Rachel Mae explains how top salespeople shape a prospect's decision-making criteria rather than just asking about it. She outlines a three-step framework: pre-call discovery of specific business problems, identifying symptoms like missed meetings or quota shortfalls, and diagnosing root causes like poor prospecting email quality. The goal is guiding prospects toward criteria that truly impact their outcomes.
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So the way that you're going to do all 3 of these things is you're going to focus on an area of the sales process or the decision-making process that I would bet you like a million bazillion dollars, because I clearly have a million bazillion dollars, that you are barely paying attention to today. But paying attention to this and focusing on it all throughout your sales cycle is going to change the game for you and help you to really become an influencer instead of a salesperson. And that is decision criteria, the client's decision criteria. So I'm sure that you have heard That you should be asking for decision criteria. What's your decision criteria? What will you be making the decision on? That's great. Salespeople do that. Like, good salespeople at least do that. But influencers do not ask what the decision-making criteria is. Influencers shape The decision criteria. They influence the decision criteria, and they do it for the benefit of the client, not for the benefit of themselves. So their job is to make sure— if you're influencer, your job is to make sure that the client, that the prospect is basing this decision. On the things that are going to most impact their outcome in a way that really is going to make a difference for their business, whether they ever do business with you or not. So it's not about shaping the criteria to be some sort of like crafty— oh, I'm not— yeah, because if you shape the criteria, it's going to be in your favor. Um, it probably will be in your favor if you're the right choice for the people who have the problems that you have. But that's not the goal. The goal is to help them base their decision criteria on the right things. So you're going to do that in 3 separate steps. I like to do everything in 3s, keeps things nice and clean. So to shape that criteria, here's 3 steps. First is in discovery. Now, for those of you who have spent any amount of time with me, you're like, oh, Rachel's talking about discovery again. I'm I'm looking at you, Andrew Rosenblum. I talk about discovery a lot. It's the gap seller in me. I can't help it. But your ability to shape criteria and discovery actually starts before you ever get on a call with a prospect. So it starts with you, number one, before you ever speak to a prospect, knowing what business problems you're looking for. And I know this sounds really basic, but when I coach salespeople and when they're asking questions in discovery, the biggest thing that I see is they don't know what business problems they're looking for. They might know what, like, process problems they're looking for. So say I, say I sell something like Lavender, something that helps people write better prospecting, more effective prospecting emails. I might know to ask questions around, you know, how are you— how is your team writing your emails today? How are you assessing whether those emails are good? What are your response rates? How many meetings are you getting from your email prospecting today? Right? So I might know to look for those problems, but those aren't business problems, and people don't buy on process technical problems. They buy on a business problem. So if I'm, again, I'm that lavender rep, do I know what business problems I'm looking for? Well, I should be looking for, I need to raise my Series C funding in the next 6 months. And if we don't hit our target, I'm not going to be able to raise the $50 million. And if I can't raise the $50 million, then I'm not going to be able to hire the 10 people I need, means we're not going to grow the way that we need to grow, um, and we're not going to hit, you know, our goals for, um, 2022. And if that doesn't happen, I might have to lay people off, right? Like, these are business problems. So if I'm the lavender rep, I'm trying to look for that. I'm trying to look for— I'm not gonna— we're not gonna hit our revenue numbers, we're not gonna be able to receive funding, we're not gonna be able to hire more people, we're not gonna be able to buy the sales enablement tools. And because of that, all these other bad things are going to happen on the business side. So that's a really big difference than looking for, uh, I can't— my prospecting is not getting enough meetings. Okay, so the first thing is you have to know what business problems you are looking for before you go into discovery. And the second thing is you need to know what are the symptoms That those problems exist. So we can't just go out and ask people right out the gate, right? Like, when are you raising your next round of funding, and are you on track? Like, what percentage of revenue do you need to get to get there? What's the number? Are you there yet? Right? That might be a big question to— I mean, we can ask that question, but it might be a big question to ask to start off. What are some Symptoms that those problems occur. Well, I could have not getting enough meetings, not getting enough qualified meetings. My reps aren't making quota, right? We aren't hitting our revenue target for the quarter. We're behind for our revenue target for the quarter. All those things are going to tell me those are impact things, and those things are going to tell me that that business problem. exists, right? So I'm going to look for symptoms. So I need to know what are the symptoms that that business problem exists, and then I need to know how to ask questions like a doctor to uncover the symptoms so that I can diagnose the disease, which is the business problem, at the end of my discovery. And then lastly, I need to know what is the root cause What are the root causes, I should say, of those symptoms, of those impacts? Okay, so what is that, that root cause? Now I'll give you a hint. The root cause is the thing you fix, right? So in our lavender example, um, the root cause would be like, my people write shitty emails and, and they don't know how to write a good prospecting email. And so that's why they're not getting meetings. And because they're not getting meetings, That's why they're not making quota, and that's why we're not making revenue targets. And because we're not making revenue targets, that's why we're not going to be able to raise our next round of funding, right? So the root cause is what you actually fix. You need to ask questions, be able to ask questions to uncover the symptoms so that you can diagnose that business problem. So it all starts with knowing what you're looking for before you get in discovery. And what I see reps do is they don't know what they're looking for, so they just kind of stay on the surface. They, they're staying at that business or that process technical problem because they don't know how to have the business conversation, and they're, they're just asking like surface level, or they're just shooting all over the place asking like random-ass questions because they don't really know what they're looking for. So the first thing is you have to go into discovery knowing what it is you're looking for. And if you don't know that today, or you don't know enough about that, um, a really simple thing to do is to start Googling. You know, if I'm back to my lavender example, I probably sell like a VP of sales or a CRO, right? So what— Google, what are the business challenges of a VP of sales or of a CRO? What, what are the key performance indicators that a CRO or a VP of sales is measured on? If you start to look at those things for your, like, whatever your ideal customer profile is and really study them online, because chances are your company is never actually going to teach you this stuff. If you start to do that and just get really crazy about knowing them intimately as a business, then this is going to become a lot easier for you.
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