Leading better meetings by becoming a student of your prospects (Anthony Cessario, VP of Industries & GTM Solutions @ Clari)

Description

Listen

Quoted on this wiki

Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.

1. 1:58

   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 precedence club and you can get them for free in the 30MPC Pipedrive closers hub.

   In Replies and meetings

2. 2:47

   So let's get your three. Yeah, let's do it. So three things that hopefully you guys walk away with today. First is becoming a student of the company that you're prospecting into or that you're selling into of their career website. Super important, right? If you think about what a job posting is, that's a company that's an executive going “getting budget allocated to a headcount to solve a problem.” So you go look at, let's say you're selling into the sales department, right? You go look at the VP of sales job they're hiring for. You're going to see the exact pains that that person has to go solve for. You'll probably see who they report to and that's going to help you establish a really good point of view on their business and what they're trying to solve for. Love it. What's number two, Anthony?

   In Hiring signals

3. 3:21

   You'll probably see who they report to and that's going to help you establish a really good point of view on their business and what they're trying to solve for. Love it. What's number two, Anthony? Yeah, number two, when you get that meeting, right? You had a great point of view and you're getting ready to have that meeting. Always send the pre-meeting email to all attendees. Don't do it before the meeting. Do it the day before the meeting. “So they have time to digest it.” And the kind of things that go into that email, right? It's going to be stuff like setting expectations on timing. How many times have you showed up to a meeting with an executive when you thought it was 60 minutes, they gave you 20. And it's things like showing them that you have structure and that you're coming with

   In Pre-meeting value setting

4. 3:26

   Love it. What's number two, Anthony? Yeah, number two, when you get that meeting, right? You had a great point of view and you're getting ready to have that meeting. Always send the pre-meeting email to all attendees. Don't do it before the meeting. Do it the day before the meeting. So they have time to digest it. And the kind of things that go into that email, right? “It's going to be stuff like setting expectations on timing.” How many times have you showed up to a meeting with an executive when you thought it was 60 minutes, they gave you 20. And it's things like showing them that you have structure and that you're coming with a plan and what you're going to present and asking them for feedback on the agenda because that's important as well. Nice. What's number three? Yeah, three.

   In Meeting booking and confirmation

5. 3:26

   Love it. What's number two, Anthony? Yeah, number two, when you get that meeting, right? You had a great point of view and you're getting ready to have that meeting. Always send the pre-meeting email to all attendees. Don't do it before the meeting. Do it the day before the meeting. So they have time to digest it. And the kind of things that go into that email, right? “It's going to be stuff like setting expectations on timing.” How many times have you showed up to a meeting with an executive when you thought it was 60 minutes, they gave you 20. And it's things like showing them that you have structure and that you're coming with a plan and what you're going to present and asking them for feedback on the agenda because that's important as well. Nice. What's number three? Yeah, three.

   In Pre-meeting value setting

6. 3:34

   Always send the pre-meeting email to all attendees. Don't do it before the meeting. Do it the day before the meeting. So they have time to digest it. And the kind of things that go into that email, right? It's going to be stuff like setting expectations on timing. How many times have you showed up to a meeting with an executive when you thought it was 60 minutes, they gave you 20. “showing them that you have structure” a plan and what you're going to present and asking them for feedback on the agenda because that's important as well. Nice. What's number three? Yeah, three. And this is another kind of component of having great meetings. And it's a concept I call moments that matter. It's how you think about what a successful meeting looks like.

   In Pre-meeting value setting

7. 4:48

   someone who requested a demo, for example, versus when you're going into that meeting with an exec and seven other people on their team? What do you want the outcome to be, right? So the outcome might just be on a first meeting. Wow, this guy Armand is really smart. I should spend more time with him. The outcome might be, holy smokes. This company is doing innovative things, right? “influence the tone and the content” email, right? So if it's a discovery meeting, that might look something like, hey, really appreciate you all. to share some time. We have 30 minutes together. Typically in 30 minutes, we can cover X, Y, and Z. And if you had other thoughts in mind, let me know. And they might come back and say,

   In Pre-meeting value setting

8. 5:39

   for success and not miss expectations. Whereas if there's several stakeholders involved, and maybe it's your first meeting, like with the executive team, right? You might be tailoring that a little bit more to the executives. Hey, this is CFO. I know you're signed up for 60 minutes. Can you make “these are the things that we thought were going to be relevant.” to make sure we're focusing on time on topics that are important to you as well. And so again, depending on what you're trying to accomplish with that meeting, that might dictate the contact and that email. One of the things that I do is anytime I've got multiple stakeholders on an email

   In Pre-meeting value setting

9. 5:59

   to make sure we're focusing on time on topics that are important to you as well. And so again, depending on what you're trying to accomplish with that meeting, that might dictate the contact and that email. One of the things that I do is anytime I've got multiple stakeholders on an email “I'll email each person individually” want to make sure that we address in the meeting? And frequently what happens is I end up setting multiple other meetings because of that, because I'll have someone who says, well, I'm kind of interested in the dashboards you're going to show me, but data security is something I'm way more interested in. And I'll say, okay, well then we probably need to set a meeting with

   In Multi-threaded prospecting

10. 23:23

    accounting specialist, and you start talking business outcomes and vision, they'll be like, yeah, yeah, that sounds really nice. But like, how do I do my job? And so one of the challenges as a seller is you need to calibrate with the other person and understand where they are in “terms of the problem that you're solving. And then talk about your solution in the context of that.” It's super astute, Nick. Yeah. You can't up level on the value pyramid more than probably one level for somebody, right? But you should be up leveling one level. Right? So let me tell you what I mean by that. So if I'm talking to, again, I'll put it in my world, right? So like a sales

    In Persona-based personalization

11. 24:35

    little bit, right? So like, I might say, okay, I'm going to go up a level in my discovery question. So like, hey, when you sit down with the CRO, what are the types of things that, you know, that she's asking you or holding you accountable for over the next like six to 12 months? “And what I hear from their response will drive where I go next.” scaling into new markets and we want to go into the enterprise space. So we're trying to figure out how do we look at the business differently to go into enterprise? I'm like, okay, cool. They're strategic. And I'm going to, I'm going to up-level them a little bit. I'm going to put them on the same playing field as maybe even I would on the CRO and make them feel like I'm, you know, I'm up-leveling them.

    In Replies and meetings

12. 24:35

    little bit, right? So like, I might say, okay, I'm going to go up a level in my discovery question. So like, hey, when you sit down with the CRO, what are the types of things that, you know, that she's asking you or holding you accountable for over the next like six to 12 months? “And what I hear from their response will drive where I go next.” scaling into new markets and we want to go into the enterprise space. So we're trying to figure out how do we look at the business differently to go into enterprise? I'm like, okay, cool. They're strategic. And I'm going to, I'm going to up-level them a little bit. I'm going to put them on the same playing field as maybe even I would on the CRO and make them feel like I'm, you know, I'm up-leveling them.

    In Talk-track branching

13. 25:25

    And then I might say like, okay, cool. This person's like super tactical and I gotta be careful here. I might even start figuring out who else I have to bring into the conversation. So like you always want to go one level up. And I've even seen this done at like the CEO level where this is especially important when you have an executive in the room, the questions you ask “show where they should baseline you.” Cause if you're coming in as like a technologist with a C-level executive, they're almost definitely baselining you down towards the bottom of the pyramid, like process implementation of process. They're probably not thinking, Hey, Nick's like this really strategic guy who I can talk to about my business problems. They're probably like, okay, I got invited to this demo and I got to

    In Value proposition hierarchy