129: Trademarks of Top Sales Reps With Tom Williams

Thank you to our sponsors, LeadIQ, Costello, SalesLoft, WorkRamp, and Dialpad for helping us produce this podcast. Head over to jbarrows.com slash blog for the highlights of this episode and explore resources you can use right away. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend. I am up for this conversation because I've actually been toying around with some of the things that this person's an expert in. And I'm curious a lot for myself on how he's using some of the tools that we're going to talk about today. But I'd like to introduce everybody over to Tom Williams, the CEO and co-founder of DealPoint.

So, Tom, say hi to everybody. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for having me, John. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Tom, you want to give everybody a little bit of a background? Again, you started DealPoint about four years ago, give or take. But kind of talk to people about kind of where you're coming from. And then, first of all, what is DealPoint? Why just start it? And then I think that'll translate into our conversation here. Sure. So I started off in marketing for years and years. And then I was in a board meeting one time. I was the VP of marketing. And the VP of sales came in and sales weren't doing so hot. And he goes, I don't know what the hell happened.

And the next week, I became the VP of sales and marketing. So basically, they said, it can be you or it can be somebody else. And sales was kind of thrust upon me all those years ago. But I really got into it because when marketing and sales reports to the same person, I was able to see the vision and the messaging and all that actually get executed properly. And if it didn't work, there was one person whose fault it was. And it made it a lot easier to iterate quickly, get feedback from customers, kind of undiluted feedback. So anyway, so that's my foray into sales. So I was running these sales teams. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was going to ask just because I'm curious because, you know, and this is a whole other topic.

So I don't want to have this be derailed here. But what do you see as the biggest divide between sales and marketing? Is it that feedback loop? Like with your experience now on both sides and then doing both at the same time and seeing how much better it can be when they're seamlessly working together. What do you think is like the main reason? Because I've been hearing about the sales and marketing divide for literally 20 years being in business, right? And I haven't heard it get any better. You know, what are you seeing right now as the main divide between the two and the reasoning behind it? I think there's an early disconnect between what are the two organizations trying to accomplish. So the better teams, marketing is actually treating sales like a customer.

And so they're doing what you'd consider just standard sales operation, which is what problems do you have? And if I can come up with the solution, would you use it? You know, walk them down that qualification path and then say, you said you would use it. So why aren't you using it? And if a marketer applies that sales logics on a sales organization, then actually the salesperson gets their problem fixed. But I see a lot. The disconnect is they want to make, say, the CEO look good. And so they put all this effort into making the CDO or the product or the company look good. Whereas what salespeople want is, how do I close this goddamn deal tomorrow? Because I keep hearing this one objection and I got nothing.

That's where real marketing can come in is either preempt the objection by getting good marketing up front, or at least have some kind of backup so that they can fall back on a nice piece of collateral or a message or an answer. It doesn't have to be a piece of paper. It can be an answer. But just equip the sales team with what they want and they will love you. It's so much easier. They're busy. So they would much rather just have their two pieces of collateral, their go-tos on their desktop. And they didn't even know that marketing wants to help. That's my two cents. Yeah, no, I agree. I think the sales reps are looking for the very tactical things that work, right? Like even to your point, what questions should I ask or how should I handle that objection or, you know, what should I put in a subject line to a CFO of an IT services firm, you know, that type of stuff.

And it's funny because you're right, if marketing, and that's why, you know, from a training standpoint, I think one of the reasons people gravitate towards our training is because we're very, very technique oriented. And it's like, hey, just do this and try and see what happens. And then when they see that result, it's like, it's an immediate, oh, holy crap, this works. And now I'm wide open to what you're about to tell me, right? And I think that's what marketing does miss, is that they come up with these grandiose programs and all this messaging and all this other stuff, but they miss the tactical stuff that the reps will see an immediate impact with. And therefore, they don't bridge that gap of credibility, right?

I mean, a lot of the stuff that they're doing is great, but I need as a sales rep to show me why, you know, what you're doing is going to help me in any way, shape, or form for my day to day, right? Yeah, you can present the Treaty of Versailles, which is a fantastic document on how to stop a war. Or you can say, guys, we're going to go and take that trench. You go around the left, you go around the right and just start shooting. And two different mindsets. Ultimately, sales needs to know, what do I do tomorrow? Exactly. So did that lead you to DealPoint? Has that led you to? Yeah, yeah. So where that led with DealPoint was, I was in the electronics industry and my sales guys would say, you know, guarantee closed by the end of the month.

And then from time to time, I would call the prospect and they'd say, we're thinking about it. And I realized there was this complete disconnect because the sales guys had the CRM that they didn't get paid commission until they filled in the information in Salesforce. So they had great CRM, but the sales, sorry, the buyers didn't have that view. And so I left electronics and went into enterprise SaaS. So completely different industry, completely different everything, but the exact same problem. And I just woke up, I know, three and a half years ago, middle of the night, proper realization that it's because they weren't on the same page. So if the buying team looks at the same stage of where are we and what's happening, what's next as the selling team, then there's a lot less likely to be that kind of fundamental miscommunication that caused my forecast to be inaccurate because I was listening to the sales guys who were listening to their happy years instead of their customers.

And that's it. Like, that's the problem with it that I see in sales is, is, and I always tell people this all the time, like, I love sales. I hate the game of sales though. I hate like the back and forth with the customer. I mean, I did a keynote a little while ago and I put up a chicken and the egg, right? And I said, Hey, what happened first? What came first? Did the customer lie to the sales rep or to the sales rep lie to the customer? Right. Cause somewhere like, you know, my daughter's nine years old, right? And early, early years, right? You teach don't, you know, one of the first things you teach your kid is don't lie. Right. Like be honest, don't lie. But somewhere around the way it became a hundred percent.

Okay. To bold face lie to sales reps. You know what I mean? Like, like walk, I mean, a simple example is you walk into like one of those massive warehouse stores, right? You know what you want, but you don't know where it is. And that sales rep comes charging up to you with their handout and they're like, hi, thanks for coming in. How can I help you? Right. And the reaction of most people is I'm all set. I'm just looking. Right. Yeah. And they don't want to get sold to. Right. They will wander around that massive warehouse for hours looking for something when all they had to do was say, Hey, I'm looking for this. And they said, Oh yeah, it's aisle 19. Right. So, so it's okay to lie, but so let's talk about that transparency.

Like how do you breed transparency throughout the sales process so you can be aligned with the buyer and, and those happy years don't happen because it's more realistic. Like what are some of the things that, that you're seeing, um, to, to allow for that transparency, if you will, to, to control the sales process a little bit more. So, so it's, it's all related to becoming trusted because their transparency isn't going to come through on the first, on the first call, uh, they don't know you. So the step one, I think is show them that you really are interested in helping them as it's a fundamental shift of, I'm not, I'm not trying to sell you my thing and show off my thing and let you figure out how to use it.

I am genuinely coming to this to hear about your issues, see if I know anything about it and see if I can help you solve your problem. And because you write about proactive disqualification, right? So do you believe in disqualifying more than qualifying? I think you can, I actually, I did a, like a spreadsheet on this. You can, it's, it's scary how much time we spend on each section of the, on each stage of the deal, how much time we spend on deals that ultimately don't close. Right. If you add that up into more prospecting time, you can 5X your revenue. Easily. Just, I mean, it's, it's, of course you don't know which ones to disqualify up front, but the better you are at it, the more you can trend towards only focusing on, on winning deals.

But part of that is understanding what the priorities or initiatives are of the customer. So if you, if you genuinely start with, I love, um, why did you take my call? Yep. Because there was something in your cold call or a marketing's email or something that was the genesis for them being willing to spend time with you. And the other key is to, to be willing to be quiet for a couple of seconds and not fill the vacuum. Let them talk a bit about what their issue is. Then give them feedback on if you've seen that somewhere else in the industry. And if you've sold it to somebody else, then you've seen some feedback that they would find useful because you've sold your thing a hundred times, but they've never bought your thing.

So you have probably got some insight having talked to other people in the industry, share that insight. And now it's going to be a much more give and take. We're talking about their industry and their problems and things that you know about it. That is building up trust and credibility. Agreed. And, and, and you talk about priorities, right? Cause I'm a big, I'm, I've always been a believer that, you know, when your CEO stood up and you're like, when you, for instance, with your organization, when you stand up at the beginning of next year and you do your sales kickoff with your team and say, all right, here's the guiding, like, here's the things that we need to do this year to be successful.

Right. I've always believed that if I can't tie my solution to one or two of those, like that you're talking about, then good luck selling anything of significance. Right. But the, and I've always been a priority based seller. Cause I also believe that's the only way you can truly, I don't believe you can create urgency. I believe you can uncover urgency and tie your solution. And that's about like helping me understand where you're trying to get to. Right. Because what you don't see is you, you don't see how my solution can help you get to where you're going faster. Right. Yeah, exactly. With a, with me, and I'm sure you're doing the same thing, like with your executive team, right? Like I, a couple, a couple of weeks back, I sat down with my executive team and we mapped out, Hey, end of the year, we kind of know where things are coming in at this point.

So let's talk about next year. And we set our goals. And it's funny, you know, midway through. So we, and then we mapped out everything about who's going to be responsible for what, you know, midway through the year, there's not a chance that some sales reps going to give me this cold call and all of a sudden reshift what my priorities are, right? As far as creating urgency, right? And be like, Hey, John, I got this new fun widget. Oh yeah. You know what? Let me dump all that stuff I was thinking about. Let me, that's a great idea. Like that's not going to happen. But what they can do is understand what those priorities are and tie their solution to that, that I didn't see. Yeah. I think I love the thing that really sold me on this approach was they have budget for that initiative.

It's already, there's budget allocated and trying to win new budget is infinitely harder than, um, saying we, you want to get this project finished. I have helped 10 other people finish the project just like that. And they use this solution. Uh, it's a real one, two, three. And the coolest part is, uh, you've written a lot about going dark and how to handle ghosting. If, if they go dark on that, then instead of saying, I'm just calling to follow up, you're saying, how's your initiative going? Because the way I've sold this thing before, and it takes six weeks to implement. So you're going to miss your initiative. If we don't get, if we don't get this milestone up and running like now as a way, or have you changed your mind?

And either one is fine because I can either spend my time helping somebody else or I can help us get back on track. But I'm just, John, yeah, I'm just, I'm just calling to follow up on my email that was following up on my voice. There's zero value there. So, uh, yeah, you've got to understand what they're actually worried. And you know, there's, there's two points. Cause they have, like, you have a business initiative that's written on your whiteboard someplace, but you also have, um, like emotional drivers that are separate to that business initiative. And so the good salesperson, you can get a, a sense, and this, this takes multiple calls, but you can get into quickly what's on their whiteboard.

That's a fact. And then try to find out what's driving them emotionally. Cause I firmly believe that people make decisions based on emotion and then they look for a rational framework to justify it. A hundred percent. And you can use that, which I'm going to help you, uh, like sales managers are often afraid they're going to miss forecast and lose their job. And what's on the wall is grow sales by 25%. But what's really driving them is blowing the forecast or looking like an idiot to their, uh, other members of the executive team. And so those are the things to work with to get your thing in place. How do you come across those? How do you dig into those priorities though? Right. Cause, cause when I was a, you know, a kid in sales, you know, I, I always, again, fundamentally understood.

I had to understand what those priorities were, but I, I always took a very, uh, I want to say generic or, or lazy approach to it by simply stating, you know, what are your priorities? And what I found was by asking a very general statement, like, you know, general question like that, or making a general statement, I would usually get very general answers like, Oh, revenue. Oh, we're trying to do this. Right. So what are some ways that early on you can build enough trust, um, with a, with a prospect to, to be able to really uncover and have them open up about what their priorities are. Right. Because it takes trust for me, for you to even tell me what your priorities are. So how do you do that in a way that, that, um, you know, without simply just saying, tell me about your priorities.

So I think the trust comes in from having a, an insightful guess as to what it might be. Uh, so, uh, your senior executives who are in this industry should know some insight about your industry that the, both you as a seller and the buyer are both in a similar industry. Uh, so either ask your executives. And I, I love the idea of if you're a junior salesperson, ask the, the vice president of sales or even, uh, the president, can I take you out to lunch? I want to ask you what trends you're seeing in the industry. Uh, the one cool thing is one, you get immediately flagged as somebody worth noting to, you will not have to buy lunch. I promise that the other guy is going to buy lunch. Uh, but then you get an insight into some kind of trend.

And then when you're having your call, you know, assuming you've already asked the, um, why did you take my call part? And then, then you can say, well, we're seeing this trend and there's a, there's a, you know, five or six of my other customers have made, um, it the basis of an initiative. Is that something that you're worrying about too? And so either you nailed it or they can see that at least, you know, about things in their industry so that you're not just a knob in, uh, you're somebody who, okay, is, is in, in the, in the trenches. And then they say, well, we were worrying about that, but we did that last year. And now we're focused on something completely different. Uh, or they can say, no, we're not worried about that at all.

In which case you're probably not going to get the sale this year. Cause to your point is halfway through, but at least you can do a long tail, uh, play now on getting them to be more aware about that issue that you can solve. So yeah, go, go in with an educated guests. Uh, one guy I know uses a screenshot of a whiteboard from another one of his customers to say, I bet you're working on something that looks like this in the back. And they say, Oh, you have, you wouldn't believe what ours looks like. And they, now they're comparing whiteboards and that guy is, has insta credibility. I love that. And it's, it's kind of that whole, you know, the idea of it's like business acumen, right? I think, I think sales, it's, it's a hard sales is tough, right?

Because we're, we're, we're very uneducated in our profession in general, right? We, most of us fall into sales. Uh, I was, I have a marketing background just like you, right? Um, and, and so we, and we, you know, and, and now there's training and there's tips and there's structure and there's process and all that other stuff. But what I think is missing, and if I could go back and tell my 22 year old self something like, what would it be? Um, it would be to take your business acumen way more proactively, right? Really like read the books that's, that executives read. And, and to your point of, of under going in with a little bit of context, right? Instead of walking in and saying, tell me about your priorities.

If I'm meeting with a VP of sales or a CEO of a SaaS company like yours, I'm going to go online beforehand and go literally Google CEOs, uh, SaaS priorities, 2019. Yeah. Right. So actually that's something I did do for, for deal point. I, I looked up the, um, top priorities for sales leaders and the top causes for getting fired for sales leaders. And I found a couple of different studies. And then what I did was I ranked the features that my product, uh, solves for against them. So the number one and the number two, we nail it. We, we have a great story for how deal point helps those two. Number three and number four, it was on, it was on staff retention. And we don't really, we didn't do that.

So you don't have a story there. And then I was able to listen to which of the priorities were they on. And instantly I had a theme that we could talk about from the initiative because the chances are high that the, the guy you're talking to is, is dealing on one of the top 10 priorities of their, of their industry. Yep. Yeah. And that's where marketing can really come in and work with the sales team to have that sheet ready. I made it myself and I, I, I love it when salespeople will take the initiative themselves. Yeah. Uh, it makes me a little bit sad as a leader that the sales, uh, organization isn't doing this. But that's why you see, you know, you always see two sales people in an org who just kick ass over everybody else.

It's because they made the little sheet and some people are unwilling to share the little sheet. True. But, but ideally they share, but they, and they did the homework, right? Like, and this is where I talk about from an onboarding standpoint, and I, and I want to get into this with your mutual action plans, but you know, structure, right? Versus scripts. I think a huge mistake most organizations make when they, when they onboard and I get it because they're trying to do it from an efficiency standpoint is that when I come, when a kid comes on board, they, they give them their ICP. Okay. Here's, here's our ICP ideal customer profile. And here's your list that fit that ICP. Right. And then here's our personas, Sally, she's a CIO and she likes innovation.

Right. And, and they kind of like, they genericize kind of what Sally's priorities are. And so you teach, you give a kid who's coming out of school and most kids these days, at least in the States, they're being taught to the test. Right. So they're, so they're memorizing certain things. You come out into the real world and you give them that script. That's what they're going to do. They're, they're going to have no context around it. They're just going to regurgitate. And when you go up to a CTO or, you know, executive have conversation. And you just regurgitate that one thing that might sound interesting, but there's no real true understanding. They'll shred you. They'll sniff that out in a second.

So what I've done is like with Morgan, the kid, you know, I hired him a couple of years ago. Instead of saying, Hey, here's our ICP. I said, here's our 10, here's our 10 best customers. Go figure out why. Go figure out the characteristics that make these our 10 best customers, right? Interview them, look on their websites, do some research and find the commonalities. Then here's the ICP. So we go after VPs of sales, CROs and VPs of enablement. Go figure out what these people care about. And what he did was, you know, VPs of enablement. He's never sold to VPs of enablement before he came on board with me. So he did some research, but he also went on LinkedIn and he, and he said, Hey, I just joined Jay Barrow sales training and we are, you know, our main persona is VPs of enablement.

I've never sold to VPs of enablement before. Would anybody be at anybody out there who's a VP of enablement would be open to jumping on a call with me and just giving me some insights as to what your day, day-to-day life is. He got like 50 people jumping on board saying, Oh yeah, Morgan, happy to help. So now when he's calling VPs of enablement, he's not reading off of a piece of paper. He's actually like, Oh yeah, you know what? I remember I was actually having a conversation with so-and-so and they said that their main thing was this. Sounds like you're facing the same challenge, right? It's just, I don't know why. I recommend the exact same thing in terms of going to look, I like to recommend, go look at say 10 successful deals.

Cause then, so yeah, you mentioned earlier, my thing is proactive disqualification. So go, go look at deals and on a successful one, see what did you know at various stages throughout the deal? And then look at some ones that you thought were going to close and end up choking and see if you can see, is there a consistent choke point? Like you never got the VP of finances name and now, now you have some data to the, like the profile of a good looking deal. But again, it's all about going back to the real, the real deals or the real customers rather than I, I, I, I come from marketing. I really don't like the personas of Sally has 2.5 kids and she likes to watch real housewives. You talk about putting somebody in a box, it is the exact opposite of what sales is supposed to be, which is understanding each other.

Yeah. So, so let's talk now. So you've had a few, you've done a little bit of homework, walking in the door, you show that you're somewhat competent from a business acumen standpoint. You have some context around your questions around the priorities, right? So you're now uncovering some trust, you know, now you're building some trust and, and it looks like, and you've asked the right questions, right? Cause you're disqualifying a little bit more and you're qualifying. And so you're like, all right, this, this kind of looks like a fish, smells like a fish. Let's, let's, let's kind of keep moving in this direction here. And so after that initial call, let's talk about this mutual action plan, because I, I'm, I've never personally used a formal mutual action plan.

Right now also just as a caveat, my ACV is, you know, 30 to $40,000, you know, sales cycle is 42 days on average. And, um, you know, I have two to three stakeholders, right? So it's not, and I've never sold massively complex enterprise type deals, million dollars, stuff like that. So, so that's probably why I've aired. I actually take a very slimmed down version of it, which is kind of the, because you always say, make sure you get a next step and then follow up for that next meeting. So the summary email, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that is the mutual action. Well, that is an action plan, right? It's not mutual, but then I do know that you say right back and let me know if this is inaccurate. That's the key.

Now it's mutual because they've signed, they've, if not with an actual signature, but they have said, yeah, that, that, that sounds right. At least even if it's not a contract, you are, you're further ahead than you would have been without asking the question. And that's a huge indicator for me. Like, and I see, cause I like, I see a lot of companies, they'll, they'll reps, they'll send a summary, right? Of the discussion, but they'll just kind of send it as a note taking exercise. Like, Hey, Tom, thanks for the conversation. Here's what we talked about. Right. But they don't look for the convert. And what I find is I, the, the numbers that we have is, um, I only get, even when I tell you it's coming.

So I, the, I think a key here is making sure that you tell them it's coming. Like, Hey Tom, I'm going to send over this. Could you respond back? Right. Even when you do that, you only get about a, I only get about a 30% response rate on that. But I'll tell you right now that the ones that I get that response rate on, I get a 90% close ratio. Yes. The ones that I don't, I have a 60. So talk to me about your approach to mutual action plans, because mine's a little bit looser, if you will, but there's still those indicators there. How do you introduce a mutual? When do you introduce it? First of all, take a step back. What is a mutual action plan from your perspective and then how to use it when to introduce it?

The idea of a mutual action plan comes where a lot of salespeople hear, great, I'm interested. I agree with your value proposal and they think they're sold. They think it's, you know, it's done. And really, in my, in my opinion, that's like, you're actually at one, one third of the deal at that point, because now you've got to get to the nitty gritty of what buying process do we actually have to do? Like, is there a parent organization that's going to sign off on a deal this size? Is there a conflict with your ERP that's going to get in the way? There's a million things that can kill the deal, even though your champion wants to buy it. So you've done this before. Your, your, your sales team knows what the standard operating procedure is to buy your thing.

So present that to them because you want to get out in the open that there is, there's going to be some work that your side has to do to buy my thing. And if you get it out in the open, then you, you, you grow that credibility even more because it says one, this guy's done this before. I'm not going to be left high because the biggest risk to a buyer is not the budget that they spend with you. It's that you leave them high and dry and they look like a dick for having brought you into their organization. You screw them. And the, the CEO doesn't get mad at you, the vendor, they get mad at the guy who brought you in. Absolutely. So your number one job is to keep that guy safe and make them feel safe that you're a good bet to, to go in and endorse.

So you say like, this is, this is the steps they're going to have to get done. So they feel that, you know what, you know what to do. If they're not willing to do the work, then it's awesome to know that now rather than when the work's being done, because you're probably going to do a whole bunch of legwork. And actually a point that I heard just last week was when you show the work that you've already done, it puts like a social obligation on them not to blow you off. Cause you can say we had the first discovery, I did a bunch of value research and here's how our product would work for you. And I met with the people in my engineering team and blah, blah, blah. Let's meet part of the agreement.

That's a lot harder to blow off because you're a person and you did them a favor. So you, you set up what's going to happen. You build trust and you understand what they're going to do. Then it's easier for them to marshal their resources inside their organization because they're able to show their boss, one, this is a trustworthy organization that I'm working with. They've done it before. Two, here are the resources we're going to need over the next six months to make this deal happen. And there's, I think the, the biggest, uh, smart move you can do when you're listing those out is don't have your signature, like have, don't have closed deal, be the last item in the plan. The final item in the plan is them getting the benefit of whatever you've promised.

Gotcha. So then we are all working, all this work is so that we can achieve this benefit to your organization and your initiative succeeds or, you know, whatever the thing is, whatever your value is, that's what you're working towards. The, the hardest question is when do you pop this question, you know, introduce it to them. Uh, earlier is better because if they have a parent company who will never sign off on anything, then you want to know that early, uh, but I like to do it after you've established that value prop. So they say, yeah, I like this. I want to buy it. Um, then you say, okay, well, here's, here's the work that's going to have to have to have happen. You can, you can do like a, a big picture view earlier.

If it's, if you have a lot of, um, if you have to do a lot of work to get that proof of concept, for example, uh, by all means bringing it up earlier and just say, you know, FYI, because just like with budget, you want to check, do you guys have a hundred grander budget in your campaign to, to even be worth talking to? Likewise, you can say, this is typically, it's normally a six month sales process to implement this thing and get a check through all. And we normally have to talk to these departments, but the key is that it just, it just grows your credibility up like crazy because you know what you're doing and they feel like they're in safe hands. I'll tell you. So when I was at Basho, you know, the previous training organization, and, and I still do it to this day, it's one of the favorite parts is it's this give, get scorecard, right?

And negotiations about gives and gets and, and the equality of them. And so we line up all the gives, what are the things that clients ask of you? What are all the things that you want from them? Points score them, right? So gives are easy to give away, hard to give away. Uh, gets are early, late, right? And then you match them up. So when somebody asks for a five, you ask for a five in return, 10, 10 in return, and you score a deal. So I apply it as a very simple gut check objective to where I stand, right? But we, we did this training, uh, for semantic as a matter of fact, and semantic sells multimillion dollar deals, right? Oh yeah. And I've never seen, I've never seen a group do this before, but what they did was they took the scorecard and they mapped it.

So I usually have like 20 gives or gets, they mapped it out like to 40 or 50 gifts or gets for these massive, huge deals. Right. And not only did they map it out to the, the gives and gets, they then said, okay, well, here's all the resources that are associated on both sides. So here's the people for each one of those gives, here's somebody on our side that we have to get involved. Here's for each one of the gets, here's what you need. Right. And then they did a time estimate of how much it would take to do that. Then they job costed it out and they took, you know, average salary of, right. And what they came up with was this process where they said, like it costs. Um, it would cost the client.

There would be 15, I think it was 15 people that needed to be involved on the client side and about 20, 25 people that would need to be involved on semantic side and rough, you know, soft cost stuff. It was going to cost the client $20,000 just to make the decision. Okay. And it was going to cost semantic 30 or $40,000 just to help them make this decision. Right. Yeah. And no joke, going back to qualify versus disqualify with the best reps that submitted to do it. I don't think I'd have the balls to do this. They would, they walked in and once they kind of said, okay, there's an opportunity here, they would sell the client. Okay, look, we've mapped out our buying and you know, what has to happen throughout this whole thing.

Here's all the things that we need from you. Here's all the things that you're going to need from us. Here's the people that are going to be involved in each side. Here's the time and here's how much it's going to cost. So it's going to cost you about $20,000 and it's going to take you about 15 people to make this decision. And by the way, that's when this decision goes well. And that's just with us. If you're going to evaluate three different vendors, triple the price, triple the resources. Yeah. You ready to go through this? Well, it's exactly, I mean, that's exactly what Accenture would do. When Accenture walks in, they would, only they would just start charging you the 60 grand. They'd charge you the money on both sides.

Right. And it's, what was beautiful about it, what I saw, and again, I don't think I'd have the stones to do that, especially walking into what could be a $20 million deal. I mean, at the end of the day, when you're spending 20 million, like 20,000 is nothing. But what happened was like, there'd be people who are non-sophisticated buyers who were just kicking tires and they'd literally immediately be like, ah, no, like we are not at that stage yet. We are not ready to, okay, good. Well, when you are, call us back. But the ones who said yes, yep. Okay. That makes sense to us. I mean, Symantec pretty much closed every one of those deals. Yeah. I mean, it is the perfect qualifier. And I love it that scaring them away, they were going to get scared away in six months anyway.

They were going to, there's, there's, you can't hide the facts of the work that needs to get done. The work's going to have to get done. And if you, if you're sneaky about it, you're just going to do all the work for the first five months and then get jacked at the end. That's why I don't think sales reps understand. I think they're scared. I think it's a systemic issue because of where we are from a, from a result standpoint. I mean, we are a very short term oriented society, right? You got to hit your daily quota, you know, your daily numbers and your weekly numbers and your monthly numbers. Right? So, so the idea of, of walking away from a deal that even smells reasonable is scary to most reps because they don't have a big pipeline, you know, they, they find these deals.

And, but I can't, I think the best sales reps, I know the best sales reps I've ever come across are the ones that only focus their time on the right deals. Well, so the thing I love about a good mutual action plan, and I want to emphasize, uh, I've got a ton of these things from all sorts of different, uh, salespeople who've made their own in a hundred different ways. Um, the, the cool part is it gives you an objective basis to disqualify somebody because you can say that boss, we were on stage milestone two, and they can't come up with the resources that we all know that they need. So you can have a put up or shut up call and then move on to those greener fields again. And the rep doesn't need to feel bad or did I leave money on the table?

Cause all they need to do is look to see they, they didn't do milestone two. So why, why are you thinking about milestone three, unless it's the super good reason why they don't want to do milestone two. And that's again, now, now you're talking to the customer again about their, about their, their, their issues and you can move forward from that, but it's, it's a tool to facilitate communication between the buyers and the sellers. And I would say the other thing I really like about mutual action plans is, you know, you need to get ahold of the different stakeholders on the, on the buyer. And that's something that the champion has traditionally been reluctant to just hand out. Cause when you say, who, who is your VP of finance?

Yeah, exactly. That typically doesn't go well. No. If you say in, in, in milestone three, we need to have the financial signed off. Who would be in charge of that? They're going to say that's John. Yeah. Is you're asking a reasonable question to help them get the thing they want over the finish line? So it's just much more rational and calm and everybody's on the same page. I love it. So have you ever seen a mutual action, a shitty mutual action plan or one that's, or a misused of a mutual action plan that's been misused? I think the worst ones are where they, and I've only seen this a couple of times, you know, there's the concept of a closed plan that your rep and your manager work on how are we going to close this guy?

And then they use that internal sales terminology with, with the end customer. So there's, there is no reference at all to their needs or pains or anything. It's just like, and the bottom is closed one. That does, that does not make me feel good. I'm very happy to have helped you with your boat payment, but that does not make me feel good as a, as a mutual party in this, in this endeavor. Yeah. And I think this goes, you know, going back to holding people accountable, right? Cause I think this, you know, the mutual action plan, if done right, and, and you map out the stages and this process and all that other stuff, you know, that allows you to push, right? Because now it's in their best interest and as opposed to yours.

And, you know, I had a kid ask me recently, you know, I get a lot of this question, which is John, how, how, how far can you push? Like, like say it's coming to the end of the month, end of the quarter, right? Like how hard can you, or should you push on a client to close? And I'm like, well, the answer to that one's all relative, right? Because it has everything to do with how much of it is in your interest versus their interest. Right. If it's in their interest, because they have to have it by a certain date. And if they don't, there'll be some significant impact to their business. If they, you know, that type of thing, then you could, and you, you can, and you should push as hard as you want because it's in their best interest.

Whereas anchoring, right? Yeah. Whereas if it's in your best interest, cause you just got to close about the end of the quarter of the end of the month, you're just an asshole sales rep, right? I had, I had a boss years ago who he's like, Tom, Tom, I've sold all our problems. I'm going to let you do a 25% discount. Oh God. I was, I was just crying. I was like, that's not the problem, Paul. That, that is, that's not the problem. No. That, and discount selling. I, I mean, you, you probably see it as much as I do, if not more. I think discount selling, how do you leverage discount? Cause I think discount selling like literally destroys your credibility across the board. Unfortunately, we've gotten, you know, people to expect it, but when you, there's two types.

There's one, when somebody asks for a discount saying, Hey Tom, you know, come on, can you shave a little off the top here? And then you can kind of say, well, look, you know, are we going to get the deal? Sure. Fine. Whatever. But then there's the proactive discounting where it is the end of the month and I fire off that email that, you know, so what's your philosophy all the time from reps trying to sell me technology and then, you know, screaming deal at the end of the quarter. I get offended by it because I feel like he was ripping me off last month. Exactly. What's the value? What is the value of this thing, buddy? So I'm all in favor of, uh, discounts as a negotiation tool. So, but you've got to get something out of it and otherwise you really are hurting yourself.

And I've, I've certainly been on the receiving end. Uh, I've sold to big multinationals. And when you're talking to procurement department, it's different because they only care about getting, they have to get a discount in order to get their jobs paid. But if you've done a good job on that, um, anchoring to their initiative thing, you can say, why are you asking for a discount? We already agreed that you're going to get fired if you don't do this thing. Do you want the thing? Yeah. Um, but yeah, I would always have a couple of points available to save face, but, um, a big steep discount is just devaluing what you're offering. Yeah. And to your point, like in every, like the thing about discount selling, it drives me crazy is that everybody knows the discount doesn't go away, especially in SAS.

It's like, you know, I've had kids call me like I've been in the middle of the sales process. Kids have done a really good job. Right. And I'm, and I told them, I'm, look, I'm going to buy. It's just not right now. It's not a priority. Like I will get this by the end of the month or next month or something like that. And then they call up and they say 20%, 30%, whatever, if you sign today. And, and, and the way it pans out most of the time is you offer that discount. Maybe that person says, yes, maybe, yeah, you know what? Fine. I'll go early if I can get that 30%. And then what happens is the end of the month comes, right? And that person, it was supposed to be on a Friday. They were supposed to sign that contract.

Right. And guess what happens at the end of the month? The same exact thing that happens in your company at the end of the month is happening in their company at the end of the month. So the chaos of closing happens on both sides, but their side is focused on other closes. You're trying to focus on them. So what happens is they inherently get busy. Then Friday comes and goes and lo and behold, they don't respond. Then Monday, what happens is they'll call you back. Oh, so sorry. Oh, it was the end of the month. It was batshit crazy. We're ready to move forward here. So can we still get that discount? Yeah. Once it's on the table, I would, I would be furious if they said, well, I wouldn't buy it because they, the guy already told me, this is what it's worth to me.

Right. Your business is worth 20% less than I told you earlier. Yeah. And people try to play the hard line. Oh no, the discount expired. So, cause you've got to do, you get, now you're an asshole as a sales rep either way. Right. Cause you either have to go to your boss and say, Hey boss, can we extend that discount a little, just a little bit. They promised they'll buy today. Or you got to go tell the client that no, sorry, that expired. And shut up. Like, like, what did your profitability change over the weekend? Like, like, fine. Then I'll just wait till, you know what I'll, what I'll do is I'll wait till the end of the next quarter to, as a matter of fact, and then I'm just going to turn those screws even worse.

So piss off on, on discounting. Like I, I actually have a fundamental policy of not discounting unless there's circumstances. Um, but I, I just straight up say, I just want to be upfront here. If you're looking for a discount, we're probably not that. Like if you don't see the value in what I bring to the table here, like, then we're probably not a good fit for what you're looking for. Totally. I sell, sell the discount. Cause I mean, I'm case studies are gold, right? So if you say, I will give you, I will sell you a discount. If you agree to spend 10 hours with me on a really detailed case study. Yeah. Now that's worth a thousand dollars to me or whatever the, whatever the value is. Well, I look and I, hopefully people heard how you phrase that by the way, because when you say I'm going to pay you in the form of a discount, now it's coming out of your pocket.

You know what I mean? Like I'm now, it's not a discount just because our, you know, we're cutting off the top and we've got tons of margin. Like I'm actually paying you in the form of a discount cause it's coming out of my pocket. Right. And yes. And I want to get into your point. Case studies. Absolutely. I will get a case study. If somebody wants to sit down and actually go through the metrics of what the, you know, train that totally worth it for me. I, have you ever read a Todd Caponi's, uh, transparency sale? Uh, it's one of my favorite books. Actually, he came into Portland last month and I, yeah. I'm not often starstruck, but I, I have his book and I was like, Todd, can we meet before your thing?

Yeah. So we met at a Starbucks and I had him sign my book and I had, uh, I had post-it notes in it and everything. Yeah. And yeah, we, we, we talked a lot about, um, cause he's big on transparency and mutual action plans. Uh, so yeah, we had a, we had a total, uh, love fest of mutual action plans and don't discount. He has a, like a three way discount process. And I forget what it is, but yeah, uh, definitely, uh, I'd say that's a fantastic book. I want to be a salesperson when I grew up. Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. There's some real, there's some classics out there that can really just, and the other thing I like about Todd is that he doesn't use the super cheesy sales anecdotes in like obviously made up.

He has a couple of real life ones from when he was in sales and they just come through a lot more genuinely. Well, and I, and the beauty again, transparency. So I think his three way thing is look, here's the levers. I know you want to discount, right? He's like, I know you want a discount. So here's the deal. Here's what's important to me. Uh, payment upfront, like early payment helps. Okay. If I can get paid sooner that I I'm worth paying for that. Um, uh, length of contract. So if you want to, if you, if you, if like relation, long-term relationships are important to me, so I'll pay for that. And, um, the other one is, is obviously the quantity, right? So the size of the deal. So if you're willing to, so if you want to increase the size of the deal, increase the length of the deal or work on payment terms, those are the, those are the three levers that I have.

So which, which ones can we play with? And then it becomes this collaborative effort with the client to say, oh, well, maybe if we did a two year and we paid 50% upfront, what would that get me? Well, that'll get you, you know, 10, 12%. Okay. Right. So now we're working together where I think a lot of people make the mistake is they start with, well, could you do a bigger deal? No. Uh, how about a longer term contract? No. Uh, how about upfront payment? No. Right. So he's like, here's everything. Let's talk about it. Right. I, I, uh, his accuracy, the book is cool because the cover is transparent. Yeah. That's the coolest thought about that book. I love it. Awesome, man. Well, I, you know, I think, uh, you know, there's other conversations that I'd love to get in with you, uh, but you know, on about ROI calculations and those types of things.

Cause I know you speak at, you know, you've done a lot of work on those, but, um, I think just in timing wise, right. Keep this to 30, 30, 40 minutes. Um, what, any, any parting thoughts that did you want the, you know, the audience to think about or, or, or how they should be thinking about controlling the process a little bit more, uh, or, or any other, other things that you want them to make sure that they walk away with? Yeah. So, so my one walk away is try doing a mutual action plan on your own, just with take like five key milestones and put them in an email and say, does this look right with your buying process? Cause this is what we normally have to do and include the external dates in those milestones of the things that are important in their initiatives.

Yeah. And then focus on the close of the deal is when they get their value. Yeah. And I promise you will have, uh, uh, an enjoyable conversation with that client because they are going to come back to you saying, huh, thank you. So, so Tana McDermott at work, Eva, she said, no buyer has ever argued with clear expectations. Yeah. They, they want that. They don't want to be jacked. They want to have a low risk relationship. And here's what I'm going to do is low risk. And it doesn't need to be, it doesn't, you know, please do buy a deal point software as well, but you don't need deal point software to, to do this stuff. Just communicate with your customer and they will love you for it. Um, and just try it.

Just literally try it. Like I said earlier, I think, I think expectation setting is, is, is the key to life in the sense that, you know, if, if, if you can pick it, if you can think of anything recently that you were pissed off about, right. I mean, pick anything. I almost guarantee it's because your expectations were missed that. Right. In your head, they, they're either you misset your own expectations, right. Or whoever it was that you were dealing with said, and the easy, perfect example here is like, you know, last one I'll make is, is, you know, you go to a restaurant, right. You know, the restaurant's bananas busy. It's a Friday night, seven o'clock, just the craziest stuff. Right. And, and you finally get your seat, right.

And there's two options that a waiter can have, a waiter or waitress can have when they, when they address you. Right. The first option is they come up to you and they say, Tom, I'm so, thank you so much for coming in today. We are absolutely slammed. It's going to take me about 15 minutes to come over and take your order. Right. So I'll get you some water and bread and that's everything to make sure, but it's going to take, I apologize. It's going to take 15 minutes. Right. You're not happy with that, but you're like, whatever. I get it. You know, it's, it's busy. Uh, so that's option one. Option two is, um, the waiter doesn't say anything to you and comes over in 15 minutes. Now they say, I'll be right with you.

And then they're not 15 minutes. Exactly. Now you get the exact same result. Okay. 15 minutes. The rep, the first waiter came to take your order. Second waiter came to take your exact same result. Which one are you happier with? Yeah. Uh, I'd like to know. And all day be, have a schedule. Like, I like it when you're on hold and they say, you are number 27 in the line and it's only been 18 minutes. Well, that's so much better than it could be any time. Oh, that's, I, I, or, you know, my favorite these days is, Hey, you, you like push a button here and we'll call you back when you're like, when it's like, Oh my God, thank you so much. I do like, I like, and they're like, and we promise we will call you.

I promise. The other guys, we're not going to call him first. We're going to call you next. You swear to God, you have not lost your place. I love it. Awesome. Tom. I love it. It was a great conversation. Hopefully everybody got as much value out as I did. Um, Tom, how can they find out more about you? Deal point, all that stuff. Where do you want to point them these days? Yeah. Deal point.io is the easiest because, uh, I actually have a LinkedIn group called people called Tom Williams. You do sales and marketing. There are 7,000 people who do sales and marketing. His name is Tom Williams. So it's easy to find me on there, although I am connected to you. So if you look at Tom Williams through you, uh, or deal point on LinkedIn or deal point.io, uh, that's, that's where I'm at.

Brilliant. Awesome, Tom. Well, thank you so much for coming on board. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, John. No problem. And everybody out there, hopefully, like I said, you got as much value out of as I did. And like I say, every time, if you had a bad day, no matter how bad your day went, if you go and do one thing, just go make somebody smile today, right? Because if you make somebody smile, I don't care how bad your day was. You had a good day, right? If you made a difference. And get 1% better. I love that. There you go. I love that idea. 1% better. And that makes it easy, right? Because if I were to tell you to get 50% better in 50 days, like you'd look at me sideways.

You're like, dude, are you out of your mind? I'm going crazy right now. But if I say, hey, could you do 1% better tomorrow? Make one extra cold call, ask one extra question, get 50% better. So, yeah, that's what we're trying to figure out, how to get a little bit better every day. So, thanks again, Tom. Everybody, have a great week. And let's make it happen.