Ask Tough Questions That Move the Deal Forward - Mark Tanner, Jonathon Blackburn, Kendra Berner - Revenue Today - Episode # 069

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All right, mate, I'm ready for it. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's flick, Gina, let's flick through to the next slide.

Cool. So I guess I'm taking a step back. Once we know what the right deals are, the deals that we should be working, we have a pretty clear idea of what's in our pipeline, and then we're working the right things. I think the kind of Next question here, the next kind of stage is, are we asking the right questions? I.e., in most cases, the hard questions that we need to be asking to ensure that we're actually progressing the deal forward. I'll give a little bit of a story here of myself from back when I was selling. This was a while ago, back in 2015-ish. I'm pretty sure Kendra's heard this story before, or at least heard me tell it before, if not a couple times. There was a deal I was working with a large, very large media company. And this deal, I began working it in February. We were on a fiscal calendar year, so our Q4 ended in December. And I was working this deal for about 9 or 10 months. And through each conversation, through each exec we met, through each in-person lunch, drinks, conversation, The deal obviously felt more and more real and it seemed to get bigger and bigger. And towards the end of the year, I was really expecting and quite honestly counting on the deal to help me not just hit goal, but grossly exceed goal. The TL;DR to summarize this a little bit, I hadn't been asking the right questions and I hadn't been getting the right people involved in the deal. And while I wouldn't say I was single-threaded, I wasn't as multi-threaded as I should have been. in a deal of this size. Come to the end of the year, we've actually finished legal review. It's about a week before Christmas, waiting on contract signatures, and an executive and founding member and my point of contact left the company. Needless to say, the deal did not get done that quarter. It did get done the next quarter, but for about 10% of the original amount, which just goes back to— I think it's easy It's easy as a seller when things are looking good to want to continue to get good news, to want to hear good things, to want to project that. I think what's even more important in these scenarios and instances, especially in situations like this where you are working large deals or you're in a scenario where maybe one deal can make or break your quarter or year, to be asking the tough questions, to be asking the questions of some way, shape, or form, I use Quiller as an example. Why do something? Why Quiller? And why now? To grossly oversimplify this, and then have a better understanding of what are the internal pieces from a process perspective that you need to understand. Storytime aside, I'm actually curious to get your thoughts, Kendra, in terms of some of the questions that you like to ask or just how you think about this in deals.

Totally. What a painful story, but I'm sure those I mean, I know we've talked about deals before and questions like, you know, why wouldn't you make a change or who could say no and why immediately come to mind. And if you've already asked those questions for deals in your pipeline, like I'm a control freak and so I feel way more solid around reviewing my deals with my manager or even just feeling confident in my projections for my commit and best case, knowing that I've used and have answers to some of those questions where you're really testing your champion or testing the validity of the deal. So I think those are ones that come to mind for me. And also, you know, being mindful of stationing these out, right? Like there might not be a world on your very first intro where you need to challenge a prospect as to why they wouldn't choose your software. That could be maybe saved for later, but making sure that you're also not too far down a deal and spent, you know, the hours of time on a deal if you haven't really qualified the opportunity and made sure that you know kind of what roadblocks may be ahead that you're preparing to overcome.

Totally. Yeah. I think to the point too, understanding the problem you're solving and how important or how big of a problem that is for the company is incredibly important. To ask a question and to understand, hey, we're solving a million-dollar problem and our solution costs $10,000, again, completely making up numbers, that could sound great, but in the context of the company needing to solve Something that's a $100 million problem, that million dollars might actually not even make the top 10 in terms of the most important things. And so I think it's easy again to fall into that trap, again, asking the right questions to really understand how and what you need to uncover in a deal that might not be easy to ask in terms of what their priorities are, who would be responsible for this. I mean, I kind of Can keep going here, but I think, you know, those, those tough questions become really important, especially as salespeople sometimes. Um, we don't want to hear bad news, and we don't hear the thing that we don't want to hear.

Uh,

I mean,

go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think like, I think the— so the way I should think about this is if it's going to end in a no, you, you want to get that no as quickly as possible. And I know that sounds demented in a weird way, but you know that, you know, for most reps, I mean, maybe, maybe there's a rep on the call who closes 90% of their deals, but for most reps, most conversations lead to a no. Like, that is the, that is the stock standard thing. It's like whether it's 55% or 95%, like most of the time it ends in a no. And I think the, the sort of, you know, do you get to that no in I don't know, 2 or 3 conversations, or do you get that no in 9 or 10, right? And the delta between 3 and 9 is 6 conversations, a whole bunch of mental brain cycles, all this effort and energy that you could have been putting towards nurturing and loving and watering that plant I sort of mentioned earlier, that these other deals that sort of have real chance. And I think that, I think that, you know, that's just like the important rational thing to sort of, you know, be aware of is that If you can— oh, Gina, we've lost our screen again. Anyway, if we can, it's wonderful to be able to sort of get back to that side. I think the number one thing here that I spend a lot of time with reps talking through is that, guess what? Your champion wants to do the deal. They they're not here talking to you for no reason. Like they really want to do the deal. Like they they're excited about it. They this is all positive. This is great. You and them are like on the same page. Wouldn't this be the most awesome thing for the thing? Like unless your champion is the person who can get the deal done, that doesn't insert bad word matter. Like it's just like it just it doesn't freaking matter. Like I think like you need to be able to. Remove the delusion of one really happy champion leading to a deal. Now, again, there are some times where your champion is the CEO. Congrats to you, you're going to be fine. But every other sort of instance, like, I think the reality is you need to have some awkward conversations with them. Now, as Kendra said, maybe you don't have it on the first call, you know, maybe you build a little bit of rapport, get a little bit of love. But by call 2 or 3, you should feel comfortable with them sort of being like, Hey, how's this actually gonna get done? Like, who needs to approve this? Do you actually have budget? That's gonna be like, this is like a thing to tattoo on your forearm, like, for the rest of the year to be looking at. It's like, do you actually have budget, right? Because a bunch of people, you know, will love the solution you have, but won't necessarily have budget. And I think, like, finding ways to get to budget is like another thing we can talk about later in this call. But, but I really do think that, that, you know, you do need to have those somewhat awkward conversations with, with, you know, it's with someone you may have developed some nice rapport with sooner rather than later. Again, probably not call 1, although maybe call 1 depends on your, your vibe. But, but I would sort of say that's, that, that's one of the big traps you can fall into is, is this sort of eternal good vibes of a lovely champion where both of you agree this is the right move. But actually neither of you have the ability to close the deal.

Yeah, for me that brings up really anchoring on, you know, how have you done this before, right? Like, who, who are you talking to that has experience in actually crossing the finish line, mutual partnership? Um, and then you can mimic a lot of that process too in terms of mutual action plan or timelines if you also are working with someone who's already done this before, um, and has the ability to do so again.

Totally. No is, I think, my second favorite answer by a pretty wide margin. Yes is definitely number one, but I do like hearing no, as MT said, as demented as that may be. And there's a lot of good frameworks out there, opportunity management frameworks, things like MEDIC or MEDPIG and other different methodologies that you can lean on here, but really having a clear understanding of Why someone should do anything, why they should work with your company, why now, who's involved in the process, and having a healthy amount of paranoia and skepticism around why a deal might fall through, what obstacles might get in the way, and working around that can all be really helpful and impactful in situations like this, even more so with an extra level of depth and granularity when a deal tends to be a little bit larger. that can be even more important.

Cool. Okay. Well, I'm gonna flip forward. I'm being mindful of time here. That was an awesome chat. We've got 2 more things we're gonna touch on here. So Gina, if you wanna throw up the next slide and Kendra, it's over to you.

Amazing. Perfect. So I love how this is going so far 'cause we're just progressing along our deal cycle here, which is very fun as well, getting closer ideally towards a yes. And at this point, hopefully we're driving the decision-making process, but really thinking about, you know, we have clean pipeline, we have a good champion, ideally, your prospects are meeting your deal criteria. And we know that there is still always a risk, right? I think a statistic that we were talking about, which kind of blew my mind, is that 40 to 60% of the average salesperson total opportunity is usually lost to no decision. Kind of depressing, but at least we know, right? And I do think there are is an ability for a really strong rep to influence making a change and holding their prospect accountable to this too. So we're going to talk a little bit about ways that we can do that and how reps have driven decision-making process. I know that Jonathan and I have talked a ton about mutual action plans. We both love them. And I think that's been a huge part of keeping deals later on in your— or the deals that are progressing in your pipeline, really keeping you know, mutual party or both parties accountable to a mutual action plan can be really helpful in moving the deal forward. We also here at Lattice really anchor on strong requirements lists to propel an evaluation, right? If a company is just like, oh, we love the software, let's implement it, it's going to be really hard for a CFO to say, sure, like, I'm glad you like it, but like, why on earth? What are the outcomes that are going to exist? Or why is this system much better than the system we probably already have today? So Something that we're working on here too is digging into what's the cost of the status quo, even digging down that pain funnel of, you know, if we choose not to make a change, what happens? What are the business effects that happen for your organization? What happens 2 or 3 years from now because you didn't make a change right now? Right. And getting your prospect to really understand the larger narrative at hand can help continue to move the decision-making process forward towards change. I'd love to pick both your brains, Jonathan and MT, around what comes to mind in terms of maybe overcoming customer indecision in a downturn, right? We're going to have more people that are a little bit hesitant to make a change. So thinking about what we can do or what we can avoid, I'd love to get your perspectives.

Totally. I think we're getting to a point where it's— and I think the stat really kind of points this out, in some cases it's easier to do nothing than to do something. And you as a salesperson, as a seller, really need to be able to fully understand. I think part of this goes back to the problem you're solving and your understanding of how you win the deals that you tend to win more often, who's involved, what that process looks like, hold people accountable to that. And hold your prospects and your hopefully soon-to-be customers accountable to that. And also really understand, I guess going back to it, the problem you're solving, how important that problem is for the person and people you're talking to, but approaching it from a different lens depending on who you're having that conversation with. If you're talking to, let's say you have a champion or an influencer or just a point of contact, I think it's really important to make sure that the problem you're solving for them aligns to what you do, but also being able to reframe and refocus that as either conversations progress upward to VPs, C-level execs, or across different orgs within a company in terms of, I understand the problem we're solving for the VP of sales, but how might this actually impact the COO or the CFO or other people within the organization? I think reframing it and being able to have clear articulation of the problems you solve, not just for the person you're talking to or people you're talking to, but others across the company becomes incredibly important because buying committees, I'm sure anyone who sells has felt this, are just getting bigger and bigger. They have been. I think there's a pretty big shift there after COVID. We kind of went to more of a remote world, and I think that's only continuing to expand now as Budgets get tighter and companies get a little bit more, I'll say tighter as well with where they invest and what they invest in.

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