# Selling to Two or More B2B Decision Makers at the Same Time – Matthew Du Pont – MicroConf Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lJdhhYI6hg Duration: 13 min Language: English Words: 2733 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/3lJdhhYI6hg --- [0:00] [Music] [Music] [Applause] imagine yourself in this scenario you're the man or woman at the head of this table you're speaking with a suspiciously photogenic and diverse group of people that are potential that are all working for a potential b2b client of yours and whether you're doing this in person through video chat or a conference call in any case your goal is the same you want to get this room of people committed to purchasing your software now many of you might approach this by presenting or demoing what you're working on for 5 to 15 minutes then ask them what questions they have and going from there I'd like to present an alternate [0:54] approach this is the romance novel Texas Wildcat it's available in airport bookstores worldwide so feel free to pick a copy up on your way out now this story is like most books if you read it twice which I wouldn't necessarily recommend you're gonna get the same material the guy always gets the girl and they live passionately ever after the reason I bring this up is because the goal of my talk is to convince you not to be like this novel not to go into your demo your presentation or your conversation with a set of things in a linear order where you know you're gonna march from A to B [1:30] to C and then ask for any questions instead what I want you to look for as an example is the time-tested favorite from fourth grade choose your own adventure books and what I mean by that is two things I mean you should be prepared for your presentation to go in multiple different directions and also that you should be giving your audiences meaningful choices from the very beginning not waiting until the end before you ask them what to do now I recognize that seating some control of your presentation to your prospects sounds like it could be really scary and it is certainly more work to prepare for [2:06] but I'd also like to show you how this could be a lot more effective and the main reason this might be a lot more effective is very simple a traditional presentation where just presenting a bunch of slides in order has one big weakness you have as soon as you start talking people are going to have doubts and so when you start speaking about what your product is then someone is going to either disagree with you or be confused and that's gonna rattle around in their brain until you happen to stumble across exactly what they wanted you to say or they get to ask you a question but I want to make you feel [2:38] that I just want to make you say an abstract so think back to all those small group conversations you've had since you got here on Tuesday and I bet I'm one of those conversations at some point you had a story you wanted to tell you have this amazing insightful funny thing you want to share with this group and the only problem is that someone else is talking and so even if you're very compassionate and a great listener and very interested in what they're saying some piece of your brain is not listening to them it's just waiting for their mouth to stop moving so you can jump in there with this thing you really [3:12] want to share demoing software is the exact same thing whether you're talking to a group of people or one person if you are telling me how easy your software is to use and I'm sitting here worried about whether your company's going to exist in a year or not you're not persuading me so to see how we can deal with this I want to use a personal example my name is Matt DuPont this is my first micro conf and we've heard about a number of amazing and successful companies over the past few days supply better is not one of them so I'm gonna explain what we did there because we did [3:47] have sales process that worked and we can talk later about why the company died but what we did is we had we work with mechanical engineers who needed custom parts made we'd analyzed their CAD drawings and then we take those leads to machine shops who would pay per bid to make those parts so in order to convince those machine shops to pay us we typically had to get three people on board with us the chief machinist the head of marketing and the head of IT I have selected this photo because the average beard length by role is approximately accurate so when we were initially selling these [4:23] people we were frustrated because we talk about supply better for five or ten minutes we'd ask what questions they have and then the questions would quickly make clear that the either totally didn't understand what we were doing or they thought it was a really stupid idea from about ten seconds into the presentation that it's been sitting there waiting to unload on us the whole time those five minutes saying all the positive things about our business or wasted so we started iterating on how he presented to them and we eventually came across a way of doing things that I'm gonna call PDA provoke discover doubts and then adapt so first we provoke the [5:01] customer and I use provoke very deliberately because you're trying to get them to have a negative reaction you're trying to say the minimum you possibly can to get those doubts to happen those doubts are gonna happen at some point so get him out early and I'm not talking about pitching for two or three minutes that's apply better this was one line we would go in there and we would tell them that we are going to bring you leads for the exact machines and materials you have in your shop and you're gonna pay us if you want a bit that's it but with just that little piece of content if [5:33] you're a manufacturing expert you can get plenty of doubts out of that maybe the marketer has paid for leads before and they were terrible quality and she is already worried about getting burned again maybe the machinist figures out that if they're paying for bid he's gonna have to go through every single one of those leads and he's worried he's gonna waste half his time looking at our website we're ten seconds into that presentation and already I've lost my audience if I keep talking if I talk about how amazing our software is they're already sitting there with a reason why they're not going to you why they think they don't [6:02] need to use us so instead of keeping talking what we do right away is we discover their doubts we just ask right away after that statement what is your biggest doubt right now about paying for supply better it's that simple and so them so tell us their doubt we would then adapt the presentation we spend the rest we don't come in with a set order of how we're gonna go through things we address whatever a key decision-maker is thinking we attack that first and what we notice is that when we do this well the questions start off really negative they're trying to find a reason the [6:33] business doesn't fit and those can be a little scary but as you fend those off or answer them well you'll see that the question become a little more positive once you've done two or three things right once their main reason for doubting your existence is out of the way who are these guys why did seem to know about us and once those questions become more positive that signals us that we can take back control of the conversation and share some of the themes that you'd ordinarily share in your original five-minute presentation but this time they're listening because they're already bought in so that's it that's PDA and I'm not a [7:07] sales guru I'm not a super expert this company failed but I do think this worked really well for us and it might work for a lot of your sales also but I want to get a little meta here and go through PDA one more time so here's my provoke I'm asserting that adaptive presentations are better than rigid ones when presenting a small groups in all cases full stop and you might have a doubt right now because I'm telling you to do all these exciting adaptive choose-your-own-adventure presentations over-prepare take in three directions I'm just sitting here with a clicker going through slides one by one that's a [7:42] little bit hypocritical so I am going to take a risk with you guys today I'm gonna put myself in your hands and I'm gonna get the doubts from everyone in this room who wants to participate so I don't know what this talk is going to be in about 90 seconds to do that I need you to get out your laptop or your cell phone I'm gonna tell you what to do with them in about 30 seconds so to get those doubts so that you can tell me them I want you look at this framework again I want you to pretend that I've come up to you and I have said [8:08] I want you to throw out everything you do with your customers right now and instead give this a shot picture product for one or two sentences ask them what they're most concerned about and go from there now you're probably think that's a terrible idea you're probably right for several reasons I'd like to know what those reasons are additionally you might have some questions where even if I had convinced you this is a good idea to try it out maybe you're not sure how you put it in practice so now you've got those doubts top of your mind now you're not listening to me because you've got the [8:40] reason this won't work once you go to this website pull em calm / MDP that's pol le vos komm /m DP this is gonna be like a live reddit so you can not only put in your doubts but I'm gonna go see them on my phone the rest this presentation is gonna be whatever you think is the biggest problems that I'm saying and I will try to adapt in real time and show you a little bit about how this works so keep in mind that this is a lot harder than if you're just talking to people you don't need software you can just ask them but I think a conversation might [9:11] not really work too well given the present circumstances so take a you know put in your doubts up vote down vote I'm gonna lock that's after about a minute because otherwise no one's gonna look at me for the remain of this presentation and we'll get to what we can so someone likes turtles that's very nice of you thank you for sharing that with me one of the top ones what about when no one asked profound questions I have anticipated your objection so the question don't necessarily need be profound but I want you to think about what mental reaction you have if I was to come up here and say that raising [9:47] venture capital always makes your company more likely to be successful now you know that was a cheap verbal trick but you still your brain had a reaction and in the same way if you're talking to people that really feel the problem that you have a customer that's really passionately engaged with what you're doing then they're going to have some sort of doubt or objection or thing to think about now you might get no doubts sometimes when we've had no doubts in the past it's when we were trying to sell the shops it didn't quite fit our value proposition that didn't quite understand what fit us and so I think you'll find if you try [10:16] this out but the customers you'd actually want to work with it actually have a problem we'll have doubts for you but people that aren't a fit for you are not gonna really engage with whatever you said first and that's a good signal that they probably weren't going to buy it whether you talk to them for 10 seconds or 15 minutes but it can be awkward and is something you have to deal with so what if they let's see how do you handle at one negative to Center that will just won't start peppering you with questions I'd say it depends on who that negative to center is if that negative to center [10:45] is the person who will buy your product then it's probably a great idea to answer those questions if they're not as relevant you might want to try and shift the conversation by saying people aren't participating very much and then ask the people to participate who write you a check but I'm not I'm not a sales ex I don't know the exact answer to all these questions the one thing I would say is that sometimes you don't want to answer the questions directly and there can be whole families of questions that can be defeated by not defending against them but actually attacking that premise so here's an example of what we'd face [11:19] it's apply better a lot of time we'd go in there we'd pitch someone they're kind of interested but they're we're not gonna have enough they say you're not gonna have enough jobs for my laser cutter for example now I could respond to that defensively I could the intuitive response is to say oh well yeah you know we're gonna have so many jobs for your laser cutter and here's all these reasons we can have all these leads but that's not really true we're a start-up this is a doubt they should have about us but their real problem is that they don't want to spend time or money on something that isn't bringing [11:46] them value and so instead of answering the question directly we just reiterate that they're paying per bid if we never find a lead that fits them we'll never bother them again and that actually addresses the root of the objection so if someone's peppering you with questions try to figure out what's actually pissing them off instead of answering their questions and then address that directly got time for about one more how would you use a pitch deck so I would use a deck like I'm using it right now there's ways of doing it more sophisticated we had to submit PDFs for this conference so I can't do anything [12:17] with internal linking where I'm at a central index right now and is going out two slides I prepared but essentially you can just have a PowerPoint like a choose-your-own-adventure where when someone chooses to go into the aquarium you turn to page eight and you talk about the content you've prepared there or as I'm doing right now when you've asked me a question I didn't anticipate I'm just staying on the same slide so I've got to wrap things up so I'm going to move forward but since you're hearing a lot of amazing presentations today by a lot of people more successful than me I'm just gonna ask you to remember one [12:48] thing remember that feeling when you're a small group conversation and you want to ask a question or tell a story or correct someone who is obviously wrong and you can't because someone else is talking don't let your prospects experience that when you're trying to sell to them my email is up here if you have any questions or you want me to respond to something I didn't have time to get to as part of our adapt adaptation today I'm happy to talk thank you all so much for listening [Applause] [Music] you --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own 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