# How to Shorten Your B2B Sales Cycle and Close More Deals: The OCGC Framework

Channel: MicroConf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d0mhE-4uVw
Duration: 46 min
Language: English
Words: 9498
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/8d0mhE-4uVw

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[0:00] 60% of loss sales are a result of not properly qualifying your potential customers before you take them through the full process. That's over twothirds, folks. That's almost 68%. It's a lot of people that don't make it through the process because we didn't do our job. That's why we're here. And I got to figure out these buttons, too. So, give me a check a second here. Okay. So, why we're here here is your conversion rates may be down. You may want to boost your conversions. Maybe you have a goal in your company. You want to exit. You want to hire a lot of people. Or you just

[0:33] want to reach a certain revenue goal, but you need more conversions to do it. Your sales cycles may be super long. The longest deal I've closed to date, hopefully I never repeat it, was 524 days for an enterprise deal with Gartner. It was the most painful thing. It felt great when it was done, but I really wish I knew some of the things I'm going to share with you today to

[0:55] help shorten what that cycle looks like. The next is B2B sales according to a lot of you I've spoken to over the past few days is difficult and frustrating. Who agrees? Okay, a couple of you here. I know the energy is a little bit lower. I get it. So that's why today we're going to cover the following things. We're going to cover the magnificent seven reasons why people buy anything. These are seven different vectors you can use to start to tell stories about what your business does, how it can be more effective, and to really resonate with people. We're going to cover the four questions you need to ask yourself

[1:29] before you sell anything. These are also clue in going to help you with stories that you can tell. And then finally, we're going to cover the three essential phases of selling with the OCGC framework, which is how we're going to use these stories. So, super quickly for some context about me, I'm Steven. Yes, this is a picture of me about to put a down payment on Jurassic Park or I'm going to sell you some crypto

[1:53] somewhere in the jungles of Tulum. But either way, I'm Stephen and I'm a creator of a method I call contact selling. I'll tell you what that is in just a second. But as Lyanna mentioned kindly, I've it's now 800 companies I've led workshops for from 30 countries. I'm super proud about it. And another funny thing about me is I was once in a Beyonce music video. So direct yourself to the uh screen over here where you will see in the top left you'll see my hair over there. So you know me doing all the all the fun stuff over there in the video. You can ask me about

[2:28] it later if you're curious about it. But let's set some expectations. First and foremost, are y'all having a good conference? All right. Before anything else, I want to make a really big shout out to the team here. Rob for having me, for for Sonia, for Xander, for Colleen, for Tracy, for Ron, for Braden, for Eric, and everybody and Alex and everybody else who's here helping us and giving us a great comments. Can we make a round of

[2:50] applause for them, please?

[2:56] They put a lot and Lyanna, of course, they put a lot of effort in. Uh, last but not least, ever with Lyanna, but yeah, they put a lot of effort in to bringing us all together, and I hope you guys have enjoyed it, and I'm honored to be here with you. So my expectations, we don't have a lot of time, but I want to make sure that you guys share your ideas. If this sparks anything in you and sparks a conversation, share it with your community, share it on Slack. We are here to learn from each other. The next ask questions. Ask them to me during the question block or out in the

[3:24] chats. But I'm here to help and I'm a resource. And after speaking to a number of you over the past few days, I know you guys don't like B2B sales and you want to get out of it. So I'm here to help if I can do that. Then finally, expect some value. So, one of the things that I'm really precious on is sending you home with something that you can put into your business immediately after the

[3:44] session. So, that's my promise to you. If you'll give me your attention, I know I'm the last speaker of the day. Please know that I'm going to send you back with stuff that you can use immediately and I ask you to hold me to that promise. Is that cool with everybody? All right. The next thing is expect free

[3:59] money. So, what do I mean by that? No, I'm not giving you free money, but I will be giving every single one of you a copy of my book, which will be available for free out in the foyer. It contains a lot of the frameworks we're going to discuss today, which is all about storytelling for sales. It gives you frameworks, the stories you need to tell, how to do them, and where to use them. And I know

[4:19] you guys like frameworks and structure. So, hopefully that's of some use. Please pick up a copy. If you want me to sign it, I'm happy to do that as well. By a show of hands, how many of you use sales scripts in sales? How many of you sell B2B? Okay, not enough of you use sales scripts. Okay, so this is going to be relevant to each of you here. I'm 10

[4:40] years in and I still use sales scripts. Every single call I use a script. Okay, if you want to skip ahead, this is the slides and a lot of the resources, but I know we're trailing in attention. So, I want to make sure I get you the value as we listen and go forward. So, what is context selling? It's the methodology I created to help founders fire themselves from sales. That's the whole reason and the place that I focuses on is specifically on the sales call. This is the key place where founders make two mistakes. One, they don't have a script, which a lot of you

[5:12] have admitted they don't have. And then two, they don't tell any stories on the call. So why the call specifically? Firstly, it gives us visibility into the situations and specifics of selling. So if we can hear what we're talking about with a customer, we know where we are in the call. we know what we're supposed to do and kind of what directions we need to go. And from there, that informs what skills we need to train for. Do we need

[5:35] objection handling? Do we need stories? Are our tones wrong? Are we asking the wrong questions? This gives us a vector to run into, which informs the systems we use to sell. And then that informs the strategies we like to use. This is a great place because a sales call is the lobby to your business. It's a quick picture of the health of how you speak about who you are and what you do so that people can choose you over anybody else. That's why we focus there with context selling. So here's an example I want to give you about how to think about B2B sales and selling. So I want

[6:07] to tell you a very quick story. I want you to imagine that today is Saturday. You had a chance to sleep in and you're going to get a cup of coffee in the park with your best friend. You walk through the park and as you get into the park, you pass a blind man walking through the park. He sits down on the bench directly in front of the coffee shop and he pulls out a sign and starts asking for change and it says, "I'm blind. Please help me." You go inside and you order your coffee and as you order your coffee, you see something weird. A woman appears in

[6:37] bright red heels and grabs the man's sign from his hands, pulls a marker out of it and rewrites something on it, passes it back to him and runs off. Next thing you notice is a group of people crowded around this guy and they start giving him tons and tons of change everywhere. He's pouring it all out of his jacket. He's got so much of it. So what does the sign say? It says it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. So why do I tell you that? I want each of you to envision yourself as that beautiful mysterious woman with the red heels. And yes, some of us look better in our red

[7:11] heels than others for sure. But you are that mysterious person who's able to with a just a swope of a marker change people's perspectives. That's what you have to do in B2B sales. It's about perception and giving people things that they didn't know they saw. And once they see it, they can't unsee it. That's the magic of it. And that's where stories can really be of benefit to you in B2B sales. So, let's talk about the magnificent seven reasons why people buy. Yes, there are seven and I'm going to share them with you right now. Get ready. The first is that you help people make more money. You need to be able to

[7:43] describe how your business can help another business get more bottom line. Okay. The next, you're going to help them save money. Those are not exactly the same things. I'll explain in a second. You're going to help them increase their efficiency in their business. And you are going to help mitigate risk inside of their business. These are the four reasons that businesses buy. Now, the reason these are the reasons is because they're all measurable. You can attach a number to each of these things. Here's where you are. Here's where you want to go with it. And that delta is what we can help you to achieve if you want to. For a

[8:22] quick example, how many of you sell enterprise? Okay, not not a ton of you, but for an example, in enterprise sales with software specifically, it takes about seven people inside of a company to decide to work with you and make the decision. Seven people. That does not include incumbents that they may be using right now or consultants that have to weigh in. So, you have to convince a lot of people. So, I know you're looking at these reasons and you might be like, "Well, I do a couple of these." And that's good. You should probably be able to discuss how you do all of them because a CEO cares about making more

[8:54] money for the shareholders. A CFO cares about saving money. The people who might use your solution want it to be more efficient. And then everybody might want to mitigate some risk across the board. And if you can talk about how you do these things and how you've done these things, now I can trust that you might

[9:10] be able to help me do the same. Let's move on to B TOC. So, how many B TOC? Precious little I'm I'm I'm sorry that this is less applicable, but it's good to see that y'all are B2B. B2B is the way to go. I love it. But B TOC is the same where it's more health, more wealth, and better and stronger relationships. Cuz what good is better health and more wealth if you don't have people to share it with? Now, let's discuss some of the quick judo here with storytelling. Right? We gave the four reasons why a business would buy. But who's behind a business? It's people,

[9:41] right? Remember, before anything else, I want to pare down B2B sales in a very simple way for you guys. We are humans solving human problems in a business context. Humans solving human problems in a business context. And if we know the reasons why a person in a company might want to invest in something or what's happening in their life, we can ma we can match those together. So quick example, if you're selling to a CTO whose code base keeps breaking, they're not QAing it the right way, but you know how to fix it and that can make the company more efficient and he just had a

[10:12] baby, he may want to spend more time at home with the child. And we could talk about not only how can we can solve the problem, but that can get hours back in his day so he can be at home doing what he really wants to do. Right? This is how you can mix the B TOC and B2B reasons to help people buy and have

[10:27] stories behind it. Now let's jump into the four questions to ask before you tell a story or before you sell anything. The first is what is at stake? What is the big picture thing that people need to frame their thinking around? Rob yesterday shared about AI. We'll use that as our example for today. Some of you be might be saying AI is

[10:49] going to be the biggest best thing ever. Other of you are saying that it might kill us all. Who knows, right? The questions you want to ask is generally speaking, what hangs in the balance? Who's going to win? And how should people be thinking about these things? You want to frame the bigger picture? Because if you're selling on big timelines, you want to help people understand that you understand where they're going and what they should be approaching as you help them to sell things. This makes you a great partner and somebody they may want to spend time with and use for years. The next question is, what do your prospects want

[11:22] to learn or achieve about what is at stake? Here are some guiding questions for you. Think about this mainly as what does success look like against what is at stake for their business, right? Can you frame that well and help them learn about that in the right way so that they are the people taking advantage of that

[11:42] change in their marketplace? The next thing here is how do you want your prospects to feel? And I I typed in this AI image and I was like B2B bros having a good time closing a deal and I got Santa's workshop if it was a corporate office. But you know what are you gonna do?

[12:00] Here's why this is interesting though. 95% of buying decisions are made subconsciously. Which means our perky annoying lizard brain is how we actually make any buying decision and how every single person you sell to makes their decision. Developers included, right? we back into these decisions with that 5% of logic after we've made some emotional connection to the problem, to the people, or whatever that is. So, you need to know how you want to make people feel when you get into a conversation

[12:29] with them if you want to be successful. And then the last question you need to answer if the button will work. Let's make the button work and we'll try it again. Here we go. What do you want your prospects to do next? This is where a lot of us fail, and I've seen founders do it time and time again and sales people all the time. We don't

[12:48] tell people what to do next. We just expect them to know. My mentor famously told me one time, he said, "If you don't have a process for selling, you're at the mercy of your prospect's process for buying." And I bet each of you will say, "My customers don't know how to buy anything." Right? Because we're still waiting on a lot of those responses. So, you have to tell people what to do. And what makes you memorable and sticky is stories. 65% of information is retained when shared in the form of a story. It acts in the human brain in a very specific way that you just can't forget. It's easy to tell

[13:22] a story than it is to talk about what your widget is or isn't. Next thing here, so skipping ahead, sorry, wrong slide, wrong slide. The OCGC model. So this is where I'm going to give you something you can use immediately today. The place I mentioned where founders make the biggest mistakes sales reps across the board is in their sales script. You don't even have one, some of you, which is an issue. But I'm going to give you a way to use one. I'm going to show you what a good one looks like, and I'll even give you a template for it so you can take it immediately

[13:51] and start using it. Now, I want to give you some context on why this is an important thing for you to have. Not only is it something that's easier for you to sell, how many of you want to get out of sales at some point? Okay, we know Wayne does. Absolutely. a couple of you do. And whether you do or you don't or you love selling, if you're going to hire someone into it, you have to hire someone into a system that you know

[14:13] works. You can't hire someone to say, "Hey, go figure it out." Because then they're just taking your money and you don't have visibility into what they're doing well or not doing well. The other thing, especially for my more technical folks here, this is a structure and a series of steps. What do you do when code breaks? You debug it and you find the exact place where it's going wrong and you adjust that code so the whole thing works. A sales script is no different. It lets you know which phase or which section fell off and I lost the customer's attention or that

[14:43] question didn't work and we can do what? We can go back in and we can fix it so that the next time it works and we have some predictability in our businesses. So let's get into the OCGC model. The first phase is opening. So, how do we open a sales call in a way that makes

[15:00] sense and is not going to feel gross? Who feels gross on sales? Okay, some of you, don't worry, I can see more hands. Some of you really low here. Yes, sometimes sales is gross, and I get it. But I want to help you do it in a way that feels easy, conversational, and most importantly, sets you up for the

[15:16] success you're looking for in a call. So, here's a stat for you. 82% of decision makers feel that sales people don't know what they're talking about. Right? That's almost every call you get on, somebody doesn't believe you before they get on the call. That's crazy, right? And part of that's because we don't have scripts. So, opening is all about a couple of things. Setting the tone, demonstrating interest, and showing that you've been here before. Build trust, build confidence with people, and show them that you're the right decision to make. So, how do we do this? I'm precious about a lot of things in this, but one of them is the

[15:52] prospect prologue is what I call it, and this is showing you did your research. Okay, there's a couple of different ways. Again, I'm not going to read everything on these slides. You can read for yourself and you'll have them afterwards. But basically, this is you asking yourself the right questions about your client. So, when you get on the phone, you know what stories to tell and you have clarity around how you can already help them before they think about it. Cuz how many of you have

[16:15] people say, "Oh, we're not interested. We don't need that." But you know a way you can help. You have to be able to have that ready before you get on a call. Next here is an agenda. This one will boost your sales immediately. Immediately when you set an agenda. How do we do that? The key to this is setting expectations for your client. It builds trust and it sets you up for next steps. I'll give you the exact way I set up an agenda on every single call. Hey Wayne, it's great to be here on the call with you today. I have a really light agenda. I want to learn and a little bit

[16:47] about you and what you're working on. I want to share a little bit about us and what we're building and if it makes sense for us to discuss working together based on anything we cover in today's call, we'll set up some next steps for that. Is that cool? And everyone will say what? Yes. Because they're already there. They've already agreed that we're going to go for next steps if there is a fit. The other thing that's really important about this is one, it feels really low pressure and it lowers cortisol, which is the chemical that makes people have sales resistance. It's what makes sales feel gross. You lower

[17:17] it when you give people the chance to say, "Hey, we might not be a fit for each other, and we're going to determine that today. I'm not going to sell you something. This is a key to relaxing people and making it feel easy. You can be an expert instead of a saleserson." So, use an agenda. That's going to be

[17:32] huge for everybody. The next is one of the things that I love to call the kryptonite question. Y'all obviously know Superman. It's the one thing that can stop him. Maybe Lois Lane, too, depending on the evening. But Superman and I love this question because it really helps you. I think of it as the open book test. So I remember one time in history class in high school, Mr. Eert said we were going to have an exam and we could bring one page of notes to the exam. It was going to be on Thursday. So I studied all night. I wrote down all my notes and I show up on

[18:03] Thursday and he's like, "I'm moving the exam to Monday, but you can only use half a page of notes." And I was like, "Ah, this guy wrote half a page of notes, show up Monday. He moved it to Thursday. He said a quarter page of notes." Little did I know he was forcing me to study by doing this. But secondarily, when I had the the test, I actually had all of my notes and I got a very good grade. This question I'm going to share with you allows you to get all of the answers to your sales call so that you can be more prepared and answer

[18:31] the right questions and most importantly tie your solution to their needs, which is the whole point of a consultative sale. Okay. The question is, what made you hop on the phone with us today? Or alternatively, if you want to make it more specific to your industry and you know the problem you solve, what made today or what made now the right time to talk about growing your sales or re refactoring your code base or establishing better compliance, whatever that thing is. They're going to tell you say, "Hey, well actually we started to build something internally. It's taken 17 months when it was supposed to take three. We've lost a lot of people in

[19:07] layoffs." Now you get all this additional context and you can talk about how your solution can solve some of those immediate problems. And the best part is we're not even 5 minutes into the call and we still have a lot of room to establish more context. This is the kryptonite question. You've got their guard down and you're getting

[19:22] answers. Use this question. Next here, my favorite part about this is this is a storytelling opportunity. So when we establish that they've got this problem internally that they're losing people for or have spent a lot of time and resources on, what do we do? We create parody and we say, "Hey, thanks for sharing that. We actually recently started working with another company experiencing very similar things. I'm going to share a little bit about that later, but I wanted to let you know we've been

[19:52] there before." Oh, I'm talking to experts. They've seen this problem before. Again, a very small, subtle shift, but I can trust that you've been here because you've heard my situation and what? You've listened to me and you've listened to your previous customers. Create that space with a story as you transition. In general, stories are a great way to transition between states and to create a space of listening. That's one lesson

[20:15] I want to put in front of everybody. Here's a quick example. This is one of the clients I worked with in ran sales. They had no sales script. So, we installed a sales script and then they that kryptonite question gave us the opportunity to grow the business 3x in 12 months with just using a sales script. Think about that. That's what a sales script can do. Okay? And that's just the first part of it. Next, we want to create the gap. Okay? So, a gap is a space where you can fit in with your products and services. Really, really simple. And the whole goal of that is to

[20:47] create more parity. So, here's another stat for you. 39% of the top performing reps, sorry, top performing reps ask 39% more questions than the others. So, I know I've been on the phone with founders. I've reviewed thousands of sales calls and most people just pitch their product. They tell me what their widget does, why this blue button is better than a red button, and how they coded it. And again, I'm not saying that's not cool or interesting

[21:13] information. I just don't care yet. You have to tell me about me first in order for me to care about what you are. Okay. One quote I love. I love I love I love and I read about this in the book. It says you need change only the name and the story is about you. So if you're telling me about client results that's social proof and I want those results too versus you saying hey I'm great at this versus hey we help this company in your industry 3x their bottom line by installing our frameworks. Now, I might care a little bit more and be willing to

[21:47] listen because you've done it before. Social proof. So, what is creating the gap? It's all about asking the right questions to create space for everything. Okay. First question you want to is where do you want to go? Now, again, there's going to be nuance questions within each of these. I'm giving you the high bullet points and then we can create the nuance and you craft that specifically for your industry. But the big nugget to take away from where do you want to go is what is the idealized

[22:14] future state of your client's business? What is the idealized future state of your client's business? And you could set a timeline. Some of the the judo or NLP of this is depending on how long of a contract you want to sell to these folks. Let's say you want to sell a year. What does success look like for your business in the next year? Or if it's three years, in the next three years, next five years. You want to attach them to that timeline. And then you want to get clear on when they want to start going towards that goal. That gives you everything you need. And I'll

[22:44] get back to that with the timelines here in a second. But establish where they want to go and then that gives us a place to go towards together. And that gives us the right stories to tell about how we've gotten others there before. The next is take them back to reality. Right? We told they told us all the things they want to do that they don't yet have. Take them back to where they are and get clarity on that. Who's involved with this? What are the KPIs you're tracking? what is happening inside of your business. Get really clear on all of that so that you can

[23:12] start to help them feel a little bit weird about the fact that they don't have what they want yet. And I don't mean that in a pjorative way. I just mean create the space because we don't even know if we can help even though they have uncovered these problems. Okay. The next tier is we want to understand what is in their way. Have they identified for themselves what might be causing these problems inside of their business? if they have, how

[23:36] long has it been a problem for them? Start asking gapping questions because this really helps them to see, oh man, this has been going on for way longer than I thought. It's costing me way more money than I thought. I need more help. I need more people. And they come to the conclusions on their own through your

[23:53] line of questioning. You then don't have to sell the solution. And as my mentor also said to me, and I love this one, too. If it feels like you're selling, you're doing it wrong. It should feel like a conversation. And this script I'm going to give you, exactly what we're going over, helps it flow much more like a conversation and not like you're

[24:15] selling or pushing on something. Next, here is another client. We put this in. They had a script, but they didn't ask any of the gapping questions. And we got them 1.5 million in pipeline in three months by just making a small change like this. It's it's really nuts what sales scripts can do. I really hope

[24:32] you guys use them. Now to closing. Everybody wants to close the deal. Everyone wants to land the plane. Everyone wants to get more business into their company. And closing is one of the ways we do it. But we're talking about closing a call. How do we get the call to the right place? So inside of a call, we want to unlock urgency. So I want to share something. I didn't say establish urgency. You know, I hear people like, "Oh, you got to create urgency in salesman. You got to make them buy today, right? Everybody sale bro, every guru says that." I think that is malarkey, right? I think that's

[25:07] a total croc. You have to unlock urgency and the prospect has to feel it themselves. And through your lines of questioning, you help people to see that they need to make a change. Now again, that won't work everywhere. I'm a consultative seller. I'm not pushing anybody into any decision. But once we help you see what you need to see, we change your perspective. We can unlock that urgency and you get moving on your own and then I can help direct you the right places to go. So that's what the other ones are, right? We direct the prospect towards the logical place and then we streamline their decision-m,

[25:38] right? If we don't have a process for selling, we're at the mercy of how our prospects buy. So, we need to know every next move that they should take and how to advise them on how to take it and where to go next. 48% of sales calls, that's almost half folks, that's almost half, end without

[25:57] an attempt to close the sale. One out of every two times someone selling something gets on the phone, they don't try to close. And that doesn't mean just asking for money. That means asking for a next step. half of the calls you take because we expect people to get back to us with those emails. It's not gonna happen. I'm still waiting on emails from 2015 when I started sales, right? Like I'm still waiting on them. It's not going to

[26:24] happen. We need to do that. So, how do we do this? This is one of my favorite things. Again, if you only do a few of these from today's call, obviously do your research, do the agenda, hopefully the kryptonite question, but summary is going to be your best friend. Okay? Again, this is how we state change inside of a sale. So, we've gone through massive discovery. We've uncovered a lot of impact we can make inside their business. We've asked 39% more questions than our competitors have, right? We've uncovered that. We then want to summarize what we heard. So, here's an

[26:58] exact script you can use to summarize. You really want X, but it's Y is holding you back. You tried A and B, but haven't been able to make it work. and X is happening which is hurting you with all the Y. And then what you say is did I miss anything? And they'll say yes or they'll say no. And if they say yes, you missed something, they'll tell you something else that you should have hopefully been listening for or something else they thought of that is an objection that they have to what's happening in their company. And now we have all the answers. And now what we can do is then

[27:31] tell them a story about when we've solved the exact same issues for another client in their industry with incredible results. Dive into a case study that you have about how you've solved these issues. And then the magic starts to happen. This is where you say, "Would you think similar results might work well for you in your business?" And they'll say, "Yeah, I think that would work pretty well." or they'll say no. Whatever that is, you handle that objection if it comes. Most people will say yes after you've gone through the case study in this instance and

[28:03] summarized because you listened, right? And then after we've gotten that, now we've smashed an objection. Did you hear us smash the objection? Did anybody hear it? Okay, this is the magic of it. So, quickly for background, there are three types of sales objections. Is this going to work? Is this a fit for me? And is it's something I can afford? Those are the three. They come in different words, but those are generally the three types of objections you experience. We just solved the fit call, the fit objection. Is this something you could see working in your business? Yes, fit is gone. And earlier we've covered, does this work? Because

[28:42] we've given them situations and circumstances and stories about how it's worked for many other people. All we have left now is price. And hopefully we've established enough value through our line of questioning that price shouldn't be a big enough big as big a factor unless we have an established value. Right? So tell that

[29:01] story and give people that clarity. Now we get to the meat of it. After we've gotten that storytelling out, we then invite people to whatever it is that we offer. Okay? So we say, "Hey, here's how we've helped XYZ company achieve Y result in Z time. Can I tell you more about it? Yeah. Right. And now we tie our solution directly to the problems that the prospect has said that they have. Remember this is the open book parts of the test that gave you all of the criteria you need for a successful engagement with them in a B2B

[29:34] context. Then you can provide recommendations. So based on your needs, here's what I recommend as the best thing for us to do or the best next step we can take. And now it feels like we are giving them a specific prescription to their individual needs. Even if it's a productized service, it has the feeling of, "Oh, you listened. You're giving me what I need. Thank you for that." Now, at any point does this feel really salesy so far, how we're describing it, right? It doesn't. It's much more conversational and directed. So, we've opened the door to enroll people in our system or in whatever it is that we're

[30:13] building. And then finally, we're on to Bam Fam. Does anybody know what this means? You can shout it out. Talk to me if you know. Okay. Yes, you got it. It doesn't mean be awesome, make friends, and achieve more. It also doesn't mean books are my friends and mentors, which is true, but it doesn't mean that. It means book a meeting from a meeting, which in essence means lock in next steps live while on any meeting. You got to fish on on the call. That is the environment that we control. The only environment we control in a B2B sale is the phone. You have them on. Don't leave it to chance to

[30:46] say, "Hey, I'll just email you that thing. Even if that is your next step, ask for more time. Even if it's five or 10, 15 minutes, whatever it is, get on someone's calendar. This achieves three things. One, it holds them accountable to the next step in their company to solve their problem. Two, it's a test if they're really serious about solving their problem. And then three, it budgets actual time and brain space for them to say, "Hey, I'm going to talk to this person again." And those three things in concert can be the difference between your sales cycle being 50% shorter or 200% larger because you have

[31:23] to wait for people to get back to you, which sucks. And chasing people sucks unless you're playing tag or big wheeling like we did some of us yesterday, right? So lock in those next steps and you're setting yourself up for the success that you want. In site medical, we added that and we increased their close rates by 25% just with asking for a meeting at the end of the call. So again, use a sales script. It's your

[31:47] friend. I saw many hands not go up. Please use one. And uh with that, I think now you can see it's a beautiful day, but you can see it in sales. So with that now friends what we know is the magnificent seven reasons why people buy. We know the four questions to you need to answer before you sell anything or tell any stories in sales and then you know the three essential phases of selling using the OCGC model. So as I promised you earlier hopefully this has been useful for you but I said I wanted to give you stuff that will be helpful for you immediately inside of your business. So

[32:24] if you scan this code there's going to be a couple things there. First, the slides are available there. Download them at your leisure. Use them. The second thing that's going to be there is a call script template. You can take it, use it, update it, make it your own, but please use one. Okay? Take it. But just understand that those beats and the intention behind those beats are very, very important. Follow those, use your own language, but use a script. It's a huge difference maker, especially if you want to fire yourself from sales. The other thing there and uh as a as a new member of this community, I want to be

[32:57] valuable to everybody and I saw a lot of you don't use call scripts. So for those that do record calls, who records calls? Okay, a couple of you do. For the first 10 of you that click the link in there, there's a form and you send me a sales call. I will review it 100% for free and give you insights on where your gaps are and what you can improve using my OCGC model 30point rubric. So go ahead and take that. And with that, friends, I

[33:22] open it up to your questions.

[33:33] Hey, great talk. Thank you. What's your name? Zack. Hi, Zach. Hi. Nice to Hey, Stephen. So, I love this. This is great. One of the things that I struggle with doing more BTO than B2B, okay, is helping the client be aware of their problem and using this framework, how would you recommend to add that part of being aware, hey, you actually do have this problem and you didn't even know

[33:57] about it. Okay, so there's a framework I like which goes the known said, the known unsaid, and then unknown unsaid problem. Right? You want to help them with the unknown unsaid problem. This is you establishing context. So what's the big overarching picture? what's at stake for them in the company, what's the big goal

[34:13] they have, and then what's in their way. So, you say, "Hey, it sounds like you want to do this in the next 3 to 5 years. Is that right? Have you thought about how this is happening?" And they may say yes or say no. And you say, "Well, based on our research and 20 other companies we've worked with who solve this, this has been one of the biggest contributing factors to this

[34:31] thing you're working on not going well." as a person who's working with you, whether you work with me or not, I want to point this out to you so that you're aware of this so that whether you go with us or not, you've got the right stuff to to solve this issue. That usually handles that pretty well.

[34:45] Thank you. You got it. Thanks for the question, Zach. Aloha. Hey, hey, we're here. Oh, S, what's up? This happens to me all the time. Um, how do you handle it when prospects badmouth competitors? Do you ask specific questions which clarify? And do you have any tips in navigating this case? Okay. When they badmouth a competitor, as in they've worked with the competitor before, yeah, they they've worked with the competitor and they're talking like they've they were a client of our competition or they want to leave our competition. This sucks. And so you'd say, "Hey, thanks for letting me know. I'm really curious. What would a great partnership look like for you

[35:24] with someone in this in XYZ industry?" And again, that's also you getting the open book answer of, "Well, we didn't like that they did this. They we don't have regular calls with the accounts. They don't give us reports. They're hard to whatever that is. You want to frame it in a way that points towards success. And then you can speak about how you help them with those specific answers that make a successful partnership look

[35:45] good. Other questions? Got a gentleman back here. Over here. Over here. What's up, Julia? Thank you so much. I really appreciated that. and um the BAM fam uh suggestion really resonated with me. But how much time do you kind of budget at the end of the call? And maybe how would you say how would you say it like verbatim like in a Zoom like to you know someone might be reticent to like are they looking through their calendar while on the phone with you to like get it done because I' I'd love to know like more tactically how to like literally what buttons am I pushing

[36:21] and pressing? How am I doing it? Yeah. So, first thing, there's a framework I also learned from a mentor called confirm, ask explore. This is how you run a sales call. It's budgeting. So, you budget 10% of the entire call length to confirm previous information that you already know. This is if they filled out a form. Hey, how you doing? You're from Kansas. It looks like your business does this and these are some of the issues. Is that correct? Cool. Then we go into the ask section where we budget 40% of the entire meeting time to

[36:47] asking questions and doing discovery. Then we budget the remaining 50% of that meeting towards getting towards next step. And I use the word budget importantly because if discovery is going well and you're getting answers, you're not going to rush it off. But you do want to be minding the clock all the time. So you say, "Hey, if it's a 30-minute call at 15 minutes, I've got to start getting ready to transition my way into the closing." Now, to your specifics with the tactical side, when we get to that part after we've summarized and then we start to making some kind of offer, we say, "Hey, here's

[37:16] what I recommend based on your conversation. It looks like we can absolutely help you to achieve tripling your revenue inside of the next 3 years. I recommend we book in another 15, 20 minutes to discuss what that might look like for you. Does that sound good?" They'll say yes or say no. Again, this is a test. It's why you also always ask for the next step because if they're

[37:36] like, "No, just send me an email." they're not a serious contender. Doesn't mean you don't follow up, but you don't spend as much time and energy getting them that follow-up as fast. So, if they do say yes, you say, "Great. How does next Tuesday look at this exact same time? I'm going to pull my calendar up." And then you pull it up and you coordinate times. I would absolutely coordinate and lock that in. Even if you

[37:56] got to stay over, get them locked in. And then the other thing that I would mention is post call expectations. So, after you've locked in the meeting, you would say, "All right, so after this call, here's what you can expect from me. I'm going to send you an invite for next Tuesday at the exact same time. I'm going to send you a write up of the exact meeting we had, and then I'm going to send you a recording of the meeting in case you want to review any of the things we covered today. Is there anything else you'd like to see from us

[38:20] between now and and Thursday?" And then we've covered everything we need. And that's exactly how I do it. Julian, thank you. You got it. And that's also all on that script as well. Hey, over over here. Hi. Thanks for that. Uh, so B2B sales enterprise. Yes. The focus. And so you're always selling to a committee.

[38:43] Oh, yes. And so it any tips on trying to zone in on that that individual who's coaching the the process because often they're try to play a little bit koi, poker face it, and you know, just I'm going to give you a very consulting answer which is it depends, right? But the the key thing here is every organization is very different. Your decision maker could be the champion and be pushing it across. It could be someone who's using the product. I think this goes back to why it's so important to have these stories. So if you have someone who's engaged with you in the process, they're your champion. And then

[39:18] what you would do is you'd have your formal meetings where you talk about whatever discovery and everything else. Then you'd ask for a sidebar. Hey, can I just get five minutes to clarify X or just ask a quick question? And you start to build your champion and relationship. Uh the general way I think about this is you really want to be clear about what happens next. So not just hey let's get a call and book a call in. You want to get clear on your prospect's process for how they buy stuff. So enterprise especially you're going to be like all right so it

[39:45] sounds like XY andZ are the big issues. Really curious how are decisions like this made inside of your organization? You want to ask that direct question and they'll say oh well it runs from our team. We meet every two weeks to discuss this and after we make a a determination, it then goes to our CFO. We meet with him every quarter. So, we already know the sales cycle is going to go out because their meeting may or may not be coming up. And then it goes to procurement. Yeah. Just curious, on average, how long does a procurement process take? About a year. So, we already know our sales cycle is going to

[40:15] be super long and we need to nurture. Quick point for you, especially Rob went over all of those pieces in the funnel for awareness and different things. Sales is a funnel, too. You should have content and steps and actions for each parts of those pieces in the funnel for whatever product you sell. Different emails you send, different parts of how you share people, share with people

[40:33] about what's happening in doing that. But I would say the person who's most responsive for you, who who says yes or no about meetings, just ask for like five minutes so you can pull them aside and get a quick picture. Um, and then the other thing I'd say, this works well when people ghost you, which happens in enterprise all the time. Uh, the only lever you have in B2B sales is information the prospect does not yet have. What do I mean? That means if someone's not answering you, you could say, "Hey, I've come up with five or six ideas about how we could help you affect

[41:06] X. Let me know if I can share them with you." Most people like, "Oh yeah, what's that?" It's like, "It's going to take way too long to type. Do you have five minutes so I could hop on the phone with you?" And we get them back into the place what that we control, which is the call. Hopefully that's helpful. Other questions? We have

[41:21] time for two more. Yeah. Can you hear me? Um I don't know where I'm looking, but I can hear you. Right back here. Hey, there we go. Nice. Um so, one of the reasons I've kind of steered away from using scripts in the past is because I really want to be fully present in the moment when I'm talking to a prospective customer. And I found like my weird engineering brain is so focused on like saying the exact words that I like I get pulled out of it. Right. Okay. And so when you say script, do you mean more of like an outline of the conversation or like how

[41:54] do you handle that that uh conflict? Great question. Great question. I mean an outline. Okay. You can use exact words if you want. I would say practice them. Like again, all of this is practice. This is just you getting the reps in, right? You can memorize the script eventually. Like when I say I use a script, I'm not like and the summary is the plea. Like I'm not doing that. like I know what beat I'm going to hit and again there's so many frameworks at play when your variables are humans. So if I know at 15 minutes I got to start moving the conversation forward. I know what I'm

[42:26] supposed to be doing and what question I'm supposed to be asking that takes me to that new stage. So, I would say if you're not going to memorize the words, that's fine, but at least have the beats of knowing exactly what phase you're in and where you're guiding the person because again, yes, it's important to be really present and you don't want to sound like a robot. But I think at the very least, have an outline of what you're going to be doing inside of the call so that if you do get sidetracked and you get into this funny conversation, you know where you're supposed to go next and what you're

[42:53] supposed to do. One last question for Stephen. Uh, thank you. Oh, he's working. Yeah. Thank you for the presentation. I already can see in next three months our conversion rate will be increased by taking otherwise. So thank you for that. U my question is uh you give a lots of good advice on how to ask questions. uh but I found quite often I don't have a good strategy or general guideline how to react to the answers from client because question you can prepare but answers can be various uh you it's hard to prepare how to react to it uh like what's your advice on general strategy

[43:36] on that and then additionally specifically for people like me I sounds less intelligent when I speak in English, I sound more smart when I speak my native language. So, uh how how I can uh deal with the situation better when either I don't fully understand them or they don't understand my English, let's say. Okay, the I'll answer the second

[44:02] question first. That's a tough one. Like, I mean, the I'll say this way. If somebody's not patient with that, that's a red flag that they're not going to potentially be a great client for your business. So, let's start there. Uh, I always I set a lot of I don't want to say trip wires, but just to know if someone's going to be a good client. I don't want to work with everybody. I don't need to work with everybody. And a lot of people are really hard to deal with. So, the more I don't the more tests you kind of put in, if someone's not willing to engage with you on where

[44:31] you are, I I kick them out. That's the first place I would say. Uh, then I would say get more reps and more practice around your talking points so you're more confident in whatever language you're doing them in. But to your second point, how I structure answering questions, I'm not there to answer questions. Not yet. I'm there to

[44:48] ask and then to get them to talk to me. So, as far as answers, I'm taking notes the whole time. I I have uh, if anybody's curious, I have I learned this thing called the pain funnel, which is a series of questions to get someone to dive deeper into their answers. The first level of pain is like if they're like we're experiencing a a huge upsurgence in our in our market and compliance is going crazy. The first question is tell me more about that. Just get them talking. I would say more than anything else your job especially in discovery is to just get them talking. It's not to

[45:18] answer and say oh we handle this technical approach this way. Just get them to talk. So, we're the answers are important for sure, but they're most important in that it gives you the context you need to say when it's your turn, after you summarized, here's how I think we can help you. Here's how we've helped other people like you. And then in future calls, when it's time for demos or other things like that, then we can get into the answers to those questions. But the discovery is to know if it's a fit and to create

[45:44] enough curiosity to move them forward.

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