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. 7:19

   And if they were going to price us out because we weren't meeting specific requirements, they stood to lose a lot by doing that. So we came up with a point of view, and this is really important when you go to executives, “you have to have a very strategic point of view on what they stand to lose if they don't” do business with you. It's not what they stand to gain if they do, but what they stand to lose if they don't do business with you, because that's what makes people change is they stand to lose something pretty big. And so what we did is we said, look, the application that they were building was called Awards.

   In Cost-of-inaction messaging

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. 21:16

   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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 24:41

   said each time. You sort of summarized in a bullet point or two, and then you use that to transition to your next question. That was proof of how much you were listening, and it made it seem much more conversational. I know how important discovery is to you, because something you put in the prep document that I wanted to ask you was you wrote, “position your discovery as a next step.” means. Yeah. There's something called decision fatigue. If anyone follows Gong and Devin Reed, he wrote an article about this. It says that if execs are too involved in the deal, it actually decreases the... likelihood of closing, which is counterintuitive because the same Gong research shows that

   In Discovery and qualification

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