This week on SalesTV.live we welcome Michael Phelan, founder of Go-to-Market Pros. In today’s competitive sales environment, knowing where you stand relative to your peers can be the key to unlocking higher performance. Join us to explore how top sales professionals identify and close their performance gaps to stay ahead.

In this episode, we’ll ask:

* How do successful salespeople assess and understand their performance gaps?

* What practical steps can individual contributors take to boost their results?

* Which insights from high-performing competitors can be applied immediately?

* How can focusing on buyer behavior lead to improved sales outcomes?

Michael has spent over a decade helping sales professionals and businesses elevate their game by understanding critical performance metrics and competitive insights. His approach combines data-driven strategies with practical, actionable steps that help individuals improve both their daily impact and long-term results.

Facts, the latest thinking, chat, and banter about the world of sales.

Come and join us for some lively discussion and debate.

This week's Guest was -

• Michael Phelan, founder of Go-to-Market Pros

This week's Host was -

• Rob Durant, Founder of Flywheel Results

This week's Panelist was -

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of DLA Ignite

Transcript of SalesTV.live Mid-Day Edition 2024-11-20

Rob Durant [00:00:04]:

Good morning, good afternoon, and good day wherever you're joining us from. Welcome to another edition of Sales TV Live. Your competitors are doing it better, and we're going to fix that. Today, we're closing the performance gaps. We're joined by Michael Phelan. Michael is the cofounder of GoToMarketPros. In today's competitive environment, knowing where you stand relative to your peers can be the key to unlocking higher performance. Michael has spent over a decade helping sales professionals and businesses elevate their game by understanding critical performance metrics and competitive insights.

Rob Durant [00:00:47]:

Michael, welcome.

Michael Phelan [00:00:49]:

Well, thanks for having me on, Rob.

Rob Durant [00:00:51]:

Absolutely. Michael, let's start by having you tell us a little bit more about you, your background, and what led you to where you are today?

Michael Phelan [00:01:00]:

Yeah. I started my career in, in the marketing area, in b to c companies like the Reeboks of the worlds, the Staples of the worlds, the Polaroids of the worlds. Then I migrated into b to b, and then over the years, I got involved in a lot of, startups and emerging, SaaS, and tech companies. And then I formed go to market pros, 13 years ago, when I saw a gap in terms of go to market strategy, and a disconnect between sales and marketing teams. And since then, I've been working on helping people, deliver more value to buyers.

Rob Durant [00:01:37]:

Excellent. So I know you and I talked beforehand when we were planning this episode. But for the audience, I'm going to, ask a foundational question for us. What do you mean when you say your competitors are doing it better?

Michael Phelan [00:01:53]:

Yeah. If you think about kind of the type of boardroom questions people get or executive get. And so I'll compare an example of, if you look at, say for example, Target versus Sephora. Highly competitive retailers, Target knows that Sephora is doing a much better job in marketing than them, and especially in personalization. They've been doing it for years. And if you're a Target executive, you're gonna walk into any executive meeting, any board meeting, and they're gonna say, have you bridged the gap with Sephora? Why are we ranked number 14, and Sephora's ranked number 1? And if you go into those meetings and you're unprepared for that, then it's not gonna look good. So you have to kind of come with a strategy, come with a technological solution, come with a programmatic solution of bridging performance gaps. It's very, very important to boards.

Michael Phelan [00:02:46]:

It's very, very important to investors. It's very, very important to senior executives, and it gets asked all the time of the people we try and sell to in the b to b world.

Rob Durant [00:02:57]:

Okay. So thinking at the individual contributor level, what are the most common performance gaps that individual contributors face?

Michael Phelan [00:03:09]:

What are the most performing gaps that individual contributors have?

Rob Durant [00:03:12]:

Right.

Michael Phelan [00:03:13]:

On the sales side? Mhmm. Yeah. So so what happens is, a lot of times salespeople reach out to to buyers. And in that target example, they'll reach out and say, oh, we got a great product that can save you money, or we've got a great product that can increase your efficiency, or we just got more investment, or look at our great boards, look at our great all this stuff that's really not usually relevant. Because unless you are an individual contributor that can point out your prospect is underperforming their best in class peers, it could be cost, it could be process efficiency, it could be generating income, but, if those individual performance, reps don't know how to engage a prospect, how to point out the performance gaps, then they have a real deficiency. And in this climate, it's even more important because the concept of leaving money on the table really does motivate a management team. So we when I was in Staples and I headed up marketing at Staples, we would routinely send a check to our prospects. In one case, I'll give an example, it was a $275,000 check.

Michael Phelan [00:04:28]:

We would say, if you stop doing business with Office Depot and you start doing business with Staples, at the end of the year, we'll write a check to you for $275,000 in savings. And it looked like a check, but it was obviously not a check, but it brought the savings and the competitive gap to bear, and it made it made it more tangible in a in a way that people could relate to. So if you're either on the marketing side or the sales side and you can really bring highlights to that performance gap, you're really good and you'll do very well. If you don't know how to do that, then you're probably behind a bit. The other way to do performance gap is to show what life would be like with your product versus the existing product. So you might say, here's what a day in the life of you, mister Prospect, would be like using our product. Here's what it feels like. Here's what it looks like.

Michael Phelan [00:05:21]:

Here's the end of your day. Here's what you'll be as a professional using our product versus what you're doing right now. So show a show a comparative of what a day in the life was like, or show what it'd be like for your your customer to use our product versus your competitor's customer using our product, and show what the difference is between if you change to our product, your customer will have a much better experience versus what they have right now. So anything that compares and contrast the company to their best in class competitor is gonna get attention. And there are lots of different ways of doing it. So I've been focused on how do I help sales and marketing teams bring that comparison to life in a way that's really meaningful and will drive action and decision making.

Adam Gray [00:06:11]:

Suppose that, the comparison is not as clear cut as that. So in the case of Staples and Office Depot, you've got, what you have calculated is quite a big cost saving, and then you've got a really neat way of of highlighting that to to the customer. But, in the case of it's largely an American audience, so I may not be picking 2 brands that are appropriate here. It it may be that that, Rob always buys Chevrolet and you always buy Dodge. And you've always bought Dodge and you your dad bought Dodge and your children buy Dodge, and you're a Dodge family. And likewise, Rob is a a a Chevrolet family. And, actually, like with most cars, I believe the JD Power survey said that there's no such thing as a bad car anymore. So it's like, you know, you you're buying it for the brand or for the heritage that you perceive in that.

Adam Gray [00:07:06]:

And those are very difficult things for the company to highlight. And, you know, there there are lots of commoditized products in the marketplace, so everything from CRM systems to staplers. So it's like if if there is no clear differentiator like that for you to flag, how do you how do you draw that comparison? Because I get the comparison is really good, but how do you make that comparison?

Michael Phelan [00:07:28]:

Yeah. So, you know, there's always, there's always negative aspects of dealing with any brand or dealing with any company. And one of the ways of finding that out is to look at these review sites. So if you're a Dodge dealer, for example, and you're looking at you know, you could look at Trustpilot, or you could look at any one of the review sites, or you could actually interview some of these guys, and you could say, hey, what do you like best about being a Dodge dealer? What do you really hate about being a Dodge dealer? Where is Dodge behind the market in terms of their programs? And they will really share that with you. So so there's no one is really great at everything and nobody there always is areas for improvement and differentiation. So so if you're going after that analysis, and let's say I'm trying to sell against Dodge, what I would first do is I would talk to the Dodge dealers about what's good and what's and then I would compare that to the other dealer and so forth. And then I do a do a a contrast. Are you getting the very most from x? Do you feel satisfied with the way the company is delivering y? Or maybe I do a comparison, say, did you know that on this particular aspect of working with car dealership that, you know, Chevrolet was really good and had introduced this new program that you know kinda gets at our real pain point.

Michael Phelan [00:08:51]:

There are dealers also that will move from one brand to the other. It doesn't happen a lot because there's to your point, there's a lot of equity. But in any situation, you can look at some churn, and you can look at some dealers that have moved, and you could actually interview the dealers that have moved. And you could say to them, you know what? 9 out of 10 dealers are moving from this brand to this brand because of the following reason. That's why this company has put so much money into this. Would you be interested in a conversation about why people have moved from this brand, and why they're moving from this brand, and why this is a better brand for you. So sometimes you gotta carve it out and figure it out. It might not be obvious, but once you interview car dealers, they'll they'll tell you what's good and what's bad.

Michael Phelan [00:09:36]:

And believe me, there's plenty for them to complain about. The question is, is it enough for them to move? And I think one of the things that causes them to move is they're losing market share. They're dropping prices. It's harder and harder to sell. So if you can say, hey. If the things continue in this direction 2 years from now, your share will should go down below 5%, whatever it may be. But if you can forecast into the future based on the things that are happening now and give them enough unease about the situation that they're ready to have a conversation. Not to say everyone's gonna move, that's a very big move that you mentioned, but people do move, and you can actually push them in that direction if you know where their real issues are and where the real pain points are.

Adam Gray [00:10:23]:

Yeah. No. That makes perfect sense. And I mean, we we we've we're all in sales. Everyone's in sales to a greater or lesser extent. What happens when when you're dealing with somebody that is, I'm dubious about using the word stupid, so I won't use the word stupid. But they're less sophisticated. So, you know, you would hope that the person you were talking to, particularly in a b to b context, is quite data and fact driven, so driven by head rather than heart.

Adam Gray [00:10:51]:

But what happens if if you're not in that situation, if if logic is not a weapon you can use on this person for whatever reason, you know, and this could be I want to get Oracle on my CV as an installation or I want to get, I wanna to to sell something in that city or or whatever the reason is. How do you how do you work around that if if the the if the normal strategy of dealing with smart people that are open to change and new ideas isn't getting traction?

Michael Phelan [00:11:25]:

Yeah. So so I'll give you a good example of that. You know, I I did some work with Comcast and Xfinity, they were delivering remote tech service, and it was it was through a solution provider called support.com. And they had a fantastic, service. They were they did guided, sophisticated AI, helping the customer understand what they want, bringing them through that and so forth. It was all it was like Geek Squad in the cloud, and they were competing against AT and T that had a very similar service with an inferior brand that was delivering a relatively weak service. And and AT and T were saying that, you know, we're great and we get delivered great service and there's really no reason for us to look at anything else. And the people managing the program at that mid level were very happy, they've made an investment in the company, that they had, so they're strategically aligned and they were actually really, over 5 years, refused to take a look at the product that Comcast had.

Michael Phelan [00:12:25]:

So what we did is we said, well, we've got to really we've got to really bring the customer experience, their customers experience to life. So what we did is we took 10, SMBs in this case, because it was an S and T brand. We we ran them through the Comcast system. We ran them through the AT and T system to solve a technical problem. We did a side by side video comparison, and we sent it to them, and they were very annoyed and very arrogant. And initially, they said, how dare you make us look bad? And then the day later, they said, have you seen our JD Power Awards? We're better than Comcast in every case. Nobody has ever said that AT and T was not as good as Comcast. But the facts of the study said that they were far weaker.

Michael Phelan [00:13:11]:

And then the 3rd day, they said if you sign a letter apologizing for making the video and and and for guaranteeing that you'll never, put it out in public, we will meet with you. So they met and they understood after that meeting that was a dramatically better product and service available, and it took 5 years of trying to get into that account with somebody that was very entrenched, wasn't willing to look at anything, didn't really understand the comparison anyway. But when we brought that comparison to life, both with the mid level team and the head team, we immediately got reaction. They were engaged every single day, in that, and they were really bothered by it. So, yes, you can have a buyer that either doesn't understand the data, or you can have a buyer that's actually doesn't understand the customer experience. How many buyers have actually pressure tested the product, have gone through the experience themselves, really understand what it's like. And I do this in occasions with CIOs, where a CIO will say to me, you know, I'm very happy with our product, everybody on my team loves this product, They're all using it. There's really no reason to look at anything else, and we're too busy to look at anything else.

Michael Phelan [00:14:28]:

So what we did in that case is I interviewed 10 of his software engineers, on his team, and I talked to them about tell me what product you're using, what do you like about it, and so forth. And they trashed the product, they hated it, it was flawed, it was buggy, it was old, out of date, everything. And I wrote that up and I said, hey, we've talked to all of these people and this is what they say, and we got the meeting, and it it it was that he was wrong. He didn't really wasn't that connected to what was going on. He didn't understand the user experience. He he didn't ask his people, but when he saw the facts, he was willing to say, hey, you guys have done the work and you've actually pointed out some real issues, and I'm willing to take a look at that because now you've armed me. And also when I go forward and recommend a potential purchase or a switch, and people say, well, we love this product and why would we switch? And we say, no. Look at the research, and I can reach I can reach out to those people.

Michael Phelan [00:15:27]:

So you can get people who are very, set in their ways. Now sometimes you'll tee them off a little bit by doing that, but by and large, people try and do the right thing for their company. And if they have a comparison that is powerful, meaningful, and relevant to them, and the reps deliver that to them, they'll engage, and then they'll engage fast because now they know there's a real problem that they didn't know about.

Rob Durant [00:15:56]:

So how do successful salespeople assess and understand the performance gaps?

Michael Phelan [00:16:03]:

One of the one of the the things I've noticed by interviewing top reps is they'll often, leverage, an interview with a competitor, ideally with a competitor, because most people are more motivated by what a competitor does. So they'll reach out and say, so for example, on the on the targeting example, they'll reach out to target. They'll say, I know that, say, advanced marketing personalization, if you're selling into that, is really important, and I've had some really interesting conversations. I've taken a look at what they're doing versus what you're doing. And if you can visualize the gap, like, if you can actually show the gap and say, you're operating at a one out of 10 and and Sephora is operating at a 7 out of 10. It's delivering these type of results. If you can do it data wise, even better. But even if all you say is, I had a really good conversation with these 4 retailers, and I've gained some really interesting insights on what they're doing in this topic.

Michael Phelan [00:17:04]:

I'd love to talk to you. Now what I do is I pay them a stipend to participate in the study, and and I invite them back to see the results of the study. So if I'm going to talk to a 100 retailers, I'm gonna give them a lot of value for those conversations. I'm gonna pay them for their time, or I'm gonna give a charity donation to their cause, which works very well at this time of the year. I use food banks right now with thanksgiving and holidays coming up, and then I invite them back to hear what everyone else has said. Because if you think about why Gartner or SiriusDecisions have been so successful over the years, they're really informing the prospect of what's going on with the best in class buyers in their industry. And you as an individual rep can play that role and take that role, and marketing can play a huge role on doing the studies to give you the ammunition so that you've got some data behind that. So an individual rep can do it or a company can do it.

Michael Phelan [00:18:01]:

There's a company called SaleThru, and what they did was they did research against the top 100 retailers, and they researched their customers, and they did a ranking. And, and now SalesTrue gets invited in every year to present the results of their ranking, and why companies are rated 17 and how they can improve. And that's, where the company takes on the ranking and rating in terms of how well they're getting the job done. It's not about pain, and it's not about problems. It's a you wanna show the buyer the job they're doing and how they're not doing the best possible job at that and how they can improve it, but they prove it in the direction of their best in class peers. A lot of times they don't care about your case study until much later in the buying process, but they'll care about their comparison to best in class peers or competitors much earlier in the buying process. And we need to get in earlier because what happens right now is buyers make their decisions, they narrow it down to 2 or 3 vendors, and if you're not one of the top 2 or 3 companies in the industry, you're not gonna get play at all. So we need to add value earlier in the buyer process so we get engaged earlier before they've made that final decision because we're not always one of the top 2 or 3 brands.

Michael Phelan [00:19:16]:

We're not always salesforce.com on a CRM sell, so we gotta get in earlier and we gotta rock the boat if that makes sense.

Rob Durant [00:19:26]:

We want to provide some actionable insights for our audience, for the individual contributors. What practical steps can an individual contributor take to boost their results in this context?

Michael Phelan [00:19:41]:

So before you well, obviously, you wanna line out who are the prospects you're going after. So let's say I'm going after 10 prospects this week or this month, and then you say, what is the what is the job that this prospect is trying to do with my product? Right? What are they trying to achieve? What's the inputs? What for you to find that, and then you kinda talk to some of their competitors. And, and in fact, their competitors may buy from you too. So talking to their competitors is is equally a prospect. But first off, you find out what they're not doing well. Sometimes you can just look at their website, you can look at their operation. Sometimes you could interview someone in their company. So either by finding out that they're under doing the job, they're not performing well, or finding out their competitor is doing a better job.

Michael Phelan [00:20:26]:

But before you reach out to them, you you find out, that they're underperforming. You get some information and and and some ideas of why they're underperforming. So when you reach out to them saying, I understand that forecasting is very important to your company if I'm selling a forecasting solution. And I've talked to some of your reps, and I've looked at some of your competitors, and they're doing things quite differently than you. I know forecasting is a real challenge for companies. Would you be open so I can share some insights of what I've learned about your company and what I've learned about your competitors, and see if we can bridge some of this performance gap? I don't think there's a buyer that wouldn't take that call. And even if the rep doesn't have a ton of information, maybe they can even get a meeting and wing it. I wouldn't encourage them to totally wing it, but with meetings down 30% and MQL SQL converting conversion down 50%, we have to come up with new and innovative ways to engage prospects.

Michael Phelan [00:21:32]:

The old, can I get a demo, is not working that well, and the old, I can save you 5% is not working that well because people are looking for significant savings? But really they're looking for companies that can help them do the job better. So think about how can you help them do the job better. It's a great mantra. It's used in product development a lot, and I encourage both sales and marketing to think about how do you cuss how do you get your customer to do the job better to be, a better mantra than anything else.

Rob Durant [00:22:04]:

Are there any specific metrics or KPIs I should be tracking to identify my own gaps?

Michael Phelan [00:22:11]:

Yes. I I like the one I like the best is is net new prospect meetings and net new customer meetings. So where you say, here are the 100 customers that I wanna get an additional meeting with or with somebody I don't know. Here are the 100 prospects that I wanna get a meeting with, and how many meetings do you have booked per week with those? I have a CEO that's a client, and he walked into the sales and marketing meeting on Monday, and he said, how many meetings do we have booked this week and next week with these 100 top prospects? And the answer was none. And the sales guy said, well, look at our pipeline. He goes, I don't care about anybody in that pipeline. I don't wanna sell to any of them. I wanna sell to these 100, prospects.

Michael Phelan [00:22:55]:

So he says, I'll give you guys a week, to get me into those 100 prospects. A week later, they hadn't got any meetings. So they called me in, and we used this new methodology of best practices and performance gaps. And I got the meetings with 95 out of the 100 prospects, and they got their largest sales, in their company, which is Brooks Brothers and their first major customer in the US. So so the right approach, but it also energizes the sales team, because there's nothing worse than trying an approach that doesn't work. And I I get the frustration of reps right now, but doing the same thing again and again is not really gonna help. So I'd encourage people to try much more value added, metrics. And I have a workshop that I do that goes over about 28 different approaches, on this, and I'm happy to share that with folks and talk to them about that.

Michael Phelan [00:23:48]:

I don't even charge for that. And companies that can pick and choose what they really like and run with it. But let's get the best ideas out in the table. Let's let the reps select the ones that work best for them, and and run with it. But I'm all about trying something more buyer centric in 2,025.

Rob Durant [00:24:08]:

Michael, this has been great. How can people learn more and where can they get in touch with you?

Michael Phelan [00:24:13]:

Yeah. So my my website is is, go to market Pros. It's g o t o, market, m a r k e t, pros, b r s. Or you can just email me at michael, at go to market pros dot com. I'm also on LinkedIn, and I do publish a lot on sales and marketing and GTM. So always happy to connect with folks and have a conversation, and see see if I can help them in any way. Fantastic.

Rob Durant [00:24:40]:

We now have a newsletter. Don't miss an episode. Get, show highlights, beyond the show insights, and reminders of upcoming episodes. You can scan the QR code on screen or visit us at salestv.live and click on newsletter. This has been another edition of Sales TV Live. On behalf of the panelists and everyone here at Sales TV Live, To our guest, Michael, and to our audience, thank you all for being an active part in today's conversation, and we'll see you next time.

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