Podcast episode
Challenger Sales Mistakes | Dan Flood | 30MPC Hall of Fame
30 Minutes to President's Club3 Mar 202535 min
Description
ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Provide Hypotheses, Not Generic Questions: Instead of broad questions, offer informed hypotheses to invite deeper discussion. Ask Questions to Guide Next Steps: Use questions to guide the process without being pushy, keeping the prospect engaged. Teach Process Over Just Problems: Beyond identifying issues, recommend processes (like a custom demo over a POC) to build trust. Uncover Intent Behind Extra Steps: When extra steps are requested, ask what they aim to learn to suggest simpler options. DAN'S PATH TO PRESIDENTS CLUB: Senior Vice President of Global Sales @ Challenger VP of Sales, Account Management @ Challenger VP of Sales, Major Accounts @ Challenger Managing Vice President, Sales & Community @ Evanta RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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Tell me more. Like, where are you getting that from? And sometimes they might even express some skepticism. Wait a minute. I'm not sure I see that in our world. Where are you getting this data from? Why do you think it applies to our business this way? That can feel scary to a seller because they're worried like, Oh, this person's disagreeing with me. That means they're not going to like my solution, but we are, what they're “actually doing is probing for understanding.” That's the type of behavior that someone who can drive deals and drive consensus exhibits early on. Right? So if you see that type of action, you can hit your wagon to that opportunity knowing they've got a problem I can solve. And they're exhibiting the behavior that shows me that they know how to navigate
The red flag we're looking for is they don't care to check the box. What we do instead is we put together a proper case with problems, numbers, etc. We talked about challenging people in terms of multithreading and getting access to power. We need to get in front of these people to get the deal done. If not, they're like, I can approve it all. “That's your red flag.” And then we just talked about legal red flags. It'll get done in a month. I'm sure it'll be fine. Instead we chop it up into red line deadlines. There's one last place in a buying process worth challenging prospects on, and that's on the evaluation itself.
If this goes really well, here's what that would cost. Are you prepared to do that? If we meet whatever the success criteria of the proof of concept is, and a lot of times you can just walk yourself out of that proof of concept idea by going there because you end up talking about the full solution anyways, or you better qualify the larger opportunity “on what happens after the POC is done.” Dan, this has been a phenomenal episode, but the clock is ticking. We're running out of time and we got to move to the final question. We've talked about a lot of really great things salespeople should be doing. Now we got to flip that question on its head and ask you about a shouldn't. What is one bad habit that you see a lot of salespeople exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps? Okay.
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