Selling to executives at the enterprise level (Ian Koniak, Founder of Ian Koniak Sales Training)

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1. 1:31

   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. 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 Pipedrive does.

   In Timing and priority objections

2. 1:48

   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. 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 Pipedrive does. If you want to get clear, complete sales visibility, you can use Pipedrive's 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 Pipedrive to help you get to President's Club and you can get them for free in the 30 MPC Pipedrive closers hub.

   In Discovery meeting structure

3. 11:30

   So first thing is the delivery is really important. You don't want to call someone's baby ugly but the cool thing is I knew this wasn't his baby. In fact, I knew they had a new CEO in the organization and he was new to his role. So you want to find people that are new to “an executive role because they are brought in to make changes. They are brought in to transform” the organization typically and that's why they're there and I think the delivery is really simple. Look, I know you guys are working on this one project and it's important to deliver but we are getting these requirements but what's missing is the collaboration. What's

   In Leadership and organizational changes

4. 21:12

   any sort of business value case or anything like that, and we're doing things that are optimized for a one- to two-month sales cycle as it stands. Great, man. Well, at this point in the question, so you get the point. I just asked like five or six. I'm really trying to understand what it is. Next question I would have asked would have been, okay, so you have a 30% to 40% gap in the “percentage of deals that you want to do, and that represents how much revenue. So I'd want to find” out what that opportunity cost that they're missing out is by not getting to that point. I'd really want to quantify. So I'm spending time, a lot of time implicating pain. I'm really trying to understand the situation in a way that feels curious, feels interested. So I'll ask you,

   In Outbound revenue targets

5. 21:16

   for a one- to two-month sales cycle as it stands. Great, man. Well, at this point in the question, so you get the point. I just asked like five or six. I'm really trying to understand what it is. Next question I would have asked would have been, okay, so you have a 30% to 40% gap in the percentage of deals that you want to do, and that represents how much revenue. So I'd want to find “out what that opportunity cost that they're missing out is by not getting to that point.” I'd really want to quantify. So I'm spending time, a lot of time implicating pain. I'm really trying to understand the situation in a way that feels curious, feels interested. So I'll ask you, Armand, how did that feel just on the receiving end? Did it feel like I was peppering you with

   In Cost of inaction

6. 21:16

   for a one- to two-month sales cycle as it stands. Great, man. Well, at this point in the question, so you get the point. I just asked like five or six. I'm really trying to understand what it is. Next question I would have asked would have been, okay, so you have a 30% to 40% gap in the percentage of deals that you want to do, and that represents how much revenue. So I'd want to find “out what that opportunity cost that they're missing out is by not getting to that point.” I'd really want to quantify. So I'm spending time, a lot of time implicating pain. I'm really trying to understand the situation in a way that feels curious, feels interested. So I'll ask you, Armand, how did that feel just on the receiving end? Did it feel like I was peppering you with

   In Cost-of-inaction messaging

7. 22:14

   before asking me about my reps today, you asked me why I even care about that in the first place. So you started with, why is that even important to you relative to the business? Is this even a problem that's worth talking about? And then you got me to acknowledge that it was a problem, “and then started to diagnose what are the things that are stopping me from making that problem go” away. And I felt like we were on the same side of the table. And it felt like you got my business like you had seen this before. So you knew the questions to ask. You got to rake me over coals a little bit, but not so much that it felt like you were doing it to have a gotcha moment,

   In Problem and impact discovery

8. 23:20

   we promoted them. What are they up against, right? Because I'm looking to see if they're getting any penetration using this approach, right? I could have spent easily an hour for the sake of the 30 minutes part of the 30 minutes to the President's Club. I cut that off. But “fundamentally, I'm really interested in understanding how important to him this is,” and also the challenges specifically that he's dealing with. So I know the challenges that he has specifically in this case are he doesn't have a playbook in place to sell the enterprise. In fact, I probably wouldn't even pitch a workshop at that point. I would pitch

   In Problem and impact discovery

9. 24:00

   consulting and working with him to develop an enterprise playbook. So I'm really trying to understand where he needs help so I can recommend the right solution in that case. That is the key. Treat it as a conversation, but also your intent is not to sell. Your intent is to understand “where they need help and what their challenges are so you can recommend and prescribe” the right solution. That is where all the selling time is. It's not through pitching. Once you get to the pitch, you'll have your chance to showcase what you do and how you do it. But all the power is done upfront in these upfront executive conversations. Ian, what was really powerful, what you did, was I heard you play back what Armand had just

   In Needs and requirements discovery

10. 24:00

    consulting and working with him to develop an enterprise playbook. So I'm really trying to understand where he needs help so I can recommend the right solution in that case. That is the key. Treat it as a conversation, but also your intent is not to sell. Your intent is to understand “where they need help and what their challenges are so you can recommend and prescribe” the right solution. That is where all the selling time is. It's not through pitching. Once you get to the pitch, you'll have your chance to showcase what you do and how you do it. But all the power is done upfront in these upfront executive conversations. Ian, what was really powerful, what you did, was I heard you play back what Armand had just

    In Problem and use-case fit