Part 1: Making the Mental Shift
Prologue: Just Like That
- Sales reps are rarely in the room for moments that create and kill deals.
- Effective sales reps don’t sell to buyers. They sell with them. They influence their buyer’s thinking about the problem. They enable them to deliver a clear, compelling narrative that gets their team aligned on what to do next. Which means sales reps don’t close deals. Buyers do.
- Your job is to create and enable committed champions for every deal in your pipeline.
- In most cases, deals stall for lack of urgency and loss of momentum. The buying team wasn’t aligned on the problem or its level of priority.
- [Champions are] the glue between three different sets of contacts in a deal:
- Daily users.
- Key stakeholders. These are contacts like SLIP (security, legal, IT, procurement)
- Decision-maker(s).
Your New Sales Job Description
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No Champion, No Deal
- It’s next to impossible to align a dozen contacts, each with their own set of competing priorities and busy schedules, without a solid champion. And often, multiple champions.
- Here are a few different tests you can use.
- First, change the channel. Close a conversation by asking, “Would you mind if I shoot you a quick text if I hit a question before our next call? Also happy to set up a Slack Connect channel if it’s easier?”
- Second, ask champions to lay out their buying process.
- Third, assign them action items. The best kind of action item is one that “adds value” to the process and gives you a clear, black-or-white measure of whether or not they followed through. Examples are calling a customer reference, sharing data for your business case, or adding comments to an internal memo (more on this later).
- Fourth, train them.
Life Inside the Enterprise
- When it feels like you don’t know where you stand in the sales cycle, here’s the thing. Your buyers likely don’t know, either. To find out, they’ll likely book another internal meeting to discuss next steps and force more feedback.
- Ideas are never independent of their messenger, and this couldn’t be truer in a corporate environment.
- Issues only become problems when they’re standing in the way of a priority. Otherwise, they’re just distractions. Not true problems.
- Part 2: Designing the Buyer’s Journey
Building Your Pipeline Around Buying Behavior & Bias
- You never want to negotiate terms until you’re confirmed as the provider of choice.
- Make sure your buyers set the pilot goals; not you.
- Deliver short-term rewards during long sales cycles.
The Buyer’s Emotional Journey
- Start by asking, How do I want my buyer to feel after this meeting / call / email?
- We started asking our prospects: Based on what you’ve seen, on a rough scale of one to ten, and ten being a perfect fit, how do you feel about working together? This way, we could step in before the dip. Oh, a six? Why not five? … and what do you think getting to an eight might look like?
Account Maps That Actually Win Deals
- Enterprise account mapping is about designing the flow of internal communications. Who needs to say what, to who, when, to keep a deal moving.
- Here’s an example of the end account map you’ll be creating:
- Create a short profile for each contact with three bullets:
- Buying role. Again, I like color-coding by role.
- Current priority. What project absorbs most of their time and attention?
- Key metrics. How are they evaluated? What company-level metrics do they impact?
- Reach out to partners and noncompetitive sales teams in your network who have sold into the account in the past. How did their sales process unfold? Consulting firms who have worked with the account are a goldmine of information, too.
- Remember, an account map is dynamic. Not static. So, you’ll want to revise and update your map as you receive new inputs, your deal evolves, and it grows hotter or colder.
- Use forwardable emails when possible to ensure the sender is internal, not external. Internal emails are always prioritized over external emails. For example, instead of the sales rep sending the proof-of-concept results back to Tina with Gina cc’d, we’ll have Gina forward it to Tina, cc’ing the sales rep.
- If you notice a contact who stays silent, fades into the shadows, or ducks meetings, shine a light on them. Are they a power user of another software? Are they opposed to making a change?
- Build a bridge between business units from up high, not down low.
- To keep your deal moving, you’ll need communication flowing from someone who oversees both business units — the CRO, for example.
- Not every communication that moves your deal forward is an email or a call. What standing meeting agendas, or Slack and Teams channels, will the buying team use to share feedback?
Part 3: Think & Sell Differently
The Discovery Roadmap
- Asking better questions starts by realizing that curious sales reps aren’t enough — we need to create curious buyers.
- Good sales questions are measured by the level of curiosity they spark in your buyer.
- Qualification is account research. It happens at the start of the cycle to search for a potential fit with a product based on straightforward questions and known answers.
- Discovery is continuous throughout the sales cycle. It searches for meaningful problems and uses open-ended questions that require reflection and collaboration.
- On the topic of seeking to understand, try asking: What’s something about this issue others you’ve shared it with don’t always seem to understand?
- On the topic of priorities and ranking problems, ask: I’m guessing [relevant project or problem] isn’t your full-time focus. Which projects would you prioritize over this one in your team’s next meeting agenda?
- To create greater buying confidence and conviction, ask: It seems like you’re getting by with [current process] okay. So why not hold off and come back to this project later?
- To start developing a business case, ask: Does your team have a standard structure or template for sharing new projects with everyone?
- To find the requirements your buyers are already sold on, ask: What do you believe must be true of a solution for it to work in your case?
- On creating — not allocating — budget: I don’t imagine you have extra budget for software just sitting around. It typically has to be created. So if we assume for a minute that you feel it’s worth the effort, how would you go about creating a budget for this?
- To reveal the personal motivator tying a potential champion to your deal, ask: Everyone tracks their work a bit differently. For example, I use OKRs. Are you personally working toward any certain metrics this year?
- Who from your team would share the most meaningful feedback with us?
- No buyer wants to feel interrogated. They want to have a conversation. Pepper your meetings with questions as they flow naturally, in between sharing your point of view and customer stories to break up the flow. Never pour them out in a constant flood.
Writing & Framing Compelling Problem Statements
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The Art of Crafting Internal Narratives
- Too much branding is counterproductive. The best color scheme is “camouflage.” It uses your buyers ’ branding, not yours, to create materials that look like they could have been created inside of the buying committee.
- We assign far greater value to the things we build, than what we buy or others build for us.
- There’s a major problem with sellers using battlecards. Every time you use one, you’re fighting a feature war, and top sellers do all they can to avoid feature wars.
Copywriting Shortcuts for Sales Reps
- The reality is every rep either is or needs to become a writer.
- When you can’t be in the room, your writing can be.
How to Avoid Screwing Up Executive-Level Meetings
- Generally, they’re thinking about:
- Seismic shifts in an industry
- Looming and existential risks
- Massive, untapped opportunities
- Executive meetings always go off-agenda.
- To be sure you can hold their attention, fill in this sentence: Most people believe _________, but actually, ___________.
- To discover if you’re truly aligned on priorities, frame up a choice for them: Are there certain projects this discussion will need to take a backseat to?
- The most likely outcome [of an executive meeting] is an internal referral. That referral is worth its weight in gold because it brings priority with it. “Do this, because it matters.”
- A good question for the end of [an executive] meeting. “How would you like us to keep you updated?”
Multithreading & Navigating Dysfunctional Buying Groups
- The question [your champion] and other buyers ask themselves is, “Am I better off in a meeting with you than without you?”
- Your champion can’t introduce you to someone they don’t know. So, it’s your job to come alongside them with research and outreach to new contacts who need to be involved. Invitational language for this might sound like: [New contact], I was hoping to include you in a conversation about [internal priority] with the [business unit] team next week. Would it make sense for you to weigh in on this? If this doesn’t sound relevant for you now, all good — [your business unit] tends to be closest to this topic at first, so I thought I’d reach out.
- It costs your champion something to sell with you — their social capital — regardless of whether or not your deal gets done.
- Getting to the decision-maker is a myth. There’s never one decision-maker because of all the people who can say no. While there may be a single “economic buyer” who signs the contract, everyone in the committee who can say no is a decision-maker.
- If you find that the buying committee keeps expanding, it’s a sign of dysfunction. You’re too multithreaded. To keep the committee functional, you’ll want to assemble and maintain a “minimally viable” committee. Just enough people to confirm the problem, create a use case, and clear the contract.
- Holding a group call to discuss pricing is rarely the way to go. The reason? People react how they believe they’re supposed to react in group settings. They’re less likely to share what they truly think. “Will I look like a pushover if I don’t push back on this?”
Making Your Words Travel: Writing for the Mid-Funnel
- When you get to know your buyers on a human level, send them a gift that speaks to that. No mugs, no notebooks. It should scream, “I see you.”
Building Mutual Action Plans
- The “decision memo” (your narrative-structured business case) is the why, and the “project plan” (your MAP) is the how.
- MAPs can help increase decision confidence after an executive is aligned with your narrative, but executives aren’t the main audience.
- When introducing a MAP to your buyers, explain the benefit to them. You want to very explicitly communicate, “This is not a plan to sell my software; it’s a plan to solve your problem.”
Running Demos That Don’t Suck
- Average reps run demos of their own product, but high performers ask their buyers for a demo [of how they do things today]. This is the “reverse demo.” When buyers demo a current provider. It’s magic for below-the-line buyers like daily users.
- To run a reverse demo, you’ll:
- Discover one or two workflows daily users spend 80 % of their week in.
- Before opening up your product, ask if they’d be open to demoing you.
- After, demo how that same workflow works in your product.
- If it makes sense for your product, turn over screen control.
- The idea here is you focus on showing: Outcomes, not operations.
- [Show] just enough product to create confidence you can deliver.
Why Buyers Hide Objections From You
- Instead of handling the objection, here’s a three-part framework you can use called understand, unpack, respond.
- Here are five phrases to confidently share pricing and address budget-related questions, before they become blockers.
- “You haven’t asked, but I imagine you’re curious about our pricing.”
- “The reason our pricing model is structured this way is so that you …”
- “How does that price range compare to your expectations?”
- “Some providers charge as little as $ X for this. Let me share why we charge more and why we might be the smarter choice for you.”
- “Let’s say our solution was free. Would we be the right fit for you?”
Creating Authentic Buying Urgency
- The question to ask ourselves, then, is how do we tap into and help our buyers act on their own internal sense of urgency?
- Ask, “How long would you say this has been a problem?” If it’s a considerable amount of time, you’ll need to help your buyer see reality as it actually is.
Building a “ Hardwired ” Proof of Concept
- Every POC has five basic elements to it:
- Scope
- Timeline
- Hypothesis
- Measurables
- Next steps
- Pilots and POCs aren’t the same thing. POCs strip out 80% of a product’s scope to focus on a small subset of activities. Pilots are a full product rollout, but only to a subset of customers or users in a test market.
Part 4: Mental Frameworks
Measuring Deal Momentum
- The Four Drivers of Deal Momentum
- Expanded Reach. Involving executives and key employees early drives more deal momentum than interactions at the bottom of the organizational chart.
- Effective Follow-up. Seller activities aren’t factored into deal momentum — only the activities buyers participate in.
- Increased Commitment. Each interaction becomes more valuable in the late stages of a deal, as the buying team reaches consensus and grows increasingly committed to seeing a deal through.
- Shorter Cycles. Making more time to engage with a sales rep, over a shorter period of time, demonstrates that solving a certain problem is a priority that matters.
The Change Equation
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Trust: The Hidden Pipeline Metric
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The Minimum Viable Sentence
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Managing Up: Internal Communications About Your Performance
- Nothing kills your reputation more quickly than deal slippage. Consistently calling your shot … only to miss the mark.
Becoming a Non-Anxious Seller
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