#610: I've Spoken at 150 Sales Kickoffs. Here Are 9 Ideas Worth Stealing

0:00Today we are going to be jamming with Jen Allen-Knuth, who is one of the number one enterprise sales trainers out there. She spent 18 years as an enterprise rep. She's spoken at over 150 sales kickoffs, and she recently pulled her following of 110 ,000 people to tell her the number one thing they've seen done at SKO, that they are like, look, this is a non-negotiable to take my SCO from a lot of rah-rah company BS and snooze fest sessions to incredible. So today we are covering the nine best categories of Sko ideas to take your Sko from no to whoa. So Jen, let's dive in. What is category number one?

0:35Number one is honest why we didn't buy panels. So I think we've all sat through a customer session at an SKO where we got our happiest customers up there saying all the things they love about us, which is warm and fuzzy to hear, but really teaches us nothing. So it's actually flipping it on its head and instead taking a prospect or a customer who said no, bringing them on stage and having them break down where things went wrong. Did they choose to stick with status quo? Did they choose another vendor instead? Did they deprioritize the decision altogether? I think for many of us as salespeople, what we crave is understanding all the things we don't see behind the scenes that happen when a decision goes in the way that we don't want it to.

1:17So one of the folks that had shared an idea said, happy customer panels feel great and teach nothing. Losses are where the real patterns live. I remember at one of my scos, they brought a happy customer on stage. And it was cool from the perspective of, I think it gave me more confidence in what we were selling because we were an earlier stage startup. But I don't know if beyond the confidence it gave me, it really changed how I was selling. I have to imagine you've seen some of these executed, Jen. what are some of the best practices that you've seen in terms of how this session gets facilitated?

1:52Because I can't imagine you just throw someone who didn't buy on stage and say, go. Do you have the rep who worked with them on stage? Do you have leadership there? Are you trying to convince them to actually buy on the spot? What does it actually look like? No, I think it can't be a disguise sales pitch. I think ideally you want the rep on the stage. There's an optics to that. I don't want to be the rep sitting in the audience, having everybody's eyes on me. They should absolutely be part of it. I also think it shows incredible lack of ego to sit up there and say, I'm willing to learn from a loss instead of just, I want to hide it and pretend it didn't happen.

2:27So one way you could do it is you could actually map the sales process from start to finish and highlight on one slide on the screen, the moments where something took a direction you didn't want to. So I remember one time when I sat in one of these sessions, the prospect had talked about, I asked for a summary to bring back to the team so that I could share why we were doing this, what we were thinking of. And what I got back was basically standard collateral. So here's what I did instead. And it basically taught me as a salesperson, every time I take the easy path by saying, oh, marketing already built this, let me just shoot that over.

3:03I'm making the job to be done harder for my champion. And so I think if you can have those moments illustrated on the screen. It also gives that conversation structure so you don't end up spending the entire 30 minutes or 60 minutes on just one piece of the sales process. Yeah. So what I'm doing is I'm saying, all right, what are the major milestones within any deal? And I'm saying, all right, we're going to pick the sort of intro period, maybe discovery, the first, maybe the second demo, maybe the implementation or integrations conversation that we had, and then when our CXO met their CXO for executive alignment.

3:37And so we might pick the four major stakes in that deal and then have both parties share their perspective as a way to say, what reality did each of us see and where did we not not see each other? Which I think brings us to category number two, Jen, which is you call it unscripted inside the mind of a buyer. Yes. So one of the questions I almost always ask when I get on stage for an SKO is raise your hand if you have been an executive buyer before. And there are almost never any hands that go up, which is, I think, a big part of the problem. I was 17 years into my sales career before I ever was part of a buying group.

4:14And that was, I would argue, probably some of the best training I ever had was just seeing what it feels like on the other side. And so I think there's this really big desire from salespeople. Like if I'm selling into lawyers or I'm selling into superintendents, I've never lived a day in their life. I have no idea what their inbox looks like I have no idea what's being asked of them. I have no idea the flow of work I have no idea how they prioritize and so to me one of the sessions I always valued and one that came up a lot When I polled the audience was I just want to understand what is it like to buy?

4:45And the whole goal is that everybody leaves saying I have a much better understanding of what it's like to be this role Or this buyer in this industry There's a reality that you see as a seller, and there's a reality that the buyer has. And it usually shows up like a Venn diagram, where we might see a sliver of things the same. And the goal of number one, the why they didn't buy panel, is to increase the overlap between those two circles. The second one is actually very similar where there's a language that you speak as a seller, and there's a language that the buyer speaks, and there's often very little overlap.

5:25And the goal of this is you actually start to create more and more overlap, which helps you as a seller when you sit down with somebody and you immediately speak their language. They're like, oh, this person gets my space. They've talked to people like me because they're not saying jargon that like it's company language. It's our language. And that's actually one of the best ways to build trust very, very quickly. And if I can make a suggestion, I think it is so rare these days that I work with a client who is not who does not have the CTO as part of their decision making committee. Like the CTO has become everybody's favorite person now.

6:04So if your organization has a CTO, trust that they are probably being pulled into decisions they've never been pulled into before. It might be the year to really focus in on that and say, as a CTO where every line leader is coming to you, every function has to come to you now because there's a technical component to every solution we're considering. How do you make decisions around whether you spend that time with HR or sales or marketing? Like, how do you think through that? Because I think that is the executive, I think, that's becoming probably a stall point for most deals and also the one many people are not accustomed to selling to if you haven't sold a traditional CTO solution.

6:38Yeah. I'm going to disagree with you because you said the CTO is everybody's favorite person. You're my favorite person, Jen. Let's move to number three now. Number three is non-traditional team-based competitions. What the heck is this? Am I playing tug of war against the SDR team? Maybe you do you. I think one of the most disappointing things is you pay all this money, you fly all these people, you get a hotel, you do all this investment, and then you make people sit in an audience and stare at a screen the whole time. The whole language behind it is like, we win as a team and we need to work together more as a team, but there's nothing intentional about it.

7:13So I'm going to call out one idea that was submitted that I absolutely loved and think everybody should consider for next year. So Christian Simonson, because I want to give credit where credit due, said, give one afternoon where everybody gets like a, you know, little cards and a marker. They get 30 minutes and they write down what they see as one opportunity or problem worth solving inside of their business. Then they cluster all of the cards into categories, right? So you start pattern matching categories and then everybody signs up for a different room based on like where their idea was or where they think they can add the most.

7:50And then people then have to leave that room with a two-page kind of Amazon-style summary. So if you've ever seen like the Amazon memo, it's got to be short and distinct. And then what we think we can do to solve this problem that's happening in our business. So at the end of it, the leadership team gets like 15 different memos. They get ideas. Everybody feels closer. And you also get the team working together because these are ideally cross-functional teams that are coming together on these things. I thought that was such a brilliant answer because I think one of the things that every seller has had happen to them is you're sitting in the audience at SKO.

8:26You're listening to a priority or a plan for this year and you're shaking your head and saying this is not going to work because but there's never an opportunity to raise it in a constructive manner. So these aren't bitching sessions. These are let's write down what we think we can do. So it's not just like complaint sessions, but rather here's a productive idea.

8:49Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multithreading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of finance, who's viewed your champion's recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's speaking around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line. And Align's AI surfaces it before it's too late so you can multithread to them. We built a full multithreading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes.

9:19Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end, and one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

9:46Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

10:14and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. So literally every single person at the sales kickoff gets an index card. They get to write down one problem they want to solve. And this is a great like bucketing use case for your LLM. What you can do is then you take all of those. And I actually think there's another added benefit of you start to see the clusters of the major themes or things that the org is seeing needs to be solved. So that's awesome insight as a enablement leader or executive. And then what you do is you might use your LLM to bucket those into, I don't know, 14 different teams.

10:51And then everybody goes, oh man, that's really good. It's a productive way also to make people feel like you are more than just a cog in the machine, which I think sometimes, especially as the organization gets bigger and companies these days are growing faster than ever. I think it's a way to preserve that feeling of like, we're all hands on deck. We're all in it. your voice matters, which I think really does matter to sellers. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that makes me feel like a cog in the machine, this brings us to our next one, is when the Sko is so jam-packed that I am just getting fire-hosed with information from dawn until dusk, and I don't have any space to, I don't know, breathe.

11:29So number four you shared was intentional white space. Talk about this one. This one came up a lot. I think we've all lived this. I think Corporate Bro did a video once where he was like, okay, here's a day in the life of SKO, and it's like in a room and then you go to your hotel, you lay down and you get up two seconds later. I think there's a tipping point, right, at which we stop being able to absorb information. So there was a lot of conversation around not everybody is an extrovert who likes to be on all day long and doing things at all times. One idea that stood out, because I saw this happen once at an SKO, was someone had suggested doing a breathwork session.

12:03And I will be honest, I am not a woo-woo kind of person at all. And when I went to this SKO and I saw it in the agenda, I was like, this is going to be so strange. But they placed it at a really good time, which it was like an hour or two after lunch. So you kind of start hitting that drag. And then they had a breathwork coach come in and the entire room, there are about 250 people in this room, the entire room worked through this breathwork with the facilitator. And in the beginning, it was strange to me. But by the end of it, you could feel the energy in the room shift. Everybody kind of like was centered and locked in.

12:36And I think leading into the rooms or like the rest of the afternoon sessions, it just made it so everybody was more focused. And it was just a nice, it was honestly just nice to hear silence for like 20 minutes. I thought that was awesome. So that's, I think, finding ways where you can break up the agenda, where you're not trying to cram everything down everyone's throats all at once, recognizing at a certain point, we just start tuning out. Two things on that. one, if you didn't know, Jen, we literally kick off our weekly sales team meeting at 30MPC with box breathing. Like we spend two minutes before that meeting because everybody's coming from like, someone just came from an intense negotiation.

13:11Someone just lost a deal that was in their forecast. Somebody just spent an hour making cold calls. Somebody else just got engaged that weekend. And it's just like, everyone comes with a little bit different energy and it gives you a chance just to like get present before the most important like meeting of the week to kick things off. And then I've also seen this happen with our team where like every time we do a company retreat, we do them typically two or three times a year. We have like on the last night, something big planned where we're going to go out as a team or we're going to go surf.

13:39We went to Costa Rica earlier this year and like more than 80 % of the time, by the end, everyone's like, can we just like chill here together and hang out? And we've done it. And it's always been the right decision for our team. So we're seeing that. You know, Jen, this episode is turning out better than I expected. I feel like I'm having a little bit of unexpected fun here. I think that's category five. You are the king of transitions, might I say. Okay. So fun is almost always an afterthought at these things because it's like, we need to tell them this and they need to know that and they need to master this and get certified in that.

14:11And I think the teams that have the most fun always outperform the teams that just feel, again, like you're some sort of cog in the wheel and everything is happening to you. So there were two ideas that stood out. One I've heard many times, you probably have two, which is bringing in an improv teacher. The reason I love this, I love this is because the whole idea with improv, if you haven't been through it, is you have to build on what the person before you says. So instead of someone saying something and you say, yeah, but that won't work because, which as you know, is just like a culture killing killer in sales organization.

14:42The idea is you learn how to yes and. And I think for a team, going back to teamwork, that is such an important skill to have as a team. But because it's improv, it's also really fun. And you will inevitably see someone that you thought was a quiet wallflower that totally shines. And it's a great way to build bonds and kind of just have fun together in a productive way. If you're kind of uneasy about the idea of just like, you know, everybody goes off and has a good time. The second idea that I thought was really clever, and I've seen this before too, is doing a talent show. I think anytime you can give someone the opportunity opportunity to show a side of them that they don't typically show.

15:19It allows people to bond. It's a memory. It's like a core memory coming out of things. It's also usually just a ton of fun. So we had one one time years ago where a seller came out that like pretty quiet person came out and just belted Tina Turner. And we talked about that for years. And it was a great way for her also to get closer to people because she was a little bit more shy. So I think anything that makes people laugh, makes people get up, clap, have a good time. I think that's a productive use of time. We're going to post this on YouTube. And if we get more than 30 comments on this YouTube video, I will post a video of my talent that I presented at one of our sales kickoffs.

15:57Oh, what is this? Yeah. Well, why do you think I'm so good at improv with these transitions? I did. Okay. Let's move to the next one, which is host city activities. This is where I'm going to wander around Chicago. I'm going to go touch the bean and take a photograph there. And then I go home and have a tequila in the hotel room, right? I think there's, there's unproductive time where you're like, just go out. And I think I would, I think many leaders are right to assume maybe that's not the most productive way to spend it. But I think that it's so disappointing to go to a new city that people get excited about.

16:28And then just to sit in a courtyard Marriott with no windows all day. So I've been to ones where they all went out to a baseball game. So I've been to a couple in Boston where everybody went out to a Red Sox game. And that's a cool thing. Even if you're not super into sports, it's so fun. It's a good atmosphere. It's a great way to say you did something that was like a box check in a city that you'd probably do even if you were just there for vacation. Weirdly, a cooking class came up many times when I pulled this. And I was like, that is a great one because usually most people are not expert cooks.

16:59So again, it's fun. It's engaging. It's not performative. You just have a good time. So I think the idea was don't go to a city and then not see the best part of that city. Weirdly, it used to be that Orlando and Vegas were the go-to SKO spots. This past year, there were more kickoffs I attended in New Orleans, in Boston, in Austin, in Denver. So I think also getting a little bit more creative, not to say sometimes you just have to have it in Vegas or Orlando because of the size of your sales team, but if you're not a 5 ,000-person sales team, maybe also just get a little bit creative with where you go each year.

17:36Let's talk about creativity and let's talk about volunteering because I don't think I had even considered this beforehand. And I know this is something that's meaningful to you, Jen. Oh my gosh. This one, every time I talk about this one, I get choked up. So let's see if I can not get choked up. So Marcus Chan had this brilliant thing that they did. He said it was almost 10 years ago and I've now heard others have said they've done it too. So he said what they did is they broke into teams of eight people and they had a competition of who could build a kid's bike the fastest and then what they didn't know was that the boys and girls club was there oh i'm getting choked up with all of these foster kids so when they built the bikes they opened the doors and the kids came in and they were for the kids like how does that not get you emotional i think it's the sweetest thing ever and talking about a memory that like you will just remember forever and a purpose like beyond just like what can we do for us i freaking love that one you can see i love i'm i'm tearing up because it's such a good idea and i care about No, but you know what I really like about that one, Jen, is you are getting shared problem solving as a team where you're getting together.

18:37It's kind of like the cooking class where you're collaborating with your hands in a different way. You can get different teams together. And so there's like, look, I care about doing good for the sake of doing good. But part of the reason that we're doing sales kickoff is like we're trying to get the team to sell more so we can make more money. Yes. But then we also get the benefit of like it's not like you're cooking a steak and then you're just eating the steak. You're building a bike and you're giving it to a kid. That is really good. I really like that one.

19:07Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multithreading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of Finance, who's viewed your champion's recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's peeking around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line. And Align's AI surfaces it before it's too late so you can multi-thread to them. We built a full multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes.

19:37Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

20:04Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

20:32And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. And then obviously I'm a dog lover. I can't think of anything that is not made better by a bunch of rescue puppies. So there was a bunch of submissions saying like, go to a shelter, hang out with the dogs, bring the dogs to you. Like it's such a great way to just make it more meaningful and memorable. But the last thing I saw that was kind of interesting, One person had shared, you know, sometimes you do these things and it's thrown together. Also, just consider giving money because that's what a lot of these volunteer organizations desperately need is fundraising.

21:06So, you know, if you can't make time to all go somewhere, you can still make a donation. I think that's meaningful to people who are more purposeful. Let's talk about number eight, cross-functional team activities. I actually feel like the bike one is kind of a good example of this, where you might get cross-functional teams together building a bicycle. But are there others that you think should be mentioned here? Yeah, one that was mentioned was this idea of like skip level one-on-ones. And I really like this one because I think one of the things you and I were talking about beforehand is sometimes when you go to SKO, you're just like a participant.

21:35You're like, all right, I'm going to go and I'm going to go where the agenda tells me I need to go. I think one thing that standout sellers really do is they make an effort to reach across the aisle and say, I'm going to get to know the person like you talk about a lot. That is the deal desk person so that my name is not just a name on a list. I actually build a relationship with them. I thank them for the work they did for me last year for a big deal. Or your marketing counterparts or your product counterparts. So I guess the point here was just like, don't be at the mercy of where the agenda tells you to go.

22:04Take the time to make good use of the white space that you have to say, who do I want to meet? What connections do I want to make? Who do I want to thank for the work that they did for me last year? Yes. To that point, the Sko, because there are so many other teams there, it is your oftentimes one opportunity, if you're at a big company, to go get FaceTime with and build your personal internal brand with people that have a direct impact on your ability to make money, which means you should go seek out your friends in marketing or the friends that are throwing events or your friends, they can be your friends, in DealDesk.

22:36So that when you need to put together like a custom dinner for a bunch of prospects, marketing doesn't think, okay, this is just like this random AE who's pinging me on Slack. Or at DealDesk, you're not just like another name and a face. You're someone that they've built a relationship with. And oftentimes, those folks will go a step or four further than you. One of the reasons that I was really successful when I was selling ERP was not because I was the best salesperson. Like, I was pretty early in my career when I started selling ERP. But the nature of that sale is you're sort of at the center of it.

23:08And you've got SMEs, subject matter experts, that surround you. And I think one thing that I did a good job of, Jen, was building relationships with the people that were leagues smarter than me. and they were the ones showing the demo. They were the one meeting with the buyer. I was coordinating and priming and prepping those people and they were always willing to do more for me because I took the time to build a relationship with those people. And so I'll be honest, I was not the best seller from like a tech, like I didn't set the best agendas. Like I barely set an agenda half the time. I was new to sales, but I did a damn good job doing what you're describing here, which is like getting the people that you depend on to be like, Nick's a great person.

23:45I'm going to help them out when he's got a deal. 100%. It's not talked about enough. It matters so much because you are one of many and any opportunity you have to stand out is a good thing. The one other, I will say, so if you are planning the SKO, that's more from like the seller's perspective. If you're planning the SKO, one really fun cross-functional one I've seen, and it doesn't take that much time, is when you get to like a lull moment, again, like two hours after lunch or kind of late in the morning, late in the day, doing a rock, paper, scissors competition. you can actually do I've seen it done with a room of about 250 people in about 15 minutes so everybody just turns the person next to them they rock paper scissors once it's one and done then you move to the person next to them who won and then ultimately leading up to one per like two people on stage fighting it out it is so fun because people like lose their minds over rock paper scissors everybody's out of their chair everybody's yelling and it also inevitably means you are rock, paper, scissoring with people you don't know.

24:41I just can't say enough about like these little moments of fun, I think really break up what feels like a PowerPoint heavy day. So that's a cross-functional thing. That's super easy to plan. If you have 5 ,000 people, I probably wouldn't do it. But if you've got 200, 300, you can totally do it in 15 minutes. Heck yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the last one. Personal perks. So I think this is, if I made it to president's club, I get to get a coffee with Jen. Is that it? God, I hope you have more perks than that. So I'm going to list off a couple of these because these were brilliant. So one was Benjamin Arnie said, 30 minutes on what to actually do with your commission checks.

25:13Half the room is probably having a great year and still living check to check would totally beat another icebreaker. I saw this done at a conference once and I was like, how is this the first time I'm ever seeing this? We're not taught how to invest, how to save, how to do these things with your money. I think that is an awesome one that shows you really care about your salespeople. Number two, I am seeing this a lot more now, which is new headshots. Many people will just, like my husband's a professional photographer, so I love sharing his name, but bringing them in and making it so someone doesn't have to pay out of pocket.

25:45We all know that social selling is becoming far more meaningful in an AI, you know, everything world. So make it easy for people to have a professional presence. Number three, this was shared by Jonathan Zub. He said, carve out some moments where everybody gets to share something that they're passionate about. So he said when they did this, it was like someone who was super passionate about Spartan races to circadian rhythm to Henry VIII's promiscuous ways. Again, like, does this help you sell more AI tech? Maybe not, but does this help people like actually get to know one another and be more likely to pick up the phone when they have a problem and talk to one another?

26:24Absolutely. I think it does. So I thought those were really cool. And then the last one that I love, this is from a dear friend, Jenna McCoy. They did a Nike shoe lab for top performers where they did custom Nike shoes. And I was like, as a sneaker fan, that would be so rad and unexpected. So lots of different ways to just think about the person, not just the company. All right, Jen. So those are our main categories. I guess any other closing thoughts, big themes throughout all of these that you've observed? I mean, you've spoken at a ton of these kickoffs. Yeah, so I think there's three big themes.

26:53So number one is don't just celebrate your happiest customers on stage. Sellers want to learn what did we go wrong? What could we do differently in the future to prevent future losses? So create those opportunities. Number two is remember the focus on the team, right? So if you bring people in and everybody just sits in a dark room the whole day and you never cross pollinate anybody, we're missing out on a huge opportunity that's going to help us sell more deals down the road by giving people trust and confidence in one another. And then number three, which is like most important to me is yes, it has to be educational, but if you want people to remember it, to want to come back next year, it has to be equally as entertaining.

27:32So find those moments of joy and fun and build that into the agenda as much with as much focus as you pay attention to the educational elements. And if you're looking for some joy and fun and energy, Jen, I know that you are actively booking sales kickoffs to speak at. So honestly, Jen, we've literally had now over 600 people on 30 MPC, and I can attest that you are not only one of the most engaging and thoughtful speakers that we've worked with, you also, like, you know your freaking stuff. Like, you know your stuff. And so I highly recommend reaching out to Jen. So that's one. The other thing is if you're watching this and you're like, okay, these sound great, but planning an SKO is pretty freaking overwhelming.

28:11I don't know if I have time to also think about including all of these bonus nuggets. 30 MPC has got your back. So we partnered with the VP of Enablement at a company called AwardCo, and we put together a master project planner for your next sales kickoff. This literally has a master project plan, a detailed run of show, a meeting space agenda, breakout room agendas, speaker walk-up song planning, attendee list flags, a room sharing list, a speaker timeline, a master budget planning template. But let's see, other random ideas, dinners, dietary restrictions, a two-print, a shopping list. Literally, it has everything you could possibly need for you to plan a sales kickoff so you don't have to keep it all up in your brain or, I don't know, ask Claude who is going to steer you in a weird direction.

28:58So hopefully this episode was helpful. If you implement any of these and it went well, let me and Jen know. We like hearing from people so that we're not just shouting into a void. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you on the next episode of 30MPC.

29:21Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals. So here's a tip about multi-threading. There are stakeholders in your deals that you don't even know exist, like the VP of Finance, who's viewed your champion's recap twice this week, but no one actually introduced you. That is the type of person who's speaking around your deal and might sneak up to kill the deal at the finish line. And Align's AI surfaces it before it's too late so you can multi-thread to them. We built a full multi-threading playbook powered by Align. It's free in the show notes.

29:51Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20-plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate. When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate.

30:18Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, PipeDrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

30:46And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.