Is Management The Weak Link in Revenue Chain?

I did this webinar for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine with Dave Stein who is legend within the sales training industry. We discuss whether sales management is the weak link in the revenue chain and to skip the introduction, advance to 4:00 mark in the webinar recording below.

Edited Transcript

(From approximately 4:30 minutes into recording)

Lou Schachter from BTS Global made the comment, a couple of years ago at a seminar we were both speaking at, that 40% of B2B professional salespeople, field salespeople, won’t have jobs in 10 years from now. That’s a pretty confronting view, and he went on to talk about why he thinks that’s the case, but in essence professional selling is changing because professional buyers are evolving at a faster rate than what we do in the sales industry.

There are probably three big things that all of the analysts are seeing, the first is the rise of consensus-based decision-making.  

There are a lot more people inside organisations that we need to cover if we’re going to get a complex B2B deal done, and the era of just being able to sell to a single senior relationship and have them drive that through their organisation, that happens a lot less of the time now.

The other two things are risk aversion and general distrust of ROI claims

Buyers have a much stronger focus on price and commoditisation. Just to bring the whole topic of commoditisation into sharp belief, the USA post-WW2 was absolutely the global leader in manufacturing and manufacturing quality, and actually obviously taught the Japanese about quality, and another Asian country such as Korea are getting very good very, very fast. If you look at what’s happened to the manufacturing industry, that particular ship you can see, there’s five of those that have been built now, and they take just five days to travel from China to the States. An aircraft carrier is not quite as big as that – aircraft carriers have got 15,000 crew, this has just 13 – and this ship travels fast enough to actually water ski behind.

The amazing thing about this is that these ships predominantly travel to deliver goods to Walmart to be consumed in the States, and these ships get unloaded in hours, not days – every single one of these ships returns back empty!

The point I’m really trying to make here is that every business tries to build a moat around its castle to protect itself from the competition, and I guess for markets like the USA tariff protection and the sheer distance from Asia was for a long time that moat that really protected the business, but those things don’t last. The reality for organisations is that things that gave you strong competitive differentiation can actually fade over time, and I believe that almost all complex, high-value solutions can drift toward commoditisation.

Let’s have a look at what that means in B2B solution selling. The thing obviously that we all know is that if you’re in the transactional commodity business, you need to be able to transact high volumes and drive cost out, marketing clearly obviously plays a much stronger role, and then for high value solutions that’s typically the realm of expensive, field B2B selling.

The thing that’s really been going on though is that a lot of high value solutions are really more commodity solutions now, and one of the big mistakes that organisations can make is to apply expensive, field sales force resources down to where things are becoming transactional commodities. That basic quadrant, the shape of it I believe is fundamentally changing: the transactional commodity piece is becoming much larger and the high-value solution piece is becoming far smaller. Let’s think about this quadrant in the terms of where you apply your resources to potentially bring inside sales under marketing and force field sales to actually move to value. If you have a look at the traditional roles of people here, the term “hunter” and “farmer” was really coined by the insurance industry, but the traditional hunter and farmer roles I believe are the ones that are in trouble.

When you look at the fact that up to 40% of people are not going to have careers in 10 years from now, the ones that actually fail to move to value are the ones that are going to really be in trouble. What this slide here is really trying to show, I know it’s a little complex, is that if you’re a farmer, relationship seller, where you really manage accounts, I don’t believe that the funding is going to be there in the future to really pay for what is in essence a professional visitor. Customers these days I think, with especially the Web and self-service, don’t really need someone to just stand in the way between them and getting the answers they want out of the organisation, or stand in the way between them just wanting to actually transact. And the whole concept in that top left quadrant at the moment over your traditional business development manager in the field, the big question to ask here is is there such thing as a high-margin commodity and, my view is very clearly that there’s not. So if the margins aren’t there to justify or fund the activity of the person in the field, they’re obviously going to be in trouble.

So what’s happening really is that the field sales force executives need to be able to move very strongly up to value, they to be able to deal with complexity within the customer side of the business, otherwise they’re just not going to have a role. The other thing is that the Corporate Executive Board in their excellent book The Challenger Sale documented a whole pile of research, but one of the pieces that interested me most was that in their surveys with buying organisations, and there are over 1,200 organisations that they surveyed, for most buying organisations at the point in time where they reach out to a sales organisation when they engage the seller, they’re already 57% of the way through their process. Again, the field salesperson has got to be very good at being able to still influence the agenda if they’re turning up to the sale that late, but even more so to be strategic to me means to engage very early, so that’s really what those people are going to need to do.

Let me just for a moment talk about how professional selling has actually really evolved. To me where it’s landed today is very much on The Challenger Sale, which I’ll talk about a little bit later, and I’m also a huge fan of Neil Rackham. If you have a look back in the 70s, you can see that there’s the term “FFAB” there: feature, function, advantage, benefit. I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation that subsequently got bought by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard, but the thing is that marketing departments were very good at teaching salespeople, I remember sitting through 180-slide slide deck presentations from marketing, trying to link every single feature and function a product to some kind of benefit, so that was really what was going on in the 70s and salespeople were talking brochures.

Then there was excellent research done by Neil Rackham, and he really was for the first time in history the person that did a proper level of PhD, academic-grade research about how people sell, what works, what doesn’t, and he came up with the excellent methodology of SPIN: situation, problem, implication and needs-payoff. He probably would’ve liked to call it SPIB selling, but I guess that doesn’t roll off the tongue, B for benefit, but he did that as needs-payoff. Rackham is still very active today, he was kind enough to review my book for me and I’ve been able to meet him a few times. Neil obviously joined halfway, and then they evolved SPIN selling into value selling, you’ve got people like Keith Eades and Miller Heiman with Solution Selling, and those methodologies have evolved. About 10 years ago there was a strong focus on insight selling, what are the insights that we’re going to take to a client and let’s build on value selling, let’s work out what the business case is that’s actually wrapped around either realising an opportunity for a client for solving a problem.

In my view challenger selling is really not a new revolutionary approach, it really is iterative, and as evidence of that on page 82 of The Challenger Sale book there’s a section in there about Neil Rackham’s BOLD framework. So he came up with an acronym BOLD which is you’ve got to find something for the client that’s big, that is outperforming through the use of innovation, to help them outperform their competitors in the market; leading edge was the L, and by definition if it’s leading edge there’s going to be an element of risk, and the D was it’s got to be difficult. His framework for going and having those conversations, identifying those insights and opportunities to go and take to clients, to me was also part of the foundation on which Challenger has been built. So Neil wrote the foreword and some of his IP is there.

I’m a huge fan of Challenger; I think it’s a fairly difficult thing to implement for an organisation, but it’s certainly where the market is today, and the great thing about it is it’s forcing conversations inside organisations about how they define value and how they can go and change the world for their customers. The thing with methodologies is that how do you drive a methodology through an organisation, and it really brings us back to the question that was posed today, and that is is sales management the weak link in the revenue chain, and I actually firmly believe yes.

Now, I don’t really blame the sales manager completely for that, I think the pressure on sales managers and the way that a lot of middle management resource has been cut out of organisations in the GFC, and this relentless pursuit of “The urgent is the strategic, we just need to get the revenue in this quarter,” isn’t at all a healthy thing. But of a CEO, the frustration they have is that in their mind they can’t believe the forecast, but the implied statement really is that they don’t really feel that they have confidence in the sales organisation in their ability to deliver. But the CEO is a big part of the problem, because they don’t really want the truth, they just want the numbers for this quarter and they tend to drive sales management down into that left-hand quadrant that I was being quite critical of. People that drift into that bottom left quadrant in those previous slides really don’t have a future in professional selling. We need to go and be strategic, we need to create demand, we need to lift the level of value that we’re delivering for clients, outside of the intrinsic value that’s in the products and services that we take to them but extrinsic value in the way that we really understand how their businesses operate.

So the CEO of an organisation is trying to drive his sales manager, and if you look at all of the things on this slide there’s a lot of moving pieces there. They want people to use a good methodology, they want them to adhere to process, they want them to coach people as well as manage, but for many sales managers they’re stuck endlessly either in the CEO’s office rediscussing the forecast or they’re in endless meetings. The truth is, in my mind, is that nothing good happens in the office, all of the good things happen there out in the field in front of clients and with partners. So they’re wanting to sell value, they want them to plan well, they want them to implement strategy; depending on who you believe, anywhere from one-third to 70% of CRM systems don’t succeed, and yet you’ve got to have a CRM system if you want to be successful in B2B selling, you have to have a CRM system if you want to put customers at the heart of everything that you’re doing, and there’s all of these endless, endless distractions.

The big thing that sales managers I think need to do, and it’s the thing that most of the organisations struggle with most, is this whole concept of strategy. So yet another quadrant – I apologise for all of the quadrants, people in consulting just can’t help themselves – if you have a look at this quadrant, obviously the bottom left-hand corner is transactional and the top right-hand quadrant is strategic, and the top left quadrant is the business development manager and the bottom right quadrant is the account manager kind of role. But what does it really mean to be strategic? The thing for me is when I interview salespeople and I help a lot of my clients hire people is I’ll actually ask that question of them, and I’ve got to tell you I almost never get a good answer to the question. For me, if you ask me what does being strategic really mean, these points here is really the answer. A strategic person makes sure that they do their research and they prepare really, really well, they make sure they engage at senior levels. One of the big problems for salespeople is they don’t seem to understand that in selling you get delegated down to people that you sound like. If you sound like a feature-function person, you’re going to get delegated down to people that evaluate those kinds of things, so if you’re going to engage early in senior levels you need to engage as a businessperson and as a domain expert.

You need to be willing to challenge the status quo, you need to take them some insights, insights beyond just generic research, which is typically what marketing departments have done in the past to help salespeople, but those need to go a lot deeper and they need to become very customer-specific. The other thing is that if you’re going to engage early, you need to do it in a way that creates a bias toward your unique strengths, and if a tender does need to be issued at some stage we want that thing to be wired our way, and then make sure we’re actually embedded in a compelling business case. The reason that’s important is that if you have a look at the statistics for B2B selling, 80% of the deals in a qualified pipeline that constitutes the forecast – I know for some organisations they really only forecast what’s won – but if you just defined forecast as qualified pipeline, 80% of that business fails to close, and one-third of that 80% that fails to close is actually lost to non-decision, it’s just lost to apathy within the customer organisation. That’s why being strategic to me, it’s critical to make sure that you’re embedded in a very strong business case, and then make sure that there’s a focus on business value and risk management. 

I think many salespeople fail to use risk as a weapon in the way that they go and sell. If you have a look at the value for money equation that most organisations will run, either formally with weighted criteria or informally, they will define value for money as “Here’s what’s being proposed fit for purpose,” and then they’ll multiply that by “Is it from a low-risk profile supplier?” and those two things together they’ll then assess against the total cost of ownership with whatever their mechanism is actually for assessing that.

So, aligning with the buyer is also very important, and again back to that Corporate Executive Board piece of research that buyers are typically 57% of the way through their process before they engage a salesperson, you can see that there’s a solid black line [21:00] at the bottom of that slide where the two groups of text are, and just going above that and you can see that there’s a business case phase, above that it’s where they’re motivated, so they’re at the end of their discovery phase. That’s often when buying organisations are engaging sellers, and the problem of coming in at that point in time is it’s just too late. If you’re getting involved with a client at that point in time, you can see at the right there are the bottom that there’s a strong focus on price, they want you to comply with their process, it’s hard for you to really exercise influence. They often try and deny your access to real power inside the organisation, they put you under a whole lot of time pressure, and sales reps that are engaging at that level typically get blocked with this bottom-up approach, they just get delegated to people who are actually evaluating product.

So, with all of this information so far, I guess it begs the question what should you really do about this, and I’ve got a couple of ideas. The first is you need to define what being strategic means for your people in your organisation. It’s no good to tell people to go and be strategic if we don’t provide them with the tools and the framework to go and do that effectively, so define what being strategic really means for your business. The second thing I would recommend is define value, define value for your market. It’s so unnatural for us to view things from other people’s perspectives, the way we’re wired is to project what we believe about things. One of the dangers of challenger selling, as much as I’m a big fan, one of the dangers is that implemented poorly there is a risk that people just take telling is selling or projecting what they think is value to a whole new level, and we’ll talk about that a little later. So define what value is for your customers, and then build and engage a model around those two things. What does being strategic mean? How do you set an agenda around your unique strengths? How do our customers really define value? Let’s build our engagement strategy, our sales model around those two things. I’d really encourage you get hold of The Challenger Sale and read it if you haven’t, because it will absolutely provoke thinking in your organisation at all levels.

Let me get to three of what I think are sins of sales management, and let me get you to the first one. I think the first big sin of sales management, and these aren’t all of them but these are three that I think are relatively straightforward to address and I want to provide you with some solutions of what to do with these.

The first big mistake sales managers make is hiring and retaining the wrong people.

I remember talking to the past CEO of a very large organisation, he was a bit of a mentor for me about 10-15 years ago, and I asked him what’s the biggest mistake that he felt he made in leading a very big organisation, and he instantly said to me that the biggest mistake he made was holding on to people that just needed to move on. It’s great that we care about people, but if someone’s not a good fit then we need to look ourselves in the mirror and actually do something about that.

Dave:  Tony, I’ll just give you and everybody else just a piece of real data. We know from our research at ESR that depending on the industry, somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople in B2B jobs are not suited for the positions that they hold, which means no matter how much training, no matter how many CRM packages you give them, no matter how much coaching, no matter what tools and play-books and e-learning and management time and whatever else, they just don’t have the DNA, not the skills but the DNA in order to be able to succeed in that particular business-to-business role. So what Tony is saying here in terms of number one being hiring and retaining the wrong people, research bares that out; it is a big, big, big problem in the B2B selling world.

Thanks Dave, that’s a great piece of data. And the thing I think that also reinforces it is one of the mistakes organisations make is they tend to focus their training efforts and coaching efforts down on the very bottom end of their organisation to try and lift them to become average. I think that is a massive mistake; the right approach is to focus on that middle area of people and help them be great. Again, one of the good things in The Challenger Sale is they identify two personas of salespeople that are quite teachable that you can really lift, but I agree with Dave completely.

The second big mistake I think that sales managers make is they allow people to pursue deals that they really can’t win.

Salespeople are generally wired to be pretty optimistic, but in complex B2B selling the cost of running a sales organisation, pulling the organisation in behind them to try and win the sale is very expensive, and it’s disheartening for organisations to try and pursue business that they can’t win. And then the third thing is failing to have close plans in place. Close plan is a relatively simple thing to do, but to me it’s a discipline that needs to be driven through the sales organisation to really try and improve win rates. I’ll talk about how we do that in a moment.

So, let me just go back to the first point, who belongs in your team. I’ve actually got a blog, who belongs in your sales team, and this is what I encourage CEOs and sales managers to evaluate in their own organisations: Ask yourself these four questions about a person that they got concerns about, and if the answer to two of these questions is negative, they just need to move on.

• Are they performing and adhering to the processes and using the tools within the business?
• Are they competent (truly capable of executing at the required level)?
• Are they committed?
• Are they a cultural fit?

If the answer to two of any of these is negative, they just need to go. These are really difficult decisions to make, and again in The Challenger Sale they actually make the point concerning performance is that if you’ve got a lone wolf style of salesperson that’s performing but these other things down the bottom really aren’t there – especially around number three and four, commitment and cultural fit inside the organisation – then when they stop performing they really need to go, because challenger is an organisational capability, not an individual person, you need to be able to function well as a team.

We tend to hire based on skills and qualifications, but the reason we fire people is cultural fit; we need to get good at figuring out cultural fit before we’ve hired them, not trying to clean up the mess afterward.

The next thing is opportunity qualification. To me there’s a lot of good processes for qualifying opportunities and I’ve listed them there at the bottom and I’m sure there’s others that you may be aware of. All of these are good; it doesn’t really matter what you use, so long as you actually use something well. There’s always two big questions I think to ask before you dive into the minutiae of the questions in these qualification processes, and the two big questions are: why are they going to buy anything at all? Are they really committed? Is there a danger that these guys will be part of the one-third of business that doesn’t close where they just do nothing? Are they trying to educate themselves, are they on a fishing expedition? Is the person that’s allegedly the executive sponsor for this really outside the power base inside the organisation? I’ve often had salespeople get very confused with the fact that the client might have a budget to do something but they don’t have the actual money locked in, so having a budget doesn’t mean that someone’s actually committed to spend. So they really need to understand all of those things.

So, make sure that you’re qualifying opportunities well, and there’s actually a opportunity management tool available on my website. An important part of this is 'close plans'. The whole concept of a close plan is rather than salespeople forecasting a deal based on their need at the end of the month, the quarter or the fiscal year, rather than them having dates that are all amazingly at the last day of the quarter, let’s get dates that the customer has nominated and let’s make the date they’re going to buy from us just a date that’s about two-thirds the way through all of the other things that matter. So if you get a salesperson to start with, “Well, where are we today with them, and what are all of the things that they need to go through within their own organisation to actually go live and be realising the benefits of implementing a solution that we’re proposing?” And I also make a date beyond that, which is what’s the date they’re going to have a published case study, so let’s make sure that part of their process is a benefits realisation or review form that they can present back to their executive, but that’s going to also for us start to frame the key points within a business case.

The whole idea here is that you work with the client on the basis that you want to make sure that you can provide the resources from your organisation when they’re going to need it, and that you need to understand all of the critical milestones of their project, where all the points of risk are so that you can get resources for them, but it’s also going to enable you to forecast accurately. And it’s going to be a date that they care about and that they own, and it’s going to really identify are they actually really committed.

So, just to wrap up, make sure you build your team around competence, commitment and cultural fit and don’t just lapse into this whole thing of it’s just about performance. I know the CEO says it’s just about performance, the tactical thing is the strategic thing, we’ve just go to deliver the numbers this quarter, but forcing people in organisations to do unnatural acts just to keep dragging revenue in ahead of time I think creates a huge fatigue factor on an organisation, and salespeople can easily go and damage a deal when they get pressure put on them which isn’t good for anybody or for long-term business. Strategically pursue deals you know you can win. Get opportunity qualification as part of your standard DNA so that resources aren’t being wasted, but what it also does is it identifies where the weaknesses are, and if you do it well it’s going to improve win rates dramatically. And the idea of having close plans in place is that it not only helps you improve win rates but it makes sure that you improve forecast accuracy and that you don’t get those disappointments.

One of the things I find that’s really common is when organisations don’t have close plans in place that are elevated by the client, and there’s a couple of key points here, one is that a good close plan is going to have lots of actions in there by the customer as opposed to being filled with actions just from the seller, and if they do that well then you know that the client is actually committed to making sure that the date is going to happen. If you do that, what it avoids is this whole scenario of deals mysteriously slipping at the end of the quarter all of the time, 70% of people’s pipelines or forecast just mysteriously slip over into the next quarter. This will actually help solve that problem because you can see that the dates are actually real.

And then there’s two other things I’d just like to say in summary that go to the earlier points about commoditisation and how do we move the field to value, how do we get people to engage strategically and make those things real and tangible rather than clichés is just recognise that there really are no silver bullets, there’s just unique combinations of things that together put you in a strong position that make you unique. Really think about what does being strategic really mean and how do our customers define value – really important. The other thing is consider making structural changes, this concept of a Chief Revenue Officer that maybe has marketing and sales reporting into them so that you can bring sales and marketing together, I think that’s one of the critically important things to be able to implement something like The Challenger Sale well. Take away from field salespeople as part of that structural change these lower-valued transactional commodity kind of products and force them to go and sell more complex high-value things to their clients around them being a vertical industry domain expert is obviously a very, very important thing to do.

And just on the whole subject of strategy and execution, obviously both are important but the thing I’ve just seen in the market time and time again is organisations that are kind of like the guys on this golf hole: they stand there looking down the fairway, the water, the trees, and they’re thinking, “Well, what’s my strategy? How am I going to play this hole?” and they have these great strategies, but the problem is they can’t hit the damn ball. And that’s the thing in business: a strategy is only as good as the intelligence of the information that led to it, but a strategy is then only good if you can implement it. We’ve got to be able to execute the strategy, and really good execution is almost more important than strategy. What we need is simple strategies that are executable, and then hardwire into all of our people a very high level of competence in how they actually go and deliver. So, that’s really it from me. I hope there was some good takeaways there for you, and I might just throw it back to Dave to see if there’s any questions.

Dave: Well, there certainly are from me I have to tell you, and, Tony, now having seen your slides and listening to you talk as opposed to having read your book – by the way, ~Yan~ also said [36:00] that he read your book in one sitting, so that seems to be the thing to do, I think once you’re into it you can’t put it down – I think the thing that hit me as you were speaking was just such a clear articulation of the difference between strategy and tactics and the importance of execution, and it occurred to me in my role as someone who evaluates sales performance improvement companies and sales trainers and sales consultants… I mean, that’s what I do for a living. I no longer do sales training, it would be a conflict of interest, but I have to tell you and the participants on this call that many of the people who profess to be experts as expert sales trainers and consultants don’t know the difference between strategy and tactics, they literally don’t know the difference, and you as consumers of outsource sales training or third-party sales training, that’s just a great question to ask a vendor who’s coming in to try to win your business. “Explain to me what strategy is and how you’re going to apply strategy to helping improve the performance and the effectiveness of my sales team.” So that really hit me, Tony, I thought that was really profound.

Dave: Hey, there’s something that in one of your earliest slides, it might have been the second or third slide, you used the phrase “ROI distrust” and you made a pretty strong point about that. From my perspective, I think that B2B salespeople don’t know – generally, I’m making the gross generalisation here – don’t have enough comfort with numbers, with financials, with the ability to look at their customers’ financial statements and make a determination as to where and when and how and with what risk their solution will have an impact on their customers’ business from a financial perspective. I think there needs to be a lot more of that. You’re saying that there’s ROI distrust. Are you agreeing with me, are you disagreeing with me? Could you just kind of frame that distrust in a way that would explain the need for salespeople to have more or less financial savvy?

Yes, I agree with you 100%. I think salespeople are typically wired to go and tell great stories to people. The thing we know is that logic and facts and information makes people think as opposed to act and it can be paralysing, whereas stories and emotion will cause a person to make a decision and do something, but that’s far less important in larger, complex selling. People need to make evidence-based decisions, and, again, that was one of the really good things I liked about Challenger is that it creates a very strong, evidence-based approach. If you’re going to go and take a very provocative insight to somebody that’s going to necessitate a lot of change management in their organisation, you’d better be able to back it up.

So I agree with you, salespeople are not typically wired at all… One of the quite controversial things I believe – people may want to throw rocks at me, I’m glad I’m sitting in Australia right now – I actually don’t think that selling is really a profession, and that’s a much longer conversation. I think it can definitely be done professionally and there’s a lot of moves that are good to make it a profession, but people don’t typically have that finance background, and I think being able to sell to the COO, CEO, CFO level and really talk about their business case is very important in large, complex selling and it’s definitely a weakness for people.

Dave:  Well, that just rings so true in your book and that’s one of the things that just made me kind of fall in love with the book, that not only did it explain it but it told a story around it, so you can really identify with it now. I’m somebody who came through that whole value selling kind of era and had gone through financial training and business savvy and that kind of thing so that always came naturally to me. But let’s get back to the Challenger because you mentioned it a couple of times. The Corporate Executive Board, the Challenger Sale folks are clear that strategic selling is maybe no longer or not about relationship. So where does relationships play into all of this business-to-business selling as you see today?

It’s interesting you keyed in on that because that’s probably the biggest part of the book that I have a question mark with myself. I absolutely agree with their focus on how the value of a salesperson is defined, they certainly believe that the era of the professional visitor is dead, people are just too busy to keep having meetings with people in customer land, but I think they’re dead wrong about being so dismissive about the role of relationship in complex selling to the enterprise. People buy from those that they trust, and the expertise of the person brings to a deal and their deep domain knowledge I guess is the other piece that needs to be there for challenger to work, so it’s putting deep domain experts in front of senior people on the customer side that’s going to give them the confidence that they can believe these claims. So I think positive relationships at senior levels, I think that that’s the foundation of all sales success in enterprise selling. But I agree with what they’re trying to say, they’re really trying to make a point that the value you bring your customers is not in the relationship, the value you bring the customer is in the insights and your ability to help them transform their business.

The other point I’d make is that I think risk management is a very important thing in the mind of the buyer, and I don’t think us as sellers use risk as a weapon well enough. Again, if you put the right people from your organisation, these domain experts, in front of the client, it’s going to give them the confidence that we can manage [42:00] the risks, we know where the risks are, we’ve done this before and we can go and achieve the outcome for them. “How are you guys going to implement these outrageous claims you’re making for me? You’re saying you will, but if you’re going to do that it’s all about people. How are you going to come in here and have good cultural alignment with us and go and deliver this initiative?” 

Gary:  Dave, thanks so much! And Tony, we really appreciate you taking the time, especially at this early hour in your day, to join us for this and to share your insights with us! I’m looking forward to reading your book, having only just recently become aware, but you surface so many things that I when I was a sales manager ran up against that I’m just dying to dig even deeper. And Dave, thank you so much for brining Tony to us and making him available and for designing the Executive Series!

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