Sales Discovery Calls - Workshop for Consultants

We are live. Welcome to episode 112 of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? What if the deal that you lost last month wasn't because of your price, your proposal, your pitch, or your competition, but because of something that happened during the discovery call that you never even noticed. See, I recently released a video summarizing my observations of 50 sales calls that I audited and uncovered the 4 patterns, the 4 mistakes that kept showing up in lost opportunities. So that was the summary in that video. It's on the channel. But today it's going to be a workshop. I'm going to work— I'm going to work through real sales call scenarios and the mistakes that many new consultants commonly make, and more importantly, how to fix them. Whether you've recently won a client, you lost one, or you have an opportunity that is stalling, I want you to think about that conversation as we go through today's workshop. I have a special checklist for you. It's my sales call evaluation checklist where you can assess what happened, identify areas for improvement, and then identify also ways to strengthen your next discovery meeting or discovery call. And part of this is I want you to understand, if you're new to sales, many Many new consultants, 68% of new founders, they don't have a lot of background in marketing and sales. And the one thing that you want to understand about, about entrepreneurship is that there's a lot of things that you'll end up having to learn, including sales and marketing. And when it comes to sales, people buy from people, especially in our space in consulting. So part of learning the science of sales and, and over time becoming a master at it is that you want to understand buyer psychology, which I'll cover today. Also, what questions to ask. It's one thing to go into a meeting or in a call and go over your credentials and the case studies and your services and how an amazing consultant you are. These are all good, but there are questions that you want to be asking to uncover the real pain points that the customers have. So I'll cover those as well. In addition, and especially in B2B scenarios when you're selling business to business— business to consumer slightly different, although you still want to ask many of those questions— but in a B2B, in a business to business scenario, there there are a lot of stakeholders involved. So I call them the hidden stakeholders, not just the person or the people that you are speaking with and have established some rapport with. So how do we— okay, what questions we ask, the hidden stakeholders, and also how to leave every sales call, every sales meeting with stronger momentum, not just I'll send you the proposal, I'll follow up next week. That will not give you clarity, will not give the client clarity, that the clarity that you need to keep the sales process moving. So that's what we'll cover today. And throughout this workshop, I'm calling this a workshop, I want you to leave your questions, drop me questions in the chat. If you're listening or watching later, leave me a comment in It's on the YouTube channel @StartupWithFeras, and Feras spelled like my first name, F-E-R-A-S. I answer all the questions I get, and if it's something that is still private, you haven't announced to the world that you're starting a business, so you don't want to put this online, you can email me at info@startupwithferas.com, and I read all these questions, I keep it all confidential, and I will reply back to you with my observations, my recommendations, or at least point you to some resources. And for those of you who are new to the channel, my name is Feras Alhlou. Welcome. I've started several businesses, a few of them in consulting. We took 2 to 7 figures and 1 to 8 figures, and we sold that business— it was a digital analytics business— to the global media giant Dentsu. Um, and, and since, um, I've been helping a lot of entrepreneurs scale, helping entrepreneurs start, grow, and scale their ventures. And a lot of you out there who want to leave corporate, or maybe they were laid off from corporate, and I know the pain, I was laid off once, and you just don't want to go back and deal with bosses, and you want to establish a culture that you'll be proud of, you want to grow a business, that you— that will help you and your family, you want to reach certain financial objectives, you want to reach financial independence, whatever your dream is, whatever your goal is, from starting a business, scaling a business, and having a profitable and a sustainable business, this is my mission, is to help you get there faster, to get there with less bruises, to get there I don't want to say easy. There's no easy. There's no short— there are no shortcuts. There are ways to optimize and improve and do things more efficiently, but there are— there are— there, there is no such a thing as overnight success, or as you see a lot on social media, that, hey, follow this methodology, follow my system, and you'll get to a million dollars in revenue or in profit, as some claim. In the next 3 or 4 months. It doesn't work that way. You can't go from $0 to $20,000 a month in consulting like overnight. It doesn't work. There's a lot— you could get lucky one month or another month, but to make it repeatable, sustainable, to, to build a system and the infrastructure you need to, to allow you to go from $0 to $10,000 to $50,000 to 6 figures to 7 figures later to 8 figures There's a lot of foundation that have to be built, and I am here to support you in building and scaling. So if you have any questions about sales pitching, issues with discovery calls, sales calls, let me know. And of course, I'd love to hear from you, not, not only about the challenges but also about the wins— small wins, big wins, things that are working out really well for you. Let me know. Leave me a comment. I, I love to share these wins with the community as well. And I have these live streams every week, Tuesdays, at least for this year, Tuesdays at noon Pacific, 3 PM Eastern, where I cover a topic and I answer all the questions I get from the community, from the community. So whether you're watching or listening live or dialing in later, let me know. I'll be more than happy to be of help. All right. So I'll be walking through real sales call scenarios and I'll be identifying, asking you questions and then identifying the issues that these consultants are kind of causing themselves and then how to deal with these issues, how to do it better for the next call. And it's really important before we get into these mistakes, there are 4 mistakes that I want, there are 4 scenarios I want to go through. But before we get into these, one of the biggest issues is that a lot of, a lot of us, especially those of us like me who learned sales from the ground up, we assess our own performance. We judge our own performance emotionally. Like we work hard to learn about sales and what to ask and how to package a proposal. And we follow up and we think we're doing well. Well, you're giving it your best. Maybe you're giving it—you're doing a lot of effort, and that's there's—that's really important. But at times, that's not enough because we have to learn how to do it right. So it's not just like if you have a map. If you have the wrong map for a city you're going to—you're going to—you're going to San Francisco, and you have a map for Los Angeles. So no matter how how fast you're going, following specific highway on, on the wrong map, you won't get to your destination. So the same thing here. I want you to put— I want you to give it your best. I want you to work really hard. Work hard, play hard, give back— my, my motto in life. But I also want you to have the right blueprint, the right map. And that's what we're covering today— things that you might not be aware of issues, mistakes that are costing you deals that you might not even be aware of during these meetings and during these calls, just like I wasn't aware of a lot of these mistakes, so that you can avoid them on your next calls. I remember when we first started, and the first several months, my win rate was, was 5%, 1 out of 20. Out of every 20 proposals we were winning, I was winning 1. So it was pathetic, but hey, that's what it was. That's where we started. Later, as we grew to 7 figures and then 8 figures, and we had a sales team and a process and everything has evolved, we were closing at about 33%, 1 out of every 3 deals. And this was going after Fortune 1000, Fortune 500, Fortune 50. We had a couple of Fortune 10 clients later as we grew and became very established in our niche of digital analytics, and we were one of the top Google partners in our space. So I know how hard it is to pitch and send proposals and getting ghosted and not getting rejections and not closing deals. I hear you. I've been there. No one closes every deal. No one closes every proposal. I get that. Our goal here is to improve from where we are today and knowing the mistakes that we make and planning to avoid these mistakes on the next call is really important. So don't just feel— I want you to feel good that you're giving it your best. That's important. But I also want you to learn that by asking yourself questions about these sales calls that you're having, Okay? After every— make it a practice, make it a habit. After every sales call, after every sales meeting, you huddle. Initially, it could be just yourself. You're a solo consultant initially, that's okay. And what did go well? What did not go well? What should I do better? Do not delay this. I had this in every one of our businesses. And right after the sales call, I'd huddle the team later when we grew and had a sales team and we had senior folks, senior consultants helping us close these bigger deals, we would huddle and we would have a very transparent conversation and people say, hey, Feras, you spoke too much on this call. Let the client say what's on their mind, or I would say, hey, my sales, John, or we have 2 Johns on these sales calls, amazing, amazing folks who helped us to grow the business. Hey, John, maybe, You mentioned this, but maybe the client was looking for that. So we would do a transparent analysis of our own sales call and then have an action plan based on what we've learned. 2 action plans, one to get back to the client with the open items and with the follow-up plan, and then also how to improve our processes for the next call. So you learn a lot from doing this audit. Again, initially it might be just yourself. So to help you in evaluating your own sales calls, if you don't have a team yet, I'll— I have this, um, um, let me share that with you right here. I have this sales call evaluation checklist. We'll go through it throughout the workshop today, throughout the session, but let me just give you a quick preview so you know what I am talking about. It's right here, and I'll have the link in the description. And actually, I'll put it on the screen here in a second. I have a short URL, but basically You can make your own copy. This is a Google document. You put the name, all that, and I want you to do this after the sales call, after the sales meeting, because you'll forget. You'll move on. You'll be chasing other leads. You'll be delivering to customers. You have a marketing campaign. You have some outreach to do. So I want you to really do it right after the call or the same day before you move on to the next activity. So, but we'll go over these mistakes and then what to ask yourself, that is, so that you have a proper audit, a proper evaluation of what went well and what didn't go as well. And then you can score yourself whether it's a yes or a no. So out of 20, we have 5 score— 5 points here to score yourself on for each of these mistakes. So 5 times 4 is 20, and you'll see where you are. So we'll go over this. with a whole lot of detail during this session, but I just want you to get a flavor of it for now. So let's go over mistake number 1 and then the scenario, the sales call scenario I mentioned I'll be going through. Okay. Mistake number 1, over-talking the buyer. I know we're consultants. I know we know our domain really well. We've solved problems. Whether you have 20+ years of experience or you have 5 years of experience in HR consulting, in process automation, in IT consulting, you name it. You know this stuff cold. You've done it. You might not have done sales and marketing and done business on your own, but in terms of the actual area of expertise that you have, you know it well. So what happens is during these sales calls, we keep on broadcasting and just talking. So here's the scenario. Okay. So the buyer, and he's talking, let's say he or she, they're a marketing manager, and they tell you this, we've tried a couple of agencies before, marketing agencies, neither one really worked out. So the buyer is saying they've worked with 2 agencies, 2 marketing agencies before, and neither of these agencies worked out. So you now, the expert, the consultant, you say, I completely understand. Let me explain how we are different. First, we have 30 years of combined experience, whatever that means. Second, our process is much more collaborative. Third, this. Fourth, this. So you keep on now promoting, pitching your services, your credentials, all the great things that That you've done. And then 2 or 3 minutes later, the buyer says, oh, that, that all sounds good. Then they want a moment to breathe and process, so they become quiet. Now, what happens in these calls that I audited is that the new consultants, they keep talking for another 3 minutes. And they, we have these certifications. I used to do the same. We are a Google certified partner and we worked with clients in New York and, and, and, and, and here are, here, here's a list of testimonials and we have 5 case studies. The client wanted some time to think, but you keep on talking. So what happened here? What clues did the buyer give? And what I want you to think about it for your own conversations, like what should, what should the consultant have done instead? So think about it for a second. You gave an overview of your services. That's great. You went on a bit too long, not so great. The client says, that's that all sounds great, and then they were quiet, and then you kept on talking more more credentials and and services and awards, whatever the case might be, and maybe you have a patent, all that great stuff. So so when clients go quiet. They do that for a reason, because they want to process what they just heard. They are thinking of the questions, they're thinking, they're developing their questions, they're thinking about, oh, this consultant is so established, maybe they're too expensive for us, maybe we can't afford them, so they're thinking about budget. They could be thinking about internal politics. How do I get this processed? How do I get this approved? They could be thinking about, okay, this is going to need some support internally. Can I offer this consultant the support they need to deliver their work? So they might be questioning, they're still maybe not convinced that you have the requisite expertise. You know, they don't, you don't know their domain. They want to ask you if you've worked in their domain. So Your job is not to eliminate silence. You want to be really, really curious at this point when clients are silent. Don't confuse, uh, or don't, don't enter, don't confuse silence with uncertainty. Silence is just a little bit of time, a couple of seconds for the, for the buyer to process everything that you have shared with them so far. So instead of keeping on pitching, keeping on bragging about your, your background and expertise and experience, I want you to do the following. When clients say this is all great Pause and say, give them a couple seconds. It's okay. Ask questions like this: What's your reaction so far of everything I've said? Any concerns? Do you have any concerns that come up, you know, come up in your mind? Things like, what feels like the biggest risk from your from your perspective as as the buyer? So so. Pausing and let them process what you've shared with them and speak is really what you want to be doing. So, and of course, some clients could be verbose and could be talking a lot, and, and, and you might need to kind of interject at some point and, and just let them know, sort of guide them to where you want them to, to land. But in a lot of cases, It's not about me and my credentials and my experience. It's about understanding the pain points of the client. And the pain points could be the technical thing that you will solve as a consultant, but also other things that this buyer who maybe they like you by now, what else is going on in their mind that could be not technical? It could be again about about how they can get the approval, about if they have the time to support you, as I said earlier. It could be about another set of factors, a whole set of factors that have nothing to do with you. So understanding not just the technical issue and the business impact, which these are important of course, but also the logistics and Everything else that has to be right for them to hire you as a consultant. So if you're looking— so I'll share those questions and then I'll share, I'll share, I'll walk you through the questions in this evaluation worksheet. But before I do that, I want you to think of the following points or signs that you're explaining too much. So That's your cheat sheet before you go to a sales meeting. Just remember these points. If you've spoken— if you've spoken for more than a few minutes without hearing anything from the buyer, then you're explaining too much. You gotta pause, let them absorb and react, and then you have maybe to nudge and ask and poke. If you're repeating the same points that you've already made, That's not a good sign. If you're answering questions that they haven't asked, like there's a saying in sales, whatever doesn't help the sale hurts the sale. So hurts the sale. So, so if you bring it up and some other clients have budget issues and some clients have some issue with data privacy, like don't bring up all these things. Yes, it shows that You have a thorough knowledge about the domain, but initially let them bring this up. Initially hear them out, see what is top of mind for them. And, and I shared this in this, the video I mentioned earlier, there is this talk-to-listen ratio that I want you to be aware of, 43 to 57%, almost. You want the client to speak more than, than you do. You want to take notes, you want to have Practice active listening again to really understand their situation, and then you can start, you know, offering solutions, which actually mistake number 2, solving too early. I'll get to it in a second, but early on in, in, in these conversations, if you're catching yourself repeating, asking the same questions again, you're speaking for minutes on and on and on, then you gotta pause and find a way to get the client To to to tell you more and to help you evaluate your last sales call or maybe an upcoming sales call. Let me go back and share with you, walk you through this spreadsheet right here. So we go here for this first mistake that I just mentioned. So I want you to score each one of these. You get a one for yes, zero for no. Okay, and if it's a maybe, put give yourself 0.5, all right? Half a point. So did I allow the buyer enough time to think about things without immediately filling in the silence? That's one thing. Yeah. Did I ask follow-up questions? And I gave you sample questions to ask instead of just keeping on explaining. Did I avoid repeating or rephrasing my value proposition multiple times? Did the buyer speak at least as much as I did? Again, Ideally you want them to speak more, you want to listen more. And then when the buyer became quieter, did I become more curious instead of talking more? So these are the questions that I want you to ask yourself after a sales call and then score yourself and, and put it right here. I have it ready for you. So now we go to the second mistake. And for those of you who are with us live, if you have any question about about sales and rejections and how to win more deals. Again, leave me a comment. I'll address those. We'll talk in— we've covered mistake number 1, over-talking the buyer, and then we have 3 more mistakes to go. And I'm walking through real sales call scenarios and what's going— the issues with these calls, and then what you should do to avoid making them. running into the same mistakes. All right, so let's go on to mistake number 2. All right, solving too early. So the first mistake was on not allowing the customer to speak, over-talking the customer. Now maybe we are allowing them to speak But we're jumping into conclusions and solutions too early. So here's a call scenario. The buyer, let's assume they're a marketing manager again. Again, this could apply to any buyer, but since all of us, most of us understand marketing, I use this as an example. So the buyer says, we're struggling to get consistent leads from our website. So they have a website, They're not getting leads, or at least they're not getting leads consistently. Now you as a marketing consultant, you've solved this many times before. So with your excitement, with your eagerness to solve and help this client, because you are a trusted advisor, you are the person who can solve this problem, you jump in and say, we've solved that before and I'd recommend Redesigning your website, improving your search engine optimization or answer engine optimization, and and running some paid campaigns. So you offered, which is the client gave you a sentence, a short sentence that they're not getting leads consistently, and you offered three solutions: redesigning the website, a big project; improving SEO and AEO. Big project, and then running a paid campaign that requires a budget for ads as well. So the buyer going along with with with the with the scenario here, the buyer nods politely, and then you just feel that you've lost the momentum or there's there's no energy. The energy drops. So think about it. The client gave you a short sentence and then you went into a solution mode right away. So what did this consultant miss on the sales call? They skipped the whole discovery process. I mean, you're having part of this, part of the sales process is understanding the client situation. Right? Every client is different. Their likes and dislikes and sensitivities and scenarios and internal politics— all of those are part of what you have to understand to, to package a proposal that will, that, that will turn into a contract. So you really have to ask a whole lot of questions. Now, not, not 50 questions, you know, don't put the lead to sleep like I did. I, I I have this one of the videos where I literally put the lead to sleep because I was asking all these questions. But no, but, but you want to understand when they said in this scenario, uh, we're not getting consistent leads from the website. Well, did they run ads, paid ads? Did they have an in-house person who was doing SEO, AEO, and they don't know what they were doing? When was the last time they redesigned their website? Maybe they just finished redesigning their website. Maybe the website they have today is still in beta. They haven't launched it, like the new website. There could be many, many reasons. So part of sales is this discovery process. Again, whether this is— the discovery could start in that initial meeting that you have with a lead at maybe a networking event, and then you have a follow-up call and you ask for more questions to better understand the situation. And you say that, say, yeah, we, you know, you can give your 10-second pitch and say, this is what we do, this is what I've done, these are my credentials, but every client is different and I'd love to know more from you about why you're not getting consistent leads. Is it maybe the website is unstable? Maybe the issue is just a hosting environment that is not stable, or it could be that They've done something really, really questionable with, with SEO and AEO, and then they got delisted from search engines. It could be that they had their paid campaigns, their paid ad campaigns running on autopilot. They haven't done any optimization to these ads over the last 12 months. So, so until you understand the whole picture, every recommendation that you offer is going to sound like— it's going to sound like a sales pitch, and it's going to sound like a bad pitch, and it's going to feel generic. So use this 3-layer approach, and I covered this in the video I mentioned earlier about the 50 calls I audited video. And level 1 is like, what's happening so they're not getting leads? That, that you already have that. And then digging deeper, What have you already tried? Did you— maybe they hired an intern and the intern didn't do a good job, right? Or maybe they did things with AI and AI, it was some generic stuff that they put on, on the website. Maybe they're doing copying and pasting text content from, um, that there's just, there's just not well thought out and, and it's done by AI in a sloppy way. So, so understand what is it that they've already tried, what resources they have. Maybe they're only putting in an hour a week to this whole online marketing and website, so no one, no one is keeping the website updated. Maybe, maybe the content on the website is outdated. There could be like— I could list 50 reasons that could lead to this summary answer that they gave, that is, we're not getting leads from our website. So, so asking, going to this first layer is what's happening, what has happened, and then layer 2, what is it that you've already tried and what did it do? Why, why, why did it work or why did it— didn't it work? And then, which is really, really important, that the third layer is What is at stake if nothing changes? So per the buyer's statement, we're not getting leads consistently, but maybe they're totally happy with this because they're doing a lot of offline activities. They're putting ads in magazines, they're going to conferences, to exhibits, they're doing cold outreach. Who knows, maybe the CEO doesn't believe in digital, which is kind of hard to believe these days. But some people, they just like some other things that work for them in other companies, and the new boss saying, let's just don't put any effort, any budget into online marketing. So, so if that's the scenario, your answer and your pitch about why they need a website is like, like an online— this is their storefront, there's online storefront they need to have. Even if they're not putting money into online marketing to drive leads, you want to have a very professional website. So that would be my pitch if they said they're doing things offline. You still need the website to support your offline activities. You don't want your clients to go search on Google or search GPTs and Claude and ChatGPT, and you're not getting there as a trusted resource. So there are different ways to address their concerns, depending on what you hear and what's at stake. If they're putting all of their energy, all of their hope, their hopes in, in online marketing, and they're not getting any leads in a consistent way today, then there's a lot at stake because they're not getting leads, they're not getting business, they're not getting revenue. So understanding what's at stake is really important, and by listening Waiting for the clients, as we said in mistake number one, when they're silent, give them time to process and digest and process and come back to you with with more details. And then you, you being prepared to ask questions to uncover all these issues, and then you can start talking about solutions. So again, this I'm using. In marketing example, let's say if you're an HR, let's say you're an HR consultant and you speak with a CEO or a VP or COO or VP of operations, and they tell you employee retention or employee turnover has become a real issue for us. Again, you have to pause and think why, ask why, what has changed recently? Has it been— Has the retention rate or the turnover rate been the same for a long time, or is it a recent change? If it's a recent change, what has happened? Is it the way you're hiring the wrong person, or you're hiring people and you're not onboarding them? Maybe you're onboarding them, but you don't have trained managers, you don't have an HR department. So many— there are so many scenarios, potential areas where this issue is is, is, is, could be, could be coming from. So your job as a consultant in these discovery calls, on these, on these calls, is to understand the situation, the technical issue, the impact, what's at stake, and then also the, the, the, all, all the contributing factors and all the internal, internal details and including politics and who's calling the shot. People share a lot with you if you establish that trust and if you're sincere about solving these problems. I don't know, that sincerity, you know, you're genuine about helping, that comes across. I know you want to sell. I want you to sell. The client knows that you will be selling, so no one is avoiding that, but there's also the way you approach it is I'm an expert. I've done this before. Okay, do this for a minute and then listen and nudge and poke and politely and nicely and gently dig deeper to understand the entire situation so you can offer the right solution. So you can package the right solution. So they might tell you that one thing, one small thing that could help make or break the deal. They can tell you, we've never hired consultants before, or we've had terrible experience with consultants we've hired. We pay them a whole lot of money upfront and then they don't deliver. That point of information is invaluable. Then you can differentiate by saying, I don't ask for a lot of money upfront. I ask for a small down payment And then I want you to deliver. I will send you my invoice after my first deliverable. And you have 3, 4 milestones in your proposal. And that builds confidence because they've— what happened in the past, they told you that they've paid these consultants a lot of money upfront and the consultants did not deliver. So that's a cue. That's a very important, very important— piece of information that you can leverage to present how you, uh, you to present your proposal and your approach to work, to working with this client. Okay. And to help you assess and grade yourself with the evaluation worksheet, let me go there again and go to mistake number 2. You should be seeing this on the screen now. Yep. Right here. Give me one sec. Yep. All right, so this is about solving too early. So here, asked, did I fully understand the business problem before discussing my solution? Score yes, give it a point. Zero, no, zero. And then it's maybe, give yourself half a point. Did I ask what they've already tried? Did I learn why previous attempts did not work? Did I understand what happens if nothing changes? And did I delay presenting my solution until I understand all 3 layers? Remember the 3 layers I mentioned earlier, like what happened, and then of course what they tried— they've already tried— and why didn't it work, and then what's at stake. So equipped With all this information, you will be in a better position to offer a solution. Now you offer the solution and your point of contact, your main point of contact, they nod and say, let's do this. Now you think you've closed the deal. And that brings me to mistake number 3, hidden stakeholders. Unfortunately, In most cases, especially in medium-sized and larger businesses, there are many people involved in this decision-making process to buy from a consultant, and the larger the engagement, if you're selling something for $500, it's one thing. If you're selling something for $5,000, there's a bit more involved. If you're selling something for $25,000, a whole lot is involved, and this is just very typical, especially in a B2B scenario. So mistake number 3, and remember, for those of you who are joining now, we've covered 2 mistakes. Um, one is over-talking the buyer. 2 is solving too soon or too early, and now hidden stakeholders. The idea here is I'm going through real sales call scenarios and then assessing and identifying the areas where Consultants, especially new consultants, those who are new to sales, that the mistakes they make and then how to fix those mistakes. So into, uh, let's go into hidden stakeholders. So in B2B, and you go on HubSpot, you go on other research resources, from my own experience, you could have anywhere from 5 to 15+ stakeholders involved in saying yes on a proposal. If you're selling to small businesses, a small business owner, and you're speaking with the business owner themselves, typically they have a huge influence on saying yes or no. They might check with their right-hand person. If some family member is in the business, they might check with someone else. Typically, people want to validate, they want to confirm that they're making the right decision before they make it. Again, the larger the deal, the more, I think, the more it touches the business, like in terms of if it's something that is discretionary, that's one thing, if it's something that's really important to the core of the business, if it touches their clients or their people, you know, it could impact their revenue, people get a bit, they hesitate, they want to confirm before they make that decision and they go and ask other people, so that is in a small business, if you're selling to small businesses. Now, once you start selling to medium-sized businesses and also to the enterprise, there are always other stakeholders who are not on the call, who are not in the meeting. So if your main point of contact, the person with whom you've had multiple meetings, you've established rapport, they trust you, you trust them, they like you, when they say, I love everything that we've discussed, I think we are ready to move forward, and you send the proposal, and then a week later, 2 weeks later, 3 weeks later, Nothing happens. Now what's happening is you have finance; they have to view this from a budgetary perspective and make sure there are favorable terms for them. Then you have the lawyers; legal wants to make few changes to the contract, and then you have the executives. Of course, they want to understand. the impact on the business. Why are we spending $10,000 on this audit? Do we need it? Or there could be a freeze across the entire organization, say pause all new spending. It happens totally, totally out of your control, or it could be IT, like who's this vendor? We're not going to put this software on our website, or we're not going to give this person access to our employee data, or we're not going to give this financial analysts access to our numbers. There's so many departments and people within this department, these departments, that want to have a say for, for a legitimate reason. Again, there could be some additional layers of, of politics and internal, you know, backstabbing. Hopefully you don't run into a lot of these things, but there are organizations that are not very healthy. They have toxic environments, and a lot of people in that environment, or some people, don't like your main point of contact and any vendor this person is bringing to the organization, these people will say, no, we don't like this vendor, we can do it in-house. Yeah, you have all these things happening in the background that you are not maybe aware of or you're not involved in. So when your lead, your main point of contact say, It looks like a go. That's that's that's positive. That's good news, but you haven't closed the deal yet. So you want to ask. This is the the issue is is most most new consultants they don't ask. They they hear these good good words, these compliments. They feel good and they move on. And then then it becomes a follow up, and then they get tired of following up, and then they stop emailing and contacting, and then. Another vendor comes in and they win the deal, right? So I don't want you to be in that situation. Be aware that when you're selling to small, small businesses, the sales cycle could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks to 8 weeks, plus or minus. And then when you're selling to medium-sized businesses and the enterprise large businesses, the sales cycle could be anywhere from 3 months to 9 months. And I've seen it. go way beyond. If you're selling to the government or if you're selling to really big, big enterprises, they might be budgeting, they might be asking for a quote now to budget for next year. So there is a long cycle, long sales cycle, be aware of that. And then if you've done your job in the previous 2 mistakes that we mentioned, we asked all these questions, about what concerns the lead has, how decisions are made internally, and people will share this with you if you've established that rapport with your main point of contact. They will share this with you, and you can tell them, you can ask it this way, like, in similar situations, I know finance and legal, they're typically involved. So in your company, how does that process work? How do contracts like the one I'm about to send to you, How do they get reviewed internally? And then I want you to be proactive and provide them with what I call this, not a winning pack, is this like show them a one-pager or include that in a proposal part of the introduction, the information that these internal that your main point of contact, they can take and then share internally. You can do it, I've seen it done where you include that in the proposal, if the proposal is going to be circulated around, people can see it or you write it actually as if your champion, your main point of contact who's now advocating for you, you enable them to sell on your behalf, so you can have a one-pager, it could be an email. Again, you want to keep it brief, but it addresses not the technical issue that you're solving, but it addresses the concerns of these common stakeholders. So finance, they want to understand about the ROI, they want to understand the budget, they want to understand the impact if this is not addressed, right? Operations, they want to understand what systems in IT will what systems you need access to, the resources you need from them, when are you implementing, what's your QA process, and then of course legal, they want to assess risk, all risks that are involved, what are the terms, if they work in an industry like let's say healthcare, and they have some security compliance requirements, you might hear that from their procurement team, you might have to have certain level, certain levels of insurance coverage. So all of that you can, you can proactively prepare. And once you do it, once you do it for one client, you have that more or less ready for every other client. You also want to refine it and personalize it for that client. But by asking your champion, your main point of contact who's now impressed by you and by your services, you want to ask them who, how decisions are made in their environment, and then provide them with this, let's call it the champion enablement pack, that they can then run internally as if they're speaking, or if they advise you to include it in the proposal, I would include it really early on, so this way all these stakeholders that are involved in this decision-making, in the decision-making process, they have their, they have their questions answered without you being there or being part of those internal. So that is, that's the thing in, in selling, especially in large, uh, the larger, the more complex the solution is, the, the higher the, the amount of, the higher the price is, the more of this due diligence will be required. So be prepared for that. It's a lot of work initially, but once you do a few of those, you'll have all that information ready and you can quickly package it and then send it with the next— with the next— for the next client. All right, so one more mistake, mistake number 4, before we move on. And this is very, very common. And it is actually, before we go to sales mistake number 4, let me walk you through the worksheet again for mistake number 3. I forgot to do that. Here we go. So mistake number 3, these are the questions I want you to answer based on your last call and score yourself again. 1 for a yes, 0 for no, and 0.5, half a point for a maybe. Did I ask who else will be involved in the decision? Did I understand each stakeholder's role? Because the client might say, hey, John, I'll have to run this by John. Okay, great. Who is John? What's his role? What is John looking for, right? Did I identify who has final approval? Any chance I can meet with them so I can impress them, right? Did I equip my champion, my main point of contact, with information they can share internally? And did I anticipate objections from people? who weren't on the call and I gave you the examples, right? These are the common things, finance, leadership, finance, legal, procurement, IT, and operations. So score here, put your score right here. Hopefully over time, this will be 5 out of 5 and you'll be winning more deals, but this is the process. These are the reps you have to do to improve your sales muscles. Sales, there's a lot of science to sales. sales. There's a lot of art to sales. Art requires reps and practice, and you can master it over time, but you can still, even if you're not a master at sales yet, no one becomes a master at anything overnight, right? You need the 10,000 reps, as Malcolm Gladwell said, right? So same thing in martial arts. You can't get your black belt in a month, even if you train 10 hours a day. Still, you have to do— you have— you need time. You need the reps. You need the time to practice. Also, you need the time to learn and read and understand and watch others. So, so that elapsed time is important, and the reps— doing these reps will help you. So don't— so take these templates. Don't take yourself too seriously, but take these, um, the business seriously. Take these— this process seriously and do it after every call before you forget. And score yourself so that you can improve within a month, within a quarter. You can see your score going from 10 out of 20 to 18, 19, 20 out of 20. And then all of these, once you do, once you do so many sales calls and, and you do the proper preparation ahead of these sales calls, all of this will become second nature and you'll be able to think on your feet and react very quickly and, and get To that final point of addressing all the client's concerns for them to sign with you again, barring any external external information that no one has control over. Okay, so that is on mistake number three, and then the last mistake, and we'll wrap up this session with is on weak next steps. So so let's say we practice what we've preached. So We did not talk over the client. When they were quiet, we gave them space to think and we asked them the right questions. We did not start solutioning too early. We understood the real pain points. We understood their situation and then we offered a solution. They liked it and we understood that there are other stakeholders involved and we provided our champion pack, our champion support pack. to help them address the concerns of these other stakeholders, and now we're about to wrap up the sales call or the sales meeting. So what do we do? So you as a consultant, you say, it's been a great meeting and I'll send a proposal next week. And then the buyer would say, excellent, sounds good, have a great day. And the meeting ends. Now 5 days pass, 10 days pass, nothing. Another week passes, still nothing. So something went wrong there. So for those of you who are watching now live, or for those of you who are listening or watching later, think about it. It was a great meeting. You offered a solution, they liked it, and they say, they say, we want to proceed and we've addressed the concerns of all the stakeholders. The issue here is that from this point on, you did not leave the buyer— and actually better, you and the buyer did not agree on a plan of what happens next. You sort of left things open-ended. And I did this. It took me, I don't know, maybe 2 years to learn this one. So because everything is going well. Right on these calls where the client is excited, is excited to work with you. But we did not put a plan on what happens next. Was it? Is the client going to need two weeks to review, a month to review? Is it going to be they need you to come and meet the CEO? Like, what are the next steps now that we understand what we're delivering and we agreed on timelines and budgets, right? So it's really important to not just leave it to hope that they will sign the contract, but we want to keep that momentum going and we want to have a plan on what happens next. So instead of saying, I'll send something over, And we will reconnect soon. Let's say, let's spend the next couple minutes before we wrap it up and say goodbye agreeing on the next 3 steps. Okay? So a version of this will definitely help you, help your stress level go down because you know what to do after you've sent the proposal, after we ended this call. So you can say, for example, You can say, sorry, you can say, okay, I'll send you the proposal within 2 business days. Okay, then should I expect to hear from you within a week? Is that reasonable about any feedback you have or comments you have about the proposal? Okay, then when will you have your internal review? When should I send you any supporting material that someone will need, right? So you go through, depending again on the deal, depending on the client, depending on what has been discussed throughout and what you've learned about the client in those conversations, you come up with this follow-up plan. And when you have that plan and you're doing the follow-up, Then the follow-up is not a chore. The follow-up is not, oh my God, I have to follow up with this person and, and I'm going to— I think I'm going to annoy them and, and they're not going to like me and they're not going to go with me. No, it changes the whole dynamics. You're doing the same steps, but instead of doing it without agreeing to it and then doing those steps while you have it as part of a plan, makes a huge difference for you and for the client because it does psychologically, your main point of contact, your champion has agreed on this plan, so it's hard for them, they're not going to be annoyed by you executing on that plan. So again, identify what will happen next and obviously with sales, follow-up is part of the game. People get busy, people get sick, people change roles, things happen, So don't feel like you're annoying the person. Of course, don't call them every day, don't text them at 8 PM at night, don't send them 3 emails a day. But again, depending on a number of factors, but every week or so you can send a follow-up email based on the plan that you agreed to. And even if the, the plan— now we've agreed on 5 steps, and if you've done all those 5 steps and you still haven't closed the deal, you can still follow up. But my recommendation is to Always, always, always add value in your follow-up. So it could be you've seen the competition do something, you share that with them. You've seen an issue on their website, tell them fix that. You have some report or some blog post that you've published, share that with them. Always add some value and continue to educate the client as you're doing these follow-ups. So, um, this was, this was the, the 4th mistake. Let me go To the checklist, the evaluation checklist, and show you right here. Mistake number 4, weak next steps. So again, give yourself a point if you say yes, 0 if no, and then half a point if it's maybe. Did we agree on the next specific action before ending the call? Did we assign ownership for each of these next steps? Did we agree on target dates? Did we identify who else needs to be involved? Did I schedule my follow-up? before ending the meeting. So again, I'll leave a link to this worksheet in the description for those of you who are watching later. And I do have— let me put the link here on the screen. Give me one sec. I believe I have it. Yeah, it's right here. So it is bbsu.net/salescall-eval. E-V-A-L. Eval. So, uh, so you can make your own copy. Click on this link. pbsu.net/sales-call-eval. So get a copy of that and then use it for each one of your sales calls. My recommendation is that you do it right after the sales call. If you're busy, you have another meeting, you have another event to go to, then do it the day, the same day before you forget, before you lose track of what else is happening. And then, and then if you scored Low, that's okay. That's where you start. Even if you score 0 on all of these sections, 0 out of 20, that's where you are today. Don't let that frustrate you. You're learning. You're in entrepreneurship. It's all about building muscles, marketing muscles, sales muscles, operations, delivery muscles, you name it, right? So start somewhere, build on it, and then on the next call, maybe you'll score 5 out of 20, and if you do the preparation and you know the questions to ask, it's going to be scripted in a way initially, but over time you start just, it becomes part of this art type aspect of sales, so don't hesitate or don't let it bother you a lot if you're scoring low initially, That's just part of learning. The idea is to be improving, to be learning from our mistakes and learning and moving on to better, to having better discovery calls, better discovery meetings, and then improving our close rates. So with that, if you are struggling with getting leads, nothing I said today will help. So you want to spend time getting leads, you want to spend time going to networking events, you want to spend time doing some outreach to your warm network. But if you're getting leads and you're not closing these leads, then you're getting on these calls and they're not going well, then follow what I mentioned earlier. Now I do want to share with you a few, few videos from the channel that will help you with this issue of closing deals. So for example, if you are not sure how— if you're— there are a couple of things I want to mention here. One, if you are looking for a business idea, check out this video on 26 Profitable Business Ideas for 2026. If you are losing deals at the proposal stage, check out this, an hour this hour and 4-minute video on proposals, everything you need to know about proposals with templates, including an AI assistant, actually 2 AI assistants you can use to help you generate proposals faster. If you have, if you, I'm going back, if you're struggling with vetting your idea, you haven't started a business yet, you're about to and you're learning, you're watching this video and other videos and you're learning about entrepreneurship and sales and delivery, Then check out this video on the 10-point system I have to launch with certainty, to vet your ideas. So, and if you are not sure how to start a consulting business, you're really early stage or you started and you're struggling, then check out this video that has been really, really well received by the community, the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business in 2026. So check it out here. Let me know where you're struggling. Let me know the issues you're running into. Leave me a comment on the YouTube channel and I will be more than happy to answer. That is it for today and we will see you next time. Thank you.