Closing big deals for Research and Development

How to create outlook signature

coming up on today's episode of the sales man podcast it is great if you can close 10 deals instead of omega deals what we see in the research or what we saw in the research is that you actually tend to sign a mega deal out of a existing deal so it's very very seldom that you go in and sign a mega deal the first thing you do to become a big b2b enterprise company you can't do it without doing mega deals hello sales nation my name is will barron and i'm the host of the sales man podcast the world's most downloaded b2b sales show on today's episode we have two legends this is an incredible episode we have david clattenburg and we have borah brandstrom from mega deals advisory which you can find over at megadeals.com and that's exactly what we're getting into on today's episode of the show how to close a mega deal one what it is we define it two who you need on board and then three how you can qualify and start to move down this process of closing mega deals everything we talk about including the book is available in the show notes over at salesman.org and with that let's jump right in today's topic we're going to go a few steps further than we ever had i have done it in the past and we're going to talk about how to close not just any deal but a a mega deal so just to tee up the conversation and we'll see where we go from here but just to sell the audience on this idea of closing mega deals why would i want to close one mega deal over 10 smaller ones what is that what is the benefit of going down this route and this approach well i mean it's great if you can close 10 deals instead of a mega deals what we see in the research or what we saw in the research is that you actually tend to sign a mega deal out of a existing deal so it's very very seldom that you go in and sign omega till the first thing you do so start with 10 and then grow from there and you know a lot of people talk about cross-selling etc but you you often find the opportunities to do a mega deals within the accounts you actually have by growing them also it's very important since you know in the research we saw that 1 of the deals could actually stand for 80 90 percent of of the revenue and the profit so the importance of these deals are massive so you don't want to lose one of those who can't as well sure add anything to that yeah just add to that i mean you know it's quite amazing when you think about it but mega deals is the second largest monetary flow in the world and you're like what so so m a's right m a's mergers acquisitions are the largest monetary flow in the world mega deals is the second largest monetary flow in the world so to david's point when we looked at all these fortune 500 companies um it was only just really a handful of a small number of accounts that stood for a big volume of of the business right so it's really the kind of the holy grail of your business um and the um um sorry i lost my train of thought hold on um rainmaker uh no no no no um i completely lost my training thoughts sorry well sorry let me ask you this let me ask you this dave just to clarify on on that last point because i think this might blow people's minds as well is that um one mega deal is 80 or 90 of one sales reps um revenue that they generate or is it one mega deal could be 89 of the revenue of an organization right so i mean some of the scale-ups that we meet on a regular basis they can have like one account or two three accounts that stands for 80 90 of of their total revenue so that's the importance of these big deals so imagine signing another one of those right and how how much faster you scale and that has a huge impact on the valuation of the company as well so one of these mega deals could actually you know double um the the um revenue and it could actually you know triple or five x the the evaluation in the end yeah and i just remember you just triggered what i was going to say you're right and it's so so it is the business if we look at one of the biggest swedish companies well uh um it's a well-known brand but i think it's 16 or 17 accounts stand for over 80 of the volume and it's one of the biggest swedish companies and we saw the same trend across the fortune 500 companies that we looked at right so to david's point it makes a huge difference the other thing that we and hypothesis that we've come to we don't have enough data to say it is like this but we haven't seen anything contradictory yet to become a big b2b enterprise company you can't do it without doing mega deals right and we were even we were interviewing a gentleman called mark ogden who built alecqua you might know that the company was first in the world with sales and marketing automation he sold it to oracle for 800 million and and his point was that you know founded mark oregon mark horgan whatever it is oh sorry mark organ excuse me so so i'll just say that again so we we were talking to mark um oregon who um uh started alecqua uh and first with sales and marketing automation sold it to oracle for 800 million um he made the point that when you get to around 5 million air as a business you have to go upstream and start doing big deals if you really want to grow otherwise you get stuck so it's back to your question it you know in the research that we've done when we looked at these companies it's really really important to be able to do mega deals for the for the health and the growth of the business and i just wanted to give the audience a bit more context on this right because you're not just doing a mega deal and hitting your sales quota as an individual contributor as a salesperson and getting a pat on the back and well done you're probably off speaking with the board members and sitting with your ceo and getting kind of getting promotions right this isn't just a you do your deal and you've hit your quotes for the year this is especially if you can then manage the account and if you're at the top of the food chain in your organization with regards to that this is something that could be your whole career could be based around right yeah and to your point on average when we looked at the mega dealers were interviewed on average they were doing one million dollars a year on bonuses doing mega deals so it's also for the individual to your point well it's a very financially lucrative place to be and space to be in for sure officer okay so there's a bit of context there but let's give it another layer of context is there a set of key definitions that make up what a mega deal is is it just the biggest deal your organization has ever done or is there other criteria that kind of locks it into that mega deal category it's actually our pro grabs but in in the book we the research looked at companies fortune 500 companies they also interviewed you know 60 of the i would say one of the you know the best mega dealers in in the world across the globe fifty percent or or forty percent actually were were women uh and and um what we what we saw uh was that it's sorry take that again so um it it's actually up for for grabs so uh a mega deal definition by the book is the mega deals book is from 10 million dollars and upwards but a mega deal for you is something else that'll make a deal for us sure uh but a mega division in this context is involved with a lot of change management uh it's often a combination of hardware and and software and you you you buy as a team on the buyer's side and it also requires you to sell as a team so it's much more complex in a lot of senses it's not just the the the money it's a lot of people on the buying side inside the organization but also outside of the buying organization so it's a huge ecosystem yeah and to add to what david's saying when we studied in the research that was the definition we looked at some of the biggest deals but what we've what we've really experienced and observed as we start to go in and help companies do and orchestrate these type of deals is that there is just a bigger a demand from scale ups so companies that are scaling that need to do mega deals to really boost their growth like david was saying i mean you signed two or three mega deals in a scale up and you can you know two three times the volume of your business which five 10x is the value of your business um and it's just as relevant there and i think the the the key difference will is in a in a midsize complex b2b deal you tend to have a handful of stakeholders that you can actually get hold of or meet right and with a good dialogue technique and with a good negotiation technique the individual can actually um close a deal like that right sure whereas in a mega deal you start to have significantly more stakeholders you have a much more complex ecosystem with different players impacting the ecosystem and it it goes from being an individual in a sales process to being a bigger team in an orchestration discipline but you could still be signing deals that are you know um half a million a million two million three million but it's the complexity of the deal that defines it if that makes sense that makes total sense okay so let's get uh slightly more practical here i guess what is the difference then if the audience will be familiar with a uh what we call systematic selling or a complex sale is there a set process for closing a mega deal versus what would traditionally be called you know a complex sale that's hundreds of books have been written about at this point is there a process for a mega deal and is it different or how does it differ to to that of a complex sale all right let me take a stab at this one so that's a really good question there are we've seen some really some very very clear differences that also reflect as uh and you're alluding to it well challenges that we see a lot of enterprise businesses face as they try to go about doing mega deals in a similar fashion as they would in a less complex deal so let me give you a few of those so the first one is rainmaker dependency all right so in the research we did we saw that these mega deals were done by one or two in a scale-up for example a ceo and someone else right and then even in some of the biggest deals that we looked at it was four or five names that were being flown around to help orchestrate these deals and without them the deal wouldn't happen right so so that's what the the second thing that that then generates the second difference is that that um the point i made previously which is being too dependent on too few stakeholders right so as i said previously in a mid-sized deal it's enough with one or two and you you drive that deal yourself but as as the deal gets more complex it could be 10 15 20 50 200 300 stakeholders that you need to influence right um and you go away from being individual sales person dependent and going from a sales process to more of a an orchestration discipline right and and the ecosystem significantly grows so all of a sudden you have players outside of the organization that you're trying to close that also impacts the deal politicians um suppliers third party consultants etc right so so first you've got rainmaker dependency secondly going from very few stakeholders to a much broader ecosystem now to organize and to to be able to orchestrate you need to go from selling to orchestrating this leads to the next challenge will right and the big difference is that to be orchestrators right you then need to you need to work as one big team right so it goes from individual to these rainmakers being orchestrating and orchestrating the you know the hand the the ecosystem in their own organization the ecosystem and the customers organization etc etc and to be able to do this they can't do it alone so this is where marketing becomes extremely important in a mega deal because what we see today unfortunately is that marketing and sales in many organizations are working in silos so marketing tends to be more of a leads generator they hand it over you know to a sales person then then then goes and does a sale in a mega deal that does not work well right so marketing is like imagine like air support right flying over the deal and you've got these rain makers as troops right um and they're dropping these kind of bombs as a bad analogy but but but but but what they're doing is they're doing three things they're creating really good messaging turning that into really good content you know short videos long videos um blogs posts etc and then pushing it through different distribution tactics like social selling ip targeting retargeting etc and influencing that huge ecosystem because one individual can't do it right so and that leads us to to i'll just make two more points around this which is which is a big difference so for sales and marketing need to work together to be able to orchestrate this but even the whole organization needs to work together from product to finance and all that kind of stuff but what then needs to happen is in what we call industrializing sales and marketing and scaling sales and marketing right because as as the rainmaker is orchestrating all these different stakeholders and marketing is supporting uh as air support right um you then need to be able to scale your content in videos right that's being pushed out into this ecosystem but you also need to um the repetitive tasks that a salesperson does and explaining the value proposition over and over again and explaining how to implement bringing in the i.t person and bringing in compliance you know that's coming to the meeting for the 500th time rolling their eyes because they hate these meetings you know you can turn them into short short videos so just to summarize it's it's a long answer but there is there are some it's a really good answer a question will because it's really rainmaker dependency right so how do you scale the rainmaker secondly going from few stakeholders to a significantly larger stakeholder moving from selling to orchestrating right um that puts pressure on on marketing and sales to work significantly tighter as kind of as in ground support right which then puts uh onus on scaling and industrializing your efforts um i hope that makes sense but it it as as the process becomes more complex so does how you manage and orchestrate the ecosystem within a mega deal sure okay about 15 questions come from this first one if we're going to kind of start with the foundational elements of this of how it's built and how it's led um you said the word orchestra a bunch of times the borer is there a conductor to the orchestra is this led by one individual or are these deals so big that they are tend to be led by group yeah so so the conductor the orchest orchestration leader these are these rainmakers that and we see these are these are you know skilled people who have uh often years of experience but what we come from is i would say the the traditional sales so both borah and i've been rainmakers but in i would say in the old world so when we were interviewed for the book we were kind of blown away because we never we never been able to articulate how we did it so it was the first time that we actually got an instruction how the uh serena williams or when gretzky's or slaughters of the world actually do it and what we realized was that we we need to become more media because we're moving into a lot of more film making we need to create more posts articles that to use a word that this boss word today but drive thought leadership but really you know really understand the audience engage it um you can add a bit of fun into it i think you are good at that will and also you know really educate and you know don't go for for the mass masses but really find your niche and your target group really understand the pains that they have etc you know all about what i'm talking about but the thing that holds this together all of the things that borah talked about the glue that holds this together is actually the messaging when when we read the messaging part the messaging architecture in this book we were quite blown away because i never seen anything like that before and i i worked with sales for a long long time so i'll we'll get into the messaging in a second but i guess we should take a step back here how do we know if a mega deal is on the table say you know take me selling medical devices here in the uk uh to the nhs uh we would sell i would sell individual camera systems that be used in theaters and occasionally you kind of once or twice in in the what seven eight year nine years i was in the in the business i would sell uh you know a whole operating room or a series of operating rooms so then you'd be in the kind of millions and multiple millions and for the organizations i worked for they were i don't know if you'd cuss it as a as a mega deal we could come back to that a second perhaps but they were big deals that made then the whole nhs trust that had bought them then buy other stuff on top of it and over the course of 10 years maybe it would then become a mega deal so how do we know when a customer is is a potential how do we know when it's worth investigating further with a potential customer with a current customer whether there's a potential opportunity to work uh more closely with them that's a really good question so let me just answer that in two ways so the first thing you're talking about absolutely backs up by the researcher what you're talking about is a land and expand sure and we haven't seen a single mega deal that we've looked at there are i'm sure there are exceptions but we've not seen a mega deal in our research that you do from day one so you come in and you do a huge mega deal it's exactly the way you describe will you come in you do a deal you gain the trust because mega deals is all about trust and as you you gain that trust you start to expand it into a larger deal into a mega deal so that's number one second piece of your question is how do you qualify or disqualify how do you know it's a mega deal and this is a brilliant question because what we saw on the research there was a huge difference between how these mega dealers operated and how you know traditional sales people and sales people doing mid-sized deals operated and as salespeople we are schooled we're schooled to think about sales as a numbers game right the more you the more you fill the pipeline with the the greater the chances that you sign something and in transactional sales i agree but in mega deals it's the other way around so the mega dealers are actually almost religious about disqualifying mega deals right because doing a mega deal takes so much time money and energy and we see a lot of companies just running after these deals because it's a nice shiny object to sign right um but if and there are a number of criteria we call one of them key initiatives in our book um if they don't fill some of these criteria the mega deal won't happen so these mega dealers actually go in with a disqualification mindset they're trying to inject themselves from a deal because they know that they they go for fewer deals but they increase the chances and likelihood of signing the deal so win rates go up what would be an example then borrow of one of these criteria or a trigger event that would trigger then the salesperson to go hey there's an opportunity here as opposed to waiting for the buyer to say hey this is great and we would like to work with you further so key initiatives is the one we talk about in the book it's one of the five cornerstones and the what we saw in the research was that if in a mega deal if what you're selling doesn't align to and support the buyer in achieving one of their key initiatives so one of their you know top strategic priorities big bets whatever you call them the mega deal won't happen because it's in those key initiatives where the money and the resources is invested for the bigger deals so one of the one of the quickest thing and i think one of them as a business that you can start implementing tomorrow start you know start to understand that the obviously the business that you're going after but what key initiatives do they have and is you what you're selling as a mega deal helping them achieve one of those if not eject if yes well that's the first trigger to move on and very practically tell me if i'm wrong here but it seems like we could just go into our crm find our top 10 15 customers whatever the numbers are look on the home pages go over if they're a public company any shareholders notes come up with a list of keynote tips and then just have them in the crm perhaps on an important document or a page and then we should just be maybe every quarter or so just having to flick through to see if they've changed and to see if our product or service can help with them am i on the right tracks with this definitely and and you can have this in a even more strict way so one approach is to have like a dragon's den so you have maybe the head of sales head of marketing maybe even the ceo depending on the big these companies and and you come with your different prospects or customers and say they they have just this key initiative or this they change this key initiative into this and i think we have a go ahead here this this is an opportunity and and then the the dragons say yes or no and when you say yes you double down on them and add their support with all the different tactics like uh abm retargeting um social cell enterprise social selling and all the other tactics so you really you know focus as one team on those specific accounts so it's really about tabora's point disqualification is about saying no say no to maybe 90 maybe 80 to have a bigger yes to the ones that you're really going after sure so boy you you cringe slightly when you said this word and i think it's cliche and um not overused it has a purpose but it can be misconstrued as well this idea of thought leadership right because what does it mean i mean you've got a blog does it mean that you've got a youtube channel does it mean you've got 50 000 subscribers on on whatever exactly so let's can we narrow this down because maybe and i'm picturing here an audience remember they're driving along in the car and they're going oh crap i think i've i'm on to something here there's there's one organization what we're doing this project they've got tons of money and the it allows you on their key initiatives my sales the director managing director of the company has given me a pat on the shoulder for just getting in the door what does this individual need to do from a perspective of their own individual thought leadership to get them to a position where they are then i guess able to have these conversations without being looked down on as just a pesky salesperson trying to claw more cash out of their customer what do they need to do to position themselves as an expert that a large organization would want to deal with that's a really good question and it's it's you're actually kind of you really hit the nail on the head when it comes to the heart and soul of mega deals and you know we call it the messaging architecture that you were referring to before so so what we see what we see more and more is that companies are getting better at bettering the b2b world at actually starting to scale so you know using account-based marketing tactics and techniques to start to scale their message targeting stakeholders and organizations so we're seeing that but what we are we're where i think they're a little bit behind still is is the message and the content that they're scaling right so to your point well the message and the content is still very much around the benefits and features of their products me me me me buy from me right um and the problem with that is twofold the first is you don't differentiate yourself because most of the competition is pretty much saying the same thing so the client's there going okay what is the difference between all these competitors and the second thing is you then end up differentiating on on on price and we know what that does for margins but what what we see the best mega dealers do is they follow a complete different framework what we call the messaging architecture and split into three three sections the first we call the fundamental messaging now the fundamental messaging gets a customer from i don't know who you are to i'm engaged and i want to buy but we all know well i've been there i'm sure you've been there we've had customers saying i want to buy and then we lose them right sure so the next the next part of the messaging we call deal closing messaging and it takes the customer from i want to buy to i want to sign all right and then we have the third part of the messaging which is orientational messaging which draws a much broader audience um to take notes of you your business and whatever you're selling now so what what the fun what this does it rather than talking about the benefits and features of your product you're actually educating challenging and entertaining your audience so we don't have time to talk about all of it in this session but i'll give you a little snippet so so the fundamental messaging rather than going in and talking directly about the benefits and features of your products some of the better mega dealers and companies look at the macro environment that your clients in what's going on and describe that macro environment and the change going on in that drive and explains the change drivers and why they need to make a change because if they don't need to change then why would they want to buy something different now that change creates some kind of pains and gains and they're really good at understanding the pains of these clients based on the changing a macro environment now still you have companies doing this doing this relatively well but then what we see happening well is they go straight they say look this is the change going on environment here's the pain it relates to you come and buy from me they miss two very important layers and one of them is what we call category choice and sub category choice so just because your client needs to make a change because of a pain it doesn't mean they're going to buy from you they've got different categories of options that they could go down right and then they have different subcategories of options they can go down and then and they evaluate all these different options right so you know should i should i do this or should i do that or should i do this should i go down this solution or that solution right and so what the messaging architecture does it is actually helps you it helps you paint a picture of the decision process that the client needs to go through from change driver panes down to category choices and subcategory choices before they even think about buying from you and if you create really good content around the change drivers and pains the category options and subcategory options without even talking about you as a business or limiting that you drive phenomenal thought leadership that engages your audience and helps them through the buying journey towards your category of solution that you're offering to solve that pain i don't know if this is making any sense but um but that's the one piece now the deal closing messaging i'll just very briefly talk about the first piece gets them engaged but we also see there's a huge difference between getting a customer engaged and as they get closer to buying it's complete different content it's much more around risk mitigation so if i but if i you know if i spend five million on this what are the risks for me as a business so you need to mitigate those risks or deep dives i mean if you're buying a house the closer you get to buying the house the more you want to know about the details of the house right it's the same thing in a big deal so in the deal closing phase you need to shift more towards risk mitigation deep dives referrals how-to and all these kind of things so i don't know if that's it's easy to explain in these five six minutes but if you do this really well and we haven't even talked about orientation yet but if you do this really well it diverts the conversation from talking about you as a vendor and much more around driving thought leadership around the decision journey and why they should go down that journey um and buy from you if that makes sense well that makes total sense i won't think here and tell me if you guys agree because i'm doing some of this but on a tiny scale in that and and there's a there's a point to this that i'll come to in a second but it seems like a lot of work right to put all this together and and tell me again if i'm right or wrong it seems like the further you go down this process the more in depth the content has got to be perhaps you start off with a series of youtube videos outlining the the problems the changes in the marketplace by the far end of this it's reports or books or coming on site and consulting and things like that right so with all that said i'll ask you this david how does this um scale from a perspective of once we've done all the work once can we do this again using a lot of the same content with other mega deals is this just something that we do want to have to start again every time or can some of this be reused that's a great question and and the answer it can be reduced it can be reused but refused reused uh definitely uh some some parts of it you need to actually change but not all of it so typically when we help our clients we see that the the change drivers on top or described if you like on top of the tree chain drive are are often pretty much the same the categories can also be pretty much the same or the sub category as well but you need and also to refine into that specific customer so there will be changes but a lot of it you can actually reuse i can't give you a percentage but it's not definite it's not definitely like that do you do it for one customer and then you have to start all over again it's not like that you can reuse it also depends on the industry of course well so for example if you're within a specific industry or a vertical to david's point there's a lot you can reuse just tweaking slightly but if you change industry for example then the whole messaging architecture could change so it really depends also what audience you're targeting and within what industry vertical deal we're talking about yeah so we i mean we come from a company american express they have three today they have three different business lines so of course you need different um messaging for for all those three and you will also shift it uh depending on the customer you have in front of you but yes there's a lot of it that can be reused yeah because one of the reasons asked this and i'll pitch it to you both now but it seems like in some organizations this will go it depends on the culture of the organization if it's a if it's a startup if it's uh has a founder perhaps that has done this before in skilled organizations they're going to embrace this with open arms right because it's it's ip it's intellectual property adds just all this documented adds value to the organization going through this process run seeing if you don't win the business will help with messaging for every other deal that you probably put together and so there's real value in all this but what happens uh david bora when we we start to pitch some of this to a sales manager or sales director we get slightly favorable food chain and we really think we're on to something but the the leadership are not bought into this what do we need to take to them to convince them to allow us to spend the time energy and resources to at least have a go at closing one of these mega deals yeah so so that's when i remember in the beginning i explained the difference between the mid-sized deals and the and the larger deals so what you're explaining now is you're expanding the ecosystem of influences right um and to your point as you get into a mega deal you've got you know different functions different departments senior management etc impacting so this is when you need to start to scale your message so how do you scale your message once you've got the messaging nailed you use it also in your meetings face to face which is now more on zoom of course but you know in your discussions because you know where they are in the messaging and you can direct your communication but to your point if you start to then turn it into the the content we talked about whether it's a short video a long video a post right and then you start targeting the stakeholders that you've identified around in the ecosystem so to your point management would be in that ecosystem because you need to influence them if you start to if you start to direct that content through social selling through ip targeting through retargeting webinars or podcasts or whatever it is right then you're starting to influence this ecosystem without actually physically being there or through through digital means so it's the combination in a mega deal it's the combination of the physical touch points you know whether it's a meeting or a call or whatever and the digital touch points of using these different distribution tactics and distributing the different parts of the message and it's when you get that combination right you're able to orchestrate i can also add the importance of a broad entry so a good point sometimes i did a mistake back in the days that i focused too much let's say on the cfo and that happens to be a gatekeeper right and we all know what happens you can't take any turns or anyways left or right or you know above him because then you lose all the trust and he or she says why do you talk to um the head of sales all of a sudden we had this conversation i owe this project so broad entry is key in a mega deal and what does that what does that look like is that um i i can talk to my perspective of selling medical devices is that going seeing the cfo who probably physically has to sign something to get the deal done but also getting involved with the surgeons the the theater staff is is it very literally just going broad and speaking to lots of people within the account yeah so the first piece would be mapping the ecosystem which is the second cornerstone right so to your point all those names that you said you would map up and you'd say here are the i'm just making this up the 25 stakeholders in the organization that we need to influence and here are three outside the organization that we need to influence so first you map them up then to to david's point you you what we call divide and conquer so maybe you would go and talk to three of them one of your team would go and talk to two of them another part of the team would go and talk to another three of them but at the same time so now all of a sudden what you're doing is you're infiltrating the organization that you've mapped up with several people in the team um at the same time so you're building relationships um uh very early simultaneously so maybe product would go and build with product compliance would go and build with compliance i'm just making this up right so um sales with sales someone else for procurement and when you do this simultaneously you're building that that broad consensus and then it's difficult for one person to say why are you talking to him or her you know back to david's point if you if you do it if you first talk to one person you do that for a month or two you're kind of stuck in that in that trap and and it's important to also mention that when you moan borah say go and talk to you mean uh digitally as well right so that's really really important so from from the beginning you have you use all these different tactics and and you're not only working with marketing top of funnel but you you help you have the support of marketing all the way through and even after you've signed them yes we all know about buyer's remorse why bmw invest a lot of money once you actually bought a car because then you start to think about did i make the right decision here and that happens of course in a mega deal as well right so it's super important to keep feeding them with the with the right information sure i'll ask you both this one question we'll start with yourself david what is the one thing if you have to narrow it down just to one thing that you see people organizations um orchestrated groups do wrong when they are trying to put together a mega deal what's if you could narrow it down to just one specific thing david what would it be i would say the easiest thing to do something about even tonight or today is look into the key initiatives so you probably don't disqualify enough and even if you're doing mid-sized deals you should probably if you take a look at yourself disqualify say no to a much larger number of accounts and double down more on a few of them and you know really tailor taylor to that industry or even better or if you're doing mega deals into that specific account you're going after and double down on that one i would say and what about yourself borah i don't want to kind of uh cause a massive argument and a fistfight between yous but do you agree that that is the the biggest thing that you personally see or anecdotally see go wrong with mega deals or what's your thoughts on that no i i it's a really valid point and just to be let me compliment then to add a different perspective um um there's two i'm struggling between um and i'm going to cheat here and say both of them uh what one of them is the inability to to build trust uh that's the that's the essence of a mega deal whether you're not mitigating customer risk or to david's point going after the right the right deals um or whether you're unable to to influence the ecosystem it's all around building trust and the second thing i would say and sorry i'm saying two here but the second thing i would say is we see a lot of organizations um unable to make the shift and the transition from two things one how they how they go about doing mid-size deals that we talked about initially and secondly transitioning to what david was saying earlier to be going from being more analog to more media so going from the kind of physical presence to combining it with the digital presence so i would say those two it's the inability to build trust and the second one is making that that transition um to kind of the mega deal space and when you say trust the answer's undoubtedly both right but is it trust of a a brand you know i can trust red bull or coca-cola or is it trust of the individual that's you know i i've listened to david elizabeth i've i've heard the your quote thought leadership i've listened to them on bruce podcast i've read the book and i trust them as an individual person which one is is most impactful in a mega deal you or me um i know i would say both of them are extremely important so you need to work with both of them i mean on a personal level there are some things you can easily do to build trust i mean if you say that you're going to send something on a wednesday send it on wednesday and then be in be on time et cetera et cetera and then you have the other part and what what when borah talks about you know building trust i immediately start to think about two things it the one is that we tend to talk too much about ourself our product benefits and features um so as borrow said we're schooled to talk about these things and we forget about how they are viewing us and what risks even if there are just perceived risk risks but there are a lot of risks um in in doing these kind of big deals and in a mega deals in a may deal and if you're a smaller not that well-known brand how how do you how do you come across as um you know trustworthy it's not by telling how great you are it's it's really understand what they are thinking about you so there's a great saying you never get fired from buying from ibm right and that's that's just because of this because we are our our brains are very very old we haven't changed that much so you know back to khan i think fast and slow and loss aversion we are 2.5 times more um how do you say it's likely to be likely to move away from from that pain or risk than going after you know opportunity and pleasure and pleasure and the upside so we have to think about that when we sell or we we we market something so how do you mitigate and you can't mitigate everything right it's also important to understand so i can mitigate this this i can mitigate me maybe to 50 but we have to live with that risk and if you don't bring that up to build trust and your competitors come in and talk about these things then um you're in a bad place yep for sure i love it well i've anecdotally only ever worked for just by fluke i guess more among anything else the best medical device companies in the industries and i've closed so many deals david just on the back of working for this company with a blue logo not really any much more than that and it's as you described in an acute situation where a surgeon has your uh endoscope or camera inside a physical you know a real human being who's your heart's beating on the table there they'll pay a little bit more they'll work with you they'll use your consulting services just because of that brand recognition so i think there's real value in in understanding that for the audience especially perhaps you know there's some of the audience right now fortunately or unfortunately who are looking for jobs who have been through uh redundancies different things i think there's an understatement in people on the the benefits of working for a great brand with great products and great organization and i think there's often an over emphasis on sales skills and and hustle and why would you want to make your life hard by working for a crappy company i've never really understood that so i just wanted to double down on that point and with that chaps only tell us a little bit about mega deals i've got the book here in front of me for everyone who's watching this on youtube clearly you can't see it if you're listening to this on on the podcast the audio version of this show but tell us about the book where we can find it and where we can find out more about both you guys as well yeah so so the book really describes what we have talked about today and a lot more of course and it's a it's a great discipline it's a it's a true guidebook and it i actually it's the first book in the world that combines all these different this discipline into one discipline and i i never seen a book like that before even if you look at mid-sized deals if you look at the biggest deals in the world there's no other literature and and if there is please feel free to share that with me on linkedin i really want to know and read that book as well and just to be clear and david um just out of what david's saying um you'll find literature out there that talks about the sales element yeah you'll find a lecture that talks about the marketing element you'll find literature that talks about social selling and stuff but today's point we've not seen anyone that's written about a discipline um that puts all of this together in an orchestration discipline and for me that is mind-blowing world because when you when you look at what came out of the research so we were just telling you that mega deals is the second largest monetary flow in the world you know um over you know less than one two percent this is from the research but as one two percent of the company's client stood for 80 of their volume the holy grail of their revenue and profits um um only a few rain makers in every business can actually orchestrate these deals and nobody's written about it it's like really that's unbelievable so it's um um and that's where the research started by by by the authors um yeah and you can find it on amazon or megadeals.com our website it's like 30 30 bucks something like that yeah good stuff well i'll link the book i'll link both your linkedin profiles i'll link the mega deals advisory and the website in the show note to this episode over at salesman.org and with that chaps i really appreciate your time i appreciate your insights on this i love this topic it's absolutely fascinating and i will thank you again for joining us on the salesman podcast