Transcription
I'm about to demo a real-life scenario where I'm doing executive-level discovery. And by the way, it's for a product I've never sold before. And I'm going to be the pissed-off prospect. And at each step of Jen's discovery framework, we're going to pause and break down exactly why she made certain decisions throughout this executive roleplay. So, if you want to close big deals and you want to see what an executive conversation actually sounds like, here's what it sounds like.
So, as a reminder, I am a salesperson selling a security solution. And my dear friend Armand over here, he is my prospect who is the director of environmental health and safety at ISU Illinois State University. You ready to get into this?
We keep campuses very secure.
Don't be too tough on me.
You never know.
Okay, let's get into it. Arman, thanks so much for making the time today. Now, before we get too far in the conversation, I have to ask. I see that for you from Chicago. I've never been, but I've heard the deep dish pizza is amazing. What's your take?
I think it's trash.
I think deep dish pizza is like if they tried to turn bread bowl soup or bread bowl chili into a pizza, but it was it was like overflowing from the crust and so they had to like make the edges really wide. You wait 45 minutes for deep dish pizza. You burn your mouth when you're eating it and then it just tastes like soggy lasagna. And so I don't like the pizza. So if you come to Chicago, there's lots of great food, but don't get the pizza.
Okay. So what pizza place should I eat at instead?
Um Domino's Pizza is usually better than Peekquad's Pizza or Jordanos or whatever it's called. You none of that nonsense.
Okay. I can tell I really struck a nerve. I'm going to shift off this topic though. I kind of feel like you could spend 30 minutes talking about your hatred time about.
Okay. Okay. We'll take the finger off the the button there. So before we get too far into the discussion about what we do, which I'm sure you're kind of curious in, I want to take a second just to kind of tee up what I learned about ISU. Now, obviously I don't work in your shoes, but from what I could tell as an outsider, it looks like there are a ton of different types of buildings on campus that you probably need to protect. So I saw like academic halls, residence halls, stadiums, event spaces, and it looks like there's about 21,000 students, and it's a pretty distributed campus. So, I'm sure the expectation is probably like we got to keep all these spots safe, but what did I get wrong? Obviously, I don't work there.
Yeah, obviously there. So, we're a very distributed campus and there are certain spots on campus that are particularly dense. It's weird because you have the center of the campus that's very dense and so there are a lot a lot of eyes on it and so it's not as hard to protect the center, but I think one of the things that's challenged about the distributed campus is you have a lot of different hubs like kind of on the outside of campus. So you'll have like student traffic on the edges and like making sure that we keep all of those areas secure as they're very spread out and don't have as many eyes on those. That's a little bit harder for us.
So is that like one time stuff like we've got events that occur off campus or are you talking more like residence halls are surrounded around the campus? What are you seeing there?
It's the latter. So it's more residence halls or like an engineering hall or something like that.
All right. So, let's do a quick pause. That was step one, which is opening with credibility. Could you break down what you did there?
Yes. So, we talked about deep dish pizza, and I had no idea Armand had such deep feelings about deep dish pizza, but notice when you get someone talking about something that they're passionate about, you start to see their personality. So, that's exactly what I'm going for there with that tip I mentioned before. Let's say Arman goes me later in the sales process. I might use the subject line um Pquads greater than dominoes to trigger him again. Um, that would be something that only he and I have probably talked about from a business perspective. So, it's a great way to stand out later on.
Great. So, that was the rapport piece and then you moved on to telling me what you know about my business already. So, what what did that look like?
Yeah. So, that's when I got into listen, you've got a large distributed campus, you have 21,000 students, you've got all these different types of buildings, and what I'm looking for there was what did I miss? And Arman did a great job. He as he added something to it which was like yes, but the concentration of our our buildings is primarily here. So, that's why we have everything here. So notice that's not something I uncovered in my research. I'm learning something. So even though I wasn't completely correct, it didn't didn't feel like I botched the call because of that, right? It just felt very very natural for you to correct me.
Correct. It for me it was very easy because I was like, okay, you have this many locations. This is what your campus looks like. And my correction was more an addition on the nuance of why security is complex at a distributed campus. So, I felt like you already brought me to step 10 and I didn't need to explain, hey, this is what our campus looks like. This is how many students we have, yada yada yada. I just explained one nuance and we were already starting two or three steps ahead of.
And it it that part took way less time, right? Like it wasn't 7 minutes of the call you explaining, well, we've got this building and that building. So, I think we were able to move faster into the call.
Exactly. So at this point you have the lay of the land. You've demonstrated some credibility and now we move to step two which is anchor to a strategic objective. Let's do it.
When I was doing some research before the call, I was looking at there's this excellence by design initiative that your president talks about a lot. Is that right? Okay. And one of the things he was talking about was just how important it was to increase student retention and graduation rates. Now, I don't want to assume this is the same for you, but a few of the other universities I'm talking to have spoken about how state government is deinvesting and how that's impacting your cost structure because now you don't have the same revenue that's coming in from the state. So, you need to make that up for it with tuition revenue and keeping those students in school matters a lot. But before we go too too far down that path, like where am I completely off in that?
So that is correct for what the university is focused on in terms of my business. As much as I would love to think that my job in security is to help with retention, honestly the biggest thing for us is a little bit more. You might have seen that we have some budgetary constraints with funding and keeping a campus secure with budgetary constraints is honestly the bigger thing on my mind because I feel like it's kind of table stakes to keep your campus safe and like that may or may not boost retention. Obviously an unsafe campus wouldn't be good for retention. But the bigger thing that's on my mind is we are operating with a pretty lean budget due to like lack of public funding. And so for that reason, like I need to be able to keep students safe while not having a really big pocket to spend from.
That makes a ton of sense. I would assume you're probably not getting additional headcount to help you with that either.
No. If if anything, I'm getting less.
Less. Okay.
All right. So, let's pause real quick. That was step two, anchoring on a strategic business objective. Could you break down what you did there?
Yes. So, here's where I'm taking my research on what I uncovered that the university is trying to achieve. So that was the whole excellence by design initiative. That was me saying, "Looks like student retention and enrollment are the focal points." And notice when you corrected me, it helped me get closer to how you interpret the the initiative that you're mindful of. So again, just because I do research does not mean I'm going to have a complete answer. That correction allowed me to better understand Arman's point of view on the initiative as opposed to just what I read off of a, you know, chatbt prompt.
Exactly. And so one of the things that we intentionally did here is Jen was saying, "Hey, a lot of people are focused on employee retention." And I actually kind of wanted to push on that and say, "There's another priority that you might have seen somewhere else that is a little bit more what I care about." And if Jen just kept hammering me on some of the original things, I would have felt like she's not listening to me. But then she clearly makes a pivot to understand more about our budgetary constraints. So that finishes step two. Let's go to step three, which is a problem hypothesis.
So then when I was looking at it, it looks like when you're looking to protect the campus today, there's a combination of fixed cameras, right? It seemed like there was a recent investment that was made to kind of establish cameras across the campus. And then it seems like maybe there were was also like an emergency text alert system. So if something goes wrong, like everyone on campus is alerted. one, did I get that right or did I get that wrong? And two, what am I missing? Like, what else are you doing to try to keep the the campus secure without investing a lot of extra money in it?
Yeah. So, we've invested a lot in things that don't literally require a security officer to see the thing for it to go well. And so, it's everything from what you described, but also one of the things that we've invested in is we have a campus safety app that all the students are required to download. So it becomes super easy to report an incident or even like easily text a line where you can say hey I saw this thing at this place. Oftentimes what is really hard is people will see certain things but they don't even know how to go about reporting on incidents. And so a lot of this is taking all of the eyes we already have on on campus and making sure that people find it as easy as possible to report an incident if something seems off.
Is there an incident that like recently occurred when you've had to use that system? There are a shockingly large number of petty theft incidents. Car breakins in parking lots.
Really?
Yes.
Like what is like what's shockingly frequent? Like how often is that happening in a month?
If we get call it three to four uh DPS, Department of Public Safety notifications. I would say at least half of those tend to be related to petty theft, give or take. It's someone who sneaks into a parking garage and they start looking inside of cars and often times students will see these folks but then they'll just be like they don't want to confront the person because that frankly puts them at risk. And so there was one incident where we had caught someone who on camera had been seen multiple times but we had never like gotten there in time and now a student reported it and so that was how we were able to catch that incident. So let's pause there again. That was step three introducing a problem hypothesis. Where did you take the call?
So, this is a great example of our need to pivot in a conversation. So, Arman had mentioned we've got this dense concentration of buildings in the center of the campus. So, active listening is really important here. When you hear something earlier in the call, don't stick to a script of where you were going to go anyway. So, what I did, if you notice in the beginning of this part, is I'm seeking to understand. So, you've got this dense population of buildings in the center, but how frequently do you have these events where you wouldn't necessarily have a fixed camera because it's a one-time event or an infrequent event. So, before I go down that path, I'm looking to validate or invalidate my assumption. Notice how it's like it wasn't on script, but if I didn't do it, the original talk track wouldn't have added up. Also notice how all this stuff comes together where Jen was building credibility, understanding the shape of our campus, and then I explained the nuances of the shape of our campus and why it was hard to protect. And then from there, I talked about the issue with budgeting as our strategic objective while still keeping the students safe. And then Jen used that information that she got all the way in step zero or step one around building credibility to say like, "Hey, here's a problem that I think you're going to have based on what you mentioned earlier in the call, which is you have a very distributed campus. It must be hard to cover all of that with cameras."
Exactly.
So that was step three, introduce a problem hypothesis. Now we move to step four, which is name the status quo.
Okay. So then if but this is often happening in parking garages, which makes sense. That's where the money is. How many parking garages do you have on campus? I couldn't find that in advance.
We divide the the campus into quadrants. Yeah.
So, usually each quadrant has two to three major parking lots and those are surrounding the major entry points of the school. So, you've got somewhere between 8 to 10 parking lots including some of the off-campus smaller lots.
And then how many fixed cameras in each? Cuz I imagine like you've also got the stadiums, you've got the residence halls, like you've got a lot of places and there was a finite amount of budget that you were spending on fixed cameras. So how many are in the parking garages, do you know off hand?
Yeah. So it depends on the the arrangement or the size of the parking garage.
But usually you want to have one in each major corridor. Okay.
Within the parking garage. So if you think of like how a floor is laid out, you usually have like one on each corner. So there's four, but then also you have all the in between holes. So there's like another two. And then you also have all the stairwells. So there's another two. So if you have a five-story parking garage, you might have anywhere between 20 to 40 cameras set up in a parking garage.
Okay. And so are there still spots within that pocket parking garage though that would be not visible by camera?
There are definitely going to be spots where something can't be seen. You can never get everything. comp the nodes in the pathways per se,
but there are definitely things that could be missed due to gaps in the camera.
Okay, so it sounds like the parking garages are kind of covered. One of the things I saw when I was doing some research before was that there was an event that happened at a student, it looked like a student pep rally or something. And when I was read, I could be totally off here, but I was reading the article and it looked like you couldn't identify who was actually like conducting the crime.
Yeah.
So, I'm wondering parking garages make sense, right? Cuz it's a fixed building. You always have the same traffic in and out. What about like when you have a pep rally or you have an event on campus where you don't typically have as much crime? How many like do you think cameras are covering those areas well or
Yeah. So, for those ones, that's where it's really hard because I mean, you've probably seen on NBC News where it's like person breaks into the store and you see the fidelity of those camera images and it's like even in a store where it's a fixed location, it's kind of hard to make out what's going on. When you have 400, 500 students or if there's a major period where classes end and people are trafficking all around, it's so easy for someone to like disappear on camera. Which is again, it's part of the reason that we're trying to rely on like students to report things because they can use their eyes to identify people a little bit more as opposed to me looking at like a pixelated camera image where the person disappears and then I've got to look at like 17 different frames to like figure out what that person looks like, where they went. All right. So, let's pause right there. That was step four. Name the status quo. Could you break down what you did?
Yeah. So, again, I'm going back to my research. And what I found in my research, if you remember, is that they had just invested in fixed cameras and they have this um tech system where they alert the campus if an event is occurring. Now, what's interesting and the reason why we always seek to be corrected, not correct, is because Arman brought up a point around security guards and how not likely it is to be able to make the case to invest in more security guards because they aren't allowed to have additional headcount. So, that's yet again something else I learn in Discovery simply by asking for a correction.
All right, so now let's move on to step five, which is empathize with the status quo.
It's so hard. I I hear this a lot when I'm talking to others at other universities. It's like the expectation is we completely eliminate crime. And so we're also doing that within a fixed fee environment where we don't have a ton of headcount. We can't put security guards at every spot because we just don't have the funding to do that. Like that's a really tough spot to be in.
Yeah. It's one of those things where it's unfortunately no one gets thanked
Yeah.
for like hey no one broke into cars. It's just kind of expected. Yeah.
but I mean you see it all the times where it's so hard to find a bad actor in a place and it's like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. So you try to cover as many areas as you can with cameras. But the reality is someone who's a little bit more adept in crime, they're going to be able to spot the holes in the system and they're going to try to find your blind spots. And you can't literally surveil an entire campus, nor do I think that is what our students would want. Right. Big brother watching. Um, that's tough, right? Because there's only so many cameras you can place because there's a fixed budget for that it sounds like. Can't hire a ton more security guards cuz that's another headcount expense. And then even with the emergency alert system that's happening after an event occurs, right? It's not preventing crime, right?
Exactly.
Yeah. It's tough. I think one of the things we see is particularly for campuses that are in a city like yours is, there's already a little bit of hesitation from students who are either considering enrollment or are already enrolled around what does safety look like? Like I'm going away from my home for the first time. I'm not with my family. What happens if something negative happens to me? We actually have seen that it impacts retention rates and and enrollment rates. Are you seeing something different? If there is a place that feels from a reputation standpoint unsafe, for example, I have friends who have gone to USC and USC is like in an area where it's like pretty rugged urban environment and there's a lot of crime around the area. You will see students who hesitate to go to school unless they are living on campus. But the reality is usually sophomore, junior year you start to move off campus.
I would say for us having issues around retention specifically related to student safety is less the issue. It's hard to know if you're having issues with student retention due to that but it comes up in like NPS surveys or in like student wellness surveys where you'll ask the students about a variety of different things, affordability of housing, all this stuff. And some of the rising of these breakins and other incidents has led students to be concerned around overall student safety in the overall like sentiment of the population. So like your goal is to drive positive academic outcomes and a great experience for the students and so it's definitely impacting the experience. Whether that is the reason that people are dropping out or transferring colleges is probably another question. I don't know if that would be the only reason, but I see it as a contributor to student happiness and wellbeing.
Do those NPS scores get reported publicly?
Uh, they do.
As a public university, we need to report those. All right, let's pause. That was step five. Empathize with the status quo.
Now, notice I'm not saying, Arman, you're not doing your job correctly because you don't have every inch of this campus covered. Because that's unrealistic. And so what I'm doing here is I'm if you notice the tonality of of how I responded, I'm showing empathy. Empathy the fact that like this is a really tough job. There's serious consequences if something goes wrong. This is a human being on the other side of the phone with actual repercussions that happen to them if a negative event occurs. So that's why we talked about it's really important to empathize with the situation that they're in. It's it's a really difficult job to be up against. What I felt as a prospect is Jen was saying, "Hey, your job must be really hard." And in my mind, in character, I was like, "Yeah, it's really hard to protect a whole campus." And it's even harder to do that when you don't have money. And on top of that, it's kind of a thankless job because like, how could you possibly cover every single inch of a campus? There's no way you could. And no one is like stoked when you do a good job. They're only pissed when you do a bad job.
Yeah.
So, that was step five. empathize with the status quo. Let's move on to step six, which is introduce an enemy to the status quo.
Because I'm wondering, right, if I'm making the trade-off between do I go to ISU or do I go to, I don't know, the other ISU Indiana State, they're relatively close, relatively similar in size. If I see that one campus is safer than the other and my parents are heavily involved in that decision, I wonder if they might push me towards the safer campus.
Possibly. Um, I think if there's a stark enough difference, yeah, one could uh I my mom likes to worry and so I could see mom whether or not mom would be able to convince me to go to a, you know, that lesser university down the block is TBD, but yeah, it could it could factor in.
Okay. Cuz I was talking to Penn State University, which is my alma mater. Um, and one of the things they were saying is like it is really tough with to manage this trade-off because obviously the job is to prevent crime, right? It's not simply to react to crime, but when you have a fixed budget, you can't dump a ton of money into putting cameras everywhere. So, one of the things that they were looking at is is there a way to not fix the cameras, but have it so you can move those cameras around. So, let's say like you have a pep rally and you know you're going to have a large population of students that walk into that gym, but normally it's a low traffic area. You can't really justify a camera. Is there a way that you could actually put something there that would allow them you to feel like we've got eyes on those students?
Yeah. Without having a fixed camera in a place where you're just not going to typically have high traffic. So that was something they were exploring which is how do we think differently about the monitoring of student safety as opposed to the reacting of student safety.
Yeah. That almost essentially allows you to have like more campus patrol
Yeah.
around without having more campus patrol around. Especially with the overnight shifts. I mean imagine you see during the day how many people are walking around campus. Imagine having the same number of security people and staff all through the night. It's it's frankly impossible. So you just have to pick and choose. Um, so that's I didn't I didn't know that was possible.
It's it's interesting like the even if you look at attrition for man security guard, it's such a high attrition job. So you're having to constantly throw money into recruiting and investing. And that's I mean based on what you described about the cost situation, that's an unnecessary cost. So I know we're coming up on time here.
All right. Pause right there. That was step six, introduce an enemy to the status quo. Let's break it down.
So here, notice what I did is I brought in the example from Penn State. So again, I'm not fingerpointing and saying, "Well, what you should do is this." I'm I'm creating this moment where I'm saying, "This other university was doing something similar. Here's the thing that they didn't realize was going on." And so, as we talked about before, it makes it safer for Arand and executive to be able to be like, "Yeah, okay. I kind of fall into that trap, too, without assigning blame towards him for not doing his job effectively." This is also one place where I can start to get a sense of the solution that Jen is offering, but it's not in the way of like, hey, I think you should use this thing like buy my product. It's like, hey, like someone else also dealt with the same problem. Here's how they solved it. And how they solved it probably happens to be what Jen is trying to sell. But I look at Penn State as a respected peer. And it's easier for me to be more open to that when I hear how a respected peer solved the problem versus how a salesperson wants me to solve the problem.
And that's a great example of like sometimes you're going to be pushed a little bit to tease the solution. I notice I didn't get into pitching mode. I positioned it more as an idea. Like here's an idea another university is tackling, which is we don't have to have a fixed, you know, fixed camera in place. There's a different way to think about camera monitoring. But I'm not then going into a deep pitch about it because at this place I'm still just testing the waters. And so if you noticed his reaction was a bit like didn't know that was an option. That's an ideal state I think to be looking at at this point in discovery which is just opening up the executive's eyes to new ways of thinking about solving existing problems.
All right. So we've empathized with the status quo and now it's time to move to the high impact close.
Let me just pause for a second. I've really been enjoying the conversation. and I hope you have too. Based on what we've covered so far, I'm going to ask you two questions actually.
One is does this feel like this issue of protecting students, reducing or ideally eliminating crime on campus, does that feel like a problem worth exploring?
Yeah, I I would say so. It's a within within cost that that's the job. And with some of the recent spikes, it I would I would like to continue exploring it.
Okay. So, what I'm hearing you say is worth exploring with the caveat of can't be a eight figure solution to address it because that's not realistic.
Okay. So, I'm going to ask you a second question. It's going to sound a lot like the first, but I want you to be completely transparent in your answer with me.
Is does this feel like a problem worth exploring right now? So, right now we are sitting in it's coming toward the end of the school year and so right now we're in March.
Mhm.
And so anything that we would be discussing would be for the new school year deployment. And so my guess is we're not going to keep the campus safer from April to June other than the things that we already have planned. We start to do a lot of our planning around security and budgeting once the school year ends. And so it's like a little bit early. Um, but that planning cycle begins in call it June, July.
Okay.
So, and this is probably not the only thing you're planning for come June, July, right? I imagine there's a ton of others. Okay. So, here's what I'm thinking. Why don't we schedule time for Friday? And what we'll do in Friday is I'll walk you through how Penn State shifted from what they used to do to increase security to what they do now. If you like what you're hearing and you're interested to explore more, then we can shift and talk about exactly what the solution is and how much it costs and all the things I'm sure you're wondering. But first and foremost, why don't we use our time that way and then you can decide if this is even something worth going down the path of. And if it's not, by the way, you can shoot me straight and you can tell me to cut bait. That's all good. I know there's a ton of stuff that you have to plan for come planning season, but maybe that way you can evaluate even if this is something worth looking into.
Cool. Sure.
Well, that was easy.
There you go.
All right. And that is a wrap. So, that was step seven, a high impact close. What did you make of the way that I responded and how we closed the interaction?
So, I think it's like a really good example of a very practical response, right? It's not like your executive is going to be like, I am drowning and I need I need help. Throw me a a life jacket. What he said, if you notice, was like, yes, it's a problem worth exploring, but that's very common. It's like, I will open the door a little bit, which is our goal, but I'm not going to like spend just because you gave a great discovery conversation. So, what I did there is I acknowledged what I'm hearing cuz I want to build that trust. So, I'm hearing this is a problem worth looking into, but I'm also hearing it can't be an eight figure solution to solve that problem. It's really important at this point to make the executive feel heard and not just take it as our ticket to start pitching. By separating those two questions, I also think I got a better answer around predictability of this deal and timing of the deal. So notice when he talked about like we're not going to change things between April and June, that gave me a clear signal of how can I position the need to have a conversation between now and June, but not put this thing in my forecast for July because that's really unlikely we'd get through problem, solution, and budget all in that timeline. So I get really clear clarity and it also at the end would allow me to make a recommendation for next steps that felt aligned with your schedule as opposed to align with my end of quarter.
This allowed me to opt in to the next step because a lot of times a seller will get to the end of a discovery call and they'll be like great, the next step is let's schedule a demo. And sometimes the prospect will be like uh okay and then they'll cancel later.
Yes. or sometimes they'll be like, "Uh, I'm I'm good or whatever because you haven't actually given your prospect the chance to explicitly say,"Hey, was this relevant? Do you want to opt in for more?" And so, one, you did that, but then two, you also remove the pressure of the sale by saying, "And if you don't like what you see, you can totally tell me to kick rocks or whatever it is." I didn't feel under pressure. I felt like under my own control. I was choosing to take a next step knowing that you weren't going to try to force me to buy something.
I think that's such an important call out. This is a mistake I made all the time. The second you start introducing demos and things like that, someone feels like now I'm entering your sales process. And I think there's this moment where an executive thinks, do I really want to do this? Because once I know I'm in your forecast, I know you're never going to let me out and do I want to sign up and opt into that? And so notice like the step we talked about is talking about how another university solved this problem. That's insight. That's ideas, things that we can offer them. And then that way it's not here's the demo of the product. It's more here's what another person in your position did, which as we talked about before is is generally what executives are curious about. What are you doing that I'm not? What do you know that I don't? And so it's very much in line with an executive audience and the type of thing they want to hear about. The demo itself candidly might fall to someone on his team. And I don't necessarily want to give up the sale at the executive level that quickly because it'll be much easier for me to take that next step for the demo with the team once I have the executive saying we need to solve this problem. We need to solve it now. So part of this is also just about like not losing control of the conversation by getting too quick into product. So if you want to learn how to prepare for and deliver discovery conversations like this with executives, check out the link in the show notes below for our course on selling to the seauite. You'll learn how to do discovery. You'll also learn how to earn and book meetings with executives. You'll learn how to manage champions. And you'll learn how to multi-thread, particularly in bigger deals where you've got lots of different stakeholders involved.