0:00:01 - Alex
And welcome back to Experience Focus Leaders podcast. Today I am very pleased to introduce you to Anthony Copage. Anthony is a leader in global digital sales at IBM and, more importantly, he's effectively the implementer inventor of agile selling in the enterprise. Anthony, welcome to the pod.
0:00:28 - Anthony
What a blast to be here.
0:00:30 - Alex
And Anthony, I am really intrigued by your explanation of what you do at IBM because it's a little bit less conventional than an agile sales leadership or whatnot and it's a little bit more realistic of the reality of the enterprise sales world from which I come from. So do you want to throw that out to our audience?
0:00:53 - Anthony
Sure, so I like to joke. I mean, it's true, but it's fun to say that I help people who think they know what they know to realize that they don't yet know what they need to know so that they can know what they don't yet know.
0:01:06 - Alex
That's what I do, so basically back to the Socratic core that we don't know anything. That's why we know something Correct. And it sounds like what you're really implying is humility. I think some people in particularly enterprise sales they've been successful. They made a ton of money. They've kind of operated very high stakes of the game. They're kind of it's a tenure track almost to get there. That's results driven, but yet the best folks, it sounds like, are able to learn, adapt, adjust and the enterprise-wide level. Can you tell us more about how you are driving that at IBM? Which, by the way, for those of you that are new to sales, what's the saying about traditional? The IBM quote is that nobody gets fired for buying from IBM. So there is that sort of still legacy of safety play there. But that world is changing and I'm curious how you're adapting your organization for that environment.
0:02:18 - Anthony
You couldn't have set it up any better, and I think the idea here what's important, is that it might be the safe play because of the legacy, but I want to build on that legacy, but I also want to go beyond it. So one of the things that we're doing is we transform to an agile business agility model, which means, basically, are we iterative, are we adaptive, are we responsive? And that's over, by the way, being static and stock and reactive. So if you feel like you fit those last three, there's hope for you, because there's a way to not be that way. And for us, we have to lean into the legacy by making sure we stick to the DNA.
The DNA of who we are is very important, but the expression of that DNA should change. So the metaphor that I use for that and this is true for any organization that wants to adapt and not just survive but thrive is it's kind of like Caterpillar butterfly right or Tadpole to frog. The DNA of the Caterpillar is the exact same DNA in a butterfly, but the expression of that DNA is so different it's unrecognizable. On purpose, that's not a whoops, that's not a while. We left our caterpillarness behind and now we regret it and all we have is this butterfly-ness. Now, no, we are still us. It's the same organism, right?
But instead of being in a catechus stage where you've got this chemical reaction making the change, we have an intentional leadership reaction making the change. And what does that mean? It means that we put five values out there Respect, openness, courage, empathy and trust. And if, at any time, anybody doesn't feel at least all five at the same time, even one is off, we have not just a responsibility, but the right and the safety to speak to it, because that's how we go. How do we become what we're not yet? And that's a super healthy way to look at it. The other thing is we have five values, three principles, and those three principles- are You're kind of the when you say this is the way, the idea of playbook.
This is the playbook. This is the way this is the way I'm leading agile sales to say look the huge-.
0:04:31 - Alex
This is the way, by the way, right out of Roder and Star Wars, right out of the and take it.
0:04:36 - Anthony
Run with it, modify it, use it for you, because it's just, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. We're taking stuff that's worked and we're just constantly saying does it still work, and why is that, and why is it not, and what can we do? So we've landed on respect, openness, courage, empathy, trust, rocket or OCT, and it's super easy. And it's one of those things we we don't just say it, we act it. People don't believe what you say, they believe what you do. Right, so your actions matter.
And then the three principles are hey, do we have clarity with purpose? Do we know our why? And our why is not more revenue? Our why is not a better stock price? Our why is not quarterly performance quotas? Our why should be what value are we creating to living for the benefit of others, those we serve, whether it's our business partners or prospects or clients. And that why drives it? Because that's a client-centric approach, not an IBM-centric approach. So that's our caterpillar to butterfly idea.
The second thing that we say is hey, are we experimental? So if you aren't able to experiment frequently, which means have small, low-cost failures to learn from and be excited about that, because that means you're learning, failure is not failure until it's final. So if you're learning, was it really failure or was it just a learning opportunity? You've got to be able to take the losses and the wins together. But what you're trying to do is say we don't punish the losses, we learn from the losses. So there's not a punitive environment.
And then the third thing is we say hey, are we self-directed? So we change the role of managers. This is a really big one from saying a manager directs and controls to a manager supports and provides. So what does that look like? Means a manager says I have two jobs. One to skill you up and help you be as successful as possible. Number two, to get all the junk, move, all the crap out of your way. So I'm an impediment remover. So if it's something in your way and you're in sales, if you're doing non-sales, revenue-generating work, why are you doing it? Well, I have to do this, I have to do that. Why do you have to do it? And so, as a manager, I'm now serving. It's servant leadership. I'm serving rather than directing.
I'm describing a destination, not prescribing a turn-by-turn, pre-described route on a map. It's already got the highlighters and the turns. I'm instead of saying here's a destination, here's the budget, here's a GPS. Let me know not only how it goes, but what happened when you got there and what you recommend we do next. So, instead of telling, I'm asking.
So the narrative I would use, and then I'll stop talking. But the narrative I use for that is very simple. I say it's kind of like saying I want you to go to Chicago and be there from Dallas, fort Worth, where I live, dallas, chicago, be there by Friday, make sure you visit these three clients. Ok, make sure you don't spend more than X. And then the sales team come back and then they go. Yeah, we went. But here's the thing there was terrible traffic. Gps took us around. It was so bad due to road closure. We ended up going through Kansas City, believe it or not, and it was nuts. But while we're there at lunch, we realize we're in this tech hub and we start hearing conversations. And so the next thing we know we're having lunch conversation with a couple of people, and now we go and say we're going to come back and meet with you. So, hey, we went to Chicago, we did, that was great. But you know, kansas City is this thing. We didn't even have it on our radar and it was amazing.
Now, that story illustrates three things. One, I didn't tell them how to get to Chicago and what they exactly want to do. I didn't direct them, I described. So I didn't prescribe or describe. Number two I asked them to tell me what happened on the trip, because the learning is not just the destination, the learning is the journey. And then the third thing is I asked them for what we should do next. And what's the third thing? Not go back to Chicago. Not that Chicago is bad, I love Chicago. They found an opportunity in Kansas City. They want to go back to Kansas City. They should probably go to Kansas City, and that's so different than how most managers manage today, especially in a quota-driven environment. So my job is to say how do I help? Individually motivated, individually compensated people work together as a team and that's really the value we're learning together.
0:08:46 - Alex
Fascinating. So I'm going to try to connect the dots a little bit. For some of the audience that has newer to sales, right? Or maybe you know, in some parts of the organization that support sales, so historically the enterprise sales and large organization had to run a little bit in the top down military style and then go. You know, there was even terminologies like theater of operations is right out of you know, the European theater, like, okay, this is exactly what military would say, right, like so there is that and it's exciting to some degree, right, and it's.
There's, like the very hierarchical structure, the reporting, you know, in terms of forecasting, everything has to go up and you know, obviously the military doctrine has changed recently. Right, the development doctrine has changed. You know which is the word agile, where you know it comes from. The marketing doctrine is also trying to change, right, can you know, can we have be more creative, can we have user generated, employee generated, etc. Content we are, relate to, we live in the content world, so we kind of we think agile content which you can create quickly on the fly, adapt, learn from. You know that's changing the way the content production has worked historically in a kind of more centralized fashion, and so we see this broad trend happening, probably starting with smaller organizations. But I think the transition that you're driving is like you still have to report like an IBM right, you still have to have some degree of structure and process, you have to protect the very only thing, that's significant brand right, like in reputation.
So you have to kind of balance, some degree of structure, but but there is that sort of you know you're imbuing just like in the US military doctrine that's changing and some of the other disciplines you're imbuing more room for finding creative solutions for people growing, learning and experimenting. Am I capturing this in the larger zeitgeist of the change that you see?
0:10:48 - Anthony
Sure. Overall, I would say that's a pretty helpful thing. In fact, military terminology is still used in a lot of sales things. I've heard you know we're going to go attack this deal and we're going to, you know, win this thing. So it's very much battle mentality thinking and I challenge that all the time. By the way, I challenge that all the time because I know the spirit of it is not conquest, but the languages, and so I don't want to conquer my clients, I want to serve my clients, I want to partner with my clients. We're not here to rape and pillage.
0:11:17 - Alex
You know the old fat in the way Like this is. You're trying to create a mutually beneficial long term relationship and potentially, that's it business away if you can't meet it successfully. Right, like you are such a powerful thought.
0:11:35 - Anthony
Yeah, yeah. And what I say is we're not here to get the deal, we're here to make them successful, which is why, when you go back to the thing I said earlier, we're trying to create and deliver value. So the business has goals, and I can hear somebody in the audience in my mind saying, yeah, but I still got quota, yeah. So how does this all work? Well, we still have goals. Right, we should have goals. You should have a vision of the way you want to be perceived and utilized in the world. We should, so we do. We have goals, and so we'll say these are the goals. And then we say, okay, hey, teams, if the goals are X, y and Z for this market, this product, this, whatever vertical, what would you say are the best ways we can create and deliver value based on your experience working with these partners, your experience working with these clients, your experience he, listening to prospects, what are you hearing, what is your take? And we want them to come up with. This is that idea of experimenting.
Experimental mindset is to say, hey, what could we do to create, deliver value? We call that an objective, and each objective then I should align to. If we do this, well, this goal probably going to be hit, has a very high likelihood of being achieved. But we're not doing it so that IBM wins or doing it so that they win Because, funny enough, no one buys from your enterprise. Because they want to be a profit center for you. But that's how we often treat them. You know, enterprise often treats clients as though they're our profit center. Well, they here's that there's nothing wrong with profit in the sense that if I'm not profitable, I'm not in business. So you want me to make a profit because that's how I continue to serve you, but the value should be so much greater than the investment you're making. So what we want to do is say what's the return? How do we frame this around? What is your pain or opportunity? The only two reasons they're talking to us anyways right, pain or opportunity. Welcome to sales. If I'm addressing a pain and creating an opportunity, I mean gold, right.
And the way I frame this is that you have to have that alignment, clarity with alignment to say are we creating, delivering value? How would we measure progress? Key result. Okay, our objective key result. How would we measure progress towards achieving that and does achieving that likely lead to a very satisfied client, that would also achieve the business goals we have. That's good.
When, when everybody wins, there's no conquest, there's no battle. This is, this is a, this is a service opportunity. And so we look at is how do we serve them well? And if you do that relationally in B2B sales in particular, which are building, is a way to go, how do I help you be successful? How do I make you the hero at your job? How do I help your company? And then how do we listen back to that and say what's working well? Not just did I make the sale, but what's happening, how's that going? What else could we do?
And cross, sell and upsell, or maybe part of that solution may not, but we always want to have that partnership mindset that you described so well, because that's how you really create a long lasting, what we call lifetime value. Ltv and lifetime value is usually described. What's in it for us? You know if, if you're in an enterprise and someone buys more than once, it's probably going to be an exponentially more valuable client experience over the time for your, your books, sure, true, but that's kind of like the byproduct. The real value is that they continue to receive value and they find so much value that they keep coming back and then they want more value. So it's what's in it for them, not what's in it for us, as the primary driver.
0:14:55 - Alex
So what you're describing is really a very healthy definition of the sales profession. Right like in the sort of the opposite of the wingloman, you know stereotypes, right of the you know just kind of selling whatever is necessary. Or you know, actually, when you brought up the, the metamorphosis from from, you know, into butterfly, I thought of the opposite metamorphosis where you know, with friends Kafka has a book by that name where you know, salesman one morning wakes up as a giant insect. Right, and it's sort of a very, you know very scary kind of notion if you think about it, because I think fundamentally the sort of the, if you remain the old style or kind of whatever the stereotype of the sales person.
Right like you know aggressive, ra Ra Ra, forcing, you know products, you know into people's lives. You, you're that insect. Right, you become the annoyance, right that is showing up as a spam which ensure you and I get you know plenty of in, you know in a day to day thing. And now the spam is powered by AI powered insects that are kind of like just pretending you know that they really, they care, like pseudo and realizing it, and sort of like just overwhelming people with a ton of approaches, information, and so these are sort of some of the tactics that you know. Maybe IBM doesn't have to do, but a lot of folks that are trying to break in, create new categories, new products, are trying to grab some attention right to, you know, at scale. And so you know the and some people would call it agile right, because like it's automated, it's, you know, it's high volume, you know. So that doesn't make us about it.
That doesn't that's not your definition of agile, obviously, but like. Guide us a little bit about like. What's the risk that we have of not changing into the agile right like? So like a great person, great great sales. People always paint like. What's the opposite of not, you know, going down this path of change that they have to like? What's the outcomes of not deploying a particular solution? So what's the cost for people of not becoming agile sales leaders and producers?
0:17:12 - Anthony
And so you know the ability is a is a belief, not a thing to do. Right, so you would. You would might hear it in software we have standups, we have retrospectives, all these terms that really came from scrum inside of it, but what we're doing is is not that what we're doing is we're not doing that. Hey, how do we work together to realize what we can mitigate, eliminate or optimize on the downside right? So we reduce downsides to increase better upside, and we do that internally by making feedback actionable. So we solicit feedback at scale. You ask the people closest to the problem what's the problem? And what's interesting is they almost always always have an idea about what the solution is to.
And so we do that through multiple methods. I created a thing called the retrospective radar, which you can look up, but it's this idea of saying, if we capture feedback, then feedback is a gift. True, what I want to do is say but aggregated feedback captured at scale is actionable intelligence, because now.
I have trend analysis now. I have so, and this works not just with your internal teams, this also works cross functionally with marketing and product, and I think marketing, product and sales should be tight at the hip because we all have the same ultimate outcome that we're aiming for maybe different outputs, but same outcome. And so what we do is we do cross functional teams to say how do we bring those three people together? And then say those three groups together to work on what we're hearing from the end users, what we're hearing from the prospect of hearing from our business partners. We're using that to validate the data, because we have numbers. Everybody's got their numbers, their clicks, their this, their opportunity pipeline, their conversion rates.
Whatever Great have your numbers, what we want to know is, if the number says this, but the feedback says this way down here, what is that delta and why does it exist? So what we want is to say real agility has asked better questions. It does not have better answers. Real agility asks better questions. It does not have better answers. So we start looking for well, why is that gap so great? Why does the numbers say one thing but the feedback's another? Because if we just run on the numbers. I guarantee you're wrong, right, I guarantee it. And so what we want to do is say how do we validate those numbers with feedback and this, by the way, sounds like work, because it is, but the value of it is that you're not irrelevant. Look, if you hate change, you're going to really hate irrelevance. So I think the idea of agility is that you're going to be able to do that.
The idea of agility is how do you come around and say what does it look like to be adaptable, to be flexible, to be nimble and not react but respond right? Because one of those is about foresight and intent, and so I can't read the future, but I can sure pay attention and I can listen. And so the two years, one mouth thing you should listen twice as much as you speak. If you're in sales, that's true. And what we want to do is say but are we solving their pain? Are we addressing their opportunity? And if we're not, why is that? Is it the product, is it our service? Is it our offering? Is it our understanding? And should we do something different? So if you want to remain relevant, you have to not just change at the time. You actually have to.
I think of the Bruce Lee quote of you know, be like water, you know, water in a bottle takes the shape of the bottle. Water in a cup takes on the form of the cup, and so what's the cup today? Well, the cup is that those are more empowered prospect than ever before. They have more information, more bad information too, but they have more information, more time to do the research and figure things out before they ever talk to you. We recognize that. So we use AI as part of that, and so we have Watson X, and so we have the ability to say and anybody could use our software. It's not just limited us, right, we make it for others too. But it's this idea of saying how do we figure out what's best to create, where AI does the stuff that it doesn't take a human to do, right, that we could do things that make it really easy for you to self qualify and not have to get harassed by a salesperson. What could you do, what could we do to make that really easy and surface things to you.
That makes sense, whether that's a chat bot that listens and doesn't just come up with a prescripted answers but actually learns and over time says if you're interested in that you might also want to check this out, or seems like you're still looking for this and can I offer this? And now you have this really great experience where the customer is driving, not us. We want the prospect and the customer to drive it, because it's their problem, their opportunity to solve right. And what we're here to go is and we're ready when you are. So when we get somebody, we have a much higher qualified lead. So the MQLs are much better, which means the conversion to SQL sales quality is much better. And so now you have a much more satisfied clients because they don't feel like they're talk too too soon or too often. They're not getting that locus swarm effect right of the insects, just swarming them with automation. And I know where we are reflective and responsive.
0:22:08 - Alex
This is music to our ears. You know, I think what you're describing is exactly, you know, like I couldn't afraid to phrase it better is that sort of. You know, I fill out my form, you know, and like just to get some white paper, and I just get either, you know, forced to read 50 page manuscript on my phone that wants to suck the life out of whatever energy I have in my professional life, and and then I'm bombarded by folks that kind of don't even know what I've clicked on, what I've read, if I've read anything, that kind of they're just like, oh, you must be interested in this, when I actually didn't end up reading it and it's just sort of this, the, the kind of the playbook right, and I really like your, your quote that if you don't like change Boy, you're not going to like it. Relevance right, like the playbook.
And marketing and the playbook and the sales follow up has to change in the world, where the innovation is no longer scars, right, and and I think what you're describing is the sort of agile adaptation to the customer, right, if they want to consume content First, and you know you want to create that digital experience pre meeting and then you're engaging in the meeting, though how those agile sales reps are not showing up was a monologue of slides, right like that sort of linear, I imagine they. They say, hey, it sounds like you're interested in a BNC or customers like like you in the past. Have you know the ABC issue? Which one do you want, to which one resonates, which one I would address today? And then they go on a particular journey that that is more relevant to that customer. You know how are you?
0:23:54 - Anthony
how are you driving? But it's but it's a non but it, alex, it's a nonlinear journey. See people used to. That's an important distinction I want to throw in there. Sorry for interrupting you, but it's really important thought. It's not a BCD, it's a ELBC, bca. You know, it's like it's anything but linear anymore because the way that we get the information.
0:24:17 - Alex
It's not a funnel, it's a B doing a little. It's all over the place.
0:24:20 - Anthony
Yeah, yeah, exactly Right and we don't try to force you in a funnel. Right, are there stages to progression? Of course there are. Right, there's still discovery phase, there's still engagement, faith, but but we, we don't make you and that's kind of what's powerful and we're getting better at this. We don't do this perfectly, but we're getting better at this and it's it's really this, this idea of so how do we create and deliver value? How do we measure that value over time and how do we decide? This is the key should we keep creating that value? So we one of the things we've done is we've got a group I work with where, strategically, we work on a certain type set of products to put digital enablers on a website, for example, so maybe a pricing estimator or an R my calculator or a demonstration or something.
And what we do is we don't just measure the performance of what, we measure the performance of that over time to say, did it create enough lift to keep doing that and so does it actually end up being. And we have attribute tracking, so you have an attribute attribution model to say if this, then they did this. And we have all that data in the background to understand over time statistically likelihood of success. And so that, along with feedback, right data, with feedback tells us should we keep doing that or should we change it. There are so many fields that might be a very easy thing for marketing to go. Well, yeah, but we need to know this. Do we need to know what on day one, or could we learn that by day five or the fifth visit? And maybe we use progressive formatting.
So now with the field, the first time just gives you know who. How can we help? You just give your name and email and we'll, you know, give you this, or sometimes you don't even gate it, you just give it to him. Eventually you get one bit of information and if they're on the same device and they keep coming back, which they usually are you mean in this kind of enterprise stuff. They're going to be on their computer again or their phone but they're going to come back.
And we have a tracking, and now we start to understand. Oh hey, it's you, it's Alex is back. Alex, it's great to see you back. Hey, we got this webinar. Would you like to sign up for it? If so, give us. You know this one field, and now it's an but see five times later.
0:26:19 - Alex
I have five. If a cool and if you show up to a party, right, and you've met like 90% of the people there last week but you weren't paying attention and you didn't remember any of their names and there's no name tags, you're like you're going to look like an idiot, right, like you're going to. You're going to like it's going to be very obvious that you were like checked out and like you could have. You know you could, like you could do some ticks around there, but generally like this lack of awareness of what's going, you know what's happened, you know we're, you know we call it digital body language and the kind of in the in the world that you're describing right language.
Yeah, so like it's sort of, and you'd, I know, like you know, in the conversation you're like let's, let's dive into here, or like somebody's really interested, right, that's congruence, and I think what what you're describing is, you know, like there's a risk if the organizations are not agile, that they will be huge risk there. This is just like, like I'm very excited to welcome you back. Right, like that's not that's not exciting, right, but people that we're delighted to present 90 page summary of this, you know research report. Right, like it's not a 90 page, like it's sort of it's the length, sometimes it's the language itself, sometimes it's a combination of the medium, the kind of the context. But you know, without the tracking I think this is to your point you know you're not, you're not able to be agile fundamentally right, like because it's one cannot be responsive.
0:27:57 - Anthony
For sure, you could be as good as the sellers memory and capability are in their own processes, their own discipline, right, but that doesn't scale. People don't scale. Systems and processes do the trick with any of this. Right is not to be big brother, ish, right, so you don't want it to be like well, we know it's you and we have five questions that you can't be like that.
But but what you're really doing is you're creating a customer centric experience. So for their experience, how great can you make it so that they can either self qualify or self de qualify, which is just as useful, by the way, right, yeah, because if people and then this is a phrase I talk about a lot of people believe what you believe and value what you value, it shut up and take my money, right, that's just easy. If they believe what you believe but do not yet value what you value, you have a chance to explain that value and then you can convert. If they don't believe and don't value, probably never gonna be a great customer. I mean, honestly, they're probably the wrong fit.
0:28:55 - Alex
They're probably a better fit for us. They got there by accident, right?
0:28:59 - Anthony
And if we were to convert them and convince them, and that's not what they value. Ultimately, they're not gonna be a satisfied customer. That ends up harming our brand reputation because they won't speak kindly of us, right? So why would we try to be a poor fit, right?
0:29:13 - Alex
So and that's hard for us. This is actually really beautiful. What you're describing is sorry to interrupt, but like because in the startup world, from where I've been, you know, can we bridge the enterprise who we work with, but also, like we speak the startup language. There's sort of this sort of product market fit terminology and ideal customer profile terminology, and I've never heard it described the way you just did. This was the two by two which, by the way, we should capture in the in a follow up to this, if you have a visual for this, because it's fundamentally for found opportunity, because it's very easy to get confused.
Like we value intro, you know that values are not enough, right, sometimes you hit the jackpot, like that you know the beliefs and the what, the perceived value for the customers are aligned, but it's just not always there and I think people that have oversimplified it that it's like oh well, you, you know, you just find that ideal customer profile and they're always perfect. No, I think, especially if you're introducing new things to the market, you know, like majority of the people are not gonna be, you know, are champions of this out of the box. They need to understand what you're doing and they kind of need to connect it to their experiences in their head. And that's that opportunity to you know, say hey, you're broadly believer in the principles, but here's, you know our approach and why that may align with you. And I haven't heard any of that.
0:30:44 - Anthony
You're right, it's cool. I actually did that during a keynote for one of these, a smaller company, really cool company. That was fun to do, where I was sharing this concept, and it was the big thing that really resonated. Right? How do you visually represent the insights? And this is hard, right, because if you don't start with a model, you quickly devolve into spreadsheets, and that's not a compliment. So you have a model that helps you keep it, a kind of a North Star. You know, it's our litmus test for how are we doing? And I think it's useful because the value comes when people begin to think differently. I actually don't try to change behaviors at IBM. I try to change minds, because if I change your behavior, the only way I can force that is compliance. Well, that's anti-agile, because what I would be doing is saying, hey, I want you to be self-authorized, I want you to be self-directed, I want you to experiment greatly, but do it exactly this way? Whoops, right, fail. So instead, what I do is I invite people. I want you to be a non-forurial leader.
0:31:49 - Alex
Here's a 100 page manual.
0:31:52 - Anthony
Yeah, and don't deviate from it, right. So that's the thing. So, in order to demonstrate it, I have to actually invite people and I offer, I offer for people to step into things. Now there are some things we do have to do, right. So I do have a boundary, what I like to call it the guardrails, right Way at the edges.
But how you decide to work in space inside those edges, up to you, because I want you to discover something, not just follow something. And if I change your mind, guess what your behaviors follow? It's just a reality of human age Psychology, as is well-documented. If I can change your mindset, change your thoughts around something, your behaviors will follow. And here's a really interesting thing your behaviors will stick If you implement something, if you're through compliance. The moment it doesn't stick is the moment when no one's looking right, so it doesn't last. So why would I go down that path? And this is very different In most enterprises. You use the term command and control over it. Yeah, that's a hard shift. It's a hard shift away from that, because it's what got us here. And what I'm saying to every enterprise is what got you here will not get you where you're going. The world has changed.
0:32:58 - Alex
Let's double click on this behavior. So I'm a believer in the mindset, so I think I'm generally in agreement with this. But one of our mentors is a gentleman by the name of BJ Fogg, a Stanford professor, who has a behavioral change model and he has variables, like your motivation, which I would put in the mindset.
0:33:18 - Anthony
And transit versus extrinsic right.
0:33:21 - Alex
So that's key. But there's other variables and one of them is how easy or difficult is the task? Do I have to become a? I've never read anything and I have to read war and peace? That's a difficult task. Or versus, like, read a little snippet of wisdom, that's going to make your life interesting. That's how you get to war and peace eventually, if you're kind of talking of reading.
And then the other one is the trigger Is that book right at my bedstand and I could just pick it up and it's really easy. And that's the first thing I see when I wake up, not the phone, and it's the last thing when I go to bed. And so it becomes the sort of prompt for it. And so his model actually says well, yes, you need to change the motivation, but some behaviors that are, if you make them easy, they also kind of help you get into more motivated, right, because you're building that confidence that, yes, I'm the type of person that reads nuggets of philosophy, versus, like you know, in that creates myself every night with some mass produced media that kind of destroys value in my life, right, and so that people start then, because of that easy behavior, the trigger, they are going after it. So is there a version of this in sales, where you see some behavioral changes that are actually just little steps, little bets?
0:34:55 - Anthony
That's the point. That's the point, right. But I don't lead with behavior. Change is my point. I don't lead with. You need to do this, that's compliance, right. So what's the trigger? My command, that's not the trigger we're looking for. We're looking for an intrinsic motivation, not an extrinsic motivation. Right, hit the quota, or else extrinsic motivation, be more successful, have a better quality of life. Intrinsic motivation, right, and everybody's intrinsic is a little bit different, so the trigger for one is not the trigger for another. That's why I say change minds, because the behaviors follow. Well, whose behaviors? The unique behaviors of the people, based on their worldview, their culture, their values, and so ultimately, we get down the same path or the same destinations, with parallel paths. But I don't make them is what I'm saying do very many things. In fact, I only prescribe two things.
The rest I describe because I really want them to get there, there are some things we do need to do, but we visualize our work right and we communicate frequently about hey, what's working, what's adding value, what's not adding value, and what are we learning? Those are the two things I require. That's it. That's interesting.
0:36:06 - Alex
So this is actually a little like I would say. My worldview is that the way software works and it actually does things a little bit different and that's probably why you're doing more you know a mind change, right, and a philosophical change in the way the organization functions, the way software actually hones in on these little behavioral habits, right, and it tries to turn them into something that's just habitual, easy to do. You get some intrinsic or extrinsic rewards where it does like, like it's sort of, and then it becomes like you go, build on that habit. I think it sounds like you're doing a more global shift, but then that leads to those habits and people define those habits on their own in a way that's relevant to them and slightly different, right.
0:36:51 - Anthony
And usually what works for one will work for several. So the sharing among the team about what's adding value for them ends up being a useful construct, because now you're skipping the pain of figuring that out yourself and you're applying the wisdom of someone else who already experienced the pain. Right. So there's the value of that. And it's when you do that at scale, right. This is the thing about feedback at scale. Now you start saying it's not just your team, it's not just you. We hear that a lot and here's how someone so solved it. And here's this person interested. This team no longer has this issue that you're talking about. Wow, how do they have that Right? So, yes, I won't disagree with the Stanford professor. He's right.
My point is that if you're going to really make that stick, you may not have all the levers to make it simple.
At first, you might not be able to do all those things you may have. The environment that you're in is complex, and so you're going to start with the complexity where it's at and you are going to let them discover a little bit at a time, because that's the invitation, and it's always an invitation, because if I make you do it, suddenly we're anti-agile, the way someone described this is that there's a difference between agile and fragile. Like they're talking about fragile and they said what's the opposite of fragile? And mine went like resilient, strong, and the answer was there actually is no real antinom to it. The thing about it is it's anti-fragile. So here's this idea is, if I took a wine glass and I threw it at the ground, it would chatter, but if it was a really anti-fragile glass, then somehow the energy of hitting the ground would strengthen it and the impact would make it stronger and would bounce back up and be a better glass than when I threw it Right at the ground. The rumble-roll glass I think we have a new product.
0:38:36 - Alex
here we have a new product.
0:38:37 - Anthony
It's going to be great. Throw your wine glasses, watch them bounce right back up. But think about people. Or give me one more example and then I'll talk about people Trees. We have a little tiny tree out in the front of our yard. We have a relatively new neighborhood, a few years old, and so there's these little trees and they always put these stakes on the ground with these ropes tied around it all four sides, to hold the little tiny tree upright during the winds. But there's a point where our horticulturist, dr Moon, says make sure, once the tree is the size, that you remove those ropes quickly, because the wind pressing against it is what lets it grow stronger. The resistance it has to face is what makes it stronger over time. And so it goes with humans.
If you want to get better at something, persevere, persevere. Get stronger through the resistance. Resistance training in weights or resistance training for athletes Same thing Get better through the resistance. So we see the same thing and I'm trying to say so. How do we do that? All we're trying to do for the people, the span of care that I have is make it where they can have an experience I've never had before and have something so much better. They would never want to go back. But because if we do that, we will by default right with this focus on client centricity. We will be a value creating organization and people will be value receiving and then we will be value co-creating together. There's no way someone's going to say I want a better price on higher value. It's just the prices. Because if value is the point, price is not.
0:40:15 - Alex
If price is the point and guarantee you, value is not, yeah, there's nothing beats the experience of having a really symbiotic relationship with your customer, where you feel like you're a hand in hand, you're solving a problem, you're bringing your best, they're bringing your best, you're kind of learning, and we love customers from whom we learn right, and they may not be always easy right, because they may challenge some of the assumptions that we've had. Good Especially and this is great, that's great.
Thank you. Yes, it felt like we didn't need that thing, the roadmap that. We heard it from you. We know you care, we know you understood, we think you had worthy goals, and so that made us, they had opened our eyes, and that feedback.
0:40:59 - Anthony
Validating those data points.
0:41:01 - Alex
But then it's just, it's the sort of sense of co-creating, right, and that's like if you're in a relationship where you have kids, right, you're co-creating kids right. Arguably I do very little compared to my lovely wife, but it's still a sense that you've co-created something that becomes this tree right. That kind of doesn't need your boundaries anymore. So what you're saying is you're creating that experience for salespeople, right, so they become these. It's about, I mean maybe less of like production, delivering, killing, killing it. It's more about like giving you know nurturing a forest right.
I think that keeps on giving and gives shade to your business and you know that's a beautiful visual right. Like yeah, I love it, I love it.
Win, win win, everybody wins. So one thing so we've talked about sales right, like, so this sort of like. I'm bought into what you're doing, obviously. So we tend to love other disciplines that support sales teams becoming more responsive, more customer centric. So obviously there's customer support teams that's working with the customers, but another one that has a lot of scalability opportunities, marketing right, and so for an agile sales team to really work, right, they can't come up, come you know, show up with monolithic marketing content and marketing process that is centralized. There are fewer marketers and the sales people, so they may kind of they may feel overwhelmed by supporting all the unique flavors of customers and needs and industries of the like. You know, a platform like IBM has to support, right. So how can marketing be more agile and support those sales organizations?
0:43:05 - Anthony
Funny enough, that's where I got my start. So in 2009, I worked for a software as a service company. I was hired as the director of communications. It was a brand new role, made up for me by the CEO. I wanted me to come and he knew my skills and said I want you to lead this. And so I was introduced. And as I walked around this hundred person, I was employee 99. And as I walked around the whole we had the whole floor of this building. I went to the developers area and they had this 60 foot wide, 10 foot tall magnetic whiteboard with all these really cool colored postcards all over it and I was like what is this? And like, oh, this is scrum. And I'm like rugby, like no, no.
And so it was it was a flavor of agile, right, one of the one of the things actually predates agile, but that's kind of not important. So it's this idea of how do they iterate together, and so the teams decided what to work on. The teams decided the prioritization of the effort against a roadmap, and it was super interesting. Well, for me, it was super valuable because I could hear about the product changes that were coming, so that I could let our users know, hey, this is coming, expect this, but the not. It was also marketing fodder, because now I have something new to promote to prospects. So it was really useful and so I started applying agile marketing in 2009, really early, and I'm now part of the agile marketing alliance.
Agile marketing alliancecom, I think, is the website where I write all the time over there, put a lot of content over there. I love helping them because, in my mind, marketing and sales should be tied at the hip In 2019,. Agile marketing at IBM had digital sales rolled up underneath agile marketing, which I thought was great, and I was brought in to say you know, agile marketing, agile marketing works with digital sales or owns digital sales for now, and so can we be agile to the core and sales, not just marketing, and I said I believe so, but I'm going to have to invent it because it's not been done at scale.
And so they gave me a lot of, lot of leeway and what I did is this is where I worked with the marketing people who are already becoming agile marketers. We had coaches specifically for this and I was on that team and I just had the sales side of it. But we it was really obvious that the respect, openness, courage, empathy, trust that they had would apply perfectly to sales. So we took the same values and then I only modified the principles just very slightly for sales, but basically we're aligned two different organizations and a huge organization like IBM. Right, there's sales and marketing, but the customer should never feel that. They should never feel, oh, because no one comes to your websites, like you know.
What I'd love to be a part of is a drip nurture campaign, and it would just be fantastic if I could be handed off to a business partner so that I could be controlled by a salesperson like. No one wants that, but a lot of enterprises make it go that way. We wanted to say how do we make a seamless experience so all they get is the brand, all the experience is the value that IBM brings for them. And that means internally, we work like crazy. It's like a duck right On water. On the top it looks so smooth, but underwater the feet, the feeder, both feet are peddling furiously right. We needed to do that together and so, by by having the coaching shared right, it really made that a lot more realistic and it was a big part of my early success was because we had agile marketing in place. That made the agile sales piece work so much easier versus having to do it all at once. It would have been a much more difficult journey.
0:46:28 - Alex
So this is where they're still kind of separate, but I align and I think now what's interesting that's happening just kind of want to, like, get your last thoughts on this as we wrap up. It almost feels like the best marketers, and particularly in the B2B world, need to understand what are the best salespeople. Do the agile salespeople right and create the type of experiences for the customers that mimic the sort of transformational sales experience where you're jointly solving for a particular problem. Co-creation, it's like co-creation, right, that's. Marketers need to do that now, not just salespeople. Obviously, they need to enable sales team was the tools.
But sometimes even customers don't want to talk to sales for a long time, right, like even at great places. So how do you maintain that conversation? And then the vice versa, the production expectation right in an area where there's a lot of noise, a lot of information. So if a sales person shows up looking unprofessionally, looking like slides or whatever PDFs that are built by their grandpa back in the eighties in a basement somewhere, that takes away from all that good work on the brand side of things, right, that is sort of noise. That kind of doesn't contribute to that perception of a journey. And so, and as you know, historically, like sales teams are not designers, right, like this is not a core kind of strength. I mean design an experience for a customer. But certainly you know slides would not be core strength. And so how do you create that? You know sales people best sales people become a little bit more like marketers and best marketers become a lot more like sales people.
0:48:19 - Anthony
Cross-functional teaming I mean intentionally putting product owners so the product team leaders, sales leaders and marketing leaders together and then bringing their people in to be a part of that, the team members themselves speaking into it. It's not just the leaders, but it's all three. If you don't have all three together, you're gonna have a swing and a miss somewhere. It's just inevitable.
0:48:40 - Alex
That's interesting. So it's not just sales and marketing, it's sales marketing, product Sales marketing and product Interesting.
0:48:46 - Anthony
Yeah, and basically in today's world, product led growth, plg is very popular because it works, but I find PLG is only as effective as your communication, coordination and collaboration between marketing and sales.
0:49:00 - Alex
And that's a beautiful thought, and I never expected that I would be hearing from IBM sales leader about the value of PLG and aligning between PLG marketing and sales, which is really telling that you're just on the bleeding edge of what customers want. Yeah, which is amazing. Congratulations.
0:49:21 - Anthony
We are learning, we are learning.
0:49:23 - Alex
I think, as your fearless leader once said, the elephants can't dance, and it sounds like you guys are dancing up a storm. Was this sort of agile approach to delivering value to the customer across the discipline so really inspiring? Thank you so much for sharing your insights, anthony. How can the world connect and benefit more of that? Short of listening to this talk?
0:49:52 - Anthony
Yeah, but I love LinkedIn. It's my favorite social platform. So it's Anthony Coppage on LinkedIn, or anthonycoppagecom, I mean, and you'll have show notes. But, alex, what a pleasure to be here. I hope there's value for someone to take a little bit of value from something that was said today and go apply it to today and their own organization. So, thanks for having me, thank you.