How to Become a Buyer’s Trusted Ally with Ted McKenna

Mike (00:05.301)
Ted, thanks ever so much for joining us on Hegel, the B2B Sales Club podcast.

Ted McKenna (00:21.954)
Thanks for having me.

Mike (00:24.034)
So Ted, just talk about something, a bit about yourself first of all, bit of background, who are you? Kind of what do you do? And then if there's something unusual about yourself for the audience, that'd be great.

Ted McKenna (00:36.91)
Okay, well I'll have to think about the unusual piece, but my name is Ted McKenna. I am a researcher by trade. I'm a co-founder of a company called DCM Insights. We're a sales effectiveness company with a research background. So we help organizations with business development, with sales, and come at it from a research point of view. I was sort of born professionally, if you will, at a company called CEB, which is now part of Gardner.

Mike (00:40.809)
Ha ha ha.

Ted McKenna (01:07.41)
researching sales and marketing for organizations, best practices, with lots of interviews and surveys and you name it. And was there in the early days of the Challenger Sale Research, which became sort of a big, big signature piece of research that we helped organizations implement insight selling and all the things that come with trying to lead with insight with your customers.

And then spent a stint in professional services working for Russell Reynolds, which is an executive search and advisory firm and in a mix of kind of content marketing, insight generation, practice management, even some sales enablement type positions there. And then transitioned back into product, which is sort of my core area. So, so what's it work for a company called Tether, which is a

software company and that's where Matt and I, Matt Dix and my co-author of The Jolt Effect, we did this big study towards the end of our time there. We did this big study of sales, ended up studying two and a half million sales conversations, which turned into the book, Jolt Effect, and we sort of launched the company from there.

Mike (02:18.421)
Very good. And something slightly news about yourself.

Ted McKenna (02:22.602)
Well, so I'm not all that exciting. I will, I'll tell you that right from the start, but, uh, this is, uh, the, I guess maybe the, maybe a unique, but boring, uh, detail about me is that I go by Ted that's, but that's my middle name is Theodore, uh, which always, you know, was the, uh, the scarring moment was the first day of school every year when people remembered that my first name was actually Martin and not, not Ted. And like, it's really Martin. I'm like, you don't, you remember this from last year, but, you know, anyway.

Mike (02:26.139)
Oh, I don't think that's true, Ted. I don't think that's true.

Mike (02:50.187)
Exactly.

Ted McKenna (02:50.666)
My whole life, my parents decided to inflict this on me and this is my lot in life, I guess.

Mike (02:57.497)
Exactly. Well, Ted's nice and short and easy to remember, that's for sure. Before we get into the questions, Ted, what would be good is, could you just explain a really high level view of the kind of the Jolt book? Because obviously anyone listening, if you've not read it already, it's an amazing read. Go off and find Jolt, J-O-L-T. But yeah, do you want to just like give an overview of what it's about?

Ted McKenna (03:01.049)
Yeah.

Ted McKenna (03:21.046)
Yeah, Jolt is a book about customer indecision and how sales teams navigate that with buyers of all stripes. You know, we focus primarily on B2B purchasers, people who are buying things with other people's money, if you will. But this also applies in any setting when a consumer is purchasing and they're gripped by indecision and not really sure about what path to go down. And so we did this big study about what happens in those settings, why it happens to us as

effect it has on sales teams. The main conclusion of the study was that, well, first, lots more deals get stuck due to no decision than we think. So I think we're primarily meant to assume that when a deal gets stuck, it's because the buyer isn't fully convinced that change is necessary, that they're not fully persuaded that they need to move forward. And so we need to double down on that and reconvince them or convince them better on that front. But we found a whole bunch of situations when...

the buyer was fully convinced on that front, wanted to buy, felt like they needed to buy. Seller was doing all the things you might expect and it was still stuck. And it was because of this indecision what turns out to be due to their fear of failure. When you dig into the psychology of it all, so we read a bunch of psychology from people much smarter than us that have run experiments on these types of things, for decades there's this concept around omission bias that becomes really key and critical with respect to how buyers are evaluating purchases.

Mike (04:38.323)
Hehehe

Mike (04:44.915)
Yeah.

Ted McKenna (04:49.354)
looking at options and trying to understand all the information they need to make a purchase. And the critical piece that really is important for sellers to understand is that when the buyer goes to make a decision and can't, the thing in the back of their mind that they're really hung up on is that they're going to mess up, that the thing's going to go wrong and that they're going to get blamed for it. And so as sellers, we need to be really careful about handling those moments, those cold feet moments and being very careful about...

and are reducing what ultimately is a fear about messing up. And so the whole book then takes on the playbook of, what is the jolt playbook meant to do? It's helped to reduce the fear of messing up. So there's kind of four critical behaviors we found that matter. The first one, of course, the J of the, which is an acronym, the J of the jolt is about judging the level of indecision. It's trying to understand the depth and the breadth, understand the nature of it such that we can both understand the attractiveness of this opportunity, you know,

Is this something I should keep pursuing? Can they ever make a decision? But then also treating that as best I can, knowing more about the type of indecision they might have. And then the OLT parts of Joel are really about the playbook for overcoming indecision. And so the O is typically aligned with around making a recommendation, firm recommendation in a personal way, which is really powerful in a situation, especially when a buyer is stuck in indecision, primarily because they can't figure out which option to select.

You know which path to go down which onboarding or contract term or configuration or implementation. Uh, what have you, every supplier has got every, every company and professional services in particular, tons of different ways in which you could go about purchasing from them. And buyers just really struggle to make trade-offs. They make sure they struggle to understand which direction to go in and a recommendation done so in a firm and personal way makes a really big difference there.

The L is about limiting the exploration to healthy rather than excessive levels. We all know these buyers who get stuck into analysis paralysis, you know, they start spinning their wheels, feeling like they don't have enough information. They're going to be left in the dark, caught by surprise later on. So we talked to teams about the skills necessary as a way to limit those, those exploration levels to healthy levels. Cause you can't just tell the buyer to stop asking questions or stop exploring. So there's, there's some technique involved there. And then finally on the.

Ted McKenna (07:09.814)
The T is the taking risk off the table. At some point, we might have to de-risk a little bit of that purchase for this buyer who feels like, no matter how many assurances you've given me, we're gonna be the one exception. That we are not gonna be able to get what we're paying for. We're not gonna be able to achieve this. We can't really accomplish this. And so I need a little bit of cover here in these moments. And so again, a lot of skill that goes into those, but that's the kind of the core story around Joel.

Mike (07:24.497)
Exactly.

Mike (07:35.645)
Brilliant. And where did it come from, Ted? So what was the hypothesis? Like all pieces of research, I guess, there was an idea that you and Matt had, and that was the seed of doing the big study. So where did that come from?

Ted McKenna (07:42.166)
Mm-hmm.

Ted McKenna (07:53.13)
Yeah, I mean, like all of our studies, we try to start from two places. One is buyers and what's changed with them and how are things evolving and what is that impact on sales teams? And then separately, we also always look at high performers on the sales side. So we take inspiration from what you might think of as lead steers. You know, what are the top 15 or 20% people doing differently than their peers? And when we dug into the study and we looked at this big, huge study, we first found way more losses than we might've expected.

in places that we wouldn't have expected losses, you know, where the seller was doing the things you would have hoped for and the buyer seemed pretty excited and they were still losing. So that caught our attention. But then when you saw those differences between the high and the average performers, especially in those cold feet moments, again, that caught our real attention. I think indecision in general has been, you know, on the rise for a lot of secular reasons, you know, and that became clearer the more we started to understand the nature of indecision.

Mike (08:40.62)
Uh, okay.

Ted McKenna (08:50.614)
You know, what drives it, you know, if, if the number of options or the number, amount of information or the overwhelming, um, feeling of trying to do more than I'm ready for, if those are the big drivers of purchase related indecision, all of those things are on the rise, you know, every company in the world that's, that's selling is trying to expand the number of options, expand our practice areas, expand our solutions. Um, and with that, you know, comes lots of information.

Plus you got the internet and all the other ways in which buyers have access to endless amounts of ways to evaluate different alternatives and whatnot. So lots of reasons why indecisions on the rise and affecting sales teams and professional services teams far more now than it ever has.

Mike (09:35.957)
And I guess, so this wasn't something that we kind of talked about in advance, but something that a bit of a rabbit hole maybe, that maybe you want to explore with me. AI is that obviously with the rise of AI as a conversation on everyone's lips in business and everywhere else, it's such an unknown. People don't understand how it works, they don't understand what it is, and therefore, I'd imagine again, anyone that's selling AI enabled solutions.

is going to face even more of that uncertainty in the buyer's mind and indecision.

Ted McKenna (10:13.158)
Yeah, so I think it plays on, I mean, any number of levels. By the way, as a researcher, I love rabbit holes. I'll go down them way more often than I probably should. I think about AI on just my personal perspective on it. It come at it from a couple of different directions. So one, we're somewhat familiar with the research power of using AI and machine learning on unstructured data.

Mike (10:20.109)
Oh good, excellent! Ha ha

Ted McKenna (10:39.606)
You know, if you sort of just demystify what is, what is the power of AI and the tooling associated with it, Gen.AI being the most prominent one for frontline teams. It's really just about unpacking the power of unstructured data. You know, for so long, we've been locked into trying to understand structured data, you know, fields inside of CRM systems, for example. And so.

Mike (11:00.037)
Exactly. Creating taxonomies so that we can then cut things in different ways using pivot tables.

Ted McKenna (11:06.126)
Yes, exactly. And so what technology has done and a whole bunch of math has enabled us to do, and compute power for that matter, is to make better predictions using unstructured information. And for researchers, that's really powerful. It's one of the reasons we were able to study two and a half million calls at scale, rather than a couple thousand surveys or a couple hundred interviews, which we might have previously relied upon.

But yeah, from a buyer side, I think it has created these interesting dynamics too, both in terms of buyer curiosity, you know, about tools they could be taking advantage of or ways that they could be speeding up or making things more efficient for their teams. So that opens up doors and hopefully fills some pipeline, at least in terms of lead gen for sales teams. But also I think creates a lot of uncertainty about am I going to waste money? Am I going to waste time?

Mike (11:52.359)
Exactly.

Ted McKenna (12:00.37)
Is the promise of this going to be bigger than it actually ends up being? I mean, look, I think if you step back, and this might transition us into a wholly different place but related, I think, which is around trust. If you just zoom out and look at the relationship between buyer and sellers over the last 10 or 15 years, I think there's been a huge...

Mike (12:05.301)
from the reality. Yeah.

Ted McKenna (12:24.962)
decrease in trust between buyer and seller. I think a lot of that has to do with sales teams overselling and overpromising in these situations, tech sales especially, overselling capabilities, selling roadmap items that aren't really fully ready for prime time. Then you enter AI.

Mike (12:28.969)
Go!

Mike (12:39.315)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (12:44.361)
So Bios Remorse has kind of increased.

Ted McKenna (12:47.954)
I think for sure. And then enter AI, which has both promise but uncertainty related to it. And I think it's this sort of really interesting concoction of both interest and distrust at the same time.

Mike (13:03.677)
Because there's organizer, I mean, this is a great rabbit hole to go down, which we haven't prepared, but let's go down anyway. So the organizations are terrified of not getting involved in AI, because if they miss the boat and the boat's moving fast, they will be left behind the curve. But they're also completely unsure about really what is it? What's the benefit to my organization? Is it going to produce efficiencies?

Ted McKenna (13:20.353)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (13:31.945)
Will that make people redundant? Is that a good thing? Can I redeploy those hours in different ways so that I grow more? There's lots of uncertainty and doubt in decision-makers' minds inside corporates.

Ted McKenna (13:45.386)
Yeah, and of course, I think it depends of course, how it's positioned. So for example, if they're buying a AI tool that their team would then use, you know, you have a whole host of things that go, go into that in terms of just general usage of a product and training them up and getting them used to it and all that good stuff, you have separate issues with respect to, uh, you know, them believing in the value of it or trusting that this will, will provide value. I think in professional services, we see this playing

a slightly different way often, which is that the service provider is the one positioning they will then use these tools on their behalf. These are proprietary tools they've built as a way to improve the service experience or improve these products, which holds lots of promise, but also inserts a lot of interesting follow-on implications for the efficiency of the work, for example. How do you think this is going to work?

Work is monetized, you know, which typically often is based on time. And if that's the case and you're doing the work more efficiently, should I then pay you less, you know, as a consequence, you know, there's all these very interesting ripple effects.

Mike (14:42.121)
Yeah.

Mike (14:49.597)
Where exactly? Yeah. Ha ha ha.

So let's go into that kind of the trust piece. So what is your research telling you about the evolving trust dynamic between buyers and sellers? So just kind of unpick a bit more about that. I mean, the overselling, the tech salespeople overselling, that sounds like it's having a macro effect on buyers effectively.

Ted McKenna (15:16.258)
I think so, yeah. The agency dilemma is something that sales teams forever have had to deal with, where there's an asymmetry of information between buyer and seller. And you could have found this thousands of years ago in markets all across the world where you're trying to haggle over the price of a rug. For example, there's always gonna be some level of distrust between buyer and seller, but I think it has only gotten worse over time.

Mike (15:35.452)
Exactly.

Ted McKenna (15:45.906)
I think part of this is, I mean, who among us has not felt like they've been oversold in the past, you know, or bought something that they didn't really fully need or didn't fully use? And so what's interesting about this, of course, for the seller is it's not their fault. You know, if you think about just thinking average seller coming into that situation, the buyer doesn't trust you right from the get go. It's not your fault. You didn't do anything personally. It's kind of just like the nature of things between buyers and sellers.

We talked to the sales teams about there's a chapter in the Jolt Effect called Becoming a Buyer's Agent, which is a lot about kind of overcoming this agency dilemma. And how do we first earn back a little bit of trust, you know, with that buyer across the course of the process? I think it's become super important for the seller to demonstrate to buyers that we have your best interests in mind. You know, that we are aligned on this front, that the last thing I want to do is oversell you.

The last thing I want to do is start off this relationship in a bad place. Um, I think at professional services, this is, this plays out a little differently, of course, because that is, it has been forever, much more of a trust-based relationship based, uh, you know, thing that I'm building over the longterm. And so you don't see quite as much of that overselling, uh, necessarily. But I do think, you know, in general, um, buyers are, uh, less dis or are less loyal.

you know, and willing to entertain, you know, perspectives from lots of places. And so that might not be trust necessarily that's lowering, but nonetheless, the seller has to navigate the waters and build trust wherever they possibly can in every corner, you know, over time.

Mike (17:29.601)
If you go back, so back in the day in the 90s, late 90s when I was a consultant at KPMG, we were introduced to the trusted advisor book by David Meister, which you probably have, I suspect, read in the past. It's funny how that stuck with me for like, you know, what now is nearly 30 years, I guess, is building trust with a client as an advisor. A lot of salespeople will focus on the relationship piece.

Ted McKenna (17:42.383)
Mm-hmm. Yup.

Mike (17:59.453)
That's their go-to. They start with relationship. And the Meister Worker course said, well, yes, you've got relationship, but you've also got credibility. And you've also got, I think they turned it as lack of self-interest, more interest with the client. I've also thought about it being risk. My job with a client is to help them, is to help de-risk the solution for them so that we can start working together in a lower risk way.

Ted McKenna (18:24.534)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (18:29.99)
Is that also playing out? So is his work still, I guess, relevant to that as it was 30 years ago?

Ted McKenna (18:38.15)
So I think the answer is probably yes and no. So I can get to the no piece of it because we've done some recent research on this front as well. Look, I think it's undoubtedly true that the basis of the relationship is founded on trust and that's especially true in a service-based situation where the person that you're buying from often is then still the person who's executing on the...

Mike (18:45.767)
Yeah, yeah.

Ted McKenna (19:07.322)
the project, you know, and so you're hiring their expertise, you're renting their brain, if you will. And so that's been true. And look, I don't think what has not changed, of course, is that you have to build trust and that you have to build great relationships and that you have to demonstrate expertise. What might have changed and what our research is showing is that the how to get there might be shifting a little bit. How to establish that trust.

Mike (19:08.201)
Correct. Yeah.

Ted McKenna (19:33.186)
how to, what's the best possible way to build that relationship? What's the best possible way to demonstrate that expertise? That part we do see evolving a little bit as buyers are empowered with more information, as they have access to more and more expertise in lots of disparate places and what have you, we do see some shifts there. But what has not changed is that, of course, you have to build great trust, you have to build great relationships. And I think-

especially tricky. This is not of course news to anyone in professional services, but especially tricky of course in that setting is that the sales cycle never ends. You know, so it's just this ongoing sale that you have to kind of keep navigating through and work through on an everyday basis.

Mike (20:06.845)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (20:13.877)
So when you talk about the way that trust is built, is changing due to the, for many factors, but you know, the ubiquity of information on the internet and the ability to go on to chat GPT and ask it questions and it predicts an answer, which is reasonably accurate. What do you see shifting? So if someone was listening to this and they're in professional services and they're, you know, they might be a new director, they don't hold a sales target, but they're certainly being encouraged to build a pipeline. Because if they're going to be a partner,

Ted McKenna (20:17.844)
Mm-hmm.

Ted McKenna (20:33.518)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (20:43.613)
they will need to eventually obviously have a pipeline of deals. So if they were starting out on that journey and they were looking to say, well, how do I build trust with clients? What is, what have you found?

Ted McKenna (20:56.694)
I think one of the main things that we're seeing, and we've done a couple of surveys here of buyers that indicates this as well, is that buyers, and I think this is especially true in professional services, but probably true more broadly, is that while it used to be true that buyers are far more likely to buy from the current provider they have again. If they buy from anyone, they're likely to continue, if they get great service, if they get great experiences, they're likely to just re-up with that person and continue with them.

Mike (21:21.822)
Yep.

Ted McKenna (21:24.614)
Now it feels like buyers are, for lack of a better way to say it, a little bit more promiscuous. They're willing to entertain at least conversations, if not actual services, from a bevy of potential providers. And sometimes that translates into working with non-traditional type providers. So you see alternative service providers in law, for example, finding ways to get after some of the more commoditized aspects of that work.

fixed fee type arrangements, lots of other things that have changed the nature of that relationship. And more broadly, you see appetite for expertise in sort of multi-dimensions, not just within projects, but I need expertise between projects too. I'm looking for somebody who's willing to give me sort of off the clock advice. And that creates lots of problems for managing partners and others who are managing.

teams and try to figure out the best way to monetize that work. Uh, and so because of this, because of these changes and how buyers are, are evaluating and valuing expertise, um, it has shifted a little bit about the best type of person who can go and build that pipeline and think about ways to position themselves for when that buyer is ready to engage in the next project. Who might they select?

Mike (22:47.913)
Perfect. So, which leads us nicely into the kind of final question that we're going to talk about, which is around the selling archetypes. So, just like just talk about what you've found about selling archetypes and some of the myths and some of the reality of what works and what doesn't today.

Ted McKenna (23:04.702)
Yeah. So we did this very large study of 1800 plus partners, you know, seller doers inside of professional services organizations. So lawyers, accountants, bankers, consultants, executive search consultants and talent advisors, you name it. We've surveyed them and the, if anyone wants to read it, the, some of the conclusions were published in Harvard Business Review. It's a article called what today's, what today's rainmakers do.

Mike (23:30.993)
I saw that. That's very good. Yeah.

Ted McKenna (23:34.182)
And so what we found is that there are, in any organization with doers sellers, there are five different kind of archetypes, five different types of, of individuals who go to market in different ways. These are statistically defined. So the data kind of, you run a factor analysis, the data cleaves together, and it, it shows kind of their approach, their typical approach for, for going to market. Um, of the five, we found that one of the profiles that we call the activator.

is far more likely to succeed in today's environment in contrast to some of these other profiles. I'll get to the activator in a moment. The other four profiles.

Mike (24:13.713)
Yeah, go through the other four first of all. Definitely. Yeah.

Ted McKenna (24:17.394)
Yeah, so you've got the expert. The expert tends to be somewhat reactive in nature to business development. They don't love doing business development in general. They'd rather focus on their own sort of expertise. But their general posture is, I put my name out there, I get on stage, I write articles, and I attract business as a consequence. And so I'm sort of reactive in that sense. And I like to position myself as that.

sort of hero as the person who is the locus of expertise. It is me and my expertise and you guys should follow that lead. And so then you also have the confidant. So the confidant is sort of that classic old school trusted advisor. You know, they're the person who is constantly, you know, looking to build very deep, very personal set of relationships.

with their, sorry, let me, I just gotta.

Can we start over there on that point?

Mike (25:25.213)
Yep, so hang on, just a note to the producers. At about 24 and a half, 25 minutes, could you cut out this bit and then reset the clock and Ted will start to go through the archetypes again. So our count is in Ted, and then you can kick off. You ready?

Ted McKenna (25:44.33)
Yeah, I apologize about that. I just got a text from him.

Mike (25:46.685)
Don't worry. That's fine. Okay, you ready? So three, two, one. So, Tim, we're gonna talk about the four other archetypes.

Ted McKenna (25:55.638)
Yeah, exactly. So the expert is the first individual and these are people, I think most organizations would recognize who is the person who kind of positions their own expertise as the reason to contact them. So they're sitting there waiting for the phone to ring because they've put their name out there on thought leadership or on stage and so they tend to be very reactive in nature and also kind of reluctant to business developers actually.

But again, they turn a position themselves as that locus of authority, I'm the expert, and that's the reason you want to work with me. The confidant is kind of the classic old school trusted advisor. So they tend to have a very deep, very personal set of relationships that they've kind of built a moat around over time. And then they try to win by providing white glove service, you know, on the assumption that the best possible way for me to get the next piece of business is to absolutely crush this current project, this current matter that I have.

on the table. The debater is kind of like, for those of you in the audience that are familiar with the challenger work, the debater is sort of like the challenger in the study. They're not exactly the challenger. The activator is doing some of those things too, but the debater kind of always has a different perspective on the world and they're not afraid to share. They're actually quite eager to share that. They lead with their deep, deep subject matter expertise, but they do that by bringing innovative ideas and they kind of want the client to follow their lead.

Stylistically, the debater often comes across as somewhat confrontational. They're looking to make sure that the person, again, is they're following their lead. They're taking control of that situation. And so consequently, over time, they can kind of rub the client the wrong way. You know, when you've got this very long relationship and they're constantly looking for places to tell you where you're wrong. And then the realist, the realist is the last of the other four.

Mike (27:39.709)
Yeah, exactly.

Ted McKenna (27:45.93)
And the realist is really trying to separate themselves through honesty and transparency and making sure they're setting very proper expectations with their clients. And so they're almost overly comfortable telling the customer no or the client no in certain situations, shielding their team for what feels like no win situations. And consequently, they can often kind of come across as almost too pessimistic about the situation, not idealistic enough, not ambitious enough in kind of those situations. And so that stands in.

Mike (28:14.51)
Okay, so, no, so that's the four and then there's the fifth. So if you look at the fifth is the activator. Is that correct?

Ted McKenna (28:15.167)
I'm sorry, go ahead.

Ted McKenna (28:22.986)
Yeah, so without further ado, yes, that's the activator. And the activator, they're looking to continually connect with clients on an ongoing basis. So they're very intentional about building a network of individuals and then expanding that over time through different forums. So they make really good use of events as a way to connect with individuals and they're intentional on how they prepare for and follow up to those events.

You see them often on LinkedIn, not just posting, but more generally connecting with people, expanding the size of the network and being intentional about cultivating that network, curating it and understanding the role that each person might play in that, because then they look to create opportunity and value for people in and across their network. So they're really, again, intentional about making introductions for people within their network. They're proactive about suggesting ideas and ways to work together between projects and within projects themselves.

Mike (29:09.521)
Exactly.

Ted McKenna (29:21.482)
And then they also make a very strong commitment to business development. Um, so they're regular and consistent in almost a habitual way, uh, in executing against business development. Uh, they recognize that this is not separate from their day job, but rather a core part of their day job. And actually in many ways, as I execute business development, I learn things about the client and learn things about what's important to them that make me better at my core, my, what might be my core job. So.

Yes, I'm engaging in business development. Yes, I'm looking to pitch for business. And yes, I'm looking to expand relationships, but in doing so, I actually get better as a lawyer or an accountant or a consultant, because I understand more about the needs set, not just of that person, but across their whole organization. As I think about the different levels of the organization, I think about the different teams in that organization, the dynamics this person plays in. These are all the things that a great business developer is looking to do, and an activator is constantly looking for ways to navigate those waters.

Mike (30:20.629)
And what did the evidence tell you? What did the research tell you about the impact of activators versus the other four roles in today's market?

Ted McKenna (30:30.821)
Sorry, can you repeat the question?

Mike (30:32.593)
Yeah, sorry, in terms of the scale of impact, so the activator's twice as good as the other roles or only like 50% as good or what was the kind of like the findings?

Ted McKenna (30:42.746)
Yeah, so the activator, first of all, the activator is the only one we found that correlates with increase in performance as they get better at that skill. So the one way to think about it is the intensity of these profiles matters. You know, I didn't spend all that much time on how the math works out on these different profiles. Everyone's a mix of some of these profiles. It's kind of like a major versus a minor, if you will, when you go to university, you know.

Mike (31:06.047)
Yeah.

Ted McKenna (31:12.182)
So the activator, when we talk about activators, these people kind of major in activator. And so as you think about adopting activator type behaviors, part of this is about how hard and how often do I lean in those directions on a day-to-day basis. What the math tells us is that if I were to double down and lean harder into one of the other four profiles, I'm likely to negatively impact performance. Whereas the activator is quite the opposite. It can lift performance.

Mike (31:36.281)
Right.

Ted McKenna (31:41.946)
considerably, especially for average performers who have a much better chance to improve on that front. So if you're going to look to get better at business development, it's a clear winner in terms of adopting the activator behavior set. And again, the only one really that if you were to lean harder into it, you're more likely to get better over time at business development.

Mike (32:06.153)
Perfect. And just because I'm conscious of your time as well, Ted. Just in a few kind of like words, phrases, if someone was looking to expand their business development role, take that new director in a consulting firm, kind of like looking to become a partner in the next five years, intrigued by this activator role, what are the kind of two or three things that they should do to get started on today that has a long term benefit?

as that activator roll.

Ted McKenna (32:38.058)
Yeah, look, I think the, and there's a separate aspect of this, which is how to firms attract those types of people and how they think about building more of them. But if you're an individual person, you know, just trying to emulate as best you can what the, what the, the activator is doing. I guess there are two first pieces of advice that we would give based on what the research tells us is, is first on the habitual side. So if you think about the commitment that they're making to business development.

Mike (32:45.725)
Absolutely.

Ted McKenna (33:05.846)
You know, think about this as a regular thing. This isn't a sporadic or episodic thing that I look to do when I have time or, or when my project ends, but if I can dedicate 10 minutes a day, you know, 15 minutes a day, and how do I make that as intentional as possible about building better relationships inside of my accounts of finding ways to establish new relationships and growing my network? Um, and then the second piece I think is, you know, cultivating the network as early as you can. So don't wait until.

Mike (33:11.998)
Yep.

Ted McKenna (33:35.318)
You now have expectations as a partner to go and develop that business, but start early in developing that network and think about how can you create value, mutual value for people across that network. So this isn't about just taking and finding ways to extract value from them, but rather how can you add value for people in your network?

Mike (33:38.862)
Exactly.

Mike (33:56.117)
Exactly. I mean, so one thing that I've been doing now pretty consistently for the last kind of 12 months, I guess, is a simple thing on LinkedIn. And it is a discipline is following people that I'm genuinely interested in and don't have a relationship with, and then commenting on their posts in a meaningful way. Not saying, oh, Ted, that was great, because that's meaningless, but adding some insight or adding some difference of opinion into a post that you've made.

is a great way of starting to build a relationship.

Ted McKenna (34:27.798)
For sure. I'll give you another very tactical example of a contrast between the way that an activator would behave and look, none of us are perfect on this front. I can't tell you I'm a perfect activator in this front. But if you think about just like the contrast. So for example, let's imagine that a person in your network changes jobs. You know, and maybe with that change in job, they've moved cities and it's clear they're about to pick up their family, move to a different city. There's a big difference between congratulating them on LinkedIn and then saying, hey, I'd love to catch up.

Mike (34:37.18)
No, no, no.

Ted McKenna (34:57.374)
you know, in a couple of weeks, once you are able to, you know, come up for air, which is clearly an attempt to, I want to sell you something, you know, based on what's your new role versus, hey, I don't know if you know anyone in this new city, but I've got a couple of people that I think you should definitely meet with or know because they're either well connected or they're great people or what have you. And I'd love to make that introduction, you know, so it's sort of a paying it forward element here. And look.

Mike (35:05.553)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (35:22.342)
Exactly.

Ted McKenna (35:25.89)
At the end of the day, of course, it is a commercial relationship that you're looking to build and cultivate. I think buyers understand and appreciate that. Absolutely. Especially because you're going to provide value on that front as well. But there's an element here where I'm adding personal value to for this individual in doing so in a somewhat selfless way.

Mike (35:31.733)
They understand that. They do. Yeah. Absolutely.

Mike (35:44.777)
So one of my clients moved his family to the US. They won a big contract out there and he's building his businesses doing exceptionally well. And it happened that Craig went to a city where one of my other clients was and they had an excellent network in that city. And I said, oh, Craig, you ought to go and meet this kind of colleague of mine that I'd worked with. They live in the area, they've lived there for years. And it was simple to do and yet he found it incredibly helpful.

to meet Amy. And that kind of connection, it was intentional, but it was done for the right reasons. He's new in town. He actually had lived there before many, many years ago, but he was relatively new in town, introducing some people who might be able to help.

Ted McKenna (36:31.862)
Yep. Making it honestly, if you're just trying to measure activator behavior, I'm convinced that just the number of... Activators make more introductions than the average person, full stop.

Mike (36:44.165)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. For all the right reasons. Ted, this has been fantastic. I love talking to people like you that have got deep insights through research into particular areas of selling. So where can people find out more about you?

Ted McKenna (36:59.542)
Yeah, so love connecting with people on LinkedIn for that matter. So look me up and connect with me there. DCMinsights.com is our homepage for our company. And then we have two other web properties, if you will, that represent those two studies I mentioned. So jolteffect.com, if you're interested in customer indecision and ways we help organizations on that front, you can find information there. And then the Activator Development System.

is the way in which we're working with professional services organizations to develop more activator behavior.

Mike (37:28.85)
Huh.

Mike (37:32.306)
It's been a real pleasure. So thank you ever so much being guest today.

Ted McKenna (37:35.566)
Appreciate it.

Mike (37:38.437)
So let me just stop the recording.