#519 - Set Next Steps That Actually Close Deals | Roy Mathew

The first thing I ask reps, and this is always the starting point when you're doing coaching is like, why do you think that they're not adhering to your next steps? The reason why in a lot of cases is you don't actually know what's going on in their head. And so there's a lot of polite people out there. And so when you're suggesting next steps, they're like, that could work. But as they have time to digest on everything that you've shown them, they start to lose interest, especially they're not sure what's in it for that. And so the way that you tackle that is by helping the rep sus out what the customer is thinking before they suggest those next steps, leaning into the negative. People want to object. And so if you give them the space to lean into the parts that are unclear, that are challenging, that they don't think will work, they're more than likely to give that up. And by doing that, that gives you like a library of information that you can work on to say, hey, this is the why behind the next steps I'm suggesting. Good morning everybody and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand folk and I'm here with my coast, Mark Cosgrove. And today folks, we have a clinic in how to not set crappy next steps when you're in your deal with the one and only Roy Matthew. He is the VP of sales over at recurrency. And I really wanted him on the show because it's like one of those people who went from like I see top three revenue producer over at air table, awesome sales team and like rose the ladder super quickly. He went from first closing rule to VP of sales in six years. And he is officially a VP running a lean mean deals match and machine team. Mark, why should people listen? Yeah. So first of all, congrats Roy. Awesome job. But this is why is today we talk about next steps. And if I ask 10 sales leaders, tell me something about next steps. You know what nine out of 10 of them will say, make sure you save time to do your next steps to the call. And that's about as good as they get at training the reps on next steps. This we go in depth about how to think about how to set better next steps prepare for them. And what do you do to coach your rep that's not giving good next steps? Alrighty, Roy. Welcome to the show. We start every leadership show with your top three actionable leadership take away. So let's get your three. Absolutely. So for my first takeaway, when you are trying to recruit new reps onto your team and you're going outbound, make your first call a cell call. Right. You see this all the time, whether your recruiter is going out trying to bring candidates into the pipeline or you're doing it yourself, or maybe you've experienced it where you show up and they get grilled and they don't know what they just walked into. And so I suggesting that you flip the script. I learned this from a former VP where if you're going outbound, you're trying to get someone interested in your company. Start off with something to the effect of, hey, we're going to keep this first call super casual. By the end of it, you should have a very clear idea. Is this going to be a great or terrible use of time to continue the process? I would love to get to know you. I love for you to get to know me, the industry, the company a little bit more. And then we can decide, doesn't make sense because for if we do decide to move forward, we're going to grill you. We're going to get deep into your sales process, how you think about deals. And so want to make sure you think it's a great use of time. Today's show was brought to you by Outreach, the Agente AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. Great sellers drive velocity at every stage of their sale. And one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at outreach. Get it free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by consensus. Go check it out in the show notes. Before we grill you, would you give us your second takeaway? Tip number two is to calibrate before next steps. And so the problem that I see with a lot of reps and managers struggle to help their reps doing this is getting their customers to actually adhere to the next steps. You see this all the time where you suggest next steps, people politely nod, but then things fall apart, things get pushed out. And you don't really know what happened. And that calibration is the key to making sure that happens effectively. And so what does that look like in practice? You know, you should protect your time to have deliver next steps. But before that, let's say you're giving a demo, it could look something like this where you say, Hey, we went through a lot today. I know that was a lot to cover. What parts of this seem like they would be relevant to your business. What parts seem like they might not be, and what parts are still fuzzy in your mind. And if you give them the space to open up, let them object. That will let you know that, Hey, yes, that next step actually was a slam dunk. And now they know why or that you really need to deviate from it because something got revealed that you weren't aware of. A lot of people will agree to a next step because they're uncomfortable to say no. And you didn't let them. What's number three? Number three, this very much design for leaders is you need to learn the why behind every tactic that you're instructing to your team. And so you see this all the time with early managers where they're trying to pound the pavement, they're trying to get the reps to do something, whether it's how they conduct discovery, whether they're going through the five Ys or being tied about their pipeline hygiene. But if you don't understand the why behind that, you're not able to instruct them on why they should do why it matters and when you should deviate from that. So what's one example to make that you controversial topic? Should you be demoing on the first call? Right? Sometimes maybe like, what is the reason why a manager might say you shouldn't be demoing on the first call? Because it can be a crutch. It can be a place where you can feature dump without understanding their pain and tying your solution to this. But a demo can also be a really powerful way to build energy and build excitement in a deal process. And so let's say you're dealing with a low energy scenario inserting a teaser demo where you frame it something like, Hey, I'm not going to have enough time to show you everything today. I'll just give you a little bit of a preview. And if you're interested, we can go deep on how this would apply to your business. That can be a time where it's actually selective to bring it into the process. So Roy, I love the why. I think most people kind of skip over that. And I want to start with the why of next steps. Because I think that poorly done next steps are one of the biggest predictors of your inability to succeed as a salesperson. So I'll take you through a couple scenarios. And I'd love for you to show me how you would coach me if I was this rap. Sound cool? Sounds great. Alright. So let's say that I'm a rap that gives bad next steps a lot. Like you're listening to my calls and like I'm being good about giving next steps, but they're just not the right ones. How would you as a leader attack that situation? The first thing I asked reps and this is always the starting point whenever you're doing coaching is like, why do you think that they're not adhering to your next steps? See what they say. And if people are listening to their calls, if they're kind of going through it, they're attuned to people's tone and emotions, they start to pick up on you got weak acknowledgement. They said the right things, but they weren't really excited about it. And the reason why in a lot of cases is you don't actually know what's going on in their head. And so when you're suggesting next steps, they're like, they could work. They could be open to that. But as they have time to digest on everything that you've shown them, they weigh that against all their competing priorities, they start to lose interest, especially they're not sure what's in there for them. And so the way that you tackle that is by helping the rep sus out what the customer is thinking before they suggest those next step. And this is why I just say calibrate, calibrate calibrate. The Roy Bingo card, they've heard me say it a thousand times. And so what that looks like is trying to give the customer the space to give you their takeaway. Right. And especially when other kind of concept that I kind of breathe into is leaning into the negative. I brand this throughout the company, which is it's very easy to use something to the effective. How can you see this affecting your business? Like what are the positive outcomes that you can see happening from that? You might get something you might if people are being polite, but people want to object. Because now that you've offered this objection, this thing that you're concerned about, this next step of going deeper, let's say with a reverse demo, that gives you the ammunition to say, this is why it matters for you. Not just matter for me for my sales process. The fix for somebody giving bad next steps is to say, hey, when you give the next step, pause and ask them, like, is this what is bad or good about this next step? Do you agree? Like don't just do the next step and kind of like get them to be like, oh yeah, that sounds good without understanding. Like do they really get what's going on? What I actually suggest with the team is actually like very much sequential. Before next steps, you know, you carve out your five minutes or 10 minutes, that's your next steps. But before that, the calibration happens. The calibration always has to happen before for people to opine on what's going through their head before you deliver it every single time. I was just going to add, we always say, when you're setting next steps, you want to ask the first question, which is, do you want to buy this thing at all? And it's not literally, do you want to buy the thing? But it's like, hey, this is going to require an investment of your time, your team's resources. We're going to probably bring in your CMO or whatever it is based on what you know about us so far. Is it worth investing more time together? Or does this sort of seem like me and let them step into it? And then once they step into it, you can be like, great. So like if they're shared enthusiasm about solving a problem, here, then the right next step would be this. And then you can get them to opt in again. Yeah, I think that's spot on because it lets them feel like you're not bullying them into your process, but you still get to guide them down the process that you want. Right? It lets them kind of buy into what you want them to do. And I think one thing you touched on is the best way to execute this actually happens at the beginning of the call, whether, you know, whether you're using a sandler upfront contract, but if you align on what you're hoping to accomplish, then in that calibration, you have very something tangible you can go after to say, Hey, did we actually achieve that? And if not, why? And then that makes the next step that much more powerful. So the best meeting, it sets it set up in the beginning. So you upfront contract, calibrate, next steps. Boom. So what I'm hearing is is it might not always be that the next step is bad. The problem is, is you haven't let the buyer has an exposed kind of what they're thinking is yet. So you can't frame the next step in a way that makes sense. Like the next step might always be a demo, but their their reason for needing a demo might be 10 different things. And if you just pitch a demo and don't nail it to the one that matters to them, then then it's a bad next step, even though it is the same words, right? That's absolutely. I mean, I've bought software before where I know exactly what I want and the reps just trying to go through their process. Yeah. Hey, the next step in our sales process to do a second-dalar demo where we have our solutions engineered, but like, I know the solution. I want to buy it, like help me buy it. Like you need to get into their head in order to not bother them. Armand and I talk a lot about my five-stage sales process and how it works, but everybody misses it. There's a big highlighted thing. Maybe it's not highlighted enough. At the top, it says, follow this process, unless somebody says they want to give you money now, then immediately go to your manager and figure out how to take their money. Absolutely. Yeah. Mark, I think it would be good giving a quick riff here. Like your sales process, I think, is architected very similarly where Roy, what you're hitting on is, reps should not be focused on, this is the next step for me. It's a demo and then I need to get them on a proposal call. Instead, you're thinking, this is the next step in the buyer's mind to be aligned that this is a priority, right? So, Mark, I know you have like your five seminal questions that you're trying to ask your five stages. It might be worth like riffing on that concept and getting Roy's reaction to it. Where leaders usually fail people in next steps is the process isn't clear enough or it's miscalibrated so that the rep isn't quite understanding what the next step should be. And so, they make up their own. In a great example, this is we always talk about the difference between stage-based deal management and meeting-based deal management. And a lot of people do is at this meeting base, they're like, why did my disco, the next thing I have to do is a demo. And then after that, I have to do a proposal call. Then after that, I have to do negotiations call. And so, everything is now, hey, Roy, I need you to get on another demo, like so that we can do this, this, and this. And it's all very self-insured. Versus when an exit criteria in stage-based deal management is confirm their business initiative. I might still say, hey, a demo is the next step. But the reason I need to do that is to see if this aligns to what you need to help with and the kind of outcomes that you need. And then it becomes much more about why they need a demo versus then why you need a demo. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal security and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster, grab it in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Textus, which helps you keep deal momentum moving at every stage of the sales cycle. Texting is one of my favorite ways to sell between meetings. I use it for post-big team meeting debriefs and also for game planning with my champions about how to navigate the politics of their org. And I've found that when you move somebody off company email, it makes folks a lot more open and honest. Now we put together a guide with our friends at Textus on how to revive ghosted deals and keep your deals moving at every stage of the funnel with texting that you can get for free in the show notes. I think that's spot on it. One thing that I do with our reps is we have something we call the deal board. It's kind of like a supplemental tool that we give in addition to the Salesforce opportunity where it's very easy for them to fill out and some of the fields that look in it are like does the customer truly believe they have a relevant problem? Do they believe the solution fit? Do they believe the business case and then an equivalent set for the economic buyers? And like, you know, one of the ones that we harp on is do they actually believe the solution fit? And like, can you defend that? And we go through that during one-on-ones, we go through that during pipeline meetings and it could take one meeting, it could take one demo, it could take 10. That's okay. As long as you know that that informs exactly the way you're saying it, Mark. Like, what does the customer need to believe? Not what do you need to accomplish? Although I see a commission, Rhett. Yeah, so hit me up with this deal board thing outside of opportunity. What is it, Roy? Where is it live? Like, give me the rundown, man. Yeah, totally. So this is a Google sheet that I created for one of my first reps and it's kind of proliferated throughout the organization. And it's the intention of this is to be really easy for the rep to fill out and not busy work for them, but a clarifying tool to help them know exactly what they need to be accomplishing next, not doing next, but accomplishing next. And what it looks like, it's a Google sheet, every single rep has it, we review it during our one-on-one, then it has some basic, you know, opportunity information, what's the opportunity size, what's the next step, what's the product that they're buying, etc. But the meat of it is all framed in terms of what is the customer thinking throughout the stage. And so some of the examples that are in this is does the champion believe they have a relevant problem? Yes, no, maybe does the champion believe they have a solution fit? Yes, no, maybe does they do they believe in the business case? And then there's equivalent set for the economic buyer, which is a separate thing that they have to get through. And so things like their sentiment. And so this is something that I've color coded. So like when they switch it to greet like good, it's going to turn green. So they actually know one, like on a per-deal basis, hey, this is where I, like this is the thing that I need to do, even if I've had 10 meetings with them, if they believe that the solution fit is still okay and it's not great, that's what you need to do. Nothing else matters, right? Like trying to go to the economic buyer and pitch them on it. If the champion doesn't believe it, they're not going to coast out with you, that's not going to matter. It's also kind of very revealing of kind of patterns that a rep might be skipping. And so let's say you have a rep that is, you know, consistently getting to the economic buyer late. They're not engaged with the economic buyer early in the process, having that simple color coding makes it really easy for them to like see it like right there. It's all red. How does this happen? So I'd have like a sheet that has all of my deals on a row, and then I have the columns or all the questions, and then I just kind of answer the questions. Is that how it's formatted? That's exactly right, yeah. And then do you use this like weekly for deal review sessions to help guide like what next steps a rep should be creating, or is it more just like a forecasting tool for gut check on like your confidence level? Yeah, it's primarily for the rep. It's primarily to like have a reinforcement mechanism for them to know what they need to be accomplishing with the deal. And I emphasize this is like in two different scenarios. If someone's like early on in their ramp and like they're starting to just build like their mental model about how they should be selling recurrency, we're going to like spend a lot of time on this, where some of the more tenured reps, maybe something we review, maybe like once every four one on one's or something like that, as well as if there's like a skill gap, right? There's something where a rep is consistently not doing their skipping steps there before the champion has really bought into the business case. They're trying to go directly to the economic buyer. But when they show up to that meeting, the champion's kind of hemming and hawing, that's a horrible scenario. So you need to make sure that the champion is fully sold before you're trying to prematurely pitch. And so you're like a united front. Mark, you call it your five agreements in a sales cycle. And very similarly, you're talking through these five. So as number one, problem agreement, do they believe that they have a problem that you can solve? Number two is priority agreement. Do they believe that that problem is a priority worth addressing? Number three is evaluation agreement. I believe that's, have they agreed upon what's important for them, installing for that priority? By preparation. Yep. Are they going to make a decision? Exactly. Number four is value agreement. Do you believe that we can deliver all of that stuff? And then number five is commercial agreement. Is it worth the price and the legal process and all that stuff? And if you focus on those decisions the buyer is making, they can make those decisions in three calls, 10 calls or one call. You can get someone who's like, this is the biggest problem I have. It's a massive priority. Oh my god, you have exactly what we need for our criteria, evaluation agreement, value agreement. Wow, this is a great price too. And you could close the deal on the spot. Or you could find it takes five calls just for them to agree that this thing is a goddamn priority and you're fishing around the organization. Why in the world would you set up a business case meeting when they haven't even agreed that this is a priority at all, right? And that's why you have to focus on the questions that are floating in your buyer's head and the agreements you need to get out of them, not what next meeting you need to do as a seller. I love that. Five agreements, how much federal branding though I was using. So I'm going to steal that. I'm an old hat man. I got to figure out ways to remember all the shit I got my. No, I mean one of the things I just think about including in here is like, you know, making memes throughout the company. Things that are memorable, that can stick, people can repeat and so branding it matters a lot. It does. So really question for you, you've got this deal board and you've got the five questions and you're like, is it good? is a bad, et cetera. How does this, if at all, tie to the way that you forecast? Is it related? Is it not related? Break it down. Yeah, absolutely. So it's inextricably interrelated here where, if a rep, especially if you're juggling 50 deals and you can't inspect every single one of them, they're putting something in a later stage, but it's showing up on the deal board as a yellow, as in the champion does not believe the business case is great. That's not a deal that you should have any kind of conflict. You could still close it. It's still possible, but that goes from being a 60% to a 20% very quickly. Today shows brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this. Stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts before you open your Slack, your email before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. We built a guide with you to find on how to get 100% of BDR's to quota in 2026. Today shows brought to you by Titanx, which helps you connect with prospects instead of dialing into the void. So look, you can make 100 cold calls a day, but if nobody picks up your burning time. So Titanx literally guarantees you will triple your cold call connect rate or they will pay you $10,000. So the link in the show notes down below will show you that they match literally 5,000 credits for every 5,000 you buy. Go check it out. I use it personally and it's a phenomenal way to get more conversations on the phone. And so you're basically taking these questions and you're marking them read yellow green. And then when you're doing your forecast, you can just pull this up and be like, All right, this deal is like mostly greens and a yellow like that might go into forecast versus this one's like all yellows and reds like that thing's not that basically should be a close deal that one. Yeah, it should be a close lot deal or if you know, they have a mark to close in this quarter and you've got 20 days left alarm bells should go off. Let's say that you've got a deal that has like a couple yellows of greens and it's going into that like fourth question, right? So it's like right in that critical time of the deal where it's like a stage three or stage four deal. I know you have a very specific way that you help your reps prepare for those meetings and essentially they're probably preparing for that next question that they're trying to answer. How do you game plan these calls with your reps? Absolutely. I think the key to helping them game plan is first off just instilling them that preparation matters, especially if you're bringing in other stakeholders into the process, whether that's myself a solution to engineer. And so, you know, at minimum, that should be some kind of digital communication that happens over Slack, but ideally that's happening over a prep meeting where you should have at least as a starting point, a standard set of questions that you're going through every single time as the manager or the leader. And so the first one arguably the most important is what is the primary goal of the call? No, this isn't the agenda. It's not tactics, but what is the goal? What are you trying to accomplish in this deal? If you don't have clarity on that, we need to go back to square one in terms of workshopping it. The second part of it is related to scenario planning. No call goes the way you want it to. There's going to be curve balls good and bad. And so the question I ask every single time these prep calls is if this call were to go sideways, what would be the most likely way that it does? After that, if the call goes well, what are you expecting steps to be? If the call goes really well, what are you expecting the next steps to be? And if this call goes something in a predictable way, but not the way you want, what are you expecting to be? All this will help them get in the mindset of thinking through all these different scenarios. And so if there are the kind of rep that goes off a script, they know how to deviate from that. So just every single time the goal scenario planning next steps. So if I'm like, Roy, the goal of this call is to walk through price. What did I do wrong? That's not the goal. That's a tactic. Right. What are you walking through price and service of? Are you trying to line on something? Are you trying to get buy in from the economic buyer after the champions already done this? Or do they need to agree upon it on that call? You need to have an idea of what you're trying to accomplish, what you're trying to do. This is such an important designation. When you ask most reps what the next step is, they tell you what they need to do next, not what needs to be accomplished next. And we know busyness is not productivity. In order to be a productive rep, you have to know what you have to accomplish it. And you can take a million routes to accomplish the same thing. But like without that clear understanding of, no, your next step is what you're trying to accomplish with the buyer, you're going to always going to end up just tasting your tail being busy. I think that's spot on. And it actually is a really important distinction between a involved and helpful manager versus a micromanager. If you're constantly dictating the tactics of what they need to do, you're up in their business, you're bothering them. But if you're helping them kind of articulate what they need to accomplish, you can still get the freedom to operate and use their own flavor, their own style towards it. Exactly as you said, there are different ways you can tackle it. But you're helping them get to the right place. I remember we were going into a big sponsorship proposal meeting last week. It was on Wednesday and it was like 100K deal. And we were so focused on this is the information we're presenting. And instead the question that asked her up, I was like, what does it take for the CMO to be like, this is a hell yeah, like I have to work with these guys. And it completely changed the conversation because it was like, well, like I think this is the new product they're launching, right? And like they've had other product launches in the past that haven't hit. And here's what went wrong. And I'm like, great. So like we need to prove that this product launch is going to go perfectly this time. And there are 20 different ways we can do that in this meeting. But that's what we need to get the CMO to realize. And then you can figure out the right way to do that or the million tools in your belt to do that. But when you become anchored to this is the presentation that I always do. You're basically just hoping that this presentation accomplishes the business that every single CMO has, which is just not the case of what yeah, I love that. And you know, one thing I would add onto, you know, how do you make the rep kind of start digging through these kind of questions on a more systematic basis is I love assigning probabilities or a one to 10 to that right going back to the deal board. I was trying to kind of talk about it in like a very discrete fashion. But it's like, you know, to what extent is your champion excited to move forward on a scale of one to 10. And they say, Hey, it's a seven. Well, what would it take to get them to an eight or a nine, right? Always asking those questions so they can start to think through like, how do they get to that next level? Right? Because a lot of times these are emotional decisions. Yeah, I feel like Roy, what you've really mastered isn't really next steps. It's, it's way to second, calibrate where you're at like assess where you're at before you determine what to go do. You're teaching people how to get ready, aim, and then fire versus fire. And now I'm just like figuring out what to do with the last graph is absolutely at the deal level at the tactical meeting level. I think that's a great way to frame it. One of the things that is your job as a sales ear is you see where a hundred other deals go sideways. And it's your job because you see more deals to flag those things for one rep who's only looking at their pipeline. So so Roy, like, let's go to your second question. If the call were to go sideways, what would be the most likely way that it does? Let's pretend that the goal is to get power agreement or to get power on board like we got to get that executive being like heck yeah, we want you guys at this company to be our vendor of choice whatever it is. What are some of the most common ways reps get blindsided in those meetings or the most common things that reps miss when they go into an executive meeting? Yeah, great question. I think one of the most common things that I've seen is they did not prepare the champion or they didn't get the information from the champion about what the economic buyer is going to care about. They've spent all sorts of time de-risking and figuring out what's the personal motivation of the champion. You know, that's a great thing to do or what are their success criteria? But the champion didn't think to ask or to tell you or you didn't think to ask them what does the economic buyer care about? What are their personal motivations? What is the metric that they have told you they care the most and they're putting the thumb on you about? What are the landmines? What are the buzzwords that if you say this they're going to laugh you out the room? If you don't have that perspective going into this, you're likely going to say something that might have worked with eight out of 10 other economic buyers, but it's going to completely turn them off the meeting because you didn't prepare an event. Yeah, it comes back to thinking about what's going on in the prospects head. And a lot of times you'll have a champion who's like they're fired up like this is the best thing since sliced bread. Like I got to work with these guys over at outreach or something like that. And then you get like a CRO who's like, I believe in pen and paper emails my entire life. And it's like you assume that what your champion is thinking is exactly what the boss is thinking. And if it's a really good champion, sometimes those things are the same, but usually the big boss is thinking something different than the mid boss. Totally. A sales trainer that I worked with once upon a time, he framed it as the below the line, the on the line, the above the line, they speak different languages. Once speaking Russian, once speaking Spanish, once speaking Greek. And you need to frame it in those different languages because they're thinking about it. It's totally different. It's good. Awesome show. I'm glad we hammered home this point. We talked about a lot of good habits that sales leaders can exhibit, but to wrap this up, what is one bad habit as it pertains to deal game planning pipeline reviews, trying to help your reps land things on time that every sales leaders. it needs to stop doing so that teams get a little bit better. More important than you getting information about your deals is helping the rep understand what they should be doing next. It's not about just extracting information so you can forecast. Forecasting doesn't matter if deals aren't going to close. It's how do you instruct them and put frameworks in place to help the reps close those deals more effectively, which you can then forecast. Boom. Dude, amazing show. Everyone, hang on for a 60-second recap coming up soon. Already, Mark, it is time for a three-step recap and one thing you can do. All right, three-step recap. Number one, before you have your reps set an next step, you should have them ask the question, "Hey, do you even want to take a next step?" Where do you stand? Sounds pretty obvious, but the next step is what you want to do. Why don't you ask where their head is at? That's number one, calibrate. Number two, once you calibrate from deal to deal, the way that you start to get your reps heads out of what they're doing instead of what they get is you want to map out the five questions that your prospects need to answer in their minds to make a decision. In Mark's framework, it's, "Do you have a problem?" Is it a priority, etc? Figure out what it is for your business. Map out those five questions. There are a lot of things you can do to answer those five questions. You could do a discovery call. You could do a demo. You could do a business case. You could close it in one call. You could close it in 10. But you have to answer the key questions in a prospect's mind no matter what. That's number two. Deal Velocity is a huge driver of win rates, which is why Armand and I partnered with the easy and effective CRM pipe drive to film a 60 minute video masterclass that covers all of the different ways that you can drive velocity in each individual stage of your sales process. Literally from opening call, all the way to contract review, we documented our favorite tactics in this pipe drive and 30 MPC masterclass, which you can get for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by AirCall, the AI Powered Communication Platform built for sales teams. If you want reps to adopt AI, you have to be intentional about building AI skills. On my team, we wrap our weekly sales meeting with a five minute builder, where each week one person shares one learning that's helping them be a more effective seller. AirCall helps you by bringing AI into real customer conversations that reps are already having, so you can't help but realize the benefits. And we partnered with AirCall on a resource for building AI confidence in sales teams, which you can get for free in the show notes. And then lastly, number three, whenever you are game planning for one of those calls, let's say you're going into a stage three deal, you're going to ask your up three questions. Number one, what's the primary goal of the call? Number two, if it were to go to sideways, what is the most likely way that it does? And then number three, if it goes well, what are you expecting the next steps to be? So you're planning what you're trying to get? What could get in the way of you getting that thing? And then if you get it, what are you going to get next? I already mark what's one thing people should do. It's time to start a next step workshop, y'all, reserve one hour block for each the next four weeks. Go listen to two to three calls and each one of those specifically the last 10 minutes. And then have your team assess, did we ask the next step? Did we ask it the right way? Did we make sure that we took into account what was happening in the deal? Did we make sure that we gave the person a chance to respond and hear their side? And then get into a team call coaching format, listen to calls, have a couple people diagnose and score and then start to show and model people how to do better next steps. Boom, folks, if you like this one, mark has a five stage sales process and sneak peak. We might be coming out with some pretty crazy content with Mark coming soon. So I'll leave it at that. And then we'll see you in the next one.