245: Nick Cegelski on Creating and Keeping Momentum in Sales

Hey everybody, what's going on? So we got a good one coming up here for you. This is a super tactical podcast with Nick Segelski, who's the host of 30 Minutes of President's Club. He was on a webinar for us, with us last week, where we talked about urgency and driving and uncovering it. And so we got very, very tactical here on how to manage deals and how to make sure that you are moving in the right direction and getting out of deals that you shouldn't be in. So enjoy this one. It's about as tactical as it gets. What's poppin' y'all? It's your man, James. Say what, Sales Buckley. Welcome to another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Gong, Vidyard, Chili Piper, Sendoso, and now our newest partner, Prelay.

Prelay's function is to make complex deals easier to manage. From POCs to trials and pilots, Prelay makes those tedious complexities a smoother experience, helping sellers sell and helping buyers buy more efficiently. Check them out at Prelay.com to learn more today. The JB Sales membership is really taking off. Thousands of sellers are leveling up by gaining access to all of our training, our courses, our tips, techniques, inside of the annual membership to JB Sales. For a dollar a day, that's right, $365 will get you the skills, best practices that you need to finish the year strong and come into 2022 ready to rocket to the top of that leaderboard. Let's go, y'all. Sign up today at joinjbsales.com.

Good afternoon, everybody. It's John Barrows making up on Monday. Hopefully you had a fantastic weekend. I had a pretty good weekend. I think I'm pretty much all set up in my new setup here. If you're watching this or seeing some of the promos of this, you're looking at my new frame. I'm just waiting for a picture here. So everything's good. And I am excited to bring back Nick Segelsky, host of 30 Minute to President's Club podcast. How are you doing, my friend? I'm doing fantastic, John. It always puts a smile on my face to talk with you. Yeah, this is a fun one, man. We just did a webinar. So we're going to, I think the theme of this one is, and we'll get a little background. I mean, people, you've been on here before, so hopefully people know of you, but we'll get a little background.

But we're going to kind of continue our conversation here on, we had a pod, or we had a webinar, was it last week? Yeah. Yeah. And it was all about creating urgency, driving urgency, understanding urgency. And so we're going to kind of talk about some of those things about how before, during, and after the sale, what you can do here. But Nick, just a little background, just to make sure if anybody hasn't heard of you, that they know where you're coming from. Sure. So I'm a current salesperson. I'm not a sales trainer or anything. I sell software to lawyers during my normal life. And then outside of work hours, I run a sales podcast, sort of similar to John's. Actually, the reason I started it is I've learned so much from you and your podcast.

Like the first sales job I ever had, John, we didn't do any training whatsoever. And so I'm like poking around on the internet. And I found this John Barrows guy, and I listened to every single podcast. And then I said, Oh, wow, this really helped me get better. Sales isn't so bad. I love what you say, where it's like, it's the best profession when done right and worst when done wrong. Absolutely, man. So I appreciate that. And I love what you're doing on President's Club too. That's a fun one. So let's talk. We dove into urgency on the webinar last week about, you know, and we talked about how everybody always asks like, Hey, John, how do you create urgency? And I kind of debunked that and said, Look, I don't think as sales reps, we can create it, we can uncover it, and we can drive it.

Right. So and it's all about the client's priorities. So let's talk through some of the stuff about uncovering and some of the best practices that you've come across in your career, as far as, you know, next steps and closing. I mean, I actually have a webinar coming up, I think it's actually today on closing. And the funny thing is, is I think a lot of people are have this misperception about closing that it has to be this sleazy, like tactic thing that they have to convince somebody to do something, and how closing just happens at the ends. But obviously, it doesn't, it happens at every stage. So let's talk through some of the things that you're seeing out there and what's working for you to help kind of align expectations, drive urgency, uncover it and close so that you know, you're moving towards the right angle here.

Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is I would trash the word urgency, because I don't know, there's something like anxious about that phrase. And I would use the word momentum instead, like something I'm really, really focused on when I'm working with the customer is keeping and creating momentum in that sale. Because when you create momentum, it's almost like it's very natural when you get to the end of the sale to close it. And so I think the first thing that I think about it, like I think about the beginning of the sale, like the first maybe meeting or two meetings you have with the customer, the middle of the sale and the end of the sale. One of the things that you said on that webinar was there's gong data about this.

The best salespeople are talking about next steps way more than the middle or lower performers. And next steps is plural there. They're not just talking about the next step. And so I think with a customer, first thing that you can do to actually start to drive some momentum and create some urgency is you should be talking about next steps. If you've got more than three steps in your sales process, at the beginning, once you realize that, okay, there's actually a there there, there's an opportunity with this customer, you should be foreshadowing all of the things that are going to happen. I've been in an enterprise sale for a while where we might have 10, 20 steps from first meeting to close.

And so there will be times that I'll even propose to a customer once we realize, okay, they're going to do a formal evaluation of my thing. Like, hey, like, normally, there's 15 to 20 steps that customers will take when they're doing some due diligence on my product or service, or they're evaluating my thing. I don't know if you feel like it would be it would make sense for us to schedule a meeting to actually talk through what customers will typically do. So that's one option. The other option is you can spend some time on your discovery call talking about, hey, usually, when folks are doing due diligence of my thing, they're going to want to do a meeting to review the analytics dashboards, they're going to want to have a security meeting to make sure this thing actually is going to fit with your different security requirements.

They're going to want I saw the lawyers, they're going to want the attorneys to take a look at it and understand how they're going to interface with it. And so I'll talk about the seven or eight steps. And I do that for a couple reasons. One, I want to impress upon the buyer that I do know where I'm going here. I'm not just like haphazardly throwing out next steps here. Like there is a very intentional plan. And my job is to help you with your evaluation. Of course, I want to close the deal. But my job is to help you navigate the evaluation. The other thing that I'm doing is, and it's sort of like this Sandler term about lowering anxiety. But what I want to do is, is let them know that like, there is a plan and a path.

And you don't have to worry, because I know where we're going. They're never like, well, are you like, Nick, you need to know we're a law firm, like, we need to make sure that our data is secure. Well, I've already talked about we're going to do that meeting at some point. Let me ask you real quick. Because there's this whole concept that I've been playing around with or thinking about, and realizing, obviously, that there's two types of buyers. Well, there's a lot of types, but there's two buckets. In this case, one is sophisticated buyers, and the other is unsophisticated buyers, right? For the unsophisticated buyers, the people who have never bought what you're selling, or somebody maybe below the power line that hasn't done this before.

And they're just like, oh my God, I don't know why. I love that, right? I love the, hey, let me map this whole thing out for you. This is what you would expect. I mean, some of the best sales reps, one of the craziest things I think I ever saw was when I was working at Basho. We do the scorecard, you know, right? So when we do negotiations, we line up all the gives and we line up all the gets, right? And then we point score them like 1 to 20, 1 to 20. So when somebody asks for a 5, I ask for a 5 in return. Somebody asks for a 10, I ask for a 10 in return. And we score, right? So whatever. But what Semantic did when we were training them, huge enterprise sales, millions and millions of dollars, right?

What they did is they mapped out, usually our scorecards are like 20 gives or gets, give or take, right? They mapped out like 50 or 70 gives and gets on each side. And not only did they map out that, they job, they assigned roles to each give and get. So they said, okay, like this person on your team is going to have to do this, this person. And then they job costed it. So they said like on average, it's probably going to take 10 hours, 20, whatever it is of that person, average salary, boom, right? So they walked in and they said to people before they even started, they would be like, hey, look, here's the deal. We've mapped out our buying and selling process. Here's typically the things that you're going to want from us.

Here's the things that we're going to need from you. Here's the people that are going to be involved on your side. Here's the people that are going to be involved on my side. It's going to cost you. And they would literally say this, it's going to cost you probably around $20,000 to $25,000 just to make this decision with us. And it's going to cost us $30,000 to $35,000 on our end to help you make this decision. And by the way, that's when things go well and that's just with us. So if you are evaluating three different vendors here, triple the cost and triple the investment, right? Are you willing to go through that? And what happened? I mean, look, I don't think I'd ever have the stones to walk into somebody's office and be like, hey, it's going to cost you about 25 Gs just to make this decision with me, but you're ready to go.

But what happened was it would automatically, people would be like, oh my God, no, we are not prepared for that. So they would get out real fast. But when they got in, obviously who was in the driver's seat, right? So I look at that as holy shit, they were driving the sale. Like they were absolutely, they knew what the hell they were talking. I mean, that is challenger sale, like 101, right? Actually, it's like 301 right there, challenger sale, in my opinion. But then there's the sophisticated buyers, the ones who've been there, done that, the ones who corporate executive board, by the time somebody comes to us, they're already 60 to 70% of the way through the sales process. They know what they're talking about.

And if you try to lead them too much, they're going to like walk them through your process. They're going to push back and be like, fuck off. I know what I'm doing here. Tell me the price. This is what I want. So how do you, first of all, determine which one you're dealing with? And then let's talk about, we just talked about how you lead. How do you deal with somebody who's like, I got this, man. I've fucking done this before. Shut your mouth. You're the sales rep. Do what I tell you to do. How do you manage that scenario when it's a real opportunity too? Like we're not talking about somebody who just calls in and says, give me the price so they can put you on a spreadsheet. So how do you handle that?

So the key word here is I'm presenting what folks usually do. This is usually how folks buy from us. This is usually how we sell. And so I actually think presenting that map, that navigation path to buying, both an unsophisticated and a sophisticated buyer appreciate. And it demonstrates that you are a sophisticated seller, because the last thing that a sophisticated buyer wants to deal with is an unsophisticated seller who doesn't know how to help them get through it. And so what you're never doing is saying, hey, this is absolutely hard and firm how you're going to have to go through our sales funnel. What you are saying is, hey, this is how folks typically do it. John, you've bought something like this before.

Okay. This is how folks typically buy from us and go through it. But you bought from other folks before. Like let's talk about how those map to each other. And if there's differences, let's talk about it because my job is to help you get, get, get there. And actually talking about how you've bought before in contrast to how folks normally go through us is a really awesome way to start to understand what's important. Like that's top tier discovery, believe it or not, because folks will start to tell you things about how they bought before and what they did and didn't like. And those are important clues to help you figure out how to win that deal. So what do you, what's your approach when through all your best efforts, you, you know, you got somebody on the other end, who's at a, you know, hard driver, right?

They're pushing. They're like, Nick, look, man, I got this. We've done the homework. I got a technical win here. You know, just tell me what this, like, I just want to see this part of the demo. Like I just want to see, don't walk me through the whole bullshit thing. And if it does that, we're good to go. How do you identify that isn't somebody that is just kicking tires? That is just, you know, you're getting happier. Cause I think so many sales reps don't have the confidence to push back on somebody like that. I mean, and it goes back all the way to that inbound lead that calls up and just says, look, just give me the price, right? Like kids don't know how to, how to handle that. But like, what are some quick ways that you can discover?

Is this person full of shit? And are they just really just looking for a price so that they can put me on a spreadsheet? Or is this person really just needs to see that? And they're pretty much going to buy if I just show them that, like, how do you figure that out? So the path there is they tell you, okay, just show me a demo here. Here's just show me this module or just give me the price. I just need to put that on my spreadsheet and we're ready to go. The sort of the framework for it is you agree with them. You say, no problem. I'd be happy to show you a demo just so I know exactly what you'd like me to show you. So you can figure out if this is a fit or not. What specifically do you want to see in that demo?

If they're able to tell you that, well then show them the demo and show them specifically what they've asked for. If they can't tell you, I'm like, show me a general demo. Okay. Well that doesn't really jive. If they know exactly what they're looking for, but just want to see a general demo, there's something off there. Same deal with the price. I would be happy to put together some pricing for you. Here's the information that I need from you in order to give you an accurate quote. And so what I'm not doing is resistant. Oh, well, you know, you really need to see a demo in order to understand the value of the solution. Come on, man. Seriously. So what you're doing is you're saying, yes, here's where we are right now.

I would be happy to get you what you need. Help me understand what you need so I can do it for you. There's a nuance there for people listening. When I go back to talking about how we deal with negotiations, right? Gives and gets. That's what negotiations is. It's a series of gives and gets and the equality of those gives and gets matter. That's why we point score, right? So when somebody asks for like a two or four and a seven, a three or five and a six, like that score 12 to 13 tells me how healthy that deal is. And the difference though is, and again, for people listening, there's a nuance. There's quid pro quo. And then there's something more along the lines of the rule of reciprocity, right?

Quid pro quo is I'll do this if you do that for me. If you don't do it, I won't do it. And look, at some places in negotiations, that's necessary. Look, I'm sorry. I'm not going to give you a demo unless you tell me what you want to see here. And if you do want that type of a demo, by the way, I recommend people, I recommend reps doing this. I recommend an individual rep using a tool like Vidyard and creating a canned demo from them, not from their marketing department, from them. That's like five minutes that show or whatever, however long you're in complex your thing is, right? So if somebody comes to you and says, just show me the demo, be like, you know what? I'm going to save us both a lot of time here.

I'm going to send you this link. Here's a link to our demo. I just, I made it personally so you can watch it. Go ahead and watch that and tell me if you want it. Like, cause then it just cuts. Cause then somebody might push back. Well, no, no. All right. I really do want to see this, right? Cause you'll call their bluff. So, you know, from, from a delivery that give, get component to it, the rule of reciprocity is more along the lines of Nick, look, I'm, I'm thrilled to show what you said there. Like, yes, I am thrilled to give you that, whatever that is in order. And this phrase, in order for me to give you exactly what you want, man, this is what I need in return from you. So you want pricing, Nick, man, I'm happy to share with you pricing.

Could you just give me a little bit of understanding? How many reps do you have? You know, what, you know, do you want onsite? Do you want remote? You know, what are you kind of looking for here? And how are you looking to scale this? If you give me those numbers, I'm going to give you a pretty accurate price range. But if you just be like, dude, just give me the price. I'm going to say www.jbarrows.com slash pricing asshole. Like go fucking look it up yourself. Right. Or I'm going to give you such a huge range. It's going to be insulting. I'm going to be like, yeah. Okay. Well then if you want price, it's probably going to be anywhere between 20 and $300,000. I don't know. You tell me. Right.

So is that like, how do you, is that how you call people's bluffs? Like, are you kind of testing what their answers are as you go through? Yeah. I mean, look, even if you have someone who's just using you as column fodder, they're already knowing that like, I think you, your job there is to, I was selling an ERP system a couple of years ago and I wish I were kidding John, but we did eight hour demos. Oh my God. Are you shitting me? We'd have six or seven room changes. I would be in a conference room from seven in the morning until six in the evening. And I would still have people say, just show us a general demo of everything you can do. Now there'd be room changes. So there'd be a demo to different groups, but I would still have to be working with like a COO or CFO who is bringing this thing in.

And I'd say, look, like it's an eight hour demo, but we could probably demo this product solution for a hundred hours to you if you want it. And I guarantee you, you don't want me to show a hundred hour demo. So like, help me understand how we can refine this down so we can really make the best use of the limited time we're going to have together. I'm not, I'm not like gatekeeping anything that they want. I'm telling them, I will give you anything you want. So you can figure out if this thing's a good fit, but tell me what you're looking for. So I know what to give. That's what, so again, for those listen nuggets here, tips, I do the same thing. And I ask very directly, like, even if I've already pre-qualified, say I've already gone through the discovery.

I already know you, Nick, and I already know the three other people that are on this demo. So I've already learned what you want to learn. Okay. Even before I kick off a demo. Now think of that as I did a discovery on one call. Now I have another call and that is the demo. I'm still, first of all, I'm going to start with what I know about you. So here's what I know so far, Nick, like Nick, is that still, is that accurate? And then I'm going to say this and please, everybody ask this question. I don't care if it's two days later, ask the question, has anything changed since our last conversation? And then go around and say, okay, Nick, what is out of all the stuff that we're going to see today?

What is the one thing that you want to see today that is going to make it worth you taking the next step with us? And then we can bring in next steps, right? So then I write those down as I, as I'm like, okay, Nick and Jeff says this and Sarah says this, that's the one thing. Okay. Now out of all the shit that we talked about, I know if there's four people in that room, I know I got to show four things, right? And I skipped through the stuff. I'm like, yeah, yep. Anyways, but here like, all right, Nick, this is the part you had said earlier that your main priority was this. This is the part of our solution that addresses that. And now I'm going to pause here because I'm not going to say, does that make sense?

Please, please, please. I beg you. If you're listening to this, do not go through a fucking demo and say, does that make sense? It's actually an insulting question. It's like, Hey idiot. And nobody ever says no to that. What you want to say is Nick, how does that compare to what you're doing right now? That question open-ended gets Nick talking to say, well, because if Nick gives me a short answer or it's like, oh, you know, it's, it's pretty similar. And I know it's a lot different. I know Nick's full of shit. I know Nick's just going through the motions here. I'm like, uh, Nick, then I'm going to pause and I'm going to even pull back. Nick, I'm actually, I'm sorry. I'm a little confused here.

You had said earlier that your main priority was this. And I just showed you what I think is the thing that absolutely crushes that compared to what you're doing now. And you just told me that it's, it's kind of similar to what you're doing. And so I'm a little confused here. Help me understand. And I'm going to dive into it right there. So the, those nuances of, Hey, how does that make sense? You know, not, does that make sense, but whatever. And what's the one thing you want to get out of that's going to make it worth you taking the next steps with us? So, so what you just said is really important. And actually something that I've learned from you, John, is when you ask a buyer a question, you always need to be prepared for them to say, well, why are you asking me that?

You have to have a reason behind your question. And if I'm just pulling out of my pocket, Hey, how does that compare to how you're doing things today? They might say, well, why are you asking me that? And so what I'll say now is I'll say, Hey, I'm curious how this compares to how you were doing things today. The reason that I ask is I want to make sure as I continue to take you through this demo, I'm explaining it in the context of how this is different than how you guys are doing things today. And so when I say that they say, Oh, okay. Like I'm, I'm almost teasing. Like this demo will be a lot better if you can give me some feedback here, because otherwise there's just like, why is they asking me that?

And so it's easy to phone the question in one thing that you talked about beginning of that demo, like you're asking each person, okay, Hey, what's the one thing you really got to see here? Um, I think active listening and showing that you're actually listening to the other person is really, really important, especially because there's so many like crummy software demos where everyone shows like five buyers show up and it's the sales rep and they're the only person with their camera on. And you know, everyone else is doing emails in the back. And so, um, one thing that I learned from, um, actually Armand, the guy who co-hosts 30 minutes of president's club with me, what he does is he finds out who's going to be in the room in advance.

And he puts together one slide and the slide has the faces of each person who's in that demo. So if I was doing a demo with the JB sales team, I would have Morgan's face and John's face. And then he has a text box, a blank text box next to their names. And when he asks that question in real time, he's typing on the slide, like, here's the thing that John really wants to get out of this. And people like sit up, they're like, wait, that's me on this slide. And this guy's actually listening and writing the stuff. And so that's like one of those ways you can say, Hey, I actually care about you. This is going to be a custom demo. This isn't just like me taking you through my, my stock thing. Or, uh, Hoffman, my mentor does that too.

He'll, he doesn't do it with the images. He'll do it like with a Google doc though. Like, so like right now you and I are going through a conversation and this isn't forget about a demo. This is actually just in his sales calls too. He'll share his screen and on his screen, it'll be a Google doc and it'll be him taking notes. And so the person's like watching what he's writing down. And, and there's, there's something about that. That's like, to your point, active listening, holy shit, like, all right, this person. So I got to be careful with what I'm saying here. And by the way, what that translates to me is that's a direct, almost cut and paste into a summary email to them saying, Hey, thanks for the time today.

Here's what we talked about. Just, you know, next steps, priorities, those types of things. Could you email me back to confirm that's all accurate to make sure that we're all on the same page? Well, so one other thing I want to go back to that you talked about in the beginning that I think is sort of a really important nuance is you've got five people on your meeting, right? And what most reps will do once they start to, you know, they listen to this podcast and they're like, Oh, okay. It's good to ask them what they really want to get out of this. And so they'll ask the group, Hey, like, what's the number one thing that you want to see out of this? And I would really encourage by salespeople who want to do a better job of multi-threading to stop doing like these big group questions, emails, like sending a recap email to the eight people that were on your demo is a great way to not get a single response, but sending a one-to-one email, it can even almost be the same dang email.

You just change the name of the person. It's like, Oh, this person emailed me specifically. And I really think about like the concept of breaking the meeting participation seal. So the idea of like in the beginning of the meeting, if I ask, Hey Morgan, like what's the number one thing that you want to see in this meeting? Okay, cool. Write it down. Thanks. Hey James, like what's the number one thing that you want to get out of this meeting? And now what happens is like if James couldn't figure out his microphone and like, you know, his audio screwed up, he's sitting there smiling in the back, but he can't actually participate. We've like, we're figuring out, okay, we got to troubleshoot this audio as opposed to midway through the meeting.

The CIO is like, I'm actually going to speak up on participate. And then they realize, Oh shoot, like my audio is not working. And they're like, ah, screw it. Like this isn't going to work. And so talking to each individual person, as opposed to the group, now it opens up later down the line. Like you sort of have a semblance of a relationship because you didn't talk one-to-one that, that in that meeting. And it gives you an excuse to a week later, you can now call that CIO and be like, Hey man, like I'm trying to take care of some of the security stuff for you all. Do you have some time that we can talk through making sure that like, we're going to meet what you need? All right, y'all the tactics that Nick and John are delivering right now are going to impact your sales results immediately.

So be sure that you're using them right away coming out of this show. As you're aware, we love to highlight folks that are taking great things away from our training and seeing some results. Today, I want to give a big shout out to Rukaya and Jason at Ready Mode. They signed their team up and gave them memberships to JB Sales. And these sellers are diving into world-class training on hot skills like video prospecting, how to get the most out of LinkedIn sales navigator, cold calling, best practices, and email cadences. The team at Ready Mode is going to come into 2022 sharp as a tack and ready to hit goals, set more meetings, and close more deals. Big shout out to Rukaya and Jason for investing in their team and giving them the resources that they need to be the best sellers that they can be.

After all, they deserve it. Welcome to the family, Ready Mode. We got your back. You too can become a member and gain access to all our training techniques, tactics, and templates, along with actionable takeaways that you can put into place right away and start seeing the sales results that you want. Join us at joinjbsales.com to become a member today and start learning. Also, don't forget to sign up for the members-only Ask Me Anything sessions that are happening on a weekly basis. Once you sign up, reach out to me at jamesatjbarrows.com if you have any questions. Let's get back to Nick and JB for some more tactics you can use right away. Yeah, actually, it's funny because, so Shelly on our team, she's brand new.

She's doing some, she's just getting started training. She had her first training. And, you know, and it was, it was a, we always do friends, family, and fools first. So we give away our first few trainings for the new hires just to make sure that they're getting their feet wet, right? And it was funny because she, she did that a lot. She asked open-ended broad questions to the group and always crickets, right? So it was like, okay, so what do you guys think of that? Or, you know, anybody have any questions or, you know, so, you know, what, what are your priorities when any, and nobody's ever going to jump in on that? Like, especially in a group of, I mean, maybe two or three, maybe, but if you're going to group of 10, 20, 30 people, nobody's ever going to reach out like to a random ass open-ended question and give an answer there.

So you literally have to be like, Nick, what do you want to get out of this? Shelly, what do you want? Like, like, all right. And so like, you can't ask open-ended questions in group settings. You just can't if you, well, you can, but you should expect no answers or very broad answers. And to your point, I think that that sets the stage for pulling people in who might be hiding in the meeting as well. Cause there's always that jackass that's there in that meeting of a four or five, six people who are sitting in the corner or off camera, who's sitting there just waiting, you know, halfway through to throw the zinger in. Oh yeah, does it do this? And now you're screwed. Right. But if, but if I pull you in, Hey Nick, I know you're not on camera.

You don't have to come on camera now. Right. But I just want to make sure that, you know, what are the things that you want to get out of this? And there, there go from there, which actually brings me up a question for you. How do you handle that person? How do you handle the person that's, that's hiding and is the, is trying to lay some landmines for you because they probably already like somebody else. What do you do when somebody kind of get, tries to do the gotcha in the middle of a demo or a presentation? Okay. So two things in response to that. One, what we just talked about, like the asking each individual, calling somebody out who's not participating, isn't something that you should just be doing in your sales meetings.

It's actually something that is like a fundamental of really good leaders and great meeting management. Like, let's say you're in a meeting with your whole sales team and there's one person in the corner who's like not speaking up even as an individual rep. I'm like, Hey Jeff, I haven't heard much from you. Like, I'm curious to hear what you think. And like, if you're a salesperson who really wants to become a great leader, that's an amazing way to give, like help somebody come into the conversation who might not actually, they might be timid. Like you never know. So I just think it's the right thing to do is make sure everybody's engaged in that meeting. If you're dealing with that person who's trying to sabotage your demo or meeting, and it's coming up in that demo or meeting, you haven't done the prep work that's necessary to almost inoculate yourself against that landmine.

And so if I'm in a big group meeting and I'm talking to anybody for the very first time, I probably haven't done my job right. So I know I'm coming into a meeting and there's three people there. One of the things that I try to do is get the attendee list in advance. And then what I do is I'm either going to call, which I always prefer over email, but some salespeople are like, ah, it's kind of weird to call someone I haven't talked to. So you can also email and you can say, Hey, John, I see that you're on the attendee list for our meeting next week. I'm trying to be as prepared as possible for this meeting. Is there anything that you really want to make sure that we cover or address in the session?

And so when I send that out, like it gives me an opportunity. So it does two things. One, if they reply, awesome. I know what content they want to cover. And that's an excuse then maybe to call them and say, Hey, I said you wanted to learn more about the analytics dashboard. Can you tell me specifically what you'd like to see so that I can show it? The other thing is if they don't reply to that email, now you sort of have a fallback where it's like, Hey, I asked for the agenda. That's actually not my area of expertise. We need to bring in a different subject matter expert or, Hey, like we can definitely cover that since we have the whole group here. I want to make sure that I really give like my full attention and focus to this.

And we've got these three other things that John and Morgan said they wanted to cover. Would you be against you and me scheduling some time offline so we can really do a deep dive on that? And I can even bring in an expert who could answer it way better than me because I don't want to screw up getting you an answer to this important information. It happens a lot with like, you get it folks on the call and it's the very first demo and you're, you're trying to impress the CFO and they're asking you about sock compliance. Like boom, let's isolate this. I'm going to hook you up with my security team because security is important. I don't want to, I don't want to screw something up and give you the wrong answer.

So would you be against me getting you at the right person to get you that info? Well, that, that is, that's giving them, actually I do the same thing. And it's, and it's, I over index what I want to give them. So I, I isolate them, but the, but the important part of that one is you have to set the stage of what the agenda is there for you to talk about in the first place. Cause if you don't do that, you have no guidelines to fall back on. But if you start with, and look, I'm not talking about a 75 point agenda here. I'm talking about a general guideline and then going around, what do you want to get out of this? What do you want to get out of this? And then framing that. All right, cool. And then you can do the Sandler up front contract.

If you want to be like, all right, Nick and everybody here, thank you for all that. So I'm going to restructure the agenda here. So we're going to kind of walk through this timeline here. If we go through all that stuff, you all feel, you know, typically to your point, your word, like typically the next steps are blah, blah, blah. Would you all feel comfortable? Right? So you kind of close there and then it sets up the close. It's a lot easier, but then halfway through when Jackass Johnny pops up and says, Hey, yeah, what about this? You can actually, Hey Johnny, that's a great question. Um, you know what? Uh, I don't think I, I don't think we have enough time in this conversation to give that question that the details that it needs here based on what we had all agreed upon here of what the agenda was about.

So why don't we do this? Would you be okay with me taking, you know, a dedicated meeting with just you and I, or just you, me and the tech expert or whoever it is. So we can dive deep in that and give you the exact answer you're looking for. Cause what you're doing there is you're basically calling them out in front of everybody to say, all right, asshole, do you want to take over this conversation? Even though we all agreed that this is the way this conversation is going and nine times out of 10, unless it's the CFO, unless it's the CEO and the CEO has the ability to change the talk track whenever the fuck they want. But if it's somebody below the power line that puts them in a box and they really have a hard time getting out of that because now you're saying, no, no, no.

I actually want to answer you. I want to, I want to over answer you. We just don't have time right now in this conversation to address it based on what everybody else wanted to talk about. It gives you an out. So, and it also, usually those people never schedule the follow-up. Um, but you also know that that person is now somebody that you have to go back to your champion and say, look, how do we address Johnny over there? Because I know he's not happy with what, where we are. Like I can just tell based on the questions he was asking. Yeah. So a couple of things there, you've got to be cognizant of where that person who's like blowing up your meeting sits on the power line. Because to your point, if the CEO is like, Hey, we need to cover this.

Okay. You should be pivoting. And so what I think about is I always try to cater the meeting to the person who is highest on the power line. I want to like, so if the CFO is like, here's what I like, if I've got a CFO and a controller. Isn't that dangerous though? Hold on. I'm going to pause there for a second. Isn't that dangerous? Cause I'll give you an example. I on JB sales here, I am the highest person on the food chain, obviously. Right. Megan and Chris, who are, you know, my, my second in commands, right. Right. And left hand. Um, and then there's other people, I mean, we're small enough that there's other people that I implicitly trust. Like I'll give you a quick example this morning.

I'm not even going to say who it is, but there's like, so Kelly, you know, Kelly on our team, he manages all our sponsorships and everything. Right. And there's somebody who keeps coming to me like over his head to try to negotiate with this stuff. And I'm like, dude, I have no insight. I like, I have zero responsibility for that side of the house. So stop asking. Right. Like Kelly, if Kelly doesn't want it, it's not going to happen. So say I bring, say you're coming in to do a demo and I just happen to be like, I'm kind of curious here, Nick. Right. But Kelly, I trust implicitly to make the decision on whatever this is, but you now cater to me. Isn't there some danger in that? Because I'm just here just because I'm kind of like, yeah, I just want to see what this is all about.

But if, you know, and if Kelly gives us a thumbs up, I'm going to give it up. Don't you, by how do you identify the fact that that scenario is a real scenario that all of a sudden might ruin your relationship with Kelly. If you keep talking to me the whole time and Oh, John, look at this. And John, because I'm the highest person on the food chain, Kelly's sitting there over there like, dude, what the fuck? Like, like, talk to me. Like I'm over here. Like, and I've seen that happen multiple times where people get enamored with the highest person on the totem pole when it comes to that presentation and actually lose the opportunity because this person is going to be in and out of that meeting and not think of it again.

Whereas this person is going to be the one dealing with it all day long. Yeah. So the way that I think about that is you never want to disrespect any person who's on the call. Like, I don't care if you have a custodian who shows up on your demo, like you should be actively trying to work the room and involve everybody, which to my point earlier about great meeting management, I'm saying like a great barometer is when you exit that meeting, have you said every single participant's first name at some point in that meeting? Scott, like, I'm curious to hear what you think about this, John, what's your opinion on this? And so I'm never, um, I don't know. I'm never ignoring somebody. I'm never making somebody feel like they're unseen in that meeting.

However, if I'm in a demo with John, who's the CEO, um, like it's important that if John says he wants to see something that we show that to John, like if I'm in a meeting with John and Kelly and John is like, Hey man, I want to understand this. Well, you better believe I'm going to show that, but this is where your emotional intelligence as a salesperson needs to come into play. If John's like, Hey, the most important thing in this meeting is that Kelly gets what she needs. Well, you better believe like I'm still catering to what John has expressed is important to him. And so I guess what I'm saying is you, you're going to get less shots with people who are higher up on the totem pole. And so if they express something that is important to them, you're going to get another shot with the controller.

You might not get another one with the CFO. So what I am not saying is that you should ever purposely ignore somebody. I think that's extremely disrespectful and salespeople who do that are shooting themselves in the foot and getting the profession, a really bad name. And actually, it makes you feel really good, John, when you're like, wow, this guy did a really good job engaging all of my people in this meeting. Now I have opinions. Now you're hearing stuff that you might not have heard as a CEO about your organization. I think that falls in line with, I mean, let's go all the way back to prospecting, right? And how so many reps try to like get through the gatekeeper or, or go around, you know what I mean?

Or like, like basically disregard them in so many ways. And I can't tell you how, how many sales I've gotten by, by working with the gatekeeper, right? Like by respecting their role. You know, I, one of my personal 12 guidelines to success is, you know, you can learn something from anybody. I don't care what level they're at. I don't care where you are. When I was at my first job in DeWalt, you know, all we sold power tools, right? To construction workers. And most of my fucking colleagues, they would go straight to the foreman. They would get on the job site and they would go straight to the foreman. They would talk about how awesome DeWalt power tools were and and they would walk by all the workers.

And I, I mean, I knew power tools. They, they educated us on power tools. And so I knew that the grind, you know, and I like, I work, but I'm not like a hardcore user of power tools. Right. So I would come on site and before I would go to the foreman, I would spend like a week sitting, eating lunch with the workers and watching how they use shit and be like, Hey, uh, have you ever tried the DeWalt version of that drill or whatever it is? And be like, no, I've never seen it before. I'd be like, Hey, do me a favor. Could you just kind of use this for a week and let me know, I'll give it to you for free. You know, could you just use it for a week and I'll, and I'll come back. And I just would love to hear your feedback on, on good, bad or ugly.

Right. And so I'd let them, I'd learn from them about how they used it and who gives a shit about this type of gear versus that type of gear. Like, did the fucking thing work? Was it ergonomic? Right. Was, did it help them do their jobs? And I would come back a week later and they would be like, yeah, man, this thing's bananas because I dropped this thing off the roof three times and it still is working and this happened and dah, dah, dah. And I threw it in water and the shit still worked on it. I'd be like, okay, cool. Then I would take that knowledge and I would go to the foreman and I would say, Hey, um, you know, I've been spending the past week or so with your guys and they're telling us that, you know, these drills that they're using are really slowing them down.

And the DeWalt version of this actually does this and this is why. And the foreman would be like, holy shit, really? I'd be like, yeah, I think it was probably going to save you. Forget about like the gears and all that other stuff. I think this is probably going to save your guys about 50% of their time when they're putting these things up. Would you be able to be like, fuck yeah, I'd do that. So I, you know, I learned from those people to be educated up that. So like going through and there isn't anybody who's not important in a meeting. I will say that, right? Because even if they are trying to sabotage you, if you get that deal, you're going to have to figure out a way to work with them, period.

As far as a long-term relationship is concerned, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like, so I want to go back to one thing that you said a couple minutes ago, even where it's like that person who's maybe sabotaging a meeting or has got some weird ask might not even follow up with you. That's on you as a salesperson. I think you've got to follow up, even if it's like, okay, you know, you're going into sort of murky water with whatever that next meeting with that person is that deep dive. I would always rather have the objection or the uncertainty out in the open, because even if you have someone who's super confrontational in the meeting, if you actually like get on the phone with them and talk with them, get in a meeting with them, that sort of starts to like, a lot of times people want to demonstrate their status and they're important.

And that's why they throw that stuff out there. And so it's why you never ignore someone. You're a big proponent of the phone, like get on the phone, call somebody afterwards, have that go, whatever it is. What are your thoughts on like, you know, the use of video? Because a lot of times people just aren't going to pick up the phone. Right. And I agree. I think, I think phone is the best. Well, a zoom call is the best, right? Phone is the second best. Phone is the third and emails the worst, right? So have you ever used video to follow up with somebody who's been a, uh, kind of that person, right? Cause you know, you can see, all right. So say Nick, you're the it guy that kind of threw me a zinger halfway through.

And I called you afterwards and you didn't pick up. And so I'd throw a video and say, Hey Nick, look, um, I just want to follow up on the meeting, man. Um, I can tell there was a little hesitancy from your standpoint. I'm not sure if I answered your question correctly, but I was wondering if, you know, if we, if you and I could just jump on a call real quick, just to make sure I, you got what you needed out of that meeting. Have you ever used that approach? John, I use vidyard probably every single day at my job. There's a million and a half use cases. Like everybody talks about video prospecting, video prospecting. And yeah, that stuff's good. Actually. I love using video when I'm in the sales process to document stuff.

And like one of my favorite use cases for it is a proposal because everybody knows, I hope, you know, if you're listening to this, like you shouldn't just be blindly sending out a proposal. It's important to go over it with, with, with the stakeholders at the customer. And so normally you're going over that stuff with your champion. Well, your champion is sharing that proposal with other people internally. And if you don't like you're, you can't feasibly go over the proposal with every single person who's going to look at it. And so what I do is I go over the proposal with you, John, and then I say, Hey, I'm going to try to make things easy for you. What I'm going to do after this meeting, I say this, when we're going over the proposal is I'm going to put together like a five or six minute video of some of the highlights that you and I talk about today.

So if there's anything that you really want to make sure that other folks know about this proposal, let me know on this call. So when I send you a video recap of the proposal, I make sure to call it out. And then what I do after the meeting is I send that, that Vidyard recording. And now every single person who looks at that recording, they're hearing my voice and my context. And so they're not just looking at that. And so, yeah, I'm defaulting to Vidyard more and more and more. And part of it, I don't know, as a PR major in college, and we would always lose a couple of points, like five points off of our grade if there was a single typo in an essay. And so like anytime I'm sending an email, I'm proofreading it 12 times and that just slows me down so much, which is part of the reason.

And I don't know, I feel like I have a lot of energy and I'm pretty animated and I want that to come through in the sales process. If you've got six vendors and there's one person who's got a face and a smile, you better believe they're remembering that person. Yeah. I think my favorite use case on video is objection handling, right? Is like, you know, you do all the right stuff and somebody says, yeah, John, we're going to close by the end of the year. You figure, all right, I think it's great. And then all of a sudden you get that email out of nowhere that says, sorry, we're going to push this till Q1 or sorry, John, we've gone in a different direction. Now, again, obviously the first thing I want to do is pick up that phone and be like, Nick, what's up?

But you're going to avoid that because you know what's coming when the phone call comes. So then my secondary is I'm going to write up a video and I'm going to use the word confused. I, you know, I like Kenan does this a lot with gap selling, right? Hey, I'm a little confused here. So the video goes, Hey, Nick, got your email, man. I get it. Look, timing, everything's an issue. I understand that. I'm a little confused though, because you had said previously that one of your priorities was to do blah, blah, blah. And now it looks like your priorities have changed, obviously, because we're going to be, but I'm just a little concerned. So could, could I just get like five minutes back on the call with you just so I could reset expectations here.

And look, if it is what it is, then that's okay. But I just want to make sure that I'm following up with you correctly after this from moving forward. And I, I've gone from like a 0.00001% conversion ratio of an email to a, about a 10% response rate for video objection handling. And it's, it's a game changer as far as I'm concerned. Well, what you're doing there, and you, you even said it earlier where it's like, you use the phrase good, bad, and ugly when it comes to like, you know, give me your feedback on the power tools is I'm always trying to get the other person. Like I'm always saying it's, it's totally cool. Like you might see this demo and you might absolutely hate what I show you today.

If that's the case, totally fine. And like, one of the things you talk about is like, um, it, from a closing perspective, if you lose a deal, I lean really heavily on like, Hey, like totally understand. Like, can you help me understand like what I screwed up? Or if we did something wrong, I really take this profession seriously and I want to get better. And so any feedback you can give to me will help me improve for the next buyer. Now, if somebody has given you feedback and you've truly lost the deal, which you shouldn't be trying to do is like, well, wait, but no, wait, that's just cringy. But so what I'm always doing is I'm positioning it as like, Hey, like I might've screwed up or I'm confused.

And I'm not trying to use this to resell you. My job as a salesperson is to get to the truth of what's actually going on. And when I express that and you have to express it throughout the entire sales process, I just want the truth here. If this isn't a fit, that is okay. Just let me know because the worst objection, like if there's a true reason that you're not going to get the deal, any sort of pushing and like pressing and trying to create urgency, it's actually going to hurt you more than it helps. However, if someone's like, yeah, I'm sorry, we really got to push, you know, we are our fiscal year's ending. And, and so we know we don't have any more money to spend. Oh, well, how about a creative solution?

What if we do something with billing terms? And so you can't help the customer until you get the true truth. And the only way you can help is if you know what's actually going on. And so you really got to articulate that again and again and again, if there's something we can do here to make it happen, like, let me know what's going on with the reason for the push. Cause if there's something I can do to help, if not totally fine, like let's reconnect in January. I actually even use it when I lose the, when I lose a deal that I thought I want, if I usually these days, I know why I lost, you know what I mean? Like I can probably sense that halfway through and I try to preempt it in the first place.

But if I lose a deal these days that I genuinely thought that I had my, my, the verbiage that I use is, Hey Nick, you know, look, I get it. Ended up losing here. You ended up going in a different direction for my own personal professional development. Can I get about five, you know, 10 minutes on the calendar with you just so I can get some feedback of what really happened here. And, and look, you only get probably one out of five, one out of 10 people that will give you that feedback. But that feedback, man, holy shit, that's actually more valuable than the commission check. You would have gotten by closing the deal because the amount, I mean, the biggest learning lesson I've had my entire career was when I got fired from Staples.

And after I got fired from Staples, I went back to the seat, like the guy who fired me, the guy who ran a $12 billion part of Staples. And I asked him, Hey, for my own personal professional development, could you help me understand what happened here? And it was the most, like that hour was my MBA. Like he gave me such awesome feedback. And then fast forward, I had a chance to work for Jack Welsh, right? GE Jack Welsh. And, uh, to help his online MBA program get off the ground. And he wanted references. I gave the guy who fired me as a reference and the guy, Jay Baitler, who, who, who I did that with and broke down that barrier with and gave me that feedback, got on the phone with Jack Welsh and said, if you don't hire John Barrows, you're an idiot.

And so literally like that, that reflective of being open and honest throughout and then being genuine with your, Hey, help me understand what happened here. People want to like, they feel bad for saying no. So there's like this, like, all right, let me try to help you out a little bit. Give you some guidance. Cause they'll tell you some vague thing of why you lost all pricing, whatever it is. But when you ask them, Hey, what's the real reason? Oh, sometimes they'll be like, well, this is what happened. You got Joey in the corner here who just absolutely hated you guys. Cause he implemented something a while back and he had a bad experience with your team and there was nothing we could do about it.

It's like, fuck. All right. Now I know. Yep. Awesome, man. Well, look, we got to tie things up here, but, um, anything, any last things you want to throw out there for everybody other than where to get in touch with you? I'm just grateful for you inviting me back on, John. I really, uh, I'm grateful for all of the stuff that you and your team put, put out there because I remember my very first sales job and I rode my bike to work because I didn't have a car. And I remember like, yeah, it's tough being a new salesperson because you don't know a lot of these things and it's take, it takes time to learn and absorb. And like, I'll never forget listening to some of the, like you, you did always, I don't know, some of my favorite nugget podcasts that you did.

And like, you dropped like six or seven things. And I was like, oh, I can go use that stuff today. And like, it was helpful. I remember not crying after work. This stinks. I hate it. I got hung up on 42 times today. So, um, you know, that's what it is. You start to accumulate best practices as a salesperson. And I think really leaning in heavily to like your professional development. And, uh, I'm grateful for the stuff you do. I don't know. I sort of rambled there. No, no, I appreciate it. I appreciate what you're doing out there to try to level up here as far as the rest of the profession too. So how can people find out more about you? You got 30 minutes president's club where you got, get with me on LinkedIn.

My first name's easy. It's Nick. My last name is a little tougher. It's C E G E L S K I. Uh, I also run a podcast called 30 minutes to president's club. So if you liked this episode today, you might want to listen to it. We've actually had a ton of people from the JV sales team on, we've had John on, we've had Morgan a couple of times we've had James. And so, uh, we only talk about things that salespeople can do, say, or write that very day. There's no talk about like mindset or hard work, which are all very, very important to success, but we just talk about things people can do. All right, brother. Well, thank you so much for coming on again. And, uh, we'll see you probably on another webinar, another podcast coming up here soon.

So anyways, uh, as always, everybody, thanks for listening. And, uh, look, like I say this every time, but I mean it, uh, even if you're having a shitty day, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause, uh, if you made somebody smile, no matter how bad your day went, you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that these days. So thank you all for listening and I will see you on the other side. Let's make it happen. All right, y'all. This was a fantastic episode with a lot of great takeaways. As always, we strive to bring you the best guests with value that you can learn from. We never like to close our show without giving you a chance to become a member at JB sales, invest in yourself and start learning the tactics and strategies that you need to become the versed and effective sales professional that you deserve to be gain access to all of our training, all of our content, tips and techniques at join JB sales.com.

That URL again, join JB sales.com. And we look forward to getting you on the path to sales excellence. Have a great week, everyone get out there and make it happen.