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um thank you everybody for participating um i'm hoping that it becomes more interactive than me talking um because quite frankly in these workshops i think we can all learn from each other quite a bit so before i um get going just so i have an understanding how many people here if you can i don't know if there's a way to raise your hand or saying are in the kind of 0 to three million ar phase okay so early how many three to ten got a few and then more than ten okay so this is going to for the people who are in the 10 plus this might be a little bit hopefully there's still things you can pick up for those in the very early stage this is awesome that you're doing this now because i was reading an article the other day and it was from a fitness trainer and how he was talking about how his clients were all expecting all these whizzy amazing exercises and to constantly be excited so stephen when you said this might be mundane yeah it should be and this is sort of the basics of a good fitness routine is you know what push-ups are kind of boring and so are squats but they're pretty critical in order to build the muscle to be able to build upon that and do other things so what we're going to talk about here is building a sales process um does anybody here know why a sales process is so critical that once that feels brave and wants to share because you need something consistent they'll be able to track monitor measure and then improve bingo perfect because board meetings aren't super fun when you're constantly projecting something and then in your next board meeting you were off and look nobody's you're never going to hit it right in the middle like dead on every time but in order to show predictability and in order for you to be able to really understand what's happening you need a framework right and i always say sales is a mix of art and science if you think about it this is the science part of things is you can't repeat things if you don't know what's happening and what great and what good and what terrible looks like so does anybody here have a typical sale right now anyone how many right now have um are still primarily founder-led and you're still kind of figuring founder-led sales where you're doing the bulk of the sales okay what this is great what i would ask you please start documenting everything because the next stage is hiring sales reps and how do you replicate yourself how do you go from being the best salesperson to essentially being the best sales engineer where you're supporting the team where you don't have to be involved in every single deal of every single at every single stage that can't happen if you don't start documenting everything what questions are asked what objections come up who's involved in the meeting what do you do so what i thought we would do and what i've started doing is we can go through and talk about a sales process i'm not going to say this is your sales process but hopefully throughout the in the course of the next 50 minutes you'll understand the framework to then go out and build something that's right for you this will not be right for everybody this is primarily what i'm building here is primarily full disclosure more of a sales lead if you're plg some of the fundamentals will still be there but if it's primarily plg you might have some different pieces involved okay but if this is for more of sales reps what i want to do is show you the framework and the questions you need to ask yourself to start documenting later on kind of phase two once you've you know done the squats you've done the sit-ups you know you can you have that let's we'll start adding plyometrics and we'll start adding more fun exercises on top of this like what kind of questions do you ask to be able to coach the sales reps and to be able to interrogate the sales reps at each stage to get a deep understanding but you can't do that you can't genuinely understand what's happening until you you lay the basics how many times just out of curiosity before we go here have for those of you who do have sales reps have you had your reps send out an email saying 10 off if you can sign before the end of the month and gotten silence nobody okay i'm seeing a bunch of smiles so i'm going to take that as a yes it happens all the time do you want to know why that is because there's a sales process and the only person merely going down the process is you and you're negotiating with yourself because your buyer isn't there yet so that's why we're going to start defining things so let me share my screen okay so let's again ignore some of the names of the stages they may not be relevant to you specifically this right now is for me to talk you through how to build a sales process and then you know i'm happy to share this this framework and then you go through and you just you refine it for what's relevant to you now hopefully i'm not going to be doing all the talking but so i'm going to ask you to participate um but i've prepared some things just in case so let's just start with the basics meeting booked right it's gone from being a lead you're working really hard this is they've agreed yes i am going to give you time it might be half an hour it might be 15 minutes um i've agreed to give you time here are the things that you're going to be starting to look look at okay stage 0 you haven't really spoken to them you're just doing research one of the things you're going to start looking at is what percent is it likely to close the answer is probably not much so i've got this filled in as we go but who wants to start talking about what do you think the buyer is doing right now before the meeting's even booked have you thought about what the buyer is doing i guess would it depend on like how where they are of the problem they have i.e are they in like problem exploration space or like solution exploration space good point sometimes they don't even know they have a problem you've just peaked their curiosity what should you be doing at this stage but the meeting is booked what should you be doing before you even walk in to that meeting or log on to that meeting do your research definitely know everything about the the customer you are trying to speak to his company the person who is going to attend and then you listen to what he has to say how many of you be honest actually do the research before really do the research on the customer i know a lot of problems it depends how you got the lead maybe you've received maybe it was outbound lead so in that case maybe you targeted the specific country the specific customer in that case definitely you know about him but if it's an inbound then still everyone checks i mean if you get a lead the first thing you do is check who is it is it a company is it an individual is it a legitimate lead is it a spam what is it what else should yeah no that's true but a lot of times what i see is poor preparation for going into a meeting you might look the person up on linkedin you might look at you know the company but how often do you genuinely prepare lists of good questions you should be asking how often do you prepare you know understanding what is their competitive what is the competitive situation who do they compete with right what you really need to understand who that customer is especially in this day and age they've agreed to give you time you need to make sure that you are you are really prepared because we'll get to the next stage the next stage is about them right and if you're asking them the basics that you could have learned from doing some basic research you've wasted both of your time some other things but virginia you're right i mean it's depending on where the lead comes in it's different i want you all to start thinking about from this okay what information is critical to know in meeting booked maybe it's just you know maybe there's again early stage we'll talk about it but i want you to start really documenting who she who should be involved from their team what do we want them to learn meeting booked is just they learn that you have empathy right you understand that there's a problem and maybe you can solve it or you maybe not even a problem you understand what their day-to-day is like right and that's the key to booking a meeting is not really pitching who you are it's showing that you understand there's a problem and that you can you can solve it okay one thing most companies don't think about is who else in the company needs to know the details of that stage right how often do you book a meeting and you don't you don't let marketing know necessarily that that lead has converted or that potentially you can start changing changing how you market and target to them so what i've done is i've gone through and filled in the buyer is acknowledging there is a problem to be solved it doesn't mean that you're the right answer it doesn't mean that they're actually going to do anything different they might determine there's something else but these are the kind of things that i'd like you to start thinking through okay has anybody has anybody done this does anybody want to talk about a process of what you do or maybe we can wait until we get into the next stage where it's a little bit deeper right this is the meeting is booked and this is why it's so important to think through this and to start putting the framework together because as you add sales reps being able to systematize this there is so much information and data that you can learn and especially feedback to product right for product to understand probably more in the later stages but we'll go there we'll get there so just just one question actually um i'm george by the way um regarding the research um like especially in early stage you often i mean we all have a thousand things to do and we also have quite a lot of um discovery course each week um and it's it's it's just also a matter of timing i think i mean i would also often be like to be much better prepared and go deep into our um our leads um but often it's just a matter of how much time you can spend on it and want to spend on it and it's also like question to you would you rather then maybe make a few less calls and try to postpone some other ones later um or yeah how would you and rather have like five very very good calls a week or how would you how would you manage that you tell me which would you would you rather have five very good calls or ten ten calls yeah probably yeah probably probably uh five very good cards no i mean look everything is gonna i'm not gonna give you there's not one answer for everybody what i'm saying is people right now especially in the age of where it's all on zoom and people are back-to-back calls you want them to know that you've done your their research because you can get to the to the meat of things much better and not spend the time asking questions that quite frankly you should know and i'll turn that back on you how many of you have been the subject of calls where there's a sales rep who's asking you questions that quite frankly a little bit of googling would have would have solved anybody how does that make you feel just makes me laugh you know you get something and it's so poorly thought through um and they haven't even we get them as motion capital we get people trying to set pictures constantly that we're notion the collaboration company to sell products to us it's hopeless yeah it's look i can't i can't tell you i can't emphasize enough prepare especially now especially as budgets are tightening up especially as people's time is more and more valuable if you don't if you don't encourage your sales reps and set a culture of researching beforehand you're going to be wasting you're going to be wasting time so the next stage typically again i'm gonna i'm gonna keep emphasizing typically usually the next stage is discovery right still pipeline um there's when i when i forecast i tend to look at there's pipeline which means yep it's there then there's best case meaning it'll it should come in and then there's commit which means you're telling me it's coming in and that's not when the contracts are already like clean you know you need to start getting your sales reps to start thinking and and putting some professional commitment but let's talk about what is the buyer what is the purpose of discovery who should be doing most of the talking personally the other side of the call how many of you spend discovery demoing and pitching and talking about your product be honest how many first meetings are you mostly demoing how do you know what to demo so this is this is a step and being candid the discovery and kind of the next stage often blend together sometimes in the first meeting once upon a time it was advised don't even talk about yourself at all in the first meeting that's changed a little bit right there's an expectation that you have to show a little bit more um you have to you have to give to get right you have to prove that you're worth that them opening up to but the bane of my existence is for example when my more junior reps open up meetings and they get nervous and then they start demoing and then it's just basically a feature dump that has absolutely nothing to do with what the client's problem is and they also they also waste an opportunity because once they've demoed on that first meeting it's very hard often to get more people involved for the following if that one person isn't excited so oftentimes you can just show a little bit and say who else should be involved let me let me prepare a demo who else should be involved to see this which gives you a an excuse to get another meeting but also get to the right people in the room it also lets you demo to their problems as opposed to giving a feature jump because we all get really excited about our product because we spend all day thinking about our product you want to know who cares about your features nobody the client doesn't care about the features they clear they care about the problem it solves we've all been guilty of this we've all been guilty of showing cool features and the client's like that's nice so let's think about this what's the one thing that we're showing that we must make sure that they walk away understanding in a discovery that we have the answer to his questions i mean that we have the answer to his pain point first we listen to identify the pain point and then we will show exactly that just that okay so so one of the things is why do anything has anybody heard about the concept of the three wise okay there's there are three questions that if you can't answer them your customers won't be able to answer them and quite frankly good luck getting a signed contract why do anything why your company and why now right if you can't answer all three it's really hard for your customer to be able to do this i actually go so far as to put together documents for for prospects how many times has a deal dragged on forever because there's no compelling event because you haven't been able to get them to actually sign they really want to do it it's just the why now is not there if you can't answer that and you can't help your customers help you answer that you're not it a deal will drag on and it's one of those deals that every quarter it's gonna close it's gonna close and it keeps those are the ones that have the you know 500 and something days in salesforce um but i want you to really start thinking about these may not be right for you these questions who's involved from the team who should be involved from their team think through in each stage what do we want them to learn right and again in discovery it's just scratching the surface you want them to have enough confidence that they're going to go through what i've done for the exit criteria here is i've overlaid medpick there's probably it might be that you have partners that you want to start getting involved because you know going to the next stage they can help you move forward that's probably for the more advanced more kind of um larger companies if you're kind of in that early stage you might not have partners okay does this all make sense yeah jen there was a question um on the chat from apologize kelso celso is it possible to clarify what chair of sales we're discussing is this enterprise field inside smb no that's a fair question um the the level of detail this is a 100 this is a must for enterprise sales sales but you still want to put some rigor around the smb again partially to start getting a little bit of frameworks you might not go quite as deep on the inside sales and i know a lot of inside sales sometimes you aim for you know like a one or two call close absolutely fine like i said you can sometimes condense some of these stages together but you want to start thinking through what does a great sale look like and this is why i'm asking you to start documenting everything now because when you start overlaying sales reps they're going to need to know what to do and what good looks like will there be deals that are their own work of art and that don't that somehow have a life of their own yes there will be i'm i'm not that naive and i've you know certainly seen deals that defy every expectation i've seen and i quite frankly i hope to see this again i don't know if i will i've seen a seven figure deal close in two weeks that doesn't happen often i've seen deals that are like 20k take two years but again if you're not figuring out what's happening and you can't answer those questions this gives you the framework to have that critical because it's just as important to qualify deals out that are never going to close as qualify them in okay and again this is the 80 20 rule you want to give your team a framework to be able to follow okay so you've had the meeting discovery i still consider discoveries they're still not necessarily a real deal right we're still trying to figure out what's going on does anybody is there anybody here that has in their discovery that has anything that i'm so i'm trying to figure out how to make this bigger anything that i'm missing does anybody do anything different in discovery we we try and um adapt the following process like to the person and to the the business um so if if they don't seem to be the type of um individuals that are interested in lots of conversation is kind of get out the way and get the product to them as quickly as we can and but but try not to force one process on everybody um after that discovery phase because it will be different okay i i can appreciate that and there are again in this day and age the the days of spending an entire time just talking about the customer they wanted they want to know what's there but this again like i said this can be condensed there's just some basics but i appreciate that there are there are exceptions so again typically again ignore the name but you might go into some kind of a business validation right this might be and i've combined a couple different potential names here these might be split into multiple stages i've certainly seen that and to be honest i tend to split business and technical separately for purposes of time i'm trying to condense talk to me about what happens here when you're doing when you're validating the business the business case when you're doing the demo talk to me about what what typically happens in that meeting or meetings this is usually more than one meeting who do you normally see get involved typically i'll see business users i'm really happy if i can start seeing some of the technical teams involved what i don't want to see is it constantly being one person again okay i'm i'm generalizing here but if you're constantly speaking to just one person it's probably not just one person who's going to be making the decision right how many people here have had deals where you thought it was all one person and at the very end somebody else flew in and complicated things that you didn't even know about nobody ariel put on on the chat so you know just oh sorry you know what i i'm struggling because i can't see the chat and i thought i'd bring so she basically the budget holder the user possibly the it teams maybe legal procurement etc you need to be thinking about all of these things at this kind of stage um and that is part of the reason we'll go to the bottom one of the reasons that i'm so pedantic about medpick is it reminds me what questions i need to ask and maybe i'll do a separate session on medpick one day um but in discovery you're just figuring out who what's the pain what metrics are they gonna judge you by and who might be a champion they're not really a champion until you've tested them um does anybody has anybody ever had somebody who you thought was a champion in the minute that things got tough they immediately folded oh i can't do that right you got it we've all been there that's coaches tell champions act so you always want to test that person who you think is a champion to see if they will do things or if they're just really good at talking and then the minute something you ask them to do something like oh i can't do that they're a coach that's okay but they're a coach so one of the things again when we start talking about medpick is i want to know who the economic buyer is i want to know who's actually who's actually paying for this is this important to them what's the what's the decision process how does a company actually make a decision i literally ask that and i'm not going to turn this into a med pick discussion i'm going to kind of keep this brief but half the time who you're talking to is absolutely no idea how to actually how the company makes that decision you can start figuring out by your conversations who the competition is based on what questions they're asking you and you can you can ask them too but what do we think in business validation or kind of once the discovery is done does this seem sort of fair for what the buyer is doing how many you actually how how many people here actually think about what the buyer is doing in each stage presumably they're going to be doing some referencing in the background as well would you think that would be a later stage um you know what to be honest in this day and age quite frankly they're probably looking on g2 yeah they're asking their peers that's a good point you're not the only source of information they're going to that's a really good point there's lots of back channeling and i mean one of the things that that's interesting about this kind of approach of course is as to tell us the question from earlier is what's is it enterprise or smb or is it self-serving sales leader or problem the thought process is very similar no matter what the stage and what other whatever the motion yeah and again for the smaller do you need to go way into depth on some of the smaller deals probably not at this stage you should be probably mapping out the org chart partially this is also for ongoing let's say they sign the deal you want to know who else is is involved so you know where the expansion might be able to come from potentially different use cases potentially different different users of the of the product more usage if you're a usage based type of company okay the two question when we talked about the three wise here before it was why do anything right if if they can't figure out why to bother doing anything like you're nice but now it's why us and why now this is where you're starting to lay this those seeds where not only do they know it's worth solving a problem but that it's worth spending money on solving the problem constantine i have a question just can you double click on why do anything like in terms of i know it sounds like maybe an obvious question but is it that you're trying to validate that they actually have a problem in the or like yeah how can you how can you ask that question in a number of different ways to really understand what's going on so sorry this is more from the from you're a good point i'm not phrasing this right this is more from their point of view why should we do anything you know if you are selling let's say you're selling um what what does your company do uh we're a data analytics company okay why do anything you know right now we can't figure out you know our data is a mess we don't have insight into our business we're missing sales opportunity like what would be a reason for companies to even talk to you um well yeah that they're leaving opportunities on the table because sort of like data is siloed away into different teams okay and what's the impact of that when if the if the data is siloed you end up just building a more efficient slow business okay they're probably leaving money on the table they're spending money and unnecessarily their teams are probably frustrated right they're probably there there's probably lots of reason that's the why do anything once we get to stage two business validation why are you the best solution to solve that right so i guess just reiterate it's kind of like we've identified a repeatable pain can i validate that the customer recognizes that problem and and appreciates the impact and the value i guess that's the essence of it isn't it yeah why you know why are you better better than using you know google sheets or there's there's tons of of data analytics solutions out there that are not solving all of the the problems in the most elegant efficient effective way right and that's where i literally have my teams for the bigger deals it's just one page three columns why do anything why us and then we'll get and then why now but it's it's to hand to your champion because internally there are discussions and there are people probably championing other ways of doing it including doing nothing or including what they already have but if you can arm your teams and again this is part of the reason that you that you say okay in this stage you want to earn your teams before you even get to negotiation because once you're negotiating if you're if then you're educating them it's a much harder you're starting in a hole if you already have people who are so passionate about your business procurement's job is to secure the best deal for their company it's not really to pick the vendor right it's to secure the best deal and if you have armed your champions really well before you even get to negotiation it makes that negotiation so much nicer because you're negotiating from a position of strength and it's not like you know it doesn't become about price price will always be part of it i get that that's part of procurement's job but there's more to negotiate on than price does that make sense any other questions on that what else can i answer if you take nothing away from this first of all have a process and second of all three wise if you can't answer those three questions assume your customers can't and assume they're not like you might get to a deal but it'll drag out and right um i want you to also to think about what happens what best practice should we be doing demo putting together a mutual business case it's amazing how many people don't work on business cases with clients they just give them one has anybody here ever been had a sales pitch where they told you and we're going to increase your sales by 20 and therefore like everything is laid out has anybody had those how many of you actually believe that has anybody ever believed when somebody's like we're gonna increase your sales 20 and therefore we anticipate you're gonna make 20 million dollars right okay that'd be a little bit more but nobody believes it but if somebody sat down with you and said okay let's you know once they're a little bit bought in i don't want to be so presumptuous as to give you this data let's work this out together to be honest they've kind of done the calculations beforehand in their head so they know what their what kind of numbers they're looking at but how much more believable would it be if somebody said tell me what do you think like based on what you've heard if we you know can you see how this would increase your sales anywhere from 10 to you know based on you know past case studies let's usually it's 20 let's just say 10 or 12. let's be conservative does that does that seem fair when you say yeah that seems fair you're buying into it when you co-create the business case it's much harder for you to then reject okay so this is where you start building the business case again you want to do this before you even start negotiating because it's really hard to do once you start negotiating because then you're negotiating on price which is not a super fun negotiation okay i want you to start thinking in each stage what you need to learn in order to really confidently move to the next stage has anybody here ever gotten to all the way down the funnel and you realize you're missing a huge piece of information that would have been really helpful to know does anybody want to share we've all made mistakes trust me i can tell i can sit here and do three hours on mistakes jennifer has made in the sales process of across her career yeah sorry philip uh we have this quite a bit we gotta have actually a question because we get a lot of inbound uh requests and then we we handled them and was like and you assume that the why now question is answered because they're coming to you and i said i have this problem can you help me and then we have a technical somewhat technical solution so you need to ingrid like built it into your software so we went down huge sort of demoing um sample data mapping we did pre-work for them another meeting they had five people on the call only to end the call to say well it's not going to be on the roadmap until q4 and uh so you know it's another six months from now so we could have actually spent our time much better so it's one of the learnings who was like okay we got to move the whole discussion first and we also had like some people where we had the decision makers in the room but they thought they could make decision and then it turns out they can't uh so we had like business buyers in the room they realized i think you asked get like i.t resources in place and i t had no resources so we now we don't talk to them anymore but uh yeah stuff like that so when they said let me ask you this when they said oh we can't do this right now it's on the roadmap for six months why do you think that was to be honest you had a simple question i didn't i was like i was a bit shocked because like we went through all this exercise back and forth they did what we did work and then it was like oh it's not going to happen for until november um so it's kind of weird i'm probably into i haven't asked them i should ask them yeah so some of the things again part of it is building up that business part of the why now is building up the business case where if you can show that for every month there's there's two there's a couple ways you know there might be a natural why now one is if you build up a strong enough business case and you can show that there's i'm making something up 15 000 euros or pounds of impact per month you can wait but that's gonna cost you seven the equivalent of seventy five thousand is that okay the other fun thing is you know when do you need to be live we need to work backwards into implementation and there's you know time for how long is it going to take to implement how long is it going to take to bed in there's the old nugget of we need to get you into the implementation schedule which most companies there it really isn't a problem to slot them in but everybody freaks out about getting an implementation slot but if they're saying oh we're kicking we're kicking the tires it's not as urgent a problem for them to solve so part of again part of having this process is knowing what to ask when a so you can either start increasing the urgency or if it's really not that urgent you can then figure out and align your resources right and that's part of decision process and decision criteria of who's involved when you're saying you know decision makers i always ask the question you know who's formally involved in this and who's informally involved because there's always somebody informally involved okay right about now you probably also want to let your product teams and maybe your cs teams know that you're having these conversations so they can start planning and product can start seeing you know what what's resonating any questions on this on we're past we're now we're past we're past discovery now this is this is a real deal this is where you're committing resources right and philip thank you for sharing that that was really that's nothing that not every single one of us has dealt with has anybody else been there where you get super excited about a customer and and then they just drag it out thank you i i appreciate you sharing that and it's not easy we've all been there and it's something silent worst case they go silent even even if you validated the timeline you asked the right question the question during the discovery process and uh they they told you the exact timeline when they needed to implement you start uh trial you know everything and at some point they just stopped communicating yep and it's really rude and it happens so how do you how do you sometimes use the sales process to help mitigate that you need to follow up with every single person who was in in contact with you and during the discovery process that's why it's important to have multiple contacts uh in the company because if your champion uh i don't know switches jobs or something you you're in danger of losing that deal yep it's also this is why when we talk about being multi-threaded it's not just having multiple contacts in the company it's internally as well it's about orchestrating not you don't need to bring the whole cavalry to every meeting but there are so many times when i've had deals that i thought were lost or they weren't communicating but somebody my solutions engineer was communicating you know they could get to the tech person and have a separate conversation and find out what was going on that's part of the reason you want to start thinking about is who should be involved from their teams but also who should be involved from our teams as well and look it will always happen they will there will always be cases where and we always take it personally not realizing that as much as we like to think that we are the center of their universe they have other they have other stuff to do as well but oftentimes when you can start thinking about how you can orchestrate a deal and have other other touch points it makes it it so it's not just you calling it's there's somebody else who often times has a different a different relationship okay i've i found a quite useful kind of mental model for that it's almost like a three by three matrix where my top row is the c suite and then you might have the director and then the manager or the user and then you can map people to people so who's going to manage the relationship with the these two or three cc people who's going to manage the relationship with the technical people and it's a very simple kind of way to visualize that kind of problem just a question um on that actually um so we do find out quite often who will be the the who's for example the decision maker and we are talking to some head of department but we know for example the cfo at the end will be the decision maker do you have a smart way of actually getting them on the table bringing them to the table because i mean you can't of course force them to just bring the cfo into the meeting and yeah that would be actually quite nice to know how a smart way on getting them involved what a great way to test your champion huh maybe they don't have to come to the whole meeting but hey hey mr champion hey mrs tim miss champion you know i just want to make sure look i know you're investing a lot of time if you can help me i would love to just have 15 minutes with the cfo to make sure that that this is really a priority for them because i don't want there's nothing the cfo wants less than their team spending time on something that quite frankly they're never going to sign off on and that's a whole separate conversation but it's it's respectful that i want to make sure that a that it's a problem and and that they um they understand the solutions and that you're not going to get to the economic buyer and that that would be the economic buyer in that case you might you might not get to physically speak with the economic buyer in every case depends on the size of the of the deal you know if it's a smaller deal they're not going to but it's a really good way for you to test your champion is to say hey can you can i just get 15 minutes with this person i just want to validate so they you know make sure that this is a priority for them okay peer-to-peer can work quite well in that kind of instance as well isn't it where you you know i said what i really like you know you've got a great cfo who you've got a great relationship with another customer you know perhaps i could introduce you to your cfo to this cfo or to my cfo if you have one internally as well kind of um just kind of disconnects it from yourself um as it and doesn't feel quite so as if you're selling you're you're kind of helping and supporting yeah good point so i'm what i'm not doing is i'm not going through because i'm assuming you can read faster than i i can talk and quite frankly there's nothing worse than somebody reading bullet points to you so i'm assuming you're reading this as we're going i'm happy to send out a copy of this framework for you to then adapt but my biggest pet peeve is sitting there staring at a screen when somebody's reading bullet points to me because i've already done it but what you want them to learn at this at this point after business validation they're they're bought in right now it comes down to the negotiation ah negotiation can i just please ask that you make sure that you're both negotiating please don't put something in negotiation until you know that they're also negotiating that they're not still trying to figure out is this right for us is this tactical because that's where you get those end of quarter if you sign by the end of the month we'll give you 10 off good luck getting that 10 off because quite frankly if they're not ready they're not gonna sign and has anybody ever then gone back up like no they know that you can reduce the price good luck forget it you've just lowered your price the only person you're just negotiating with yourself okay so oops i should probably have put the let me do this sorry let me freeze this you freeze okay sorry i thought i had everything all planned um so negotiation what is the buyer doing they're figuring out the various options to create the best value that does not mean the best price always it's the best value and what they're doing is there's different things there's different levers and that's a whole separate conversation of is it term is it support is it price is it there's lots of different levers and i can't emphasize enough they're negotiating to get the best value for them and as long as you as you can turn that switch and this is why everything else beforehand is so critical because you are negotiating from a place of strength if they genuinely understand what makes you different they've bought into the business case that you can you can have an impact on their business they understand not just that you're solving a problem but you're solving a problem that actually is more urgent than they realized and they they've it's become more urgent than they've realized because as part of this and again one of the the next pieces to this is overlaying the types of questions that you ask that makes the client or the prospect realize things that they hadn't even realized so they're actually answering and they're selling themselves has anybody ever been in a situation where you've asked a question and all of a sudden you can see the light bulb go on for the client and you knew the answer but it's quite frankly don't want to say insulting but it's nobody wants to be sold to right nobody walks saying like yay a meeting somebody's going to sell to me they want to learn something and so when you ask this is part of why research is so important beforehand when you ask questions and you've planned through this you ask questions that you know as they answer it's going to be like that aha moment and sometimes you can see that that light bulb go on they're selling themselves okay so once they've gotten there you're negotiating from a position of strength because they've realized the pain is more urgent than they realized they realize quite frankly they can look like a hero by solving this this is all about the prospect right um what are what are what are you doing i hate the word closed plan because nobody wants to be closed like we all say it but hey can we help you work on a clues plan i always call it a map mutual action plan because then it feels a little bit more collaborative and it's you know hey if you know if you want to be live by this day let's work backwards okay we need to get the security review done by this date they might not even know there's a security review hint most of them don't know i would say in 60 of your deals the client will have absolutely no idea what needs to happen themselves always ask them have they ever have they ever worked on a deal do they know what has to happen can they find out because there's always paperwork that comes in at the end um validate the process who has to sign do they know they need to sign has anybody here closed a deal um after noon uh or after one o'clock on december 31st yep did anybody close a surprise deal at the end after after one o'clock on december 31st nope because people are pretty much checked out by then but you can absolutely close deals after one o'clock on december 31st if everybody who needs to sign knows they need to sign and if they don't know they need to sign quite frankly they're probably not looking at their phone or they might be but they're not you know they're not looking for the okay i have a question here jennifer shouldn't you have already validated their sales process i mean how they usually buy um during the the discovery code usually that's one of the questions i asked i mean how do you usually handle this how the typical buying process looks like for your company this is something i need to know from the early stage to be ready for it yep and well i find it too too hard to get this information at this stage um well you're still in negotiation and you're confirming the paper process because how many times are there often internal signatures right i know who signs but actually there's six people internally who need to sign as well before it even gets to that last person okay so does that just be one okay but if you don't this is why you confirm right can i just confirm and you're you're dead right can i just confirm is it one person who signs or are there internal signatures oh good point i don't know it might be there's just one but if you don't ask you don't know and there have been so many deals that have died or slipped because there's two people that need to sign that actually are they planned a trip to bali three months ago right like it's nobody plans a trip to bali spur of the moment maybe they do but if you know that's going to happen are they going to be available to sign no is there anybody who can sign for you know this is why you ask way in advance you're right you need to know this in advance okay um what do we need we've got about five minutes um left perfect um basically we want them to feel that they've negotiated a fair deal right um finance probably needs to know about this okay i'm gonna get a little bit quicker make sure that prospect understands some of the trade-offs they might say you know no i don't want to pay for this i don't want to pay for enhanced implementation okay i understand that here's the value that you might be trading off make sure they understand the trade-offs and then just going to sorry trying to i might rush through some of this a little bit negotiation the sale is agreed so in this case they've agree they've agreed the sale right the deal can still die and i still see deals died we've negotiated we've got a great price again that's when you have to start it's it's still precarious they've said yes they haven't signed right you need what the buyer is doing they're probably negotiating like the legal terms warranties and you know the kind of the boring stuff that lawyers love which is why yay there are lawyers um and business people kind of zone out on some of this stuff but what are we doing we're again to your point we're negotiating we're making sure all the other paper processes are complete security reviews are the bane of probably everybody's existence has anybody here had a deal slip because at the last minute there's a security review yep we all have and if you haven't you will if you don't ask about that beforehand um you know what should we learn what do we want them to learn okay and then closed one is closed one like we all kind of know that and you know close one there's still things that you want to start planning and who's involved but i'm just conscious of time so my point kind of to sum everything up if you don't plan for what happens in each stage and virginia thank you for bringing that up because if you don't ask and you don't tell your sales reps and you don't train your sales reps to ask early on certain things then you're going to be having that uncomfortable situation of going into a board meeting and saying yeah this deal slipped it shouldn't have slipped we could have done that but you know had we asked the right questions and done the right things it wouldn't have known it would close later i mean you know it may be that it was never possible but you're in control fair point but again look is this like you're not hiring robots are they going to do everything exactly 100 no but this is so you can start having repeatable so when you are looking at your sales funnel and you know when your teams are telling you a deal is in negotiation you actually know what should be happening in that stage and who should be involved and is it really a negotiation or is it just we're negotiating because i've sent them pricing which is not really a negotiation i'm not sure if costas in saying goodbye or want to ask a question just just one last question if you don't mind jennifer um i guess you mentioned sort of like how this is like enterprise sales but there's some nuances of this that you can bring into product like growth where do you see product like growth like how do these two sick worlds combine most effectively from from your experience and what you've seen sure you still want to start thinking through in each stage of what the customer or the prospect user is doing in product led growth what should they be doing what are some of the triggers that gets them to the next stage before we can actually convert them and consider them a paying client so it might not be that you are as actively involved you're not having phone calls but there's still things of who might be involved right okay at this point if we see that they're stuck at a certain stage this is where sales assist comes in and nudges them um this is what we want them to learn these ah-ha moments at each stage if they haven't had this aha moment they're probably not going to move to that next stage so it's like i said this is more designed for a sales lad but you can still think about it these questions of who should be involved what do we want them to learn what do we maybe need to learn you know are they sharing this are they stuck on certain points um so you can still think it through we've got um we've got a session cover quite a bit of this next thursday um with harrison one of our other go to market experts um and we're going to be looking at the fundamental you know how do you make decisions around product versus sales lead where do you start how do you start how do you build that process you know our our philosophy is that wherever you start you're going to end up ultimately doing both um and um you know but it's the philosophical approach i think here which is really really powerful to think about how and why people buy and how and why you sell yeah fantastic thank you great thank you very much thanks everybody enjoy the rest of your day thanks bye do you want to hold on second gen oh she's gone