Podcast episode
Challenging Your Reps on Their Deal Risks (Chris Surdi, Ascend)
30 Minutes to President's Club5 Sept 202433 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Instead of lecturing a rep who hasn't followed expectations, ask what's preventing them from doing the task. This helps identify roadblocks or allows the rep to own up to the issue. When discussing reasons for making a change, focus on three questions: Why do anything? Why with us? Why now? The "why now" should have a specific date tied to an event. Link the urgency of change to concrete events, such as a software switch, new hire, market trends, or growth initiatives like entering a new market. Ask your reps key questions like when the economic buyer last bought something similar and who typically pays for software in their industry to ensure they understand the buyer’s decision-making process. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB Head of Sales, Retail @ Ascend Strategic Account Manager @ Ascend Strategic Accounts @ Sourcegraph Head of Enterprise Sales @ Segment Enterprise Sales Executive @ Braintree (a PayPal company) RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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Is there a champion? Is there an economic buyer involved? Is there a compelling reason to make a change? And is there a compelling event? Then you are challenging the rep to determine how real each of those domains is. You gave the example, if there's a champion here, are we on a text basis? “Are they giving us confidential behind the scenes information?” Are they coaching us on beating the competition? What about the other three? So let's go to the next one, which is economic buyer. How are you challenging or digging in on that? And what are the series of questions you're asking in that area? Yep. That's a good one. On the economic buyer, my typical question is when was the last time they
typically buys this type of software. If we don't know that, let's go find that out. And if we find out that somebody that we haven't talked to, let's come up with a plan to get in front of that person. Sometimes that's not through your champion. Sometimes that's through another channel. What is your definition of economic buyer? I'm curious what you coach your team on. “It's the person who will sign the check when they say go, everyone else moves.” Great. So in a lot of your scenarios, it sounds like that might be a CFO. In our case, it's typically a CFO or a controller. It depends, but typically, yes, on the finance side, our champions for our business are typically on the operation side, and so we, as most organizations
It'll keep the conversation going versus something that's stalled out because nobody's stepping up and saying, we don't believe your business case is justified. When you're asking these challenge questions, the champions make sense earlier in the sales cycle. At what point in the sales cycle do you expect to know all this information about the economic buyer? “You should have this information by either the solution mapping stage or at least in” the pilot stage. So we have five stages here. Ideally, you would have that information in solution mapping, but by a minimum, you should have that information before we kick off a pilot. It's required as part of our customer engagement process. We need to know who the, what we call decision makers here, it's a little bit different than B2B SaaS typically,
We built a guide on how to help you drive six and seven figure deals with our friends at Outreach. Get it free in the show notes. We did a newsletter a while back that talk drive timeline. On one side, you have hard compelling events, which would be a contract expiring. Like they have to buy a new software or continue with their existing one. “And then you have on the other side, cost of inaction,” which is more of this slow burn or this painful burn every single day, but they don't necessarily need to solve it today versus tomorrow, unless literally their house is on fire. Let's say I don't have a meaty compelling event, like a contract expiring. And let's say I have a medium cost of inaction.
We did a newsletter a while back that talk drive timeline. On one side, you have hard compelling events, which would be a contract expiring. Like they have to buy a new software or continue with their existing one. And then you have on the other side, cost of inaction, which is more of this slow burn or this painful burn every single day, “but they don't necessarily need to solve it today” versus tomorrow, unless literally their house is on fire. Let's say I don't have a meaty compelling event, like a contract expiring. And let's say I have a medium cost of inaction. What are some other common compelling events that you're able to find that aren't as easy as a contract switch? So it's dependent on each business.
a new hire, a departure, a market trend, or growth. For example, entering a new market or launching a new product. And lastly, number four, here are my two favorite challenge questions. Number one, you can ask your rep, when was the last time the economic buyer bought something similar? Number two, who typically pays for software in your space? If you don't know the answers “to those questions, you'll go get them.” Alrighty, Nick, how can people help us out here? Norman, you wrote a piece on how to find and drive timeline where you covered the four different timeline levers reps can use, how to find and drive those levers early, how you should be reminding and revealing that stuff throughout the deal cycle, and some