(163) $3k vs $30k vs $300k Sales Close (Live Breakdown!) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kl8SBxSQfE

Transcript: (00:00) I'm going to show you the fastest way to close a $3,000 deal, $30,000 deal, and a $300,000 deal. We're going to close the $3,000 deal in one call. We're going to close the $30,000 deal in three calls. And we're going to close the $300,000 deal in, believe it or not, 20 calls. A lot of sellers make the mistake of thinking of their sales cycles in terms of meetings. (00:23) So, for example, they'll be like, I need to do a discovery meeting and then I need to do a demo meeting and then I've got to do a proposal meeting, negotiating meeting, etc. And that's one way to think about it. But the problem is the key to moving deals faster is if you identify deal momentum in your first call or in your first meeting, then you can actually stuff the next two or three calls into that first meeting. (00:47) But if you're so rigid in your sales process where you're like, "Call one must be a discovery, call two must be a demo, you'll never actually have what it takes to move deals forward faster, or you might not recognize when you actually need to slow a deal down because maybe you didn't get everything you needed in a deep dive demo and you need to do another one. (01:06) " So instead, I always tell people, think about your sales cycle in terms of the agreements you're trying to get from your prospect. In other words, what are the things that your prospect needs to agree to in order to buy your product? And there are five agreements that I'll go through today, but the key is you can get all five of those agreements in one call if you have a really hot lead in an SMB or a transactional sales cycle. (01:31) Or it might take two, three, four calls in an enterprise sales cycle just to get those agreements with one person. And then you've got to do that with the next person and the next person and the next person. And that's how you figure out how many calls or meetings you actually need to spend when you're closing a $3,000 deal versus a $300,000 deal. (01:51) So folks, let's dive into the $3,000 deal. I'm going to be using an example from a company that I used to sell for called Carta. And the reason for that is Carta typically sells to founders. It's actually pretty painful to manage a stock option plan on your own as a founder. And so Carta helps companies manage their stock option plans and helps them get valuations on their stock options which are required every single time you close a new round of funding. (02:17) Okay. So often times because we were selling to early stage companies, you'd want to close these like 3K, 5K, 10K deals in one call if you could. So let's walk through the five agreements and then I will whiteboard out what a one call close would look like. So the first agreement you're trying to get is problem agreement. (02:35) And that's pretty straightforward. Do they agree that you have a problem that you can solve? Number two is solution agreement. Do they believe that you could solve the problem? Pretty straightforward. Number three, you would get power agreement. Power agreement is just does power or the decision maker believe that the problem and the solution are worth it. (02:54) And then number four, you have commercial agreement. So do they believe that it's worth the price? You might believe the problem is big. You might believe that the solution is good, but you still might not be willing to pay the price. And then lastly, number five, you have vendor agreement, which is are you willing to sign a contract, go through a legal process, it review, etc. (03:14) All right, so these are our five agreements. Let's walk through what a one call close would look like. All right, so one call close. So at Carta, you could literally get all five of these agreements right here in one call, right? And what that would look like is you'd basically take your 30 minute discovery call or demo call that was scheduled when they clicked the meeting booking link or whatever and you would just divide it into different parts and you would try to get these five agreements as quickly as humanly (03:41) possible. So, usually at the beginning of a call, you'd ask someone why they took the call. And if they were like, I really got to get a valuation. That was something that I was like, we knew we were the best in the market for it, and we knew they had to get evaluation because when you close a round of funding, you literally must get a valuation by a certain point of time. (04:01) So, you honestly can get to problem agreement in like 5 to 10 minutes. So, we'll call this we'll split the difference here. We'll call this in like like 10 minutes of rapid fire discovery between like setting your agenda and doing all the other like nonsense, making sure the person gets on the call. From there, you'd give your brief elevator pitch and you'd be like, "Great. (04:23) Well, like here's how Carter helps with your valuations, all the different things that you're going to need to do to manage your stock option plan, yada yada yada." And then you'd be like, "Let's drop into a 5-minute Harbor Tour demo to give you a sense of what this thing looks like." And so, at that point, you drop into a very brief overview demo. (04:38) And because it's an SMB account and SMB business, the solution wasn't very complex. Sort of like the people who sell Yelp ads, they literally try to cold call a business owner and close the ad deal on the call because everyone knows what a Yelp ad is. It's like a pretty straightforward concept. So, you don't have to demo that much. (04:56) So, you're at like the 15-minute point in the call and at this point you should know if the demo is going well based on how you ask questions along the way. And at the end of the demo, you'll just ask a simple question, which is like, hey, like at this point, like you have a pretty good sense of like what Carta does. I know you need this valuation. (05:12) I know you need to do it pretty soon. Is there anything else regarding like the solution or like what you're trying to solve for that you feel like you don't have answered yet? And they'll give you one of two answers. They'll be like, uh, I have these like 20 technical questions and I got to bring some other people from my team into this call to see this, too. (05:29) At which point, you know, that's not a one call close. or they'll be like, um, I I just love to know the price. And you might ask them like, are they the ones who can actually execute the contract, etc. You want to make sure no one else needs to be involved. But if they're like, no, I'm good to go. Like, I just need to know what this thing costs, which would happen pretty often. (05:45) Guess what? You actually now have both solution agreement and you have power agreement because in this case, the founder is power. Half the time they just wanted to get this thing off their plate and they're like, just give me my valuation. Let me get Carta and get out of my way. So at this point you're usually going into proposal or you're starting to give pricing so that you can get commercial agreement and this usually takes another solid 10 minutes. (06:10) So at this point we were at the 15minute point of the call at the end of the demo and this will bring us to like the 25 minute mark. So usually takes like 3 minutes to give price and then you get the first reaction from the founder. And sometimes because people got referred in from their law firm or something like that, they'd be like, "Great, I got my 20% law firm discount already. (06:31) I'm good to go. Send me the contract." At which point, you're done with the wholesale cycle. You literally send them the contract. And I like to preschedu their implementation call for the end of that week so that they have like a back stop where they like have to sign the contract by that date. And I'm like, just let that thing close, right? or there are people who want to negotiate at which point you give them the price and then try to get their number as soon as possible. (06:55) So, if I come in at three and I'm like, "Okay, everyone knows there's some discounting in SAS and they're at like 2500. Maybe I can say something like, "Hey, let's just pretend that like I could get you 2,700 bucks, right? Like, we can't go past a 15% discount. It would be too low. But I can I think I can get $300 off. I need to know from you if I get that done with my CFO that you're going to sign this by the end of the week and that's good to go. (07:19) Are you good on that?" And if they give me a clear yes on the timeline and on the commercial agreement, at that point, I literally get off a call. I pre-draft an email in a contract, I delay it 1 hour, so it looks like I talked to my finance team about it and I send it over and that completes the one call close. So, it usually takes about 10 minutes and then you've got like 5 minutes for buffer for like other contractual stuff at the end or like fine print or they have like questions about implementation. (07:46) But that's basically how the one call close goes. It's pretty straightforward. The key here, pro tip, if you know before the call that a company is in your hot ICP, it doesn't always make sense to extend the call, but sometimes extended to like 45 minutes. And the reason for that is like if I saw a company was like raising around funding and they were going to need valuation services, I was like, I I think I can knock this one down in one call entirely, like let me extend this out 15 minutes and try to run this like a one call close. That's one way you can (08:17) do it. The other way you could do it is at the five or 10 minute mark before I jump into the demo, I'll be like, "Hey, I just want to make sure I'm conscious of your time in case this goes a little bit over. Like, do you have a hard stop at the 30 or can you go a little bit over?" And see if you can like do that post-discovery check-in where you're like, "If this is a hot deal, can I like buy myself 10 more minutes on this call to go through like a proposal and pricing?" Like that's how you make sure that you don't delay this into another (08:42) call. All right, so that's the one call close at Carta. Now, let's go into the $30,000 deal at PAVE. So, when I was selling compensation software at PAVE, it was usually a mid-market sale. Companies wouldn't really care about compensation until there were like 250 employees. So, you almost always had to have like a couple different stakeholders involved. (09:02) So, unless you could get like all of the stakeholders, like the compensation leader plus the chief HR officer on the first call, like you probably weren't going to close a 30K deal in one call. So, I would usually close these ones in three if they were quick. So, the way that this would play out is the first call would usually cover the first two. (09:22) So, you're on a discovery call and a lot of people are like, "Never show software in a discovery call." And I'm like, "You are a unless you're selling like Oracle and an ERP cannot be demoed on the first call." In my mind, if I get problem agreement very quickly in a discovery call, it makes sense for me to start to work on solution agreement. (09:46) So, the way this would work is you'd have a 30-minute discovery call, and that discovery call would usually be like 20 minutes of disco plus 5minute harbor. And so what this allows me to do is it allows me to go to the champion and be like, "Hey, so like it sounds like this is the problem you wanted to solve, and you've gotten a good sense of what this solution looks like. (10:06) How do you feel so far?" And because they've already seen the 5-minute Harbor Tour demo, they're usually like, "Honestly, I feel pretty good. I have a couple more questions, but like overall, like this is what I need." Again, this is if the discovery call went really well. That's my sign that I can accelerate this deal. And I'll usually be like, like, would it be a crazy idea to schedule our next meeting for 60? I want to make sure that we go through the rest of the demo that you haven't seen. (10:29) But also, it's probably going to be important for like Jane to get involved in compensation pretty early on. Like, would it be crazy to kill two birds with one stone and bring her on to the next call? Jane would be the chief people officer in this case. So, let's jump into the second call. The second call, you'd want to make sure that you pull in power. (10:44) And in the second call, you get to finish all of solution agreement, all of power agreement, and you get to start on commercial agreement. So, what this looks like is you got like a 60-minute call right here. Okay? And that 60minute, we'll call it um an executive or like big team meeting. That's usually divided as follows. (11:07) You've got 15 to 20 minutes of discovery and that's because you need to do a little bit more rediscovery with the new power person that's been brought in, the new chief HR officer. So usually like recap the problems that you found and you're like, "Hey, how is your perspective different? Are there things that you want to double underline, etc. (11:25) " You don't start from zero, but you do some more discovery where the power person is like adding on. Then you go into your demo, at which point that's usually like a solid 20 minutes. And then from there, you can usually go into like 15 to 20 minutes of like pricing. We'll call that another 20 minutes. And the beauty of this is like because you identified this is like a hot deal in your last call, you can spend the first 20 minutes just like gaining momentum with power on the problem. (11:55) And if that goes well, you can actually show a shorter demo because you know that you've already preflated the Harbor Tour demo with your champion in the first call over here and you know they didn't have a million technical questions. If they had a million technical questions back here and they were like unsure about it, that's a deal you have to slow down because you want to get solution agreement with the champion first. (12:17) Otherwise, they're going to be like dragging this demo into the weeds. But if they're like gung-ho at the end of the first call, try to get power on board. And so that brings you into the 20-minute demo. At the end of that demo, you ask power the same question that we asked the champion. (12:29) Based on everything you know so far, how do you feel about moving forward? How do you feel about everything that we're doing independent of price? Is there anything else that you would need to know about what we do to make a decision? And they'll be like, I need to know the price. Or they'll be like, I need to do these 17 other things. (12:42) At which point you slow down the deal cycle. But if they're like, hey, I need to know the price. Great. Now we can go into proposal. And then usually what will happen is you'll have one more call because power with a 30k deal will usually not just agree on the spot if they're a sophisticated negotiator. And so I call this a 30 minute yes no meeting. (13:04) Okay? And a yes no meeting is literally ideally I've gotten like the number over here in this previous call. Like I got their number of like this needs to be a 25k deal. And then I'll give them like a highle sense of like what I can get done. And then I'll be like great. So like you have everything you need to make a decision. (13:22) I'm going to go back to my finance team. Can we schedule a 30inut meeting on Thursday if it's Tuesday today so that I can walk you through like the final proposal that we can bring you with the goal of getting to like a yes or a no either way knowing that we can only take one cut on these things. (13:40) And at that point you usually finish up commercial agreement plus vendor review. Other tricky part about closing this in one cycle is you want to make sure that ideally in this like big team meeting call when you're giving them price and you're starting to like test on things like timeline, try to like get a sense of like how long it would take them to get through vendor review, legal agreement, IT agreement and all that stuff because like you might try to close this thing in three calls but the reality is they've got like a 8week legal process at which (14:10) point that slows down your sales cycle. All right. So, that is this three call close at PAVE. All right. So, 30-minute discovery, 60-minute big team meeting, and then 30 minute yes, no call. And now, let's go through a $300,000 deal that I also sold at PAVE. So, this one, one of my favorite logos of all time. (14:29) It is a very well-known Fortune50 company that you would all know if you hold any S&P index funds, they are probably a good portion of it. And this deal literally took 20 calls to close. It was like a 3 to four month sales cycle. And so a lot of times I think people who are going from like SMB and mid-market to enterprise sales, they like don't actually understand what happens in these enterprise sales. (14:50) Like why does it take so long? And the reason for that is you're getting all five of these agreements. But number one, it takes way longer to get these agreements because the complexity of the product is so high. And then number two, once you get problem agreement, solution agreement, etc. with one person, you then have to like go get it with the next person. (15:10) So, I'll walk through very quickly like how many calls we had to go through. So, this started with a first discovery call with the champion. And we'll call this person, I'll put a title there. Um, we'll just call it a director of compensation. Cool. And then you would do another disco plus demo with the director of compensation. (15:29) And you probably didn't get into a Harbor Tour demo on that first call because the solution is like so complex. Like sometimes we would do 5 minutes, but the reality is like that 5minute Harbor Tour demo would be get like 20 more questions from them. And so you do another disco plus demo and they're like great that covers like one of our work streams. (15:48) Let's do like another demo except this time we have to bring in our like HR ops teams. Great. So now we're doing like another deep dive demo with the director of compensation and the people ops team. And at this point, like this set of like three to four calls, you probably have to do a fourth demo here. (16:07) Like this alone is four calls just to get the director of compensation on board, right? So you did these four calls to just like get a champion. And now what happened is they're like, "Great, this isn't just going to be used for the compensation team. This is an enterprise deal. I need to make sure that this works for the talent organization. (16:29) " So what you would do is you would start another mini sales cycle with the talent organization. And so what this would look like is you take these same four calls that you ran with the HR organization and then you would move these four calls over to the talent organization. So you would do a discovery with the director of talent. (16:48) You do disco plus demo with the director of talent. They would bring in their director of talent ops at this point. And then you do another one where it's like the director of talent ops is going through a second deep dive demo. And by the way, as you're getting ready for these calls, you're also doing prep calls with your original champion. (17:09) So, usually before you go into this like disco with like the director of talent, at this point, you're usually doing like a champion or a director of compensation game plan calling about what does this director of talent care about? What should I be showing in the demo? And you're using the champion to make sure that these next parts of the sales cycle go well. (17:31) So, you've got like five calls down here. You've got four calls over here. And if there was another department, that would literally be another four or five calls. But at PAVE, these were like the two major departments that needed to be on board. You had like HR and compensation, and then you had talent. And so those two combined allow us to go for power agreement. (17:53) And guess what? Now we have another set of calls. So I'm going to do a champion game plan going into the meeting with power. I'm probably going to do that a little bit over here. And I'm asking them like, "What does it take to win over Power?" And they're like, "Here's what it takes." Great. Now we go into the executive discovery where at this point we're doing executive disco plus maybe like harbor. (18:13) So this usually ends up being like a 30-minute meeting. And if the executive is on board with it initially, they probably want like a deeper dive business case at this point. And now you're like, "Oh god, now I got to go through like a 60-minute meeting where we go like more deep dive plus business case. (18:32) " And you're like building out the ROI of the solution. and all that stuff. You're not doing as many deep dive demos as you did with your champions, but like at this point like the executive is like, "Okay, my team is pretty much on board. I want to see this thing and then I want to see the proposal of like how it's going to change my business. (18:47) " And so, usually it takes two or three calls to get the executive on board if you've done a good job champion selling. And the reason for that is these two people should be like pushing for you internally. Keep in mind at this point we have the director of talent and the director of compensation on board. (19:03) So at this point, hopefully I have the chief HR officer on board. And that finishes power agreement. So we had another three calls with power. So we're at what? Four, five, three. Uh there's my math. 12 calls so far. So usually at this point, you've covered some semblance of price. So like this started to bleed into like commercial agreement phase over here. (19:25) And now I need to actually like formally get into commercial agreement. Now unfortunately at big organizations commercial agreement usually happens with procurement and finance. It actually doesn't happen with the executive. The executive is like high level. I have this budget but the person who actually like approves it and negotiates the deal is like a finance person whose like job is to try to like shave down my commissions. (19:51) And so this was three calls with procurement is we went through the giving price call. We went through the first cut where he was ripping me apart on just the overall amount and then we went through the final cuts which included things like billing terms and like other things. So like this first cut was really like price and the second cut was like terms and final negotiations and like by the way that is like as good as you can get away with procurement on like if you can finish procurement in three calls you're like golden. So we just went from 12 to 15 (20:21) calls here. Now, the problem is in enterprise sales, you've got a meaty vendor review process. And so, for a minimum, basically every single week, I'm meeting with my champion, working through the legal process, maybe bringing legal into those calls. And you had at least at least five calls of vendor review with your champion. (20:44) And so, that would just be like vendor review, champion touch points where you're like, "How's legal going? How's it going?" yada yada yada. Maybe you do it every other week for 10 weeks total. And so that gives you another five calls. And by the end of this, it was literally like standup comedy. I I knew everything that was going on in this guy's life. I knew he was having kids. (21:05) I knew like all the different things that were going on with like his toddler over these 3 months as he was like raising the child. It's like you really get to know your champion over these sales cycles. And like that is what a full 20 call enterprise close looks like. This was like a $357,000 deal by the end of it all. (21:23) And it's worth it, folks, but it takes a long, long time to get everyone on board with all these things. Whether you are a sales rep or a sales leader, I would really encourage you to start thinking like a sales leader. And a good sales leader can think about deals this way where they're not like in the weeds of every single call. (21:41) They can be like on top of the deal and be like, "What are the best calls we can use to get commercial agreement? How can we like accelerate this deal in our forecast into like two calls instead of three calls because there's momentum here. And if you know how to do that stuff as a leader, even if you are not a leader, you will be 10 times a better rep. (22:02) And by the way, if you ever want to become a manager, if you can learn how to drive multiple deals without literally being on all those calls through pipeline reviews, through deal reviews, if you can learn what makes a forecast land versus not, because you know the levers you can pull in these deals and what risk looks like at problem agreement or solution agreement, etc. (22:21) , you will be one heck of a sales leader. Personally, I have learned more from Mark Kasuglo than I have from any sales leader of all time, including all the ones I've worked for, unfortunately. And he just launched his sales management operating system course. This video alone is a product of how he runs his sales cycles and his deal reviews and his forecasts. (22:43) The course literally covers everything, and it is everything you will ever need to be the best sales manager in the world. I was a 29-year-old VP of sales and I made a ton of mistakes and frankly I really wish I had it. So because you're watching this on YouTube, there's a special discount code down below. I really recommend you check it out. (23:00) It is like really good. Really, really good folks. All righty. Catch you soon. [Applause]