58: John and Morgan talk about Preparation and Execution

good afternoon everybody here for morning those of you out there watching this on the west coast and for those of you listening on the podcast thanks as always this is john barrows make it happen mondays and since we didn't have a facebook live session on the group last week we usually do for those of you who don't know on the make it happen group on facebook live uh for just people who are in that group we do a friday happy hour where morgan and i get together from four to five o'clock east coast time and we answer all the questions that were in the community that we weren't able to get to and also open up for live discussion for anybody who has questions so it's almost like office hours so for those of you out there looking for some live coaching do not hesitate to join us four o'clock to five o'clock every friday but last friday we couldn't do it because both morgan and i were pretty busy with a bunch of other stuff so i'm having morgan come on make it happen monday which hasn't been a while it's been a little while for this one specifically so what's going on morgan how you been doing good doing good john crushing it and uh i wanted to bring morgan on for one very specific reason so for those of you uh who've been following us you know morgan would you come on board october last year oh yeah october 15th okay so october 15th and we kind of put together a ramp schedule to get morgan out there he's obviously you know executing and selling um that's why we came up with his title as director of sales execution but also evolution right so he's executing on sales to drive revenue for j barrows but he's also getting out there to go deliver because that's one of the main goals is to get morgan out there to deliver so i can kind of stop being on the road a hundred percent of the time and work a little bit more on the business here and we're we're at that point where last week morgan did his first half day session um without me being there and then tomorrow right tomorrow's your first full day session tomorrow's first full day session yeah awesome so we're going through this progression and one of the things that we wanted to hone in on with this podcast right here with this make it happen monday is is the is how critical preparation is because i remember morgan when we did we did a half day session uh what was it like a month ago where you came out with me and i kind of did the driving to close stuff and then you took over the fill in the funnel and it went well right but you kind of felt a little like you know choppy and i mean the feedback from you was like yeah it felt okay but right and it was because i kind of was like okay here's the slide deck you've watched me a couple times now get up and see what happens and i was there to help kind of fill in the blanks right but and it went okay from your perspective right yeah it was all right yeah but then let's talk about your prep for going out there and doing it on your own and kind of the process we went through and then the difference that it made so why don't you share with people kind of how you got to where you got to yes last week and and how in the result of what happened last week yeah so big thing is you i've done half day sessions before but not with the slides and without any backup or references from the online portal that we have so this was me hey i'm coming to the slides i'm gonna do the presentation standing up there the entire time and going through everything and the difference in the one last friday was the fact that we took the time to actually prepare and go through each slide together so john and i went to the slides from a full day perspective we went through every single one it's probably two hours and a half three hour conversation we went through every single one and detailed what examples i need to talk about the things that i need to dive more deeper into and other slides and other examples that i can run through to make sure everyone's getting the most value out of the training and when we brought that out and then i looked over the material went over the examples myself printed out the slides so i can look at them if i'm on the move or in the middle of transit i've actually was able to profess my message a lot better and i felt more confident and because i felt more confident i was willing to engage more and i could flow through the slides and it almost felt like that was part of the training and it wasn't like i was making things up along the way love it man and that's and i think that's the key and in the message that i want to make sure that everybody who's listening to this or is engaged in what's up rob oh it's rock hey what's up rock um but uh for everybody who's listening to this right now is is how the difference between prep and non-prep is literally night and day when it comes to presenting meeting with clients or any of that stuff so you know let's translate this now to everybody else who's going through the day to day from a meeting standpoint right i mean you've been on meetings we've all been on meetings where we kind of just showed up and we we asked our basic questions right like you know i call them the doctor checkup questions the stuff you have to ask you know for us it's how many sales reps do you have how many sdrs versus bdrs what's your average deal size those type of things but you've also gone on to meetings where you've gone on their website you've looked at their business you've asked and can you do you have any examples of of when the the difference between when you prepped for a meeting and how you like walk people through how you prep for meetings and then the difference between the ones where you just feel like you're kind of going through the motions because you got a lot going on that day and you just didn't get a chance so could you walk people through kind of like how you prep for a meeting with a client like that's scheduled on the calendar like not necessarily a cold call but a meeting that you have like a qual call scheduled where you're going to talk about our solution and that type of thing what's your process that you go through yeah so from a qualifications call standpoint i'm going to the website i look at case studies i look at also our i put the company an hour and they have just a brief background what other competitors that they're what they're facing against um and then also additionally i'll do a quick look at someone's linkedin profile to see is there someone else they're connected with that i know really well what are their interests what previous companies they were at i think that's really key because it could be like wait you were at a company two years ago and that is actually a client of ours so those are things that i try to pick apart in peace and then also try to see who they might directly report to uh just so i have that name and reference when they say oh i have to go to my my boss or the cfo or the cmo or the ceo at least i have a frame of reference to be like oh yeah i know that's sally or i know that's bob so those are ways that i prepare before the call and just making sure that i understand how many products that they're selling and what they're about to do uh from a initial standpoint i try to drive all the insights i can from that website uh additionally and the reason that it goes really well is i've had a lot of especially executives when i send them the shared agenda before a call they're super excited about it because they're like oh yes like this is exactly what i tell my reps to do and now they know this is going to be a good call because i've sent them at least something to go into with the frame of reference and we don't really get off track we get exactly where we need to go now if it's a meeting where like john said there's a lot of stuff going on which you know it's happened to me before i sometimes may forget this in the agenda or i just didn't have enough time and the call goes well but it goes all over the place and we don't really get to we get the next steps but it could have been a lot better and i don't get questions that i wanted answered answered so having that agenda allows you to be like okay i sent this to you and now we have a guiding conversation and also allows you to not look it doesn't make you look like you don't know what's going on when you ask what are the one or two things you want to get this call today because if you don't set an agenda and you ask that it seems like you actually haven't done any homework and you're going to basically ostracize yourself you don't want that yeah i love it man and so for those who are just uh tactically right what morgan talks about is we have a checklist for you know you go through your checklist before every meeting and i recommend everybody putting together a checklist a very simple one too it doesn't have to be too intense but just like morgan said you look at their linkedin profile you look at their website look at any news and events you open up owl or look at who their competition is that type of stuff and then ideally you come up with like two or three questions that are very relevant to that account and that person based on the homework that you do right so it's not look i get the doctor checkup questions we need to know those but i like to come up with at least two or three that show that i've done my homework right and then another recommendation here and this actually you use a specific tool for this i just use a template but the other recommendation we have is to literally structure the way you take your notes right so like literally i actually have a template that i use in um uh evernote that i cut and paste and it's like company about us so i can literally look up and say okay what do they do so i you know don't have to bounce their website linkedin profiles on everybody what you know what source did it was an inbound or a cold call and then what are what are my goals for the meeting what's the agenda right and i have that so that i can just be very systematic now what tool do you use to do that again oh costello costello and you still liking it oh yeah i love it it makes it easy for me i can bounce around and it's guided by the process of there's someone what are their buying triggers like what are the next steps like it has all planned it out for me so i know exactly what i'm doing and i'm not lost and it makes the calls just easier for me love it yeah and i think anything that'll help you stay structured in the conversation so you're not all over the place which is that that big thing which um a huge believer as you know of that agenda that shared agenda so that's actually one of my favorite nuggets about out of all this training is when you have a meeting coming up the next day and instead of sending an email this is for everybody else listening you know instead of sending an email saying hey are we still on for tomorrow i'll send you an email saying hey i'm looking forward to our meeting tomorrow in order to get the most out of our time together i put together a few points here i wanted to make sure that we cover what else do you want to make sure that we add right and we put three bullet points in there of what we want to talk about that shows you've done your homework and then you leave three bullet points blank effectively telling them fill in the blanks and to your point where do you notice a difference between the clients that respond to that versus the ones that don't respond to the shared agenda yeah like as far as the quality of the conversation oh yeah no i think you meant like responding to the email yes the quality of the conversation is definitely better uh because most people don't respond but they'll be like i saw it and so now they are i would believe i don't think they've even told me this but i would believe they've actually become more prepared to have the conversation about that because in anyone who's really who's listening and you're in a meeting and you're going into it you don't really know what's going to happen your your brain's all over the place so especially with every other meeting that you had you're kind of like trying to figure out for the first five to ten minutes what am i actually here for so that agenda allows for like as soon as the conversation starts we know we're here and it's not a confusion and that's the key because i mean if you look at my schedule i mean i showed you my schedule today every half hour until six o'clock like right after we get we got to end this exactly at one o'clock because i got a one o'clock or one thirty you know that type of thing so i don't have a lot of time and some of them are clients and some of them are prospects and some of them are partners and i will tell you right now without an agenda if a partner has a meeting with me and it's without an agenda i literally get on the call and i'm like all right what are we here to talk about like what and it we waste the first five to ten minutes of the conversation figuring out what reminding me whereas if i had it in the agenda and i would have just opened up that meeting invitation be like boom boom boom and here's a link to our website or something like that i was like oh cool here we are let's talk so it's the same thing with executives right um you know i wrote a post a little while ago called executives like children they need structure right if you don't have structure they tend to fall apart or they tend to be all over the place with the conversation and that's both working with an executive like having a call with an executive and also bringing an executive with you you know like we've talked about this like if you want we've i've been on a few calls with you right where you've pulled me in to talk to the client and without you telling me without you giving me some instruction as far as john this is what my goal is here's the agenda here's what i need you to talk about i mean you know me man and i've done this before i've pretty much taken over the conversation right but but that happened in a sense though where i did tell you what was going to happen but then it didn't happen and we got we both got blindsided right and you look you have to adjust right so definitely make sure that if you do do that and someone ends up taking a call that's your boss your leader like i understand that like that's situational because it happened on one call because i was like i don't know what is going on because we weren't expecting it right well and i did the same thing you i brought you on the call with certain expectations it was like i'm like slacking you'd be like dude sorry about this this is so off topic i have no idea what this dude's doing right now so there's only so much you can do to control it but at least if you put those parameters in place you have something to fall back on right if it does go off topic you can be like hey i'm sorry i was not prepared for this part of the conversation like i sent you an agenda yesterday of what i was expecting out of this call i know you probably didn't see it but can we reschedule this call because i'm really not prepared to have this conversation i didn't come in with the info you know that type of stuff so maybe like let's gather a little bit more intel of what you're looking for and i'll let's circle back maybe in a week or so or something so with that approach by the way where you have a checklist you send an agenda beforehand and then small nuance tactical things here everybody uh so i send the email out usually the around noon time the day before the meeting right to give them a chance to respond to it even if they if they do or don't doesn't matter well it does but but uh what i'll do is the morning of the meeting i will then update the meeting invitation with the agenda in there don't put the agenda in the original meeting invitation nobody looks at it but if you update it the morning of and there's no time change then the person's forced to be like well what's the update here and they look then they see the agenda and then you start the conversation off with hey thanks so much for your time you know 30 minutes still great well i'm sure you probably didn't see the agenda here's a few things build it together then go through it right so have you been have you had it because i know you're really getting into um uh you know meetings and you know moving from the sdr sdr manager to really the now the closing role here at j barrows is effectively an ae have you been part of meetings yet where either you can tell that the client like you know they they kick off well let me tell you a little background on us and you almost feel awkward because you've already you already know their background have you had that happen so far that that's happened uh and sometimes i'll just cut to the chase and be like you know hey like because they'll go ask like hey do you like need a background like no like i know this this and this like you sell this like let's hop into it a lot of people normally don't do that which is cool with me because i've already done my research and that's again like it's time like that's five to ten minutes of you telling me the background of something that i mean that's probably great but i can go look it up on your website so we're here to have a conversation of things i can't find out on the website yeah and that it's funny because i can tell how bad we are as sales as the sales profession in general and how many sales reps just go through the motion without doing any real prep on a meeting because i still get that to this day where our client was like all right well john let me get a little background on us and i have to politely interrupt them and be like look i appreciate it i know when you were founded i know what your company does i know who your target audience is you know i do have some qualifying questions around your background and your history and your direction but we can skip this part and you can literally almost hear like the like the almost the relief because because they're like oh wait we can have a real conversation instead of a sales rep just asking me their bad questions and you know that type of thing yeah so there's that and then and then you know you're in a good conversation and i don't know this is happening yet but it's happened to me not all the time but it frequently where they where they say wow you've done your homework you know what i mean where somebody literally like almost interrupts you as you're talking to them and you say whoa you've done your homework and when that happens you got them because you're you're you're getting them out of their typical day-to-day sales rep yeah yeah okay i'm actually really looking forward to this one and i'm going to preface a uh um a podcast that we're going to have coming up here uh on make it happen monday i think it's going to be uh where is this um it is on 7 16 so july 16th the monday oh crap no i can't do that one can't do that nine uh no it's actually the ninth uh yeah so july 9th uh with armin over a drift because he said something that kind of really really got my brain almost working overdrive which is he's the vp of sales adrift and he talks about how we do certain things that that put customers into the like all of a sudden it triggers a response from a customer in the sense that as soon as we start say like for instance if we're doing a face-to-face meeting and i would open up my laptop for the presentation that triggers to the client that oh now it's my time to shut up and listen to said sales reps presentation and not engage right it's the same thing when we talk about how we introduce ourself over the phone when you say hi this is john barrows from j barrows consulting when somebody picks up the phone it's an automatic trigger to be like uh this is a sales call how can i get out so we want to pattern interrupt that right by saying hey thanks for taking my call do you have a couple of minutes and now it's all right what's this about right yeah yeah so i think that's a lot of what we want to do here is is is interrupt the pattern of bad sales professionals who continue to drone through powerpoint presentations ask basic questions and that preparation even as small as it might be five minutes ten minutes it makes a world of difference for the conversation right yeah it does it does more of a training um i'm gonna there's a couple of questions uh lucas actually brings this one do you set aside time each day to tackle email what's your approach on tackling email do you kind of do it throughout the day or do you set aside time to go after emails i do it throughout the day because what i've realized is i'm massively add and sometimes in my head i feel like i respond to an email and then i look back and i didn't so i try to if it's important i try to tackle it as immediately as possible if i am on the move or there's something else i need to do i'll wait and try to tackle it at towards the end of the day but it really depends on where i'm at where i'm going what's going on so there's obviously like our our travel schedule and the way that we operate is probably different than most sales people that are in the office and they have like they're in the routine it's a little bit different yeah i'll tie this back to the preparation kind of the topic here of of i'd rather email can wait any email can wait unless it's a super high priority look we're not you know i always say we're not emergency room doctors here you know what i mean like we're selling shit so pretty much anything can wait until the end of the day um but uh so that's i'd actually prefer to prep for a client more than i would respond to an email from a client so for instance today you know with all my meetings back to back to back to back yeah there's a bunch of emails in my inbox right now that i you know i could respond to right now but i need to make sure that we i prep for the next call so going that's why having a checklist and going through that to me is a higher priority than looking at emails and i'm a zero inbox guy not everybody's like that but i'll usually start at the bottom move my way up um but that said you know i use the different flags as far as priority i need to respond to this one today everybody else can wait but um you know with the theme of preparation preparation today you know i usually do all my prep for the next day that the night before so for instance last night i was going through my checklist for all my meetings today right because i because i knew i had a bananas a bananas day today and i'm not going to have time i mean we're going to end this here in 10 minutes i'm not going to have time to all of a sudden jump on that website figure out who that person is understand what my questions are i'm going to have to jump right into that call and if i haven't done my prep then i'm your typical piece of shit salesman that's like so tell me about your business you know what i mean yeah you know and i lose a lot of credit i think i lose a lot of credibility by taking that approach and not being present in the meeting be able to have a good conversation because um what other examples have you seen in um from a prep standpoint where it's helped you or some of the things that you you're working with reps right on right now to prep the right way are there any other nuanced things that you do to to give you that edge when you prep i think another another thing that you can do is go to linkedin sales navigator and see and go to the company and you can see who's been mentioned in the past 30 days so you can kind of see who in the news is being talked about is there a quote that you can grab from a c-suite uh something i'm doing if it's if it's an account if i have time to do that that's obviously a little bit more time to do so i'll do something that as well additionally i'll try to see if there's anything on youtube or someone's on a podcast that i can use as a frame of reference to be in the conversation but the things i mentioned before are the main things that i do before i hop on a call and that's just for time's sake and you're going to get a high a lot of high value obviously as the conversation evolves and you get more integrated into the sales process there's a ton of other things that you can do knowledge is there you can use aller again feed lead if they said they're interested in this type of topic you can send it over so those are things you can do after the sale after the sales cycle has begun but that qualification call there's definitely a lot of things you can do that nature and i think a lot of stuff where you know having those so we talk about small talk right and a lot of reps like to build a rapport at the beginning of the conversation they talk about the sports the weather you know that type of stuff which is fine if it's directly relevant like if you're calling into you know uh california congrats you know on the warriors type of thing fine uh or see hey that was cool but you know it better be super timely or super relevant um because a lot of times it comes off as disingenuous in the sense that you know if i see a rep trying to build rapport with me of something that is just like yeah okay fine and i actually i almost roll my eyes at it you know i'm like yeah anyways like if a rep said congratulations on the super bowl like two years ago yeah or even or like hey john i see you went to the university of maryland you know what'd you think i'd be like dude you know that was fucking 20 years ago like yeah go terps whatever why are we here to talk um but what i realize what i think is a better way of creating small talk and building rapport is based on the research that you've done for that account to prep for that meeting right i'll even say to people hey in preparation for our meeting today um you know i was actually looking at your website and i noticed this article where it talked about how you're scaling or growing or doing whatever you know before we really get into the sales training side help me understand like why are you guys going into those markets or what helped get you that to that level or whatever it is because i'm genuinely curious about that that to me way better small talk and rapport building because it reinforces the prep you've done for that meeting and it kind of shows that person hey you better be ready for this conversation because i'm coming with fire as opposed to just going through my typical okay um and one more thing have you um so you've gotten a bunch of the meeting efficiency surveys that we do for the meetings that you have right yep okay how helpful have those been as far as skipping some steps uh extremely helpful i was on a panel last week and i told everyone that's something that they need to look into it cuts off the checkup questions i don't have to go through and i can just hop right into it and those conversations end up being better because we don't have to talk about how many reps you have like what are you looking to do like what are some uh the acv the contract value like all that's already answered so we don't have to hop in the numbers of things we can hop into like the strategic value prop of this training and also like how this is going to help you in the long term yeah and and so for those of you who don't know what we're talking about and by the way i want some of your feedback too on what else we should put in there that's not over overly you know asking too much but it's stuff that's again oh you know what we could just ask that question and for those listening or on the facebook lab right now or listening on the podcast highly recommend considering this it's called the meeting efficiency survey and what it is is client fills out said form on website right with the basics their name their company whatever and what they're looking for what we do then is we send them an email with the agenda hey looking for no with a link to our calendar right hey pick a time and then also hey if you have a few extra minutes if you could fill out this meeting efficiency survey and what it is it's a bunch of you could do this through survey monkey any type of free software pull daddy any of that stuff and it's just check off drop down list like you don't fill in the blanks there's this you're not asking the client to write anything you're asking them to just check out boxes and for us like morgan said what's your average deal size what's your current conversion ratios how many sales reps do you have how many sdrs how many bdrs what's your sales cycle length what's your you know those type of things no stuff that we call doctor checkup questions the stuff that you need to know but are kind of the part of the conversation you know what i mean they're like i always felt like that was the i'd be in a really cool conversation with somebody and i'd be like oh yeah by the way i'm gonna ask you these five questions that just suck i mean they don't suck but they're just yeah yeah yeah anyways so we send that to them they fill that out so we now have that intel before going into that meeting and we could skip that whole step so you can do this with sdr as an ad handoff right because a lot of times depending on how much the sdr qualifies the account sometimes they qualify at a very basic level and then it gets flipped to the ae and the ae is kind of frustrated because this isn't a qualified opportunity or it's kind of a bullshit meeting yeah they don't want that meeting efficiency survey as an ae hey i'm looking forward thanks so much morgan for setting us up this meeting hey you said client i'm super excited to you know for our conversation coming up here if you could take two seconds fill out this meeting efficiency survey it'll really help me prepare and again same thing with the agenda like you said earlier the people that respond to that agenda meetings go much better and they're more engaged same thing with the meeting efficiency survey you'll find that the people who take the time to fill that out those conversations obviously go way better than the people that don't yeah exactly any other things any other tips on the uh uh to to finish up here because we've got about two minutes left any other things on preparation and and stuff that people listening here could take away or just uh some tactics techniques or just an overall thought process on on preparation that we should leave them with here yeah i think every single great person that you follow or you admire does preparation i think the only person who says they don't prepare is gary but gary is an anomaly yeah he's a unique case so like don't don't listen don't listen him in that regard but for everyone else like tony robbins obviously he's number like probably one of the number one speakers in the world like he does over prepare us for every talk that he does um obviously i respect him but i hate his team tom brady um peyton manning they're all i mean even the even if you don't like him lebron same way so they all over prepare and they know exactly what's going on and dream on green from a defensive standpoint he knows all the schemes in the nba uh most people don't know that but that's the reason why they're doing really well what they do they over prepare and they try to figure out how they can get better each time so for me i was a person that normally doesn't like preparing for things but as i've grown in my career and as i've just grown from business acumen standpoint i've realized that preparing for the activities that you could already already be good at you can actually be phenomenal phenomenal and great if you just take some prepare and do the due diligence of putting yourself in a good spot love it man and i'll make one last point on this let's put it this way the most valuable asset anybody anybody has is time yeah one thing you can't get back so by not preparing for meetings you are completely disrespecting the person's time that you are asking for by preparing for it you're showing at least some level of respect and it will go a long way as far as engaging and everything else all right cool all right everybody well we're tying things up here um this week actually we're gonna have uh i'm gonna promo this too uh on the friday afternoon happy hour we missed it last week because both morgan and i were busy this week i'm actually going to my nephew's uh graduation so i'm gonna be out in california so i won't be so we are going to have a very special guest um on friday with uh with morgan to chat about some of the challenges and answer some of the questions so please join us join the make it happen group uh you got to go to the facebook page j facebook slash j barrows and then look for the make it happen group there we answer tons of questions high engagement a lot of the reps who have actually gone through the training are in there answering questions asking questions so really good engagement they're having a blast doing it so join us on friday i won't be there but morgan's gonna run it's gonna be fire all right yep all right everybody y'all have a fantastic week make it happen morgan keep keep going keep it easy guys later you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you