Mirroring your objections, giving prospects perceived control, and controlling the room (Adam O’Chart, Top AE at Gong.io)

Description

Listen

Quoted on this wiki

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

1. 1:13

   It's gaining more tribal knowledge as a cold caller, and you do that by virtual role play, so getting yourself set up before each call. The second is something that we coin as the Anaconda Squeeze at Gong. If anyone that's seen Natural Libre, they'll get that reference, but essentially it's objection handling tactics. It's the way that we've systematized it so that when “you get an objection on a call, you're prepared to answer and you're confident.” one? Round us out. The last one is specific to SDRs. It's tracking deals from initial contact to close. So once you hand that meeting off, that's not the end of the tunnel. You got to follow that all the way through. So when you become an A, you're ready to rock. Alright. So this Anaconda Squeeze thing, I really got to talk about mostly because I was a college wrestler and Armand was my college wrestling training partner. And so I like the Natural

   In Objection response frameworks

2. 1:20

   Anaconda Squeeze at Gong. If anyone that's seen Natural Libre, they'll get that reference, but essentially it's objection handling tactics. It's the way that we've systematized it so that when you get an objection on a call, you're prepared to answer and you're confident. What's the last one? Round us out. The last one is specific to SDRs. It's tracking deals from initial contact “to close. So once you hand that meeting off, that's not the end of the tunnel. You got to” follow that all the way through. So when you become an A, you're ready to rock. Alright. So this Anaconda Squeeze thing, I really got to talk about mostly because I was a college wrestler and Armand was my college wrestling training partner. And so I like the Natural Libre thing. Talk to me about what that framework looks like. You get an objection from a customer. How do you use the framework and actually what comes out of your mouth to the customer?

   In Hand-off to sales

3. 3:01

   question. Talk to me about a loaded question. What does that mean? So the whole point of a loaded question is to number one, understand, well, there's two parts, understand really what's going on with that objection, right? Where did that come from? And the secondary part of that is to understand maybe a different angle that you can take. I think that at a fundamental level, “typically objections stem from the fact that that person doesn't believe that you add value” to what they're focused in. So the idea is how do we find a different path to value? So mirroring back essentially is your way of saying, I'm listening to you and I heard what you said. So if you tell me budgets are tied up, got it, Nick, it sounds like budgets are tied up. Psychologically now we've diffused that, right? They know that they're heard. They know that

   In Trust and proof objections

4. 7:26

   is put the ball in their court as many times as possible, but also maintain control of the conversation. So asking them, hey, before I propose an agenda, was there anything you needed to get out of our time today? From a discovery perspective, I think you'll start to understand specific things like, yeah, I actually really need to get pricing. Or I really needed to understand what implementation sounds like. “And these things are leading indicators towards how do we start to structure this conversation” and actually the discovery I run. Someone that wants pricing or an implementation plan on a first call, like that to me is a much more expedited process than someone that comes in and says, I'm just here to learn. Going into the actual discussion, I think the most important thing that I try to do and that we've seen be successful at scale, I mean, we're looking at, at Gong, we have 40 plus AEs,

   In Needs and requirements discovery

5. 7:31

   So asking them, hey, before I propose an agenda, was there anything you needed to get out of our time today? From a discovery perspective, I think you'll start to understand specific things like, yeah, I actually really need to get pricing. Or I really needed to understand what implementation sounds like. And these things are leading indicators towards how do we start to structure this conversation and actually the discovery I run. “Someone that wants pricing or an implementation plan on a first call,” like that to me is a much more expedited process than someone that comes in and says, I'm just here to learn. Going into the actual discussion, I think the most important thing that I try to do and that we've seen be successful at scale, I mean, we're looking at, at Gong, we have 40 plus AEs, is zoom out from what they assume our product can help with.

   In Buying process discovery

6. 8:22

   And then from there, like maybe we can help, maybe we can't, but I'd love to start there. And then you continue to drill and find out what's most important to them, what's most important to their bosses. And then from there, you formulate a more inline questioning that's gonna ideally get to the quote unquote pain funnel that we can then adhere to. Two really important points to call out. The first one is you're asking them what they're hoping to get out of the call. “And that's gonna dictate where your disco goes.” And then the second piece is you're also starting high level with the key business priorities. And so let's start on the business priorities for a second. How do you ask those questions or how do you get them to talk about their priorities in a way that it's not, well, look, dude, like my number one priority is like, I don't know, fixing my lead routing,

   In Needs and requirements discovery

7. 12:55

   Yep. So it's similar how I told you in our slide deck, right? We have a few different paths. Well, based on that, I talk about, hey, with these three specific value props that we highlighted here, I'm curious which one resonates the most. And from there, they're going to drill in and I'm going to ask a couple more questions, right? And a lot of people will choose kind of the easy option. Got it. Well, I'm curious. “Why did that resonate?” Did something stand out? And from there, you dig into that. And then you go into saying, hey, I mentioned that the two parts of this was going to be a little mutual discovery. I'd love to learn a little bit more about that. You might unpack in that elaborating. And then from there you do, if you're a challenger guy, you do your route. If you're a Sandler guy, you go down the funnel, so on and so forth. I'm kind of curious about the way that you are carrying this over to a demonstration

   In Value proposition testing

8. 20:25

   So that's what I do. So pulse check at the end of it. Right? And I think that people will respect that. And I think you give them the right to be candidly honest and tell them like, hey, I want to be on the exact same page as you. So feel free to be blunt. And then the second part is, again, I always tell them, hey, I have an idea for what next steps look like. But I want “to put the ball in your court. And the reason I do that is a lot of times they will give me a lot” of intelligence around their buying process when I say that. My next step would be, hey, let's set up a pilot. Let's get a couple stakeholders in the room, so on and so forth. And I interject steps in the buying process that they didn't have. Right? What if someone wanted to buy without a pilot? So when I say that, someone will say, cool, let me just ping my CFO and see if we can get

   In Buying process discovery