Paul M. Caffrey (00:00.718)
Hello and welcome along to the Work Before the Work podcast. I'm your host, Paul Caffrey. Today is Monday, the 30th of September, 2024. If it is end of quarter for you, happy closing. I really hope those deals come in and very excited for a few things this week. The first is I'm going to be meeting the local enterprise board to discuss the next phase of ambitious account executives. So watch this space.
Also have founder of Spoons, Kate Kennedy, the New Yorker based in Berlin, coming on the podcast. And she's going to share everything about her business, which had just come out of stealth mode when we had the conversation and is aimed at helping salespeople prepare better for their opportunities and for the deals they're working. If you know me at all, you know, I'm all about preparation so you can perform at an elite level. And that was a really, really fun episode and looking forward to getting feedback on it.
Friday, we are going to be joined by Devin Henig on this podcast. And Devin is going to share his five tips so that you can sell better. He is an expert in sales compensation and the full episode, which will be aired in a couple of weeks time, was really, really great. So if you think you're going to be in the position of negotiating a new contract or maybe moving company where you're going to be looking at potentially trying to figure out our options worth going with, you know, what should I do when it comes to stock?
All of that gets covered. So really looking forward to that episode coming out in a couple of weeks time.
Paul M. Caffrey (01:37.23)
But today, what I want to spend a few minutes talking about is what a lease account executives are doing a little bit differently. What are they doing in 2024 that you should be considering adding to your game?
Paul M. Caffrey (01:58.126)
There are five things account executives are doing better.
There are five things elite account executives are doing better in 2020 forward than everyone else, which is causing them to close the majority of the deals.
Firstly, they only bring pipeline in which matches their ICP.
They're getting a 3x higher close rate due to this.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:26.882)
They follow a sales process.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:31.34)
In fact, top performing account executives are nearly six times more likely to follow a process, versus everybody else who will follow it sometimes and deviate from it others.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:44.098)
They engage CXOs early and this really drives the momentum of deals, which means they can move up to nine times faster than average deals.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:56.91)
and they speak with deals every single week. This also increases the close rate by up to 17%. All of these things compounded really make a big impact on our number, on what we can achieve. But the question is, how are they achieving this? And it ultimately comes down to preparation. But preparation's not black or white. Preparation really is a spectrum. It's a case of how prepared or how...
for this meeting, for this discovery call, for this demo, for this negotiation. We all get busy. We've got a lot of experience. So the easiest thing to do is not prepare and just come on the meeting and go through it anyway.
Paul M. Caffrey (03:47.31)
Now, if we take a step back and imagine there were two tennis players playing each other who were seeded similarly, of similar skill sets, similar age, similar ability, and they were playing a match, if one prepared, what do you think would happen? Well, let's imagine the prepared person had a look at the other opponent and saw that, their backhand is a little bit weak at the moment and they're struggling with that. When they met on the court, they would definitely ask questions of that person's backhand.
And those fine margins would probably be what the difference in that person getting the victory or not.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:24.566)
Same thing happens in sales every single day. Prospects meet vendors who have broadly similar products who all claim to be able to achieve pretty much the same thing. The methods and the how can be a little bit different, but often prospects don't really understand if one of those is going to be better for them or the other. And all good products will have case studies, they will have testimonials, and they will have a lot of happy customers. So on the face of it,
Very, very difficult to determine, which one should I go for?
Paul M. Caffrey (05:06.358)
And ultimately, the prepared account executive is the one who is able to really establish how much value that their product or their service is going to be able to give the other person. And if they're able to establish how much value they can give, they're a much better place to articulate the value and the impact that will have on the prospect business. So often it isn't the case of the best product being selected. It's the case of the best salesperson.
getting their solution sold to that person because they're able to articulate the value that that person is going to get versus average sales reps who really struggle to get there. If we think about that a little bit more.
Paul M. Caffrey (06:05.998)
If we think about that a little bit more, the best way to establish how much value you can give somebody is to fully qualify them. And that means that the top sales professionals, not only do they know what they want to find out in discovery, but they are well equipped to ask all of those questions and to establish if this person is in fact their ideal ICP, if this person does in fact have a problem which is worth solving.
and how much of an impact solving that problem is going to have on the organisation and what is unique about the offering or the problem that the prospect has, which aligns with the products that you are selling to show yourself as the only way, the only way forward, the only game in town. And it's really been prepared to have these conversations, which is how account executives are performing at an elite level versus others who will hear a problem and then, you
really be delighted that they've got a solution for it, but they fail to connect the root cause with their features or product of what they sell, which means that it's not really clear to the buyer if they should go with them versus somebody else. Whereas the person who connects directly to the root cause is automatically seen as you've listened to me, you can see my pain and I can see that this is the way to go forward.
Paul M. Caffrey (07:30.606)
Now, rather than getting into that, we also have the case of if an opportunity goes to the level of negotiation, well, top performing account executives have a 95 % close rate. Average reps close deals are about 65%. And this is due to a lot of factors. They're not prepared. They're taking somebody through a sales process, maybe not the best sales process. They are doing things a little bit cookie-cutter, a little bit vanilla, whereas the prepared account executive, the elite account executive,
is always hitting the mark every single time. And when they get to that point of signature of negotiation and getting somebody to proceed, they will get them to proceed more often than not, because they have uncovered pretty much all the risk that is there and they have addressed it. And objections tend to get addressed earlier in the process. Now, there is a lot of work to get up to that elite level.
But the best place to start is to be prepared for the meetings that you're going into. So. An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure. There's all of these sayings out there. And the reason there are so many is because they are so true. What can you do to get ready? And this is something I see cause account executives a big problem because they can spend a full day, two days preparing for something.
But if you don't know how to prepare, well, you're going to end up in a position of over-preparing and maybe just procrastinating and looking at the wrong thing. So a couple of things that you can do. One is if it is a discovery session or something earlier in the sale cycle, look at preparing for 25 % of the time. So if it's an hour long discovery booked in, put 15 minutes aside and do really thorough.
preparation for that. Look at the individual, the business and the industry and see what you can find out. If it was a 30 minute discovery, make that seven, seven and a half minutes. That works quite well, particularly when you're in a high volume environment and you may have a number of these calls every single week. When you get to the point of qualifying, we want to know exactly all the information that we need to qualify the prospect for. And we want to have questions and be able to take people through to get them through that piece.
Paul M. Caffrey (09:44.6)
When we get to the point of deciding to work a deal, that's when we want to really up our preparation. So if we're going to take somebody on and do a customized demonstration or run a proof of concept or spend time with other people on the account because this is a deal we're working hard to close, that's where preparation increases. So what you want to be looking at there is if it's a demo, for example, is one-to-one preparation or sometimes twice as much preparation.
as time that is scheduled for the demo. So what does that look like? Well, if we're demo for an hour, we want to put aside time, about 30 minutes to build out the presentation, be prepared for that, and about 30 minutes to build out a demo. And to be making sure that we're doing a custom demo, which is to the three to five things that are really important for them, versus that cookie cutter demo that they can just go and see on the website. Ultimately, we would like to then, that's one hour.
for preparation for one hour of demo. But if this is a big deal and it's going to really help your year, we would like to do a little bit more. So a few dry runs, for example, can we do the demo part presentation in about 30 minutes and do a dry run of that with somebody and then maybe do a second one with somebody else. And what it means is when it comes to the actual demo itself, we're prepared. We're going to deliver that really, really well. It's going to be very sharp.
And also some of the questions and some of the gaps which you may have in your demo have probably been spotted in the dry runs or particularly when you're preparing so that it's not just a case of trying to gather a deck half an hour before fixing a few slides and then hoping that the demo is going to go well because you've done with it last week or a few days ago. But nevertheless, sometimes buttons move on the dashboard or you might discover that your demo.
isn't set up with the right data, whatever that might be, there's a lot of risk there. And we want to prevent and mitigate that risk from impacting the experience for the customer. So for example, if we show up with a deck which has typos in the slides, maybe there's a slide that shouldn't be there. If we're going through a click path and there's something not working, that does not reflect well on us. And that puts us behind when really we should be ahead and this should be our opportunity to shine.
Paul M. Caffrey (11:58.542)
So how do you make time for this? Well, the top performers follow a ready ritual and each one of the letters stands for something or is to review your calendar. So look at your calendar for them at the end of the day, look at it for the next day and even up to the next week. Establish the level of preparation, the meetings that are scheduled in your diary you require. If it's early stage meetings, it's that 25 % rule. If it's later stage meetings, it's that one to two X rule.
and put that time into your calendar so you actually do it. If it's not scheduled, it doesn't get done. And that's what the A stands for. Add time to the calendar to do the preparation. D is do the preparation. There is no point putting that time into your calendar if you're not going to stick with it. So do yourself a favor. If you put that on your own calendar, treat that like a customer meeting, treat that like a forecast call, treat that like something that you just cannot avoid and make sure you do it. And why?
Well, you're ready. That's what it means. You are now ready to make the most of that opportunity that you're going to work and you're going to be in a position to maximise the potential for it. Not every deal closes, but you will close more deals more often if you are ready for them than if you are not. And that's what we're seeing elite account executives doing this year, particularly in 2024. In the first half of 2024, 17 % of account executives closed over 81 % of the revenue.
That means we've never seen a larger discrepancy of account executives that are absolutely killing it versus those who are in some cases starving. So put yourself first, make the time available to prepare and make the most of those meetings that you have.
Paul M. Caffrey (13:47.82)
And when it comes to discovery, be prepared to prevent poorly qualified deals from entering your pipeline.
