ASP Live: Why Did I Win or Lose the Deal?

In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill creates a less than memorable acronym. I share an old college lockjaw story and we give a framework to help you know why you won or lost a deal. All right, here we go. You guys ready? Let's put it in a little chair. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast. The longest running sales training podcast and podcast. History, my name is Brian Neal, Bill Kasky. We are your co-host today. We are actually doing a little fun thing. We're doing a pop-up recording session. We're live in front of a studio audience. How about that? There's about 450 people here this morning. We're recording in any amp, plus we're really thankful for all of you. They're not 450 people. Looks like it though to me, but I'm really happy that you're all here. Thank you for that. If you are looking for a sales speaker or someone to bring in to your company for a sales launch kickoff in January, February, March, now is the time to get a hold of us. You can go to our website, advancedsellingpodcast.com. Look for the little button that says bring us in or come see us. What does it say? I think it says come see us. Come see us. You can also send us an email, listen to Advanced Selling Podcast, put in the subject line, come see us and we'll start the ball rolling for that. You'll hear from Brian. Yeah. You're my question. You officiate games in front of 60,000 people and this is a big project. I try, I'm focused. I try to narrow it in. We also have the comment there. So we have this live, so we've a bunch of sales people. No, no, no, no, no, but we're recording this podcast. We've got energy in here and there's also right next door like in the same place. There's a CPA tax review deal going on. So I told the woman in charge, I said, hey, if it gets a little dry in there, not that it would just send them over to the podcast recording might be a little bit better deal. So so I was thinking the other day, you know, I listen to a lot of podcasts and it really is funny when these authors and these experts always come up with an acronym. You've heard of the acronym smart as goal setting. Yeah. Anybody remember what it stands for? Of course. The S stands for specific, attainable, realistic. No. I don't know what you are. Retrograde. Realistic. Reverb. Reverb. Yeah. And the T stands for time, time, time, time based or something. Yeah. So we all know that we've heard down before we failed. We had a C plus on that drill. No, that's okay because we've heard that. Does it? And so then there's the one Aida and I never know quite how to pronounce it. Aida, Aida, Aida, Aida, it's a marketing acronym. It was a great play or a movie with Madonna, wasn't it? Oh, no, that's Evita. My bad. Evita. For all you musical fans out there, thank you for laughing. Marketing. Awareness. Awareness. Interest. Decision. AID. And then these acronyms are great. So and then there's fear. What's that one? False. Appearance. Appearing. Real. Right. Yeah. Well, I've got one. Yeah, I always like it when the author has one and I know what happens is we sit around and say what's going to cause people to remember this framework come up with an acronym and nobody ever remembers it. So I've got one here on communication. It's frameworks encourage stimulating conversation in every situation. Frameworks encourage stimulating conversation in every situation. My acronym is feces. That's crazy. I thought well, if you're going to remember something or you're going to remember fear or you're going to remember feces. Oh my god. Aren't you really? You got it. You know, that's the one thing you guys remember from this anyway. That's my fun. Everyone's right. Right that down. Everybody's writing down feces. Unfortunately, on their no pad. So it's great. I can like this. It's great. Well, you can listen to all when the episode see now my junior high brain is kicking in. Isn't it? It's really bad. I still want to say conversation in every situation. I think that's true and I don't want to go here. But in my wife is sitting right here and she knows this is a top. I don't like to talk about this topic. Just that whole the feces. Yes, at all. It's just and some people are very okay with it. One of them is sitting in the room here. One of my clients, their group. They talk about that and I just I'm not okay with it. Just now I'm just saying right there. So I didn't think that's how we were going to start off. But okay, okay, then here we go. All right, ready? Talk politics. Kind of culture. Go. Okay, so topic today in my rounds and travels with my clients something that tends to pop up a lot and they usually pops up with on the front end and I wish it popped up more in the back end. And that is everyone wants to know how can I win a deal or how can I not lose a deal. And then there's the aftermath when I win or lose is can do I look back and do I know can I point to why I won or why I lost. And what I realized as I start to talk about deals going in, I'm realizing people sometimes don't they don't peel a deal back for enough to figure out why they won or why they lost. Both of them are going through it and then afterwards. And so I thought it would be a really good thing to give our listeners and our group here are 450,000 people here in the room a framework to figure out and to help them figure out why did I win or why did I lose a deal. So and I've got three things written down that I normally teach all my clients that might be refreshers for some of my clients in the room. And then I added one for me. Okay. I do. I do. I mean, do you have? I got three. Yeah, three. That's good. What did you start? Let me start. Okay. So and what I want you to think about is so the way to use this. So you're looking at your funnel. So you've got salesforce.com or HubSpot or whatever that is. This is a great lookback. So if you look back the last 30, just close out the month of October and kind of spot check some of these things and say, okay, can I look back and figure out why I lost or more importantly why one. Because I think it's a really good mechanism to look back. Sometimes we want to look at why we lost. We don't look back and say, why do we want to? We're just like glad it glad it came in. So the first thing I have written is motive. Number one is motive. And so did I win this deal because I understood and connected with the motive of the person that I was selling to or did I lose the deal because I got fooled or tricked or thought that the motive was something else or just flat out missed it. That's my first deal. Okay. Motive. And can you say that? Can you figure out why and all that other stuff? Do you want me to turn it into an acronym? Motive. Oh, yeah. Not really. After the last one. My acronym. My acronym. Repentations. Bad. Yeah, I would want to know which is kind of part of this motive is did you do a thorough assessment? Did we really assess the situation or what I see a lot of times is we kind of jump to the proposal. We jump to the presentation. And maybe it's our customer is wanting that. Maybe we are so anxious for the deal that we jumped to the presentation, but was there a fair amount of assessment because I think within assessment is motive within assessment is motive. So we just we can say to the customer, well, I do want to fix this and they'll say because if I don't fix it, I'll lose my job. But we don't know if that's really true until we really get down and assess the situation. So and I know that a lot of times we sales professionals are not really thorough with assessment because we like that we like the action and we like to close the deal and get the deal. And unfortunately if we're only closing 15% of the deals, which is the standard B2B conversion rate, it means we're not assessing enough. So I think assessment and motives are kind of very similar. I agree. And if you do it, right, if you assess it deep enough to find motive, you'll get more efficient. Because I think what people, what people confuse this with is they think, well, if I go deeper, I'll find deeper motive, which will make me close more deals. And that's not the case. The case is you'll go deeper, find nothing and realize you don't have what you thought you had going in and save yourself a ton of time and energy going into that. So that's a really good thing. If you're doing assessment right and it's a great little spot check for everyone in the room and also our listeners is how many deals have you said no to in the past 30 days or someone wonder how many deals have you said, you know what, I hear your situation. I don't think it's right or I just don't think that we're going to be able to help you any better than who you're with now or how, look at that and see how many. I bet it's almost zero will be my guess. We've got heads not in the shake and I love it. So it's a good little question. Okay, let me go again. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. All right. Next, this is the big, to me of all the things that cause a deal to be won or lost, it's how will you do this subject and that is how do you manage the process and the process is theirs and yours together. And I can't tell you how many times we think we've got it right, we've got it all pegged down and we don't. And so it's a double whammy, either we don't understand theirs or we have not articulated ours well enough, deep enough to be clear enough to say now there are sometimes when the process is out of our hands, I know everyone deals with this where the where people are fact-gatherers and they get something together and then has to go somewhere through procurement or it's multi-tier decision making all that other jazz. Your main deals to understand it. It doesn't matter what it is. It's going to be what it is. Your main deals to understand it, then you manage your risk, then you understand where you're exposed, I always say when I'm teaching this, where am I exposed in the process. So if a deal has got to get approval from a procurement group, then you're exposed. It doesn't mean you don't pursue it or anything. It just means that you know you've got, there's something there and I always got people like there's someone from the healthcare world. Their healthcare buying system is crazy now because they've got these vendor management systems and they have to apply and they have to get their, you have to get a TB shot, right? Right, again, to not forget it, or TB, what is TB? To Berk-Yelosis, okay, it's not Tedness, right? That's when I drink out of a tin cup. My Tedness shots, I don't get long-drawn, right? It was down at IU. There's a game in IU we played in this bar called Nix called "Sink the Bismarck." You know, I was down there with my kids. We didn't play "Sink the Bismarck" with them. We talked about playing it with Sprite and then I thought that's still a bad idea to teach them, you know, but there was a family playing or a group of women playing behind us and my kids were like, what are they doing, dad? And I'm like, well, you got to tell them the truth of that point, right? Yeah. But they used to be in 10 buckets without any liner in them. So they're amazing to get a lock jaw on college sidebar. Anyway, process, sorry. Yeah, I would say one thing you can do when you look back to learn something from deals you got or didn't get is where in the process did you give it away? Where in the whole sales cycle did you lose control of the process and thus gave the deal away? And there's usually one point. It's when the customer asks for something and you feel-- you felt like, oh, god, it's probably not time, but oh, he sounds like a really good interested prospect. So I'm going to give it to him. And so be thinking about as you look back at these. Where did I make that move that I had a decision to make? Do I follow my process or their process? And you pick theirs because that's where you started to lose the deal. If you lost it. If you won the deal, it's the same thing. There was probably a point in time where you said, Mr. Prospect, I appreciate you asking me for that. But I can't do it that way. I'm going to do it this way. And that's when you win those deals. So there is always a point in time, I think, where we act. We ask. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Default. And think too. In that process deal, be real with yourself because there are times all of us have these where we get lucky. And so I want you to be real with that. I want you to take too much credit sometimes. You're like, you know what? I just had good timing on that deal. Because that happens, too. And I'm a fan of more of a optimistic you create your own luck kind of person. And still I believe that's out there. So don't be afraid to say, you know, I just had really good timing on this deal. Process wise, I was exposed going through. I wasn't in the room and they made the call, but they chose me, you know, crashing, then you're good to go. Don't be afraid to know that. That's a good learning thing to say. We got lucky here. How can we keep from relying on luck in the future? Isn't that the idea? How do we keep from relying on last second field goals in the future? Yeah. Loaded topic. OK. Again, yeah, sure. I got two more. All right. Next one. Take a guess. Anybody have a guess? Any guesses? It's great. My clients are in the room. I teach this all the time. There's no money. It's the next one. Money's an obvious one, right? So did I lose the deal because of money? Money doesn't mean that I got beat on price. This is the thing that people think, like, well, we lost it because we got beat on price. That is not why you lost it. The reason you lost it is because the value connection, the framework that you used to connect pricing to what they were trying to accomplish and the other motive things didn't align well. So don't ever think you lost a deal on price because you did not. I guarantee you did not lose a deal on price. Price was a part of it. But this deal about the whole money aspect, and we've got a-- Bill and I teach a lot-- we're work really hard to teach our listeners and our clients about framing that whole conversation around the economics of the deal. You're supposed to use this language a lot. And that includes our side of it, but also their side of it. So what does their return like? How willing and compelling are they to write a bigger check than they're writing out? All those sorts of things. You can audit that and say, I won it because I did a good job. Because your thing is funny is-- I've had clients do this. This just kills people. When you lose the deal and you were the lowest price, that's bad. It just sucks. The feeling of it's bad. You're like, oh my gosh, I can't even buy a deal. It just sucks. So that would be a thing. Like, OK, did not. Yeah, good. Yeah, and the problem is that when we lose a deal and we're high price, we always blame it on low price. Always. Always right. We were so high. But when we lose a deal and we're low, then we've got nobody blame on it. Which brings me to my fourth point, third, fourth, third. Yeah, yeah. And that is, when you get a deal, I think you should patch yourself on the back and say, I was a critical component in why we won that. Oh, good. I know we always say, well, our product was good. You were talking a little bit. You said you rode the wave. Well, you know what? Our product was good, but you had to represent it in the right way. By the same token, when you lose a deal, I think we have to look at ourselves and say, what did I do? What role did I play in us not getting this? Was I not kind enough? Was I not present enough? Was I not curious enough? Did I not bring up the difficult subjects the way I should have? So you can patch yourself on the back when you win one, but you also have to take a deep look at yourself and say, what role did I play in us not getting this? And that's a tough one because we want to externalize, we want to blame. But sometimes we just weren't the right fit, the chemistry with the customer wasn't right. Maybe we were in a bad state that month because our funnel was, you know, we were aggressive and attached and fearful and scarce. So I think if we're going to take the good, we also have to take the bad and say, what role did we play in that? And we don't talk before we play in this one, do you see mine right there? Can you hear it? So how did you-- Yeah. So this is the one I added to we don't talk. I'm just going to say the exact same thing Bill just said, which is how did you show up? That's your energy on it. This is the thing that now I'm reflecting on myself. I don't teach this enough. I think I need to bring more of this to my clients to say, we've got to look at our energy and say, how did we just show up mentally for the thing? You'll hear NFL teams say, we had a great week of practice. We had good energy in the building. They say that all the time. And it translates out, great thing to audit yourself going into this because sometimes when time goes on, you forgot how you were at the beginning. You forgot where your energy was at the beginning. You remember where it is at the end, but you forget how your energy was at the beginning. You say, you know what? When I first got into this deal, I was feeling needy, little scarce, whatever. And so no wonder I got taken down a path. It's a great thing to do and energy audit. It could also work too if you have a full pipeline. And things are going really well. And then somebody calls you and the deals may be not as big. You're not quite as excited about it. That'll show up too. So the key is to how can we become present? And it's not a big deal for us, but it might be for the customer. You're a really big deal for them. So we've got to make sure we-- - Fo sho. That's my last. - That's good. Me too. If you'd like for Brian or I to come visit you, we're now booking for January, February, and March of this year. And you can email us at [email protected]. Subject line comes to us and start the ball rolling and Stephanie from our team will get a hold of you and we'll start the ball. And we'll see about one or both of us coming out next year. - See you next time. - See you next time. - Bye. - That's it. [APPLAUSE]