Sales Training That Feels Natural: Learn a Better Way to Sell

1. Welcome to Your Sales Training Journey: Hey, and welcome to Sales Solved. I'm Mart Harrison, and if you can't tell, I'm a little excited. I'm excited to be bringing you this course because I do love sharing the knowledge and the experience that I've accumulated over the past 25 years, but I'm even more excited for you because I've been exactly where you are right now, looking for an edge, wanting to become a better seller to succeed more in my opportunities and in my career. And I know that this course is going to give you the tools you need. This course is going to be so valuable to you. It's going to be valuable to your prospects, your customers, and your career as a whole. And the reason I know that is because everything you're about to learn are things that I've experienced and done for the past 20 or 25 years and things that I've learned from the world's best sales coaches, consultants, and trainers. You see, I've been a founder. And as a founder, I was selling, and I was quite successful selling six to seven figure deals to some of the largest organizations in the world. I was successful sometimes in an unconventional way. I didn't follow a set methodology for most of my career. I was just curious. I just genuinely cared about the people I was meeting, about their business, about their goals personally and professionally, and I found a way to connect whatever I was selling to their own ambitions. And then, when we raised about $20 million in my last business, we wanted to bring in the best coaches, consultants, and trainers to train the entire team, to build to replicate what we were doing as founders, but in a much larger scale. And what really excited me and what really clicked, is what these trainers were teaching was actually really similar to what I was fundamentally doing instinctually. Now, it cost me about $150,000 to bring in one of these trainers. And I know that none of you have $150,000 just laying around. If you do, you know, DM let's talk. Maybe you can do something else with that money. But I assume you don't have it. And you're not able to bring in one of these coaches or trainers to train you personally. And I would also guess that most of you don't work at a high tech, high growth company that has just raised $20 million and is about to bring one of these groups in. If you do, fantastic, this course will still add value. It'll either be a great warm up to whatever they're going to teach you or a great refresher on some of the concepts that they teach. I always tell people, if you have the opportunity, take their courses. They're usually a week or so in depth. I can't go as in depth as they do. I can't do team role plays or breakout rooms. But what I've done is I've taken the core learnings. Everything that I found had meaningful impact on the deals I was working on, on how I prepared for or executed meetings, and I condensed it into the easiest possible framework, the solved framework. That's what we're going to cover in this course. Now, this is a no fluff, no nonsense course. As I said, I can't go into an insane amount of detail or role playing for every topic. But what I can do is bring you tangible, actionable things that you can choose to apply or not apply. This is a standalone course that is meant to bring value to every single person that takes it. And the course is built around the idea that the best way you can sell is, yes, to have some techniques and tactics, but it's to be authentic and to be authentically curious. So as you go through the course, keep an open mind. I'm going to teach you a lot of different things from the questions you should be asking your customers to how to organize your notes, how to follow up after meetings, or plan for meetings, how to use agendas to your advantage, and a lot of other things. But I want you to try everything and only keep the bits that work for you. Not every topic, not every lesson is going to work or be applicable to every person. You're all selling different products. You're working in different industries. So what I want you to do is to have an open mind, to be curious because that's an important part of this, and to try out the different techniques and tactics. If they work for you, find a way to incorporate them into your existing playbook. And if they don't, it's okay to just forget them. Not your manager. I don't care if you take the same notes that I tell you to take. I don't care whether or not you actually update your CRM with this information. What I care about is that you have access to the same information that my teams had, that I had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring in house and the things that I learned over the past 25 years. So this course is built to be simple, to be actionable, and to be optional. Apply what works for you that allows you to remain authentic and to add value to everyone you interact with and forget the rest. And that's it. We're ready to jump into the course. I am so excited to see the impact this brings to you and to your opportunities, but until then, welcome. And let's get into sales solved. 2. Why Customer-Centric Sales Skills Matter: Fundamental layer of all of this course and every course that I've ever been through that has been meaningful and impactful to me has been the concept of being customer centric. Being customer centric means putting your customer at the center of everything you do, every question you ask, every meeting you have, making sure that it's rooted in what matters to them, not just what matters to you. So when we're talking about setting a foundation and being customer centric, there are really three key things to think about. Number one, is understanding your customer's needs and their goals. Number two is building trust. And number three is knowing that being customer eccentric doesn't mean doing whatever your customer wants or saying whatever you believe they want to hear. It's about being a genuine partner. So let's start with number one. The key to being customer eccentric means actually caring, being curious, asking questions, and making sure that you understand the business that you're selling into. Every business has one of two or three goals. They want to grow revenue. They want to reduce costs, and in some cases, they need to operate within some regulated environment. So starting your understanding of each and every prospect and opportunity by understanding what they're trying to achieve is essential. Then it's about understanding how they're going to achieve that. What are their strategies? What are their business objectives that they're going to take on this month, this quarter, this year in order to achieve that organizational goal? And often when you're talking to an individual team, if you're not talking to the CEO or the CFO, it's about understanding what they're personally responsible for in terms of that broader so your job is to actually dig in to have them tell you what they're trying to achieve both personally and professionally when it comes to their goals. Then you can start understanding the obstacles that they face. What are the problems that are preventing them from succeeding in those cools? What's the landscape? Who are the people, the processes and the technology that may be hindering their ability to achieve that? You can take that approach and understand it from their perspective, then you can start positioning yourself, your solution, your service as the key to their success. And that leads us to number two, building trust with your customers. Building trust doesn't come from talking about the features you have. Trust comes from them genuinely believing that everything you're doing is in their interest. The reason you're asking so many questions is because you're taking that information in. You're not just doing it to fill out a worksheet. You're doing it because you're going to use that information to make recommendations to them. Going to use it to provide options or solutions that are going to best fit their needs. That's how you build trust. You also build trust by using their language, by understanding how they see the world, how they talk about the world, and repeating it back to them in ways that are familiar to them. Real trust comes from experience and from delivering value. Think about your friends, your family, your relationships. If someone just walked up to you and said, Hey, trust me, immediately, I'm not going to trust that person. But if someone is always there, if they are thoughtful, if they know things about me, and they bring value, if they recommend an article because they know I have an interest in an area, if they tell me, Hey, I can't help you, but you should talk to someone else about this problem, that is all building trust. I now know that this person understands me that they have my best interests at heart, and that I can go to them with any problem because I'm getting unbiased, meaningful advice from them. The same applies in business. If you are customer centric, if you are genuinely out to serve the people you are working with and deliver value, then you are building the type of trust that will make them want to work with you now and over and over again in the future. And that brings us to our third topic. And that is that being customer centric is knowing when to say no and knowing that you don't just have to say what you think the customer wants to hear. You have to genuinely bring authentic, meaningful advice, opinions, options to them. One of the most impactful things that I learned early on in my career is that when I said no to a customer, when I said, we're not the right product for you, I think we're too expensive. You should look at these other options. I don't think this is going to help you achieve your goals. All of those statements actually build trust and credibility. More often than not, when I initially said no to an ask, to a change, to something that I just genuinely knew I couldn't provide for a customer, they ended up coming back to me and buying from me because they knew that I was genuinely thinking about them and what was right for them. So being customer centric doesn't mean saying how high when they say jump. It means being a partner, being someone who is genuinely trying to help their business grow or help them achieve their goals. So those are the three core aspects of being genuinely customer centric. I want you to keep those in mind. I want you to ask yourself with my existing opportunities or the next opportunity that comes across my desk, do I understand what they're ultimately trying to achieve, or do I just understand the features or the problem that they're currently facing? It's the latter, dig in a little deeper. See if you can get them to tell you about why that problem is important to them, why that problem is impacting their ability to achieve their goals, and see what difference that makes in your conversations. Now, I'm going to give you the techniques and the tactics to actually draw that information out in the later lessons. But if you're stopping now, you're taking a break. Maybe you'll come back to this course in a few days, try it out. It could be in a conversation with your spouse, your manager or your next opportunity. Just see if you can go a little bit deeper and understand what that is preventing them from achieving. Alright, let's hop into the next lesson. Actually, if you want, you can skip the next lesson. Because what I'm gonna do in the next one is just talk a little bit about myself. We're obviously spending a lot of time together, and you might be curious. Who the heck is this guy? Who is Art? Why does he have all this information? What was it like being a founder? I'll tell you a little bit about myself in the next lesson. If you want to hear it, great, have a listen. If not, just skip over to the next one and get right into actionable things that you can use for your career and your opportunities. 3. Meet Your Instructor (Optional): Hey, so as promised, this lesson or this video is really just a little bit more about me, that you understand who your instructor is and the experience that I have that has led me to creating this course for you. So, as I've said before, my name is Art Harrison. I'm probably best known as a founder. I've been a founder twice in my career. In my 20s, I founded social networks. Before the days of Facebook, I built social networks with over 1 million members, and I built them as a software engineer, as a marketer, and as a salesperson selling ads and other content. Later on in my career, I became the founder of a company called Daylight automation. We started out as form hero and were rebranded as Daylight after we raised our series A. We grew that business from just myself and a partner, just two people to over 100 people. Now, I'm not going to tell you everything was perfectly smooth. There were ups and downs, but all in all, it was incredibly successful business, and we were acquired in 2023 by an international software company. It was a fantastic learning experience because we were up against some of the biggest names in technology, but we won national RFPs for large banking and insurance companies because our technology was good, yeah, but we sold it before it was even finished. And what we did that was different than most people was we genuinely cared. We differentiated ourselves because we were personal, because we were curious, because we were customer centric. Between those stints as a founder, I've been a software developer. I've been a sales engineer, I've been a trainer. I've been a VP of marketing, a VP of product marketing, and a chief growth officer. So I've basically done every go to market role and even some of the back office roles. I've also been a buyer, as an executive, as a founder, and I've done it all very unconventional. The underlying thing about me is that I'm just this same guy, no matter who I'm talking to. So one of the lessons that I've learned and the things that I'm most proud of is that when I'm authentic, when I'm just me, I can connect with just about anybody. And when I'm connecting with people and when I'm genuinely curious about them, I tend to succeed. And that's what I do now. I I create content to share the knowledge that I have about being authentic, about being creative, being a creative thinker, about selling, marketing, building, about just getting things done, because that's what I'm passionate about. I love building new things. I love helping people become better, and I do that full time now. I'm a dad. I got two kids. I live in Toronto, Canada, and I'm very, very accessible. One of the things that I really love doing is just randomly posting my calendar link on LinkedIn or on other platforms and letting people book time with me, not to sell them anything. Usually, there's nothing that I'm selling, and most people I talked to have no direct relevance to whatever it is that I'm currently working on. But meeting with people, just learning from them, being curious about what they're doing. I've had calls where people had just wanted to practice pitching on me. I've had calls with people's children who were thinking about getting into software. I've had calls about being a founder, calls about being a dad. I just genuinely love connecting with people. What else can I tell you about me? Is that I love to talk. You may notice that. That's why this is a kind of natural extension of what I'm doing these days is just talking. And I love to have fun. So throughout this course, wherever I can, I may throw on a joke here or there. I may share some of the wacky videos that I've made for the marketing initiatives I've done in the past or some of the creative things I've done to get in the door as a salesperson. But I just love trying new things, and some of them fail terribly. And that is, I think, the other thing that I want you to know about me is that I am someone that loves to experiment. I'm not going to say that I'm going to teach you things to fail here, but I'm going to encourage you to fail. Because if you're not failing, you're probably not trying enough things. You're just doing the few things that you've done that have worked before, but nothing is going to work for forever. So I am someone that really believes in experimenting in having fun, in relishing failure because failure means an opportunity to learn. And that's something that I hope will come across in all the lessons that I teach you throughout this course. That's about it. As I said, if you want to know more about me, find me on LinkedIn. Find me on this platform, find me anywhere. Reach out, and let's connect. And we'll get to know each other a little more, one on one, little more personally. I'd love to actually listen. So one thing I don't get to do in these courses is listen, and I do love to listen. Alright, that's it for me. Let's hop back into the course, into our next lesson and get you some actionable things that you can start using to advance your opportunities. 4. Introducing the SOLVED Sales Framework: A, it's time to actually introduce you to the Sol framework. That's what this course is called. That's what this course is about, and it's the tool that you'll use throughout the course and throughout all of your opportunities to get a holistic view of your customers and what matters to them. The Sol framework was built to be absolutely simple to use. I use it in a notebook. I'll provide some worksheets that you can use as well, but there's no right or wrong way to use it. It's really just an acronym that ensures that you are capturing the right information about every single opportunity you have. And the acronym serves as a reminder, a reminder to dive into each of these areas to make sure that you actually have a complete picture of your customers. What is the acronym? Well, it's solved. It's six letters. Each letter represents another area of conversation of discovery and understanding. S stands for strategy. Strategy is about understanding the goals and the strategic initiatives your customers are using to achieve their goals. It's really a reminder to understand the bigger picture items that are driving them to make a change. These are the things that will get funded. These are the high profile strategic initiatives that your customers are going to use to achieve the goals they have for themselves, their team, and their organization. O stands for obstacles. These are the obstacles or the problems that your customers are likely facing or are going to face when trying to implement their strategy. Their strategy isn't something you can solve for directly. That's their plan. It's their goal. Now, the obstacles are things that you want to uncover because they are things that you can solve for. But you don't want to be seen as just a solution to that obstacle. You want to be seen as an essential part of their strategy. To do that, you need to understand both. L stands for landscape. Now, landscape is an important part of your overall understanding of them and how you're going to structure the deal or the solution for your customer. The landscape may be the technologies that they have in house, maybe the other options they have to solve their problem or the other tools or people or processes they're going to be using to achieve their strategy. Might also be the internal players, the landscape of their organization, and how decisions are made. Landscape really helps you get a clear understanding of what it's going to take to build a solution with your customer. Stands for value. And value is split into two areas. There is professional value, and there is personal value. In professional value, it's about quantifying what solving their problem and achieving their strategy is going to mean to them. If they can overcome this problem and they're successful in their strategy, how much revenue will that equal? How much time savings or cost savings will it create for their organization? So quantifying the value helps you understand just how meaningful this is to them and how motivated they're going to be to find a solution. Personal value, which is another aspect of value, is also important, but it's a little trickier to come across. It's about understanding what's going to mean to that person personally if they can overcome this problem. Is it going to lead to a promotion? Is it going to let them go home earlier at night? Is it going to give them the credibility and respect they want within the industry? It's what's going to motivate them to go through the hard work. And, believe me, as a buyer, it's hard work to buy something. There is a lot of corralling. You are putting your neck on the line because if it fails, everyone's going to remember it was you that brought it into the organization. So understanding how motivated they are and what motivates them, what is the value they're going to get from succeeding is essential. E stands for engagement. It's about understanding how they want to be engaged. What is the pace? What are the key meetings? Who are the players? It's about really understanding how they want to buy. Because ultimately as much as you have a sales process, you might even have a process map or a playbook, they're the ones buying from you. You need to understand how they want to be engaged in order to build that type of trust and confidence that we talked about earlier. Finally, D is for decision. This is about understanding when and how and who is going to be involved in making the decision. You want to be able to time box the problems and the goals so that you can build a workback schedule where you are engaging the right people, that you are meeting all of the correct milestones, and that you are ultimately getting to the yes decision that you so desperately want, I'm sure. Don't come across as desperate, but we all want that very desperately. So that's what solved is strategy, obstacles, landscape, value, engagement, and decision. And when you put those together, all that it's meant to do is drive the conversations you're having with your customer, build an understanding of each one of those categories. And solved as a framework can simply be written in a notebook. I tend to write it vertically down a page and just take notes according to each letter. And it's a reminder to me and to you that if I don't have anything for S, then I need to go back to that customer and really understand their strategy. I haven't captured anything around decision, maybe I need to have a conversation with them about who needs to be involved, who has the authority to buy this. So solved is more of a guide. It's not steps you have to take. It's not a checklist. It's really just a prompt for you to make sure that when you're asking questions, when you're having conversations that you're capturing a holistic view of your customer. As we go through the course, we're going to dig into each letter individually and go through some examples and some case studies of how you can ask the right questions and what you can do with the information or what to do when they won't give you that information. We're going to look at how you can apply the solve framework to any opportunity. But before we do that, the next few lessons are going to be about questions you can use, tools that you can have in your arsenal to actually get people to open up on these topics. How do you get someone to share what their strategy is or to uncover other potential obstacles or strategies or value so that you're getting as much information as possible in a natural, authentic way. So let's hop to the next lesson where we'll look at effective question types and techniques. See you there. 5. Sales Techniques – The Power of Smart Questions: You made it this far. That's fantastic. So now we get to dive into some of the tactical things. And in this lesson, we're going to talk about effective questioning, how to use the right types of questions at the right time to get customers to share more information with you, to open up about what really matters to them, even when they're kind of reluctant to do so. I want to start by saying, don't just walk into a meeting and blurt out every question that you can think of. To build trust and to be customer centric means that you have to find ways to do this in a way that is valuable to your customer. So for me, I tend to be upfront and say, Hey, listen, this is who I am. I ask a lot of questions. And the reason that I ask these questions is to understand you better, to understand if I can help you, how I can best help you, and to make sure that everything that we do from this point going forward is going to be relevant and tailored to you and your specific needs. By saying that, I'm setting a foundation. I'm setting a base. I'm setting expectations in the relationship that yeah, I'm going to ask you questions, but I'm not just doing it because I'm trying to gauge how much to charge you or to qualify you in or out or do some typical sales thing. I'm genuinely trying to understand you and to use it to maximize our time and to minimize the wasted time that goes into a lot of sales meetings. So the way I do that is I have three types of questions that I ask in every single meeting that I'm in, and I use them interchangeably. We're going to go through them one at a time, but it's not a linear thing. You don't do all of one type and all of another type. You use them in various ways in combinations to get more information about a topic or to find new topics. There are really three key types of questions that I'm going to teach you about in this course. Number one, are expanding questions. Expanding questions are really open ended. They're meant to get your customer to share more information. Typically, expanding questions start with how, why and what, and you use them to really get them to expand on a topic. For example, what are your goals for this year? Why is that a problem for you? How do you plan on achieving that goal? All of those allow the customer to then share more information to elaborate, to expand on a topic. The second type of questions are initiating questions. And I know that sounds a little confusing. You know, if you're putting together course, you might think initiating comes before expanding, but initiating are usually to initiate a secondary or a third line of questioning. They're about initiating a new avenue when you've exhausted the topic you already have. So initiating questions are usually things that will result in a yes or no answer. So it's not a detailed open ended question, it's an opportunity to uncover a new area that you might want to expand upon. Example, are you concerned about the increased costs you're seeing across your organization? If they say yes, then you might ask an expanding question to say, What are the areas where costs are really expanding? Or how do you plan on overcoming that? But you initiated a new line of questioning. And if you get a no, that's great, too, because it means, well, that's not important to them. Even if I had a bunch of material and insights on that topic, if they say, No, that's not of interest to me, I'm just going to let that go. I'm not going to force a conversation to be about something that doesn't matter to my customer. So initiating questions are really about uncovering a new area that you want to expand upon. And the third type is one that I use a little more sparingly. I call them provocative questions. Provocative questions, they introduce a little bit of drama or conflict in a conversation. So you don't want to use them too often because, again, we're trying to be customer centric and trying to build trust. But a provocative question can be really helpful when you're dealing with a prospect or a customer that doesn't want to share information. A provocative question is meant to provoke a response from them even when they don't want to give one. So an example might be when a customer says, I don't want to tell you or I don't have any strategies or any problems, then I might use a provocative question, like, are you concerned that you're going to be overlooked for a promotion if you don't achieve some goal? Or are you certain that there is no way that your strategy will be impacted this year? Those type of questions are provocative because they're either going to say, Yes, I'm certain and really put themselves in a spot where they're now kind of at risk, or they're going to be forced to answer a little bit and open up a little bit more information. So provocative questions can be an important tool when needed, but they should also be used very sparingly. That's really just a quick overview of the three types of questions we're going to cover in the next three lessons. We're going to go in depth into each one. We're going to look at expanding questions, initiating and provocative questions and make sure that you understand when to use them, how to use them, and what their intent is. But the key aspect of all of these questions is that you can use them interchangeably within the soul framework. So when you're trying to understand the value you'll know when to expand on the value that they see for a particular initiative. You'll know how to initiate potential new avenues of value. And if needed, you'll know how to use provocative questions to uncover more value. The same applies for any of the other letters in the solved acronym, whether it's strategy, obstacles, landscape, engagement, decision, or value, as I discussed, you can use these heaps of questions to make sure you're getting the complete understanding and the complete picture of your customers. Alright, with that, let's jump into the lesson on expanding questions so you can really see how powerful they are and how you can use them in every conversation. 6. xpanding Sales Questions (Part 1): Uncover Customer Insights: Let's get into it. Now we can talk about expanding questions in detail. As I mentioned before, expanding questions are all about getting your customers to open up to share information in their own words about their challenges, their goals, their strategies, about their value, how they want to be engaged. Any of the topics that are the center of the solve framework. Expanding questions are really the heart of your understanding of what matters to your customers. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about the purpose of those expanding questions. We're going to give some examples of expanding questions and even a little bit of a role play just so you can see how I would use them. Going to talk about how to use those in a conversation flow and how they would be mixed with the initiating and the provocative questions. We'll talk about ways you can start practicing how to use these hepsa questions, not just in your sales opportunities, but in your daily life to drive conversations to a deeper level. And we're going to wrap up by talking about how you can confirm your understanding, build trust, and encourage your prospects, your customers, or whoever you're talking to to share even more insights. The purpose of expanding questions is really just that. It's to expand. It's the center of every conversation. If you're being customer centric, if you're trying to create a holistic understanding of their world, of what matters to them, then you need them to tell it to you. You can't walk into a meeting and tell them that you know everything about their business, their needs, their problems. No one is going to believe you because you're not living their life. So expanding questions are the way to get customers to tell you what matters to them. When done right, expanding questions are part of the trust building exercise between you and your prospects. They're an opportunity for them to talk, and most people love to talk. But when they're done wrong, they can feel like a root canal. They can feel like an interrogation. So there is an art to using these questions effectively. I mentioned it in the overview, but I tend to start conversations by explaining why I'm going to ask so many questions. I don't want someone to feel that I am going through a playbook or my typical sales process. I want people to know that I'm genuinely curious about their business. I want them to know that I'm going to ask these questions, not just to meet some internal needs of my own. But to make sure that I'm a good fit for them, to make sure that I can bring them value, to make sure I can help them, or for me to be able to quickly tell them somewhere else where they might be able to solve their problem even better than what I could do. And so by setting that foundation, I'm opening the door for a real conversation for someone to want to share information because they know in return, they're going to get my insights. I think we all prefer that in real life. You don't want someone coming in and just asking you a bunch of questions then walking away and not doing anything with it. You don't want someone badgering you with questions when you just want to be left alone. So you have to find a real balance between the number of questions you ask, how you address them, and what you're actually doing with the information that you capture. Terms of examples of expanded questions, as I said before, there's really three core areas, and you can obviously word questions differently. But typically, or at least the easiest way to understand it is to think about the open ended style questions. How, what and why. Each of those questions don't have a defined answer. You don't ask someone, how are you planning on doing this and have them say yes or no or seven. Each of those questions is really an open ended question that is meant to allow the other person to share information. Now, let's look at a couple examples of expanding questions. I'm going to use insurance because it's an area that I'm familiar with, but even if it's not an area that you've sold into, don't worry about it. I'm just going to give you some examples of customers that I've spoken with throughout this course, and I'll try to give you enough information so that you can follow along and see how you could apply the same type of principles to whoever it is that you're talking to. So, using insurance, let's pretend that we're talking to a VP of member enrollment. These are the people that are responsible for how many new members their business signs up, how many new people are being insured. They may be individuals that are buying insurance for themselves, or maybe it's an organization that sells group policies like the type you get through your employer, and they're signing up organizations that bring in thousands or tens of thousands of members at a time. Now, if I've done my research, and always I do research before I go into a meeting, maybe I know that they're number two in the market or they're seeing memberships decline, or I may know a few other pieces about their business that I want to understand more about from their perspective, as opposed to whatever I've read in their annual report or in some interview. So in that context, I may walk into the meeting after giving my preamble, explaining why I'm going to ask a lot of questions. I may ask them some starter expanding questions like, I understand that your memberships have been declining. Why do you think that is? Or I may start off even broader and say, Hey, I'm just curious to know what are your goals for this quarter or this year? Or I may try to attach to their broader corporate goals that I've read in their annual report. In that case, I may say something like, I understand that your organization is trying to hit profitability this year. What are you doing on your team to contribute to that goal? Each of those are expanding questions. They're really starting a conversation and allowing the customer to start sharing what they care about, what they're working on, what their initiatives are. But I don't just stop with that one question. When they reveal information about their goals, their strategy, their problems, I'm going to keep trying to get them to expand upon it so that I can learn as much as possible and really get to a problem or a goal that I believe my organization is well suited to solve. For example, using the previous conversation, if I had asked them what they're doing to contribute to their corporate goals and the person I was speaking with said that they are planning to launch a new onboarding initiative, making it easier for both individuals and organizations to sign up for their products, I'm not just going to stop there. I'm going to ask more expanding questions about that particular initiative. For example, I might say, Well, what would a great onboarding experience look like? Or how is your onboarding experience going to differentiate from your competitors? Or maybe what problems is this new onboarding experience going to overcome from your existing one? Each of those are really my attempt to dig in deeper to not just understand the superficial objective or strategy or initiative, but to really understand deeply what they're trying to do, how they're going to do it, and the problems they might face. No, when it comes to actually asking these questions, the goal of expanding questions is to basically get to exhaustion on a particular topic. So in our example, we're starting to talk about this new onboarding experience, and I'll continue to ask expanding questions until I see the customer either growing frustrated with a number of questions that I'm asking or until they get to the point where they say, Well, there's really nothing else that I'm concerned about. That's okay, because in a natural conversation flow, you're typically bouncing between expanding and initiating questions back and forth. So when we do reach the conclusion of one area, I might ask an initiating question at that point, and we're going to go deeper into that, but just briefly, I might say something like, aside from onboarding, are there other initiatives that you have planned that will help your memberships grow? They might say yes to that. And if so, I might say, Well, what are those? How do those work alongside onboarding? But what I've effectively done is I opened a new area of conversation that I can then expand upon. And that's really what expanding questions are about. They're about finding ways to have your customer share more and more information. But it's also about balancing it in a natural way. 7. Expanding Sales Questions (Part 2): Putting Them into Action: One of the things that I want you to all take into account as you go through this course, these lessons on the solve framework and on questioning is that no sale or very few sales happen in one conversation. So it is absolutely okay to stop it at a natural point and come back to it at a later date. Example, when you think about the Sol framework, if I'm actually selling to a VP of member enrollment at a large insurance company, I'm not going to answer every letter in my acronym in one call. I'm not even going to get to every expanding question on their strategy or their obstacles in one call. Instead, it's a living document. I am building my knowledge over conversations with that person. I'm comparing notes as I talk to others on their team. Sometimes they may send me down to an end user. They may send me up to an executive, and in each of those conversations, I'm building the picture. I'm building my understanding. I'm using expanding questions to get different people to expand upon how they see the problems, what they see as the most effective solution, how they see the solution contributing to their goals. So it's okay for you to stop. I don't want to see any of you acting like a robot or blindly going in and just bombarding your customers with question after question relentlessly until they just want to get off the call with you. Instead, all of this needs to be balanced. You need to find the way that works for you. How much information is the right amount of information in a call? How quickly do you need to offer value in return so that they're willing to take the next meeting or provide more information? The delicate balance that is sales. It's knowing how to read people, and it's using all of these tools in the right way, the right combination, the right sequence to actually get the results that you and your customers want. Now, one of the things I love to do is use expanding and initiating questions in my daily life just to practice because it actually brings value to any conversation. It's not just a sales technique. These questions can be used in job interviews. They can be used with your children, your spouse. They can be used when selling. They can be used when managing honestly, anywhere that you're having conversations, you should be using different types of questions and trying to get a better understanding of the people you're talking to. So that's an assignment that you can take on after this lesson. And that is try getting people to expand more practice asking more expanding questions on your next date, with your kids, you know, with your peers in the lunchroom, wherever it is, ask more open ended questions, and listen if you have to, even use a provocative question. I'll tell you an example just for my personal life. I have two children, and for any of you that have kids, you know that asking them over dinner, what happened at school often gets you very little information. Even if something massive happened, you tend to find out about it a day, a week, a month later. They don't always offer that information up. You say, how was your day? It was good. That's where you have the opportunity to ask one of these quests type to get them to expand more. You might ask them. So what do you think was the most impactful thing that you learned today? Or I saw you walking home with someone different today. Why did you walk with them as opposed to your normal friends? Right there, you've changed the dynamic. You didn't just say, how was it? Good. You've asked them to share more information. Now, if they don't open up, it's an opportunity to maybe even use the provocative questions that will cover a couple lessons from now. With my kids, I use this all the time. Don't tell them. But I might say something like, I'm having dinner with Timmy's m this evening. And if I were to ask her what Timmy's been saying about your walks home, would he also say that nothing interesting happened whatsoever? Now, that is a little provocative. The kid now may feel obligated to share a little more information because now they're worried that there's going to be conflicting information when I have another conversation. And you'll see how you can apply that to the sales context later on by asking someone, Oh, I'm meeting with your boss. Are they also going to say that you have the complete authority to do this or that there'll be no repercussions if this isn't successful? It's a provocative question, but now you've created a new area where they may share some information and that you can expand upon. The final topic when it comes to expanding questions is really another question type. It's not one that I have a dedicated lesson for, but I find it incredibly useful, and I think it's something that a lot of us do naturally and instinctually, so I didn't make a lesson on it, but I will address it briefly right now. And that is the concept of confirming questions. One of the things when it comes to expanding questions is you are putting a lot of burden on your customers. Sometimes they love it because it gives them the opportunity to talk. And like me, a lot of executives love to talk. But if they don't feel that you're actually doing anything with the information, their motivation to share will quickly diminish. Confirmation questions are your opportunity to demonstrate that you're listening and understanding what they're telling you. Confirmation questions are really your opportunity to restate what you're hearing, to demonstrate that you're understanding it, and that you're understanding it correctly. So after someone shares one or two or any number of expanding answers and they provided you a lot of information, it's essential that you confirm that you're understanding correctly. So in the case of the insurer, I might say, so I just want to confirm you're trying to grow your memberships in order to help your company achieve profitability this year. And to do this, you're planning on launching both a new member initiative and reducing the amount of time it takes to open new accounts because you believe that'll make a large impact on the number of memberships you enroll each quarter. Is that correct? So by simply stating it back to them and using the language they're familiar with, you're instinctually and inherently demonstrating that you are listening, that you are understanding. And you may even take it a little further if you want. You can not only confirm it, but you can actually state what you're going to do with the information. And the real point of doing this is, as I said, to build trust, to demonstrate that you are listening and understanding, but it's also for you. You don't want to walk away from that meeting with a misunderstanding. So use confirming questions as an opportunity to actually confirm that you've heard them correctly, because then you know that the notes you're taking, the options or the strategy or the solution you're going to present to them in the future is rooted in the truth that you have genuinely understood what they are trying to convey to you. And that is the lesson on expanding questions. I really do recommend, and I'm going to call this an assignment, even though it's not an official assignment for the course, but I recommend that you start applying expanding questions in your daily life. See if you can get everyone you talk to over the next few days to share a little bit more information. Ask them how, why, and what questions and listen and then confirm what you're hearing. I don't know exactly what you're going to do with the information, but as a practice, it's great to start seeing how to work those naturally into any conversation so that it becomes second nature for you when you're in a sales conversation. Next up, we're going to dive into initiating questions. And as you saw in this lesson, it'll be a little back and forth because no one question type is used independently. You are initiating lines of conversation and then expanding upon them. And then once you've exhausted an area of conversation, you try to initiate a new one. But we're going to look at how to use those initiating questions and go a little deeper in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 8. Initiating Questions: How to Create New Sales Opportunities: Hey, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to dive into the initiating questions. Now, it may sound a little repetitive because I did talk about them quite a bit in the last lesson, but I think it's important to have a dedicated lesson on this type of question because they are an essential part of your arsenal, your questioning arsenal, your ways of getting more information and uncovering more avenues of conversation with each and every prospect that you talk to. And I say prospect, but when I say prospect, I also mean customer, manager, executive, anybody. So, initiated questions, as I've said before, are really yes or no questions. The name implies that it's the start of the conversation, but it's really the start of a new line of questioning. Initiating questions are questions that have a yes or no answer. So they're not the how what and why that expanding questions are, but instead, they're a little different. They're questions that are things like are you concerned with or have you ever or are you thinking about? These are the types of questions you'll use to guide the next line of questioning in your conversation. So we're going to go back to the insurer example that I was using before. When I'm speaking to that insurer, after we've talked about the new portal or the new member registration that they want to implement, I might look for a brand new avenue of conversation. Now, I'm assuming that there is room in the conversation for this that we're not running short on time or that I haven't overwhelmed them with my questions already. But if it's the right time, I'll look for another avenue. It may be totally unrelated to what we've been talking about in the past. I might say, Well, that's great. I'm glad we talked about your new member initiatives. But are you also concerned about the rate your team is adopting new technologies? Or are you concerned about the shrinking budgets that we're seeing across the industry? Those are initiating questions. They allow me or you to understand if another area is of interest to your customer. Because the ideal scenario for you and for anybody that's selling is to get as much information. When you're being customer centric, you're not going in and saying, I have a widget and I want you to buy a widget. You're going into them and saying, I want to understand what you're trying to accomplish. Once I understand that, I will come back to you and be able to tell you if my widget can help you achieve that goal. In order to do that, you need as much information because the first thing they tell you might be top of mind, but it might actually be the smallest problem or the smallest strategic initiative that they have, and there might be something even bigger and even better suited for your offering that you're going to want to pivot the entire conversation and deal towards. So initiating questions are all about uncovering other areas that are relevant to your customer and ideally that are relevant to you. One of the best sources for initiating questions are previous conversations that you've had, and I really believe that sales is kind of a machine. The more conversations you have, particularly within the same industry, the more knowledge you have for the next conversation you have. So, for example, if I'm talking to an insurer, but I've spoken with ten before this month, I will likely have new initiating questions based off of the priorities, the problems, the goals, the value that I've uncovered in other conversations. And I'll use that insight, that information to craft new initiating questions in the future conversations. So as I said before, I might ask them if they're worried about technology adoption, about shrinking budgets. I might ask them what they're doing when it comes to member churn because I've heard a lot about that from other conversations. But I'll phrase it as an initiating question such as, are you concerned about member churn? Or are you finding customers are expecting new channels to engage with you, such as social media or chat bots? Those are all initiating questions, and they come from my existing knowledge of the industry or the problems that the person I'm speaking with likely faces. That is a bit of the challenge when it comes to initiating questions. It does require some insight and information on your part. That should be a goal you have regardless of this course, regardless of the question types that you're going to ask. You should want to become an expert in the industries that you're selling to. You don't have to be an expert in everything that they do, but being an expert in the common challenges that they may face or the goals they likely have allows you to ask more insightful, more relevant questions to each and every person you speak with. I think I mentioned this before, but a key aspect of initiating questions is to initiate conversations that are potentially relevant to what you do. There's no point in initiating lines of conversations for things you could never help with. For example, if I'm selling to that insurer and I'm trying to sell them some technology that helps with onboarding, there's no point in me initiating a new topic of conversation about employee retention. May be a problem that I've heard about. It may be a fine topic that they want to talk a ton about. But ultimately, I'm not going to do anything with the information they provide me. So I want to initiate areas of conversation that are at least somewhat related to things I might be able to solve for them. And that's really important for you to understand is that you could initiate a conversation about anything. You could initiate a conversation about their favorite sports team. Do you like tennis? Do you like baseball? Those are initiating questions, but the outcome and what they would expand upon when they got into that topic has no relevance to the reason that the two of you are meeting. So you want to initiate things that potentially lead to areas that you can solve, that you can add value, or that you can help them overcome or achieve some sort of strategic objective within. That is what initiating questions are all about. It's about opening lines of conversation related to things you might be able to help with and opening new areas of conversation that you can then ask expanding questions about. Together, expanding and initiating questions allow you to really, really learn about your prospects and your customers, your children, your spouse, anyone that you're talking with so that you can really get to understand what matters to them how significant the problem or the solution might be. And ultimately, in the ideal state, they identify something that you are perfectly suited to solve, so you can position yourself as the solution to all of their worries. That's how these questions come together. Now, in our next lesson, we're going to talk about provocative questions. The type of questions that you can use when you're in a bit of a challenging situation, when you're facing someone who doesn't want to tell you anything or is really guarded with the information they're willing to provide. Remember, these aren't quests you're going to want to use all the time, but it's still important that we talk about them and that I share with you examples of how you can use it and when to use it. So let's hop into the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 9. Provocative Questions: Challenge & Engage Clients: All right let's talk about provocative questions. As I've said, probably numerous times up until now, I don't always use provocative questions. I don't think that they are the best way to build a relationship with your ideal customers. Ideally, you're creating an environment where your customers want to share information, where they're in meetings with you because they are in search of solutions. They really believe you're there with their best interest in mind. But there are times where a lead comes in or a meeting is scheduled, and the person you're talking with is kind of jaded. They've been through this 1,000 times before, and they don't like to offer up new information because they feel that it's going to be used against them. In those cases, provocative questions are an important tool in your arsenal because it can help you get information from people even when they're reluctant to give it. As I said, use this sparingly because as soon as you introduce this type of conflict into a relationship, there is a little bit of degradation of trust because now they're worried that you're a bit of an adversary of theirs. So you can use it, but use it sparingly and be aware of the conflict and the issues that it can create when you use it too often or too soon in a relationship. Now, when I tend to use these is when I'm in the situation where someone just wants to see a demo or they don't want to provide any information. I hate being in those situations. I love giving demos, and I'm actually probably going to build a course later on about how to do effective demos because I believe in using the same framework, the sol framework to understand what my customers care about, what they're trying to achieve. And then I like to demo related to their business, as opposed to demoing related to my features or functionality. I'm in those situations all the time, where a customer doesn't want to see anything, they say, No, just tell me about yourself, tell me about your offering, let me see it, and then maybe I'll tell you information. And there's a time where you just have to say, Sure, let me do that because nothing's going to happen here. But more often than not, that's when I would use a provocative question. So a provocative question is meant to put them in a position where they are kind of forced to reveal a little bit more information. So how do we come up with these questions? Well, typically, these questions do come from prior knowledge. If you don't know anything about the industry, about the role, about the organization that you're speaking with, it's really hard to have a provocative question on hand. But if you do know information about them, about people in similar roles or about their organization, that's when you can craft provocative questions that will get them to open up a little bit more. Here's an example where I used a provocative question to get someone to open up to me when they really weren't interested in doing so. I was recently talking to a chief technology officer, and they didn't want to offer any information up. They've been through it 1,000 times before. They just wanted me to demo my product or show them what I did or tell them exactly how I was going to help them. And I didn't know anything about their business directly. I had done my research, but I didn't have any information from them about where I should tailor the demonstration. So I really felt that I needed to use a provocative question to get a little more insight out of them and to tailor what I would ultimately show them. And I would say that in this conversation, we had a 30 minute meeting booked. I knew that in order to keep the conversation going, I was going to have to show them a demo. They weren't going to have another meeting with me if I refused to demo and I just asked them questions over and over again and they didn't reveal anything. We would just hit a stalemate and they would no longer want to have anything to do with me. So I was going to do a demo, but I needed some more information from them before I did that demo so that I could at least tailor it to their needs. In their case, I used a provocative question to understand their concerns around budgeting. Question that I asked them was something along the lines of just to confirm, you're not at all concerned that your budget will be reduced if other teams start buying low code products that allow them to build solutions themselves. And so with a question like that, they had one of two choices. The CTO could either say, No, not concerned at all. And in which case, they're probably lying because everyone, every executive is always concerned about their budget and their mandate being reduced. Or they're kind of forced into a situation to at least reveal a little more information. Even if they're not concerned, they're going to explain why they're not concerned. No, I'm not concerned about that at all, because I know that those solutions are never as robust and scalable or easy to use as they claim to be. And that right there is an avenue that I can now speak to with the low code solution that I was actually selling. I now know what their belief is when it comes to these types of products, and I know that what I should be demoing is ease of use rather than some cool functionality or visualization. The flip side, if he had answered, Yeah, actually, I am a little concerned about that, you know, especially if these tools are able to deliver A, B, and C, I could see that actually being meaningful to those businesses. But what really concerns me is not them doing it or not my budget going down. It's the fact that I'm going to have to support all of these ad hoc solutions that these teams make and then don't know how to support for the next five or ten years. If he had gone that direction, that's a whole new avenue that I could either expand upon or that I could demonstrate in the demo that I was going to provide, because now I'd be talking about how my solution makes it really easy for them on the CTO and the technology side to have oversight on all of the different products that were going to be made with our low code solution by these individual lines of business. So just like that, I took someone that wasn't willing to offer a lot of information, and I got them to expand a little bit, either why they weren't concerned or why they were concerned. In the case of my actual conversation, he did describe the concern that he had. So it was an opportunity for me to say, Yeah, well, let me show you how we can actually help you and those lines of business. So it's a win win for everyone. And we actually built a better trust. They ended up becoming a customer of mine. And all of that came from a provocative question. It wasn't meant to actually cause problem. I just wanted to demonstrate that I actually did understand his industry. I understood the concerns that people in his role have, and I wanted to use the information he provided to better tailor the time we had together. So provocative questions can actually be part of a great relationship, part of that trust building, part of the knowledge demonstration, but you have to know how and when to use it. However, there are going to be times where expanding, initiating and provocative questions just don't open any avenues for conversation, and that's okay as well. What I do in those situations is pivot. I'm a big proponent of adapting. Not everyone is going to be the same, not every situation is going to be the same. I can't win every opportunity or every deal, but I can learn. When I really try every avenue, every angle I can to get a customer to share information, knowing that I'm only doing it to be able to help them better, if nothing works, I will pivot and I'll change. In one conversation, recently, I stopped after I had tried expanding, initiating and even a provocative question, and I just looked at the person and I said, Hey, listen, I understand you don't want to offer any information up about yourself or your team, and I get it. I've been in this situation before. I know that people tend to use that information against you or they're not even listening, they're just asking you questions. So rather than me just asking you more and more questions or jumping right into the demo or just ending this call, we're here. You obviously took this meeting. There must be a reason that you are interested in learning about new products or solutions. What were you hoping to get out of this conversation? And so even though I said that I wasn't going to ask any more questions, I was effectively asking them a new expanding question. It was a what question. What do you want out of our time together? What are your expectations? Why are you here? And that level of authenticity, that ability to just pivot and say, Hey, listen, I won't ask you specific questions, but there must be a reason you're here. Is it just because you have to meet with a certain number of vendors every month? And if so, great, let me know that. I won't spend a lot of time and waste a lot of time trying to follow up and chase you for the next three months. Or maybe there is something you're interested in. If so, tell me what it is, and we can work together to see if I can help you. That's your kind of last resort. If nothing else works, just be honest. Ask them what they want out of the meeting. It's another type of question, but it's just a change in how you present the question. So however you do it, all of these questions together, expanding, initiating, provocative, how you confirm the information you're hearing, they're all important parts of how you engage your customers and how you get them to share more information about their strategy, their obstacles, their landscape, their value, how they want to be engaged, and how decisions are made. They're all part of solved. That is the end of our effective questioning section. We're going to move into the actual solved framework in our next module, but next up is a quick quiz, an opportunity for you to make sure that you're understanding what the questions represent, what they're used for, and when you should use them. So take the quiz, and then I'll see you in the next module. 10. Setting Up Your Sales Workbook: Hey, welcome back. So now we get into the actual solved framework. And the way that I use the solve framework is by using the solved workbook. Solve framework, solve workbook. Obviously, they go together. This solve workbook is really a simple concept. It's not anything complex. It's something you can do with a notebook, like I have here. I have a rocket notebook that I like to use because I can scan the pictures in. You could use it in a regular line notebook, a scrap piece of paper, a napkin. You can use in one of the templates that I'll provide a PDF, an Excel document anywhere that is just going to be available and accessible to you when you're having conversations with your customers. And whether you're using one of the provided templates that I'll give you or whether you're just using your own notebook, setting up a workbook is the simplest thing that you'll ever do. So we'll do it together so that you can see how I do it. But honestly, you can do it any way that you like that works for you. It's not an essential part of the program. What's essential is the understanding, and it's diving in, asking questions and uncovering information about all these areas about your customers. The workbook is just a handy way to capture your notes and can become a really powerful way to share your notes with others on your team. I use a sale framework, I will actually provide it to any colleague that I have. I'll provide my notes to them using this framework so they can clearly understand the strategy, the obstacles, landscape value, engagement, and decision making criteria or contexts that I've uncovered in previous meetings. So whether they're marketing, helping build new content or material for that prospect or for future opportunities or there's someone on the sales engineering pre sale side, helping prepare for a demo or a meeting, they have the same contexts and the same broad understanding of the customers that I have. Anyway, the way that I do it is I simply write the word solved vertically on a piece of paper. So I use my notebook, and just down the side of it, I will write in big letters, and that is effectively setting up your workbook. Now, you can take it further. You know, you can really create sections and lines that clearly delineate each section, or you might even add a whoo column to the right hand side, so you can put initials. If you're having conversations with multiple stakeholders, you may want to capture that JD said this and AH said that. That way, when you're meeting with them later on or when you're thinking about how to engage different stakeholders, you'll remember specifically what they said and what their context of the opportunity was. Writing it down the page vertically, what you're doing is two things. Number one, you're creating a visual prompt for yourself. So when I'm having a conversation with anyone in the sales context, I'll be taking notes, and if they're telling me something about the obstacles they're facing, I'll just align them to the O on my page. So that later on when I'm putting my notes together or putting a map together, which is a concept we'll talk about later on, I know that the notes there are obstacles, although things next to V are value. But it also becomes a prompt of what's missing. So I will be able to quickly see as I lead into a new conversation or as I'm thinking about the next meeting or the next conversation that needs to be had, I'll notice that I don't have anything on value. I haven't quantified how much value someone is expecting to get out of a solution. So that immediately tells me, Hey, the focus of this next meeting, maybe the focus of the agenda I'll put together, which is yet another topic we'll talk later on about. I'll recognize that that's an area that we need to dive in deeper on. So setting up the page is really a matter of just putting those words vertically and getting yourself ready. Now, another handy trick that you can do, and I do with colored markers, you can do it any way that works for you is I tend to make each letter color oriented. So S may be pink, O, may be green and so on. And that way, I don't have to be restricted to a single page. There may be times where I haven't set up every page or the person may be offering so much information that I'm flipping across multiple pages in my notebook. By using different colors, if I can do it fluidly and do it naturally throughout the conversation, it doesn't matter if the notes I'm taking are properly aligned to a letter. I know that anything written in pink is strategy related. I know anything in green is obstacle related. And that's how you can set this up and use colors to just make your note taking a little clearer. Because at the end of the day, what you really want to do is, a, have something visual prompt, something that is right in front of you that reminds you that your goal in this meeting is to uncover more than just one area that's important to your customer. Want to make sure that you're de risking your opportunity by actually creating a full, holistic view of them, their organization, their strategies, their obstacles, and more. And as I said, it also creates a really convenient way to take notes. Now, as I've said before, you can apply the solve framework anyway you want. If you want to, you can change the letters. If you want to, you can write solve horizontally across the page. You can do it anyway you want. It's not important to me that you're following it exactly the way I do. What's important to me is that you're understanding why you want to capture all of these different areas, that it's important that you understand how capturing information in a methodical way in a robust way and across all of these different subject areas, how it's going to help you close that deal, how it's going to help you bring value to your customers, win their trust, and win the deal. That's it. That's really all that it takes to set it up. Once you've got your notebook set up, it's just a matter of getting on the call or being in the meeting room and starting to use your questions, your curiosity, your understanding of your prospects, your customers, and the industry or people in similar roles to just get them to open up to you, to tell you more about what matters to them. Now, in the next six lesson, we're going to actually dive into each letter of the solved acronym. We're going to look at how to uncover strategy and why it's important obstacles, landscape value. We're going to go through. You're going to see examples of potential questions. You're going to see what I would capture based off of simple role playing and examples. And when we're done going through, you can apply it to a hypothetical or to real opportunities you have and then we're going to take a look at how to transform those notes that you've taken with respect to the Sol framework into really effective post meeting follow ups in a living document called a map. So let's get right into it. Let's get into ask for strategy in the next lesson. 11. S = Strategy: Aligning with Your Client’s Goals: Welcome back to our next lesson, where we're going to dive into S for strategy as part of the solve framework. Now, I wouldn't have created a six letter acronym if I didn't believe that all six letters were essential for you advancing and winning your deals. But having said that, S for strategy really is the most fundamental and probably the most important of all the letters. O is where you're going to gravitate to naturally. Obstacles are easy. Most people are willing to talk about problems. There's something that's annoying them with the tools they have or a feature they wish that they had or a function that they wish they could achieve. But strategy is where your deal is going to be won or lost. The obstacles are things that are problematic, but they're not fundable. Strategies are the things that actually get funding. They are big enough and have enough impact for an organization to actually spend money in pursuit of achieving this strategy and this goal. So without strategy, you really do not have a complete deal. When I do deal reviews, not only do I look at the entirety of a solve framework. Do you actually have an understanding of each letter, but I specifically look first and foremost at strategy. If I'm working with someone or if they're working for me and they can't tell me what a client is ultimately trying to achieve or how overcoming this problem is going to help their business. I don't want to have any more of that meeting. I'm going to send them right back and say, you need to go uncover what this means to them. What are they trying to achieve? Why do they want to achieve that and how big is the problem before we can get into anything else? So strategy really is the one letter that I want you to pay the most attention to because it can seem superficial. A lot of people like, I know their strategy. They want to have revenue. But if you don't have a clear understanding of what strategy means to your customer, in their own words, you are too far from winning the deal. You need to focus in on this ladder. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about three key areas of uncovering strategy, so you can learn more about your customers. First, we're going to talk about the difference between strategy and goals. After that, we'll talk about how to align your solution, your product, your service, whatever it is that you're ultimately selling to strategy rather than problems. And then we're going to have another quick look at how you might uncover more from your customers about their specific strategy and their goals. First up is the differentiation between strategy and goals. Goals are what an organization or a team set. They're their objective, their mandate, what they're trying to achieve this year. I've said this before, but most organizations, basically every organization has one of two or three goals. They either want to increase their revenue or they want to decrease their costs, reduce their costs in some way. And then there is a third area that's usually in the public sector or in heavily regulated industries, and that is the need to stay in compliance with some form of regulations. Usually pretty easy to uncover what the goal is because most organizations, especially public organizations, will state their goals. And most organizations will have no problem telling you what their goal is. Our goal is to be number one. Our goal is to increase revenue to get to profitability. Those are things that are shared across the organization. They state it publicly. They're saying it to their shareholders. The organizational goal is usually the easiest thing to find out. If you can't find it, just ask. They will most likely tell you what their goal is. Now, that's the entire organization, but you're usually not selling to the organization as a whole. You're selling to someone or some team that is contributing to that goal. So I can usually start meetings knowing what the organization goal is. And then my job, what I'm trying to accomplish is to identify what the goals of the individual and the team they represent are and what strategies they're using to achieve that goal. For example, if an organization has publicly stated that they are trying to double their revenue this year, that's great information. But when it comes to the meeting that I'm having with the head of a business unit, I might ask them what their goal is. And I would usually ask it by stating what the company goal is and then asking what their individual goal is. So, for example, I might say, I understand that your organization, according to your annual plan, is trying to double revenue this year or that your organization is looking to cut $200 million from your expenses this year. Once I've established that, I'll pivot to what they're going to contribute towards that goal. So going back to that original statement, I might say, I understand that your organization is looking to double their revenue this year. So what is your team's mandate to accomplish to contribute towards that goal? And that's an opportunity for them to say, Well, what we're trying to do is double our membership of new product enrollments, which we think can contribute up to $50 million towards our goal of $500 million, which would be double our revenue. So now I've scoped the problem from this broad organizational goal down to the team goal, but I still know it's incredibly big, and I now have an area that I want to explore more. So with goal in mind, and that was a relatively easy thing to accomplish, now I can start digging in on the strategies. What are they planning on doing or stopping to achieve that goal? So in this same context, I might say, Well, that's a very ambitious goal. What are your key initiatives that you're planning to undertake this quarter or this year in order to meet that goal? And that is hopefully going to open up a lane of conversation where they start describing the biggest initiatives. You know, I've used a few examples throughout this course already. Maybe they say, Well, the biggest thing we're working on is a new member enrollment system, something that can be done on a phone, on a computer, from any device, anywhere that we think will make us much more attractive and competitive when it comes to attracting new customers. Now I've uncovered their strategy, a new digital onboarding experience. I know that it's associated with their goal of achieving $50 million in new member revenue and that that goal is tied to their corporate goal of 500 million in new overall revenue. So I have a much better understanding of what's going to motivate this particular person. But I might want to dig in deeper and say, that's a great initiative. Are there any other initiatives that you think will have as much impact or that are as meaningful to you and your team in pursuit of that $50,000,000 goal? And as they are sharing more and more information, I'm taking notes next to ask for strategy in my workbook. I'm using their words. I'm noting how they describe it. When they describe their onboarding experience. Are they calling it a portal? Are they calling it a form? Are they calling onboarding. And I'm making sure that I note sometimes I'll underline some of the key words, the phrases that they're using, because in everything I do going forward, I'm going to make sure that I'm using the same language, the same inflection, the same meaning that they were using so that it's always associated back to the way that they think and the way that they operate. Now, I won't go into all the different ways to ask the questions because we just went through lessons about effective questioning. So what I will talk about, though, is how and why you want to align your solution, your offering to their goals and their strategies rather than the problem. Let's use this example, and I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but let's just say in the next lesson when we start talking about obstacles, we learn about some of the problems that they suspect they're going to have in launching their new member portal. They're worried about cost or timing or about the ease of use for their customers on any device. Those are individual problems. And yeah, those might be the things that we ultimately solve. But when it comes to positioning myself, my organization, my solution, I always want them thinking about my offering as being the key to launching their member portal, because it's much more effective to say, Oh, I remember that art guy and his company, whatever it's called. I remember them, they would be really great at helping us launch our new portal, which will help us achieve that $50 million that we're aiming for this year. I would much rather have them thinking of me that way than saying, Well, remember that art guide. They had a cool feature that was going to help on mobile devices. Think about which one of those they would rather talk to their manager about, their team about. Which one of those is going to be prioritized in terms of time and effort and future meetings. Positioning yourself as the solution that is going to help them achieve their strategy and their goals is always going to be better than being the product that is associated with solving a problem. And that's why S for strategy is such an essential part of the Sol framework. It's the area that you want to understand. You want to lock down before you do anything else, because every other question you ask about their problems, their landscape, the value should all be driven by the strategies they're using to achieve their goals and to contribute to their organizational goals. And that's what S for strategy is all about. It's all about that understanding and how you can capture the notes to drive everything else you do forward in a meaningful targeted way. Next up, we're going to look at O for obstacles. Those are the things that you can actually help with. You can't help someone's strategy, but you can help them overcome the obstacles they're going to face when implementing and executing that strategy. 12. O = Overcoming Obstacles Without Resistance: Now we're going to look at O for obstacles. Obstacles are real problems. These are things that can and need to be solved in pursuit of achieving a goal by executing a strategy. Now, I know you're going to keep hearing me tie one letter to the next letter to the next letter, but hopefully is connecting for you and you're understanding how all of these things are interconnected. Obstacles are real problems that customers are facing, and it's often what they come to you with. I have a problem. My software is not working on a mobile device. I have a problem. My sales teams not getting enough leads. I have a problem. My website is out of date. Whatever it is, these are the things that often drive someone to at least initiate with you. So it's your job to first bounce it back to what are you trying to achieve and then come back to the obstacles, the problems in the context of the strategic items that they're trying to execute and the goals you're trying to accomplish. Let's say, for example, someone comes to you and they say, I need more leads for my sales team or I need an auto dialer in my CRM so we can make more phone calls. Well, you could immediately jump into how you can solve that problem. Oh, great. My CRM has an auto dialer. You just press a button and it will phone people, and your salespeople will make more phone calls. Okay, great. You're at a very tactical thing. That's now a feature comparison. Now they're going to look at other CRMs or other products that also have auto dialers, and they're going to compare the functionality of the auto dialers and the cost of the solution. But that's not where most organizations, most salespeople want to be. You want to be in a strategic conversation. You want to be an essential part of their strategy. So in that example, even though I'm talking about obstacles, the first thing that I would want to do is say, Oh, well, well, why is that? What are you trying to achieve? Why do you need your salespeople to make more phone calls? And they might tell me about their strategy. Going back to our last one, maybe it's that they need to grow more revenue, that they're behind on their number or their quota. And then I would say, Okay, well, what are your problems when it comes to that? That's where they might say, Well, I told you, our problem is that people aren't making enough phone calls, and I need an auto dialer. Well, that may be something you can solve for, but sometimes maybe you're not the best. Maybe your CRM or your product is great, and you happen to have an auto dialer, but you know that there's competition out there that also have the same functionality and that theirs is actually pretty good. So now you want to dig into the problems, not just that they came to you with, but the problems that are related to their strategy and their goals. So you may dig into. Well, why do you think they're not making enough phone calls? Why has auto dialing been a problem? And from there, you may learn new information. Maybe it turns out they're only successful in booking meetings one out of every hundred phone calls. So their initial plan was just to make more phone calls and get more meetings. So they wanted something that would allow them to make 200 calls a day instead of 100. But the problem was actually that they're just not getting enough meetings. It's a very different context than our problem is our auto dialer isn't great versus our problem is we're not getting enough meetings. So now you can dig into the problems that associate with not getting enough meetings. Why is that? Is it just that you're not making enough phone calls? Do you think that you should be able to book more than one out of 100 meetings? Whatever the scenario is, and I don't want to dwell on this fake scenario too much, but problems are all the things that may be preventing them from achieving their goals and executing on whatever strategy they've laid out. And it's really important that you uncover as many obstacles as possible that are relevant to what you do. Because a lot of people come with a baked in notion because they only know what they know. But if you can get them talking about all of the potential problems that they see, well, you know, it's also our information isn't really good. We make a lot of calls without having any contacts and wish we had better research in advance. Maybe our team always complains about the technology and the CRM that we have, and they say that it's really slow to use, but I don't know if that's true or not. These are all new problems that you're uncovering, all things that you would want to use expanding questions to learn more about or initiating questions to find new avenues of problems. But the real goal is to identify things you can solve. And then once you've done that, you can start allowing the customer to describe their ideal solution to those problems. So if they say, Well, our problems were that people weren't making enough calls, were not winning enough deals, only one out of 100 and the technology that we have is really cumbersome and people don't like using it. Then you can ask them, well, what would an ideal solution to these problems look like to you? And that's where they start describing, ideally, something that sounds a lot like whatever you're offering because you've asked them questions and had them frame the problems that were all related to things you can do. So they might say, Well, really, an ideal solution for us would be that every time someone makes a phone call, they have the right information at their fingertips. They have research about the person they're calling so they can have a meaningful conversation right off the bat, and that they're making call after call with great information and winning not just one meeting out of every hundred calls, but maybe two, five, ten, and that it's just dead simple for them to use. So there's no complaints from the team, so we can hire new people, and they're up and running really, really quickly. Well, now you've just learned what a solution would look like to your customer. You can confirm back to them what you've heard. So it sounds like a solution that does this, this and this would help you achieve your goal of booking more meetings, growing your revenue, and contributing to your bottom line, is that correct? So by expanding on the obstacles that they're facing, you're really creating an environment, an opportunity to position yourself as the solution they've always dreamt of that will help them achieve their strategic goals. And that's what obstacles is all about. The workbook is just a way to categorize the notes. Whatever you're hearing in their words, you're just capturing it, and you're making sure that you're making a note so that you know, yes, I've captured what their strategic goals are and what their strategy to execute on those goals are. I've captured three different obstacles that they see and maybe even a little bit about what their ideal solution is. So I really know a lot about this customer now. I know what they're trying to do, and I think I can help them. Now I can learn about the landscape. What are their alternatives? What are the roadblocks or the players that are going to be involved? What is the technology that this new CRM offering is going to need to integrate with? Now I can move on to make sure that I learn everything else. But remember, it's not always sequential. Strategy, yes, is important to do first and early, and you may come back to it over and over again. Everything else is going to flow naturally. You'll have some conversations that start off with value. Oh, man, I need a solution because otherwise, I'm not going to get my bonus this year. Okay, I started with value. Or, Hey, listen, I want to look at your software, but I want it to work like this. I want to meet with you once a week for the next three weeks to make a decision, okay? We started with engagement. So it's not always going to be linear, but you have a framework. You have six letters that are going to allow you to capture information and to notice and recognize where you have gaps. That's what the solve framework is all about. Next up, we're going to look at landscape. As I already talked about a little bit, we're going to look at the realities of their world. What are their alternatives? How else could they solve this and who else is involved? 13. L = Landscape – Understanding the Bigger Picture: We are on the third letter of the solved acronym, L for landscape. Landscape isn't about the physical reality. It's not about their office decor or anything else that's not at all applicable to what you're doing. Unless maybe you're selling office furniture. In which case, that would be part of their landscape. What is their layout? What is the square footage. But most of the time when I'm talking about landscape, I'm talking about the business landscape in which they operate. Landscape is about understanding their alternatives. It's about understanding their technology, their people, and their processes. And all four of those are essential pieces to have a complete picture of your customer. So let's go through them. First, and the one that for a lot of salespeople is the scariest is the alternatives. But I find that to be a ridiculous concept. It's reality. Everyone has an unlimited number of options, a lot of different ways that they can go about solving their problem. As unique, as fantastic as you are as your organization is, your product is, there are other products, where there are alternatives to solving the problem. One of the alternatives is doing nothing. And that often is why deals don't close. People just don't see it as a big enough issue. It's not worth their time to go through all the headaches of corralling their team, of putting their neck on the line, of securing budget and financing, talking to the CFO. It's just not a big enough deal to do anything, so nothing happens. So that is an alternative. And the reality is there are other products. There's other people right now probably trying to sell a different solution to the problems your customer is facing. But your opportunity and the way that you can and should win is by differentiating yourself from those other people. Most of those other people probably aren't being customer centric. They're not understanding and aligning their solutions to the customer's strategy and goals. So they're really still fixated on the obstacles. And so those alternatives, you want them to just be seen as that as these tactical little things that aren't strategically important. Because that way, yours is a strategically important opportunity for them. Everything else is just a little feature or function. But which one do you think is going to win out? The strategically important thing or the feature function thing? Nine times out of ten, if not more, it's the strategic one. So understanding the landscape and understanding the alternatives is really important. And any real relationship, any real authentic conversation should include conversation about what are the alternatives? Hey, I know there's alternatives. I know there's other ways you could solve this problem. So what are the ones that you're looking at, and why? And you want to frame this in a way where it's not about disparaging your competitors. It's my least favorite thing. I've managed salespeople that want to jump in and say, Oh, they're terrible or they're way too expensive. Don't do that. Everything that your customer is thinking about is a good idea because it's their idea. So by disparaging one of their ideas, which is maybe an alternative product, you're kind of disparaging their thought process. You're saying, Well, you're not very smart if you're thinking about doing that. And that's not a very good way to build trust and connection with someone else. What is great is to just have an open, honest conversation to say, Hey, listen, I know there are other ways to do it. Are you looking at this, are you looking at that? Those are really great options if what you want to do is just overcome that problem. But when it comes to your strategy, the one that you described before and the goals you have, here's why I think our solution, us working together is really going to help you achieve your goals. That's how you want to frame yourself and your solution because it's really going to elevate you in the mind of the buyer. So when it comes to landscape, just don't be afraid to actually ask what else they're considering. Ask them what the impact of doing nothing would be. If their response is that, Well, it would be a little problematic, but we'd get by, then you're probably not talking about the right strategic initiative or the right obstacle. But if you've done a good job and you've identified a really big strategic initiative, and you ask them what the impact of doing nothing would be, you're actually starting to uncover value because they're going to tell you, Oh, it would be a nightmare. If we don't find a solution to do this, there is absolutely no way we're going to hit our goal, which means losing out on $50 million in revenue. Well, now you are making sure that you understand the landscape. You've eliminated the probability or the possibility that doing nothing is going to be an option for them, and you can focus in on the other alternatives that they're looking at. Along with understanding alternatives, you need to understand the landscape that they operate within. And it's going to be different for every product, every industry, whatever you're selling, where you're selling it. It's going to be different. So I can't tell you exactly what to ask or what to look for, but ideally, you know your product. You know how customers buy and implement whatever it is that you're selling. So you want to uncover the things that are relevant to you. So for example, I've always sold technology or most often sold technology. So for me, I want to understand, are you an Amazon or a Microsoft shop? What other tools need to be integrated to the CRM solution or the low code solution that I'm selling or that you're considering in order for it to be truly effective and used throughout your organization. I want to understand if there are things that are just non starters for them and for me, because if I don't uncover that now, I'm going to waste a lot of time trying to work with them and understand their problems only to find out that ultimately we just have incompatible systems that I'll never be able to work together. I also want to understand the people and the processes. Now, there's a section on people when it comes to engagement and decision making. But in terms of landscape, I want to understand who are the teams that are going to be impacted by this and do they need to be part of this conversation? I want to understand if there are key people I should be talking to or avoiding. I want to understand who are skeptics, who are likely champions or early adopters so that I can make sure that I'm engaging them in the right way. I also want to understand their processes. How do they buy? How do they go through security? What checks? What other steps are we going to have to go through in order for my offering to be accepted into their organization, for this deal to close, and for us to move forward together. So landscape in the context of the SL framework, is about asking questions about their reality. What is their environment? What are their regulatory requirements? What are their technology? Who are the key people? What are the processes, and what are the alternatives? By getting these early and upfront and aligning the rest of your activities to their realities, means that you will become an essential part of their solution. It means that you're able to be an active participant. You can remind them, Hey, you told me early on that your security team is an essential player in any decision making, any technology procurement, because they are responsible for ensuring that everything is going to work nicely with your data like. So is it time that we should bring them into this conversation? That understanding of landscape, even if they're not necessarily a decision maker allows me or us to add value back to the customer by keeping everything on track. And that is really important when it comes to complex sales. People get pulled in all kinds of directions. You're not the only thing they're working on. Remember, they have a strategy and a goal. So while you may be a part of what they're thinking is going to help them achieve it, they have other work to do. So the more you can learn about what's important to them and how they work and then actually help them achieve those steps in the buying process, the more valuable you are. And that's what landscape inside of the solve framework is all about. Next up, we're going to get on to value. We've touched on it a little bit, but we're going to dig into personal and professional value in the next lesson. 14. V = Value – Showcasing the Real Impact of Your Offer: Alright, we are four letters into the solve framework. Hopefully, you are seeing how everything is interconnected and how you can start using this guide to drive your conversations and your understanding, to create more meaningful connections and to be a value added partner for everyone you're working with or trying to work with. When it comes to value, this is an essential part because this is about quantifying what the value of solving their problems is going to be for them. Sometimes they will tell you, you'll know their goal. My goal is to drive $50 million in new business. That's an example I've been using up to this point. My strategy is to have my sales team make more calls or to provide a better member enrollment experience. Now, after you've understood that, you started talking about their obstacles. Well, I'm worried about the time it's going to take to implement something. I'm worried about user adoption or about features and functions or about security. You understand the things that are problems that you can help them overcome. Also have understood their landscape about who's involved, what the people and processes are, and what their alternatives are. The next step is to understand what the value is, to quantify it so that you can really see how big this opportunity is to them. Now, some of you might price on value. I've worked in a lot of organizations that don't have defined pricing. It's all about having a piece of the value you're delivering for an organization. So if you can help them save $100 million, you're going to price it at five or $10 million, where if you're only helping them achieve 20 million, maybe you're only charging them 2 million. Organizations have defined pricing. This is just what users receipts cost, and that's all fine. Value isn't necessarily going to drive the price. It can, if that's important to you and your organization. But really, it's about understanding how big the problem is, what resolving these problems is going to mean for them and what it's going to mean for their team. When it comes to value, there's two things. Number one, I segment the V on my worksheet into two areas. There's personal and professional. We're talking about professional first because that's the most common and usually the easier of the two to uncover. The professional value is really trying to quantify not the strategy, but the obstacles. So to illustrate value, let's actually use a brand new example because I think it'll be really clean and easy to understand if we use a brand new example rather than the ones we've been previously talking about. For this one, let's say that you're talking to an organization who has a top line goal. The organizational goal is to achieve profitability this year. Now, there are going to be teams whose mandate is to grow revenue in order to achieve profitability. But for the sake of this conversation, let's say you're talking to someone in operations or IT, and their objective is to cut costs in order to help the organization achieve profitability. Let's say that through your discovery in their strategy and obstacles, you found out that their goal is to reduce their spend by $24 million a year. And their strategy to do that is to replace their problematic legacy technology because it's been crashing and causing problems. That's the understanding you have. You would understand their strategy, replace legacy problematic technology. You understand a problem is that it's been crashing all the time, and you understand that this is how they're going to contribute to their larger organizational goal. Now you want to quantify how much value the system that you can help with is going to bring to them and their team and ultimately their goal of reducing costs. So this is where uncovering value comes into play. This is where you can use the same types of questions, expanding, initiating and provocative, if you need it to help identify the value of replacing one of those core systems or whatever it is that you can impact for them. So let's say you had a system that you wanted to sell them that was going to be a replacement for one of those problematic systems. What you want to do is ask questions to uncover how valuable that particular system would be for so you might ask them, well, how often does the legacy system go down? Or how long is it down for? How many people are impacted? And some organizations will tell you right off the bat. They've already done the work. They know exactly what the impact is. Every time it goes down, 100 people are impacted, and it costs us about $1 million. And it goes down on average about once a month. So you're looking at somewhere $10-12 million in lost revenue because we can't book any orders or handle anything on that day. If they tell you that, great, you know the value. You can move on. But a lot of times they haven't done all of that work yet. They know it's problematic, but they haven't really sat down and looked at what the costs are. So in those situations, it's just a matter of digging in a little deeper and helping them get to a realization of what the ultimate costs are. So maybe you ask them, well, how many people are impacted, and they will tell you, that's about it, Bob 100 do you know how much money you lose every time it goes down? No, I don't. Well, let's work on this together. On average, let's say it's a sales tool. What is the average booking of one, you know, mid tier rep every day? Well, they do about $10,000 of bookings every day. Okay, so if they do 10,100 of them are impacted every time it goes down, then you're looking at about $1,000,000 of lost deals or revenue bookings every time that core system is down, is that correct? Yeah, that sounds about right. And you said it goes down about 12 times a year. So you're looking at about $12 million in lost revenue at the high end. Maybe at the low end, it's eight or nine, maybe it's not every month. Now that you understand the value, what is the quantifiable amount that this problem is causing them? You can attach your solution to that value to the problem and the strategy. So think about how impactful it would be to go back to that same client and say, Hey, I appreciate everything you've told me. And now that you've told me that, I'm going to come back to you with a proposal. And what if that proposal were to show you that we could help you replace your legacy technology so that it was no longer going down every month and impacting over 100 people that are trying to book deals. And what if I could show you that by replacing that core system, you would be able to save up to $12,000,000 a year, which is half of your goal of cost reduction this year in this one solution. Would that be meaningful? Would that be worth having another meeting? Well, of course it would. That's halfway to my annual goal in one thing. If you can show me how I can achieve half of my mandate with one product, absolutely. I'll be there. I'm going to bring my manager, all my coworkers. So that's what this Soul framework allows you to do. It allows you to understand what they're trying to do, why they're trying to do it, and how much of an impact you can potentially make in their roles. Now, that's the professional value, and I can't tell you exactly how to do it because every product, every problem, every organization is going to be different. But the goal is to find a number. If you don't know the impact it's going to make, you don't actually know what the deal is worth to them, how important it is, and how prioritized conversations with you are going to be. Personal value is a little different. And I find it personally, no pun intended, a little trickier to uncover. It's not my natural thing. There's a lot of salespeople that are wonderful at getting personal details out of the people they're talking to. That's never been my absolute strength. Of course, I connect well with people. We get along. I learn more about them and their families, but I tend to deliver value on the professional level more than the personal Apple. But I do recognize the importance of understanding personal value because ultimately, it's a person that is buying from you. It's a person that needs to take the risk. Put their neck on the line, bring in a solution, be accountable for its success or its failures. So there has to be a sufficient motivation for them to do so. Even if it's going to save their company $12 million, if no one's going to care, they're not going to get any recognition, if it's actually going to make more work for them, they're not going to be that motivated, even if it is really big for the organization. You know, be great if everybody just did what was always right, but a lot of people do what's right for them as well, and they sometimes prioritize what's good for them over what's good for others. Not right, but it happens all the time. So personal value is about understanding what's motivating them because when you have both their professional and their personal value, you have real levers to keep the momentum in the deal. So let's use that example that we've been talking about. The team that is looking to replace some legacy system. You might want to uncover the personal value. What would the impact be on you if the system didn't go down once a month? Would that mean that you didn't have to spend late nights at the office trying to get things back online? Oh, yeah, that'd be great. I'd get to my kids' baseball game or T ball game more often. Or what would it mean to you? Would you be up for a promotion? Would you get the recognition? Would you get to speak across your industry at events about how incredible the transformation was from legacy to modern? If you can understand what motivates them, that becomes another catalyst for your deal. So when it comes to value, it's about uncovering both. And if I could only do one, I would obviously go for the professional value. But every time you have an opportunity to learn a little bit about what motivates the buyer, that is going to make them look great, is going to make them have more time to focus on the things they care about at home or at work. You're really tapping into something that will connect you to them and will keep the deal moving forward because everybody will be motivated. And that's what value is all about. We're now four letters in, right? You've almost made it. We got two more to go. So next we're going to look at the engagement, the letter E. And it's a little bit different. Both engagement and decision are more about how the deal is going to move forward. The first four letters are about understanding whether or not there's even a deal there. And then E and D are all about how to move the deal forward. So let's hop into the next lesson and we'll look at the letter E for engagement. 15. E = Engagement – How to Keep the Sale Moving Forward: Welcome to the last two letters of the solved framework. The first four, SOLD, were all about understanding your customer, their strategy, their obstacles, their landscape, and the value that solving their obstacles is going to bring to them. The next two letters, E and D are all about moving the opportunity forward. And in this lesson, we're talking about the letter E for engagement. Engagement is all about two questions. How do they want to move forward and be engaged, and when do they want to move forward? Engagement is all about understanding the way that they want the deal to work. And they don't think about a deal. They think about solving their problems and achieving their goals. You think about a deal, a sales process, but engagement is about understanding their side of it, because both of you are engaged in this process. I'm one that is pretty upfront about my own sales process. I'll tell someone This is how I like to work or what my requirements are to move forward with you, but I would like to know about your requirements. Who are the people that I'm going to need to meet with? When do you need a decision made by? What are the criteria? What are the other ways that you want to meet? Do you like having regular touch bases? Do you need to see a demo? Do you need me to talk to specific people on your team and get their buy in and then bring everyone back together for you to save you time and to save you the effort? I want to understand how people want to be engaged, and I want to capture that information so that I am always consistent in my approach and so that if I involve anyone else on my team, they're also true to the right engagement model that my customer or my prospect wants and expects. So engagement is all about understanding how they want to move forward. When it comes to timeline, that's an essential piece that can actually drive every single meeting and keep a better pace to the progress of your deal. Say that you're talking to someone and they're looking at implementing your solution, and they need it live by their user conference, which is happening next summer. Well, now you know when it needs to be live and operational, but you can create a workback schedule that says, Well, if you need it live by next June, then you probably want it actually implemented by May so that you can have a few people onboarded before then. To have it up and running by May, you probably need to make a decision by February. And to make a decision by February, these are the people that will need to sign off on it, and let's try to have that done by January 1 so that you have some buffer and so that we can make sure that everything goes smoothly. Now, I'm not saying that I would say that in the first meeting, but that simple understanding of when they need this by, why they need it by that date, and what things need to happen in order for the deal to close, then I understand how we can create an engagement model together. I have a reason to say, you know, to make that happen, I think that I need your commitment that we're going to meet every week on these topics to make sure that everything is covered off before we hit the end of the year. And knowing the holidays are coming up, let's try to do a few of these extra meetings in advance because I know everyone starts taking holidays around that time. Engagement might also tell me that they prefer written communications over meetings or that they prefer demonstrations to be recorded or not recorded. Whatever it is they're telling you, they're telling you how they want to be engaged. But they're only telling you that if you ask them. A lot of people don't ask those questions, and as a result, they book meeting after meeting, and it starts frustrating the customer. Why are we having so many meetings? Why didn't they just send me that as a note or as an email? Or the opposite, where you're sending them all kinds of documents and meetings, and they just don't have time to read everything, and they wonder, why aren't we just hopping on a call? And you're leaving it up to them to come back to you and say, Woah, let's get on a call and actually discuss this. But if you ask them upfront, how do you want this to work? What would a good engagement process look like? And if you acknowledge even their alternatives, Hey, I know you're probably evaluating a lot of solutions. What's the best way to make sure you're getting the information you need without being a burden on your team? Because ultimately this solution is all about easing the burden on your team. There's so many ways you can phrase the questions around engagement, but the real goal is to understand from their perspective, what the buying process looks like. And I just want to be clear one last time before I wrap up this lesson, it's not just asking them What does buying look like at your organization? That's a fine question. I've asked it before, but there's more to engagement than just the buying process. It's not just a qualification process or understanding what procurement looks like. It should be asked in a genuine, curious way to understand, Hey, if we're going to make this work for you, what would that look like? How do you want this to work? You're in control here. I'm here to serve you. I'm here to make you successful to achieve your professional and your personal goals. I want to see that happen. So tell me the best way that I can work with and support you. What do we need to do? Who needs to be involved, and when does it need to be done by? And I'll take ownership of that. I'll make sure that everything happens the right way at the right time so that you can achieve your goals and see little Timmy and Mart ball games or whatever it was that they wanted to accomplish. That's what engagement is all about. And so, again, when you put that together with all the other letters, I know I'm getting repetitive here, you're creating a framework to advance every opportunity in a customer centric way. You're putting the customer at the center of your understanding and of your actions. And that's what differentiates you from everyone else. And with that, let's move on to the last letter in the solved acronym, D for decision. I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. D = Decision – How to Close Deals with Confidence: Alright, here we are at the last letter of the solved acronym, D for decision. Now, decision making and uncovering who the decision makers are, what the criteria is, who has authority and budget to buy, could be a course in and of itself. But in the context of solved, we're just treating it as another area to uncover, another thing that you need to learn about in order to properly understand the opportunity, the customer, and win their business. So when I think about D for decision and when I think about how I'm going to capture notes, I'm going to ask the right questions, I really think about two core things. I think about who the decision makers are, and I think about understanding what the decision criteria is going to be. When it comes to the decision makers, it's really about understanding and validating. Some organizations, some trainers call this triangulating who actually has authority to buy. And quick side note here, I hate trainings that tell you to only talk to the decision makers and that there's no deal if you're not talking to the decision maker. Yes, it's true. You ultimately need to be talking to someone who has authority to buy, and if they're not involved in the conversation, your deal is at risk. However, that does not mean you should not be talking to everyone else you can at that organization. Don't talk too much about this in this course, but when I'm training people individually that work for me, I share stories about what I've done in the past. And in the past, I've done everything from calling 800 numbers to walking into branches and talking to front line workers, tellers, wealth advisors, anyone else, depends on whatever I'm selling. I talk to the people on the ground. The reason I do that is that I use what they tell me to elevate conversations up the ladder, to managers, to VPs, to C suite, and I bring the insights that I've gathered from the bottom up to them because often there is a disconnect. They have a goal or a strategy, but they're missing some fundamental piece of what's happening on the ground. Oh, we are talking about decision and decision makers right now, but I just want to make a distinction between using that to ensure that you're talking to the right people to close the deal, but to actually win the deal and demonstrate your value and your understanding, you should talk to as many people as possible. Now, when it comes to identifying the decision makers, what you really want to do is use the same style of questions, expanding, initiating and provocative when needed to identify if the person you're talking to actually has authority and budget to make the decision. Because if they're not, you're going to need to find a way to win access to the person that ultimately will make that decision. And so there's a few different things, a few different aspects of this. Firstly, it's about asking them basically straight up who needs to be involved in this decision. And you can ask that as an open end question. So in order to buy a solution like this, who are the people that need to be involved? You can ask it as an initiating question. In order to buy a solution like this, does your CFO need to be involved? Does your VP of IT need to be involved or anyone else that you know or suspect may need to be involved, or you can ask it as a provocative question. So for a decision like this, you have the full and complete authority of your CEO to be able to make this decision and spend over $3 million that's, you know, a type of question that they might say, Well, yeah, I have the authority, but I'm obviously going to get the advice from my peers in IT, in procurement and all these other places. Well, now you've used that provocative question to understand, Well, I should probably be engaged with those people as well, because ultimately, they're going to be part of the decision making process. Another key aspect of decision making is triangulating. It's about understanding if everyone that you talk to says the same people are going to be involved. You may be talking to the head of a line of business who says, Yes, it's just me and my lieutenant that are going to make this decision. But then you talk to someone in IT, and they say, Well, those two people will be involved, but it's also going to be myself and our CFO that will voice in because we control the overall budget. So triangulation is about wanting to hear from two or three people at a minimum, the same decision makers. If you've talked to three different groups of people and they all say that Jane and Diane are the two people that are going to make this decision, and everybody says the same thing, well, then you know Jane and Diane are the people that are ultimately going to make that call. If you're hearing different things from different people, you need to get to the point where you really whittle down who are the decision makers and have I spoken to all of them? Because if not, there's a risk to my deal. There's someone that I haven't engaged with that I don't know what value means to them, that I don't know their perspective on obstacles, on landscape, or on strategy. And that's a risk because they may have a totally different take than the others. So when it comes to decision, number one is about understanding who's involved and getting access to other people if there are people outside of the people you're currently speaking with. Access may be a matter of negotiation or give or take. Maybe it's a matter of saying, Well, if I can do this and that for you, would you then be willing to bring me to your CFO for a meeting? If I can help you build a business case that demonstrates how this will help you save $12 million a year, would you be willing to introduce me to your CFO? Or it may be using reverse negotiation that says, I thank you for your time, misses CFO. I'm going to go talk to the lieutenants and the individual lines of business leaders. If I can get their buy in and create a business case with all of their insights, would it be alright if I came back to you to discuss the final business case? Either way, you're using the information to make sure you have access to all of the people that are involved in the decision making process. The second area to focus on when it comes to D for decision are the milestones and the criteria. When that's covered in the engagement side, but when is a decision going to be made, and what is ultimately going to drive the decision? Is it a matter of cost? Is it a matter of alignment with your strategy? Is it a matter of buy in from these key people? What are the metrics that you're going to evaluate your different options on so that we can make sure that we've addressed them either in the positive or the negative. We want to make sure that we are addressing whatever those milestones are and meeting those milestones and those metrics and the criteria. Think of it like an RFP. An RFP clearly lays out what all of the milestones, metrics, and criteria are to advance to the next round. Every deal has the same thing. There is ultimately some criteria. It needs to align to what we're trying to do. It needs to work in our landscape. It needs to be a big enough problem to solve. We need to get buying. You need to achieve security certification. Whatever it is, you need to understand what those milestones and criteria are so that you can plan to work within that framework. That's what decision making is all about. It's about understanding who's involved and what the criteria is going to be. When you can combine that with how they want to be engaged and your broad understanding of how meaningful this is to their strategy and their goals and how your solution to their problems is going to help them achieve their goals, you've created really simply an end to end understanding. I can't guarantee you're going to win every single deal, but you're not going to lose a deal because of a lack of understanding or because you weren't servicing that customer to the best of your ability. So that is every single letter of the solve framework. S for strategy, O for obstacles, L for landscape, for value, E for engagement, and D for decision. Ben terrible if I got that wrong. Those are the guides that are going to drive you to understand everything about your customers and your opportunities in a more holistic and complete way. I hope that even if you stop the course right now, you would already be head and shoulder above where you were before taking this course in terms of an approach and a strategy to understand your customers. But next up, we're going to look at applying the solve framework. How can you prepare for meetings with another acronym called prep? How can you turn the information you collected in your workbook into a post meeting document, a living document that will really bind you with your customers? How can you create more effective agendas? And how can you just generally do things better and take more action using this approach and using this knowledge? So let's hop into the next module, and I hope that you were enjoying this course. I hope you're finding value. Let me know the comments or reach out to me because it is so important to me that this course adds value. If there's areas I can improve it, just let me know. I will make the changes. That's what's great about this kind of digital world. I just want to make the best content for people like you. So let me know, but in the meantime, take the quiz, and let's hop into the next module. 17. Sales Techniques – How to Use Mutual Action Plans (MAP): First up in this section of the course is how to take the information that you've been collecting throughout your meetings and turn it into something that is a living document that you can exchange with your customers to collect even more information and to really demonstrate your leadership and your understanding so that you really do become that essential partner, that key to their strategy. And we call this a map. App stands for a mutually agreed upon plan. And what it is is a living document, ideally built in something like Google Docs or Office 365, where you can take all of the information from your solved worksheet, turn it into more of a narrative, more of a living document that captures their intentions, their thoughts, their key words, something that you can share back with your prospects or your customers, so they can see that you really do understand them, so they can see all of the hard work and the previous meetings that have got you to the point that you're at something that they can use to share with their own teams to bring new people into the fold and get them up to speed quickly and something that they can actually comment on, add more context on that will even increase your knowledge and understanding further. So a map, and I'll share some examples in the resource section, a map is really about taking things that the customer has said and things that you have agreed upon. Remember, it's called a mutually agreed upon plan. So it's not just your ideas or the things you want to position to them. It's not a marketing document or a static document. It's mutually agreed upon facts. Fact is something that they have said to you in their own words or something that you have confirmed your understanding to them and that they have said, Yes, that is, in fact, correct. An ideal map includes your understanding of their current situation. It lists your understanding of their strategy and goals, your understanding of their pains, their obstacles, their problems, their landscape. It probably touches on the value, maybe not the personal value, because it is something that ultimately they want to share internally, but it really captures everything that has been communicated and shared and agreed to up to that point. Lot of times, I will keep a running list of the different meetings we've had and their outcomes, the different people because, again, solved isn't meant as a one person thing. Every new person I talk to, I'm going through the same solved list. I'm trying to understand strategy from their perspective, value from their perspective. So I'm taking all of those different insights and I'm adding them to a single map. And that way, whether I'm talking to the head of a line of business to mid manager, to an executive, they can see all of the input that all of these different stakeholders have provided. And that does a few things. Number one, it really does demonstrate your value and understanding. Number two, it reinforces how much effort both you and they have put into this up to this point. Times that gets forgotten as people move between teams and meetings. But when people see the effort, there's a bit of an inherent obligation to see it through. You've done so much work. We've done so much work. We need to get to a conclusion, either a yes or a no, preferably a yes, but we need to get to a conclusion because clearly, there's been a lot put into this. It's not just something to kick aside and not think about anymore. A map done correctly is also an opportunity to get new feedback. Many times I've put a map together, I've shared it with comments. I've assigned tasks to the customer directly in the document, and they've come back with markups. They've said, Oh, don't call it this. Don't call it a Form solution when I was selling something related to forms because internally, the word forms is a bad word. Call it a digital solution, or make sure that we include this stakeholder. You have a list of all the people that need to be engaged, but you forgot to include Mary or Dave. Let's add them to the list because I think their input would be invaluable. So a map is all about turning your notes, something that was just for you and your understanding into something that conveys that value back to your customer. They have the opportunity to correct their words, to add more detail, to see your understanding, to see what the next meeting is going to be, to know why you're asking for access to their manager, because they're reminded that you agreed three meetings previously that if you accomplished X, Y, and Z, that they would make that introduction for you. A map is a way to not just summarize in a static way. I hate post meeting summaries that are just we talked about this, this and this and the action items are this and that. Those are fine, but that's usually one person's perspective. A map is a living shared document. It's not just yours. You may be the first person holding the pen, but ultimately it's a shared document. You want to encourage your prospects, your customers to engage with your map. Want to make sure they understand it is mutually beneficial. The more accurate this is, it's basically the foundation of the business case. So a map is something that I want you to experiment with. I'll share a few examples in the resource centers so you can see both a solved workbook and a map and how the two correlate, how one turned into the other. And as an assignment, I'll give you an additional solved workbook. And what I want you to do is to try to create your own map from it. Doesn't have to be perfect. No one's going to do it the exact same way, so I can't grade it as if there's a right or wrong way. I just want you to practice taking notes and turning it into something that you would be willing to share back with your customers. And I want you to see what the potential value of that would be. Once you've done it once or twice as an experiment, try it out. Try it in your next meeting. Whether or not you're using the solve framework as is, just try writing a real concise, mutually agreed upon plan and sharing it with your customers. See how they respond to it. Are they willing to make notes? Do they compliment you on your attention to detail? Does it help in your next meeting? Does it help when someone new joins your meeting and you share that document with them in advance so they can get up to speed? See what value it brings for you. If it doesn't bring any, don't do it because there is work involved in documenting your notes like this every time. But I can tell you, from my experience, I do it every single time because the value has paid off infinitely for me, maybe not infinite, but the value has always paid off. And the action also just helps me codify my understanding because I had a bad habit in the past of making all kinds of notes while I was in a meeting and then just turning the page and getting on to my next meeting. The act of deliberately writing this letter, this note, this map after every meeting at the end of every day, has made it so that I genuinely remember everything that I've engaged with and talked to my customers about, and that I am well prepared for my next meeting because I read a map before each and every meeting to make sure that I'm right back where I left off. So I hope you'll find the same value from creating maps, and I look forward to seeing how you do it and what you do with the examples that I provide. 18. Crafting Agendas That Lead to Sales: Now, speaking of creating living documents, there's one other area that I am a huge proponent of putting the extra effort into and creating something that is shared between you and your customer. And those are meaningful agendas. Now, I can't stand. I hate the typical agenda that you see for every meeting. It's usually the same points, introductions, about you, about us, next steps, wrap up, thank you, something like that. It's generic. It means nothing, and almost never does a conversation follow that. And when it does, it's a really informal and impersonal meet. So for me, agendas are an opportunity for you to demonstrate your value, to differentiate yourself, and to set the right tone for each and every meeting that you're going to have with your prospects and your customers. Now, I know at my organization, we had a rule that every meeting, even internal meetings needed an agenda, and that was great, and it really did set a better tone for all of the meetings so that we didn't have meandering meetings where no one really knew what the outcome was going to be but we didn't take it to the level that we did with customers. That may have been a mistake in hindsight. With customers, agendas are something that we put real meaningful effort into. I hired sales executive, a CRO who swore by agendas and got all of us to buy into the same premise. And that is an agenda should be just like a map. It should be a living document that has meaningful detail. Think about your solved framework and your solved workbook. You know that you've met with this customer once or twice and that you still need to dig into the value and get it really quantified or that you really need to understand their landscape and that you have some specific questions that you want to ask them. Your agenda should reflect that. It should be detailed and meaningful. It should really convey we are getting together on this day for this amount of time, and the real goal is to understand what your landscape is quantify the value of solving this particular specific problem. It's to come up with a plan of completing the business case and to come up with a resolution of when you're going to introduce me to your boss or your key executives. Now, an ideal agenda is crafted with the same care that a map is. You're using their language. You're using information and facts that you've uncovered through your conversation, and you're really setting a specific tone and a specific agenda for what you're going to talk about. When you do it right, and I've seen this personally, if you do it right and you share it in the same way that I share a map. So in Google Docs, we're in Office 365, not just as the notes in the meeting invite that nobody cares about or really looks at. When you share it with them and you share it with enough time for them to actually look at it, they will at different times, actually mark it up. They will change it. They will tell you that there needs to be additions or subtractions to that agenda, and it will become a much more meaningful conversation. Actually had customers completely red line our agenda, saying, We will not talk about this. Here's the answers to those questions that you were going to ask me. Here they are in advance so that we don't even have to address that in the meeting. Let's talk about something even bigger in the meeting. But to do that, you have to first create meaningful agendas. Secondly, you have to send it as a dedicated item. Don't just embed it in the invitation because most people won't look at that. But you send it as an actual document. You share a document with the customer and you tell them in advance that you're going to do and then you follow up with them if they haven't had any comments. So a typical workflow for me, let's just pretend that I have met with someone today, and it's Friday, and we've scheduled a meeting for next Friday. At the end of that meeting, I tell them that I'm going to send them the map, or I'm going to make changes to the map, but I would love for them to review it, and that I will send them an agenda on Monday morning or Monday afternoon for our upcoming meeting. When I tell them that, I say, I would really love your input on the agenda. I'm going to really try to cover what I believe we should talk about, and I would love your input on any of the items or any of the additional people that maybe should be included in that meeting. I'll usually also add, if I haven't seen any notes from you by Wednesday, would it be alright if I give you a call or just send you an email to check in to make sure that you've read it and to make sure that you do or don't have any changes that you want to make to the agenda? And that way, I've now demonstrated that I'm a leader. I've demonstrated that I'm going to be deliberate in all of my activities. If I actually follow through on those timelines that I put out there, I'm going to demonstrate that I am trustworthy, and I'm going to make sure that they are treating the agenda with the same care that I am because not only do I want to respect their time, I want them to respect my time. I don't want to be working on deals or opportunities that they don't want to be working on. Yeah, I want to sell, I want to make money. I want to succeed, but I want to do that with people who actually want to be sold too or people that want to solve problems. So the entire process of doing the agenda is a way to really set the right tone, to set expectations and to learn more about your customers. So an effective agenda is one that is detailed, that is delivered well in advance, that is seen as a mutual thing that both sides recognize is important to having an efficient meeting. And in a perfect scenario, it's one where they contribute to the agenda as well. So those are just my tips on creating effective agendas. Put the same care into your pre meeting agenda as you would your post meeting map, and you will see a world of difference. It's a practice that once you get used to it doesn't add that much more time. And yeah, some prospects, some customers will just say, Oh, looks great. And not do anything with it. And that's okay, because the ones that do will be ingratiated with you. They will love your process, and they will see value in it, and they will want to work with you. So you can't win them all, but if you do it every time, you will win more. Alright, that is it for my lesson on effective agendas. Again, I'll include some in the Resource Center. But let's move on to our last lesson, which is about preparing for meetings. So agendas are about the meeting that is scheduled, but let's actually prepare for a meeting, whether it's a cold call, a new prospect, being introduced into an opportunity or just any upcoming meeting that you have. 19. Preparing for Sales Meetings – The PREP Method: Lesson, we're going to talk about preparing for meetings. Now, as you've probably seen, I hope you've seen, along with value, I hope you've seen that I really believe in being detail oriented and being very deliberate in how I go about every opportunity, every meeting, every engagement that I have with customers. And I want you to take the same approach in the way that makes sense for you, of course. But being that kind of person, being someone that genuinely cares about your craft that cares about the people that you're working with, their time, your time, and is curious about all of their businesses, about the problems that you can potentially solve for them, and the amazing outcomes that you can have for them is really going to set you apart. And part of standing apart from others is making sure that you're well prepared for every meeting that you attend. So when it comes to preparing for meetings, because I love acronyms, I made another one. And for me, I call it prep. Prep stands for purpose, research, engage, and plan. And it's pretty straightforward. There's not a ton that I need to cover on this, but I just want to make sure that you at least have a simple framework that you can work with. I'll give you another worksheet. You can also just use a notebook like I do and write the letters prep down the page. Purpose is pretty straightforward. It's kind of connected to your agenda. What is the purpose of this meeting? You need to have a purpose. Otherwise, why are you having the call? Why are you meeting in person? Purpose may be to get to the next meeting. It may be to get resolution on a specific topic or problem. It may be to get an introduction or just simply to get to know one another. But there's got to be a purpose, and that should be the driving focus of that meeting. You can have multiple other things that end up happening in a meeting, but a great meeting has a singular purpose. It's the purpose that if time is running short, you'll let everything else fall away, but not that purpose. If my goal was to get another meeting book, then, yeah, I may have also wanted to know about your organization or understand value or any of the letters in the solved acronym. But ultimately, my goal is to get that next meeting booked. So if I can get that booked without learning anything, maybe that's okay for me. Or if there's some other problem that comes up or something else really interesting, I still want to focus on why did we have this meeting in the first place? Let's not lose track of our purpose. Research is pretty self evident. It's about doing research in advance of the meeting on the people you'll be meeting with on anything related to the purpose and their organization. Me, there's the typical things you can do. There's reading annual reports, if you're selling into large organizations. I just generally go to LinkedIn and read the profiles of the people that I'm engaging with. I built myself some chat GPT, little scripts that I can paste information in and derive what they seem to care about or topics that might be of interest to the person that I'm speaking with. I can actually share those prompts with you in case any of you have a GPT account. And it's about doing anything else I can to walk into that meeting as a knowledgeable person, maybe not an expert. I'd love to be an expert. But to at least have some knowledge, some curiosity, something that I want to learn more about. And that is what research is all about. It's about making sure that you're not just walking in and saying, so what do you guys do here anyway? It's okay to not know things. There's lots of times I go into meetings and say, Hey, I was reading about your role or your company, and this sounded interesting, but I don't actually understand what that means. Can you tell me more about that? And that's one of the things that I notice junior salespeople are hesitant to do. As an executive, I'm the first to raise my hand in any meeting or with a customer to say, Hey, I don't understand this. Will you please tell me? Because I want to learn. But the more junior people are, the more they seem scared to admit they don't know something, and they're more likely to end up looking a little silly or like they have less knowledge because they're busy trying to hide some gap that they have. But it's okay. We all have gaps. Just acknowledge it and say, I have a gap. Can you help me fill this knowledge void that I have? That simple. So research is about understanding what you can know, or understanding what you want to ask about to advance the deal or even just to advance your understanding. Now, I'm a big proponent of systems, and the way that I see sales, I know it's a bit of a tangent. The way that I see sales is as a system. I go into every meeting trying to learn about that opportunity, that customer, that deal, and to win it, but I don't win them all. Every one that I enter, I learn something new. And that means even if I've lost the deal, I'll go after a competitor or a similar organization or someone in a similar role. And in that next meeting, I have more knowledge. I walk in more prepared. I have done more research. I've talked to other similar people. So my questions get better, my understanding gets better, my ability to initiate new lines of questioning gets better. So it all feeds itself. And that's what research when it comes to repairing is all about. It may be research you're doing online, just reading things, or maybe other conversations you've had. It's what I talked about earlier on, where I said earlier in my career and when I was selling, I would call 800 numbers. I would go to branches. I was doing research. And quick anecdote, one of the first deals that I won as a startup founder, which was at a large national bank up against the big names, the Big Boys, Adobe, IBMs, we won because we did that type of research. We got in the room, but in that first meeting, we were able to walk in and say, Hey, I know you've set out this criteria for this meeting, but I want you to know that I went to your branches and I talked to some of your frontline staff, and they told me that it doesn't actually work that way. They said that rather than how it's written in the handbook, they do this, this, and this. And so we've put this presentation together, combining your requirements with their reality. And we want to show you what that would look like. So that research instantly set us apart. We may have been a two person team up against organizations with tens of thousands of employees, but we were instantly on even footing, if not above them, because we showed that we cared and we understood we had done our homework. We won, by the way. The letter E from Prep is similar to engagement in solved, except this time it's about how you're planning to engage. Inside of the solve framework, if you remember, it was about asking the customer, how do you want to be engaged? But when you're preparing for a meeting, whether it's the first call, a cold call, or the tenth meeting you're having with someone, engage is about planning what your engagement is going to be. How are you going to use the research that you have gathered towards the purpose you have for the meeting? What are the questions that you are going to come prepared to ask? What are you planning to do in the meeting? Have you created your agenda? Are you going to be doing a demonstration? Do you have leave behinds or other items that you want to present to the customer or the prospect? Engagement is all about planning what that meeting is going to look like and what you're going to do. May need to involve other people. Maybe you're working with a pre sales team or a solution engineering team. Engagement is about bringing together the knowledge, the research, maybe reading your previous solved worksheets or your map, looking at different documents or research that you've done and building an engagement plan. And ultimately, that's what the plan is. You take your engagement, your research, and your purpose, and you create a plan. This is how we are going to execute it. This is what I'm going to do if they say yes or no. This is what I'm going to do if they come at us with this hardball question. The plan is how it's all going to come together. That simple framework is how I prepare for each and every meeting. I'll prepare for interviews that way, whether I'm hiring someone, I'll prepare for cold calls because I still cold call because I love learning what it's like even at the beginning of an organization or a beginning of an opportunity. I'll use it when I'm preparing a marketing campaign or I'm leading a marketing team so that I really understand what's the purpose of this campaign? Prep is just a simple framework you can use to understand what is it that I'm trying to accomplish and how am I going to do it? That's what Prep is all about. And together, Prep solved and MAP allow you to prepare for, to execute, and to follow through with every meeting in a deliberate, in a thoughtful and in a powerful way to make sure that you're winning more deals than anyone else that is trying to sell to the same people you're selling to. And that's it. That is what Prep is all about. 20. Next Steps to Apply Your Sales Training: Friends, that is our course. That is the solved framework. I hope you found this valuable. I know that when I first learned these techniques, these approaches, these different tactics, and this way of organizing my thoughts and my actions, it had a massive impact on me. And I know that this is what these trainers are teaching for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. So you now have all of the same information that people at some of the largest, fastest growing companies are doing to win more deals every single day. Hope that you've found this valuable. I would love to learn more about you. The one bad thing about this platform and doing it in this way, yes, it is very economical. Yes, I can offer you content that you may not have had access to in any other way. The downside is that I don't get to hear from you. I love training people in a real world scenario where we get interactive feedback, where the questions are coming in and adding as much content to the course as my planned material. But we don't get to do that here. So, I encourage you to introduce yourself, to connect with me on LinkedIn. Book time with me. It's not gonna cost you anything. It's just an opportunity for us to get to know each other. And if you've got a deal that you want help with, if you need an introduction, I know a ton of people. If you see someone in my network that you'd like to speak to, let me know. Let's find a way to help each other. You know, I learn from you, and I'm happy to give you whatever access I can to my network, to my knowledge to make you better because that's what the world's about, right? Anyway, I appreciate you being here. I will update this course, and you'll always have access to it. So as people give me feedback, as I learn new ways to present this information, if there's something I miss that I really want to make sure you all have access to, I'll update the course. I think you'll get notified. And hopefully it'll just become part of your daily activities, and you'll see meaningful results. Maybe we'll work together in the future. So let me know how it goes for you. And if you have any questions whatsoever, please reach out. I'm here to help you. Thanks, everybody, and maybe I'll see you in another course someday.