#608 - How Mapping the "Shadow" Org Chart Got Me to 305% of Quota

So today we're going to go through the critical thing, especially in enterprise sales, which is not just how do you map the org chart in a company to figure out who's your champion, who needs to be your exec sponsor, who's your detractor. What you really want to be thinking about is how do you map the power base, the political, invisible spider web in your customer and your prospect. I spent a lot of time learning this technique and it's definitely one of the things that helped me get to 305% of my number this year and finishes the number one rep out of almost 100 sellers. I've learned this from sales leaders, I've learned this from a book called The Power Base, so I'm going to consolidate these learnings and take you through my exact strategy for how I do this. Perfect, so we've split this episode into three chapters. We're going to start by the exact way that you map the power base, the shadow org chart, the political org chart with your champion, then we're going to talk about how you get access to the different people that you need to win over, and the blockers you need to neutralize, and then we're going to talk about your playing, cupid, matchmaking, why are the building strategy that you use to make sure that you win the deal? So Laura, you were telling me when we were prepping for this, this is not something that you are wasting your time with before you even spoke into somebody. You're not even doing it after like the first or second call. Give me context for when you map the power base, and then I would love for you to show me this crazy diagram that you are using to get your champion to basically coach you how to win over the whole org. Absolutely, and thank you for having me. It's my favorite topic, so excited to hopefully share some learnings here, and you're spot on, like you cannot do this until you have real trust with someone on the customer on the prospect side. So if you're an enterprise sales, this could be a couple of months even into your cycle, and it might be a champion, you can even do this with a coach, to be honest, doesn't really matter. Champion is ideal, but just someone who you trust enough and who trusts you, that they're going to open up the kind of kimono on the organization here. I'm going to show kind of what this looks like, and then I'll work backwards to sort of how I get here. I mean, this is real life. I'm obviously not going to zoom into individual names on here, but you can see this is where I do all my org chart and power base mapping. There's so many ways you can do this with AI or in other tools. I just prefer it in mirror. It's just my preference. I'm going to zoom in on one here. This is a fake company, next var chemical group. I made it up, but this is kind of what it would look like in in real life. And you'll see this one's been a little bit built out. I'm down to, you know, like six layers in in some of the teams in this particular chemical manufacturing organization. So I'll just rewind us to where this starts. So I will always build the initial framework of the org chart. And I will always start with pretend, you know, send into PepsiCo. I will go to their leadership page first. This is obviously super easy. You can find CEO, CFO, SVPs, etc. So I will just manually kind of build these into my org chart. I will just guessing presumably, in this case, Scott reports into Jordan. I can presume that COO Valentina reports into Jordan. And so I will build out that first layer. I'll then also go to LinkedIn. Again, easy go to PepsiCo's page. I'll open them up in sales navigator. And kind of do the same thing, you know, PepsiCo. And then I'll probably seniority title. Like I'm looking to build out at least CXO and maybe SVP, VP type level. And then I'll kind of filter a little bit by if I'm looking for building out analytics org. For example, I'll look at analytics and kind of see who comes up at that title, senior director. Maybe I'll add Vomesh, VP here, Jeremy. I'll add them in. So I'll build out that first couple of layers. So maybe here I've gone down to, you know, I've added Fatima in Nadia, Exetra. And you're just taking your best guess at this because I'm an idiot. I have zero idea how to build something like this. I mean, you're smarter than me, but it seems pretty comfortable. I mean, PepsiCo is a massive company next to our chemical group, not a small aura. I mean, you're smelling a massive company, Laura. But it's just guesswork. And the point is, you kind of want to get it wrong. Once you got to this point in your sales cycle with your champion coach, whoever, I will get on a call with them. You know, I'll make up some excuse to have a one to one. Or maybe we just have a weekly one to one or something already as part of our engagement. I will say, Hey, I've been selling analytics for a long time. I know how many people are involved typically in in these kinds of decisions. As do you, you've been at the company for a while, you've been in this role. What I would love to do if you're open to it is can I just walk you through the different people who I think will need to be involved in any kind of decision on thought spot. And you know, you tell me if we're thinking about things in the right way. And then together, we can kind of figure out if we need to involve these people and when that might be. So you said something really interesting a second ago. You said, the point is to kind of get it wrong. And I thought I was supposed to be clairvoyant and get everything right as a salesperson. Don't I look silly if I get it wrong? No, the, there's a book by Chris Voss, the never split the difference. We've had them on the show, Laura. Okay. So you know, and I'm sure so many people watching this will know as well, the whole, the psychology of getting people to a note or getting people to correct you. So if you show someone an org chart and they see people are in the wrong place, they will tell you that you put them in the wrong place. How do you team this up? Because I imagine you don't just like pull this up and you're like, so I built this thing. I guess what do you say to like introduce? So I say, so I've, I've kind of taken my best guess at your org chart in this scenario. I really want to understand, you know, selling analytics or whatever I want to be in the data analytics org to start off with. So I'll say, okay, so I'm, I presume your CFO reports into your CFO and then Prost, Mr. Prospect, Mrs. Prospect, you've talking a lot about Scott Thomas, your chief AI officer, as probably being the sponsor of this. I see this in different companies. Sometimes CAAI, CAAI is report straight to the CEO. Sometimes I've seen we're going to the CFO. Do I have, do I have this right here? Does Scott report to Scott? And they'll say, yes, or they'll say, no, actually Scott Thomas reports to Valentina over here. There's one really subtle thing that you're doing there. You're not just saying, who does Scott report to? You're saying, hey, I've seen this at different companies. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. And what that is showing is that you are one, you know what you're talking about, which again, continues to raise your status in the eyes of the prospect. Okay, Laura is somebody that I can trust. She's done this before. But also, it's just like you're making their cognition easier here by suggesting as opposed to making them do all the thinking work. And it's this really subtle thing. But when you make this exercise feel heavy to your prospect where they're doing all the giving, even if you get through all this, they're going to be less apt to help you again in the future. And so subtle thing you're doing, but I've noticed you do it at multiple different places. I really like it. Thank you. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. Like if you just say, hey, can you draw out your all shot for me, that's massive cognitive load. They probably don't know as well. So anyway, and then I'll kind of continue a little bit. Some of these names who are lower down in the org, every single time I have a call with a prospect company, regardless of who's on there, I will add them to where I think they sit in the org. So this is a continually evolving thing. And it also just helps me remember who's who and who have we met and who haven't we met and things like that. If I fast forward here, what ends up happening is you end up having a discussion with your champion where you get a sense of not the shadow org or the power base, but you get a sense of like the real org structure. What you're doing here is you're trying to understand who are the people that care about this project. But I think then you're going one step deeper and you're figuring out who has influence over the scots of the world and the other key executives here. So could you take me to what are the types of questions you are asking your champion in this discussion? And what are you trying to understand? So once we figured out, you know, all these people sit here and they sit everywhere and you'll see as well, I have little notes like if I'm on a prospect call and someone mentions, oh, you know, Pina says I love tennis and she's got two sons and things like that. I'll just kind of add some of this stuff along the way again so that I remember forward later down the line. Then I will start to ask questions to figure out who actually matters here. What we find is that usually it's not always who you think it is. So so Pina, so she's okay VP of AI. So I will ask questions like, okay, so like to Pina and Scott kind of get on and then the prospect would either say, oh yeah, you know, like, you know, they're super close and they work together at a previous company. Pina really is Scott's kind of right-hand person for this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can kind of put on that thread like, oh, interesting. So does Pina know about this analytics project that we're working on at the moment? Oh yeah, she's, you know, we keep her regularly updated and things like that and, you know, we send her a summary every week of the different tools that we're looking at and where we are, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so do you reckon Pina is telling Scott that? Like, I'm presuming they meet pretty often, et cetera, et cetera. And then they're like, oh, probably not because Pina doesn't, you know, tell Scott things until we've made a decision on the technology. Oh, interesting. Okay, so Scott has absolutely no idea that this [BLANK_AUDIO] regulations even happening? No, no, no, no. So you can just learn little things along the way. One, you're trying to figure out, do these people have influence over the EB, but then you can go deeper into does the EB even know this is going on? Kind of a red flag if they don't, because then that means probably not their top three priorities. Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, what does success look like today? Slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by Consensus. Go check it out on the show notes. The worst discovery advice is just be curious and ask lots of questions. Look, our prospects are not showing up to sales calls to answer our questions. They're showing up to get their questions answered and figure out how we can solve their problem. And this is what pipe drive does. If you want to get clear, complete sales disability, you can use pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM that is designed to be simple from day one and stay easy to use as your team grows. We actually put together an entire resource hub with pipe drive to help you get to Presidents Club, and you can get them for free in the 30 MPC pipe drive Closers hub. The link is in the show notes. Today's show was brought to you by Outreach, the agentic AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. Great sellers drive velocity at every stage of their sale. And one thing that's worked well for me is assigning red line deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro deadlines for things like first cut of red lines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at outreach. Get it free in the show notes. I think for folks that haven't done this to the level that you have, it might not seem obvious that Scott and Pina, like if she reports to him, you would think, oh, cool, she has influence over him and they work well together. But one thing that I learned is like another executive could come with the exact same initiative. And depending on who it was coming from, look, there's a big or it's especially like there are politics, there are relationships, there's stuff here that like you might not want Pina to bring it to Scott, you might want Fletcher all the way down here to be the one to bring it to Scott. And so your question of do they get on? Do they get along? It seems basic, but you're walking into a world hurt if you have the wrong person, bring the initiative to somebody that matters. If they say no, then obviously you go into, oh, that's interesting. I mean, well, you can go into, you know, how come they don't? I would have expected if she reports into him, they have a good relationship. Or, you know, however that conversation goes. But then you want to understand, say Scott has a couple of ideas that he's bouncing off. Like, who is he bouncing those ideas off? And then they might say, oh, well, Scott always goes to Priya. And you're like, oh, interesting. How come, I wouldn't have expected that. She's not even, you know, she's three levels below Scott. Oh, well, when Priya started in the company, she was in Scott's internship team, whatever it might be. Or, oh, well, their kids go to the same school. So they're actually friends outside of work. They've been friends for about 20 years. Oh, okay, interesting. But I would draw these dotted lines. And this is basically me mapping the power base on top of the org chart. After the call, I'll add kids, same school. So I'll note that down. And then, you know, you can continue. You can do as much of this as natural. I find that people kind of like taking you through this because, you know, everyone likes talking about, it's basically gossip about their company in a way. There's sometimes you want to be cautious. And people will clam up if they say you putting notes on screen. But in my experience, when somebody talks and they see me typing, they end up talking even more and sharing more because they're like, oh, this person is listening. And what I'm thinking is valuable enough to them that they're writing it down. And so again, it's one of these like subtle signals that I think at the enterprise level gets people to open up that most folks would take for granted. If they say like, oh, everyone hates Priya and exactly, I probably wouldn't write something like that because then they're going to come back to them. But I'm actually afterwards. So you get the idea. So you just keep kind of layering in and figuring out things. They'll also usually tell you like, oh, no, Declan isn't with the company anymore. That's an open head count. Or it's actually this new person they've just started. And so they can kind of fill in in gaps there. So you figured out who is going to be a positive influence on the deal. One of the things you were talking to me about in the prep call was neutralizing blockers. Could you give me a sense of like, how are you exploring that Laura? So either I will have a sense already of who's a potential blocker just vibes on cause and things like that. So if I have an idea of who it might be, then I'll firstly call that out. So Kofi, for example, if I've had a few calls with Kofi and she's being really difficult on cause challenging us and just giving very negative energy, then I will say like, so Kofi on cause is really challenging. And I'm not sure if she's doing that because she is tasked with getting this right and kind of her heads on the line. Or if she's anti thought spot and is kind of pushing for one of your other tools. So I'll call it out in that sense. And then, you know, they will correct you. Oh, well, yeah, Kofi is, she is the lead on the Sigma evaluation. So, etc, etc. Oh, okay. So is she, is it fair to say she's kind of the Sigma champion? Yeah, she's, yeah, she's Kofi's pushing Sigma. And then I'll say, okay, and she, like, how come, what does she see in Sigma that she thinks is the right fit? So then I'll get us, try and get a sense of like, how is Sigma or my competitor being talked about internally? How are they being positioned? And then I'll go into understanding how important is this? And so then I'll say, oh, so, okay, so Kofi's pushing Sigma, unique, your profile spot. Are there any other tools that you're looking at? No, no, no, it's just you two. Oh, okay, cool. So Kofi, like, where does kind of she fit in with Pina? Like, does Pina listen to Kofi? Cause I know from previous that Pina is influential over Scott. And then they might say, oh, yeah, like, Pina and Kofi work really closely together, etc, etc. So then I'll say, oh, okay, so should I be should I be nervous? Then that Kofi is kind of pushing my competitor. And then, you know, depending on the situation, but some of them say, yeah, yeah, I'm nervous about that as well, actually. So then I'll say, kind of when you've seen this sort of situation before, how do you kind of bring Kofi along to your side of the table? Because you might have an idea is the sales rep of how to mitigate a blocker like, oh, well, we're going to go, you know, we're going to go around to everyone in Kofi's team and get them all excited about our product. And I'm going to make sure that my CEO is meeting with Scott to give influence there, etc, etc. But again, no one understands the politics except the people on the inside. So I will ask the prospect champion coach, etc. How, what do they think we should do about Kofi? Well, she probably wants to hear about your implementation plan and, you know, kind of what resources you provide. And then this is starting to go into like, what is the action that you can then take off this whole old chop pile based mapping? So to recap what we've talked about so far, Laura, step one is you are taking your best guess at building out the org chart using both the company executive page and then you're also going to LinkedIn sales nav. And in your case, because you sell analytics, you are searching the word analytics and basically throwing anybody who you think you might want to get access to onto an org chart. The intent here is not to get it right. It's actually to get it corrected live by your champion. So not only do you get the real org chart, the most up-to-date version, you then also are able to start asking questions about the different people involved in this and figure out who has influence, who's on your side, who's not on your side. And because you've got this thing up, it gives you a chance to do some discovery about the real power base. What we just talked about was our friend Kofi over here. He, I think, might be a blocker that you need to address some of their legitimate concerns. And then there's also some other people that my guess is as you're looking at this, you're like, ooh, I really need to get access to, to Simone or Fletcher. How do you use this as a way to then get access to stakeholders that you have previously not been given access to? Yeah, so let's take Simone, for example, director of AI. Say the person I'm talking with, the champion coach, however I'm going through the org chart where they will say, you know, Simone is going to be important in this because they're going to look at, you know, how accurate is your AI or whatever it might be. And then if I haven't met this person yet, I'll usually say, oh, okay, how come I haven't met Simone yet? Simone will come in, you know, once we've actually, once we've decided on the technology and then they'll just do some final checking on, you know, whatever it is, they want to check off. And I'll say, oh, okay, yeah, that's, that's very enough. I get that. They don't want to waste their time on, you know, multiple tools that you're evaluating before you've actually shortlisted down to the one you want. But what I've seen happen so many times is that there's a number of people who get involved right at the end. And they will have some kind of criteria that no one knew about. My advice, ideally, is we kind of meet with Simone now and just make sure that we kind of fully understand the criteria. And I will give them an out of me meeting with them. So I'll probably add something like, obviously, you can, maybe you should meet them now before we go ahead with this POC. And kind of make sure their requirements are added to the requirements doc and then they'll say oh yeah, true Yeah, that's a good idea actually Yeah, I'll I have my weekly with Simone a next Monday or do that. So I said okay cool Also, I mean if you're open to it. I can always kind of connect them with our AI team as well Like I know I've been through this so many times the AI people usually like to meet our people to understand really Not just the tech but more kind of philosophically how we thinking about AI within our product and where they see us going on things like you know We're going to go more open source or Simone's probably going to come up with those conversations in your Those questions in your meeting with him. So you think it would be helpful if We may be connecting with that person on my team just so he can get all of those answers up front this brings us to My wedding anniversary was four days ago, but I think I think I smell some love in the air Laura, this is actually the first entry to You're playing Cupid playing Cupid is this strategy where Simone does not want to meet with a sales rep as Much as we might know about our AI and our models and our product and as much even if we were a director of AI or a VP of AI and analytics before The second that they see sales Reptidal. There's a higher level of skepticism less trust and so what you're doing is you are Matchmaking your AI team and their AI team and that is How you are getting at you are getting access to these people because you're getting your team access to these people and frankly They're in some ways better equipped to sell than you are because they are the true technical experts to what these folks care about a lot of the time People are hesitant to introduce you because obviously as soon as someone introduces you to someone higher than them or just elsewhere in the org They're then attaching their name to Your product so if they're not fully bought in or fully trustworthy They're going to be very hesitant about doing that if in this scenario the person I'm talking to is like Yeah, I'm not going to introduce you yet. So, you know, let's circle back on this later down the line once we're further along with our evaluation Then that tells me one is this person who I'm speaking with actually a Champion because a real champion would be more Strategizing with me on To get to Simone and how to bring him in so I'll challenge back a little bit and I'll say like oh, I'm you know I'm kind of surprised because you just told me that they're going to be an important person and they're going to be part of the decision-making criteria So I don't know I just would have thought that you would prefer to have all of these people kind of involved up front before you Then go and invest your time in doing a POC with us if someone likes Simone who's going to have a voice in the decision It doesn't think thought spots the right fit and so I'll test again Like to try and get them to connect me with someone else if they fail that test again Then I'm like oh, I don't think I'm with the right person here. It's also this how exercises Yes to help you understand the power base and to get you to the people that you need to but it's also a great Champion test as well. I think the reasons that you shared with me you do this We already talked about the trust piece. There's just like some people on your side are going to be better at Building trust and selling than you are you're hoping a head-of-eye eye up with your head-of-eye They both can just like talk at a level that you're not going to be able to You also talked about the ego piece if you're trying to get access to a CXO They are far more likely to take a meeting with a member of your executive team Then they will with you as a wrap and so if you ask for access to the CXO probably not going to happen But if you say hey, I want to hook your CEO with our CEO It is more likely to happen this happened to me when I sold the law firms I would want to get a meeting with the managing partner of a big law firm They wouldn't want to meet with me. I was 26 years old and my voice sounds like this But if I got my CEO who was Rizzled and had worked on Wall Street like oh, man, he would just go in and they would immediately get into talking shop And like he was just way better than I was and so you should use that to your advantage So you got the trust piece you got the ego piece you've got the practicality piece Which is you have limited bandwidth as a wrap Laura and it's really tough to hit 305% of your number literally selling what the equivalent of what three sales people are supposed to with limited time and So what this allows you to do is extend the amount of selling time that you have available to you And then also just like from a geo perspective if you're trying to meet with somebody who's in London You're in San Francisco like you just might not be able to make it work so you hook them up with someone in London And then the last piece meeting with a salesperson again people are a little more guarded if your head of AI is meeting with their head of AI You can send them on a mission to be like hey, I need you to figure out what our competitors price that or what features on the road map They're promising you and your prospect will be a little bit more willing to like open up to someone who's not a salesperson So that's the why behind all of this that you shared with me. Can we get into the how maybe we can start with like How you choose How you make your matches you're an expert matchmaker and love is in the air So I look at it across the lens of their role their professional role and then also their personality, so we can go back to Scott for example, so I want to get to Scott a couple of things This was actually I learned this from someone else was to ask your champion and say hey, you know my my CEO loves to Reach out or connect with kind of the executive sponsor for this initiative on on your side And then I'll tone it down. They don't have to meet. He just likes sending a note to say you know, hey Thank you for giving us a chance. We're really excited You know, I'm following this personally. Laura's keeping me updated. You know open to chat through all things, you know, AI analytics You know whenever you need to so I'll kind of bring the pressure down on my champion Like how I'm not asking for all these interest necessarily some of it is just like a warm touch point It's also a you know a champion test to see if they say oh, yeah, yeah go for it They say that's like okay cool this person wants my CEO to message their chief AI officer And then I would ask what kind of person does Scott Typically like to meet with is he more technical is he more business or chart titles can be deceiving my Champion might say oh no, Scott is like super business focused like he's actually more business than than tech So now say okay, I'm what see like what's Scott like is he kind of you know fun bubbly guy? Is he very like analytical no smile kind of thing? I know he's like super straight late He's you know that he's ex-Army. He's very direct. Exceptor, etc Mentally my roster of our our execs in my head like I'm gonna put him with someone who's like super bubbly extrovert kind of vibes I'm gonna connect in with maybe our COO who's pretty Great lace to the point can like match that kind of persona So that's what I mean by like I'm trying to match the professional side of things and then also their just their personality Like who are they gonna vibe with this all sounds very like Foxy and snakey a little bit, but it's also just good partnership because Especially in enterprise when you're in these long sales cycles and then you are I mean their success is your success So all of this as well is just really making sure like is this the right company is this the right tech Is this the right fit for our product tech wise and culture wise and then you just become a better partner to your customer If you can then help your champion also navigate all of these politics I actually think what you're doing is if you Flash forward to they sign a contract with you all and they actually decide to start working with your org to bias and Emma your tech person who's asking about football and gaming They're gonna be working together a lot like they're gonna be working together a lot and what you're actually doing is you're almost like Forward deploying the the relationship before the contract is signed and this gives them a chance to be like Hey, like these people are already trying to build a full relationship with us They're already connecting with us. You're actually just like You're matchmaking before the marriage which I think you want to go on a couple dates with all of the people at the other Oh boy that that analogy is not extending. I apologize But yeah, I don't think it's meaty. I actually think it's extremely customer centric Today shows brought to you by consensus, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room before I show a demo I set it up like it might have to work without me I include these three slides before I drop in number one the biggest problems I learned in discovery number two How we solve those problems and number three eight? What does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30 mpc demo deck template powered by consensus go check it out on the show notes The worst discovery advice is just be curious and ask lots of questions Look our prospects are not showing up to sales calls to answer our questions They're showing up to get their questions answered and to figure out how we can solve their problem And this is what pipe drive does if you want to get clear complete sales disability You can use pipe drives easy to use and customizable CRM that is designed to be simple from day one and stay easy to use as your team Gross we actually put together an entire resource hub with pipe drive to help you get to president's club And you can get them for free and the 30 mpc pipe drive closes hub the link is in the show notes What's going on folks quick heads up the week of September 21st is SKO slash RKO planning week at 30 minutes to president's club There are a lot of companies that spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars at sales kick-offs They fly every one into a place. They take sellers off the floor a trainer shows up and spouts nonsense at them for 48 hours and everyone gets fired up and then they disappear. Well, good news. We have your back because all week, we are going to share practical ideas and resources for free on exactly how to plan a not bad, in fact, a great revenue kickoff that actually changes the way that your team sells. And the biggest one that you don't want to miss is our live sales kickoff masterclass. Go to 30mpc.com/sko to save your seat. I'll see you there. Yeah, it is very custom centric. So yeah, so you get the idea. So I'm trying to match make-across professional line and personality line as well. And then it's also really important about the kind of champion building and org mapping and things like that that you do on your own in your own company. I mean, obviously I've been at Thoughts Book for a while so I know I mean pretty much everyone. But if I was a new rep like you want to also make sure that the execs know who you are. Because obviously they're just as busy as the execs on your on your customer side. Every sales rep is saying, hey, can you reach out to my prospect? Hey, can you meet this person? So you also want to show them that you're kind of going above and beyond to make their life easier. It sounds great that your CEO loves sending a message every now and then do a customer to say I want to support this. But it's not like you're working for a small company. You almost have to sell them on putting their attention on and then doing this. So why don't we talk about now how you actually action these pairings particularly with your execs because if you do this wrong, you kind of look like a dork internally and they're also not going to help you out. Your job when you want to get your execs involved is to make it as easy as possible for them to do whatever action it is that you've asked them to do. So you basically want to give everything up front. Like if I want Kate to send an email to someone, I need to give him the email that I've got written. The email address of the person I'm wanting him to send it to. I need that. Yeah, they're exec assistant to CC them in. I need to give the subject line. I need to tell him, should I be CC'd or not? Should I be a BCC just for visibility? And then a bit of context on like usually this is a Q4 deal. We're competing against these people. I need you to send this ASAP kind of thing. We need. Temple of what this looks like, Laura. Do you have a slack channel called ELT sales, which has all the execs or the sellers and all the execs executive assistants. There's actually a great, it's probably my favorite channel that we have at Thought Spot. You can see, so this is an example here. So what I've got is the emails for Kate and to send it to. I've said like, this is the person, this is his EA. Put me and Francois, who's our chief product officer. Put us both in copy. This is the subject line. Here's the email. And you'll notice that, you know, I tag the exec, but then the real thing is especially for the execs who don't, maybe they don't even manage their own inbox is the EA. So my CEO, that's the person really who I will go to to say, hey, I need Kate, I need to send this email. I need Jeff to send this note on LinkedIn. Like you help them. Yeah, you just the EA that will just send it from their inbox after kind of running it by them. So that's, you just want to give them everything upfront, copy, paste, send, done. Then what I will do is I will put a reminder in my calendar for three days time, you know, no went out. And then I will have another reminder in my calendar. And I'll probably make it repeatable, depending on the sales cycle and the customer. And it'll be something like every four weeks reminder, KTAN to email Michael. And I'll just, you know, do another ghost note of, hey, company product updates or checking in, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. Because that's the thing as well, I think is you don't just want one touch point in the middle of nowhere. You want to actually build a relationship between these people. Like my aim is to have I want my SVP to be texting with the equivalent on the customer side. I want my boss to have a one-to-one with the boss of my champion every two weeks. So it's not just a one and done. It's like you want to cultivate those relationships so that it's not just the first date. It's like it becomes an actual partnership. Okay, we're coming back to my analogy. My, my, my playing cupid dating analogy. Exact sends the note. Prospects response and says, yes, we would love to meet with you. How do you make sure that your CEO goes in and runs this meeting the right way? Always have a prep call for sure over any exact meeting. I mean, that's obvious. If you're not going to read what you, if you just send something, they're not going to read it. You got to get them live. Yeah, you got to get them live. 10 minutes. That's what you really need. And then I will also make a prep doc. This could be something that it would look like like high-level information at the top. You know, what's the contract value that you're selling them? When's the date? Who are they meeting? What's the scale here? And then I'll have, you know, here, like who are you meeting? Sarah, she's part officer at TREX Payroll, talking points, things like that. What do they oversee, etc, etc. Always have pubs at the core. Like, what are you trying to get out of this? Even if it's just, I just need you to build an exact relationship. I need them to feel like, yeah, trust advisory. This is a genuine partnership. And then I'll put, you know, Apex is concerned about rolling out thought spot to this many customers. Like, you need to give them some guidance. Dana is the fake name for one of our execs. You need to give them guidance on how to manage the change management because that's a concern they have. You even give them an agenda. I mean, you literally make this mind numbingly easy for them. It's paint by the numbers. It's usually like no excuse to not to not have this. And as usually happens with exec cause, they might do the first part. And then they will just go off in another direction. And that's, that's fine. That's kind of the point. But as long as they have this and really just narrow it down to like, what's the one thing I needed to get out of this call? I need you to figure out is Sigma still in play here? Or I just need you to swap phone numbers so you can text and start getting on a texting basis. Can you actually give me like if you think about all of the asks that you'll have of cause one of the things that you shared with me is you send them on a mission. So I heard from you was like, is this competitor in the deal? Swap phone numbers so that we can text are there other like FAAs frequently asked asks. I really love for my execs if they're in a, you know, exec partnership one-to-one for them to ask how can we be a great partner to you? Because it often, I mean, one, it's just shows like, hey, we're invested in your in the partnership here, not just selling you the tech. But it will often uncover things like, well, you know, our last vendor that we signed, they completely messed up the implementation. And, you know, so I really need to know that we're going to have the best of your people on this. And then obviously the other thing is budget. Just getting a clear answer from the eb or whoever it is that the exec is aligned with. What do you tell them to ask? Do you just say like, give us a sense of how big we should be swinging? Do you ask do a budget set aside? Like, do you coach your exec on what to ask here? Because I feel like there's lots of different things around budget you might want to actually know. By this point in the sales cycle, like, you should know already is this, is this actually something that they're intending to buy and kind of what's their timeline? But it would be more things like just for them to ask, again, you know, so how does, how does it work getting funding unlocked for this kind of initiative? And there's a phrase that one of my SVP's told me once, which was, why are the building? Which is basically, like, multi-thread and get one on one in front of everyone. And why are the building? Is how is how he described it? And then he said, get all the liars in one room. So he was like, ask the same question to multiple people. So like, I'll ask my champion. So how does funding get unlocked for this? My SVP when he's on the court care SVP? Can you ask how does funding get unlocked? If they are saying different answers, then that's interesting. You know, there's like, who's right? When you're next all on a call is when you make it a bit awkward and you say, I'm kind of confused because I've, and you don't, you don't like name them in front of each other. I'd say like, I've heard that funding gets unlocked in this way. Someone else told me that actually it's this person's budget and he signs, I'm kind of confused guys. And then you see how they like play out internally. And that's, you know, get all the liars in one room and figure out, you want your execs to ask questions that also you've already asked to other people to make sure that what you've heard is correct. Laura, this has been a freaking clinic on mapping the power base, getting access, winning over the right people, neutralizing the wrong people, playing cupid, wiring the building, we're running out of time, so let's recap this thing. So folks, we have put together a lovely cheat sheet for you of exactly what Laura is doing. And so let's use this to recap. So step one, we talked about mapping their org chart and establishing the power base. What you are doing is you are going into your mirror board and you are literally putting all the people that you think you need to get access to and you are seeking to be corrected to understand the real org chart. And then you are asking about who has influence, who likes a competitor, who listens to who, whose kids go to school together, you're taking notes, you're drawing dotted lines, and you are annotating like crazy so that you understand what's actually going on here. And you didn't talk about it, but I bet this makes your pipeline reviews way easier because you can then just show your manager how you're doing these things. Then we talked about getting introductions from your champion to the very important people in this deal. You are usually saying, Hey, you Usually, this person should be involved for this reason. You are framing why it is in their best interest to give you access to other people. If they are not giving you access, you need to kind of fall on your sword and be like, shoot, maybe we did something wrong or maybe I haven't properly explained thought spot. Or you're being like, hey, this is gonna cause risk in this project where, again, it's in your best interest to do this. This is not seller-centric, this is buyer-centric. And then if they really reject you, you talked about you gotta go back and just like PG, Pipe Gen, back into the org. My favorite part was love is in the air. We're talking about playing pubic. And we talked about the reasons. They trust other people more. Egos will get you access. Get your CEO with their CEO. Their CEO's not gonna meet with you as an enterprise AE, no matter how cool you might be. The practicality, you can triple, quadruple, can tuple your selling time by getting other people in your org to help sell on your behalf. And then the intel that you get, you send them in to say, hey, I need to know if Sigma is still on this deal. That is the one thing that you need to do. We talked about the different matches you can make. You get Tobias, the lower level AI engineer talking with your AI engineer about how they love Red Dead Redemption 2. Then you get your CEO, your C-suite connecting with their C-suite by using the EA, the ghost-written message, and then the prep doc, so they go in, and they at least follow the first five minutes that you set. And when you do all these things, you too can hit 305% of your number like Laura. So Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Can I ask one selfish question at the end? Sure, I think you've gotten some value from 30 NPC over the years. I think for the folks who are watching this on YouTube, why should they subscribe? I wanna see your, I know you're a good multithreader. I wanna see your sales pitch capabilities. Why should people subscribe to the 30 NPC YouTube channel? There is nothing that I've seen out there that has as much actionable things that you can literally implement the same day. We all have that phrase of, you know, get 1% better every day. And the kind of feedback loop with having something that you can try that same day and see if it works. Like there's nothing better to kind of hone your craft. So. - You're so good at playing cupid, my heart is pounding, my skin is flush, that's so kind of you. Laura, thank you for joining us. We gotta get you back on again soon. This was freaking awesome folks. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of 30 NPC. - Today's show was brought to you by Outreach, the Agentech AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at Outreach, get it free in the show notes. 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