Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab Podcast. I'm here with Philipp, and our guest today is Richard Harris. Nice to have you here, Richard.

Richard Harris: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. Good to see you both.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Good to see you as well. I think we first met through a LinkedIn comment on a cheat sheet on sales methodology. But maybe for the audience, right, like, you've been around for a long time. You have a very successful podcast, a very successful business. Maybe it would be awesome if you could just quickly introduce yourself to the audience, and then we'll go dive right in.

Richard Harris: My name is Richard Harris. I've been in sales my whole life. I'm one of the few people who knew that going into careers that I was going to be in business and sales, particularly sales. I currently am a go to market strategist and sales trainer, teaching reps how to earn the right to ask questions, knowing which questions to ask and when to ask them. The goal is to improve the performance of an individual so much that they are happy with who they are. Therefore, they can achieve goals that they have personally and professionally, of course, which then translates into an organization achieving the goals they have at least at a revenue level. So that's the quick version of me.

Janis Zech: Yeah. You also wrote a book. You trained a lot of teams at some very renowned companies. So I guess it's a very humble introduction. But, yeah, I think today's topic — I mean, maybe let's kick it off with, you know, it's Q4. Most people run an SKO in Q1, typically in January, February. What's your take on SKOs now?

Richard Harris: I think they're great as long as you don't do sales training at an SKO. I think it's terrible to do sales training there. Nobody's going to remember. You're downloading way too much information into people. And the excuse I get is, "Well, we finally have everyone together." Well, why are you waiting so fucking long to do that? Like, it's terrible. Nobody can remember what they do at an SKO, right? I've done training at SKOs. Look, if a client wants to pay me to come to an SKO and train them, I will. And I know how to do it in a way that's meaningful and helpful. But generally speaking, SKOs are not a place for large sales training.

Janis Zech: What is it a place for? What should you focus on?

Richard Harris: I think it's a place for strategy. I think it's a place for understanding product knowledge. I think it's a place for some role play, right? You can do different kinds of sales. You could come in and say, "Okay, SKO, we're going to focus just on negotiation, right? And we're going to talk about negotiating this and these are our discounts and this is how we do it and here's how you negotiate with procurement." That kind of sales training is tolerable. But to come in and do a whole sales training is just silly, right? It's funny because people say, "Well, we want to get them all together because it's a good time," and then they want to throw these burdens of sales training like they're going to come out like they've just memorized War and Peace or the Bible — with unrealistic expectations. That's the challenge.

Janis Zech: Yeah. It's like going to school once a year.

Richard Harris: That's a great way to describe it. We're going to go to school once a week for a year, fifty-two times a year, and expect you to remember it all. Great analogy.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And so in your mind, like when you think about sales training — I mean, just the super high level, right, like, how long should it be? What's the framework to think about it? Because I think, you know, we have a lot of folks in the audience that are tasked with getting the most out of the sales team. Right? And they sometimes have enablement in their organization, sometimes they don't. But I'm curious, like, how should you approach that from a very high level and then we can go deeper and deeper into this topic.

Richard Harris: I think at a high level, you have to decide what it is you want the team to be better at. Right? "Hey, at the end of this SKO or the end of this sales training, if it's outside the SKO, or at the end of us implementing this tool, we want the team to be better at blank, blank, and blank." And what are those blanks? And when people come to me and they say, "Well, we want to be better at prospecting," I'm like, "No, that's not good enough. Of course you do. Right? Like, thank you. You got into leadership because you could say that?" No, you want to say, "I want to be better at this part of prospecting — cold calling, emails and subject lines and body, writing the hook." You have to get training based on the specific use case you're trying to improve, not the overall concept you're trying to attack. That's the difference. And that's what you do. So that's why I was sort of saying, "Hey, we're going to do negotiations or negotiations with procurement." You can spend an hour or two on that topic alone. Right? Now, that will only work if they're really good at discovery, right? And again, which part of discovery matters as well. There's a difference of discovery in a first call than there is in a third call or at a demo, right? So you've got to make sure that you understand the specific nuance and use case you're trying to improve, not just this high level buzzword.

Janis Zech: Is there a fundamental philosophy or framework that ties everything together that you teach?

Richard Harris: There's tons of them. Right? And I'll explain mine, but I hope everybody knows that nothing in sales has changed since Mesopotamia. Like it really hasn't, right? Everybody comes up with a different way to say something. That's good. That's called evolution, right? That's important. My framework is called NEAT, N-E-A-T, which focuses on the need of the customer or prospect, the economic impact they feel based upon that need, access to authority, and timeline. Access to authority is super critical because you're never going to get to an authority figure early in a sales cycle. Sometimes you don't even get to an authority figure late in the sales cycle. And oftentimes there's more than one authority figure anyway. So it's about what level of access do you have to this level of authority that you need. So that's my approach to how I do training or how I even focus on just discovery or negotiations or closing techniques or determining the right decision maker. But there's nothing wrong with other frameworks if they are properly coached to. That's the other challenge I see, right? I'm not a rip and replace guy. I don't come in and say, "Oh, you've got MEDDIC, rip it out." Well, why is MEDDIC working for you? Have you done that analysis? Because if MEDDIC's not working because you're not coaching and you haven't built the right pieces, what makes you think that NEAT's going to be any better? Right? So it's a really unique situation in that regard from my perspective.

Philipp Stelzer: You mentioned nothing has changed since Mesopotamia, which is like really a long time ago. There must have been something that has changed though. Right? Like, if you compare the current state in sales to ten years ago, then I would think, like, what success means, or how to be successful in sales — don't you think it has changed? I mean, there's so many new tools out there, so many different ways of communication. People, you know, I think also getting tired of cold outreach.

Richard Harris: Yeah, that's right. That's the evolution of the technology around sales. Philosophically, nothing's changed in my opinion around the concept of having a sales conversation. Can people get better faster? Sure. That's changed, right? Are buyers smarter? Some say yes, I say no. I think they're just as stupid as they were before they had all this technology because they have their own bias into how they perceive things, right? Salespeople are smarter than their customers ninety-nine percent of the time because the customer goes out and practices buying. We practice selling. We practice what we do. The buyer doesn't. The buyer just has an ego. Now, does that mean you go in and call them stupid? No. Am I being a little facetious and obnoxious? Yes, it's a podcast, of course. Right? But I genuinely don't think that buyers know how to buy better than we know how to sell. And I don't mean that in a manipulative way. I'm not talking about a salesperson being manipulative. I'm talking about a salesperson knowing how to communicate better and how to draw out the right answers to the right questions to build trust. We're way better at that than a buyer is at purchasing. They just see everything. Every human being is a comparison shopper. So they only see us as a commodity. That's it. Right? That's just the way it is. And they compare it with what they know and what they see in other demos, right? And what they think they know.

Janis Zech: I mean, I find it always so fascinating is that there's so few that actually have requirement docs. And so you go through this whole journey of buying. And I mean, the first thing, if I do a major decision on infrastructure, I would basically have a very clear understanding of a requirement doc because typically there's buying committees. Right? And so there's no alignment on what the different stakeholders actually want. And I find that always fascinating because to a certain extent, you would expect the way you basically align different stakeholders is by writing it down and aligning on the importance. And many buying committees don't do that. And I think it's a good example, right, of this process. I think there's different buying personas, obviously. But, like, maybe just going a bit deeper on this — so, obviously, the salespeople do this all the time, so they have a high end of selling. Right? Buyers don't buy so much. Typically, they also have other things to do in their roles. You mentioned this, like, if MEDDIC doesn't work, right, you don't go in and rip it out and replace it with your own framework. Why is it that it doesn't work? Like, what are the common issues?

Richard Harris: That's a good question. Right? If it's not taught well, whether it's any philosophy, to be honest with you, or methodology, the problem is the leadership's not coaching to it. And oftentimes leaders build the process around the information they need to gather, not the perspective of the buyer and the information that needs to be understood from the buyer's perspective first. So oftentimes, if you go into any methodology, right — BANT, budget authority need timeframe — well, if I'm trying to figure out someone's budget, that's not about them, that's about me, right? If I'm doing MEDDIC and I'm talking about metrics, I have to be mindful: their metrics or my metrics? So often it's around my metrics, or the way I'm asking questions is their metrics in a way that helps me understand how to sell, which isn't what we want to do. We want to understand their metrics in terms of the way they need to buy and building that trust so that they feel seen, heard, and understood. That's a leadership issue. That's not always a methodology issue. So if you're not careful, too much of the discovery is built around the information your seller's leadership team wants to know because they think that's what's going to help them improve the forecast. That's not wrong. There just needs to be a better balance in that regard. So to answer your question, it all comes back to how it's set up, how it's taught, and how that teaching is implemented and reinforced.

Janis Zech: You have this company, right? At some point you achieve product market fit, but then that's not good enough. You need to keep building, you need to keep expanding, right? Talking about the typical SaaS company here essentially, and I think this is where I've seen the biggest gap. Basically, salespeople — so you have the sales enablement, which is outside of the product and engineering group. You have a product marketing team that is also not really involved in that. Then you have the sales team, and the communication, I rarely see it flow really well.

Richard Harris: Really? Surprise, surprise.

Janis Zech: So the salespeople are not really trained enough to really go with a consultative approach when they talk to prospects and go really deep. Right? It's really understanding, "Okay, this is your pain point. I understand. I've seen this before. Here are the different ways that our product can solve this, and here's another idea." And that's not really — I've rarely seen this. Right? And I wonder, like, how does a company achieve this? Like, have you seen a really good way a company has implemented this?

Richard Harris: Implemented what? Training? Reinforcement of the training? Is that the question?

Janis Zech: Really good reinforcement, continuous. Yeah.

Richard Harris: So a couple of things. So one, that's one of the things I do, right? So when someone does hire me, it's not just training where I show up, throw up and leave, right? There's additional training and coaching. So if someone works with me — sorry, shameless plug, but he asked — you know, it's a four week program. Week one is training. Weeks two, three, and four, I spend time with the leaders to see what's working and not working to help coach them. And then I also spend time with the team — what's working, what's not working. Because it takes effort, right? You got to give people some time after the training to implement things. And you can't implement everything, right? You know, sometimes you train and you just get them to do one thing. I get them to do, just ask this one question differently, right? Just next week start asking this question and see what happens. So that reinforcement needs to be there. So yes, it needs to be built in. It needs to be done in different ways, right? You can do training in a sales meeting. You could do training in a sales meeting led by a rep if they know how to do it or the manager knows how to coach them to do it. You can do a daily stand up which says, "Tell me a tactic you used today" or "Tell me a tactic you want to use today." Right? So there's lots of different ways to reinforce. It doesn't have to be built just around Richard Harris or someone else coming in and doing training. Right? That's the reason I do training and reinforcement and particularly with the managers so that when I leave, there is a pathway for them to continue to do the reinforcement.

Janis Zech: And do you think that — I think the challenge is obviously, like, I think both in sales methodology implementation as well as in training, right, you need to do it continuously. Right? You can't just do it one off. Like, exactly. So, obviously, right, like, I think there's different views on this, but I think in the end, the impact will come from being very deliberate about, like, look, this is what we're doing. Right? And now we're basically — so we had someone from Meltwater here on the show talking about their MEDDIC implementation. It was a two year process. Right? And in the end, there's a lot of different pieces that need to come together. Right? Like, we, for example, automatically update Salesforce fields from our AI notetaker solution. And what we typically see is that the sales methodology fields in Salesforce, they're almost always empty. Right? So even the data capture doesn't work.

Richard Harris: Oh, come on.

Janis Zech: And I think the point being, right, like, that's obviously bare minimum. That doesn't make anyone better in terms of asking the right questions and the way they ask the question. If you don't have the data visibility on what's actually being discussed, or the manager is not looking at it and not caring or not doing the coaching around it, it's very hard to operationalize the methodology. Right? And so I think this has been on my mind for a long time. Like, how do you effectively do it? Do you think the managers are the missing piece there? Or is it the enablement team that should be doing this, or everybody?

Richard Harris: It falls to everybody. Right? In my head — and I could be convinced otherwise, right, I have my own biases — I feel like enablement's really good at building out the program, building out the infrastructure for training, and helping to get that training implemented. There needs to be someone who has accountability on the reinforcement part. Sometimes that's the enablement team. I often feel like it needs to fall to the sales manager as long as the sales manager isn't being tasked with too many things. And there should be a partnership between enablement and the sales manager. There should be a partnership for the enablement team to teach the manager how to manage around these things, right? To ensure consistency, right? And there's got to be a way to do this that's also authentic, meaning that what enablement teaches — the concept, the ideas, the structure, the scripting — there has to be enough allowance for authenticity to come through, in my opinion. So that's the big picture.

Janis Zech: Let's talk about implementing NEAT, right? Or I want to come back to the fields you were talking about that are always empty.

Richard Harris: Well, they're empty because so many times I think the field title is wrong. Therefore, because the field title is wrong, the rep doesn't actually ask the right question in such a way that it captures that information. So let's say we're talking about economic impact, right, from NEAT or need. I will ask questions and I won't say, "So what are your basic needs?" I'm not going to say that, right? So I am going to ask questions around their pains, their challenges, their struggles, and I'll probably use those words. But then through active listening, go back in reinforcement. Then I might say something that says, "Hey, Philipp, it sounds like you're in need of blank." Well, now all of a sudden that field could get implemented. So now I'm not necessarily having to use that word. You know, the same thing with MEDDIC, if it's around metrics. Okay, great. Then find a way to ask the things. "What are you trying to track? What does that help you do? What does that not help you do? Okay, so if I understand, these are your primary metrics, right?" And it doesn't mean you can't say "what are your primary metrics." I'm just trying to make sure people don't sound robotic, right? I want them to sound — this is that part of authenticity, right? If a rep can feel authentic using that word, that's great. That to me is where I feel like the rubber meets the road and is unintentionally overlooked or not quite understood unless you have someone who really, really gets it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think it's another thing on their plate. And fundamentally, I think it starts with what are the right questions and how do you ask them? And having an alignment there to understand what is the crucial — I think we had John Barrows on the show, right? He talks a lot about discovery. And I think a lot of people agree that if you don't do discovery well, it is actually very hard to tie the economic positive impact back to the pain and the negative impact. Right? So I think — what's your take on that? Would you agree? And then how do you identify those pain points? How do you do that discovery well? Because in my mind, at least, you know, the conversations we're having — the buyers are very eager to see that demo. They're often more informed than maybe ten years ago. I think that has definitely changed, that they come in — they only take the meeting if they're really trying to solve a problem. And so, how do you do that well?

Richard Harris: How do I do that well? Well, I think you have to know your buyer and your buyer personas really well. I think you have to know what it is that they want before you show up, right? Like your buyer can have more information about you and what they think they're trying to solve. But I also have more information about my buyer. I know more about their business. I know more about their industry. I know more about their use cases and their case studies. And I know more about them as an individual because I can go run a psychoanalysis on them through some tool on the internet. Like ChatGPT will do it for you for free. Right? So I actually have more information than they do. It doesn't mean they don't have information, it just means I have more. So I think that's the first part is to understand that piece. And then I think you have to also remind your buyer to slow down, right? Like, "Hey, Philipp, you know, Philipp asked me, 'Can you just do the demo?'" It's like, "Philipp, I could do a demo and guess what? It's going to be death by mouse click. I'm going to show you a thousand things. What are the three things that are most important to you?" And all of a sudden, Philipp's going to go, "Wow, I don't want to sit through that kind of demo anymore. These are the things that matter." Great. So when I get there to show you, help me understand what's important about those three things. Okay, great. Let's dive in. So I can do a little bit of discovery for part of that. The other part of it is that particularly when we talk about demos, just because you brought it up — a demo is not product training. For God's sakes, nobody cares. Right? Do not show someone how you upload the information, how you connect to their API, how they do any of that, short of them asking you that. But nobody cares. They care about the resolution and the potential problem being solved based on what you do, not how you connect all the systems. Right? It doesn't matter if you're using a call recording software, you know, and I need to show them, "Oh, by the way, here's how we connect everything to those empty fields in Salesforce." Unless they told you that's their pain, why are you talking about it? Right? We know it's a pain. I just don't think that's the primary pain in most cases, right? In that instance of recording software, right? So again, that's the long passionate answer you get from me on that question.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. One thing that I really liked that you said earlier was the time that you spend. So you start with the training with the reps or the teams, but then you spend more time with the managers and sort of reviewing the outcome of the work that you put in before. Because very often also with our own software, right, I think the manager is so often the make or break point when it comes to these things. Like, if they don't run a weekly sales meeting where they basically ask all the questions, ask the reps to talk about the deals that they're working on, basically reflect on what they did the past couple of days —

Richard Harris: But that's not a sales meeting. That's a pipeline review. There's a big difference. That's not a sales meeting. That's a pipeline review.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. What's a sales meeting then for you?

Richard Harris: A sales meeting is a place where I'm trying to get someone to get better at what they do. I'm trying to make them better at life. You know what I brought into sales meetings before? I brought in financial people. I brought in a real estate agent to teach my team how to buy a house because they have no clue. Right? That's a sales meeting. A sales meeting is where I can show I care more about them than just the number that they represent. Now, are there certain sales meetings that are pipeline reviews? Yes. Are there certain sales meetings where you're always working on a tactic? Absolutely. I think every sales meeting should have ten minutes on a tactic. "Hey, we're going to learn how to qualify this better this week." Or, "We're going to role play this one little thing this week." Absolutely. But pipeline meetings are pipeline meetings, not sales meetings. Sales meetings are much bigger than the number they represent.

Philipp Stelzer: And is it that, like, as a manager, you should then basically have a good balance of, like, let's say, the actual execution of the plan versus what I would call more continuous training and coaching?

Richard Harris: Yeah, there's always a balance of that. I'm also, you know, be mindful — I'm also not saying you need to have a sales meeting and a pipeline review meeting every week. That could be exhausting. That's a lot of extra meetings on your calendar, right? So a manager's got to figure out how to do that well. Sometimes it doesn't always have to be a meeting per se. You could tell everybody to go into Slack and have a Slack channel that says, "Tell me your two best deals and what you're doing this week to get those over the finish line." Okay, well that's a different kind of coaching. It's just a different technique to do the same thing. Is it going to take longer because you got to type it? Maybe, but it's no different than sitting there with six or ten people in the room and each person taking a turn. Meanwhile, the rep's sitting there twiddling their thumbs. Right? There's a balance in that. So there's lots of ways to do all that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And so maybe coming back to the role of enablement and the managers, right? So obviously, you experienced managers being super crucial, kind of the glue to do continuous training. How do they team up with enablement? Or also, what is the best setup to achieve that? Right? So you come in. You have a four week program. I assume that the outcome of that is that they're probably tasked with certain things, right? Both on the enablement side, on the manager side. Like, what are your recommendations there?

Richard Harris: I think ultimately it's communication, right? And I think it goes back to sort of that alignment in the beginning. Like, if I'm working with an enablement team, right, I will say, "Great, here's what you're telling me we need to do. Let's talk to the managers. Is that what they really need?" Sometimes enablement is being pushed to force something — not negatively, but new product, new product launch, new product rollout, all that stuff. Well, that affects what the sales team's actually doing. So what are they really doing? Right? What is the sales team and where does the sales team need help? That doesn't mean they have to avoid the new product launch. I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying there needs to be that key communication component between the two that's really critical when you go into training. And it should be a partnership and a teamwork, right? It should be — if I'm an enablement person, and look, we all know that most sales reps will sit back and look at enablement and go, "Yeah, you have no clue because you haven't sold anything in forever, right? Till you're punched in the face, don't tell me how to box." Right? So I think that's a regular occurrence. So that's where that piece comes in — that strong communication between enablement and the manager, and even enablement and the reps, in my opinion.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, sounds almost like enablement is that facilitator, but they absolutely need the managers to actually get that point across. Right? To essentially — because obviously the reporting line is also into the manager, so that obviously changes a lot. But if the managers are not interested in proper training and development, it's probably gonna be really tough.

Richard Harris: You've got a manager problem. Exactly.

Janis Zech: And I think in the end, right, like, you're a CRO or VP of sales, right, and you basically start promoting ICs into managers — they need to be very strong at essentially helping the ICs to become better over time. And that mindset — is it thirty percent? Is it forty percent of the job description? I don't know. Right? But I think that's super crucial. And if you don't have that mindset on the manager level, on the leadership level, it's gonna be really tough. Right? Because I think the biggest challenge in all of this is the change management aspect. Right? Like, and I think we've all lived through this. Right? You have people that just go and they wanna train, they wanna learn, and they wanna go. Right? And it's on the IC, manager, and VP level. But then you also have people who actually feel that this is very exhausting and they're actually not interested in it. And they've done it for a long time like this. And if you have that and you come in to that place, right, the big challenge is like how do you then change that?

Richard Harris: And that is — I think there's a couple of reasons, right? So I think communication is key. Letting people know that we know change is not easy. It does matter on that rep if they are achieving their numbers and goals, right? They might get a little more flexibility. And then the other thing is at some point managing up. And I'm a straight shooter and I'm not above turning around and just saying, "Look, this is the direction we're going. I understand you don't like it. I'll work with you on it. But if it's no longer the right place for you, it's okay for you to say that too." I don't need to sit there and have battles with someone who's going to be cancerous in my organization and try to bring the team down. The people who got you to where you are may not be the people who need to take you where you need to go. And that's the fundamentally hardest part of management in my opinion. Now, how you do that with a certain level of grace and space and recognition and accountability is important. At some point, you have to be willing to pull the trigger and so does the person on the other side. They have to know that too. And they can pull the trigger too. Door swings both ways, right? So I'm very quick about these kinds of things. Other organizations are not, and I'm not suggesting you go around HR and you don't do the right things and you don't try to coach them and all those things. I just think people need to understand like this is where we're headed, right? And it's okay if you don't like it and it's okay if you don't get on board. Then it's time for everybody to have a different conversation if we get to that part. I'd rather you stay, you're one of my best reps. I'd much rather you be happy, right? But I'm not gonna put up with your shenanigans.

Janis Zech: No. I mean, I think it's also a mindset, right? Like, belief in what the company and the product is doing is also playing a key role in being successful in sales. At least I can say that speaking for me personally. I mean, I'm sure there are successful salespeople out there who absolutely do not believe in the product that they're selling. Like, there's enough hustle culture out there, right, and products that would reflect that. But I think if you really wanna be successful and happy as a sales rep for ten years plus, then you need to work in places where you actually believe in the company and their product. I would say. Curious — you think otherwise, if it's just something you could just, I don't know, fake?

Richard Harris: I mean, everything can be faked. It's exhausting to put on that much stuff. I think if I'm understanding the question correctly — it's just about sincere honesty. Right? Be sincere and be honest about your intentions and your desires and your goals and your results. And I think everybody's a little bit happier. Doesn't mean we're always happy, but I think that's maybe — is that the essence of change management? Sure. I suppose so.

Janis Zech: The perfect ending. No. I think it's a perfect place to end, but I also very much agree. But I think, like, the best demos that I got were from people where I had the impression, even just through a computer screen, that they had a serious intention of trying to solve my problem or telling me that they cannot solve my problem. Right? And those were demos where I go —

Richard Harris: Those are always the best.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And I go out and I feel like I trust this guy. Right? Like, he built trust with me — not by maybe replying to an email quickly, but really taking me seriously and reflecting that in a conversation.

Richard Harris: Yeah, I think I say this all the time — people will choose to do business with us, not just because of what we do, but how we do business. Right? Like, I think it's how we engage, right? It matters in a big way.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Perfect. A hundred percent. So many thoughts, but, you know, before we let you go — any book, research report, mock, or anything you would recommend?

Richard Harris: Yeah. Yeah. Of course, I'm going to recommend my book. It's called The Seller's Journey. It's the only sales book I know with a full money back guarantee. If you think it's terrible, I will send you your money back one hundred percent and you can keep the book. So it's called The Seller's Journey, it's on Amazon and Goodreads and all the other places that you can find books and