Podcast episode
Own the Sales Cycle: How to Take Command from Call One (John Barrows)
30 Minutes to President's Club1 Oct 202435 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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least important to you? And as you go through that process, if price is the number one thing on the list, here's my second tip for you, which is use the preemptive strike. So if you know the objection is coming, where you are the top most expensive provider in the industry, if they put price as number one on that list or cost, then you need to “preemptively address that right out of the gate and say, look, we are not the cheapest.” And I use the word cheap very specifically. We are not the cheapest, nor do we ever want to be. So if you are really looking at price as the number one, let's unpack that a little bit. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile.
about their business. 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. Are you seeing the same stuff? And it's not tell me about your priorities. This is what I understand so far about your role based on what I'm seeing out there. Is it yours?
certain people that need that rapport up front. There's certain people that don't, right? Certain people just get to the point. There's other people that you got to talk for five to 10 minutes about sports and weather and all that crap. So I think it's a little bit loose there. I'll start with, hey, Nick, as I was preparing for this meeting, I actually noticed that either somewhere on LinkedIn, you did this or your news and events, you just did that, whatever it is. “I'm curious, is that what's driving this conversation?” Is that part of what's happening here? What that's doing is that's getting my temperature level down so I can relax a little bit and it's getting yours up because you're talking about something you like talking about, which is you. So from there, I'll be like, okay, great. Hey, before we dive into some of the details here, do you mind if I just ask five or six quick questions? So we can just get this out of the way.
you're going to get, could you just show me what you got? Could you just show the demo or whatever it is? But if I tell you five questions, you'll start and wait. You'll wait for five questions. And then I'm like, all right, perfect. Thank you very much for that. That gives me some good context here. Now let's talk about why we're here. You know, what's the problem, right? How big is this problem? “Why is it worth addressing now?” Those type of things. And then we go into the rest of the discovery. So it's hard for me to break down kind of the specific timelines because everyone's a little bit different. Everyone's either willing to have that conversation or not. I tend to do a little bit of five to 10 minutes of, I guess, rapport building slash qualification.
I think you should do it fluidly throughout the whole thing. So when people are bringing up certain things throughout the conversation, I'll be like, oh, that's interesting. Actually, you know what? Let me show you something real quick here. Here's the part of art. Here's how I do that. You kind of show them the piece that is most relevant to what they said that they were interested in. And then you pause and you say, hey, could you explain to me how that compares to what you're doing now? “Or could you explain to me how that fits into your existing workflow?” Because the way that you explain to me how it compares to what you're doing now or how it fits into your existing workflow tells me everything I need to know and whether or not it made sense. And so I'm kind of doing that ebbing and flowing and showing like a piece of it and going from there. Because the problem that most revs do is they discover, which usually, you know, in a discovery
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