#113 - Playbook: Top 10 moments that change the way we sell

Foreign.

Good morning and welcome to this Christmas special of 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is. Wait, Nick, It's. It's not actually Christmas. I think we're thinking of a different anniversary. What is it actually the anniversary of?

It is the hundredth episode of thirty Minutes to Presidents Club. You know what that means, Armand? That means that you and I have been at this for almost two full years. That is two full years of you showing up late to every single recording that you and I have ever done together. And it is two full years of the audience putting up with those awkward noises when you count 3, 2, 1, and go off to the show and the audience has put up with me. Also, sometimes I ask sort of weird questions, but that is okay because I think you have some funny jokes you wanted to tell, Right?

I have some funny jokes that I want to tell. But, Nick, I think you gave them all away. Those were really, really funny jokes, I must say, because we have so many new listeners today, because one can tolerate you for more than three episodes, why don't you give the audience a reminder of what we typically do every five playbooks and what that means for Playbook 10 today?

Right. So we do a Playbook episode every 10 episodes where it's just me and Armand breaking down any particular topic, sharing all of our best stuff. Every five playbooks, aka every 50 episodes, we share the stuff that we have learned that has changed the way that we sell in the last 50, 50 episodes. And the great part about being the host of this show is that we get to ask the guests questions that we're legitimately trying to figure out in our sales jobs. And so I learned a lot from hosting this show, and I think you do too, Armand. So what we've done with this episode is we have distilled the top 10 moments from the last 50 episodes that have changed the way that we sell that you can all steal, use and try today.

And as part of this, if you follow us on LinkedIn this week, as part of the episode 100 Blitz, Nick and will be giving away 100 tactics on LinkedIn. That's right. Five days this week, two hosts, 10 tactics per post. We're going to have 10 tactics on cold calling, 10 tactics on cold emailing. Nick loves his eggs in the morning. He eats 10 eggs in the morning as well. And so we're doing everything in the buckets of 100. And of course, as you all know, everything in 30 NPC world is bucketed. And so the way we're going to go through these 10 ways that change the way that we sell are through the following categories. Category number one is prospecting. Category number two is discovery. And then lastly, category number three is sales process and negotiation. And so, no further ado. Why don't we kick off with bucket number one, prospecting. And I believe it starts with the legendary Mr. Jeb Blunt. Nick, what changed the way that we sell?

So one of the things that Jeb taught me is when you get hit in the face with a tough objection, it doesn't matter how great of a salesperson you are, your brain is going to freeze for a second and you're going to have that half second moment where, like, you get hit with, I'm not interested, or we already you're using something for that, or your price is too high, your brain shuts down. And what you shouldn't do is attempt to intellectually battle the objection that you get hit with because your brain isn't on. And so instead, you should have a stock phrase that you respond with anytime that you get hit with a tough objection. One of the ones that Jeb recommended was, you know, everyone says that a framework that I learned around this is respond with your ledge, mirror what the customer just said, and by then it's been a couple seconds, and your brain should be able to then intellectually respond to that Objection. That's episode 83 with Jeb Blunt. And believe it or not, Armand, that is our only prospecting focused tip for this episode. So let's move on to some of the ones in Discovery. Do you want to talk about our good friend Joe Deliberto, episode 71?

Mr. Joe Deliberto, let me describe the acronym that is a not. It is the famous upfront contract from the Sandler school of selling. And it goes like this. I appreciate you taking the time. Naturally, you're going to want to see the software. Obviously, I'm going to want to ask you some questions first just so that I know exactly what I should be showing you. And then typically, this call goes one of two ways. At the end, you either love what you saw and. And you're ready to set up another call with us to go deeper, or you say, this isn't really for me. Are you okay with giving me a no if it's a no at the end? And that's the upfront contract. The goal of an upfront contract is to say, hey, we're going to do some discovery before we jump in a demo, and I'm going to set up the next steps. All the way at the beginning of the call. So that at the end of the call, all I'm doing is going right back to those next steps that I set in the. Look at that, the upfront contract. And so this brings us to our next takeaway, which is number three with Mr. Corey Bray. Nick, what do we got here?

So this is similar to the Joe Diliberto one. One of the things Corey does is something he calls the Velocity plan, which is where in your upfront contract you talk about that one of two ways. And so let's say you're showing a demo to a group. I might say something like, hey, Armand, typically these introductory demos end up going one or two ways. You might see this thing and say, hey, this isn't really a good fit for us. And if that's the case, that is okay. I'm not the guy who wrote the code for this software. I'm just the guy who makes the cold calls and shows the demos. And if that's the case, no worries, you won't hurt my feelings. The other outcome might be that you say, hey, this thing looks relatively interesting. It's probably worth doing some further due diligence to see if this is actually the right fit for us or not. Usually what folks will want to do after this, if that's the case, is X. And X is whatever your best next step in the process would be. So you're suggesting where they should go from there. And what this allows the customer to do is disagree with your perspective next step early up front. And if they don't disagree, they're now thinking the entire meeting about are we going to go that direction or not. You don't want to be slamming them with next steps at the very end. The first time you talk about next steps should never be at the end of the meeting. You should be talking about it in the beginning of the meeting. Now what Corey taught me to do is you say, hey, given that this usually goes one of two ways, and I think we have a stop at 4:30 here. Are you okay if we end maybe five or six minutes early to talk about whether or not we move to that next step? Now you've covered, we're gonna talk about next steps. We're gonna carve out time for next steps. And I've given you a very clear path to, hey, either you're out or you're in. And this is where we would go. That one changed a lot for me. Speaking of things, that changed a lot for me, Armand, we've had a multi time Guest on this show, Josh Braun, episode 63. And when you and I were doing our prep for this episode, you were like, nick, this seems really, really silly, but because I was telling you about how before every sales call, now I make a cup of warm tea. And I'm not kidding here, I make a cup of warm tea and I bring it on my sales calls. Because one of the things I learned from Josh is that it is okay to be quiet for a second. I am the type of salesperson who always wants to prove to the customer how knowledgeable and great I am. And I often speak to fill the void. My friends will even tell you that. Right, Armand? And so what I've done is I've started to bring that cup of hot tea onto the call to actually force myself to take a sip of that tea and stop talking for a moment. And you would not believe the number of times that the customer fills that silence with really, really great information that I'd be trying to otherwise pry out of them with discovery. And so sometimes the best discovery question is a cup of hot tea. Now, Armand, we had an episode, Nick Casale, number 82, that you said was just your cup of tea, wasn't it?

That's right. And so you're drinking your cup of tea, you're sitting by the fire, and across from the fireplace, what do you see? You see one of your competitors. Now, here's the issue is if you've already gotten to that point, it's a little bit too late. So with the one and only, Mr. Niccasale, what we talked about is early in the deal cycle, before competitors come up in that head to head, set the foundation for your buyers and educate them on the three or four things that matter in your space. And make sure that when you educate them on the three or four things that matter, you have a couple of ones that are in what's called the winning zone. In other words, the things that you do better, better than anyone else in the market. Then once a competitor comes up, all you're going to do is you're going to say, hey, you remember those three or four things we discussed at the beginning of the call? You said that X, Y and Z were super important to you. Just so you know. I know you're looking at competitors, but where we tend to be really strong is in xyz. What they're really good is at A, B and C. But of those four criteria mentioned, they're going to miss two of them. And so what you've done is you've already gotten people addicted to the three or four things that they think should matter in the space. And then all you're going to do with a competitor is take those things away. And so the last thing that might happen, Nick, is you've been silent with your tea, you've come across some competitors, and the one and only Josh Bron and Nick Casale have helped you through the way, and now your customers or your prospects might start to ask you some questions. And so the last tip is from the one and only Keenan, who screamed at you for 20 minutes straight. What do we do when people are asking us questions?

If you have not listened to that episode, it was a really good one. It was number 75. The reason I got a lot out of it was we legitimately came into that recording of that podcast episode. I had come off a discovery call, that sort of rent went awry, and we workshopped it with Keenan. And so I learned a ton from that. So if you want to hear me get coached by Kenan, go check that one out. The thing that I screwed up in that discovery call was the customer came in asking me some questions, and I was seeking to respond rather than seeking to understand on those questions. What I mean by that. This comes into play a lot in the demos that I show. I sell time tracking software that's very configurable for the user. And so the user, the folks that I'm demoing, will say, well, how does the application behave in X scenario or Y scenario? And the truth is it could behave in 87 different ways, depending on how you set it up. And what I used to do is I would respond and say, well, here's all of the different ways you can configure it. And for a buyer who for the first time is seeing the software, it's overwhelming and confusing. And my new response that I learned from Keenan, which is to seek to understand before trying to be understood, is, now I just say, well, how would you like it to behave, Armand? And then nine times out of ten, the customer goes, huh, that's a good question. And they think about it for 90 seconds, and then they tell me what they want. And then I say, oh, well, yeah, we can do that. Here's how you do it. And so instead of trying to jump down the customer's throat to show them how smart you are, take a second, take a sip of your tea, and then say, well, how would you want to behave there? Or if they ask you a question that's like sort of out of left field, it's okay to say something like, you know, I don't typically get asked questions like that at this point in the sales process. It sounds like that might be something that's important to you. The idea here is you've got to understand the intent behind the question or the question behind the question, instead of trying to quickly show them how smart you are and respond right away. Speaking of how smart we are, let me kick it over to my buddy Armand, who's got another tip in the field now of sales process and negotiation.

All right, so up until now, folks, we've ledged our way off of objections. We've set upfront contracts at the front of the call, we've drank our tea, and we've dismantled our competition. And now it's time to talk about sales process. The first part of Sales Process that changed the way that I sell is with the one and only Mr. Stephen Gurgi, which was actually the last episode. And oftentimes what will happen is after Nick was describing, hey, you're going to get asked a bunch of questions about your competitors, your features, your functionality. Da, da, da, da. Ideally, what's happened at this point is you've gotten to one or two big business problems and you have four or five different things that feed into those business problems. But here's the thing. What happens when you get to that end of that call and there are four or five things that are actually missing and you don't solve all of the things that they've put on their 30 point checklist of what makes a good software solution? Well, what Stephen Gurgi taught us is all you have to do is put that in front of people. Don't be afraid to DQ deals and spend your time on the deals that really matter. The best sellers, they sell the 10% of deals that are going to go as big as possible. And the remaining 90%, they throw them in the garbage so they can spend more time finding and closing the 10%. Find that you only satisfy 50% of the requirements for a customer. What you should do is you should say, hey, it sounds like we only have 50% of what you need. And honestly, these are the one or two things that sound like you really need them. But if we're missing five of these 10, should we even have another conversation here or do you think you're going to buy this? If we get to the end of this process knowing that we don't have these five or 10 things, and by pushing someone away, what you do is you create this environment where they feel comfortable Giving you the real answers and then they have to opt back in to the process and then that gives you the ability to re anchor them on. Hey, you're not going to have everything. But what really matters is this one thing that you cannot get anywhere else. And that is the name of the game in early stage selling. That's the name of the game in enterprise selling when there are so many features that you need to satisfy that you cannot possibly check the box on every single one of them. Alrighty, Nick. So speaking of which, this goes hand in hand with the one and only Mr. Bilal, who taught us a lot about not being the most helpful seller in the world. Not trying to drop everything we do, not trying to meet every single requirement that a customer has. How do we go about being a less helpful seller?

Believe it or not, there is a paradigm under which most salespeople operate, which is I need to be this super helpful salesperson. Customer says, hey, can you send me a proposal? Armond, it would be my pleasure, my absolute pleasure, to put together a proposal for you and your team. And you know what? I'm also going to include a couple case studies in that email that I send you. Let me drop everything and do that for you. Now, the problem is when you are this uber helpful hotel concierge of a salesperson, you are no longer operating from a place of give, forget or reciprocity. And in a normal relationship between human beings, AKA buyer and seller, there should be some reciprocity. Meaning if the customer asks you for something, instead of being the person who drops it all, cancels their next three internal meetings to make sure they get this done before the end of the day. It's okay to ask your customer for something in return. So if they ask you for a proposal, it doesn't have to be something big, but it can be a question like, well, you know, we've got a couple different directions that we could go with this thing. Can we have a conversation for a second about sort of what your preferences are or what you even want to see See in that proposal, the key here is what you are never doing is giving unilateral gifts. One of the things we actually learned from Joe Deliberto as it relates to negotiation, Armand, is no unilateral concessions and doing something for the customer in the sales process, showing them a demo, sending them a case study, giving them a reference, putting together a proposal. Those aren't concessions per se, but what they are, are gives. They're gifts of your time, your effort, your energy and your attention. And if you are going to do that, you, you have the right to ask the customer if they ask for references and you say, yeah, I'll give you some references once you talk to those references. Are we going to be able to schedule a meeting with your boss? You should be able to say something like that. You should be able to sense check the customer. Stop dropping everything to be the helpful, helpful seller. What do we got next?

Well, while I'm not going to be the helpful seller anymore, I am going to be the helpful podcast host. And the reason for that is I'm actually going to help you preserve your commission check. And I'm gonna be even more helpful. Cause we're gonna intertwine the last two tactics together. And those two tactics come from episode 70 with Morgan Mello and episode 84 with David Primer. Step number one, when you get into a negotiation, what you need to do is you need to slow it down. And David Premier talked about the concept of you need to concede really slowly. If you know you have a 20% discount floor and someone says, I can get this done for a 15% discount, don't just go, okay, that is a nick move. That is not a commission check preserving move. You need to slow the thing down and you need to make it feel like work. You need to say, look, I'm going to need some degree of approval. You're going to need to make them justify why they need that discount. And then what you need to do is before you give up anything, now we get into the world of Morgan Melo. Before you give up anything, you need to start with the things that preserve your commission check. And so it usually starts with things like billing terms. Maybe it's quarterly billing, maybe it's net 60 or net 90, maybe it's a free month, maybe it's waived implementation fees. But whatever it is, you need to preserve that ARR as the final cut and make people work for it in a slow, slow, slow, slow, painful negotiation. You need to force people to do the work to get the negotiation. And then as you go deeper in the negotiation, you need to ask them for more things in return. So it might start with an ask for timeline, and then it continues for an ask on a three year deal or a five year deal or even fewer products in that package until the point where it finally ends instead of being this endless, endless negotiation because you've made it too easy for them to pull stuff away from you. All right, Nick, Those are our 10 tactics. We're going to go category by category. But look at this. We've actually gotten much better on time. So at the top of each category, we're actually going to give our favorite tactic, our personal favorite tactic in each category that we found all time in the show. And so we started with the prospecting bucket and we had the one and only Jeb Blunt. Talk about the ledge, which is when you get hit with a tough objection. Make sure you have something that you can pull out of your back pocket to slow things down and get out of the reactance mode. Before we move on to discovery. Nick, what is your number one prospecting tactic that you've learned from the show?

Well, most people on here know that I love my permission based opener, which I've recently adapted. So I've actually taken some elements of Armon's cold call opener, which is the heard your name tossed around opener, where Armon will say something like, hey, we work with a bunch of other Sequoia backed portfolio companies. It's armod over at 30 minutes to President's Club. Have you heard the name tossed around? I've actually sort of adapted something from that, which is I'm taking what I found in research and I'm including that upfront. But my question is not have you heard the name cost around? It is a permission based opener. So it might sound something like, I call partners at law firms, I might say, they pick up the phone, they go, hello? And I say, armand, I'm calling you because I saw you just transition from being the head of the law firm's bankruptcy practice group to being the firm coo. This is Nick Sigelski. I know you didn't expect me to call you this afternoon. Do you mind if I take one minute, I'll tell you why I'm calling and then you can tell me whether or not it makes sense for us to speak. What I'm doing here is I'm saying, hey, I actually did some research on you. There's a reason that I'm calling you. When you lead with a normal permission based opener, and you say something like, they answer the phone and you say, hey, Armand, this is Nick Sigelski with 30 minutes to President's Club. I know you didn't expect me to call you this afternoon. Do you mind if I take one minute, I'll tell you why I'm calling and then you can tell me whether or not it makes sense for us to speak. They have no context, meaning they might think you're the insurance salesperson or you're a financial advisor, or you're calling about their car warranty and I want to differentiate from those people. So I'm leading with the research and context and then I'm quickly transitioning into my permission based opener. It feels sort of weird because I'm saying a lot up front, but in my experience this has yielded a much higher conversion on they say, all right, fine, go ahead. And then they actually listen to me. So that's my new cold call opener. Hot off the presses. What's yours, Armand?

Hot off the press. Well, we're going to go to my tactic in discovery, but first let's recap what we discovered in the discovery section, which is, number one, Corey Bray talked about addressing next steps upfront. We talked about doing an upfront contract to set the expectation with Mr. Joel DiLiberto on, hey, we're going to do some discovery before we do demo and we're going to talk about next steps at the end and you're going to give us a yes or no. And then we talked about drinking tea and sitting for a second with Josh Braun being a little bit quiet. And the reason you gotta be quiet is you gotta listen. And you gotta listen for things like competitors. But the thing is, if you got to competitors, Nick Casale taught us to set the stage for how to handle competitors before they come up and then knock them down. And then once you start getting peppered with questions, Keenan taught us to make sure that you're always asking the question behind the question. And so my number one discovery tactic that I've learned on the show is probably the single most used discovery question that I use today. And it comes from Mr. Charles Mulbauer. Anytime you hear of a problem that is not explained in terms of, like, how they got to the realization that they had a problem, you're just going to ask them when was the moment you realized that this was a problem. And so let's use an example. I work for a company called Pave. Pave helps companies communicate compensation better. A lot of times people will come to us saying, yeah, we just feel like employees don't really understand equity. Usually what I'll say is, my guess is you probably didn't wake up and immediately come to the huzzah realization that my employees don't understand equity. While brushing your teeth in the morning, could you give me a sense of like, did it come up in exit interviews? Did someone bring it up in an NPS survey? When did you realize that this was a thing for you guys? And almost always. Almost always. Almost always you will get a story in return. And that story will sound something along the lines of, oh, this employee left the company, but they didn't realize that they were sitting on a gold mine of equity. And that's what you do. You just ask when they realize they had that problem. And you will always get a story that is usually an emotional story in return. Alrighty, folks, that's the end of discovery, the last piece of sales process and negotiate.

You're not going to ask me my tip. You're going to say, skip my tip.

Yes, we do. One for each section. You did prospecting, I did discovery, and you're going to.

I thought I got to give a tip. I thought I got to give it a tip.

No tip for you, Nick. Keep your tips to yourself. Okay. And so the last piece is sales process and negotiation. And so we started with Stephen Gergi telling us that we need to stop chasing the deals where we only satisfy 50% of the requirements. And Bilal then told us to sell, Stop being so helpful to every single person in the world, stop being so eager to help your buyers and put yourself in a position of equal business stature. And then lastly, Morgan Mello and David Primer, they told us to slow it down and start your concessions with the things that pay you last. Always bring those things that pay you last to the negotiation table and make it slow and painful to get to those things. All right, so, Nick, you asked, when can I go about giving my tip? You are allowed to give the final tip for the episode. Go ahead.

And the great part about this tip is it hits on discovery and negotiation. It's my favorite question when the customer has an ask, and it is a very basic question, is, well, what did you have in mind? I do this when the customer says that pricing isn't going to work for us. Huh. What did you have in mind? The reason I use this question, it's actually a combination of a lot of what we've talked about today, Armand. It's the ledge. It's my go to. When I get hit with an objection, I always default to, well, what did you have in mind? It's also the Keenan one where I'm understanding the question behind, in this case, the statement or objection. And finally, what it allows me to do is understand what's really going on here, what's the real concern when I get hit with that pricing isn't going to work for us. And I say, well, what did you have in mind? It might be the billing terms, it might be the annual escalation price increase clause. It might be the implementation cost. If I try to fight that objection on its face, I end up throwing my commission check in the trash because I instantly drop on price or I think, oh, they're focused on the seat price when it might be something else. So never, never, never, never, never fight the negotiation. The first punch that gets thrown at you instead of figure out what's going on here. What's the real concern? Well, what did you have in mind? It's always my go to Armand, what did you have in mind? For our outro, we didn't really do any planning.

Well, for our outro, here's what I'm going to do is because Nick got two tips, I get one tip, I'm going to steal his outro. So he's going to ask Armand, how can people help us out today? And I'm going to say, guys, the way that you can help us out today is by posting your favorite, favorite 30 minutes to President's Club episode on LinkedIn and tag us in it. We promise we will try to engage in as many posts as humanly possible, but we want to know from you, who should we have back on or who was your most impactful episode that changed the way that you sell, folks? And the last thing that I will say is a huge thank you for everyone who has listened to the show every single day. We are thankful for the fact that we get to talk about tactics and every once in a while we get paid for by businesses that are amazing to talk about sales tactics, which we would have done anyways. And it's all because of you folks. And so episode 100 in the books. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.