Set Yourself Up for Success in Closing Through Discovery with Kevin "KD" Dorsey

Foreign. 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 over to patreon.com inside sales excellence. Now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. What up, everybody pumped for this one? We talk about champion selling and how to navigate the end of the call. Because this is an area that I see a lot of reps struggle. A lot of reps do the wrong way. And unfortunately there's not a lot of, I guess, content out there on what to do when you get to the end of the call. Right. Like, everyone talks about how to close and how to wrap up, but when you talk about a long sales cycle or even one that's relatively short, but you're not in touch with the decision maker, this is the process you need to go through because you know the numbers now vary all over the place. Like it's anywhere from 4.7 to 6.8 decision makers or people are involved in any B2B purchase. So knowing how to navigate the end of the call the right way is going to set you up for way more success. Actually creating a champion, but also creating a mobilizer, which is a phrase that Doug Landis and the challenger customer talks about a lot. It's one thing to have a champion, another thing to have a mobilizer. So we're going to talk about that in this training today. So this is what I want to touch on first, a buyer's focused process. Most sales reps have never bought the software. It actually is a pretty funny thing to think about, right? On top of that, most salespeople don't even use the software they sell. Let that sink in for one second. Unless you're at a gong or an outreach or a sales loft. Like a lot of sales reps don't even use the software that they sell, which means you don't understand what it's like to buy. And it makes it very hard to build a buying process because you don't know how to buy it. Right. Buyers care about themselves, their security and their results, and you need to build a process accordingly. It Always cracks me up. I talk about this my own team and it happens to me all the time. It's like you don't know what it's like to buy. Sales reps never sit through demos. Salesups never go get approval from finance to buy something. They never have to talk to the cfo. Like you never go through the process. And so a lot of calls end the wrong way because we're not thinking about what the buyer is about to go through. And that's what this process is a lot about, is how to help the buyer buy. Now all of this starts in discovery, right? So this is one of those things. Anytime a rep comes to me says I'm having trouble closing or I'm having trouble getting deals across the line or deals are stalling out, I always go all the way back to discovery. If you're not doing problem based discovery, the end of the call will never go the way that you want it to. No problem, no next steps, no deal. Like you'll be referencing the problems that you found in discovery in the coaching part of the demo. So this is key. We have a whole other training on problem based discovery. If you haven't watched that, go watch it right away. Because if you don't know how to do that, you're never going to be able to wrap up the calls the way that you need to. Almost every single time I have a rep struggling with closing, they're actually struggling with discovery and that sets up a bad close and a bad championing and mobilizing process. So I won't touch on it too much here. But upfront agreements are a big part of coaching too. I also do cover this in the discovery training, but most reps ask for decisions too early. With an upfront contract, the key is to know what normally comes next. So back to that buyer's process. If you know what normally comes next, whether that is talking to legal, whether that's pulling in someone above them, whether that's going cross functional, this is what you build into your upfront agreements, right? So, so you're, you know, you're pitching me, we're kind of getting ready and you say, well, hey, at the end of this, Katie, if you believe this will actually solve XYZ better than what you're doing right now, we can talk about a follow up meeting and pulling in Betty and Kim, but if not, no worries. All I ask is that you let me know on this call, would that be okay? The upfront agreements about setting up another call, if you listen to a lot of upfront agreements, you're asking for a decision, right? Like, if you like what you hear today, is this something you'd be, you know, able to move forward? Whoa, we haven't talked about anything yet. Like, we haven't done anything yet. So you can't go that far down. But you need to be thinking strategically. What is the normal next step? And if you're really trying to get to that next level, make that your upfront agreement. Hey, if you like what you see today and you think, I'll solve XYZ problem, next steps will probably be pulling in Betty or Kim. If not, let me know. But if you do, we can go that route. Does that sound all right with you? Now you have agreement to that next step in the very beginning. So the upfront agreement, done the right way up, helps you with your immobilizing and champion stuff.