#586 - Sales Masterclass: 40 Minutes to Go From Cold Call To Close

In today's masterclass, there are three big things I promise you that you were going to walk away heading master. Thing number one is you were going to get cold calling frameworks to land net new meetings with your dream prospects. From there, we are going to take you through a discovery approach to turn those new meetings into real deals that actually have some momentum behind them. And then from there, we're going to give you a sales process frame to drive your deals forward too close. We've got a lot to tackle in this session. I did a lot of work putting this stuff together. So let's start with cold calling. Then we'll get into discovery and we will finish with sales process. So starting with cold calling, we're going to go into some frameworks here. The first framework is for how to differentiate from all of the other crummy cold calls that your prospect is getting because our prospects are getting hammered on the phone. And most of the cold calls they get are coming from people who are pitching student loan refinancing packages, used car warranties, or trying to steal their social security numbers. And you don't want to be lumped in with those people, you want to be taken seriously. The way that you do that is everything that you do, everything that you say and the way that you sound on the cold call has to be different than all of the other telemarketers out there. And that starts with the opener. You are not going to use a traditional canned opener. You're not going to say, how's your day going? Did I catch you at a bad time? This is a cold call. Do you want to hang up or roll the dice? Instead, the first way you differentiate from all of the other cold callers is you actually don't even start with something about you. You're going to start with context about them. This is called the tailored permission opener. There are three parts, lead with context, own that it is a cold call, and then get permissioned pitch. It sounds like hello. And I go, Emma, I just finished reading your press release about the new office opening in Rochester. And I'm going to be honest, this is a cold call, but it is a well researched one. And I'm wondering if I can get half a minute to share why that press release about the office opening prompted me to call you. And then you can totally hang up on me if it doesn't make sense from there. So let's actually break this thing down. Piece one is the context. This is the most important part. The context that I lead with needs to be tangentially related to the problem that I solved. So I saw legal billing software for a long time. And my context I would lead with would be things like, had they just want a big case, they'd be collecting money that we could help them with with our billing software. Had they just open a new office that often added to billing complexity, which we could help with, had they rolled out a new practice group at the law firm, again, more billing complexity. When I sell sponsorships for 30 NPC, I'm looking for things like had they launched a new product. They probably want to get the word out there. Are they doing webinars or events? Okay, they're already investing in getting the word out there. Do you want to do more? So what you have to do is you have to think, what does it look like when somebody has a problem that I can solve? So step one is I lead with context that gets them to sit up and be like, oh, this is this is definitely meant for me. But then from there, I can't just lead with context. What I need to do next is I need to own that it's a cold call and roll into getting permission to pitch. Look, I'm going to be honest, this is a cold call, but it is a well researched one. And I'm wondering if I can get half a minute to share why that press release prompted me to call you and that you can totally hang up if it doesn't make sense to speak. Notice with my tone, I'm not bringing myself to an inferior place. You've got to keep your status high with I have a little couple of laughs that I put in there. I don't want to sound meek or afraid or dejected. Keep your confidence high. And most people will say, sure, go ahead. You've got half a minute. But some are going to say no. And so what do you do if they say, no, step one is get the real objection. Shoot. This one's totally my bad. Look, just so nobody for my team calls you again, is it that I just caught you at the worst possible time? Is it already know what we do or maybe this just isn't a priority at all right now? And it's totally fine if it's that last one. Most people are going to say things like, no, I just don't like getting cold calls or I'm about to head into a meeting. That's okay. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pivot permission while really leaning into the fact that I'm a real human being. Hey, I really appreciate you being honest here. Look, to be honest, I don't really love having to make these calls. And my guess is you're not a fan of getting them either. Look, I promise I did some research for this one. I promise you this is not just like a random call. Do you think I could get 30 seconds to tell you what I found and why I called and look from there, you can totally hang up on me if it's not relevant. Most people at this point are going to be like, all right, kid, you got half a minute. What do you have for me? And the ones who say, no, you were probably never going to get a meeting with anyway. See a mud is well just move on to the next prospect. Last note here on tonality, you've probably seen I keep going like this every time I do a voiceover. And the reason for that is is I want to come across as disarming as possible. The reason for this is cold calling might be part of our job. But for our prospects, it's a pretty unwelcome interruption in the middle of their day. And they feel sales pressure when we interrupt and intrude on their day. I want to reduce that as much as possible, which makes them more likely to say, all right, go ahead. You got half a minute to give me your pitch, which is what we are going to teach you next in this framework's master class. So let's talk about the pitch. Most salespeople undo all of the work they did differentiating from those telemarketers with their pitch. And there are three big mistakes people make. Mistake number one is their pitch includes vague telemarketer buzzwords where they say things like, "Pave is a single source of truth for all of your compensation related data." Or, "Ping is an all-in-one platform to help you streamline attorney billing." The problem with these statements with vague telemarketer buzzwords, this is what every other cold caller is saying in their pitch. You don't want to be lumped in with those people. You can't be perceived to be better until your first perceived to be different, which means you need to use different language than all the other cold callers. Problem number two is most pitches pitch benefits instead of problems. And people are much more likely to take action to solve problems than they are achieved benefits. There's a lot of research around this. Last piece, this is the biggest one. The value of your product has no context without a problem associated with it. If I cold call you and I say, "I've got titanium coated pans," you're going to say, "I don't care. I already have cookware." But if I call you and I pitch a problem first and I say, "Look, I talk to a lot of new dads that get really frustrated when after making omelets for their kids, they end up spending 20 minutes scrubbing the pan to get the egg crust off of it." Our titanium coated pans make sure nothing ever sticks to them. Now you're interested in the pan. And so we have to lead with the problem to get them to care about our value. Let me prove it to you. If I cold called you and I said, "Hi, would you like some ergonomic insoles?" You're going to say, "I don't know what those are." But if I call you and I say, "I talk to a lot of runners who are sick and tired of taping their heel blisters after their long Saturday run," now you might actually care about those insoles. If I call you and I say, "Hey, you're interested in some eucalyptus cooling blankets?" You're going to say, "Isn't that an essential oil just sprayed on a blanket?" But if I say, "Hey, I talk to a lot of new dads who are sick of waking up in the middle of June at 3 a.m. sweaty and they can't fall back asleep." Now I can get you interested in these eucalyptus cooling placking. So I got to get you interested in this. I got to lead with this to get you interested in this. Let's talk about now. You might be wondering, "How do I build one of these for myself?" And good news, your friend Nick has you covered. So there's a couple different ways that we can layer in descriptors to make our problem trigger them enough to care about the solution. So just for context here, I used to sell specialized billing software to large law firms. These were big law firms that often had insurance companies as their clients. And the issue they ran into is these insurance companies were devious. They did not want to pay their bills. And so they would scrutinize these bills and they would ask for things like deductions or they would reject the bill if they didn't like it or they would appeal the bill as to not have to pay it or to delay the payment as long as they could. While the law firms didn't like that and our billing software would help. So if I take the base pitch that I might say to a CFO, I could say most CFOs tell us billing takes a lot of time. It's not a very compelling problem. So I can now start to make it more compelling by layering these things in. So step one is layer in the vertical or the ICP of who I'm calling. So it's most CFOs of insurance defense law firms tell us billing takes a lot of time. Okay, we're getting somewhere. Now it's not just they say it takes a lot of time. Let's layer in the annoyances. They tell us billing takes a lot of time because of the deductions, rejections and appeals. Cool. We're getting somewhere. But now let's make the movie scene come to life with the scenery. Now it's the deductions, rejections and appeals they get from insurance carriers after winning a big case for them. Last thing you can hear I'm starting to do this with my voice. I want to start to layer in the emotion. It's not that they tell us that it takes a lot of time. It's they think it's ridiculous. They think it's horrible. They feel like they're getting hosed when they have to deal with so many deductions, rejections and appeals. They get from the insurance carriers after winning a big case. I want this to feel like I am joining them in the problem. Like I felt the problem that I'm sitting in the emotion of the problem, not that I am just reporting on the problem and saying what is on the page. I need them to feel that. So let's look at some examples here. I've got three. One for Covey, which is an AI resume screener. One for practice, a two during platform and one for pay. Covey, most talent teams find it mind numbing that they have to sift through 2000 inbound applications just to figure out which five candidates they should even talk to pay. During Q1 Marys season, most comp teams are buried under a mountainous spreadsheet with 17,000 V lookups. I'm building this problem up. This is going to get them to care about what comes next, which is our one sentence solution. I don't need to give them a lot. If I do a good job of building up the problem, the descriptors that I gave you, I really just need one sentence to tell them how we solve it. Your framework for your one sentence solution is part one. We do x where x is your key differentiator so that you don't have to do y, where y is a reminder of the problem. So let's look at this. For Covey, I already have the problem. It's Covey takes your ideal candidate criteria and uses AI to surface the top applicants. There's the differentiator. So you don't spend all day screening resumes. There's the problem reminder. Practice. Practice consolidates the scheduling, session tracking, and tutor payouts. So you don't have to juggle 20 systems or let sessions fall through the cracks. There's the problem. I'm not going to read pave in the interest of time. You can see it. You can always go back and watch and pause this webinar. Let's keep rolling. From there, all I'm going to do is say, do you want to learn more? What I'm not going to do is I'm going to say, do you want to see a demo, a Tuesday at one or Thursday at three? What they're going to have to figure out, do I want a demo? Do I'm not interested at all? Am I free at those times? Keep your CTA light. You open the learning more when I'm when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue. Once you've gotten that initial, yes, then you can handle scheduling. So if you do all this right, this is what it ends up looking like. I've got here my big problem. Then I've got my one sentence, half sentence differentiator, and a reminder of the problem again, finished with one of my interest-based CTAs. If you do all this right, you're going to have a lot of prospects that say, you know what? I would like to learn more. Why don't we book some time? But you're also going to have some who say, I'm not interested. Send me an email. I'm in a meeting. They're going to give you some objections. And don't worry, your good friend Nick is here to help you handle some objections. So let's start with the biggest misunderstanding sellers have about objections, which is most objections are not objections to your product. They are objections to the interruption. When somebody says, I'm not interested, that is not them saying, you know what? I've seriously considered the pros and cons of your product thought about it and just decided I'm not interested. No, they're saying, I don't want to get cold called. Go away. Most objections are actually reactions to the cold call. And so you cannot logically overcome an emotional reaction. We have to handle the reaction before the objection. And the way that we do that is called the Mr. Miyagi method. Or instead of fighting the objection, we're going to wax on. And then wax off. Let's talk about what that looks like. There are three steps to the Mr. Miyagi approach. Step one is we agree with the objection step two is we incentivize conversation. And then we sell the test drive. I'll give you an example for the objection. We don't have any budget. Step one is I agree with the objection. And I say, shoot, this one's totally on me, you know, honestly, nowadays it's hard enough to keep a tool, let alone and something new. Okay, that got them saying, wait a minute, this guy's not going to try to fight me and convince me of like, how we can help them find budget or they should look at me anyway. Or that's exactly why Nick called. No, this lowers their sales pressure and keeps them on the phone. From there, I need to know a little bit more about the objection to be able to properly handle it. And so the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to ask them a question about the objection with the incentive to answer of no more cold calls. And so what I'll say next is, look, just so nobody from my team bugs you again, is it, is it that you're at a budget for this fiscal year or is it that you just get put through the ring or every time you try to buy something just to no one from my team bugs you again, just to nobody calls you again, just so I know not to follow up, give them a reason and they're more likely to answer your question. And then from there, they're going to give you some information. They might say, hey, look, look, we just don't have any budget until the end of the year. And that's six months from now. Well, I probably don't want to wait until the end of the year to meet with them. I want to get the meeting right now, but I can't force them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to sell the test drive, a K, I'm going to sell, why would it make sense for us to meet now? And why is it in their best interest? What do they get even if they don't buy from me right now? And that might sound like, hey, I totally get it. Look, you're probably not going to buy this thing right now. But honestly, usually for the teams that I talk to, I guess if budget ever does free up, the folks who end up getting it are the ones who at least have a sense of what they might want. So I guess, would you be open to taking a look just to at least know what's out there? And again, I'm going arms up on this. So let's go a little bit deeper and let's look at some examples. Reminder, step one is we are agreeing. And the reason we are doing this is it feels really stupid to fight somebody who is not fighting back. Most salespeople, when they get hit with, I'm not interested, they go, well, how are you not even interested? You don't even know what I'm selling yet, which is a great way to come across as a jerk and get them to hang up on you. You're not fighting them. Instead, we are agreeing. We're saying shoot. This one's totally on me. You probably would have requested a demo if you needed help. Or they're using a competitor. I go, ah, this one's totally my bad. I should have assumed you were using someone. Honestly, it rarely makes sense to switch off of that me go. Okay. So I'm agreeing with the objection to reduce the pressure and get them to hear me out when I ask them the question to be able to overcome that objections. Step two, then is I'm incentivizing conversation. The reason that I need to do this is I need a little bit more information. If somebody says I'm not interested, I need to know a little bit more about why they are not interested in order to properly overcome it. Additionally, I want to make it feel like I'm there to understand them. I'm actually there to seek first to understand before trying to overcome and be understood. And then the last thing the reason I need to get them talking is the more I can get them talking, the more conversation I can incentivize, the higher likelihood I have of booking the meeting, the data shows. And this is usually because the more you actually talk to someone, the more they realize that you're not a total buffoon, you are actually somebody who understands their space and might be worth actually having a meeting with, which is why I incentivize them with no more cold calls. So you're going to say, look, just so nobody reaches out again, is it that you've got something in place? You're doing it in house yourself or you just hate getting cold calls and it's totally fine if it's that last one. And so pro tip here is I want to give them multiple choice. The reason for that is I'm not interested. If I go, hey, just so nobody reaches out again, why are you not interested? They're not going to answer that. Sometimes I have to give some options to get them to give me the real answer. The last piece is selling the test drive. AKA, why should they take a meeting with you, even if they never buy their product? There's lots of reasons why they might not have any budget, but they might want a wish list in case budget does open up. They might already have a solution in place, but maybe they're not going to be at their company forever. Maybe they want to know why other people switched if they go somewhere else or maybe they'd be open to getting a quote to be able to keep their current vendor honest. Maybe their contract won't be up for six months, but wouldn't you want to take a look so that you're not scrambling when it comes renewal time in case you do want to look at alternatives. So you have to think what value do they get, even if they never buy from you? All right, there is your cold calling frameworks crash course to recap. We covered your tailored permission opener where you leave with context. You own that is a cold call and then you get permission to pitch. Most people when you do this right will give you permission. But when you give your pitch instead of leading with a value proposition filled with buzzwords and benefits, instead, you're going to hit them with a problem proposition to give them context for your value, where we layer in the different descriptors, the emotion, the scenery, the annoyances, etc, with our joining them in the pain tone. And then if they don't book a meeting right away, when they hit it with an objection, we are going to agree with the objection. We are going to incentivize them to share more. Hey, just so nobody from my team calls you again. Plus a question about the objection. And then we will sell the test drive. Why should they take the meeting even if they never buy from us? And so if you follow all of those frameworks, you are going to have a stacked calendar of meetings. But now we got to do a little bit of discovery to turn those meetings into real deals. There are two big discovery problems. We are going to teach you how to overcome in the section of the master class. Problem number one is if you are struggling to uncover or discover or get what you need to on a discovery call, pain, problems, massive impact that it's worth spending money to solve. A lot of sellers struggle with this because of what I call the Cheshire Cat problem. There's a scene in the movie Alice in Wonderland where Alice comes to a fork in the road. And there's a cat in the tree, Cheshire Cat, and she says to the Cheshire Cat, "Hey, which way should I go?" And the cat says, "Where do you want to end up?" And Alice says, "Well, it doesn't really matter to me." And so the cat goes, "Well, then it doesn't really matter which way you go." And so for many sellers, the same thing happens on their discovery calls where they vaguely know what they need to uncover. But I'm going to teach you here how to build a discovery map, a discovery tree, to help you always uncover massive problems worth solving on a discovery call. However, that leads us to issue number two that plague sellers, which is they might be able to get massive problems worth solving. But a discovery call is not just about you discovering. Your prospect should also be discovering. Our prospects are not joining calls with us with the sole intent of answering all of our questions. They're coming to get their questions answered and learn how we can solve their problem. And if all we do is discover, discover, discover, we are not building enough trust with them that we can actually solve their problem. And so we need to balance both of these things. We have to uncover big problems worth solving while also building enough trust that we can solve them. So we're going to teach you how to do both. Let's start with the first one, which is uncovering massive problems worth solving. This is something that would have helped Alice so much if she was selling compensation software for pave and helping companies make equitable compensation decisions and communicate total rewards, salary, benefits, equity to their employees, which is what pave helps with. And so I'm going to show you what's called a discovery tree. A discovery tree is simply a map to help us go from situation, which is literally how they're doing things today, to operational problem, which is just like a small annoyance, something nobody would want to do. to an executive problem, something that an executive would care about, to business impact, which is like something the sea suite would care about and really want to spend money to solve. And so I'm going to go through this pay-of-tree. Most folks have multiple branches of a tree. This is just one branch based on the situation of somebody who is planning their compensation and spreadsheets. That's not inherently a problem. That is just how they are doing things today. And so for my map, in order to get to a place where they would want to spend money to solve, a problem, I got to get to a problem. And so there are two problems that at Pave, we know arise as a result of planning compensation spreadsheet. Problem number one is they spend too much time in spreadsheets. It's not very fun to do compensation out of an Excel doc. Problem number two might be they can't oversee manager decisions because managers are making comp decisions in 800 different spreadsheets that are not all connected to each other. Okay, well nobody would want to do these things. These are problems, but these are small problems. And in order to get somebody to spend six figures, I got to make the problem bigger. And so I can attach these operational problems to a bigger problem. So if someone spends too much time in spreadsheets, that might be leading to compensation mistakes. If somebody can't oversee manager decisions, that might be leading a compensation inequities. Someone gets paid 75 grand, and someone gets paid 120 grand for doing the exact same job. Well, both of those things create retention and risk issues. And so I know based off my Pave discovery tree, my map, that if somebody is planning comp and spreadsheets, that I should be asking about these things. And depending upon which one they tell me, I will ask about things layers deeper based off of the branch of the tree. Now this is a simple one based off of one situation. However, when you're building these for yourself, there's a couple notes. Thing number one is like, actually I'll start backwards. You will have multiple trees for multiple products, problems, situations, competitors. When you are going through these trees, you don't need to get everything on one call. You always want to go down before you go up. Once you've gotten the business impact, I shouldn't be going back up and asking about situations unless I've really explored that business impact. The deeper I go, the more I need to balance, give and take and watch my tonality. If I'm talking about sea level risk, I probably can't be flippant about things. So let's actually go through how I would navigate a discovery tree on a discovery call pretending that I'm a rep at Pave. There are two different big situations I would be looking for at Pave. I just went through the first one. The other one is simply if they are communicating total rewards to their employees. So I might jump on the call and let's talk about how to navigate a tree. The first thing that I want to ask my prospect to navigate the discovery tree is why did they take the call in the first place? So I might say something like if they came inbound, I would just say, so what prompted you to reach out? They might say, while we're planning on compensation and spreadsheets and we're looking for a better way. Cool. If I'm outbound, I might say, well, look, I know Dave on my team reached out to you last week and I can't imagine you take meetings with every single person that emails you. I guess what prompted you to want to take this meeting today? And they might then drop me at the situational level and say, we're planning compensation and spreadsheets. Again, that's not a problem. I got to go deeper. And so the way that I can go from this layer down to this layer is using what is called a multiple choice question. And so I might say, you know, that's something we see a lot. You know, typically when folks tell me there's planning compensation and spreadsheets, that either means that they're spending way too much time on spreadsheets because it's a pretty manual process. Or it might be that you're worried that you can't oversee manager decisions and people are making different comp decisions in different documents. I don't know if either of those are happening for you. So I'm using what's called a multiple choice question where I give them both options here and see which one they bite on. Now they might say, yeah, you know what, we are spending way too much time in spreadsheets. Okay, well, that's a small problem. No one's going to spend $100,000 to save a little bit of time. So I have to tie this a layer deeper. The way that I go from the operational layer down to this layer and to be clear, I'm not going to immediately do this. I'll probably ask some more questions here at this layer about how you're doing in spreadsheets, how many they have, what other systems the spreadsheets talk to to help me paint the picture of how we solve it later. But eventually, I know I need to go down to the executive level problem. My favorite way to do this is by using what is called the magic moment question. And what I'm going to say is, you know, David, I can't imagine you woke up earlier this week and we're like, we've got to fix this compensation planning issue. I guess when was the moment that you realize you needed to solve this problem? And almost always what you will get in return is a story about how they accidentally paid somebody the wrong amount of money or they paid someone too much and had to pull it back and then they threw a fit and threatened to sue. And that takes us down to this layer. And sometimes even this layer, you get so much more color when you can get them to tell you a story. Then if you just ask question after question after question. So your action step here is think about what are the main problems that my product solves? And what are the situations that we need to be true to create those problems? When you build your own discovery tree, start at the problem layer, then go up and say what situations have to be true to create those problems. And then think through what are the executive level problems that are created from those high level problems. And when you build that map, you can use the very basic, why did you take the call? Multiple choice and magic moment. When did you realize that was a problem? Questions to very efficiently navigate the tree. And because you have become so efficient now your call is going to be a bit more balanced because you only need to spend part of the call uncovering those massive problems we're solving. Now we can start to make it feel like a conversation, not an interrogation. And we can start to build some trust that we can solve those problems. I'm going to give you a couple different techniques for this framework master class of how to build that trust and make it feel like a conversation. Technique number one is to use vertical questions instead of horizontal questions. Horizontal questions sound like questions where I am just asking questions at this layer where I get on with them and I say, oh, okay, how are you planning compensation? How are you communicating total rewards? What is your tech stack? How many employees do you have? Are you also based in Amia? When I ask a bunch of situational questions, it doesn't feel like I'm going anywhere. Each question that I ask needs to build down layers deeper. That makes it feel like we are actually diagnosing their issue, not hunting and packing and asking random questions. So step one to making it feel like a conversation is focus on vertical instead of horizontal questions. So technique number two is called a playback, which is just the most basic form of active listening. A playback is anytime your prospect shares a big chunk of information and goes on a riff, all you're going to do is repeat back what you heard from them in your own words. This does three things. Choose that you're listening. It gives you a free comprehension check where if you get something wrong, listening, no, actually, it's this and three, it actually gets them to yes and you where they'll say, you know what? That's right. And then they share even more information without you having had to ask a question. So it feels more like a conversation, less like an interrogation. Technique number three is called a pile on, which is where when your prospect shares a problem, you expand on that problem. You pile on to that problem based on what you know about that problem. This is really powerful because one, it shows your prospect that you've seen the problem for and you know it. This is how you start to move yourself into that trusted advisor frame. Two, it helps you make the problem bigger than it was before and you can move their operational problem towards the executive problem or the impact problem. Oh my gosh, it takes me so much time to do these spreadsheets. Yeah, I know. And it ends up, you end up having people who end up making mistakes and they miss things because they're hard coding stuff into 17 different cells and connecting it with ADP. Oh my gosh, you know the space on your right. We had a mistake last month. Boom. Now I went from operational down to executive level or even impact level. So pylons can be very powerful. Last technique is to use short parallel stories sprinkled throughout your discovery call. And so throughout the call, you might say things like, you know, honestly, you kind of remind me of Acme Law. They were like another 40-ish attorney law firm that we worked with who they were billing like 17, 18 different insurance companies and dealing with a lot of like the appeals that it sounds like you have. And so one of the things that we worked with them on and we'll show you this in the demo was how we set up some like workflow validations before they sent bills out the door so that they didn't get so many of those deductions and stuff. And I guess I'm wondering like, I think you shared that you're working with tub and nationwide. I guess how many different carriers are you working with right now and which ones are giving you the most issues. So what I'm doing here is I'm sharing one to two sentences on someone else's situation similar to theirs. I'm sharing one to two sentences on the problem that they had. This is where I can leave in a little bit of pylon to show that I know the problem. And then I'm asking them a question to pivot back to discovery. So the pressure is not on me to tell them more about our workflow tool. I want to keep discovering, but I did just give them a little bit. So we feel a little bit more balanced. All right, that's I wrap on our discovery framework section to recap. You learned how to not be like Alice in Wonderland and know what you want to get nowhere. You want to end up on a discovery call by building your discovery tree to go from situation to operational problem to executive problem to business impact. And you learned how to navigate the tree using the questions. Why did you take the call using multiple choice questions and then using the magic moment question to get them to tell you a story from there. We taught you four different techniques to make the call feel balanced and build trust and make it feel like a comment. conversation, not an interrogation. We talked about vertical instead of horizontal questions, playbacks where you recap what you heard from them, pylons where you add to the problem and parallel stories as a way to micro pitch without actually having to pitch. Now when you do all of these things, right, you are going to build so much trust. You're going to uncover such big problems that your prospect says, I want to move forward in your sales process. And you might be wondering, well, Nick, how do I move them forward? How do I drive this deal forward? Well, we're going to teach you how to do that in your sales process right now. So let's start with the biggest mistake that sales people make when they think about their sales process, when they think about their sales stages. So what I have on screen here are the very common stage names for most sellers sales process. You can see most of these stage names are really just meetings or things that you would do. Stage zero discovery, stage one demo, stage three, giving a proposal. Just because you've given somebody a proposal, which you might do in the second meeting, doesn't mean they're 80% of the way through the buyer's journey. The problem with sales stages or a sales process like this is that it is based off of what you, the seller, have done, not where the buyer is in their buying journey. And so what I'm going to teach you here is how to build a sales process based off of verifiable exit criteria of where the buyer is, which then informs what you would do next to progress the deal. And when you do this, you actually have a lot more flexibility and creativity for how you move and drive your deal forward. And so we're going to teach you to build a sales process that is based off of exit criteria, not meetings. Now to be clear, you might need multiple meetings to move through one stage. You might need to show three demos to get them to stage three. That's okay. At least you're dealing with reality. The inverse is also true. You might be able to consolidate stages if you can be efficient. And so this will actually help you speed your sales process up when you do it right. So what I have here is the perfect five stage sales process. What I'm going to walk through here is each stage, the exit criteria of what I'm trying to get for each stage, what good sounds like and what bad sounds like for that exit criteria. And then we'll talk through how you can get that exit criteria, both from a who and ways to get it perspective. So let's start with problem agreement. Problem agreement, the exit criteria is the champion agrees to a problem that they believe it is worth exploring and maybe even spending money to solve. Good is a problem that actually impacts the business. Bad is we need to save time or we love pave. Those are not problems. Some agreement is the first stage we are trying to get. From there we move to solution agreement. Solution agreement is that the champion agrees we are the best solution to solve the problem. Good is they clearly believe and have explicitly said that you are the best vendor to solve that problem or in the freaking hunt to be the best vendor. Bad sounds like they want to see a proposal, they kind of seem interested but they weren't explicit. That brings us to power problem and solution agreement where the power power in the deal agrees to both problem and solution agreement. So they believe that this is a problem worth solving and they believe that we are the best solution to solve that problem. They agree that this fits in their priorities and that this supports their priorities. That's what good sounds like. Bad is yeah, looks interesting, send over a proposal. That then brings us to commercial agreement. The exit criteria for commercial agreement is they agree that it is worth the price and we are aligned on all major commercial terms. That's not just the price. That is what it costs. That's a number of licenses. That's the deal term, etc. Bad is, oh yeah, the price looks good but we haven't agreed on things like term. If they want it for $100 per user but they want to sign a one month term instead of our standard three year term, we've not gotten full commercial agreement. And then stage five is vendor review. The exit criteria is we have a signed contract. Good is the contract is signed. Bad is the contract not signed. So those are the five stages of what we are trying to get. Let's talk about who is involved at each of those stages. I kind of alluded to it. Problem agreement, you got your champion. Solution agreement, you have your champion and one more. Maybe this is a director and a director or a director and a VP. Over here is your champion and power. So you've got your director and a CXO. We're depending upon the level of your sale. You've got a director and a VP. You know what power is for your deal, I hope. The next stage is we've got our champion. We've got power and we've also got finance involved so they can fully sign off on these things. And then vendor review, we got the whole crew. Not only do we have champion, power, we also have finance, IT and legal who's doing the red lines. Now the cool thing about this is when you orient around exit criteria of what you need to get instead of what you need to do, there's more than one way to get each of these stages. So I'm going to zoom in on problem agreement and let's talk about the different ways that I can get problem agreement. The most common way that I'm going to get problem agreement is your classic discovery call, which we literally spent a third of this master class teaching how to run. There's one other way to get this, which is with like a data audit or some other deep dive process audit. We would do this when I sold billing software to law firms. We would actually run an analysis of how many bills had been rejected to give them a sense of like the dollar value around this to determine what it even makes sense for you to solve the problem is it worth it financially. But the main way you're going to get this is going to be a discovery call. When it comes to solution agreement, this is when you start opening up some options. So you got your demo. Now you might need to show multiple demos to fully get solution agreement. When I sold to law firms, we might have to show six or seven different demos to different stakeholders. So it ended up being our champion plus like 10, not necessarily plus one. Other ways that we can get solution agreement would be a pilot or a POC, let them try before they buy or a case study actually walking them through how we solve this problem for another customer. We've got some ways that you can get solution agreement here that are beyond just your traditional demo. Now the good news is when you know your exit criteria, the way that you figured out, do I fully have solution agreement is you just ask them this question. You finish your demo or you finish the POC and you say based on what you know about us, do you believe that we're the best solution to solve your problem? If they say yes, then you can talk about this stage. If they say no, you need to figure out which of these tools am I going to use to drive my deal forward. Let's talk about power problem and solution agreement here, which is stage three. The way that I'm going to get this is I've got a lot of different tools. So I've got what's called the big team demo. This is typically when I'm bringing together all the stakeholders that I've met with. I've got my executive and I give them the recap of what I've learned and then I walk them through a harbor tour of how we solve the problem. Another tool is a shared business case that I co create with my champion and other stakeholders where I actually document the problem, the impact of that problem using those discovery trees and then how we solve that problem to have a very short summary that I can share with the executive. There's other tools I can use here. I can use reference calls at this stage to get my customers to sell on my behalf. Two other tools that I like to use. Once you have power involved in the deal, this is when I like to pull in my executives. I pull in my power and I match power with power to get my CEO to talk to their CEO for executive alignment. They're going to be able to sell better than you because they have more experience than you. One other approach that I like is called the road map call. This is where I'll pull in my product team to give them a sense of, hey, this is what we have today. But here's some of the functionality that it's coming down the line to get them excited about the vision of what your company is building and prove that you are the most forward thinking player in the space. So you got a lot of flex here. I recommend at this stage, do not just throw spaghetti at the wall, work with your champion to explicitly ask or if you can ask power explicitly, what will it take to get this exit criteria from you? Let them tell you the questions that will be on the test. And then you can just prepare for and answer those questions at this stage when we have moved to full commercials agreement where we get them to agree to all of the terms. This is where I'm going to have a proposal meeting. I might have a negotiation meeting where we're going back and forth and trading horses. I might get on with procurement pro tip here. Use your champion to coach you behind the scenes. If you can get on text message basis with them, they can help feed you inside intel and help you get your deal done. Over here, we got a lot going on in vendor approval. So a couple of pro tips here. One is you want to get legal and legal on a call if possible. When you are going back and forth in red lines, one of the fastest ways to move this quicker is to get your legal team and their little team on a call instead of just doing red lines over a word document. You're going to be doing your security reviews. You're probably going to be answering questionnaires about data access. Pro tip at this stage is to get what I call a weekly vendor review touch base on the books. This is a 15 minute sink once a week with you and your champion to unblock any items. Your champion can be the one to nudge their legal team to get the red lines moving a little bit faster. They can push security to approve you on something that they were being kind of obsessive about. So use your champion as a way to lubricate the vendor approval process. So that's it to recap what we just covered. We are reorienting our sales process, not around what we are going to do, but instead around what we need to get. We talked about the five stages problem agreement where our champion agrees to a problem we're solving solution agreement are champion agrees were the best solution power problem and solution agreement where they agree it's a problem worth solving and they're with the best solution to solve it. Commercials agreement where we agree on all of the major commercial terms, not just price, and then vendor review where the exit criteria is a signed contract. When you reorient to this, you can then focus on what you need to get and the most creative or most strategic way to get that instead of just following discovery, demo, multi-threaded proposal, etc. Folks, thank you for joining this month's 30 NPC masterclass. Make sure to let me know in the chat what topics you want to see us cover in the future. We've been doing more like AI for sales sessions, we've been doing more prospecting sessions, but let me know what you want to learn from 30 NPC, and I will make sure to add it to our docket. Thank you again for joining us and we will see you next time on 30 NPC.