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

Foreign.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk. I'm here with my co host, Nick Sigelski. And today we have another Playbook episode, but this one's gonna be a special treat for y'.

All.

First of all, we don't normally get all soft and pansy like this, but I wanted to thank you all. We've gotten to a whopping fan, 50 episodes, plus all the playbooks, and we have become one of the most popular sales podcasts out there. And it's all because of you guys. You share it with your teams, you share it with your friends, and that means, we hope, that it's changed the way that you sell in one or two ways at least. But here's the deal. You're not the only beneficiaries. This show has absolutely changed the way that both Nick and I sell. And so today we are going to go through the top 10 moments that changed the way that both Nick and I sell personally, because we both carry quotas today. All righty, Nick, how are we gonna do this thing?

So every episode has made an impact on the, oh, I'm gonna tweak this, I'm gonna tweak that. But there have been particular moments that Armand and I can point to where it's been like, oh, my gosh, this is gonna change the way that I do X. So we're gonna talk through a couple different categories. We're gonna talk about prospecting episodes, or we're going to talk about Discovery episodes. And then we've got a bucket of some episodes that we couldn't really categorize but have really had an impact on.

The day to day ways that we.

Execute on our jobs. So this isn't going to include the Playbook episodes because those were kind of just me and Armand. And Armand, I do learn from you, but I want to give some love to our guests. So you want to start with prospecting?

Let's do it. And we're going to do a four by four by two. So four prospecting for Discovery and. And two everything else episodes. Alrighty. Number one, the one and only the king of the Buckets. Nick, it's Ryan Reissert. What do we know about that?

Well, when I think about the Ryan Reissert episode, the guy was talking about using the phone and making an impact in your prospecting using the phone. And I remember getting off that episode, and I don't think I've ever been as jazzed up after that episode's. About making cold calls. As I was there, the thing that changed it for me in that episode was he was like, Nick, what if you just took an hour and all you did was make cold calls? You're not sending emails, you're not doing LinkedIn touches, you're not even leaving voicemails. You called 50 people in a row. You'd probably get some conversations and it wouldn't be you slogging through a bunch of different workflows and logging tasks. Bang out 50 dials and see what happens. So I get off that show, I had a couple red Bulls in me and I start making cold calls and I get a prospect who I've been trying to reach forever, actually picks up and he takes my call and I book a meeting. And I closed a deal in less than three weeks. And my normal sales cycle is six months with that guy because I got him at the right time. And I don't think I would have reached that person had I been sending a bunch of emails. And so I got to give some love to Ryan Reissert. He made me realize when you hammer out a bunch of dials and don't get caught in all of the other bs, sometimes you end up reaching prospects.

The other thing that changed it for me was documenting the path. And one of the things that's really important is reps what will make 40 dials and then make 40 dials again the next day to people who they already know have a bad number or they know aren't at the company anymore. And so marking things as bad number, in outreach, I actually tag people as bad phone or no phone so that if it's anything after the first dials task, I skip all of those tasks in bulk so I never have to call bad numbers again.

The other thing on document the path, right, is if you're calling through a phone train, you have to hit 1 6, type out the numbers of their last name. You write that down so the next time you just bang them out. And it saves you like two or three minutes per dial, which, I don't know, get an extra half hour back in your day.

That's exactly right. And he is the king of the phones. And number two, we have Kyle Coleman. Kyle Coleman is the king of a cold email. And so one of the things is, not only was he one of the most popular episodes out there, but there are a couple of things that I permanently use today in my cold email sequences. Now, most importantly, I used to have all these different second emails, the bubble up emails, which as you all know, the first email gets some good replies, but the second one is the most popular. And I used to do things like, I just called you. Did you get my last note? Did you see that last.

No.

And all that stuff. And now literally my second touch every time is just thoughts. And literally my reply rates went up an additional 5% after that. What else did we learn from that one?

One of the big things he talked about was the Art of the Segue, where you hear a lot about personal personalization and how do I personalize an email? But the thing is, if I just send an email to Armon where I'm like, hey, man, I saw you were a wrestler. You want to buy some lead generation software? It's like there's sort of a disconnect. And what Kyle talked about was creating a connection or a bridge between the research about the human being that you're reaching out to connected to the business problem. And one of my favorite examples, Kyle talked about small but mighty. And Armand has a corgi, which I actually see in the background of his video right now. What a cute puppy. But he talked about how Clary was small but mighty, just like a corgi. And that's a message that Armand would respond to. And so the Art of the Segue was something I pulled out there. Cause I don't want these crappy, hey, I saw you went to ucla. Go Bruins. Wanna buy some workflow software. It's just awkward.

So we've slammed the cold emails. This one's gonna straddle a little bit of social, a little bit of email, a little bit of calls, and honestly, a little bit of discovery. Sarah Brazier, number three. And so this one was a killer show. What I most took away from Sarah is not only was she one of the first big quote unquote, LinkedIn influencers, but what she really popularized is super, super casual, real human language. And the way that she booked a meeting with Nick on LinkedIn was, hey, surprise, lucky you, you're in my territory. And I got a new book of accounts. And that is something that you cannot possibly say would be a templated message. It's such a pattern break from all the other nonsense of prospecting. And way too many people want to say, well, Acme Co is the leading provider of lead management software. Meanwhile, Sarah is breaking through all of the noise. She also does this with her upfront contract. And honestly, I'm not going to lie, a lot of time when people are like, hey, I want to talk about your business priorities first. I'm not crazy about that because I feel like it makes people cringe. But when Sarah gave her upfront contract, it was the first time that I actually understood why it helps to start at the business priorities. What she said is like, by the way, like Gong's marketing is almost too good. And so everybody thinks all we do is we just analyze your calls. But honestly, everything from the first time you prospect to the time you onboard and close a deal, we probably have a use case for almost everything you have. So why don't we start at the business priorities and then I can give you a sense of where we can actually help. That actually crystallized it for me in a non cringy fashion of why you should start at the top level business priorities. What did I miss?

Well, what she does is she weaves in a little bit of personality and.

Conversational tone into everything that she does. And I think a lot of salespeople, they get nervous and they hear about this actionable tactic on the show and then they say it with no humanity inserted into it. And usually the tipping point for a seller is when they stop trying to sell like a person that they heard and they start selling like themselves. And what I mean by that is I can hear a tactic from Armand and I want to use that tactic. I want to implement like the heard your name tossed around opener. But I can't do it. I can't just like copy Armand's tone of voice. I have to be Nick when I'm selling. And so I think Sarah does that really, really well. She uses best practices. The upfront contract is a best practice. As a salesperson, you don't want to deviate from that.

But what you do want to do.

Is deliver the upfront contract like Sarah would. Don't try to copy Nick. Don't try to copy Armand. Don't try to copy our next person, which is another sales influencer, Morgan Ingram. Morgan was a really fun episode. The guy is a ball of energy. And I love Armand and I have had a lot of laughs with Morgan on that episode. My favorite thing on the Morgan episode, we talked about video prospecting. And Armand has been guilty of one of the cardinal sins of video prospecting, where if you think about when the video starts, it shows that thumbnail.

And we learned from Morgan, you need.

To actually start the video smiling, not with like this creepy, all right, I'm about to record a prospecting video look on your face. And so it was kind of funny learning Armand used to just be like staring at the camera. And then after Morgan's episode, he realized, I need to start with a smile, not with a scowl.

Well, I would start every video with, like, this deadpan look at the camera and be like, all right, I record my video. And then I would click record. And then I would go smile. And the smile would turn on creepily. And so now I start every video with my hand up in the air, big, cheery smile. I even got some good likes. And so I'm working on my Instagram aesthetic over here. And so life has gotten a lot better for me over here. A couple other things to point out is he had a structure for almost everything. And I don't consider myself to be someone who's supernaturally talented, and I have to think in boxes and lines as well. And so he broke everything down into a process. The 5:25 discovery call, the 10:30:10 video, the PLA cold call opener, and everything has been processized, so to speak. And then from there, Morgan puts his creative flair on it. So those were our four prospecting changed you'd life tips. All right, we got Ryan Reichert, we got Kyle Coleman, Sarah Brazier, and Morgan Ingram. What's next, Nick?

Moving on to some discovery. You always hear, if you have a big fat pipeline, you're going to have a great time as a salesperson. Well, you also need to know how to do some discovery, so you actually win the deals you bring into your pipeline. So the first one that changed it for me actually was episode number one, and that was with our great friend Joe Caprio. He's actually been on the show a couple times. If I think about episode number one. Joe talked a lot about me meeting mechanics and then also removing the friction from the sale. And what he talks about is giving a good meeting. Part of that is the upfront contract and your responsibility as a seller to shepherd the buyer through the buying process. You have a selling process, and you've probably sold the thing that you sell a hundred times. And the person that you're selling to is buying this thing once. The thing that I sell, they buy it once a decade. And so they don't know how to go through the process. But a lot of new sellers, they'll ask the buyer, so what are next steps? Thinking that that's a good thing to do because, well, I want the buyer to feel like I'm not pushing them too much. When in reality, Joe talks about, you need to talk about in the beginning of the meeting. Look, typically these meetings go one of two ways, and usually the next step will be here and when you do that to a buyer, you're actually making their job easier because then they can go back to the rest of the team and say, hey, I talked with the. With the 30 minutes of presidents club guy, and he said, I think what we need to do next is this IT review call. You take the work off of their plate when you give a good meeting.

And this wasn't the only thing, because Joe actually came on for a second episode, and that's the one that really changed it for me is the whole product led sales mentality. There are so many times where I'm like. Like, I can tell this customer has given me the one word answers. They came on, they clicked the request a demo button, and. And I'm trying to ask him discovery questions. And don't get me wrong, I still do discovery every single time. But there are times where I felt like in the past, whether it was giving them pricing, whether it was showing them the product, I was putting roadblocks in front of my customer. And so now up front, I always ask them, like, hey, how much do you know about Pave? And are you the kind of person who sort of wants to see it and ask questions along the way? Or do you want to talk about what you want to see first before you see the software? And that primes them and gives them the permission to actually buy into the conversation, like Nick just mentioned. But then also, I don't deal with this, like, uncomfortable moment halfway into the call of, am I going to see a demo or not? No matter how good your upfront contract is. And so stop wasting your time with the bonding and rapport on the front end. Give good meeting. And also, don't put all the roadblocks inside of your sales process.

Well, that bonding and rapport piece is really. It's a powerful paradigm shift there. A lot of salespeople think selling their thing means they show up and they're super chummy with the buyer.

They.

Your mom's a mom. My mom's a mom. Oh, you live in Boston. I visited once. Like, okay, you want to have a connection with the other person that you sell to. And what Joe taught us is the best way to make a connection with the other human being is to show that you respect them and you respect their time. There's going to be an opportunity to make some small talk and laugh about, oh, you love sushi. Me too. But first, show look, I respect your time. I see we've got 30 minutes on the calendar. I want to make sure that still works for you. And so I don't start blabbering on when you've got two minutes left and you've got a meeting with your boss after. So show you respect their time. Give a good meeting, and that's how you build a connection with your buyer. The next one, let's talk about a great connection with a buyer. It's our buddy Keenan. Keenan was one of our early episodes, and it was all about discovery. And this was the episode that I think pulled me in our mind out of the weeds of meeting with buyers and talking about technical problems. Oh, how many clicks does it take you to do that? Tell me about the roles and permission setup of the thing you're looking at. Kenan literally came onto the show, and I made the mistake of having my speakers turned all the way up because the guy brings the energy. And he literally screamed for 35 minutes about, stop getting stuck in the technical problems. Pull the conversation up to talk about business outcomes. He was so excited. I went downstairs into the kitchen after the episode, and my girlfriend said, nick, did you just bring a drill instructor onto your podcast? It was really, really funny.

And fortunately, that was probably the only episode we've ever recorded where I literally needed to take a walk outside afterwards because I felt a little bit violated from being screamed at for 30 minutes straight. But now every time I step into a discovery call, the moment I start asking about, like, oh, do you click here? Do you click here? Do you have this spreadsheet or that spreadsheet? Do you do this configuration or that configuration? I immediately have this screaming Keenan voice in my head saying, get out of the technical problem. Get to the business impact. And so I've literally started doing things like, if you remember the pick, I've drawn out a pick for Pave, a pick for Carta, where we start with the business problems, then we go to the impact and the business outcomes associated with that problem. And then afterwards, we drill it back to the root cause instead of getting super caught in the weeds. But on day one. So this one has probably, out of all of our episodes, changed the way that I think about driving executive level discovery absolutely the most. And then literally right after that episode, we had the one and only kd. So number one was Caprio. Number two is Kenan. Number three, Kevin Dorsey. And he brought in so many tactics that I use in discovery and has a very different style from Keenan. The most important one for me was the so that questions. And oftentimes it was actually very different from Keenan's approach where he's like, you have to ask some situational questions, but then you need to drill that deeper into a problem. And the way he does it is by saying like, hey, how do you do this thing? So that blank doesn't happen? And so he's asking a situational question around how you do this process, but then inferring that there is a problem and then drilling the customer deeper and deeper from there.

He also talks about the sizzle, which you wanna talk about bad habits, which we talk about a lot at the end of our episodes. Every time. This is one to break. If you're doing. When you're talking to a customer and they're telling you about an area that they struggle with. So when you say, well, so how do you do this today? And they tell you their current process, and you're like, yeah, that's spectacular.

Cool.

You're affirming that the way they do things today is good, but you're trying to sell them a change to that process. So what he does instead is the sizzle, where when Armand says, oh, we do things this, I sort of go, oh, okay. What you do is you put a little bit of concern in your voice. That plants the seed that maybe the way they're doing things isn't the perfect way, which is true.

Yeah. The spirit of the sizzle is there are times where I'm like, oh, like, wow. Like, you do all that and just acting surprised when they do it a certain way almost makes the customer realize, like, oh, shoot. Like, maybe the entire market isn't doing it this way and I should consider something different and so totally agree with you. Alrighty. The humbling disclaimer King. The one and only the Charles Muhlbauer. Nick, what do we got?

So the humbling disclaimer is a tool you can use when you're having an uncomfortable conversation with the buyer, which can be hard because it can be confrontational. Maybe you're getting the sense the deal isn't going to happen or you're in a tough negotiation or the demo's going on and you're realizing they don't really like it. And it can be really tough to be direct with the buyer and say, you hate this thing, don't you? And the idea of the humbling disclaimer is you take the uncomfortable energy that's inside of you, the awkwardness that you feel, and you throw yourself under the bus so hard that the other person has to reach down and save you. So it might sound something like Armando. I feel really awkward and uncomfortable asking you this. And I know I'm going to sound like every other salesperson, but my boss is asking me if we're going to get started on this thing before the end of the quarter. And I know a lot of salespeople try to whip you and beat you to close a deal before then, but I had to ask, otherwise he's going to be upset with me and Armand. You used a humbling disclaimer when you and I bought an apartment building together recently, and we saved close to $100,000 on the purchase, so maybe you can tell that story. Yeah.

And so what happened is we were fresh off the humbling disclaimer episode, and Nick and I were buying quadruple in Texas. So let's call it a $400,000 purchase, for example. And so we knew that was the price of the property, and we knew we needed to be competitive because it was on the market and it's a hot market today. And so we come in at 400k and we take the deal and we get it under contract, but we haven't done an inspection yet. And we have this really good relationship with the agent. Her name's Miranda. Awesome lady. And we do the inspection, and all of a sudden we find that, oh, there's some piping issues and there are some roofing issues. And honestly, we sort of knew there was that stuff anyways, but it was new information in the deal. And so I call her up and normally what I would do is I would say, I can't believe you didn't tell me there were plumbing issues. I couldn't believe you didn't tell me there were roofing issues. We're going to pull out of this deal today. And I would ruffle all the feathers, but instead I jump on the call. I'm like, miranda, you're going to absolutely hate me for this thing. I really screwed up here. And she's like, what's going on? What's happening here? And I'm like, we did the inspection and I should have done my diligence before, but we found some plumbing issues. And I got a quote from my contractor, and it's going to cost us 30 grand here. And I'm so sorry, but I just don't. Don't know if we'll be able to do the deal with you anymore. So I wanted to apologize to you personally. And she's like, no, no, no, no. Let me help you out here. Let me go back to the seller and see if I can work on this. Boom. 30k off the deal immediately.

And the thing about the humbling disclaimer. All you're doing is you are throwing yourself under the bus. I feel sort of awkward asking you this. I'm not sure if this is a okay question even ask you. And what you do is you, like, you make yourself seem like a lot of salespeople. They think that they've gotta come in super competent and charismatic with a lot of bravado to force the sale in. And you almost pull back a little bit with a humbling disclaimer where you feel sort of awkward, you're a little bit embarrassed to say that your boss isn't gonna let you give that big discount that the customer asked for. You're embarrassed, you're awkward, you're uncomfortable. And the person's like, oh, my gosh, this guy is so pathetic. That. Armand, it's okay. Don't worry about it, man. You're good. So the humbling disclaimer, if you haven't listened to that episode, go back. Charles Mobauer. That one really changed the way that we do things. So our four on Discovery here, we've got Joe Caprio, we've got Keenan, we've got kd, and we got Charles Malbauer. So now we got to move into the everything else bucket.

Armand, Everything else with Adam Ochart, number one in the everything else bucket. And the reason this is everything else is Adam put on a clinic around sales process. Most importantly, what I found is that what he was doing both in the meetings and outside of the meetings when he would set up a pilot was fundamentally changing the way that I think about POCs. And so what he would do is upfront before going into a pilot is he would set exit criteria every single time. And if those exit criteria were not realistic, he wouldn't agree to the pilot. And he would say something along the lines of like, hey, if at the end you're looking for X and we know we can't deliver X, we can only deliver Y in a pilot, you lose, I lose, and we don't have a way to move forward anymore. And so what he does is he uses pilots to drive timeline. He gets customers to agree to a certain outcome and then just takes away the pilot when he needs to close the deal. And that is something that very, very few other reps do well. They just pass out free trials for free and, and hope that stuff comes back.

The other thing that Adam does really well, especially when he gets to the trial phase, is he multi threads and he talks to every single person who's involved in the trial and the Deal, which means he might be calling eight of the AES that are trying gong and he's getting feedback from those people, and then he's funneling it up to the VP of sales. These three people are kind of struggling. And here's what they told me. It might be a them problem more than a gong problem. These three people gave me these insights. I thought you might want to know about those because they're using gong in this way and it's making a big impact. The idea that I got out of that was I've got 18 different buyers who are looking at demos of my thing and going through meetings, and I am doing myself and the buyer a disservice if I'm not having one on one conversations with each of those people. The other genius thing that Adam does is when he's got a prospect going through a trial, he sets up a shared, this is tough to say, a shared Slack channel. The two S's throw me off where there's a Slack for everyone who's going through this poc. And when people have issues or questions, they're all chatting in there. And so he can respond in real time. And then he keeps those things open in perpetuity. So when he needs a reference, he goes into the Slack channel and he says, hey, can someone be a referral for me? Can someone be a reference for me? I thought it was such a game changer with how folks are using Slack and the impact of that.

And the last thing in everything else to wrap everything up, we have the one and only number 10, Belle, the king of the popcorn here at the movie theaters. Nick, what do we got?

So what did it for me in this episode was the idea of transparency. And what he talked about was, when you go into a demo, the buyer knows your product's not perfect. It can't solve every problem for everything, for every person. It does a couple things really, really well and probably will help them with their business, but they're looking out and they're inherently a skept to see, oh, you know, what's wrong, what can't this do? And what he says you should do is actually start the meeting with some areas that you're not the best at and use that to talk about. Look, we really don't focus on A, B and C. And that's because we put a lot more resources into X, Y and Z, which I understand Y and Z are pretty important to your group. And the idea is when you lead with, we are not perfect, we make mistakes. Our software is not the best thing in the world. It does a couple things really well. And I understand they're important to you. The buyer relaxes a little bit. Now they don't have to look and scrutinize everything that you're doing and ask really tough, pointed questions. Now they're free to look for how this thing can help their business. Now, Armand, you liked this episode for another reason, because he talked about your favorite food.

Well, this ties right in to the rows in your pricing, if you remember. And so popcorn pricing, you figure out what's important to them. You're working with transparency, and you're getting all the nonsense off the table. And then there is one pricing tactic that I use more than any other tactic that I've learned in any episode, and it's popcorn pricing. Your small pricing. Your small popcorn has like three popcorns in there, right? And so it's the classic person who has a budget that's half of your list price. And so you give them the half of list price option with three popcorns in it. It's just the bare bones minimum thing just to even say that you have the product. The medium popcorn is really what they need. It's like the solid size popcorn. Maybe you got like 30, 40 good popcorns in there. And it's definitely closer to what the actual price you want to land at is. But the key one is the big popcorn. It's only 50 cents more. It's only 50 cents more for double the amount of popcorn. And you get all the bells and whistles. You get the little trim on your rims on your Tesla. You get the white interior, slick leather, and it's only 50 cents more. And there are a number of deals where I've laid out the popcorn pricing, and there has been no negotiation whatsoever. And they're like, all right, well, we'll give it a stretch for the large one. And it works every single time.

When I learned that there's a reason the small popcorn costs $7, the medium costs $9, and the XXL is $9.50, it gave me some clarity about why I always feel sick after I go to the movies.

So that's it, folks. You got your top 10. And these are, by the way, not the best episodes in the world, but these are the ones that changed our lives. There were many other phenomenal episodes from the one with Jeremy Donovan to Josh Braun to Ian Cognac recently, but these were the 10 that changed our lives. And to play him back, your four prospecting episodes were Ryan Reissert with the Buckets. The document, the path, the Kyle Coleman with the thoughts and the small but mighty. The Sarah Brazier with the upfront contract and the conversational tone. And then number four, you had Morgan Ingram with the PLA and the no creepy smile on your videos. All right, those are your four prospecting. Nick, what were the four discovery?

We've got Joe Caprio with the given the good meeting and removing the friction. We've got Keenan screaming at Armand. Focus on the business outcomes, not the technical problems. We've got the Kevin Dorsey. So that questions and the sizzle. And then we've got Charles Mulbauer with the famous humbling disclaimer, what are the last two? And round us out, Armand.

And we rounded it out with Atomochart with the exit criteria in front of your pilots and the multi threading through Slack and email. And then of course we had the popcorn pricing and the transparency sell with number 10, the one and only Bilal. Alrighty, folks, so this week's show notes are going to be a little bit special. We're going to include the links to all 10 of those episodes which are again some of our favorites. But then lastly, we're thinking about doing some new stuff here at 30 minutes to President's Club. And we really want your guys opinion, Nick. How could people help us out?

So we had a conversation with our great friend Jason Bay last week and he was saying, Nick Armando, you guys do some really interesting stuff. You guys are really disciplined with your workouts and the way that you structure your lives. You own a bunch of real estate together. You're doing pretty well for guys in your mid-20s. And people want to see the other side of 30 minutes to President's Club. And so what we're thinking of doing is launching another episode each week that focuses on stuff like the mindset, the work ethic, some of the real estate stuff that Armand and I are involved and that's not 100% sales focused. And if that's not something the audience is interested in and we don't want to do it. So if you're listening to this, we would really appreciate a message on LinkedIn. Let us know, is it the worst idea in the world or is it something we should do? Stay tuned and we'll catch you next week on 30 Minutes to Presidents Club.

And thank you for an amazing 50 episodes.

Sam.