Podcast episode
How to Turn Every Sales Pilot Into a Closed Deal | Shaun Crimmins
30 Minutes to President's Club10 Sept 202636 min
Description
Shaun Crimmins breaks down how to run pilots and POCs that prove measurable value and actually convert into paid contracts. Learn how to define success upfront, build the right champions, and engineer value throughout the entire pilot. 📈 Pick metrics you can move: Start with measurable upstream metrics you can impact during the pilot, then connect them to larger business outcomes. 🤝 Build two champions: Win over both the business champion responsible for the outcome and the technical champion living in the workflow every day. 🎯 Agree on the conversion upfront: Define success criteria before the pilot starts and establish that hitting those outcomes should lead to a paid agreement. You're one step closer to President's Club! 📝 Build vs Buy w/ Jen Allen-Knuth 🏋 30MPC Training 🛠 Weekly Tactical Breakdowns 📚 Things you can steal and use today
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And by the way, we just made a bunch of updates in 48 hours. Now you're in 90%. So I think defining that for them can help draw it out. But a lot of it is, here's what we've seen. Here's other companies we've worked with and how they've defined it and what they've seen before the pilot and where their metrics actually work. So let's like get serious with a specific example. “Like when I was at outreach, sometimes we would say, okay, what's your reply rate?” People would have no clue. And then we'd be like, well, we can't tell you we can increase your priority X% if we don't know what the baseline is. In your world, what's like a common metric that you anchor on? And then how do you talk to somebody to give you that actual number that they believe? Because they all know what you're going to do, man.
That is how many tickets are being resolved in any given day. It's the volume of tickets, the amount of time it takes to actually triage something. Ticket resolution time is a big anchor for us. Great. Mark, how about yourself? Yeah, I think at Outreach, since we have a GTM oriented audience, that would be the most appropriate thing to share. “We would look at how many people are you actually touching in a day per rep?” That's a big leading metric that we could control. We might go after some- Shaun Crimmins, Intedat, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, Hunter, UpLead, Clearbit, RocketReach, Seamless.ai, Smartlead, Woodpecker, Reply.io, Mailshake, Artisan AI, 11x, AiSDR
two champion rule. You've got two things you're doing here that you are using to make sure that it is impossible for the pilot to fail. If you're a seller, you've probably heard, like, oh, we could probably just build this ourselves. Buy versus build is a conversation that needs to happen in every single sales process right now. And I think the way through that is to “build two champions. Your business champion who's responsible for the outcome, they're trying to” improve a process or have their sort of neck on the line for whatever the metric actually is. And then you have technical champions that you also need to build who live in this day in, day out. That's the team where I find more often pilots die in that room. Your technical person is saying, you know what? We can probably set this up ourselves. I don't understand the value this
It could be. Depending on the structure and size of the org, oftentimes we see with the enterprise organizations that that person is still heavily involved in the day to day, in the weeds. So we can make their life a lot easier. And the other thing that's a part of this is the politics behind it. Yeah. What do they have to gain? What do they have to lose by you coming into the organization? Always something to consider. “Making sure you've identified those champions is key.” Can we talk about how to win over the technical person, the engineer? Because I feel like that's probably, that's where my head is going, which is like, okay, sure. I know how to build a relationship with and win over a business champion. I'm pointing to the metrics we're impacting. I'm going, we're working with their team.
They're doing some of the building, they're responsible for orchestration. For us sometimes that is engineers, IT engineers specifically. One thing I will say is that, my CEO says this all the time, engineers respect other engineers. Why? Because they're doing the work. This is one of the hidden values of the forward deployed engineer emotion. “Because if you're talking to another engineer who understands your environment, because” I've armed them with, hey, here's what we're trying to accomplish. Here's what matters to them. Great. They go in and uncover what that engineer is doing on a day-to-day. What's their world like? What are the challenges they encounter? And then actually building things, in this case, to make their lives easier.