Lead Playbook: The Perfect 5-Stage Sales Process

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1. 6:02

   these are the meetings that you want. Now let me tell you why meetings don't work. If my first meeting is a discovery and my second meeting is a demo, what do you think I try to do at the end of every discovery session? Schedule a demo. Should I always schedule a demo after discovery? Not if I haven't figured out the stuff that helps me have a good demo. “And what we need to do is we need to accomplish something in that first meeting” that allows us to do a good demo. In other words, in a stage-based deal management philosophy, we need to accomplish what happens in the stage. There may be multiple meetings that happen in that stage. You might have a demo in your first stage. Outreach is my first sales process was meeting-based.

   In Discovery and qualification

2. 23:36

   The next stage two is investigate. Think about this from a buyer's perspective. I now know that I'm interested in talking. Now I need to investigate and decide, is the problem I have actually big enough to solve? And the buyer must determine that, right? And if we don't help the buyer determine that, then that's when you get these languishing sales cycles. “You waste, they don't get back to you because it's a problem, but it's not actually big” enough to solve. So that's what we want to do in stage two is we're going to investigate and make sure that we have a big problem that people care about paying money to take care of. Awesome. So what is the, is that the question? Make sure that this is actually a big enough problem. Are the problems big enough to solve? All right. So that's the problem. Is the problem big enough to solve?

   In Lack-of-need objections

3. 26:57

   It doesn't something that you just do, right? So, like, I would think and I hope that most of my reps at Outreach understand why we would quantify the business initiatives. I would get, when I did deal reviews, and listen, every quarter, I would have every manager send me two recordings of their deal reviews “to make sure that they were doing this type of stuff, and I would coach them specifically on it,” but, like, they should be, like, hey, I don't really know because that's going to hurt their deal to not really know. The reason that they would do any of those things is because they don't understand why it's important to them to do it, which means that they're not really doing the process anyway, so you got to start back with the why, right? Yeah.

   In Call review coaching

4. 34:45

   or do it better. But like that ultimately you need them to say, I need a product to help me follow up with leads in less than five minutes. And now that becomes a part of the required capabilities, right? So you want that mutual action plan, what are the steps that we need to go through here to finish buying and then required capabilities. “What is the evaluation or the buying criteria that you're going to make on that?” And then if you're a really great rep, like this is the 400 level is, you influence the required capabilities to be ordered so that the things that you differentiate in. Spam is the most important thing that they evaluate. So at Outreach, in the beginning, none of our competitors had automated emails,

   In Buying process discovery

5. 42:15

   So you have your stages, the seminal question you're trying to answer, the exit criteria, the people that need to achieve that exit criteria or give you that exit criteria, and then your gives and gets, how you get those exit criteria. The five stages we went through, well, actually technically six, was stage 0, Initiate Meeting Book. “Stage 1 was Interest, and the question we were trying to answer is, do they have a problem we can solve?” Stage 2 was Investigate. The question we're trying to answer is, are the problems big enough to solve? Stage 3, Validate. Will they agree on how to buy? Stage 4, Justify. Is this worth putting money into? And then stage 5, Decide. Are they going to buy this thing?

   In Problem and use-case fit

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