How to Get Your Stalled Deals Over the Line

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:10

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a fortnightly live show for startup tech founders who want to improve how they sell. Every episode, we bring you the hottest topics in the world of startup sales, and the shiniest pearls of wisdom from sellers at the absolute top of their game. I'm your host for the day. Alastair Cole. I'm a computer scientist and software engineer with two decades experience in sales and marketing. I'm a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership, and I'm joined today by Kiran Gill. Hi, Kiran.

Kiran Gill 0:49

Hi, Alastair. Hello, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill, co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. And I have 25 years worth of experience in b2b business development, say in sales, in sales in tech sales operation, and also in banking.

Alastair Cole 1:05

Thanks, Kiran. And we're here for a really important topic today: how to get your stall deals moving again and over the line. Something that we've heard quite a lot recently. We've had a fairly busy month out there haven't we haven't met my friend and talked a little bit about why we chose this as a topic for today? Yeah, well,

Kiran Gill 1:27

it's, it's one of those things that just came up in conversation. As you know, through July, we've been to several different kinds of events, we've been lucky enough to be in London, two different things, as you can see here. And I had lots of conversations with different founders, different types of businesses. And one thing just kept on coming up in conversation that, you know, it was deals were no longer stuck. They weren't moving things that seemed to be, you know, very positive at the start of the year, you know, all that lead generation that everybody was doing, and then suddenly now, they're just not moving forward. And this wasn't it, it was quite surprising in the sense that it was a very common theme that kept on coming up in different conversations. Everybody was being very positive about things moving forward. However, those deals just didn't seem to be closing.

Alastair Cole 2:25

Yeah, and you know, that I think we've covered about 100 talks spoke to about 100 founders, over those, those three big events, I felt like we rinsed every single startup booth, and we were the last ones kicked out of every Sideshow saloon, across those kind of like two or three weeks, it was a, you know, inspirational time, but like you say, you know, people really struggling with, with progressing things along the pipeline, right, real, tangible revision. And for a lot of people, it felt like almost all their deals were stuck. That seems to come through to me. So then when we talk about the deals being stuck, talk us through where that might happen in the sales process.

Kiran Gill 3:12

Well, let's have a look at what's happening here. So what you have is that, you know, early on in your, in the sales process, we're talking about lead generation, and these deals tend not to get stopped, or you wouldn't, you wouldn't say that these are stuck, they might be slowly progressing, or these people might not be in the buying window, we've spoken about that before. They're not ready to purchase, they're not interested in meeting with you. And that's what happens as you go along your sales process. And we're talking about complex selling here, you know, we're talking about where you have to meet the client, maybe potentially several times before you put an actual proposal together. And then what you'll do is you'll put a proposal together and you reach out to the client, and then there might be some kind of conversation but then they suddenly go quiet and they suddenly disappear. And they no longer answer your calls anymore. And you're thinking to yourself, is it something that I said? Is it the way I look, you know what's happened here? Why am I suddenly why this person who was so positive at the start of the sales process suddenly started ghosting me and that is a common theme in complex b2b selling.

Alastair Cole 4:23

Yeah, we've we've we've touched on a few of the kind of classic reasons why deals might get started we're gonna boil it down to our big three for today. But you know, what, what are some of the classic things that you see Kiran in reasons why deals might get stuck. Well,

Kiran Gill 4:41

okay. So classically, what tends to happen, one of the most classic things is not having a real understanding of whitening declined need your product, so a lack of information or lack of discovery in the sales process, so you know, too busy trying to sell what you have Not trying to listen to what the client actually needs or wants. So inefficient understanding of need from the client's point of view. And that then tends to cause a lack of urgency. So from a client's point of view, there is no urgency to do this, to tell you the truth, they can't see the value, they can't see the return on investment. It sounds nice, but you know what, I can do something else instead, because that's more, that's more less risky. The other thing could be that there could be a change in the actual company itself. So you know, suddenly priorities within the industry change, you know, so you know, suddenly what was hot suddenly isn't hot any longer. So not actually understanding your market can turn into a bit of a problem as well.

Alastair Cole 5:45

Yeah, and, you know, we've heard so much over the last few weeks about this challenge about deals being stuck. And at the same time, it's something we see, from a kind of scientific point of view, from a scoring point of view, our 360° Sales Diagnostic product analyses the maturity and capability of a startup sales function in seven areas. And underneath those seven areas, there are 52 different metrics we take in order to ascertain exactly how well that startup is doing in sales. So we see this as well in the numbers as well as, as well as what's happening when we talk to startups. And that 360 And the other products and services that the partnership offers have a big impact on the startups we work with the 50 Plus startups we work with over the last five years, see up to 300 times happiness, rating on how they're selling once things are clearer and more confident. So a process that works and we've boiled it down today, in terms of data, why? The key reasons why deals are getting stalled are two to three. We're going to dive into those three big reasons. Now. Let's kick straight off with the first one. Tell us about this Kirin

Kiran Gill 7:14

tends to be a common kind of theme that turns up when you're speaking to someone. So let's say you've been ghosted for a while, and eventually you do get through to the person you're selling to. And they tend to tell you things have changed internally. So either the actual people that you were speaking to have now moved on, they've moved to a different department. Remember, we're talking complex selling here. Now, these sales cycles tend to be anywhere over for maybe up to 12 months, which is a long time. If you're selling into a corporate 12 months, things change quite rapidly quarter on quarter, things are changing rapidly. So a conversation that could have been super positive, tell you the truth is no longer irrelevant. Now, you know, because things have moved. So what happens there is that internal factors, one of the excuses that they tend to use in the background, will be external factors. Oh, my God, you know, the economy isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. There's a government changing. We don't know what's happening here. It's summertime. Well, we can't buy anything in summertime. Because that makes absolutely no sense. The budgets haven't been signed off for this year. Oh, you know what John needed to look at this, and he's not here at the moment. There's so many things that are out of your control, when it comes to those excuses that people are willing to put in front of you, because tell you the truth. But the real reason behind it is that they don't want to move forward. That's it, they're blocking you. Because at this moment in time, it isn't a priority any longer for them. And they're using these as a barrage of excuses just to stop you in your tracks.

Alastair Cole 8:51

Yeah, so that the internal, those internal changes are such a big deal. You know, we've all seen over the last year or so here's the number of tech employees let go leading up to January. So all of last year in the beginning of this year, and those have continued not just in the tech world, but in consulting roles, a lot of change going along with a lot of individuals moving. And in one of our previous shows, we talked about the importance of addressing large and complex buying groups. And we laid out seven different types of buying from the champion, the end user and five others. And it's really important with those internal changes going on to have those large buying groups mapped out right.

Kiran Gill 9:40

Yep, totally. The thing is the buying groups are continuously changing. So as a as a as a salesperson selling into complex companies, you need to have an understanding that just because you spoke to somebody a month ago and they were positive, there's no understanding if that person is still in that role and whether that thing they were told kilobyte is no longer on their radar. So, you know, they might have been told a month ago, yeah, that's what we're looking to do, go and find a vendor that can supply this process, or sell, you know, find a product that can solve this problem, then go and do this, however, then what happens, things change internally, and suddenly, that is no longer a priority. Oh, and also I, you know, we talk about a champion, you know, one person within the company that is going to be flying the flag of your company saying, this is definitely something we need to do. The problem there tends to be that we try to put ourselves into the position of one person driving that deal forward. Theoretically, what we need is several people driving that deal forward if you're selling into a large enterprise. And one of the things that I do see when I'm talking to companies that are trying to sell into large organisations, when you talk about who they're speaking to, you suddenly realise where the real problem seems to be, they're talking to one or two people. And they're expecting one or two, one or two people to drive this, potentially 50-60,000. You know, how many hundreds of 1000s of pounds worth a deal through life, it's never going to happen. And this is a major problem in most deals. Now, there are easy ways to get around this. And that's by doing a, you know, a stakeholder analysis and understanding the landscape of the company where you're settling into. And if you're not doing that, your deals are always going to get stuck. Because if you honestly think that John or Rachel is going to buy on their own, you're going to be very, very, you're going to wake up and find out no, they're not going to do that. And the good chances are, that's why your deal is stuck.

Alastair Cole 11:37

That stakeholder mapping is really important. You know, you've got these buying personas. And we know that actually getting into the details and getting into the weeds and writing these down and being very clear about who you're going after where we know that works. HubSpot reported that, you know, two thirds of accounts were one where they had a stronger ideal customer profile, when they were more specific with the detail of who they're going after in each of the different slots within the buying group. So mapping that buying group out doing that stakeholder analysis is proven to deliver results in sales. So that's internal changes, people moving and might be leaving to map out that buying group and then external market forces, you've got to be ready with the rationale of why not do it needs to keep going forward?

Kiran Gill 12:29

Yeah, so think, got please, sorry, sorry, I did there was a bit of an out so we're looking at is sorry, carry on. That was a bit of a mixup from my side, I couldn't see the camera because

Alastair Cole 12:39

The vagaries of the internet were good. So that leads quite nicely on to your this bit about external factors being a reason why a buyer might not continue. And the way to counter that is by better value demonstration. And we've seen this time and again about just sales teams and sellers just not being great at articulating the value, right? The value of the solution, the value of that offering. The truth is that all the way through, right, hyper personalised content is required, you have to be super tailored, you have to be able to articulate the value specifically to the buyer and the opportunity with the company. And 87% are expecting to be delighted all the way through. So the stakes are very high. And demonstrating articulating that value is absolutely paramount. What what are you seeing as the kind of deficiencies, clearing of startups, tech startups when they're trying to demonstrate or articulate value, they're

Kiran Gill 13:41

seeing value from their own point of view, they're not seeing the value from the clients point of view, think about when you're buying something, you know, no matter how much the salesperson is telling you, you know, you know you're buying something and that's the remember value is from the the eyes of the purchaser. How do I see value? Can I see it? So has that resonated? Now you might be saying that your product brings certain types of value to the client. Now, is that something that they truly believe? Or is that something that they're just nodding their head along? And when you're trying to back that value up by sending them, you know, the white paper and the customer success story that tells them exactly why that value is telling the truth? They might not see value like that. So what you really get is what I tend to find when I do you know when I analyse, you know clients deal with a lack of understanding of what the need was. And if we don't understand what the client's need is we're not able to tailor the value proposition to the client. Just because we've got a value proposition that's written it's not written in stone. What we need to do is make sure that resonates with the person that we're speaking to. Because if it doesn't, you're going to be missing the boat. They're totally

Alastair Cole 14:55

Yeah, that's why we advocate so much those debt clinicians and of colour we like to add to buyer personas, right to really get into the mind of you know, depending on where I am in the buying group, what is the Tweak for that value proposition? How can we delight them? And again, like the previous way, it's about doing the work, it's about being thorough, it's about writing it down. And only when that definition is written down, that makes it so much easier to sit at the other side of the table and say, you know, rather than from my perspective, but from that bias that individuals, what do I need to get this deal moving forward. And the truth is that, if you are able to demonstrate value better, there is a 30%, higher likelihood of a quality deal happening, according to Harvard Business Review, no surprise, right, articulating that value, high quality deals happen, they happen quicker. So and you know, that's really about doing the work, you know, you need to have the assets to hand that the right asset at the right time for the right individual within that buying group tailored for them with a personal message, you know, it's not easy for them, if you want to be successful, that is what's required. Let's skip on to the third. The third part, right, you know, internal changes, external market forces, big, big issue, lack of value, demonstration, big issue. We think the biggest one is this one of the top talks us through this curve.

Kiran Gill 16:28

So, when we're talking about selling into enterprises, and especially, you know, when you come from selling, selling from an enterprise point of view, the one thing that every successful salesperson tends to do is qualify their deals. Now, what we mean by qualifying your deals is that what you do is you look at your deal, you have a criteria of categories that you are going to score that deal on to see to make sure that you've qualified it correctly, that you understand it. Now, there are lots of different ways of qualifying a deal, some of you might have heard of medical Bantle, with all of these different versions of qualification. The major thing that they all have in common is, first you need to understand the need of the client, you need to understand who they are where, what were they, you know, the role of the stakeholders within that purchasing, whether they have the right amount of money, there's loads of different ways of looking at it. However, what I find when I'm speaking to people, and I'm talking to them about their qualification, first of all, the majority of people haven't done qualification. It's seen as that's something that somebody else does. It's not something that I need to do. And the other thing is, if they have qualified, they've qualified it once at the start of the deal. So again, when you're looking at a roadblock, and if you're thinking that your deal stalled, that's a big red flag. When was the last time you qualified your deal? Have a look at your pipeline now? And have you sat down and qualified each of those deals recently? And when I'm in recent, I mean, in the last 24 hours, do you really know if the need is still there? Do you know the person that you're speaking to is still engaged? Do you understand that the customer that you spoke to still sees the value the way they see it? Do you still understand who the competition is, there's so many things that you can do to make sure that the deal is staying on track. And if you do that systematically, you will always know where your deal is. And before it even goes red, you'll be able to act to it and do something about it. Because that's how the top performers hit target quarter on quarter, they qualify, they qualify consistently and qualify all the way through the deal.

Alastair Cole 18:41

Okay, and so that I, you know, 24 hours, are you suggesting that sellers should be looking at all their deals every 24 hours? That is that it needs to be that regular to unstick deals. It

Kiran Gill 18:53

depends on how many deals you've got. Now obviously, if you've got 100 deals in complex, what I've very doubt is that people have got 100 complex deals wandering around. They're all at different stages. The major thing is if you've got a deal that is supposed to be closing by the 31st of July, you should be sitting on top of it and making sure that that's going in the right direction. Now if you find that that client for whatever reason isn't responding to you, you need to get a response from them. That means you need to get on the blower, you need to get on the email, you need to do whatever you need to do to get to talk to them. Now they might pick up the phone and say hello to Alistair. You know what tells you the truth, you don't want to buy from you may not need it. That's great. We've got an answer. We can throw that deal in the bin and we can get on to the next one. And this is the major problem with most sellers. What tends to happen is you kind of leave things up in the air and you kind of have dilly, dilly, dilly dally around with it. They tell you the truth, the chat and the chances are there was no value from the client's point of view. They were just being very, very polite. And what you thought was an actual opportunity actually wasn't an opportunity. You were too busy selling but you didn't really hear the client. So what happens is that this non opportunity, you're, you're now frustrated because it hasn't closed, I'll tell you the reason it wasn't an opportunity in the first place. So be frustrated as much as you want. Sorry, I'm ranting and raving, I get passionate about

Alastair Cole 20:14

this. It's great. And those, these two big bricks that we put together, you know, the lack of value, demonstration and deal qualification go hand in hand for me, because the more regular you're qualifying, the better you're qualifying, the better you know exactly where that deal is, and where that deal is for each of the individuals within the buying group. And therefore, what is the right piece of content, the right knowledge, the right message, the right bit of support that is required, in order to get that deal going. And that's what a great deal of qualification does. And we've, over the last couple of years, thrown our hat in the ring about where we think the most, the best way to qualify more than deals is and that we've taken a modified bounce process qualification method. And we've amended that. And we've built that into revenue coach.ai, which is flagship SAS product, it's a personalised sales coach, for the price of a coffee, although it's still free at the moment won't be for the rest of the for the whole of this year, but it is at the moment. And that is a great place to start. If you're, you know, unsure about how well or how thoroughly you should qualify as deals and the benefits that you can get from qualifying them comprehensively, think head over to revenue coach.ai. And you can see the kind of rigour and the detail that is required, and then what the recommendations will be about what you should do next. So those are the three big things, right, the internal changes and external market forces are a huge reason they're getting stuck, lack of value demonstration from sellers. And something that you can, you can all see in here that's very close to your heart is a better deal qualification. It feels like , you know, there's an awful lot of effort that's required checking those deals on an almost 24 hour basis, especially the ones that are due to close soon. That feels like there's just more sales actions that are required by a seller and you've told me that you know, I should be hitting my 618 sales actions a week. So startup founders on listening live or back on a recording, what can they do to talk to us about this 680 number and how that can be achieved. So

Kiran Gill 22:53

it's 618 a month. So no wonder you've been outperforming everybody else or if you're succeeding a week, then that is a hell of a pace, but still doesn't matter. 618 is a number one, one thing, the one thing I will say, if you want to be successful, first of all, you need to have a sales process. And that process needs to be put into a playbook. And that you follow that initially that might be very, very basic. However, you will be able to then replicate that continuously. Those 618 actions that you're supposed to do through the month, you'll suddenly realise that this is a process that you will follow continuously for every single person. The great thing about building those processes, and this is what I love doing, what you do, is once you've built those processes, you can then tweak those to make sure that your deals don't get stuck. Because when you analyse your deals, you suddenly realise that everything's getting stuck in, you know, Phase Five, that's after the presentation. For some reason, customers just disappear. Now what we can do, then, at that point, because we've got a sales playbook is saying, why do we think that's happening? Let's speak to some of our clients. Even if we don't speak to our client, what can we do to unstick or uninstall those deals, now we can create new assets, or we could try to do something totally different. Maybe our product actually isn't resonating with the client, and we need to redesign it in some such way. Whatever it is, but once we've analysed those, we can actually do something about it. The problem that I find with a lot of startups is and especially companies are doing this, it's not that what they're doing is wrong. They just don't have that clarity on their process. And if you don't have clarity, then you can't be successful and your win rate is going to be lower.

Alastair Cole 24:47

So that's one of the reasons that we talk about clarity first, our approach. quadruples, clarity in the sales process when you lay it out, it's clear it's See that in turn doubles people's confidence. And that results in a four times win rate. So yeah, clarity absolutely critical that it comes first. And and and it's important that you've got the right tools at your disposal, I think sellers have something like an average of 23 or something tools at their disposal and one does have to be careful about that. Because you know, when sellers that are overwhelmed by technology achieve a 43% lower quota than those who have harnessed it properly. At the same time, if you're able to use AI and sales tools Well, as laid out by Gartner, you should be able to find an additional 27% extra bandwidth because you know, prospecting and workarounds, and meeting preparations can be done by intelligent technology tools. One of those is our 360° Sales Diagnostic that we covered a little bit earlier, this is a 90 Minute one on one session with one of us. And you get a four, four quarter plan for what you should be doing in sales in your business. After four business days. It includes a full score and breakdown within seven areas, bespoke recommendations for each of those areas, and what you should do next, and a revenue roadmap, calculating the additional income that can be generated by making those recommendations. If you like that, go and check out our 360 at theupliftpartnership.com/360. Thanks for today, Kiran. That was great, you know, internal changes and external market forces, big reasons they get stuck, lack of value demonstration and inadequate deal qualification. And hopefully, for those listening and watching, we've outlined a few key practical ways to change that. Our next show we're going to be focused on AI in the sales process, we're starting to see some enormous gains of building AI into our process using some of the tools that are out there. And it really is supercharging our sales, we're going to bring our audience an exclusive session, a dedicated session on AI for sales in three weeks time. It's not going to be in a fortnight because I'm on jury service at Crown Court around the corner. So it's going to be three weeks from now. Thank you very much for your time today, Kiran, for those watching or listening. You know if there was a one or two key practical steps that you could leave them with about how to unstick that deal what would that be?

Kiran Gill 27:49

Basically, I would get a piece of paper, and then write every single deal where it is. And then I would qualify it, I would sit down and qualify. Now you don't have to use a piece of paper, you can use a revenue coach instead. And it's free like Alastair said and it will help you qualify if you need help using a revenue coach. You can contact either myself or Alastair and we'll we're happy to walk you through how easy it is. That is the easiest thing you can do. Because once you have an understanding of what's happening in that deal, you'll be able to come up with a strategy on how to mitigate that problem. But until you do that, you're pretty much shooting in the dark.

Alastair Cole 28:35

Excellent. Thank you very much. I think we're done now. Let's just leave me to say thank you for your time, my friend and your expertise.

Kiran Gill 28:45

Thank you very much, Alastair.

Alastair Cole 28:47

See you all again next time. Bye for now. See you soon. Bye