The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect)

**Matt Dixon** (0:00)
We collected 2.5 million sales calls and studied them with a machine learning platform at scale.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:05)
The big insight is that you're losing most of your sales deals, not to competition, but to indecision.

**Matt Dixon** (0:11)
And that indecision stems from their fear of failure. Dialing up the FOMO backfires 87% of the time. They're not afraid of missing out, they're afraid of messing up.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:19)
You just talk about how to actually leverage these insights to improve your sales process. You have something, I think you call it the jolt method.

**Matt Dixon** (0:25)
Yeah, jolt them forward. So the first thing is we've got to judge their level of indecision. The second thing is we've got to offer a recommendation. The third thing is we've got to get them to start trusting us. We call it limit the exploration. And the T is we've got to de-risk the deal. We've got to take some risk off the table.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Great segue to the challenger sale, which is basically this on steroids.

**Matt Dixon** (0:41)
Most salespeople are trying to figure out what's keeping the customer up at night. The challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night. What's a risk that they don't know about, but you do.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:51)
Holy moly. This is going to be the most action packed, high density podcast episode we've done.
Today my guest is Matt Dixon. Matt is one of the world's foremost experts in sales, known for his groundbreaking research into what makes the best salespeople different from everyone else. His first book, The Challenger Sale, was a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller and has sold over a million copies worldwide. His most recent book, The Jolt Effect, builds on his lessons and insights and will change how you do sales. In our conversation, Matt breaks down what you're probably doing wrong in your sales process based on research into millions of sales conversations and then how to tweak your process to be a lot more successful. This episode is for anyone that wants to improve their sales skills or improve the rate at which they close deals. With that, I bring you Matt Dixon. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Matt Dixon** (1:58)
It's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:01)
It's great to have you here. So first of all, a huge thank you to April Dunford for connecting us. She's a huge fan of your work. She mentioned you a number of times on the podcast episode that she did.

**Matt Dixon** (2:11)
She's great. Yeah, she's very nice.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:12)
She's amazing. Okay, so you basically spend your time researching salespeople and digging into what makes the best salespeople different from all the rest, and then synthesizing these lessons into these really actionable pieces of advice so that anyone can become better at sales, which to me feels like a dream come true, even if I'm not a salesperson, even though many of us do sales part time, but especially if you're a salesperson.
So first of all, just to give people a sense of the work that you do, can you just talk a bit about the research that went into the books that we're going to talk about? We're going to be focusing on the Challenger sale and the Jolt Effect. What is the research they did?

**Matt Dixon** (2:53)
Yeah, sure.
So they just start with that Challenger because that chronologically came first. So we actually started that research study and I think it was in late 2008 actually, and we published the initial results to, at the time I was working for a company called CEB, which was acquired by Gartner Group in 2017, a research organization and I was running the group that served heads of sales, business to business heads of sales around the world. We had five or 600 clients around the world and we launched that study in 8 We published the initial results to our clients in 9 We kept collecting some data and then we published the book in 2011 The book was published off a data set of 6,000 salespeople. So we did an in-depth survey with 6,000 salespeople as well as collected performance data on those 6,000 sellers.
It was global, cross-industry, different types of companies as well, product companies, services companies, large, small, slow growth, fast growth, you name it. Over time, though, that research has been ongoing, so we've collected data, I think, to date on roughly a quarter million salespeople around the world that we continue to go back and not just validate the original findings, but look at how things are changing and do cuts of the data now that the data set's so big. So that was a survey-based piece of research we did. The Jolt Effect, we started that research in 2020, actually. It was actually in March of 2020, which I think is a time that everybody remembers with probably mixed emotions, most of them bad.