THE SECRET TO WINNING LARGE ENTERPRISE DEALS IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions Brutally Honest Answers Show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes, where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show, if you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, The Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice before it's showtime.

Here we go. So things typically go smooth as silk on deals with you. Is that what I hear?

I wish that was the case. Over the years, it seems every year there's always stuff that kind of falls through when you're least expecting it. But if you don't kind of prepare for that, I think you're bound to fall into those same traps. So there's a lot of ups and downs, especially with the deals. And it seems that one that you always think is 99% ready to go doesn't happen for some reason. And there's other ones that you weren't expecting that creep up. So I think it's how do you bounce back from all that? How do you regulate all that? Because you know you're going to get beat up and you're going to have some challenging things happen. And I think you just have to have that mindset to embrace that. Otherwise, it can eat you up and you can fall into these dark spaces when you lose out on some of those deals.

Well, I say on the podcast all the time that the complex sale is just one huge trap after another. And people just smile and nod and go on the way and go right into the trap. And then they don't realize it for quite a while, including myself. I mean, happened to me all the time. And what— I don't know what you did, but I kind of started to look for a pattern because I noticed the other reps were treating each call like it was a unique snowflake. And I was like, yeah, there's some unique— everyone's unique, yes, but everyone— every call has a pattern. Why don't I document that? And what are the signals of the trap coming? Because if you don't recognize it, you buy right into it because the trap, let's define it just so people understand. A trap means it's almost impossible not to walk into it. Let's give an example. Send me a proposal. Now that sounds like a buying signal, doesn't it? Sure.

I'll get that right over to you.

Right? And it's a classic trap or, you know, check back with me in 2 weeks and We'll set up the thing in procurement. Yeah.

Let's follow up next year.

Yeah, give me a call in 6 years. And people believe this because it's what we want to hear. We want to hear, oh, a quote. Well, are they saying that because they don't know what to say? Are they saying that because they just want the price? Are they saying that because they're really going to move it forward? Which one do we believe?

We believe it's going to get moved forward.

You know where it gets moved?

Number 98 on the priority list, probably.

It probably sits in their inbox. And that's, that was the pattern I noticed quite a bit selling to engineers. You know, I just sat down with one engineer and I go, so where is it in the process? I flew out and everything. He goes, well, it's in my inbox. And he didn't know what the next step is. I go, so your manager hasn't seen it yet? No, he hasn't asked for it. I go, well, why would he ask for it? And it was that point in my career, I was like, that's it. No more proposals to people who don't have buying authority. And people always say, well, how do you get multithreadedness? Well, you can initiate it, you can force it, or you can sit around and wait for someone else to do it. And, and these traps, we think that these are obvious. They're obvious when you see someone else do it.

Well, that's, that's always the best way when you can learn from other people's mistakes. But unfortunately, that hasn't always been the case for myself. But I did realize when I changed industries multiple times, especially when I went to medical device, I was just like, wow, this is way more complex. There's a lot more moving parts. It takes forever to get stuff done. There's technical or clinical folks and business folks. So it was just a lot going through your brain and you couldn't just rest on your relationships or your personality or being aggressive and following up, all that type of stuff. So I realized I needed a system, a process, something that's repeatable. It's never going to be 100% perfect, but something that's very close to the pin that I can just tweak as I go through these bigger deals. That ended up being your course years ago. But the thing about it, even though that helped tremendously, it's also just a constant self-improvement game because I think things change so much in sales and there's so many different things that can happen if you don't keep staying up to date and keep reinforcing that. I mean, I think sometimes people do that and then they just, oh, I had a couple good years, so I'm just gonna stop doing that now. And then they go back to what they were doing before. But I've, even since I've taken your course or whatever the process is, I have consistently maintained that and I keep, you know, showing up and renewing for another year, all that type of stuff, because it helps me kind of stay fresh and stay on top of my feet. Because I think you can, even if you, you make some good improvements with the process and trying to avoid those traps, you still can go right back to it pretty quickly if you don't watch out. So I, I believe you have to just, it's a continuous thing. It's like athletes. I mean, they're always training, they're always getting ready for the next season.

Right.

Same thing should be happening in sales. Doesn't typically happen like that. But I think the people that you see at the top of the leaderboard, that top 5 or 10% are probably doing something to stay on edge, whether that's with the process or their mind as well.

Well, and when I say it's easy to see somebody else do it, it's because we're not there. We didn't hear it from our customer because when our customer says it, they mean it. When their customer says it's a trap. And in sports, they call it a fake. One player fakes going one direction to make you chase them, and then they pivot and go the other direction, and all your momentum is going in that direction, and they fall onto the field because you're not there to be tackled. You're over there running to get a touchdown. This is what's going on in the sale. And we don't realize it because our clients sound so confident that they know what they're doing. I mean, in the complex sale, the number one thing that keeps coming up, people say, well, they— I did everything perfect and they said they needed it and it was already approved and now they won't call me back. I go, it sounds like a trap, doesn't it? What changed? They need it. It's approved. But why wouldn't they call you back? Apparently, they need it, but it's not approved. Right?

Can't, can't be a good sign when you're getting ghosted or not getting called back. It's typically not a good sign.

Yeah. And ghosting is up in the top 5 or 3 issues. And people, how do you do it? Well, you gotta plan for it. Once you're ghosted, that's not the time to fix being ghosted. You, you gotta do it along the way. And I think too many people today feel like they're service reps, that they're reacting to what the client wants to do. You gotta understand, the client doesn't know what to do next. That's why they ask for the quote. Because if you go in to look for a car, what do you look at first, the engine or the sticker price?

Price point for sure.

Right. You're like, that's a beautiful car. Second thing that pops in your head, how much is it? You know, the sticker price isn't the real cost, and that's why they tend to scrape it off in the showroom. Or leave it on to get the tire kickers out of there, and that's how people think. Now, is that person going to buy a car? Who knows, right? Maybe they're there for some reason. Maybe they're getting their car fixed. Maybe they're bored, and they're a professional tire kicker. They love. I was that guy. I shopped for a car 5 years at a time. I'm the worst customer if you want to sell a car to. You better get me on the 5th year. Otherwise, it's a big trap. And we think that since a customer's engaged and participating, that they want to buy. And maybe they do, but does the company want to buy? Does the prospect, do they have any experience internally getting anything done? You worked at a big company. How easy was it to get things done at your company?

I mean, it's crazy when you go back and think about it, whether you had a VP title or director, but you really, the companies that were doing well, you could get away with expensing stuff probably up to 3 or 4 grand, maybe a little bit higher depending on your title. But outside of that, Trying to get something done. I mean, it was it was like a foreign, like speaking a foreign language. I had no idea how to do anything, or even my boss, who probably had a little bit more power. It still was a crazy process. So it's funny when you're talking to other companies and customers, you're going through all this. But then when you take a step back and you're like, how do you get stuff done at my company? And it's you can't even you have no idea what the process is. There is no process. Nobody knows the answer. Even people SVP or hired don't really know the answer. And it's kind of a because I remember one time I was working with Home Depot and. They kind of had this program where they wanted to essentially have a full-time person that was assigned to our account, the power tool company I was at. And but it was, you know, a 6-figure type of thing. And I was trying to sell this internally and it was like so fricking hard compared to doing the other stuff because I was trying to get this 6-figure thing done internally. So yes, to answer your question, it's not easy. People have no idea what's going on there. And I think the other thing too is It takes so long for these deals to close, typically like 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. Everybody kind of wants that instant gratification and they feel like if you go faster, it's going to make the deal close faster, but it usually backfires. And sometimes the customer could be really excited too.

Me too.

And you listen to them, so you're getting happy ears, not just for yourself, but with what they want to do and they seem really confident. So then you start pushing faster, you skip a A trial, or maybe do a shorter trial than you should have, or you don't get someone else involved because you just the person says they're going to make it happen right away, and then boom, and then you end up not getting anything where you could have maybe gotten the door doing it that way. So it's crawl before you walk type thing, walk before you run. But it sounds very cliché, but it's it's so true in the complex sale because you just want to skip steps and you just want to get to it. If it's in the fourth quarter, you're trying to get stuff in before the end of the year, so you start. Doing things you normally wouldn't do. And then it typically just always backfires. And even if you do get a deal by skipping steps or significantly discounting, I don't think you really feel good about it. It sets a precedent that isn't good for the future, probably with other customers. And it's, it's just kind of crazy. So I think that instant gratification society, I think hurts us as salespeople because we just want to deliver results and then you get a lot of pressure internally from your company.

So it, it's the stimulus response. If you do the stimulus, you expect the response, and that's what we're good at. But then if you do the stimulus and there's a large time gap between the response, like weight loss, right? I, I keep bringing it up, but that— it's the same analogy as the complex sale. Everybody thinks, I had a Diet Coke at lunch and a salad. Time to get on the scale. You get on the scale and you've gained a half a pound. This doesn't work. It must be my biology. Notice what happened. I don't say, oh, I need more time. I say, oh, I bring up some superstitious thing to fill in the reason because our brain has to have a reason. I need a new book. What's— what diet book did you do? Everybody asks like, what, what, what did you do? Has the answer ever been anything other than diet and exercise?

I don't think so. It's pretty straightforward.

It's just, it's just hard. And this is exactly what happens in sales. We fill in these gaps of these traps and this ghosting with folklore, superstition, and conspiracy theories. Instead of saying, well, I do this every day, I've done deals like this, what typically happens when I hear, don't talk to anybody else, get me a proposal by the end of today with a 30% discount and I'll get it right through? Well, I've done a couple thousand of them and I know what happens. You get all excited, you put it on the forecast and it doesn't close. But then when you take your time and say, well, we'll get to that, but let's make sure it's the right thing for you. Why? What's behind this? Is it just your idea or is other people care about who else cares about this?

this?

How does it affect them? Where on their list of priorities is it? Wow, wait a second. Now you start to identify what's really going on instead of just being a quote generator.

And do you think it differs too depending on the type of role that you have? Because I mean, if you're I guess if you're more in that account manager role, you probably get away with that stuff more. But if you're in that new business commission type role, I mean, this is, you know, what we're talking about. And I think it's also easy to get complacent sometimes and just, you know, once you hit your number, let's say you have a good year, you just kind of take the foot off the pedal. You don't prospect as much. You're not going through all the motions or the details as much going into the next year. But I think if you kind of have that proactive mentality, Even when things are going well, I think that also helps because I see a lot of times people get overconfident when they have a lot of good years or good things going on, and then they start skipping steps or they're not, you know, prospecting or doing multi-threading at the beginning like you were talking about when they normally would because they're kind of just going based off what they did in the years past. So I always try to have that proactive mentality and you have to Think through the— and this is where I think it's hard. You have to think through the bad things that could happen. And sometimes people call me out on this because they're like saying you're being negative talking about these deals, but it's not negative. It's, I want to be confident in front of the customer, confident in life, et cetera. But you have to be realistic about what could go wrong in the deals. And then people are going to be like, man, you're so pessimistic. Like, we're going to make this happen. But that That doesn't mean that much. If you're really confident and outgoing, that's great and that's a good trait to have. But if you don't have a process in the complex seller, you're still going to get eaten alive in most industries. So you have to be confident, but you also have to be pessimistic a little bit and beat up those deals to make sure you're not falling into these traps. Because it's so easy to, when you get excited, you're in a meeting, if you don't have stuff written down, you don't prep the right way, it's just easy to blurt something out or forget something and not ask the question you wanted to. And then boom, you, you go right back to where you were before. So that whole confidence kind of paradox is interesting too with, with salespeople and deals because it's hard to be on both sides of it where you, you need to be pessimistic sometimes. Yeah.

It's the killer because, you know, it's the B-player trap. You get confident, Which is good in certain situations. You need to be confident to stand up in front of a group and present. You need to be confident to push back and ask hard questions. But you need to be a little bit— maybe paranoid is too strong of a word— suspicious, cautious. Intelligent to understand what's really going on here, because excitement's another emotion. Usually that first call goes really well. You know, if you're smart, you did your research, that's the right type of company, the right persona. They had some interest, they seem to have the problem. You go for the call and it's usually about what?

Not why.

What are we buying? And we all know what we sell. We're great at what we sell, but we forget about why people buy it. And that's all that cares. People don't buy something because it's a thing. They buy it to solve something, to get something. What is that get that they're looking to get? And if you're confident to the point where they're going to buy, it becomes, I've got some magical touch. Which is what most B players think they have. They love me. The number of times I've heard that during a forecast call is, and then you hate to bring it up the first day of the following month. It's go where'd the love go? And even if that person loves you, does the company as a whole love you? Oh yeah, they all love me. Okay. Who in procurement loves you? Well, not everybody. This is where, I mean, you, you hit on that motion. Emotional regulation is something that kind of has popped up on my radar as the right word, but it gives the wrong impression in your mind because you think of, if you hear emotional regulation, what do you think of? You think somebody in school who can't behave and sit at their desk. You don't think about a professional in their 30s or 40s trying to close a million-dollar deal, being very confident one moment, a little bit paranoid at the next, a little bit insecure at other moments. If you can't do that, you're blind.

You're essentially—

you will not see what is right in front of you. And then if you go and you talk through the deal with your manager or someone else and they say, well, who else at the company cares about— they think you're attacking their deal or your approach or your skill set. No, they're trying to help you. They're trying to get you to see the trap that you're in or could be in or going to be in before you're in it. If they know about us. Yeah.

And you should be grateful if you have a manager or someone that could do that. It's probably at the time though, if they don't present it to you the right way, it could come off probably as more of an attack to your point. So a lot of salespeople probably don't enjoy that, but I'm sure looking back, if you think of those managers that were actually doing that for you or a counterpart, whatever, it probably helped you close some big deals. And make a lot of commission too. So no, it's interesting. So I've been trying to balance that as well and be— I guess paranoid is a good, good word. I say pessimistic, that's probably not a good word, but I have to just kind of see what, what deals have closed, why have they closed, what deals were lost, why did they lose, and then kind of compare and contrast those and see what, what the trends are. But at the end of the day, you're never going to be Perfect on anything. So you also have to kind of mentally prepare yourself for when stuff doesn't go well, when you lose deals, because it's not always going to happen. And then there's that there's a whole other side there too is when when you lose those big deals and how much do you have? How much skin in the game did you have with that? You have to kind of take a break to kind of regroup a little bit and just process it. And so I try to try to visualize all the good things happening, but sometimes I I was reading something and. like the Daily Stoic about how they recommend visualizing some negative things happening sometimes so you can kind of mentally prepare yourself too. Not, not to get negative, but it's, it's good to kind of be able to balance both because if you're not prepared for when things don't go your way, it still can kind of put you derailed a little bit as well. So I think visualizing your success is, is great, but you also have to kind of, when that deal doesn't come through, what, how are you going to react to it? Are you going to let it completely ruin your week or your month or your year? Are you going to keep kind of Pound forward and have a lot of other things going on and stay positive. So that's, that's a really tough thing too in sales is when the, that deal gets lost.

Yeah. And what I did was I would do some pattern matching and I would take like the ideal deal and this is always cold outbound. This isn't managing accounts and upselling. Those are much easier. Relationships established, technical win is already there. It's really about funding and prioritization. And I would contrast the deal that I have versus the deals that naturally just flowed and would close. And what am I missing? And, and you have to face what you're missing though. You can't just like, I'm sure it'll close because when you find out it won't or they ghost you, that's not the time to fix it. Today and now is the best time to fix it. Waiting and seeing, and if you've made a mistake already, you got to kind of work around it. But until you really understand what a deal looks like, and I'm not talking about, oh, I sent a proposal and it closed. No, I'm talking about what actually is happening at the customer site. Who's involved? Why are they involved? What do they care about? How do they justify this economically? And really start to look at it the way the client looks at the deal. And this is a lot to take on if you're new at the company or new to sales, but sit down with another rep and ask them. Go through their inbox. Search for that company name. Go from that first call all the way through. And really study, you know, how long did it take? How did you do it? What went wrong? What took longer than anticipated? What would you have done differently? And write it down.

Right.

This is something that salespeople seem to refuse to do because apparently if you get into sales, you're handed a photographic memory. I didn't get mine. Maybe that's why I have to do it. And I don't say that to be— it's because it's not about intelligence. It's about emotional regulation. If you're comfortable and you're sure it's going to happen, are you analyzing the deal?

No. No.

Is your brain saying, hey, hey, Don't forget this. No, it's like, how are we going to spend that commission? That's what the brain is thinking. Do we get a summer house? You want to go on vacation?

How about that new car?

What color? Let me get on the website and check it out. What's the lead time on that car? Can I get it by the— right at the time I get the commission check? And this is how our brain thinks. Our brain doesn't want to think about pain, wasting time, being tricked, being in a trap. Who wants to think about a trap?

It's, I think it's an ego thing too, because I was thinking back to when I was younger, like reaching out to other people for advice. I think I was pretty good at that, but I don't know if most everybody is willing to go to that top rep and, you know, kind of be more vulnerable and understand how they have been so successful and that you're trying to get where they want to go. So there might be a lot of egos, I think, involved with salespeople and that's why they don't do that. And they definitely don't want to write stuff down. They don't want to do work on the front end. So everything you're talking about, like planning out the process, all the steps, writing it down, whatever it is, it could be a sheet of paper or Word document, whatever, but no one wants to do that work on the front end. They just want to pound through more calls or more opportunities and just go based off the relationship. I mean, it's, Very cliché, but everyone always says it's all about the relationships and they think they can just get by by just going through that more. And maybe you can if you work for a unicorn company and you have that going for you, but most people don't when they're going after new business. So you have to, there's like this shift of, I wanna see what you think, but there's a shift of, I think more, it used to be the extroverted salesperson, life of the party. And I think the last decade maybe or so, it's more kind of process driven, a little more Analytical to be able to kind of map that process out. So that I think there's a good balance probably of salespeople moving forward, and it's not as cliché personality as you would think because I'm more introverted myself. I'm you know I can I can flip it on when I need to and when I'm comfortable, but I'm more introverted process analytical kind of more like an architect, and I think that helps me with the process size. But then there's a lot of people that are more kind of that rainmaker personality, and doing that type of detailed stuff is really. Probably challenging for them?

Well, I had a VP who slammed my manager right in front of me because my manager was 100% relationship. He could talk about the Braves all night and day, any sport, any comedian, any TV show. And that was his approach. He was a very likable guy, knew nothing about the product, could care less why the company was buying it. So it was relationship and discount. That was his go-to approach. It worked for him. I had to work for him. And both of us just got out of this account and we're on a forecast call with the VP and he's touting the relationship he has with this vice president. And our vice president just goes, I don't give a shit about the relationship. He's not your brother. And even if he was your brother, he can't buy it. Why are they buying it? And we looked at each other and we're like, people think that, okay, do you, is that relationship with the CEO, the finance person, the person who owns the budget, or is it with the user of the product? That's the technical win. They may pick you. You're the best widget. Doesn't mean they're buying a widget. They're just admitting that you're the best. Congratulations. You're— that's one ingredient in the sale. Now get the other ingredients. And his approach was always end of quarter, 30% off. And it would work 20% of the time. Worked great with existing accounts because they would buy things forward. New accounts, it was marginal. But if you knew how to drive it, you first, you don't have to give up the 30 points. Second, you know how they're buying and you can drive that process, but you gotta know how before you're in front of them, not reacting to, oh, we decided to push it off a year. That's the part that people miss about the relationship.

It's true. It's not a bad thing. Obviously, being likable is gonna get you in the door, get you more meetings, get you through a lot of those steps, but you have to kind of balance that. So whether it's somebody else on your team or you kind of going after being more process-driven, I think that's, it's a great way to kind of bring it all together.

And to become great at sales, The best way is to model somebody who already has become good at sales and to hear other people who have become great at sales and the journey that they're going through, the false beliefs, uh, the, the misnomers, the mindset issues, all of the stuff that gets in our way between where we are and the income that we want. Let's face it, we're in sales because we're money motivated, we're competitive, we want to be better every day than we were yesterday. And how do we do that? Hmm, just really, you know, read a book, listen to a podcast. That's good. Good start. I like it. But then you have to take action. And then you want both tactical and strategic ideas. You want mindset. You want strategy. You want to understand how companies buy. You want really deep content and examples, case studies, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes.

That's what I'm here for.

I'm here for you to learn from my mistakes. And boy, do I got a lot of them. So go to b2brevenue.com, sign up for the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the conversation, get the meeting, fills up your pipeline, gets rid of that problem of, oh, I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough meetings. It gets those conversations started with the people you want to talk to. Now, it's not about a pitch. It's about a conversation. Now, everybody thinks of conversations when you're talking or you're online at the same time, or you're on the phone or Zoom at the same time. That's not a conversation. A conversation's when the client is talking about what they care about, what they're interested in. And that is what we call qualification, where we can sense where are they and how do we build up that curiosity into interest, into urgency to get a deal. And these are skills that we need. They're lifelong skills that we need in sales. And then how do we get a deal closed? Yes, anyone can take an order, but what if they don't know how to get it done? You get a new account where you're trying to get a big change done internally. What are the issues? If you're not planning that through, odds are it's not going to get done no matter how much your champion wants it. So winning the complex sales solves that problem for you. Why waste all your time on these false positives or these no decisions? Because they don't pay very well. They pay 0.0. What you want to do is pay a lot. So sign up today. Invest in yourself. You're the asset in sales. Quit waiting for somebody else to approve it or train you. See if you can get it expensed. That should be your first sales obstacle. Your first sales challenge is how do you get your company to pay for it? Just go down, tell your manager you want to do this. I put a little example email in the show notes right below here. Just swipe up and take a look at that. And if they won't, you got to ask yourself, why won't you? Why won't you? Oh, it takes time. Well, you work all day.

You're working wrong all day.

Why not improve that? There's the time right there. Oh, the money, Brian. It's money. Well, you make more money if you become better in sales. And Start the Conversation pays for itself the first week because you're going to get at least 2 meetings just learning from the very basics.

of it.

Closing the Complex Sale will pay for itself 100 times over. Students in it tell me it's the best money they ever spent because they now have control over their deals. And it doesn't end.

Some give up.

Some give up after they win their first deal and they think they've got enough. No, come back, come back, keep going. You can get even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Yeah, excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse— you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, 50, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income. Really?

Yeah.

The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000. Decent, decent income. But you know, there's other people in your industry making $300K, $400K, $500K. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you there with those leads, trying to close those deals and Do you have the game?

Few people do.

Everyone thinks they do.

Why not prove it?

The market tells you what you're worth.

Accept it.

Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't. So sign up today. We'll see you next time.