Land Enterprise Deals Using Great Openers with Christian Banach

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute. And deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And we're gonna talk about closing big deals, but not the way people tend to think about it. Cause everyone loves to hunt whales, right? They say go whale hunting, land the big deals, go get those six figure, seven figure deals, but no one talks about, well, how do you get your foot in the door in the first place? Because if you can't open the deal, you can't close the deal. And the tactics that work in SMB or mid market or smaller deals are different when you're going after the big boys. And that is why I'm so excited to have Christian Banach on the show with me today to talk about how do you get your foot in the door in these enterprise deals, how do you start that relationship off and then how can we guide it along to bring those deals across the line? So Christian, my man, welcome to the show.

Hey Katie, happy to be here. Thank you.

I'm pumped for this one. Right when anytime someone's like, let me talk about prospecting. I get super fired up because this is where it all begins. In fact, somewhere in my background here, I have a decanter from my last team that had Poe on it. Right. This was our phrase. We talked Poe every day. And I was pipeline over everything because if you can't open it, you can't close it. So let's talk about prospecting specifically to these larger deals. And I think it's important to start from a place of just what's different. Like, what's different when you're going after the big companies, the big deals, compared to going after the smaller deals.

Yeah, yeah. Well, great. Yeah. A topic near and dear to my heart here. But yeah, I would say, you know, one of the biggest things that kind of jumps out right away is when you're talking with the larger organizations. There could be a number of different buyers or influencers that you need to. That could potentially reach out to. When you're talking small businesses, it's very easy to find, you know, the, the owner or, you know, the head VP and reach out to them and you know that they're responsible for whatever it happens to be that you're selling. When we're talking some of these larger organizations, they're very easily. You could, you know, go on LinkedIn or Zoom info and you might find 10, 20 in some of the pharma companies, hundreds of prospects with marketing titles that at first glance look like they could definitely be the, the right person for whatever you happen to be. Be pitching. So there is, there's a larger, a larger involvement in your list building process into doing the research into finding out who are the right decision makers, and you're likely still going to cast a little bit of a wider net. You know, we're oftentimes reaching out to maybe, you know, 10 to 15 prospects at an individual company because they all seem like they could be the right fit. So I think that's one of the things that I think takes people back when you know, the number of prospects and that whole process is a little bit different. Mm.

And I love the call out to casting a wider net, but I would love your thoughts on should you be using the same bait? Because oftentimes when I see they're going after enterprise and they're like, I gotta cast a wide net, but they're, they're using the same bait for everybody versus tailoring the bait a little bit. So what are your thoughts there? Should you just be casting a wide generic net or should you be like wide Net. But I'm using a different bait based off the Persona or based off the person I'm targeting.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you definitely want to look at different Personas and you. There's a couple ways to look at it right there. There could be. We do a lot within marketing, but what the CMO is looking for might be very different than what a manager level is looking for. Manager level might be looking more tactical type of thing. So your message might need to be tailored a little bit more to some of the tactics that you know that and the features that your product or service happens to be able to do versus the C suite is looking more bigger picture strategy. So how are you going to move some of those bigger KPIs for them? So you might want to have some different Personas there. But even within that, again we're talking marketing, sometimes we'll reach out to a cfo. Again, what they're looking for is going to be different than what say the marketing department might be looking for. So yeah, your base message is probably very similar, but you're going to want to change around some of the KPIs and, and maybe some of the features and benefits to make it more relevant to that individual Persona.

I like that call out because it, you know, it's always interesting to me. It's like these are potential seven figure deals. Are you treating it like a seven figure deal? Right. And I feel like oftentimes it's not the case is they're treating it like everything else versus like this could, this could make me $100,000 this one deal. But, but we're still just blasting out templates. So we're still blasting things out there. So let's go a layer deeper on the Personas because what are the things you need to know about the Personas? So your messaging does hit. You were kind of touching on it a little bit there. But oftentimes in sales and SaaS, like we hear these Personas, you have Enterprise Eddie and Mid Market Mary. Right. There's these high level fluffy Personas. Like what should I know about my Persona? So my messaging does land.

Yeah, yeah. I mean one of the biggest filters that we, that we try to do when we're building out our Personas is understanding what are the KPIs that that individual Persona is being held to for their job. So the cmo, you know, or chief executive officer, you know, it might be market share, it might be driving top line revenue, but when you're talking more maybe manager, you know, level their KPIs will be a little bit different, you know, maybe a little bit more specific. So that's one of the biggest things that we want to do is, you know, how is their performance, you know, going to be judged by their boss. And then that's what we want to lean into because that's what they're going to want to actually improve and want to have help with.

Love it. And then how do you connect those dots to messaging? Right. So if we're talking about crafting and there's obviously there's multiple channels here, which is where we'll go next. You have, you know, email, call, social, you know, events, however you go through it, how do you then connect the dots to that messaging? Right. I find out that the CEO is like market share. How do I craft a good message around that when I'm prospecting?

Yeah. Well, I think part of it is even just taking a step back before you even get into the writing the messages, really understanding first and foremost what is the problem that you're solving for this particular prospect in this company. And you need to be really clear on that because if you're just gonna go and send the message out that we're ABC company and we do X, Y and Z and it's not going to resonate, these enterprise companies get, you know, the volume of emails and outreach that they get is astronomically more than what you're going to see in the small business world. So you have to keep that in mind. Their inboxes are much more noisy, so you have to be very short and concise in your message, but at the same time drill down into, you know, you have a problem and we have a solution and we have an idea about how to solve that problem. So, so that's one of the first steps that, that we actually start with before we can get into the message, understanding what the problem is that we solve. And, and then when you know the problem, you can start to think, okay, particularly for this prospect, what. How do we help make their jobs and their lives easier? And then that's when you start connecting some of those KPIs back to your solution. And that problem.

I love it. I knew we were going to vibe on this when I saw like one. I love acronyms. So we're going to get into your propel framework here in a second. But when the first letter of propel is pivotal problem, I was like, this guy gets it. Because that is the key is like, if you don't understand the problems of your prospects and Personas, your messaging is never going to land. And so I really, really like that point there. And how do you find that out though? Let's keep going tactical. How do you know the main problems of your Personas? I feel like we've lost sight of this in sales over the last really like seven to ten years. Where, when, when I think when you were coming up in the game, I was coming up in the game like you, you got a binder about the industry, about like the prospect, the. All that. And now we just get product training. Like how do you find out some of these key problems that the Personas deal with? Because most sales reps are not the Persona they're selling to.

Right.

I'm a sales rep selling to a cfo. I'm not a cfo. I'm a sales rep selling to a VP of engineering. I'm not a VP of engineering. How do you kind of find those problems out?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to look at it. Again, when we are looking at enterprise, you're probably not a startup, so you probably have some experience already working with these types of companies. So I think that's probably the first place that I would turn is internally to our team and start talking about their experience within a certain industry or to a Persona and really start to look more internal. Now, even with us, we work with some very big advertising agencies. However, a lot of times they have gotten, they've grown through more word of mouth and referrals. So they haven't really had to go out there and position themselves as solving specific problems. They just get this lead, they respond and they win the business, hopefully. So if you don't have that kind of internal and even if you do, what we like to do is you go out and you have to do research. There are a lot of third party reports, gardeners and foresters and even some of the big consulting companies, the McKinsey's of the world are putting out reports about what's happening in the industry or what's affecting certain trends that are happening. And really educating yourself on the marketplace we call doing a market analysis. So that's another place to go. Competitors is another good one. Look at your competitors. What type of thought leadership are they putting out about different topics? So that's another place to go. LinkedIn, another good one. Look at the Personas of the people you're targeting and what are they talking about on social media, what are they posting about, what does their profile say? So it's, you know, I wouldn't say there's one magic bullet on where to go. But it's, it's a combination of a lot of different things. So you can really start to get a picture of what's happening in this particular industry.

Love it. No, I. The, the art of researching the Personas and prospects is just, it's just not there. And that's where I think a lot of messaging doesn't land. So now keep going down this path. One of the other letters in your framework is Offer insights, right? The O is offer insights. Talk a little bit more about that. Because if you think about a lot of the messaging, I'm sure you see and what I see, there's no insights. It's about the product, right? It's like, here's what we do. We work with Facebook and Google. There's no insights, there's no education there. So talk to me about that a little bit more because I think that's a really important thing to call out, especially going after enterprise because they are getting hit all day long with this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I think this is really something that I think is also a differentiator from small business to midsize business. But if you can bring this same mentality, even if you're in the small or midsize business, I think you're going to really stand out from the competitors. But you know, as you mentioned, you know, we really try to stay away from any sort of messaging that's like, hey, we just want to get on your calendar for 15 minutes, tell you all about us and you know what we can do for you. There's nothing in it for the prospect, there's no value in it for them. So what we advise is to really do an assessment internally on we talked about the problem, so we know we're going to be problem based. But what is your unique point of view? What is your perspective? Have you done, has your company done proprietary research? Do you have some sort of proprietary process or tools or something unique and different that solves the problem? And the difference here now is so when you send out your messaging, whether this is phone or email or LinkedIn, whatever channel, it doesn't matter. It's a different ask. Instead of saying that, hey, we'd like to get on your calendar 15 minutes, tell you who we are, say, hey, we've been looking at your business. We think you might be experiencing this problem. We've got a really interesting perspective on how to solve that problem. We'd love to set up maybe an hour type workshop with you where we can walk you through some of those insights and just use this as a way to get to know each other. And again, I think that's also a good segue is, you know, we're not trying to close anybody on the first, you know, email or meeting. This is to try to build a relationship and we're using these insights as a way to get our foot in the door.

And I love even just, I'm a, I'm a language hound. I love the subtle nuances between different words and I want everyone listening to go back and listen to what he said. He said workshop, didn't say demo, said workshop. Right.

That's a.

That in itself already stands out differently because everyone's asking for the demo, everyone's asking for the meeting. Whereas a workshop implies I'm gonna get something out of this, like I'm actually gonna leave with something that I can use and leverage in my business. So I love that little language change there because everyone's like, can I get 15 minutes of your time, please? Have a 30 minute meeting. No one wants a 30 minute meeting. But a workshop on how I might be able to solve something. Now you got my attention a little bit. So does that kind of fall into your engaging messaging part of the framework? So you have the insights and then you're tying it in, like to be engaging in the content?

Yeah. It is a little bit more about the workshop approach as well. Again, now there's some value in it and what we're seeing here is the dynamic of those calls are different. When you're doing a 15 minute or 30 minute demo, like what the prospect's expecting to get pitched and they're going to sit back and just know, listen. Right. But if it's a workshop, it's more collaborative. Right. So now what you're also doing is you're bringing together what we're finding is the prospects. Usually you might meet one on one, but we're finding in a workshop setting they're inviting their team. So we're often getting emails. Well, do you mind if I invite my marketing team?

Sure.

Great. So now we have, you know, four, five, six. We've had up to 20 people on some of these introductory first calls that we've had. Because it's a workshop, they're going to learn something. They want their team involved, you know, in the whole process. So. So that's great. It's also changes the dynamic. Right. You're now providing value. You're an expert on a topic, you're exchanging. You're not a salesperson. That's just out there trying to pitch your product to them. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of benefits to that type of an approach. It definitely takes a little bit more work upfront for those meetings. You have to come prepared. You're not going to just show up and walk them through a demo. You have to come prepared, do some research. But when you're chasing those seven figure deals, it's worth, worth that type of effort and that it blends in then to the engaging messaging, you know, portion that we talked that you mentioned. You know, when you're, and I talked about this a little bit earlier, but when you're reaching out, these executives are busy and I think this is kind of true of everybody. But you have to be short and concise in what you say. You know, we're trying to write emails in, you know, 100 words or less, which is difficult to, you know, demonstrate what this workshop is going to be about and what the value is in it for them and at the same time be personal. When we're doing enterprise, every email that goes out is personalized to at minimum the company. And if we can find something relevant to the prospect, then we're going to write something relevant to the prospect. But if it just looks like a mass email that went out to all these different companies, it's an instant delete. And you may not even get past the spam filters because a lot of these large organizations have, you know, more advanced type of spam and email systems where it's even more difficult to inbox than you would on a small or mid sized business.

And I love that because I want to touch on the difference in customization and personalization.

Right.

It's like customization is the, you know, hey Christian. Hey kd. Right. It's autofill. Personalization means only that person could read it and it makes sense. And so I love that of like being relevant though. So go deeper on that because some people hear a personalization think, oh hey kd, saw you went to the University of Wisconsin. Go Badgers. They're like, all right, I personalize it. I'm good. Talk about what relevancy means when it comes to personalization.

Yeah, so we definitely try to stay away from and advise to stay away from those, you know, schools you went to, you know, hobbies, things like that. You know, this is, this is a B2B type email. So we really want to make it relevant to the problem, relevant to the offer, the workshop that you're looking, that you're doing. So as part of the process, really what we're looking for here is we first will build out our list of all the prospects we're going to target. Well, let me take a step back. So we're going to write more of a campaign template. So maybe we know we're going after automotive companies. So we're going to have a general email that's relevant to the automotive industry. So that's going to be where you're talking about more on the customized side. So it's definitely written to the industry. It's talking about relevant, you know, data points and things like that for the, for the automotive industry. But then we need to take it a layer deeper. So when we're researching and we're going to reach out to, say, Tesla, you know, well, we're going to research Tesla. What's happening at Tesla right now? If we have an ability to, let's say we're an agency that's really good at TikTok, right? And that's our niche and that's our specialty. Well, we're going to, you know, do some research. What is Tesla doing on social media? Are they even on TikTok? So you want to get a sense of that, so you have a sense of what the company's doing and then you also then look at the prospect level. So again, we might have 10 prospects at Tesla where we're going to reach out to. Well, let's look at each one of them. What are they posting about on LinkedIn? What do their profiles say? We're going to Google their names, we're going to see how they have been on any podcast and we're going to try to find something that has to do with Tesla talking about social media or more in particular TikTok. And, and if, and when we do, we're gonna personalize then that opener to be related, you know. Hi, you know John Smith. I, I heard you on XYZ podcast, you were talking about, you know, Tesla's social media strategy. That's your opener. And then you can get into, you know, hey, we've got this interesting workshop about, you know, three great ways to, you know, make a, you know, penetrate TikTok to the gen Z consumer, however it happens to be. But that's the idea then is that, you know, you're researching a company understanding, you know, what they're having to do with that offer and that problem, and you're researching the individual as well.

And I love that you're putting the personalization in the opener. Touch on that a little Bit more too because I think sometimes people bury the personalization where the opener is still some generic and the personalization's in there. Talk about why that opener is so important.

Yeah, yeah, the opener is important because a couple reasons. One, well, first off, we are also personalizing the subject line. So whatever is whatever we realize or whatever we uncovered in our research is going to be personalized in the subject line because that's the first thing. You got to get the email open. Doesn't matter what your, what you say if it doesn't get open. So we want that subject line to be unmistakable, that it was written to that person or that company secondarily. Then the next part is the opener. And you know, you can see there's a little preview on your emails. We all have them. So if it looked very generic then it looks marketing or salesy, it's going to be deleted. So you want to make sure, especially those first few words that it's, it's very apparent that this was written one to one to that individual. So that's really important. That also helps get it open. Well, now you get it opened. What the first line needs to do is prove that it is really a one to one email. But then it needs to get them to read to the second line. So the first line got to get in the second line. The second line got to get in the third line. So you want to keep accomplishing those little mini goals. So if you have your personalization buried, you know, in the middle or the end, first of all, they may not even open the email and even if they do, they're going to read the first line. Oh, this is a canned email. Sales email and press delete. So you want to make sure you get that out right, right out of the gates.

No, I love. And actually it's funny, I haven't ever used this language around it, calling it the opener. I've always just said like the first sentence. But I love opener because that's what gets the email opened. Way, way simpler. I like your method a little more like it's the opener. That is what it is. And it makes you think, will this line make them open the email? Okay, so, but is one email enough, my friend? Can I just send one good email and hope for the best?

I wish, I wish it was, but it's, it's certainly not. No, you know, I think, you know, this is true. I think probably small business, mid size, but definitely an enterprise. It definitely takes a multi, touch, multichannel approach. You know, we like to do shorter maybe two week, you know, 10 to 10 days to 14 days, sprints we call them and where you're going to get maybe four emails in that kind of condensed time frame and there's phone calls and social touches you know, mixed in, in between. And then we usually then will put that prospect to rest if we haven't heard from them and then we'll try to re engage them in another 90 days. But yeah, it's certainly not one email, it's multiple emails. And in those follow up emails you still have to be short, you still have to be personal and you know, hopefully, you know, you're adding some value along the way as well where you're mentioning maybe because you can't get everything, you know, put into that first email. So what else can you share in a second, the third and the fourth emails that continues to help tell the story and hopefully push the prospect and incentivize them to want to reach out to you.

Yeah, and I don't know if everyone caught it, but you said it very early in the episode. Every touch should be personalized. When you're going after these large accounts, it's still shocking to me one, how often no messages are actually personalized. None. But most people only personalize the first one, just that first email and then all the rest are templates. And it's like, well, by the time they open email number three, they're just seeing your garbage template there. And so now they're just going to throw you away like everybody else. And so I love that personalization for every step. But then you just touched on something I think is so key, which is storytelling. Talk about that a little bit. How do you create a story throughout this process that is engaging?

Yeah, yeah, you know, that is, that's challenging again when you're, when you got just 100 words or so to do. But you know, you want to make sure you're, you know, you're talking about the problem and there are different elements that you might want to poke at because there might not just be one problem. Maybe there are different facets of the problem. So you know, you, maybe your first email touches upon one, the second email touches upon another. So that's another one way to look at it is kind of, you know, bringing the problem to life in some different ways. You know, you may be talking about, you're mentioning, you know, the workshop again, there could be a lot of different elements on some of the insights that you're going to share. You probably can't come right out of the gates and just say all of it. So maybe one of the emails goes a little bit deeper into what, you know, what the workshop will entail and some of the insights that you're going to have or you know, perhaps it's more case study based and some of the experience than that that you have. Because I think that's also key when you're talking enterprises, they want to know that you've done it for companies similar to them, you know, they're, you know, they're hit up again every which way. So, so how do you tell that story? You know, well, hey, these, you know, here's some workshop, here's some insights. Oh, and it's based on some work that we did for, I use Tesla earlier for, I don't know, Ford, you know, some of the work that we've done for Ford. So you want to kind of continue to add onto it and make that come to life in each one of those emails.

Yeah, it's connecting the dots to the whole process because I see that happen a lot too. Like email 1 talks about this thing, then email 2 just talks about a totally different thing over here. We're not connecting the dots. We don't keep that thread going throughout the entire process. Now where do I get some of the other channels fit into this? We've been talking a lot about email and I hope people are kind of picking up on really, we're talking about email, we're talking about messaging.

Yeah.

And the messaging kind of carries over but like then where kind of walk me through your thoughts on what channels or like is it just email? Is it email social? Like kind of. What have you seen work best for you and your companies?

Yeah. So email and phone are probably the primary two channels that we work with. We're definitely using LinkedIn from a research standpoint, but our experience interestingly for enterprise has not been as strong. Doing the kind of connection request and sending a cold DM in LinkedIn. We haven't seen great results from that. I will say for our company and we're targeting for us, our customers are mid size advertising or small advertising agencies are who our customers are. We get a lot of leads from the LinkedIn approach. But we're really phone and email are probably our two from outreach standpoint, our two main channels.

And then how do you approach that call then? Right, so we've been sending these emails. How do you approach that call? Like again like, what's the opener there of like, okay, I've been emailing you and all of a sudden you answer Right. All of a sudden, wait, he actually answers now what?

Yeah, great point. So what we, you know, we've done all this great research to personalize the email. Well, why are we not using it on the phone as well? So what we do is, you know, you have to kind of get past the first, you know, song and dance to just at least get them to engage in a little bit of a conversation. But very quickly in your opener, you want again, make them realize that this is not just a blind, cold call. So, you know, we're going to reference, you know, hey, we've been looking into your business, Tesla. You know, we saw this, you know, you speak on this podcast. So the same type of talk track that we're using for the email, we're trying to incorporate that into the beginning of the cold call. So. So again, so it's unmistakable that we were, that we engaged you on a one to one level. And there's a reason, you know, for reaching out. So that's, you know, that's kind of how we'd like to start. You know, these cold calls that we make. And you know, the objective then is to share enough about, you know, hey, you know, here's the personalization, the personalized opener. We talk a little bit about the problem. We make it very clear that, hey, we're not here trying to sell you anything. You know, we've got this interesting workshop that we're looking to offer you. And then we, we try to then book, you know, that book a session with them if they're not willing to jump right into, you know, a big one hour workshop, then we try to move them. Hey, how about maybe a 15 minute call? We'll just at least dive into what this workshop is all about and that we kind of make it a little bit of a bigger ask and then we'll pull back and ask for something maybe a little bit, a little bit, you know, smaller of a commitment on their behalf.

I love that. Well, what I taught my teams often was twofold. One, what's the big no to little? Yes. What's the big no? Like something that maybe it is too big, but you ask for it because it sets up that smaller. Yes, but we also very, very often we talk about what's the next best thing and being prepared to make that ask. Okay, we asked for the workshop. They say no, what's the next best thing? How about a 15 minute, just like overview of what it could be? They say, no, what's the next best thing? Well, if I sent you a video of Just some of the main highlights. Would you at least give it a watch? It'll be 90 seconds by that point. They're probably gonna give you a yes. And it's like, all right, fine, yes, I'll watch the video. All right, next best thing as we go through this process and so as we start to kind of get towards the end here, as we start to wrap, like really, it's almost like what else? We've talked about messaging, we've talked about the channel, we've talked about offering insights. We just started to touch on the call. Like, what are some other strategies or tactics you've seen work well for you and your clients to land more of these larger meetings?

Yeah, a couple other things that I'll throw out there. You know, oftentimes where people are surprised at the limited number, I guess of companies that we're reaching out to. And, and I think when you're doing smaller mid sized businesses, from my experience the list have actually been a little bit larger than what we do. But when you're doing more enterprise level deals, there's not an endless supply of companies, you know, we may be reaching out to. Again, automotive. Think about how many automotive companies there really are. You know, I don't know, 20, potentially brands that you could reach out to. So you can't just blast out, you know, these lists. So, so I think, you know, taking a more quality over quantity based approach is the mentality that you need to have when you're doing more of these enterprise type of deals because, and again it's worth it because one deal can, can, can make your entire year in some of these cases. So I think that's, you know, really important to think about. I think also trying to be aware of this is a little bit down the road. But nurturing these prospects is also a big key because again you're looking at enterprise deals, the sales cycles are much longer. You know, there could be 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Sometimes you meet with somebody before they're ready to sign on the dotted line for something. So there's a whole process on how do you then stay top of mind with these prospects. You have a great meeting, you go through the workshop and everybody loves each other. But the bottom line is budgets are set for the year, they have another vendor that they're currently working with. So like you need. But, but doesn't mean there's not an opportunity and it's worth staying top of mind when you're going to have multiple million dollar deal with them. So how do you stay Top of mind with them. And there's a whole, you know, strategy that we can talk about, you know, briefly about how to actually go ahead and do that.

Yeah, let's, let's, let's. That'll be a great place to kind of rewrap on this topic because I do think it's important because also, as you're talking through, it kills me when people use like budget as an early qualifier. Because like this is a large deal. Someone's willing to talk and one of the first questions, you know, rep or a sales dev rep will ask like, so like, do you have budget allocated for this? They'll say, well, no. They go, oh, then probably not the best time to talk. It's like, no, no, no. That's exactly when you need to be talking. Like you need to get into that process early versus waiting till those negotiations start to happen. But let's talk nurturing. So either I didn't hear back or to your point, hey, we love the idea. Budgets are pretty set for, for the quarter right now, for the year. Talk to us in six months. How do I stay in touch besides just checking in for six months?

I hate the just checking in. Right. So I think about it in two different buckets. I think ideally you have a marketing bucket. So there's something from a marketing standpoint, maybe there is a, a newsletter that your company puts out. Maybe there's social ads, something that you're kind of putting out there that you can kind of stay top of mind. Maybe you have that, maybe you don't. But from what you can actually control as a seller is your communications with them. So what I like to do then is you have your list of these prospects then that you've met with and you've had a conversation with them. You got to know them a little bit better, you know a little bit more about their business. It's really staying in touch then with what is happening in the marketplace so you have a reason to reach out. So for example, you know, maybe again just to kind of use that Tesla and the social media thing that we've been talking about here, maybe, you know, you see some report that comes out by Gartner about social media. That's a great way to reach out to the prospect. Hey Tom. You know, I was, you know, thinking about you. I saw this report, thought it would be interesting and pass along your way. There's no ask, there's no let's meet, there's no anything, you know, like that. It's just trying to put something ideally in their inbox maybe every 30 days. That adds value back to them. And it could be third party things like I mentioned, maybe you've come out with a new case study or a new report or something like that. But the idea here is on a monthly basis, you're putting something in their inbox just to kind of stay top of mind. That's one connecting with them on social media, on LinkedIn. I know LinkedIn hasn't been great for us enterprise wise to start conversations, but it's really good to nurture and keep top of mind. So are you posting content? So they're seeing your name pop up in their feed. That's important. If they're posting content, you better be liking commenting and adding value back to their community as well. So if you have Sales Navigator, you can set up alerts so every time they post, you get notified. So it's just trying to stay engaged with them on a minimum of a once a month basis. So then when the timing is right, you're the people that they think about. You don't want to have a great meeting and then six months later, when the need actually arises, they've all forgotten about you.

So yes, and also y', all, if someone says follow up in six months, don't wait six months to follow up. Right? Like that was heavily implied with what he was just walking through. But people do that. Oh, sorry. We have a contract till the end of the year and the rep will reach out at the end of the year and be shocked to find out that they renewed that contract. I was like, no, you needed to stay in touch ahead of time. And so no, man, I'm loving this. And what I really appreciate is the level of attention to detail you're giving these large accounts counts. It still just, just blows my mind how often times people just treat them templated multi touch and then move on without really taking in the idea of like, this is a million dollar opportunity. To treat it like it's a million dollar opportunity. And so as we wrap here, man, right, the name of the podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Because I actually had this really weird idea, right, that like, if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, more joy, more fulfillment, more happiness in life, that the sales would also improve. So as we wrap here, what would your live better advice be for people?

Yeah, I'm going to answer that because I don't think there's one exact answer, but I think of mind, body and spirit, right? So when I think on the mind side, it's Definitely staying intellectually curious. And I love reading, I love podcasts, I love audiobooks. But constantly feeding that brain with, you know, positive information that really enhances your life. So I think that's the mind part, body part, I think, is getting out there and being active. Whether that's the gym, whether that's running, whether that's walking, playing sports, I think that's also important. And then, you know, spirit side, I'm real big into meditation. I think it's really helped me with focus, with creativity, with clarity. And I think that three combo, I don't know if I would be as far along in my journey if I just went after 1, but I think it's the combination of all three, which is really, you know, 1 plus 1 plus 1 instead of equal 3 is equaling 10 for me.

I love that because it is. It's the combination. Each one amplifies the next. And I love that. Like, also big believer in meditation. In fact, I went to my HR team just two years ago. I was like, can I make meditation mandatory? Like, can I make it mandatory? Can I block 20 minutes of my sales team's day every day for meditation and, like, dictate it? And they're like, no, you can't do that. And I was like, why not? Like, if I can make cold calling mandatory something that just absolutely destroys your soul, why can't I also make meditation and mindset mandatory? So I'm gonna keep fighting that battle. Well, we'll get there eventually. But, my man, this was. This was great. Where can people find more of what you're putting out? Where can they find more information about what you do and what you do for companies? Like, where can they get more of the.

The.

Just the insight that you have?

Yeah, great. I would say the best spot is our website. So it's. It's my name. Christianpadoc.com if you want to go dive deeper into any of this, we do have a free masterclass. I walk you through our process. We also put out a newsletter, to your point, about mindset. You know, part of the newsletter is a motivational type story to kind of start your week off, along with some, you know, new business tips as well. And you can register for that on the website as well. I can be found on LinkedIn. Christian Binoch also. But yeah, anyway, reach out. I'm happy to connect and talk turkey with anyone.

Hell, yeah.

My man.

Well, I appreciate it. This is the good stuff here, and it's the things that I hope people actually go and do. They don't just hear this and go, that's a great idea. We actually go put it in to effect because it'll actually drive the change. So I appreciate you, man. This was great. Thank you for your energy and your insights today, man. It was really good.

Thanks, Gaty. Appreciate it. Ra.