16 Sales Calls, $0 Closed (Here's How We Fixed It)

You're about to see a coaching call with an enterprise SaaS seller who was previously promoted from an enterprise BD, where he did two to 300% achievement of quota was therefore then promoted in an enterprise SaaS sales and is now going out on his own and selling his own thing for his own agency, as a lot of you probably want to do. The problem is that he went zero for 16 on his last 16 sales calls as an agency owner trying to sell his own thing. And in this coaching call breakdown, you're about to see me work with him with a recorded call and breakdown exactly what he's doing wrong and why his enterprise SaaS sales skills, which were great for that particular niche, are not translating into the agency world. So if you're also thinking of transitioning from corporate sales or enterprise SaaS sales into your own offer, your own agency, this call will help you. And if you've never watched any of my videos before, my name is Drew Long and I previously worked in Fortune 500 and in fact helped build Fortune 500 sales teams from five sellers to over 150 sellers, collecting over $6 million in cash per month. So that's where all my expertise comes from and now my business sales by tomorrow helps grow sales teams. I've been in sales for 12 years. I've both worked on the SaaS, on the enterprise, on the software sales and all the B2C like large company. And now I've also spent the last two years helping agencies and small business owners grow their sales skills and grow their sales teams and scale those teams as well. So that's my perspective. Now go ahead and enjoy the video. Hey, what's going on, man? How you doing, brother? Good to have you here. I'm stoked. We can actually do some live role play. I haven't had a chance to review that call that you posted yet. We can also do that if you want. I can give a brief background where I'm at right now. Yeah. So like I, for reference, like, I don't know if this is a typical issue. So I actually have a day job in enterprise sales. And so funnily enough, right? Like you probably can see this when people come to you, like selling software for bigger name brands is so much more different than selling your own shit. And so like now I've actually had to, I can't like hide behind the product to really sell for me, which I kind of have. And I've done really well. Like when I was in SDR, I hit like 200, 300% quota. Cause you're just selling the meeting right yeah they give a big brand behind you and then you know as enterprise rep right like i've gone up the way to like you know so into big government and education but now as i'm doing my own product i'm like lead generation is not an issue like i have like i think this month alone i had like 16 sales calls and so i didn't close a single one right and so that's bad and so that's where i'm kind of like i know i'm tripping up in discovery and i would watch one of your videos beforehand where it's like i'm asking questions but i'm not asking the fork in the road questions i think and building more urgency implication and i'm trying to navigate my way so that's why i'm really going hard at, you know, doing as much. Looking through your training has been really helpful. I'm doing the mock calls every single day and just trying to get at it. Yeah. Well, that's great. That makes total sense. I did not realize that was your background. That makes so much sense. All the sense in the world because with enterprise software, you have like, I don't know, what's your sales cycle? It's not bad. It's like usually two, three months, but I've always have a security engineer working with me. I'm like a glorified product manager. That's what it is. Exactly. It's project management. Now you come into the agency world and it is like a hundred times faster, a hundred times more consequential. Every single slice of the call matters so much more because you're one agency. No one's going to sit on the call with you for three months. They're going to make a decision in the first five minutes of the call, whether or not they want to work with you. And it's all dependent on how you conduct the call and if you're getting them on track. So that makes a lot of sense. That makes me understand why you were conducting the sales calls the way you were. The good news is we can definitely shorten that and we can compress it and we can turn it into something really tight they'll actually get you closing deals for your agency. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, dude. Yeah. So actually the call last call I put in, I did, I looked back, I went through, so I had Alex from AI look at it as well. And so looking back, I realized that the discovery call, I was trying to wedge in a way to show the product per se, but I didn't really build enough urgency or just like any sort of like proper discovery to realize the implications and stuff like that. So I had a call this morning that was much better that I'd be loved to review. Whereas I kind of focused more so on like hey just i didn't even pitch i like i soft pitch i just showed like a high level overview of the three pillars but it was more of like just asking where they're at so we have a follow-up call next week with their ceo as well but yeah i'm just trying to figure out how to ask more better fork in the road questions that you know for people who aren't stake who aren't like so ceos like i have a really hard time getting the emotional aspect versus the logical aspect of urgency if that makes sense for sure guys if you're enjoying this video so far and you're finding value in the information i'm sharing realize that it doesn't matter if you understand this intellectually, what matters is that it's practice and that it's real for you. So because of that, I'm going to invite you to join my school community. Link in the description. It's completely free for seven days. You could come in and try out the techniques, take a look at a lot of additional content we have. But the thing that's really going to help you is we're going to help pair you up with a role play partner. And then at higher levels, you can also get your own calls reviewed by me every Friday. We can do a call breakdown. We can do a role play scenario and we're going to skyrocket your skills a lot faster. Now back to the video. Yeah, well, let's take a look at that call. And then that'll give us some ground to cover in terms of role play. Where are you based out of? I am in Salt Lake City right now. Oh, where? You born and raised in Utah? No, I'm actually, I was born and raised in Oregon. And then I lived in San Francisco for six years, worked in sales there in FinTech, financial services and software, because you know, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and then moved out to Silicon Slopes for Salt Lake for three years, moved back east for another three years now i'm back in salt lake so i've lived all over you didn't like the software sale life it's okay it's just i love the faster paced sale i love i mean silicon valley did you work for a startup or what did you where did you work at yeah i worked for startups i worked for big companies i worked for fortune 500. yeah i kind of got to taste a little bit of both yeah and i know one of the comments you made one of the calls i had was like my pricing structure which i totally agree with you is kind of like all over the place kind of simplifying it and kind of making it more consumable because that's one struggle point i have where it's like this is still a relatively new offer like it's only like seven months in there's not as much data in the field of other people doing the offer there's some people who've gone good success with this offer but it's not like it's like like blue or it's not as uh saturated as like cold email for example where there's like framers you could follow yeah for sure all right let me share screen and let's get into this bad boy do you want both your note takers taken away yeah yeah okay so repeat the last thing you said regarding affiliates i think this one came in a little bit my intro my uh fathom note here came in a little bit late so totally fine totally fine uh right now you just don't know if they're how to really activate you guys we try doing affiliates uh another problem with affiliates is since we are a merchant becomes very difficult to structure an affiliate program that will work well for our users as well as our partners right i think can give you a little bit more insights on that yeah so when we started the three program like four months back and initially kind of you know it was more more for like you know actually we stopped like a couple of influencers initially on instagram and youtube uh working in the same space and kind of creating content in like you know payments and ai monetization so we stopped like a couple of them but uh you know it was like a very different kind of conversion then we kind of switched it we then we started to like you know creators on medium and sub stack and we got like you know handful of creators out there so we got like 150 partners from medium and sub stack and but the problem with medium and sub stack is that the people are basically creating content they're pushing out the boxes but we're not getting like the effort businesses that is something kind of you know because we are kind of putting a lot of time and effort and kind of doing outreach and also reaching out to people kind of you know like taxis that we really want so that is something very problematic from our side and that's something that we want to do yeah so you guys you guys have tried doing creators or more so you know these uh business influencers uh using affiliates but they just haven't after the content they haven't converted anywhere brownie leads them sort of yeah we did get a couple of leads but you know not much revenue from them not much and so is that your uh target partner icp is that like the kind of partner who would serve your end consumer you guys are mainly who's your main icp so our main icp would be three the first icp would be indie hackers people who are building tools out there and would want to sell globally that's one second would be ai startups any startups that are what is their business so it's kind of like uh like imagine like wise but the it's usage based so they charge like a percentage based on international fees like a startup wants to sell to brazil or wants to sell to any international shop you know how there's payment processors instead of being like a it's kind of like that basically so they're like an international stripe yeah basically okay and they're trying to grow through influencer marketing yeah like affiliates and stuff like that yeah right building in the space of ai we would be be a good fit for them. Third would be a really helpful question to start the call off. And I don't know if you've maybe already asked this question and had it answered and it's just not on the recording is the question I always like to hang everything off of is what's the business growth goal in six to 12 months? Like where are you guys trying to go? Do you start with that? Typically? Okay. I usually ask that in the middle. You'll see, like I usually ask that in the middle. Okay. The reason I start with it is because it contextualizes everything that's downstream of that. So, I mean, it also allows you to get your head around the size of the lift. Like is if the goal is to double, I mean, depending on the revenue numbers, you probably have an opinion on can the partnership channel even get them from X to Y, depending on what X and Y are, right? So part of it is helpful in sizing. And I'm just trying to assess and evaluate, is my vehicle going to be able to get them all the way to their goal, halfway to their goal, a third of the way to their goal, you know, like, so I can position it. Oh, what else are you guys doing to double your revenue. Oh, well, so how do you see partnerships channel fitting into that? What are you anticipating it can do? And then I can more so shape their perception of the offer. Okay. Typically how I start these calls is, Hey, no pleasure to meet you. Do you have, are you guys a hard stop at 30? Just to get time check. It's like, okay, cool. Just real quick then to introduce myself. You know, I've been in marketing for nine, 10 years, have been partner channels for four plus years, been working with startups all the way to level enterprise, helping generate seven figures plus through partner channels. And so my goal for here today is to qualify for a guarantee and see how can we help you out and what situation you guys are in. It seems like it's a good fit. We'll talk about our services. The next call, go to a deeper dive with your CEO. But yeah, I'm going to leave it over to the floor with you. What led you to take this call? So that's why you're pitching for two calls. You're pitching for two calls because you're feeling like there's no way you can get enough information the first call or... that. And like, these are 30 minute calls, right? And so sometimes like this guy isn't the main decision maker with money. For sure. Even with those calls, decision makers money, I find myself like I've tried doing an hour long call. Some people would say like, Hey, I only have 30 minutes. So I switched over. I did 45 hour calls for a little bit. And I switched over 30 minutes because I was able to get more bookings that way or less, less no shows. Yeah. I find myself, I just can't get through my discovery as well, or get through like the entire process as well, which is obviously asking better questions, you know? Fair. Yeah. And so my goal for you would be let's tighten up the question so that you can get a really solid discovery in like 20 minutes. Yeah. And of course, people are going to commit more to a 30 minute call. You're right. It's a lower ask. So great. Let's keep it there. But the whole goal for you in this 20 minute, 30 minute call, they should be sold. One call sold. Whoever shows up on the call should be sold that the vehicle is correct. It's a great vehicle. It's the right vehicle for them. And that you are the guy to drive the vehicle to their destination, right? It's like you're ordering an Uber, which Uber you can order Uber Black, Uber XL, Uber Econ, Uber Pet, right? You pick that vehicle first. Then, I mean, I wish Uber gave you this option. They don't. But in the agency world, really what they're doing is picking the driver. They're choosing like, oh, cold email lead gen. Now, just let's pick the driver of that vehicle. Or, oh, partnerships channel. Let's pick the driver of that vehicle, right? Which is you. So the objectives for the first call is they need to be sold on the vehicle. You need to make sure you're always checking for that. Closing the doors on alternative vehicles. And then choosing you as the driver of like, okay, this looks really good. 10 minutes is awesome. Super professional. We love it. Whoever shows up, if you can sell them, then you have a shot to have them sell the actual decision makers. Right. And I wouldn't always necessarily frame it as a two call thing. I realized that's probably like helps relieve pressure and whatever. But I would be open because you want to be open to the possibility that someone could pay you in one call like that is possible, you know, or they could sign docs in one call or whatever. You just want to take that 30 minutes and try to get the ball as far down the field as possible in one call. And then you'll have a good instinct. If midway through the call, you feel like for sure, we're, you know, we've barely gotten any information. We're going to have to go to a second call. Then just signpost that, right? And be like, okay, well, I want to ask you guys a few more questions. I'm mindful of time. Is it all right with you guys? Is it okay if we have to break this up and maybe we can follow up on some things if we don't hit them today? Is that okay? Would that be okay with you guys? Just to make sure I could really present what's going to be most useful to you. And everyone's going to say yes, right? So you can tie down and bridge into a second call if need be, but I would be open to, you can get a lot done in 30 minutes once you get a little bit more efficient structure. So how would you adjust my intro in the sense of like, obviously don't mention the two, like, hey, next call is going to be like this. Would you just reposition it being like, hey, if we feel like we don't have enough information, we can schedule next call. But ideally, we can kind of, you know. Yeah, I wouldn't put that in the intro, though. Intro I'd use is just be like, hey, my name is Drew. I represent this company, blah, blah, company name. Goal for today is just to see if we could be a fit to help you out. If not, I'll point you some other direction. Is that fair? Like, very short, very simple, right? Just like boom this is what we're doing and then as you go through the call if you feel the need you know if you're at 30 minutes and you're like oh you guys told me you had a hard stop like for sure book something else okay so you think i can get rid of that intro because i just recently started adding that like the last like five six sales calls i'll like the brief intro about myself yeah credibility but no that's fine credibility drop is totally fine nothing wrong with that i mean it does help i mean it's neutral right you can add it you can you don't i've seen people like you don't need to have it you can have it it's fine yeah but the most important thing is just like, Hey, we're going to see if we can help you if we can. Great. If not great. Like let's go, you know? And then you talk about the business. Hey, where are you guys looking to be six, 12 months from now? Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about partnership channels today. I guess, you know, as regards that, where would you guys like the business to be? Like, I guess, tell me about the business growth goals in the next six to 12 months. Cause you're mostly talking to like SAS, right? Yeah. It's all software companies. It's all stuff. Okay. So they all have a growth goal, right? Yeah. Yeah. So give them something that's easy for them to answer and then gives you great context on where to take the call next right a series a back companies that are looking to sell to india brazil and all these other countries where traditionally have a lot of volume but people don't sell because of all the compliance that's there so those three icps that we're looking at okay so you're kind of like a and for correct me if i'm wrong but you're like a why i don't know if you're wise before yeah so you're not wise per se have you heard about lemon squeezy or have you heard about polar i have not uh so we basically enable companies to uh collect payments across the globe without them thinking about tax and compliance. We handle the tax and compliance for them while we charge. And they just work on selling products using the product payments. Okay. So it's like, yeah, because then Stripe, you have to make sure you register in certain areas, you have to do blah, blah, blah. You basically help like, hey, we'll charge a little extra, but you don't have to worry about it basically. Is that the value prop? Yeah. That's the idea. Yeah. So your ICP could probably be, I mean, are you only looking at those indie hackers, AI startups? Seriously, because I think that this applies to almost every single business, to be honest, every single small business who sells international now. It does, but the way that we want to position ourselves is AI startups. And we don't do physical products that's not any additional products works we don't do uh iptvs or nfsw anything that's in that area we don't sell any of those what is the book yeah yeah anything from my distribute perspective what are you guys at right now we are at 1.2 plus as of now and where you guys want to go by 12 months from now definitely how many leads are you looking to get a good question that can help there to follow up with the double it because you'll get that a lot obviously is like okay and um any particular reason why double apart from just sounds good yeah like you can challenge them them a little bit. The thing I've experienced is most, especially software companies, have not really thought a lot about their goals. They'll just pick something out of the air and they just throw it out there. So I would want to assess, particularly if I know, is funding tied into that in any way? What does the board think? Is that a board goal? Is it a CEO goal? Whose goal is that really? Let's say you guys don't double, you get to 1.8x. Did anything bad actually happen? Or is actually everyone just still stoked that you got to 1.8x? I don't know. How about 1.5? How about 1.2? How much growth do you actually need realistically before people start getting like, we should fire some people you know like let's let's calibrate that because that also that makes a material difference in like what you're going to be able to promise right and what you're going to go and especially i'm imagining with partner channel just saying like okay yeah we'll double you with partner channel i don't know if that's that's not possible yeah yeah so there you go so so i actually want to cut their goal down to something i can really confidently say like oh for sure we can knock this out of the park right gotcha so there's a strategy behind that because most people have not put thought into their goals and it's just literally like who knows sure double sounds good you'll see because i think let me pull it i could have the notes for the call so yeah i do this they eventually do budge i'm like okay is this like your goal is this whatnot i did say like okay do you when i asked like do you really even get there on your own they said yes and so i was like okay so ideally an ideal world right let's just shoot for the stars what are you hoping to get out of them they eventually said five million but i know probably my sequence of questioning there kind of led me to it's like hey i'm talking about the dream i'm not talking about the potential, like you said, the anchoring of like, what's the absolute bare minimum you need to hit? Yeah. So that can be helpful cutting down their goal. Then the other conversational path to go down there is, well, what else are you doing to get there? Because obviously if they have a huge goal, the other way it can work in reverse is let's say they have a huge goal and they're like double or triple or quadruple or whatever. Then you can question like, okay, well, what are you doing to get there currently? What is your plan to get there? And usually their plans are vastly inadequate. So then you can use that as the leverage of like, oh, well, it stands to reason And then you need to go all out on the partner channel. It needs to like absolutely explode for you. So you guys actually, what you're telling me is you don't have an option not to do the partner channel then. Is that what I'm hearing? Right. And do you see how that kind of jujitsu them into like, oh yeah, we're committed. We have to do this. Right. Yeah. Whether it's you or someone else right now, they're committed to the vehicle. They're locked in. They have to do partner channel. And then it's just a matter of, okay, now I got to sell them that I am the best partner channel guy for them. Yeah. Because I asked them, what are the channels that you, they mentioned like content, organic, it's a little bit of ABM. to like what's stopping you from just continuing that. Right. Yeah. Then I guess I never got the, and this, and you'll see, like, I never really got the, we have to do partner channels to really, it's more of like a nice to have in there. Sure. That's exactly right. You don't want to be a nice to have, it can't be a nice to have, cause then you're going to get no deal. Right. Yeah. That's where I've been stuck. Yeah. And then you also have to sharpen what they're doing and their plan. So if you ask them like, Oh, what are you doing to double? And they're like, Oh yeah, no ABM content. Then the next level is you're like, okay, what kind of results are you seeing from those channels. Yeah, what kind of results and the results are crap, right? Most likely, if they're like, Oh, they're amazing. They're blowing up beyond our wildest dreams that you're like, Oh, well, then why do you need partner channel seems like you could just keep doing that. And then either they get off the phone unlikely, because they're probably just blowing smoke. It's not actually going that great. Or they're like, Oh, actually, it's not going that great. We need partner for sure. So either way, it kind of leads back to they need the vehicle, right? That's kind of your jujitsu is you want to figure out like, okay, what's your plan to get there? How are those other channels performing specifically and don't let them get away with some BS, like, oh, they're pretty good, or like, they're all right. They're doing good, you know, so far. Too early to tell, you know, like they have concrete examples. They have concrete results. Stick with it, get those numbers. And then when those numbers inevitably fall short, you're like, oh, okay, it makes sense why you'd want to add more channels. Those channels aren't, doesn't look like they're really performing. I mean, in your opinion, are you going to get there with just these results you've gotten so far if they continue? Well, no, we probably won't get, okay, then you definitely need to add on partner channels, right? It's a tie down. Okay, you find the tie downs. okay yep you're building this inescapable logic of why they need the vehicle and they need it now okay no i agree i agree that's pretty standard for industry 30 40 okay and then ideally are you guys looking to eventually raise funding what's the purpose of adding another channel for this kind of thing yeah obviously we will be going for a lot of funding i don't have timelines but should be within a year or two so having growth in the pipeline would actually help us number one get a good amount of funding number two gives us a lot more value when we start negotiating with it okay so there's another place you can push on well like how much do you think it would help having growth in the pipeline like how much negotiating leverage do you think that would actually give you yeah like in dollars quantify how much basically yeah quantify because that's huge right it could be massive right if i could if they're valued at 8x versus 5x or whatever right that's huge so then it becomes about justifying your cost and their investment based on what they can get out of it so again you always want to have that big number to compare to so that your the investment in you looks teeny tiny by comparison so having growth and then right now you guys truly selling to india-based companies or do you have any other geos or yeah i think we are focusing more on the us-based companies as of now india is just a you know outcome of all our organic activity but our focus is US UK English speaking regions basically. And so for that funding what is the purpose behind it versus saying bootstrap are you guys looking to get more hires to start scaling more is it looking to hopefully you know to look at M&A's merchant acquisitions what is your kind of goal for funding to kind of grow? So the major goal for funding is obviously growth we want so we are in a I would say we are in a very good space wherein we actually don't require funding to grow but the other idea is to get the funding to push that growth maybe 10x what we would be doing right now which we definitely have to hire more people. Is it right now like everyone's kind of doing everyone's job like is there kind of like overloading work right now or is it more so just like hey we want more hands on deck yeah i would say right now a lot of us are doing double work i would say okay yeah i mean it's a startup i totally get it yeah so yeah we're doing uh more than what we should be doing what's the idea like how many hours you work right now how many hours you want to get to because i was like working from the end goal of mine and so like how many hours you working right now and how many hours do you want to kind of buy back from kind of like a system okay where are you going with this how is this as in i guess this was my attempt of trying to figure out what is the not dollar amount but what is the time they could save by implementing a system for this for partner channel specifically yeah because like i help them i don't sell partner channels on behalf like my offer just for reference is like we help you build systems to help generate more partner source opportunities and so we're not partner facing we're not client facing but we help you get more partner recruitment calls we'll help you build enablement activation materials to help you co-sell and um build workflow so that you know the nitty-gritty tasks like doing the excel spreadsheets the dashboard stuff like that we build it for you so it's like buying back their time. So yeah, so it's like the plumbing for the partner channels, basically. Basically, yeah, like they're still having to be partner facing client facing just because like internally, right? Like I and so like, candidly, I've actually been exploring, I've been talking a couple CEOs, I've been like adding a consultancy or hiring staffing arm for this offer, where it's like, because it decreases the effort and sacrifice, right? Yeah. And so that's what I've been exploring right now. But as of right now, that's kind of offer. So if I'm these guys, and so just like give me the briefest and most simple explanation if i just paid you a bunch of money whatever whatever you wanted and had you wire up all my plumbing for my partner channel then all i'd have all i'd be left with doing is blank fill in the blank what's the blank talking with the partners and co-selling with the partners so does that mean i have like a weekly partner call with all of them as like a what does it typically look like so like it obviously depends on the type of company but like yeah it would be like depending on the size of the partner either just a cadence for talking with a partner, review pipelines and stuff like that with your direct sales team. Okay, got it. So I'm, and then when you say co-selling. So like enterprise level, right? Where it's like, if they're like, you know, a Deloitte consulting, for example, you know, they'd have to work with Deloitte consulting to kind of help, you know, move along sales deals and stuff like that. Got it. All right. Understood. That's helpful. So the pain you're going for here is you guys are working too much. Let's cut down that work. But do we know that there are a lot of this work, I guess you're probably about to get to it. Is it a lot of this work to do with setting partner channels let's let me just play it because i was like working from like the ending goal of mine and so like how many hours you working right now and how many hours do you want to kind of buy back from kind of building a system i think we're doing about 60 60 hours is what we're doing right now i need the 15 hours extra what they're doing maybe we should probably what are you looking at reallocating that time is ideally right like yeah you guys seem pretty ambitious and you guys want to grow really fast where are you guys going to reallocate that time instead of this stuff so i think uh some of it will obviously go i think those 15 hours we might be looking at allocating to growing our solutions that's why you know we should be aiming at looking at multiple channels so if partnership is kind of taken care of then obviously we start looking at others so we're So we're doing really well in SEO, that's working really well for us. Organic, I think, founder-led growth is happening for us on Twitter and LinkedIn, that's working really well. The next part of this would be to grow our social media channels, official social media channels, and start creating content. So it could be anything, it could be podcasts, webinars, it could be events, yeah. So those are the things that we want to do, but right now we don't have the time to go ahead and do it. Okay, no time to bandwidth right now. But ideally you want to get those 15 hours flat back so you can focus more on those other activities. Okay, cool. So I have an idea for the end goal in mind. I need 30-40% revenue, buy partners, obviously you're focusing on 10x, buy back those hours, ideally raise funding so you get a hyper growth scale. What revenue? You said hopefully double by next year, correct? Yeah, I'm saying that I'm being realistic. I think 1.2x is what my goal would be, but my CEO would probably say 5x of that. Do you think right now for what you're doing, like if nothing changed right now, do you think you'll hit that 2x mark or no? Yeah, I think we can. We should be. You should be? Then I would suggest them. Okay, so this is the problem with setting the question up this way. If you ask them, based on what you're doing right now, are you going to hit your goals? Everyone will always say yes. Say yes, yeah. Because ego, right? Yeah. Like if you ask someone, are you going to hit your fat loss goals? Yeah. Are you going to hit your bench press goals? Yeah. Are you going to hit your education goals? Yeah. Yeah, because humans are irrationally optimistic about the future and we want to protect our egos by assuming we will succeed at everything we do, which is completely incorrect, like 95% incorrect, by the way. So you can't ask the question this way. You have to ask the question in terms of like, as I was saying earlier, like, okay, like what results are you seeing? Like reality testing, right? Like what results are you seeing from those channels? What growth have you brought in the last three months? Oh, gosh, man, I just did the math and I annualized that. That's not going to get you to double your revenue at all, right? I mean, in your opinion, like, is it, is something going to change? Like, what do you expect to change that would, I mean, is there any reason to expect that things will massively, even that question is like too dangerous because I'm like, yeah, we're going to double down. We're going to have additional effort and we're going to crush it. It's like, no, you won't. So just reality testing of like, are you guys going to get there? Like based on those past results, like what that's bringing is it's not going to get you there, huh? And there's the gap, right? And they're like, yeah, I guess it's not like, oh, so suddenly it makes sense why you want to, why you need to add the partner channel. Right. And then they buy into that as a tie down. They're like, okay, yeah, I see on this call, I've admitted I need help. I need the partner channel. Because right here, he's now admitted he thinks we are going to hit it. And then there's no gap. So like, why are you even on the call? If you think you're gonna hit it? Like, why are we talking? Right? That's why I tried to find that new anchor. Right. But I also realized that like, I just, well, first of all, wrong order of doing it. But like, yeah, like, I didn't really show them like, hey, what you're doing right now is not working. I didn't lead them to that conclusion of what you're doing is not working. That's why I'm on the call. That's why you need this. Correct. Exactly right. And you can make the time argument that that is a way to sell. There are a lot of products that do sell with that time compression argument. But in that case, you then have to further that question up above where you were going into the 60 hours a week, 15 hours saved. You would need to go deeper into that and dimensionalize it in terms of, okay, well, what is your hourly cost within the business? Yeah. Right. And then they're like, boom, and they're like 150 bucks an hour. And you're like, oh, times 15 times four weeks, times 12 months. Right. You get that big dollar figure and you're like, oh, so you've already been spending $75,000 over the last year on activities that actually shouldn't cost you $75,000 of your own time, right? So that's why you want to change, right? Okay, cool. Well, let me, I'm going to charge you 15 grand versus 75 grand. That's a big savings, right? That makes a lot of sense to do it that way. So that's, if you do want to sell, I'm just like, I'm saving you time. That's how you'd have to sell that. Gotcha. So let's go a little bit farther. Mark or no? Yeah, I think we can, we should be. You should be? Then I would suggest then let's probably set a little bit more ambitious goal, right? Because if everything's already going to change the same, there's kind of no reason to change anything. You know what I mean? Yeah. So what, ideally, from your perspective, I know of course you want to stay more realistic, but let's say like hey, you know, realism aside, the world's your oyster, what would you kind of say? I think we can hit 5 mil. You think? Okay. Because right now we are working in a way where we are restricting ourselves, but if we, you know, there's a gate and then we're just blocking it right now, but if you open the front gates then obviously 5x, 5 mil is not that difficult. Okay. And that 5 mil, you're hoping then, will allow you to actually buy back those hours and probably focus on other areas, right? Because you guys are doing- Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay. Okay, cool. So now I understand where you guys are at right now. Let's let's understand what you guys want to get to. Let's just figure out where you're at right now and what that gap will look like and how do we get to that gap. So you guys currently 1.2. What's your current lead flow per month? No, that's per week. 4,000 signups right now. How many of them convert? So it's not about conversion. Actually, when we say signups, they have to go through a flow where we check their documentation and everything. So only if they fit in the ICP that we're looking at, or rather we are able to help them sell what they want to do, then we onboard them, right? So that's what maybe 300, 400 is what actually goes through. We make sure that we don't onboard everyone. So you said 4,000 sign-offs but only 10% get onboarded. How many of those people are actually spending money with you during that monthly basis? When you say spend, you mean how much money they make because we enable them to collect... But I do think you're making cash on the back end as well, right? So you guys charge based on transaction, correct? Right. So how many transactions are you getting per month? Because ideally, if we increase the affiliate program, we'll increase the amount of transactions happening, right? So we're just trying to find a baseline metric. It's a very difficult number to actually depend on because transaction value is not in our hands. It's totally dependent on our users, our customers. customers but how many transactions let's just say forget forget like how much each one's spending let's say how many of them are spending i don't have the money okay great work trying to get them to some ground truth here yeah super difficult also super common that they come on the call and don't know their numbers right but another way to do this and the way you can shortcut this is ask them like okay how much revenue did you guys take in last month okay how many clients do you have active last month let's just do the division problem right okay you have 100 clients you did did it a hundred thousand, right. Just do the division problem and like show them like, okay, here's your active monthly spend per client or whatever revenue per client on a monthly basis. Right. And then therefore that's like, that's your customer value. That's your, maybe not lifetime, but that's your current customer value per month. Okay. How many customers do we need to get that to double whatever, whatever. So at least like you can kind of force them into math that actually is helpful. Don't let them get away with this BS of like, I don't have that number right now. It's like, you know, roughly how much revenue you pulled in last month. And you know, roughly how many active customers you had last month. And if you have to bracket, you know, do it, right? It's like, is it between one and 10? Is it between 10 and 100? Is it between, you know, like you can, you have to nail them down. Otherwise they'll give you like useless information or like no information. So versus me asking for them to know the answer to the math equation, just ask the components of the math equation. So you can just do it on the call. Just do it. Yeah. You got to take responsibility. People won't give you their funnel math. You have to reverse engineer it usually okay so this is useful i think this is a good overview um what i think we should do for the remainder of the hour is just do a quick practice on like discovery and like running it this different way and kind of trying to get more directly to what you need to sell them yeah but any questions about all that i know that was a lot of feedback no it makes sense it makes sense honestly it's one of those things where i mean if you can just send me the your fathom note taker after um i think what it is is that i feel like my questions are very sporadic in the sequencing of like it doesn't like sequentially build upon each other. Right. Right. And it is, I feel like I build tension in one area and then I kind of lose tension because I'm asking another surface level question. Yes. That makes sense. So that's where I kind of struggle with like, how should I go about questioning my framework or framework of my questioning that leads me to build upon and then eventually, you know, lead to the pitch. Yeah. I'll share with you kind of what I recommend in terms of like the discovery sequencing questions, and then you'll see how it kind of gradually builds. It's not obviously like a paint by numbers thing. You're going to have to modify it, but there's enough good questions in there that you can kind of string together. Okay. These questions make sense. These don't, but the whole point you're right. Discovery is attention building exercise. And the point is to build attention and hand it to the prospect. They have to resolve it. And all those questions that I was advising you to ask, do that, right? Like what's the goal? Are you for sure? That's the goal. Maybe that's not the goal. Are you sure? Okay. This is the real goal now. What are you doing to get to that goal? Is it adequate? Oh, it's not adequate. Okay. We've uncovered a gap. So then the whole rest of the call, it's like, well, what are you going to do to solve that gap? Right? Like that's sort of like the tension we hand back to them. And then the rest of it is all just tie downs on, is this the vehicle for you? Are you sure? Why? And then here's how I do it. Here's why I do it better than everybody else. Here's why you should prefer me. You know, does that make sense? Does that help you? Do you believe this will resolve the gap? Okay. Pay me like in brief. Okay. So I'll share that with you. I'll put that in Slack or in the group after the call. And you can just, just go through it and kind of like tailor it to your own thing, but it needs to be, you're right. Like you are asking discovery ish questions, but they just need to be way more focused and pointed. Yeah. Cause I'm finding myself like asking questions that sometimes I don't even need the answer to. Yes. Correct. Exactly. There's it's called like following your curiosity. Like a lot of salespeople do this. They'll ask like the questions they want to know the answer to, but it's completely useless in sales. Like to actually sell the person, like you don't need that information. How do you balance teaching and like questioning sometimes? So like, that's what, that's where like that one call I put in the school group where I realized like I'm teaching way too much and I'm just falling victim because I think it's a solution selling kind of trap where it's like, OK, you want to talk about your solution as you get better about like knowing about your domain of expertise. I'm like, OK, shit, like, no, it's actually this or you should go through here. But like, how do you balance that act where it's like, for example, right? Like I asked him like, oh, you guys could probably go for more ICPs, for example, right? Should I even mention things like that or like how do you balance that? No, that was actually good. It's like the spice that makes a dish. It's like a very little bit here and there sprinkled throughout the call will enhance your expertise, build rapport, but you don't want it to be so heavy that they feel like they're getting tons of value from the call, right? Because then it's like a free consulting call at that point. If they're like, oh man, let me write that down. That's a free consulting that you should charge for, right? You're giving the product away for free. You want to spice it up and drop just enough knowledge where they know that you know what you're talking about. And it also comes out if you ever talk to them about previous vendors or other vendors they're interviewing for the same thing. You can get a lot of leverage and mileage out of asking them what the other vendors who have failed have done. And then you describe to them why that failed and explain away those failures. So that's almost universal in B2B is they've tried other vendors that sucked and they failed. If you haven't experienced a lot of that yet, I'm guessing you probably will. I mean, your offer is a little bit more niche and less common, but with something like cold email lead gen, it's like everyone's hired like five cold Yeah, I actually had an intro call where they compare me to Colleen Allegiant. So I was like, they asked like, Oh, I've talked to your running competitors. I'm like, really? I don't, I know most of my competitors who have you talked to and then kind of backtracked to like, okay, so you do more than that. And then that the second call I actually fumbled because I know CEO couldn't make it to that call for whatever reason. And I saw, I met like the other champion who was on that call and it turned into like a basically as a consulting level call. Right. I did some work up ahead of time. I don't know for, so I see some people in the group and like, Hey, like, you know, you should show prepare, like obviously isn't for most beginners, at least in the group. Right. Like I'm doing D100 level style. For example, I won in person for this $100 million company. I met their GTM lead, I met their VP of revenue, I met their partnership leads. And so afterwards, I have a block set for April 14th to where I'm going to meet them again, closing things off. But I then built some assets for them ahead of time, showing some of the systems. I did a little quick walk through. I didn't really pay in discovery as much. And so that's where I'm really trying to find a balance of like maybe this is insecurity on my part where i've seen somebody do be beginner i feel like i have to prove my value of like okay i know what i'm talking about versus like you know what i mean because i'm so used to that solution selling where you kind of have the product you show the product you show that like use cases after you talk about some questions where i don't know if i should even go down that route you know what i mean yeah i mean you're not selling software you're selling a service right in this case so that's the difference is software you have like a demo section right where you're like oh look at this and you tailor the demo section to their specific pain points right don't show the whole software don't show everything it can do you're You're just showing what specifically they care about. The difference in sale in service is like, I mean, you're still tailoring it to what they care about, but there's not like a demo. And you do want to like for this client, this prospect you're talking about, you need to convey competence. You need to convey that you're an expert, but don't feel like you have to do a ton of free work for them unless that's part of your sales process, which for a Fortune 500 or a Fortune 1000, it may very well be like I've sold bigger companies like Fortune 1000 because I was like, here, let's just do a trial. It's a thousand bucks or whatever it is. Like it's a nominal fee, but I'm going to give you this 15 hour consulting project and you're going to see what I can do. And then if you like it, let's talk more. Right. That's a valid way to sell a bigger company because usually they won't just hire smaller vendors just like on a sales call. Usually they're like, well, let's do a limited test. And that also gives cover for all the people inside the company to say like, oh, we're not just wasting money. You know, we're not committing to a year with this guy. No one knows him. Right. He's a small company. Eventually they were like, oh yeah like one of the guys because he's from bcg mckinsey so they're they're a different stack i mean they just had the u.s headquarters in and um they were saying oh wow one of the objections they gave soft objections gave like what i'm just gonna consult it to do this right because they have an hour for it and so i you know i didn't fully handle that because he had to leave midway through the call but um yeah they then eventually said like hey what if we do like versus you doing the whole system you teach us how to build the system right right yeah as a down sell so i offer that we'll see how it goes but yeah that's where again maybe this is an insecurity complex thing or whatever but I feel like this all my bottlenecks are just purely mental in terms of just like I can figure this out like I'm getting the volume it's just once I like unlock like clean up the faucet like it'll flow through so yeah 100% and it's totally normal you're also transitioning from a way different sales cycle don't beat yourself up so much it's like a compression of like yeah like 3000x compression of like the sales cycle time so don't beat yourself up don't get in your head about it just it's just all mechanical tweaks right we just have to change the mechanics of how you're doing it. So I've tried using scripts and this is like what I've done. What I do now is more of like a general flow. Do you suggest I kind of have like a more loose script of just like questions and then kind of go from there? Yeah, I would do. Yeah. Question based selling. So you want to have kind of the questions and really even just the categories that you need to check off through your discovery to have a complete discovery. Right. And generally, you know, it's it's similar. It's like Bant, right, is what I go by. Budget authority needs timing. But, you know, within that, there's a lot of different ways that can go. So as long as you're kind of processing through the general categories. And you're really just looking for the gap and the problem of like, do these guys actually need what I have? Do they have a problem that can be solved by me? And like, let me be open to that could look different ways. But let me just I'm looking for the problem that I can actually solve competently and with a high degree of confidence. And if it's not there, cool, that's fine. I can't help you guys. Like you guys don't really need this. Just being totally neutral about it. And then for like the budget questions, like towards the end of that call, I did ask like, hey, do you guys have the budget for like a service like this? And email I found that I always try to dodge it. It depends on the price point and stuff like that. I don't know if there's a better way for me to frame that question or better timing for me to ask that question. Yeah. The whole framing, everything we did about cost of inaction, cost of the current, right? All that dimensionalization, that whole thing is to really establish the budget. I actually was just on another call with a B2B seller where he completely fudged the ROI question and it was with a real estate broker. Because he was going more towards like, oh, well, can you guys afford this like, you know, four figure fee. And they were like, yeah, we have the money, but he wasn't addressing the ROI. So the whole point of dimensionalizing is to put your fee or whatever you service costs in context of like, this is what you stand to gain or lose. If you don't do this, that's the budget. So like, if you tell me I'm going to make, you know, a million bucks and it only cost me 50,000, well then of course I'm going to find the budget, right? Cause it's like an insanely good ROI. It's like, if there's an ROI, then budget must exist. or there's like a logical fallacy within their business. Because like, if you can't find- I think I saw one of your videos where you tied down where it's like, hey, so I think one of the notes you gave where it was like for you to hit that $1 million mark and to save $15 or a ton that you value at, let's say like 750,000, whatever, it would cost you 5,000 per month, roughly 15,000 total flat just to hit that 1 million. Yeah. Okay. Is that worth it? You tell me, you can be completely neutral here. But like, if they believe if the math is their math, the logic is inescapable. Like you have to have the budget for this. Maybe I'm just not doing enough math before I ask that question. That's what it is. I think so. Because if you just ask out of the blue, what's your budget? It's like people know that it's a lead into the price and they're like, well, that's a negotiation, right? Yeah. So I guess, of course, I know we're going up at the time. I appreciate this too. This is really, really good. Awesome. What do you suggest? I guess three action items I can take to kind of really focus on. So rebuild your discovery. I'll send you a link for that so you can work off something. Two, just practice the discovery. Practice going through it smoothly, efficiently. And then sub-goal three within practicing discovery is practice dimensionalizing, right? Practice getting those numbers out, practice doing all that math to set up the logical ROI argument because it's B2B, right? As you know from software, it's not a hugely emotional sale. So in a logical sale, we have to have really strong logical evidence of why they should do this and why it makes sense mathematically, logically. So we've got to build the logic of the sale and it has to be very ironclad. So I would say work on that. Okay, cool. Yeah, I have mock calls all next week, actually. And I'll probably pop by your thing next week as well. Awesome. Yeah. Real quick, if you're a business owner or an offer owner, and you've struggled with hiring salespeople and having them stick or having them perform at a high level, I'm going to invite you to go ahead and check out my website, my company salesbytomorrow.com. Take a look at the video there and see if you potentially think we could be a good fit to work together. It's completely free to just take a look at the information on the website. And if you do feel like that it could be a fit, you can go ahead and book a call with me or someone on my team. we can evaluate your business and see if there might be some way we can help enhance your sales team. If not, continue enjoying the content, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

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In this video, you'll watch a live sales call breakdown with an ex-enterprise SaaS seller who went 16 calls deep without closing a single agency deal and the exact discovery framework, high-ticket closing tactics, and B2B sales psychology he was missing and how to fix it. 16 Sales Calls, $0 Closed (Here's How We Fixed It)

TimeStamps- 
00:00 - Why 16 Sales Calls Closed $0
00:42 - Selling SaaS vs. Your Own Agency
01:29 - The Discovery Mistake Killing Deals
03:34 - The First 5 Minutes Decide Everything
05:54 - Live Call Breakdown Begins
08:00 - The Opening Question You're Missing
11:56 - How to Introduce Yourself the Right Way
15:53 - The "Jiu-Jitsu" Move That Forces a Yes
21:08 - Why "Will You Hit Your Goals?" Backfires
26:39 - Handling Prospects Who Don't Know Their Numbers
29:32 - Discovery Is a Tension-Building Exercise
33:50 - Selling Services to Bigger Companies
38:33 - 3 Action Items to Fix Your Close Rate


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