Ep. 365 - Special Guest: Jen Allen - How to run a group meeting

Welcome to SaaS Talks from Lead to Close, where I'll be sharing with you everything that I've learned to close leads. I went from quitting my first sales job because I was too scared to talk to strangers to becoming a VP of sales for multiple tech startups where I built a sales team from scratch and led them to an acquisition. I'll teach you how to schedule more demos on your calendars, close at least 50% of your demos, and build a pipeline large enough so you're always hitting quota. If you're looking to scale, then turn the volume up. All right, everyone, welcome back to SaaS Talks from Lead to Close. We have another special guest, Jen Allen. Fun fact, she has a website, demandjen.com. She's a former chief evangelist at Challenger, co-founder of Social Social with Will Aitken, I believe, right? Yep. And she also runs Community Growth at Lavender. And when I asked her, hey, what do you think reps need help with, she said, how about running a group meeting? And so how to run a group meeting, how to open it, how to run it, how to close it. So when you say group meeting, how do you mean? So I think group meetings have traditionally been looked at as like, hey, it's a large enterprise thing, right? Like if I'm going to buy a CRM system, I know I got to get 10 people involved, probably a lot more. In SaaS, I think for a long time, we were able to get away with maybe one person or a couple people saying yes. But now, even these lower ticket items, maybe I'm looking at 5k, 10k, it's the amount of disruption that they're causing to how things get done that's causing all these people to come in, not necessarily the price. So I think, especially in SaaS now, we're having sellers who are saying, I'm not used to having to get this kind of consensus. I have all the people in front of me on the computer screen or in the room. What do I do in that meeting? That's what I mean by group meeting. And you're referring to like that initial meeting, the demo meeting? So this is where it'll get interesting. One of the mistakes I think I made a lot was when I got the group into a meeting, I felt like, all right, I'm at the final mile. I got to show them all the solutions. And one of the things that was a huge, huge lesson for me when I looked back at why I was losing deals is because I actually wasn't getting the group on board with the problem and the priority of that problem to begin with. And so I would run into those meetings. I would arm my stakeholder who I was working with, my coach, my advocate, whatever we want to call them, to go in and say, hey, we're going to learn all about this sales training today. And then you get like five or six people in the room who are like, I don't even think we should be doing sales training. I think we should be buying a piece of tech, or I think we should be focused on negotiation. And so no matter how good of a job I did talking about my solution or my demo or whatever the case may be, it didn't matter because the group wasn't aligned on the problem it solves. So I view this as a kind of an early stage motion. You have your first call with your buyer, you get your second call to align on cost of inaction, and then you help them bring in the right people. And that's what I think we'll kind of go deep on today is how you do that, how you run it, how you close it. Yeah, that's interesting. So it sounds like based on that flow, initial discovery call with the main buyer, secondary call to get two real people in, and then third, let's just say a tailored demo presentation. I'm definitely going to say this. So this is definitely not for the S&B model where they're getting, especially for inbounds where they're getting a demo request, hey, I want to see a demo, and like, no, no, no, no demo today. It's a discovery. They don't want that. They're like, show me the product. All right. So let's jump into it. I'll let you lead us a little bit. Let's talk about first how to open it or how to get the buyer. Yeah, how to open it. That was the first part of it. Right? Yeah. So I think a lot of this, this is kind of my philosophy as a seller who's made every mistake in the book. Like so much of it comes to how we prepare. So before we get to opening, like let's take a real scenario, right? I have had many, many situations where I get a very interested stakeholder who reaches out. I used to sell sales training, right? And they'd be like, I love the sales training. I want to bring it in. Here's our problems. And I get really excited because I would match their level of excitement. I would assume that everybody else in the business felt the same way because oftentimes that person was tasked with the job of buying sales training, right? So number one mistake I made was I would talk to that person one-on-one. I'd figure out what they think they need. And then I'd build this like, you know, solution back and I'd share it with the buying team. What I'm talking about is in that first call with that buyer, and to your point, like you got to show, there's certain times, like, especially in an SMB motion, you got to show them so they understand, should I be this excited? But let's say we've checked that box. We've got to understand, is this truly a problem that needs to be solved? Or is it nice to solve, especially in years like we're walking into now? So what I'm doing there is I'm giving them a formula to calculate what is the cost if you do nothing to solve this problem? So for me, what I was always selling on was how many deals were dying to status quo, right? When you talk to a sales leader, they talk about competition, price, product, all these factors. Many of them underappreciated how many of those deals were being lost to status quo. So I'd give them a way to size it. I'd have them come back to the next call and say, all right, what are the inputs? Let's do the math. Is this a problem that the business needs to solve? Or it's this like little problem you want to solve? If it passed that test, it was a big enough problem we could show that there was a significant cost, either financial, risk, whatever the right metric may be. Now I'm saying, all right, now before we throw this up in front of this group and tell them we want to sell them a solution, I'm going to write an email for you that's going to pitch the group on coming together to talk about the problem. So this is step one of the tactics. In that email, I always think it's better if we write it, they can flavor it up with their tone. But the email sounds like this, was speaking to Jen at X company the other day. She raised some really interesting points about how much we may be underappreciating. We're losing the status quo. You fill in whatever your problem is there. Would it be a bad idea to come together and explore what we are seeing here for our own business and determine if this is something worth solving? Cheers, whatever, you're signed off. And what I'm asking them to do is set up a conversation, not on the solution, but on the problem. Right? So that's step number one is make sure people are coming in, not thinking like, oh, I don't want to evaluate sales training. I got a lot of other stuff to do. This costs money. I don't want to spend money. Step two is when you get to that meeting, taking what you've learned from that one-on-one discovery and then building into a, just a very simple one-pager. I think a lot of sellers do this, but going in, not trying to convince the team that this is the current state, using that as a source of disagreement. So a big mistake I made a lot was I would go into those group meetings and I'm trying to convince everybody, you should prioritize this as a problem. You should want to do something about it. And when you come in with that tone, with that motion, I think people back off because they're like, you're, you're trying to sell me something. You don't feel like a peer. You feel like an outsider. So instead what I'm doing is I'm taking, here's what I've learned so far. I don't work for your company. I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing, John, you know, we're talking a lot over here about new logo acquisition, you're in client success. How would you prioritize this problem relative to what you need to do? Right. So I'm potentially seeding these disagreements statements so that the disagreement isn't happening behind closed doors. It's happening when I'm in the room and I can prompt people in the buying group to kind of respond to it. So I'll pause because I know I'm talking a whole lot right now, but I think the core tenant here is I actually want disagreement because if you get 10 people together, which often is the case for any purchase these days, unless you're on like the very small SMB side, you are going to have disagreement and dysfunction in that buying group. And we have to just lean into it instead of leaning away from it and just hoping like if we don't acknowledge it, it won't happen. So let me stop there. Yeah. A couple of follow-up questions. Number one, let me actually write it down. Okay. So the first one is when you say you're trying to understand like what is the cost of an inaction for them, what's the actual, what's an example question that you've actually asked them? Because like, Hey, what's the cost of not doing this? Sort of like salesy. Absolutely. No. Yeah. And that's also putting all the effort on them. They're like, I don't know. I showed up to the sales call. I think that's your job. So when I talk about giving them a formula, I'll give you an example of a company I use. I was selling to a really large tech company and they were sort of saying, Oh, we want sales training because, you know, we want to make our company more attractive to new hires. I'm like, that's the fluffiest, fluffiest reason to buy this. You're not going to spend what it costs to do that. So I was trying to pivot them and say, okay, that's great. Let's put that aside. Where I am curious is, have you ever looked at your pipeline to determine how much of your pipeline is actually being lost to status quo? And they said, no, we haven't. How would we even do that? When you say status quo, what do you mean? You mean like, what's status quo? Yep. So status quo is they didn't buy from your competitor. They just chose to do nothing. Like good was good enough. So there's plenty of stuff I've looked at. I'm like, this would be so cool to have. And then I look at the cost and I'm like, nevermind. I'm cool with just the way we're solving the problem today. So they said, no, we haven't looked at it that way. And so I gave them a formula. I said, go back. Here's one way to sort of get a read on it. It's not perfect science, but go back, look at your pipeline and then in your CRM, identify of all the opportunities that are forecasted for this year, what are the opportunities that have not had a meeting in the last 60 days? Now 60 days was unique to them. Sometimes it could be 15 days, 30 days, it doesn't matter. Now let's have an honest conversation. If you have not had a conversation with a customer in the last 90 days, why the hell is that in a forecast? That right there is a red flag for status quo. So I'm giving them a formula. This was unique to what I'm selling and saying, go back, look at your CRM data, come back to the next call and tell me how much it was. They came back to the next call and they said, holy curse word, it was $90 million of pipeline. And so all of a sudden, this really nice to have little thing of like, we want to make our company more attractive to new hires, went from nice to have to, we've got a $90 million problem. And so all of a sudden they're comparing $90 million of cost of inaction to what was probably a million dollar contract, right? And that's what I mean. Like you don't want to do the ROI, the upside, all that stuff, because it's just nice to have. You want to compare early on, what's the cost of doing nothing? This problem is going to fester. Interesting. So the format of your question is really not about like, like you said, having them do the work. I'm going to ask them a very specific question. I'm trying to think for like someone where we're selling, I'm using Gong, for example, because they help. I can work the sales. They can say something like, if they want to figure out the cost of inaction, like what percentage of your pipeline, something similar to you are not closing because of X, because of competitors. And they can say, oh, let me look at it. Oh no, there's a $500,000 worth of leads that are not closing because of competitors. And so, and then let's just say you figure that out. All right. Then how do you sort of like, not do a like gotcha, but like, you see, you really need this. You really have this problem that you need to solve. Like what's the next? Yes. Okay. I love this question because now like all of our sales innards are like, let me pitch my solution. Right. Like here, I'm going to be your hero. That's where we got to have a ton of patience. Right. And this is a mistake I made all the time because you lose credibility. Switch back into that seller mode. Here's where I say, think like a consultant, right? Not in the sense of ask a thousand questions, but like think like a consultant in the sense of, okay. We agree that there's a problem. It's big. It's nasty. It's not going away. Now let's come together. And this is where the team, like this is where you can really easily get around those like weirdness of, oh, I don't want to go over their head or like you bring them on board with this. You say, you know, everybody in your, in this team, I imagine it's going to be this person, this person, this person is going to have a perspective on this. So rather than get really far down the line and then try to drag them in and get them up to speed, let's have a conversation to explore. What are all the alternative ways we can solve for this problem? What I'm selling you is one of them, but I'm going to take what I've seen in working with other executives in industries like yours or companies like yours. And we're going to just explore, you know, the three or four possible routes you can take. And that there's so much conversation around, how do you build trust? How do you build credibility? In my opinion, I think when you're willing to step back and think like an employee, instead of think like a seller and just say, let's lay out all the pros and cons, obviously I'm going to be biased, but I'm going to have an honest conversation around, you could do this right now. And maybe it makes sense to defer this till later. That's the kind of reputation I want to have as a salesperson. And that's the purpose I think of the group meeting is to put all those options on the table, weigh the pros and cons, get that disagreement. That's really interesting. I would have loved to be a fly on your sales meetings. They're so fun. Like once I got, once I figured out what I was doing wrong, I lived for these group meetings Because people expect you to show up as a seller and pitch them. And when you don't, it's like, you can watch these people on zoom. I don't care what the format is. You watch these people and they're like, okay, we're actually talking about what I care about, which is a problem. Like consider the fact that one of the biggest businesses ever is therapy and self-help, right? We as humans love talking about our problems. We don't want some stranger we don't know telling us they know how to solve a really complex problem by just buying our product. Yeah. I did it. I did this today and I call it like unselling. I don't know if I call it. I've seen it before. I had a lead come through before our call and he was telling me his deal wouldn't reach like 20 to 25%. He wants to do it to bring it above 30%. And he asked me like, well, what have you done in the past to try to like, you know, solve this problem? And he mentioned a competitor or whatever you want to call him. Like, and he's like, he worked, you know, it worked well and you know, I'm just looking at other options. I'm like, why look at other options? I mean, why not just continue using this particular person since, and he would convince me as to why it doesn't work anymore. That's interesting. Okay. So that's, that's really exciting. Wait, really quickly on that thing. Cause you do this, you do this when you were on the challenger podcast last year, you had one of my favorite quotes from any of the, why not later? Why not later? Right. That is an example of unselling. I like, I don't know if that's a real word or not, but let's ride with it. That's an example of someone who's not reeking of my favorite, one of my favorite terms from Josh Braun, like commission breath. It's like, I'm really trying to look at this from the perspective of, should you even be throwing your time and energy? And I think buyers appreciate that we get like that shows that you have experience as a seller. Like you're not just trying to convince everybody to buy all the time. Yeah. That's really insightful. So, um, all right. So we talked about how to open the meeting. Um, so you're, you're part of, let's sort of do a recap part of opening the meeting is using a question or having a question that is an investigative question. I would call it, um, about their metrics or whatever it is about their problem. Um, and then you're doing a follow-up with other people in the team, not to pitch anything, but just to look at alternatives and to dive a little bit into the problems. What's an example of a disagreement question you talked about, like doing a disagreement question or like you want to run the meeting where people are disagreeing, so to speak. Yeah. Um, so one of the questions I'll ask is I'll put up that summary statement of here's what I understand about your business thus far. And I will ask early on who is a different opinion on this. And I will sit like uncomfortable silence is our blessing here because people are reading you. They're like, how honest can I be? And the longer we're comfortable sitting in discomfort, the better. Now, if it gets so awkward where you're like, all right, I'm burning all this time. That's when I'm going to, that's when I'm going to see it. And I'm going to say, okay, a lot of this problem statement is around, you know, as an example, I had a customer who ended up in this meeting, not agreeing whether they should be solving for retention or new logo acquisition. I thought it might come up. So I asked the account management leader, a lot of these problem statements are about new logo acquisition. Do you actually think that's the real problem here? Or do you think the business is more at risk because of customer retention? And he like sat there uncomfortably for a moment. There were almost 20 people on this call, by the way. And he was like, yeah, I kind of disagree with this. So sometimes we actually have to like make it safe for them to talk about it. But that's a simple question you can ask all the time. Who's got a different opinion and those different opinions, they will come out at some point. I want them in the, I want them there when I'm in the room and we can have people respond to them. Yeah. I try to teach my students on this when they're doing demos, when you're showing a feature and sort of asking like, yeah, ask like, hey, how does that align with what you're looking for and all that? But like ask them like, what wouldn't work for you based on what I just showed you? Another one is like, you know, Debbie, Debbie just talked about this being the bigger issue, but with your role, I imagine that this is also important. So how do you weigh these two problems? You don't have to have someone battling it out, but you can have someone think out loud about here's how I decide the relevant importance. And that's all great insight for us to know that helps us determine, is this actually a deal with legs or not? Yeah. And this transitions into the third part of what you were going to say, like how to close it. So let's just say the, let's prerequisite that a little bit. Let's say somebody does disagree. What's your, what's your next move? P.S. If you're still listening to this and you want to get better at discovery, demos, closing and everything in between, like multi-threading, negotiation, closing, then check out FDTC university, my on-demand sales training, the best part students join in a few times every month for live sales coaching with me. So you're not alone. You're not just going through a course. You actually have a coach that helps you along the way. So if you feel like you're leaving money on the table and you want to level up your sales game, then check out the link to join FDTC university in the description below or visit demo to close.com. Yep. So if the group doesn't achieve consensus, I want to isolate what that stall is, right? And I want to say, let's, and this is where I think some intuition is required. So if someone's just like disagreeing and they don't have a valid reason for it, I think that opens up an opportunity to say, look, it seems like there's some potential disagreement on here and here, whoever my stakeholder is, can I work with you to collect data on this point so we can revisit this discussion, not based on assumptions, but actual grounded in data, right? And I'll isolate what is that thing? You'll say that on the call with like 20 people, whatever it is. I will. Okay. Yep. Because I want everybody to know what are we doing? Not just like skim it over. Oh, Mary, let's talk about this afterwards. So that's, that's one thing. The second thing is if, if it is a valid disagreement and they've got, it's not just like, Hey, I think we shouldn't do this. I will ask, I will turn to the group and I'll say who, who here agrees with that. So if we have to kind of pick a lane, who's on that side of the fence. Now this is a place, again, I think so much of sales is about being comfortable being in awkward situations. I don't want to make that person the enemy. So a lot of this is tonality. Like we want to empathize with them. I see your point here. Who else sees it that way? And this is where I'm going to get a read in the room. Is this person that, that person who always naysays everything, or is this someone who actually is a valid point that people agree with? The key here and the place I mess up a lot, candidly, is just time management, making sure I allow for enough of a conversation there. Like I think you got to save at least five to seven minutes at the end to do this in case you get one of those landmines. And then I'll say, you know, depending on where the room is, if it's like 75% of the room agrees with that person, I'm not saying this is the right answer, but to me, I'm like, I don't know if this is the deal I'm going to prioritize because people buy because of problems. If I haven't got alignment on the problem, I don't know that this is worth my time. So that's kind of how I think. Do you tell them the reason why you're doing it? Like you're like asking them, like, here's the problem statement. Who disagrees with it? Who agrees with it? Are you giving them the reason why you're doing all this? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I will start every meeting and this is a great way to like lower the, like, again, I'm just like quoting all these Josh Brown things. I know you love him too. Like the zone of resistance is I'll open the meeting and I'll say, look, you know, we are here today because we've identified that this could be a potential problem in your business. It looks like it's costing you this. First, we're going to figure out if that's in fact the case and everybody sees the world this way. But I want you to know something very clear. I have no intention of trying to convince you to buy a solution for a problem you don't have. So today I don't want to talk about solutions. We'll put it in the parking lot if it comes up, but today is all about the problem and figuring out, is this something we want to prioritize or not? And then you got to stay true to that, right? Again, it's all about being really good hygiene, about not slipping in and going happy years on like, and this is why our product would be so great about it. So you're setting the objective in order to give yourself permission to sort of dig and challenge all these folks. Do you ever get folks where they're like, Hey, we just, we want to see some of us want to see the solution. Yeah, of course. Actually, it happened a lot with many of the entry points for me. My entry point, the people that would come in as leads were almost always sales enabled it. And what do they care about? They don't care about the business problem. Cause they're not close to it. Many cases they want to see the solution. So that example I was talking to you about, they actually came to the, like, they were the people I was talking about with the meeting with 20. And they said, we don't want to have this conversation. We just want to have a conversation to show them challenger. Because I was actually coming in after two other people. They had already got to contract stage and then they, they couldn't write. So I was like, this is, I'm going to die here. I'm going to lose this call. So I was like, yeah, I go, listen, we will absolutely get to that. I commit to you that we will get to that in the conversation, but if you do not get alignment on whether the problem that we solve uniquely differently from these other two competitors is more important than these other problems, this is going to become even harder for you because now you're evaluating three people instead of two people. And so I'm trying to relate to them around like, what's, what's at loss for them if they don't do this. And educating them on my, why is why I want to run the meeting like that. So of course that meetings opens up, they put, they position it like, Hey, Jen's here. She's going to tell us about how challenger training is going to help. And that's where I like, I never want to make someone look bad. So I say, we'll absolutely get here. But then I use the scripting I just shared with you. And in that situation, it was one of my most fun deals I worked last year. They literally went from like red lines completed from one of these other suppliers to moving forward with us. That's like, that's the power of just taking control and having that like unselling attitude that you talked about. You have to be very comfortable, literally challenging the person. I mean, I'm listening. One way to avoid that situation where they're coming in, your main buyer is like, Hey, everyone, we're here to see product. Before that, when you are setting those next steps, set the agenda of those next steps in advance. True. Yeah. Great point. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. And Curious, why are you writing the emails for them? Is it just so you don't trust them or is it to have them do less work? What's the reason for that? Reducing effort, right? It's all in my opinion, especially right now when people are doing so much more with less, it's like buying is an extra job on top of the job they already have. And it's a little bit quality control. It's not that I don't trust people, but I'm like, are you going to, are you, it's just easier for people to talk about the solution. We all do it. It's hard to talk about the problem. So it's, it's twofold, right? Part quality control, making sure it's set up the right way and part just making it easier for them to. That's it. That's interesting. I've seen people do this for like letters of recommendation. Like, Hey, can you send me a letter? Recommend me like, yeah, can you just tell me what you want me to write and I'll send it to me and I'll, and this does the work for them. That's interesting. Wow. I could talk about this all day. All right. So I think we're, we're at time. So we'll do two things. Number one, if there's anything else that you feel like you want to add, feel free to add it. If not, feel free to plug yourself in. Yeah, no. I think this is just an area where first, I appreciate you having me on because I think this is something that's very different and we just have to keep practicing. Very different. Yeah. Very, very different. I, the last thing I would say is like at the end of the meeting, I, I've started using your statement. Is this a problem worth solving? Is this a problem worth solving right now? It is one of the best things I learned. I'm not just saying that to like pump your pump, your ego. I really love that. In terms of what I'm doing now, it's wild, right? You know me, I've been spending the last 18 years in sales. Now I'm in marketing responsible for growing community at lavender, which if you don't know it, it's basically an AI assistant for writing emails. So it's not going to write your emails for you. I'm a big proponent of using AI to help us not replace us, but it does help you make sure you're not making stupid mistakes starting like, I hope you're well, and this is who we are and doing all these things that we tend to fall into the traps of. So I'm really excited to work with them and start building community over there. Nice. And anyone can find you on, uh, on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. I did one tick tock video. It's going to be my one and done. I'm not, it's not my channel. It's not my channel, but LinkedIn, you can find me. Cool. Well, I appreciate you. I think we're going to do a part two. I have a feeling because, uh, yeah, this was, this was, this was a different take, very different, unique take on, on sales and how to approach meetings. Thanks. I appreciate that. That's what I go for. Yeah. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you found this relevant or practical at all, then please share this episode. Until next time, I'm your host. More a suite. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.