A salesperson opens a call with a late CEO while a coach critiques in real time. The key moves: skip small talk, ask what keeps them awake at night, and adapt when time shrinks. Control the conversation by matching their constraints.
How are you? Thanks for taking the meeting.
Having a good day? One thing that you'll immediately notice is that he's very relaxed. They intentionally had the CEO show up late to try and fluster him and shorten the 45-minute meeting into a 20-minute meeting.
I kind of want to know about you, your company, what kind of challenges you're facing right now. We kind of tailor-make our strategies directly to suit our clients' needs.
Straight away, what he's doing is he's setting the frame and the expectations of the call. There was no chitchat at all. It was straight into business, which I think is an important thing to learn for a lot of sales reps.
You have to say one thing right now in your business that was kind of like, give me the most Time is really unknown to us. That does keep me awake at night a little bit. In the sense of that, to fill the demand, they have to—
I think it's a mistake there. The CEO said, you know, that's something that keeps me awake at night. I would have then probed and clarified a little bit deeper, probably even before he said that, and be like, you know, it's a real unknown for us. I would have said an unknown. So if you're going to have a short period of time, you need to attack pain points like that very quickly and decisively, and then let him use his words instead of putting your words into him.
