A sales leader (now global sales VP) presents a practical framework—"remove the burden"—to shift from a seller-centric to a buyer-centric sales process. Drawing on a decade of experience and managing hundreds of sellers, he walks through three tactical stages where sellers commonly offload work onto prospects (discovery, demo, and closing/internal buy-in), gives concrete scripts and examples (ask “what do you want to get out of this call?”, demo how they would use the product, write the internal summary and schedule a short review), and explains how these tweaks raise win rates and speed up promotions. The talk closes with links to a newsletter (16,000+ sellers) and free sales psychology training.
Questions this video answers
About 10 years.
Global Sales VP.
More than 100 sellers.
Over 16,000 sellers.
Two years into his career.
Over the past 10 years, I've gone from being a very mediocre SDR just getting my way to a global sales VP. And over this time, I've managed hundreds of sellers across three companies. My number one differentiator as a sales leader has been knowing how to teach sales reps to sell. It's helped my teams consistently finish number one, even when changing companies and industries. It's helped me promote more than 100 sellers to higher paying roles, which is by far the best part of my job. And it all starts with the shift I made two years into my career that took me from the bottom of the sales floor to the top. And in this video, I'm to break down that shift that you can make in your sales process to start blowing through your quotas and potentially doubling your income. Or if you're like many of the sellers I've worked with, even more than double your income. The mistake that destroyed any chance of success early in my career was making the sales process completely about me. What did I need to learn on a discovery call? What did I need the prospect to do to progress my deal? What did I need for the prospect to figure out pricing for the deal? Literally everything was about me. It was, which makes sense because we're inherently selfish people. But the problem is, so are our buyers. Everything changed in my sales process when I stopped trying to make my own life easier and instead focused on making my prospects life easier. I call this removing the burden. And I'll teach you how to do that across three key parts of the sales process, starting with step one in discovery. Now, I've personally been involved in thousands of discovery calls and I've been on both the selling side and also on the buying side. And almost all of them are terrible because the discovery call usually just serves the seller. What I found is most sellers, myself included, early in my career enter the discovery call thinking, what do I need to learn on this call to qualify that this is a real opportunity, which is a really selfish way to approach a sales conversation. A prospect enters a discovery call with their own questions. One, does this seller actually have a solution that solves one of my biggest problems? Two, does it solve it better than alternatives? I remember sitting through a ton of sales conversations with several sales training firms. Ironically enough, as we were looking to pick one to help us roll out our new sales process, I sat through discovery after discovery discovery. And they all sounded the same. I, I found myself, I remember thinking, how can you help me? How do you help differently than the others? And how can you prove it. Throughout the process, none of them answered those questions because they were too busy asking their own selfish questions. So it's not any wonder that we ended up actually not buying from any of them. You can lap your competitors with just one simple tweak to your discovery. Just ask your prospect, what do you want to make sure we get out of this call today? And then make sure they get it. You may have to ask some questions to provide them with what they want, which is fine, but understand first what is a win for them in the discovery call. Commit to them you're going to get them that win and then make sure that as you ask your questions that you answer theirs as as well. The big shift for me was approaching Discovery through the lens of what does the prospect want to get out of the meeting and how can I make sure to deliver it instead of the selfish of what do I need to add to this call? And that completely changed the tone and success of Discovery. And most of the time, what they want to know is going to benefit you as well in the end, because it's likely. How can you help me? Do you do it differently and better than others? And how can you prove it? Which are questions you need to answer to go, go win a deal. Now, it's not just in Discovery, where we often make the prospect work way too much. I've also seen this in the demonstration phase. I remember sitting across from a struggling AE and every demo they would do would start with them saying, I'm going to show you a lot of features today. As I show you the features, make sure to tell me what stands out so I know where to spend my time. Then I remember he'd go into his demo routine and he would literally show like every part of the platform in the same order that he always did. It was basically a memorized presentation and halfway through he'd always say something like, hey, you haven't stopped me yet. Just a reminder to stop me when you see something valuable. The demo was putting all the burden on the prospect. He was asking them to be just laser focused during this boring, high level presentation and then for them to be vocal when something stuck out. And so it's no wonder those demos never converted. But it was super helpful for me to observe so I could do the opposite. My goal was to make the demo much easier for the buyer. I wanted to remove the burden for them to understand our product in the most simple way possible. And I did this by following a very simple rule. Demo the product exactly how they would use the tool I avoided High Level Overview 30,000 Foot View There was no product tour. I wasn't trying to require them to imagine how it might work in their environment. I remember doing a demo for a very famous chocolate company on site with the team. Actually, I had built out their demo environment that was so close to their real use case that they asked me to transfer the project over to their account after they signed up. There was no imagination required. I made it easy for them to connect the dots. So while your competitors are giving the product product tour, the high level overview and forcing your prospects to do that work to connect the dots, you can put in the extra effort to build up presentations and demo environments that get as close as possible to your prospect's use case. So they can just sit back and think, all right, I see how we would use this instead of, okay, this is, this is cool, but how would it work for us? Just this simple tweak makes your buyer's life easier and will increase your win rates. Now, if you want to get access to weekly golden nuggets like this and even in more depth, I do have an incredible newsletter that's backed by over 16,000 sellers, sellers that are part of it. You can get the link in the description to join. Now, let's get into possibly the most important time to make your buyer's life easier towards the end of the deal. A common phrase you'll hear at the end of the deal cycle is your buyer will say, let me talk internally and get back to you. This is when most sellers lose control of their deal because they're at this point relying on their prospect to go do a ton of work to make it happen. It usually comes after a demo, maybe after pricing is shared, but it's a problem because most rookie sellers think your prospect is gonna go convince everyone how to buy. But experienced sellers know that this phrase means, my prospect has no idea what to do next. They may have a couple of conversations internally about our solution, but if I don't take charge now, they're gonna come back to me in a few weeks with, yeah, it's a great product, but not a priority right now, or even worse, they're gonna ghost me. So instead of relying on your buyer to go do a ton of work to get internal consensus to move forward, remove the burden. So when I hear this phrase, what I would say and do is, hey, it makes sense you're going to go talk internally. We've covered a lot the last few weeks or even months. I'll help you put together A summary of what we've discussed so far so you don't have to go spend a ton of time organizing your thoughts. Now to make sure what I put together is relevant, who are you going to be talking to? Once they answer, I'd ask another discovery question to make sure I can really make their life easier. Out of all the things we've talked about, what do you think Linda will find the most interesting? And then I'd repeat for all the people they'll be talking to now I've got a good understanding of who they're talking to, what those people care about, and I can keep control of the deal by saying something like, all right, I'm going to take what we discussed and I'm going to put it into terms that are the most, that are most relevant for Linda, Tyler and John. I'll have this done by end of day tomorrow. Let's take 15 minutes on Friday to review my work and make sure it's accurate enough for you to take this internally. Now it's so simple. But look at what we've accomplished. One, we've made our buyers life way easier. They don't have to go through all the emails and assets that you've shared, remember the calls you've had and look through their notes to have their conversation summarized. And an easier life for buyers generally means happier buyers and happier buyers obviously, obviously are done. Really a good thing too. We've, we've kept control of the deal. Instead of waiting for them to go up the conversations that they aren't really prepared to have and then come back to you, you have a valid reason to meet with them before those conversations where you can prepare them to sell internally, which is a massive win win. Now just, just like that, you now have the the blueprint that allowed me to take sales from a very painful, high friction type job where it felt like I was just an uphill battle like pulling teeth to get money, to a job where I found buyers were excited to partner, buyers are excited to go sign contracts and to work with us. It's a simple framework. It's not easy though to do. But the reason why it works so well is because the more you get to try it, the faster it'll be for you to implement until it becomes second nature. However, this framework alone isn't going to be enough to make your sales happen at the optimal rate. If you don't also understand the psychology behind the buyers, that will allow you to adapt the framework to match the situation. So click the link in the description to enter our free sales psychology training, and I'll see you in this next video.
