Your champion’s boss DGAF about you 🤨
Try to think about about EVERYTHING YOU SAY to your champion through the lens of how it impacts their ability to sell other stakeholders on their team.
At some point they’re gonna have to ask their boss for approval…
Or a peer for support…
Or IT for resources…
In some internal meeting that YOU won’t be in.
But this is actually a good thing because (1) you’re not trusted by all the other people at their company.
But… your champion *is* trusted by those people.
And (2) you can PREPARE your champion for those internal conversations!
It just takes intentional effort. Think of yourself like their personal tutor for how to get this purchase approved.
You should think about this LIVE while you’re on a call. Imagine if you had a live dashboard of how prepared your customer is:
Are they REALLY ready for the internal meeting? Which specific topics might they fall short on? And then begin shoring up those areas.
For example, most salespeople, in their hearts of hearts, know the common objections in their sale.
Let’s use “we can build this with Claude” as an example…
That idea is GOING to come up internally. It just is. They all get together… the VP says to your champion “ehhhh IDK… I like it, but I think we can build a good enough version w AI… let’s start there for a couple months and see where we get.”
All you get is a “hey we’ve been asked to put this on hold” email.
But what if in your discovery call you said something like: “one thing we should maybe spend a few minutes on… I’m guessing there are plenty of people on your team who will at least be THINKING to themselves ‘I wonder how much of this we can build on our own’… maybe let’s chat through how some of our customers have thought about the tradeoffs…”
When your champion is inevitably sitting in that meeting and starts to hear their CXO winding up to suggest building their own version, you want them thinking to themselves “HAH! Yeah right. What a horrible idea. I’ve already thought all about this and know EXACTLY why that would be insane…” all because you tutored them extensively on this specific scenario.
It’s the same thing when you’re pushing back on a discounting ask from the CMO that’s being delivered by your Director level champion…
Or for the connection between your product and the high level business goals (revenue, cost, etc) that matter to your champion’s executives…
Imagine the live dashboard!
Live Training Update
As you guys know, we’ve been running completely free live training sessions every other Tuesday at Noon est. Feedback has been really really positive (but plz do keep it coming!).
COMING UP NEXT WEEK: verrrrrry timely live training session on END OF QUARTER best practices like what to do when a key deal goes sideways. Tuesday, September 8th @ 12:00 PM est (free, no catch) Sign up here: https://luma.com/s5livok1
Last week: YouTube VIDEO of our past session on The Last 10 Minutes of the Discovery Call (and here’s the Google Doc)
The most common mistakes candidates make on interview mock calls ⛔
Mock calls are often the most important step of the interview process. Here are some of the most common reasons we see candidates get rejected after mocks (specifically discovery calls).
Try to avoid these!
The pitch simply not being compelling enough. Really ask yourself if the product sounds like a complete no brainer or not…
Doing discovery but not using the information you learned in discovery to tailor the rest of the conversation to the customer's business (e.g., you learn about a goal relating to a revenue growth target being at risk, but then you never come back and talk about the fact that your product would explicitly solve it)
Too much “process discovery” and not enough focus on uncovering business context that would lead to a purchase (similarly, too much feature selling)
Not being able to demonstrate that you understand the product. Do a little research. Ask questions prior to the mock.
Not trying to build rapport at the beginning of the call as you would on a real call (also being late or having an unprofessional Zoom background / appearance)
Not following the simple instructions in the prompt. If the prompt says something specific, DO IT! Also, don’t break character.
Talking too much (unless you are an INSANELY gifted communicator)
Being too salesy. Don’t be a different person than you’ve been on the interviews. Be yourself!
Not using social proof, examples, or customer stories
Not booking “next steps” at the end of the call! Just schedule a fake demo or whatever!
Poor clock management (don’t run out of time!)
We’re seeing INSANE demand for BDRs ($150k!)
We have two clients actively recruiting BDRs at $150,000 OTEs ($100,000 base salary).
We have another already paying $150,000. And one more paying almost $250,000 for super strategic pipe gen.
If you’re a transactional AE. Someone from another industry. A recruiter. Etc…
And you’ve though about getting into sales, this could be a great way to do it.
We’re especially looking for folks in NYC, but some great remote options too.
Especially if you know someone, we’d love to meet ‘em!