A lot of up-and-coming salespeople struggle to think strategically about their deals. Especially, what action should I take next and why?

For a long time, I’ve thought about this as the difference between first downs and touchdowns. And I often see early career sellers overly focused on scoring, not on moving the ball down the field, so to speak.

For example, imagine you get a “bad news email” on a deal. The customer says “Unfortunately we’ve decided to go in another direction, but we’re happy to revisit next year blah blah.”

Hopeless reps say “Thanks for letting me know. Looking forward to connecting next year.”

Reps with the right mindset will reply trying to convince the customer to change their mind and select them instead. This is good in that it means you believe there’s always an opportunity to persuade.

But it’s bad in that it’s too focused on closing the deal, and not focused enough on the next most important move.

In this case, what you really need to do is get the customer on the phone.

Think about it: are you going to be more likely to change their mind on the phone or over email?

Everyone’s a tough guy over email. It’s easy to say “no.”

But on the phone, they remember that they like you, they pay attention to what you’re saying, they’re more open…

So when you reply, as we’ve covered before, you might say something like:

“Ah okay. Bummed to hear, but know there are lots of great options. Can I ask a hopefully very small favor? Is there a time where I can give you a quick call for 5 min today? Just want to hear the update and get organized for next time around while it’s all fresh!”

Because our goal is simply to get them on the phone, we’re willing to basically concede that it’s over, and we make the ask very small (“a quick call for 5 min”).

Is this a little tricky? I don’t think so.

It’s fine if it’s over. We’re being sincere that we want to hear the update and plan for our next evaluation.

Now if the update reveals say a misunderstanding, that maybe they’re going with another solution because they think we don’t have a certain capability or can’t match a certain commercial term, we’re obviously going to correct the record and see if that changes anything.

The lesson is that in this moment you have to realize that the ONLY thing that matters is getting on the phone and everything you do must be thoughtfully calibrated to increase the odds that happens.

The same logic applies at all points throughout the sale:

The lesson is: think short term. What’s next? Don’t worry about closing the deal, just baby steps to keep the deal moving forward. Try it.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 3 at noon Eastern (free, 90 salespeople already registered, tell a friend!) on Zoom: SIGN UP HERE.

I think more candidates should do sales math in their interviews. Like “here was my quota last year, here’s how I broke it down to make sure I always had enough pipeline, these were my specific weekly KPIs for myself, etc.”

I almost never personally see this from candidates, nor hear about it from hiring managers.

Total missed opportunity.

Think about what hiring managers are really asking themselves as they interview you:

Put yourself in their shoes hearing a candidate say the following:

“In my last role my quota was $1,000,000 a year, or $250k per quarter

My win rate was about 20% and my ACV was $50,000

So of course I needed to close 5 deals per quarter

And with a 20% win rate, I needed to make sure I had 25 really high quality opps in the pipeline with enough time to be in play for each quarter

But in reality I wanted to be at 150% of target so really I was trying to make sure I had nearly 40 quality opps for a given quarter

I could usually count on about 10 inbound from marketing and another 10 from BDRs

So that left 20 for me to generate myself, which I would break down into weekly blah blah you get the idea..."

An answer like this runs up the score on a huge number of the key questions hiring managers are asking themselves… food for thought.

Started posting a couple weeks ago. There’s actually a very interesting sales community on there (there are a lot of anon accounts who are dumb, but also a lot of who are clearly real reps who want to post, but not under their real names on LinkedIn).

Here’s a good lesson I posted about, if you want to dip your toes: