Jason Bay: Coaching, Multi-Threading and Uncomfortable Conversations.

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So to learn more and get started today, go to HubSpot.com and check it out. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is with my good friend, Jason Bate. Jason is the founder and CEO of Outbound Squad and they do pretty much exactly what I do. They train reps and companies on prospecting skills, specifically focused on front end of the funnel. And in this conversation, we got super tactical. I mean, we started a little bit with some of the challenges around training and finding reps who actually care about their own development and leaning in on them.

And then talked about kind of what we skipped over, I think for the past five to 10 years here and how we really need to get back to fundamentals. I mean, both Jason and I are seeing the exact same thing. You know, leadership is telling us that their reps don't even know how to make a cold call these days or carry a conversation. And we really need to get back to those fundamentals because look, the enablement process is broken. You know, we stuff product knowledge down these kids' throats all day long and then expect them to have cool conversations and it just doesn't work that way. But then we got really detailed into multi-threading, which is the topic that I did a blog post on, or actually I did a LinkedIn post on, and Jason saw it and he said, John, we got to talk about this stuff.

So man, we got tactical on this. We talked about how he leads the conversation and makes some assumptions, but also plays a little bit of the challenger sale and talks about the outcomes as opposed to the product or the solution. And then talks about have the upfront contract and how to de-risk the purchase, how to set the stage in the initial conversation for multi-threading, and then how to reverse engineer your lost 10 deals so that you can really come back and figure out what is ideal and share that with executives. And he, again, ended with some very tactical things about this pre-email that he sends to executives, how to engage with them throughout, and everything else. So hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

And as always, let's make it happen. JB, what's going on, brother? Welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How you doing? Yeah, we were having like quite the conversation right before this, dude, so I'm bummed. Yeah, well, that's why we should probably hit record, right? But it was all AI, like, holy shit, what's going on with it? Yeah. We're getting a little more tactical today, a little, bring it back down to earth, I think. But talk to the audience. I mean, you've been on before, but I think it was a while ago. So give the audience a little look in the background here so we can put some context to this conversation because we're going to dive in tactically around cold calling, prospecting, multi-threading, and everything else.

But give them some history here. Yeah, I run a company called Outbound Squad. We used to be called Blissful Prospecting, and when we got started, we were kind of doing done-for-you prospecting in an appointment setting. And did that for a couple of years, and it was really hard, but I got really good at writing cold emails and creating sequences and kind of just building out a process that I would then train and coach companies through, which is mostly what we do now. We've mostly specialized in Outbound up until probably the last 12 months. We've been talking a lot more about discovery, multi-threading, which we're going to talk about today. It's the prospecting, I like to say, that happens after you get the first meeting that everyone tends to neglect.

We've been talking a lot about demos, negotiation. And really what I have a lot of fun with is, I mean, you work with a very similar crowd. I love helping young account executives that are in their mid-20s that are so eager to learn that are not getting the structure, the training, the everything basically from their organization, very large organizations. And I love helping those reps. You know, when you can get something to stick with someone that's like 26, 27, and they have the ability to sell to someone that's like 15 years older than them, that's like a very experienced buyer, like that stuff's like really cool. And that's what keeps me pretty energized these days is seeing that transformation is really, really awesome.

Yeah, that light bulb that pops. And you can tell, right? Like when you're doing that session and there's 20, 30 reps in the room, not all of them are going to pop, but there's always that two, three, four, they go, ooh, and then you know they got it. Actually, you know, we'll get into what we talked, what we're talking about as far as prospecting, but let's lean in on that point for a minute with, you know, reps who are really excited to learn. Because I, you know, you probably heard my whole spiel of 10, 60, 30, right? Like somebody asked me, you know, when, you know, John, you train all these people on the same stuff, how do we differentiate? And I said, 10% in this room are going to take what I tell you and run with it.

60% are going to do something different because it's easy and 30%, you know, not going to do shit different. And I always say I play between the give a shit factor and, you know, unconscious confidence. But I'm having a harder and harder time these days finding people who give a shit. People who do, like really actively want to learn. So with your audience and who you work with, where are those people coming from, right? Because there's a lot of people who are legitimately just going through the motions and I am deathly afraid for them because I'm not, I mean, I'm not worried because there's no skin off my back, right? I mean, they're the ones who are going to be unemployed. But the ones that give a shit, like really are elevating and I'm doing my best to try to find them.

So where are you seeing the sweet spot, if you will, for the groups that you work with that really care? It's a good question. So we, I work with both sales teams and then we have programs for individuals and one of them is, you know, where they're paying 500 bucks out of pocket per month for group coaching and like more access. Yeah. That group, like you would love being on one of those calls, John. It's like you hop on a call there's 20 people that everyone wants to be there. Yeah. And they have a deal that they want to walk through or a cold email they want feedback on. That's how I kind of scratch that is for the most part on the sales teams. I take a little bit of a different perspective maybe in this.

I don't believe that I think that 99% of the people want to do good at their job. I think there's a very small portion of them that actually want outside development that are going to do stuff outside of the nine to five aspect of it. So what I try to do is I try to figure out in the kind of thin slice every topic. So like multi-threading if we take that for example I'm like you know what most of the people here are probably not going to do anything outside of this call so how can I teach the 100 level version of this which no one does. So if there's like one thing that you do it's hey you're going to make sure in that first call you have a good talk track for how to get other people involved in the next call.

So that's the only thing if you take that away like you're going to do that and I also break up the sessions we'll do 15-20 minutes of teaching 10 minutes of breakout room practice so I'm like forcing you to practice. Nice. And I find that like I was just doing one earlier today and I bounce around between the breakout rooms like a creep with my camera off and the audio off I'm like listening to people. So I'm like listening I'm like most of the people I think want to get better at their job I think it's finding a way to like meet the group where they're at or the individuals where they're at knowing that 99% of the people want to do good but maybe 10% actually really want to be great and I've just had to have that ego shattering you know kind of look in the mirror where I'm like I can't help everyone I can't help you if you don't want to be helped and most importantly most of you don't really want to change that much but you will at least listen when you're on the call so it's like what can I give you that's like the toddler version I don't mean that as an insult but like the toddler version of the cold call it's like okay if you just do a permission-based opener and don't pitch your fucking solution in the first 60 seconds that's a huge win for me cool you're gonna be better than 80% of the people that do this so I try to without being too repetitive here thin slice I think is the big thing and just coming to the conclusion that for me it doesn't have to do with my inability to like really break through and teach this person because great personal trainers fail two-thirds of the time with their clients so it's unreasonable for me to expect that 80% of people you know latch on to this and I think that's a good lesson for probably sales leaders listening too that you really gotta get people to want to change and most of them are not gonna want to so you just have to accept that it's a very Buddhist maybe way of thinking about it but you just gotta accept it and do your best and take advantage of the time that you have with them and make it so easy to implement the thing that you're trying to get them to implement is how I kind of look at it hey I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JBSales membership it includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses filling the funnel and driving to close it also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChachiBT and how to leverage it in the sales process and it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done you get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams and as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast you'll get 20% off let's make this happen together yeah I think it's funny I think you came to the same conclusion I did you know I think early on because I took this training when I you know it was called Basho at the time and it was so good for me right I was the one in the front of the room asking questions digging in I'm always like if I go to a training I'm the wicked annoying one because I don't give a shit who's in the room I'm sitting front and center and I'm like okay what about this what about that what about this right yeah and so last time you sold something yeah exactly um so you know so you know for me it was great it was it worked so well that when I had the opportunity to train this stuff you know this was when we were doing a lot of face to face and you know there'd be 30-40 reps in the room and if you were in the back of the room on your iPhone not paying attention I'd be like yeah hey Jason hey eyes up man come on like because I would try to be like dude you gotta learn this shit this stuff's good it works I promise you right so I was trying to reach everybody and then I kind of came to the conclusion like you can't you know you can bring a horse to water type of thing but uh and I was like all right cool and that's where I just I legitimately threw up my arms I said okay if you don't care I don't either I'm like I'm not going to it's just like almost like you know somebody like an alcoholic right you can't help an alcoholic unless they decide they need help right you can't force it on them to make that change it's the same thing with learning in my experience and so I did kind of micro learn like hey here's a nugget here's a nugget here's a nugget here's a nugget try that try that so at least people would walk away with something no matter if you were paying attention or not but it would but it but the real satisfaction is when you can see that 10% of the people that can get it and you're like oh yes all right that's why I do this shit right um leaders especially this this is the the thing that I'm so bullish on is that uh the frontline leaders getting them to give a shit yeah because like that's where the ROI of the training is just the reinforcement of it and if the you know it's like I did a call earlier today and it's like the director it's for a BDR team uh and it's like the director was just not engaging and had his camera off and it wouldn't go into the breakout room like what the fuck are you doing man like you're the one that's supposed to set an example for everyone else yeah so the engagements where I've had really good outcomes is where like I was I was working with one I remember and it was like a VP of sales development but you know he had a team of like 50 people under him and it's like this dude participated in the training he asked questions he took himself off mute and cut me off in the middle and I was like yeah dude you know he's like setting a good example and he's taking feedback in front of everyone and I think we need more of that I think that's where as an organization they can really invest more and these frontline leaders you just get zero training so it's it's like I kind of feel because every rep I talk to and my you know wife got into sales you know also and it's just like hearing her experience I'm like dude it's kind of hard to fault them a little bit because they care a lot but they're not being taught how to do their job without micromanaging people through slack and expecting a five minute response time so that's a whole another can of worms that's uh yeah so that's where we need to really really focus is those frontline leaders I will tell you just as a one more point on that that's where I actually think AI is going to make the biggest short-term impact especially in sales yeah it can help prospect and automate a lot of this other stuff but really where I think because managers just don't coach they don't because they don't have time and we were talking about this before like gong chorus all those things those are fantastic but even me using them like if you tell like if you if you're one of my reps right I gotta and you have a 30 minute call okay that's recorded fantastic but now I have to listen to that call and I have to coach on that call and I can't listen to it at 2x because I need to listen for tonality I need to listen for pitch I need to listen for the gaps and everything else so it's going to take me at least a half an hour and don't tell me I can just jump to pricing right because there's context around when that conversation came up so it's like 45 minutes to an hour to coach on a 30 minute call if I got 10 reps that's all I'm doing and you know even though that's probably the most important thing I could do I gotta close deals I gotta do what I can do so I think actually AI is gonna come in great because maybe for somebody like you or me who's been around the block for a little while like okay some of that's a little rudimentary as far as their coaching ability is concerned but for that 22 year old kid that's not getting any coaching from their manager not getting anything I think AI is gonna be an absolute godsend for them so that's the part I'm really actually looking forward to as part of this yeah it's like we're in the information age right I mean the problem right now is not getting access to information it's getting good information and getting it when you need it exactly you know and having context with it so yeah it's exciting stuff well yeah like I said we can talk about the philosophical side of this house for a while and what AI is gonna do but let's get tactical here I mean one of the things you reached out to me right because I did a post on multi-threading and just some tips on this but you know what's your let's start with I'm gonna start with prospecting in general and then move to multi-threading let's start with what you're seeing working right now because you're on the ground floor you're working with reps you're in these war rooms basically like doing you know looking at emails and everything else and I know there's no silver bullet by any stretch of the imagination but you know what's what do you find working is personalization still good is it not is it relevant is it phone is it email is it social and obviously it's all of it but is there an area where you're leaning into right now yeah I think what we're finding out when this is my first time selling B2B during a recession prior to this I was a college student in 2018 going door-to-door selling house painting services so we saw a little bit of it through COVID but basically when stuff like this happens all the gimmicks kind of go out the window they don't they don't work anymore so getting a voice note on LinkedIn is not so special anymore dude I don't know what you're saying even video man I'm like video almost feels like a little bit of a gimmick right now where it's like getting people to actually watch the video is the hardest part but it's like it feels like such an extra nice to have kind of thing so dude just fundamental basics I think is really where it's at right now so I answered this question the same that I would have like a year ago and it's dude it's the thing you do it's one of the first things I think we even call it the same thing a messaging matrix the messaging matrix is for the persona that I sell into what are their top level priorities what are the patterns there what's status quo so what's the current solution people tools process how are they getting the job done what are the problems that creates for them and the impact of that and then a quick like kind of aspiration what do they want to do over the next 6 to 12 months when an executive maybe multiple years out that exercise will never fail you you just need to do it again if you haven't done it for a while and I think that the what we're starting to see is that there aren't really a lot of new shiny stuff that people are doing from a prospecting standpoint so if you're messaging through email phone whatever it might be does not align with existing priorities you're not going to get any like FaceTime you're not going to get anyone wanting to talk to you you're not going to get any responses so I think like really getting back fundamental basics the actionable thing that you can do is the very first thing I do with a new client is and no one does this is you want to run a messaging workshop with your top sellers get 15-20 people in a room or 5-10 if you've got a smaller team and we're going to work through each persona we're going to spend 30 minutes on persona A and we're all going to come to a consensus on the common language around their priorities and by the way doing this with account executives is going to be much more effective you want people that sell full cycle but this concept of we have to meet our prospects in their world and align with what they care about first before we talk about our thing it's the most fundamental basic thing that you have been like you've been teaching that forever dude and that is just more important so I think messaging is super important I think channels multi-channel is more important than it's ever been so you better be calling I feel like people are totally scared of the phones because pickup rates low so if you can figure out a way using I know you have some opinions on dialers I'm a fan of using a dialer as long as it helps you personalize you know if you take notes prior and then load it up and call and I'm not blasting like three different personas at the same time I'm a huge fan of that I'm a huge fan of like using you know verified you know kind of phone numbers if you can get that together but really it just comes down to when someone picks up like do you have the chops and the talk track to be able to have a good 30 to 60 seconds once you get past that it's you know your odds of getting a meeting are pretty high LinkedIn same kind of stuff I mean it's I'm not really suggesting or seeing anything like work that's different it's just people actually being forced to use like fundamental approaches of not talking about your own shit so much and talking more about the other person and then being really diligent and account account executive self-sourcing is probably the other big thing that I'm seeing a huge theme of where a lot of the SDR teams are starting to go by the wayside and as an account executive I'm happy to dig in there more if you want on tactics but yeah all of a sudden now you got to be good at outbound to be a great account executive which again you should have already been doing that before so nothing crazy new that I'm seeing it's the same kind of fundamental stuff which is funny because I've talked about that recently and I genuinely think you know the past 10 years in sales we as leadership in a lot of ways or leadership in general has done a disservice to the sales population because we've over-engineered the sales process we've thrown too much technology at it and all the stats say that with all this technology we're actually far less efficient and effective than we've ever been and so now and look we grow at all costs here's a ton of money go go go go go skip the fundamentals who gives a shit right because a 60% quota button seat is better than a 0% quota button seat as you're growing like that but now that things are hard now people have to go back and sell and they don't have the fundamentals and it's scary to me because just recently and I'm not going to call out any names but big ass companies that you would think holy shit they know like they've defined this like they're the ones who can do this and I'm talking to their managers and their managers are like to your point that they're still product pitching you know I don't know about you I still get people coming to me saying hey John you know I think we got to make the move to you know to solution selling because my reps just pitch too much and I'm like you do realize that Xerox came up with solution selling back in the late 70s early 80s right like that's when solution selling was defined and where the fuck have you been for the past 30 years 40 years 50 years you know what I mean like but it's still to this day reps and I'm just curious why you think that is like why do you think that sales with all the education now right I mean we have now universities you can get your degree in but why are you and I seeing the same thing with fundamentals being so sorely lacking I think it's a couple things there's that's a huge thing that we can kind of unpack but there hasn't been a consequence for it yeah that's true that's the big thing so I mean you mentioned this before we were recording the economy has been really good the last 10 years yeah it's been freaking booming dude but I know a lot of people that do what we do now that are not making any money right now dude you know and I think it's there hasn't been a consequence so things have been really good so you could reach out if you're working for insert big company name and say I'm with this company like that'll get you a meeting you know a lot the other thing though is that I think the way that we enable reps is fundamentally broken I was just talking to my wife Sarah about this right before this when we were eating lunch and she's right now she's Korean and she's trying to become fluent in Korean so she speaks pretty good Korean right now but she's going through like this language learning kind of thing she's got like apps and like a tutor and all this other kind of stuff she's like you know what's weird when you're learning a language you don't you know listen to other people talk in that language for 8 hours and then practice it for 20 minutes which when we onboard reps what does enablement do they take people through like 15 hours 40 hours of content and then they have to do a 20 minute pitch in front of all these executives like what that is such an unreasonable expectation like that's not how you learn and I see huge companies the way that they enable reps is like they're not being taught just fundamental principles like Gong's got some great data on cold call success rates right and the cold calls that end with a positive outcome it's 55% talk ratio rep 45% prospect I always ask this question when I teach cold calling like what percentage of time should you be talking everyone thinks less and I'm like you're expecting a stranger to drive a conversation with you come on but it's like fundamental things like that that are not being taught nor is there an opportunity to which it sounds like you're gonna be spending a lot of time and resources energy on is like is how do I practice like how do I actually practice this and I think that's been fundamentally broken to where there hasn't been a consequence the existing enablement that teams get is just like course modules essentially so reps aren't enabled and then also there's not a consensus on how things should be done hey everyone thanks for listening so we're going to be doing something a little different with the podcast Russell Bradley Cook is the partner manager for HubSpot and he's going to be doing a podcast takeover for me while I'm at HubSpot's inbound conference in Boston from September 4th to the 8th during that week we're going to be dropping an episode a day and Russell's going to be interviewing five different CEOs and talking about their personal perspective and career lessons learned and also where the industry is headed you're not going to want to miss these oh and if you're coming to Boston for inbound make sure you find me I'll be around all week and would love to meet up with you so you brought up medic earlier I'm a really big fan of medic but like knowing what the acronym stands for and being able to actually execute that are two totally entirely different things so there's just a lack of consensus on kind of like how to go about stuff and I think that as a as a sales leader dude I'm talking with a big company they have like well they're not a big I mean they're decent they have like 250 account executives and they've never done outbound before yep like are you kidding like you've never had these reps do any outbound before so they don't even know John like how to send a cold email crazy so I think there's like some fundamental things that if I'm a VP of sales right now I'm gonna be like hey it's like get back to basics it's like getting back to school kind of thing and let's just look at all the 100 level things that we need to do really well yeah and let's just create a simple easy to follow framework for each of those things and start measuring against that like it's just it's I hate to be a broken record with getting back to basics thing but that's just where it's at right now no I mean I look at the end of the day if you look at almost any successful sports franchise or whatever it is like they do the fundamentals better than everybody else and they do them consistently better than everybody else it's not just like okay this month we're doing the fundamentals it's like no the baseline is set and they all know that this is what is expected now where they pop is where the creative stuff comes into play whatever but yeah I agree with you I think there is a need to get back to basics here from a sales standpoint learn how to actually have a conversation with somebody without pitching your shit ask you know be actually curious and genuine about it that type of thing so well let's let's get into multi-threading right because I think this is an area obviously all the statistics say that you know there's more people involved in the sales process than ever before and you know you get ghosted all the time and you know people lean in on a champion and that champion gets laid off moves job you're screwed so what is your approach and let's assume here that we're selling something over ten thousand dollars ACV and there's you know four five six people involved in the decision making process and you have your champion and everybody else so what's your thought what's your approach I guess philosophy on on multi-threading and then let's get into super tactical on how you do it yeah I love this topic so I learned a lot of these things actually from a good friend his name's Dan Strauss and he did strat sales at zoom info and chorus and landed some very big deals when competing against gong and so he taught me a lot of this stuff a while back and I think fundamentally there's a couple things one there's always this fear that I mean this is what I hear every time with multi-sign I don't want to alienate my champion and like all of this other stuff I don't want to go around their head and what they shut down the deal I think the first thing is like take the lead so you need to think about it like this I always think about running a sales process like being a good host so John if you and your wife were over at Sarah and my place and you guys were coming over for dinner there would be an expectation I would assume that I would probably do the cooking like we would have some stuff there for you there might be a table for us to sit at and I would kind of like let you know like well first thing I ask you to do is like hey take your shoes off yeah this is an Asian household okay but like there would be some guidelines and parameters so that you don't like you know what to do right but you're allowed to participated that I might ask you hey what do you want to drink you know so there's room for participation but there's also like me setting kind of guidelines and boundaries around what's going to happen so that I can like lead you through that experience and in the sales process you have to lead the buyer through not how to buy your stuff part number two is like how to get a great outcome and this is where I think there's a lot of confusion in that you don't even know if they want to buy your thing yet or if they're even sold on changing do you want to talk about how to get a great outcome because that's the part of the buyer's journey that's neglected people talk about awareness consideration interest all this other stuff well the buyer doesn't give a shit about that part they care about buying something and then getting the outcome it's supposed to get I mean pause there for a second because I want to because this leans this this hits on something I've talked about a lot which is there's two types of buyers right and well there's a lot of type of buyers but there's two groups in this example sophisticated versus unsophisticated right and sophisticated so unsophisticated buyers are I've never really done this before I'm looking into this I was told you know so I got to go through the motions and I 100% agree we have to lead them through the process because they've never done this before you do a little challenger sale you know hey you make this decision once a year I help people make it every day let's go right and here's the guidelines but for the sophisticated buyer right the one that y'all hear the stats by the time somebody comes to us they're already 60 to 70% of the way through the sales process blah blah blah what do you do to that like how do you how do you lead right because in a lot of cases you want to make that sale frictionless like you want to get out of the way and make that because if you put them through a process you're going to lose them so how do you deal with in in that scenario with what you just mapped out there the sophisticated buyer who's done some due diligence who knows what's going on who's gotten to the point where they're in this conversation they just want to see price they just want to see that feature how do you calm them down a little bit and make sure that you lead that process without getting in their way yeah I want to preface this with I rarely see that that situation just because it's like when you hop on a sales call you're that sophisticated buyer but it's like for us I really see I don't know about you I really have an SVP want to talk to me on the very first conversation or like a chief revenue officer so I would just like kind of keep that in mind it depends on kind of who you are and what you're selling so this the sophisticated buyer the talk track sounds a lot like this so John obviously you've been a VP of sales at SYC company for a decade you've probably brought in trainers before in the past I would assume yeah cool so there's a couple things that we do they're maybe a little bit different than what you might have done before and we've gotten some really good results with companies like Gong Medallia Zoom you're trying to get to a third of your AES pipeline being self-sourced do you want me to kind of walk you through like how we were able to get that outcome for them is that cool if I share that every time they say yes sure one of the perspectives obviously you have a lot of really good direction from a senior level on like the vision where the sales org is going over the next couple years there are some other parties I would recommend that we get involved as well sales enablement is typically going to want to have their eyes on content so they can reinforce it and I would love to get some frontline leaders on a call as well so we can get their perspective boots on the ground like their buy-in I find if we don't have it we can do everything we want from a training standpoint but they're not going to implement it well with their reps unless they really like and resonate with the content so with that being said I'm happy to give you price but can I make a recommendation based on how I've seen it work really well with a few other organizations on what we could do for a next step I always get a yes with that so the sell the outcome is I'm not going to walk them through how to buy my stuff I'm going to walk them through how other organizations get great outcomes because again I'm curious your experience too if it's different then when I get this is a situation we should talk about too because the most common situation every rep listening to this is on is a manager manager or a director of something hops on that first call it's hardly ever someone above the line so for me a lot of times that's a sales enablement manager from a well-known company that I want to work with coming inbound and I look at I'm like oh fuck okay I got my work cut out with this one you know but what I'm thinking about through that process is like how do I educate them not on how to buy my thing but like what the best organizations are doing to get a great outcome because when they bring that senior person in the number one question I get asked is like they want proof points yeah oftentimes it's a 10 minute conversation zero bullshit at the beginning they say who have you done this for and what kind of outcome have you gotten they're thinking how can I de-risk this decision yep so that's what I want to supply to the senior person and I think there's a little bit of ego stroking that you should do too like I did there hey you've been doing this for a long time I imagine you have a really good idea of what you're looking for I've also been doing this for a while and have talked and sold and gotten great outcomes with these other companies do you want me to share how we've done that yeah and if you pull that off correctly now they're bought into multi threading because there's a purpose for it yeah McKinsey's got another stat I think it's 71% of change management initiatives fail I mean it's like seven out of ten times when a company brings in a new process or new tool like a lot of the clients that that we have that sell it doesn't work no yep so people want to de-risk the purchase that's what you kind of need to think about so that take the lead piece and the selling the outcome versus the solution that's what I want to do is I really want to come in and be that trusted advisor that everyone talks about like you need to give them advice here that's what they're looking to you for so if you're a rep and you're listening to this because a lot of them might be fairly new this is the type of stuff that you can pick up from your more seasoned account executives listen to their calls ask them talk to customer success hey the customers that you've seen get the best outcomes from our solution what do they do differently than everyone else and now I have an insight or two and multi-threading is not this big thing that happens at the end of a call when I have two minutes left I need to secure a step and I need to do them at their VP no it's it's a seed that I planted the very beginning of the first conversation y'all know that I love being on this new network because of all the cool exposure and cross-promotion that we do but also because of some of the podcasts that I'm getting exposed to here that are quickly becoming some of my favorites especially this one coming up created hosted by John Uche now created gives you an inside look at how to build a business as a creator and improve your creative process and also stay ahead of the latest content trends he's an ex-youtube and instagram employee and breaks down the creator economy of guests like Logan Paul Paris Hilton Jake Paul and many many others and his most recent episode why youtube's biggest star left is really interesting Lisa Koshy she was actually there before mr.

beast and she was had I think 25 million subscribers or something like that and she bailed on youtube and they dive into why which I thought was fascinating so you're gonna have to listen to it all right so check out his podcast created wherever you can get your podcast now and let's make it happen you know you know it's funny I you know this is mea culpa on my part you know you know the sailor up front contract right like yeah I remember when I was 22 23 years old I sat through a sailor training and you know typical you know suit that's three sizes too big you know guy who's probably hasn't sold shit in years and he's and he's explaining the three the upfront contract I'm like and I just rolled my eyes at the whole thing I was like this is so fucking cheesy I'm never gonna do this right so for legitimately 20 years of my career I shit on the upfront contract I was like that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard right and then gong data actually came out with with some stuff so the best sales reps use the upfront contract to set the stage and it was all about closing I was like huh all right well let me let me kind of revisit this and and it was actually right around the time when Morgan was on uh was on the squad with me and he was having a little hard he was having a really hard time you know nailing down next steps and so we kind of role played it out and we started we started implementing the sailor up front contract in our style and it was along the lines of what you did and it's using the word typically right so it's like hey Jason you know here's a quick little agenda we want to make sure we like and this is for a scheduled call obviously for a cold call it's a little bit different but for a scheduled call it's like hey Jason you know I sent you over a little quick agenda just make sure we get the most out of this I'm probably sure you didn't see it you know here's a few things I want to make sure that we cover today what else do you want to what else do you want to get out of our call today right and then you work through what they want to get out and they say okay cool look you know if we get through all this stuff typically the next steps are we bring in enablement we bring in VPS sales X we bring in that so that we can actually really put this pieces together and get everybody's insight so we're doing the right thing here so if we were to do all that would you feel comfortable taking that next step with us right so it really all it is is a trial close and it's something similar not the same exact talk track to what you have but you're basically leading like setting the stage of this is how it's done right and do you want to do it right yes I want to do it right okay so if we do it right then the next steps are these things is that cool and if they say yes well then at the end of that conversation then it's a natural close right it's now it's a very assumptive close we're like all right cool Jason do we did all that stuff fantastic so now when do you want to you know when do you want to set up that call with enablement or whatever it was and by implementing that for Morgan it actually gave him a lot more confidence because if they said no to it right then you kind of knew what you were up for like this is just a discovery call then this is just a I'm going to show you what I got and it is what it is and I'm going to treat it a certain way but if they say yes then the conversion ratios were through the roof so I like the way that you positioned it though I like the way that you handle that a little bit better where you know when things go right effectively let me let me paint this outcome of the best clients that I work with this is what they do right do you want to be that best client great if not like we could end this conversation pretty quick because I don't understand the point yep oh god so much there one little thing I want to say is when you get an executive on a call I interviewed a Henry shock CEO of the zoom and phone or podcast and I asked him what he wants to get out of a sales call if it's a big enough deal that he has to hop on something right when they're being sold something he's like dude I want to know what a best-in-class peer is doing are you working with a peer that I know and what is the best-in-class thing that I can take back to my team so you get an executive on share something helpful with them this is this is what you do so I would say one other exercise that's super important is like you need to reverse engineer the perfect deal so if you look at your last 10 closed deals this would be a very good action item spend 10 20 minutes on reverse engineer your last 10 closed one deals and just look at who was involved in these deals who needed to get involved and for your next deals intro calls coming up etc I cannot tell you how many people don't even do basic LinkedIn sales navigator research and look at okay I'm talking to John VP of sales is so-and-so chief revenue officer is so-and-so head of enablement is so-and-so now I have names I can specifically ask for people so like your chief revenue officer is his name's Tom Alamo let's say I don't know where that name come I'm gonna be like hey so when we involve Tom John in a future conversation typically Tom's gonna have perspective on how this kind of fits in to the vision over the next one two and three years and we're gonna make sure to get alignment there are you cool you know when it comes time loop and so-and-so into the conversation like I want to ask by name and suggest specific people and the principle there is it's easier to correct than to educate it's easier for your prospect to correct you than to do all the work of educating you and it's also showing that you're putting some work in yeah so come to the table with a hypothesis of who you think the stakeholders are and use that call to validate and I gave you the top track earlier the top track really is have you bought this thing before and if so how did that work who was involved etc etc and if you haven't do you want to hear what best in class looks like with our other clients and how this stuff typically comes together those are kind of like the two really big fundamental things before you start running the kind of plays and things that happen between the calls yeah because I love that because I used to I even on a cold call for instance I I'll call and I'll say hi is you know executive there like gatekeeper picks up I'll say hi is Sarah there and the gatekeeper will say I well I don't know who's who's calling and I'll be like well this is John with JV sales and actually you know what maybe you can help me you know I have Sarah's name here but I'm not exactly sure she's the right person to have this conversation with this is what we do you know is she the is she the right person and to your point of correcting versus educating oh no it's not her it's so and so oh why so and so oh because they do this oh great could you patch me through please right now you're getting referred from the executive assistant or whoever it is because you're saving them time but it goes back to like not being lazy because you know that's why the who's the best person to speak with about this is such a it used to work back 15 years ago right when I was doing this but I think that's now a very insulting and ignorant thing to say because it shows you just have no ability to even open up LinkedIn and take a fucking guess at who this is because you should be able to figure out by based on some stuff who the person is who should buy this stuff so you can't be lazy exactly yeah so I know we don't have a ton of time left here but what are some other other ways of multi-threading that you suggest people use to spread the audience without pissing off your main point of contact your champion who thinks and I think the most dangerous one by the way is not the jackass point of contact who's blocking you for everything because then fuck them I'm going to go do whatever I want to do and see what I can do I actually think the hardest one is the person that's nice to you it's like oh no Jason we definitely need this but but but yeah you know we're not going to involve so and so yet and then it asks so what are some other ways that you find are effective at multi-threading within organizations yeah so I'll give you some plays and to address the thing that you shared earlier it's a great insight I think you need to be willing to get really uncomfortable in conversations so I'm working a deal about 150k which is a big training deal for like what we do at least for me and the person that I was talking to she was like in the second call yeah let I'm going to take this ballpark kind of figure you gave me and let me bring that up to my SVP if so-and-so and I was like hey love the excitement first off that you're really excited about this let's pump the bricks real quick what I'm really fearful that's going to happen is you seem really excited about this and we're going to bring a dollar figure up to so-and-so with no justification no cost of inaction no quantified outcomes that we want to get and so-and-so is just going to shoot it down are you cool if we pump the bricks on that I would love to set up another call with you let's put a business to get case together first boom cool you just need to be educated that was really uncomfortable for me to do yeah this happened a couple months ago you know I mean it's always uncomfortable to like tell someone that they're wrong and there's elegant ways you can do that of course so other plays that you can run I think a really simple one is if you get a lot of first meetings with people that are managers of something so sales enable manager for me let's say I'm going to reach out to who I think the economic buyer is and who I think a good champion is and medic lingo is really good for this champion versus coach really important distinction yes champion is typically an executive who has direct access to an economic buyer so for in our world that's a VP of sales sales manager that's not your champion they could be a great coach they can give you a lot of great insight but they're not meeting with a CRO on a weekly basis right so that distinction distinction super important one thing that you can do before that first meeting with the manager send an email to who you think the economic buyer might be VP of sales I'm going to say hey John just let you know a few people from your team I'm not going to mention names because I haven't talked to those people yet are meeting with us to discuss XYZ no need for you to respond no ask here I'll keep you in the loop that's it all I'm going to do now I've opened up a thread of communication and I've promised the person I'm going to keep them up to date so after that meeting after I've had the multi-threading conversation I'm going to reach out again to John say hey call went really well with so-and-so today by the way I want to say they're really on top of their numbers seem really aligned with the vision here's what we talked about and what I understand your priorities to be bullet a bullet b again no need for a response here just keeping you looped in okay and imagine you do that three or four times and now when it does come time to engage the chief revenue officer or the VP of sales they already know who I am because you know what they're likely going to do after getting those emails a couple times is forward it over to that person or ask who the hell is this Jason guy and now I've like warmed up the oven so to speak I've preheated the oven so that's one really simple thing that you can do like prior to that first call to like get a lot of engagement and especially just getting people talking about it yeah have you ever have you ever gotten a negative response I mean probably every once in a while but yeah on average you get probably put mostly pretty positive on that yeah one of them he I all I did was send a LinkedIn connection request this just happened to his VP who he said that he was already talking to about me as a director of business development and I was like hey so-and-so have been having some great conversations with John no ask here would love to connect that's it he emailed me back canceled our meeting yeah he got super pissed I know there's no deal there though I saved my time exactly there was no deal he was like fanboying me basically you know and it's and it also shows that there's that's probably not your buyer anyways because like in general from a company from a client standpoint because they don't agree with your philosophy right if somebody if you're doing something that aligns with your philosophy and they have such a negative reaction to it for you somebody like you and me that's a death blow because it's like that means you just don't get it and you're gonna hate what I have to offer here so I like yeah and I think that's a softer way of doing it so instead of sending the email you send a LinkedIn request to the leader saying hey you know what just want to let you know I'm having a great conversation and you know if you have any questions let me know I like that a lot so there's the free email and then there's a threading and keeping that person looped in and then another one that I feel like does not get pulled off well is how to start incorporating your leadership this is a more advanced tactic yeah so if I'm selling to CIOs ghostwriting an email for my CIO to send to them okay yeah this requires a lot of like you got to be on the same page with your CIO there has to be something that your leadership has put into place for stuff like this and this is usually reserved for large enterprise deals yeah so you can get a deal unstuck that way and you can also proactively like a lot of my clients I used to be very against this but I don't really care anymore like their sales managers have a VP title yeah I'm like okay it's kind of cool I guess because like their prospect they'll send an email over saying hey I heard our two teams had a great conversation around these topics yeah no need for a response here I just want to put it out there that we're a resource for you and happy to support this project okay and I'm like looping in my leadership so I think multi-threading happens on your side Gong's got a lot of interesting stuff around this too but if there were like two or three things that you started doing immediately it would be research stakeholders in advance ask for them by name on the call and keep people looped in by email like let your point of contact know that you're emailing other people and keeping them in the loop just be totally open and transparent about everything and then that's going to expose a lot of cracks in the deal and it'll let you know how real a deal is because prospects don't socialize as good as you think that they do oftentimes they don't talk about it at all so this is the thing sometimes that could just get them to have that internal conversation or like who the heck is this guy that keeps emailing me about this project that you two are talking about oh yeah it's this yeah and like now it's a real conversation I love those and I think you know we could have we could keep talking about you know the they're going down and how to engage as far as what to say to those people but I know we're coming up on time here so let's leave a little bit to on the bone here for people to either go find out more information from from your site or or tune in to the next time here so Jason you got a ton of free content out there where do you want to direct people because you're doing some really cool stuff and you get super tactical I mean you give away a ton of free shit which I would genuinely appreciate so where can people find out more no it's been awesome always always fun to jam with you man outbound squad.com is the best place so that's kind of a hub for a couple things we have a podcast also at bound squad podcast I post daily content on LinkedIn and then there's also programs in there if you're an account executive especially and you're looking for help implementing some of the stuff that we talked about we have you know an online platform there's coaching options if you're a sales leader it's all kinds of stuff there too but I think the best way to get into our ecosystem is on that on that website outbound squad.com love it and easy enough for everybody is Jason Bay goes by J Bay but Jason Bay on LinkedIn it's pretty easy to find so Jason always a pleasure man I appreciate you coming on here man I'm looking forward to seeing what else we can do together moving forward yeah you're coming on the podcast on my podcast next I'm looking forward to jam with you again man yes indeed I'm looking forward to that man awesome everybody well look thank you very much hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did as usual look go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went or you think it's going make somebody smile today you know you had a good day in the world and there's a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network also check out my new website at www.johnmichaelbarrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage there's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team look I'm out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology so if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales let's connect and let's make this happen together you