8 Discovery Call Lessons Every Sales Professional Must Learn

[00:00:00]So, we have made a ton of mistakes selling hundreds and hundreds of deals and somehow we are still alive. So, the number one biggest place that sellers make mistakes is on the first discovery call. So, we're going to draw on my horror lessons as a VP of sales and your horror stories as a number one enterprise seller. And so, we're going to break down eight brutal discovery lessons that we learned the hard way so that you do not have to learn them face to face. Number one, this first one you wrote, the playbook of the old enterprise sales guard is dead. I won't show you the product until I rip you with 300 discovery questions. I'm not going to tell you the price until you intro me to your boss. I won't tell you if I can help you until you quantify the business losses. I won't answer your questions until you're qualified to buy.

[00:00:41]This is why prospects hate talking to salespeople. I'll see a seller at the 15minute mark of a discovery call and they've done a good job asking questions to uncover pain, get to business impact, what have you. and they actually like have enough >> and you'll start to smell it in the air where the prospect is like like they sort of want to see something. They're like, I'm getting tired of answering these questions. Like I I sort of want to see a demo. I click the request a demo button and there's this internal battle that these reps are often times fighting between traditional sales advice that says never demo on the first call. Never give price before you establish value. and what they're actually seeing in the prospect's eyes when they can see the impatience that's happening there.

[00:01:30]>> And there's a lot of oldw world sales advice that has sellers almost create this adversarial relationships with their prospects.

[00:01:39]And I think it's well-intentioned because to sell a seven figure deal, if you're selling Oracle, you're probably not going to like demo Oracle for a $5 million >> sale on the first call to a financial analyst, right?

[00:01:56]>> But the reality is like the game has changed. Like people can look up product tour videos. People get free trials all the time. People can test drive a car.

[00:02:04]And if you're good at discovery, the moment you have found a problem that they admit is a problem and the moment that they say that it's a problem that's worth solving, that usually gives you enough material so that you can do a 5-minute teaser demo that will actually give them more ideas about the problems they had versus trying to talk about your solution in the abstract. So instead of like feeling like you need to follow these binary rules of never show demo on the first call, you should instead be asking yourself, did I get enough and was I efficient in my discovery? And if I was, how can I actually take a piece of what I would normally cover in like the second call and pull it into the first call instead of getting in the way of what my prospect wants to do? Where a lot of sales people screw this up is they don't balance give and take on a discovery call with their prospect. And I see like the evolution of a novice salesperson to someone who is more seasoned. Novice salesperson level one. They show up and they're like, I'm here to sell and they pitch for all 30 minutes of the discovery call and then eventually they get to level two where they they start to learn, oh, I got to do discovery. but they actually overrotate in the direction where they spend the entire 30 minutes asking questions and by the end the buyer's like, "Well, you just peppered me with questions. I have no idea if you c can even help. Like, is it worth me taking another call with you?

[00:03:30]Like, I'm not really sure." When you get to level three, this is where you get good. You learn to balance the give and take. And so, what you might do is you show that four or five minute demo and you use the demo as a mechanism to ask more questions. You show them the feature and you're like, "Hey, like how would you see your team using this?" and you buy yourself more questions and more back and forth and it starts to feel like a conversation. And so you're you're in sales because hopefully you have pretty good EQ. Use that muscle. If you sense something is off the way you're running your call, you might need to adapt things. If you've ever been to a great doctor or a therapist or if you've just had a friend like give you advice on a problem, >> the best advisors are usually asking questions, asking questions, asking questions, and then saying like, oh, here's like a story of when I've seen something similar or like, have you considered this?

[00:04:21]>> As they get information, once they get enough information to understand like this is the problem that you're dealing with, they pattern match it to make you realize like, oh, you've seen this before. and then they start to like tease solutions because eventually they're going to be like I'm tired of being therapized like can you just tell me what to do? And so stop interrogating your prospects and start having a conversation. All right, number two is you wrote this one. This is one of my favorites. It's most reps try to build rapport by sch smoozing.

[00:04:46]>> The top reps build respect in the first 90 seconds by showing you prepped, showing you know their business, showing you respect their time. We call it the 90 secondond rule. Start your call by proving you did your homework first. Th This one was one of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn where I just got dude, I got freaking put in my place by this partner of a really big law firm.

[00:05:10]So, as you know, I used to sell to to law firms and I'll never forget I've got this big demo with like a group of eight or nine like top partners at this big law firm in Century City. And I get on the Zoom meeting with these guys and I'm feeling a little anxious cuz like these are some like legit law firm partners.

[00:05:30]And I'm like, "All right, like let me loosen everybody up. Let me let me build some rapport." And I I get on. I'm like, "So, like, is everyone based in Century City? I know it's a really nice area.

[00:05:39]Like, where are you alling in from?" And I I get cut off by uh by the managing partner and he goes, he was like super stern. He's like, "Nick, we've had a long day of meetings. Can we just get to the demo, please?" And I felt like an ant. And I could sense that the the way that these people viewed me. I was down here. They were up here. I was just this little gnat who was here to show them a demo because I showed how junior and salesy I was trying to make small talk about where they were calling in from as opposed to like starting from a place of credibility and respect. And I got off that demo and I was like, I'm I am never going to let that happen to me again.

[00:06:17]And so I vowed I was never going to make lame salesy small talk again. If I make small talk about something that shows I prepped for this call. I know their business and is like somewhat related to the problems that they're there to solve by looking at my product. I keep us focused on business. I show that like I'm a professional and it gives them a chance to talk about the thing that we were there to talk about. Anyway, so what I did is I I jotted down. All right, I sold um it was like this ERP system to to law firms and I was like what are all the things that like could be happening in their world that I could mention in the beginning to get their respect and it was things like had they just won a case? A lot of lots of law firms publicize when they win big cases or had they opened a new office or had the managing partner put out a piece of thought leadership and could I comment on something I saw there and I started showing up on my calls and I'm like Armont it's really great to meet you. I I actually just read about the big case win over Acme and I'm excited to like get to to know you a little bit more and get into today's demo. I get on with the CFO of the law firm. I'm like, "Hey, it's great to meet you. I I saw the news about the big office opening in Tacoma and I I know there's a lot that comes with the new office opening, especially like tax complexities. So, I'm sure we'll end up talking about some of that stuff in today's demo." And when I started with, hey, I saw this thing when I did my prep and I'm not every other salesperson that's talking about the weather or sports or asking where are you calling in from, people started to be like, all right, like they started to treat me differently. I was no longer this inferior salesperson trying to butter them up. Instead, I was like, all right, that they saw my game and it it just changed the way my calls went from there on out. You got to remember that you're battling the reputation of every other seller who has sold to your prospect and piss them off. And when you show up to a sales call, nine times out of 10, people view salespeople in lower status. If you go to a bar and you tell people you work in sales, everyone's like, "Oh god, let me let me >> I'm going to grab another drink. See you later." And that's why it's really important to establish respect, not schmoozy rapport in the first 90 seconds. The example I like to give people is imagine you had been training as a chef for the longest time and you go eat an amazing duck breast at a restaurant and the chef comes out >> and you're like, "Oh my god, the duck breast was so good. You're so good at making food." And you give all these lightweight, peopleleasing compliments.

[00:08:41]Well, they're going to be like, "This person's a consumer.

[00:08:44]>> I'm the chef. I'm the expert in the room.

[00:08:47]versus if I look at the chef's cuisine and I'm like, "Oh my god, the cross-hatching you did on the duck was perfect. It made the sear come off just the right way. You must have done the reverse sear, not this type of sear."

[00:08:58]They're going to be like, "This person gets my business." And they're going to be like, "You must cook."

[00:09:04]>> And so the key is you still want your rapport to be something about them.

[00:09:09]>> Y, >> but you want it to be something about them >> that shows you get their business.

[00:09:15]unlike most sales people. And if you do that in the first 90 seconds, you'll notice they'll like sit up and they're like, "Ah, I look at you a little bit differently." All right. So, this one's also yours, and it's what happens after you build rapport.

[00:09:25]>> Mhm.

[00:09:26]>> Which is if your prospect says, "Are you going to show me the product? Why are you asking so many questions? Can you just tell me the price?" You botch the agenda.

[00:09:35]>> Set a one minute PO agenda and get on with it. Purpose, why are we here? Plan, how will we spend the time? outcome.

[00:09:43]What decision will we make at the end?

[00:09:45]>> Selling to attorneys, they can be pretty like doineering, commanding people. And I remember I had a first call with a managing partner of this insurance defense law firm that was on Long Island. And I get on with this guy and he jumps right in. Like we didn't have any small talk. He's like, "All right, so how does this product compare to what we're using today? Does it integrate with our document management system?

[00:10:09]Talk to me about with the data migrations." like he's throwing questions at me and I'm like I answer one, I answer another, I answer another and we get like 20 minutes in the call and I've answered dude probably like 30 questions and finally at the end I was able to like be like okay but like talk to me about what's going on in your world. It it sounds like you use this product, but like what what are some of your pain points? But by then I had already lost the call because like this guy was just throwing questions at me and I was answering them totally blind.

[00:10:37]I didn't know much about their situation. I didn't really understand the real problems he wanted to solve. I was literally just like they call it Stump the Chump. He was just throwing things at me. And it was actually kind of funny. At the time, my company was um doing a PC with Gong. And I recorded that call on Gong. And the rep who was trying to sell my CRO Gong was actually Sarah Brazier, believe it or not. And she did a really good job selling the PC where she checked in with every single rep who was using Gong. And so she got on a call with me and she's like, "Yeah, let's let's look at one of your calls and see some of the gong insights." And I'm like, "Well, let's pull up this stinker of a call." And I pull it up and we didn't even watch the call. At the bottom of the screen, you can see like the talk to listen like who's talking when. And she goes, "Nick, I know why this call didn't go your way. I don't even have to listen to it." I'm like, "What?" And she's like, "I can see there's no long like minutelong riff that you have in the beginning, which tells me you didn't set an agenda. you didn't tell him, hey, I've got to ask you some questions before I start telling you all about our product. And I was like, oh. So, what I started to do then, anytime I got on with an attorney, we would still have folks try to like take control of the conversation and just throw questions at me. And what I would do is I would say, cool, we're definitely like I can answer that question. I can tell you how we compare.

[00:11:55]I guess the way that I saw this call going today was really purpose was just to see like can we even help you solve some of your problems as you're a growing law firm in terms of how we actually accomplish that. I'm wondering if I can ask you a couple questions first about like how you're getting things done today, some of the the challenges you're running into specifically around stuff like billing and then I can share a little bit about like how we might fit in with that and then we're probably not going to have enough today to like figure out should you buy this or not, but maybe we can spend the last 5 minutes talking about if we get this in front of your CFO for like a more formal demo. And I would set that purpose, plan, outcome, agenda. And now I had control of the call where I would get my questions. But this guy wasn't anxious anymore about am I going to get my questions answered because I told him you will get them answered in this order. So in the agenda I set here's what we're going to cover. Here's the sequence of things and we're going to carve out intentional time for next steps. All my calls were easier because there was no longer this like friction or tugofwar over where the call was going to go. A lot of times there's this internal tension that reps have when they start building rapport and it will all of a sudden start to steer into the discovery call. You bring up the new office launch and they talk about all their billing problems and you don't want to like interrupt the momentum of the call and you want to jump right into discovery.

[00:13:11]>> Do not be afraid to break rapport and just say like, "Hey, I totally screwed up here." just in terms of an agenda in terms of how we're going to run this call.

[00:13:20]>> We're gonna talk about this stuff first, then we'll talk about how we can help later on. Sorry, keep going. What were you just talking about? Do not be afraid to reinterject the agenda if you find yourself accidentally jumping into discovery motion when you're building report.

[00:13:33]>> I mean, one other place is you talk about on that first call, you show like that harbor tour demo that's like five to maybe 9 minutes long. I set a second agenda before that where I'm like, "Hey, we're at the midway point. I would love to give you a look at like how we can solve some of the things that you shared with me. Like just agenda wise, like this isn't going to be an exhaustive demo, but I think I can show you like one or two ways that this might be able to help. And if you like what you're seeing, maybe we can talk about a way to like set a more formal demo after that.

[00:14:00]So, I I love setting that midpoint agenda as well to like keep the call on the rails. All right. All right. So, on the note of questions, here's one that you wrote which says, "Most reps ask a bunch of disconnected questions which feels like an interrogation and rarely leads to real business pain. Instead, go vertical. Use each answer to guide your next question and dig deeper." Example flow. One, situation. How do you run comps? Answer: spreadsheets. Two, operational problem that usually causes X or Y. Which is it for you? Three, exec problem. When did you realize this was a real problem?

[00:14:38]>> All right, so I'm gonna show this one and I'm going to pretend that you and I are on a first date.

[00:14:43]>> Yeah, very cute. Okay, >> I'm cringing already.

[00:14:45]>> I'm gonna ask you a question and I just want you to answer it however you would actually answer.

[00:14:49]>> Okay. All right, >> cool. What did you do last weekend?

[00:14:51]>> You know, I hung out with some friends, played with the dog a little bit. Um, actually, there's a really cool bar that opened up down the street, so I went there for a little bit, hung out.

[00:15:00]>> Awesome. What do you like to do for fun?

[00:15:02]>> I'm in a volleyball league. Um, just joined a new soccer group. really trying to build some community here in in New York City and so, you know, just trying to get active and hang out with people.

[00:15:10]>> Nice. What do you do for work?

[00:15:11]>> Oh, I work in uh I work in sales.

[00:15:13]>> I'm literally interviewing you with like a checklist of questions.

[00:15:18]>> There's a certain point where you're going to be like, why are you asking me all of these questions if you're not doing anything with the answers? You're like, where are you going with this?

[00:15:28]>> Your cold email reply rates literally triple if you pair them with a cold call. Right now, you can get 34% off our 30 Minutes to President's Club outbound bundle, which includes our cold calling course, Cold Calls to President's Club, which will teach you exactly what to do, what to say, and how to sound for every single step of a cold call. It also includes our cold email course, which will teach you how to write personalized onetoone feeling cold emails in minutes, not hours, and how to make worldclass offers to your buyer to solicit responses instead of just asking for time. And so if you go to 30mppc.com/courses, go check out our outbound bundle and you will find yourself booking meeting after meeting after meeting and on your way to President's Club. A good first date and a good discovery call uses what you give me.

[00:16:17]>> Yeah.

[00:16:18]>> To build the next question. So in that first answer, you're like, "Oh, I played with my dog."

[00:16:22]>> I might be like, "Oh, you have a puppy.

[00:16:25]>> How old's the little guy? When did you get the little guy? When did you decide you wanted to get the puppy?" and you're going to tell me the story around when you got the puppy and then I might trade a story of my own and then I might start to go into problems or stuff like that where it's like oh my god what was the crate training experience like and now I'm going to get some emotions in there and that's how a conversation goes vertically is you go deeper where every question every answer builds on the next and then you move to the next topic once the first topic is exhausted. So when I was selling deals at Carta, not on first dates, but actually selling software, I would ask people questions like, "How do you manage your option plan?" Carter was a solution that would help people issue out stock options, >> not using paper certificates, but using electronic stock certificates, right?

[00:17:10]Pretty simple.

[00:17:12]>> And a lot of times with an easy prospect, I'd be like, "How do you manage your cap table?" And they'd be like, "Oh my god, we do it on spreadsheets and it's like super painful and I got to deal with these lawyers."

[00:17:23]And they would answer a checklist question with a problem.

[00:17:26]>> Mhm. And I'd be like, "I'm so good at discovery. I'm the man. I must be great at this." And the problem is easy prospects, you can ask them a checklist question and they'll give you a problem. So I go to this next prospect and I'm like, "All right, John, how do you manage your cap table?" He looks at me, he says, "Spreadsheets."

[00:17:48]I'm like, "Okay, what accounting system are you on?" He goes, "Quick books." Nice.

[00:17:58]And this goes on for four or five minutes straight where I'm getting one-word answers out of him.

[00:18:03]>> Mhm.

[00:18:04]>> And most prospects would have been like, "I'm on QuickBooks and it doesn't talk to my cap table and it's complete mess."

[00:18:10]But when someone was a little bit tougher of a prospect, 5 minutes in, he's like, "Can you stop asking me questions and just show me the software?"

[00:18:19]>> Because I was in the way >> Yeah.

[00:18:22]>> of him just getting the answers that we need. And so I remember my manager clicked the mute button in the middle of the call and he just looks at me and he's like, "Stop asking closedended questions." and he clicks unmute and then he jumps in with a question and he goes, "John, my guess is you don't take demos with every single product that you see in the world. I'm curious like you're doing this stuff on spreadsheets.

[00:18:46]You're a pretty financially savvy guy.

[00:18:48]Like what do you want this thing to look like? Like why are you even here?"

[00:18:51]>> And he goes on a fiveminute monologue around all the problems he has with issuing stock options, the investor updates, and all that stuff because he asked a real question instead of a checklist question. So the three layers of questions you can think of are situational questions and that just like tells you about their situation. For example, how do you manage your cap table? From there, turn the situation into a problem. So if you manage your cap table on spreadsheets, I can now say, hey, typically when people are managing their cap table on spreadsheets, it's either taking them a lot of time or they're spending a ton on legal fees because they're outsourcing it to lawyers.

[00:19:29]>> Yeah. And then I can go into impact. If they say they're doing it on lawyers, I'm going to be like, "Hey, like it looks like you're around 30 employees or something like that, that probably means you're issuing like 10 or so years." So, you must be paying like, would it be ridiculous to say you're paying like three, four, five grand in legals fees per year just for the options? Or like, give me a sense of like how we can size this up cuz I want to make sure we're solving the right problem.

[00:19:49]>> Now, I'm building one discovery question on the next.

[00:19:53]>> Yeah. and I can get to one or two deep problems in 10 minutes and then I can actually move on to the demo instead of asking them qualification questions.

[00:20:00]>> Yeah. I mean, you're pulling on the thread if I go back to that bizarre dating example that felt very uncomfortable for me. One, because it was you and me, but then also like your questions were just terrible. I felt like one like I mentioned I have a dog and then your next question was about like what I like to do for fun and I was just like, "Oh, I guess what I said before wasn't interesting to you." So, I already felt like sort of like you didn't really care about me. But what you're doing is you're pulling on the thread and taking the conversation deeper on the thing that matters. In the dating example you gave, you might ask about the dog because you might be an animal lover also, and you want to have a deeper conversation about that as opposed to the bar that I went to. In a sales conversation, prospects typically are going to give you a couple leads to pull on. You're just going deeper on the thing that has the problem you know you solve. For a dog, it might be, oh, okay, what was the crate training like? You can pull on that nightmare. For Carta, it's oh, okay, you're paying for the attorneys. You might have a screwed up cap table or something. And so, all you need to know is what's the problem that you solve, get the highest level, and then pull that thread deeper. And that's how you steer the conversation in the right direction.

[00:21:09]>> All right. So, this next one's from you.

[00:21:10]It's your number one discovery question.

[00:21:11]>> Yeah.

[00:21:12]>> In 2024, I closed 1.6 $.6 million in sponsorship deals. Here's the number one discovery question I used on every call.

[00:21:20]I imagine this has to be a busy time of year for you. What prompted you to take this call with me? I asked that question every month of the year because it's always a busy time of year for the prospects. But what I'm really trying to understand is like what is their motivation for even showing up today?

[00:21:37]It's the best way to get them talking in the beginning of the call. And the way that I learned this was when I was a new AE. I remember I booked my very first discovery call and I'm preparing for it.

[00:21:48]I hadn't gotten like real training on how to run a discovery call. And I'm like, what am I going to say to start the conversation? And I'm like sitting there and I'm like writing all of these questions about like, okay, I'm going to ask him what system they use and I'm going to ask him how long he's been looking for a system and maybe I should ask about like what their decision-m process is. So, like I literally had this whole checklist of questions I was going to ask, but I was really stressed cuz I like I think I had heard from you about like the one-word answer story and I was like, don't want that happening to me. And so, I was really really anxious.

[00:22:20]So, I messaged my boss on on Slack and I'm like like how do how do I like kick this thing off? Like, how do I really get this guy to open up? Like I was emailing him. He was like a head of it and sort of seemed like a little bit closed off. And my boss messages me back and she's like, "Why why don't you just ask him like why he agreed to meet with you?" And I'm like, but he kind of told me that in the email. He said he's thinking about switching systems and would love to learn more. So, like, I know why he wants to meet with me. And she's like, "No, no, no, no. Ask it live. You're going to get so much more information." And so, I get on with this guy. I'm like, "So, uh, you know, Dave, I I I guess this is a busy time of year for you and, um, what made you want to meet with me today?" And I'm like, he's going to just steamroll. He I'm like, he's going to tell me. I told you that via email. The guy goes on a 12inut monologue and he is just gushing and gushing. He tells me what system he's using. He tells me how long they've been looking. He tells me what their decision-making process is. He tells me what their budget was. He told me about the different partners involved in this decision. Literally, every discovery question that I had pre-planned, he answered off of that one question. And I realized that when like you don't start with business problems, you don't start with their situation. You don't start by asking about their decision-making process. You start with like why did you even agree to this meeting? And most folks are like, "Great. You gave me the mic. I'm going to share a lot." They share what they're looking to get out of the call. They share the background context. It's my number one discovery question. I use it every time. The other day, we were hiring a new outsourced finance and accounting firm.

[00:23:49]>> Mhm.

[00:23:50]>> And I jumped on eight different discovery calls with sales reps. And one of the first ones, I get on the call and the guy's like, "All right, what's your growth goal? What's the revenue target you're trying to get to? What's the biggest thing in the way of that?" like how's your profitability looking? And eventually I had to interrupt him. Yeah.

[00:24:08]>> Because I'm like, "Hey, dude.

[00:24:11]>> I'm not here to get your advice."

[00:24:13]>> Yeah.

[00:24:13]>> On how to hit our revenue goal.

[00:24:15]>> I'm here to get your advice because we got reamed on taxes last year.

[00:24:21]>> And I need your help saving on taxes.

[00:24:23]And I'm happy to talk about my revenue goals, but I've got a really good plan for that and I don't need help there. I need you to help me with my P&L and my tax burden. and he's like, "Oh, I spent the first 5 minutes talking about the wrong problem because other customers come to me with that problem." The reality is like, if you're listening to this, most products solve more than one problem. Yes. And there are two ways to do discovery. You can say, "This is the first problem, the second problem, the third problem, the fourth problem, the fifth problem I solve. Which of them is the one for you?" Or you can just be like, "Hey, why are you here?"

[00:25:02]>> And the prospect will be a heat-seeking missile for you to get directly to the problem as quickly as possible.

[00:25:09]>> Yeah.

[00:25:10]>> And then usually in their explanation, they will give you a thread that hints at another problem. And then you can be like, "Hey, based on this, if you have this problem, you probably also have this problem. Could you tell me more about that?"

[00:25:23]>> Versus just throwing stuff at a wall.

[00:25:25]>> All right. So, this next one is your number one discovery question. And so, you wrote, "My most used sales question by far is, when did you realize that was a problem?" It's called a magic moment question. And it prompts the prospect to recall a specific moment, turning abstract pain into a real emotional story that sells. Yeah. So, a lot of conventional sales advice says that stories sell. If you can tell a story or if you can get your prospect to tell a story, that usually involves emotional pain or emotional problems. And that is the key to closing a deal. But it's actually really, really hard to get your prospect to tell you a story.

[00:26:08]And so when I was selling compensation software at PAVE, a lot of compensation software was an emotional sale. The HR department typically is the first budget to get slashed. Like if they're going to the CFO and they're like, "Yeah, I really want this workflow tool that's going to save me a lot of time. They're going to be like, you're HR, you're a cost center. I'm not going to give you any budget for this. I'm going to spend this money on my sales team so they can go generate more deals." And so we always had to find a way to come up with these like painful emotional stories that they could bring up to a CFO and they would even keep a CFO up at night.

[00:26:48]>> And so the way we would do that is we would start with our situational questions be like, "Hey, tell me about how you're running your merit cycles today, your compensation reviews today."

[00:26:56]They'd be like, "Oh, it's on spreadsheets. Classic problem." And then I would be like, "Okay, typically when you're running these merit cycles on spreadsheets, that usually means it's either taking a ton of time or you're worried about like compensation mistakes or you're worried about like you can't oversee all these manager decisions when you're managing competion different spreadsheets." And then they'll be like, >> "Yeah, I'm like honestly really freaking out about overseeing all these manager comp decisions." Now, that's a problem.

[00:27:22]>> Mhm. But if I can find a story behind that problem, >> there's something really terrifying behind that door. And so the moment you find a problem, all you have to ask is when was the moment that you realized that this was a problem and you will always get a story. So, I would ask that question and nine times out of 10 they would drop into this horror story where it's like, "Oh my god, I've got this one sales manager who had someone who had like a performance rating of a two and they give them like a 10% comp increase when this other engineering manager had a top performer and they got a 7% increase and then they talked and now the top engineer is leaving the company."

[00:28:01]Boom. Stories are the linkage between problem and business impact.

[00:28:06]>> Yeah. And if I can add up enough of those stories where I can be like, "Hey, this like general gut feeling of a problem you have is what's leading to consistent attrition or bad employee experiences." That's something that I can bring up to a CFO. One of the best follow-ups that you taught me to that question is once they tell you that story, you're like, "Oh my gosh, that's brutal. I'm really sorry to hear that."

[00:28:32]I guess I'm curious, was that like a one-time thing or is that something that's like happened a couple times? And if you can get them to go from this was an isolated incident to this is a trend or this is a recurring thing, it just magnifies that pain so much more. So, love that follow-up question that you also taught me there. All right, so this next one is another one from you and it says, "The five minute drill. Three simple questions to qualify real deals fast. One, do you want to buy? Two, when do you want to buy? Three, how do you buy? What's going on with this one here?

[00:29:05]>> We had this problem when I was the VP of sales at Pave where our SMB, our small medium business segment had like a 10% win rate, which was like abysmally low.

[00:29:16]>> Yeah.

[00:29:16]>> And I was like, what the hell is going on here? It was like the deals are getting from the first call to the second call and from the second call to the third call and then at the third call when it's finally time to make a decision, every single deal is saying no.

[00:29:32]>> Mhm. And >> I'm like something is going on inside of these calls that's like they get to that third stage and something's not working.

[00:29:37]And so I started looking at all the calls and eventually what I realized is I would see these reps going into a second demo call and they would get on the call they would start showing software and the prospect would be like mhm mhm and I would ask the rep I was like hey go on this demo like what is the problem that this prospect said that they wanted to solve and they would say something like they love pave And to me, that isn't a problem. That's like a sentiment of happiness. And that is the definition of what you often times call happy years in sales where you look at a prospect's enthusiasm and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to say like because they look happy, I think they're going to buy my software." And a lot of times in sales, you're taught to set next steps at the end of every single discovery call. And I actually think that's a horrible mistake. What I found is that reps were so obsessed with setting next steps after a first discovery call that a prospect would be like, "Sure, I'll take another call with you." When they never had any intentions of buying in the first place. And so all we did is we literally had our reps ask one question at the end of every discovery call before they said a next step. And that was do you want to buy?

[00:31:04]You don't literally ask that. You say hey before we set a next step before we go a new demo. Going through a demo is going to require resources from your team. Eventually we're going to want to like propose this up to your leadership team. You're going to have to burn some political capital doing that. And that's okay if you really see this as like a problem we're solving. But based on everything we've discussed so far, is this something you could actually see yourself moving forward with or is it a nice to have? And nine times out of 10 on those SMB deals, the answer was no.

[00:31:34]>> Mhm.

[00:31:35]>> But here's the problem. We were still having that issue. That improved things a little bit. But then what would happen is these deals would get kicked out further and further and further and further. And that's when we added the second question. is say like, "Awesome.

[00:31:49]Based on this being a problem that's worth solving, your next compensation cycle is coming up in like five months here, right? Is this something that you could realistically see yourself implementing for that comp cycle or does it still feel too early >> and maybe we should like punt this out to the next one?"

[00:32:04]>> Mhm.

[00:32:05]>> And so when you ask, "Do you want to buy," you validate whether or not there's a problem really worth solving.

[00:32:11]>> When you ask, "When do you want to buy?"

[00:32:13]You validate that they're going to solve the problem today.

[00:32:16]And then you can ask, "How do you buy?"

[00:32:20]And that's when you set your next steps.

[00:32:22]But if they're not having a problem and they're not having a problem that they want to solve right now, you shouldn't even set a next step with them. All right. So this last one's from you. The way you send a recap email is probably killing your discovery call.

[00:32:33]>> Mhm.

[00:32:33]>> You need to take what you normally send and flip it in reverse order. You put the next steps first, then the problems that you solve, how you solve them, and the resources all the way at the bottom.

[00:32:45]Yeah. So, this one, another hard lesson selling to a law firm. I had this, it was a 60inute intro meeting onsite with a law firm in downtown LA. And so, I go on site, I got my suit and tie, and we had a really awesome conversation. They asked me a bunch of questions. We had a bunch of really great back and forth.

[00:33:02]And I was a voracious notetaker. I took eight pages in a notebook like this of handwritten notes. And I get back home and I'm like, "Okay, I know I need to send a recap email." And I totally botched this. We're like, "Dude, it it took me almost a week to turn those eight pages of handwritten notes into like something that I could actually send to a prospect in an email where I literally recapped, you asked this question. Here's how we answered it. You shared this, this, and this." And I literally just like regurgitated all of the stuff that they told me and that was my email. And then at the very end, I was like, "By the way, we talked about scheduling a demo. Uh, you know, do any of these times work for you?" problem was this was like dude I I swear it was probably like a fourpage email. It was like the Declaration of Independence and of course they didn't respond and I followed I followed I followed and like nothing back. I killed the deal because I was like I vomited in the email and I was like there's got to be a better way to do this. And I think you and I had a conversation you were like bottom line up front put the thing they need to do up front. And so now the way I send recap emails, I keep them short and I keep them actionoriented. And if I need to send longer form stuff, I'll link out to it and like a Google doc or a mutual action plan or something. But there's three pieces. The action items go first, the things that they need to do. My number one way to move a deal forward is action, not recap. So action items first. Then I go max three bullets on here were the biggest problems you said that you had. One sentence corresponding of like how we can make it go away. And then at the end, if there's other resources I need to link to, IT docs, integrations, full notes, I'll link out to those because my number one thing I need to do to drive the deal forward is get them to respond and say, "This time works for our next meeting." So folks, those are your eight lessons. If you want to actually see what Nick is talking about, we have the ultimate 30 minutes to President's Club recap email template that has the next steps, the problems and solutions, and the resources at the bottom. You can go check out a link to that. And then also we'll include a link to our ultimate discovery framework that you can use to run your call step by step and it will prevent you from making a lot of these brutal mistakes that Nick and I made.

[00:35:08]We'll catch you on the next one.

[00:35:10][Applause]