The JOLT Effect

How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

De: Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna

Narrado por: Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna

From the best-selling co-author of The Challenger Sale, a paradigm-shattering approach to overcoming customer indecision and closing more sales

In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing.

For years, sales expert Matthew Dixon has been busting longstanding business myths. Now in The JOLT Effect, he and co-author Ted McKenna turn their trademark analysis and latest research to the vital and growing problem of customer indecision—and offer a shocking new approach that turns conventional wisdom on its head. Drawing on a brand-new, first-of-its-kind study of more than two and a half million sales conversations from across industry, they reveal the surprising truth that high-performing sales reps grasp and their average-performing peers don’t: Only by addressing the customer’s fear of failure can you get indecisive buyers to go from verbally committing to actually pulling the trigger.

Packed with robust data, counterintuitive insights, and practical guidance, The JOLT Effect is the playbook for any salesperson or sales leader who wants to close the gap between customer intent and action—and close more sales.

* This audiobookincludes a downloadable PDF that contains charts, graphs and illustrations from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Something to Think About

I love it when a cell book gives me a critical element to be thinking about at all times!

Very light on what to do.

Good stats, good information. Very light on actual tactics. I usually don’t have trouble getting tactics and next actions from books, but after completing this book, I’m still thinking… “Ok. What now?”

Overcome Indecision

Broke out how to overcome indecision and provided the guides to also replicate in 1:1 situations with your team.

Great when you are stuck with deals!

I work in crm consulting and this book is amazing as we can add playbooks from this book directly into clients crm

Datos interesantes para equipos de ventas

Buena información sobre el sesgo de omisión y cómo sobreponerse a la indecisión de un cliente o descartarlo por lo mismo.

Great stuff!

Kind of hit on what might be a paradigm shift from companies still doing business 90’s-style… where a room full of “experts” are meant to “Wow” the client.

Now… the salesperson should hone their own expertise (up to a certain level) and reduce FOMU!

The high cost of buyer indecision

After reading The Jolt Effect, by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, where they analyzed more than 2.5 million sales calls recorded and digitized in the Tethr call recording system, we know the problem exists across the entire SaaS B2B market, regardless of sector or deal size.

The insights from the analysis published in The Jolt Effect result from an AI model created after analyzing 8,300 data points in a 2.5 million call sample. The model reliably predicts the outcomes of a deal with 85% accuracy, based on the language the buyer uses in the call.

This is a historic and watershed study of buying behavior and sales leaders who ignore the findings or fail to read and absorb the lessons in this book, do so at their peril

What’s Going on?

In the past 5-7 years win rates (from qualified prospect to close) have nearly halved, while deals ending in no decision have more than doubled. Until the Jolt Effect was published, few people knew why or could tell you what to do about it. As revealed in the study, elite salespeople could intuitively detect indecision and took steps to overcome the indecision to bring in the business or recognized the buyer could not decide and they moved on.

win loss rates to no decison

But what about the other 94% of salespeople?

If you are not recording every sales call and Zoom/Teams/etc. call and your sales managers are not analyzing sales calls and coaching, peer coaching, and mentoring salespeople and SDRs on a weekly basis, then you might as well click away now because nothing is going to change and your %age of deals ending in no-decision number will remain the same

Why are so many deals ending in no decision?

Based on the data, 44% of deals that ended in no decision because the buyer preferred the status quo to change. The other 56% of deals were lost because of buyer indecision, see Figure 1.1 from the Jolt Effect Audible download.

root cause of losses

Buyer indecision is not new. We know in every decision involving change that there are two opposing sets of forces at play. This is well articulated in the Jobs to Be Done framework or mental decision model, articulated originally by Tony Ulwick 20 years ago, and adopted by Clayton Christensen in the Innovators Solution alongside Bob Moesta.

There are opposing forces at play in any decision to change that result in behavior change. On the forces pushing forward to a new choice; there is the urgency of the current problem and the desire to make things better, combined with the attractiveness of the new solution. The forces blocking change are the habit of the present and the tug of historical allegiances, combined with the anxiety and uncertainty of making a new choice.

OPPOSING FORCES MODEL FROM BOB MOESTA.
JTBD Forces model
What is causing buyer anxiety and uncertainty that leads to indecision? It’s human nature and the fear of messing up is causing high levels of indecision for three main reasons. These could resonate with you as you think back about deals that didn’t close for your team over the past year or so.

Buyers are unable to choose between different products and ask for comparisons between your offering and competitor B and obsess over features that are present or missing from your offering.
Buyers are drowning in high-quality information from dozens of sources and trying to find the best product/service becomes a confusing, time-consuming chore. This is known as analysis paralysis. Symptoms are when buyers ask for more information, another pilot, another customer reference or advise they will get back to you when they have analyzed yet another competitor’s products.
Buyers are uncertain of achieving the ROI and financial outcomes they seek from the new product or service and believe that it will reflect poorly on them and the decision team if they don’t. Buyers view the amount of change, disruption, and financial outlay as too risky for them and possibly career-limiting if all goes badly.
What are High Performers Doing to Overcome Indecision?

The JOLT in The Jolt Effect title is an acronym for what elite salespeople are doing that is different from the rest and it starts with a J.

Judge that indecision is happening by listening carefully to customer language and observing behavior.
Offer proactive guidance and advocacy (personal recommendations), based on experience working with similar customers who faced the same array of choices. This is the domain of elite reps who have established trust and are industry experts in how companies buy and use your product.
Limit further exploration. This requires several skills, sense-making and controlling the flow of information. Salespeople who have established themselves as subject matter experts are in the best position to help customers to decide.
Take risk off the table. Top performers help buyers to get comfortable with their decision by setting outcome expectations, offering downside risk protection, and or starting with a smaller deal size.
What to Do?

Implement The JOLT Effect training to overcome buyer indecision, and this starts by getting everyone on the customer-facing team to read the book, or as a minimum watch a video summary of the core concepts. In your weekly sales meeting, get each salesperson to present one key learning from the book or idea they will adopt next week.
If you are not already recording and analyzing sales calls - when would now be a good time to start?
Call recording software from companies like ExecVision (Mediafly), Gong, Chorus, and Tethr are the only tools in the sales enablement tool stack that go viral in an organization. Why? Because salespeople, particularly new hires, want to hear what top reps are saying and doing on sales calls. A library of curated calls is a wonderful way to accelerate sales ramp time with regular coaching and mentoring. Nothing beats call recording and coaching for improving conversational competency.
Focus on skills development. A recession is a good time to upgrade the consultative selling skills of your team by replacing poor performers with mindset issues and by implementing weekly 3-4 hour skills coaching, and role-playing workshop sessions, where managers review and critique calls and focus on developing one skill a month and monitor individual performance improvement. Toastmasters is a great first step outside the company to gain important communication sales and life skills
Adopt a continuous learning ethos. This starts at the top of the company and sales leaders must encourage salespeople to take charge of their own personal development, subsidizing book and development course purchases, holding monthly book reviews, and encouraging participation in external learning courses in line with career development.
Why bother?

The data in the study reveals that Jolt seller win rates are nearly double that of average sellers in deals with low indecision, and more than double in deals with medium levels of indecision, but when buyers have a high degree of indecision, Jolt sellers have a win rate 5 times higher than average sellers. This chart is from the Jolt Effect Audible download.

jolt win rates

I know of no other lever that sales leaders can pull, capable of increasing revenue that would otherwise be lost to no decision. What is the financial impact to your company if in the first year of implementing Jolt training, deals lost to indecision were reduced by 10%, which means your win rate increased by 10%? What if that was 20%?

Want to implement the Jolt training outlined above? Get in touch and book a free consultation.

This review was originally posted on whychangselling dot com 26.1.23

If you sell complicated offerings… read this now!

I could write a separate novel on the takeaways of this book. But it is a game changer.

Start at the beginning obviously, but Chapter 5 is filled with insight. I didn’t realize I was already doing many of these behaviors.

I sell complex ERP and have a deal I am closing this month at 100kARR. Ive been doing what I do for a while (SME) and always been a subscriber to Challenger, but the dynamics and flow of this deal was text book exactly how the book describes the Jolt Seller. Never heard that articulated. The close was one if the easiest and most natural processes Ive worked on big or small. I also gained other new tools.

The explanation of injecting fear into a fearful process like incentive expirations and pressure tactics are why clients end up doing nothing. The salesperson is shooting their own foot. Looking forward to using these to up my close ratio.

Great mindset shift for sellers

Great mindset shift for sellers to approach customers with confidence and truly advise, rather than always play it cautiously.