Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 101: How to get better at first meetings (Part 1)

Transcript

101: How to get better at first meetings (Part 1) · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a seller or sales leader at a B2B startup, especially if it's a cybersecurity company, you are in the right place today.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and welcome to episode number 101.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know how when you've been doing a bunch of first meetings, but not enough of them are converting into second meetings or demos and therefore into quality opportunities, you just know that something is happening or not happening, depending on the situation in those first meetings, to cause them to not convert through into good opportunities.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the subject for the episode today.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into it though, I want to hear from you, the listener, to these episodes.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: What questions or topics do you want to see answered or covered on the podcast?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: You must have something that's burning inside you right now, something you're wrestling with, something you're struggling with, something you want to get better at, something even you might just have been thinking about and you want to dive into it a bit deeper.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Send those over to me.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Send them to me directly at andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a do at the end.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you want, you could actually message me using this cool new service I use called zipmessage.com.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the way to get hold of me on there is to go to zipmessage.com forward slash unstoppable.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And there you get the chance, you can send a video, an audio, you can just you know live speak whatever is on your mind and give me something to work off.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably maybe easier to do than send me an email.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if you prefer an email, you can send me one at andrew at unstoppable.do or at zipmessage.com forward slash unstoppable.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go back to this idea of converting from first meetings.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, first meeting conversion has such a huge impact downstream on how successful we are.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you can improve it just a little bit, your conversion rates further down stay the same, but that one from first to second improved, the impact on your results at the end of the day is actually quite significant.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: If your conversion rate isn't good, then what ends up happening is you're sucking on very thin air, right?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're trying to make the most of what you have, you're trying to do whatever you can to get opportunities through, and bad habits kick in, right?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: We we kind of convince ourselves that something that's sort of had a half decent opportunity is a lot better than it is.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Things that maybe sometimes maybe need more discovery or qualified out, even end up in the pipe just through uh we want to make the most of what we have.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, during these meetings, it's so there's so much going on that it's tough to figure out what exactly needs to be fixed.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the next three episodes on the podcast are all about how to go about fixing and thinking about what's happening in those first meetings.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna start off today with a checklist.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this checklist is available to download in the show notes for the episode, and I'm gonna cover a few of the points in the checklist today to give you a flavor of what's there.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, point number one is are you truly meeting with your ideal customer profile?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right again, sometimes what happens is when we're struggling, we're not getting the the leads, the quality opportunities coming in, what happens is we stretch our boundary, right?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: We we convince ourselves that you know, this isn't great, but let me meet with them anyway, and you end up having conversations because they're not in your in the right profile, they end up having conversations that are not that effective.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the very first place we need to make sure that we're meeting with people that we should be meeting with.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is are we having the right level of conversation for who we're meeting with?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think about the people that we meet with in three blocks.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the operators, which tend to be the team members, the people who are more hands-on keyboard uh than people further above them.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're the operators.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have middle management, and that can be a big area, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: They tend to think about TCO and they tend to think about their team, and things are being effective.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've got at the senior level, you've got the execs.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is the CISOs, the SVPs, the VPs, people like that who are managing teams of teams below them.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And each of those groups of people have different things that they care about.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Just naturally, if you're down there at the bottom and your hands-on keyboard, you care about the things that affect you.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is your job going to get easier doing uh what you're asking them to do with this new solution?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're right at the top and you're the CISO or CISO minus one, then you're thinking about strategy and transformations and whole different ways to think about what you're doing.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the question for you is are you having the right level of conversation for the person you're meeting with?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, are you actually carving out 10 minutes at the end of the meeting to agree next steps?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of these things that we often intend to do, but in reality it's rushed, right?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: It can just be a minute at the end, or sometimes you know the worst one is we'll just email you next steps, right?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or we're just, you know, let's just go back and forward and email, right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of great intention can go out the window as the discussion gets deeper and you think it's a really powerful discussion.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some Gong did some research recently where they were analyzing the deals in their world, so all their customers and themselves, the deals that went fastest, right?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the attributes they found was that the fastest deals, the sellers on the fastest deals spent 1.53 times the length of time at the end of the first call on next steps than those that went slow.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you imagine, you know, normally uh if a if a slow deal went at the you know five minutes of the end on next steps, then I think that's what's what is telling us is that the fastest deals actually spent more than that, probably about seven, seven and a half minutes on next steps.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what they're doing is actually going through not just the next step, but the next steps, you know, who's involved and what happens after that, and why do we want to do that, right?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So are you truly carving out the time at the end of that first meeting to do next steps justice?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Fourthly, in the meeting, you just haven't been able to find a big enough problem to work on with the prospect, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: We found problems, but we don't know if they're big enough.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if they're not big enough, the motivation from the prospect side to fix them can sometimes be limited.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that goes hand in hand with that is number five, which is we haven't been able to articulate a great new awesome future for them to move towards and therefore get excited, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about the the value in a deal is the gap between where things are right now, the problem, and then the great new feature they're gonna get to and solving that problem.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So either we haven't been able to figure out the problem that's big enough for them to get excited about it to fix, or we haven't given them an idea about what that great future that they can move towards is.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sixthly, what we've done sometimes is we've pitched too much in the time split in the meeting, right?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you imagine a half hour, 45-minute first meeting, we spent way too much time in that uh in that meeting on talking about what we do.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you know, I've seen these where they'll go up to like 80% of the time, almost like the discovery is a token thing at the start, and it just goes straight to, well, let me tell you what we do.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So often when that happens, we're not having not doing justice to understanding our prospect situation and problems to therefore be able to identify the big ones and also the big the big future that they might be able to move towards.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, for this sample of the checklist, are we asking great questions during either what you might call the pitch or the explanation of what we do?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: When you get to the point in the meeting where you have to say, well, this is how we approach this, this is what we do.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Some people will use a deck to do that, some people will just have the conversation and just explain it.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: But are we asking great questions?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I challenge you to go look at your gong or chorus or whatever CI tool you have and just look at a subset of your first meetings.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're doing the talking and explaining, look at what the interaction is from the prospect.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you have very thin slivers on those bar charts, I don't really call bar charts, but you know what I mean, those horizontal indications who of who's talking.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: If it's tiny slivers, I bet you that the question you asked before that was not a strong question.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was something about is this resonating or does this make sense?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or what questions do you have, or things like that.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: That often results in a sure and none and not much more than that, right?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you ask great questions, you draw the prospect into the conversation, then you'll find on your bar charts and the CI tool that their responses are a lot longer.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: When the responses are longer, we're learning.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're learning about more about the problems, more about the impacts, and more about the great future that we can take them towards.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this is just a quick subset of the list in the checklist of being able to, first of all, just you know, go down the checklist and say, am I falling prey to any of these errors when I'm going through my first meetings?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's going to help you diagnose where you need to think about how you can fix what you're doing.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I encourage you to go to uh salesbluebird.com forward slash one zero one and download the checklist.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, salesbluebird.com forward slash one zero one to download the checklist.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you like these episodes, the absolute best thing you do is help spread the word about what we have going on here with Sales Bluebird.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Share this episode with just one friend.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just one friend would be great.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to do more than that, that's awesome too.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the challenge you just to share it with one friend, one co-worker, someone that you work with.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Also, subscribe in your favorite podcast player.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Every podcast player provides some sort of ability to subscribe to the feed if you haven't done so already.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that just means these episodes show up automatically into your feed all the time.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can, where you are in your podcast player, like it, rate it, review it, whatever it might be.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: This all helps spread the word about what we're doing.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, the the hub for all content that we do on Sales Bluebird is at salesbluebird.com.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to the podcast itself, we've got blog posts, there's videos in there, and you can also subscribe to the Sales Bluebird Weekly Email.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the weekly email is packed full of more tips and thoughts, mostly from me, but sometimes from other people as well, all about getting better at our craft of selling for cybersecurity companies.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's salesbluebird.com.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: With that, I'll see you in the next episode.