Paul M. Caffrey (00:02.318)
Oh, pleasure to have you on the show. Dan, thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here. Yeah, yeah, likewise. And you are in Dublin, Ireland. How's Dublin today, by the way? Dublin is confusing today because autumn has started and we have had the best weather we've had all year. So everybody is melting and the leaves are falling off the trees, which is two things we never see together. So we're making the most of it because I think there's a tough winter ahead. Yeah, yeah, that's that's.
something that I'm halfway looking forward to in sweltering New York heat, where it's just disgusting right now, frankly. But it's great to have you on the show. I think that we want to make an effort to have more sales focused conversations. We're all over the place. We're kind of focusing on this agency audience. And I think that also the topic of your book in focusing on preparation is just...
is really timely. It's just sort of been in my head lately. I listened to sometimes Alex Ramosi stuff, and he talks a lot about, like, the bar is so low, right? Like, if you if you just do a little bit of prep, you look like a mad genius, like a professor X sometimes. So I think you're onto something here. I guess before we get in get into the book, would you mind talking about your background a little bit and how you built this experience and so on? Yeah, look, absolutely. Thanks, Dan. And
You're a big fan of Alex Formosi and everything he's doing. It's super to see what's going on there. So for me, I'm 15 years in the tech sales space and I reached a point where, yeah, forced to maybe I picked the right industry to jump into. I was initially a research scientist going to cure the world for cancer. All research got cut for that. So I switched careers and ended up working in sales. And what I found was with sales, you reach a point where
your performance becomes optimum. And you are working all the hours that you have. And very like agency owners, founders, people who are starting out as well, you reach, very quickly, you can't do any more. So I was fortunate enough to come across Todd Herman and his great elite performance work. And did a bit of work with him in an online course many years ago, which was fantastic, called the 90 Day Year. We're checking out, even now, I think it's still running, which is the sign that something is truly valuable.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:21.618)
And what the outcome of that was in sales, I realized that the only way to actually continue to grow and to get better and become even more relief was to bring in preparation and professional preparation into what you do. So I was able to do that. And then year after year after year, you know, success kept coming, kept coming. Working with like businesses such as Salesforce.com, who some people may have heard of, had a really, really great time there. I reached a point where I was.
coaching a lot of account executives, sales professionals in general. I was working with a lot of founders and people who were growing businesses and even the odd times speaking about a topic. And I realized that the one thing everybody had in common was they wanted to be elite at sales, particularly they wanted to be elite around their business. And they didn't bring preparation to and that was the only thing holding them back. So I decided to step out and actually focus on this full time.
I wrote a book on the topic called The Work Before The Work, and it's where I shared the hidden habits elite sales professionals use to outperform the competition. I was fortunate enough to partner with Phil M. Jones on that project. I know Phil has the number one listen to book on Audible. It's exactly what to say. Fantastic book, something I'd recommend people check out. And we had this similar mindset of wanting to bring elite performance to the masses. And the great thing is, as you've alluded to,
Most people don't prepare. They jump in, they do the activities, they work really hard. They get a level of success, which will come out of doing that, but then they plateau. And for me, it's how do we take a step back, bring preparation in so that our results are actually much, much better and much stronger than just they would be if we don't. So essentially that's where it all came from. And yeah, the last few years have been just so much fun. Fantastic, and thanks for that. Yeah.
feels great, another friend of the show. I love that book as well. So when I think about preparation, I think that kind of hit me where I live because I've been doing sales a long time and we have consultants, we optimize our processes, we have scripts, we're kind of running through similar, if not the same motions each time. But I think preparation sometimes is kind of this gray area for me because
Paul M. Caffrey (04:44.526)
For a couple of reasons, I think one is just like everybody, time and bandwidth and figuring out where to put your resources. And I think the other is, I'm not sure what exactly it looks like, right? Cause it's like, yes, some research, checking out the website, the LinkedIn, seeing what you have in common, the basic stuff. But then I'm like, okay, where does that extra work go? Cause it's like, I know our ICP or our market pretty well. I have the questions. I know that people are gonna have one of like a small handful of problems.
How do you think about that work? What does the preparation look like? Yeah. So the preparation, I've put in this instance, it feels like you're speaking about prospecting, reaching out to potential clients and in that sort of world then. Yeah, I guess to hone in a little bit, I guess I'm thinking about those first calls when somebody's agreed, whether it's a qualification call or a later call. Yeah. So what we will find is that
No matter how prepared you are, and no matter how much you know about someone's business, they want to do business with you because you've got the expertise and they think that you've got the solution to a problem they have. OK, so you do need to know your own service. You do need to know the outcomes that you can bring. You do need to know how to articulate the successes that past customers and current clients have had with your service. But most people know that to an extent. So that's a starting point.
Are you able to actually tell a compelling outcome or customer story? Do you have two or three of those that will resonate that are maybe somewhat similar to where that person is at? And do you know what you're talking about? The industry piece. Most people have a good level of that. And I guess what your audience being agency owners, that's what I think will be pretty comfortable getting to that. Preparation is what takes you from the other person being skeptical, disinterested.
forgetting about why they even agreed to speak with you or even wondering why they've stayed on the phone with you if it just happens to, you happen to have caught them in the time, to being really engaged, to wanting to hear what you have to say, to being able to solve their problem. So really what I think about is, there are three things to consider when we're doing the preparation. The first is we want to make sure that the person understands we want to do business with them. The second is we want to grab their attention.
Paul M. Caffrey (07:04.25)
And then the final piece then is we have their attention. We want to transition into something which is going to be relevant for them. You do have to guess a little bit at this and it is a little bit of an educated guess. So there is nothing that says you're going to listen to somebody more than telling them something or sharing something about them or their business that they didn't expect you to know. So again, that is something that you can find out in advance. So have they changed premises? Have they signed up a couple of new clients that are case studies on the website?
Have they been acquired by somebody or are they in a partnership with somebody? Like there is generally typically something out there from a business sphere that we can find out. Then it's also from a personal perspective. Are they active on social media? Are they on LinkedIn? Have they liked the post? Have they commented on something? Is there something there that we can kind of latch on to very, very quick? And where we're at is bringing that piece and then having a, we probably can have four or five different things we help businesses solve really well.
Probably more than that, there's probably three or four core things. Having the perspective of, I think I'm going to be able to help you with X. I think this is the problem. I think this is the reason. Hopefully if it's qualification, you may have even had a little snippet of that beforehand. So it is opening up the conversation. Um, you know, in appreciative of them taking the time to meet with you. But then in that first 90 seconds, two minutes dropping in that thing that they don't expect, showing that you've done your research, someone that you're
a little bit more interested in doing business with them and perhaps the other two competitors who just went straight into their, oh, how are you? Did you see the game last night? Building faith rapport, taking a chance on that. Then the rest of your conversation is the same. And then you, but what you're doing is you're getting them to lean in, get interested. Maybe you'll be a little bit surprised that you know something like that. And it just starts your conversation off in the right direction. Rest of the conversation can be the same. But getting that particular, that starting point of, that is the focus.
Yeah, I really like that because it's like, I think implicitly you're acknowledging that there's like a finite amount of real estate or time in that call. And that usually the beginning that's filled with fake rapport, which is nice, you know, it's better than nothing. But that could, that space could be filled with, Hey, I saw that you clicked on this. I saw it will be no these people in common. I saw that this thing recently happened in your company. So something that's directed towards what they're up against in the business. So that all makes sense to me. Yeah.
Paul M. Caffrey (09:27.634)
Especially if somebody has filled something out, if they fill out a questionnaire and they've ended up in your calendar like that, actually taking 30 seconds to read that and have a question already based upon that. For example, oh, you gave yourself a seven out of 10 for your ability to run discovery sessions. What do you think is preventing you from being a 10? Or it looks like this is really good, but this other area you're lacking in, can we expand upon that? Or if they spoke to somebody else in your company and now it's come to you as the expert or the knowledgeable person.
calling out that you've actually spoke to that last person and that they don't have to repeat themselves. What I really want is when you're speaking with somebody in a sales call, I don't want, and I think it's terrible when people ask information to that person or about the business that can be easily Googled because then you were just wasting time. We want to get to the business problem, understand, well, what do they think the cause of that problem is?
Do we have a solution to that cause or do we not? And then we know, do we invest more time in this or do we maybe refer them off to somewhere else so that we can spend time working on the clients that we can actually convert versus just filling our calendar, speaking to everyone, hoping to get as many people through a sales cycle so that we convert just enough to keep things going. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One thing that I love about your book is that
you acknowledge that there's a finite amount of time and bandwidth in people's lives, which I think a lot of business books don't do, right? Because there's so many sales books, business books we read that are like, here are all the things you should do to be amazing. And it's like, okay, if I was a, you know, a master AI that could replicate myself a thousand times, this would might be attainable. But alas, that's not the case. So maybe for six months anyway, who knows? Well, we're getting there. Yeah. So
With that in mind, can you talk about that framework a little bit? How are you deciding how much to prepare, who to give your attention to, who not to, and so on? Yeah. And I think what's really crucial is it's the amount of preparation you look to put in for something is really dependent on the payoff or the potential outcome that's going to come your way. So for example, I've got some clients and they might spend two whole days or in some cases, two whole weeks preparing for a sales meeting.
Paul M. Caffrey (11:40.986)
And then you might go, well, that sounds absolutely ludicrous, but they're working in enterprise space. They've got deals worth millions. They may only have two or three of these in the whole year. So for them, that merits that level of work. Whereas if it's a case that you do, let's say you do five sales meetings a week, you'd be in the position of going, well, I do five sales meetings a week. Maybe I close one or two. You know what your numbers are. So then you can put the amount of preparation time.
according to the potential payoff. So in that instance, maybe it's 15 minutes or maybe it's 20 minutes of preparation time that you do because it is somewhat high volume. It is still a good value, but maybe not going to dictate if you're successful or if you fail. And the same for people, if you are looking at, if you wanna get a strategic partnership in place for your agency, you may put a lot of time in to prepare for that. You may have a couple of people that you want to actually partner with.
could be something you work on over a longer time horizon versus, I don't know, we're going to run an event, we're going to partner with someone for an event and that's just going to happen next month. So we'll put a little bit less into that because it is a one-time thing as opposed to a partnership that will last over for the long haul. Right, right. That makes sense. And you've got to kind of think about that the right way and budget your time correctly. And
you have a really great framework for this. And it's funny because you make a disclaimer in the beginning of the book that's like, there's not going to be hacks and tricks and everything. And the questions seem a little bit basic, but then I think they're really good prompts for thinking time, which is a concept that is probably not from Keith Cunningham originally, but he's something somebody that I think writes about this really well, which is the idea of budgeting time for thinking deeply about things. Would you mind without giving away your whole book? And I won't.
I won't regurgitate everything in the book right now, but would you mind talking about that a little bit? Like what are some of those prompts that you're going through before you're getting on a sales call typically? Yeah, look, absolutely. And there are essentially six habits that elite salespeople do. And where this came out of, because I went from the realms of being a top performer that was inconsistent to being a consistent top performer to being a consistent elite performer.
Paul M. Caffrey (14:00.51)
I was constantly looking at how everybody was doing this. And I was asking the top sales professionals who were ahead of me at the time, how do you do this? What are you actually doing? And their answers, I sell. I'm meeting my customers, I sell in my prospector, as if to say, you're crazy, you're just doing your job. And what the truth of it is, that's when I realized I had become so habitual, so ingrained in them, they didn't know what they were doing and they couldn't explain it. So after a long time, I realized, okay, now I've seen it.
And there are essentially six questions to run through, which can be super, super powerful for people. So what you want, let's say for preparing for, you know, a meeting coming up, which we would, you know, it could be a qualification call, it could be a discovery call, it could even be a, you know, a final commercial presentation, whatever it may be. It's thinking about it from the state, at the point of view of yourself, from the person you're meeting, and then any other stakeholders that might have a somewhat vested interest. So,
For example, that could be maybe that business has some investors, maybe there's partners. If it's a bigger company, maybe there's other parts of the business that could benefit from your solution in a lesser way. So they might be intrigued as to what's gonna happen there. And then obviously from yourself, what do you want out of it? Typically, if we're speaking to somebody, taking them through a sales cycle, we want the business. Hopefully we have qualified it. So it's good business for us to go after versus bad business, which is just filling a gap in our revenue funnel.
Well, let's presume it's a good business, the business we want. So we're going into whether whichever meeting this is, it's asking yourself, you know, what am I looking to achieve? Now, what is the ideal outcome for me in this meeting? What is the current situation? So where are things at today? How far away am I from actually getting there? And then it's into, well, what's the decision making process? So what decisions will have to be made for me to go from?
being at this current situation to achieving that and asking that same question from the perspective of the person that you're meeting. So what do they want to achieve out of the meeting with you? Where are they currently at and how are they looking to make a decision? So what we could turn into is all of a sudden, instead of just going in and relying on hope, then we are in the position of going into the meeting and going, OK, well, I think I know where they are. I think I know where I am. I think I know what the situation is. I think I know what needs to happen.
Paul M. Caffrey (16:26.614)
or for a decision to be made. And I want to give somebody the ability to make a confident yes, no decision at the end of this, typically most sales meetings is that way. And then you're into, okay, great. Well, how do I get there? So how am I going to start a meeting? How am I going to deliver the message? How am I going to go from where I am to where I want to be? Then it's a case for sometimes some of the bigger pieces or some of the more complex sales.
It might be, well, what might be a sign of progress? So if I'm in the meeting, what's the sign that I'm progressing towards it? Is it this, they like our agency, they like the solution that we're offering, but if they don't connect that to an outcome they're working towards, well, that would be a sign of me progressing towards a decision or a confident yes, no decision. If I don't get to that kind of middle marker, then maybe I'm missing the tricks. So you have to think about what needs to happen throughout that meeting for you to know you're on the right track. And then it's...
How do you measure success? And in sales, I always think success is not so much about whether you've won the deal. That is an outcome and you'll win deals, you'll lose deals. Well, it's have you taken that prospect to be able to make that yes or no decision? Because ultimately a lot of people get a bit of interest, take people along and then there's, oh, I'm not too sure, I'll come back to you. Oh, maybe. And what we've realized is we haven't helped them make a decision. So they sit in our pipelines too long, frustrates us.
pretty annoying for them when we reach now consistently. And then it's a case of taking like those six questions and you can apply that to your, just one part of your sales meeting, you can apply that to a whole sales cycle or even applying it to your whole year. And essentially then it's into the realms of, well, if it's a bigger outcome task, then we go into each question in a little bit more detail. And if it's a lesser outcome task, we go into each one less, or even if it's a chance encounter.
we just ask ourselves two questions is, what is the person I'm meeting looking to achieve? How are they going to achieve that? Actually, what would I like to achieve and how am I going to achieve this? Let's say you meet somebody at a conference you'd love to do business with, all of a sudden, instead of just being talking about the weather, the commute, or how can you decide to take a day out of the office to be here, it turns into, oh, they're here, they're doing this CX role, there's this conversation happening over here, I met this person over there.
Paul M. Caffrey (18:44.598)
you're starting to think about how you can help them, how you can serve them, about what they might be looking for. They get really energized. They get really happy that you're actually putting them first, human nature. A lot of reciprocity kicks in. So then they're trying to help you because those chance encounters, those unexpected conversations, they're rarely with the person that we want to do business with, but that person often knows people who we would like to do business with. And if we've served them in that conversation, there's a greater chance of us being remembered and being
mentioned later on in the day and so on and so forth. Yeah, that's really helpful. To hone in on one of those points, I think you mentioned helping them make a decision and the fact that most salespeople aren't good enough at this and it just leaves them falling up, being annoying, getting ignored and so on. Can you talk about that a little bit? How are the elite salespeople better at helping decisions happen? The elite salespeople,
And I guess that keyword is elite versus salespeople. They genuinely care about the outcome that the person is working towards. And they are curious. They're looking to try solve that problem. And they're also brave in the fact of even if the customer are saying all the right things and yes, they want to go ahead. But then you've noticed something which I'm not quite sure that aligns because that this problem over here, they'll also mention that.
because they don't want the other person to naturally make a mistake, which kind of flies in the face of that traditional salesperson that we think that's gregarious sales monster, just there's a chance to close something so they go and close it. And that is the difference. The good sales people, okay salespeople are thinking towards getting the deal closed. The elite salespeople are thinking about when the customer is gonna get value and achieve the outcome from what they're selling.
So that means rather than talking about close dates and implementations, they're more talking about, well, when the value is coming out of this and when certain milestones are achieved. And then the customer themselves, they start, it's a subconscious thing, but it is an important thing. They start, their perception of success from what you're providing to them is that bit higher. And so then they're in a greater state of actually going, right, I'm ready to actually make a decision and go ahead with this because of X, Y, and Z.
Paul M. Caffrey (21:10.846)
Or the elite sales professional realizes that, well, we might not achieve this. We may not be getting to that stage. Maybe that's not going to be realistic. And there are these problems that are going to happen. What are you going to do if this team is too slow to actually start using this? Or if there's pushback from the organization. And then we get to a stage where we realize maybe it's not a fit and it's not going to work for these, for X, Y and Z reason. Or we realize actually.
I can do this, I can do that. Your team could do something else or we could change what we're doing. And then we bring along success. So it's more speaking to this successful outcome, which is maybe three, six, nine months after you have used of your service. So I think that is a real key difference. Yeah. And there's a couple of things you said that I think are really, really important. One that I've seen with salespeople we fired and the process of training and being trained is like, there's this tendency to just gloss over
the landmine that's gonna blow up the deal later, or that will prevent somebody from getting value. And then what happens is people gloss over it, invest a lot more time and resources, and then it still blows up as opposed to dealing with it right away, which we've all dealt with. And one thing that I think you also said is the idea of focusing on outcomes and not onboarding and set up in your capacity and all these things. I think we've been guilty of that. I know a lot of our clients have as well.
where it's like, you want the deal to close. And it's like, for us to successfully onboard you, we've got this many spots. Here's our team schedule versus six months down the line. Hey, if you actually want to get ROI on this, this is when it's going to happen. It's going to happen in June. Is that okay with you? Or do you want it to happen sooner? So I think that really jumps out to me. One thing that you cover in the book is the idea of
of the best salespeople involving the team effectively. I think in the agency space, this happens badly in a lot of ways in that teams are brought in either too early or too late and too early, it wastes a lot of time. You know, if you're thinking about hourly rates and you have high specialized people and they're all in a room, that's an expensive sales process very quickly. So can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, and I guess the key piece is
Paul M. Caffrey (23:33.758)
You want to have a sales process that you're following, which is it's not going to be repeated exactly the same all the time, but it is repeatable. And if you don't follow it, well, then you're deviating away from it for a particular reason. And I think what's really, really important is in those early meetings, that it is pretty much predominantly just the salesperson, where the person who's taking the lead on selling it and they do a really good qualification and they do a really good discovery.
And how you know you've done a really good discovery session is you know the outcome that your prospect is working towards. You are agreed on what the problem is, which is preventing them to get there. And the most important part is you've then uncovered what they believe to be the cause of the problem. And that cause of the problem is something is a feature or benefit or something specifically that you're a service you offer or something that your product actually does.
prospect has verbalized, it would be great. I could solve this problem and I could reach this outcome if I had and then it was in certain your product or service. And then it's also the case of, and if they don't do it by a certain time, so whatever that compelling event may be, then there is going to be this much pain felt, whether it's missed opportunities, whether it is, you know.
bottlenecks in the business, whether it is something else. But typically we want it to be for something. And it's at this point typically where we want to go, okay, we've qualified really well. And we think if we take this person through our process, we have a great chance of them converting into your business with us. And that's when you want to be bringing in the other more expensive resource. If it's a technical team to scope out something, if it's a creative team to do a bit of work that's needed to...
flesh out the idea or whatever that may be. And it's bringing them in at a time and giving them a brief, which is really clear of where you're going towards, what you expected them. But then also importantly, before you get into the realms of spending your expensive resources on a sales piece, because we really want them maybe more delivering in the sales process, it's having agreement with the prospect that.
Paul M. Caffrey (25:53.678)
I'm going to put resource in, you're going to put a lot of resource and a lot of time into this, we're working towards this outcome and how we're going to get there is X, Y and Z. And I know as an agency owner that these projects, they typically stall if we don't have X person involved on your side, be that an executive or be that a technical person or whatever. So
Can we get a plan together where actually we'll get that person involved? And I know that sometimes there's issues getting those people involved. So what are we going to do that's going to stop that from being an issue for you? And then straight away, what you're doing is you're signposting that you're working together as a team. You've also qualified everything that is needed for the project to be successful. And you've also called out that I think there's going to be problems on your side, which could lead to me having to use my resource multiple times.
How do we stop that from happening? And they're then working with you as opposed to, I guess you going to this one person and them getting tired or them getting a bit embarrassed that they haven't been able to follow through, bring somebody in and you're having to repeat resources. So, I mean, that would really be the focus, I would say, in that situation. Yeah, I like that. So you're kind of calling out the issue and then dealing with it upfront.
Maybe this is a little bit tactical, but I think a lot of the times information's being gathered in different ways all throughout the process, right? So you have maybe somebody's booking on a Calendly link, they're filling out a form, you're having an in-depth qualification call. Maybe that's with one salesperson, or maybe it's with multiple like a BDR sort of model. Then you might have questionnaires, you might have people fill out stuff. Can you talk about that a little bit? If there's this grand schematic of information you need to get.
how should you acquire that information? Because sometimes some information is better acquired live and from talking to people, others it's better to give people the privacy of typing answers and thinking more. Can you talk about that process a little bit? Yeah, I guess what you're really looking at is the information that you're looking to gather from let's say a questionnaire or whatever, if that can be maybe more factual.
Paul M. Caffrey (28:11.386)
and more to the point and pretty fast to collect information. And then if we're looking at the information where we're going to actually, we wanna get that person to open up and we want to go a little bit below the service level, that's where it needs to be a bit of a conversation. So for me, I'm really looking at, there's kind of just two aspects to it, right? There's the qualification side. So the qualification side can be a calendar, it can be a couple of questions. And...
From a qualification piece, what we're really looking to do is high level, figure out who we could sell to. And if there was people that we couldn't, we can't sell to, that they're gone at this point. So if they operate in a geography that we don't want, or if they operate, if they use a system that we can't integrate with, or if, you know, they're simply too small or whatever that might be.
So that first qualification piece is really just making sure that we go from a lead, which is someone interested in us to taking them to being a qualified lead, which is somebody that we can sell to. Key difference because we get a lot of interest. So that's one thing. And that can be a combination of just filling out your form because that's pretty standard yes, no, somewhat straightforward information. You're using the BDR, SDR, you want them to go a little bit further and understand an outcome or a compelling event that people are working towards or
if there's traditional budget for your services, what that kind of looks like, or if there isn't, how that might go to be created. But again, if people will have their own feel for that in their agency, and then you're into, I guess that's the qualification piece, then you're into the discovery and taking somebody through the rest of the sales process. And this is the part where it's a little bit more in depth. So I guess the way to look on it is, the first answer people give is typically,
It's something that makes them sound good, but it may not be the real reason, because they may not have actually thought about the outcome that they're missing out on or the problem or what actually happened with the problem continues over a long period of time. Sometimes it's conversational that needs to do that. So that would be the piece getting that into the pain. And it's down to the, it's down to what would I say? It's, it's down to the size of the problem for the individual. Again, so if it's a big ticket item, always going to be a conversation.
Paul M. Caffrey (30:31.442)
If it's maybe not so big ticket, you can maybe sometimes do that to a group or with questions that go three levels deeper. So if you're going to be doing it and you're selling by, let's say, chat or you're selling by questionnaire, it's, okay, well, what do you think is going to prevent you from being successful? They'll say something and you go, okay, and what else? And they'll say something else.
And if there was one more thing and then you're into the level of right, that's probably where it is. And then your questions can be going along those lines to get the, the real pain, which some people don't know. Yeah. And, um, you know, there's different frameworks for sales and a lot of them kind of like hone in on focusing on the individual. Is there anything that, you know, you think is underappreciated with that? And I, to frame that out a little bit more, I think a lot of the times we just assume like, okay, well,
you talk to somebody about your offer and they're like, okay, well, I'm not going to get fired if this goes wrong, but it's like either fear of getting fired or aspiration to get promoted. And it feels kind of like hollow a little bit, I guess. What are some of the other considerations on the individual level that you think people should have in mind? Yeah, well, I guess one of the things that I have in mind, and you want to always get it is, we always hear this word, are they a champion? So are they your champion? Are they your main point of contact?
And the definition of a champion when you're selling to somebody is the organization will benefit when I have all that stuff, but then the individual will benefit as well with your solution versus nobody else's. So it might take them a step towards that promotion. It might get them that annual performance review score to get them a bump in their salary and maybe something else. So if you can understand, well, what's the successful project mean for this person?
on what does an unsuccessful project mean for this person, then you know how much they're going to support you. If you're dealing with somebody who, you know, doesn't really care, isn't too bothered by it, which can happen, you know, maybe that's not on the table or it's, you know, it's just, it's not on their agenda right now. They're focusing on their family. So they're just doing the bare minimum. That's when you want to look at multi-threading the deal. Multi-threading is great to do more often.
Paul M. Caffrey (32:55.202)
But if you don't have those, that bite of that individual actually taking ownership, being rewarded, being successful for you being successful with what you deliver, there may be others in the organization who will. So let's say you're head of whatever doesn't really care, but if there's a director and it turns out, yeah, they've got equity in the business. And for them actually, it is much more compelling and much more important, then you may be onto something.
And that works around, you know, for different parts of the business. So again, the more people involved, the greater chance you have of finding that tipping point, which is going to get you over. Right, right. That that makes a lot of sense. And I think one, one sort of paradigm we get presented with a lot is, you know, painkiller versus vitamin. If you've heard of that, like, are you selling something that cures pain or are you selling somebody this crazy aspiration?
From studying a lot of elite salespeople, do you find that there's one of those they emphasize more than the other, or is that paradigm even correct? And yeah, how do you feel about that? Yeah, it's...
Paul M. Caffrey (34:05.294)
It comes down to the individual that you're selling to. OK, so when you're early on, let's say you're in a qualification call or you're chatting an initial discovery session with somebody. If you just take a note of the words they use, are they using words like struggle, frustration, challenges? And they're kind of unloading a lot of negative words. What you're.
where you're kind of, it's a subconscious warning that, okay, this person has been unsuccessful for a while, and they may not be actually buying the services they should be buying, they may not be making the right decisions, they might actually be sitting in indecision. So it's a little bit of a concern. And in that instance, they're the people who will be looking to
You know, what is less painful struggling with the current situation for another six or 12 months or actually bringing you in and having your going through your implementation and adding everything else up versus then you might hear people in a qualification or discovery. And they're they've got words like they're van Bichan. They're talking about goals. They're talking about growth. They're talking about what went well before. What went well previously. And they're the ones that be more oriented towards.
going towards that growth piece. Ultimately, what we're looking for is an ideal situation, is we want somebody who's got the more positive, ambitious words being used, and then we want the business to have to make a decision, and then there is a negative financial or some sort of implication by a certain date. If they don't do make this decision, and if they do make the decision and your solution works for them, then they'll actually then grab
some market share and some more positive outcomes. So the, what I would say is you can sell to both, but be weary about putting too much time or too much effort into people who are using a lot of the negative words at the start and be weary of working with people who don't maybe have that compelling event, don't have that fire, could just go another six months without making a decision, because those two ends of the spectrum will
Paul M. Caffrey (36:22.174)
waste a bit more time for you. And again, in retrospect, oh, that makes sense what I do is in the pipeline so long, but at the time you kind of missed that. You don't notice it. Yeah. I love to dig into that a little bit more because so, so you're, if I understood right, you think that you should de-emphasize the people that are complaining and have more, more of a pain motivation. Why is that? Cause that's, you hear the opposite of that a lot, where it's like, yeah, if they've got bleeding neck pain, like
that's, that's a hot lead, right? So yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. Because that's, that's the way we're traditionally trained is, Oh, there's some pain and okay, I can solve that pain. So let me go and actually sell. So what generally happens is we come on pain, demo indecision drives us mad. And so what it ultimately comes down to is, um, it's that person can still be talking about being in pain.
But it's how they're talking about it. So if it's a case of the business is really struggling, we've tried so many different things and this just isn't working and that, and yeah, now we really need a solution here and you know, blah, blah. You're going, okay, warning signs, warning signs, lots of negativity, you know, that's there. Versus if they're saying, yeah, we've, you know, the business has a challenge with this, but you know, we've tried that and we've saw some improvement.
put this temporary solution in place. And that's been somewhat good. And then we're working towards this thing. It's the way they're speaking about it. And it's latching on to how that person is speaking. We'll actually then see, you're gonna have more chance of success with the person who speaks about it in a more positive, in a more straightforward way, versus the person who just is struggling and complains. And then what we want to look at is, you get the pain. So even if it's from the person who's negative about it, or the person who's positive about it, it's what's...
the cause of the pain and are they in agreement what that cause is? And does your solution directly address the cause or does your solution not? And ultimately then that is, you know, whether, you know, you want to keep going at that or you don't. Um, what you'll find is the negative struggling down person with all the pain rarely actually give you an accurate cause. So then.
Paul M. Caffrey (38:49.602)
They have a problem, you have a product that can actually solve that problem, but that negative person stays in that negativity a bit too long and doesn't actually connect the cause of their problem with your solution. So it is something I guess in a podcast, it's hard to dig into in the depth it requires, but just listen to the language, listen to the words that people are using in those discovery and initial calls and get them to share what they think the cause is.
Those two things alone, if you have both of those, you will give a really good chance of progressing that deal along. Yeah, that's super interesting and a little bit counterintuitive, right? Because I think the first instinct is if they've got this horrible pain, this is a good prospect. But the reality is they might be flailing. They might not be savable right then. They might have to get closer to the shore first or something, right? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, as opposed to, oh, you've got this problem. Well, if my product could do this better than what you're doing at the moment, would you buy in?
you know, all that usual jargon, it just doesn't really work anymore. Yeah. Uh, and to keep kind of like focusing in what, what's the best way to get people to understand the cause of their pain? How do, how do the best salespeople do that?
Well, it's really the first thing that you do is you kick off that conversation and you get them to lean in. So you've done the preparation. So you showed that you're interested in them, their business. So they think, OK, this isn't going to be just my standard box, my normal standard meeting. And then the second piece is we've read the notes. We've got a theory for what we think is causing it. But with them, we're asking their opinion. So.
It seems to me that this may be a challenge. What are your thoughts on X? Whatever is the reason they've started chatting to you. We dig down three levels deeper to get into to talk about that. And then it's also looking into, well, what do you think is going to prevent you from being successful, from achieving certain goal, from what do you think is going to prevent you from not losing X, Y and Z? And then when they give that piece,
Paul M. Caffrey (41:01.25)
then extrapolating into that, what does that mean? And then it's into what is causing that. So whatever we think that thing is, what is causing that and what else? And then towards the end of the conversation, it can be down to then, okay, well, have you looked at, you know, how have you tried to solve this before? You're hoping they have tried to solve it before even with free solutions, because it means they've put a bit of effort or mindshare into it.
And then you can go really explicit. And with what they've said is what's the cause of their problem. Have you considered X and uncertain what your, your product or service does to then, and then solve for Y. Right. You kind of getting them to come up with, to their own conclusions. It sounds like through those questions. So, and it's, and what you see is you'll, you'll either get there and you'll realize
this is a great fit, let's go ahead, or you're like, no, this isn't really a fit. And then you don't need to do those three, four, five meetings and waste that time and waste that resource upstream because they've ticked the boxes and they deserve a demo or a pilot or a proof of concept or whatever else. So. Right, right. I know we're getting close to the end of our time, but I think one of the biggest things that our audience struggles with, and this is probably the same across most B2B sales, is having these meetings. And oftentimes we're getting our clients these meetings.
But it's unrealistic that somebody is going to have a meeting with you and then give you a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars or whatever it is. Right. It's going to be, there's people that are problem aware, uh, but not solution aware yet, there's people that are interested in curious and looking to scan what's out there. So some of this ties into the offer itself, which might be above the pay grade of, of a lot of salespeople, but how are the lead salespeople you've worked with creating that, that urgency or else.
figuring out an offer that allows people to get started sooner rather than later, if that makes sense. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I guess like this is something which I would have been exposed to and done a lot at Salesforce. So I just know at Salesforce, CRM business is probably what most people know them as. Salesforce itself has 46 different solutions. There is a ton of things that they can do for your business. And what the great salespeople do is,
Paul M. Caffrey (43:19.318)
They focus on the outcomes that they're working towards. They hone in on compelling events. They look at, well, what is pain? And they'll extrapolate that a little bit. And they'll get to a position of going right. They'll make a call early. And I've done this many times and the call is this. From my first couple of calls, is this going to be a land and expand? Is this a case of we want to get this business on to just...
a small part of our solution because we'll get this really big quick win. And then we can then continue on work with the customer and then the budget becomes available or there's a milestone that they're working towards or the compelling event for the big value problem isn't until later in the year, but we can solve something smaller now. And then it's, you know, so that is you make that decision, whether I'm going to go for this or that, and then you close out that sale or you don't. And then the other piece that you look at is or no.
We're going to do a complete solution. We're going to take a step back, work a six month sales process. We're going to get the right people in on both sides and do this properly. And what the elite salespeople are doing is they will do that intentionally. They won't let the customer, doesn't dictate that they decide that because of what they've seen. And they stick to that. And then they work it through. And it's remarkable. And sometimes that can be down to...
you know, someone's down to comp plans, for example, how you might, how things are sometimes run. You know, other, some organizations don't let salespeople hold onto accounts. They, you know, let's say they sign them and then they've got to hand them over to someone else. So maybe that changes a little bit in that situation. Or if you're an industry, if you're, you know, an agency owner, maybe you need to get some revenue in because your business needs fuel. So you guys, that's just not a fit for me right now. But if you don't, you will probably, what you tend to find is
If you run that sales cycle longer, you get the right people involved in both sides, you will capture most value and then you will bring most revenue versus if you're trying to pull a problem forward, you'll capture a little bit less value, a little bit less revenue, but then probably still have to deliver on that big thing. So it really is a judgment call, but elite sales professionals qualify well and are intentional in the action they take. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of power in
Paul M. Caffrey (45:45.462)
doing that and holding your ground and saying, no, this is how we start with, with everyone, or this is how we need to start with you, even if you want to give us more money. So I think that's important. And it's down to that person being successful and the outcome that they're looking for. You'll have that feel for, they'll be more successful if we bring them onto our whole platform now, or they'll be more successful if they get this quick win now or whatever. So again, it's putting the outcome first for the prospect.
Yeah, that makes sense. And Paul, I probably have another hour's worth of questions. So hopefully we can do a follow up at some point. But but for now, where can people go to pick up the book and learn more about what you're up to? Yeah, I'd love to shout again, Dan. If you go to paulcaffrey.com forward slash sales dash schema, there's three copies of the book up for grabs for listeners. So go there and pick yourself up a copy. Other than that, Amazon Audible.
all the usual places and thanks very much for having me on. Awesome, thank you sir, appreciate it.
