Episode #333:

Jennifer Knecht, Chief Revenue Officer at Western States Lodging, explains how emotional intelligence strengthens B2B revenue performance. She explores how awareness, trust, transparency, and meaningful connections influence buyer decisions. Jennifer also shares how AI can help sales teams understand different perspectives, strengthen human relationships, and reach the emotional level behind buying decisions faster.

“Revenue is driven by the exchange of value. The faster you can get to the emotional level, the faster you can get to a true, solid decision that sticks.” – Jennifer Knecht

Jennifer explores why emotional intelligence is becoming a practical revenue capability for B2B sales organizations. She explains how stronger self-awareness, buyer understanding, confidence, and trust can improve sales performance, while AI-powered digital teammates can help sellers recognize different perspectives and build meaningful connections faster. The conversation shows revenue leaders how technology can reinforce human relationship skills, improve sales consistency, strengthen internal champions, and help complex opportunities move forward.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a very special guest with us, Jennifer Knecht. Now, Jennifer, you’re currently a Chief Revenue Officer. You’ve been a Chief Revenue Officer multiple times. You’ve been a CEO and an advisor to companies. What we’re going to talk about today is an aspect of the go-to-market strategy that, I have to tell you, I think we’re now recording over 330 episodes with C-suite executives here, and maybe once or twice we’ve even touched on the area of emotional intelligence and the role that it plays not only in sales leadership, but what it plays in how we work with and understand and build relationships with our buyers, with our customers, how we build revenue.

[00:00:56] Steve MacDonald: You have the whole revenue motion of the company underneath you. You oversee sales, marketing, and revenue management, so you get to think about where the buck kind of stops. Let’s put it that way.

[00:01:07] Jennifer Knecht: Yes, which is fine.

[00:01:10] Steve MacDonald: You have a real focus on mindset and setting the right mindset. Before I say too much and get into trouble, I’m going to turn it over to you and just say, if you wouldn’t mind taking that and expanding a little bit more on your background, and then we’re going to get into the title of our episode, The CRO’s Guide to How Emotional Intelligence Leads Revenue Growth. How do we connect those two dots?

[00:01:33] Jennifer Knecht: Oh, I love that. So thanks, Steve. I’m so pleased to be with you today and with your audience. I can’t wait for this discussion. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I’ve spent the better part of my career studying the psychology of people, I’m sure like many other sales professionals, especially chief revenue professionals, and in the last two roles that I’ve held, so I was absolutely a CEO at one point, and recruited out of that to be a Chief Revenue Officer, and then landed again to be a Chief Revenue Officer as it pertains to building the commercial operations inside of a multi-industry platform, which is where I sit right now.

[00:02:03] Jennifer Knecht: Some of it’s B2B, some of it’s B2C, so we actually have both sides of the coin that we work on from a commercial perspective, depending on the industry vertical that we’re in, ’cause we have several that we oversee. But my background in studying people and the psychology of people led me to mindset, which is a big thing. You study sales or anything about commercial operations; it’s all about driving the sale. Sales is 100%, not just a contact sport, but 100% an emotional sport. So even in the B2B environment, you’ve got to make sure you’re connecting with the right person, arming the right person- your internal champion, with the tools so that they can sell to their internal team, whatever it is that you’re trying to move forward in closing, finding negotiation around.

[00:02:45] Jennifer Knecht: I’ve spent the better part of probably 25 years studying what makes people tick, why people make decisions, being curious about, like, why do we do things in a certain way in this particular industry. What if we questioned that and did it a little bit differently? What if we married some of the best practices over here and sprinkled them into this realm? That curiosity has certainly brought me to today’s discussion, all around emotional intelligence as it pertains to B2B selling.

[00:03:10] Steve MacDonald: I have to say that just as a pretext to our conversation here, there are plenty of studies that have proved that our buyers in the B2B world, they’re driven more by emotion than rational decision-making factors. Knowing and trusting are emotional states, and if they don’t know and trust us, we’re not getting onto the short list. If we’re not on the short list, we’re not getting in; we’re not getting.

[00:03:33] Jennifer Knecht: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Yeah, exactly.

[00:03:34] Steve MacDonald: I mean, so if we kind of just boil this down, we know innately we are in the relationship business. We know creating an emotional connection and understanding our buyers is of the utmost importance. But what I love is you’re going to help us put some meat on the bone there, so to speak.

[00:03:52] Jennifer Knecht: Yes. We’re also going to talk a little bit about how we’re leveraging technology to build the muscle of emotional intelligence. Maybe 15, 20 years ago, it was a little bit of a buzzword. What is emotional intelligence? We’re learning about it. Some things started sprouting up in the business world around it. Since then, I think it has certainly evolved to where it is today. You’re right. We all know it’s a relationship-based sport, selling. We’re creating a relationship. People like to do business with those that they know, like, and trust. We all understand that as any professional that’s been in the business world for some time.

[00:04:22] Jennifer Knecht: But getting to the point of helping your frontline sales leaders, your middle-of-the-funnel sales leaders, even your executive sales leaders recognize in B2B and become aware of emotional intelligence and how they can leverage that to their benefit, that’s really what the focus of our commercial operations has been over the course of the last several years as we’ve built out the platform that we have today inside of Western States.

[00:04:46] Steve MacDonald: So I have to tell you, I’m going to start with a question that we never talked about before. Because I’m going to go out on a limb, and I’m going to say when you’re in front of the board, nobody’s asking you about emotional intelligence. Right. It’s true. Nobody’s asking you about.

[00:05:02] Jennifer Knecht: It’s true.

[00:05:02] Steve MacDonald: How are we doing on training the team on [00:05:05] emotional intelligence? So this is not something you’re being asked to do. This is not, yeah, something that’s part of a typical sales training environment, right? Why have you proven to yourself that this is important to connect to revenue growth? Why do you see that connection?

[00:05:22] Jennifer Knecht: Three aspects of emotional intelligence that we dug into, and let me give you a little clue of how we got on that track. A couple of careers ago, if you will, so a couple of iterations ago, I really dug into this. I noticed that, like maybe any other sales leader, we were missing some of what we thought was right there in our hands. We thought we’d done everything right. We were not closing the deal. We weren’t getting to the finish line, so we had to dig into it, and we took a different approach at that point.

[00:05:47] Jennifer Knecht: In business, it’s all about looking at the gap, looking at gaps, looking at the red numbers, the yellow numbers, and then celebrating the green numbers. We took a slightly different approach at that time, and I had a really great leader who said, “Let’s use an appreciative inquiry process.” And so we dug into it, and this was several years ago, and then actually just in the past couple of years, we reenacted that as well.

[00:06:08] Jennifer Knecht: But appreciative inquiry is maybe what you would call a rip-off and duplicate. What’s working really well over here that we could apply, that we’re winning at, to the places where we may be needing a little bit of help. So we dug in, saying, “Hey, we know that,” the team that I was with at that point, “we know that these things, X, Y, and Z, are working really well.”

[00:06:26] Jennifer Knecht: One of the pieces that we identified was that our sales leaders who were highly aware of themselves, like highly aware of how they were presenting, how they needed to adjust, who their audience was, and they were making intentional adjustments in the sales process to align with that other individual, they were being very successful. That awareness was a really important thing for a sales leader.

[00:06:46] Jennifer Knecht: We noticed that sales leaders, and this is something, well, everyone inherently understands in the world of any kind of sales-related relationship, is that if you believe in your product or you have belief in yourself, confidence, you’re going to close much faster. We noticed that was another big winning attribute, and we also noticed that when that same sales leader or another sales leader could instill trust, we boiled down how we were getting trust faster with the internal champions and whether, of course, we were connecting with the right internal champions.

[00:07:15] Jennifer Knecht: You may know an influencer, but you may not know the decision-maker, and that’s an important aspect inside of B2B. Who’s your champion? Do you actually really know who the decision-maker is? Do you really understand what’s driving them? Then the last thing that we dug into, in the world of business, often what drives our emotion at the table, especially the boardroom, is how our reputation will be viewed after we leave the boardroom.

[00:07:39] Jennifer Knecht: So a decision oftentimes has to do with our reputation on our career journey. If I’m a CFO, I’m going to make a decision that’s going to make me look and make my organization stronger, but I’m going to want that sort of, “Hey, my reputation is I’m a really great CFO because I analyze all these pieces.” Emotionally, though, I feel really satisfied as the CFO when I come back to my board and say, “Hey, we analyzed all these pieces. We had three RFPs out, and we went with this one because they could meet us on all these different aspects.” But it really was about: did we set that CFO up for the greatest amount of success because they felt like their reputation was going to be strong with the board when they presented whatever solution they had come to?

[00:08:19] Jennifer Knecht: So we noticed those four things. We took those four things, and we boiled those down at that point into what we phrased as our internal sales process, and really started training on those four aspects: awareness, belief, understanding, like the emotional aspect of, like, how you might be impacting your champion and your influencers internally, and we started seeing really great success.

[00:08:42] Jennifer Knecht: So yes, we were tracking all of the other metrics in the sales journey. We’re watching the close ratios along each of the different phases of the funnel. We’re watching how marketing’s impacting that. We’re looking at all those other pieces. But when we started training the sales leaders, arming them with something they hadn’t necessarily been trained on from a sales perspective before, we started seeing a pretty dramatic change.

[00:09:02] Jennifer Knecht: So fast-forward to my role today, we’ve applied the same thing and hit a couple of different frustrations. I joined an organization three years ago that had done really well and had come off of COVID with, it depended on the industry, ’cause we have several different industries that we serve into, but had come off of COVID either with a really great tailwind, or COVID had sucked the wind out of us. So, depending on the vertical we were looking at, we needed to figure out how to adjust all those levers for the sales team to get them, like, kick-started and growing consistently again.

[00:09:32] Jennifer Knecht: We applied the same sort of idea from an emotional intelligence perspective, things that we had boiled down basically two journeys ago in my career into the environment that we’re in today, and now we’re starting to leverage technology to help us further drive the behavior around those basic core elements that we’re trying to upskill our sales team with.

[00:09:52] Steve MacDonald: So I want to get into the technology, but there’s a really important question I want to ask first. If I could boil it all down, those four areas you train on are about building reputation and trust. We all know this, but we don’t always look at the Edelman Trust Barometer. Yeah. The most recent barometer that came out, 32,000 respondents worldwide, 67% of them think that business leaders like you and me are being intentionally misleading. Intentionally misleading. They think we’re lying to them.

[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: No matter how we personally operate, that is the ecosystem that we play in, and that’s up 11 points since around COVID. So this is getting worse, and we wonder why they’re waiting longer and longer to even talk to us. Yes, they can get great answers out of search engines or the ask engines now, the LLMs. Yes, and everything. So there’s a lot of dynamics at play here, but there’s never been a more important time to build trust into the relationship. Yes, it’s always been important. But it’s never more important now. I just wanted to, like, state that behind what you’re saying.

[00:11:06] Steve MacDonald: Now, how does AI, ’cause everybody talks about how AI can erode trust. They’re like, “We can write content. We can learn things at the drop of a hat. Our clients can do a lot more than what we used to supply to them. They’re expecting a lot more out of us in a shorter amount of time.” There’s a lot of negativity that’s coming out about the relationship that we have to overcome. How has AI impacted the emotional intelligence in building trust?

[00:11:35] Jennifer Knecht: This is such an interesting thing, and it depends on, I think, the age group, maybe the generation that’s leveraging it. It depends on what aspect of AI you’re using. So AI has become a blanket term. There’s a lot of different uses for it. You can use it really well to strategize, to analyze, and to, I think, comb through and understand data much more quickly.

[00:11:55] Jennifer Knecht: There’s a lot of great aspects to that. The approach that we’ve taken, and we use a word which is really important to us from a core value perspective. We’re here to create meaningful connections. AI is simply a tool that helps us create meaningful connections more quickly. What does that mean exactly? It may help us better understand the consumer. It may help us look at it from three or four different perspectives versus just one. So we may be able to analyze a conversation and run it through a model that’s telling us, “Hey, let’s look at it from these five different ways that the mind might be thinking about it,” versus just one way that we’re seeing it, so we can understand the multiple different perspectives and come to a better solution about how we may create that connection with the decision-maker in the process.

[00:12:39] Jennifer Knecht: AI is helping us with that, which is really interesting and unique because, face it, Steve, we don’t all have different perspectives. We try maybe to have different perspectives, but we still have our perspective, the lenses that we see through based on whatever it is that we’ve experienced in life, and that tends to give us the different types of biases that we have as we analyze situations and we read situations. But if you can run it through a model that’s telling us, “Let’s look at it from these five different, 10 different perspectives,” that helps you first open your eyes to be aware- the awareness part of it, and then the second part is we are using AI to train, to coach in the voice of the sales leader.

[00:13:16] Jennifer Knecht: So the sales leader is feeding back to its digital team. We have a digital teammate running alongside the sales leader, connected to our CRM, and helping feed back to the sales leader on a continuous basis. “Hey, here’s how I’m seeing it. These are my two cents from an AI perspective. Here’s my recommendation after we ran it through this model to see these multiple different perspectives. Maybe a conversation like this would really resonate with this individual on a deeper level,” and that’s ultimately what we’re trying to get to. We’re leveraging technology so that humans, people in our sales process, can do what only we believe sales leaders who are excellent and humans can do, which is build a trusting and meaningful relationship, and just get us there faster.

[00:13:57] Steve MacDonald: So you just also answered the next question I was going to have, which was this: the goal of having meaningful connections and relationships. Absolutely. So a lot of CROs I talk to, if I boil it down, say it’s getting harder and harder to connect. When we do, the connections are fewer and farther between, and the actual meetings we have are shorter. The opportunity to connect is getting smaller. What that would mean to me is I better make them more meaningful, right?

[00:14:30] Jennifer Knecht: Exactly.

[00:14:31] Steve MacDonald: I’m having fewer at-bats and less time to build that trust, to build that meaningful relationship. So you’re nodding your head. Agree? Then if that’s the case, how do we ensure that, the fewer and farther between, we’re really making those meaningful connections?

[00:14:49] Jennifer Knecht: Such an interesting thing. I don’t think my experience has been, so through my perspective, my lens, is that we don’t do a lot of training in the country overall through schooling, through university, through anything on how to create connection, like a quick connection. The first thing I think you have to boil down in the sales process is what a meaningful connection is to the person you’re trying to connect with. So first of all, how do they want to connect? How would they define a meaningful connection? So that’s part of the awareness of trying to step into their shoes, and what we’re working on training our sales team with around using AI is: how do you identify quickly what might be meaningful for them?

[00:15:28] Jennifer Knecht: How do you get underneath the layers of business quickly, like all the layers of logic, into the emotional level, and how do you more quickly connect with them on an emotional level, like a true meaningful connection, like a human being connection. Maybe that’s face-to-face, maybe that’s voice-to-voice, whatever it is for that other individual. AI is helping us to analyze it, look at it from all these different perspectives again, and then be able to give us, “Hey, try this. Let me know if this worked,” and then our sales leaders are feeding back to the AI, and the AI, the digital teammate, is getting smarter as they go.

[00:16:00] Jennifer Knecht: They’re feeding back to and mirroring back to the sales leader the digital teammate’s, “Hey, this worked,” or, “I’m telling you, the digital teammate, this worked, or this didn’t work because of X, Y, and Z.” The digital teammate takes that to analyze the situation a little further and feeds back to you, even more specifically, in your words and your language so you’re prepared to, again, more quickly make that connection. When we talk about emotional intelligence, a lot of what we’re training on, and again, using AI to help us, it’s not even coaching. It’s beyond coaching because coaching is saying, “You should do this,” or, “I would advise that you try this,” or maybe, “Run this different play.” It’s less like that and more like, okay, I’m sitting on your shoulder, and you just told me that this happened in the exchange. I’m sitting on your shoulder using words that you would use. So, using words that you would use, I’m trying to think like you, which is the digital teammate, to the sales leader. Now, we’re thinking together like this. Here’s how this person appears to be feeding back to you information. Here are the emotions that might be driving that. Why don’t you try X, Y, and Z, and then tell me how X, Y, and Z would work in this interaction?

[00:17:02] Jennifer Knecht: It’s a really beautiful, interesting, unique dance that’s happening with our digital teammates and our sales leaders. We just implemented it. It’s taken us quite some time to get to the place where all of the foundational pieces that we needed in place to be able to implement it, our sales training, our philosophy, how we were going to be modeling the emotional intelligence aspect of it. We had to feed all of that into the system to make it bespoke to us. But we’ve implemented it over the last several months, and we’re starting to see a dramatic impact on our sales leaders’ ability to make that meaningful connection more quickly. Measured by, we’re starting to move the process forward more aggressively for every one of our sales leaders, rather than having one sales leader be stellar. There’s more consistency across the sales team.

[00:17:45] Steve MacDonald: So I have to ask, ’cause every program falls apart if the people that it’s designed for are pushing back, or they’re not, correct, seeing results. Or they’re like, “I’m just going to go back to the old way that I know. I’ve been in sales for a while.”

[00:17:58] Jennifer Knecht: Adoption is always the case. 

[00:18:01] Steve MacDonald: So tell me about the adoption, and what are your sales leaders and sales team saying about it? What are they reflecting back to you?

[00:18:10] Jennifer Knecht: Again, the beautiful thing is my digital teammate is like a mirror of me. It’s starting to use my language, my mannerisms, my sort of thinking, and positioning recommendations around the way that I think or that I see the world to better resonate with the other individual, to better resonate with the prospect that we’re working to connect with. The pushback is not, which has been really interesting; even the folks who are very resistive, they’re like, “Oh, I’m not going to do that. I’m scared about the idea of this. I’m going to be replaced by an AI bot,” all this. And no, not at all.

[00:18:43] Jennifer Knecht: This is my personal success advisor, if you will. It’s not even a coach who’s helping me just have more meaningful conversations. As we’re seeing sales leaders start to find the progression happen faster, to be able to get to the emotion a little faster with their prospects, their nervousness around the use of it is starting to dissipate, which is why we’ve seen the consistency, why I’m so excited about this, and admittedly, we’re in the early stages, so we’re several months in progress. I’m sure we’re only going to see more. I’ve talked to other colleagues that have something similar running with their sales teams in different industries, and they’re having success doing something very similar.

[00:19:21] Jennifer Knecht: What I’m most excited about is, I’ve been in the commercial business for a long time, Chief Revenue Officer for a significant period of my lifetime, and the vein of our success in every organization is you have some really stellar sales leaders, and maybe you have some sales leaders that need a little bit of help. Yeah. And you’ve got some really stellar sales performers. The consistency is not there 100%.

[00:19:41] Jennifer Knecht: What this is doing is it’s helping us to level consistency. So performers who aren’t as good at creating those quick, meaningful connections are starting to have success creating quicker, meaningful connections. Success is contagious, Steve. We all know sales teams are flying high. Belief is strong when you’re winning. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We’re proving that out, and it’s not a perfect science because, again, it’s learning alongside us, and we’ve had some folks that are a little bit slower to adopt, some folks who are really excited about adopting, various degrees of that across the organization. But overall, the consistency is starting to create better momentum. And we gauge our sales process by how we move folks forward.

[00:20:22] Jennifer Knecht: Of course, we want a sale. Of course, we’re watching all the metrics, but we want to move them forward. And then when we go into account planning with deeper and wider and all those great concepts, we want to make sure that we have that connection with, again, the decision-maker, and we’ve made that meaningful connection. They’re walking into their boardroom feeling like they’re flying high because they found a really successful solution to whatever it is they needed. Sales is about filling the need, whatever it is that the other decision-maker needed, like filling the gap. And from an emotional perspective, we can do that faster when we have that meaningful connection.

[00:20:56] Steve MacDonald: So this is going to be an interesting question. Customers are our North Star. We’re supposed to be customer-obsessed. We’re supposed to be customer-focused. Forrester found, in a customer obsession study they did, that only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed. The ones that are have 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% faster retention. This isn’t something to be ignored. How does this help your sales team learn and understand their customers better? Does it facilitate a better relationship that opens up? How does it help us be more customer-obsessed?

[00:21:38] Jennifer Knecht: So one of the things that our training around emotional intelligence has helped us do is to create a foundation of greater transparency. So when you talk about trust, a lot of that is because we have these, everybody has this facade or shield up, especially in the business place. We are a certain way in the business place, perhaps different than we are in our real life, and we do that. We curate that on purpose a lot of times, especially when we are the decision-maker. What we’ve found as we started really training around emotional intelligence is that it helps our sales leaders better understand, shared this a little bit, but talking about all the various perspectives. The fact that you’ve got a different generation speaking to maybe a decision-maker who’s in a different generation, they have completely different perspectives based on what was happening during their formative years.

[00:22:23] Jennifer Knecht: When we understand that it’s deeper than just communication, like communication, the words, our mannerisms, like kind of the whole way that we show up may be off-putting to the other individual. We understand all those different signals, and we can get to the emotional aspect of it. The emotional aspect takes away all the facade. It takes away everything else and just layers, and helps us create greater transparency out of the gate. Once we have transparency in a relationship, we can actually have a meaningful discussion. We can have a real discussion to get behind the 60 things that the prospect may not say to you that you really need to understand in the sales process in order to carry it forward, or all of the concerns that they have, not objections themselves, but they know that they’re going to face as they try to champion that solution into their board as a final decision.

[00:23:06] Jennifer Knecht: That transparency is really difficult to teach, but AI is helping us. It’s just helping us help the sales leader in real time more swiftly identify those different perspectives, look at it from different ways, and test, I think, in an easier way, stepping into the shoes versus a role-play array that might be like, “Okay, you have to do this, and this.” Less of like a connect-the-dots and more like these are the 17 dots that are out there. Let’s try this one. If this one doesn’t work, immediately pivot to this one because this is really what’s going on.

[00:23:38] Steve MacDonald: Now, I’m going to have you bring it all together. Think about it like a VC presentation, right? You sell an entire business model, and they’re like, “Put it into 10 slides, and I don’t want any more,” right? Like, boil it down. If you boiled this down to why a sales team is being led, trained, and indoctrinated inside of this, why, if you’re now in front of the board saying why we should do it, why it worked, connect the dots. Connect the revenue growth dots here. Why is this a good strategy I’m going to put my team and my resources behind at a board level that I can understand? That’s a big ask.

[00:24:19] Jennifer Knecht: Love that. Oh, no, I love that. So we know, again, that a buying decision is made emotionally, and then you logically back it up. Every quick decision that we make that sticks is made that way. Psychologically, that’s just how the brain works. So what our job is, the sales leaders’ and our sales team’s job, is to connect with the decision-maker, the champion, and then to be able to arm the champion with the same sort of concept.

[00:24:45] Jennifer Knecht: Meaning, you’re going to speak to your 17 board members around the table as you go present this solution back. You and I both agreed that this is solving X, Y, and Z, and this is why it’s good for your company, and we’ve already touched on, maybe haven’t directly talked about, like emotionally, how it’s impacting you as the champion, right? So we’ve connected on these things.

[00:25:04] Jennifer Knecht: I’m now, as a sales leader, helping to arm you with the idea of looking at all these different perspectives around your table and thinking ahead three steps about where their perspectives may lie, and I’m arming you with ways in which you navigate their perspectives so that they also can understand why this is the best solution to move forward with. We’ve trained our sales leaders, and then we’re training our sales leaders in a very graceful manner using AI to kind of coach them along the process, how they can arm their champions so they can get a deal across the finish line.

[00:25:38] Jennifer Knecht: It’s pretty amazing, honestly.

[00:25:41] Steve MacDonald: Here’s one of my big takeaways: the typical sales conversation can be very much the buyer has their cards against their chest, and they’re not revealing. They’re not putting, yes, their cards on the table for everybody to see. But if you can open up a relationship with a meaningful connection, have trust built in, you understand them, you actually have something to say that makes them want to have the next conversation.

[00:26:08] Steve MacDonald: So instead of the connection being farther and farther between the next and shorter, that’s in an environment where no, no buyer ever wants to come out of it saying, “I educated that salesperson.” They were just asking, nothing. I was just spending my time educating them. It’s got to be the reverse, and that’s the feeling they should have. They’re going to come out feeling like it was a good use of my time or a waste of my time. Somewhere in between maybe, right? The big takeaway that I have here is how to create a relationship where the cards just naturally come onto the table, and it’s a, yes, transparent, open conversation. That’s a skill.

[00:26:45] Steve MacDonald: That’s a skill that’s not easy to do.

[00:26:46] Jennifer Knecht: It’s very difficult. Frankly, I think that we’ve gotten further and further away from that skill with the use of technology, maybe with the use of Zoom. You don’t get some of the feedback that you might get if you were in the room entirely when you’re doing things on video calls or on the phone conversation that you might have in person.

[00:27:03] Jennifer Knecht: There are a lot of barriers that have been put in place in the sales process, like you said, not just time, but other barriers to connection. We’re really working on retraining those skills and getting around, like knocking down any of those barriers so they’re not even, they’re not even a point in the sales process. It’s moot now.

[00:27:20] Jennifer Knecht: Then getting our champion versed enough that they’re also skilled enough to be able to present it in the way in which it’s going to get across the finish line. Because we all know you might have a champion; they may be really strong, or they might be weak from a sales perspective. You’ve got to arm them so they’re the best salesperson. Because at the end of the day, they may be the decision-maker, but maybe the decision actually has to go in front of, or it’s going to get reviewed by a board, or it’s going to get reviewed at the end of the year in financial conversations, or whatever that barrier to the final over the finish line might be.

[00:27:50] Jennifer Knecht: If you can equip them appropriately, like you said, so the cards are all on the table, and that they can navigate with agility from an emotional intelligence perspective, then you’re going to get across the finish line faster.

[00:28:02] Steve MacDonald: Okay. One last question. We’ve covered so much territory here. I love it. You know, but our poor human brains can only assimilate and remember two or three things at a time.

[00:28:10] Jennifer Knecht: Yeah. You’re like, “Let’s process all this.”

[00:28:12] Steve MacDonald: So if there was one takeaway that you wanted the other C-suite executives that will be consuming this podcast to take away from the conversation, the one most important thing you wanted them to remember, what would that be? A long time ago, I had a sales leader, a mentor of mine, when I was actually on the sales desk, not even further beyond that. Nothing else, no other levers of revenue in my world. I was literally just selling. And they said to me that people are always lying, not intentionally, but because they’re protecting their world. So they have their, yeah, facade; they’re protecting their world. They’re not going to give you; they’re not going to show you all their hands. So if you can get underneath the words and whatever attachment we all have to those words, I might define fabulous differently than you define fabulous because of something that happened in my life.

[00:29:06] Jennifer Knecht: We may not at all be aligned because just that one word is setting us both on different paths. If you can get underneath the words to the emotion, sky’s the limit. You’ve got to get to the emotion. And so everything that we’ve talked about today and how we’re really trying to train our sales leaders and adjust their behavior is getting our sales team comfortable with getting to the emotion because we connect on an emotional level. We can resonate on an emotional level, and until we get everything else gone, out of the way, dropped on the table, you don’t get there.

[00:29:39] Jennifer Knecht: So my quest, honestly, from a sales leader since that point and going forward, in all things, all aspects of revenue creation, all the levers that you pull, is how do we more swiftly get to the emotion of the person that we’re working to connect with?

[00:29:56] Jennifer Knecht: So we’ve just leveraged AI to help drive different behavior and different skill sets for folks that haven’t been trained or used to getting to an emotional level in a sales process. And then we’re trying to also not only equip them to be able to get them there themselves, but also then equip their champion to be able to get to that emotional level with the audience that they’re in front of.

[00:30:19] Jennifer Knecht: We’re leveraging technology now to help us get there faster, drive different behavior. But the takeaway I would have for any other CRO or sales leader, or any other aspect of revenue creation, is that revenue is driven by the exchange of value. The faster you can get to the emotional level, the faster you can get to a true, solid decision that sticks.

[00:30:40] Steve MacDonald: I love it, and I have to tell you, I hope when you write your book on all of this, which I have no idea whether you’re going to write a book or not, but you should, I hope you go back to the transcript and go, “Okay, that was pretty good, so let’s start there.” So I just want to say thank you.

[00:30:54] Jennifer Knecht: I hope your audience takes a nugget. The one aspect we cannot lose sight of as humans is that we are the only ones who create the relationship and build the meaningful connection.