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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill creates a less than memorable acronym, I share an old college lockjaw story, and we give a framework to help you know why you won or lost a deal.
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All right, here we go.
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You guys ready?
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Let s bring it in with a little cheering.
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Come on, here we go.
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest-running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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Bill Kasky.
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We are your co-hosts today.
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We are actually doing a little fun thing.
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We re doing a pop-up recording session.
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We re live in front of a studio audience.
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How about that?
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There s about 450 people here this morning.
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We re recording in Indianapolis.
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We re really thankful for all of you.
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There are not 450 people.
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Looks like it, though.
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to me, but I m really happy that you re all here.
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Thank you for that.
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If you are looking for a sales speaker or someone to bring into your company for a sales launch kickoff in January, February, March, now is the time to get ahold of us.
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You can go to our website, advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Look for the little button that says, bring us in or come see us.
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What does it say?
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I think it says, come see us.
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Come see us.
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You can also send us an email.
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Listen, advanced selling podcast, put in the subject line, come see us and we ll start the ball rolling for that.
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You ll hear from my question.
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You officiate games in front of 60,000 people, and this is a big crowd.
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I tried.
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I m focused.
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I try to narrow it in.
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We also have to comment that there, so we have this live, so we have a bunch of sales people.
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It s not mad at you.
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No, no, no, no.
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But we re recording this podcast.
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We ve got this energy in here.
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And there s also right next door, like in the same place, there s a CPA tax review deal going on.
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So I told the woman in charge, I said, hey, if it gets a little dry in there, not that it would, just send them over to the podcast recording, might be a little bit better deal, so.
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So I was thinking the other day, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and it really is funny when these authors and these experts always come up with an acronym.
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You ve heard of the acronym SMART as in goal setting?
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Anybody remember what it stands for?
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Of course.
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The S stands for?
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Specific.
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M. Attainable.
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Attainable.
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Realistic.
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No?
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I don t know what they are.
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Retrograde.
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Realistic.
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Reverb.
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Reverb.
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Yeah.
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And the T stands for time.
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Timely.
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Time-based or something.
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Yeah.
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So we all know that.
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We ve heard that one for a long time.
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We failed.
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We got a C plus on that drill.
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No, that s OK, because we ve heard that one.
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And so then there s the one AIDA, and I never know quite how to pronounce it.
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AIDA.
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AIDA.
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It s a marketing acronym.
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It was a great play or a movie with Madonna, wasn t it?
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Oh, no, that s Evita.
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My bad.
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Evita.
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For all you musical fans out there, thank you for laughing.
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Marketing.
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Awareness.
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Awareness.
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Interest.
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Decision.
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AID.
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And then.
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These acronyms are great.
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So and then there s fear.
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What s that one?
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False.
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False.
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Evidence appearing real.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Well, I ve got one.
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Yeah, I always like it when the author has one.
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And I know what happens is we sit around and say, what s going to cause people to remember this framework, come up with an acronym, and nobody ever remembers it?
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So I ve got one here on communication.
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It s frameworks encourage stimulating conversation in every situation Frameworks encourage stimulating conversation in every situation My acronym is feces.
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That s great.
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I thought Well, if you re gonna remember something are you gonna remember fear are you gonna remember feces?
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Oh my god, aren t you really?
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You got any more?
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That s the one thing you guys will remember from this.
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Anyway, that s my fun.
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Everyone s writing that down.
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Everybody s writing down feces, unfortunately, on their notepads.
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So it s great.
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I kind of like this.
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This is great.
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Well, you can listen to it when the episode comes out.
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See, now my junior high brain is kicking in.
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Isn t it it s really bad.
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I really I still want to say any conversation in every situation I think that s true, and I don t want to go here But and my wife is sitting right here, and she knows this is a time I don t like to talk about this topic just that whole the feces did yes at all It s just and some people are very okay with it one of them is sitting in the room here one of my clients their group they talk about that and I just I m not okay with it just I m just saying right there, so
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Okay.
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Didn t think that s how we were going to start off, but okie dokie then.
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Here we go.
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All right.
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Ready to talk politics?
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Kind of.
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Cultural issues.
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Go.
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Okay, so topic today.
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In my rounds and travels with my clients, something that tends to pop up a lot, and it usually pops up with on the front end, and I wish it popped up more in the back end, and that is everyone wants to know how can I win a deal, or how can I not lose a deal?
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And then there s the aftermath, when I win or lose, is do I look back and do I know, can I point to why I won or why I lost?
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And what I realized as I start to talk about deals going in, I m realizing people sometimes don t, they don t peel a deal back far enough to figure out why they won or why they lost, both as they re going through it and then afterwards.
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And so I thought it d be a really good thing to give our listeners and our group here,
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or 450,000 people here in the room, a framework to figure out and to help them figure out why did I win or why did I lose a deal.
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And I ve got three things written down that I normally teach all my clients that might be refreshers for some of my clients in the room.
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And then I added one for me.
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OK.
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So you ve got four of them.
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I do.
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How many do you have?
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I ve got three.
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You ve got three.
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That s good.
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Why don t you start?
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Let me start.
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OK.
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So, and what I want you to think about is, so the way to use this, so you re looking at your funnel.
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So you ve got salesforce.com or HubSpot or whatever that is.
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This is a great look back.
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So if you look back the last 30, you just closed out the month of October and kind of spot check some of these things and say, okay, can I look back and figure out why I lost or more importantly, why I won?
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Cause I think it s a really good mechanism to look back.
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Sometimes when we look at why we lost, we don t look back and say, why do we want, we re just like glad, glad it came in.
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So the first thing I have written is,
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Motive.
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Number one is motive.
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And so did I win this deal because I understood and connected with the motive of the person that I was selling to, or did I lose the deal because I got fooled or tricked or thought that the motive was something else or just flat out missed it?
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That s my first deal.
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Motive.
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And can you say that and can you figure out why and all that other stuff?
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Do you want me to turn it into an acronym?
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Not really.
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After the last one.
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My acronym reputation is bad.
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Yeah, I would want to know, which is kind of part of this motive, is did you do a thorough assessment?
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Did we really assess the situation?
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Or what I see a lot of times is we kind of jump to the proposal.
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We jump to the presentation.
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And maybe it s our customers wanting that.
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Maybe we are so anxious for the deal that we jump to their presentation.
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But was there a fair amount of assessment?
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Because I think within assessment is motive.
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Within assessment is motive.
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So we can say to the customer, well, why do you want to fix this?
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And they ll say, because if I don t fix it, I ll lose my job.
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But we don t know if that s really true until we really get down and assess the situation.
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And I know that a lot of times, we sales professionals are not really thorough with assessment.
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because we like the action and we like to close the deal and get the deal.
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And unfortunately, if we re only closing 15% of the deals, which is the standard B2B conversion rate, it means we re not assessing enough.
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So I think assessment and motives are kind of very similar.
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I agree.
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And if you do it right, if you assess deep enough to find motive, you ll get more efficient.
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Because I think what people confuse this with is they think, well, if I go deeper, I ll find deeper motive, which will make me close more deals.
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And that s not the case.
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The case is you ll go deeper, find nothing, and realize you don t have what you thought you had going in and save yourself a ton of time and energy going into that.
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So that s a really good thing.
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If you re doing assessment right, and it s a great little spot check for everyone in the room and also our listeners, is how many deals have you said no to in the past 30 days?
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How many deals have you said, you know what, I hear your situation, I don t think it s right, or I just don t think that we re gonna be able to help you any better than who you re with now.
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Look at that and see how many.
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I bet it s almost zero will be my guess.
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That s a good point.
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We got heads nodding and shaking, I love it.
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So it s a good little question.
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Okay, here we go again.
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Yeah, go ahead sure all right next This is the big to me of all of the things that cause a deal to be won or lost It s how will you do this subject and that is how do you manage the process and the process is theirs and yours together?
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And I can t tell you how many times We think we ve got it right.
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We ve got it all pegged down, and we don t and so it s a double whammy either We don t understand theirs
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Or, we have not articulated ours well enough, deep enough, to be clear enough to say, now there are some times when the process is out of our hands.
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I know everyone deals with this, where people are fact-gatherers, and they get something together, and then it has to go somewhere through procurement, or it s multi-tiered decision-making, all that other jazz.
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Your main deal is to understand it.
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It doesn t matter what it is.
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It s going to be what it is.
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Your main deal is to understand it.
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Then you manage your risk.
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Then you understand where you re exposed.
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I always say when I m teaching this is, where am I exposed in the process?
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So if a deal s got to get approval from a procurement
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group, then you re exposed.
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It doesn t mean you don t pursue it or anything.
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It just means that, you know, you ve got, you know, there s something there.
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I know we ve got people like there s someone from the healthcare world, their healthcare buying system is crazy now because they ve got these vendor management systems and they have to apply and they have to get their, you have to get a TB shot, right?
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Right.
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I m getting a non from my Gary, a
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I don t know what TB is.
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What is TB?
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Tuberculosis.
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Okay, it s not tetanus, right?
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That s when I drink out of a tin cup.
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You probably need my tetanus shots.
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I don t get long-draw, right?
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I was down at IU.
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There s a game at IU we play in this bar called Nick s called Sink the Bismarck.
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And I was down there with my kids.
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We didn t play Sink the Bismarck with them, which I thought about playing it with Sprite.
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And then I thought, that s still a bad idea to teach them.
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But there was a family playing, or a group of women playing behind us.
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And my kids were like, what are they doing, Dad?
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And I m like, well, you ve got to tell them the truth at that point, right?
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Yeah.
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But they used to be in 10 buckets without any liner in them.
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So I m amazed they didn t get a lockjaw in college.
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Sidebar.
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Anyway, process.
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Sorry.
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Yeah, I would say one thing you can do when you look back to learn something from deals you got or didn t get is, where in the process did you give it away?
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Where in the whole sales cycle did you lose control of the process and thus gave the deal away?
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And there s usually one point.
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It s when the customer asks for something, and you felt like, oh god, it s probably not time, but oh, he sounds like a really good interested prospect, so I m going to give it to him.
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And so be thinking about, as you look back at these, where did I make that move that I had a decision to make?
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Do I follow my process or their process?
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And you pick theirs, because that s where you started to lose the deal, if you lost it.
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If you won the deal, it s the same thing.
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There was probably a point in time where you said,
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Mr.. Prospect, I appreciate you asking me for that, but I can t do it that way I m gonna do it this way, and that s when you win those deals So there is always a point in time.
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I think where we acquiesce yeah, yeah for sure default And think too in that process deal be real with yourself because there are times all of us have these where we get lucky
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And so I want you to be real with that.
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I want you to take too much credit sometimes.
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You re like, you know what?
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I just had good timing on the deal.
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Because that happens, too.
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And I m a fan of that.
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I m more of an optimistic, you create your own luck kind of person.
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And still, I believe that s out there.
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So don t be afraid to say, you know, I just had really good timing on this deal, process-wise.
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I was exposed going through.
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I wasn t in the room when they made the call, but they chose me.
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You know, crush it.
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Then you re good to go.
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Don t be afraid to know that.
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That s a good learning thing to say, we got lucky here.
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How can we keep from relying on luck in the future?
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is an idea.
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How do we keep from relying on last second field goals in the future?
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Yeah.
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Loaded topic.
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OK.
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Do you have another one?
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Yeah, sure.
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I got two more.
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All right, next one.
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Take a guess.
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Anybody have a guess?
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Any guesses?
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It s great.
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My clients are in the room.
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I teach this all the time.
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Money is the next one.
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Money is an obvious one, right?
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So did I lose the deal because of money?
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And money doesn t mean that I got beat on price.
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This is the thing that people think, well, we lost it because we got beat on price.
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That is not why you lost it.
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The reason you lost it is because the value connection, the framework that you used to connect pricing to what they were trying to accomplish and the other mode of things didn t align well.
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So don t ever think you lost a deal on price, because you did not.
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I guarantee you did not lose a deal on price.
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Price was a part of it.
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But this deal about the whole money aspect, and we ve got to, Bill and I teach a lot, work really hard to teach our listeners and our clients about framing that whole conversation around the economics of the deal.
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You hear us use this language a lot.
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And that includes our side of it, but also their side of it.
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So what is their return like?
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How willing and compelling are they to write a bigger check than they re writing now?
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All those sorts of things.
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You can audit that and say, I won it because I did a good job.
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Because the other thing that s funny is, I ve had clients do this, this just kills people.
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When you lose the deal and you were the lowest.
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Price.
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That s bad.
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It just sucks.
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The feeling of it s bad.
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You re like, oh my gosh, I can t even buy a deal.
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It just sucks.
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So that would be a thing.
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Like, OK, did not.
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Yeah, go ahead.
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Yeah, and the problem is that when we lose a deal and we re high price, we always blame it on low price.
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Always, always right.
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We were so high.
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But when we lose a deal and we re the low, then we ve got nobody to blame it on.
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Which brings me to my fourth point, third, fourth, fifth.
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I don t know how many.
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And that is?
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When you get a deal, I think you should pat yourself on the back and say, I was a critical component in why we won that.
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I know we always say, well, our product was good.
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You were talking a little bit.
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You said you rode the wave.
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Well, you know what?
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Our product was good, but you had to represent it in the right way.
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By the same token, when you lose a deal, I think we have to look at ourselves and say, what did I do?
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What role did I play in us not getting this?
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Was I not kind enough?
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Was I not present enough?
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Was I not curious enough?
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Did I not bring up the difficult subjects the way I should have?
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So you can pat yourself on the back when you win one, but you also have to take a deep look at yourself and say, what role did I play in us not getting this?
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And that s a tough one because we want to externalize, we want to blame, but sometimes we just weren t the right fit.
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The chemistry with the customer wasn t right.
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Maybe we were in a bad state that month because our funnel was, you know, we were aggressive and attached and fearful and scarce.
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So I think if we re going to take the good, we also have to take the bad and say, what role did we play?
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And we don t talk before we plan this one.
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Do you see mine right there?
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Can you?
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Yeah, so this is the one I added so we don t talk I m just gonna say the exact same thing bill just said which is how did you show up?
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That s your energy audit.
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This is the thing that now I I m reflecting on myself.
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I don t teach this enough I think I need to bring more of this to my clients to say we ve got to look at our energy and say how did we just show up mentally for the thing you ll hear like you hear NFL teams say we had a great week of practice and
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We had good energy in the building.
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They say that all the time.
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And it translates out.
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Great thing to audit yourself going into this, because sometimes when time goes on, you forgot how you were at the beginning.
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You forgot where your energy was at the beginning.
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You remember where it is at the end, but you forget how your energy was at the beginning.
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And so you know what?
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When I first got into this deal, I was feeling needy, a little scarce, whatever.
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And so no wonder I got taken down a path.
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It s a great thing to do, an energy audit.
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It could also work, too, if you have a full pipeline and things are going really well, and then somebody calls you and the deal s maybe not as big, you re not quite as excited about it, that ll show up, too.
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So the key is to how can we become present.
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And it s not a big deal for us, but it might be for the customer.
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It might be a really big deal for them, so we ve got to make sure we fit.
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For sure.
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That s my last one.
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That s good.
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Me, too.
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Good.
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So if you d like for Brian or I to come visit you, we re now booking for January, February, and March of this year.
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And you can email us at listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Subject line, come see us and start the ball rolling.
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And Stephanie from our team will get a hold of you.
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And we ll start the ball.
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And we ll see about one or both of us coming out next year.
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See you next time.
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See you next time.
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Bye.
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That s it.