#416 - The Ultimate 5 Stage Sales Process to Speed Up Your Deals | 30MPC Playbook (Sell)

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Everybody, and welcome to this playbook episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froh and I'm here with my co host, Nick Skielski. And folks, today we are talking about the five sales stages that you can use to drive your deals beginning to end and possibly accelerate your deals by combining or skipping stages. Nick, we should. People listen.

So one of the biggest problems sellers make when they think about deals in their pipeline is they mistake activity for achievement. Meaning they think they had a meeting, they showed a demo, we're now in the demo stage. I gave my prospect pricing. We're now in the proposal stage. And they get themselves mixed up because they conflate having a meeting or sharing a certain piece of information with where the prospect is in their mind buying journey. And the reality is, is buyers don't buy based on linear meetings. Buyers based on meeting certain thresholds where first they acknowledge a problem exists, then they acknowledge the solution that you have solves that problem, then they get to a place where they feel like, yeah, it solves at a price that is worth paying. In this episode, we're going to talk about a different way to think about where your buyer is and some different tools in your toolkit to actually accelerate their purchase based upon where they are at, which is not meeting based.

Whenever I've stepped run a sales team or advise a founder that's trying to build their sales process for the first time, the first thing that I will always map out is what are the four or five things that we need to get your prospect to agree to independent of how many calls that happens on.

Right.

And then from there that allows us to design a two call close flow or a three call close flow, or a five call ten call close flow based on how quickly we can get those things depending on what our product looks like. So if you know the things you need to get your prospect to agree to in the right order, that allows you to start getting creative and combining multiple stages into one call and drive deal acceleration. Because you might not need to do a separate demo if you can get them to agree to a solution in the first call instead of the second.

So in this episode we are going to start with how to establish your sales stages and align them with different exit criteria. And then we're going to talk through how to run deal driving calls in each individual stage.

All right, so let's start with key concepts or principles when establishing your sales stages. If you ever see a stage that sounds like demo or the name of a meeting which is a mistake I've made in the past. That is probably a good sign that your sales stages aren't architected the right way. What you want to do is you want to focus on not what are you doing in a sales stage. You're not doing a discovery call, you're not doing a demo, but what are you trying to get get? You're trying to get problem agreement. And one way that you can get problem agreement is through a discovery call. One way you can get solution agreement is through a demo. But another way that you could get solution agreement is you could do a harbor tour demo at the end of discovery call and then you forego the demo call entirely. Or you could do a POC to get solution agreement because you have a more complex solution. And so the first rule of thumb is use exit criteria as your stages, do not use meetings as your sales stages.

One other principle to think through is while you can never skip stages, you can combine stages. One area a lot of folks screw things up where they'll inadvertently skip a stage when they're thinking about their pipeline is they'll think, hey, I told my customer directionally what this costs in the first meeting. We're now all the way in the proposal stage, which is close to closing. Just because you gave somebody pricing doesn't mean you're in the proposal stage because you have not hit the exit criteria of the previous stages. So you can't ever skip stages. And however, you can combine stages and get multiple exit criteria in one meeting, in one interaction. One very common example of this is you might show a demo to a prospect and at the 45 minute mark of your 60 minute demo, they're like, this thing is awesome. This solves my problem. You might then transition into giving them pricing in that same meeting and getting them to say, yeah, that looks pretty good. That's directionally aligned with what we were expecting to pay. You now are at our place where you have progress to that deal beyond just yes, solution agreement. So you can combine exit criteria, you can't skip exit criteria.

Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster. When timing matters, the fastest way to.

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Getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting. And that text opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward. With text us check it out. It's free in the show notes. So let's do a quick rattle of the five sales stages, the exit criteria for each, the common people involved in achieving that exit criteria, and then the ways you can get that exit criteria. So stage one is what we call problem agreement. Your champion is usually the stakeholder who needs to agree that there is a problem that is worth solving for the organization. The most common way that you will get to problem agreement is through a discovery call. But there are other ways that you can get problem agreement that you might not be thinking about.

Right? So one example of this is you might have a conversation with them and they think they have a problem, but you and the prospect need to validate whether or not that problem is actually a problem by doing something like a data or a process audit. So one example, when I sold ERP systems to law firms, law firms would always complain about the billing process and they would say, oh, we have all sorts of rejections and deductions and write downs on our bills. We need to solve this. But then when we actually validated what percentage of their bills were being written down against industry averages for their practice group, they realized they were actually better than the industry average and it wouldn't be worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix this non problem. So there's times that you actually need to do more or do different things to get that problem agreement.

There's another example here for a client that I advise. Their name is BRM Labs. Think of them as a CRM for buyers, AKA brm. And one of the things that they help buyers do is they help them track all of their software subscriptions so that they make sure that they never miss a renewal. Or if they do renew, they're not accidentally renewing more seats than they needed when they bought that software. And so the first thing that they'll do after a discovery call is they'll actually hook into all of their credit card accounts, they'll pull all of their contracts and they'll show them, hey, this is how many renewals you've already missed. And if the answer is zero, it's a little bit less compelling than what they usually find, which is, I've found 30 renewals that you missed. Now do you really want to see the solution? Great. We have problem agreement. So when you think about problem agreement, there are multiple levels to what good looks like when you're achieving the exit criteria. Here, the worst is this would happen all the time. When I was selling compensation software at Pavement, a rep would say they love pave. That is not a problem at all. That is the worst. The middle okay is the champion says that they're spending hours and hours and hours compensation planning and it's a huge operational pain for them. That's okay because it's a big problem for the champion, but it's not really a business problem. They're not losing masses of money. It's one problem. It's a process problem for an individual contributor, but a great problem. Sounds like the champion is spending so much time manually planning compensation and spreadsheets and that's leading to compensation mistakes because they literally don't have the time to oversee all of the decisions from all the managers and they've seen a few people making semi inequitable comp decisions and we have to ratchet down on it and literally the CEO put their fist down and they're like, you guys have to button up this process. That is great problem agreement. So as you think about de risking your own deals and when you decide to move a deal out of pipeline into stage two or as a leader, when you start to do pipeline reviews, these are the types of places you should be asking questions to really make sure that you've checked off that exit criteria. So that brings us to stage two, which is solution agreement, right? So solution agreement means, hey, you agreed that you had this problem in the previous stage and now you've seen what we have to offer and you know enough about our solution to be like, yeah, you guys are like really, really best equipped to solve that problem. The people involved are usually the champion still. And it's usually the champion plus one. Sometimes that's someone above the line, but usually it is someone either at the line across. So for example, if you're meeting with a director of mid market sales, it might be a director of enterprise sales or it is someone on that person's team. So if I was meeting with the director of rebops, it might be the deal desk manager. And there are multiple ways that you can get solution agreement. The most common way that you get solution agreement is through a demo, which is what most people do. But there are other ways you can get a solution agreement. So the most common way is after that 30 minute discovery call, you might do a 60 minute demo or that demo might actually happen inside of the first discovery call. So again, multiple ways to accomplish solution agreement either inside of the first call or it might require a separate Call. Or you might have such a complex solution that you actually need to do three demos and then you have to do a POC on top of that. Or you have to do three demos, a poc, a technical validation, and possibly even an initial business case just to really show that we can manage all of your integrations and things like that before we even get to the next stage.

Right, so then for solution agreement, Bad solution agreement sounds like Armand. We had a great demo and they asked me for pricing. That is not concrete enough, that is not explicit enough to exit that stage. Great solution agreement sounds like Armand. I asked them at the end. So at this point, you know what we do, we know how we solve that problem we talked about. I guess if this thing were free, like could you see this actually being something that you would want to use on a regular basis? If the answer to that is no, well then you're not exiting. But you have to be very, very explicit of like, independent of price. Is this the solution you would like to use? That brings us to stage three, which is very similar to stage two. The key difference is the altitude of the person who is validating this exit criteria. So stage three is solution and problem agreement from power. Somebody who is above the line who can make a purchasing decision. So the people involved in this stage are still going to be your champion. Maybe that plus one. But the key here is you need to have power involved in this to exit this stage. You need validation from power that the problem is a problem big enough worth solving. So exiting stage one again with that person and that the solution that you have adequately solves that problem in a way that they're like, yeah, this is something that I would like. Again, there's a lot of similarities in this, this stage three and stage two. And so you're going to be doing similar things, showing that demo, maybe doing the poc, potentially building a shared business case with your champion to co present to power. But there's some other things that you might start to pull into this stage to get that agreement from power. Those would be things like bringing in an exec from your side to meet with an exec on their side to have that exact exec one on one. You might do the roadmap sale call where you pull in somebody from your product team to say, hey, this is where our product is today, but check out where it's going to be in a quarter, in six months, in two years, and you get them excited about that. You might also, in a big enough deal, start to pull in references now to get them selling on your behalf. While this is a very similar stage to stage two, this is where you start to really get creative and open up your toolkit.

When it comes to checking off exit criteria for power agreement, one of the biggest things that you want to look for is not just did power like the solution, but number one, does power see this problem as something that is top three in all of the priorities they need to support? And then number two, do they see you as someone who is adequately equipped to support them and their scale as an organization? So a lot of times, for example, you'll have someone in power who will be like, this is a really great solution, but it's not the right priority for us right now. Even though it's a problem, it's a problem I'm willing to let burn. Or you'll see someone in power who's like, this is a massive problem for us to solve. It's a huge priority. But I'm going to be honest, like, I like what you're doing, I like where the vision is going, but I've implemented early stage software like this a couple of times and I just know once we get into implementation, this thing is probably going to break. And those are the two places you need to dig in. You need to really make sure that this problem matters to power and you need to really make sure that power believes that you can actually solve their problem.

So stage four is full commercial agreement, not just agreement on pricing, but full contractual terms agreement, which includes pricing. In order to exit this stage, you need to have got an agreement that the problem is worth solving. Your solution solves that problem in a great way and at a fair contractual price and terms place the people involved in this. You're still going to have your champion involved in this, helping drive things. You're going to have power involved in this and typically there is a financial stakeholder who's going to be involved, maybe somebody in procurement, maybe a CFO, etc. The ways that you typically exit this stage and drive it through are a formal proposal meeting, some negotiation conversations, which might be a couple conversations, it might be one, it might happen in the proposal meeting. And then typically you're going to have some engagement with procurement in a bigger upper mid market or enterprise sale.

When you think about what good exit criteria or bad exit criteria sounds like, good exit criteria is this price 100% works. We've mapped out all the key contract terms and we've gone through the budget approval process. Yes, bad exit criteria is a champion's Like I think this price could work. And then you move it to vendor review stage, which is the next stage. And then they're like, oh wait, no, could this be a three year deal? Oh wait, this isn't budgeted for in finance. We need to literally go bring this to finance first. There are a lot of things outside of just agreeing with the high level price that need to happen for you to one, get all of the terms mapped out and then to even extract that budget from the rest of the organization.

Well, to the point of you can't skip stages, I can't tell you the number of times that early in a sales process someone is like, yeah, I'd love to take a look at the contract and just see what it is. Okay, well just because I sent over a contract after the second call, that doesn't mean we're in the vendor review stage. That's another sort of bad exit criteria of is they asked for a contract when clearly they're not ready to sign one.

Again, if you are in demo stage, a lot of times you will share a proposal and just because you're sharing a proposal, then if you didn't get problem agreement, solution agreement, power agreement first, even though you are sharing a proposal, it is not in commercial agreement stage yet.

Right. And that doesn't mean that you can't actually be sort of progressing multiple parts of the sale or multiple stages at once. You might still, you're not going to say, nope, we're not in that stage yet. I can't give you anything to look at. You might say, okay, yeah, I'm going to simultaneously or in parallel work on stages. But you can't say, oh, it's accelerated to that point.

Correct.

However, if we've done a good job here in this commercial agreement stage, we now move to stage five, which is full vendor approval. What this means, the exit criteria for this is very, very clear. You've got a signed contract. The people who you're going to need to work with on the prospect side to do that include your champion power, probably finance, probably security, legal. To make sure that everything related to signing a formal contract is thumbs up. Ways that you exit the vendor review stage is not just send them a contract and wait for them to sign it. You'll be doing things like having legal to legal calls where you work through red lines on the contract. You'll probably want to be having regular check ins with your champion to unstick parts of the vendor review process. You're probably going to pull in someone on their IT or security team to do a more formal security review. And those are the ways that you should be thinking about moving through that vendor review stage.

Yeah, and this one's pretty obvious. What good exit criteria sounds like is you have a fully executed contract signed. The only bad exit criteria that I could think of, because the final stage is closed one, is if you close one an opportunity. And maybe they signed a contract, but it was like an illegitimate contract where you didn't finish vendor review yet. They still need to do security review, there are a bunch of contingencies on it, whatever, but that is an edge case. So the exit criteria for this is you have a fully approved vendor contract that includes legal security and anything else that needs to be done to close one the opportunity. So to recap, the five stages were problem agreement, solution agreement, power agreement, commercial agreement, and vendor approval. Five stages, this doesn't mean five calls, it doesn't mean three, it doesn't mean seven. When I was at Carta, all of these things could happen in one call where we would get on. Someone has been on Carta four different times. We would literally be like, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Great. Need to issue out options. Quick Harbor Tour demo, nothing's changed. Power agreement, you're the cfo. Commercial agreement, here's the price. There's a discount on it because your law firm works with us. Vendor approval, it's three grand. There is no IT approval. Send me the contract. It's literally all done in one call. When I was selling a 300k deal at pave, I had 3 months of vendor review calls and that sat in stage five and there were probably 20 calls minimum in stage five alone. So that's an example of how it can be elongated or shortened. So now that you know your five sales stages, we are still going to give you an example call framework that you can use within those stages, which will represent the most common call that is usually used to achieve that exit criteria.

So before we actually get into those individual calls, Armand, let's actually talk about how you game plan for those calls. Because the agenda that you set up front and the structure that you follow in these meetings should be oriented around the exit criteria for the stage that you were in that you are aiming to achieve. And so before you get into the meeting, you have to think about, what am I trying to get? That's going to be your agenda that you set. And at the end of the meeting, when most folks just talk about next steps, that's when you're going to validate whether or not the meeting made progress or got through that exit criteria.

There is a concept that will carry throughout every single call that you will use to make sure that your calls are actually driving your sales cycle forward. And you're not just doing a demo for the sake of doing a demo. The beginning and end of each sales call are oftentimes your agenda and your next steps. Those are your steering wheels. In other words, when you're setting an agenda, you usually say, this is what we're trying to achieve. That's the steering wheel that makes sure that the purpose of this call is aimed toward achieving the exit criteria in the stage. And then at the end of the call before you set next steps, usually what you're doing is you're saying, hey, did we achieve that exit criteria? And then you're using your steering wheel again to say, awesome. So the next step that will achieve the next exit criteria is a demo or a meeting with power or whatever it might be. So the beginning and the end of the call are oftentimes acting as your steering wheels. And those happen in every single call in your sales cycle. And then the middle part of the call in a discovery call, those are discovery questions. On a demo, it's the demo itself. On a presentation to power, it's a business case or a proposal or a presentation, that middle part of the call is your ignition that actually moves you forward and gets you to achieve the exit criteria. So again, to recap, agenda sets the exit criteria for this call. Middle part of the call achieves the exit criteria. Next steps, recap and make sure that you achieve that exit criteria. And then they set the exit criteria for the next call.

So let's say I'm in stage one, where I'm trying to get that problem agreement. The way my agenda is going to sound is like this. I'm going to say, Arman, really the purpose for today is for us to figure out, like, can we even help you solve anything as it relates to your law firm's back office operations? I guess in terms of how we get there, it might be helpful to get a sense of like the top two to three things that you're focused on as it relates to your billing, accounting, and like client back office processes. And then I can give you a sense of like, how we work with a couple other law firms in the Chicago area. And then I guess I'm thinking we should probably end about five minutes early to talk about, like, does it make sense for us to keep talking after today? Are there problems that you have that we can actually address. Does it make sense for us to show you a deeper dive demo? So that's sort of how I'm thinking we should spend our time. Does that sound fair to you?

What Nick's done is he's made it clear that the goal was to get to problem agreement. He's told me how we're going to get there. Got alignment from me. From there. We're oftentimes going to run the discovery call itself. We're not going to go into the depths of how to run a discovery call on this call. And then he will go to the end of the call, which we end with what we call the five minute drill. Right.

And in the five minute drill, what I am doing is I am trying to validate with the prospect whether or not we hit that exit criteria. And so the way that I do that is I ask three questions at the end of the meeting. Do you want to buy? Not literally, but do you want to keep looking at this? Is this worth your time to keep exploring to buy this thing? When do you want to buy? I'm trying to get a sense of the timing for when they want to have something like this in place, because this helps me qualify as this worth our time right now. And then I advise them on how they should buy. I'll give some input of. Okay, if you want to keep exploring, if this is generally directionally when you want something in place, here's what I would recommend you do next.

So the way that I'm going to end these calls is with what we call the five minute drill. And a lot of times there's this conventional advice in sales that you should always be setting a next step. That's actually a really common mistake because if you finish discovery call and your prospect literally doesn't care about the problem you're solving, a lot of times they will still agree to a demo because they want to go window shopping. There are three questions that you're going to ask at the end of the day. Every single call. And the last one talks about setting next steps. The first question is, do you want to buy? Now, when you ask this, you're not literally going to say, hey, do you want to buy? What you want to do is you want to say something like this, hey, Nick, honestly, like, I think there's something here. You mentioned that your employees were really, like, not understanding how their stock options worked. You mentioned that you've had a couple of employees leave for higher salaries even though they had a bunch of equity on the table. And I think these are problems worth solving. Honestly, between you and I, it's going to take a lot of resources for us to keep going through all these demos. A proof of concept, all this stuff. Is that a problem that you actually feel like is something that your team would realistically invest in and is it worth spending more time together or is this a little bit of like a nice to have? You really want to push them to check off the exit criteria of problem agreement in the stage. Once they say yes, then I can move to the next question, which is when do you want to buy? In order to know what next step I need to set, I need to understand what is important in terms of when they need to go live. And so I might say, look, it sounds like you're going to do a big comp cycle in Q2 and it's Q1 now and that probably means directionally we want to have this thing like contract signed and like starting to implement around February so you can go live in April. Does that directionally sound like the right timing for this kind of thing? Awesome. So what I'm doing is I'm directionally setting go live and contract sign and date, but I'm not giving a formal, formal walk back plan yet. That will happen on future calls. And then the final question is how do you buy? And that ends in a period. It's not actually a question. The key with this one is you always want to suggest next steps because you've sold your software or your product a million times more than they have bought your product. And so here's what that might sound like. Well, awesome look, sounds like we're directionally aligned that like this is a problem that's worth solving. Usually the next step from here is we would want to make sure that you feel like we're the best equipped to solve that problem, AKA solution agreement. And the way we would accomplish that is we would go through a 60 minute deep dive demo with you and probably one of your other peers, maybe your director of compensation over there in emea. From there, if that goes well, we would do the same thing and we would bring that proposal up to Jane, your chief people officer. Does that sound about right? And so what I'm doing is I'm saying here's how people have usually bought in the past, here's the next step and what we're trying to get in the next step, the exit criteria. And then here's the next next step. What are we going to do two calls from now to get the stage three exit criteria.

So now that you understand that steering wheel and ignition analogy around orienting your prospect around the exit criteria and validating whether or not you got at the end, let's go through the five different sales stages. We will talk about the most common call or the most common play that you use to get that exit criteria. And then let's actually talk about a couple different ways that you can comb or accelerate through multiple exit criteria in one meeting. Two ways that you can start to accelerate through stage two, which is also getting Solution Agreement, is one before that first discovery call, I really like sending my prospects a pre watch or a pre read that teases just a little bit about our solution. This accomplishes two things. One, it gets them excited about what you do. Two, it almost primes them to be thinking about the problem area that you solve for. So when I sell our podcast sponsorships, Armand, I literally have a 90 second video where I talk through how big the audience is and it goes through some actually basic demographic information. And so when I show up with the prospect, they're already excited about getting in front of a really, really big audience that is aligned with their icp. So that's one way that I start to accelerate through. I haven't achieved the exit criteria, but I've made progress on getting through that Solution Agreement. One other thing that I'll do this is when we sell our Club Pass offering is we'll frequently meet with a champion on a first meeting and we'll get 15 minutes in and we'll spend the last like seven minutes doing a harbor tour demo of the Club Pass Solution. And we get them excited enough about this thing where they're nodding their head and they're like, yeah, this looks really, really good that they're willing to bring their boss into the next meeting. And we actually end up accelerating almost all the way through stage three, because now we have power involved on the second call instead of the third.

So let's go through stage two again. Solution Agreement. The most common way that you will achieve Solution Agreement is typically through what we call either a big team meeting or a 60 minute deep dive demo. The way that call is usually structured is upfront. You're going to set your PPO agenda, which the goal of this call is. You agreed that this was a problem in the past and we want to make sure that we can actually be the people that are going to solve that problem for you. The way we're going to do that is through a demo, yada, yada, yada.

So that now brings us to stage two where we are looking to get solution agreement. This typically is that champion plus one. And the big mistakes that I see sellers make in this demo where they have new stakeholders in the room is they think, I gotta do some discovery, Armand. And they start their discovery back at square one where they have somebody that they had a full 30 minute conversation with and somebody knew and they start asking all of these questions of that somebody knew and they burn a ton of time. And the champion sitting there being like, I thought we were going to see the software. The other mistake that I see people make is they know that there's already that context and they assume that the new stakeholder has gotten the full download and they jump right into things, both ends of that spectrum. You have a ton of risk of having the meeting blow up in your face.

So the way that you're going to structure this call is as follows. You're going to set your agenda with your normal purpose, plan, outcome. And that purpose usually sounds like we're trying to achieve solution agreement. These are the problems that you wanted to solve. We need to make sure that we're well equipped to solve them from there. I like to run this out of what we call a big team demo deck and there's actually a link to a template inside of the show notes if you'd like to follow along as you go. The first slide is you want to recap all the problems that they shared, all the problems that the champion shared in that first discovery call. Your second slide is you're usually giving a high level overview of how you can solve them. One slide, hey, you mentioned that you have these four problems. Here are the three things that we do to solve those problems. And the third slide is a blank slide where you just have the faces of each individual stakeholder on the call and you go one by one and you ask each person, hey, which of the problems that we mentioned are especially important to you or what did we miss that's particularly important to the compensation function versus the finance function versus the recruiting function? You want to make sure that each person has the opportunity to say, yes, all of those problems on the discovery call were a hundred percent on point or no, this is the only one that matters, or no, you actually missed these three. From there you now have a really clean punch list of things you can call back to in the demo. And now as you demo, you're going to use a lot of what we call past questions where you might say, hey Jane, you mentioned a little bit earlier, either on the past call, or earlier in this call that the employees were constantly complaining about the fact that they had no idea how much it costed to exercise their options and they would oftentimes forget that these options are actually deeply, deeply in the money and worth 10 times more than what they originally came in and saw. This is what they would see inside of Pave today. I'm curious, how does this compare to what they've been using in the past? So you do multiple callbacks throughout your demo where you're constantly asking past questions to validate the things that you've learned in discovery and that you've set up on the front end of your demo. And then at the end of the call again you're going to run the five minute drill. Or sometimes this becomes the 15 minute drill. Because usually what happens is you say, hey, at this point you've probably seen everything that our solution has to offer. At least on the high level. We can always go deeper on the integrations, the permissions, all this other stuff. But based on the problem that you were trying to solve and based on what we've shown you so far, naturally you know our software is not free. Do you see this as something that is at least semi worth investing your time into, independent of the cost? That's the first question you ask in the 5 minute drill. From there you're going to get a little bit more detailed on the timeline and now you might start to get a little bit more granular on when you're going to loop in power, what it looks like to secure budget, et cetera. And then you're going to set your next step, which is usually the goal, is to get to power agreement.

That said, some ways that we can accelerate through this stage and make progress on future stages, if I want to get power agreement faster, there's a world where I can get power to join that first deep dive demo that I do. Typically in order to do this, I need to have shown some degree of a harbor tour. A high level overview in the back half of my first meeting with my champion, to the point that they're like, yeah, I feel good about this thing, I want to bring my boss in. So that's one way we can make progress on power agreement. Another thing that we can do to accelerate into the commercial agreement and through commercial agreement is if I have power on this meeting and I'm able to nail a really tight 40 minute mini discovery upfront and demo and they're not in their heads and this thing's going well, I might budget 12 minutes to go through pricing and give them a proposal. And now we're already talking commercials. I don't have to set a whole separate call to do that. So those are two acceleration tactics in that stage that we can use.

So to be clear, at the end of stage two, if you ran a big team demo, you're actually going to set two meetings in your next steps. The first is you're going to set the big team meeting with power. And then before that, let's say that big team meeting was on Wednesday. You might set the champion prep call on a Monday so that you have a full day to update the deck and all that stuff. This is the perfect time to ask your champion to get on a text basis instead of email. So I might literally say, like, hey, Nick, I want to make sure that we really nail this meeting with Jane. Is it okay if I shoot you a text or, like, give you a quick call before this meeting just so I really make sure that we come in prepared? They will always say yes because you're trying to make sure that they look good. And then you still send them the meeting invite. And you'll probably still be on Zoom anyways, but you can use that text later. All right, so let's talk about the champion sandwich prep call. The bottom part of that sandwich, usually what you're doing is you want to get three things out of it. The first is you want to shake the post a little bit. You want to make sure, hey, are you still feeling good about this thing? It's sort of like you're there with your best friend on wedding day. You're in the back and you're like, hey, like, we got this thing right. Like, you know, this is the problem you want to solve. You know this is the right solution. All right, great. You're still feeling strong conviction. Let's move forward. Second thing you're looking for is tell me everything that you know about what Jane cares about. What are the priorities that you have that are top priority for her? What are the things that you care about that you can't get her to care about? What are the things going on in other departments that she cares about? You're using your champion as pre discovery, and then from there, you want to walk them through the call flow and the plan for the day. And this is really key because you want your champion to not be blindsided. That, number one, you're going to be recapping a lot of things that they've already heard. A lot of times a champion will be like, wait, we've already covered this stuff. Will you jump into the demo? You need to explain to your champion that they're completely new to the solution. And, and you're going to have to recap some of these things. But then two, what you want to do is you want to have the champion play a bigger role in the call. And it's the money zone when you can actually get your champion to agree to kick off the call and explain why we're here and recap the problems themselves. And then from there, you take over Discovery, and you're the one who's running Discovery with power.

The last thing that you're going to do at the end of this bottom part of the sandwich before the big team meeting is you are going to pre schedule a debrief meeting, the top part of the sandwich with your champion to happen at after the big team meeting. And the purpose of this is you want to figure out, like, sometimes prospects are just aren't comfortable voicing their real opinions, or are we really going to buy this thing with you in the room? But you want to figure out what was said when you weren't in the room. You want to get a debrief from your champion, and you want to get on the same side to figure out how you drive this thing home. You also want to drive and force urgency for the whole team that you're trying to sell to to actually talk about how things went. And if you don't set a backstop, they can just let that discussion linger. And now you're like a week after the demo and you're like knocking on the door, hey, what did you all think? What are next steps? And so at the end of that bottom part of the sandwich, you'll aim to get that hey, backstop on the calendar. The way that I voice it over is I'm like, hey, okay, awesome. I'm really looking forward to that demo with Jane next week. You know, I know sometimes there's questions that come up after these meetings and honestly, it might be good for the two of us to sync after. So that one, I can get you really, really fast answers to those. But then two, like, you and I can have an honest conversation about what Jane thinks and how we might get this brought in for you all. I guess, are you free? The demo's on Wednesday afternoon. Are you free like mid morning Thursday for us to debrief? If you've done the good work up until now, every champion will be fine to get that backstop on the calendar. And that is where you can Navigate real next steps with your champion, as opposed to being at the end of the big team meeting with six people there being like, so, do you want to buy? When do you want to buy? It's just. It's too hard when you have that many people in the room.

The last thing that I'll share that Nick just called out, which is, is that this is when same side selling starts to occur. So if you use a mutual action plan, which is oftentimes just a series of steps that are mapped out between you and your buyer, where it's like, okay, we need to get budget approval, power agreement, we need to do it, review, et cetera, this is usually when you introduce it. If you got to solution agreement in stage two, that means your champion agrees this is a problem, agrees you're the solution. And now it's you and me against the world. And so this is where you're game planning with them. Not just on the next step, but on everything that you need to do to drive this across as a sale in the organization.

Again, one way we can accelerate through this stage and get into making progress on stage four, which is full commercial agreement, is if you've run a really, really good team meeting and you've got 20 minutes of extra time at the end, you should be going through the commercials of pricing of your proposal with that team because you're not going to get finalization on that call. But then you don't have to set a whole separate call where you go for formal pricing with power. Only do this if you have adequate time to actually go in this in detail. You don't want to accelerate your deal just for the sake of trying to accelerate. When there's seven minutes left on the clock, that's a bad play.

So let's go through stage four, which is commercial agreements stage. There are usually three stages or phases of a negotiation, and these can happen across 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 calls. Those three phases are as follows. The first thing is you initially present price and you get the first reaction. And oftentimes there's a little bit of like a negotiation dog fight that happens where you say it's 100k and they're like, oh, my God, I thought this was gonna be 50k. And you're really just creating that initial fight. But oftentimes they don't actually know what needs to happen to get it done. So you're just pulling more and more and more and more. In this first phase where you're just trying to get the full ask on the table is it just price or is it a two year deal? Is it a rate lock? Are there other products that you need from there? The second phase is usually you're sending them on a homework assignment and you're saying, look, I need you to come back with your full and final ask of what gets it done. If I told you it was 100, you got to come and tell me that it's 70 on a two year deal or whatever it is. And that second phase means they come back with a number. And now you're starting to drive toward a solution. What usually happens here is they say, oh, I needed to be 70K. And you're like, oh my God, I can't do 70K. And it's again a dogfight for, for. And then again it's a dogfight for 10, 20 minutes. And then what happens is eventually you're probably going to soft float a number where you're like, I, I think I could get an 8 in front of it. And your goal from there is to get them at least directionally, saying like, I think that would get it done. So ideally you're meeting somewhere not all the way where their ask is, but not at full rack. And then the third stage is an optional stage that will happen when you're trying to seal the deal shut. So sometimes when you soft float that number, if I quoted them 100 and they're like, I get it done at 90, I'm probably just going to be like, okay, let me get my approval, send them an email, it's going to get approved. But if I still feel like there's a little bit of negotiation to be done, I'll oftentimes come back with options which will be like, okay, I'm going to give you a two year deal at 140k because I know you wanted 70k per year, or I'm going to give you a one year deal at 80k. And usually what will happen is that will seal up the deal. Because at the end of a negotiation, if you give people options, sort of like with a kid, you don't ask them to put on their shoes, you say, do you want your red shoes or your blue shoes? If you say, hey, here's the one year deal, two year deal, they'll usually focus on picking one as the final step, knowing that this is as far as you can take it.

So one way that you can accelerate this stage and actually start to make progress on the next stage, this one's sneaky because it actually helps with both. If you can initiate vendor Review, procurement, legal, it. In tandem with negotiating the pricing and the commercials, you do two things. One, you'll start to make progress on that last phase to get the contract signed. But two, you figure out where you stand in this because if you've got a prospect who's already initiating legal review, you know you've got leverage here and that their bluff of like, oh, that's way too much is a bluff. And so this is a really, really sharp one where get them to initiate this stuff even before you've fully agreed on commercials.

We have the saying in wrestling, which is don't look at their eyes. A lot of times a wrestler will fake with their eyes or with these head bobs, look at their feet. It's really hard to fake where you're moving your entire body with your feet. And so if they're saying they need a discount, but if they're finishing legal review, they probably don't actually need the discount. All right, let's talk about the last piece, which is stage five, vendor approval. There are a couple of calls that you'll oftentimes run when you're in vendor approval stage. Usually you first have the initial kickoff. So again, you want to parallel process it security and ideally procurement at the same time. And you usually want to do that on separate threads. So it isn't responding with security questions while legal is responding with red lines. And it's impossible to drive next steps from there. You want to meet with your champion every single week. So I usually say like, hey, every week on a Monday or on a Tuesday, we're going to set a standing meeting and we're going to just work through every bit of vendor review. The final piece here is you want to set micro deadlines for every part of vendor review. My favorite, most common place to do this is with legal and we'll use what's called a redline deadline. So oftentimes what will happen with legal processes is you'll know it's a six week contract review process and you'll just say, great. If today is February 1st, your goal is to get this done on March 6th and then what happens on February 28th is legal finally prioritizes your contract in the queue and they're like, oh, this is pretty bad, you know what, let's use our paper instead. Or they'll come back with literally 70 pages of red lines and you're like, oh God, this is literally going to take me like four more weeks and your deal will slip. So instead what you want to do is you want to Create micro deadlines for every part of the legal process. So I might say, hey Jane, usually when I'm working on a legal review with a company of your size, it takes about five days just to get like those first cuts prioritized and even get our contract looked like. So if today's a Monday, do you think we could shoot for your legal team to get us our first cuts back by Friday? Say yes. Awesome. That's the first red line deadline. From there I'm going to take no longer than 24 hours to get you your cuts back on your first cuts. So let's call that the following Monday. If I get you those cuts back on Monday, do you think you give me another 48 hour turnaround now that it's prioritized and maybe on Wednesday you get me the second cuts. Awesome. Great. From there I will see if there's anything left to be done. Again, 24 hours by Thursday. By next Friday if there's still revisions. Usually there are only a couple of left. Could we just like pre schedule a legal to legal call on the following Friday just so that if there are any final issues we can literally just like get the lawyers on the call so they can duke it out on the one or two last terms? I promise you it will save us both like 17 more emails and 9 times out of 10 they will get it done in like 15 minutes. They'll say yes. Now here's the magic. Not only have I set a deadline for contract kickoff, I've set a backstop where the legal team is now going to see that there is a calendar invite on their calendar for the following Friday. Which means they're going to look at and they're going to be like, oh God, I don't want to jump on a legal legal call. Fine, I'll look at your contract this week. And that's what actually gets them to push through the redline deadlines quicker and earlier in your sales process.

Right. Honestly, those mini deadlines are the best way to accelerate this stage and make it move faster. There's a couple other things that we can do to incentivize the customer to move through that full contract agreement. The obvious one is like hey, if you sign by X date, you get a discount. Well, if a customer wants that discount, they will incentivize their team to move through things faster. You can give them softer deadlines of like getting this thing in place by a certain date. An example might be, hey, you mentioned that you want to do a data migration during the slower summer period. And so in order to actually have the data migration of your implementation time up with, then you probably need this thing in place by May 15th. You can use things that they want as it relates to using the product to also incentivize them, to pull them to move faster through this part of the deal process as well.

Alrighty folks, so that is literally the final exit criteria that you need to achieve, which is your vendor approval is complete, your contract is signed and you can close one year deal. So to recap folks, we went through the five stages. Problem agreement, solution agreement, power agreement, Commercial agreement, and vendor approval. And what I recommend that you do after this is you map out those five stages for you and you map out what good exit criteria looks like for your business in each of those stages. And then you think about for my sales cycle, does this happen in one call, three calls, five calls or 20 calls? And then that's what will allow you to get creative around thinking about how can I combine stages or combine calls to drive my deals forward faster?

Right. And one other thing that we talked about that I think is a recommendation if you are a sales leader trying to get your entire team bought in on this. I'm literally doing this in our CRM later today. I am changing our deal stages from Discovery Demo proposal to the exit criteria name. So our stage one is literally going to be Problem Agreement because that's what we're looking to do in that stage and I think that will help change your team's behavior over time. Last thing this Friday we're going to be releasing a 30 MPC newsletter where we're actually going to document what we talked through and give a bunch of visuals to help you visualize those stages and the different plays that we talked about to accelerate your deal cycle. So don't miss it. If you're not subscribed to the 30 NPC newsletter, there is a link in the show Notes to check it out. Thank you for listening and we will see you on that newsletter on Friday.