Imagine: it’s the end of your discovery call. You’re booking the next meeting typically some sort of demo.

Should you ask: “is there anyone else you’d like to add to the demo…”?

Or if the customer says “great, 3pm on Weds works, I’d like to also add Bob and Jane”...

Should you agree?

In other words, is better for the second meeting to be a group demo or another 1:1 call?

The default should almost always be 1:1.

(the exception would be something like if the person you’re currently talking to is VERY unlikely to become your champion).

It’s almost impossible to sell anything complicated, expensive, or even just novel, without a champion who will advocate internally for the purchase.

When the CFO asks “why can’t we build this on our own?” you need someone to really push.

When IT says they don’t have bandwidth to implement you need someone to push back.

When procurement and legal get bottlenecked, same thing.

Two main things dictate if a “point of contact” will become a champion:

It’s MUCH easier to achieve both of these in 1:1 conversations.

Try to avoid bringing other people into the sale until you’ve developed a real champion.

Which is on our minds because we’re going deep on this exact topic (specific talk tracks and objection handling for this scenario and the entire last 10 min of the discovery call) in tomorrow’s live sales training session. Totally free, no catch.

30 min at noon EST tomorrow, Tuesday, August 25th.

Sign up here: https://luma.com/whfa35zd

This is one of the best examples we’ve seen all YEAR of a candidate demonstrating their sales skills IN an interview process.

Remember, when you’re interviewing for sales roles the hiring team is watching how you sell YOURSELF (if you won’t execute this sale well, why would they think it’d be any different if you were to do theirs for real?).

Hopefully helpful to see what good looks like so here goes:

First, we had been going back and forth in LinkedIn messages to find a time, but he wanted to lock it in faster (love) so he sends a “calendar dart” with accompanying email:

I reply right away. We adjust slightly. Good to go.

We meet. Lots of interesting roles to explore. I make a couple intros right after our meeting. Within an hour, he sends these next three.

First, this one’s just to me. The best candidates don’t just sell the hiring team, they also sell their recruiters because they know we can influence their chances (in this case, I made VERY warm intros).

Then he replies with these next two to the Founder and SVP of Sales I made intros to.

Great personalization AND demonstration of urgency with his ability to have done some research in the short time between the intro and his reply (roughly an hour).

This stuff goes SUCH a long way to send positive signal about him as a candidate.

Easy to copy!

(btw, if you’re enjoying this section, we’d love to hear from you even just w a quick reply here — any other feedback appreciated too!)