Transcription
[Music] Good morning everybody and welcome to episode 300 of 30 minutes to the president's club. My name is Arman Faro and I'm here with my co-host Nick Skielski. And folks, for 5 years straight, every single week, whether it was when we were on sales teams, whether it was when we were hanging out in Hawaii, whether it was in between vacation, we have hopped on this show. We have gotten on our mic. We have packed our mics in our bag. And we have interviewed a top seller or leader out there in the world. And we have become way, way, way, way better sellers because of it. And our goal today is to share with you 15 tactics that truly changed the way that we sell in the last 300 episodes.
Nick, why should people listen? Well, to your point, across the last 5 years, we've been exposed to some of the world's best sales trainers, reps, and leaders who literally sell in every single industry. We've talked to people in SMB, in mid-market, in enterprise. We've talked to people selling real estate, selling tech, selling services. And most of the episodes, we're like, "Damn, that was really good." But there have been a very, very select few where I'm like, "That's actually going to change the way I'm showing up on my sales calls." And so what we did is we distilled this episode into the best of the best of the best of literally the last 5 years. So you can go pick up and steal and use this stuff on your sales calls today.
And so the way we're going to go through this is we have five categories and we have three tactics per category. So three cold calling tactics, three cold email/overall prospecting tactics, three discovery tactics, three sales process or deal management tactics, and then three leadership tactics.
So Nick, let's start with number one in the cold calling category.
Right. So the first one in the cold calling category is something that we learned from Jeb Blunt, which is called the ledge. And it is an objection handling technique. When you get hit with an objection on a cold call, I don't care how long you've been cold calling, when you get smacked with, "I'm not interested," or, "I'm in a meeting," or, "We already have a vendor for that," it hijacks your brain and it shuts you down for a second. And in order to overcome those objections, you're going to have to be able to respond moderately intelligently. But it's impossible to do that when your brain is literally hijacked. And so you need a moment or two to be able to figure out and recalibrate to figure out how you should respond to that objection. But you can't just sit there and say, "Wait, hold on. Give me a second." And so what Jeb recommends is that you use a technique called the ledge, where you have a predefined statement that you will use to buy yourself that second before you actually respond to the objection.
So for me, my ledge is the statement, "Shoot, this one's totally on me." So, when I get hit with the objection, "I'm not interested," my response is, "This one's totally on me. I guess you probably would have reached out to me if you had been interested." And then I can handle the objection. When they tell me, "Hey, call me in 6 months," my response is, "Shoot, this one's totally on me. I guess I've got a knack for calling people a couple months before they're ready for stuff like this." If they tell me they already have a vendor in place, my response is, "Shoot, this one's totally on me. I should have figured you'd be using something already." And so that's not where I stop, but that gives me a second to buffer against that emotional turbulence that I get hit with when I get hit with an objection. So that's called the ledge. It's from Jeb Blunt.
Number two, this actually made it into our cold calling book. And we learned this from Jason Bay. It's called chunking up. So a lot of times when people try to articulate the problem they solve to a senior executive, they think, "I don't need to get super technical or tactical on the problem. I need to get big picture, high level." But then they end up saying really generic things like, "Most CROs really care about hitting their revenue targets." And while that's true, you could literally be selling any solution in the world if you just talk about generic problems or generic outcomes. So chunking up is when you have a very, very specific triggering problem at the champion level and then you chunk it up and you explain what it means at the executive level.
So, I'll give you an example of a problem that I would say to someone who's like below the line. If I was selling compensation software at PAVE, I might say like, "Hey, Nick, look, the reason I'm reaching out is during Q1 merit season, most compensation teams are buried under a mountain of spreadsheets with literally like 17,000 VLOOKUPs." Now, that's an operational problem that the champion cares about, and that's going to trigger them, probably get them to book a meeting. But to get an executive to care, I need to explain why that spreadsheets problem leads to an executive problem. And so I'm going to say, "Look, Jay, the reason I'm reaching out is usually during Q1 merit season, most people leaders are freaking out when they see their team buried under spreadsheets running their merit cycles, like doing VLOOKUPs and stuff, because it actually becomes really hard to oversee managers and making sure that they're making equitable comp decisions." That's an executive level problem that is caused by a champion level problem. So chunk your triggering problem up to the executive level without losing specificity if you're pitching to a C-level.
All right. So, the first tactic that we've chunked together, Arman, for this last takeaway around cold calling is one way that you can open a cold call that I use, which is called a tailored permission opener. And what a tailored permission opener is, there are three pieces to your tailored permission opener. The first thing that's going to come out of your mouth when your prospect answers the phone and they go, "Hello," is not going to be your name. It's not going to be an ask to tell them why you called. It's literally going to be something that you saw about them, context for why you called them in the first place. From there, you're going to own that it's a cold call. And then you're going to use the fact that you led with something about them and you were disarmingly honest about the fact that this is a cold call as a way to get permission to pitch.
And so what that might sound like is, Armand answers the phone and he goes, "Hello." I'm going to say, "Armand, I just finished reading the press release about that office opening y'all had in Tacoma." And I'm going to be honest, this is a cold call, but it is a fairly well-researched one. And I'm wondering if I can get half a minute to share why that press release had prompted me to call you. And then you can totally hang up on me if it doesn't make sense from there. What I'm doing is I lead with that office opening. That's something about Armand that can't be templated or genericized. And that gets him to sit up and pay attention. And then I just tell him like, "Do you want me to tell you why that office opening press release made me call you?" And that curiosity piece, plus the fact that I owned that this was a cold call, usually gets me permission to pitch.
The other opener that you can use is called the "heard the name tossed around" opener, where your goal is for them to actually forget that it's a cold call. So the key here is you're going to lead with something that shows that you work with other people just like them. So if I was calling another like sales podcast host, I might be like, "Hey Jane, we work with a few other guys over at um 30 Minutes to President's Club. It's Arman from Podcast Inc. Have you heard her name tossed around?" Even if they haven't heard my name tossed around, what matters is they've heard 30 Minutes to President's Club tossed around. And nine times out of 10, they're going to sit up and they're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be like a total jerk to this person because they're working with someone that I respect." One of the biggest areas I see people screw that one up, Armand, is they think that like, "What if they haven't heard my name tossed around?" And that's not the goal of that opener. The goal of the opener is to make it seem like they should have heard your name tossed around. So you have to act like they should have heard your name before, otherwise it's going to come across like, you know, you're a rando, and it totally breaks sort of the frame you're setting up with that opener.
So, what happens after either of these openers is you're going to eventually have to tell your prospect what the heck you do. And this is where a lot of sales people end up shooting themselves in the foot because they hit their prospect with a value proposition or pitch that the prospect's eyes and ears just glaze over and they're like, "Yeah, we're all set. I'm not interested. Thanks anyways." The value of your product doesn't really mean anything to your prospect without the context of a problem associated with it. And so when you tell your prospect that you have AI workflows or a single pane of glass or a single source of truth or back office optimization technology for them, you're now putting the work on them to figure out, okay, what am I actually going to do with AI workflow technology? And you're putting the hard work on them to connect the dots of the jobs that they have to do, the problems they're dealing with, and how your tech would make that go away.
And so our recommendation is instead of leading with a value proposition, lead with what we call a problem proposition, where you're actually going to articulate and paint a movie scene of the biggest, hairiest problem that you think they have that you can actually make go away. So, if I'm selling billing software to a law firm, my problem proposition is going to sound something like, "Well, look, Dave, the reason that I called you is typically when I'm talking with a CFO of an insurance defense law firm, folks like you get driven crazy by all of the deductions, the rejections, and the appeals that you get when you send your bills to your insurance carrier clients because I know those folks will like nitpick the bills to death. And if you use the wrong word on the bill, they refuse to pay for research or things like that." Uh, and so we work with about 300 other different law firms helping them scrub their bills before they even send them so that they don't have to deal with those deductions and rejections. I'm not sure if you're open to learning more when I'm when I'm not cold calling out of the blue, but that was why I called you. And so if Dave, the imaginary CFO in this scenario, has that problem of the deductions, rejections, and appeals, that gets him interested in hearing more about how we can make it go away. So we have to get them interested in the problem before we can get them interested in the solution. Most folks do it backwards.
The last piece is you're bound to get at least one objection. And most sellers think that they need to pitch or counter that objection when in reality what you need to do is you need to agree with the objection and redirect the momentum of that objection using what we call the Mr. Miyagi method. So let's assume that someone says, "I've got no budget." Step number one is to agree with the objection. So you might say something like, "Nick, I totally get it, man. Honestly, nowadays it's literally harder to keep a tool, let alone buy something new." When I do that, Nick's guard immediately goes down. It's like he tried to sit in a chair and I pulled it out from underneath him because he's like, "Wait, this person's not going to try to sell me." But then from here, I need to keep it going. So, step two is called incentivizing conversation. So, I need to give him a reason to tell me more about the objection, which will give me more information because I don't have enough to handle the objection accurately right now. So, I might say this. "Hey, Nick, just so no one calls you again, could you give me a sense of, is it just that budget is completely out for this cycle, or is it literally like anything you're trying to spend money on in perpetuity, like you get put through the ringer on and have to put together like 17 ROI cases for it? Which one is it?" So, number one, you want to say, "Just so no one calls you again," to give them a reason to give you a little bit more about the objection. And then number two, use multiple choice where you can say like, "Hey, is it this, this, or this?" to make it easy to answer your question.
From there, it doesn't really matter that much what they say. What you want to do in step three is you want to sell the test drive, not the car. So, in other words, like people don't want to be pitched a product on a cold call, let alone at all. And if you try to pitch your product or even pitch a heavy meeting, the reality is like most people are just going to get turned off and reject that on the front end. What you want to do is you want to answer the question, "What is the reason that they should take the meeting with you even if they never buy the product?" In other words, you might have no desire to buy a Tesla, but you probably at least want to know how it drives. And that's called selling the test drive. So, that might sound like this. "Hey, Nick. Honestly, my guess is you're probably not going to buy this thing, but the folks who end up getting budget are usually the ones who they they sort of know what's one, two, and three on their list. And so, my guess is like this thing isn't going to free up for quite a while. But like, would you be open to taking a look at this thing? Not for now, but just so you know what's out there in case budget does open up." That's the third step. And then from there, once you get them in the meeting, then you can talk about what it means to secure budget once you've actually proven out that there's a problem we're solving. And that ends the cold calling section and brings us to cold email.
Nick, what's number one in the category of cold email?
All right, so the first one is something that we learned from Ryan Riser, which is called run the triple. And the approach here is when you are cold calling, you never want to make what is called a naked dial. Your goal when you're calling people and reaching out to them. I saw the look on your face, Arman. Don't worry, it's we're fully clothed, no matter what. But when you call somebody, what you want to do is you want to amplify the fact that you are a real human being trying to get their attention. And you also want to make it as easy as possible for them to respond to you. And so what Ryan recommends is when you call somebody, you shouldn't just call and move on. You want to stack that touch with both an email and a LinkedIn touch. So my first step in my sequence or cadence, whatever you're using, is literally an email, a call, and a LinkedIn touch. And the goal here is you want them to be like, "Whoa, like this is actually a person. Here's a face to a name." And when you email right after the call or LinkedIn right after the call, it makes it easier for them to respond to you because the reality is most people are not going to pick up the phone and call you back. So run the triple. You mostly do this on your first touch where you email, call, LinkedIn in very tight secession. But even the later stages of your sequence, you're likely going to be stacking email and LinkedIn touches with your calls to the point of being clothed, not making a naked dial.
Number two, Kyle Coleman, the master of cold email himself, has personally taught me a lot that influenced my own cold email framework around a term called resonance, or the art of what we call the segue. So, a lot of times sellers will use random personalization. So, they'll say things like, "Oh, Nick, I noticed you wrestled at USC. I want you to buy my building software." And it has nothing to do with the problem that they solve. And don't get me wrong, you should put that stuff somewhere in the email, but you should not think that just because you happen to look at this person's alma mater that that means that they have a problem your business can solve. So the framework for resonance or relevant personalization is you want to identify something that you know about them and attach it to a problem that you can solve. And those are the first two paragraphs of every good cold email. Something I see about you, what that problem means for your business.
So, a couple of examples. If I was selling legal billing software, if I knew you just won a big case, that would mean that I knew you were about to have to deal with collecting a bunch of money, which I could help with. If I was selling a 30MPC sponsorship and I saw that you just launched a parallel dialer, that means you're probably competing with all the other parallel dialers out there. If I was selling compensation software at PAVE, I could say, "Oh, I just saw that you posted a head of compensation job posting, which means you're probably cleaning up and taking it a lot more seriously than you used to because now you have enough risk in your business where you need to tighten up compensation." So, always, always, always have a trigger that is attached to a relevant problem that you can solve, and then you can segue into your one-sentence solution for that problem and a low-friction call to action.
Armon, how do I actually do this at scale? This seems like it's going to take a lot of time. Well, I have a third tactic for you. It's called trigger templates. And this is from the one and only Charlie Johnson. Charlie Johnson has probably influenced me the most when it comes to learning how to personalize at scale. Now, here's a trick. Take those three triggers and all you have to do is templatize those two sentences. "I noticed this about you, which means you have this problem." Templatize those first two sentences and you can keep the rest of your email the same. So have three, four, or five triggers where you just look for those five things on an account and then pop in trigger templates for each of those things and you can literally send hyper-personalized emails at scale that are problem-based and relevant without having to reinvent the wheel every single time.
That brings us to the conclusion of the prospecting and cold email category. If you follow the tips that we shared, you're probably going to be booking some meetings. You're going to get some discovery calls on the books. So, Arman, let's roll into the discovery section of the tactics that changed the way that we sell.
Great. Number one is from episode number one of all time. Joe Caprio, PPO, purpose, plan, outcome. And he actually got this from Doug Landis, who was another guest, funny enough. But this is literally the way that I set an agenda for any meeting in the sales cycle. A lot of times sellers will focus on things like, "Oh, the purpose of today's call is to do a demo." And that's actually not true. The purpose of the call is not to do a demo. The plan for the call is that we're going to do a demo. The purpose of us doing a demo is for us to figure out whether or not our solution is actually going to solve a problem for you. The plan is this is how we're going to spend time to make sure that we can actually like prove out the purpose. And then the outcome is that at the end of this call, you and I can have a frank discussion around like whether or not it even makes sense for us to take a next step, which might look like a POC, but that should only happen if you really like what you see in the demo today. You do that to start every discovery call. You do that to start every demo call. You do it to start every single executive call. Purpose, plan, outcome.
The next technique that we learned comes from KD Kevin Dorsy, and it is called bucket questions. Bucket questions are a technique that you can use to guide the conversation you're having with your prospect in the direction of problems that you solve while simultaneously establishing some credibility for yourself because the way that you're asking this question shows that you know the common problems or pain points or focuses of the person that you're talking to. So a really basic example of this would be, I used to sell ERP software to law firms, Arman. And a thing that we would frequently hear from the COOs we were talking to would be something along the lines of, "Yeah, we're really looking to optimize our back office operations." A non-bucket question that doesn't steer the conversation in places that we can solve and makes me sort of look like a buffoon is, "Oh, well, what are your pain points with your back office processes?" A bucket question would be, "Okay, cool. Well, we're typically able to help with stuff like that, Arman. I guess I'm curious. Usually, when I'm talking to COOs and they're thinking about back office optimization, like there's two main places folks might be focused on. Place one would be around new client intake. I know I've heard from a lot of folks that it can be really, really slow and manual and prevent your attorneys from actually working on cases when they come in. The other place that I've been hearing has been around like billing and assembling bills because there have been a lot of new changes with the way insurance companies like process bills. I guess I'm curious, do you feel like new client intake or billing is more of a focus for you?" And what I'm doing here is I'm laying out the buckets of the places that I know we can really, really help with that I am certain they're struggling with as a way to steer and guide the conversation toward places that we can actually sell and solve to.
I'm next. Okay, Nick, I recognize this is an awkward question, but do you know who has the next tactic? I do, Arman. It is the legendary Charles Mulbau, the king of discovery, who if you're not following on LinkedIn, you should be. One of the things that totally changed selling for me was the first episode we had with Charles, where he taught me the concept of the humbling disclaimer. And the humbling disclaimer is a technique that you'll use any time that you need to have a direct conversation with your prospect or ask them a really hard question or ask them about something really sensitive. And so this might be if you're asking about things like timeline, like when are they actually planning on making a decision and signing a contract, or budget. Have they actually set aside budget for something like this? Or you might be asking about like, "Hey, you're in a tough competitive battle. What does it actually take to beat competitor B?" And it can be kind of weird for you to just like say to your prospect, "So, Arman, do you have budget set aside for this?" And that will put some prospects on the defensive. Or if you're asking about, you've done a great job at discovery and you've gotten all the way to like impact and you're at the point where it's like, "Oh, it's clear that like they might lose their job or have to lay people off if they don't solve this problem." You can't just be callous and be like, "So, it it feels like you're probably going to have to lay people off if you don't solve this problem." That's like a little too on the nose and it's going to put your prospect on the defensive and get them to clam up.
And so what Charles recommends is using this technique called the humbling disclaimer to just soften those tough asks where all you're going to do is you're going to take that like sort of uncomfortable feeling that you have asking this direct thing. I still have those feelings on sales calls. And you're going to soften the ask by saying something like, "You know, Arman, I recognize this is sort of a sensitive question," or "Arman, you know, I know this might be a weird thing to ask you," or "Arman, I'm I'm not even sure how to ask you this, but..." And you take those statements and you put them before the tough, direct question, and it makes you seem far more human. It softens the ask, and you're actually more likely to have the prospect say, "Hey, you know what? I know that's not a weird question. That's actually something that I've thought about before." And so, use the humbling disclaimer before you have a hard ask of your prospect.
The other question that is my favorite discovery question that I learned from Charles is called the magic moment question. And it's really simple. Whenever someone admits to having a problem, just ask them, "When was the moment that you realized that that was a problem?" And you will almost always get a painful story. And stories are usually the bridge between operational problems and executive problems. So, for example, if Nick is like, "Oh man, like I'm just like really struggling to like oversee these manager compensation decisions." I might say like, "Totally get it, Nick. We see this all the time. Like, hey, my guess is you didn't wake up yesterday and think like, oh man, like I have no idea what's going on with these managers. I guess like when did you realize this was a problem in the first place? Was it like you saw a manager going rogue on decisions? Is it just like you woke up in a cold sweat, or is it something else?" And almost always they will go on a long rant about that one manager who made a ridiculous compensation decision that was totally out of whack, and it was because they were planning compensation in spreadsheets.
That finishes the discovery category and it brings us to deal process. And number one in the deal process category comes from my number one seller ever, Morgan Melo. And so there are a number of things that I've learned from Morgan, but what she's probably absolutely best at is her ability to build and test champions. So there are three mini tactics within this one. The first is the champion sandwich. So once you finish up a discovery and a demo with your champion and you're getting ready to go present to the big team, you want to set three meetings. Yes, three meetings. The big team meeting with the exec goes in the middle, and then you do a champion prep call before and a champion debrief afterwards. So your champion prep call gets you on the same side of your champion, and they give you inside baseball and what's to come in that big team meeting. And then the debrief call always gets scheduled before so that you're not on this big team meeting like being like, "Hey, all right, who's who wants to take a next step here?" Right? So that's number one. You got the champion sandwich.
From there, once you actually start to meet with your champion, you can start to test them by asking like, "How do you plan to justify this internally?" And that will usually tell you whether your champion is going to be talking about your solution in above-the-line or below-the-line terms, and whether or not you really need to like contain their narrative, put together really tight business cases and videos so that it's not really them talking to the org, it's you talking to the org. And then lastly, number three, once you're done with that first champion prep call, that is the best time to get the digits of your champion. Be like, "Hey, could I text you after this big team meeting just to get a sense from you, like to get a sense of how this thing went?" Nine times out of time they will say yes because you're trying to make them look good. Beautiful.
Okay, that brings us to our next one, which is a pricing approach that we learned from Bel on his first appearance. I think he's been five times on the show now. This is called popcorn pricing, and it is a pricing strategy. So I want you to think about the last time that you went to the movie theater, Armand. You go to the big board, you're going to get some concessions. You got your Coca-Cola, your candy, and you're like, "I'm ready for some popcorn." There's three different sizes of popcorn at the movie theater. You've got your small popcorn, which costs $6, and it's like a couple kernels that literally nobody but an infant would be satisfied by eating. That's six bucks. Then you've got your medium popcorn. That's like enough for a normal human being. It's probably the right amount of popcorn for one person, and that costs $7. And then you've got the extra large popcorn, which is enough popcorn to feed a family for an entire week. It's a massive, overflowing thing. And it costs not $8, but $7.50. And the reason that movie theaters price popcorn this way is they're trying to maximize their deal size. And if you think about what popcorn actually costs the movie theater, the difference for their costs between the medium and the large is probably $0.03. And so what they're looking to do is they're actually using psychology as a way to guide you towards that biggest popcorn, which is more than you really need, but it's such a better deal. Like the price per kernel is so much better than the medium or the small that they use the medium and the small to anchor you to what popcorn should cost. And that makes the extra large seem like a great deal. And so you can actually do the same thing with what you are selling. What you want to do is if you have options for modules that you can sell or the way that you sell professional services, what you want to do is if you set up multiple packages, the value of the packages should not increase in a linear fashion. Meaning the largest tier should be the most valuable as a way to steer them up in that direction. And so think about there are things that you can likely offer, whether it is a second instance of the software, or additional licenses, or training hours, or pre-purchased professional services hours, or a module that like doesn't cost you and your company anything that you can put into that biggest tier as a way to drive people to the most valuable package. So use popcorn pricing as a way to increase your average deal size.
And the last one is yo-yo selling from Ian Kak, the number one all-time producer over at Salesforce, who has closed multi, multi, multi-million dollar deals and had multiple seven-figure W2 checks. The way that you get an enterprise deal closed is not by this long groundswell motion. You need to start by finding an executive sponsor. So that's the top of the deal. Let's say for example, you meet with a COO or a president. That's your first meeting. From there, you don't want to deal fatigue that person and bring them through seven more calls. You want to get permission from them to run an assessment with all of their department leads. So, the COO might introduce you to their VP of Revenue, their VP of Customer Success, their VP of Operations. And what that does is it tells them, "Hey, take this thing seriously." And then it gives you a reason to report back results after you've done deeper discovery with each of those department leads. So the yo-yo goes, and you run three separate sales cycles with each of those department leads. And then you stitch it all together and you bring back the results to that executive buyer in the upswing of the yo-yo. So to recap, you start at the executive, you win over the department leads, and you report the results back up to the executive. That's yo-yo selling.
We're down to the last three. Arman, we launched our leadership show, I think it was two years ago when we brought Mark Kasaglo on as one of the co-hosts of that, and I've gotten to join for some of those episodes and we've learned some things that have also changed how we think about sales leadership. So, let's get into that.
The first one is the only person on this list, Arman, who I think made it on twice, which is Katie Kevin Dorsy, and it is to document the wiggle and practice forward. So, let's start with document the wiggle. Wiggle stands for WGLL, what good looks like. And what you want to do as a sales leader is it's one thing to tell your reps, "Hey, here's what to do," or "Here's the way you need to approach this meeting," or "Here's why we do things this way." It's another to show them how. And so anytime you have something that actually matters in your sales process, talk tracks, demo flows, negotiation best practices, you need to have documentation of like what that being executed actually looks and sounds like. And so whether that is call recordings, whether that whether that is examples of emails that have booked meetings, you need to make it extremely obvious for the entire team the behavior that they need to replicate. Don't make people go from, "Okay, I know this is what I need to do. Let me figure out how to do it." Literally enable them with the how.
Now, once you've done this, once you've documented the wiggle, you've reinforced it, you've helped the team get up to good. The next piece is the way that you approach practice with your team. One of the things Katie talks about is like, you can't just stumble into a meeting and expect the words to come out of your mouth the right way the first time, especially in something like sales where there's so many different contingencies and situations that you get thrown into. And what KD's approach is, what a lot of sales leaders will do is they'll ask a rep, "Hey, how did that meeting last week go? Let's dig in. Oh, shoot. We're looking at the call recording. We need to practice. You didn't set an agenda." Well, well, what you actually need to do, what KD has taught us, is first identify places that the reps and the team needs to get better. And instead of retroactively practicing by saying, "Hey, here's what you screwed up." Instead, practice for meetings that are coming in the future. So, when you're in your one-on-one with a rep, pull up the calendar and say, "All right, what are the most important meetings next week? What are some of the moments that you need to nail?" And then spend some time in that meeting practicing the way that they're going to set the agenda with that tough exec, or the game plan for the negotiation. Literally roleplay the negotiation for that meeting that they have next week. And when you practice for the future, you're actually driving outcomes as opposed to just venting and being upset about something that you can't change because it happened in the past.
Number two is the five-stage sales process from my lovely other co-host, Mark Kasaglo. And so Mark really changed the paradigm for me when it came to running pipeline reviews and overall like figuring out when a deal has actually moved to the next step versus another meeting has just happened to have happened. So what you want to do is if your sales stages sound like discovery, demo, executive meeting, proposal, that is called an activity-based stage management. And the reason that that is a broken form of sales stage management is because discovery is one meeting. But what if you don't find a problem in that one meeting? Or what if you're able to do discovery and demo in one meeting and you can get problem and solution agreement and maybe you can even get a proposal out too? Well, then your stages are totally irrelevant. What you need to actually do is you need to flip it and you need to change your stages to what are you trying to get in each stage. So for example, we oftentimes describe stage two instead of demo as solution agreement. You need to get your prospect to say, "Yes, I believe that your solution is the best to solve my problem." And there are 10 different ways that you can do that. You can do that through a demo. You can do that through a POC. You can do that through case studies. You could do that through a reference. You could do that in five calls. You could do it in one call lumped in a discovery. But the reality is all that matters is you need to get your prospect to make a decision in that stage, not just do a random activity for the sake of doing an activity. For reference, the sales stages that we use here for our deals at 30 Minutes to President's Club, stage one is literally called problem agreement. Stage two is called solution agreement. Stage three is called power problem and solution agreement. You need power to also agree to those things in a deal. Stage four is called commercials agreement, and stage five is called vendor review. The exit criteria for that is a closed-won deal. And by renaming those stages, Armont, it's changed the way that we are actually talking about our deals because it is front and center on our deal board. Boom.
And the last one is a personal one that Nick has called out was very helpful. So I threw it on this list, which is called inverting the hiring funnel. So, a lot of people make the mistake, especially in early stage selling, where they think they're Salesforce, and they're like, "I'm going to post a job, and I'm going to get 500 applicants, and I'm going to screen 500 applicants down to 100, and then I'm going to keep grilling the living daylights out of all of my candidates, and then by the end, they're going to want to work for me." And the problem is, number one, a lot of the best candidates need to be sold into doing some of those tests in the first place. Number two, a lot of decisions are actually made in the first and second meetings in an interview process. And so instead of trying to get a thousand candidates to be 10, and then hope that of those 10, three will actually accept, you're going to invert the hiring funnel. You're going to spend as much time as possible with your top 10 candidates and you're going to sell them upfront. So that first interview is actually 75% selling and 25% evaluating. And then that earns you the right to almost use like a permission-based opener to ask them for permission to grill them and then opt them into the process. Now they're far more likely to take the test seriously because they're sold on the interview. And then at the end, you know they're going to accept the offer because you sold them on the front end instead of trying to sell them on the back end of the interview process.
Arman, that brings us to our conclusion. And before we recap, I'm actually wondering if I can ask you a question, which is, we've been doing this for five full years and we've learned a ton about how to sell, but there's still more that I'm learning every single week and I imagine there's stuff that you're learning. And so I'm curious like, what are some of the things that you would like to learn from our guests over the the next 5 years?
You know, I was having dinner with Johnny Larson last night, who's a multiple-time guest, one of our greatest. And his manager was there, really mild-mannered guy, and was the number one global leader at Talkdesk Sales Kickoff. Of his seven reps, all seven of them went to President's Club. And this guy was the quietest guy at the table, like did not was not beating his chest or anything like that, very mild-mannered guy. And so I sat next to him eventually. I was like, I I sort of want to figure out what this guy's all about. Like he's clearly very good. He's he's a super humble guy. And one of the things that he was talking about is he's like, "I don't tell anyone what to do. He's like, I I I try to help people figure out their way to do things because my way is a very different way from your way, which is a very different way from their way." And I think I did a decent job of that in sales. But when I think about that as just an overall leadership characteristic, whether it's like teaching someone to write in the 30MPC style, teaching someone to manage projects in the way that I like to manage them, I can honestly tend to be like pretty prescriptive. And what that ends up leading to is like someone ends up just being like a slightly lesser carbon copy of me trying to emulate a style that isn't theirs. So figuring out like how to find strike that balance when I'm coaching people between giving guardrails so they don't go all over the place and literally just like micromanaging the living daylights out of someone having to have something be perfect is something that I'm honestly still working on a lot. Still trying to balance.
Nice. What about so glad you asked? I think I think for me, one thing that I'm so obviously like I'm interested in seeing how sellers are going to continue to use AI as it continues to evolve over the next one, three, five, 10 years. And so I know that there's going to be changing best practices and worst practices related to that. And I think one offshoot of that is we have the ability to access like very detailed information in a second about our prospects. Like I was reading on LinkedIn, someone made a post about like, "Here's how I can use six different prompts to prepare for my discovery calls." And I think there's going to start to be a chasm between like ability to access information and then like the way that we actually show up on the call and like hold our ground with a tough executive because you don't have the luxury of like being able to ChatGPT your way through a call when you're like face to face with another human being. And so I'm interested more in learning about like some of like executive presence and like the little things like thinking about like the Ian Kak yo-yo ask for permission, or we've talked about people that are like leading with a point of view. Nate Nazala talked about like the executive one-minute pre-read. And I so I think understanding how folks that might be a bit more junior in their careers can start to get respect and credibility with executives, and that's not always just like an easy tactical thing, but I know there's more we can uncover with that. And then I think one other thing is like, I know there's going to be more changes to prospecting, especially with the AI stuff. And so understanding what folks are doing to cut through the noise. I was talking with my mom about this. She was telling me about when email rolled out and everybody was like losing their minds over email. And like at one point, just sending somebody an email was definitely enough to get their attention. And so I know that sellers will evolve in ways to cut through the noise that's being created right now with different channels and approaches. And I'm eager to learn about like what's cutting edge related to that.
Well folks, 300 episodes, 15 tactics. Most importantly, the only reason that we were actually able to go 300 episodes wide is because you all showed up every single week. You continue to listen. And you know, I'm fortunate enough to live in New York where I get to walk around the streets and see like a lot of people working in tech or other sales careers. And I would say that like every other week, someone comes up to me randomly on the streets and says like, "Your podcast changed the game for me." And there are a million and one stories out there like that. And folks, the reason that we are able to be full-time on this and spend so much time in front of the mic and interviewing the best sellers in the world is because you all show up every single week and you're trying to get yourselves to President's Club. So, thank you for listening for 300 episodes. Whether you've been here from episode number one, or whether somehow this is literally your first episode, you landed on a good one, folks. We will see you next time at President's Club. Alrighty. Peace out.
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