Podcast episode
How to keep your demos interactive to navigate directly into your winning zones (Cory Bray, Managing Director @ ClozeLoop)
30 Minutes to President's Club22 Dec 202130 min
Description
Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 Four Actionable Takeaways: * Establish next steps at the end of your meeting to prepare yourself for new stakeholders / questions. * Avoid open-ended q’s, instead use “typically” or “usually” language to demonstrate credibility. * Keep your demo’s interactive by asking the prospect what jumps out to them right away. * Start your demo’s with the exciting outcomes and work backwards to reality (integrations, permissions) ====================== Cory’s Path to President’s Club: * Managing Director @ ClozeLoop * Co-Author of The Sales Enablement Playbook, Sales Development, and Sales Playbooks: The Builder's Toolkit RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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three actionable takeaways. Let's get your three. First one is coming out of any sales meeting that we're not disqualifying, we need to have next steps on the calendar. And in the framework that we use in Triangle Selling to get there is the plan and the velocity plan. So the key, the one thing I want to point out is if we talk about what the next steps could be at the top of the meeting, “it helps the prospect realize what decision that we're going to ask them to make at the end.” And so we don't surprise them. That way they're thinking the entire meeting, do I want to go to this demo? Do I want to go to this proposal stage with Nick or not? We're not throwing Adam at the end. And so it makes it much more tolerable for a prospect. Beautiful. What's number two, Cory?
the velocity plan. And the velocity plan is very similar to the plan that we use at the top of the meeting where we identify what are the logistics for the next meeting? Who's going to be there? How long is it going to be? And if there's any concern about media, so you don't have somebody in a Costco parking lot when you're trying to do a demo, make sure that's tied up. So that's “what do they want to cover?” ask them what that other person wants to cover. This is a step that salespeople often miss. Is there only focused on whoever they're talking to today? Well, if I'm meeting with Armand and say, hey, you're bringing Nick to the next meeting, what do you think Nick's going to want to get out of that meeting? That gives me at least some insight. You probably know. Maybe you
“Who are the personas we sell to? How do we win? And if we want to go deeper on that, what do they do every day? What's their job to be done? And what's the pain that we solve for them? And what are some customer stories that we've got to support that?” So, if we understand that winning zone through each of those dimensions, one, we prioritize our time. So, we're working deals that we're going to win. And second of all, when we're in these conversations, we know what questions to ask, because all this stuff does, it just informs what questions we ask.
the questions that they might be asking. Tell me about your current process. That doesn't position you in your winning zone. It gets the prospect talking about all kinds of stuff. It could be winning zone, it could be battlefield, it could be losing zone, it could be completely irrelevant to what your company does. “If you start off a discovery call there, you've completely lost control,” and now you've got a ton of hard work ahead of you, and you've got to pull it back. And that's really hard. So why not make it easy on yourself? And instead of asking that open-ended, I hope they say something that's a good question, ask a close-ended question, and then you can go ask all your open-ended questions. So you can say something like, hey Armand, typically when someone's asking you about
it could be completely irrelevant to what your company does. If you start off a discovery call there, you've completely lost control, and now you've got a ton of hard work ahead of you, and you've got to pull it back. And that's really hard. So why not make it easy on yourself? And instead of asking that open-ended, I hope they say something that's a good question, “ask a close-ended question, and then you can go ask all your open-ended questions.” So you can say something like, hey Armand, typically when someone's asking you about journal entries and executive dashboards, they're concerned that they're not closing the books fast enough and they're anxious that they might not be able to pass an audit. Is that why you brought that up? And so now what I've done is I've demonstrated my expertise
like I'm taking this call because. Yeah, totally. Well, one approach, if you want to just narrow it down, if you solve a very specific set of pain points, you can say something like, look, Armand, there's only three reasons CFOs work with us. They're either struggling with this, they're concerned about this, or they're anxious about “Are any of those relevant to you?” to pain. And then you can dig into that pain a little bit more if you need to. But that's the idea of really knowing your winning zone. Where do you win against the competitors in the market with the personas? And what pain points do you solve with high impact
competitors in the market with the personas? And what pain points do you solve with high impact and in your winning zone for each one of those personas? There's not a ton. And if you know which ones they are, and you can bring them up specifically with these folks, we identify that pain, then we can ask more open-ended questions and explore it. “we start close-ended, then we can focus on our winning zone” doesn't get away from us. We're trying to pull it back the whole time and figure out how to get it back into our winning zone. All right, Corey, this has been a phenomenal one. We got to move to the final question now. Final question is this. We've talked about a lot of really good things that salespeople should be doing, but we got to ask you about the inverse. The inverse is, what's one bad habit that you see a lot of salespeople exhibiting that they need to ditch
And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11x breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11x.ai backslash 30MPC or grab it in the show notes. Your top four takeaways from this episode with Cory Bray include, number one, when you're going towards the end of a meeting, don't just stop there. “Double up on next steps for the following meeting.” In other words, if you're about to multithread, you might want to ask, hey, on that next meeting, can we talk about what your CFO is going to care about? Number two, don't just ask willy-nilly open-ended questions. It is okay. In fact, it is encouraged to ask a couple closed-ended questions.