#44 - Playbook: How to run a sales process

Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froouk. I'm here with my co host Nick Zagielski. And today we have playbook number four. And guess what? For this playbook, congratulations, you're walking into the Ritz Carlton. Welcome to the Ritz, everybody. What we're talking about today is not one piece of the experience. Not discovery or prospecting or negotiation, but we're talking about what makes the Ritz Carlton the Ritz. And what that is is the overall deal process, the sales process. In other words. There are a million things, from recap emails to next steps to pre meeting agendas, all of the little things, the little chocolates on your pillow in the Ritz, the little guy who has a bow tie at the front desk that make your deal process, the Ritz Carlton experience and separate you out from all the other goons who follow up with these long, horrible recap emails. So Nick, why should people list, well.

We'Re not going to sit here and pretend everybody's got the exact same sales process. But for I think if you're listening to the show, you have meetings with customers and we're going to talk about what do you do before meetings, what do you do in meetings and what do you do after meetings? To do things like work the room when you've got multiple stakeholders, make sure that deals don't go dark, make sure you get next steps on the book and get the deal to close faster. So I'm pumped for this one. Let's jump right in. Okay. Section number one is before the meeting even happens, you've got to make sure that the customer feels like this is a good meeting to be going into. We've all been in a position where you look at your calendar and you say, ah, shoot, I really don't want to go to those three. That's why you're getting ghosted half the time. So before the meeting even happens, if this is a first meeting in particular, you want to give the customer something that's a tidbit of why should I go and meet with this person? One of the things that I love doing is filming like a two minute Vidyard video where I had a cold call with a customer and they say, yeah, you know, your analytics thing sounds interesting. Let's meet next Thursday. What I'm going to do then is I'm not just going to show up at the meeting and be like, let's talk analytics. I might film a two minute vineyard video and Say, Armand, I'm excited to be meeting with you on Tuesday. I thought it might be helpful to give you like a 45 second preview of the analytics thing we're going to be talking about. Show a couple screens and say, I'm looking forward to meeting with you. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is what we call the shared agenda, and we learned this from John Barrows. Almost every introductory call that you have with a customer, you've got a couple different discovery questions that you're going to have to ask. And they're almost like your doctor's checklist questions that aren't really that exciting. Okay. You might need to know what HR system they use or how much they've grown recently. And they're just like your checkup questions. Here's what you do in advance of the meeting. Send them that email and say, hey, we can either spend 10 minutes discussing these items or if you want to fill these out for two minutes in advance, we can skip all the checkup conversation. So those are a couple of things I do before the meeting to make sure the stage is set. What I miss, Armand.

All right, so then the other thing is that's all of your customer facing work. However, there's a lot of work that you, believe it or not, have to do to not just show up and throw up. When I show up to a sales meeting and I get people asking me, oh, how many sales reps are on your team? How many people are at your company? I'm like, dude, you literally could have looked on my LinkedIn for two minutes and easily could have saved us five minutes of conversation.

All right?

And so I'm going to give you three buckets of things you're going to want to know for every single customer. Literally, in my note taking template, I have a table of three, four or five things I need to know for every single customer. Number one is for my specific deal cycle and maybe it's different for you. I need to know when their last round of funding was, how much it was for and who their investors were. So I go on Crunchbase and I find that stuff. Number two, I need to know how many employees they have, how quickly those employees are growing and where they're located. That's number two. Number three, I need to know. This is probably the most important one. I need to know who am I meeting with, what is their title, how long have they been at the company, and then anyone I'm going to have to multi thread with at the company later on. Use LinkedIn or sales navigate. Go find the other people you're going to have to meet with later on in the sales cycle and write them down. So later on when you ask for next steps, you can say, hey, is this something that you think Julie might want to see? And that's a great way to create the Ritz experience. All right, so that's number one. And that ties right into number two, which is this is how you make sure you're talking to the right person. Okay. The way you're going to handle a below the line conversation and your discovery is going to be focused really on technical problems, on process problems, versus if you're focused on somebody above the power line, you're going to be focused on vision and big picture and business risk. If you don't know that stuff and you're going into a meeting blind, you're totally screwed.

So now you're at the point when the meeting has actually started. Do not at the beginning of a meeting, just start having your meeting. You've got to make sure that the first two minutes of your meeting is set. An upfront contract. There's four things that the customer needs insured and described at the beginning of every single meeting. You've got to do a time check. You've got to set and discuss an agenda and give the customer a chance to disagree with that agenda. You've got to cover meeting mechanics and you've got to foreshadow setting next steps at the end of this meeting. So time check might sound something like this. Armand, I've got us down for an hour here with a hard stop at 11:30. Does that still work for you or do you have a hard stop sooner that I should be looking out for? I want to make sure I'm respectful of your time setting the agenda. What you don't want to do is just say, here's the agenda for today's call and start going into it. If you do that, you actually haven't set an agenda. You have to give the customer a chance to disagree with the agenda and contribute to it. Sounds something like this, Armand. I've got a couple things that I wanted to cover in today's demo, but honestly, you're a little more important. Is there anything in particular you want to make sure that we address in the hour that we have here? If you haven't given the customer a chance to contribute to that agenda, you ain't setting an agenda. Meeting mechanics. So can everybody see your screen? Can everybody hear? Is there anyone else who's joining? There's Nothing worse than getting eight minutes into a demo. And then the CFO says, oh, wait, are you sharing your screen? I can't see it. Make sure you cover that right in the beginning. And then the next steps piece might be the most important of all of this. What you're going to do is foreshadow that at the end of that hour meeting, the customer is going to make a decision. And that decision might be that you're not a good fit and you need to let them know that that's okay. It sounds something like Armand. These demos typically go one of two ways. Either you see the thing and you think it's the worst thing you've ever seen since canned bread. And if that's the case, that's okay, you can tell me. You won't hurt my feelings. The other case might be you think, all right, this thing looks interesting and probably warrants some further due diligence. If that's the case, typically the next thing that customers will want to do after this is go over pricing because they want to have a sense of what the heck this thing costs. Since you have a hard stop at 11:30, would it be fair for us to stop five minutes early and talk about whether or not we move to that next step?

There we go. And one quick note on that. So first thing is, when you're setting those next steps, it is critical to set the exit criteria upfront. And this is how you prevent yourself from getting ghosted. And you must manage the clock correctly, otherwise you will miss that. And this is the number one way prospects go dark on you is you don't agree to the next steps up front and then you don't leave that time at the end of the call. And then number two, while you're setting that agenda that Nick talked about, it's really important to take the one most common momentum killer in your calls or thing that ends up being throwing a wrench in your disco, which is usually for me it's like, hey, am I going to see a demo of this thing today? It's really important to take whatever that is and put it in your agenda. And it could be a demo, it could be pricing. And for me, when I'm setting the agenda, it sounds something along the lines of, hey, usually what's helpful is I get to know you for 10, 15 minutes here, get to understand your business, otherwise I'm just going to be showing you complete junk right after that. I'll usually go through a pretty high level overview of the demo, but we won't go super deep, maybe five minutes or so. Is that okay with you? Awesome. Now I don't have them breathing down my neck the entire time waiting to understand when they're going to see the software.

The whole reason behind this is what you're trying to do is give the customer a sense of certainty. One thing that all human beings hate is not knowing what's going to happen. That anxiety, that uncertainty. And what you're trying to do here is put all, all those other things to rest.

So the next step here is you've set your agenda. Let's talk about that first question. That first question, as we've talked about in many of our episodes, is why the heck did you take the call in the first place? And that is always a great first question on a disco call. However, sometimes you get thrown on the calls with four or five people and I'll tell you, the worst possible thing you can do is pop up that annoying slide deck with all of your customers logos and testimonials and the canned questions of what are your business priorities and all that nonsense.

Okay?

Neither Nick nor I use any slides in that first meeting because I don't know a thing about you. However, I'll break that golden rule right now. And there is one time that I use working slides and what it looks like is if I know I'm going to be in a first, second or third meeting with a prospect and they're bringing new people into the room and it's going to be a crowded room, I will carve out the first five to 10 minutes and I will create a slide with everybody's faces on it and text boxes next to their faces. And I will literally ask every single one of them, hey, what do you want to get out of this call? What do you want to make sure we see what's your biggest concern here? And I will literally go through every single person and write down all of those things in front of them with their faces next to it and with my face in the corner calling it customers wish list. And then what I'll make sure I do is throughout the rest of the call, I will be weaving every person that said something into the demo. Hey, you said your workflow looks like this today. How does this compare to what you asked me you wanted to see on the front end? Hey, you mentioned that this is a process that takes a really long time. Hey, you mentioned you're worried about compliance. How does this solve that problem that you shared right at the beginning of the call? And that's how you multi thread a room. You don't put up your nonsensical customer slides. You do live notes, you understand why they took the call, and then you constantly multi thread those throughout the rest of the call.

Armand, one of the really cool things you're doing here is you are actually engaging each individual that's on the call. And that's a really critical piece because we've all been on the zoom meeting where one of the stakeholders has their camera off and they're on mute and they don't really participate at all. And what you're doing right up front is you're breaking the seal of getting each person to speak up and engage. And when you do that right up front, then everybody participates. Don't wait till the end to be like, oh, and Armand, we haven't really heard from you. Is there anything you wanted to add? Do it in the beginning, 100%.

And what you'll usually find throughout this process is as you're doing your discovery, one of the things you'll realize is there are usually some big milestones. And if those big milestones or buyer triggers for your customers are two or three months out, that is a great thing. If they are nine months out, that is a problem for you. That usually means you are not going to close a sale for six months if they have a nine month buyer trigger. Okay. And so what you need to do is very early on in your disco process, you need to ask questions that lead to your buyer triggers. For us, it might be, when is your next compensation review? For Nick, it might be, hey, do you have to close your books annually? When is your next audit period? And if that's far away, you now need to ask questions about every single thing that could happen between today and nine months from now. Because if you're talking about all of the problems that are going to happen all the way over there, and then at the end you ask for some next steps, they're going to be like, great, this sounds like something that would be awesome to do at the end of the year. Congratulations. And so don't drive next steps only at the end. You have to do this throughout the entire sales process. Alrighty, Nick. So now what we've done is we've gone through discovery and we're at those last five minutes of the meeting that we have ideally, time blocked out. And now we need to set some next steps. And this is probably the most important part of this entire playbook is those last five minutes of the meeting. Okay, so what do we need to do? In those last five minutes, Nick.

So the last five minutes of the meeting, you've got to tie it back to the beginning. You said in the beginning of the meeting, these typically go one of two ways. So ask the customer. Armon, we talked about at the beginning, these meetings usually go one of two ways. I don't know, did you think the thing was worse than canned bread? Arman's going to give you feedback now. You're going to set that next step on the books that you proposed. Okay, well, let's set a pricing meeting on the books. The critical piece here is you need to now set the stage for that next meeting at the end of the call. You're on right now. So you just showed a demo to the customer. And next week you've got a time on the books now to go over pricing. What you need to do in those last five minutes once it's calendared is say, cool, I'm looking forward to going over the pricing with you next week. Typically, those pricing meetings go one of two ways. Either you see the thing and you say, hey, this isn't going to work and if that's the case, that's okay. Or typically what customers will do after we go over pricing is they'll want us to schedule a demonstration with the VP of sales because that person's going to beat us up a little bit and get a sense really of how we need to fit in with lead routing. So what you're doing here is it's the end of meeting number one and you're foreshadowing the decision that's supposed to happen all the way at the end of the next meeting and setting the stage for what will happen, not next meeting, but the meeting after that. And what happens here is your ask can be a little bit bigger because if you've said, at the end of our meeting next week, I'm going to ask to get to your VP of sales, I'm going to ask to get to some power. The customer's going to scrutinize you a lot, lot harder in that next meeting. Which guys you want that you want them pressure testing you so that they can feel that it's okay to introduce you to power.

And here's the thing is you have to get a time on the books. Okay? Even if you need to now check the calendars of those next people, you must get a time on the books. And what it might sound like is like, great, how does your schedule look like on Monday or Tuesday next week? And they say, ah, you know, Like, I gotta look at their calendars too. Can you just send me a couple times you're available? No problem. Absolutely. I'm gonna do that right after this meeting. Here's what I'm gonna do is honestly.

This is more for me.

I get super, super swamped all the time and I wanna make sure that I carve out enough time for you. So one is 45, okay? Yes.

Great.

Awesome. I'm gonna put a placeholder on for next week. My guess is it's probably not gonna work as a time, but I'm going to put it for Thursday or Friday, so it's a little bit out of the way. Would you mind just declining it if it doesn't work and picking one of the new times? Or if it does work, just add the other folks to the invite. Is that cool? Awesome. Almost every single time they'll say, sure, no problem, because you're putting it on yourself. The last piece of this is when I look at your pipeline and I look at your Next Steps column. Both Nick and I do this and we actually had no idea before this episode that we both did this. But both of us literally have a date at the beginning of our Next steps every single time. And what that date references is the date of the next meeting. And if you do not have a date next to probably at least 75% of your opportunities, that means you're either not doing a good job of setting Next Steps or you have a bunch of junk in your pipeline that needs to be cleaned out because they're not willing to take that next step with you. Okay, so we've hit you over the head enough about everything you got to do during the meeting and before the meeting. Section number three, the last hurrah. After the meeting, what do you do? We're going back to the Ritz Carlton. You just had this great discovery call with a customer and this happened to.

Me the other day.

This rep was trying to sell me, did a horrible job. I had four or five questions that I needed to have answered and he didn't reply back to me. He didn't send me anything for three days and he didn't answer half of my questions, didn't listen to anything. I might as well have just done the sales cycle myself. Complete garbage, waste of time. So I don't care if it's a recap email, a recap video, a recap call like Nick's going to do, but you got to do some sort of follow up after here with the action items. What that typically consists of is here's what I heard from you. Very short. Each bullet needs to be one line maximum entitled three things that I heard from you that are priorities. And then here are the two next steps, probably including a next meeting and something about pricing or something like that. And your recap email should be very short, no more than four to five bullets maximum. And you send this out after the meeting if you want to get really creative with this. I have a recap email template and I usually know I'm going to ask about the same four or five things in every call. And so I'll have six boilerplate bullets that I will just customize. Like I know you have systems like this and this, I know this is.

A general problem we tend to solve.

And so I'll have six templated bullets in my recap email and then I'll just take out any that aren't relevant and then customize the rest and keep it super short. But then the master Nick over here doesn't send any emails. So what are you doing instead?

Well, I'm not that extreme. Sometimes I'll send a video recap. A great example is after I have a pricing meeting with a customer, I'll send them a highlight reel video or after a demo, it's a highlight reel video. So what I do when I go over a proposal with a customer is I'll send them a video of me going over that proposal because they're going to share that proposal with other people internally and I want my voice inserted in every single conversation about pricing. Plus, it makes the customer's job easier. They don't have to explain a six page proposal. You're doing the work for them. The other thing is after a demo, if they really love three key pieces of functionality, send a recap of that. They're going to share that with other people internally and it helps you build consensus. But I'm not a big fan of sending the recap email with a bunch of bullet points about here's our value, here's how we help you out. Here's why my company's so great. I prefer a magic device called the phone. Here's what I do. I get out of a meeting with four different stakeholders and I've got my champion, Armand, the IT director. He's been the guy sort of shepherding me through all of this. What I'm going to do after the meeting, let's say we just did a demo, is instead of sending a mass email to everybody, hey, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. Here's my Bullet points. I'm going to call each person who is on that meeting in order of their seniority. So I get out of that meeting, I'm going to in the next 15 minutes call the CIO and the person's going to pick up. I'm going to say something like, armand, this is Nick with 30 minutes to President's club. We literally just got out of this meeting we had. I wanted to ask, was there anything that we missed that you were really hoping we were going to address today? Eight times out of ten. No. No, we were good. Thanks, I really appreciate it. Okay, cool. But occasionally you're going to have them say, yeah, I really liked your analytics thing, but I'm really, I'm concerned about the security side of things. We really got to make sure that your guys cloud security is up to par because it's a big focus of our organization. Okay, would you like to set some time to speak with our cio? Because we can go over some of those things. The idea here is I'm trying to multi thread and set concurrent next steps. And I also now have a relationship with people who are a little bit above the power line. The other piece that's really important here, I posted something on LinkedIn and everyone was like, what if they have a meeting after that? What are you going to do? Well, I don't know, leave a voicemail or call them later. Armand, we had a demo yesterday and I was thinking, was there anything we missed in that meeting? I really want to make sure that we're giving you guys like a clear picture of what this is going to be. Don't feel like you have to call them immediately after, but call those people, develop a relationship and try to set concurrent next steps. It's one of the most powerful ways to speed up your sales process.

One other quick hit here is one of the studies that GONG did a while back was if you can get on a text message basis with your customers, then your close rates close to double. And that's wild. And so when you're communicating with these folks, whether it's email, whether it's calling, whether it's text, I always like to ask before I send out that recap email or before I call them after this, like, hey, is it okay if I shoot you a text after this thing just so we have some quicker back and forth and usually they'll say yes. And if they don't say yes, it tells me a little bit of something about the deal. All right, so we've talked about what we're Doing in the recap email, in the recap call, or maybe even in the recap text. But what if, Nick, what if none of those things get a reply? What if the customer has gone dark? They're nowhere to be found. They're part of the witness protection program. There are the golden four. The golden four of what to do with a gone dark deal. What are the golden four, Nick?

Number one, call the customer. I cannot tell you how many sales reps tell me Armand's ghosting me. I can't get in touch with them. And I said, well, when was the last time you called him? Well, I sent a bunch of emails. Call these people. Here's another thing that I'll do. If you have someone's direct aisle, great, you should be calling that direct aisle. But if that's not working for some reason, try calling the front desk and ask to be directed to that person. Because it's one thing for them just to ghost to you. It's another for other people in the organization to find out that they're ghosting a vendor, which most organizations don't really look kindly upon, being that much of a, I don't know, jerk to a salesperson. Just tell them you're not interested. So I love calling the front desk and being like, hey, I've been having some trouble getting in touch with Armand. He and I were working on this evaluation of an accounting system, and I haven't been able to reach him. I hope everything's okay. Well, they'll track that person down and they'll relay that message, and then that person's going to feel bad. So call them. Stop just emailing or, God forbid, looking at their LinkedIn profile and calling it a social touch. What's number two, Armand?

Number two is you have to set the expectation up front. In the upfront contract, you say, hey, usually at the end of this thing, like, you either love it or hate it.

Okay?

And so at the end of this, can we just have a candid conversation.

On, like, whether or not you like.

This thing so I don't have to.

Pepper you with 70 more emails?

And I will literally say that. And they'll get a good laugh. And so then when I follow up with them later, I will ask them, like, hey, like, I don't want to be that guy. I think I mentioned I don't want to send 70 more of these. Like, should I stop following up now? Is that okay? That's number two. Set the expectation up front. And then number three, Nick, it's about following up on that expectation, right?

Yes. And what you want to do as a salesperson is put the blame on yourself. Sometimes when a customer has gone dark for a couple weeks, part of the reason they're not replying and telling you it's not a deal or they're just really busy is they're kind of embarrassed that they've gone dark so long and you've got to help them break out of that. So what I do, throw myself under the bus. I send an email where there's nothing in the email body. All I do is I reply to our latest thread and I change the subject line to did I mess something up? It's on me. It's a simple message. It gets reply almost every time. Square us out. What's number four, Armand?

Number four is time. Block all this stuff. Do not spend a million hours doing pipe reviews on deals that are going dark. Okay, so set up a sequence, a gone dark sequence or cadence for all of your dark pipeline. And for me, it's usually five to seven touches over about a month. Mixing up calls, LinkedIn and email. The first one is usually what Nick has. I'm doing a little bit of self deprecation, saying, hey, usually when this type of thing happens and I haven't heard from you in a minute, it means I either horribly screwed something up or your priorities have changed and you're not interested. Either one is totally okay. I'd appreciate your feedback. So I know what to do next here. Cheers. Here's the golden rule of number four. If six to seven touches go by over a month, you've called them, you've LinkedIn to them, you've emailed them, you've done everything you can. You sent them the carrier pigeon, for God's sakes. Guess what? You have your answer now. And way too many of you folks right now, if I were to inspect, your pipeline would have a bunch of crap in your pipeline. And one of the things you'll notice is when both Nick and I are selling, we have some of the smaller pipelines on the team. But you want a lean pipeline. You want your pipeline to be real so you know where to focus your attention so you don't spend your time staring at ops that are never going to do anything that have been dark at you. You spend your time on the folks who are serious and then you spend the rest of it actually getting more of it. All right? And so those are your golden four. Okay, so we hit it all. Let's do a quick recap. Number one, we talked about everything before the meeting. Send the pre meeting preview in the shared agenda. Let them disagree to that. Get all of the brain trash out before the call, all of the doctors checklist questions out before and do your research. Know the 3 or 4 things you're going to research, know who you're talking to and get ready to multi thread by knowing the cast of characters in the organization. Number two, during the meeting, first thing you got to do is you must set an agenda. And you must set those exit criteria up front. That includes one, a time check to the agenda itself, which also includes any of your deal exploders like where's my pricing? Or where's my demo? Number three, your meeting mechanics. Can you see my stuff?

Can you hear me?

Okay, blah blah blah. And then number four, the next steps. Which are the most important. Are you going to tell me a no? At the end of this call, you must agree to that. From that point on you can start to work the room. You can use working slides where you understand what every single person wants and then you need to back out. Timelines both throughout the discovery and at the end of the call. Those last five minutes are used for getting feedback, setting the stage for the next meeting date, asking about the next person who needs to be involved, and then always, always get that next meeting on the books. Number three, after the meeting, send a recap, something a recap text, a recap email, a follow up call, whatever you gotta do, do not leave it in the dark. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to know what is happening next. From that point on, make sure you get other people multi threaded in the deal. And then if you get stuck in the deal, call them. Set the expectation upfront that you're not allowed to do this. You can tell me. No. Make sure that when they are dark, ask them if you've messed something up, put it on you. And then lastly to round it all out. If seven touches have gone by without any reply over a month, you have your answer. All righty. There's your playbook. You're now walking out of the Ritz Carlton. You've been pampered. You've put on ten pounds because we put the chocolates on your bed. Nick, how can people help us out?

Get a nice lean pipeline. But you've been eating too much chocolate, so you're not so lean. Okay. We appreciate you listening to these playbook episodes and I like hearing success stories from our listeners. So if you go out and actually try one of these and it revives a deal or it helps something move faster. Send me a LinkedIn message or a voice note or something. I like hearing the success stories make me feel warm and fuzzy, like I'm at the Ritz. We'll see you guys next week on 30 Minutes of Presidents.

Sam.