Do This in the First 10 Seconds to Win More Deals

0:00Lee Salz:Lee, we've got a closing issue. Jack, based on what you've shared with me, it doesn't sound like you have a closing issue at all. Go on. I'm Lee Salz. I'm a sales manager and strategist, and I help companies win more deals at the prices that they want. Closing is the symptom of the real issue you're experiencing. Where's the issue? It's an opening. It's in that first meeting. If that first meeting is weak, so is the deal. Then why doesn't that translate in the real world? prospecting cannot be done in mass. If your message is for everyone, it's for no one. So personalization is the absolute key when we talk about getting that first meeting.

0:39Lee Salz:I've been doing things wrong. Is there a way to fix that? Discovery meetings must die. Oh, wow. Discovery is an egocentric interaction. It's all for us. The expression that we should embrace is the concept of a consultation. If I agree to take a meeting with you, What do I get out of it? People buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic. So it's differentiate or drop your price. Those are your options.

1:12Before we get started with the episode, our books are now open. If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers or winning new business, we might be able to help. Why not outsource your sales to We Have A Meeting? just go to wehaveameeting.com. Lee, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Wonderful, Jack. Thank you. Wonderful stuff. Thank you for joining us. And we've been looking forward to this one. We're going to hit off with a big open question.

1:41Lee Salz:Oh, wait, I got to get ready. Okay. All right, go ahead. Fire away. Hope you're sitting comfortably. Who are you and what problem do you solve? Wow. How long do I have to answer that question? Take as long as you want. No, I'm just kidding. I'm Lee Saul. I'm a sales management strategist and I help companies win more deals at the prices that they want. My specialty is working with sales organizations to differentiate what and how they sell. Nice. Okay. So if people are struggling, I think one of the things, and obviously you've got a new book about it is probably that first interaction that first meeting so if they are struggling what what kind of symptoms might they be facing in the world where you kind of see it kind of going wrong well i'll give you the big one they're not winning deals that were they're not winning them at the levels or the prices that they want and so oftentimes i get this call from a frustrated executive maybe it's a business owner maybe it's a vp of sales and the conversation always sounds the same.

2:51Lee Salz:So Lee, we've got a closing issue, closing issue. I say, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, tell me what's going on. They say, well, my salespeople, they tell me about deals that are imminent and we're at the finish line. And then something goes awry and we don't get that business. The deal gets put off into some point in the future, which I know means never. We get ghosted, meaning they stop communicating with us. We get told we have to drop our prices to unacceptable levels to win it, or we just lose to the competition. All just to say we've got a closing issue. And normally it takes about 15 minutes to get this all off their chest.

3:30Lee Salz:And after they do, I empathize again, but then I correct them. Jack, based on what you shared with me, it doesn't sound like you have a closing issue at all. Now they get annoyed. They say, Lee, weren't you listening? I just spent 15 minutes giving you chapter and verse of all these closing issues that we have. I heard every word of it. And based on what you've shared, it sounds like closing is the symptom of the real issue you're experiencing. Now that we become docile and curious, well then, where's the issue? It's an opening. It's in that first meeting. See, in that first meeting, there's so much going on, right?

4:08Lee Salz:We're acquiring information. We're sharing information. We're differentiating ourselves. We're engaging emotion. and that first meeting is the deal foundation. If that first meeting is weak, so is the deal. I think we might be singing off the same hymn sheet here, Lee. Let's see. Let's go a bit deeper. Let's go a bit deeper. Where is the balance between salespeople, they get on calls, and they're like, I want to tell this guy how great I am. But then there's also the discovery part needed, right? Does this person actually have a problem we can help with? where's the balance between those two things well when you're first reaching out to someone most likely they're in a complacent state they're not actively looking for an alternative if they were they'd be calling you they'd be called a lead and the mistake that we make when someone's in a complacent state is we start talking about us and what we offer and you may as well talk to the wall no you're not being heard at that moment when you have someone in a complacent state, the entire conversation needs to be about them and the issues that they may be experiencing.

5:19Lee Salz:And our goal is to lead them from a point of complacency to pick their head up and say, you know what, maybe I should consider an alternative and lead them to the other side of receptivity. Now, when they're in that state, what they want to know is why you? And that's when the floor is open for you to position your differentiators in a meaningful way. But so often, the mistake that's made is someone's in a complacent state. And the question then is, why now? And what we're answering is, why you? And it fails. They don't want to know that then. Why do I need to do something about this issue you're calling me about now?

5:57Lee Salz:And if we don't answer that question, click. Bye-bye. So I always think when we have these conversations, that all makes sense right to us three on this call that will make sense there's other people that have sat in your seat as guests on this podcast who have said something somewhat similar that makes sense but then why doesn't that translate in the real world it feels like you know there's the mass market out there that let me do everything on bant or let me just try and discount have it like where does where does it come from what's the root cause of of this Well, you just said it in the first word when you started explaining this.

6:35Lee Salz:You said mass. Prospecting cannot be done in mass. If your message is for everyone, it's for no one. You know, there's a number of studies that have been done around prospecting, and one of my favorite ones was performed by the RAINN Group, and you may have heard this one. They asked executives if they have ever agreed to take a meeting with a salesperson that had reached out to them through some form of prospecting. Are you familiar with that study? Okay, then I'll put you guys on the spot. What percentage of executives do you think said, yes, I took a meeting with a salesperson that had reached out to me through some form of prospecting?

7:183%.

7:19Lee Salz:3%. How about you, Jack? I was probably going to go a little bit more optimistic, like 4 % or 5%. How about 82 %? Oh, wow. Better than four out of five executives said, yes, I took a meeting with a salesperson that had reached out to me through some form of prospecting. But the study didn't end there. They got the secret sauce, the key ingredient to getting the meeting. What do you think that was?

7:49Knowledge, like they knew my problem, the time they were in my market, that type of thing. Jack, what's your guess? I'm going to go left field and I'm going to say some kind of ridiculous personalization.

8:05Lee Salz:That was the word personalization, personalization. So if you're sending generic emails, leaving generic voicemail messages, or heaven forbid you get someone live, you're having a generic conversation. You're not going to be in that four out of five group. So personalization is the absolute key when we talk about getting that first meeting. Like I said, if the meeting, if the messages for everyone is for no one. Okay. So let's, so, so before we like dive deep onto like the first meeting, and I want to make this as framework and practical for people. So before we get to that, let's say I've cold called you and you said, wow, you're the third best cold caller I've ever met Jack.

8:48Yeah. Let's schedule some time next Tuesday. Brilliant. I've got a week in the diary. It's there. It's booked in. You've clicked attending. What should I be doing before that meeting to prepare before I sit with you?

9:03Lee Salz:Well, let's talk about a couple of goals we have for that meeting. The first one we just talked about, personalization. So I want to research the company. I want to research the role that this person is in. I want to research the individual. I want to learn as much as I can so that we're in that first meeting. one of the things that they're feeling, that they're feeling, is that this meeting is just for them. And the meeting I have later today is going to be totally different than the meeting that I'm having with them. So that's number one. Number two, a salesperson's most precious commodity is time, right?

9:42Lee Salz:None of us gets more or fewer minutes in our day. And when you look at top performers, one of the skills that they master is qualifying. And what you see so often in the sales world is salespeople will chase a deal. They'll put months and months, maybe even years going after it, and they lose it at the finish line. At least they think they did. And then when you conduct a postmortem, you come to find they didn't lose the deal. And they'll say, well, I didn't win it. Now, it's true you didn't win it, but you didn't lose it. You were never in the game. That if you would have qualified in the first 15 minutes of the first meeting, you would have recognized that you weren't a viable option for this.

10:25Lee Salz:So if you think of all the wasted motion going after a deal that you had no chance of winning. So that's another thing that we're preparing as a part of the strategy for that first meeting. The other thing that we think about in preparation for that meeting, are the questions we're going to ask, the information we're going to share, and the actions we're going to take. And one of the things I'm going after right now is something that the salespeople that have been told for an eternity, that the first meeting is a discovery meeting. And in chapter one of my book, The First Meeting Differentiator, it's titled Discovery Meetings must die.

11:06Lee Salz:And the reason for that is if you think about how salespeople prepare for that meeting, they think about the questions they're going to ask, the information they're going to share. And one of my favorite questions to ask salespeople is, if I agree to take a meeting with you, what do I get out of it? And they'll say, well, you'll learn about my company and what we offer. that's not meaningful value and i'll explain why there's two types of sales and i'm going to use a bathroom environment to depict those two you guys ready you buy toilet paper i sell toilet paper you're buying toilet paper from my competitor and i'm saying you should be buying my toilet paper because it's superior that's a takeaway sale and that's the environment that most salespeople are in.

11:56Lee Salz:The other type of sale environment, you buy toilet paper, I sell bidets. It's an alternative way of solving an issue. That's a demand generation sale. So in a takeaway sale environment, I already have a supplier. I have a provider in place. And you're telling me the meaningful value I get out of this interaction is I'm going to learn about your stuff. Well, I don't need to learn about your stuff. I already got a guy that's taking care of it for me. So what else you got? And now they struggle because they've never thought about that first meeting in the context of providing meaningful value. Discovery is an egocentric interaction.

12:40Lee Salz:It's all for us. The expression that we should embrace is the concept of a consultation. If you think about the medical community, right, we go to the doctor for two reasons, to become wiser about our circumstances and to understand potential remedies. We sure wouldn't go there if we thought we were a science experiment. They're going to gather all this information, all this data on us, right, but we get nothing out of it. But that's what we're doing in sales. And that's what a discovery meeting is all about. Of course, the medical community, they don't refer to that meeting as discovery. They call it a consultation.

13:19Lee Salz:And the implication there is that the person we're meeting with also has to get meaningful value out of that interaction. Now, I'm guessing your audience likes free things, right? Don't we all like free things? Of course. We love them. I've got a tough URL for everybody to remember. Meaningfulvalue.com. Meaningfulvalue.com. 10 ways to provide meaningful value during first meetings. And that meaningful value, if I could summarize it, is that they're going to learn something during that time with you that either helps them in their role or helps their company. That's meaningful value. And here's the key.

14:03Lee Salz:We talked about prospecting a few moments ago. It's really hard. It's really hard to get someone to agree to a meeting with you. Once you define what that meaningful value is, you fold that into your prospecting messaging. So, Zach, when we get together, I'll share with you a best practice that operations leaders are using to creatively reduce costs. Oh, I'm going to learn something from Lee if I take that meeting. I'm in. So I'm really enjoying this river ride that we're on. And I want to continue down it. But I do want to go back to something that we started the point with. So we were talking about research and finding out about that prospect.

14:45Just to play devil's advocate, how do you prevent reps from building their own bias that could actually be at some detriment to themselves? When you say building your own bias, what do you mean by that? so i think uh the issue can be with too much research and i think this is heavier on the cold calling side but i think it's definitely like powerful if i go if i go away and i do a load of research and i know right certain things and there's funding and i know that this person was in this role up until this point and there's been if i know everything well then i've already built my own story so that when i'm going into the consultation i'm going it doesn't really matter what you say because I feel like I probably know the answers.

15:31So how would you kind of best teach reps how to build a practical piece of evidence and the story that might be useful, but not build a bias?

15:43Lee Salz:Great point. It's not so much about building a bias. It's something that I think you'll agree with. Do you like to be lectured? no no does anybody like to be lectured no so what we want to do is take the research that we conduct and find those points and rather than come in and lecture them develop thought-provoking questions that get them to think because as soon as they identify the issue that they verbally share that information with you now they own it so it's very different than when you come in and say so So I research your company and I see this, this, this, this, this, this, this. Well, then no need to have the meeting.

16:25Lee Salz:But what you're trying to do is build engagement with them. So you want them to see that you did your homework. So it's a personalized experience. But you want to create questions from that rather than just come in and lecture them on all your great findings. Because the questions become very telling. Because when you create questions that show you did some homework, like, oh, okay, so you prepared for today.

16:51Lee Salz:is that what you were getting at Jack? Something like that? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely nailed it. And then, so we've done that. We've kind of got to a point where we're not building biases. I think everybody will be thinking, okay, cool. I've got this first meeting. Where do I start? What is the first question? How do I introduce myself? How much small talk am I having? Are we talking about the weather, the football, what should we be doing? Great point. So when we talk about discovery, a discovery meeting, we say, let me make my list of questions and my message points. But if you think about it, there's an infinite number of questions you can ask and only so many someone's going to tolerate before they say, okay, enough.

17:35Lee Salz:You can talk about your company for 16 hours, but no one's going to give you a 16-hour meeting. I don't think you'd want one anyway. But when we talk about a consultation rather than discovery, rather than starting the process by identifying questions and message points, we identify the outcomes that would be a great first meeting. In other words, we define what success is. We list, here are all the outcomes that would make for a great first meeting. And there's a chapter in my book, plus a download with it, that helps you define what success looks like from a first meeting. And once you've defined those, let's come back to what we said before.

18:15Lee Salz:Which questions are we going to ask? Only the ones tied to the outcomes that we've identified. What message points are we going to convey? Only the ones tied to the outcomes that we've identified. So it's almost like a set project plan that we've put together. We are entering a new era of outbound. Four years in, we have a meeting that has levelled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us. And we've put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club. We've helped close deals up to 950 ,000. We're doing it all. Phone, LinkedIn, email, direct mail.

18:56and there's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket. So if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time, inquire today.

19:09You mentioned, I don't know if there's links, Lee, you'll have to correct me if it doesn't, but you mentioned something in the book about empathetic expertise. Yes. Where does that come into things? Maybe you could give the listeners a bit of a flavor of what that is.

19:21Lee Salz:You know, that's one of my favorite topics today. There's an expression in sales, and I'm going to guess you've heard it somewhere around 4 million times. You ready? People buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic. Did I get it right? You've heard it 4 million times? Yeah. No, you've heard it 4 million and one because you just heard me say it. Now, every salesperson on the planet has heard people buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic. Now find a salesperson that actually puts that into practice. I'll bet you the deed to my house that if we recorded 100 first meetings across all sale types, all market segments, all around the world, 99 of that 100, if not all 100, were entire logic conversations.

20:09Lee Salz:So every salesperson on the planet has heard that concept and no one's doing it. Well, why is that? And I struggled with that answer. And I finally had this epiphany. I have two sons that played college baseball, and I remember when they were first learning the game, and coaches would say, now the name of the game is to hit home runs. And they'd say, big smile, got it, hit home runs. Well, guess what? Until you taught them how to hit home runs, nothing changed in their game. And what we're doing with salespeople is we're preaching to them this concept. People buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic, and they're saying, got it.

20:47Lee Salz:but we're not teaching them how to put this into practice. And I'll give you an example. One of the questions we commonly ask is something like, what's the biggest challenge that you face in your business today? That's a fact-based question. We're going to get information as a result of that. But what if we phrase the question like this? Zach, what is that one thing in your business, the one thing that you're like, oh, I got to figure this out? What's that one thing? I mean, here we are in a podcast, right? A fictitious environment, if you will. But you felt that question, didn't you? And the information you're going to share back with me, I'm not just going to get information.

21:29Lee Salz:I'm going to get color, flavor, texture. I'm going to know how you feel about what you share with me. because emotion is the deal energizer. If we're only having logic conversations and you wonder, why did my deal just stall out? Why did it go nowhere? It's because we haven't aroused enough emotion to energize that deal. And there's a lot of ways that we can do it. There's also a chapter in my book, another thing that I'm going after. We've told salespeople, you share features with benefits, right? Again, 4 million times you've heard that. And the title of that chapter is Features, Benefits, and Boredom.

22:12Lee Salz:Again, we're back into lecturing. No one wants to sit through that. In a discovery, when we think about discovery, we think about what am I going to tell them? In a consultation, the question we ask ourselves, what do we want them to remember? What do we want them to remember? And there's countless studies that show that people remember facts when they're embedded in stories as opposed to facts that are just thrown at them. So what we want to master is a skill of storytelling. And there's a framework that I provide in the book in how to put together effective stories. Much more memorable, much more engaging.

22:54Lee Salz:and their emotive stories when we put them together so they become memorable and it helps to further energize the deal. So how does that translate then, Lee, between even the delivery that you gave them? Yeah. I can imagine if I'm marketing director or CEO of maybe American company, let's position it there. I might be like, yeah, I'm in. I'm all in. Good. Right, but then I could be CFO in Luxembourg and be like, oh, don't know about that now. He got a bit American for me then for a moment. Which part was American? Just the passion. We're not passionate people in Europe. Okay. We hate passion. Interesting.

23:40How would it translate to different ICPs or different culture? How do you switch up the delivery depending on who you're dealing with?

23:48Lee Salz:Well, again, that's a cultural consideration is very, very important. And not just culture, but also reading the individual that you're meeting with. And it doesn't matter where you are on the planet. The concept that people buy based on emotion and justify their decisions with logic is valid. It's been proven. It's not something that's open for us to discuss or to debate. The way that we go about it is going to vary based on the different cultures that we encounter. so the storytelling interselling i think we we've had people on the storytelling experts and i think that there's so much with it but i think that it sometimes it's hard people go yeah i'm going to start telling more stories and then i i hear them on sales calls and they're talking about the hungry caterpillar or the gruffalo or something like that like they get it wrong could you give us an example.