#557 - How to Run a Perfect Discovery Call (Start to Finish) | Jacob Fleisher

always think that you have this big hand next to your face and if a prospect asks you a question and you answer it and it's not right, you get slapped in the face. To me, like when I think about sales like assumptions, they're going to be the death of you. So what I kind of advise my reps to do is that when they're asked a question, they really want to understand why they're being asked that question. And if you don't know why, you're going to end up in a really bad place. And like, do you have analytics? That could be something so simple as you track our conversion rates. It can be like way more complex around like, hey, we have four different disparate systems. We're really having the tough time of like figuring out how this like x impacts y. So it really helps you better understand like, hey, oh, we're going to be a good partner here. And can we help you? Good morning, everybody. And welcome to this episode of 30 minutes of the President's Club. My name is Armour Frock and I'm here with my co-host Nick Skalsky and folks, this was really really good. I can't remember the last time we did an episode that literally just like walk through a discovery call beginning to end. It's not only has something for an entry level seller, but has something for like an a who's trying to level up and like learn how to challenge their prospects. Today, our guest is Jacob Flesher. He is the head of sales over at attention. Nick, why should people listen? We've got some really great disco stuff, including why confrontation on a discovery call is good. How to move the call towards challenging or confronting your prospect without pissing them off or making them feel really uncomfortable. And then towards the back half, we got into like, if you sell a solution that has AI in it or you sell against solutions that have AI in it, Jacob got into some common FAQs, objections and questions that he gets and how he overcomes those. So make sure you listen to the end because he got into some really good stuff there. And Nick gets slapped in the face 17 times in this episode. Three, two, one, let's roll. All right, Jacob, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three action able takeaways. So let's get you three. First one, I like to call the slap in the face roll. To me, like when I think about sales, like assumptions, like are going to be the death of you. So for example, with with one of my reps, when we were ramping him up, he would always be asked the question, like, hey, does attention have analytics? And he'd always say, yes, right? Because he was trying to get that quick win to show, hey, we might be able to work with you and progress the deal. But the end of the day, like we actually didn't know what he meant by the process, what mean by, hey, like do you have analytics? So kind of the framework, I or mental model, I have my reps think through is like, imagine that there's a giant hand next to your face, right? And if you're asked a question and you don't know why the prospect is asking you that question and you answer it and you're wrong, you get slapped in the face, right? So really, would you take a step back to think, am I understanding why they're asking this question? And the reason why that's so important is something like do you have analytics? Right? That could be something so simple as like, do you track our conversion rates? Or it can be like way more complex around like, hey, we have four different disparate systems. We're really having the tough time of like figuring out how this like X impacts why, right? So it really helps you better understand like, hey, are we going to be a good partner here and can we help you? Right? So always think that you have this big hand next to your face and if a prospect asks you a question and you answer it and it's not right, you get slapped in the face. Today's show is 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 linked in 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. 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. 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 30mpc masterclass, which you can get for free in the show notes. Next face is about to be really red. I promise this is not a test. You're allowed to answer this one without asking for more clarification. But what's takeaway number two? Well, so takeaway number two is what I call the no car trick. For me throughout an entire sales conversation, there's so many different golden nuggets of information that might pop up. And you want to make sure that you're being strategic in a way where you're not derailing or getting happy ears when you hear one golden nugget, but you're still pulling the thread of another. Or a prospect is just like kind of opening up and scoping on a five minute monologue. They might share pieces around how their forecasting is destroyed. And their coaching and adoptive med tick is not going well. So for me, I want to make sure I'm always able to reference back to these previous golden nuggets. So throughout these conversations, I always just jot down one word on a little note card that can look back at. After that monologue, I go deep into that golden nugget. As you should, right, you might be able to go for five or 10 minutes around one of these pieces that was talked about in that monologue. But you don't want to forget that they already mentioned this massive problem or pain point that we don't circle back with that really could be either more important or equally important to really ensure that we're solving the entire surface area of all of their problems. Love it. Round us out Jacob. What's number three? Yeah. Number three is the subtle knowledge flex. To me, building rapport in sales is like, it's important to like get along on a personal level. But it's also important to gain industry trust. So what I like to do is after a prospect finishes speaking, they might say, hey, coaching is really, really important to us because we just rolled out a new sales playbook and we're having a tough time of understanding, is it working or is it not? So what I might say to that prospect is totally understand you've rolled a new sales playbook, right? Maybe it's something like a med pick. And what you're really trying to understand is, hey, we just rolled out med pick. And we want to understand is that impacting our conversion rate. Like did it make sense to actually adopt this new playbook? And if it does, is it like, is it decision criteria that's working really well for us and that's correlated to our win rates? Or is it metric? Like are we doing a good job of quantifying metrics? Is that even important for our business? And like, I think if you can start to show like, hey, I actually get this uneducated in this space, right? They're going to start to gain trust for you. But also, they might correct you and say, wait, it's funny that you mentioned metrics. We actually have a hypothesis around paper process and we need to identify that earlier in our sales class. Or they might just correct you and say, hey, I think your summary is a bit wrong. This is actually what I meant. And that really arms you with the right information to continue to have an effective conversation to understand, are we going to be a good partner here? So we're going to walk through a discovery call beginning to end because you just gave us a ton of discovery knowledge. To start off in the prep, you broke down your number one discovery question that you use pretty early in a sales call. What is it? Yeah. For me, it's really important to understand the overall top priority of my prospect, right? I think a lot of people go into conversations and they want to understand what is the top priority for the prospect that we can solve for. The challenge with that is say they say, hey, yeah, coaching, coaching here is not going great. Like our frontline managers, we're not coaching at all. And we show how we can make their managers more efficient, more effective. And they're like, this is great. We love this. And then you get to the end of the sales cycle and they say, wait, wait a second. Like we still have to build our commission plans for next year. You've just spent so much time working this deal, which was probably disqualified in the first place. Or maybe they say, hey, forecasting is actually most important. And we didn't discover that early enough in the sales cycle. And now we're bundled in as a coaching tool when in reality, there's way more surface area that we could have solved for the prospect. So I always like to take a step back. And I'll say something like, hey, Nick, like, attention aside, like what is the one thing at the top of your priority list that you're trying to solve for for today? Right? And that gives me an opportunity to say, hey, we can help with that. Or you know what, it might actually be better to pick up this conversation in a few months from now. Once your commission plans are all squared away and the focus is on increasing conversion and getting your coaching, like your coaching system in place. What's your approach? And I guess, I guess where do you need to be on the priority ranking for you to say, I'm going to abandon this deal and push it away hard versus no, I want to keep working a sales cycle right now. Yeah, I think for me, it's really trying to understand, typically it's like top three, but what I want to understand is like the magnitude of each priority. Right? So if number one is like a CRM integration, they're going from Salesforce to HubSpot. Like I just know that that is such a heavy lift, really implementing anything else is going to be such a challenge. And I really want to understand why that is their top priority. It also gives you the opportunity to kind of take a step back and maybe can we help you reprioritize your priority? For my opinion, like the way you're thinking about solving number one, I think it's actually a lot more effective if you that number two behind X, right? And kind of give give your buyers a is the new perspective of I get it. But for me, it's really important to just understand how big of an issue is number one, number two, 'cause if those are like dying pains and they have these massive goals or metrics they're trying to hit, and one or two is something you don't play in, CFO is not gonna sign a check for that. But if it's like, hey, we got a lot of these different projects going on, they're all somewhat ukulele. I'm thinking about solving outbound first, 'cause I see a lot of vendors in the outbound space on LinkedIn and it's easier to evaluate that. Then for me, it's like, okay, I have an opportunity here. So this is really interesting because I feel like the next level of selling happens when you can start to advise and challenge your prospects on their priorities and get them to think about their business a little bit differently. I literally just got off of a sponsor sales call and they were dead set on doing a product launch with a big LinkedIn activation saying, we're just looking for influencers to make LinkedIn posts around them. And either I had to challenge that priority or lose the deal because we don't do influencer marketing posts, right? And so I had to basically go toe to toe with them on their marketing strategy and got them to open up a little bit. Jacob, could you give an example knowing what you sell at attention? What is an example of a priority that you are able to artfully challenge as a sales leader? - Yeah, I think right now, one of the hot topics people are saying is, hey, it's all about outbound, it's top of funnel. And for me, that doesn't mean a whole lot 'cause I don't really understand what's actually broken. Like, is it a volume thing? Like you're actually not getting enough leads and you just need to improve the amount of leads that you're getting and your conversion rates are great. They're 35% and we know MQL to SQL converts at 30% and we're good. Or is there a different issue there? Like, is it that we're actually from an outbound perspective? We're converting our outbound leads at a 15% SQL to close one versus inbound, which is 40%. Right, and our reps don't do a good enough job pivoting their talk tracks and how they build champions and how they engage prospects from outbound leads versus inbound leads. So I really wanna try and get an understanding there 'cause the issue might not actually be the number of meetings you're booking or the quality of logos you're booking, it might actually be that your reps are technically addressing outbound conversations the same way that they're addressing inbound conversations. And fundamentally, those are completely different. So I might say something like, hey, we've actually helped a lot of people with top of funnel. We're not a top of funnel tool, but what we can tell you are the things that work when you're talking to an outbound prospect versus an inbound prospect. Right, and here the talk tracks you should iterate on to help you establish a champion earlier on your sales cycle 'cause we know with outbound, it's really important earlier in the sales process to engage a champion. Right, so it might not actually be an outbound problem, it might actually be a conversion issue and your talk track issue and coaching issue around outbound. And that can open up a channel worms from there. - That's really smart. Like a lot of times good discovery feels like Beck Holland was on the show the other day and she talked about how good discovery feels like you're talking to a doctor where a good doctor will be like, okay, yeah, your stomach hurts. I get it, that's the pain you're feeling. Like that's the fire. What I'm gonna challenge as a doctor is I'm gonna challenge your diagnosis. In this case, the prospect's diagnosis was like, I gotta find a way to book more meetings. And you're saying that's actually not the rate, that is not the right way to solve your pipeline problem. I agree you might have a pipeline problem or one way problem or whatever it is, but I think you're challenging the way that they want to solve that problem. And like that is where the confrontation is happening. - I was gonna say, I think confrontation in sales can be good, right? 'Cause to me, there's two ways to run a discovery call. There's like the qualification, like can I go back to my VP of sales and say, yeah, they have budget, yeah, they have this many retail locations or to your prospect that kind of feels a little tricky. Or there's the other way to think about it, where it's like, hey, I'm just deeply trying to understand. I'm very curious and what you guys are doing, what you guys are building and how you're trying to solve it. Right, so by me poking and challenging status quo kind of shows that like, hey, I get this and I've been here before. And me poking and prying is actually me just genuinely curious of your business and what's going on. And I think people can gain respect for that if done in the right way. - I wanna go to the point of you said, confrontation is a good thing, Monica. And I bet there's a lot of people that are hearing that and they're like, yeah, no fucking chance. So I wanna understand because confrontational can both be adversarial where you're like fighting and it's like really uncomfortable for everybody and a lot of prospects flee if that's the case. But when your doctor confronts you, they do certain things with the emotional tenor of how they communicate that message where like they'll use softening language to not make it feel so you're a fucking idiot. And so I'm wondering when you are challenging or confronting a prospect, if there are any things that you do to make it, hey, I'm here to help you not to make you feel like you're wrong. - Yeah, I think for me it's about, it's challenging the status quo, but like positioning in a way that's coming from a point of experience and I know what I'm doing. So I may say something like, hey, like I hear you like outbound is really, really important for you. The way I'm thinking about it though, like we were working with another customer and outbound was a really big pain point for them. But what we ended up figuring out with them was that it wasn't just, hey, we're not booking enough meetings. What we actually at team defined out was we were just not converting our at bats and our talk tracks weren't right first outbound versus inbound. So I'm curious for you that do you actually think that it's the amount of meetings you're booking or do you think you're doing a good job with the at bats you currently have or if not, if we were able to improve your conversion from where's that today? So by 5%, does that actually get you to your revenue target? And so it's a little confrontational of challenging the status quo, but it's back to my experience that like, hey, I've been here before, I've seen this problem. It might not be the same for you, but it was for someone else that looks like it. - So so far what has happened is you got a big priority and then they had a certain way that they wanted to address a problem. You've challenged their status quo. So instead of it being book more meetings, you're saying, hey, maybe you need to convert your meetings that you're already getting better. And let's say that they're like, okay, I didn't think about it that way before. So now that they're open to focusing on conversion instead of top of funnel, your priorities are aligned. In other words, their priority is aligned with what problem you solve. How do you start to then bring them further down the discovery train from there? - So then I'll take a step back around conversion and be like, great, now that we're aligned around conversion being problem. Can you kind of talk me through like what that motion looks like? A lead comes in, right? How is a rep approaching that call? What does that look like today? Like how are you understanding what's being said? If you can kind of give me an end-to-end understanding of what that looks like, that would be really helpful. - Yeah. - Right? And they'll start to unpack what that looks like. And then they'll start talking and then I'll start using the note card trick and writing down one, two, three golden pieces of nuggets of information that can then pull on, right? To go really deep in that area. - So you're starting to break down, okay, how are you managing your inbound versus outbound? The meetings you're booking, yadda, you're essentially trying to like diagnose what's going wrong in their conversion, right? So again, all of this is like independent of the product you sell so far yet, right? - 100%. Like to me, how I think about sales at the highest level, like I sometimes forget that I work for attention, right? Like I'm really just fixated on trying to understand like where are you today? Where are you trying to get to? How are you thinking about getting there and like what happens if you don't, right? And once we start to really, really unpack that, together we'll have a really good understanding of where we're at today. And I can start to share, hey, here's how I think we can help and get you from here to here, which you just explained to me, right? So I'm really only starting to think about attention and the things that we sell for. If we've been able to unpack enough, I think that we might actually be able to get you where you're trying to get. - Like give me an example of some current state that a prospect would share with you, where you're like, okay, now I know we can help. - So, you know, we just raised our Series V, we're trying to raise our Series C next summer, right? We've really lofty revenue goals on our head and we need to ramp our reps in a really productive way. We're hiring 30 of them right now. And if just five of them end up not ramping, we're not gonna hit that number, right? So for me, what's most important is that I've got this entire sales playbook out, right? So I need to make sure that each rep from day one is utilizing our playbook in an effective manner, because if they don't and just five of my new reps don't hit their number, we're gonna miss our targets next year. And when we go to raise more capital, it's gonna be way harder for us to raise our C. So to need that's kind of almost everything I need to start to pull and understand, like, hey, there's actually a really good opportunity for us to help, right? Like you have this goal of ramping reps, you have this thing that you're trying to measure against, you're just not quite sure how you're going to bench bark or measure how those reps are actually performing based off of this playbook that you're educating them on. So that's an area that we might be able to help and then I'll start to share golden nuggets there where I think I can help and sales is all about getting take, right, you don't wanna just keep going and going and going when you kind of have enough where you think we're onto something, all of them get a little bit. - Your team sells to sales leaders, to rev-ops leaders, Jacob. At 30MPC, our course and enablement subscription product, we also sell to sales leaders. And one of the challenges that I've run into those folks selling to them versus when I sold to law firms, those sales leaders can talk and they can talk a lot. And one of the biggest problems I'm finding myself running into is like, you gave a very, very succinct like situation and challenge. They've got these reps. They need to ramp them. They know the metric associated with it. And I can't tell you the number of calls there I've been on where like, they just like take the conversation and it's totally different to like, they're just giving a bunch of information. I'm like, okay, this is, I get it. This is like good situation, but like has nothing to do with the way he helps solve for. And it's not even really associated with like, their number one priority. They're kind of just like, oh, Nick's here to talk with me. So I guess like, how do you steer the conversation in the direction and like, contain it so that you're thinking about like discovery efficiency almost? Do you have any advice for me and my team? Because that's a place we've frankly been struggling with. Yeah, I think for me around like discovery efficiency, like, I think part of the magic, right, is kind of letting them rant a little bit. Right? Kind of like for me, I want to understand where each buyer is at. Like, I take a little bit of a dynamic approach to my sales process. Yeah. So if I can understand like, they're a little bit all over place and a little bit of a rancer, that's where I take a little more of a strict approach. And I'll kind of change my talk tracks a little bit. Right? Hey, this is like really great. And like, you're giving me really good context on the business. That being said, I think for me, like where we really tend to help is x, y, and z. Cool. So some of those things start to resonate with you. And if they don't, like, what is that one or two thing that's keeping you up at night or that you're constantly thinking about today that you need to solve for? I actually had a really random question on the point of give and take. If you feel like you've gotten enough, what's your take on demoing on a discovery call? I don't personally love demoing on a discovery call. I think if it's a 30 minute first call, you can save five, 10 minutes, but only keep it in your back pocket. If you're like, yes, we've gone through this. The challenge is coaching. They don't have a systematic way to measure the efficacy of their playbook. Like he's screaming from the rafters that we rolled out in that pick and we have no idea if our reps are using it. Right? So I think about five minutes, I can showcase that. The challenge is that if you don't have that perfect thing and you use the demo to try and save your deal and you just start showing features and bells and whistles to try and see if you can get someone interested, you're going to end up in a really challenging spot. Because if you only have five or 10 minutes, like, I don't know many platforms in the world where you can actually showcase that we're going to solve this massive initiative for you in five minutes. Right? So you have to be really, really careful because what, like psychologically, your buyers will draw conclusions if the product can help or not help, even if they see it from one minute for one minute or for 30 minutes. So you want to really make sure that you're indexing towards having the best chance to convert when showing them. So I only using it very sparingly when I know that thing I'm going to show, it's going to create what I call this, oh shit moment. So then talk about if not demo, you're doing some give and take. How do you typically wrap up a discovery call? Yeah. So I'll typically say something along the lines of, hey, Nick, really appreciate you taking the time here. Just to kind of summarize from what I've heard from this conversation is that your reps are really struggling with forecasting their deals. They're really struggling to understand, like, is this best case? Is this commit? And what that's doing for you is that it's inflating your forecast. It's inflating your pipeline because they're putting a lot of deals in commit. And you're going up to the board and say, hey, we're going to be 150% to goal. And you end up being under 100%. So for what that's doing is it's losing you resources. It's potentially putting your job at risk. So really what you're trying to better understand and better of solve for is how do we help our reps better understand their deals and where they currently stand and the likelihood. I think attention can actually help solve that by doing x, y and z. Is that a line with you? Am I, does that sound right? And they'll say something like, yeah, that does sound right. And I'll say great, like now that we're aligned there, like I would love to actually show you how I think attention could help make your reps more efficient in forecasting and also get you just more visibility into that. You think we can set up 30 minutes. I mean, if you have time later today, that would be great. And that's a bit aggressive or the tomorrow or the next day. So we can really dive into this and try to see if there's anything that we can help with. Awesome. So let's talk about what happens from there. Your buyer's like, yep, great. You get that demo scheduled. You had a really interesting nugget on the prep document where you talked about building relationships with other people in the org, whether or not they're like involved in the deal at all to like help you get it done. And I'm wondering if you can speak to that. So I think this is like a little bit of an unlock that we've discovered and a little bit of a secret sauce. Today, everyone's kind of fighting for mind share over AI, right? Everyone's saying that hey, we do AI, we do AI. And especially selling to like not as a technical buying group, right? It's really hard to like distill like, are these guys really doing something with AI, innovative with AI or is it vaporware? Right? So what I'll do is like, I'll look at our CTO's network, right? We're selling into a company. He might know an engineer. He would be the engineer and say, hey, like my, my head of sales is talking to, you know, John, your CRO. No, would love for you to reach out to John and just say like, hey, I actually know attention, like they're the real deal. Because what that does is like, if you have like an engineer who's building with AI every single day, reach out to the CRO and say, hey, this isn't vaporware. I know their CTO. That guy's sharp, right? If he's just now started to gain trust in attention as a business, right? And they start to like think, huh, these guys might actually be real. Like that guy, look at engineering, like he's brilliant. So if he's thinking that, like, maybe I need to take these guys seriously, right? So you start to build credibility from other people in the org that don't really impact your deal, but can, right? Because this is starting to give your buyer a little more trust that these are real people, people know them, they're legit. You sell an AI, a solution that has AI is a big piece of it. I'm wondering what some of like the common FAQs or objections specific to AI that you and your team are frequently seeing coming up and like how you address and answer those. And some of this is going to be attention specific, but I bet we have a lot of reps listening to this who like their solution now has AI or they just started selling for an AI company. And I'm wondering if like you picked up any best practices since selling for an AI company. Yeah, I think for me, the first question, it's probably the most obvious. It's like, hey, like, why can't I do this with chat, GPT? And I always will take a step back and say, have you tried, right? And if all to that question is, is yes. And it's like cool, like, then why haven't you implemented it? And when you start to like that, you get a little bit of a point of friction, this actually just happened to me. Oh, where someone said to me that they were like, hey, we're not actually interested. Attention fills your CRM after your sales call. And this person says to me, hey, we're not actually interested in filling our CRM. Because that's easy to build. We want to know more about the high text. And I was like, cool, like, so regardless, filling the CRM is valuable. It's just easy to build. And she goes, yes, it is. And I go, why haven't you built it yet? Like we just believe what it's valuable. I'm just like genuinely curious. And another person on the call hopped in and was like, well, it's actually not that simple. Like, you need to like get your engineering team involved and how the APIs work with our current CRM. It don't really work so well. And then it's like, oh, wait, so now we're level setting. Like, we actually want to solve this problem. So I think a lot of people make this assumption that like, hey, we can build this or chat you be deep-can. And to me, it's all again, it's about challenging this data score. Like, have you or have you not? And if they have it and say, hey, like, that's fucking a week, that and try and see where you want. Yeah. So one of the objections is, how is this different or why can't I do this in chat GBT? What else have you frequently seen? Come up. Yeah, I think right now what we see come up a lot is, hey, you know, we're working a lot of vendors that are adding AI. How do we know that one of our existing vendors are just not going to build this and we're going to have a duplicative spend in a few months? Right. And then it's like, for me, it's like quantifying the impact and more about why now. And if I can start to understand that, it's like, great, maybe, maybe not no idea. That being said, like, we are talking here today. Like, is there a reason why we're here today that like makes you want to learn more about us? And then start to like unpack that a bit more and say, hey, listen, like we just said that in three, you can't wait three months. Like you just explicitly said to me that they were to releases in three months. We can't and we don't even know if they're going to and if it's work, right? Like we're here together and we figured out that we can solve your problem today. Like why wait? Why take on that risk? Well, Jake, we're talking about a number of different best practices for sales people. Now we got to talk about a worse practice. So the last question is, what is one bad habit? You see a lot of sales people exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps. The second I can sense what they're trying to qualify me. But currently, expending my tech stack pretty rapidly right now. And I got on a call recently. And the first thing that person said to me was, how many sales reps do you have? And I just knew I was in for a bad call. I put it on the lead form, right? How many reps I had. And then from there, it was just all surface level. And it's a tool that I wanted to move forward with. But it just drove me crazy. Because you can find that on LinkedIn. I filled it on a lead form. And it also just sets the stage that I'm now like, oh, do I have to sit through this? And to now earn my trust back, I always tell my team, you win or lose a call in the first five minutes. When we do deal review or call reviews, by minute five, I can look at my rep and say, dude, you crushed this or meh, I don't think this is going to go well. So it's really important that you spend that time and use those first questions wisely. Because if someone gets rubbed the wrong way or thinks they're about to have a boring conversation, you're done for. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So, pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has a risk, and I have something I can coach too. Now, we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again. And you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by TechSets, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a deal forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so, my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting. And that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps, and use texting to keep deals moving forward with text us, check it out. It's free in the show notes. Today's show is 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 Unify on how to get 100% of BDRs to quota in 2026. Go check it out in the show notes. Jacob, I counted you answered 17 questions on this episode. So, I hope you're ready for some slaps later, but seriously, amazing interview. Thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Already folks, it's time for a 2x2 recap. Yes, the return of the 2x2. Recap. Nick, what do you have for yours? The number one is understand your prospects problem that you solve in priority context of all of the things that they want to solve. You may be able to solve the problem that they tell you about because you steer the conversation towards talking about how they need help with analytics and you sell an awesome analytics tool. Yada, yada, yada. Those analytics problems are number 14 on the list and they've got 13 other things that are way more important. You're not going to get a deal and you're actually going to burn a lot of time on a deal that just is not the number one thing that they need to solve. So at some point Jacob does this earlier in the conversation, he goes, "Hey, I actually want to take a step back. I guess irrespective of the forecasting stuff that we're talking about, where does this sit in the broader context of all of the priorities that you have? Because I want to make sure we're solving like a top one or two for you, not just doing a nice to have." Number two, great selling doesn't feel like selling. Jacob said that he sometimes will almost like forget that he's selling attention and that is the sign of being a consultant or doing a consultative sale. So instead of thinking how do I sell attention, try to think how do I help this person figure out why their meetings aren't converting and then the solution to attention will be obvious throughout the sale cycle. Number three is the slap to the face rule. If you get asked the question and you feel like you don't have all the information that you need to answer that question, assume that you are going to be slapped in the face if you just answered that question. So if they say, "Hey, do you have analytics in your platform?" You can say something like, "Yeah, we do have analytics, but I guess I'm curious analytics." The term analytics means different things to different people and I'm curious what you're looking for because I want to make sure I speak to you how we do or don't help with that. That's how you avoid getting yourself into trouble and maybe even pitching and them saying, "Oh, actually, you have more than we need." And then lastly, number four, this was actually his final question, which is, "A prospect should not feel like they're being qualified on a discovery call." That happens when one you run self-serving discovery with checklist questions to figure out if they're big enough deal for you. But it also happens when you ask people questions that you could have figured out by looking at the demo request form or their LinkedIn. Like, how many employees do you have or how big is your sales team? All right. Do that stuff beforehand and I get it. You want to make sure you're not wasting your time. But in order for you to even have a shot at closing a deal, they have to be excited about the problem you're solving and that happens before qualification. Already, Nick, what's one thing people can do to help us out? So we parted with our friends at attention and we put together a guide on the three big deal blockers that kill pipeline and how to spot those things and fix them early. And so the guide goes through how to overcome nice to have risk, which is something we talked about on this episode, how to overcome timeline risk, avoiding soft timelines that end up splitting, and how to overcome power risk. So you don't get stuck with a mid-little level champion who's not going to be able to get you to someone who get the deal done. We've got a link in the show notes. If you want to go grab that guide, it is free. I think you'll enjoy it if you like this episode and we'll see you next week on 30MPC. 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 in 30MPC masterclass, which you can get for free in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by Knooks. Knooks 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 Knooks to automate the busy work and prospecting so they can focus on closing deals. Reps that use Knooks daily have twice as much pipeline as their peers, and we put together a guide with our friends at Knooks on how to automate the busy work and prospecting and dialing so you can focus on winning. Go get it for free at the link in the show notes.