#529 - How to Win Enterprise Deals with Compelling Events (Not Volume) | Luke Floyd

Ultimately, I just didn't want to chase big deals anymore or big logos. I wanted to go after the meaningful events which drove the big deals. Where are those events most likely to happen in my book? And then I spend my time there. Now the difficulty here when you think about where you spend your time can often be also how you get in with your messaging, with your resources, has not all compelling events you've felt the same. Timeliness is of the essence. So on the one hand, yes, I'm focusing on these 20. But on the other hand, I've developed compelling event specific plays that I can run horizontally across my entire book without being spam. Because it's going to apply to them at some point, even if not right now. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this episode of 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is Harmon Froke and I'm here with my coach, Nick Skielski. And folks, today for around three years, one of the top enterprise AES over at deal multiple time, President's Club, 185% average annual attainment over four and a half years at deal, which is absolutely nuts. His name is Luke Floyd. And this is a master class on how to use compelling events to book meetings in your territory instead of spraying and praying. Nick, why should people listen? Luke is an extremely structured thinker and that he breaks down literally step by step in this episode how to prioritize the different accounts and contacts that you work in your territory, how to reach out to multiple different buying groups, even at the same account. He gives us a couple kind of creative prospecting plays. He talks about going old school with his prospecting and not using some of this new fangled tech arm on and actually how that's helping him in some ways. So you want to listen for that part. And then he also gives us a sense of like what he does when he makes contact with a buyer who's not ready to buy now, but how he can stay top of mind. So what then they are ready to buy. He is the first call that they make and no, it is not just a generic checking in, touching base, etc. And a three, two, one, let's roll. Already Luke, welcome back to the show for a round three. I hope you've not forgotten that we start every single episode with your top three action. We'll take aways. Let's get yours. Find your own compelling events. You can't take ownership if you lack visibility. And chances are your team might not be tracking compelling events in your CRM. So if you go back and audit your last five, 10 or 20 closed one deals, you'll notice key themes popping up. Specifically a compelling event is time bound, meaning it has a deadline that we do not instill. Second, it has exact visibility built in. And third, it's organic. It's going to happen whether we're involved or not on the selling side. So if you go back and look at those last five to 10, you'll find these themes popping up. You could run anywhere from one compelling event that happens over and over again to different compelling events for each deal. But this will give you a level of clarity about the engagements that no one else has at your work. For for deals, specifically, we have mergers and acquisitions. I went this through this exercise for myself. And I realized mergers and acquisitions are my number one compelling event. So for example, I was working with a client who needed to divest from their publicly traded parent company and get set up. The problem was they had the payroll contract for five different countries in with the parent company. The payroll company that was contracted with the parent company wasn't able to support that fast of a transition. They needed to be lied in 60 days because of this merger acquisition. And so in this case, they found us. We were able to support them and get all five country payrolls migrated and get them live within 60 days, new HRS, new country payrolls, new your workers all in one spot. That's an example of a compelling event that we attach ourselves to that drives change. Deal velocity is a huge driver of wind 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 NPC masterclass, which you can get for free in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by 11X. You're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying, and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact LinkedIn posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. Great. Well, you're compelling me to ask about what's number two. Number two is you want to sort rank or prioritize the compelling events that you focus on. Your sales leadership is always telling you to run your territory like a CEO, but what does that actually mean? So once you have a list of compelling events, and again, you'll have between five and 20, who knows how many, not all compelling events are built the same. So now you need to sort rank them for the compelling events that drove the largest deals, the compelling events which drove the quickest fastest deals, and then third, the compelling events you enjoyed working on the most, the where they overlap between those three is your golden zone of opportunity. So for example, after I did this exercise, I found three top compelling events. First, mergers and acquisitions, as we discussed. Second, when orcs go into a new market. And then third, if there is a critical talent, they need to hire, think about the AI talent race right now. And they might need to look abroad in a new market they've never been in in order to secure that talent. So there are a small number of compelling events, which will drive the outsized number of your results, and those are the ones you want to prioritize with focus on. Very nice. Round us out. What's number three, Luke? Absolutely. So you know how your manager is always asking you to add value. And in this case, the way you add value is by mapping the decisions to be made around the compelling event. So to take this right back to mergers and acquisitions. In an M&A, the HR team is immediately posed with, do we even need to keep the entity if one exists? Or do we need to set up an entity if they don't have one? And then they got to get their tax team and their legal team to advise on this. Then they have to look at the cost evaluation. Do we want to retain this many talent? Then they have to look at the compliance options around the contracts that are in place. The benefits are things being done compilantly. These are all decisions that have to be made regardless of whether they choose to move forward with deal or any other vendor in the market. And so by helping coaching them on the decisions, they're going to have to do anyway bringing them resources which will help them make those decisions and increasing my likelihood to win. All right, Luke. So we want to turn this to new master class on how to book meetings using compelling events. So first, let's talk about how much of your time is being spent on these accounts that have compelling events versus all of the other stuff in your book. Could you give us a sense of how many accounts are you prospecting every week and maybe what percentage have compelling events on them? Yeah, this is exactly the way line of questioning and way we should be thinking for AE. So in my case, I have about 400 different accounts in my name. Deal, we're growing quickly and there's a lot enterprise accounts out there. However, I selected down to only about 20 accounts that I'm going to focus on. And that's a year for a week. For a half, basically, is the way that we do it typically. First half of a year. So the first half, I happen to carry forward most of my accounts because I'm making the progress, but we do it every six months. And so in this case, it wasn't even the 80-20 rule. I think that's what, 5% or something, a very small subset. And there's a whole chain I went through of where do the industries there, where these compelling events are most likely to happen. And so that allowed me to instead do a question of probability. Now, the difficulty here when you think about where you spend your time can often be also how you get in with your messaging, with your resources, because not all compelling events are built the same. But on the other hand, I've developed compelling event-specific plays that I can run horizontally across my entire book without being spammed. So 20 accounts are getting super special Luke Floyd attention. 380 accounts are getting horizontal plays that can scale without feeling spammy. Before we go into compelling events, we're going to spend most of the episode talking about that. What are some examples of horizontal plays that you can run across 300 80 accounts that don't feel spammy? Absolutely. This is where it goes back to the work to be done. So for example, deal also, deal to this global payroll. And as it turns out right now, a lot of folks aren't happy with their global payroll vendors. So there's a lot of RFPs that go on. So I used to think that procurement wasn't my friend until I actually engaged with the procurement person. And we worked together on an RFP template. And now I go, anytime I get a new account, I reach out to the procurement team or work with my SDR, shout out Monica, to reach out to the procurement team. And we say, hey, look, we're new in the space. We've only been around for about six years. You might not know us, but we must be on your next RFP list on the vendor list. And do you need any other resources to help influence or inform or build that RFP? Ultimately, procurement has a job to do just like we do. I'm trying to help them do their job by giving them an RFP template that saves them time, probably puts us also in a better condition to win. So every single time an account has a procurement team. in your book. That's the play you're running. If they're not part of your compelling events, right? Exactly for the procurement team. And then separately for finance, it might be a separate play that's very focused on what they're doing. But there are some, you could call them generic events or generic plays that apply to all companies. So that would be an example of procurement or IT. Anybody that has a global footprint and has an IT team, we can help them. And so that's another example of where we can go horizontal. If they're in my name to probably have a global footprint, I can reach out IT team, procurement teams, legal teams on place that are going to be relevant to them regardless of the time. And at the same time, I'm raising my awareness so that when that time actually hit and that compelling event comes up, I'm on the bench. So you've got your 380 accounts and it sounds like you're running a lot of like almost persona-based plays or like function-based plays, procurement plays, finance plays, IT plays, etc. That scale and they're personalized enough to the function. If we take a step back, how did you even get down to these 20? How did you find out that these 20 had compelling events? Did you literally look through all 400 accounts one by one with a checklist of your five compelling events and just scrape the earth for like 17 years on all 400 accounts? How did you actually like, pair down to the 20? It's a great question because oftentimes we'll get new books or get accounts and it's also in the middle of a set busy selling season and we got to make these decisions quickly. So for me personally, it started with a hypothesis. No different than when we engage with clients who want to approach them with an hypothesis. So when I was looking at my book, again, I didn't want to chase big logos and then get a small deal. And I didn't want to chase huge deals because that comes with a lot of risk. And so my thought was if I could chase these compelling events, so I went through this exercise, identified by compelling events. Once I had that mergers and acquisitions was like the one I was going to hone in on, I then said, okay, what are the industries that are most likely to experience mergers and acquisitions or do it most frequently? And so obviously I have a little bit more flexibility than other reps. My other reps might have named accounts or be in a certain vertical. In my case, they're just kind of random spattering of all different types of accounts that we own in enterprise. We're not verticalized yet. And so I had the opportunity to look through my book and find which industries I had, which were represented. Maybe I need to horse trade for other accounts. If there's ones that I'm like, oh, that's a good one. I need to get it. But ultimately, I just picked some industries. Once I had the three industries that I picked. So for mergers and acquisitions, the three that I picked, telecom, telecom by its nature has a lot of acquisition. But especially with everything happening because of SpaceX and really kind of changing the game on satellite area. A lot of things are changing in telecom. The second one actually was marking and advertising agencies. After I picked this, literally the next week, IPG and Omnicom, the two largest advertising agencies in the world announced they were merging. So I was like, okay, I'm onto something there. And then finally, third, this bet hasn't panned out as much, but AI. I thought we would see more consolidation in the AI market. And so that's where I was hoping to use the AI companies being acquired to get into the parent companies potentially. Kind of a true edge of course. We haven't seen as much consolidation. Those AI companies just keep growing. Where on earth did you formulate those point of views? Because as I'm understanding it, your prospecting, your prioritization is informed by your hunch, your perspective on what industry or what region or whatever attribute is going to experience these compelling events. And some of this is your ability to like, predict the future and place bets on like, this is going to happen in an industry or, oh, in the North West, this is a dynamic that's changing. So I want to focus there. I mean, are you just like, chat GPTing this stuff? Are you reading news? Like, what do you, because I feel like this is a really, this is a skill not a lot of sellers have. Hey, folks, if you keep getting grilled in your pipeline reviews, try this. Show up with your deal risks already flagged. So gaps in pain, timeline or power and your net smooth ready to dock. That's kind of where Clary helps is they will show you live signals and risks on your deals in one clean view. So you can run your business, not have your manager do it for you in Pokemon. So we put together a free guide on three plays to get your sales manager off your back. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. Today's show is brought to you by text us, 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 text us on how to revive ghosted deals and keep your deals moving at average stage with the funnel with texting that you can get for free in the show notes. Absolutely. Well, ultimately I view myself as an investor. I might not necessarily be investing in cold art cash, but investing will my time and energy and focus as well as deals resources. And so like any other investor, I need to develop business acumen and I need to understand trends. And so this is I'm looking at not only my experience. So this is going back through my data. Again, I called all I just crossed four years with deal back in February, so almost five years now. And I had been involved and pulled all my data. I had been involved in over 550 opportunities. It's one of the things I love about a growing award. You get a lot of that. And that means a lot of improvement for me because I like to iterate. And so this was takeaways from where I noticed mergers and acquisitions happening and kept popping up on certain industries. Second though is there is a good bit of chat GPT. So I wouldn't highly encourage anyone or cloud or any other AI tool that you use. Many of the advanced voice chat features now. You can have a conversation with it. So I walk my dog in the morning. I turn it on. You get an hour limit that you can do of audio conversation basically. And so I'm just chatting for an hour, which had GPT about what's the latest in this industry. Okay, here's my hypothesis. Tell me which industries are most relevant. And then obviously I'll go in and refine. But that's how I was able to focus down on industries. It's also a question of where are strengths. I mean, ultimately are these the only three industries where compelling events are going to happen? No. I'm also not pitting compelling events that are very unique and only going to happen in a rare case. I'm trying to pick the work to be done. And that work is pretty common more common in some accounts. So there's a lower risk of failure. If I get one of these wrong, you'll also notice that it picked one industry to go heavy on or one set of accounts to go heavy on. I'm spreading my risk in that way. So investors research have the best intel, but they also diversify their risks. So that's why I'm hedging my bets with multiple industries at once, rather than going whole hog into one, which isn't fine if you can pit it quickly. But as we know about account assignment, how quickly can you reassign your whole book? You can't. Yeah, I think for everyone in the audience, your business might not be as affected by M and A events. But what you can take away from this is Luke is saying, okay, here's a problem that my company solves. That problem exists the most during M and A events. So I can either just look at the companies that literally have had past M and A transactions or I can say what companies are most likely to have that happen. And I remember this would happen really similarly at Karta where we were selling to founders and Karta was the best time to pie Karta was when you were raising around the funding. And so you could look at companies that just raised around the funding or you could ask yourself, well, when is a company really likely to be raising funding? And it's probably if they're getting good news all the time, if they're growing double digits and they're like 18 months from their last raise. And even if they don't raise a funding in that six month window, they're probably like still a pretty good account if they're playing in the sandbox of other accounts that are raising funding. So Luke, even if you're wrong, like my guess is all 20 of those accounts have not had M and A activity. You even said, "Hey, I did not." But at least you're playing in the right sandbox and you're stacking the probabilities in your favor. I mean, ultimately that's what I think of it. I mean, transparently, I'm not that great of a technical salesperson. My top time's too. I don't ask even of questions. I'm not traditionally great in that way. And so I try to stack all the odds in my favor. Any little probability chance of increase, I try to make it that way. So if there is one type of problem that produces larger deals, why go try to make some small deal large or why try to go create urgency where there is none when you can just go find those wild and out where businesses are naturally doing their thing. I think on the flip side, if you think of as a time investment, I did debate in high school and college. And one big thing about speech and debate is they talk about portable skills. The skills you learn around research around communication go with you, whether you're debating or whether you go be a scientist or a lawyer or a writer, whatever it is, a salesperson, you can carry those skills forward. Investment in your product is not a portable skill. Learning about your product does not translate. Learning about the client's economic environment. Learning about the business conditions of that industry absolutely translates. And that's one of the things I realize ultimately is like, wow, I've gone deep enough in M&A now that I could go do consulting on M&A and global footprints in the way you handle the level work forces after being involved. It also made me reflect back on my experiences differently once I had picked that M&A because now out of those 550 opportunities, it's not just 550 random opportunities. It's how many M&As that I work on. And then you go look it up and it's like, I've been involved with like 40 or 50 of these things. Like, I know stuff. I just need to go find it, right? I need to go uncover it. The learnings that I had and the takeaways I had from those opportunities. So Luke, one of the things that you were telling us in the pre-show, So you were talking about like, when you see these MNAs happening, when you see the announcement, you're like, I got to get in front of this customer. And I've heard you have some creative place that you're using to get in front of folks. I would love to hear about those. Yeah, absolutely. So in this case, I wish I could take credit for it. But honestly, it's things I've heard here on 30 minutes to presence club. So for example, once you find this MNA or you're a find your compelling event for me, it was MNA. I didn't know what's on about it. So I wanted to go learn about it and reflect on what I did know. So I went and listened to podcasts, I read publications and industry stuff. And this one podcast I enjoyed. So I just keep listening to it. And then I heard this one guy come on and he handles MNA for their whole company. They have done 300 different acquisitions in the last six years. So they know what they're doing and they do it a lot, right? So out, I mean, obviously, I'd love to work with them from a deal perspective. But I was just curious. Like, how do you do that? How do you make all these decisions? Certainly you have to have some kind of like standard procedures to do it at that scale. And the CEO is actually the person that was on the podcast. And he was referencing this guy who runs MNA for him. And so I sent an email. X CEO mentioned you on X podcast. And then I write him, hi, I think his name was a me, hi, me. X CEO mentioned you on this podcast. Said you were doing amazing things with the MNA team there. Just question around your payroll. Do you typically do it local? Do you do it global and consolidated? Really admire what you've been able to do. I sent that on a Wednesday night. I think it was Thursday morning prior to the start of the work day. So about eight, 30 years time, voicemail. And it went straight to voicemail, which I love. Because all I did is say, hey, Luke, with a listen to the podcast where X CEO was on, check your email. I'll just hit you up there. It's easier than call me back. Go back to the email, prompt it. Just go tap it really quick. Hey, you know, what were your thoughts or how are you handling this? And he responds with it in 10 minutes. And so that's how I was able to get into an account. Now, the thing about MNA specifically is no one's going to tell you ahead of time is happening. Typically, because the people I work with, HR and finance might not even know that it's happening until the last minute. There's a due diligence phase. That's when they get brought in. And so part of my job is not to open opportunities, but to look at my entire account list and get on the bench with as many of those accounts as possible. So that when this does pop up, I'm the guy they contact. You can't get on the bench if number one, your message not to get read because it's spammy. Or number two, you're you focused and not them focused and their success focused. So my messaging came across as I have a hypothesis on how to help, but it sounds like you have things under control. He confirms, yeah, this is not how we do things. We do it this way in the future. If we're going to chat with that, these are the teams you'd have to get in touch with. We went back and forth a little bit after that. I know now that if that comes up in the future, they have an M&A where payroll becomes a blocker, he's going to go, oh, that guy emailed me. And then he can just search payroll or deal if he remembers the name and his email. And I'll find my email and reply. So there's this long tail effect that I think is really valuable. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales, busy work like CRM updates, and flag hidden deal risk. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals and every discovery call with these three questions, number one, do you want to buy a K validate if the deal is real? Number two, when do you want to buy validate if it will close this year? And then number three, how do you buy validate that they will get you in front of power? We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. 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. This reminds me of a similar dynamic with a client that I worked with a company called Vitable, who sold health insurance, health benefits to large home care agencies. And they would reach out to these agencies when they saw they were expanding or hiring because oftentimes that would be when they would reevaluate their benefits. And most of the time these companies, we're like, yeah, we have benefits and our contract ends in seven months and the year, whatever. And so they done the first thing, which is like gotten on the radar, I guess you're calling it get on the bench for when they are going to reevaluate making a change. One thing we really struggled with was like, how do you stay top of mind because no offense to you Luke, they might not remember Luke Floyd deal when they're dealing with 547 different things and they're literally about to do an MNA. So how do you keep engaged with the prospect when they're you're in this bench phase without just like, schlepping case studies at them and chucking in following up, etc. And that's where I think it goes back to my third takeaway, which was mapping out the jobs to be done and the decision tree around those jobs because if they're not making those decisions while using my tool, they're still making those decisions with somebody else. I first came across this in working with total rewards, people and compensation folks. So this is something I know our mom has experience in. But in this case, most folks, total comp and rewards folks, they want multiple sources of salary data. They don't just want to rely on one. They want to have at least three to make sure that there's no averages or anything like that that are thrown their numbers off. And so once I had an HR person actually tell me that she came from that background, I was like, oh, I have tons of this data. You mean every total rewards person could benefit just from having some extra data. And so that's things they're going to be doing, whether they're using me or not. And that's how ultimately you can be valuable in the meantime. So yes, there is a nurture campaign you have to do and you have to be coordinated. It's not just like one and done. And then I'm on the bench, I'm good. You've got to stay top of mine. But if you know how to be relevant to the problems they're facing, staying top of mine is much easier. For context, the team that owned this account prior to me had put, I think, 60 or 75 activities on this account in 2024. I did three and I opened it up because it was relevant and timely. And so ultimately, you don't have to be perfect. If my copy probably wasn't great, it probably wasn't perfect. I didn't have to be because I was relevant and timely and continuing that relevant and timely based on their role. Okay, M&A happens post six months. How did the integration go? That we reach back out. Did you have any problems with the payroll after that? Or if you're in compensation, okay, it's almost time for your yearly reviews and cycles. Are there any gaps in your pay bans where you have data on? Let me plug them in for you. Or did you see this EU pay directive that's coming out with legislation? Do you have any resources on how to address that? I'm in their world helping them. I'm not trying to get them to come to my world to buy my stuff. How is your nurture sequence operationalized? Do you have a static sequence of, touch them every 12 days? Combination calls emails. Is it just like a reminder on your calendar? It sounds like you're using fairly custom and timely content. Like you use that EU example. How do you actually execute and keep track of this stuff? Yeah, that's actually a really good question. I don't do this as good enough as I should. So we have great sales tools. I don't use a ton of them. So I don't really do any sequencing or any kind of automated reminders or outreach. Normally, I have enough accounts on my name that I don't have to be that super precise. Instead, what I do is I'll typically engage with them on a consistent basis. So let's say it is six months, I'll put a reminder in. Or the other thing that I can do is to pull an activity report and go check closed lost opportunities or activity contacts six months ago, just so I can quickly see refresh my brain. Oh, that's right. Six months ago, I was with this software, this same thing. We know different. You go looking to close lost report. You know, I can go look at the report and do it. I don't need a tool to tell me to go look at the report and do it. But that's something that other people that are maybe doing more volume or have fewer accounts for they really got to make a stretch to hit their number would definitely benefit from that extra efficiency. That's just something I'm not personally all that good. How do you balance getting on the bench with all of your accounts? With the fact that you also need to probably close some deals earlier on and you can't just be waiting the entire time. Do you differentiate accounts where it's like these ones I'm just trying to get on the bench versus these ones I'm trying to close today. Do you just try to do it all at the same time? How do you balance it? Yeah, great question. I think we also kind of chatted about this in one of my previous episodes. It was either one 38 or one 37. How I work with my SDR. And so in this case, these top 20 will call them would be like I'm focusing on and she works with them too, but they're mostly for me. And so then all the other ones we meet on a weekly basis and she has her list of what's called on the bubble, her bubble list. So those are the accounts that are reschedules that are super engaged and maybe she just needs me to come over the top and hit something or those accounts where we haven't targeted them yet, but intent signals are going crazy from your demand based or six cents or whatever tool you use for intent. So that's the way that I keep on top of it is I would rather spend an hour coaching and working with her than spend an hour doing the call call in myself. That's just a fly will effect. I always go for one to many, not one to one. And so that's why I'm focused on enabling her and her outcomes. And so that's one way to do it. The other way I do it is even when we think about having assets and teammates like an SDR team, you still want to make sure that the outreach that you do is applicable. And so this is where I develop plays which are applicable across my book. So plays I can run horizontally touch all my accounts at a given time, but are not spanning. So a good example of this would be like procurement. Just about every enterprise order that's what I sell to has a procurement function. They have people that are in charge of buying stuff. And so if let's say payroll is going to go out to RFP soon, procurement is probably going to know and they're probably going to be involved in that. And so one way that we can reach out is reach out to all the procurement teams at all of our accounts. Hey, this is who we are, this is what we do. We've been involved with X amount of RFPs. We've been shortlisted in X many of those. A lot of folks like you like us. Here's a template. Can I help you with anything else? Just make that contact. At the same time, I might be doing that salary benchmarking conversation with the total rewards team. At the same time, I might be doing a talent outreach with the talent acquisition team, helping define specific roles and specific markets. But if you think about the functions of the business and you think about hitting those functions in a way that is not unique necessarily to the account, but could apply to all businesses because all businesses at some point need it. That's the way that I think about doing it at scale without the expanding. Arty Luke, you have given me some phenomenal reframing on how my team can even think about prioritizing their prospecting, nurture accounts, and frankly, just like get on the bench in more scenarios. But we're running out of time. And so we got to move to the final question. So the final question is this. We've talked about a lot of really great best practices sellers should be following. Now I got to ask you the inverse. So the last question is what is one bad habit that you see most salespeople exhibit? Do you think they need to break? Because it hurts some more than it helps. Oh, I could go on for days about this. I think talking about their own stuff and investing time in their own stuff, their demo, their product. Yes, you need to be knowledgeable to a certain degree where it's not a liability for you. People want to know answers to questions. But on prospects reach out to you, they're not really inquiring about your product or the specifics. And frankly, they can probably look it up in your help documentation. And they probably would prefer that over talking to sales folks, at least that's what most stats show these days. So instead, I think about empathy. Empathy is not my strong suit. That's just not who I am by default. It's something I've had the cultivate. And so I try to put myself in their shoes. And normally if you're leading with empathy before that call, if you go in thinking about what's their day like, what are they trying to get done? How can I help them get it done? You're probably going to start the conversation talking about that as opposed to coming in and showing your slide about all the logos that use you and how great you are. Because ultimately they can probably solve their problem with two or three different solutions. It doesn't have to be you. So we have to make the difference, but we make the difference by living in their world others. Phenomenal. One thing I want to point out that you said that was really smart. And then we'll go to the 60 second recap. You talked about listening to a podcast. And I was like, I listened to 30 NPC. And then you mentioned it actually was not a sales podcast at all. It was like this MNA expert talking about all the deals he's done in folks. If you like 30 NPC, we appreciate you listening. But like, that's actually one of the best ways to get domain expertise is go listen to the podcasts and consume the content that your buyers are listening to or consuming. So Luke, thank you for a phenomenal round three. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Today's show was brought to you by air call 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. Air call 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 air call on a resource for building AI confidence in sales teams, which you can get free in the show notes. Today shows brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. So 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 counts 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. Go check it out in the show notes. Our unique it's time for three step recap one thing you can do three steps to break in your accounts using compelling events number one, Luke has 400 accounts. His top 20 are the ones that have compelling events on them for deal. He said any company that's going through an M and A event means they're probably having a massive payroll migration, which means that's an opportunity for deal to help them make the transition fast. That's step one. Number two, with your remaining 380 other accounts, you don't just throw them in the trash. You run scalable horizontal plays by persona. One example Luke gave us is procurement is oftentimes on an annual RFP cycle for their HR system. So he will send the same prospecting campaigns to procurement teams at different accounts in his book so that he can get on the bench for the next RFP. And then lastly number three, when you're working those top 20 compelling event accounts, Luke booked one meeting with a critical account that was having an M and A event with three interactions. He sent one email referencing a podcast that the M and A expert was on. He made one voicemail referencing the email and then he bubbled up the email. If you are relevant, timely and multi channel, the prospecting will take care of itself. Okay, Nick, what's one thing people can do right now? We talked about it at a very end of the episode. One of the best ways to get inside your buyer's head is go consume the content that they are consuming. So you're probably listening to this podcast or you're watching it on YouTube. Go to the search bar and type in podcasts for HR professionals podcasts for law firm CFOs. I promise you will find content that like your competitors are not listening to because it might be a little bit boring, but it will make you more money. All right, Nick. How could people help us out here? Luke put together a really awesome guide. A while back, Armand, unlike how to structure and prioritize your territory with 30 NPC. We'll link it in the show notes. This is something that I recommend. It is you anytime they get a new book, a new patch or frankly, they're planning for the new year. So grab it. It's free. It's in the show notes. We'll see you next week on the show. Today's show was brought to you by Nooks. Nooks is the AI-powered pipeline engine that researches your accounts, builds your target list, writes your emails and gets you more live conversations on the phone. Thousands of reps at companies like HubSpot, SizeMek and Deal use Nooks to automate the busy work in prospecting so they can focus on closing deals. Reps that use Nooks daily have twice as much pipeline as their peers, and we put together a guide with our friends at Nooks on how to automate the busy work in prospecting and dialing so you can focus on winning. Go get it for free at the link in the show notes.