The Perfect 5-Step B2B Sales Process (Mark Kosoglow)

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Good morning everybody and welcome to this Playbook leadership episode of 30 minutes to president's Club. My name is Arman Fro and I'm here with my co-host Mark Cow. And today, you know, my favorite part about these Playbook episodes, Mark, is I basically just get to farm your brain for all of the questions that I didn't have answers to. And so folks, if you've ever figured out how to break your sales cycle into a step-by-step sales process, this one is for you. Way too many people think that their sales process is this spaghetti noodle array of different directions that cannot be codified into steps, stages, and exit criteria. I promise you, Mark has sold some massively complex deals, and he is going to teach you how to codify your sales process today. So Mark, why should people listen?

I just did my two best ever back-to-back LinkedIn posts. Both of them did over 450 likes, and they were both about sales process. I've never had two posts do so well back to back. And to me, it says that reps are starving for, "How do I move a deal through my pipeline?" So at least you got one to be able to move people through your pipeline into close one. And folks, the way we're going to break this down is, if you didn't know, Mark was literally the first employee at Outreach and he built this sales process from scratch. He then built the same sales process over at Catalyst, and now he is building the sales process at his new company, Operator. And so there are three ways we're going to break this down. First, we're just going to talk about the anatomy of a sales process, and Mark has five different parts from the stages to the questions, the exit criteria, to the people involved that break down your sales process. Once we break down the different parts of a sales process, we'll go into phase two of this episode, which will include a stage-by-stage breakdown example using Mark's past sales process from Outreach. And the last thing we'll do is we'll wrap with a 5-minute breakdown on how you can use this sales process to ask your reps questions. And folks, throughout the session, I will actually be taking live notes inside of a doc. And so you can either get a link to that Google doc where you can see Mark's stage-by-stage sales process as we're talking through it, or if you're really smart, you'll go open up YouTube and you'll watch this where you'll actually be able to see me type notes as we go through this discussion.

So Mark, let's start with part one. What are the key parts of building a sales process?

Yep. So the five key parts to me are the stages. And we're going to talk about what stage-based deal management is and why stages are important, and what most people are doing instead of stages, even though they think they're doing stages. The second is what is the seminal question of each stage that you must answer, or that stage has no purpose and shouldn't be in your process. What are the exit criteria of that stage and how to think about exit criteria? How do you have not too many, not too few? How do you have that Goldilocks zone? Lastly, who are the people and how do you work with the different types of people at each stage? And then lastly, gives and gets. What are the things that in a stage help you progress that stage, and what can you ask for in return in order to make sure that you're moving the deal to the next part of the buying cycle?

So let's start with step one. First thing is, I need to understand what my sales stages are. Talk to me about the dos and don'ts of building your sales stages.

Yeah, the number one thing that I have found that most reps never learn is how to move a deal through the pipeline. They learn skills like how to negotiate, how to do discovery, how to do a demo, but nobody talks to them about, "How do I take a deal that I'm doing discovery with and get everything I need so that they move forward in their own minds in what we're doing so they move deeper into the sales cycle?" So I think that stage-based deal management is the perfect way to do that. However, Arman, you know how most companies do their sales process? Do you know what it's based around? Meetings. It's based around meetings. Most companies think that they're running a sales process when all they're really doing is saying, "These are the meetings that you want." Now, let me tell you why meetings don't work. If my first meeting is a discovery, and my second meeting is a demo, what do you think I try to do at the end of every discovery session? Schedule a demo. Should I always schedule a demo after discovery? Not if I haven't figured out the stuff that helps me have a good demo. And what we need to do is we need to accomplish something in that first meeting that allows us to do a good demo. In other words, in a stage-based deal management philosophy, we need to accomplish what happens in the stage. There may be multiple meetings that happen in that stage. You might have a demo in your first stage. Our first sales process was, uh, meeting-based, and I quickly figured out my reps scheduled the next meeting they were supposed to, but they often scheduled it too soon, too early, not enough information, and not ready to run a really good meeting because they hadn't actually accomplished what they needed to accomplish in that meeting.

So let's break this down in an example. What would be an example stage one?

And so the first way that you have to answer that is, do you want buyer-centric or seller-centric stages? Most companies have seller-centric stages, which are things like Discovery. Do you think that the buyer has Discovery listed like, "I need to discover what my problem is" as one of their buying criteria? No. And what's the next one? Scope. And whatever. You know, did you think that the buyer, like, "Hey, I can't wait to scope out the solution I need"? That's not how they think, right? So I personally don't like seller-centric things. Another one is negotiations. No buyer has on their thing, "I need to go through negotiations," right? So what we want to do is use buyer-based stages or buyer-centric stages. My first stage is initiate. And I actually call this stage zero. This is pre-first meeting. I have a stage zero, and that stage zero gets the opportunity gets created when the meeting gets booked, and we're immediately in stage zero. We'd call that unqualified pipeline, like it's just there. We don't even know if we have a deal yet or not or anything. And so, but we want to track that for many different reasons. And in that stage, we just want to know, are they willing to meet with us, right? Then you move to stage one. And like a stage one to me is initiate, right? Or is interest. I want to find out, is there actually mutual interest on our side and on their side in, and figuring out if we want to do an evaluation or not, right? And do they actually have a problem we can solve? I think like every buyer wants to know, "Do you solve a problem I have?" Right? That's something that they're trying to figure out.

So let's talk about this stage one then. Stage one is interest. And it sounds like you want to understand, is there mutual interest on both our side and their side?

That's right.

The next part of your sales process that you discussed with me earlier is there's a seminal question that that stage needs to answer. Talk to me about that.

That the question for stage one is, "Do they have a problem that we can solve?" Like, and both the buyer and the seller need to know that, right? Because sometimes people will come to us at Outreach and at Catalyst, and they would ask us to be solving something that we didn't actually solve. And that's very beneficial for the buyer to narrow down, "They actually solve what I want solved." And it's really good for the seller to know, "Oh, they do have a problem that my solution can address, right?" So that mutual interest of like, "Hey, we should go on the next date," you know?

So how do I know a set of, what I call sales questions, and those sales questions are a series of things that once you have completed that stage, anybody should be able to ask you these questions, and you should know the answer to them. The culmination of those answers will be, "Yes, we have answered the seminal question." Let me give you an example of those in stage one. I would want to know: What are the company's top three initiatives? What projects are in place to support those initiatives? What are the before situation and the negative consequences? And what's the after situation in the positive P&Ls? How is their org structured if you're selling like on a seat basis? Do they currently have a solution in place that's not meeting their needs? Are they currently in an evaluation? If I go to a rep after they finish stage one, I should be able to ask those questions. They should be able to give me good answers, and that tells me, "Do they have a problem that we're interested in? Are they interested in continuing a conversation or not?"

Now talk to me about the next step. So I have this question that I want to answer, and then you gave me a couple different ways I can answer that question. How does this relate to the exit criteria of the stage?

Yeah, exit criteria are the non-negotiables. These things must be figured out before you can go to a stage. Some people call them gates. Exit criteria are the things that you absolutely must figure out. Like when you're going into a meeting, your headspace is, "These are the things that I need to make sure that I get through, that I accomplish." We talked about stage-based deal management is, "What do I accomplish in this stage?" What you accomplish in this stage are the criteria. Those are the required things that a, that a buyer needs in order to move forward. For example, in stage one, typically what I want to know is I want to confirm two or three business initiatives. And the reason I say confirm is because I like my reps to go in with some hypotheses of what those business initiatives are, and then we need to confirm those hypotheses. And so what is actually going on in that business that's an initiative that we can attach to? Notice I'm not saying a challenge. An initiative can be a challenge, but it doesn't have to be. An initiative is an executive-sponsored thing that typically has a slide and some deck that has some regular meeting cadence and some real business implications for being in existence, right? And so that, that's a business initiative. It's not problems. Like a problem of like, "Hey, my reps won't follow up with inbound leads." That's not an initiative. An initiative is, "We need to decrease the amount of money we spend per lead," and one symptom of that is that we don't follow up with our inbound leads enough, right? People always confuse project, pain, and preference with an initiative. A project isn't an initiative. A project is meant to help with an initiative. A pain is usually the reason why an initiative exists, but it's not the initiative. And their preference is just how somebody's doing something they don't like, and that's like the lowest form of selling you can do is selling to somebody's preference, because ultimately most people don't care what the preference is, they just want the job done, right? So, and then the second thing is, I want to, does this person I'm talking to understand the org structure enough, and like who's going to be buying? We call that 3-2-1: three people in two departments with at least one person that has power to buy. If they don't understand that, who's all involved in that initiative, then it's actually probably not an initiative.

So Mark, I want to bring this full circle just to recap. Folks, we're going to go through every stage, but right now we're zooming in on stage one. So stage one is the interest stage. The seminal question you're trying to answer: Do they have a problem we can solve? The exit criteria: You need to confirm two or three business initiatives, and you need to confirm that they understand the org structure, three people, two departments, one person who can actually buy this thing. Knowing that we are in a stage-based sales cycle versus a meeting-based sales cycle, what happens if I get through one discovery call or maybe even two discovery calls and I don't have two or three business initiatives that are confirmed? Or let's say I get through one discovery call and there's not a business initiative confirmed, but I naturally have the inclination as a seller to schedule a demo as the next step. What do I do in those types of scenarios?

And see, this is why meeting-based doesn't work. It's okay to do a demo whenever you want to do one, pretty much, as long as you're ready and have the right information to do a good demo, which I hope that your sales leader would help you understand what you need to have primed up to do a good demo. So if I'm not getting what I need from somebody to make sure that they know what they need to know to move forward, so don't forget, we're doing this for the buyer. The buyer can't tell us two or three business initiatives. They're not ready to buy. They're probably dealing with a preference. "Oh, I don't like the purple color of Outreach. I love the green of Salesloft more." Who cares what color the buttons are, right? If they don't, can't give you two or three business initiatives, then they're probably so down the totem pole and the power line that they're not going to help you out anyway. You want to find those two, three business initiatives with gives and gets. Gives are what are things that I can do for someone that I can provide to someone that's value that I can give right now that helps them want to give me something back that helps me get something back. And listen, I've talked to a lot of reps about this concept of give and gets. Most people are like, "Well, listen, Mark, I just got to give." Like, you know, "If I give, I'll get back." I agree. If you, you know, if you sow, you reap. But here's the thing: reps that don't have a mindset of, "When I give something, I'm going to ask for something back," never perform as well as reps that do have that mindset. It is okay to have a professional business relationship in which you equally give and get. And most reps feel like they can't ask for the get, what they get back, because they feel like if they don't just give all the time. And what that does, it creates an unbalanced, or guess what happens when you continually give but never ask back from a buyer? They just take and they take, take, take, take, and they never give back. And then the next thing you know is like, "I sent them the case studies, I did the meetings, I did the three demos, I did all this, but Bob, do you know when they're going to make a decision?" "No, I don't." Come on, man, like you can't give all that and not at least get back, like, when they're going to make a decision. So as a corner, a lot of sellers have to turn, it's like, "It's okay. We build relationships in sales and in business so that we can both mutually benefit from them." If you want a friend, go make friends with them somewhere else, but keep the business relationship equal and equal partnerships and always ask for something back.

And so gives in, like stage one, might be a case study. It might be a demo. It might be like, "Hey, let me take you through a detailed way that I think our solution maps to your needs as I understand them." It might be something like, "You know, here's the tech stack of most of our customers and how we integrate with those tech stacks. Which ones do you have?" Right? It might be, "Hey, here's a list of all your competitors that currently use us or partners that currently use us." So you give those things early on, and you ask back. Like an example might be, "I'd love to send you over a quick case study. I'm not quite sure which one would be most applicable. Let me ask you this, like, and I know this is kind of a weird question, but are you making this decision in like a month or in like six months? Because I have a couple of case studies where like that might make a difference, right?" See, now I've asked for something back in the way that I framed what I want to give. And like, that's the best way to do give-gets.

Well, what I love about this is a lot of times people look at their sales processes really rigid, which is, "I need to do discovery, and then I need to do a demo, and then I need to do a big team demo." And it is a three-step meeting process. But what you're saying is, I could do 15 minutes of discovery and maybe to figure out the rest of the org. I could give a five-minute harbor demo where I'm asking them, "Hey, who else is going to be impacted by this tool? Because I want to make sure I'm demoing from the different perspectives in your org." I can use the harbor demo as a way to get a sense of, "Do they understand the org structure?" And that's how I get my exit criteria. And so the discovery and the demo process are extremely iterative because you can use what you're showing to get your prospect to say things as opposed to just trying to get everything upfront and then give everything on the back end, which usually makes buyers really pissed off.

The subtlety and the nuance that the best sellers have is they frame the get with a give that's beneficial to the, that makes the give more beneficial to the buyer. Like, "Hey, tell you what, you probably, Arman, need a little bit of context of what we do. Why don't I give you a quick five-minute demo? But at the end of it, I want to ask you real quickly about like, how do you handle like your reps in EMEA in North America?" "Yeah, no problem. Let me see it." And you see it, then you ask your question. It's the nuance of like, "Let me make this, knowing the go-to-market will help me show you like a couple settings that I'll be able to show you later in a more detailed demo or whatever, right?" So the get that you get back, the reason you want it is to enhance the give that you're giving.

We talked about stage one. We know it's the interest stage. We know the question we're trying to answer. We know the exit criteria. We know some things we can give to get that exit criteria. The last part that we skipped over is there is a people bucket in each stage. And my understanding of this from our prep earlier is that there are certain people who are lower or below the line that might be able to give you the early exit criteria, but the later you get into the sales cycle, the more likely you are required to get someone higher up to give you that exit criteria. For example, you could have someone who's at the line confirm two or three business initiatives, and they might understand the org structure, but if we get to stage four, they're probably not going to be the person who's giving us the exit criteria of commercial agreement. Do I understand that correctly?

That's exactly right. So, I, I would say it's a little more nuanced than early stage, late stage, like bringing in people with more power later, right? The issue is, who is the meeting that? So when you're in a stage, if you get to meet with somebody that has power to make a decision, what do you do with them? What are the activities you do with them? And so this gives you an idea in a stage of how to calibrate, right? So don't forget, somebody that can make a decision can say yes. Somebody that can't make a decision usually can say no. And so those are two very different conversations, right? Like trying to get somebody not to say no is very different than trying to get somebody to say yes. And so what we want to do is we want to make sure that for sales reps, when they're in a stage, and let's say there's discovery calls with the VP of Sales, they're going in with a different kind of mindset of what kind of activities and conversation I want to have. If there's somebody that's a frontline sales manager, still very important, could be very influential, but probably can't say yes, they can only say no. How do we deal with that person in that situation? And so that's what it's more about. If you're really on your game, you're involving both sets of people all the way through the sales process, but the nuance of what you do with each stage is a little bit different because you need that guidance in order to not treat everybody the same.

Dude, this is so good. I love the reframing of that definition. A lot of times people simplify things in terms of above or below the line stakeholders, and it's sort of confusing because above or below the line can be relative to what line are you talking about. You could be above the line to buy a pack of gum, and that basically just means you have a pulse and you're allowed to expense $2. It's really hard to be above the line to be able to purchase a piece of six-figure software. And so the way that you frame whether or not someone is above the line in this case is, "Can they say yes to the exit criteria?" I love that reframing of it. I know I'm recapping a lot, but we're going through a lot of different parts of the stages. We've officially completed stage one. The five parts of stage one: You have the interest category, the question of "Do you have a problem we want to solve?", the exit criteria, which is confirming two or three business initiatives and understanding the org structure, the people, which are who are able to say yes to that exit criteria. For example, at Outreach, would that be like a Director of Sales? And anything below a Director of Sales would be someone that we would consider below the power line, and we would do something very different with them than a people above the power line.

Great. And so we'll assume that for today, a Director of Sales can say yes to the exit criteria of confirming business initiatives and understanding the org structure. Let's move on to the next stage.

So what is stage two?

The next stage two is investigate. And you know, think about this from a buyer's perspective. I now know that I'm interested in talking. Now I need to investigate and decide, "Is the problem I have actually big enough to solve?" And the buyer must determine that, right? And if we don't help the buyer determine that, then that's when you get these languishing sales cycles. They waste, they don't get back to you because it's a problem, but it's not actually big enough to solve. And so that's what we want to do in stage two is we want to investigate and make sure that we have a, a big problem that people care about paying money to to take care of.

Awesome. So what is the, is that the question? Make sure that this is actually a big enough problem?

"Are the problems big enough to solve?"

All right. So that's the problem. Is the problem big enough to solve?

So the next question, or the next thing, would be, what is the exit criteria for the stage?

For us, quantified business initiatives. I'm looking beyond the, "Hey, you know what, our MQL cost structure is just not working for us and we need to get more efficient with marketing spend," to, "Right now, we get about 1.5x our direct ad spend, and we need to get to at least 7x by the end of the year." Right? So that stage two is, we're investigating, "How do I determine it's a big enough problem?" Is there's a metric measuring it, and the metric has meaning behind it and is meaningful.

So when I think about the forbidden word, the meetings that would be required to discuss this type of thing, I imagine sometimes this would happen in just a really good discovery call where people are like, "You get to a problem, they're like, 'This is the impact, this is where it's going, the initiative, this is the quantifiable, like, how much pipeline we need to generate, what happens if we don't do it.'" All this could happen in a first discovery call, or it could take a long time because this could be the type of discussion that happens in a business case meeting.

And, you know, what I always encourage my reps, like, this is a linear cycle. And most people have this like spaghetti plate thing of a sales cycle, and that's because they're doing meetings. They're like, "Well, now we're way deep, and we have to do a demo," and demo is like stage two of our process. So actually, the deal went back to stage two. No, no, it didn't. Like, if you accomplish these things, once they're accomplished, they're accomplished, and you move forward to the next one. You can work ahead. You can be in stage one and be working on stage two, three, four, and five exit criteria, but you don't get to leave stage one until you finish stage one, right? So, yeah, you might figure those things out in a discovery call. You might have to have 10 calls before you figure those out, but you don't get to lead stage two until you have the two or three business initiatives we're solving, and this is how big of a problem they are.

What do you do when someone has like a, a sort of fuzzy checking off of the exit criteria? Meaning they're like, "Yeah, I've got one or two business initiatives. I know I'm supposed to have two or three, but I got one or two. It seems like hiring is important to them, and building pipeline is important to them." How do you know that the rep has really checked it off versus they're calling anything a business initiative or they're calling any metric a quantifiable business metric?

Yeah, so I think, you know, there's lots of technical ways now you could do that. You know, you could go listen back to recorded calls, and you know, a lot of these calls have like, "Did this happen in the call or not?" But really, what it comes down to is one thing is, is like, does a rep understand the importance to the deal of doing this? And will they be honest with themselves? Because working the process helps them out. It doesn't, isn't something that you just do, right? So like, I would think, and I hope that most of my reps at Outreach understand why we would quantify the business initiatives. I would get when I did deal reviews and listen every quarter, I would have every manager send me two recordings of their deal reviews to make sure that they were doing this type of stuff, and I would coach them specifically on it. But like, they should be like, "Hey, I don't really know," because that's going to hurt their deal to not really know. The reason that they would do any of those things is because they don't understand why it's important to them to do it, which means that they're not really doing the process anyway. So you got to start back with the why, right? And, yeah, then the second exit criteria on this one is an implementation date. Like, what is the date by which you need to get the value or need this problem solved or you need to get this metrics fixed or whatever? What is the date? And honestly, this is one of the hardest things that I've seen reps do try to do because most buyers haven't done it. But if they won't do it, then guess what? You now have an open-ended sales cycle that you can't control.

Great. And so let's talk about who can approve these two exit criteria. So we have quantified business initiatives, and then we have an implementation date. Is it still just the director, or is this someone higher up now?

No, it's as long as they're kind of above that power line, that's good enough. What we can't have is somebody below the power line being like, "Oh yeah, here's the quantified business initiatives and here's the date we need to implement by." We need them confirmed by somebody that can make a decision.

And then what are the things that we could give to get that exit criteria?

Yeah, so like in this, like at Outreach, one of the things we did is we did this, and this is one of my favorite parts of the sales process. This is where you can get your SE super engaged and deliver massive value. Is I would love at this stage to be like, "Listen, you know what? Why don't we look at your current workflow and just map out all the things that you do right now and what that workflow would look like with us?" So that like programmatic process workflow analysis sets you apart super early in the sales cycle. Uh, another one we would do is like, "Hey, let's do like a very detailed kind of value engineering thing where we look through like your numbers, we create like a little spreadsheet, we agree on like, you can plug in your own numbers. Like, let me give you a tool that you can use with any vendor to kind of determine what the value is." And the other one would be like, "This is where I do like super tailored demos. Oh, does your EMEA sales leader need a demo? And what about your APAC and then your North America? Those are all different people. And oh, you know, your marketing person over here might need a demo of this thing." That's where I'm going to start to do like extremely detailed, detailed demos with different specific groups. There's this one company that I do some consulting work for, and they essentially do procurement software that allows you to pull all of your contracts from all of your vendors into one place automatically. Make sure that you get ahead of those software renewals because often, often times they'll be auto-renewing, or you'll renew with more seats than you wanted, or you'll just miss a negotiation window. And so one of the things that we designed in their investigate stage was, "We're going to plug into your inbox, into your ramp, into your credit card systems, and we're going to pull all of your contracts into BRM." And what we're going to do is we're then going to identify all of the places where you had more seats than you wanted to buy, and that immediately will show you how much money you could have saved if you just knew how many unused seats you had. So little things like that allow you to create quantifiable metrics earlier in the sales process without doing some crazy full end-to-end business case, you know, type of. And I'm, I'm sure most people have heard about this kind of trusted advisor thing, and it gets kind of thrown around, and everybody's like, "I'm a trusted advisor." Well, just because they laugh at your jokes doesn't make you a trusted advisor. What makes you a trusted advisor is they're willing to give you sensitive information because they understand you know how to connect the dots and can give them back an insight or value that they wouldn't have been able to get themselves. And to me, the earlier you do that, the faster you separate yourself from your competition. And like, this stage to me is like a great place to do that. You don't want to do that before you get to, "Is there a problem or not?" Once we know the problem, now let's really dig in. Let me teach you something about this problem that you probably don't understand. Let me show you something about yourself that you can't see in your own mirror. And that's how you really become a trusted advisor.

So we've found mutual interest in stage one. We've investigated that these problems are big enough to solve in stage two. What's stage three?

Stage three is validate. Meaning like, can we validate the process by which they're going to buy? Can we? So my main question there is, "Will they agree on how to buy?" 80% of buyers actually don't have a structured buying and evaluation process in place or like a checklist of things they're doing. What they're doing is they're just kind of like sitting in on demos, talking about it, and there's this thing in their brain that's happening, and at one point they're kind of like, "Oh, I feel like Arman is best. Let's go with that." Very few, like, in Outreach, I can't tell you, you know, thousands of deals we did, you know, we probably got sent a dozens, maybe, of, "Hey, we just wanted to show you how we evaluated this." Everything else, you could just tell the person is kind of winging it, and like you're hopefully talking them into something versus them making like a confident decision.

So what does really good exit criteria sound like for this question?

This is where the mutual action plan comes in. Let's go through the steps. And then the second thing is, what are the required capabilities that you're going to evaluate on? So I'm bringing in a little command of the message here. You know, your before state or your current state and what it's causing, the problems it's causing, then you have your desired state and the positive outcomes you have if you attain it. Well, how do you get from here to there? You have to have a bridge, and the bridge are the required capabilities. Those are not features and functions in your product. That's not marketing speak. That's plain old lingo. Like, for example, "Our reps don't follow up with inbound leads in a timely manner. We need a product that can help us follow up with an inbound lead in less than five minutes." There's lots of companies that can do that, right? And Command just teaches you, you say how you do it, and then how you do it differently or do it better. But like, that ultimately you need them to say, "I need a product to help me follow up with leads in less than 5 minutes." And now that becomes a part of their required capabilities, right? So you want that mutual action plan. What are the steps that we need to go through here to finish buying? And then required capabilities. What is the evaluation of the buying criteria that you're going to make on that? And then, if you're a really great rep, like this is the 400 level, is you influence the required capabilities to be ordered so that the things that you differentiate in are the most important things that they evaluate. So at Outreach, in the beginning, none of our competitors had automated emails, and none of them had, um, unsubscribe links to comply with CAN-SPAM. So guess what we would do? "Well, hey, Arman, like, one thing I didn't hear you mention that I usually find important is, like, have you ever been hit like with a spam fine or anything?" "No." "All right, good. Well, let's keep it that way, because you could get hit with a fine when you're doing automated messaging, and you need a link that sounds like something that would be required for your compliance." "Offer, is that right?" "Yeah, that would be required." "All right, great. Probably super important to, like, this might be a deal killer if somebody doesn't have that." "Yeah, it might be." "All right, great. Let me put that high on the list."

So we asked the question, "Will they agree on how to buy?" We have a mutual action plan in place, so they know how to buy, and we know the required capabilities that they're evaluating on. Talk to me about the people who can approve this exit criteria or say yes to it.

Again, exit criteria in this one need to be, uh, power people, right? You can't have somebody with no power say, "Yeah, here's our buying process," unless they have one that's been given to them, right?

Yeah. So at this point, you're about halfway through the sales process. Most, if you're a good seller and you're roping in executives into these meetings and talking to them, and they're engaged enough to join them, then they should be there. You should be at this point really starting to build a champion so that, you know, somebody that's below the line that's kind of like the groundswell person, somebody that's above the line that's sort of like your executive sponsor. And those are the people that you should be having use help you with the exit criteria at this point. So if stage one and two mostly had this director, maybe a director plus, one stage three is really where it's like, "Okay, we have a mutual action plan, we have required capabilities," and at this point, we probably have some executive sponsor involved in the deal.

So some things you can give here are, this is where you would might do pilots and trials. Like you can say, "Listen, let's work. You want to do a pilot? No problem, Arman. I could can do a pilot. Why don't we walk through the steps of what we need to do to get to the pilot? And if the pilot's successful, what we do afterwards?" Boom, I just used a pilot to get a mutual action plan, you know what I mean? And like, so that's a, a great one. I love proactive references at this stage. "Hey, Arman, have you ever met Nick? Like, he's doing the same thing you're doing over here. Like, he's my boy. Why don't I just hop, like, why don't I introduce you guys via email? You guys just talk about whatever, right? You'll like, he's he's awesome. You'll like what he, how he thinks about things, right?" Introduce him to a peer-to-peer reference. And the other one is, this is where you would do C-suite alignment. "Hey, you know what, like, you know, I really need to get this down. Why don't I get my CRO involved in this conversation? And why don't we like set up a call between them and let them figure out like, what is the, how the different steps that we need to get through?" And then you bring your executive in to help you with those exit criteria.

Awesome. For the sake of time, I think we understand the validate spa. Stage four.

Stage four is justify. Right? Is the investment they're about to make going to be worth it? They've agreed how to buy, which means they're about to put money in. The next question is, "Is this actually worth me putting money into?" In other words, what does exit criteria look like? Exit criteria here is an approved proposal by an ATL person. Like, you've worked on a proposal with somebody that has power, and they're like, "Yes, I think this is a good and fair proposal before we take it somewhere." And then the next one is, is they've passed the procurement and security stuff, right? Like, kind of those like administrative things that you have to go through. I think that this one is a very interesting stage. Sometimes you can do some of that stuff early, like as a means to like, "Hey, I want to test my champion. Will they actually send me through a security process and things like that?" So again, you don't have to wait till now to do some of these things, but like, in order to go through this stage, they have to be done.

At this point, it's almost certainly not only are you getting approval from someone above the line, but there are probably cross-functional stakeholders like the IT team or the finance team needs to approve this as well, right?

Yep, yep. InfoSec, procurement, finance, all those people.

Great. And then things you can give to get in the stage?

Mhm. The things you can get here is, first of all, getting the proposal. A lot of people are so quick to send out a proposal. "Here's a proposal," and they don't leverage that the proposal is a give. Let's use that to get something, right? Another one might be, people love roadmap stuff. It's kind of like crack for buyers. This is a tough one to get right. So be like, "Why don't we get together and I'll send you a proposal out, and why don't we also book like a roadmap session? We'll use the first half to take you through some of the new stuff we're doing, and we'll use the second half to discuss a proposal." Boom, I just got my proposal meeting, right? So that's a really good one. And then the last one, uh, is this is where you want to start to bring in post-sales people and start to introduce them. And so you could say something like, "Hey, you know what, like, we have an InfoSec person. You know, I'm sure you have to get security approvals. Why don't I have my CSM person meet with the owner of what you're going to do, and we can talk about things, and they can tell me a couple things that your security people have been nervous about in the past so that we can make sure that we address those correctly when we get to the review."

Great. All right. So what is stage five?

Stage five is decide. And that's just, "Will they move forward? Are they going to become a customer?" And exit criteria are simple: Do they have an executed contract and have we actually passed off all of our notes and done a good pass-off to our post-sales team? You don't get to mark something in my org set closed one without preparing the team that you're about to hand the ball to.

People involved? Same folks above the line and legal, probably at this point.

Yeah, everybody should be involved. Your below-the-line people should be groundswelling, and you should be prepping them to send emails up to people like, "Oh, we love this. The trial was awesome. We definitely need this." You should have the ATL, you know, the above-the-line people being like, "Hey, we've worked together on this proposal. Like, they understand their needs," and all that. You should have the department that's adjacent to this being like, "Yes, we see how this fits in with our systems." And we, so yeah, like it's always everybody, but you just have to make sure that you know the specific groups and you're treating each group or each person with their needs. That's one of the main things I see, Arman, that reps screw up is they kind of treat everybody the same. It's the same demo for everybody. It's the same proposal for everybody. It's the same PS meeting for everybody. It's the same slides for everybody. And especially when you're doing large deals, it can't be like that. Like, you almost have to run multiple mini-deals in each one of them and run each of them through this process. And that's a lot of work, but you know what? Like, a million-dollar deal is a big commission check. It's worth a lot of work.

Yeah, heck yeah. Bring it home.

Gives and gets for this stage? Is it just a contract that I'm sending? People give you the contract, get a signature. Discounts and negotiation happen. This is where, like, two-way official references happen.

All righty, Mark. This was absolutely outstanding. We went through your full five-step sales process. So to recap, folks, there are five different parts of your sales process. So you have your stages, the seminal question you're trying to answer, the exit criteria, the people that need to achieve that exit criteria, give you that exit criteria, and then your gives and gets, how you get those exit criteria. The five stages we went through, well, actually technically six, was stage zero: Initiate meeting booked. Stage one was interest, and the question we were trying to answer is, "Do they have a problem we can solve?" Stage two was investigate, the question we're trying to answer is, "Are the problems big enough to solve?" Stage three, validate, "Will they agree on how to buy?" Stage four, justify, "Is this worth putting money into?" And then stage five, decide, "Are they going to buy this thing?"

Mhm.

And folks, if you like this, we have a link to one of Mark's recent LinkedIn posts where he literally screenshotted his sales process from Outreach and he put that out in the world for free. And so I would take a look at that table. It's going to be a really, really good reference guide. And again, this doc that I'm taking live notes out of, one, you can see it in YouTube, and then two, we will also include a link to this Google doc inside of the show notes. Anything before we wrap?

I think that if you're a leader listening and you're not providing something like this to your reps, your reps will hugely appreciate and perform much better with it. If you're a rep and your leader doesn't provide this, it's okay to have your version of this so that you know what to do.

Mark, I have one other thing. I believe that you are building this sales process right now for your new company. Could you give the audience a sneak peek on what you are working on today and how they might be able to get access to it?

We've hit the lazy button on automation too much. We haven't done the hard work, and we've sent out very half-cooked, half-boiled, irrelevant messaging to people. And we've entered the great ignore. Everybody's ignoring emails, everybody's ignoring phone calls, and everybody's ignoring DMs. But if you're creative, if you're interesting, and you're unique, you will always get someone's attention. And at Operator, that's what we're trying to help people do. We're trying to help them so that they can come to people with very interesting insights that attract them into a conversation rather than trying to chase them down.

Folks, if you like the sound of that, I've personally heard Mark show me and tell me all these different stories about the things he can do inside of Operator, everything from getting free contact data to showing you wild signals on which prospects are most likely to buy and what you might choose to say to them. And I believe Mark just opened up a waitlist to get access to Operator. And so you can sign up for that waitlist for free. We will drop a link in the show notes. Folks, I would definitely recommend looking at anything Mark has his hands on because he's a pretty damn good company picker, and he is literally building this company from scratch. And I'll certainly be taking a look myself.

All righty, folks. Catch you on the next one. Peace.

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