Podcast episode
How To Actually Challenge Customers | John Barrows | 30MPC Hall of Fame
30 Minutes to President's Club13 Jan 202535 min
Description
Join John's Newsletter FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Executive time crunch: If an exec only has five minutes instead of 30, ask, "What’s the one thing you need to hear to earn another meeting with your full attention?" Focus on that. Lead with a hypothesis: Instead of asking generic discovery questions, start with a hypothesis about their priorities based on research, showing you did your homework. Decision criteria: Prospects may focus on the wrong decision factors. Share a list of common criteria and ask them to rank their priorities to guide the discussion. Demo as you go: Don't save all product demos for the end. Show small pieces of the product during the conversation, interspersing discovery throughout. RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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might be whether it's a customer service implementation team whether it's a white glove service where it's tailored this or whatever so I think there's things that you need to put in there that uncover risk and also you can use as a talking point right the more stuff you put in there I mean obviously you don't want to have 50 things on that list but you want to put things in there to drive “conversation around okay what if we did that but yet nobody adopted it in the” first month like we can turn this thing on tomorrow but if we didn't have the training and implementation then none of your employees are gonna be able to really get the full benefit out of this until blah so that's where we know we need that implementation okay cool you know what instead of me discounting right which is a lot of reps are just gonna run to discount why don't I do
Create some objective decision criteria to evaluate the sale, but sometimes it almost sterilizes the sale because people buy emotionally and they justify logically. And the problem is a lot of people will try to introduce decision criteria way too early “before they understand the big drivers or the motivations or the priorities” for why doing this thing at all. So I'm curious, John, it sounds like the reason you're able to challenge them on their decision criteria is because you've mapped out their priorities in the first place. You've gotten the painful stories in the first place. So can you talk about what that process looks like before you start assigning the decision criteria
anybody right now. I actually think tell me about your business is one of the most insulting things you could say to somebody. I mean, think about the money people spend on SEO and marketing and everything to tell the world about their business and that you're going to spend the first 10 minutes of a conversation with me on that one. So my point is that there's a checklist I go “through to prepare for every meeting. I go on their website. I see what they do. I look at” their LinkedIn profiles. I come up with some theories about what's going on in their industry and what's going on in their business. I look at news and events and I have all that information. So I'm not saying tell me about your business or tell me about your priorities. I'm saying, hey, you know what, Nick, we're working a lot of other VPs right now in the SaaS industry and some
anybody right now. I actually think tell me about your business is one of the most insulting things you could say to somebody. I mean, think about the money people spend on SEO and marketing and everything to tell the world about their business and that you're going to spend the first 10 minutes of a conversation with me on that one. So my point is that there's a checklist I go through to prepare for every meeting. I go on their website. I see what they do. I look at “their LinkedIn profiles. I come up with some theories about what's going on in their industry” and what's going on in their business. I look at news and events and I have all that information. So I'm not saying tell me about your business or tell me about your priorities. I'm saying, hey, you know what, Nick, we're working a lot of other VPs right now in the SaaS industry and some of the trends that are really impacting them are these and some of the priorities are these.
it might be. Tell me about this business. Here's their website. Here's a 10K. Upload the 10K, read that, go look at some of the news and events. What are some of the bigger things that are happening in this business that are challenges specific to things that I could sell, right? Sales training and those types of things. Now this person, I PDF their “LinkedIn profile and I also PDF their dis profile using Crystal Nose. I upload that.” I say, tell me what I need to know about this person. What are some of the big challenges that this person is dealing with, right? From a persona standpoint, what's keeping them up at night, those types of things. And I just talk to it. You know what I mean? Again, you don't have to be an engineer to do this. That's the beauty of it is you just start
And so reps going through the motions, like if you're trying to automate all this stuff because it's so cool and it's better than what you've been doing, it's a race to the bottom and you're going to be automated out of a job. Fine. Let AI do all the heavy lifting on all this shit. But before you hit send, before you have that conversation, you better make sure you humanize this and you better “make sure you learn from it and then use it, not just get it to produce something and hit send.” It's business acumen on steroids if you use it the right way. But if you try to automate, fuck off. Augment, learn, and be the last mile. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. All right, Nick, it's time for a two by two recap from this episode with John Barrows. What do you have for your two? So number one is if you get on a meeting with
hit send, before you have that conversation, you better make sure you humanize this and you better make sure you learn from it and then use it, not just get it to produce something and hit send. It's business acumen on steroids if you use it the right way. But if you try to automate, “Augment, learn, and be the last mile.” coming up soon. All right, Nick, it's time for a two by two recap from this episode with John Barrows. What do you have for your two? So number one is if you get on a meeting with an executive and they tell you, hey, I know we were scheduled for 30 minutes, but I actually only have five, do not try to cram a 30 minute meeting into five minutes. Instead, ask them
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