#597 - How to Sell the Way Buyers Want to Buy | Lindsay Dougherty ft. Consensus

Oftentimes we've been trained to hoard information and content behind a live demo or a live call. I'm doing the exact opposite. If someone reaches out to me and says, "I'm interested in some of your platform or your acquisition," I'm sending it immediately right after the meeting set reminder. So something like Nick, we're going to talk on Tuesday about our acquisitions. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek of that platform. Will you take five minutes to review it before our next call? Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. I'm your host Nick Sigelski with my illustrious co-host Mark Costa-Glo and today we have a multiple-time President's Club winner in Lindsay from Consensus. She's currently an enterprise account executive. We got into some interesting stuff that actually Mark, you would have disagreed with six or seven years ago, but now you agree with so tell me why should people listen? Yeah, I think, you know, Consensus has this tagline as kind of that marketing phrase, buyer enablement. I don't think I ever understood it until this episode. And in this episode, it made me realize things that I used to say that I don't believe anymore because of how much the buyers changed. And I think Lindsay does an awesome job of talking about tactical ways that you can empower buyers to make decisions versus holding them back from making decisions. All right, Lindsay, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get you to three. Uh, yeah, so I call this the Chris Boschall. He wants his hostage back. I am, if someone reaches out to me and says, I'm interested in some of your platform or your acquisition, I'm sending it immediately right after the meeting set reminder. In the meantime, here's a sneak peak of that platform. Sweet. That's great. What's number two? I'm using a sync friendly channels and I'm using them intentionally. So take advantage of not just email and calls, but Slack teams texting. We want to get to the buyer where they're at and make it most convenient. So not only will that bridge a gap and being able to get to them quickly, but your buyers will appreciate it because they don't have to be monitoring their inbox waiting for your email. So for example, to get a text, I usually call. There's a good indication that it's a mobile number based on the voicemail. I leave said voicemail and then I texted that number immediately saying voicemail. This is Lindsay from consensus. Will next week work and either they text me back or they don't, but usually they'll text me back. Very nice. Round us out Lindsay. What's number three? So number three is always send an explainer for the big stuff. Your buyers are not professional sales reps. It took you six months to ramp and you're expecting them to remember everything in just an hour long call. So if I'm going over business case pricing, exact summary, whatever the case may be, I'm not relying on their memory in some slide decks. I'm going to make a short video that goes over those key points. So if it's something with your champion, I recommend five minutes, no more, because they're not going to sit on the video for 10 minutes. If you're sending an FAQ or an exact summary, make that three minutes or less. The goal is to just highlight key pieces. You're not going over everything. It's just the things that confuse you or buyer the most. So I love my reps and meetings. And I just heard you say, I don't hide stuff in meetings. So lots of times we, as sellers, I think we think we have to have something important say in order to do meeting. And if I say it before the meeting, then I won't get the meeting. How you getting out of your own head that way? Tell me the story. What happened that made you say, I'm going to just share it. I'm not going to wait for the meeting. It was really a, I want to say trial and error kind of the first five years that I spent at my first company straight out of college. Everything was a live call. And I was coached that you have to have them on the live call so that you can explain something or you can see their body language or there's a list of reasons why we think that way and have in the past. What changed is buyers have changed. Like they are getting information about your software before they're even reaching you. So people were actually buyers were coming to me with a preconceived notion of what they thought that we did. And then I had to spend the time on the live call unraveling all that information. So I want, I want my message because I'm the best at doing it. Hopefully. I want my message to get to them as fast as possible so that I can educate them the way that I would live. And the best way to do that is to give them just a little bit. You're not asking for like a 30 minute demo recording. It's just a teaser trailer to get them to the movie. You want them to get excited to go to the movie and bring their friends. I'm mostly excited for the movies because of the popcorn. But you know, Mark Langs, did this is something that I experienced where I really started my selling career at least I feel like I did selling to large law firms. And I found that oftentimes like some of these asynchronous things that Lindsey was talking about actually gave me a huge advantage over my competition. And then also Mark to your point helped actually accelerate to get me in more conversations or meetings with my customer. And I think the two advantages that it gave me were number one was like I don't know if either of you have sold to like sold to law firms before or seen the average rep who sells to law firms. No offense if you're listening and you sell into legal. Most of them are really dull and dry and boring and way to like buttoned up and stiff. And I'm not saying that you should be unprofessional or immature. But oftentimes like sending a video explaining how a module worked or answering one of their questions gave me a chance to like give a little bit of personality and build a relationship with them. Something I believe about selling is you can't be perceived to be better until you're first to perceive to be different. So I found oftentimes this helped me like set myself apart from the very dull corporate drones I was selling against. But then too I could use it Lindsey to your point about not giving away the whole farm. If a buyer asked me a question about our you know legal analytics reporting module I was not going to send back a 60 minute webinars worth of a demo video. Usually what I would do sometimes I had to partner with my AC because I was not I was not the one who was actually showing my demos. I would have to partner with them and prime them. But we would send like a three minute teaser showing some of the possibilities and how other firms would use this stuff. And it oftentimes like opened up even further discovery or understanding other use cases that they then were like holy shit. Can we talk about this and that would almost sell a way better meeting than being like we'll need to schedule some time for next Thursday for us to walk you through the platform. So that's my experience. I'm curious how much that matches to how y'all see things. That is a clone copy of how it works for tax and accounting because that's exactly who I was selling. I thought those people are exciting Lindsey. You're super exciting super exciting. No what would happen the most is and this if you don't buy software which I'm actually a buyer to so I'm a seller and a buyer so I've seen the best and the worst of both is they're busy they have day jobs. So me trying to get them to go to even a 30 minute call especially in the beginning or an hour or two hour long demo in the middle of the day is where they sort of put a pause and say do I really need to do this is this worth giving up my bill while hour with the client to then go spend time and then get 20 minutes into it and figure out that actually this is a waste of my time or that it was great but if Nick was looking for something and he sits down with me and he sees what he likes the next thing was well I wish Mark was here. I wish can you do this again? You're like of course but at the same time we're doing the same things over and over and over again especially in the beginning so we want to I want to get ahead of that give them the basic information that I'd be going over anyway and I do all the time give it to them before let them digest let them understand what it does because when you get to that live call I'm not going over that generic information I literally start my calls with what did you think and then I shut up for five to ten minutes how do you decide between video and email or do you just do one of the other all the time do you just type it out or do you do a video or do you swap between or do you do one just one all the time I'm doing a lot of demos and videos just in general like I'm drip campaigning in between every live call because there's always something a little bit that I want them to think about and more importantly share in that buying group and get someone else to come with them. So I'm almost always using pre-recorded demos to get to those buyers that I haven't met yet. And then get them to want to, same thing with the first one, get them to want to prioritize my 30 minute call over something else going on during the day. - All right, so video, second point, how long? Give me, give it two minutes, three minutes, 30 seconds, how long? - The closer you are to this hot funnel, the shorter it should be, because you haven't earned the right to their time yet. And they don't know if it's worth it or not. So to Nick's point sending, you know, 60 minute webinar, even if they're the most interested in it, they're just not gonna sit and watch it. So being able to give them that, that quick hit in the beginning, and then as I have earned that trust and relationship as it keeps going, I can then give them a 10 minute micro demo, we'd say, right? So instead of that high level sizzle reel, now we're giving them a little bit more. And then keep on going from there. - And then are you a scripted video person or just turn on the camera and talk? - I started with ad hoc, just say what I thought I needed to say, and then I ended up redoing that for like 20 minutes and ended up being way too much time. And then I got annoyed and then aborted ship. So I now do bullet points because scripted is tough, it's dingy, it feels gross, it doesn't feel natural and authentic, and authentic content, just like the TikToks, there's a reason why that's a big platform. People like all the fantasy. So even if I say, um, and my dog barks or whatever, I'm still rolling through it. So I do bullet points of, these are the three things I have to get their attention on so we can move on for the next stage. I can totally relate to that because I used to send our, like I saw our sponsorships here at 30NPC. And what would always happen is I would have a meeting with a VP of marketing or ahead of demand gen, we'd spend an hour going through a proposal and then they would wanna go share it with their whole team. And when we put together proposals, they're like full like campaigns, there's creative that I show. And I know if I just send them a PDF, like it's gonna sort of dull things down when they go share with their team. So what I started doing years ago was sending video proposals. And I will never forget, this is probably in my top five most frustrating moments at 30NPC, I spent 90 minutes trying to re-record a five minute proposal again and again and again because every time I said, um, or stuttered, or like didn't say it perfectly right, I started from scratch and I was ready to throw my fucking computer off of the balcony. And one thing that really helped me mark is something I learned from you. You talk about decks, not docs. And what that, that's actually something we've started using in our internal culture at 30NPC is I used to write out scripted all of the sentences, the points that I wanted to make. And instead, Lindsay, I'm doing what you do now, which is for each image or visual that I'm gonna be showing in the proposal, I just write down bullet point one, bullet point two, bullet point three. And it has made my presenting so much stronger and I no longer have thrown any computers off of the balcony. I don't usually do the rep episode. So this is really cool because I am a major buyer. My team spends millions of dollars on tech a year and I get involved in some of those and other ones I don't. And so let me give you guys my reaction to what Lindsay just said. Number one, the idea of less at the further up the funnel or the higher up the funnel, the less you give me, that is, that's wisdom right there. Like if I get a 10 minute video at the beginning, it's way different than a 10 minute video at the end. And then the second thing is is, I do want authentic. If I feel like somebody's reading, I feel like they're trying to sell me versus just trying to explain or educate me. So I think that that's another great thing. The third thing is is I, a lot of times, when I'm in the moment and trying to figure out what I want to do, speed is the biggest thing that a rep has to helping me move myself along in my decision making process. And waiting another week, when now I'm on to two or three other things versus that same day, I get a little video of two minutes and like I'm still, I'm still close enough to that time where I'm thinking about it. I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah. It keeps that momentum of a buyer as me as a buyer going. And I've had a couple reps do this kind of stuff with me in the past. Every single time it was a better buying experience for me as a buyer, then the gate keeping, hey, can we meet next Thursday? And I'm like, dude, yeah, we can meet next Thursday, but I want to know now because I'm about to call somebody and I have a meeting tomorrow where I can talk about this and get something done, but now you're going to make, oh, wait, which means I can't avoid another meeting from my next one on one with them to get things done. And like, so that's just from a buyer perspective, what this kind of, hey, give Chris's, give Chris Voss's hostage back stuff is, is like, you got to remember when a buyer starts, buyer thinks about the purchase they're making less than probably 2% of the time that they're working in and their day. And when they're on that 2%, you can turn that 2% to 3%. If you give them the information they need, right then and there, that 3% to 4%, if you keep it going, versus that gatekeeper stuff just makes them sit around. And you're only ever going to get 2%, or it's going to go back to 1%, even worse. - I'm trying to stay on top of my buyer's mind more than my competitors. Like, it's a differentiator to be able to do that, because I'm not limited to 8 to 5 p.m. And depending on if you have multiple time zones, that's where you get like the musical calendars of trying to get everybody in one spot one time and actually have them show up. So leveraging that async buying experience, not only as a buyer makes it easier, like you said, but I'm also staying top of mind, my competitors have to wait the week to then answer your question, or even if it's demo related, they have to wait two weeks maybe, because our SC that's assigned is out, or calendars just don't align. And now you've had more meetings with the competitor, or you've thought differently, or just something in the organization changes, and now that deals blown up, and that's just because of the timing thing. So I love, even just last night I had a head of sales, I've been in one time, I sent them the exact summary, five minutes flat, and he watched it four times last night between 8 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Eastern. And all the while I was watching TV and putting my dogs. - So the question that I would have top of mind if I were a skeptical listener here would be Mark Lindsay. Why the hell am I sending a demo before I've done any discovery? Don't I need to do some discovery before sharing this? And so I think there is some degree of legitimacy to that concern. I'm curious Lindsay, and then Mark, if you're seeing reps do this when they're selling to you, how can I mitigate against the risk of, part of the reason I think so are the advice of, do your discovery before sending, or showing a demo, is like, I don't wanna step on any landmines, and show them something that actually hurts, or show them the wrong thing in waste time. And so I'm wondering how y'all have seen, or Lindsay, in your case, mitigate against that risk of maybe needing to know a little bit about their situation before sending something to them. - I was one of those back at Don's Reuters when we implemented this motion. I think in part because my training sort of taught me to do that. But I found two things to be true. One, technology's great these days. So a lot of these automated demos are doing discovery for you with the buyer and the driver's seat. So they're still getting access to not only what's relevant to their persona, but actually what is specifically of interest to them and what isn't. So instead of me doing that live in the 21 discovery call that we like to do in the first one, just like, rattle off, they're doing that when it's convenient for them. And so I know that they're getting access to the content that is most relevant. And then what it's doing is springboarding that first live call so that because I know that Nick selected these two use cases of shortening sales cycles and getting larger deals is most important. But he doesn't care about marketing, sorry marketing. Then I know for that call that I'm going to have my case studies ready for those two. I know I'm going to dive in deeper. I know that Nick watched that five times. He shared it with Mark, Mark agrees with most of that and varies in others. So I get all of this actionable insight as they're watching it at Saturday at nine o'clock. So that Monday morning when we have our meeting, I'm ready to dive into that and go for the jugular of why is that so important to you guys? What's happening that's leading that to be a priority? I guarantee somebody can find multiple webinars and our podcasts where I've said don't demo until you do discovery. That's like six and seven year ago, Mark. 2026, Mark would never say that. And I think like, first of all, if you're a seller and you can't change your mind about stuff, you're in big trouble because times they are a change in. And this is what I would say now is, I used to do this. you the demo as this kind of controllable environment where I could create a impression of belief on a buyer and that belief would create the energy and momentum needed to do all the work of the evaluation. I still believe that, but what I believe now is that I don't need to be there for that to happen. And it may happen in an even stronger way when I'm not there. And so I just got done doing a big training today for my sales team. And one of the things that I've done is I try to decouple things that used to be kind of a sequential like milestone of a sales process like a demo. Well, first we do our discovery, our intro call, then we do our qualification call, then we do our discovery call, then we do our demo call, then we do a demo like that's the sequential BS. What I do now is I'm like, there's a tool. You have a tool. Those could be used anything. I can use a hammer for 100 different things, right? I can build 100 different things with a hammer. But if I'm always like, well, first I got to go to this. Then I finally get to use the hammer. The hammer's usefulness isn't as big. And so demo is like that demo is a tool. I told my reps today. I've told them many times. If you want to do a demo in your discovery call, just make sure it's a demo that's designed to get you information. If you want to do a demo in a negotiations call in order to close faster, make sure the demo is designed to help create urgency. And see, like the tool can be used for a million different things, but in a remind sometimes hammer nail, right? And that's all the way that we think about it. And I think one of the things that is I love is when I rep that I'm buying from just tweak things just a little bit differently. And like to your point earlier, Nick, to be better, you have to be different. The first thing you notice is different. And then you immediately start looking for better. And this is like a great way. Like, share your demo right away. Like have a seven minute awesome prepared demo video that you can send ahead of time and be like, Hey, come with two questions about this video and let's start our discovery there. Totally different, probably better, probably more informed. And then the last thing is is everybody has the context of their problem. Most buyers do not have the context of your solution. The longer you have a conversation without both contexts, the more chances that a buyer has to fill in the context that may or may not be true. And the next thing you know that this isn't what I thought it was going to be. It's not good versus just start with the context of the solution right away. Then they know, Oh, I see how this works. I need to understand it better. But I understand the product and the solution. Then your job is just to connect the two. I think that's a really unique and awesome way to handle sales calls. I'll add one thing, which is we had an episode that we were not able to publish because this was a wrap who has closed some like this one of the best reps that we've ever had on on 30 NPC. And one of their action will take a ways was kiss on the first date. And what they meant by that was literally first call, get into the demo to get them excited about this thing to then create some momentum for discovery. And what this person shared was like, if you show up and you hit them with boom, boom, and get them amped up about the art of the possible with what you sell, they are willing to answer 42 discovery questions instead of your typical 21. And so there's a balance of what we're not wanting to do is you have to control the agenda or the frame of why you're showing this of this is not meant to take you through every single use case and nuance. This is meant to give you a teaser of what's possible because that informs them the conversation that we have about how we solve your problem. And when you have context buyer, it helps you understand the questions I'm asking and like where I'm sort of looking to go with them because that's going to dictate what we do deeper in the cycle, which I want to ask about in the last couple of moments of this episode, Lindsay, which are so we talked about before the first meeting, you're sending the very short demo and we talked about deeper in we are sending longer and longer pieces of content. I think the two main use cases we've talked about today are the pre first call video or demo. You've also talked about sort of the concept of if they have a question, you're sending a quick video to answer it to get over. Are there other big places in the cycle or use cases that you have for a sink selling with your customers? Yeah, and actually it's using likely what something I've already sent them and having them use that to mobilize the internal buying group and get access to them as quickly as possible. So I know for some they like to kind of drip and get to one person and the next and so on. I want to get to all of them as fast as possible because all my champion needs to do is hit a share button and ask them for 10 minutes to go over it and let me know. And that's it. And there I know who they are, I know if they're at a former company that used us, I can see again what what's a interest, what's not and then make sure that when I get them on the live call because I gave them that teaser trailer to get to my movie that they're excited to be there. So using it as the ultimate tool for multi-threading and getting to all the buyers, even if I never meet them, I can't tell you how many CROs that I've actually still not met that bought because they saw my demo and they saw it at 10 o'clock at night. And because of that, that they were not a barrier and they weren't holding back. And I knew more importantly, the health of that deal because if I'm having them mobilize these videos and these demos and I've got 10 of them out there and four of them are watching it and sharing it and the other six aren't. Guess who I'm going to follow up with. You know, I that's giving me a buying signal to know what's real, what's not, what I can actually forecast for June 30th and what I can't. And that gets into even later stage of pricing and negotiation and procurement. If my pricing video is again by my champion being socialized and the CFO hasn't watched it and I'm still forecasting it for five days, unlikely. And I'm the one of the worst forecasters traditionally before this because gut feel and will they told me and they promised. But them saying one thing and then doing something and showing me that that buying signal are two completely different things. And I've been able to leverage that even for my own book of business and I know my managers appreciate it because my forecasting is not a lot better. I think this is another really cool insight, which is there's all the rage right now of signal based prospecting. I get these multiple signals. I stack them together and you've kind of moved that concept into the sales cycle, which is I'm going to send them content and demo videos and pre-recorded videos and self-served demos and stuff like that that are allowing them to give you signals back in the buying cycle rather than the only signal you get is them in a meeting and you confuse politeness with them just they don't really want to say no to you. You know what I mean? And like that's where as humans it's hard in as sellers it's hard because we want to we have the happy ears and we misread things. But literally if you say I'm going to send you this and you see somebody from 8 to 10 p.m. watch it four times. That is a real signal of action. Not you possibly misreading somebody's posture in a meeting or whatever. Amazing. Well Lindsay this has been a phenomenal episode. We've got a minute left. So I got to ask you the last question, which is talked about a lot of best practices for sellers. Now I got to ask you about a worst. So the last question is what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sellers exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps. I'm going to say impatience. Patience for new tech impatience for things working quickly and quickly giving up on it because it wasn't the silver bullet that we want it to be. I'm guilty of that myself and that's the biggest barrier between somebody who's willing to not just try something once and then go well it didn't work. It's all set like actually giving it due diligence and working at it and and perfecting it. I think that's the biggest thing for us. Alrighty Mariah, it's time for your two by two recap. What do you got for your two? Number one, the closer to the top of the funnel they are, the shorter your content needs to be. I thought that was just one of those brilliant easy to learn, easy to understand phrases until you've earned trust. Don't start sending a war in peace novel videos. That's number one. And number two, I think the overall theme of this entire episode is just trust buyers. Like instead of having to control and make them wait, just send it and see what happens. And I think that that is just an amazing mindset to have where I know I'm good enough. My communications are strong enough that the buyer is going to make the right conclusion if I just send it. And that speed is the one competitive advantage that you could control. Alright, my two are the bullets instead of scripts when you are sending these videos. I shared the story of like wanting to throw my laptop off the balcony. Lindsay recommends bullet points of the points that you want to make instead of writing word for word what you're going to say and mark you corroborated that with your experience as a buyer of like you want the authentic how they're going to help you, not how they're going to sell you. And then my last one was Lindsay mentioned this, but she actually uses these asynchronous that she sends to inform her discovery. So what she does is she includes a questionnaire that happens before that video that she sends or in tandem with that video that she sends of some of the questions that she wants to get out of the way. And then that informs her ability to do deeper discovery when she gets on the live call. So you can still use this async stuff to do a little bit of light discovery on your behalf. That was a great episode, Mark. Folks, if you wanna help 30 NPC out, we have put together a guide with our friends at consensus on how to get to a 72% close rate. And we've got some best practices in there around uncovering hidden stakeholders and deals, how to create deal momentum, and some things that you can do to stack the odds in your favor, even if they weren't before. So we've got a link to grab that in today's show notes. We appreciate you listening, and we will see you next week on the show.