Boost Your Sales Performance with b2b sales forecasting for Sales

How to create outlook signature

awesome all right awesome so I think we've got a good group in here already people will trickle in a lot of people are always recording and watching later off hours but really really excited thank you everybody for joining we can go ahead and start getting started here my name is Mark Fain I'm the co-founder and CEO of recap we are a mutual action plan platform and we help sales teams collaborate and and execute a perfect s process that enables the customer to have a winning buying buying journey and I think especially now it's a it's an incredibly important topic around deal reviews around getting visibility around really maximizing the bottom of funnel and middle funnel because so many of the challenges that we're facing as leaders and as sellers it's it's very different from where it was 12 months ago we're not able to just continuously throw millions of dollars in the top of the funnel and hope that things will work out out right we now have to be smarter we have to be efficient and execute on a level that frankly I think is going to raise the skills of everyone here so really really excited I have some incredible panelists here we have some great attendees so David maybe you want to kick us off with a quick intro for yourself and then anise will jump to you cool awesome well hey nice to meet everybody um excited for this webinar my name is David Wise I am the uh Chief Revenue officer of a company called the sales Collective so we are a sales transformation firm our job is to help you hire and build process and onboard and train and develop your people Implement technology think of us as like an Outsource rev shop where we bring recruiting and we bring uh amazing talent and and interm chief Revenue officers and all those things on the side I am a big voice and proponent for medic Med pic I've built apps wrote books done everything I can to help the sales Community adopt that as a deal management methodology so let talk more about how that plays with mutual action plans and recap to here soon so that's me anise over to you yeah thank you Mark by the way thank you so much for hosting this so I'm the uh founder and Co of attention a conversational AI platform that helps you understand what your customers want what they're saying what's happening within your sales and have it pushed all to the right places think about this straight into your CRM whichever CRM you're using Salesforce HubSpot Dynamics Etc or as much as it can be pushed into your slack channels or any or or your emails so we help sales teams a with efficiency getting deals closed faster but also B with coaching and C with deal scoring right David as you mentioned Medic One of the one of the things that we closely do is track how much methodology and Playbook adoption there is within your team so that you can track call after call how much your reps are adhering to those methodologies and what type of information is missing to help you a score your deals better and B also coach your reps in order to have better calls and have a higher close rate and Bo right in the future love it that's awesome thank you guys if for anyone watching if you have not read any of David's content or watch his YouTube videos on medic stop what you're doing after you watch this webinar and watch that webinar it is fantastic I picked a couple things up I learned a couple new things it was great and obviously go check out attention really really prevalent for the problems that leadership is facing right now so let's Jump Right In I want to I think there we have a lot of topics to discuss I want to make sure that this is as tactical and as valuable for everybody that's watching so we all know that in today's environment you know ensuring an accurate forecast it's more critical than ever right that we have to make sure that we're spending what very limited time we have on the deals that are actually going to move the needle and the ones that are actually even interested right I'm in I have the pleasure of meeting with hundreds you know of sales leaders every single month one of the biggest the reason why we did this webinar is the number one thing that I constantly hear over and over again is we're spending hours in Deal reviews trying to figure out what's going on in these deals we're relying on CRM data that may or may not be accurate and you know we believe that Mutual action plans can be this strategic lever in that but more importantly like let's just talk deal reviews right so I guess maybe David I'll kick it off to you why are deal reviews such a critical part do you think in today's forecasting environment yeah I mean look I've been a top performer seller leader LED Revenue teams as a second line leader and one of the most common things and I'll speak I don't want to put this on any any seller that's listening but I got very myopic about my own deals especially after like 20s something years of selling at a very high level I believed I always ran a good sales process I believe that I had things covered I believe I involved the right people and did the right behaviors and got ahead of the objections and you know did enough Discovery and was multi-threaded all the things that you think you are doing what I learned and it's one of the reasons I fell in love with you know medic Med piic Etc as a methodology is I don't care how good you think you are when you start getting into your own deals you will miss things because you will have blinders on related to your business and what those methodologies do for me is they remove that they create objectivity they create common language they create ways that um people outside your deal can look at it and then help you strategize um on other perspectives and things that you may have missed so that's why it's so important look and then I'll just add one thing to this one of the reasons why this fails though is because people approach deal management and calls related to it wrong they're looking they're they're just throwing lots of information out there and then seeing where like people need to them decipher it where I've taken medic Med piic Etc is to a color coding methodology where it's now red yellow green red is you know and I don't want to go too deep red is I I don't know yellow is I think I know and each letter has a little variation to this green is I know I'm confident I've closed the gap on this thing so when I'm doing forecast reviews what I'm looking for is not only the data but I'm looking for red yellow green because then I know where to aim where to spend the time on the Reds and the yellows and frankly trust the greens pressure test them but then move on to where people need help so you know I I'll pause there I love this this is excellent if I were to add one thing on top of what you said which is a lot of reps fall into the Trap of feature selling and talking a lot about themselves instead of trying to uncover questions uncover pain and get into places that maybe the prospect hasn't thought even about before or just think they have access to the right to to the right decision maker but they actually don't right and so in addition to what you said which was great I would say that the way we kind of uh score each letter of medic Is So within red it's no information yellow would be we have the information or some information green is actually quantifiable information where you can put a dollar sign on it or a percentage and a lot of reps who follow these methodologies think that they do by just having some information filled but the reality is they don't dig the the they don't dig behind like the why behind the why right y why is why is the decision process like this why do they have these pain points and what what would solving this pain points how would that impact their actual top line or bottom line and the second you start having these quantifiable metrics start getting closer to a proper business case which will pretty much in advance disarm your uh perspective buyer from negotiating you on pricing at the end yeah no absolutely I love that and what you just covered exactly how I would look at metrics but then like when you get and this is not a webinar on on Med pic but like when you get to like economic buyer it's like okay how involved are they have they decided to be an executive sponsor can they actually create budget for the idea and are they willing to do it off cycle are they are they an economic buyer or are they someone who you think is an economic buyer because they have a c-level title where they've actually run out of budget so they're no longer the economic buyer the CFO is the economic buyer so it's like having pressure tested you know all of these different ideas across the the entire stream you know of of Med pick so like to get to Green actually has a really high bar yellow is the the easy part but that's that's where like assumption ends like people people assume a lot in their deals and they don't take it that one step further and that's why they're in yellow so much and that's where why you get you know surprised by things throughout your deal so I Mark if you want we can turn this in Med pick and I can go like all the way down but honestly maybe we do one in a couple weeks just around Med piic because my mind is racing right now I have a couple questions too right and I know I was actually interesting enough Pavilion put out a really great report recently a lot of us probably read it but what was shocking is that well what wasn't shocking is that methodologies have skyrocketed in the past 12 months and the use of methodologies and Med piic was the number one by a large portion followed by I think it was a command the message and Sandler and things like that but it it's no surprise right because again how are you able to do deal reviews and qualify deals if you don't have a basic scorecard of what great looks like right and I think the shift that I I love what you guys said I think my only piece that I want to tribute is the kind of shift and thinking that we've had and that I've started helping to consult some of our customers on is you know 12 months ago 24 months ago deals were alive on default right we were excited we were optimistic we were going to close deals that's not the case anymore the case today is in my opinion is everything that goes through the pipeline is dead until proven otherwise right things are guilty until proven innocent and the reason for that is because there's so many roadblocks there's the number of stakeholders have increased right they were before we already were at a high number now we're in double digits on a lot of these deals what used to be an Enterprise deal complexity and sales cycle now we're seeing in mid market and even SMB in some cases right CFOs having to sign off on 10K purchases that's wild right and so to that point right I I don't think you can have a accurate Deal review unless you know what's going on Behind These wi's and behind the medic and behind all of this right I guess taking me to my next point and Mark I've got I've got something to add to that anise I'm sure you do as well do you I don't want to just be the one who starts every time anise do you want to add any any perspective on I was just gonna add something real quick which is in addition to medic what I really like to see is the three wise Why Us why now why do anything and that when you get kind of like medic plus the three wi you get maybe closer to spice which has kind of like the compelling event you know letters but yeah having the three y's why now will help you just understand that trigger that you can then start using for outbound right how can I find other customers that might have this very compelling event Why Us will also help you craft your message Market fit and then why do anything will help you assess the the cost of status quo I love that man and so I'm not gonna pull two threads first yeah why change why now why um for folks selling um most people start with Ys please for the love of God until someone has made a decision decision to make a change why you doesn't matter like it doesn't stop um why change typically is first like why change like what is happening macroeconomics in the world that is driving future state unsustainability in your business then why now why now for you to me the why why changes is is often outside the company macroeconomics why now is inside the company it's like what is happening inside your business that will eventually break down because of the macroeconomics that are happening and then it's like why us for that if at all and if you haven't done it in that order like no one really cares because they don't care why you until you know they decide to make a change and until they decide to make a change right now it's like why does any of this really matter we'll talk later so I think it's it's that then the other component of us and Mark where I where I challenge I'd say the best reps aren't struggling as much right now the best reps your top one to five% are still closing deals they're gonna hit quota this year they may have some of the best years ever because they've been able to create budget in this environment where others haven't so what's changed what's major thing that's changed discretionary spending discretionary spending is what's changed before when different levels of the organization have budget thresholds where they could just go throw money at things where you know more budget was given to you know spend for good ideas um and for the potential of future growth more risk softer risk people were willing to take more in other environments um that's what's changed but if you to an's point are really good at building business cases and getting them to CFOs you will sell right now and I think that's one of the biggest challenges in and most modern sellers that I coach and work with is they are scared to get to a true economic buyer they are scared to get to someone in the SE suite and then the person above that person in the SE Suite because the SE Suite you know you're you're cro CH chro CMO what have you has spent the money they were given because they thanked God they got any and then you know spent the budget that they predicted for you know last year it's all off cycle budget now the only way you get off cycle business cases CFOs if you're not comfortable there good luck wait till next year 100% I think if if we take that one step further right I I I agree with you that the best reps right now are the ones that are do the best reps are going to hit their numbers regardless right they're going to get creative they're going to adjust the business cases well I think the something that I've also noticed is the best reps not only realize that there's no discretionary budget but their competition isn't just budget for this category right it's not just oh hey I'm looking to buy a conversational intelligence tool my competition isn't you know the players in the space your competition is every other piece of budget that they're going to be investing in right are they investing in their CRM do they have a renewal coming up for a customer intelligence tool do they have something else right so realizing that it's not only just your tool but where does this stack in the the priorities of the business and that's what the cite cares about so that's what the business case needs to be tied around because if you're not one of those top three initiatives it doesn't matter if they have budget or not for your tool and guess what if they if you are they will find Budget if the pain if the wise if they're important enough absolutely Y and that's to me the definition of oh sorry n Go ahead now I just gonna add to that yeah so space in the budget and priorities right because people have just so much let the time within the day and within their weeks and so there might be another priority that you're competing with and it could be a complete different product they're not going to give you the time of day the other product that they're currently trying to buy is a bigger priority than your yeah that's a really that's yes I mean there is a finite technically amount of money so like understanding the priority in the organization that even to your point like resources if if the same resources to deploy two projects are going going to be utilized and project a is higher prior uses those resources and it's worth more than Project B I don't care what happens with Project B like a is going to get done first because you have finite certain resources you know I think the the the other part of that is and it's and it's Mark it's the definition I think this is where people mess up the de definition of an economic buyer the definition of an economic buyer is someone who can create budget for good ideas so you know to your point if you figured out the wise and got to the right people they will often find the money because they don't think in terms of budget they think in terms of long-term growth my business yeah and and if they can tie it not only to the budget but what is the cost of inaction right we always talk about the ROI but what is what happens if you don't change oh yeah investing 20 grand or 50 Grand or 100 Grand in tools is really hurt but if that doesn't impact your sales cycle and now of a sudden you're losing $3 million I don't know anyone who wouldn't trade $50,000 for three million right so absolutely so and I love what Bob Apollo by the way if you don't know check him out from inflection point fantastic sales thought leader I love what he just said here in the comments about a fourth why which is why should they trust you to ensure that they have to achieve right what proof points what customer uh success stories do you have I think that's such a really great Point changing absolutely yeah you know why Yu is part of the the pull threat on the on the drisking of the deployment so you know if I choose you you know I don't get fired because it failed on the on the cost of an action piece just a really fun kind of tactical way to make that come to life let's use your $3 million number Mark so there's 250 business days in a year okay so if I take three million and I divide it by 250 that's $112,000 so a really fun way to to do that is like yeah you can throw throw out that big like if you don't do this you're going to lose 3 million but even better if you don't do this for every day you don't move forward with my solution you are losing $112,000 a day I love that really fun way call I call it daily lost Revenue it's a really fun way to take this big picture and drill it down to you want to delay this meeting you know a week that's cool that's a headcount you want to delay it two weeks cool that's that's two potential headcount you could hire like you know you start thinking in those terms executive like okay we'll meet tomorrow yeah so jumping down I guess simar thread then what are the common mistakes that and anise maybe we'll start with you what are the common mistakes that you think sales leaders and reps are doing right now while while doing deal reviews while forecasting while qualifying deals yeah so one of the things that I would say in the world old world people tend to do is just sit down with a rep and go over each deal and just talk about it but and and get to hear what the rep is doing right or what the rep is saying about each one of those deals maybe some better approaches are to dig a little further into the the business cases and the kind of the why behind every every sort of piece of information but what the the way I think a better approach today would be kind of to have extremely good CRM hygiene that is objective instead of what the rep thinks they're doing out of and pull directly out of the conversation and have that as a starting point to then question the rep in a better way right a lot of reps think as we said earlier they have the right information but in reality it could be very much biased and they tend to ignore their their own risks the the risks behind each deal and if you read you know you're recording and your transcripts very precisely you'll realize that there there are a lot of risks that people tend to forget or not pay attention to right it could be as simple as hey you know what I'm traveling the next two weeks so let's chat in three weeks from now well you know what time kills deals and that is a risk that you haven't even thought of so maybe use that time to get another stakeholder on a call while that that your Champion is traveling yeah I an I agree with everything you just said like look there is a fundamental difference between a forecast call and a Deal review call forecast call is let's rip through these and and confirm that they're actually happening when they say they'll happen and if there's a risk let's talk about the risk that's it deal reviews also another big mistake they're not supposed to happen during one-on ones don't D them don't do them during one-on ones you know one-on ones are your time to build rapport with your reps it's it's your time to you know understand near-term work and how you can freaking help them it's your time to maybe do some coaching listen to a call you know support their Journey that's the purpose of a one-on them support their Journey deal reviews Focus one one deal bring have them bring one deal have them do the prep have them send that prep to you beforehand you then do the prep on what they sent you you both get on the same page have an account plan doc who are we talking to what's the problem you know color code and medp pick you know where do we have common connections and then take 30 minutes to an hour in stay freak focused turn your cell phone off mute your email and be present with your reps on the deal then take shared ownership this is not a time to just beat up your reps on their deals this is the time to say cool what actions are you going to take what actions can I take what can we do together let's now regroup in a week on this thing like it it needs to be that because otherwise you're going to it's it's going to be unfocused unstructured it's going to be rapid fire no one's going to make any movement and no one's going to actually know what to do after the conversation and and essentially what they're going to turn into is the rep's going to show up throw up at you for 30 minutes you're going to be like sounds good you know keep up the good work and no progress is made so like for the love of God Please do this right I would add to that that great approach to things is let's say ask your rep to prepare ahead of the call to write down on the Google Doc all the things that they could have improved on one call just take even one or two intro calls discover calls and ask them to go over it and write on a Google doc what they could have done better well first of all the exercise of writing it down will help them visualize a lot better those mistakes and they will get much much better a B on your end you can you should do the same thing as a leader write down what they could have done better and then when you regroup just compare notes and see what are the gaps and how between both notes and what they can learn in addition to what they think they did wrong from what you think they did wrong maybe there are things that you as a leader did not actually see and that you can learn from your ref because hey that happens I love I I don't have much to cont I mean you guys I think hit the nail in the head the David I love your point about the one deal right so many dealed when I was you know first starting out in my sales career we'd show up and we try and get through 50 deals in two hours right and it's just like you you go 10 inches deep instead of going 10 miles deep right and you're just spreading the time so I love the focus on that and I think one of the biggest issues too and we've talked about this a little bit is just not doing the preparation beforehand a deal revieww call should not as much as you can avoid should not be around okay get me caught up on this deal it should be let's strategize to make sure that we can overcome the roadblocks and the objections right let's actually make this a coaching conversation not just okay cool what are you doing where are we with this deal right that is the most JV approach to doing it in my opinion you have to kind of take help take this to the next level again especially now if you're disqualifying and you're qualifying deals properly you should be able to focus on the ones that are going to move the needle so put all of your attention towards that and instead of doing five deal reviews maybe you do the three but you take up the same amount of time all right so no fantastic I guess question for you guys we start with you outside of these kind of best practices have you seen any tools or tips to really kind of help streamline the getting caught up on Deal reviews so that way when they show up to the meeting they're already at the 50 yard line instead of starting from scratch yeah so I I have an account plan doc that I've created not to pitch my own stuff but I if you look at my app it's in my app but it's it's fairly detailed and it and it has I I can't even it everything that you can pretty much think about the deal and when I do deal coaching with people I send it to them and I say look fill this set and then it takes probably about 30 45 minutes but that's once you do it once and then it's just updating and then you know they send it to me I do my homework on it and see where I can you know fill in some gaps and help where I can you know Finding maybe new contacts or you know validating you know some business case details or looking at the the account from a different perspective I do those things and then when we meet you know we we just have the ability to shortcut a lot of stuff and say look thank you for putting together I reviewed it this is what I'm seeing can you catch me up on these specific things cool now let's talk strategy like by doing it that way you save so much time so much of the deal download which is essentially the rep saying the same thing they told you last time and taking you know 15 20 minutes to doing it and then you've got 10 minutes left in the call and you're like okay so yeah the the prep is is key so yeah I I have a really robust account plan dog not to my own product but that sounds like amazing temp that sounds like an amazing template that we should put in recap and let everyone access I have it I will share it with you I happy to we just gotta you know put a little as next to my name and then you know we got one for Med pick too so we're gonna have there we go that was my first thought I I love that right and just it's again it's about just enabling that efficiency and driving it I need H apologize I think I cut you off there no no I wasn't gonna say anything to nice so now we I get I guess this is a perfect segue into kind of where I think the the real secret weapon is right so a lot of what we talked about today is really driven around the seller filling in notes and putting in information and everything else right but even if they do 100% of that that's still only half the picture right we haven't talked about the buyer and what they're doing and where they fall into this deal review obviously I would if I didn't feel this way I wouldn't have spent the last four years dedicating my life to it but I think Mutual action plans are an incredible way of doing that being able to tie in the medic portion being able to tie it in to your Salesforce I mean that's that's that's how you get caught up right in my opinion but I guess question for you guys maybe David will start with you how have you been able to leverage Mutual action plans in Deal reviews and forecasting and and how are you advising some of your clients to do that yeah so I've been a a huge fan of of mutual action plans for for many years to me it's important though on when you start them I've had leaders that are like start the mutual action plan as soon as possible I'm like Mutual action plans are project management document if there's not a project to manage there's no point in them and so I've gotten in into some fights with you know leaders above me on this and uh so I have a certain perspective not saying my perspective right I have a certain perspective how I believe they should be used as as right around the point where someone can answer the question hey just out of curiosity if we were to go live on this when would you want that to be and then you know when when they're ready say cool yeah we could see us de playing that and we'd like it live at this point that's when you verbally do a backwards timeline then you document that backwards timeline then you start meeting weekly around that backwards timeline so like yes that that is where you know I see these views and I've got a template for it and yours is you know better of course than mine but the the whole point is you know we start talking about milestones and who needs to be involved and when not only from a medp pick decision process and then expanded upon Mutual action plan equal paper process when time is right it then allows both for an external tool and then the internal tool for deal forecast accuracy because if you can get a line and decision process paper process document it and track to it you can have a 90 plus% forecast accuracy so you know that's where I see these things coming together yeah I love this I think one of the things that's very important is that your prospects not only needs to talk to talk but also walk to walk and that means that providing you information and quantifiable information is not enough you need to give them homework and you can kind of assess your your deal deal the likelihood of your deal to close based on how much they're not only uh acting on their promises and doing what they have to do but also uh being proactive introducing other people and completing these on time if they're slipping through one of the deadlines then you're starting to see kind of like some potential risk in there and so one thing that you can do as a rep is kind of as you set up let's say a deadline time slot even a 15 minute time slot as a placeholder on a calendar for a certain date halfway through that date you need to remind your prospect that they and remind them and give them a little nudge about that homework that they have to do and the more they do it and the more the more likely your Deal's going to close yeah I I love that I'm sorry go I was just say yeah 100% agree with that there's kind of this to me is like part of micro commitments where it's like this is one of those little things around like testing Champions and then the people inside the deal like they they need to be holding up their end and one of the things I teach people is like if you notice any change in your buyer like you need to be like really really attuned to like Behavior patterns of the people you're working with if you notice any change they they used to get back to in 24 hours now it's 48 they were showing up to meetings and now they started to cancel you know they were giving you inside information they started to pull back like when you start see those things happen massive massive red flag like you're going to notice the behavior change in the champion or your or the person that you are working with the most first and just know like likely you know a competitor beat you they're leaving the organization there's no change coming they're getting acquired they're getting new funding you know priori shifted something has freaking happened and you need to be not like accepting the push off and accepting the change in temperature you need to be like hey I've noticed this what is going on because they may be scared tell you 100% I would also add that the more Enterprise you go the more of a formalized procurement process there is and so what happens is you need your Champion to be cced on every email with that procurement process if it get just get gets passed on to that procurement process or that procurement person what's going to happen is your deal will probably go from very hot to less important because you kind of lost your biggest champion and that stakeholder in on the way there right so you need to keep your Champion all the way through like kind of handholding the project management person and I've seen I've seen a lot of deals where everything goes all the way until the end and then just because that person went on holidays again for two weeks or anything like that things just kind of like Get get passed on to a new stakeholder and and at that point that new stakeholder doesn't have that much context and so you're wasting more time and Deals slip through to the next month or the next quarter and that tends to be extremely painful for any sales work I would say absolutely I you gave me PTSD actually so one of the main reasons I I imagine this is a common cause between the three of us but one of the main reasons why I personally wanted to start reca is because the largest deal I ever was going to close was literally at the Finish Line I had started telling my friends about it I started spending the commission check in my head right what am I going to what am I going to buy you know like already celebrating it my Champion went on vacation next thing you know there was a shake up at the company some people switched roles so something that was literally at the Finish Line ended up getting stalled a week ended up getting stalled a month ended up dying and we were literally hours away so I I love what you said about the continuous visibility in the inside I think that is so so key u because all of this you know when we talk about Mutual action plans the piece that a lot of us always forget is the first word is mutual right this needs to be a collaborative experience that we're all literally on the same side of the table moving to get to whatever this Mutual success is which isn't signing the agreement it is getting the feedback and getting the results that your solution offers to their problems right and so when you're thinking about all this I think it's really important to step backwards from that right what does that go live Dave I think I know you mentioned that as well any thoughts or anything else I have actually I want to challenge David on what he said earlier about introducing Mutual action plans early we can fight about that but curious if you guys have anything to contribute before we before we strap the gloves on yeah man absolutely I love it let's go the the only thing I'll I'll add is and this is really not to I I genuinely actually like like the solutions belt so please this is not a paid plug um but the biggest limitation to see of traditional Mutual action plans is they don't have the um the context the the the detail behind them they are they are a you know project management document so what I've liked is what where recap has taken it which is yes you have your Mutual action plan but then you also have your resources section where it's like you know here's the deck here's the executive summary here's the business case you know here's here's these more detailed elements and what I really like about that is because in my opinion why deals die especially towards the end is to is often a couple key things one of them is you've mistaken a champion for an influencer a coach and someone else a champion needs to sit one step below power they need to be actively selling for you to the point of putting their neck on the line for you when you are not there and they need to be tested ingly I don't want to go any deeper in that you don't really have a champion so there's not someone in the room selling for you at the end and you also haven't gotten to an economic buyer if you haven't gotten into an economic buyer reviewed the business case with them validated it aligned it to Executive priorities when eventually your Champion does or God forbid someone even below what a real Champion is a coach goes and tries to do that they get swatted down excuse my language sorry R our webinar and you know and now adults here the deal now gets deprioritized so to me like there's a lot of reasons why deals die those are two of the most common that I see that align to the scenario you mentioned so what I love again about your solution is like you can actually take the package of mutual Action Plan Plus resources plus all those other things and then socialize them and get them to a point where they can be socialized with other members of an executive team if you will to create like actual buy it and that's where the mutual action plan often stops some Your solution solves yeah thank you I really appreciate the kind words did not pay him to say that so that's great no I I I agree with you and I think you know if you were talking about a traditional Mutual action plan which is just a series of next steps or a timeline of what things that need to get done then yes getting that only one a project has been qualified and there are actually verbal next steps on what need to do to move through the procurement or whatever stage absolutely makes sense where I would advise everyone listening to this start thinking about ways to augment the mutual action plan to be including the business case to include the resources because even before we're seeing this with a lot of our customers they're saying the exact same thing where even to get approval to move forward they need consensus that this is a project worth investing in right so even before you're getting into stage three or stage four now they have to go around and deep brief internally and that's where I think if you layer in the executive summary the resources the case studies the testimonials it's something that helps enable your Champion to sell for you when you're not in the room which is let's face it 90 95% of the time all right and so I would encourage everyone thinking about this take your Mutual action plans to the next level as opposed to just the timeline that we we thought about this we're running low on time we've got a couple really great topics here and I want to leave some time for Q&A jumping in right I think another blind spot in Deal reviews we talked about earlier right is is so much of it is based around the seller and the seller putting in information Etc what have you guys seen as best practices on leveraging buyer engagement the buyer experience like how do you see that playing a role in Deal reviews qualifications execution yeah I can start there's at at the very surface level something that is extremely simple is TE the engagement right like if you're tracking the emails that you're sending to them how often they keep pre-opening your email how of often they if you're sending everything anything over doc send or how often they keep opening those documents as well or any deanonymization tool that will without plugging any of those tools here but you can see how often they're vising your website too and that gives you a lot of data as in terms of intent that's the first thing I would say I I haven't used your platform Mark but I believe tell me if I'm wrong I believe people you can see how often people are opening the materials that you're adding into the platform that's huge right if you you have the ability to see how often they're engaging with those documents that you have in the deal room then you get a lot more information and that allows you to kind of engage with your buyer if you're seeing a decrease in activity again the last thing when it comes to Mutual action plans is seeing how much of the homework that're they're doing how do they are they pushing calendar andice are they adding new people onto the next call are they and then you can even almost gamify it with a system of points where you add extra points if they do things that they promise they would or remove points if anything slips through I would say I love that yeah an i pinged you actually before the call because I I folks we prep for these things so like I I saw a some of n's thoughts on on that piece and like look I I I think that's absolutely brilliant the the the plus one minus one as as you see them do different activities really helps because you know from my perspective when I'm really excited about a deal and deals that I've won the the temperature of the deal like it it it starts like increasing over time like more people get involved the meetings start getting closer together um emails emails back and forth accelerate sharing of information accelerates Q&A accelerates like all of these things get hotter like to the point where though you know the water's oiling if you want to use that concept like uh so you know if we're seeing that happen highly engaged High likelihood of close we're seeing it stay the same or decrease like that that to me is a challenge so to me like yeah enabling buyers really getting aligned with you know their timeline and and consistently checking um to tie it back to medp pick like when I think decision process like decision process is one of those color codes for me that goes from you know uh red to Yellow to green back to yellow or red um if we noticing those micro commitments that people are making along that timeline starting to slip and be missed you know that's when we need to start changing these things we need to update you know forecast because decision process is is pushing you can see it absolutely and if you typically identify uh source of personas and we all have these in every single sector who can be gate uh Gatekeepers or showstoppers or you know I mean obviously legal can be one of them sometimes but Al there are so many other sub functions within kind of like the the the Persona that you're selling to that can close deals that that can shut down your deal and whenever though if those get to be involved in your deal that might also reduce the heat of your deal I would say yeah anise when we were I know you and I were talking about this you mentioned something about gamifying as well can you I love what you had like the tidbits on it can you share some of what you had around gamification of the buyer engagement yeah absolutely so it's not very sophisticated and I just opened it it was just kind of like a 30 minute thought once but it can definitely be iterated on and and uh improved but the idea here is that you kind of like measure the effort that your buyer is putting into the deal to help with forecasting so like plus one point for each information that you get related to uh your deal methodology minus one point for each meaning that they postpone two plus two points for each information provided where you can put a dollar sign or a percentage sign in front of it plus three if it includes a new stakeholder that is closer to the c or the economic or is an economic buyer in your call or within the process minus one point as it said if that person can be a gatekeeper or a showstopper minus two points if that same stakeholder who can be a show stoer kind of cancels your meetings decides not to show up or not does does not want to talk to you and just want wants to keep the interaction uh done via email with a person a procurement person in between right I've seen some of the biggest Enterprise deals that died because infos SEC did not even want to talk to us we would just have to communicate to procurement and that procurement person would then communicate to infosec so yeah that that's and again kind of like minus one point for each action item that they forget to to do or they're behind on or plus one for each one of them that they do accomplish in all time I I I love that and I think especially too it like you know a lot of our customers will do something similar with medic right they put together a formula based on how far we are are we red yellow green whatever like David was talking about coming out with a score that then helps to to drive some of that as well right something that just occurred to me too is I think we didn't we didn't talk about this but if you're leveraging Mutual action plans for deal reviews one of the biggest benefits that it helps Drive is eliminating all of that time that we talked about earlier about catching up and figuring out what's going on in the deal right if you as leadership has D have direct access to that plan and you can see the buyer engagement you can see where we are in the stage you can see the business case or lack thereof all of a sudden that just trimmed out 30 minutes on that deal review call where you were just spending getting caught up and now you can have those coaching conversations being conscious of time I have so many questions I feel like we could jam on this for another hour or two you know the when we were selecting this panel this was very conscious effort right all three of us sell to salespeople we are all entrepreneurial or or have our own Ventures or our own apps so I think you know for us we've kind of Taken on this Crusade really in the last six months of kind of this like death to the static Playbook right we want to eliminate the the original Playbook right when we all started getting onboarded and and trained as reps or when we onboard reps we give them a PDF or we give them a print out they look at it the first week and then they use it again right and so what I think is really exciting around this panel is that we're all really trying to focus on you know the tools and the the process to kind of support the adherence of the methodologies I want to give a quick second for the both of you go ahead use this be Shameless plug plug away what you guys are doing share Maybe some insights where can people find you and then let's leave the last you know 10 15 minutes here uh for a Q&A but uh David let's kick it off to you sure so definitely find me on on LinkedIn I also have a website called my deal coaching where I talk about you know the app I've built the books I've written different like downloadable master classes I've done I also do uh what we're talking about for companies so like I will customize the appropriate flavor of you know medic medic Med piic for an organization make it them their metrics their VI ERS you know their processes and then you know train leaders train sales people implement the the appropriate Tech into organizations and then as a whole you know sales Collective then pretty much does everything else so if you want some help in sales you know just let me know I'm I'm here to help you so that's it that's awesome yeah on my end you can definitely add me on LinkedIn email me I'm terrible with emails I have 5,000 R emails but if I catch it I'll respond either right away or never and yeah so about attention feel free to directly reach out or visit attention. te to sign up for a demo or an intro call so where we help is a capturing extremely objectively and really digging into your conversations every single element of your deal methodology showing you how your deal is evolving across all of your customer touch points so it's mostly focused on on your interactions as or your sales team's interactions with um with the customer and we stop at obviously Mutual action plans that's something that we do not cover today or or never actually and and so and so the last point is we give you full visibility on a what's happening with your deals what's happening with your customers and what's happening with your just even with your sales reps from a coaching perspective and in a way that no one has ever seen or done before because we love Reinventing the wheel over here it's uh it's really cool Tech definitely take a look at it thank you guys so as I'm sure I've mentioned already Mark firin you can find me on LinkedIn that's I'm how an is with email is probably how I am with LinkedIn I'm trying to be better but you can also just email me Mark at reca and really what we do is you know Mutual action Blends have been around forever they were static they were spreadsheet you know I saw this as a VP of sales and both as a rep where someone's giving us $200,000 and I'm sending them a janky spreadsheet with their logo pasted on the left right like if I was a buyer it wouldn't instill a lot of confidence so I kind of became obsessed with not only providing that better experience but also cloning my our reps and we've been doing this for about four years we were the first ones in the space but the space is starting to heat up now and it's it's really exciting because there's a lot of players they're all trying to take it their own different way but really there's three main pillars that we help with one is the execution right creating a framework and a repeatable process that every single rep can follow on every single deal right and we think that's the foundation for everything because if you don't en that nothing else matters two is all around what we talked about earlier which is buyer enablement right how do we give our Champions the ability to sell when we're not in the room and to be able to build that business case together in a collaborative way and three is a leadership visibility and analytics to know what the status update is of that deal because as David mentioned these are projects right whether you're selling SMB or midmarket or Enterprise these are projects that need to be managed there are timelines there are success and there's you know waterfalls that need to be taken into account so that's what we help with we kind of help take a traditional Mutual action plan into this supercharged digital sales room where you can embed your CRM Fields you can have your content in one place and you can really collaborate as a team and get full cohesive visibility but I'll stop there already seeing some q&as I want to leave some time Robert Paul's asked if there's any baselines or templates for Mutual action plans yes we'll be sending out a free spreadsheet template in case you don't want to invest in a platform but Robert I would recommend you schedule some time and we can absolutely help with that and then someone that had their hands raised for quite a while let's see Mark Dalton are you still in here let me go ahead and allow you to talk I think you had a question here there we go I just was telling you to open up the web chat which you did earlier so that's all all right chat's not working so that's an older question sorry oh good so awesome thank you Mark all right what what other questions do you guys have any Q&A and we'll we'll hang out for here for a couple minutes past the hour as well while we wait for questions to come in guys this was awesome I feel like we could we could Jam another two hours on this I really appreciate you taking the time on this and everybody else watching as well hopefully you all came away with a couple actionable insights I guess while we wait for questions then rapid fire David one takeaway for people watching if they if they didn't have time to listen to the 57 minutes what is the one thing that you're going to recommend for everyone here shoot I can never just do one but I'll try so I would say you know color code your deals beautiful anise man yeah just track your speak share if you can do it under if you can have any conversation where we speak under 40% ideally 30% of the time that will you have a great conversation you'll know that your prospect will be speaking a lot more and providing a lot more information than you just like trying to uh listen to your own voice yeah simple as that I love that and for me no surprise use Mutual action plans they are going to be the difference between winning and losing and enabling your buyer and I think we need all the help we can get right now because we can't just keep filling the top of the funnel and hoping for the best so we are in a different world and it requires leaders to be adaptive and Innovative and guys seriously thank you for an amazing presentation yeah Mark dton said great preso 100% agreed so if anyone else has any other question yeah thank you so much for setting this up guys I mean we can definitely see here that you're definitely passionate about what you're talking this was brilliant thank you Mark appreciate you having us of course let's do another one on Med piic that's that my that was my takeaway actually is we need to do one around Frameworks and methodologies and and playbooks so all day every day man I'm always always game awesome thank you everybody for attending if you guys have any questions you know where to find these people and we'll keep doing more of these so let us know if there's any topics that are