespeople, when they hear the customer talking about their eyes getting bigger than their stomachs and oh, we want to add this and we want to do that. We want it all. Your average salesperson is thinking, holy smokes, this is great.  

 
26:38 
Matt Dixon 
I'm going to make my year on this deal. What a great salesperson is feeling is more, I don't think this deal is ever going to get done because again, your eyes are getting bigger than your stomach. I'm going to counsel you to actually start smaller because one, I know we can get that deal through quickly with minimal layers of approval and deliberation, but also you are then shielded because it kind of contain the blast radius if anything goes wrong. Right? So easier deal to get done, counsel you to spend a little bit less money. Let's learn how to work together and then let's expand from there and we'll write the contract in such a way that the expansion is actually easy.  

 
27:13 
Matt Dixon 
But I don't want you to buy everything right now and then feel a lot of pressure to deliver a much higher Roi because we don't know what we don't know. Right. We need to start working together and see how this all works.  

 
27:24 
Dom Hawes 
I think the joint value approach is really interesting. I think one of my observations about SaaS particularly is that it's meant to be easy and easy out. It's not easy and easy out these days. It's a year, one year, two year, three year fixed term contract with no way out if it doesn't work, which is just like an old software licensing thing, except you never own the software. So I think the product marketers can probably do their sales colleagues a really big favor when they're thinking about price and when they're thinking about the terms they're going to attach around the product by putting some guarantees in place that the sales teams can rely on. If you've made every best effort you can to make this work and it doesn't, we'll look at a way of unwinding the contract.  

 
28:05 
Dom Hawes 
And I don't see many companies doing that.  

 
28:06 
Matt Dixon 
They don't. They kind of cringe or. It's funny, I mentioned this on a webinar I did not too long ago for sales team, I mentioned opt outs, right. In that kind of guarantee. Right that look, if you made every best effort and it just is not returning what you expected, we're happy to tear up the contract. You only pay for what you've used or prorated amount of the. We stand by our product. And I think I mentioned this on the webinar, and the chat in the zoom started blowing up and all the salespeople, you know, Jim is the head of sales. I told you we should be offering guarantee and that kind of. And it created this big debate because a lot of companies don't like to offer that.  

 
28:42 
Matt Dixon 
But maybe I'm simple minded in this way, but I do think that the surest guarantee of your confidence or show of your confidence in your product is an opt out. We know you're not going to execute it. That's why we feel comfortable offering it, because we know you're going to love our platform and we're going to get to success together. And if you don't, we don't want you to be an unhappy customer, feeling like you're stuck with something that's not paying off for you. But again, most companies, to your point, are very reluctant to do that sort.  

 
29:08 
Dom Hawes 
Of thing, which is interesting because we're talking about indecision, of course, and the no decision being the enemy of both sales and marketing. And there are a lot of companies that are, for right or wrong reasons, almost always wrong. The experience isn't quite what you thought it was going to be. And if that continues, then the reluctance to commit is going to get even worse. And there are two companies actually we've done work with. I'm not going to name them because they've got more lawyers than me, but one where they took exactly that process, they said, actually, we've looked at your logs. You haven't made great use of our product. So if you'll pay us up to where we are now, we'll cancel a contract. That company I will remember, and the minute I need a solution again, I'm straight back to them.  

 
29:47 
Matt Dixon 
Sure.  

 
29:47 
Dom Hawes 
Another one said, well, you signed a contract, pay us out for the year and we'll go away. It's like, I'm never going to use you again in the rest of my.  

 
29:55 
Matt Dixon 
Natural life, and you're going to tell everyone else not to use them either.  

 
29:58 
Dom Hawes 
Thank you so much for committing so much of your time to us. That has been fascinating. And there's going to be so many takeaways for our audience. So what does the future hold for you? What are you up to next, Matt?  

 
30:09 
Matt Dixon 
What can we expect right after this pod recording? Dom? I could go back to working on the new book. So we've got a new book coming out next spring from HBR press, which is a fuller treatment of some research we've just completed. There was an article we wrote in Harvard Business Review called what today's rainmakers do differently. So those listeners who are in professional services, whether that's law, accounting, consulting, banking, financial services, et cetera, where you're really selling advice more than anything else, would want to check that article out because it's a good synopsis of the research and we've got a ton more content to share. The book is tentatively titled the Activator way, but we haven't actually finalized that yet. But again, it'll be coming out next spring from Harvard Business Review Press. Watch out for that.  

 
31:01 
Dom Hawes 
Blimey. If you haven't listened this far, it is your fault, honestly, if people have ducked out by now, oh, well, they don't know what they missed, honestly. We did try to cut the length, but you can't do that if cutting takes away good content. So we just let it roll. And how good was that? For that reason, I'm not going to do a lengthy closing spiel today. I think the content of this show speaks for itself. But what I might do is pick up on themes we've discussed, certainly in the second half of the show, and where we dived deep into jolt itself that mnemonic, and do a show just about that. Now, if you like that idea, please drop me a line on LinkedIn. And if you don't. And anyway, thank you very much for listening and see you next week.  

 
31:46 
Dom Hawes 
You've been listening to Unicorny, and I am your host, Dom horse. Nicola Fairley is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.