Transcription
The first meeting was a 4-hour demonstration. 4 hours.
The closer and closer we got to the demonstration, the more and more names started piling up on that invite list to the point of which we were at about 47 and 50 people on this demo.
"Did you think you had a shot at it?"
"Initially, no."
"My team is going to hop off of this link and when you're ready to come back down to planet Earth and have an honest conversation about what this proposal is going to look like, then we can reschedule the call."
"The RFP window never would have even come your way."
"The door would have been closed."
One of the solutions engineer leaders told us, "Punt, no go. We cannot fulfill this. It is nothing but a technical gap and a red flag."
"Johnny, you were the number one rep at Talk Desk and you closed a $3.6 million deal. And today we are going to walk through that deal step by step so that everyone can learn how to close enterprise deals today. Johnny, welcome to the show."
"Arman, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it."
"You were telling me in the prep that there was nothing crazy monumental about what you were doing when you were reaching out to the account. Your SDR was doing multiple emails, multiple cold calls. Let's actually put this LinkedIn DM on the screen."
"Sure."
"Your LinkedIn DM was one sentence. It says, 'Hey, John, saw a few folks from company browse our website recently, so I wanted to share this and it was a case study.' That's it. Why did you approach it that way versus some people will like have both the SDR and the AE like hounding the account?"
"As you can imagine, the amount of vendors in this space now when it comes to digital channel engagement, when it comes to AI and automation, it's an oversaturated market. It's very loud. It's very noisy, and it's filled with SDRs and an account executive slamming buyers inboxes with asks and meets and dinners and on-sites. Can we take a 15-minute Zoom call or a team's call next week? I wanted to take of a different approach. I wanted to a share social proof and b I wanted him to know that I'm here to be consultative. We might not be a fit. This might not be a good time. You might already have a strategic vendor and partner in place and that's okay. But at the very least, with all the noise that is probably bombarding your inbox right now, I want to take a consultative approach here. And it worked."
"You knew you had to sell your way into the RFP and they wouldn't even take a meeting with you before the RFP came in."
"Correct?"
"So, how did you sell your way into the RFP?"
"Once I identified who was on the buying committee that was responsible for communications with the consultant, I reiterated to the buyer why I believe that we should be included on that vendor matrix. And so, when you look at a lot of the size and scope of the banks that we have globally tells the same story of what they're trying to ameliorate for their own business. When you look at the international presence that was required of this particular bank and this particular organization, I reiterated that we have customers in APAC and AMIA and Latam and that we can support that global footprint that you're requiring. And then the third piece is when you think about the demographic of their end user, their customer, their client, their member base, it's not local to a local community. It's not a local credit union that supports the Hudson Valley. So you have to think about it from a multilingual perspective, a global footprint, international presence, what have you, and the ability to demonstrate that you can effectively deploy and make a bank successful when it comes to their automation, their AI, and their CX operation. So all three of those things coupled with Gartner magic quadrant status, I reiterated to the buyer, if there's anybody on your evaluation list, we should absolutely be in that vendor matrix. And so not only did I have to communicate that to the buyer, right, I needed to communicate that as such to the consultant because up until that point, the consultant had never worked with Talkes either."
"So I had to not only convince and sell the prospect and the bank on why they should evaluate Talkes, I had to sell the consultant as well."
"So that brings us to you get the RFP and what happened when you finally got the RFP?"
"I'll never forget when we had our first internal go no-go call, which is standard operating procedure for us when it comes to RFPs and how we're going to bid and if we're going to respond. One of the solutions engineer leaders told us punt, no go. We cannot fulfill this. It is nothing but a technical gap and a red flag. We don't want to waste their time and we don't want to waste our internal resources here at Talkesk. Um, thankfully I didn't take that individual's advice and thankfully Talk Desk didn't either. Um, but it was a very very technical RFP and what I found is you have to be very meticulous about certain things when it comes to technical gaps. Sometimes there are things that you can accomplish and it's not on the road map and there's no capability request. But if there's opportunities for you to work carefully with product leadership and your proposal operations team, is there a way that we can frame the response in the bid that positions your product in such a way that this will be a custom development deliverable at such and such time frame versus no, we don't do that today. We're not putting resources into it and it's not a part of our roadmap. Well, if you fill up half of your RFP with that to that solutions engineer leader point, then yeah, punt and bit. But for the the size and scope of this opportunity, the logo, the subindustry that this logo is a part of, we were all in. We were all in. And I had everybody from the chief product officer on down commit to this bid that if we graduate beyond the short list and we're actually able to earn this business, we will invest the necessary resources to make sure that we can deliver on what these technical requirements consist of."
"So when you're faced with something your company doesn't do, how do you approach that? Both in the way you answer the RFP, but also in the way that you sell your internal team to get them comfortable with taking on custom work."
"That's a great question and I think it depends a lot on the specificity of the technical requirement and what I mean by that is I'll give you a perfect example of the RFP itself. They operate within a VDI environment, virtual desktop infrastructure. A lot of times especially global operations or American companies that have offshore presence require a VDI environment for a multitude of reasons whether it's uh cost mitigation security risk prevention whatever whatever the case might be and some vendors cannot support that right it's just it's not on the road map and it's not something that they can deliver on. So at the time Talk was absolutely in the process of getting us to having a readily available very robust very out of the box turnkey VDI connect solution but at the time it was still we don't know what we don't know yet and so it was really important to bring that product leadership in to understand how feasible is this what's the timeline what kind of energy and resources do we need to allocate towards something like this is this something we can deliver on in a timely fashion given the size and scope of this deal and if So, let's all come together and articulate a response together that we're all comfortable with."
"So, you submit the RFP. What happens?"
"Prayed. Prayed that we'd even get a response, right?"
"Did you think you would? Did you think you had a shot at it?"
"Initially, no."
"Initially, no. Once we got word that we've congratulations, you've graduated beyond the RFP stage. Now, it's time for the demonstration. This is where the fun began."
"Seven vendors submitted RFPs and four survived. So you were one of the four in the short list now, right? What was the first meeting or the first demo like?"
"So the first meeting was a 4-hour demonstration. 4 hours. Yes. Lots of caffeine prior to that call."
"Wow. So you get on the call, I guess. What was the structure of the 4-hour call?"
"We always talk about in deals establishing executive alignment early and often and where possible. And so I noticed that there was about a 12 to 15-minute block at the start of the 4-hour demonstration for quote unquote introductions. Well, the closer and closer we got to the demonstration, the more and more names started piling up on that invite list to the point of which we were at about anywhere between 47 and 50 people on this demo. And I said, 'Okay, if we're going to be expected to go through introductions of every single person on this call, that's going to take up the first 30 minutes of this call to an hour.' So I said, 'We're not doing that.' So I said, 'Let me throw a little bit of a curveball here. Let me identify everybody internally in the Talk Desk village. Let me get a cutout of their headshot from LinkedIn and create a slide of the Talk Desk village, their titles, show it for a couple minutes, move on to the attendees and the participants both from the consultant side as well as the bank side. Then what I want to do is I want to bring our CRO and our chief product officer on for a couple of minutes just to say hello and establish that executive alignment. Since there's executive presence from the bank, I want C-suite presence from Talk Desk early and often, right? I don't want to wait till I'm trying to get down to the short list to make an introduction. I want that early and often. So I brought the C-suite on to do the introduction instead. Uh at the time our CRO and our chief product officer came onto the call said hello offered their personal cell phone numbers and the Zoom link and the Zoom chat talked about the mission statement of the bank the mission statement of Talk Desk and how we marry those two together and again talking about this from a business perspective from a strategic partnership perspective before we get into feature functionality and API integrations right? So that's the way we started the call and then from there we told the Talk Desk story why we do well in the banking base, where our resources and where our investments are going, how our success in banking got us into the Gartner magic quadrant, got us into the top of the list of G2, got us into Forester Wave and continuously progress into the actual technical requirements that the consultant laid out for us. Now, the consultant provided the buyer with a scoring matrix, a report card, if you will. So every single subsection that the solutions engineers had to go through, there was a grading matrix. There was a grading criteria that they needed to score us on. And so as we went through the demonstration, typically what you find is really good account executives, especially if you start to hear silence and there's not a whole lot of engagement, you want to briefly pause the solutions engineer or whoever is executing the demo and engage. Mr. or Mrs. customer based on what it is that you just saw. How do you feel that's going to ameliorate your workflow based on what it is that you're doing today? How does this tie into your desired goal in your future state? I didn't have time to do that. You were literally being scored based on your ability to get through all of the technical requirements in the 4-hour demo. It's like you could answer the first 50 questions on your SAT correctly, but if you don't finish all 100 questions, it doesn't matter how well you answered questions 0 through 50. If you literally missed the test, you fail."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. So, what I did was, and again, I don't advise this on all demonstrations. In fact, I don't do them on any of my demonstrations other than this one. My job in this particular demonstration was clock management. I had an agenda and based on all the criteria that was laid out to us for 4 hours, I had certain time slots and certain time limits for each section to make sure that we got enough time where there was about 10 to 12 minutes at the end of that 4-hour slot for any remaining Q&A mutually agreed upon next steps and closing out the meeting. Right? So this call was all about clock management with the solutions engineer. So I made sure we talk about quarterbacking. I made sure to have technical resources available on that 4-hour demo. So that way if you have a question, Mr. or Mrs. customer, please share them in the chat. We have plenty of technical resources available. We're going to answer your questions in real time so we don't derail the solutions engineer from hitting all of your criteria over the next 4 hours. Once we started getting towards the end, that's when we started to bring on our professional services leadership, our customer success leadership, and really start talking about that post go live support model. What does that look like? Right? Cuz we all know everybody, every account executive that's watching this, I'm looking at you. Every account executive that watches this, right? They position a strategic partnership and then as soon as you get the DocuSign in your inbox, where do you go? Nowhere to be found. No strategic partnership whatsoever. The customers left hanging. They put in a troubleshoot ticket to Zenesk and somebody offshore answers it three to four weeks later. That's not a strategic partnership."
"And this is like an extremely in-depth rigorous evaluation. You've got 8 to 12 people on your team side at a minimum, it sounds like. How did you prep your team going into this massive call?"
"I wanted to make sure that if we were given a chance to be a part of this evaluation, if we were given a chance to demo for four hours to everybody from their lowest level IT project manager all the way up to the second in line to the CEO and everybody in between, I wanted to make sure that we packed a punch in the first call because perception is reality. If we come prepared on this one and we can deliver us a degree of confidence in the buying team that we're the right partner for them, then we have a chance. In fact, I remember creating the first template of the slide deck that we were going to use. I essentially broke down each part of the deck and gave it to all of the subject matter experts. So, I did the I did the 50 faces on the front. I did the first slide and I did the mission statement and how we take those two mission statements of the two organizations and merge them together. Everything else I had each one of the subject matter experts internally at Talkes create their own vision and create their own strategy for the deck. And then from there, it was dry runs. You can't do a dry run with 20 different people from Talk Desk. Calendars these days just don't allow for that, right? And so I would quarterback everything and communicate everything broadly in our Slack channel. But then making sure that I had dedicated time with each subject matter expert. I would put individual time, customer success, professional services, enterprise architecture, solutions engineering, sales leadership, executive team. At the top of the call, I would set up individual time slots with all the different people and make sure that they're experts in what it is that they need to deliver on, but then broadly speaking, um, we had a Slack channel so everybody can get full communication and visibility. So, it was again, we talk about quarterbacking and that's what we had to do."
"So, how does the call end?"
"Every account executive, I'm sure, doesn't want to hear this, but we're told, 'Thank you so much, Talk Desk. You did a great job. You'll hear from us at the appropriate time if and if and when you uh get to next steps.'"
"And at that point, what is the morale level on your team around the deal? Do you think it went well? Do you have no idea based on that response? Are you like the deal's dead?"
"I didn't think anything negatively. Did I like that response? Did I like that the consultant was owning next steps and I couldn't really hear any feedback immediately from the buyer? I couldn't establish mutually agreed upon next steps with the buyer? No, I didn't like that. But the team coming together knowing that this account was never supposed to be in my name. We should have never been invited to the RFP or I should say, let me take that back. We were never invited to the table for the RFP to now putting together a demonstration in front of 50 of members of the buying team with all these different level of executives at Talk Desk and everything flowed almost near perfectly. I was proud."
"So they say we'll get back to you. They say we'll get back to you. Obviously, that's not what my sales leader and VP of sales wanted to hear as a next step. But in any event, uh we got some good news that uh the bank has a few more questions and they'd like three separate uh demonstration placeholders. And so I thought that was a really good buying sign because not only are they asking us for a next step, they're asking us for three next steps across three different subject topics. And it's like, okay, if we're down to the short list of four vendors, or not even the short list, if we're down to the four finalists before the short list, and they're sending us three different time slots for three different subjects, do they have time to do their jobs? It's a global international bank. They have time to do this with a whole bunch of other vendors. I don't think so. So, I started to kind of get this intrinsic feeling that we really might be heading towards the short list here, you know? And so pretty much after that demo uh it was four to six months of continuous non-stop technical proof and technical validation."
"And at any point is this still running through the consultant or at this point has the consultant given you the keys to the customer and you can actually start to like run a deal process the way that you would want to run a deal process."
"So that's a great question. So, we did notice a trend where the deeper and deeper we got into the evaluation, we were given a little bit more of a leash to work directly with the buyer as opposed to funneling every ounce of communication through the consultant. However, the consultant was still very much present and really quarterbacking the entirety of the communication thread. Uh but the degree to which we were able to kind of put some personality behind the communication and start to build a little bit of a relationship and a little bit more rapport with some of the key buyers and key stakeholders started to grow exponentially as we got deeper and deeper into the evaluation. But all the way up until the formalized vendor of choice and contracting that consultant is there. So, at no point are you able to do like traditional multi-threading tactics or mutual action plan or building a champion or anything like that. You're still kind of at the bidding of the consultant's process, but there's a little bit less of a shield between you and the customer and you can start to tell the story the way that you want to tell the story."
"Absolutely. I noticed that after the demo when they said, 'We'll get back to you.' We went into now that period of time where it was four to six months of technical deep dive and validation and and social proof and customer reference calls and everything in between. But I to your point, I noticed that as we got deeper and deeper into the evaluation, they started to allow us to multi-thread. I was allowed to communicate with different leads of different departments that were all a part of the buying committee. Um, and and start to build a relationship and put some personality and some interpersonal connection between who my potential customer is and who their potential strategic partner is."
"So, four to six months of technical validation. Walk me through the next chapter in the deal. Identifying a mutual action plan because when you look at the size and the scope and the technical complexity and nuance of this given project, we really need to start having a conversation about a mutual action plan from a timing perspective, right? We still have customer reference calls. We still have to scope this. We still have to do our executive on-site. We still have to go through commercials and contract negotiations. So there was still a lot that needed to be done as it pertains to when they wanted to go live and start the deployment. So I really needed to get closer to this consultant and let them realize this that hey I understand that this is your client. I understand that this is your customer and not ours. But if we really want to do right by them, we need to start hitting a certain cadence and delivering on a variety of different topics because if we don't, we are jeopardizing the degree to which we can be live with phase one by the time their current vendor contract is over. And so instead of me talking to your client and talking to your customer, Mr. and Mrs. Consultant, why don't you and I get on a call and let me show you what this mutual action plan looks like. And if you greenlight it, I then ask for your permission to now introduce this to the bank and and and your client. How does that sound? And so obviously there was reciprocity there. We mutually agreed on that and then we got to the mutual action plan."
"Give me like the how-to of like the major phases that you walked the consultant through in the plan. And we can even like pull it up in the screen. I'm looking at it right here. First and foremost, you need to identify where we are in the deal and everything that coincides between this current period in time and getting that counter signature on the DocuSign. What beats need to be addressed? What rocks need to be tackled and taken care of between now and that DocuSign in order to get where we need to go? But in order to drive a sense of urgency from a timing perspective when maybe there isn't one, you need to identify from a business perspective, when do you need to be live? And so what I did was I created this this slide, this deck, this mutual action plan with some graphics and logos and everything else. And I put all the milestones in all the big rocks with corresponding dates that I felt as the consultant needed to be addressed by so that way we can get to that timeline of go live in a timely fashion. And so what I did was I took that document went through that document with the consultant. Once they green lit the document, what I then did was I gave access to the document to every single one of the members of the evaluation committee upstream and downstream. So, it's full visibility. Everybody's on the same page. Everybody's on the same sheet of music. And every time we knocked off one of those rocks, I'd put a green check mark. Accomplished. Accomplished. So, I would put who owns that next step, what that next step is, what the time frame of that next step needs to be to tackle it and get to the next one, and then a check mark or an X mark as to whether or not we got it done in a timely fashion and shared it with the consultant and shared it with the bank. You get on the same side of the table with the consultant. You now have access to the buying committee."
"And I know exactly who power is. Yes."
"Okay. So now what?"
"The signer, the economic buyer, the decision maker, the person who's going to give the thumbs up, the green light, or shut it down is all the same person. So it was it was pretty easy to see that early on in the deal cycle. And so once we got through the mutual action plan, once we got through the customer reference calls, once we got the technical validation proof of 2 to 3 months, four months of evaluation of that, we wanted to come on site. We wanted to build a human element of Talk Desk. And so we asked permission from the consultant as it pertains to the buying team if because I'm local here in New York City if we would be in a position to come on site, bring coffee, bring donuts, bring bagels, host a breakfast, whatever the case might be. And let's talk about where we are in the valuation. But we very much got the the blessings and the good graces from the consultant and the bank to to come on site. And so it was myself, my sales leader, our VP of financial services go to market as well as our CEO and founder. So we go on site to the bank. Establishing the agenda was was paramount when we got on site."
"And what was it for you guys? Thiago came in, told his story, the vision of the company, the vision of the product, why we're investing in financial services, what it's going to mean for a strategic partnership between the bank and Talk Desk. And then really from there, it was it was a lot of technical questions. The the second in command to the CEO um was the person who I told you he's power. He holds all the keys. By core competency, this individual's CIO, he's an EVP and CIO. So obviously by default a lot of the conversations naturally are going to stem from more of the technical and product side. And so really what it was was just a reiteration of we want flexibility. And then obviously at the end this was not a part of their agenda but it was certainly a part of ours was asking for the sale, asking for the partnership. But I think the coolest experience was is we were sitting in that boardroom again floor to ceiling glass windows overlooking the Manhattan skyline. It was a beautiful, beautiful day. Sun is out. East River. I'm with my CEO and founder and the primary member of the executive leadership team that oversees program and project management for the bank pulled me aside in such a way that other people kind of didn't hear. And he looked at me and he goes, 'I just want to let you know you ran one hell of a sales cycle. I have no doubt that we're going to be wrapping this up pretty soon. Thank you.' Stuck his hand out, shook my hand, and probably one of the coolest experiences of my sales career other than when that DocuSign notification hit, of course. Once we left and um we went our separate ways, we got on another Zoom call with my primary point of contact, my champion at the bank. Um and this was the first time we've ever gotten on a on a Zoom call without the consultant present. We had the informal handshake. We had that moment, if you will, um on site. And then for my boss and my VP of sales, we were all in a Zoom call with with my champion. And he says, 'This stays within the confines of this little Zoom box here, but uh you are our vendor of choice. Um once we come back from Thanksgiving, I think there's an opportunity for us to wrap this up a couple weeks before we break for the holidays.' So, my VP of sales was on the call, my boss was on the call. Really exciting news, really exciting for Talk Desk. Um this almost year-long sales cycle from breaking into the account with the SDR, never being on their radar, going through this long technical validation and evaluation over the course of several months to going on site, customer reference calls, technical gaps and nuances. We finally got vendor of choice, then pricing happens, [laughter] then pricing happens. So this is where things took a turn for almost the worst. So, we get the red lines back in a in a reasonable amount of time, much faster than when we anticipated. The SO was cleared, checked out with our solutions architect and and their folks. We get to pricing. Now, we think we're going into Q4 with the booking potential of this deal to be X. We go home for Thanksgiving, and I'll never forget it. We get on the pricing review to go through the order form on a Monday. I get an email in the morning saying, 'Johnny, we had some time to think and we're going to pivot our asks of the order form and the way we want to structure the proposal. We don't want named licenses. We want concurrent.'"
"So, it goes from how many licenses to how many licenses?"
"750 something down to about 245 concurrent."
"So, this is cutting the deal by like 67%."
"Yes. 75%."
"Oh, yeah. Gut check. Gut-wrenching when I got that email. So, I said, 'Not a problem. We're going to attend to this, but I know we have a call later this afternoon. Unfortunately, the degree to which I need to restructure this is going to take time with deal and finance and legal and everybody else. So, stay tuned. TBD, let me restructure this. Once I do and I make this a concurrent proposal, we'll reschedule the pricing call. We'll get back to you. Should only be a day or two.' Okay. So we go with deal, we go with legal, we go with finance, my VP of sales, my boss, and we restructure the deal for concurrent. Well, we go into it trying to do what? Preserve as much of the ACV as humanly possible, right? What other ways can we manipulate this contract that acquiesces to their asks and gives them flexibility, but all the while preserves and protects the bookings for myself and the sales organization. That's what everybody's going to think, right? So, we get everything locked and loaded. We get everything approved by deal. We get on the next pricing call, which is only a day or two later, and it's made up of that core decision maker, and I'll never forget his face on that Zoom call as long as I lived because he was working remotely that day. We get on the call, thank you for updating us on some of the recent changes. We brought the changes and the asks to our deal team and our finance team. Let's walk through it together. I go to share my screen, and in about 16 to 17 seconds, he stopped me. All he did was look at the bottom right hand number of the total contract value and he said, 'Johnny, I'm gonna stop you right here. What I'm gonna do is we're gonna shut this call down. My team is going to hop off of this link and when you're ready to come back down to planet Earth and have an honest conversation about what this proposal is going to look like, then we can reschedule the call. Until then, you guys have a great day.' And they hopped off. So now my boss and I are sitting here. How [laughter] and did you know where they needed to be? Because I I could imagine they're just like, 'Screw you. Come back with a better price.' And you you don't even know where you need to be at. So, you're like shooting in the dark. We were shooting in the dark. We knew that we didn't want to completely give away the kitchen sink. So, there were other things that we could leverage and include in there and ask of them to make sure that, hey, we're going to concede to some of your asks here, right? We're going to acquiesce, but this there needs to be reciprocity here. And I think the other thing that comes into play here is to the best of your ability to all you sellers out there listening is understanding the competition and understanding competitive intelligence and how your immediate competition, how these other vendors in your space present pricing, where they bend the knee, what their fixed costs are, what their times material costs are, what their usage costs are, what their uplifts are. Do they have a downturn clause? Is there a convenience clause? Right? I understood that if we weren't vendor of choice and they went with the 800 pound gorilla in the room, we're not talking about a [snorts] $3.6 million TCV contract. We're talking 6 or 7 million. So, I knew out of the gate, I wanted to show him good faith that listen, we appreciate the vote of confidence in Talk Desk. By right, we weren't even at this evaluation table 9 to 10 months ago. I appreciate the vote of confidence and I'm going to acquiesce to not all of your asks but most of them in good faith but I also know that if you went with one of our vendors you're paying two to three X this."
"Yeah."
"Okay. So I think also understanding where your particular product is where your company is from a pricing strategy a proposal strategy because the farther and farther you go up into the enterprise it's not just about the bottom line. It's not just about the number at the bottom of the DocuSign like you're in commercial mid-market SMB and growth. It's flexibility of the terms. It's opt out for convenience clauses. It's the ability to downturn and flex down in the middle of a contract. It's a whole bunch of other legality issues that the business cares about. There's other things that you can use when selling into the enterprise that when you're down market, it's really just it's nickel and dime. Give it away to get it off the street. Then hopefully you can expand and grow them later. Enterprise. There's other ways, other nuanced ways you can adjust the proposal without eating into your ACV. Big picture, right? We didn't see this in real time when we were going through this negotiation, but now that we're a couple of years removed, that consultant has now brought Talk Desk probably once or twice every quarter. And based on our conversion rate after that $3.6 million TCV deal that I closed. We've probably closed 8 to 10 million in TCV since then with all the different buyers that this consultant has now brought to Talk Desk because of that evaluation because of our professionalism and because the way in which we delivered."
"So you closed the deal. How do you finish out the year? What does it mean for your longer broader career?"
"So that year I finished 1.9 million in ACV for the year. 224% to plan and I believe I don't remember if it was 14 or 15 new logos. Uh certainly one of the top reps globally across the company, President's Club status and everything in between. But it's those moments, it's those moments in time that inevitably lead to um the promotion from commercial to enterprise where I'm at right now. This deal put me on the map. And aside from the promotions, aside from the President's Club status, aside from the institutional clout, a lot of us need to remember why we do this to begin with. Why do we get into enterprise sales? Why do we become SDR leaders? Why do we get into this realm? And for many of us, we do like the thrill of the chase. We love every day we wake up. There's something new to attend to. It's always exciting. There's always a new deal to hunt or a new deal to close. But for a lot of us, this is a means to an end so we can do what? So we can provide for our families. We can travel. We can dress how we want. We can buy the cars we want. We can make the most out of life. Right? Because this is one of those true industries that still exist where it's based on reciprocity. The degree to which you put into something is what you can financially get in return. And so when it comes to this deal in particular, I was able to pay off the rest of my student loans. I was able to put enough money away for an engagement ring. I was able to put enough money to put a down payment on a condo up in Westchester. This deal changed my life, not just from a financial perspective, but from a professional growth and institutional clout perspective at Talk Desk. And to take it one step further, it probably set the stage in the foundation for the reason why I'm so thankful, privileged, and honored to have been invited back. I think this is our third time to 30 MPC. So, it's done a lot for my career and I'm I'm very happy with the way the Talk Desk village came together and helped us execute on this."
"Dude, this was our first deal deep dive and I could not think of a person who could be better to tell the story than you, my friend. Folks, if you like Johnny, he is one of the best storytellers I've seen in the game. We've had him on the show multiple other times. So down below you can see two other interviews that Johnny's been on with us. I would definitely go check those out. Also, we'll include a link to like a mutual action plan template. If you want to like figure out how to do some of the stuff that Johnny did on his own, you can go copy paste that, use it for your own sales cycle. And folks, if you like this one, it would mean the world if you liked, sub, hit the bell, and comment down below. One, give Johnny some love, and then two, tell us if you like this deal deep dive format, or if there are other deal related videos that you'd like to see us do like this one. Alright, y'all. We'll see you on the next one."