CASE STUDY: How This AE Closed a $433,000 Deal in 90 Days

All right, everybody. In this video series, I'm going to be sharing inspiring success stories of SaaS and technology salespeople who are earning 300, $350,000 or more in annual income using the techniques, the tips and the strategies that they are learning as pclub IO members. Now, today, I want to start by telling you about a guy named Brian Roback. Okay? Brian is a mid market account executive at a company called Numerator. Now let me tell you a little bit about Numerator. They sell to a very different market than the one I sell to. They offer consumer data insights to food and beverage companies. So if you've ever heard of this, this company called Athletic Brewing, which is a non alcoholic beer brand that seems to be taking grocery stores by storm. They're a customer of Numerators. So those are the kinds of companies that Brian sells to. Now here's the situation that Brian found himself in in January at the beginning of this year. So he walked into the new year staring down the barrel of a $1.1 million quota and almost $0 in pipeline. He had closed out most of his pipeline the previous month in December, and now he was starting the new year from nothing. So Brian knew he needed to do a couple things. First, he needed some pipeline. Of course. Fortunately, his company had a small but mighty inbound marketing function to feed around half of what Brian needed to make his number. Now, the second thing is, he knew that every call, every deal was precious and that he needed to absolutely maximize every opportunity he got, especially selling in an economic downturn. Now, within a couple of weeks of the start of the year, Brian had a discovery call with a VP of marketing for a new prospect. And he knew that based on his research, this prospect could be a $450,000 account. So what was the problem? Well, the problem was this VP of Marketing had a very small, narrow focus of what he was trying to solve and what he thought Numerator could do for them. Okay, so if you asked Brian about the situation, here's how he explained it. He said, based on how this VP of marketing was thinking about the problem we solve, at most, we could have closed a $20,000 deal with them. Now against a $1.1 million quota. That's only 1.8% of my quota. There's no way I'm going to be able to hit my number if I keep closing deals that small. So what did Brian do? Well, he did two things to build the size of the problem. Okay, those are key words. He did two things to Build, I should say, the perceived size of the problem and therefore this VP of marketing's willingness to spend more money to open up from $20,000. First, he used what we call a discovery prompter. Okay, a discovery prompter. Now what exactly is a discovery prompter? It's a short pain deck. It usually lasts about five minutes tops. And the goal is to start new discovery calls with this deck and get your buyers to feel like you are peering into their soul before you even start asking any discovery questions. Okay, so it's not a deck about what your company does. It's not a deck about the outcomes or benefits of what you sell. It's a deck that captures the pain so well that it feels like you're reading a page from your buyer's diary as you walk them through it. Now, here's the key. When you do this, right when you do start asking your discovery questions, your buyers share everything with you. They feel like you know them so well that they tell you everything. And that's exactly what happened with Brian in this VP of marketing. So within just a few minutes, he reframed and rewired how this VP of marketing was defining their problem. Okay, here's what Brian said about the conversation. He said the discovery prompter led to one of the richest discovery conversations I've ever had. This VP of Marketing's head was spinning in a good way. And he told me about every pain. He told me about every problem happening that I could help or that I could help with. Okay. This was the first step in going from a $20,000 deal to what ended as a $433,000 deal. That's a lot of commission that comes along with deals that big. Now here's what happened next. Brian used our next technique, which we call uncovering the need behind the need. Okay, it's worth writing those words down. Uncovering the need behind the need. Not the need, the need behind the need. So after the paying deck, the VP of Marketing said that the new CEO made it a company wide mandate that they, as a company, become a data driven company in every decision they make. Bingo. That's what Brian's company helps with. Remember, he offers consumer data and insights. Now here's the problem though, with this whole statement. And think about this for a second. Is becoming a data driven company a problem or is it a solution? Maybe write your answer in the comments section. It's a solution. Okay, so if Brian stopped there, he still wouldn't have closed the deal at the magnitude that he was going for. So he asked what we call a killer question and you can seal this question yourself. He said, what's going on in the business that's driving your CEO to prioritize becoming a data driven company? That is a killer question that uncovers the need behind the need. Now, Brian hit the jackpot with that question. The VP of Marketing said that the new CEO planned on A, introducing new products and B, acquiring new companies so that they can. And here's the key, reclaim the company's market share. Okay, I'm not going to share all of the details out of respect for numerator, but that is what we call a C level business problem. Okay? He went from this VP of Marketing thinking about this problem tactically and maybe willing to spend 40 or $20,000 to market share. An issue that gets talked about in board meetings and ELT meetings. So now let's stop here and appreciate something. Okay? Brian started this deal with the VP of marketing wanting some very basic analytics on one of their product lines. That's it. Total willingness to spend maybe $20,000 or CO or so. Now he uncovered a business problem that had several hundred thousands of dollars worth of willingness to spend. But the deal wasn't in the bag yet. So using a specific playbook that Brian learned as a member of P Club IO, he landed a meeting with Access to Power. Okay. We taught him the Access to Power talk track. He used it beautifully. And he had a meeting scheduled with this VP of marketing and this new CEO. Again, jackpot. How many of you would like to land more meetings with CEOs who can write checks for $433,000? Now, right before the meeting, Brian learned in practice our SAS demos that sell Playbook. And here's how it works. This is an eight step demo playbook that you can follow to present every feature that you're going to present during a demo to ensure maximum resonance, maximum effectiveness, maximum persuasive capacity. Okay, step one and you repeat this eight step process for every feature. Frame the pain. Right? State the problem statement you're about to solve. Step two, ask a question to get the buyer to ruminate in that problem statement, such as, how are you solving this challenge today? Step three, get them to visualize the outcome that the feature you're about to present delivers. That's with a value statement. Could be something like what I'm about to show you is going to help you achieve XYZ Next. Step four is you're going to orient them to the screen. Okay. You're going to make sure they understand what they're looking at so they're not confused. That's a very simple step that most sellers skip. The fifth step is you're going to reveal the workflow. This is the demo part. You're going to walk them through the click path. That solves the challenge that you had framed. Now, the sixth step is to implant the value. It's once again to dismount the demo with a value statement. And it sounds something like, as a result of the workflow I just walked you through, you'll be able to achieve XYZ outcome. So notice we have two value statements. We have one right at the beginning of the demo, we demo and then one at the end. We're wrapping our features in value. Step seven is to tell a story, right? People forget click paths. They remember stories. So you end with a very quick customer story. And it could be something as simple. We had another customer use this workflow, and they went on to yada, yada, yada, achieve some sort of result. And then step eight, and the final one is to elicit a response, dismount, have a conversation by asking a question that could be something like, how does that compare to how you're solving this challenge today? So this entire eight step motion takes about three to five minutes per feature you show. And Brian used it with this new CEO. Now, what do you think happened? Brian showed a grand total in the entirety of the demo. Two features. Two features was all it took. And here's what the CEO said. This is exactly what we need. Okay? How many of you would rather have that reaction than having your buyers check Instagram or Salesforce or whatever while you're demoing? Obviously not paying attention. So I asked Brian about this call, and here's what he said about it. He said, before I mastered the favorite framework, I would show about seven or eight reports on my product, and each one of those could be three or four browser tabs. And my prospects were tracking Instagram for half of the demo. But on this demo with that CEO, I only showed one and a half total reports in a carefully choreographed way. And that's all he needed to see to close the deal. Now, of course, there was more work Brian had to do to negotiate the deal, to run a closing motion to get through procurement and all of that stuff. But here's the end results. Deal started with a $20,000 budget. Final deal size was a whopping 433 grand. And he closed it in less than 90 days. He broke his company's record for the largest ever deal in his segment which is mid market. He earned tens of thousands of dollars in commission. At the time of this recording, Brian was only seven months into his company's fiscal year and yet he had already been at 131% of his annual number. So he has five more months to sell and he's already crushed his number. Now he's earning accelerated commissions and Brian is currently the number one mid market seller in his company. I just interviewed Brian a few weeks ago and I learned all of this. He joined P Club IO at the beginning of his fiscal year, used all of the techniques and more that I just told about, and that's how he wound up. Now, like I always tell people, you've probably heard me, heard me say this before, you are not years away from everything you want. You are skills away from everything you want. Right? The correct measure of distance between where you are and anything you want in life is not measured in time. It's measured in skills. Sometimes we get that voice in our head that tells us it's going to take years, maybe even a decade or more to experience this kind of sales success that produces such high incomes. And yet Brian did this in record time. Seven months is all it took and he's got the rest of the year to really just tap into accelerated commissions. So I wonder what this looks like for you. As we close out this video, I want you to engage with me in the comments. What's a goal that you have where before hearing this story, you thought maybe it's going to take you 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years to achieve. But now you might be thinking to yourself, huh, I wonder if I can do what Brian did. Maybe I don't have to wait so long. Maybe I'm just a few skills away from having this instead of several years away. So if you have a goal like that, top of mind, I want you to write it in the comments, right? Writing goals has an effect on your consciousness and your subconsciousness. You are more likely to achieve a goal if you write it down. So I invite you to write your goal down in the chat. Right? Engage with me here. I'll do my best to respond. I would love to see what everybody's gunning for. You're more likely to achieve a goal if you write it down. Give this video a like if it inspired you, if it did the job of firing you up and lighting the fire in your soul, and if you are interested in collapsing the amount of time it takes you to get anything you want in life out of your sales career, more income promotions. Less work, more money. Then make sure you consider joining pclub IO, where you get access to courses that can help you with virtually any skill, topic or role that exists in a technology revenue team. Go over to pclub IO, check it out and I'll see you in the next video.