The JOLT Effect - with Matt Dixon, Author

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Matt Dixon, the best-selling author of The JOLT Effect, The Challenger Sale, and The Challenger Customer, and founding partner at DCM Insights. Today, we'll be covering four main topic areas with Matt. First, the catalyst for The JOLT Effect. Second, the challenges with buyers who avoid making decisions. Third, how win rates can be materially improved with radical candor. And fourth, the importance of setting expectations on the value to be delivered. Matt, can you take a moment and give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Matt Dixon** (1:18)
I will see if I'm worthy of the invite, but I definitely appreciate it, Ray. I obviously follow your podcast and very honored to have been invited. So thank you. So my background, it's interesting. Maybe I'm guessing I'm unlike a lot of other folks out there, I think who write about sales effectiveness. I'm not a salesperson. I've never been a salesperson. I've never led a sales team, which makes me a little bit different. I'm a researcher, so I think you should think of me more as a sales anthropologist. Maybe that's a good way to describe me. Now, my parents don't understand that. They just know I live in DC. I do something confusing, so they assume I'm a spy, which I'm not. But I have spent the better part of my career bringing research methods to bear, to study changes in customer buying behavior, and then more importantly, what do great salespeople and sales organizations do to meet the customer as where they are and as their preferences and their needs and their buying behavior evolves. What we've always found in our research, now going back 30 years, has been that there's this lead steer effect in sales, where the customer buying environment changes in some significant way.
The people on the front, the lead steers, your top performers are the ones who spot that first and then they adapt. They adapt to the change in the environment and then they improve their selling. The question has always been, what is it that those folks have figured out that we can identify with research, distill and then teach to everybody else? That's really been the story of my career. I spent probably the better part of my career more than 20 years with a company called CEB, which is now a part of Gartner Group. The bulk of that time was spent running the global sales practice at CEB. I'm now a co-founder of a company called DCM Insights. We are a research company, but we are doing a lot of our own research, some of which we're going to talk about today, the JOLT Effect, trying to understand the constantly evolving customer buying behavioral landscape. Then we also help companies improve their sales performance in light of that.

**Ray Rike** (3:18)
Well, thank you for the background. Even though you've never been in sales, you've got great insights for salespeople. Even though I've never been a researcher, that's what I do for a life now. I do research on B2B SaaS and Cloud benchmarks, but I've had two similar books that really changed my whole perspective on B2B technology marketing and sales. First was Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore, and then it was an earlier book of yours, The Challenger Customer. And it was so research-based. And when the JOLT Effect came out, Matt, I'm like, I've got to get mad on the podcast. So before we talk about what's in the JOLT Effect, because so many of the concepts I read in the books, like, well, that's intuitive, but I wouldn't have thought about it unless I read the JOLT Effect. So can you tell us a little bit about how the research was conducted to give a foundation to a listening audience?

**Matt Dixon** (4:10)
Yeah, you know, so, Ray, we had been interested, one of the topics that we had been interested in, which I think this is a better to be lucky than good, because it seems like this is what everyone in sales is talking about right now, especially in the technology sector, and at SaaS in particular, is no decision losses. So, which are so frustrating to salespeople, right? When the customer goes through the entire buying journey, they agree with your vision, they agree that their status quo is suboptimal, they want to move forward with you, and then they just kind of ghost you. You know, they go radio silent. Eventually, you give up, probably because your manager told you, after many pipeline reviews and check-ins where you had no updates, our time is better spent elsewhere, less market has closed, lost, no decision in the CRM system. It's a huge productivity loss for salespeople. We found anywhere between 40% and 60% of the average salesperson's qualified pipeline will actually be lost to deals that ultimately go nowhere. Insight, you think about that for a salesperson, or if you're a manager or leader, multiply it by the number of people on your team, and it is a huge deadweight loss. We never really felt like we had a good answer to that.