The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 491: Matthew Dixon - Overcoming Indecision, Managing Risk, & Taking Control Of The Conversation (The Challenger Sale)

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right...  Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Notes: Matthew Dixon's first book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, was a #1 Amazon as well as Wall Street Journal best seller. He is also the co-author of the customer experience bestseller The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty and the sequel to the Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results. His new book is called The Jolt Effect.  The paradox of choice is real – People don't want more options. They want someone who can confidently advise them on what to do. A challenger ultimately teaches someone something new and adds value to their life. A challenger is not afraid to take control of the conversation and has the confidence to show how what they're offering will make someone else's life better. Think outside the box whenever possible. Be a bit skeptical. Ask why. Question things… That's how we grow and learn and potentially find a better way. The Challenger: As a Challenger, you offer a new perspective to your prospect and don't shy away from conversations about money. You understand what brings them value and leverage that information to deliver an irresistible pitch — and to tactfully pressure them. Remember the three T's: You teach them something valuable, tailor the sales pitch, and take control over the conversation. The Hard Worker: The Hard Worker strives to get better in their role but doesn't necessarily focus on the customer's value drivers. The Lone Wolf: The Lone Wolf is a high performer but not necessarily a team player. Confident in their selling skills, they exceed quotas but are difficult to deal with interpersonal. The Relationship Builder: When you think of a salesperson, you're thinking of the Relationship Builder. These sales reps get in contact with a gatekeeper at their target company and slowly try to create an internal advocate. The Problem Solver: The Problem Solver is adept at finding solutions for issues in both the team and the prospect's business. They drive results by eagerly solving problems and keeping all stakeholders in the loop. The JOLT EFFECT Judging the level of customer indecision. Indecision is driven by a specific human, psychological factors that pop up in specific ways within purchases. The best sellers use these drivers as a way to qualify and forecast based on the buyer's ability to decide. Offering a personal recommendation. Indecisive buyers—feeling overwhelmed by choices—struggle to make tradeoffs as decisions progress. The best sellers use specific techniques to guide buyers toward the best options. Limiting purchase exploration. Indecisive buyers easily fall prey to analysis paralysis. High performers who limit the exploration effectively close off "rat holes" customers' heads down which can eat up time and introduce delays in the purchase process. Taking risk off the table. Hesitant buyers are gripped by uncertainty about promises made during the sales process. JOLT sellers employ creative methods for reducing perceived risk, and building momentum toward decisions. Advice: Challenge yourself - push your comfort zone Think outside the box wherever possible Question things Have empathy Teach others

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details about how my book the pursuit of excellence will help you become a more effective leader text hawk to 66866 now on to tonight's featured leader Matt Dixon is one of the world's leading experts on sales customer service and customer experience. He is the bestselling author of The Challenger Sale, a book that has sold millions of copies and revolutionized the world of professional selling more than a decade ago.

He's a new book called The Jolt Effect, that I think you'll like. During this conversation, we discuss the benefits of being a, quote, disagreeable giver and how you can become one. how to become a better decision maker and do it faster. And then we discussed how to help someone change from the status quo and embrace something new. Ladies and I'm so good, it's Matt Dixon.

All right, Matt, here we go. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you being a part of the Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Hey, Brian, how you doing? Thank you for the invite. Absolutely. So you became well known to me a while ago because,

I worked initially as a telephonic sales rep at a company called Lexis Nexus Nexus. I know Lexis Nexus well ago. Okay. I did it for 12 years. You know, the chain that I think a lot of people try to do, the rep, manager, director, VP of sales. So I lived in that world. And I'm a firm believer that we are all in sales every day, regardless if you carry a bag or you have a quota. And so you became famous because of the challenger sale and becoming a challenger. That was we were challenged to become Challenger sales professionals.

Could you outline what that means and the different types of sales professionals? Because I don't think this just pertains to sales. I think this also pertains to life. Can you outline that for me? And we'll dig in a little bit to the Challenger before we move on some other parts. Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. And I guess it's famous or infamous, depending on whether you like Challenger or subscribe

to it. kind of cuts both ways, I find out there in the market. But, you know, I'll maybe take you back to the occasion for the research. You know, we were, there's been a lot of research done on sales and a lot of, a lot of written about sales for a very long time. And about 10 years ago, the book's a little bit more than 10 years old now. We, I was at a company called CEB. I was running the global sales practice. And our clients, heads of sales at big companies, around the world, including companies like LexisNexis, who we worked very closely with. I think we're finding that a lot of the approaches to sales that their people had been taught

over the years, which was really predicated on going in and, if you will, finding out what's keeping the customer up at night, right? Let's go in, diagnose that customer's needs. And then based on what that customer says, prescribe an answer, prescribe a solution that will address their needs. And that was the core of, you know, solution selling and complex selling for, I don't, 40 years before we came along in Road Challenger. And I think what sales leaders at big companies around the world kind of came to us and said

was this model doesn't feel like it's working quite as well anymore. And I think there were a couple of big changes happening in the world. Companies had gotten a lot more sophisticated in terms of how they bought from vendors. They brought, you know, built procurement departments with sophisticated tools and very savvy, you know, purchasers and negotiators. They'd also, the big change, I think, though, was that customers have, they increasingly started learning on their own. You know,

they'd, suppliers and vendors have all their, all the information about their products, whether it's Lexus Nexus or anybody else, or is basically on their website, you know, and you can go to LinkedIn, you can go any,

you know, there's mountains of information out there to learn about vendors and what they can do for you. And so what sales leaders found is that their salespeople were getting contacted later and later in the purchase journey. And what we talk about, whenever I present Challenger, talk about this problem that,

you know, the customer today is almost 60, percent of the way through their buying process before they ever reach out and want to talk to a salesperson. And, you know, that puts a salesperson who was taught to go in and diagnose the customer's needs in a really awkward spot because the customer already knows their needs and they know how you fit in and address their needs. Now they just want to put the screws to you on price. And so all the things you've been taught to do in sales kind of are all for not in that, in that world. So Challenger is really a story about what are the best salespeople doing to counteract that?

You know, what are they doing differently? And so what we found is, and you hit on this, this. We did a large global study and we found that all salespeople fall into one of five different profiles. I'll hit them real quick and then we can talk about it a little bit more detail. You've got your hard workers. Your hard workers are kind of nose to the grindstone, very numbers driven. It's all about throughput management, right? As long as I have enough deals in the top of the funnel, enough opportunities I'm chasing, I should hit my number by the end of year. So they kind of manage sales like it's a factory floor. You've got challengers and you know who wins. So I don't it's going to be hard to act super surprised because you already know the answer.

But you have challenges. Your challengers are kind of like the debater on the team. They've got a sharp point of view. They're not afraid to use that point of view to get the customer to think differently. Not so much to get them to think differently about my company and my offering, but to get the customer to think differently about what's the right answer for them. You know, you've got your relationship builders. They're kind of a classic, you know, go in, find out what's keeping the customer up at night,

prescribe a solution. They advocate for the customer. They walk a mile on the customer's shoes. They sit on the customer side of the table. All that stuff we told. sales people do for a very long time. You've got your lone wolves. Your lone wolves are kind of the primadanas of the sales organization. They don't use your marketing collateral. They sell stuff you don't even make. They ask for forgiveness, not permission, right? And then you've got your problem

solvers. They're kind of like customer service reps in the salesperson's clothing. So really more focused on post-deal execution and making sure the customer's happy with what they bought and not so focused on getting that next deal through the pipeline. And then we did the analysis, what we found is this is pretty eye-opening is I think most sales leaders would have said it's the relationship builder right that is the person selling the way we have taught our salespeople is best in class find that customer put a bear hug around that customer find out what's keeping them up at night advocate for them prescribe that solution for them be there to react to their needs and we find that those people actually finished dead last when you look at high performers in the

winners were actually these challengers and so if you couple that with what I said before you Remember, the challenge is the person with like the sharp elbows, the sharp point of view. They got a new idea about how the customer should make money or save money or mitigate risk. And they're not afraid to share that with the customer and push their thinking a bit, right? Push them outside their comfort zone, challenge their thinking. And what it told us is that in a world where customers are learning on their own, the salespeople who win are the ones who bring the idea that the customer couldn't learn on their own, right? It's the thing you couldn't find on the internet, the thing everyone doesn't know.

And so that was a very counterintuitive finding it after decades and decades of telling people to go out and build great relationships and diagnose needs and respond and react to whatever the customer wants, is that best salespeople I figured out. Actually, that's not the way you sell anymore. And you're right. It is not, I don't think it's a sales posture exclusively either. And I found it's been really interesting to see how professionals in different areas of the business, whether you're an HR professional, working with business line customers, whether you're,

a customer service leader supporting customers on post sales service, whether you're a product manager, you know, all parts of the business can kind of see that a lot of their best people actually kind of fit that challenge or mold. They're pushing the thinking of their colleagues. They're pushing the thinking of their, you know, other stakeholders around the organization. And there's the three T's, right? You teach something of value. You tailor the pitch and then you take control over the conversation. And you're right. I remember initially being taught. My first job was more transactional based like, quick sales. So there wasn't much relationship building, but it was quick selling. So,

but as I progressed and got bigger accounts, right, there's more of this relationship stuff. And then we shifted more towards Challenger. How do you think this applies in the world outside of the profession of selling? And is being a challenger, this may be a tough question, but is being a challenger usually the right mode of operation in order to, let's say, build your career in any part of a business in order to get promoted in order to leave a debt in the world? As being a challenger, do you see that as still the right path? I do. The one place I would say Challenger doesn't work is at home because I've tried in it totally back from it. I wouldn't be the lone wolf either at home.

You want to be a good relationship builder at home. But I think, yeah, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to be true to the research, right? The research was on salespeople. But I been struck just in my career. And it sounds like you've kind of come away with this feeling as well that a lot of the people who do, you know, make a dent in the universe or make a dent in their organization or in the customer in the marketplace are those people who are out there challenging. You know, there's so many great examples of challenger brands or challenger leaders. You think about like a Steve Jobs or these kinds of folks who went out. And, you know, Steve Jobs is actually very famous, as you know, for saying like, hey, you know, he, you know,

relied very a lot less than I think the typical leader on market research right what customers are saying they want his view was I know what they need and I'm going to teach them that that's what they need and I need to get them to think differently not about Apple I think that was an outcome but more about what they need as a as a consumer or as a business person or a designer or whatever the target you know the customer profile was they're going after and I was he's a great example of like how challenging the way the customer thinks gets them to then value differently what you can do for them. And so I think it's, again, I don't want to go too far over the tip, you know, over the tips of my skis, but I think it is a business posture. And I think if you look at

great leaders, if you look at great managers, if you look at entrepreneurs, they do kind of fit this Challenger profile. I've been struck, Ryan, the number of, Challenger is very popular, I think, especially in the fast-growing kind of tech startup world. That's of all the industries where I think challengers grab, hold, certainly information services, Lexus and Nexus, that's a big one, medical devices, manufacturing, financial services. But one of the really big ones has been tech. And I think it's especially powerful in that fast moving startup world because you're almost always in a position as a startup in terms of either unseating and established competitor, right? And as we all know, like nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM or whoever the incumbent is. And so you've got to come in

and challenge the customers thinking, or you might be coming in with a solution the customer never had a need for. They never knew they had a need for it. So you've got to get them to totally rethink what's right answer if they're going to create budget and mine share in carve out resources to implement your solution. So I find that founders in particular, when they rechallenger, they see themselves in that story. And I think what is often hard for them is as they scale up their businesses, they find that

the way they sold, the scrappy challenger way they sold, it kind of, falls apart and it gets a little bit watered down as they scale the sales organization. And then they find before they know it, their salespeople are in there asking customers, what's keeping you up at night instead of showing customers what should be keeping them up at night and challenging the market and continuing to put that dent in the universe. And it frustrates them. You know, and so that's why I think they, they grab that book and they tell everyone in their sales, and read this.

This is how I built this business. And I want you to sell the same way. Adam Grant uses a term called being a disagreeable giver. And I like that because you know. need those people on your team. I think it relates heavily to being a challenger. I remember being in those corporate America meetings and you'd have the people that's kind of nod and go along with everything regardless. But every once in a while, you'd have somebody in those meetings. I tried to be this person at times. You'd have people in those meetings where there's,

you know, there's certainly ego and there are people who have ownership over things. So it's, it's a little dangerous at times in the political landscape of corporate America. But the person who could thoughtfully speak up and disagree and provide value to make it better. And that's kind of like a challenger leader. And that's that disagreeable giver where if you don't have them, I think your team is worse off. And so I think of it in that regard to. There's a lot of people, Matt, listening, that are in those meetings regularly with other senior people. And I would, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this on how they could become this disagreeable giver, this challenger leader in those meetings, not just for the sake of being the devil's advocate, but for actually trying to make the thing, whatever it is, better.

Yeah. It's a, the disagreeable giver, like that, I like that concept that, you know, Brent Adams and my co-author also talks about productive disagreement. You know, in the book, we talk about constructive tension. I think it's really important. it's it's let me say two things one is I think in some companies like that kind of posture is not really appreciated honestly and it's a little bit like you know the the saying in Japan like it's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down and sometimes in some companies where that that disagreeable giver that productive disagreement or disruption kind of approach is frowned upon and that's certainly the case in some companies I remember years ago I presented challenger to a group of sales leaders and And I got to the point in the presentation where I showed the Challenger wins. And there was a guy sitting right up front who shall remain nameless. But he kind of put his head in his hands.

He started shaking. And it was very awkward. So I said, I was like, hey, what's the problem here? Like, this should be good news. And he said, you don't understand. I fired all those folks like 10 years ago. They're a total pain. Like, they don't fit in our company culture.

Like, there is very little tolerance for disagreement here. It's very hierarchical. You know, we kind of stick in our swim lane. And, you know, people who stick. you know, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And so it is a tough fit in a lot of companies. I think it's really, the second thing I'll say is I think it's really important for listeners to, you know, as they try to bring that posture, you know, to make that dent in their

organization or with the team or with the company strategy or in the marketplace. The way you do it, you mentioned tailoring before. It's so important to think about not just that you challenge, but how you challenge. And, you know, there's a joke I always make, but it's a little, it's tongue-in-cheek, but there's a lot of truth here too, is that, you know, we talk about, you know, you hear this idea of challenging. In the book, we say that, you know, they take control of the sales conversation. But I think a lot of times people jump to the conclusion that that must be the rude

and aggressive and obnoxious people. And I always jokingly say, like, that's a sixth profile. We call the jerk. That's not who we're talking about here. You know, so we're talking about challengers. Challenges are professional. They're deeply empathetic. They're respectful.

They're courteous. they play well with others, but they do push the thinking of the organization in a productive way. And so I think that's a really fine balance, right? How do you disagree and create that constructive tension, that productive disruption without being perceived as a jerk, as a know-it-all,

as just somebody who just disagrees with everything, right? You say the sky is blue and I'll say it's green, you know, whatever. Like that's, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And how you do it, I think, is going to vary company to company. It's going to vary from team to team or department to department. It's even as a manager, it's going to vary how you do that with one team member versus another team member.

It's going to vary across geographic kind of locations and cultures from geographic perspective, but also company cultures. I could be selling to a bank on one block in New York City and then to a tech startup on the next block in the same town. And the culture is going to be very different. the tolerance for disagreements can be quite different. But I do think as so long as we can figure out the productive way in which to do that, that kind of thinking is what pushes the conversation forward.

And I think today leaders in particular really value those members of their teams who can bring that productive disagreement to the table and do it in a way that brings people along instead of alienating their colleagues because that's what makes everyone better, right? when not, and you're right, I think there's a difference between just being a naysayer and a devil's advocate and bringing a counterintuitive point of view, be able to back that point of view up, push it forward that gets the whole team to step away from maybe what they convinced themselves was right answer into kind of rethink the answer and get to a better place. If you can do that well and it's backed by facts and research and it's not just emotional,

I think there's almost always going to be a spot for you on leadership teams because you're probably regularly providing value. You're a different point of view. I love having those people around. I need them. I want them. There's not enough of them. One thought I just had, actually.

So you do all this research to write your books. You've written many books. And you also are working with other people within businesses, whether you're training and you're helping and you're delivering some sort of presentation or training or within your own companies, how do you apply what you've learned from what you've written and all of the research into what you do on a day-to-day basis to be an excellent leader, to be a good teammate, to get things done? Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question.

I mean, I think that for one of the things I've tried to, I've taken away from, you know, look, and for as much research as we've done and good answers we've come up with, we've come up with plenty of bad ones too and, you know, found more questions and, and kind of left herself scratching her head. So I would certainly not claim success all the time. It's, you know, it's a, we're all on a learning journey and trying to get better all the time and get closer to right answer. But I've learned a few things. I think one is that, you know, if you look at any of the books we've written, any of the research we've done, we've tried to do is combine data and fact, if you will, which I think appeals to the rational side.

of us, right, but also with storytelling and emotion so that we can, you know, pull up the heartstrings too. And I think when you're looking at whether it's a customer, considering your product or service, or it's a colleague or even your boss, considering, hey, should I sign off on this person's proposal, you know, or should I partner with my colleague on X, Y, or Z project? We, it is, people do decide on emotion than they justify with reason. And I think that's a really important part of storytelling. I see a lot. I work with other leaders from different functional areas trying to push concepts or thinking or projects forward or purchase decisions or what have you. And I think sometimes they lean on one or the other too heavily, right? So they come in as

too fact-based, but it's not exciting and it's not pulling at the emotional kind of the heartstrings of their team members and their organization or vice versa. It's all emotion. It's not backed up by fact and data. And so I think you really do have to have both. I think that's the thing we've gotten right. But again, as I said, we've done lots of research right. I don't think we've gotten that right. And we've tilted a little bit too hard to one side or the other. And so we always we always try to make sure that we're balanced there. I think the other thing is that, you know, we try to recognize and, or I try to at least to remember your source of authority. So, you know, just case in point, I'm not a salesperson. I've never been a salesperson. I've

never carried a bag. I haven't done what you've done in your career in sales. I'm a researcher and a storyteller. And so I think I know what I do well and I know where I'm over the tips of my skis and I need to look to others to kind of fill in the blanks and help flesh out the details and bring that practitioner lens. But I think because of that, I bring value in a way that maybe other people can't. Right. So I think that's why Challenger, yeah, I think it was it was great research and changed the way people thought. But I think one of the things that was powerful about it is that was written by two guys who are not salespeople. And there's tons of books written by salespeople and former sales leaders and top performers. And those are great. But we brought more

of a research lens and said, hey, I've got a PhD in political economy. Brandt had a PhD in in linguistics. Like we were trained researchers and we came in and we'd been studying sales for a very long time. But we came in and brought a research perspective to questions that have been plaguing sales leaders, and what we found was counterintuitive. Now, we have to go back to the practitioner world to help get them to help us explain what we're finding. Does this make sense to you? Does this resonate? And so there's a lot of kind of checking back with sales leaders, high performers, managers, CROs, CSOs on the back end to kind of confirm that what we're finding wasn't totally out of left field and it was actually explainable in the real world.

But I think, again, that remembering our source of authority is super important. And every listener here has a source of authority, whether that's you've been at your company for a really long time, whether it's you worked on the customer side for a while and now you work on the vendor side, whether it's that you're in one functional area, but you used to come from IT or finance or legal or some other part of the business, or, you know, you've got years of experience. And we've all got a source of authority and we should lean on that because there's value we can bring from our own insight, again, to push the thinking of our colleagues and make

everyone get to a better outcome. How did that book change your life? You know, it's interesting. I think it was, it certainly created a whole new kind of, I wouldn't be out on my own with my business partners doing what we're doing now, writing more books, doing more research. Had we not had that success, I think. And so I think it was really validating that there was a market for people to hear data, data and story kind of pulled together and presented to a community that had never kind of experienced that kind of research or doesn't get to experience that kind of research or storytelling that often. So I would say, you know, there are so many great books written in sales, just for instance. And, you know, but there aren't very many that kind of

approach sales in the way that we have. I look at like Neil Rackham's spin selling, I think, was one of the great examples. And Neil, of course, we're at the forward to the Challenger sale, but one of the great examples of what happens when you take a researcher and drop him or her into the world of sales and ask them to come up with, you know, to study what the best people do differently. And they approach it from a different, very different angle, unbiased by conventional wisdom or decades of sales training like Brent and I were in our research team, the CEB was. So I think, I think for me, it validated that people want this stuff and they find value in this stuff. And so that led to now three more books, a whole bunch of articles

that we've written in HBR and other places. And now it's turned into my full-time business. So I'll tell you, it's not for everybody. So there's certainly, it's a different angle on whether it's sales, marketing, customer experience. But it's been, that was the biggest thing I think, is like, wow, this is people value what we bring to the table. And we have a unique, I think a unique capability to do this stuff and it's valued by the market not by everybody perhaps but but enough people that it turned it into a business for us i've heard the quote that uh writing a book so i've published two books so i know this feeling but writing a book is like telling a joke and waiting two years to see if anyone laughs yeah very well said you don't really know like you think it's good

you're proud of it but you don't fully know so how surprised if a at all, were you when the book absolutely just exploded? I was surprised. I mean, we knew we had a good story on our hands. We had, we had, again, I worked at a company that had, it was a basically a subscription research company. So we worked with heads of sales. We finished the Challenger, the original Challenger research in 2009.

The book didn't come out until 2011. And so we had a bit of that early read from heads of sales. And we found that this was a different kind of perspective on what top performers do differently, than they had ever heard before. That gave us the confidence to go and pitch this to a publisher and then go write the book. But you never really know.

You don't know if it's really going to blow up. And I think one of the things that I learned from Challenger is that I think unlike a lot of other books out there, Challenger, I mentioned this before. It's either famous or infamous, depending on which side of that argument you sit. There are a lot of people who don't like it. There are a lot of people who think it's like hogwash

or just because it was written by nonsense. salespeople. And it, I think because, no pun intended, it challenges the way people think about, you know, conventionally what a great salesperson does. It still, to this day, creates like very angry debates amongst people. But what's interesting is every one of those folks, we want to have a conversation about it, whether you vehemently agree or disagree with it. And I think that's kind of the point, right? We created a debate and that, that encourage, you know, that created future additional dialogue and conversation and deepen our relationships. out there, but not everyone accepts it at face value.

And I think that's what we tried to do with all of our books. And again, I think we've gotten right in some cases. We've kind of swung and, you know, may foul the ball off in other cases. But you've got to ask yourself, like, what is the highest level at which you disagree with the market? And are you pushing the market's thinking, we're trying to take a page out of our own book quite literally and challenge the way the market thinks. If all we're saying is just confirming what they already believe, they can read that in any book. but the value we bring is we take these age-old questions, bring data and social science

and storytelling to bear and turn it on its ear. That's what we aspire to do. And when you do that, I think there are a lot of people like, holy smokes, this is amazing. And there are a lot of people like, I hate these guys. So we do get that a little bit. So I'd rather that than you'd rather that than them just not really notice. Like that's what you want. I mean, that's, that's, I think that's, That's what most people would have. You've kind of made it some when you do have those people who are emotionally, because I've heard that, like, I'm not a Challenger sales guy. I don't like that.

And you kind of dig in. I don't know, maybe it's cool sometimes to say that or they think it is. But in a way, though, that's when you know, okay, there's something here when you have this camp of people who say they don't like it. So if Challenger focused on status quo, the jolt effect. this is your new one is focusing on indecision, which, yes, in the sales world and that's what this is focus on, but indecision is just a big thing in life, right? So what led you, what led you, and I believe from everything I read that there's obviously an immense amount of research done

and the pandemic actually helped with this research because you didn't have to be in person. You could do these from Zoom and transcribe them. The Joel effects all about indecision. Can you share more about the background of why this needed to be the next book? Yeah, a great question. So I mentioned before the problem that the Challenger Sale was about, which is customers learning on their own, boxing you out, forcing you to compete on price, engaging you very late.

The sequel to the Challenger Set was actually a book called The Challenger Customer. That was about a different problem, which is what happens when you get a whole bunch of people show up at the buying committee and how do you get them to agree to move forward in a productive way where left to their own devices, they'll usually agree on nothing more than the lowest common denominator, like avoid risk, minimize disruption, save money, don't do anything, you know. So it was all about managing that consensus-based sale. If we fast forward to the jolt effect, I mean, I think the problem that we found in sales and when we've been kind of tracking for a few years, even before we wrote the book, was this

problem of no decision losses. And to be very clear, what we're talking about here is the customer who goes through the whole sales process only to do nothing. And in our research, we found that that was anywhere, depending on the size of the company or the type of sale, it was anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of all opportunities, all deals are lost to the customer doing nothing. Now, what I think we've conventionally been taught in sales is the only reason the customer kind of says they want to move forward and then gets cold feet, and decides to do nothing and the deal is lost to no decision is because you didn't beat the status quo, right? The customers still, they think what they're doing today is good enough. They don't think your answer, your product, your service is a compelling enough alternative

or compelling enough reason to change. Or maybe they say, yeah, status close stinks and your solution is awesome. But getting from what we do today to what you were talking about is going to be way too much time and energy and money and resources. Life's too short. We have other priorities. But it's got to be one of those reasons because what other reason could there be for a customer saying, yes, I want to move forward and then not doing so. And so I think for years and years in sales, we've taught salespeople when that happens, which happens, we found like 87% of sales calls we studied. We studied two and a half million sales calls across industry. And we found that in 87% of them, there were moderate or high levels of what I call like cold feetness. So this is like customers waffling and wavering and backpuddling.

typically after they said they wanted to move forward, then they start talking themselves out of it. And what happens in a vast majority of those instances is the salespeople go back and they assume, well, I haven't beaten the status quo. You're still in love with what you do today or you don't think our solution's a compelling alternative. So they do one of two things. They go back and they dangle the carrot. Like, hey, Ryan, you must not have heard me when I said our product is two times faster than our competitor. You must not appreciate how awesome this feature or benefit is. So we paint the rosy picture. And if that doesn't work, we put away the carrot and we break out the stick.

And then we use flood tactics, right, fear, uncertainty and doubt. And then what I'm trying to do is scare you into moving forward. Like, hey, Ryan, you know, these problems aren't going to solve themselves. And if you look at your competitors, they're opening up big gap on you in the market. Remember you mentioned to me early on, your team hates you for making them use this stinky legacy system that you guys built a homegrown system. So you've got to move forward. So I'm trying to create that burning platform and show you the cost of your inaction. But the surprise to us was that when salespeople,

treat every indecisive customer like a nail and they just go back and beat them with their status quo hammer, then it actually backfires more often than it works out. We actually found it backfired 84% of the time. So just to be clear, what that means is it makes it more likely the customer will do nothing, not less likely. And so that taught us that it's not, the question to be asking is not, what do high performers do differently to beat the status quo? The question we should be asking is, what would motivate a customer to just do nothing? I mean, to go through an entire, sales process, think about your listeners, many of them sell product, their company sell products and services that in some cases can take weeks or months or quarters or even years to sell.

And to have a customer go through that whole process and eat up all of their time and their team's time and their legal department's time and their finance department and their procurement department's time and then just not pull the trigger. You know, what could account for that? And I think what we found was that there were two drivers. The first one is that they actually do prefer what they do. today. So it is the status quo. And we found that that was 44% of no decision losses were because the customer actually did prefer the status quo. They didn't believe your solution was a

compelling enough alternative. But the other 56% of the time, the bigger driver of those no decision losses wasn't preference for the status quo. It was indecision about changing the status quo. And I think those things sound the same. But it turns out when you peel them apart, they're actually really quite a bit different. Being indecisive about changing the status quo, down in our research to three things. The first one was the customer not knowing what to pick. So they want to move forward with you. They know the status quo stinks. They're ready to move forward, but you've put a bunch of options in front of them and they all look good. And the customer's afraid they're going to pick the wrong one. And that's going to be an irreversible decision.

The second source of indecision was what we call a lack of information. So this is you saying, hey, I know the way we do things today is suboptimal. I think what you guys are talking about is great. But this is new for us. Like we've never had a platform that does. X-Y. We never had a vendor that helped us with that. I need to go do more research. And there's so much content out there. I need to be a savvy consumer before I pull a trigger, especially on a big purchase. And then the third source was we call outcome uncertainty. Outcome uncertainty is when the customer feels like they might not get what they're paying for. Yeah, the reference calls were great. Yeah, the pilot was compelling. The results were awesome. The team's on board. I'm sold,

but what if your solution doesn't generate the ROI you're projecting? If that happens, we're spending a lot of money on this. I'm going to have egg on my face. I'm going to look like a fool to my colleagues. And I might get fired, right? And that's true even in a complex B2B purchase where there are lots of stakeholders. There's still one person whose name is on the contract. And that person can feel exposed that when the solution or the purchase doesn't pay off

in the way that they sold it internally was going to pay off. So those are the three things. Now, when you think about those things, you could easily have a customer who believes their status quo is terrible and your solution is great, but is still nevertheless worried, am I picking the wrong version of the product? Have I done enough homework? And do I have any assurance this is actually going to work out? Do I have any guarantee of success here, any safety net? And so when we go back and we just hammer the status quo, it rings hollow with a customer who's not actually worried about the status quo at all. They've already mentally moved on from that.

They're instead worried about one of those other things. That's so interesting. I think about this personally with my own business. Sometimes a company will come to me and say, hey, like we don't have a good leadership development program. Could you just make it for us? And this is like the earlier years of me trying to do this, where I would like try to customize something new every time.

And then there'd be like random choices. And it's almost this. I also had Barry Schwartz on about the paradox of choice, where there's so many choices where they're like, oh, God. And I remember I call it actually Pat Linchione, an amazing guy. and I asked him because he's built a table group over the course of decades. Like, how do you do this when somebody calls your company for this?

And he's like, hey, what are you doing with all this customization and all these options? When somebody calls us for that, we either have this or this or this. And it's very clear cut. It's one page. This is what we do. This is how we help you. You need to do that. And I go, oh, and then I asked them, though, how long did it take you to get there?

He's like, oh, many years. So it made me feel a little bit better. But it's so true when, because you actually think maybe you're doing right by the customer or the prospect by offering them all this different stuff and even customizations. And you're like, oh, we could do this or that or this or that. And before you know it, they're like, this is kind of tiring, man. I just don't want to deal with all this. And then you just kind of have these random emails back and forth, but nothing ever really gets done. So I personally felt this in this world that I'm in now. And I'm curious, you probably lean towards some of the stuff. Pat said, but how. How do you feel or what do you think when you hear that? Yeah, I agree completely. It makes what he said is spot on. And actually, we referenced quite a bit Barry Schwartz's work around the paradox of choice in our own work. You know, we talk about this playbook for overcoming a decision.

If you will, the big takeaway from the study is, you know, look, you need sales. You need two playbooks. You need a playbook for beating the status quo. That's what we've all been taught to do. Challenger was a great, is a story about how to do that. we talk about a challenge or how challenges are really good at dialing up the pain of same and showing the pain of same is actually worse than the pain of change. That was fundamentally a story about getting people to move away from the status quo,

to get them to move down a different path. And we've got to do that. Remember, 44% of no decision losses are because the customer still doesn't see the benefit of leaving the status quo. But 56% of the time, they do see the benefit of leaving and they agree they should, but they get wrapped around the axle around one of those three other problems we just talked about. And so as a salesperson, you've got to know when it's time to put your beat the status quo playbook and break out your overcome indecision playbook.

Now, the overcome indecision playbook, if I were to differentiate those two, beating the status quo is fundamentally about showing the customer, if you will, dialing up the fear of not purchasing. Here's what you stand to lose if you do nothing. Show them the cost of inaction. But what they're worried about after they agree with you and they express their intent is not the loss that's going to occur from inaction. It's the loss that will occur from acting and actually making a mistake.

So customers shift from being worried about missing out to actually being more worried about messing up. And what we've got to do in overcoming indecision is not dial up the fear of not purchasing. It's about dialing down the fear of purchasing. How do we get this customer more comfortable that they pick the right thing? They've done plenty of homework. And we can move forward confidently because we're not going to leave you. you know, without a safety net here. We've got your back.

It's, we're going to get the returns we're promising. One of the steps of that, we say the playbook, we call the Jolt Playbook. It's an acronym for behaviors, but you hit on the O, which is offering a recommendation. And it goes right to this problem that you talk about,

like customization and throwing too many choices in front of our customers. It's a double-edged sword. Barry talks about this in his work. Choice is a compelling thing from the outside. Like if I'm window shopping and I'm looking at different, providers and I'm looking at your company. I'm looking at other people come in and help me with leadership development. I want to talk to those companies that can configure endlessly and have all kinds of partner integrations and a robust roadmap and the bells and whistles and everything.

Like it looks awesome. And you know what? Early on in our sales conversations, let a thousand flowers bloom. Like it's great, baby. Like tell me all this stuff you can do. But at some point, what Barry's research has found is that that what feels good early on will actually lead to consternation later on that people actually will look at all these options, say they all look good and how do I get to something? And so I think what Pat said is 100% right. The skill we talk about in offering your recommendation, there's two parts to it. One is offer proactive guidance. So how do you go from everything to like a narrow choice set? So how to go from like 50 options down to like three different configurations, the Goldilocks principle and steer them to the one in the

middle? And that's the second piece is that we call advocacy, which, which is not just telling them that this is a great option, or these are three great options, and this one in particular is the most popular, but putting your personal seal of approval on it, saying this is what I recommend. You know, I've sold this to many companies just like yours,

and I can tell you companies who buy this configuration, they don't ever look back. They love it. It delivers the benefits. It's fantastic. Just forget everything else. If you change your mind later, we can adapt it,

but move forward confidently. And what's interesting there is it, it ships a little bit of the burden the customer feels about making a mistake onto the salesperson. Now you, now you've said I should do this. So it's on you a little bit if we go the wrong route. I love it. Super helpful with the offering. So you mentioned the acronym. So J-O-T. Can you can you, can you just tackle the O? Can you tackle the J now? Yeah, the J is judging the level of indecision. So, you know, it all starts there. And I think there's an old saying in sales, which is high-performing salespeople don't chase garbage trucks.

You've probably heard this in your sales career as well. And it's indecision is a particularly hairy problem for the average salesperson because if you think about it for a moment, these are customers who are not saying no. They might be saying not now, but they haven't said no. And so for the average salesperson, the last thing you're going to do, especially with a customer you might have spent weeks or months or, you know, years courting and trying to sell to. If they haven't said no, hope springs eternal.

They might say yes at some later date. So you keep pouring time and energy into it, but high performers know that time is their scarcely resource, and they cannot afford to chase garbage trucks. So what they do is they look to qualify and disqualifying opportunity, not just on their ability to buy, right? Do they have budget? Is it a good use case fit?

Is it an industry where we've got experience and reference customers and all that good stuff? Can we integrate with their current systems, all the stuff that fits into that obvious kind of qualification set? The other thing they qualify and disqualify on, is the customer's ability to decide. So it's not just ability to buy, it's ability to decide. So you've got to understand where is the customer indecisive?

Where is that indecision coming from? Is it about what to choose? Is it about not having done enough homework? Is it that they're worried that they're not going to get what they're paying for? What is their personal level of indecisiveness? There are lots of personality traits that we all exhibit in different degrees that make us more or less likely to make a decision anytime soon. And then are there exacerbating factors?

Like for this customer, is this a particularly big decision where they is a bet the farm, bet the company kind of decision? Is there time pressure? Like, do they have to spend money this quarter and you might they miss a window to spend that budget? All of those things together will tell the salesperson, what's my likelihood of being able to close this customer this month or this quarter or even this year? So it tells them not just when to forecast them, but also whether they should even bother spending time. there? Is this a customer that is hopelessly kind of stymied by their own indecision and will never get off the fence? In which case, they might look good on paper, but you're better off spending your time elsewhere. So that's the J. Judging the level indecision. We talk all about,

you know, indecisions, no customer has ever gotten a T-shirt printed up saying like, hey, I can't make a decision. Like nobody confesses to that. We all think we're decisive, but it turns out that most of us aren't. And so how through a combination of active listening and then kind of sending out what we call Pings and then listening for the echo back from our customer, can we gauge and test how indecisive they actually are and whether we could ever get this deal closed or not in this lifetime? How about the L? Yeah.

So the L is limiting the exploration. So we talked about this problem of all this information out there, but customers still feeling like they haven't consumed enough of it. I don't feel like I'm enough of an expert yet. And this is a big decision, so I need to do my research. At some point, you've got to get the customer to trust. you and trust that they have done enough research. So L is limiting the exploration.

And it comes down to a handful of tactics we found, which are a combination of, if you will, this is an overused term in sales, but it's kind of getting the customer to see you as a trusted advisor. There's two parts of being a trusted advisor. One is, are you trustworthy? And the second thing, are you in a good position to advise me? The trustworthy part is all about doing those things during the sale to show the customer, you're not trying to put one over on them.

You know, you're not trying to hide the ball. You're not trying to oversell them. And there are lots of techniques we found high performers used to do that, telling the customer, hey, I know you want the premium version of the solution, but I think the standard version would be just fine for your needs. Hey, I know you want to add this bell or whistle, but I don't think you guys are ready for that. And I don't want to waste your money, right? Or the customer is saying, I want to go enterprise wide and you're saying, you know,

I think the better thing to do is actually start small. Let's prove it out first. Let's see, let's do a pilot and let's see how it goes from there. and then we can expand from there. So those are confidence givers that show the customer like, okay, this person's got my best interest in mind. They're not trying to oversell me. Then the advisor part is you've got to position yourself as a subject matter expert.

You've got to know your stuff, right? That means for salespeople doing your own demos. It means not over relying on other people on the team. Like you probably remember when you're LexisNexis, there are probably lots of salespeople who said, you know, hey, I brought on Ryan. Ryan's the head of product. Ryan, take it away. Well, it turns out Ryan hates when you do that because Ryan's the head of product.

He's not the salesperson. And it also creates this problem for the salesperson where they get delegated down to the person they sound like. And if the salesperson is only a glorified admin whose only value is that I can get the really smart people on the phone to answer the customer's questions, then the customer is going to feel like I need to do my own research because you're not in any better. You have to do your own demos. You have to. There was no way I would allow someone on my sales team if they couldn't demo the product. We would train, train, train, train, train, train, train, train so that every person had to become a master.

of the product, regardless of how complex or hard it was, then if you, if you couldn't get there, then you just couldn't work on the team. Yeah, totally. And the other thing I would tell you around this limiting the exploration. So creating that trust, demonstrating that expertise, which we saw done in lots of different ways. One interesting thing we found is high performers were actually more likely to proactively suggest objections to the customer. Like average performers would never do that. That's like Pandora's box. You're not going to open it. But high performance, actually say there's curious moments where they would say, you know, Ryan, you asked this question. You didn't ask this other question, but I'll just put it on the table because other

customers like you worry about this too. And I just want to like get it out there. Let's talk about it. And what you heard in these calls as customers saying, yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I was going to bring that up. I did. Yeah, Bill's trust. Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to put one over. I want to get it all on the table. Because if you're still worrying, that's a recipe for no decision, right? Let's get it all on the table. Let's deal with it. And what was super cool is that like the cherry on top of all this stuff is a heavy dose of radical candor, right? It's those moments where you've earned the trust, you demonstrate the expertise when the customer asked for that fifth demo or that's, you know, third reference call or like, hey, I want to wait till next month when the new Gardner

report comes out, you would see these high performance say, you know, with all due respect, I don't think that's actually going to address the concerns that clearly you're still struggling with. Let's have an honest conversation about what you're worried about. Let's get it on the table, let's talk about because there might be other ways than doing another demo or doing another proof of concept that we can address your concerns. But you only have the right to do that if you build up the trust and the credibility. Yep. All right. How about the T.

Yeah, T is taking risk off the table. So we talked about this outcome uncertainty idea, right? I bought something and yeah, the demo looked great. The pilot was awesome. The reference customers loved you. But what if this goes sideways and we're the one customer for whom this doesn't pan out, right? And I get fired as a result.

Or maybe I just look like a fool because I wasted the company's money. And so, and this is true for individuals too, right? It's like, I'm going to switch homeowners insurance policies. And what if I don't read all the fine print and something happens? We have a flood and it turns out our old policy covered in our new policy doesn't. So this runs a gamut from complex sales all the way to very transactional sales. But that outcome uncertainty, it might be left holding the bag.

And what you found great salespeople doing was creating a safety net or at least the feeling that the customer had a safety net. And there were a number of things they did. One is setting believable, achievable expectations, right, under promise over deliver. Don't promise the 3x ROI, promise the 2x ROI, and then show the customer everything beyond that is upside. But set the expectations at a manageable level so the customer doesn't feel undue pressure, and then they don't kind of point that back on you as a salesperson to deliver these crazy, lofty projections. The other one has come up with creative ways to manage the downside risk. So this might be concrete stuff.

Like if you have an opt-out clause or a prorated refund clause, make that apparent to the customer. Like, hey, you can cancel any time within the next six months. No harm, no foul will issue a pro-rated refund. Or they might be more nuanced. Like, let's get you on the phone with our customer success team and make sure that we are showing you the roadmap, built back from customers who have great experiences with our product and designed to achieve the outcomes that we're projecting. So we can instill that confidence that we've been there. We've done that.

we know how to get the value out of, help you get the value out of this purchase. Let me get you on the phone with the people who are experts at that. So it's those little confidence givers that, again, make the customer feel like they're not jumping off a cliff without a net, but we've got their back. We're going to be there every step of the way, and they're not taking a huge leap of faith here.

This made me think of a recent speech with a sales leader who wanted me to come to their national sales meeting to give a keynote to a few hundred sales reps and managers. And he said, okay, give me the ROI, because I think he was a little surprised by my rate. Give me the ROI. I said, I mean, it could be zero. I don't know.

There you go. I don't know. I mean, so I'm not sure I go, or it could be like a hundred million. I don't know. It depends on how it impacts your people. But given where the things that you told me is the things you're struggling with and what you want, this feels like a good fit. So I'm not going to promise any ROI, but it could be a lot or it could be a lot.

or it could be none. Yeah. And we ended up, you know, coming to an agreement, but I think he appreciated this like, if I'd have been like, oh, it's 10X, whatever you're going to pay me for sure. And here's how it's like, no,

I don't know. I mean, there's a chance. It's nothing. Yeah. But I think the odds of it being a lot higher than that are good, but I'm certainly not going to make that promise. I mean,

there's just no possible. It's not believable even if you did make the promise. Right. Of course. Yeah. I had this experience around with that. I've been asked to present Challenger many times at sales kickoffs. And I'm always really careful to say, look, it's nobody is going to leave that session being

transformed into a challenge or salesperson. This takes a lot of focus training, really great coaching from sales managers. It requires your organization, build those insights that people can use in order to challenge. Otherwise, they're just challenging, but they have nothing to challenge with. And then they're just annoying. So like this is a big organizational transformation. I can promise you it'll make people think differently. And I can also promise you that on the heels of.

my presentation, they're going to look to you and they're going to have hard questions. Like, what are you going to do to teach me to be a challenger? How are you going to enable me? Can my manager coach me and work with me on developing those skills? And so you better have answers to those questions. And by the way, if you're just looking for an entertainer for an hour, like I think I'm an entertaining guy, but it's actually going to probably create more problems for you than anything.

So you might want to call somebody else. I mean, when they call you, they got to go for the whole thing. If they're saying you're coming in and you're going to present challenger, then on the back of that, there's probably, I mean, from a business perspective, a huge upsell for you, because it's either all or nothing, I would imagine, with you. It's not just come in for the hour. It doesn't seem like it would make sense. I have one more. I really appreciate this, Matt, like the depth of your knowledge and how thoughtful you are. It's really, it's super enlightening. This is definitely one I want to do, talk to you more. But let's say you're talking to someone

who's earlier in their career, mid-20s, graduated college, want to leave a dent in the world, want to do well. Maybe they're working in sales because they're not sure. They're like me, right? You get done playing college football and wonder, I have no idea what in the world I'm going to do, so I get a job in sales. And they want to do good. Again, they want to leave their mark, a positive contribution in the world. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? You know, one of the things that we talk a lot about is the idea that you've got a lot of this stuff, whether it's challenge or anything else, starts with challenging yourself, right, and pushing your own comfort zone a little bit or pushing yourself outside

of your comfort zone, I should say. One of the other things I think is, that I would say, especially somebody early in their career, I think it is, you know, there's a lot of conventional wisdom out there in companies, in organizations, just, you know, in business in general. And I think pushing yourself to think outside the box whenever possible is a good, generally to kind of go through life with a bit of a skeptic's eye and to kind of look at everything twice, you know, test with data, test with your own experience. Don't just assume everything you've been told no matter how long it's been passed on from leader to manager to a salesperson or to individual is true.

And go out and, you know, trust but verify, maybe as the saying goes. and kind of go through life, I think again, with that skeptics mindset or that skeptics eye. And I think you'll be better off for it. And I guess the last thing I would say is, and this is such an overused term, right, but I think the idea of empathy and being customer-centric is really important. But I think what's the wrinkle there, I would say, is it kind of sounds obvious. But if you think about it, most of the people who tell the notion of customer-centricity or customer empathy then go on to say, well, of course, customers want this.

They want a great relationship. They want a salesperson who finds it. Ask what's keeping them up at night. They want this. Or when you have a customer experience in cold feet, clearly the answer is that they're in love with their status quo. So you've got to break out your hammer and hammer that status quo. And I think the reality is those two things I've talked about being skeptical

and being customer-centric, kind of go hand in hand. Because most of the things that we found that leaders and companies have convinced them that customers want, when you actually go out and test it with data, that's not actually what they want at all. that you know, Challenger, great example. They don't want to cause a salesperson come and ask them what's keeping them up at night. In a world where they have tons of information,

what they're looking for from you is the thing they couldn't learn on their own. So tell me what should be keeping me up at night. And that sounds really counterintuitive, but it's totally different from what every sales leader and most sales books have been championing for a very long time with salespeople. So again, yes, it's customer-centric,

but what is customer-centric is often not what you've been told it is. The best way to go learn is to find out from your customer, what they're actually looking for. We didn't talk about this, but we wrote a book on customer experience. And I think in customer experience, the conventional wisdom is, you know, when something's gone wrong with your product or service and your customer reaches out to you for help, you got to delight them. You got to wow them.

You got to surprise them. What we found is, like, customers who are delighted are no more loyal than those whose expectations are simply met. So don't try to wow your way to loyalty. Instead, try to mitigate disloyalty by making those experiences and those moments a lot easier than your customer was feared that it would be. So lower the level of effort in the customer experience, make it frictionless, make it effortless.

And that was a total head snapper for companies that have celebrated and, you know, those TV commercials and those advertisers they put out about how they, you know, they save this customer in a moment of need and wowed them and delight them and that customer wrote a blog post or wrote a letter to the CEO and how awesome that feels. It's like, yeah, but that's not the way to run a business. The way to run a business is be consistent

and make your experience easier than your competitors' experience, and that creates a lot of stickiness. But it doesn't, it's not what we've convinced ourselves is true. And so I think, again, the great thing about being new in your career is you haven't been exposed to this stuff. And so you can come in. That skeptics mindset is probably natural. It's harder for those of us who've been working in companies for 30, 40, 50 years to kind

of break outside that thinking into question, question what you've been told the reality is, if you will. the book's called The Jolt Effect, How High Performers Overcome Customer in Decision. Highly recommend it. I appreciate you send it in early, Matt. It's much like your other work. It's extremely well done. And as I mentioned before, I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

This is really good. I love it. Thank you, Ryan, for the invite. Thanks for the kind words about the book. And best of luck to all your listeners. Thank you. Sometimes those research-heavy conversations, can get into the weeds because of the academic elements.

But Matt is really good at tying the research with real life and oscillating back and forth. That's why I was really looking forward to having him on and so glad that we were able to do this. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did a few takeaways from my notes. The paradox of choice is real. people don't actually want more options they want someone who can confidently advise them on what to do then a challenger ultimately teaches someone something new and adds value to their life a challenger is not afraid to take control of the conversation and the challenger has the confidence to show how what they're offering will make someone's life better then thinking outside of the

Baw, thinking outside of the box, try to do this whenever possible. Be a bit skeptical. Ask why. Question things. That's how we grow and learn and potentially find a better way. Again, I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. If so, I would love it. If you would tell a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Matt Dixon. I think will help you become a more effective leader, not just if you work in sales, but if you live, you live, In general, I think all of the topics we covered could help you both in your career and at home. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcasts, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to soon. Okay, wait.