Playbook 14: The Multithreading Playbook

[music] Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this playbook episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. My name is Armon Furok, and I'm here with my go host, Nick Szygielski. And today, we're not talking about calling one person at a time. We're not talking about calling two people at a time. We're talking about calling everybody and getting everybody involved in a sales cycle. It is a playbook on multi-threading, which in this economy, you gotta have it down because if you're not getting to power, you're getting your butt kicked. Nick, why should people listen? Well, one of the most frustrating things in the world as a salesperson is when you are stuck talking to the same person on one call, two call, three call, and you're like, is this person gonna get this whole deal done for me? Like, shouldn't I also be talking to IT and don't they have a boss who might need to get looped in and who owns the budget? And so, it's really, really frustrating and ineffective when you are single-threaded. And so, if you want to not be frustrated and you want to actually be effective, you may want to listen to this one. Alrighty, folks, and the way we're going to break this down is in three steps. The first section we will map out is the Golden Path. In other words, what is the Golden Path or the order of operations of who you should be getting in front of on an account? And then once we've mapped out the Golden Path, we're going to talk about top-down selling, in other words, starting with power. And then we'll talk about bottom-up selling if you're starting with a champion. Alrighty? So, three, a two, a one, a one, two, three, four, five people in your sales cycle. Let's go. So, Armand, I'm going to start with something to be called mapping the Golden Path, which is knowing where you want to go. And it actually makes me think of, I don't know if you're a big Alice in Wonderland fan, but there's a story where Alice in Wonderland is going down a path, and she gets to a path that goes in two different directions. And the Cheshire cat is there. And she goes, "Which way should I go?" And he responds and he says, "Well, where do you want to end up?" And she then responds and says, "It doesn't make a difference to me." And he says, "Well, then it doesn't matter which way you go." And the Golden Path is the same philosophy. In order for you to effectively multi-thread a deal, and help you and your buyer navigate to a closed one, you need to know what your Golden Path looks like. And that involves sitting down and figuring out who are the human beings that I should be talking to throughout my sales process. Generally, you want to break it up thinking about the different functions or departments that you'll be talking to, marketing, IT, legal, finance, etc. As well as the different vertical strata of the folks you'll be meeting with. So, CMO, VP of marketing, director of marketing, etc. And so, what you might want to do is sit down and map a past deal that you've won, or go look in your CRM and figure out who are the people that I need to talk to, and what are the typical steps that I need to do to get a deal to close one. Alrighty, so now you have mapped out all of the different personas that need to be involved in a sales cycle. And because you're probably a salesperson listening to the podcast, let's use a sales organization as an example of how you should now map the ideal order in which you handle them. And so, while I don't have a great Cheshire cat analogy like Nick does, the analogy that I will give is the famous adage of people by emotionally and justifiologically. And that is typically the best way to carve into an account. Is your first and best option? Is to get an executive involved, so you start at power, in this case that might be a CRO or VP of sales. And you get them swelling up like a tidal wave. You get their emotional and their business problems high, a 30-foot wave, and then you get those to create momentum so that when you go and actually meet the surfers, AK, the champions, AK, the directors of sales, or the head of revenue operations, there's momentum behind your initiative. And then the final piece is there might be some Shubis who are in the way, AK blockers, and you want to handle those blockers last when the white water is crashing. And so you want to go from power to champions to blockers. That is one path. The other more common path that you'll run into is it's hard to get access to power. And so what you want to do is you want to start with your champions. And your champions are going to help you build up that wave so that you can make the wave tall and you can get to power. And then again, you will still handle your blockers last. So in a bottom-up sales cycle, you might start with a director of sales, or a director of revops, or a head of revops. You might go up to the CRO and then you might go ending with your sales force admins, for instance, or the people who are lower level that need to make sure that your product technically works. So try to get emotional validation first and then justify it logically. And so Nick, let's talk about this from a prospecting standpoint now. One of the big areas that a lot of sales people screw up is the only prospect at one level. So they say, "Ah, I want the top-down approach. I'm only going to prospect the CMO." And they ignore all of the VP level people, or all of the director level people. Or they say, "You know what? I want to do a bottom-up motion because I want to get some intel that I can start with and then roll up to the C suite." General rule of thumb is you probably should be prospecting all of those people. And we've learned on this show that you should never win a deal alone. You should also never lose a deal alone. And the same applies to prospecting. You should never break into an account alone. This is for the important ones. You should employ your team. So what you might do is if there's an exec that your CEO is connected with on LinkedIn, use them to get an intro. Or if there's a number of below-the-line people that maybe don't need as strategic messaging as those VPs, you might go work with your SDR or BDR team to get in front of some of those below-the-line people. And so general rule here is you should always be prospecting to try to get into the different strata of titles that you want to meet with. And then once I get a meeting arm on, I should just give up and say, "Cool. I've got a meeting. I don't need a prospect anymore." Right? That's correct. You just stop. You stop and you quit your job because you've done the wrong thing. But actually what you should do is you should keep prospecting until one of two things or both things happen. So number one is until you have a champion who's proven themselves innocent. And the way they can prove themselves innocent is by showing you that they're willing to carry the problem and your solution to other people in the organization. And those other people in the organization are not below the line, they're above the line. And then number two, also do not stop prospecting if you have a complex multi-department sale. So if you get a meeting with the sales organization, don't stop prospecting the marketing or the CS organization unless you have gotten those lateral threads from a VP of sales who's now introducing you to a CMO, for instance. All righty? So we've prospected into the account. And again, we're going to go through two different ways to multi-thread or run a sales cycle. The first is top down selling, starting with power. And then we're going to go to bottom of selling, which is starting with a champion. So let's start with top down selling, aka coined by Ian Coniac, Yo-Yo selling. Let's start with you get that first meeting with power. You're meeting with a CRO or you're meeting with a VP of sales. We're going to talk about the meeting structure here, but only because the meeting structure is important to lay out so you know what we're asking for at the end of the meeting. If you want to know all of the details about executive discovery, there are a number of good episodes that we've run on that. You could listen to our discovery playbook or you could listen to any episode with Ian Coniac or you could listen to some episodes with Anthony Cesario. Any of those three will take you very far in enterprise selling. So let's dive into the structure of this meeting. You're going to do three things. Present your point of view. You're going to drill down a two or three executive level problems and then you're going to ask for the permission to run the rest of the sales cycle, aka multi-thread. And that's going to be the emphasis. Let's start with presenting your point of view. When you go into an executive meeting, it's different than doing traditional discovery with a champion. You can't just show up and ask why do you take a call, walk through a traditional pain funnel and go through technical problems and situations and maybe I can get those situations to turn into a business problem. You get 30 minutes which probably means you really got 15 minutes with an executive. And what that means is you need to show up with a hypothesis on the problem that you believe they have based on what you've read in their 10K, based on what you've seen in the news, based on what you know in the industry. From there, you need to drill down the two or three executive level problems, aka things like we are missing earnings, aka things that would show up in our board meeting, aka things that would be like a downround or missing a revenue target. You need to have specific things that hit a company's P&L or their board meeting executive level problems, not technical problems. And the reason for that is these executives don't know what the technical problems are. And if you talk about technical problems, you're going to get kicked below the line. What you want to do is, again, using that title wave analogy, is you want to build an emotional wave of a 30-foot problem. And at the end of this meeting, you want to ask for permission to figure out the best way to solve the problem with their department leads and come back with a recommendation. So, Nick, how do I actually make that ask at the end of the meeting, when I have this wave that is 30 feet tall. - Yep, so a big part of this is the golden path philosophy that we talked about. You should know the titles of the folks that you need to meet with next, but you've got to go one step further. And so instead of saying, yeah, you know, you will normally meet with sales ops next, you should know the name of the head of sales ops. And so before your meeting, get the specific names of the human beings that you want to meet with next ready. And what I do is I'll actually pull up their LinkedIn profiles and I'll share my screen and show those people. And you might say something like, hey, look, usually when we're finishing a first meeting with a CMO like this, they'll tell us, hey, I want you to go talk to my team and then come back to me with a recommendation. Normally, we work with folks who head up content marketing and demand gen. I think the right people for me to meet with are Dave and Lucy and then pull up their LinkedIn profiles. Now what I need to do is get their affirmation that those are the people that I'm gonna be meeting with. And do not just say cool, I'm gonna go talk to them and come back to you. What you need to do is solicit a direct introduction. So ask them if they'd be willing to make an introduction via email. Because if you leave the meeting without an intro, what are you gonna do? Like, just start calling these people out of the blue. Even if you're able to get a hold on you, you have so much more credibility when they make that introduction and they say, Dave, talk with Nick, he's gonna come back to me with a recommendation. So know the titles, know the names, get permission to get an introduction and get those direct introductions. And then from there, a very common error that sales people make is they've got a next steps field in their CRM. And they go to their boss and say, cool, I've got a next step on the book's next week to talk with the director of marketing who you got introduced to. But you have to make sure you plug the gap with the CXO, that person at the top that you met with originally. And so my recommendation is on that first meeting, even though you have a next step of meeting with some of these direct reports, get that roll up meeting where you come back with your insights and recommendations on the book for three or maybe even four weeks out. And what that does is it gives a sense of urgency for those other meetings. And worst case scenario, you kick it out but do not leave that meeting without that next, next, next step on the books. So now at this point, we've explained who we need to get introduced to, why they need to be involved. And we even have an end marker for when we talk to these people we're gonna come back and give a presentation. Now we need to go and talk to these people. And the best way to talk to these people is to cold email every single one of them. Incorrect. The best way to talk to these people is you have this wave crashing and you should have this CRO or this CMO introduce you over email to each of the department leads. I prefer to have a standardized email template that I send to the executive and I tell them on that meeting, I'm gonna send you an example email could you make the introductions to your team. And it's extremely short and it's basically here's the thing that we're solving for. Here's why I want you to meet with them. Here's what they do, three sentences max. Extremely short, they probably won't use it or they'll tailor it themselves, okay? And then at that point, you now need to run parallel sales cycles. So do not mishmosh the four department leads together. Do not mishmosh the SMB director of sales with the mid market director of sales, with the director of revops, with the head of sales enablement. That is an easy way to burn a sales cycle because what you do is you force yourself to run five people meetings, which means you probably have multiple interests in the room, which probably means you're also doing a presentation because you can't run a five person discovery call. And what that also means is people are going to be silent about the things that are gonna block your deal. Instead, you are now going to run four mini sales cycles with each of those department leads. And again, if you wanna learn how to run any discovery call, you can listen to any of our discovery episodes. But each of those calls will be a classic discovery call with a slight twist at the end. So when I'm running a champion level discovery or a department lead level discovery, I'm gonna do the same thing where I'm doing a traditional running a discovery call, setting my agenda, asking my questions, finding a problem. I'm typically gonna be doing one or two demos with each of those department leads. And at the end, instead of asking them to walk me through a proposal or them to introduce me to power, what I'm seeking out in these three or four department leads is I'm trying to find champions. In other words, I'm trying to campaign for people to vote for me because I'm telling them that I'm going to come back to the CRO in three weeks with a recommendation. And I wanna know that I have your support director of men market. And so again, you're running these discovery calls and you have power and you're seeking out more than one champion if humanly possible. That's number one is find someone to vouch for your problem. Number two, as you are uncovering these problems and getting people on board, it is critical that you do not leave that original executive that you had high and dry because running these multi-department sales cycles can take four weeks, it can take six weeks, it can take months. And so after each of these calls as you uncover key problems and use cases, you're gonna take an abbreviated version of the recap emails that you send the department leads and strip out any of the technical details and focus purely on the problems that you've found in each department and the potential stories or ways you can solve them. In other words, they had this big scary 30-foot wave of a problem they didn't understand but they knew was coming. And what you're doing is you're chipping away at it and you're saying these are the things that we found with each department lead along the way. So you keep them in the loop without forcing them and be in every single call. Part of the value of that also are a month is when you email the executive and you give them the recap of the meeting that you had with their direct report, what ends up happening on the next one on one that those people have is they say, "Hey, and I saw you met with Armand, how did it go?" And part of what you wanna do with those updates is you wanna get people talking about you internally. And so you're doing this to states to top of mind but also to start to facilitate some behind-the-scenes conversation with their team about the thing that you solve. But that should not be the only time that you're rolling these insights up. And so we talked about earlier, you're gonna come back and you're going to have that big final meeting where now you've met with two or three or four people, two or three or four times, and you should have a decent sense of the big problems that you can solve for the executive. And one of the things you mentioned earlier, Armand, when you were giving this weird surfing analogy was you talked about buying with emotion but then justifying and backing it up with logic. And when you come back to the exact to make that big hurrah, almost presentation where you're saying, "This is what we uncovered, this is what we solve," you've gotta hit on both of those drivers. And so you wanna start with the qualitative, the emotional side of things. And the best way that I've seen folks do this, and you and I have been doing this when we self 30 minutes to president's club deals, is you take the faces of the people that you met with, go steal their LinkedIn profile and put it on a PowerPoint slide and put the most compelling quote that you heard from that person all on one slide. And so when you start the meeting, your job is to get that person up to speed. Hey, here's a reminder of you and I met and this was our initial hypothesis. From there, I went and I met with your team and here are the big things that I heard. And it is extremely powerful when that exec sees the faces of their team next to the words of the pain that they are experiencing. And so put that in front of them and that should start to lead you into, here's how we're actually gonna make all of that stuff go away. And so the first part of that meeting should be on the, here's the problems we've heard, here's the emotional piece pulse check. Am I getting this right? Once they validated that you have it right, you should move into some sort of business case. So you do need to move into some sort of logical or quantitative piece where you're talking about, okay, here's how we're actually gonna back up the numbers of how we end up solving this thing. Do you've hit on the emotional pain? You've hit on the logical backing up of, hey, we are actually gonna solve this thing. The last thing that you need to do is you need to get validation from this person of, hey, here's the explicit resources that we're gonna need from your team in order to make this happen. And that's not just, here's how many dollars we need from you, but it's also, in order for this thing to be really successful, we're going to probably need Lucy and her team for a couple of weeks, probably two to three hours a week, we're gonna have a status call, et cetera. You need to give them a slight lens into what is the, not just ROI, but ROE, return on effort. Because the last thing an exec wants to do is bog their team down for a ton of time for something that, yeah, moves the needle, but it's not worth that ROE. - One thing that always put me to rest was, if a sales rep was presenting a business case to me, to next point, I would look at the number, and usually I would know that I could negotiate a software down to what I wanted it to be if I believed in it. But the problem is, I would always know that in the back of my mind, I now have to give this to my sales reps, I have to give it to my sales managers, and I have to get revops to install it. And that's going to be a pain. And so in those quotes, and also in those earlier meetings with the department leads, you should be doing two things. One, if you find a trusted champion, you should be pre-testing price with them. In other words, the first time you share price with the company should not be back with that executive. Ideally, you find a trusted champion and you can at least share parts of the proposal at the department level or what it would cost for that single department, right? And then you can roll it up. And then the second thing is you should try to get champions in each department to buy in on doing the work. So you can show up to the executive and say, I know this sounds like a lot of effort. We've talked to your Revops team, and they have the slack, and it's not going to be that challenging, or they have this amount of work scoped for it. And they said that this is worth it relative to these other projects that your team is working on, so that they can be at peace knowing that their team has already bought into this, and they're not creating work for their team. I mean, you hit on a common thing that I think a lot of salespeople screw up is they look at the ROI of their thing, or they know the impact that the thing that they sell can make, but they don't recognize that when you're talking to a C-suite person, they've got so many massive problems to solve. And your thing might just be a drop in the bucket. And so it's also important to articulate the lift needed from the team that you are selling to and doing that at multiple stages throughout the sales conversation. So we've just talked about what I think is an ideal scenario, where you start with an exec, you go down, you meet with the direct reports, and then you come back for the big PARA recommendation. Frankly, 98% of my deals don't end up going that way, Armando. Most of my deals end up following this bottom's up approach, which we're going to talk to. And this is where you're starting with someone who is not equipped to sign the contract and write you a check, but if they're a good champion, it can help you get there. And so we're going to talk about that motion. And it all starts with that first meeting. Again, this is just going to be the structure of that meeting. If you want to learn how to run a killer discovery call with someone who's not quite able to sign a contract, go listen to our discovery replay book. So step one, you get on the call, you want to figure out, why are we even here? I bet a lot of salespeople reach out to you. And I don't imagine you take every meeting what prompted you to take this meeting, get the other person talking. Then what you want to do in your upfront contract is you need to early, early on foreshadow the fact that you are going to be asking for introductions to other people. So you might say something like, look, Armando, these first meetings typically end up going one of two ways. You might decide today that this thing is not a fit, and if that's the case, no worries. You won't hurt my feelings. I didn't build the software. I'm just the one that sells it. The other outcome might be, you say, hey, this seems relatively interesting. Might be worth doing some deeper due diligence on this. You know, if that's the case, usually what folks will want to do is have the somebody like Mary, your director of marketing take a look at something like this. I guess given that we have a hard stop in 26 minutes, are you cool if we end a couple minutes early to talk about whether or not we involve her in the conversation? When you do this, even if they say, no, I want to see a demo first before I introduce you to anybody. Fine, at least what you've done is by saying, hey, I'm going to ask for intros to other people. Even if you get pushback, you can now uncover, okay, what will it take? What do you need to see or believe or hear about what we do in order to make those intros to other people? And if it's nothing, we'll get me to introduce you to somebody else. Well, you know that this probably is not a deal and not a path you want to go down. So you've got to early, early on say, hey, usually folks will want to intro me to the team. At the end of the meeting, you can basically end by being like, so what did you think? Figure out did they like what they saw her and etc. And then from there, what you need to do is you need to go back to, hey, in the beginning, we talked about meeting with somebody like Mary to go through one of these things and get that introduction that you foreshadow in the beginning. The key thing that you want to do when framing your ask is you don't want to say we need to get Mary involved because Mary writes the check or we need to get Mary involved because Mary is your boss. You need to explain why it is important to get power or other departments or other functions or even other parallel leaders involved in order to solve your problem. So if I'm selling a sales engagement tool, for example, to a director of sales development who really, really wants it, if I wanted to sell parallel to a head of sales ops, the reason I would ask for access to that person is not because sales ops needs to install it, right? And I need sales ops to install this thing. The reason I would ask for that is in order for you to get this approved by your VP of sales, your VP of sales is going to want to know that Revops has blessed it and that it's going to scale with all the other systems that you have. And so can we get them on board so that we can help your SDR team meet this big SQL goal that you have? And that is how you justify the ask. It's always in terms of their best interest, not in terms of your best interest. One thing you might do in a more complex sale where there's a ton of steps in your golden path and you can feel like the person you're working with is going to need to make a number of different intros is you might use a tool like a mutual action plan or a joint execution plan where once you feel like the person you're working with is bought in and maybe they've entered you to one or two other people, but there's a lot of other functions that you need to touch. You might consider introducing a mutual action plan as a way to lay out the specific roles and names that you meet with as a way to have an open and upfront conversation with the other person about this is what it's going to take and here's who we really need to get access to. So just to recap that that was a good amount of information is you're running that first meeting with your champion and then you're alluding to the eventual ask to multi-thread. At that point you're probably still running a demo for your next call with that champion or maybe one other parallel stakeholder and then you're revisiting that ask at the end of the demo once you have your champion bought in and if you're going to use a jet or a joint execution plan or a map or a mutual action plan it's usually right there at the end of the demo when your champion has seen it and they're like wow this is awesome I think this solves a problem and that's when you can actually bring up the ask to get access to power and so now we're finally at the point where we're starting to get introduced to power in this bottom up motion there are two ways you can do it the first is you're selling directly to power the second is you don't have access directly to power and you have to sell through a champion in the case that you are selling directly to power what you want to do is what's called the champion sandwich is you're going to book that meeting with power now that you've gotten permission to get access to them and what you want to do is you want to sandwich that big meeting with power with two smaller meetings a meeting with your champion before the meeting and a meeting with your champion after the meeting and the way you ask for that is when you set that big team demo is you again frame it in terms of what you want for them you might say hey Mr. and Mrs. champion I know we're going to this meeting with your VP on Friday can I catch up with you for 15 minutes on Wednesday just so I come up prepared and make you all look good and make sure that I articulate the things that they want to see effectively they'll almost never say no this is also the perfect time to get on a text basis with your champions is sometimes it's easier to just before that call I can shoot you a text or give you a buzz can I get your sell just so we can like game plan quick before instead of doing a longer zoom thing they'll almost always say yes because you're selling with momentum and then in that meeting what you want to do is you then want to schedule the other half of your sandwich so you might say hey Mr. and Mrs. champion this is great thanks for prepping me on all this stuff I'm super excited to meet with the VP tomorrow hey oftentimes there are some things that are shared right after the meeting or there are some open questions do you mind if I give you a buzz an hour after that meeting ends once you've had a second a debrief and I can get your feedback on how it went and anything else I should be using to follow up effectively with your team again they will almost never say no to that ask and that is the scenario in which you get access to power the key thing that you're doing when you were explaining the rationale around why they should meet with you before the meeting and why they should meet with you after is you are explaining why it's in the other person's best interest to have this pre and post meeting with them you're saying look after there's probably follow ups you're going to have and it's not I want to know the pulse check so I can sell this thing better it's I bet there's stuff coming out of this meeting that we can take care of more quickly if we think life now there are going to be times that your champion says no you know what Armand don't worry about meeting with Nick I'm going to meet with him I'll make this big presentation step one is that should raise some red flags on your end and so you need to have an open and honest conversation with the other party and you might need to say something like gosh totally respect that Armand you know this might seem like a hard question but sometimes in the past when folks have said hey I don't want you to meet with my team it's because they might have some reservations around this thing and it's ability to solve X problem they said they had in general I'm not saying that's the case here right now but do you have some concerns that we might not have resolved yet I want to make sure that I'm doing a good job explaining how we can and can't help with this what you need to do is throw yourself under the bus there might be stuff you have missed that gives them pause around your ability to help with this thing and you need to make sure your champion is sold first and nine times out of 10 a sold champion will always introduce you to their team. So if someone isn't making that introduction, you've got to call it out in a respectful way. But there's that one in 10 chants that sometimes people are like, no, like this is just how we do things. Step one is you've got to pressure test the other person on how they're even going to sell your thing. So you might say something along the lines of cool. I want to make sure that I'm being as helpful as possible as you prepare for this meeting. I guess I'm curious, how are you positioning this internally? And what you want to do here is understand how they're going to sell or pitch your thing. And now you can start to sell and coach them. One of the common areas that we see is that champions will often go to a C-suite person and pitch things in terms of below the line problems. And part of what you need to do is coach them on, hey, Armand, this isn't just about how you're going to save a couple hours a week. This actually attaches to a bigger organizational initiative and how to help them pull up the problems to bigger impacts. Once you've aligned with them on, hey, this is what the messaging should be. What you can help do is arm these people to preserve the integrity of your message. And you might do that with a video recap. You might do that via a very particularly written recap email where you say, these are the problems. Give them stuff that they can pass along and forward easily. So you want to help coach them on how to message your thing. But then also make it as easy as possible for them to message your thing in the right way. So let's rewind a second and let's say, all right, we're doing the thing where we're selling directly with to power and we've got that big team meeting. Or the selling through the champion goes so well that they say great news. The CMO wants to meet with you. Talk to me about how we should be running that big team meeting. Great. So again, we're not going to go through the depths of how to run the demo and the discovery and all that stuff. But the high level structure of the big team meetings is as follows. Number one, you open up the call. There are probably a couple of people there, usually at least three, sometimes up to five, sometimes even more. If you notice that the room is more than five people, there are two things that I would recommend. The first is try to split up the room based on function because what that means is you have a bunch of people plus power and you have a bunch of people with different interests that should be separated in different rooms. And then number two, try to match up to that room on a two to one ratio. In other words, never lose a deal alone. So if they have four people on their side, try to match up with two on your side. If they have six, try to match up with three and also try to match power with power in those meetings. If they have a CRO, a director level and a technical buyer, again, you should split that room up, but you may bring in your CEO or your CRO, you may bring in yourself who's going to level with the champion, and then you might bring in a sales engineer who's going to handle the technical questions. That might be a way that you match power with power. Now let's talk about the meeting structure itself. You typically want to start these meetings not with the long drawn out 20 minutes of introductions. And the reason for that is these people know each other and they hate the 10 minutes of my name is Bill and I run revenue operations. And so instead start the meeting with the faces of every single person on the call and their names and their titles, including your names and your titles, and introduce yourselves and set the agenda for the call. And from there, you should actually have your champion explain why we're here. Do not do all the talking on why you think it's important to buy. Try to get your champion to set the stage on why everyone is here and get people to listen. From there, recap the top three to four problems that you found throughout discovery. This is similar to presenting your point of view in the top down selling, except you haven't even more formulated point of view because you've been doing discovery. And then what you want to do is you want to or the key people on that call validate which of those problems are most important to cover on this call or say which ones have I missed or which ones are doubly important. This entire process probably takes 10 to 15 minutes of short introductions, recapping of priorities, and maybe five minutes of back and forth on which are most important. You're going to run a short executive level demo, 10 minutes. And then what you want to do is the end of the call is used to ask for buy-in. It's not used to set up your join execution plan, it's not used to set up 17 next steps because you probably have a bunch of people on these calls. You already have your next step set with your champion after this. You have a deep brief set. And so your goal at the end of this call is to set out any reservations and see if the team is open to reviewing, pricing, proposal, what have you. In other words, do they believe that this problem is worth solving with you independent of the price? And that brings us to the end folks. We'll stay away from the things that talk about going and presenting to finance or getting in front of procurement and all that stuff. That's more sales process type of stuff. But this is more so focused on figuring out who your champion is, getting to power. And so to recap, we talked about a couple different things. We talked about mapping out the golden path. Who are the key personas involved in your sales cycle? And then we said you should start by trying to get power first as the big title wave and then your champions and then your blockers. But if that doesn't work, try to get your champions to help you build you up to power and then again handle your blockers at the end. From there, we walk through top down selling in the case that you got to power first, which involves presenting your POV to power, getting introductions to the department leads, and then rolling that all up in a business case back to power. And then we talked about bottom up selling, which involves running department level discovery with one of the champions, convincing them why it is in their best interest to introduce you to other people, namely power to solve their problem. And then we talked about how to enable your champion or to use your champion sandwich to prep for those meetings. And of course, handle the big team meeting once it comes. Ardynick, how can people help us out here? Well, the first time that I heard you explain this thing where you put the faces of the prospect and the quotes on a PowerPoint slide or presentation, I was very confused because I was like, is that going to look janky? How on earth are you doing that? And so you had to sit down and show me how to do it. And good news, Armand, you actually built a demo deck to make it really, really easy for me because I don't even know how to make a PowerPoint presentation. And we decided that we were going to share that big team demo deck with all of you. So if you want to use the faces and quote strategy that we talked about on here, as well as the other elements of the big team meeting built into a deck that you can use for your own sale, believe it or not, there's a link in the show notes for you to go grab it, steal it, it's free. And we appreciate your listening. We'll see you next week on 30 Minutes Presidents Club.