The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations | Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect)

We collected two and a half million sales calls and studied them with a machine learning platform at scale. The big insight is that You're losing most of your sales deals not to competition, but to indecision. And that indecision stems from their fear of failure. Dialing up the FOMO backfires eighty seven percent of the time. They're not afraid of missing out, they're afraid of messing up. You just talk about how to actually leverage these insights to improve your sales process. You have something I think you call the jolt method. Yeah, jolt them forward. So the first thing is we've gotta judge their level of indecision. The second thing is we've gotta offer a recommendation. The third thing is we've gotta get them to start trusting us. We call limit the exploration. And the T is we've gotta de-risk the deal, we gotta take some risk off the table. Great segue to the challenger sale, which is basically this on steroids. Most salespeople are trying to figure out what's keeping the custom up at night. The challenger approach is about showing. the customer what should be keeping them up at night. What's a risk that they don't know about, but you do. Holy moly. This is gonna be the most action-packed high density podcast episode we've done.

Today, my guest is Matt Dixon. Matt is one of the world's foremost experts in sales. known for his groundbreaking research into what makes the best salespeople different from everyone else. His first book, The Challenger Sale, was a number one Wall Street journal bestseller and has sold over a million copies worldwide. His most recent book, The Jolt Effect, builds on his lessons and insights and will change how you do sales. In our conversation, Matt breaks down what you're probably doing wrong in your sales process, based on research into millions of sales conversations. And then how to tweak your process to be a lot more successful. This episode is for anyone that wants to improve their sales skills or improve the rate at which they close deals.

With that, I bring you Matt Dixon. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Lenny. It's great to have you here. So first of all, a huge thank you to April Dunford for connecting us. She's a a huge fan of your work. She mentioned you a number of times on the podcast episode that she did.

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