HOW TO WIN THE LARGE ENTERPRISE DEAL WITH CONFIDENCE

In sales, all we hear about is dogged hard work, determination, competitiveness. And that's a big part of it. But what I'm learning from these great salespeople is there's another part of it that's a motivator. It's the solving of the problem. It's the curiosity in what the client is up against. It's trying to unravel the mystery Of how to get a large deal done, how to help a company, a customer out, and get that transaction and transformation that we both want completed. And this is a great motivator for great salespeople. Now, most salespeople get stuck in the talking about what it is they do, how's it work, how's it better, how much are you going to save, your ROI, and The thing we miss about sales is that it's kind of all of that. It's up to us as the chefs of the deal, of the project managers, of the orchestrators, of the conductors of the deal to pick out what ingredients in what levels at what time and in what way we should use them. Sounds complicated? Well, that's why they call it the complex sale. But when you're able to have that curiosity, that becomes the craving, your passion, the motivator for you to do that, to figure it out. And today's guest has got a great background. What's turning out to be the most popular or consistent degree in salespeople, psychology. And his father was a psychiatrist or psychologist. And that curiosity that his dad had kind of transitioned or transformed his son. And some early Girl Scout cookie selling also helped. But listen to the differentiators, the drivers, the passions, the curiosities, the cravings that this rep has, and see if you can develop that in you. Don't look for just innate things, things that are already there, because you chose this career. If it's not a great fit, okay, move on. But if it is what you want to do, become great at it because that's where all the rewards are. They're at the top. They're not in the middle and they're certainly not at the bottom. And before we get into the interview, make sure you're checking out our friends over at Covideo. Video email is crazy effective. I did an interview just yesterday where somebody's got a new product and they need to show it very quickly and using video. Is able to get that across in under a minute. So it doesn't fit every situation, but it does fit a lot of them. A lot of cases that we have where we want to show our personality, our caring, our sincerity, our trust, our connection that we have with our product, our customers, and how we can transform takes place in video. So check it out at covideo.com. Even if you don't want to do video email, they've got lots of great content on how to use video in general in your selling process. And if you're in the courses, make sure you stick up with or catch up with the office hours. Did a fantastic one yesterday. They're the second to the last chapter in the course at the very bottom. The 101s are at the very bottom. That's the last chapter. Had a great one yesterday. And they're getting so good that I don't even get a chance to get to my lesson. We're getting into case studies, Q&A, success stories, challenges, and to hear other people talk through it, it's so much enjoyable. So, check it out.

Here we go.

Hey, Todd. Thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

So, Todd Siegler. I work at Salesforce now. I've been there for coming up on 9 years. Was at Apple for around 8 years, largely been in enterprise sales for the last decade or so. Before that, it was more education and government, but happy to be here with you.

Cool. Why sales?

Why sales? That was, you know, early on in my career, in my life, not even my career. I just enjoyed working with people and a lot of funny stories my parents could tell you about it, but I'll give you one hilarious one. My sister was a Girl Scout and she didn't want the prizes. She didn't care. And I thought, I can do this. And I actually had a little sideshow, which was my brother. He was a cute little kid and I brought him around. I think I sold the second most cookies in the country that year for my sister and just got all the prizes.

Wow.

You know, just early on, I liked working with people. I like figuring out challenges. I like trying to figure out how to get people to, to say yes and be interested in things. And obviously not just cookies, but, uh, you know, sort of bigger things. And, uh, it's just been a fun journey.

And you made your brother your first SE?

He was my SE. He didn't do much. He just carried the cookies and looked cute. But I did learn that I sold more cookies when he was with me.

A little team effort. And how did you make the transition to like enterprise sales?

From—

I mean, I'm sure there was a lot between cookies and enterprise.

There was, yeah, you know, so most of my career, I had done education and government sales. And that was at Apple, at Lexmark before that. And the pivot to enterprise was not nearly as difficult because of what I had learned at Apple. And it was really about storytelling. And so enterprise sales is, for me, it's really about setting a vision. And that vision, it pulls together not just things about the customer, about the challenges they're facing, and really sort of seeing those things, but it pulls together your own internal team behind this common goal. So that's been sort of the pivot maybe that I've made over my career, but I think Apple really set me up for it. And at Salesforce, it took me to a different level.

Because that educational, state and local, that's a tough market.

You know, I think that all markets are kind of tough. You know, you're always working against smart other salespeople. And, you know, each of the markets poses its own challenges. And you deal with people of different types of intelligence, you know, smartness and education and what makes a, you know, whether it's a superintendent or a leader at a university, what they're focused on is definitely different than what an enterprise is. But there are a lot of commonalities. You know, each of them has challenges that they're dealing with. And it's really about, for me, just diving into those challenges, actually feeling those challenges for myself, imagining how I would deal with them. And coming up with a way that together we can do something special to help address those.

Instead of focusing in on what you do and how it's different and better.

And yeah, I think that's like a trap that salespeople tend to fall into. You know, we, we tend to believe what our company sells more than the challenges our customers face.

And why they want to buy.

What's that?

Instead of why they want to buy or change or fix something. Yeah.

I mean, it comes down to their challenges are, they have nothing to do necessarily with your company and what your company's goals are. And so I think that sitting with their challenges and feeling them and thinking, can we help on some of these, you know, and how would we go about doing that? But there's a lot of empathizing with where they are today and One of the interesting things is I've always maintained with enterprise sales that, because people all say, well, is it good? Do you want to sell to a company that's zooming up and growing really fast, or do you want to sell to a company that isn't doing so well? And I always think each of them just poses different challenges. Like the growth company needs to continue that growth trajectory or else shareholders probably get upset. And the company that is struggling, they need to figure out how to deal with that, how to fix it, and how to write, you know, where they're going from a direction perspective. So every company has their challenges. Every, you know, educational institution or government faces those as well.

And what's surprising, if you can get them talking about those challenges, they just go on and on because no one wants to listen.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's— people don't like other people's problems. We like our own problems. We like talking about what our problems are. And the funny thing is, people may not necessarily want to hear about those. But there is something to be said about listening, and really an act of listening and not just hearing something and then immediately saying how your solution is going to magically fix that.

Yeah.

But really, you know, diving into it and exploring it. And sometimes it's not even you. I had an interesting experience with a superintendent way back in my career with Apple. And I went to him and he was angry at me. And I had known this guy for a while and he was really upset. And I thought, you know, this is not like the superintendent. I've been friends with him for a while. We've known each other for a while. Like, what's going on? And I actually asked him, and it turns out that his son was experiencing a life-altering, like a really real problem. It had nothing to do with me. But if I didn't stop and keep digging, sort of peeling those onion layers back, I would have never figured that out. And it actually brought us closer. So, you know, a lot of things are just getting to the heart of the problem, because if you can get to the heart of the problem, then, you know, with that case, obviously it's related to his own personal life and it just brought us closer, which builds trust. But if it's the enterprise or the educational institution challenge and you dig at it and you really understand it, chances are you can show a lot better how your solution could help with that. But, uh, if you don't dig, it— what you're sharing is surface-level information that can generally be applied to any company. You know, it's just what you do versus how you can help.

Yeah.

And did you choose big companies or did big companies choose you?

Or— So when I, when I came to Salesforce, it was kind of interesting because I was making a pretty big pivot from, you know, traditional education and government to enterprise. And I had gotten a really strong recommendation from a former exec at Apple into a few enterprise companies. And there were questions about me and about whether I could handle enterprise sales. And I thought it laughable at the time. I understand it a little bit more now, but for me, it just wasn't a big pivot, but for the company, to consider me. It actually was something important. And one of the things that they put me through when I was doing the interview, which was, I mean, I've never done more interviews in my life. I think I probably did 10 or 12. But the last thing was you have 48 hours with this enterprise company, which you'll be working with if you get this job, and with our solutions, And tell us how you would sell them and how you would work with this organization and who you'd work with and put together the deal that you'd bring to life. The very interesting thing is that 48 hours, I probably have never worked harder. You know, it was a great opportunity and I was excited about it and wanted the job, but that opportunity actually a year and a half later, we had one of the biggest deals in the company as a result of it. And it was just thinking through how all these things fit together. And I think that that gets to a lot of why vision is so important, because you have to sort of think through in a lot of steps, not just at a surface level why it makes sense, but what the pains are and, you know, how your solutions relate to solving those pains and who you work with is also similarly important. I mean, A lot of people measure the fulfillment of their day or whether they did their job well by activity. And I know that you often talk about that. To me, I have less probably— I send less emails than just about anybody at our company, but I send better emails than I think most people at the company because I really take time to make sure, is this the right human being? Why am I choosing this person? to send this message, especially when it's a first message? And how am I going to get that person to realize that a conversation with me could actually be meaningful? So I spent a lot of time there. And that, that vision, sort of 48 hours of how you're going to get there. I mean, I didn't know anything about Salesforce. I didn't know anything about this company that I was going to work with, hadn't used Salesforce previously. And, you know, it was just sort of figuring it out and this determination of, I can get there, I just need to dig and dig.

And where do you think this empathetic skill came from? Was there some part of your life that developed it, or?

Yeah, you know, my— so my dad is a cognitive psychologist. He studies how kids learn mathematics. And he always has brought a thoughtfulness to how he helps me understand things. And also that things are never surface deep. You know, we see somebody who's walking down the street and they look angry or they look upset, and we just think that person's upset. But we all look that way at times.

Traffic, everyone looks— on an airplane.

Yeah. And so I think that it was his influence largely, and I would say definitely my mom's love, that got me to realize people are really complicated and we do things for our own reasons. And it's not like it's one reason, it's a whole host of reasons. And it's fun to sort of explore that and look into Why? Why do people do those things? And, you know, why do they keep doing things even when they may not be the best things for them to do? And I think that that continual questioning, which I like doing, gets, you know, it becomes a fun sort of almost— I brainstorm and do a lot of mind mapping. And the way— the reason that I do it is that I start exploring things that I wouldn't have otherwise. One thing relates to another, and I have another question and another question. And it sort of just gives me ideas of where do you go and how do you keep diving deeper and deeper into people and why they do things.

Well, when you said mind mapping, one of the key distinctions I find with great salespeople is they write things down. They don't just try and go from gut, because gut is good in a simple sale, but when you're dealing with complexity, many people Strategy, long time gaps in between talking. You know, you're getting hints about what's really going on within the organization.

Yeah, you know, the mind mapping is helpful for me to sort of think through what I know now and what I don't know.

What you don't know.

Yeah, which what I don't know, candidly, is much more important than what I do.

Yes.

It's sort of where I know I need to go. It's like, huh, I don't know that, or this new person, what are they all about? And I need to learn about them. One of the things that I always find very interesting, and this is dating back to— there's a very influential person in my career, and I often talk about this guy. His name was Mr. Salvo. He was my speech teacher in high school. And it sounds like, how could a high school speech teacher have this much of an influence? And I would say more than anybody in college, uh, from a teaching perspective, he had an influence in my life. And he taught me a lot of different things. One, you mentioned the gap in speaking. People think that you should answer, you should have an answer for everything, and you should immediately respond because there's this tension, especially when it's a customer. And you have to fill that tension gap where it's actually much better to gather yourself, spend a couple seconds thinking. And by the way, the customer doesn't even know. They don't notice anything. They just notice you actually being thoughtful before you respond to their answer. So that's, that's one of the things I learned from Mr.

Salvo.

And another thing is just being comfortable with saying you don't know things. I find that a lot of salespeople want to have an answer for everything. And customers don't— they're not going to respect you if you're wrong. So I'd rather just say, you know, I don't know, but I can find out, and then come through when you're finding out. That's extremely important. But a lot of times I'm saying, I don't know. And it's strange, but customers actually, they respect that because they know you don't know everything.

Nobody does.

Well, a lot of reps say, well, how can I become more curious? And I say, I use your question, what don't I know? Or what do I wish I knew?

Yeah, I mean, curiosity is, it's something actually, I think that's pretty easy. It's like a thread that you just start unraveling. And it builds upon itself. It is asking, what don't I know? And who don't I know? And what are their motivations? What are their interests. Within a company, I've worked with these large enterprises and there are a lot of people with different priorities. And so what are this individual's priorities and how do they relate to the overall company's priorities and how are you going to help them get through that? I mean, all those things sort of go into each of the meetings that I have. And again, I probably have fewer than most people at the company, But I just make sure that they're— that they count and that our message is right, that we bring the right people to the meeting. You know, a lot of companies show up with armies of people and—

School bus.

Yeah, customers notice. They're like, hey, these 5 human beings haven't talked at all. They've been in 3 meetings. They haven't said a word.

They're all waiting for their moment.

I guess, I guess. But I try to bring more of a SWAT team. And it's the people that can actually make an impact. And each one of those people, I want to speak up, I want them to participate in the meeting, I want the customer to see why they're important to them. So it's, for me, it's more a SWAT team than army. And yeah, just exploring with those few folks.

And what was your decision as far as going into leadership versus staying an individual contributor?

That's a really hard one for me. So I resisted, I resisted leadership for a long time. And I think that my leadership probably agreed with that resistance for a while, but they kept asking. And I was asked even dating back at Apple years. And I think that, you know, like you, I enjoy helping others understand things that they may not today. and think through things that they may not have considered. And it's because we all come from different vantage points. So as that became more and more important to me, I think that that's when I pivoted into leadership and thought, this, I like this. And I think eventually I'll probably become a professor or something like that for like my dad, because I really do enjoy seeing people's growth. and their own aha moments where they grasp something. And I had one of these moments actually with one of my team members yesterday, and it was a total aha, and he took off from it. And I loved it. I loved it. And it wasn't because I bestowed some knowledge on him. It's not like I have all the, you know, all the knowledge, here you go. It's that I helped him arrive at an understanding of something which helped propel him, which helped him like jump in and drive towards something that's bigger. And he was excited about it. And so that was, that was my reward was his excitement.

And do you see those common patterns in reps?

You know, it really depends on the rep, you know, the reps are so different, and people want to label them A player, B player, C-player, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is kind of crazy. But at the end of the day, I want a team that's passionate, that is determined, and that wants— is going to work really hard to achieve their objectives. And each one of those individuals is going to come in with their own set of skills and their own set of gaps. And by the way, I have a million myself. And it's just sort of like they're just holes in how we approach things, how we go about them. And so it's looking at those things and again, not looking at what they're good at, because they're already good at those things. But it's looking at where they need help, where they could use some assistance and helping them get to that, helping them arrive at a realization that they need to work in that area. But that they can accomplish it if they work hard.

And how have you dealt with the not so fun side of leadership?

Yeah, I mean, it's— there are some challenging conversations you have to have. And I actually am very comfortable with uncomfortable. I think that my team would all say, he's, you know, he'll just tell us exactly what he thinks. And a lot of leaders hide that. They think that if they put a veneer on and they just are very, very positive, that people will respond to that. And I sort of get that because there's always, I guess it's always good to have somebody who's rooting them on, but you need to tell people when they're not going the right way. And I think you need to tell them early and you need to have clarity behind it, because if you don't, you're both wasting your own time and your own effort, and maybe you could have somebody else in place who might be better, but you're also wasting theirs. It might just be that this isn't the job for them. It might be that they're better suited for somewhere else, or it might be that you just need to really share what you think and help them get better. And I think that most of the times you can help people get better, not all the time. And when you can't, There are obviously that we all have processes inside of our business, but yeah, it's not perfectly fun, but it is perfectly necessary. So you just go about it and you try and you try to work with that person and you try to help them. And eventually, if it's not working out, you know, you need to let them know and you need to let them know why. I think it's important. A lot of times it's sort of a You know, you sever the relationship. And by the way, the rep severs that relationship a lot too.

So, you know, they have other opportunities, right?

Yeah, they have other opportunities too. And by the way, I wish them well every time. I never try to trap people. I think it's crazy that companies try to trap them either internally or externally. I just want them to grow. And if they grow and do well, then I did my job, period. So, you know, it's just trying to help them along their path. And, and yeah, sometimes their path doesn't align with ours and Uh, might not make sense and they might find something else. But I think providing them that clarity, being very honest and direct with them about what they need to work on, and, you know, when it isn't working out, you need to let them know, of course, too.

And when you're interviewing reps, what do you look for? Have you found a particular process or characteristics or, or certain ones that I will completely stay away from?

Yeah. I mean, I'd say that there are all types of reps, right? So some people are very successful doing one specific, you know, they have a style. And at the end of the day, I'm looking for, it can be summed up in a single word. And there are a lot of studies on this from a psychological perspective. It's grit.

Yeah.

It is literally grit. It's how determined are you to succeed? How hard are you willing to work? And how focused are you of, we're going to be the solution, we're going to get this business? Because at the end of the day, it's always the extra effort. And I learned this early on in my career. I have a very silly story. It actually relates back to this Muhammad Ali picture with me. from way back at a Final Four, and I was VIP security there. And the way that I became VIP security is the interesting part of the story. I came in, it was like 6:30. This is early on in my career. I did— I didn't start at like a high-level sales. I started in telecom and copiers. I mean, I am definitely, you know, I worked my way up.

Hmm.

But I was going through an office park and I was meeting people. I was working for a telecom company. And it was late. Again, I think it was 6:30. And I went into this office and oftentimes the principals were there, the person who owned the organization or who ran at least that office. And I'm sort of peeking through the office because nobody's there. I mean, the door's open, but there are no human beings.

And I sort of wind my way back, but I don't want to startle anybody.

Get some coffee.

Yeah. So I'm sort of showing that I'm out of place even in my movements going through the office. And I finally find this office way in the back, and it's this guy, and he's finishing up a phone call, gives me the one minute, and I wait till he's done. I'm looking around the office. I see all these silver-plated shovels on his wall, and I'm thinking, huh, this guy is obviously doing some building projects here, and he must be fairly important to get one of these silver-plated shovels. So I start giving him my spiel afterward. And he said, you know what? I don't care what our telecom costs. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. But I really like— you're out here at 6:30, you had a good pitch, you're working hard, and I want to do something for you. Do you like basketball? I said, yeah. He goes, do you like college basketball? I said, I just graduated recently from Purdue. Went to all the games, all the basketball games there. Glenn Robinson was there at the time. And he goes, hang on for a second. And he calls up Jack Swarbrick. And Jack's now the— I think he's the Notre Dame athletic director, but at the time he ran Indiana Sports Corp. And he said, Jack, I have a guy for you. And he haggles with Jack. And eventually Jack gives in and says, okay. Because I guess you had to work your way into this VIP security. You had to do it 3 or 4 times before you'd even be considered. And you'd just be sort of one of the people at the doors and stuff like that. But he got me in, and it sort of told me a lot. It told me, look, hard work—it's not always rewarded. But if you work harder and you have that grit, it's definitely rewarded more often than it's not. Like if I didn't go through that door, I would have never had that opportunity. And so with reps, I just look for the grit. If they're gritty.

I want them.

I don't even care what their background is. I would rather have a kid, no college background. My engineer at Apple long ago, I found out at the time, he went back and he actually got his degree and he's one of the smartest human beings that I know. But at the time, I was asked by his manager, me and another rep, do you mind? This guy doesn't— he's great. He's so skilled, but he doesn't have a college degree. And this other rep and I looked at each other like, who cares?

Right.

Who cares? This guy's really— you're saying he's really smart, he's perfect for the job, but he doesn't have a piece of paper? Who cares? And that guy, by the way, he's still at Apple. He is a phenomenal engineer. And, you know, so happy we made that decision. But he was great for us. He was great for the business. And he had grit, and he had intelligence. And That was good enough for us.

Is there a particular signal in the interview that you— or test or acid test to determine that, the grittiness?

So one of the things that I usually put reps through is a similar 48-hour exercise. I actually did it to my team. I know, isn't that terrible? I'm like, hey, I suffered through this hell, so, so you should too. But I had my team do that recently, and it is seeing how much they can think, how hard they're going to work, because it shows effort. So one rep might go and spend an hour on it and come back with a surface level, basic, doesn't really have the depth that shows I understand the customer's challenges. I understand what we can do. here is the nirvana together, here's the vision.

Yeah.

And they show different levels of that. And so I think that that's a great test in enterprise sales, because it does show grit. It's like, how hard are you willing to think about this? How gritty are you? And how much of a problem solver are you? Because you have to look at the businesses and what their challenges are, you have to consider the people, that you would connect with and those type of things. So I wouldn't say it's a question, it's more an exercise.

Exercise, yeah.

Because I can't necessarily tell in like a half hour or even an hour. I know a little bit about you, right? But it's surface level. It's sort of top of mind. It's as you ask the question, I think about it. So it's not necessarily going to reveal your grit. And so I think the other exercise may do that a bit better.

Cool. Hey, Todd, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

They can connect with me on LinkedIn. But yeah, happy to talk with anybody. I really enjoyed this. It's a lot of fun. And you do great work. A lot of people love seeing the little bits because you present a lot of reality. You know, you make it into a joke. And the comical nature of what you're presenting I think that that's the real magic because that's why you get through to people so well is that you make it fun. And so, really enjoy the conversation.

What you notice when you talk to somebody who takes this empathetic, curiosity-based interest focus in sales is that they want to learn. They first want to put themselves in the client's space, what they're up against, what they're facing, what they care about before they start talking about them and their product and the solution. And it's so much more effective. Nobody really teaches us this because very few people know it. It takes a lot of experience. It takes an epiphany. For people to get this part of selling. And this is kind of what I teach in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting, where we start where the client is and build a conversation. Because people start at the same place. People— your methodology. Well, it's not necessarily my methodology. It's the way people work. And I figured it out. By doing it for a ton of years. Because most of us have like the retail mentality. Now, the retail mentality is, okay, you're in a store. When people come in, there's at least some curiosity. They may be killing time, but they could kill time in the other store. They kill time in your store because there's something that attracted them, whether it's— They just like to fidget, or the air conditioning's better, but there's usually something there that spurred their curiosity. And you could probably build that into somebody who tries something on or plays with something and maybe even buys something. That's how we view sales. And we get that in B2B with inbound leads, people who come to a webinar, download an ebook, I want to see a demo. But we don't know. We got to start— still start where they are. Are they at curiosity or are they at interest? Now, what's the difference? When you walk by a beautiful car or house and there's a for sale sign, what's the first thing that pops into your head? How much is it? Does that mean you're in market? Might be. Maybe you need a new car. Maybe you want to move. Or you might just be, hey, I wonder how much that house is. Is it worth more than me? Can I afford it? How much would I have to make to buy it? Or the cars, it might be a dream. It might be a comparison. But if you're in market, that's different. That's a big step. And what I hear from reps is all I need is more at-bats, which is really more people coming into the store who are interested. And that happens without our influence. That's what marketing does, hopefully. But that's not working today. Nobody's telling me I got so much demand that I can't fulfill it. What's happening today is people are exchanging their email address or contact information for some piece of content that they're interested in, but marketing usually makes it so broad and so enticing That it could basically be almost anybody. Doesn't mean they're in market. Doesn't mean they have the problem that you solve. Doesn't mean anything. So what do we have to do? You take the retail paradigm again. We have to go out in the parking lot. We have to go through the neighborhood. We have to network with our friends to find people who would most likely have the problem that we solve, have a need for what we Sell and talk it up. But that is not as easy. So today we have all this technology and information and tools, but nobody wants to talk to us. Oh no, just in time! Before we had all this stuff, we would, you know, just pick up a phone book and start randomly calling people. Good thing was people picked up then. Today, People don't want to talk to strangers because they know you want to take their money. They know you want to take their time. We have to start where they are. And there's a step-by-step process to do this and do it at scale so that it isn't time-consuming and arduous. It's fun and it's interesting because we know who is most likely to have the problem that we solve. We have all kinds of clues on the worldwide web to help us narrow it down and to put out little feelers, not about what we sell, but about what we solve. And that's what I teach in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. So check it out. There's a link in the show notes for a video that overviews it. Everything's at my website at b2brevenue.com. The letter B, the number 2, the numeral 2, the letter B, and revenue, my favorite word in the whole world. So check it out. We'll see you there. And what it includes, it's not just content, which there's a lot, probably more than you can consume in a year. There's office hours, which is an hour meetup every other Friday on Zoom. They're recorded and put in the— back in the course. All of them for the last 3 years, they're in there. So there's— when I say more content, examples, case studies than you could possibly consume, I, I have to index them and label them accurately so that I— you can get to the ones that most closely match what you're up against the fastest. And you get one-on-ones 30-minute Zoom calls with me applying the course to your particular situation. You know, after you take the course, it's not to teach you the course, it's to help you apply the course. So go to b2brevenue.com, check it out. It's also on the YouTube channel. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, please give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. Tell 3 salespeople this week about this podcast. I'd appreciate that. We'll see you next time. Here's some excerpts from a one-on-one that I did with one of the students in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting course. Now, this person really embraced the course after a while. It took a couple of one-on-ones for him to try each step. He kind of fought it, tried to make it work within his current model, and that That really didn't have this type of success. And then after he started, he started to get meetings. He started to get conversations. He started to get all the things that I was telling him about. And he started to get excited about it. He started to see the results that I tell you about where his week was full of meetings. Now, I'll let you hear this out. I deleted out kind of the specifics of the steps and the tools and the approach, but they're all in the course. If you're already in it, please listen to the full one-on-ones. When you hear the success that people are having, it's not just the steps, it's the matching of the steps with the appropriate actions and pacing. And then you get people asking to talk with you, which is the goal, which is the fun. So let's listen to it and I'll Sum it up at the end and give you kind of an idea and recommendation if you want to take advantage of this.

And it's crazy. This week, this week I'm full of meetings. I was like, what's happening? And like, I what I did was I baked in like I just I very generic and. People are like, oh, like, like, tell me more about you. Like immediately I have like 3, 4 meetings. Like I already had 2 this, and, and based on the, on the, on the parameters that you suggested for me, like, oh, go after these bigger companies, X amount of employees. So then by the time I'm talking to them, I already know that, okay, they, they typically have budget. I mean, assuming LinkedIn is correct.

Correct.

With the employee size, some of it was, it was off, but it's like, okay, there's still like a deal. It can, it can still happen. And, um, but yeah, I was like, whoa, this is— I like, I limited to like 30 connections a day. So then that way it's not like, it doesn't go crazy. Cause I remember one of the reps, they're doing about 30 a day. Uh, like I said, like this week, like 4 or 5 meetings and, and, and, and they're good meetings, you know, and it's just conversations. Like I say, it's not about like— pitching, but it's about working them up to that point where it's like, okay, yeah, we do need to advertise.

So after teaching this for quite a while, here's the steps that you should take. Take the course once, quickly through it. Find both one-on-ones and office hours that speak to the persona that you want to talk with, whether it be the CEO, the CMO, CRO, developer, marketer, whoever it is that you want to talk to, because we break it down in gory detail. We break down the persona and what they care about. And then try each step. Try it with your friends. Try it with your coworkers and start to see the results. Now, most people will fight me on it. They'll spend the first month, 2 months, uh, trying to make the system fit into their pitchy email and cold calls. And it works a little better, but it works a whole lot better when you apply it because each step and each pause in between each step has been designed over time to be very effective. And then when you start to see the results, all of a sudden people are replying, people are asking you, people are wanting to talk with you, want to understand what you do. It's almost turning cold outbound into Warm inbound. Now, are they in market? No, no, they're not. But they're a little curious, and it's up to us. And I show you in the course how do you build off of that instead of us telling everybody how great we are and hoping they can understand why they need us. And, and instead of them arguing about why they don't need us, because until you have active pain, Everyone's in denial. Think about going to the doctor. Okay, you kind of know you need an operation, but you're like, can I get a prescription? And the doctor's like, he has to ease you, or she has to ease you into the process. Well, let's take an x-ray. Let's see what we're working with here. Oh, can I— how about just a shot? Can I just get a shot till the next time I come in? Then he flips the x-ray up on the light and he points to something. He goes, That's what we're dealing with. That doesn't heal on its own. You have to have surgery for that. He has to build up to that. Until we build up that latent pain into active pain and properly diagnose it and get people to think about what happens if they don't have that operation, they're going to avoid it at all costs. That's why the cold pitch doesn't work. You're just igniting the denial. You're not igniting interest or curiosity. It's just denial. So check out the course, start the conversation, get the meeting. It's all at b2brevenue.com. There's an overview video in the show notes, on my YouTube channel, and on my LinkedIn profile, pretty much everywhere I am. As well as the website b2brevenue.com. Check it out if this is what you need. You know, this student, zero sales experience, but really, you know, just gobbled up this. And the people who gobble it up the fastest and the best are people who try it and get success. It has nothing to do with knowledge. It's like learning how to do a sit-up. Doesn't give you a 6-pack. You have to do the sit-ups. They're not fun at first, but then you get used to them and you start to like appreciating them. And then you start to get the connection between how you look and what you do. And so you start doing the things that make you look better. This is what we have. It's not just knowledge. It is applying it, taking feedback, polishing it up, and applying the system to your clients.