After 5 years in Enterprise sales for billion-dollar companies, I’ve narrowed it down to 7 things I’m listening for in meetings
I take detailed notes on calls, and when I go back to summarize them, these are what I’m looking to answer.
- Despite _________, it’s still hard to __________ as measured by _____________.*
- This is a ____________ level priority because its impact is __________________*
- Why Anything
- Why Now
- Why Us
- Role of Each Person on this call: Talker / Mobilizer / Blocker
Important Context:
- I’m a big fan of templates and systems.
- This can be pasted into CRM before meetings so you can fill in the blanks as the deal progresses.
- You will not get all of this^^ in one call.
Here’s what that looked like for one of my past deals at UserGems:
- Despite customers loving their product, it’s hard for the VP Sales to know if they reconnect with past buyers when they change jobs. Their own estimate is 32% of their buyers change jobs within 18 mos. (HR tech / high turnover) But they have no metric for how they track or connect with champions who change jobs.
- This is a level #1 priority because CEO & CFO held joint All-Hands to emphasize need for pipeline growth in Q3. CXOs want to see 17% YoY growth. VP Sales team is at 6% so far.
- Why Anything
They’ve tried to do this before but the homegrown system failed. They could rig SalesNave to send an alert of the job change, but couldn’t crack the code of automating new role alerts without a bunch of false positives. - Why Now
VP Sales has pipeline as his #1 priority and doesn’t have money for new headcount. Also not enough time for long implementation Needs fast impact. - Why Us
He knows we’re not the cheapest but heard about us in a sales community and they were talking up our implementation + CS. I’m recommending high touch rollout b/c his RevOps team is already spread thin. - Role of Each Person on this call: Mobilizer & he’s brought on new tech before
- Important Context:
VP of Marketing is brand new. They RIF’d almost all SDRs in Q1 so AEs are now prospecting. Marketing also has a Pipeline number, so we’ll need VP Marketing on board. VP Sales did intro/ fwd’d my summary email. Working to schedule meeting with both VPs next week.