Transcription
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this episode of 30 minutes to president's club. My name is Armand Farouk, and I'm here with my co-host, Nick Segelsky.
And folks, if you missed it, the last couple of episodes, we are in the middle of discovery month. The March 2025 discovery month is a series of the best discovery guests we've had in all time at 30 minutes to president's club, because we are launching our very own discovery course. In the first week of April, which you can access in the show notes, or you can join a waitlist or something like that.
And today we have Charles Mollbauer, who, if you have ever struggled to ask an uncomfortable discovery question, he is the discovery question masseuse, where he is able to roughen out or sand out all of the rough edges on your tough discovery questions, and find a very smooth way to ask those questions. So Nick. Why should people listen?
So Charles takes us through why you should be expressing your insecurities and fears to your prospect, how to give them an illusion of control. And he also gets into this approach he calls investigate rumblings of problems. And yes, the masseuse analogy, the sandpaper analogy, it is great. But Charles is, I mean, he's a discovery king, man. So if you want to get better at asking great questions, Charles is a man to learn from.
Alright, Charles, welcome to the show. You might remember we start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three.
Sure, actionable takeaway number one is the humbling disclaimer. The humbling disclaimer is there to express your insecurity or fear out loud to your prospect about asking a question that maybe you are afraid to ask for whatever reason that might be. B and also helps get rid of the head trash. So a good example actually that I heard a lot of AEs do recently is, Hey, I feel a little awkward asking this, but based on everything that we looked at today, do you believe that we're charging less than the value that you're getting from our offering? That's a weird question. You can ask. The weird question by prefacing. Hey, this is a weird question. I feel like I'm not. I feel like this is a little awkward asking this or I recognize this might be a weird question, or I'm not really sure exactly how to ask this, but based on everything we discussed, what would you say would be the number one or top two reasons why you feel like you wouldn't be moving forward with us, if anything comes to mind? A bad example would be, I feel a little awkward asking this, but do you want to work together? Like, don't be cheesing. Be thoughtful. Okay, that's all. Just be thoughtful. Empower your prospects to think. So a bad example would be me saying, I know this is a little bit out of bounds, but what's number two?
Number two is, explain to people, not what you are, or what you've built, but explain to them why people bother talking to you in the first place. A lot of times people will say, Are you familiar with what we do? No. Great. So what we are is, we are a blank. We are a platform. We are this. We are that. But don't start with that, because that's not interesting. Everybody talks that way. Instead, start saying, So, people like you, talk to us, because they're looking to be significantly better at any one of the following three things. You explain it, and then say, So what we've done is, we've built out a solution that's tech-based in order to solve for these issues. Naturally, you'll have a lot of questions around how all that works, which I'm happy to talk about. With that in mind, we'd love to learn about A, B, and C. So nobody cares really how it works, they just care how you help people.
Great, what's number three?
Number three is be very direct at the end of every scheduled call. For example, after your first scheduled call, you can say, Great, Bob, based on everything we talked about, assuming you feel that we have the potential capability to help you do you think it would make sense to learn more on another call and walk through how? So I mentioned at the beginning of the call that they're really one of two options. Either 1. you want me to go away or you think this offering is the worst offering you've seen or number 2. there could be potential reason to speak further. I guess. Which way are you leaning? So the reason why we're doing this is. One, there's no reason not to be direct. They know what this call is about, assuming you had a great upfront agreement. And number two, what we're also giving is the prospect an illusion of control. Without getting into details, there's a book called The Mindful Body written by Dr. Ellen Langer who talks about a study where when people feel like they have an illusion of control or basically an opt-out, they feel like they have more control over the conversation. And when they have more control over the conversation, then you'll have a higher probability that the next conversation will actually happen. The example she gives is she tested people in an elevator, people in an elevator that had a button that says to close the door, even if it didn't work, people felt more comfortable in that situation versus people in an elevator that did not have that button. They had a lot more anxiety. So when people have an illusion of control, they're more calm, they're more involved, and they're more willing to speak.
Charles, I actually want to take that all the way to the beginning of this discovery call. Is giving people the illusion of control the moment they jump on a call with you? I'm curious, is there anything you're doing in that vein at the beginning of the call in terms of how you set your agenda, how you set up a call, how you let them dictate where the call is going to go, giving your prospect the illusion of control all the time for context allows them to, uh, want to share more with you because when you give people the illusion of control and more opt-out, so to speak, they're not threatened by you and their wall of resistance really diminishes. Bit by bit. So one thing that I encourage all of my AEs that I coach is to, we're always asking for permission to do things, even the smallest things. Hey Arma, would it be okay if I shared a little bit about what I had in mind for today's call? Great. Arman, would it be okay if I kick off the call with a number of pretty direct questions just to determine if we're even a fit to help you? Would that be okay? Sure. Let's say you're in the middle of a call and they're saying something really interesting. Hey, Arman, you mentioned something really interesting. I know this might sound a little weird, but do I have your permission to ask you just a direct question about what you just shared? Like, it's non-stop, and someone wants to ask me, Hey, Charles, is there such a thing as asking for permission too many times? The answer is no. Because it happened to me personally where the prospect just told me, Hey, Charles, you don't have to keep asking me for permission to ask questions. It liberated me completely. And I just asked any question I want. The goal of these calls is to be direct and to be direct in a way where you're indirectly telling the prospect you won't offend me. If you don't want to talk to me anymore, I don't care because you're not the first. You're not the last. This is part of the job. Most people say no to things. If you're in private equity, for example, you say no to most deals that come across your desk. We say no to most things. That's just life. There's no reason to be afraid of that or to hide behind it.
Charles, two of the big themes that I've heard from you here are, one, you're using these humbling disclaimers to verbalize your insecurity or fear. To the prospect saying things like hey, I know this question. I'm about to ask you kind of strange or I'm oh I know this might feel a little bit out of bounds and you're also frequently asking their permission to inquire about a thing that they said. I imagine that a skeptical listener might be saying, wouldn't doing these things paint me as really, really low status or inferior to my prospect? And I've been taught I should be on equal business footing with them. What would you say to someone who has that skepticism right now?
I used to feel that way when I started in sales, and I failed miserably. It's been, it's so funny that we're talking about this because when I started in sales, I actually couldn't sell anything for six months straight. And the reason why I ended up realizing why I couldn't sell anything was because I was trying to be somebody I was not. I thought I should be an expert in their space, just like they are, as if I've been doing what they have been doing for the past 20 years, and I tried to put on this mask or persona of someone that's on their level. I thought on their level means I know as much as them, and that just wasn't working for me until I had the realization that, hey, I don't know as much as you do about certain things. And all of a sudden, when I told them that, they loved the honesty and the transparency. Honesty and transparency from salespeople is refreshing on the other side. And all of a sudden when I started expressing my own insecurities about certain things. My insecurities that I was expressing was really about what they are experts in. But that doesn't mean I was insecure about things that I am an expert in. For those of you that feel like they have to have a mutual peer-to-peer footing, I want a tactical item in order to be able to do that instead of keeping it inside your head is to say, Hey, Bob, by the way, you know, before we do our demo here, I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but you guys are experts in the healthcare industry. You've been doing this for 30 years. You guys are very successful. I am not in the healthcare industry, but what I do know very well are the problems that your peers are looking to solve for and why they're looking to solve for it and what they're looking to accomplish. And my goal on this call is to show you a number of use cases that, uh, really resonated with them to help them accomplish those goals, uh, and to determine whether or not you feel that's something that aligns with how you guys feel about your growth and potential as a firm. Would that be okay? You see how I combined my humbling disclaimer in the beginning, and then I did a permission-based ask at the end? In between those two things, I was very transparent about who I am and who I'm not, and who they are and who they are not. And people appreciate that. I think prospects are just not used to sales professionals being very upfront, very direct, very transparent and telling the prospect upfront who the AE knows they are and who the AE knows they're not. As human beings, people respect that.
Nick, what you shared comes from a place of the account executive thinking that the prospect has to like you. And actually, the prospect really just has to respect you. They don't respect you because you know absolutely everything about their industry. They respect you if you're honest, and they respect you if you know enough about them to be dangerous on a call to help them solve whatever they need to solve for. I think a lot of sellers make the mistake When they hear the advice in sales, you need to be a trusted advisor, but they think that means you need to be a better CFO than the CFO you're selling to. And that is not the case. When I was selling equity management software at Carta, I had a little bit of a finance background and I could speak the language, but there was no way that I was more educated on everything it took to be a CFO. Then the CFOs that I was selling to, but what I could say is that I saw 30 cap tables in the last two weeks, and I know that they did not look at 30 cap tables in the last two weeks. Cap tables or how people manage their equity. So you can be an expert in your specific domain because you've seen a million customers do one specific thing that happens to be in their world at 30 MPC. It's the same thing when we sell to CMOs, oftentimes we're not going to be a better CMO than the CMO. But what we can say is we've seen how 30 other companies do sales content, and we can be expert advisors in that domain. You don't have to be expert advisors in the entire domain. That's 100 percent correct, and that's where respect comes from.
So Charles, let's say you transition off of that initial frame, going into the call. And now it's time to start identifying and digging for problems. What are the most common ways that you start to surface or identify potential problems you can solve for a prospect?
There's a misunderstanding that AEs feel that they have to tell the prospects something along the lines of, Hey, these are the problems that our prospects have. How does that align with your world? It's a little bit too explicit. As opposed to putting some nuance to it and saying something like, Our current clients feel like they could have an issue with this. Or they might have an issue with that, or they're afraid that they have had issues with this. And I'm curious to what extent any of you have thought about those things. It's a small minutia, where you're not saying, They have these problems, have you thought about the problems? It's more of like, They might have a problem. They have thought that this could be a problem. They're concerned that this problem could be bigger. Do you guys ever think about that stuff? It's a little bit lighter because you don't want to come across too assumptive where the prospect could easily say no, we don't have those problems. You kind of want to like lean into it lightly where you're acting as if you're just thinking about it. And it's very thoughtful and it's small, but it's actually very disarming to allow the prospect to either correct you or help you. A big part about all of this is you want the prospect to help you. So a lot of AEs feel stuck that they have to do all of this work. I have to be the expert like them. I have to show them my knowledge of AEs. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. Let the prospect do the work, you'll see the prospect leaning in more.
So knowing that you are looking to soften the presentation of the menu of problems that you solve with the mights, with the typicallys, with the think they could haves, could you voice over examples of what problems you would float? Because there's a really, really big spectrum of like, you could say, you know, a lot of the folks I'm talking to are worried, they're spending a lot, they're wasting a lot of time. Or they could be saving money. And I'm wondering if those are things you've thought about. And my guess is the client's going to be like, um, well, yeah, but what the hell do you do? So could you give some examples of problems that you float Charles?
Let's assume I'm talking to a private equity firm. I might say to a private equity firm. Yeah, Bob, you know, just, just for some context, as you can imagine, I speak to private equity firms daily here at my company. And usually they're looking to either be better at or feel like they could have an issue with any one of the following three items. Sometimes they'll tell me, you know what, Charles, we do really well in our coverage of our sector, but we do feel like we could be missing insights from certain brokers that we don't cover that could have a material impact on our decisions. Sometimes I hear, you know what Charles, we have great coverage of folks that are speaking to experts, but we do feel that there could be a better way where we can cut a significant amount of time and dollars to access those experts, because they could be a commodity at this point. And the third thing that we hear a lot is, It's happened to us in the past where we've actually missed material insights that could have swayed a decision that we've made in the past that were actually buried in our own content that we have in house and we missed it because it takes us too long to find and it's very disorganized. So those are three things I've been hearing a lot from private equity firms that I've been speaking to recently. I'm curious to what extent any of those hit home for you or would you say those are non-issues and there might be something else to come to mind? You see, it's a very nuanced. They could have, they have thought about, they're asking us about, it's not black and white, it's not binary. Mm-hmm. It's just things that they wanna talk about because it's on their mind. If I give a very simple example, I'd say, Hey, Armand, private equity firms are talking to us because these things are on their mind and they're thinking about it. Now. Are you thinking about those things? That's pretty much what I'm doing, as opposed to saying, these are things that they find to be a pain. Do you find it to be a pain? It's lighter.
Charles, you talked in the prep about listening triggers or signs that someone might have a problem. So as they're giving you these answers, they're starting to give you things that it might be indicators that this is something that you could dig into a little bit more. So what are example answers or listening triggers that a prospect could throw out there that you would start to pull on a little bit more?
I think the lesser known triggers are, let's say you're in the middle of a demo and the prospect has complimented something that you just showed and they're like, wow, that's amazing. Or like, whoa, I didn't know you can do that. That is a trigger. A compliment is a trigger. It's a trigger for you to ask about what just happened. And you can just make a statement and just say, appreciate you sharing. That sounds like that hit home for you. And then just be quiet. And all of a sudden they're talking and now we're in a conversation and you can say, by the way, out of curiosity, I don't know how to ask this question. Do you have a specific example within your research process as to where that? I'm curious how you're thinking about it. And now they're sharing more information with you. Okay. So that's listening trigger number one. Listening trigger number two is. They are asking you questions during your demo that you didn't expect them to ask. If they say, oh, do you also have data on this? Or can you also filter by that? That is an indicator of interest. They asked the question because they're interested. And whether you show it to them first or afterward, it doesn't matter. You can then say, yeah, sure, we definitely cover that. We definitely do that. It sounds like you're asking for a specific reason. It's different for everyone that I talk to. Yes, I'm asking that because X, Y, and Z. We do it here, we do it there. Oh, okay, how often do you do that? All right. It also works when they're actually asking you about something that's niche. For example, something that you don't very much do. So sometimes they'll ask you, Oh, do you have a lot of coverage of companies and that are below 10 million in revenue in South America or something like that? I just made up an example and that's a weird request because let's say that's an example of something you don't solve for. You say, that's a great question. Just before I give you some context, is that something that you do most of the time, or is that like an isolated incident? And they'll say, oh, that's an isolated incident in many times. And you could say, oh, I appreciate you sharing that. That's something that I expected. Yeah, that's not something that we would cover, but we would cover the things that you're doing most of the time. So it's just a good place for you to learn more when you're getting that listening trigger. Two more listening triggers are when they say we're looking to be better at A, B, and C. That's like a great opening. Great. Can I ask why you're looking to be better? I know that might sound like a weird question, but just looking to understand you guys as much as I possibly can. Yeah, sure. Great, another listening trigger. It could be a hint. Most of the time a prospect is not going to tell you, Hey Charles, we have a problem with this. A lot of the time you'll hear like a rumbling of a pain, where they don't want to really admit to it or they're not sure how to express it and they're like, Yeah, you know, um Our research process is not the best in the world, but we want to understand what you guys offer, and so on and so forth. That's a hint, it's a rumbling. Is it okay if I ask you just a direct question about what you just said? Yeah, sure. When you say it's not the best in the world, it sounds like there's something specific that came to mind when you said that. So those are triggers for you to reverse. Reverse is a Sandler term where you want to understand the meaning behind a question or the meaning behind a statement. We all know that that's a rule, but we don't know necessarily what it sounds like. And so I have four or five triggers that my AEs listen for that allows them to say, Ooh, I'm going to ask a question about that. Not necessarily now, but I'm going to put it in my back pocket and ask it later.
There are two or three questions that I've heard from you in the past, Charles, where it's like, Hey, it sounds like something specific happened with your research process, or it sounds like you had something in particular in mind, or if someone's like, Oh, that would be really helpful for this process during a demo. You're like, Oh, could you give me a specific example of where this would be helpful? And I know you have some questions that are really designed to pull stories from your prospects. I'm hoping you could expand on that a little bit more for me. When you get the sense that there's a rumbling of a problem, how do you turn that problem into a story?
There are so many ways. The first way is actually the easiest way. Just ask them. Does a story come to mind of when that happens? That's all. Hey Bob, out of curiosity, I don't know how to ask this, but, is there an anecdote or a story that comes to mind as you're taking a look at this that maybe happened in the past year or two, where this has come up. That's such a simple question. Just ask them for a story. A softer example is just ask them for a specific example. Does a specific example come to mind of where you've seen this pop up for you where either you felt like this could take you a lot longer? Then it should. I actually heard from another client the other week that they feel like they have to hire additional people in order to get this information. And that's not something that they really look forward to. I'm just curious, where do you feel this comes up? And then Arman, I know we've talked about this in the past. The famous, like, when did you realize this is something that you felt is important enough to solve for? And all of those things bring stories. Another question that brings a story is, Hey, Nick, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here. It sounds like this is something that you wanted to solve for. I don't know exactly how to ask this, but is this the first time you've been looking to solve for this? Or have you tried to solve for this in the past couple of years and haven't done it because it just hasn't been that important or the problem wasn't that big? Curious to understand how you're thinking about it.
I want to ask you about your intention with your tonality with these questions. Yeah. Because I know you're doing some very specific things around tonality, pacing, emphasis. Talk to me about what you're doing.
The tonality I'm looking for is, I don't know everything. If I were to talk to a role model of mine and I want to learn from him. I can only learn from him. If I have this mentality of like, I don't know everything. How do you do that? I sing at weddings outside of work. I've met a famous wedding singer before. And I've sung at hundreds of weddings, but I spoke to him as if I didn't. And I said like, Oh, wow. How do you do that? I've seen you sing before and how do you do, like, where did you learn that from? I'm so curious. And it doesn't matter how many times I've done it. I'm coming from a place of, I don't know everything. I'm not sure if I've shared this quote with you guys before. Being humble doesn't mean thinking less of yourself, but being humble means thinking of yourself less. And that's really the tonality that I'm striving for. It comes naturally when you just are really like, really genuinely curious to understand more about your prospects. Anybody in sales. You don't know how lucky you are that you get to learn things from the people that you sell to. If I'm selling to investment banks, I get paid at my job to learn from people who work at investment banks, the most senior people. I learn how they think, I learn how they talk, I learn the language that they use, I learn how they position things. No one else gets to learn that aside from people at the investment bank, but my company pays me to learn that from these professionals. And when I am so excited to learn that my questions are better, I take that information, I bring it onto the next call and the tonality just comes out so much more naturally where all these things start to make sense. The humbling disclaimer, the mutual skepticism, the asking for permission, just, I don't know everything and people respect that.
So to recap, Charles, putting together the playbook that you've shared both on this episode and past ones, you're starting the call, getting permission to proceed. Then you're surfacing a couple of problems, not saying, all CROs face these three problems, but you're sort of like, saying like, they might have this, you know, some of them are concerned that this. From there, you're trying to turn those problems into stories. And then you're using humbling disclaimers to ask some of the more uncomfortable questions, whether that's asking about retention or actual revenue goals or something like that. I'm sure somewhere along the way, you are sharing how you can help as you are getting these stories, these problems and all this stuff. You're not just asking questions the entire time. How do you start to interweave where you can help as they start to share some of these stories and problems with you?
I just asked for permission to do it. So I might say, Arman, I appreciate everything you've shared with me. Would it be okay if I give you some context on how we might be able to help? And we can take it from there? Great. Now I'm telling a story, which you guys are very familiar with. You're reminding me of a client. You can even mention who the client is, depending on if the prospect told you who their competitors are, and you can mention a client. You're reminding me of this firm. They've been working with us for some time. The issues that they had were A, B, and C. The way we helped them is we built out this tool where they can find this information very, very quickly on these certain documents that they haven't seen before, they didn't know about. And it significantly helped their coverage and helped them make quicker and easier decisions. And then I say, I'll pause there and see what questions you might have for me about that. Then the prospect's asking me questions, questions, questions. And then I say, Great, Arman, with the time that we have left, based on everything we discussed here, as I mentioned at the beginning of the call, right, either this call was not really worth your time and you don't want to talk to me again or you think there's something compelling here, do you think it would make sense to have another conversation to speak further and show you how we might be able to help you? Right, depending on what kind of call you're doing. So it all flows.
Charles, we've been asking you questions, questions, questions, and I gotta ask with one final direct question here, which is, we've talked about a lot of really good things salespeople should be doing, and now I'm gonna ask you about the inverse, which is, what is one bad habit that you see a lot of salespeople exhibiting that you think they need to break? Because it hurts them more than it helps.
Don't think like you have to know who your prospect's competitors are. It's okay to ask your prospect, By the way, who do you consider to be your direct competitors? You get so much great information from that, a competitor that you didn't know about, a competitor that's actually a client of yours, and the information that you now get from that prospect you can take with you to their actual competitor and have a very poignant, direct, productive conversation.
Amazing. Charles, thank you as always for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60-second recap coming up soon.
Alrighty, Nick, it's time for a 2x2 recap from this episode with Charles Mollbauer. What do you have for your two?
So my first one is a number of different humbling disclaimer statements that you can use to preface a tough or uncomfortable question that you might ask a prospect. Some of those preface statements are, I'm not quite sure how to ask this, Thinking out loud here, I recognize this might be kind of a strange question. I understand this, this might feel kind of direct for me to ask you this. All of those statements will soften the hard question, the direct question, the impact question that you may need to ask your prospect. Number two is investigate and listen for rumblings from your prospect. Oftentimes prospects will hint at a problem that may exist, and you'll hear a rumble. They're not always going to outright say, Yeah, we've got a broken manual client onboarding process that is causing us to lose clients when we're implementing them. But they might say something like, Yeah, you know, we felt like we could get a little bit better at our implementation process. It's on you to drill in to that rumbling that they've presented, potentially using a humbling disclaimer. I'm, I recognize this might be a little bit direct, but you mentioned you're wanting to get better there. I guess, what are some of the key issues that you're seeing with your implementation process? That's how you go deeper with rumblings. Number three. We've talked about bucket questions, typically questions, multiple choice questions, where you basically surface three problems to your prospect and you ask if any of those resonate. The wrong way to do that is to say every CRO faces these three problems when they talk to us. This, this, and this. It's very declarative and assumptive. But if you just add a little bit of nuance by saying, hey, I talk to a lot of CROs and a lot of them might have problems like, or they're concerned about things like, or they're afraid that when you come in with a little bit more nuance, your prospect gets less defensive. And it's almost like you come in with this tone of, you don't know everything. And then lastly, number four, just the overall flow that Charles uses throughout the call is he gets permission to ask questions. He then surfaces a few problems without being too assumptive. He then asks for stories or moments where those problems existed or happened or manifested. And then from there he uses humbling disclaimers to ask really uncomfortable questions when it comes to quantifying the impact. R. D. Nick.
Folks, I recognize this may be an extremely direct ask, and it may come across as a little bit salesy. But, you may have understood that Armand and I have interviewed HUNDREDS of people about best practices for Discovery, and we have implemented all of the things that we've learned year over year and done fairly well in selling. And we have finally taken the steps to codify our Discovery Best Practice Guide in a 30 MPC Discovery course. And if you've learned from episodes like this, if you've learned from me and Armand over the years, you may choose to take that next step, which would be going into the show notes and checking out the preview of what that discovery course looks like. There's no obligation to buy yet, but you may decide to do that. I recognize that might have been a little bit out of bounds to include at the end, but folks, I hope you check it out. Thank you for listening, even if you don't go check it out, and we will see you next week on 30MPC.