The Sales Process That Took Outreach From $0 To $250M

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1. 2:54

   I'm wondering, how the hell you came up with these? And if you can maybe walk me through each of those stages, so that folks watching this can understand how they can reorient their sales process around things. So I have a five-stage sales process. It begins actually with stage zero. So I guess it's technically six stages. The first stage is meeting booked. “What this answers is, are they willing to meet with us?” When they book a meeting, they leave stage zero and they go to stage one when that meeting holds. They haven't agreed to a meet with us until they show up for the meeting. Stage one is problem agreement. We leave this stage when they've agreed that there's actually a problem that our product and what we're selling solves. Then we go into stage two. Stage two, we leave that stage when they say,

   In Meeting booking and confirmation

2. 23:37

   And all of a sudden they're like, whoa, this is pretty easy to use. And I'm flying through it faster than my reps do. The reverse demo, letting them control the demo and walking them through what to do next. That's an amazing way for them to be like, whoa, this is just simple and I feel in control. So the last one is I'm just going to take a case study and I'm going to send it to you in an email. And I'm going to say, here's a case study, Mark, right? “That's the bad way to do a case study.” The great way to do a case study is once you understand what the problems are, what you want to do is you want to go through the case study, print it out, take a highlighter and highlight the areas of that case study that make it a bigger deal for them in the areas where they have problems, you write

   In Outbound case studies

3. 24:20

   Or you send it via email and be like, Hey, I know that nobody reads case studies anymore. And this is like a six pager. So definitely nobody's reading this, but you know what? I marked up in the margins and highlighted a couple areas that I think really point specifically to the problems that we talked about last week. Boom. You've increased the priority of the problem by helping them see another “customer who had the same problem.” Get over that problem. The next thing in our sales process here is evaluation agreement. We're trying to get them to agree on how they're going to evaluate solutions, whether or not they buy from us, we're trying to get agreement on this is sort of the process or path. And part of the reason to go back to what we were talking about earlier is we want

   In Proof relevance and matching

4. 27:54

   “So what we want to do is help the buyer, give them room to say, let's agree together that when I say that we can do X amount of value, money saved, extra revenue risk that has been mitigated, that that's a quantifiable thing that you feel confident displaying and talking about in a meeting with people that are going to help you make this decision.”

   In Quantified outcome proof

5. 31:29

   Sally's so cool. Can you please just tell Sally's story about how you're like, oh my gosh, she flies through this and does it 10 times faster than before. And now what I've done is I've taken that referral call and I've now created, used it as a tool to help them get to agree that, yes, you can actually create this value because I've heard somebody else can do it. This may be wrong. “You may tell me I'm wrong here, but it sounds like I could probably use a referral call” at multiple different stages of my sales process. If I have a key account that is stuck at a valuation agreement, it might make sense that I put my key prospect, I'm trying to sell the GE, right? Massive billion dollar opportunity for, I might put them in touch with a referral and

   In Referral timing

6. 40:39

   Like when do you think that we need to have this in place so that students and teachers get used to it, that we can actually measure results and then we can compare them against it. And so I'm looking for that date that I'd move back. That's very similar to B2B. Principal Plus, or are there other people involved at this stage? Yeah. So at this point, what I want to do for priority is I need to start to get in. “It depends on the purchase.” So I'm doing a school-based purchase or a district-based purchase. If I'm doing district-based purchases, I need to start talking to like the Dean of Education or, you know, the person that heads up learning and learning strategy at a school district. How about evaluation agreement? Any changes to exit criteria or people involved? Evaluation agreement is exactly the same.

   In Buying committee and personas

7. 42:18

   you remember in problem one, I've actually found the right person in administration to talk to, right? I have that kind of audit trail that this is actually important. Now do you need to use that audit trail to find somebody high enough that if they're my champion and one criteria of a champion is they advocate in the “room when you're not there to effect.” That doesn't mean you always win the deal, but they're not some slouch in the room that nobody believes because I can't be a champion, then you can make sure that that person is equipped to go in and talk about that value. That's when you know how you have real agreement. So, you know, maybe for value agreement with a school, it's something like

   In Champion identification