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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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?
questions. I always have a reason for my question, which is another tip out there for everybody. If you ever wonder if you have a good question or not, assume that the person asking you the question is going to say, why do you need to know that? And if you don't have a good answer, don't ask the stupid question. So when you say, hey, like, for instance, hey, Armand, I was wondering who else you're talking to? Who's the competition effectively? And look, “the reason I ask is because if you're talking to X, Y, and Z, apples to apples, pretty easy.” But if you're talking to A, C, and Y, apples to oranges to lemons, and you're going to have a hard time making this decision. That's why I'm asking you. And you will literally watch people relax a little bit and be like, oh, that's okay. Let me give you the answer. I love how you broke it down from industry to company, to persona, to person level trends. I would categorize the
I think it's a waste of time because I sell to the 20%. Think about it. Any product or service you own, you only use 10 to 20% of whatever the functionality of that thing is. So I'm trying to find that 20% to elevate because everything is average if I tell them it's all great. But if I find that part that's most relevant to you of what your priority was, then I can “lean in on that and everything else is table stakes.” And hopefully I'll stand out. And then at the end, I summarize the next steps. I leave at least five minutes at the end for next steps. 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. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear