Meeting the Challenge Webinar with John Barrows
SSusan PungpravatMay 27 at 4:15 pm1h 25min
J
00:00John Barrows
The point of this conversation. So anyways, let's do this. I'm gonna say hi to everybody. I'm starting a webinar here. I think, yep. So we are started. See who joins in here. Oh, gotta get that
J
00:18John Barrows
microphone going. What's up everybody? Thanks for joining. We're gonna get kicked off here. I just figured I'd jump on a little bit early, doing a little Instagram live here, both trying to have some fun. It's Friday, so fuck it, right? It's Friday before a three day weekend. So it's, don't think I was gonna do this on the last like on the last week of the month, you know, because I usually do free training Fridays towards the end, but Friday ends up being the last day of the month, and that's never a good time to do anything if you want to attract closers. So human interaction. Other So Hunter, you know human interaction? Yes, right. Sorry, I'm answering some questions here on Instagram. I was saying this Guy Kawasaki, I did this interview with Guy Kawasaki, using his GPT, because I asked all his GPT the same questions as I asked him, and his GPT gave better answers. So I think when it comes to, like, one way communication stuff, I don't know, I think, I think the AI stuff is better. Quite frankly, I know I'm already irrelevant in a lot of ways when it comes to delivering content in a one way stream. Because, quite frankly, you can get better answers and a lot of things, but when it comes to the human connection of events and and just, you know, want to talk to somebody, I think that's, you know, where it's application, and it's like getting our hands dirty and that type of thing, that that's where the AI doesn't, it just doesn't hit right? It could do a lot of things. I always say that the one thing that AI, you know, it can't do is give a shit. You know, I talk about the care factor. It can pretend to care. It can pretend to give a shit, but quite frankly, it fundamentally can't, and that is our superpower as humans, is that we can care like we genuinely care. That's why I beg sales reps to stop looking at clients. Stop thinking of customers as, you know, a number to hit, or whatever that, you know, I gotta hit my cadences or my dials today, or whatever. Think of it as a as a person, right as somebody who gets up in the morning and has the same problems as their boss yelling at them, you know, has their kids all over the place. Like, if we don't look at, if we don't bring that humanity back, we're gonna be in some trouble here. So anyways, for those of you just joining here, thank you for joining the webinar. We're going to start talking. We got some sales rebellion ropes over here. So what's up? Beth, hey, Pakistan, what's going on, brother? Fluent in English and sales calls. Meetings I need. Yeah, so I want to fluent in English and sales calls. Any suggestions, actually, Sammy, if that's your name, I think this is where AI can help. Man, I don't know about your accent and those type of things, but, you know, you don't want to pretend something like you're something you're not, and so, but you obviously need to make sure that you communicate with people so that that isn't the barrier, right? So your accent isn't the barrier. I mean, a lot of times in the US here, an accent is a positive thing because it's just makes you different than anything else. So I would lean into it a little bit. But I would, you know, ask that question, to ask that question, to ChatGPT and just be like, Hey, I'm trying to sell into the US. I need to do this. What are some resources? What are some things that I can use to help improve my my language, my approach, whatever it might be, and it will give you better answers. Man, it will give you better answers. Now, I don't know if you have access to it in Pakistan, but it's something I would absolutely look into perplexity. ChatGPT, any of those was going to give you better answers. So if you want, Sami, you can send me an email, and I will, kind of think I'll put together some resources for you, if you want, but just tell me the details of what the challenges that you're faced with. Is it literally like your the tone of your voice, or is it, you know, just the approach to the US? All right, so hey, what's up? Everybody looks like I got a decent amount of people actually phone on here, on Instagram, all right, so we got two more minutes again. Feel free to hit me up with questions. It's gonna be super casual. I'm gonna walk through a bunch of content here with you. Give you some resources and yeah, just have some fun with this. So I'm gonna try to make this as interactive as possible with both,
Unknown Speaker
Hey, Al, what's going on,
J
04:19John Barrows
brother? Both, both the webinar itself and Instagram. Instagram, sorry, I'm not going to be paying as much of attention, obviously, because I have a lot more people on the webinar here. Um, he did into an agent, yep, named him Jim hunter. I got my mind calls me. JB, he's like, hey. JB, what's up, man? So I got a personalized GBT, but let me see if I can do
Unknown Speaker
all right, I'm going to do this for
S
04:43Speaker 1
for you guys here, see if that works. All right, actually, I can kind of see it through the camera, alright.
Unknown Speaker
So for the people on
J
04:52John Barrows
Instagram, if you want to follow along on the presentation, there it is. All right. You can also join, if you go to jaybarrows.com you can join live. Off to the zoom session. But I figured, why not? Right. All right. So we got 56 I think we got about 300 people showing up here. So hey, El Salvador, man, I got a great I love this, South Africa Cape Town. Man, Nilaya, oh, man, I would love to go. My wife went to South Africa Cape Town and loved it. So it's one of those. I, out of all the traveling I've done in my entire career, the continent of Africa is still yet. For me, I have yet to go. And my sister went to Ghana. She actually did the Peace Corps in Ghana and actually married a guy from Ghana. So my nephew's Ghanaian. But I have yet to go to Africa. So I'm trying to get there, and Cape Town would be my favorite. Well, I've heard Cape Town is gonna be great. I think your cell phone camera screen is not right positioned. All right, let me see here, yeah, so I'm doing it. I'm showing the presentation. And yeah, instead of just me, right? Because I want the people on Instagram to see the actual presentation, if they want to follow along. So all right, well, we are here. What's up? Jersey, oh, so couple of things, housekeeping. I'm going to get right into this because I don't want to waste anybody's time here. And I want to also open it up for questions. If people have them right, you can feel free to hit it questions. Do me a favor, and don't like throw your LinkedIn profiles and stuff like that in into the feed for everybody. That kind of diminishes the value here. You can find people and then connect with them if you want to, but just do me a favor. Don't advertise on the chat, but you can answer people's questions on the chat, and I encourage you to put it in the chat, not in the Q and A, because I will be paying attention to the chat, not the Q and A. So if you do have questions, feel free to put them in there and help each other out. And yeah, and yeah and so let's get going. If you want also, if you want me to answer your question, but you don't want everybody else to see it, do me a favor. Go in and change your settings on the chat to host and panelists. So if you put host and panelists, I won't call your name out. I won't be like, Hey Sarah, you know, great question. I'll just say, Oh, great question here, host and panelists, and I'll answer it. But if you don't mind that people ask mind that people see you see your question, then just feel free to just leave it on everyone. Okay? Flights in a few minutes, there'll be a recording. So Omar, you can hit ping me directly if you're not a JB sales member. So just to be very clear, I do these free training Fridays for everybody, but my membership is what gets the recording. Okay? So you have to show up to these things live. Now, if you're here for half and whatever, and you have to bounce you can ping me a direct email John at Jay Barrows, and I'll send you a one off link to it. But for the most part, this is to try to add as much value to the mass community as possible, but then also show you the value of joining my membership, which is really only a few bucks, and quite frankly, you're gonna get a 20% discount code for just showing up here. Okay, all right. So with that, let me share my screen. Do to do. Let me just make sure that everybody can see it. All right, y'all see that? Thumbs up. Giddy up. Let me get the chat up here, just so I can pay attention to
S
08:00Speaker 1
it, and we are off. Man, Indiana. Nice, cool.
J
08:09John Barrows
Up New Hampshire kid, yeah, Northeastern, yeah, love the weather, huh? Casey, so gross here in Boston for the past, I mean, we've had 12 weekends in a row where it's rained, and this weekend it's going to rain again, be 50 degrees. I still question why I live here, but love the city anyways. So Alright, so first of all, most I just want to say thank you for, first of all, for showing up to this. I know it's Friday right before three day weekend, at least for us here in the state. So thank you very much. I'm going to try to make this as valuable as possible for every beer. I'm going to give some some tactics and some techniques and some resources for you, and also a few you know, offers, if you will, including otter. So you know, I get sponsors, and my whole approach to sponsorship is I refuse to take money from sponsors that I don't believe in, use their product and understand their values. So I have to understand the business, the leadership. I have to understand their approach and their values, and if they don't align with mine, I'm not even I don't care how much money they throw at me, and ideally, I have to use the product, and otter crosses all three of those. I use otter. It records all my calls. It helps me summarize everything. There's these killer features in it that you can actually see you can create, like, say, I got five meetings. SAS Labs is what I'm going to use as an example today of how I prepared for that meeting. And I had like, four or five conversations with them that were recorded. I can create a folder and put all those conversations in, like, four or five of them, and then use their chat feature to ask it questions about all the meetings. So I'd be like, Oh yeah, what did they say about this? And could you remind me what next steps were, and their AI bot sales assistant will actually give me all that insight. It's bananas. It's one of my favorite tools. Highly recommend checking them out. We're gonna give you a free resource. As a matter of fact, right out of the gate, I'm gonna give you this. So let's go here. This GPT prompts. Let's meeting mastery. Sales pros. This is the lead magnet that we created together that includes a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk
J
10:09John Barrows
about. Copy Link done. I'm going to put it in the chat, and you don't have to send up your email, like use it. We did the lead magnet, and that's where we collect a lot of people's emails. That is the direct link to it, and that's going to give you a bunch of cool stuff that you can check out. So for instance, just to give you a sense, right, what what good prep looks like, here's my meeting checklist, there's my shared agenda, there's my email templates, and then a lot of details about what otter can do for you. So right out of the gate, check out. Otter do me a favor. They help me make sure that I can give this stuff away for free. Okay? And they're just a great, great company to work with. So there's the chat feature, alright? So now the other piece here is, if you go to jaybarrows.com and you go to the training and the individual training, use coupon code, free training Friday for 25 20% off. There's the core package that includes my two main programs, filling the funnel, driving to close, which I've trained to 1000s of sales professionals in places like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Dropbox, Google, all those companies. And then there's the Pro that gets you everything that I got, including these live events, recordings, everything else. My elite membership is sold out right now, so I don't have any more time for that. But the Pro is kind of the one that you'll get the highest value out of and get 20% you notice on the left hand side, you get individual modules. You get all the gpts that I've created that support the training that I'll show you today. You'll get, like, there's like 50 tips in there, like, two minutes, that type of thing. And then workshops, some really cool, very tactical workshops, and then the podcast, everything else, right? So you get a ton of shit. I put everything that I know in this and I just recut all this stuff for back in December last year, so it's all fresh, all new. Okay, all I'm trying to do is help us level up here, because it's just getting weird, and AI is coming for all of us. Alright, so if you want to join and help me learn out loud, join the membership today, and let's have some fun, and I will show you the type of value that you're going to get out of joining the membership. And that's why I want to give this to you today. This is literally one of the exact trainings that I one of the modules of my driving to close program. It's called meeting the challenge, and it's all about how to prepare for meetings. So we're going to go through Why are meetings challenging? Like, what's the difference between qualification and discovery, and why? I think a lot of reps get that conflated. How to uncover urgency? Right then, I'd say the number one question I get, by the way, from reps, is John, how do you how do you create urgency? And I'm going to tell you right up front, you can't create it as sales reps. We can't create it. We can uncover it. We can drive it though. And that's what we're going to focus on how to do. Then this is, I think, an emerging trend that is necessary, which is how to come up with a hypothesis, how to how to come to the table with, like, a perspective of, instead of just solution, selling and asking a bunch of questions about what keeps you up at night, and what are your priorities and that dumb shit, you actually do some homework beforehand, and you come with a perspective of, like, hey, you know what working a lot of people based on what I know, here's how I think that we might be able to help right, coming up with that hypothesis. And I'll tell you why that's so important right now more than ever. Then the impact of questions and how to come up with better questions. I don't care how experienced you get in sales, the number one thing we can all get better at is asking better questions, then, very tactically, how to confirm and control meetings. Something that's reduced my no show rates by about 50% and I think even some, yeah, shared agenda. There it is. Al that love your shared agenda. I've been using it for a while that has reduced my no show rates by like 50% it's crazy, right? Because, and it's very simple to do. And then my favorite nugget is gonna be the at the end, with a follow up with purpose. And this is called a summary email of how I use it to hold people accountable for what they're talking to me about and also keep myself organized, quite frankly. All right, you guys ready to rock getting up? All right, let's I'm just curious for me, like, what's the challenge with meetings? Like, if we put in the chat right here, like, what are the biggest challenge that you all have with the meeting itself? Right? Because if you break down the sales process into opening, processing and closing, right? You gotta find the clients or prospecting and look when people when I say, like, what's your favorite part of the sales process? And people sit and I was like, is your favorite part prospecting? If your hand goes up and you are my favorite part, you're you're batshit crazy, like, either you're lying or you're crazy. Now, if you're crazy, I want you on my team, because I love people who love to prospect, but very few people love getting told no. 99 of it, 100 times right now, closing. On the other hand, I love closing. You know, that's where we make our money, but I've never been like a hardcore closer. I'm just not that guy. It feels weird to me. I just don't like it, right? So, and actually, maybe we do this, will that help a little bit, right? So, um, so I like it, but Right? So meetings, for me, that's my favorite part, right? We develop rapport, we do a relationship, and, you know, get to understand the clients needs all that fun stuff. So why are they hard, right? All right. So, yep, you're crazy. To keep people attentive, yeah, no eyeglasses, right? People are going all over the place, right? Let's do that. Then you. I see the chat, so that way you can actually see a little bit of both. There we go. Yeah. I mean, I think maintaining people's attention absolutely resist Josh resisting the pitch. Early in my career, I was just, I wouldn't listen. I would ask, somebody told me, early in my career, John, make sure you speak. You know the client speaks longer than you, right? Two years, one mile. Blah, blah, blah. So I remember I would ask like, 35 minutes worth of questions. If I had an hour long meeting, I'd ask 35 minutes worth of questions just to make sure the client spoke more than me. And then around minute 35 it didn't matter what you said in those 35 minutes. Around minute 35 I'd be like, thank you very much. Well, we were founded in right? And I would go through my whole stupid deck, uh, prospect receiving the end of a pitch, not knowing where the meeting is going. Love prospect, having a client turn on the video. Yeah, that's another awkward one. It's like, now I'm speaking to a black screen. It's just so weird, especially when you can't, you know, understand body language and any of that stuff. Small by the way, I'm going to throw out tips and nuggets throughout this entire thing. That one is really important, because we've gone into this world. And we used to be able to go into somebody's office and kind of look around and say, Oh, I see you're a fisherman and that type of stuff, right? And be able to relate. Now we don't have that ability. And quite frankly, when I meet you, nine times out of 10, whoever I'm meeting has a screen, you know, nothing in their background, because it's a virtual background, so I can't relate to anything in their background. That's why I highly recommend put shit in your background. Notice my background here. Every single thing in my background has purpose, and it's all about me, right? So there's art. Usually my screen is, like, right around here, so you can't really see if that's Boston or not. So people like, Oh, what's that Patriot right? So now I know they like art, my daughter, for you Star Wars nerds here. There's a lightsaber. My Adidas sheltos Right there. My Michael Jordan signed basketball, my Playbill from Glengarry, Glen Ross, some pappy Van Winkle for you whiskey fans out there. Some Patriot stuff there. My book, my wife, my daughter, some books down there. Every single thing in my background has purpose. So when people log in, they're like, Oh, who's that basketball standby? Oh, is that a lightsaber? Instant rapport, okay? Or if they don't say anything, then I know I need to do some work. All right. So small tip there, do it even if you're even if you live in your, you know, in an apartment or something like that, you don't have a cool background set up somewhere in your apartment, something with like, some books and stuff that represents you. Take a picture of that and have that be your background. Okay, so all these challenges often unstructured and rush, right, doesn't? I know he doesn't. That's fine. Guitars that I don't play with, you put them on the back, all right? So often unstructured and rush. You ever walk into a meeting and you thought you had 30 minutes or an hour, and somebody was like, I'm sorry, I got, like, five minutes here. What do you got there? We got that one. It drives me crazy. Here's my approach to that. Here's my nugget tip for that one, by the way, is when somebody says that, that's usually an executive basically saying, these sales meetings suck. Like, what do you got? Just show it to me, and I'll determine whether I like it or not. Obviously, you know, early in my career, when somebody would say, tell me what you got, right? I got five minutes instead of the 30, or 10 minutes instead of the 30, I would just try to talk really fast. I'd be like, okay, and I would say, I'd be like, Yeah, I did it. That's the worst thing you can do. Here's what you can do that gives you confidence and kind of pushes back a little bit when somebody's like, I'm sorry, I only got about 10 minutes here. What do you got? I 10 minutes here. What do you got? You go, Okay, well, I'm sorry, we're not gonna be able to get through everything in 10 minutes. So let me ask you, what's the what's the one thing you need to hear in the next 10 minutes that will earn the right for a detailed conversation and your undivided attention? What's the one thing you need to hear in these next 10 minutes,
J
18:42John Barrows
that'll slow things down a little bit. All right, all right. So different levels of energy and enthusiasm we come in on fire, right? And they barely remember why we're there. Lack of knowledge of their business. We say dumb shit, like, tell me about your priorities, and I'm gonna say it again multiple times. I think the three most insulting things you can say to somebody in today's sales world is, tell me about your business. What are your priorities and what keeps you up at night? I think those are the dumbest, most insulting questions to ask right now. And I'm gonna tell you because we should know what their prior we should have at least an understanding what their priorities are. We should have an understanding of what people like them tend to keep stay up at night about and tell me about your business. Are you shitting me right now? Companies spend millions of dollars to tell the world about their business, and the first thing that you're going to do is walk in and say, Tell me about your business. When you could have done a quick Google search or use AI that we're going to talk to today. Stop it. We got to come with better knowledge than that. We have to earn the most valuable asset anybody has is time. It's the one thing they can't get back. So if you're gonna ask for my time, you better respect it, and you better do some homework. All right, competing agendas. We're there for a sales call. Obviously they're there for free. Consulting different levels of focus. We're focused. On them. They're focused on anything other than us, squirrel, non decision makers. I think that's a killer one right there, uncovering urgency, and then we're not prepared. We're just not prepared, Right exactly? ChatGPT can do all the work for us in seconds, and I'm going to show you how I do it all right? So with that, I do want to make sure that this is because this is something unfortunately, that hit me a little bit too late in my career. I always used to look at Discovery and qualification as kind of the same thing. It's like, whatever you're asking questions right now, I'm very clear on the difference. Qualification is about us. I'm trying to qualify you to see if I can sell you something. That's where BANT, Medic, all that shit comes into play, right? So it's like, okay, you know, do you look like a duck? Smell like a duck type of thing? Okay, great, but there's zero value in it to a client zero. That's why I actually try to get qualification out of the way as quickly as I possibly can. I don't train this, but I use it. You guys can Google this. I don't have time to hear a second, because we're going to get through everything here. But if you want to Google Jay Barrows meeting efficiency survey, Google Jay Barrows meeting, if somebody could do me a favor, Google Jay Barrows meeting efficiency survey, and then throw the link of to that blog post in there, because the way it works is say an SDR gets a meeting for me, and I'm going to show you my shared agenda later on, I'm going to send you an email before tomorrow and say, Hey, I'm looking forward to our meeting tomorrow. Thanks, Heather. In order to get the most out of our time together, put together a brief agenda here. Could you do me a favor? Let me know what else you'd like to add. And by the way, if you had an extra couple of minutes, if you could fill out this quick little meeting efficiency survey for me, I'd really appreciate it. It'll help us stay focused on what's really important, which is you. And all that is, is basically a type form or whatever, like, just a survey that is all checkbox shit, right? Like, for me, it's, how many sales reps do you have? How many SDRs, how many BDRs? What's your average deal cycle, length? What's your you know, who's your ICP, those type of things, like, all the shit that I need to know, but is is not valuable at all to the client. So I try to say, hey, like, you can do this five minutes over lunch before our meeting, or we can spend five to 10 minutes during our conversation getting this either way, right. I only get about 20% of the people that actually fill that sucker out. But man, when they do, those meetings were so much better. So try that one out. And again, this is, ai do think qualification is a stage of the sales process now, discovery. And yes, it's, I mean, I don't, yes, it's just it depends on what your qualification stuff is, okay? So as far as relevance all industries, it depends on what your qualification information is and how secret, or how you know, how sensitive that those type of people are to giving it to you, right? Because for me, sales cycle link, those type of things. Nobody gives a shit about that. That's usually pretty easy, but if it's like detailed information that you need to know, then you're probably not going to work. But discovery right, as Pam has suggested here, who's spot on? It's always right. When I see discovery as a stage in a sales process, I always cringe, because, you know, inexperienced sales reps like great. I asked my questions. Now, what you should always be asking questions you should always be scumming. Here's another nugget for you. Here's a tip after your first meeting, okay, first second, so your first one, do your thing, and I'll show you this. Second, third, fourth, fifth, the first question you should ask at the beginning of every meeting. Okay? And you can actually use this as your, you know, kind of rapport, like, while people are saying there's like, four or five people trying to get into the meeting, that type of thing, and your main point of contacts there, say, my main point of contact, Sarah and I had a meeting with her last week. Here's the question you ask every time, Hey, Sarah. Um, hey. So just, just like curiosity, what's changed since our last conversation? Not Has anything changed? What's changed since our last conversation? That simple little question, you'd be surprised at what I'm getting, because, first of all, things are changing so fast right now. It's ridiculous. Um, so I'll be like, yeah, so, so just curious, what's changed since our last conversation? And I'm getting a lot of, oh well, you know, oh well, you know, we're actually, you know, hiring a few new people, whatever it is and whatever they tell you, right? They might not think is relevant to what you're talking about there, but in the back of your head, you could be going, ooh, either that's a really good thing or, Oh, my God, that's a really bad thing, right? So just try that one out every Hey, just out of curiosity, what's changed, right, since our last conversation? Because everything's changing all the time. All right? It's focused on the client it uncovers problems, tools everyone's using for phone numbers, the seamless AI or something like that. Clay is really good. Uncovering problems, open ended, layering questions. All right, so this is the big problem here, and this is what we're facing right now, by the way, is indecision. Everybody talks about no decision as their number one competitor. Like is the number one competitor we all have, right? That's true. Like most of us don't lose to a direct competitor. We lose to no decision. And that's why I love Keenan, my boy Jim keen and his book gap selling is one of the best discovery books out there, because it talks about current state, future state, and how do you understand the impact of that? Problem, and if you don't know what that problem is and the impact that problem is having to their business, you don't got a sale. Okay? So that is absolutely critical to address no decision. And so here's, here's the succession, here, right? A lot of us are really good at reverse timeline selling. So say you want, and I encourage you, if you haven't picked this one up yet, don't ask when, when do you want to make the decision by? Ask, when do you want to go live by? Okay, so let what's the go live date like, when you want to go live with our solution? Okay? Because that backs into and then that's the decision process, right? Because then we can back into it. Oh, well, if you want to go live June 1, well, then it's two weeks to do this, and two weeks to do that, and two weeks to do weeks to do this, and most of us are pretty good at that, right? But then there's no decision. So, and if there's no impact, that's if there's if there's no impact for them not going live on that date, you I would not forecast that opportunity. So that's why I've started asking a while back, hey, just out of curiosity, and hopefully I know it because of the discovery I've done. But if I don't, I'll ask the person, hey, just out of curiosity, what's the impact of the business if we don't go live June 1? The answer that question is going to dictate your forecast, because you either get, oh, real impact. And by the way, impact isn't we're going to miss out on the discount. We're going to stay with our existing vendor. That's not impact. What's the impact of them staying with their existing vendor? What are they losing out on? What are they whatever, right? And if you don't have that again, you're either not talking to the right person, or I would not forecast that opportunity. But the bigger problem that is uncovered now by the book jolt effect is the indecision issue. It's not necessarily no decision. It's indecision. And what they highlight here, I don't necessarily love their answer to the problem, but they absolutely nail the problem. And these are the people that, by the way, wrote challenger sale and challenger customer. So challenger sale, Challenger customer, jolt effect is the third in that group, and jolt effect identifies the fact that that it's, it's people are just scared to make a decision right now, because things are doing moving so fast, and there are so many other options out there that people are just scared to make decisions. So that's why, I mean, we've all heard like, better, faster, cheaper, right? Like you can have a better, faster, you know, two, but not all three, right? I've never been in a sales environment before, where you can literally have all three you can be better, faster and cheaper, and the client can actually agree with you, and they still won't make the move. And the reason is, is because the perceived risk of them moving from this solution, current state to future state. If that risk is too high, your solution can be better, faster and cheaper, but they won't make that transition. Because, look, people don't get fired for not making decisions. People get fired for making bad decisions. And so our whole thing, this is why challenger sale is actually crap right now. Because what you're doing with challenger sales like, hey, you know you FUD basically fear uncertainty and doubt, like, you got to do this, right? I love the lead with insights part of Challenger sale, but the Challenger part, because what happens is, when somebody knows that they have to go from current to future state, now they're thinking of every bad implementation, every over promise sales rep, every whatever it is. And now I'm scared to make this decision, so us leaning in, oh, every minute you don't do this, you're losing out, Bob, you're adding fear to somebody who's already scared. So our whole goal should be to shift once we know they have to make that shift to now, how do I de risk this decision for you? That's why I've added the question, when
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28:37John Barrows
do you want to go live? Right? That's the first one back into it. What happens if you don't go live on that day? What's the impact of that? And just out of curiosity, what happens if you make the wrong decision? What is what happens if you go with the wrong vendor? And that I'm starting to get therapy sessions. I get, I usually get the man if, if I make one more bad decision, as far as the vendor is concerned, here I am screwed. You know what I mean? And this is like Sandler pain funnel shit, like we are down at a personal level of pain. If you make this wrong decision, and then sometimes they'll be like, Why the hell you asking me that? Then you come with a reason. You say, Well, the reason I ask is because risk is everybody's issue right now is making a transition. And I want to make sure, first of all, that my solution is that much better than what you're doing now, because if it's not, it's not worth making the transition. And I want to understand what's happened in the past for bad implementations so that I can address that right now before we even move forward. If you can reduce risk, you get a chance. So read both of those books, ask both of those questions, see what happens. All right. All right. Here's how we do it, at least, here's how I do it. And hopefully you can pull some some nuggets out of this, right? So I got a preparation checklist that I go through on every single meeting. I try to align from the beginning, because look at the end of the day. Go back to like, creating urgency. We can't. I mean, you can manual. Factor it, if you want to right, like with a discount and all that shit, but that's just sad. But we can uncover it, we can drive it, and the way that we do that is by aligning with the priorities of the business. All right? Because look, when your CEO stood up in the beginning of the year and said, these are the three things that we got to do to be successful this year, if I can't time my solution to one or two of those priorities, good luck selling anything of significance, right? So I got to figure that out, because at the end of the day, if I can't line that, forget it. I mean, this is, this is, by the way, a small nugget here. This is one of my favorite ways of going over somebody's head without pissing them off. Okay, so say I'm down here at Jim, and I gotta get to Sarah, and Jim's like, you know, little squirrely, get me up to Sarah. My favorite way of going over Jim's head without pissing him off is asking him questions that he doesn't know the answers to. And I don't mean that to insult him. I mean that to genuinely make sure that I'm aligned with the right way. So I'll say to Jim something like, Hey, Jim, you know, let me ask you, when Sarah stood up at the beginning of the year and talked about the priorities for the year and that type of stuff. What would like the top three things that she said that you guys needed to do as a business in order to be successful? And how is what you and I are talking about here? How does that align with any of those and what are some of the metrics you're going to use to measure the impact of that on those priorities? Usually, people below the power line have no fucking clue what those answers are, and they'll be like, well, or be like, Hey, it's okay, but, but the reason I need to know that is because you and I could come to violent agreement down here about what the problem is and in the solution of it. But as we move this upstream to go get budget and get a buy in and all that other stuff, if, if we don't answer that question, it You and I are going to waste a lot of time together here. That's why I'm asking that question. So A, could you either introduce me to Sarah and we'll go do this together, or B, can I write you just an email with the questions that I need answered, and could you go get that for me? If, obviously, if they connect you, you're in great shape. If they don't, but you send out an email like, here's the stuff I need to know, and they go get that for you. There's your champion. You got a champion on your hands. Okay, all right, so let's see here. Oh, Heather, yeah, I'm gonna the meeting efficiency survey. Let me see if that so bring truth why you can't sell the C suite shared agenda, meeting efficiency, yeah, that's, yeah, it's an old school one. But whatever you can go start survey. You Yeah, it's more the survey. My website is Jay barrows.com anybody can go to that. Phil. All right. So then there's the hypothesis questions, confirm and control and follow up. Okay? All right, light it up. What's on your checklist? So say you preparing for a meeting? What do you do? Obvious shit, right. Go on LinkedIn. What else doing me a favor. Throw up a light up the chat. Give other people some ideas. Use AI. That's what I'm about to do. But there, what do you use AI for? Right? Check their 10k love that. Right. Obviously, go to their website. You want to know what they do, you gotta answer like, by the way, you have to be able to answer the question, what do we do? Because, you know what I do now, right, by the way, as a sidebar, this is proof that can sales reps are lazy. Every single call that I take from a sales rep, you know, the first question I ask is, Hey, before we get going here, could you do me a favor? Just give me an understanding of what you know about me so far. Like, what do you know about me, the company, that type of thing. I'd love to be able to skip through some of that shit. Just want to get some perspective. I perspective. You know, a few people actually can even tell me, I do sales training. When I ask that question, I did a very specific test. It was 20. I took 20 so sales calls in a month. Asked that question. Of 20 sales reps, 14 out of 20 couldn't even tell me I did sales training, and these were sales reps in SAS. I mean, you know what happens when they can't tell me, or they do well, or the tell tale sound is always well, you know, you know I was on your website, but I really like to learn a little bit more from you specifically about what you do. That's a telltale sign they didn't do any freaking homework, right? So when that happens, I'm like, Okay, well, thanks for wasting my time. I'm gonna take it back and I literally hang out. Literally hang up the call. I don't care how much I want that solution, if the rep didn't respect my time by doing this much research, they don't get any more of my time. Okay, all right, so you all nailed it, all these different tools. Look, I do goals for my me, what am I? What am I trying to get out of this call? Right? Like, what's a primary goal, what's a secondary goal, and sometimes even what's a tertiary goal. So make me feel okay if I don't get my primary I can go for my secondary or tertiary agenda. It blows my mind. How few reps actually use agendas. We'll talk about that in a second LinkedIn. Obviously, on each social post, Crystal knows that one, that one's a cool one. Crystalnose.com that is not a drug site, by the way. What it is is a DISC profile. So it gives you a personality DISC profile of anybody that you're connected to on LinkedIn, and it's like 30 bucks a month or something like that. You get 10 free profile views if you sign up. And it's bananas, because it's super accurate, and it tells you exactly kind of what style they are. And. And matches it up to your style. Because if you're like, I'm a high D, obviously, right? High D direct, boom. And so I come usually pretty strong, but if I'm selling to a high C or a high I or a high ask on the DISC profile, and I don't adjust my style, I lose them. So that's why I just say, Okay, what type of person am I meeting with? Then there's obviously the about us, any recent news and events. A lot of my recent news and events I use for small talk. So by the small nugget here for you, when I get on a call with somebody, I don't let them guess that I prepared for this meeting. By the way, I straight up tell them I prepared for this meeting, and I use recent news and events as my small talk. I don't talk about the weather, the sports, or any of that bullshit, right? Unless I see they're, like, heavily into, you know, something, whatever. But usually I'll be like, Hey, Sara, you know, as I was, as I was preparing for our meeting today, you know, I noticed on your website, you recently opened up a new office, launched a new product, merge with so and so, whatever thought that is. And I was curious, you know, what is that driving part of this conversation? So right there, I build credibility by showing I've already done my homework, and I ask them a question that they usually are open to talking about and in detail. And what that does is remember one of those things that a challenge with meetings is we come in on fire. They barely remember why we're there. The goal is to slow down like calm down a little bit on our end and get their temperature level up. And the way I do that is by asking open ended questions about stuff that they love talking about, which is them. So that's how I that's I do that. Then I want I gotta understand more about the industry, the company, the business itself, the persona I'm going after, and then the person. And then I gotta come up with my hypothesis and some specific questions I want to ask. Now, all that sounds like a shit load of stuff, right? You're right, and it used to take me for like a legit tier one meeting. Used to take me at least 30, if not 45 minutes to prep for a meeting, at least right, to do it the right way. Now, takes me about five, Nah, maybe 10. Took me about 10 minutes with AI so, oh, Checklist Manifesto, if anybody cares, this is why I think it's so important to do a checklist. You don't have to read the book. It's like 200 pages on how to build a checklist. But one of the things that said in there is that, like doctors and lawyers, no, I'm sorry, doctors and pilots, they highlighted, and they found that by putting checklists into the process for doctors and pilots, that error rates went down by some insane amount, right? So, yeah, it's right there. It's the book is on the bottom left hand side, The Checklist Manifesto. And so the way I look at it is, if doctors and pilots who do things, they're a little bit more important if they go through checklist, why wouldn't we? Right? It just keeps me organized. So every meeting, I go, boom, boom, boom, all right, and then I produce this document that you'll see here in a second. So now let's talk about alignment and how I prepare. And what I'm going to do is I have a GPT that I have custom built that does all this stuff for us. Okay, that I will say that's, that's for my membership. So if you want to join the membership, you get all this shit. I'm going to give you the prompts, though, for everybody else that you can use to do this exact thing. Okay, so just give me a minute. Towards the end, I'm going to give you a Google Doc with all the prompts that I use to do this. And, yeah, Google, by the way, Pam notebook, LM is one of the most bananas fucking things I've ever seen in my life. The podcast shit that it creates podcast for you on any content.
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38:31John Barrows
Mind blown, by the way, all right, so let's talk a little bit of why do you think it's important to understand stuff about the industry, right? Because the thing is, is most sales reps come right in at the project level, like, if I'm selling sales training, I'm talking to the VP of sales, and most sales reps are coming in and saying, okay, so you need sales training. Let's talk about it, right? Was it fine, but, but again, I want to try to level this conversation up and also improve my business acumen here. I think there. The one thing that is sorely missing in today's world of sales is business acumen. And if there's one tip that I can give everybody out there as far as, how do you improve your sales, it's not this new technique or tactic or whatever it is, it's improve your business acumen. Learn how to have a business conversation. Learn what those personas do. Learn how to read a P and L, learn the difference between capex and op X. Those are the type of things we got to get out of, the scripted shit. We got to get out of the let me ask you a bunch of questions and present my shit to you. We got to get into these business conversations here. IQ is over, by the way. EQ is everything, and you have to be in a position where you can have a normal conversation, all right? So by understanding the industry and what's happening in their industry, right? Because I mean retail right now, compared to tech, different challenges, right? Healthcare, compared to, you know, whatever, pick a pick an industry. Be the trends that are happening in those industries are different, and if you understand that, you can actually tie your solution to a much bigger picture here. And remember the alignment. It goes more than just the business, it comes up to the industry. So here's the prompt. You can take a screenshot of it if you want, need your help preparing for a meeting with Company X. My goal is to understand their business deeply so I can ask insightful questions. Can ask insightful questions that don't come for root causes. So again, we're trying to not just the problem the root cause of the problem, Beck Holland, if anybody wants to know, like how to get deep. Beck Holland and Jim Keenan partnered up for flip my funnel Tour A while back, and Beck has gone deep into discovery, okay? And she talks about how to get to that root cause of the problem, right? So we want to figure out, how do I get to that root cause? So please provide three macro trends about what's happening in the industry in general, and then three specific trends that are specific to me and my business that I can use to maybe angle our conversation around. And when I put that in there, I get Mac. So this is a client that I prep for. I did the training yesterday, and I prepped, and I got this closed this deal about a month ago. And so these meetings, this was what I used to prep for those meetings. So macro trends in that industry. Ai power sales enablement, impact of trends on companies like just call and relevance to my solution. So okay, and the key here is, and I'm gonna put a pin on this one too. So many people are using, go back to the slide, so many people are using AI for the answer, wrong approach. My humble opinion, we've gone from a search engine with Google right where, and we can argue that Google gave us whatever it felt like giving us. So we didn't really have choice, but we had the perception of choice at least. You know what? I mean, you'd Google something you kind of look through and be like, I don't. Okay, that's my source of truth right now, with AI, we've gone to an answer engine where it just gives us the answer, and inherently, that answer can't be 100% accurate. Okay. I mean, it's pulling off the internet, for crying out loud. And so if you look at it, the reps who are, oh, write me a perfect email, write me a perfect this, and then cutting, pasting and send. I think those reps are irrelevant already, because, I mean, think about it, if you come up with a perfect prompt that creates the perfect email, then why the hell do I need you as a sales rep? You are automating yourself out of a job, all right? But if you use it to feed your curiosity, to learn, ooh, now it's a superpower, right? So tell me more. So going back to this one, right? So the industry, what's going on with this industry? Like, what are some of the things? Like, how is AI impacting this industry? Why does it matter? What's going what's the difference between the trends in this industry versus that industry? Versus that industry. Why is this important, right? Just spend a couple of minutes like being curious. Okay, so now, yeah, but if it's on the internet, it must be true, right? Bullshit. So now, so Okay, now we got the business, right? So we got the industry. We got a good sense of what's happening on this industry and some of the trends that type of stuff. Now it's the company right now, we got to figure out the business itself again. When your C level executive stood up and said, What are we trying to accomplish? Help me figure that out, because we need to put all our solution in context. Okay, so prompt here is, tell me what I need to know about company. Please include what they do. Who is their ideal customer profile. Who do they sell to? How do they make money? Ultimately, what are their top three competitors? Top three priorities, top three challenges, recent news and press releases that I could use and how my solution can help. So that prompt right there, put it in. Please gather information from reliable sources and all this fun stuff, and I get what they do, their core products and services, ideal customer revenue model, top three competitors, how it can help. And again, those are really the competitors. Like, what about which one's their biggest competitor based on revenue, and who do they lose to most right, being, you know what? What is their you know, what is their highest profit, product or service? All this stuff can be dove into further and further depending on what you're selling and who you're selling to. All right, the prompts in the chat, yeah, I'll put them in a minute now, for those of you who said 10k Have you seen the 10k analyzer? So this is the kid, Chris priest. He is my AI consultant. It's b, r, I, E, S, T. Check him out on LinkedIn. He has built all my gpts, and this is one he actually built that got my attention. This is how I learned about him, because I went on LinkedIn and I said, Hey, I never have paid attention to 10k. Is because I'm a state school kid. I drank my way through four years of college. I don't really like reading all that often. So like, you know, 10 Ks, I was just gonna, oh God, right. Like, it's like, 50 pages of EBITDA and the right. So I'd usually use, like, the first paragraph and read it and see what the CEO said. And if there was something cool, I'd use it. But so I went on LinkedIn. I said, Hey, I've heard like, ChatGPT can be used to, like. To analyze 10 KS or whatever. Does anybody have? You know, any tools that can do that? And I came across this one, Chris ping me. And I was like, Holy shit, this one, all you have to do is go find a 10k you don't actually, it'll help you find the 10k All you got to do, though, is, if you have one PDF, it, upload it, and it'll produce what they do recent funding developments, their organization identified pain points, key initiatives and how my solution can help.
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45:31John Barrows
It's like cheating right now, like, Are you shitting me? And that happens in 10 seconds.
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45:39John Barrows
So the company itself, the business, the 10k the financials, the alignment of my solutions and how I think I can help. I'm starting to get, you know, a little bit better understanding of how I might be able to help them. Now I gotta talk about the persona. So we're gonna talk about the persona and the person. Gotta get to this person level eventually, right? But we still also have to understand the persona, because, you know, and again, business acumen here, I'll tell you why this is important. Embarrassing story on my end. I used to sell it services, right? You know, outsource it services, mostly to SMB, mid market as well. So my first startup, and I had no idea, not a tech person, one sales guy within 50 engineers, right? And but so I always used to go to meetings with my engineer, like my engineer would come with me. Would do a dual sales call. I would be super lazy too, right? I'd always be like, so thank you so much for coming in, Mr. Mrs. Customer. So I really appreciate it. Anyways, Dylan, right? And I'd let Dylan talk for like, 45 minutes to an hour, and then at the end, I'd be like, Alright, so we're gonna put together a proposal for you. Actually, you know what? Dylan's gonna put together a proposal for you. And if you know, if you have any questions, here's a cell phone. He picks it up on the weekends. He's good, right? So I don't abuse their time. But after a while, I realized I probably shouldn't do that, and I should leverage them a little bit. And so I learned a little bit. I sat in server rooms, I asked some questions, I understood the lingo a little bit more, and then I got a little cocky, thinking that I knew what I was talking about. So I started going on sales calls without my engineer. And I remember vividly one time I was presenting to a group of executives, and I was going through this presentation. About five minutes into the presentation, one of the executives picked up his hand, remember I sold it services, and he said, Janet, just curiosity, do you know what the difference between a CTO and a CIO is? I was
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47:35John Barrows
like, a deer in headlights. I was like
Unknown Speaker
the acronym,
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47:41John Barrows
yeah. Acronym. And he's like, All right, that's what I thought. You can keep going. And I was like, This conversation is over, isn't it? No, no, you can keep going. Like, I think I'll leave. I just walked out, for those of you don't know, first of all, Google it, um, or chat, GPT, you know, effectively it's internal external, right? So CIOs effectively work on the internal systems that make the company run CI CTOs or product to market, right? So now, at the mid market and SMB, it's usually the same role, but once you get into the higher end of the mid market and enterprise, CTOs and CIOs are very different, and if you speak the wrong language to the wrong one, they know it. So just that alone should tell you why you should know the difference of personas. And also look for me, VPs of sales in the SaaS industry have different priorities than VPs of sales in the manufacturing industry. And if I don't know what those are, I can't speak their language, and the more I can speak their language, the better results I'm gonna get. Okay, so please provide insights about the persona, title role of the person I'm meeting when they're up to date and taking account into trends over the next 12 to 24 months. Specifically, top three priorities, top three challenges, top five KPIs, and how their role aligns with the company objectives. Please base your insights on reliable current sources such as these, right? I don't want you pulling all from crap. It's like, cool. Thank you very much. Role, tasks, KPIs, revenue, impact, tell me more about that. Who cares? Right? Learning more and more and more. So you know that stupid question. Tell me about your priorities. Never ask it again. Here's a psychology thing, because I've always been sales open ended questions, make sure you ask open ended questions, right? Blah, blah, blah, okay, but when you ask an opening question, it puts a lot of pressure on the person to answer. So when I say, Tell me about your like, an open ended question or statement like, tell me about your priorities, right? You're putting a lot of pressure on me to figure this out, because I got a billion priorities, so I got to figure out which ones are most relevant to our conversation. Then I got to think about how I want to articulate this to you, and whether or not I even want to tell you what my priorities are. And by the way, you. Haven't earned that right yet. You haven't, especially on a discovery call. Oh sure, sales rep, no problem. I've never met you before, but let me give you some details about my priorities and all the challenges that I have in my day to day life so you can figure out what to sell me any fucking mind. I tell you shit. Yeah, revenue, there's my priorities. Figure it out. There's something in psychology called anchoring. So instead of open ended questions, which I still think are good anchoring, where what you do is you come with a statement of what you know, and you ask for clarification or what you think you know. So what? Instead of saying, Tell me about your priorities, you walk in and say, You know what? We're working with a lot of other VPs of sales right now, in the SaaS industry specifically, and they're telling us that right now and moving into the next six to 12 months, the main priorities and issues that they're dealing with are X, Y and Z. Are you seeing the same thing? Because if I come to you with something, your desire to elaborate on that or correct me with detail is far greater than it is to answer an open ended question. Okay, even if you're wrong. Well, no, those aren't my priorities, but these are okay. It's going to be way better to come with a Hey. You know, here's what I'm seeing out there, here's what I'm hearing. Are you seeing the same thing? Stop asking blatant, generic, open ended questions. Come with a perspective, come with knowledge. And then we get to the person. Now we got to talk to the person that we're mainly because personas, even VPs of sales and SaaS, they're different people. Obviously, they have different profiles. They have different disc profiles, all that fun stuff. So I go to their LinkedIn profile, I download the PDF. You know how it says more on everybody's LinkedIn profile, and you click on that and say, download PDF. I download that PDF. I upload it into chat, GPT, into this thread, continuous thread, by the way, on all this give me a brief some of their background highlights, any specific ingredients, recent social posts, any news worthy mentions, analyze the company, summary of Darren's relevance to sales solutions. Go from there, and that's crystal knows, by the way. So crystal knows it's a you can go to their website, but it's also a Gmail. It's a Chrome plugin that connects to LinkedIn, and I can get any profile of anybody I'm connected to check it out. He's a high D. Be bold, direct. Do use energic, assertive tone. Don't be overly friendly. If you look down to energizes on the far right, right. Energizes makes quick decisions opportunities to advance ambitious goals. Drains fails to achieve goals over planning. This is so inaccurate, it's ridiculous. And so you know what I do these days is that, like process. Here's a sidebar prospecting tip. I will write an email, you know, use some tools and whatever it is, and then if I think the email is legit, I'll then go get their DISC profile of the person that I'm emailing, and I'll cut and paste the email into chat GPT, and I'll upload the PDF of their DISC profile, and I say, could you please rewrite this based on this person's personality? Please? Like cheating. All right, so now all this comes together, right? So now I've learned. I've learned from the top down. And by the way, I know that looked like a lot, but legit takes seven eight minutes. Tell me more about that. All right, cool. Where are we going with this? Why does that matter? Boom, boom, boom. All right, so now I have gotten a knowledge of this business from the top down. Now I got to come up with, how do I like, what's my hypothesis here? Like, how do I think I can help? Right? Because, again, I want to come with a I don't want to executives. Don't want to be qualified. You got to bring something to the table for them these days, or else they're going to bounce as I only got five minutes See you later. So the goal of a hypothesis, okay? And by the way, if anybody wants to learn more about hypothesis, selling and storytelling, check out Doug Landis, my boy. Doug Landis l, a n, d, i s, I think it's story, ARR, but I forget the exact name of his new company, but he's actually going all in on storytelling, and he's killer at this stuff as far as hypothesis. So Doug D, O, U, G, Landis l, a n, d, i s, and tell him I said hi. But the goal here is to build a connection, okay, chemistry, credibility, obviously, show empathy. And the whole thing about sales is we're trying to create another conversation. It's like we're trying to earn the right for another conversation. Every conversation is about earning the right for another conversation. Okay? So that's why we need to come to the table with some knowledge. And again, executives don't want to be qualified. They need to be qualified. They need to bring value and insights, and there's that anchoring piece. So what are we looking at their current state? So my hunch is right problems they might be facing and the impact of the problems to the business. Again, we can ask all those questions and get varying degrees of answers, or we can come with our hypothesis on what they are. Are and look for clarification. The second is better. So I'm gonna, I'll give you all the prompts for all the other stuff. The hypothesis one, you could literally just say, okay, based on all that information, what are some hypotheses on how I can help? How my solution can help? Some of their main goals. Give me three main hypotheses, right? And it'll give it to you. So I have my prompts. I'll do this in the GPT, but it'll give three and then I'll be like, I like that one. Let's, let's unpack that a little bit more. How would that impact them? Why aren't they already doing this? Like, what other options would they consider to help get this accomplished? Right? So now I kind of have, okay, this is the one I feel like, and then it's okay. Now, how do you deliver it? Because you what you don't want to come is like, Hey, I know, right. You won't be curious. So you use words like, hey, my hunches, after talking to a few other executive like, my hunches that you might be failing the same thing, you might have similar challenges. Am I right? So screenshot that, if you want, from a talk track standpoint, in doing some research about you, I noticed some similarities to another company in the tech space, and they shared with me some of the problems they might be struggling with. And I have a hunch that you might be selling the same ones. They're boom, boom, boom. Am I on the right page? Am I on the right track here? Or you got, are you guys totally different? And again, you get yes and or no, but a lot more comes out of that. Then, okay, I've educated myself. I've come up with a hypothesis. How can I come up with questions that can uncover if that hypothesis is accurate, and get to the impact of the problem they're dealing with, not just the general impact of, like, I bet you this is, you know, missing your targets, or whatever it is, but like, how much, how much did you miss your target? How you know, how big is your churn problem, specifically to your business? And this is a lot like, I go back to questioning skills is the number one thing we can all get better at. You know, open ended, closed ended questions. I think that sales one on one stuff, it still blows me away. How many sales reps ask close ended questions during, during discovery, though, like, and, you know, the only type of sales professionals,
S
57:16Speaker 1
no LinkedIn, live video ended, I guess we can't do more than an
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57:21John Barrows
hour. The only, by the way, the only type of sales reps that I know, or I'm sorry, the only type of people I know that answer your close ended questions with open ended answers are sales reps we are at we're the only ones when asked yes or no questions, we'll say yes and and then go on for the next 10 minutes about something, most other people, when asked a yes or no question will say yes or no, all right? Uh, layering questions, I think those will really tell me more about that. Give me an example of that type of stuff, right? Pain, pleasure, that's something to pay attention to. Most of us are pain oriented, like, Oh, we're digging for pain, right? But power line stuff. People above the power line tend to focus on the future, which is usually pleasure, like trying to, you know, opportunities and what they're trying to accomplish. Right? People below the power line are typically focused on today or yesterday, which is mostly about pain. Okay, so that's why, yes, pain drives a four times higher, you know, I think the stat is people are four times more likely to avoid pain than they are to achieve gain, right? So if I told you I have a solution that could make you 20 grand or a solution that will make sure you don't lose 20 grand, four out of five people are going to take the solution that make sure they don't lose 20 grand. So that's why pain is a driver, okay? But don't forget about pleasure, especially at the executive level. So opportunities versus challenges is a way you can phrase those impact questions. That's what I'm trying to get to how what's the impact of this problem? Who cares? Right? What's the problem here? Whatever. And so the easiest way to cheat with impact questions, by the way, put the word impact into it. So what's the impact of that on the business? What's the impact of that on your your conversion rates? What's the impact of that on this? Just ask it, and then having a reason. That's the key right there. By the way, the easiest way to tell whether you have a good question or not is to assume that every single time you ask a question, the person pushes back on you and says, Why do you need to know that? And you better have a good reason for it. And by the way, sometimes if you you know, if you have a good reason, sometimes you can preempt their answer with your reason. So here's an example. I used to ask, you know about competition a lot when I was selling it service, that'd be, who the who's the competition? And a lot of times I would get, I'm not comfortable telling you that we're looking at three vendors, right? Whatever. And so I used to get so sick of that, that, that I would ask the question, and then before they would answer, I'd preempt their answer with it, with my reason. So I'd say, hey, just out of curiosity, like, who else you talking to? Who's, who's the competition here? And look, the reason I ask is because, if you're talking to and I would name like, three of my direct comm. Editors, like, if you're talking to us, all the bases covered corporate, IT solutions, like you're you're in the kind of the same range there, and apples to apples, it'll probably be a lot easier for me to make the decision. But if you're talking to us, a solo IT consultant, a four or five person, IT shop, and us, you're comparing apples to oranges to lemons, and you're gonna have a hard time making this decision. That's why I'm asking. And when you give somebody a reason why you're asking. You'll watch them relax a little bit and be far more open to giving you the answer. Okay, so have a reason. So how do we do that? Well, little Gong data here, it's a little dated, but I like the I like the framework here. They talked about how the best sales reps frame their entire conversations around three to four problem oriented topics. So for instance, a VP of Sales for me would be rep, productivity, ramp time, forecast accuracy. CRO would be sales, marketing, customer success. VP of enablement would be ramp time, adoption of techniques and ROI, right? So different people I would frame my conversation different ways, and then they ask 11 to 14 questions within those now they don't come up with 14 questions and just go through them. It's usually I do probably like one or two questions in each category and then layer, Layer, Layer, Layer, Layer. So please use all the information we previously gathered about this company and the person I'm meeting with based on the identity three problem oriented topics for each topic can be five impact questions and then a justification or a reason for each question. Topic One, topic two, topic three. Lot of time I don't use all these by far, but a lot of times I'll be like, Damn, that's actually a really good question. So I take two or three of them and put them on my prep list, and then I finish with now, put this all into a two page summary document for me and edit it in either a PDF or a Word doc. So now the night before I go through that whole prep takes me about 10 to 15 minutes. I learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, I say, produce this two page document for me. I put it into the meeting invite or the date, you know, so right before the meeting happens, five minutes before I scan through all this shit, I'm like, Cool, I send this off to my boss. I'm like, Hey, boss, this is what we're about to meet. We just want to give you a heads up, and I'm ready to rock. And then the last two pieces here, yep, throw it into notebook. Lm, here's the here's the Confirm and control. So I have templates for this. This is all my membership, but you can take screenshots of it. One this is the day before, so I don't send an email saying I'm looking forward. I don't say Are we still on for tomorrow? Say I'm looking forward to our meeting tomorrow. In order to get the most out of our time together here, put together a brief agenda. Could you do me a favor and let me know what else you'd like to add? And I usually put three bullet points on what I want to talk about, and I leave three bullet points blank. And if they get back to me, obviously I'm in great shape, right? If not, that's okay. I update the meeting agenda with the meeting I update the meeting with the meeting agenda on the morning of, I don't put the agenda in the meeting invite originally, because nobody looks at that. They just hit accept. So in the morning of, I update the meeting with the agenda in it. So it's almost like a forcing function for somebody to go and be like, Hey, what's this about? Oh, shit, there's the agenda, right? And because now they know what it's about, and they probably forgot, now they're more likely to show up. And then I use the agenda to guide the conversation, all right? And then last but not least, this is where otter comes in spades for me. It records the entire conversation, okay? And then summarizes it for me, and I put it into my summary email. And this my friends, Google, Jay Barrows favorite nugget, and you will get the details of that. Jay Barrows favorite nugget. You'll find it. It's my summary email. It holds people accountable. It helps me connect the dots between everybody, and it's a way that I can use it to make sure people don't go dark on me either. So that right there, and otter has streamlined that for me. I can't say enough about otter. Please go check them out. Tom John said, Hi, there's free trial also. It's actually, you know what? There's a free trial here that I can send over to you if anybody wants to at least fuck around with it. Here you go. I'm gonna put this in the chat. There you go. And that's about it, my friends. So look my email address is there, my Instagram is there? Otter is there. Check them out. I'm gonna finish with this. I'm gonna stay on for a couple minutes. If people want to chill and hang out and ask more questions, I'll kind of I haven't got a chance to go through all the chat stuff, but 1060 30, and please wait for two seconds while I finish this. Somebody asked me a while back, John, you know, when I did a training, okay, it was about 200 reps and and actually 500 on this one. And one of the rep said, John, all those logos that you showed us, Salesforce, LinkedIn, all these, all these logos that you've trained, they're all basically competitors of ours. So if you're, if you're going to train us all in the same stuff, like, how are we going to differentiate? And my answer to him was 1060, 30, I guess 10% of you in this room, I'm going to take what I tell you and execute at the highest level, because that's the type of people you are. You people you are. 60% of you in this room are going to do something different because it's easy and it makes sense, and 30% you in this room ain't going to do shit different. So the question isn't, what how many people can I train? The question is, what percentage do you want to be in? And that is your choice, not mine. I personally think the BA. Bottom 30% are already irrelevant, and they know it. Unfortunately, the bottom 50% of that 60% they're irrelevant and they don't know it. Ai, is doing their job better than they are. The 10% is always the 10% I might not even consider myself in the top 10% it's the top end of that 50% the people who want to get better and are willing to put in the work. So if you want to get better and are willing to put in the work, I will fucking give you everything I have. But if you're looking for a silver bullet, if you're looking for the perfect thing, eat shit. I ain't going to help you, all right, but you want to join the membership and have some fun and help me learn out loud on this thing, and can survive here, because AI, whether you like it or not, AI is coming for all of us, and if you don't figure out how to use it, you're gonna get replaced by somebody who is so that's what I'm trying to figure out, out loud with my JV, sales Learning Lab, my membership and everything else that I'm doing. Okay, oh, last but yeah. So here's the prompts. Thank you for reminding me. Let me do this. Prompts, prompts, here we go. Share with Google Drive restricted anyone. Copy and there we go. There are the There you go. Evan, I just said 1060, 30, the top 10% don't need me. The top 50% of that 60% of the people I give a shit about, people are willing to put in the work. Willing to put in the work and and want to get better, the bottom 50% of that 60% of the B players that are just trying to skate by and just do enough. I don't care about, I don't care about the bottom 30% Absolutely, the complainers, the people that always bitch and moan about their bad territory, man, I don't have the technology. My company doesn't invest in me. Like, shut up. I was doing a training. You shouldn't me. I was doing a training. I was talking about ChatGPT, and, you know, and I was given all these examples of shit. And one, literally, one of the questions from the rep was, well, our company doesn't invest in us, like the $20 version of ChatGPT. We don't have
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01:06:56John Barrows
people say, there's no stupid questions. I disagree. I was like, what like? I honestly, I was I was dumbfounded. I couldn't even hide my what I was like. So what you're telling me is you're waiting for your company to spend $20 a month so you can have the fucking power that I just showed you right there, and you're not willing to put your credit card down, like, dude, you've already lost. I said it to in front of everybody, you've already lost. That is such a minimalist mentality, like, shut up. I could show you a tech stack for 100 bucks a month that would make you an all star. And if you're not willing to put $100 a month on your credit card so that you can be better, and you're gonna wait for your company to invest in training. That's why I put together. So I do mostly corporate by the way, I do mostly corporate stuff, but I put together my whole membership for individuals, for the people that give a shit, who are willing to kind of take their credit card out and say, yep, I'm betting on me. Let's go. That's the people I want. All right, so if you're one of those, come on. I promise you, I'll give you everything I got. All right, all
Unknown Speaker
right.
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01:08:00John Barrows
So I'm going to stop sharing here. I'm going to kind of scan through some of these, because I didn't get a chance to look through as much of the chat as it was. So if you want to hang out here and ask some more questions, by all means, maybe another 10 minutes or so. Let's see here, what do we got? And by the way, if anybody's doing anything cool for the Memorial Day weekend. Let me know, because I'm going to be probably sitting inside and hopefully not raining. There we go. Membership Options are great for individuals, but thank you. Yeah, Thanks Heather. Smoking a brisket. Nice Dave. Oh, see, I wish I was that good at that Sun's tennis tournament. Good luck to him. Spending money on yourself. I pay for the things that elevate me, Heather, that's the mentality you have to have, right same over events come out of pocket. Like, have you know what you should do? You should be so good that your your your manager comes to you and says, what the like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing is better than everybody else? Oh, well, I've set this tool up. I've, you know, signed up for the JP sales training. I've taken this and blah, blah, blah. I've had it where people have put their own money in, and then their bosses come in and comp them for all of that after they see how much it produces. So that's the mentality you gotta have. Thanks, Cheryl, is it possible to get the slides from today? No, sorry, you can join the membership and you can get everything, but no, I don't share slides. I don't share recordings, not for free training Fridays, like, I got to make some money here. Okay, the amount of shit that I give away for free is bananas, but I do have to keep some stuff to make a few bucks here. Okay, everybody thinks I'm a multi millionaire, which drives me crazy. I'm not. I still grind every fucking day like you guys do, so I got to make a few bucks here. So any, by the way, any referrals, or any people like, if you liked this, and you could maybe give me a review or something like that, or maybe share it with your friends. Really appreciate it. All right. Great stuff. Thanks. Let's see what else love these free training Fridays. Thanks. Natalie. Is there a limit to the pro version, since Elite is sold out, so the Pro was really just one on one, access to me, and that's what I just don't have a ton of time to do elite. Gives you everything except for the one on one access to like I'll still answer. By the way, any of you can ping me on Instagram and and if you connect with me on Instagram, cut it out. And then, and then just DM me and say, Hey, John, I'm dealing with this whatever. I'll get right back to you. So you can do it that way too, if you, if you didn't, if you didn't have the money or whatever. But the one like me coaching you, that's a that's where that elite thing was. So what else? Presentation, thanks, thanks. Thanks. All right, cool. Anybody else have any questions, anything I can help with before we get off here? What's your point of view? What's your point of view on data versus sales? NAV, okay, so this is interesting. So I'm on the LinkedIn Sales. NAV, I'm like one of their whatever insiders, where they give kind of early access to some of the tools and shit. Some of the stuff that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is doing is ridiculous. Like they have the account IQ and lead IQ where legit, and I'll show it to you right here. Let me show you real quick. For those of you are still hanging on here,
Unknown Speaker
let me do this.
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01:11:03John Barrows
Pull this up. Sorry. This is I was floored when I saw this, because it basically does a lot of the stuff that I try to do with other tools in one platform. So let's go here. Let's go accounts. Let's pick an account. I'm not gonna be strategic with this. I'm just gonna pick one, right? So let's do Arctic Wolf, whatever. Now you'll see, see this thing says account IQ. It says, see how the product helps over generate insights. What's bananas about this is that it goes and it searches all the trigger events. And it says, Because you sell sales training, here's the stuff about account IQ that is relevant to them. And then you can do the same thing with the people. So say, I go to Steve here. Let's go Steve lead IQ. There's not enough information about Steve. So that's getting better LinkedIn, like upgrading their shit, really, really well. So I love LinkedIn, sales, nav. I like it a lot more now than I did before. I'm a huge fan of clay. I'm a big fan of clay, but you kind of have to be a little bit of a nerd to figure out their clay tables. But they're absolutely bananas. I love otter, obviously, you know, when it comes to date, clay is, is the data source for me, as opposed to zoom info. Long story short, is like, if you're going to do zoom info, I would recommend going all in on Zoom info, right? Don't just use it for their contact information. Use it for their intent data. Use it for their platform. Use it for all those things, right? But if you're going to go with sales, nav, go all in on sales. NAV, right? So it's, it's almost like these platforms now are better than these point solutions, because AI is just helping them spin it up as fast as possible. So my Insta handle is, and I'll put it in here at John M Barrows. So it's John M, as in Michael Barrows. There it is, top paid app subscriptions you use. So the top paid ones that I use, sales nav, Crystal nose, Clay otter, well, those are sponsors I don't pay for them. Yeah, those here's No, I actually, you know what, as much as I love Owler, O, W, L, E, R, the Sales Navigator stuff has actually taken over the need for that, because that was about trigger events and those type of
Unknown Speaker
things. Let's see what else.
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01:13:29John Barrows
Yeah, those are the main feed li that ones I use for social selling and personal brand building and those type of things. Because it's an RSS aggregator all the by the way, all those tools are in my chat, but are all in my membership. All right? So many? Yeah, tabs don't like, don't get me started. I always know what a train wreck week I have by how many tabs. And that's, by the way, that's only one window I have, like five other windows. Try to build a use case, Apollo. Yeah, I like Apollo's good. They're, they're a lot better, because, you know, then not a lot better. I'll take that back. They're less expensive and I think a little bit more nimble than the sales lofts and the outreaches of the world. Reggie AI is a great one too. So, R, E, G, R, I, e.ai, they're bringing a lot of the AI components into their platform. So I love that one. What else? Cronk is free, all right. How would you go about a market of more price? How would you go about it if a market was price driven? So I guess that one's a tough one, right? Because I'm a value guy all day, every day, and I mean, but at the end of the day, we're all being commoditized. I don't care what you sell, right? We're all being commoditized. And so I think it's ultimately about, you know, the client needs. So what we do in the prospecting training, we think about problems questions, right? What are all so think about your ICP. Think about the problems they solve, okay, or problems they have, and your solution solves, come up with what I call interest questions, right? Like a question like, Hey, how are you currently doing that? Or something that you know is like, why would you ask that? Well, the reason I ask is because we solve it this way, right? To get the conversation going. Yeah, and then when price is the issue. I mean, if you are truly a commoditized tomato. Tom Mao, I got my I don't got much for you, man, then it's your personal relationships with them, the work that you do, the value that you bring to them as a person, not necessarily the platform, right? So if you're constantly bringing new ideas to them and that type of stuff, they're going to see you personally as somebody want to do business with. So that might be the approach, but I always ask, when somebody asks me, like, what's the price? My first question to them is, well, you know, give me some insights here. So I can give you some ballpark numbers, right? I'm not just going to give you my rate card. I'll usually give you a range if you give me some insights, but I'm also going to then ask, Hey, so where does price fall on your on your priority list when it comes to decision criteria? Here, is it the number one thing you're looking at when making this transition? This transition or looking for a new solution? Because if it is, and, you know, we're not the cheapest, nor do I ever want to be, so if that's the case, then we can make this conversation really short. But I don't like selling low value shit because it ends up being commoditized, and then it's just a numbers game. And I, you know, me adding value. I got to find different ways to add value. If that's the case. Sweet Jen, tell, told Doug. I said, Hey, but yeah, you know, differentiate yourself based on the research, based on the value that you Oh, here's one for those you left. Here's something you can do. I talk a lot about, like, adding value, right? Like, Well, I do too. Everybody says, oh, make sure you add value in every touch, you know, that type of thing. It's pretty easy for somebody like me to do that. That's why I always love like, or, you know, roll my eyes at sales influencers, or, like, build your brand and blah, blah, blah. It's like, Dude, we sell crack to crack heads, and we're crack heads. You know what I mean? Like, I sell sales training to sales reps, and I'm a sales rep. So it's pretty easy for me to add value to another sales rep or a VP of sales because I live this world. But if you're a 22 year old kid going after a CISO in the manufacture, you know, in cybersecurity, like, what the kind of value are you going to add to that person? I never really had a great answer for that up until now, just go on to ChatGPT and say, I'm a 22 year old kid selling cybersecurity to CIOs. What value could I possibly bring to them in a cadence? What are some research reports I might be able to generate for CISOs in cybersecurity that would add value to their life. It's going to give you five or six different ideas. Click deep research in ChatGPT and say, Could you go do deep research on that topic with the idea of adding value to that persona in an email that I could send them with a PDF, keep it less than three pages, and please summarize the findings for me on page one. Ask me whatever questions you need to know about what I'm trying to accomplish, so that you are 95% or more confident that you can achieve this task. It will then go ask you some questions, and then it will go do deep research for you and create this insane research report, and again, make sure you check the sources and all that other stuff that you can then send to whoever you want. I'm doing that right now with like the SDR role and those type of things and the trends analysis and all this other stuff. It is
Unknown Speaker
bananas.
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01:18:23John Barrows
Like I said, we're not going to get replaced by AI. We're going to get replaced by sales reps who learn how to use AI,
Unknown Speaker
learn how to use it.
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01:18:36John Barrows
Selling individuals and families look sales of sales at the end of the day, it's about understanding needs. It's about understanding, you know, doing your prep as much as you can about those families. If it's not about the families, because you can't find information about then do the information about the region? You know, as a family, I don't know if you're selling, like, you know, roofing, or, you know, solar panels or stuff like that. Well, you know, if you can tell me in the area, like, what, you know, what the trends are in my area, and how many houses have solar and, you know, who's doing what, and what are the options, right? That type of stuff, and it's, it's not always angled towards buying your shit, right? You can do that, right? You just, but you still have to, you know, ask the questions. But if you can come with a perspective of, like, hey, it looks like your house is X amount. I mean, the thing about houses and individuals is, like, that's all public knowledge. You can go to the local, you know, town and get the how old the house was when the last time it was bought, all that fun stuff. So depending on what you sell, are using AI agents for research. Not yet, Paul, I am definitely, though I have of those, all those tabs you saw on my channel. There's like four of them that are, like, AI agents that I'm this weekend, gonna get stoned and check out. So let's see what you take on referral, selling, engaging users, stakeholders for your product, using, using, Oh, absolutely, man. So look, referrals are the lost art in sales. It's the easiest thing to ask for, and it's what most reps don't I used to ask for referrals on cold calls. So if I did a cold call to somebody. Yeah, and I had a, you know, got him on the phone, had a good conversation with him, and they were kind of cool about it, whatever, but we weren't really a good fit. At the end of every one of those cold calls, I'd say, Oh, hey, just like your oaz, it doesn't look like we're actually a fit for what you guys do or what you're trying to accomplish. Do you happen to know anybody else maybe in your network that that could be, that you could maybe just give me a name for? I mean, one out of 10 when I call that person, be way easier, right? I think referrals and but you have to be strategic with referrals, right? You have to like, you can't just say, Who do you know, get tight, you know, put together a one page document of exactly the ICP that you look for for referrals, and ideally have a list of top 25 companies that you want to get into. So when you get into an opportunity to ask for a referral, you don't just say, Hey, do you have any referrals? You say, Hey, do you happen to know anybody that fits that profile, or any one of these companies make it easy for me. Okay, yeah, exactly. That's why. That's why don't. Don't let them think about it. Because nine times out of yeah, let me, I'll get you know. Let me go back to my office and see if I can know anybody. And then they'll never do it. That's why I don't. I don't let them do that. I said, Do you happen to know any of these people? If you do great, if not, no worries, right? Drop into wins, dropping how to win in sales if you work on construction, roofing. Yep, there we go. Yeah. I sold for DeWalt Heather, so I know the construction space, you know? I sold copiers, I sold power tools. I sold it, services. I sell, you know, so I've kind of gotten exposed to a bunch of different types of sales. I'm also 50 so, well, 49 so I've been around the block for a little bit. Here, Josh, check out. Make It Happen Mondays, yeah, oh yeah. The Alex buckles one, actually, thanks for reminding me. Mike. The so for castable, they're actually, they were a sponsor, but now I'm just working with them directly. They have a really good approach to partner based selling Sophie, ai hilte, kid, the Walt way better. Sounds again. All right, cool. Do you hate the Knicks? Enough for root for the Pacers? Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I actually, I love what's happening with the Nixon pacers, because the whole Reggie, I'm old enough to actually remember watching this game when Reggie did that and scored nine points in eight seconds, or whatever it was like. That was the most mind blowing shit I had ever seen. And I watched New York just crumble because of it. And being from Boston, I just have a deep seated hatred for New York. I have a respect for New York, no question about it, that city is awesome. I have a healthy respect for that city and the people in it, quite frankly, and all their sports teams, but I hate um, so yeah, nothing would make me happier than seeing that ball go, Bo and watch everybody at Madison Square Garden go, oh, especially after the Celtics laid a fucking egg. Like, Screw Celtics. Piss me off. Don't get me wrong. That's my shit on that. Shot, yeah, man, hey, look, I'm like, Celtics got, like, they didn't even show up, man, so I don't even want to get started on that shit. They should have won this year. They should have won. I mean, they're stacked. But for some i The Heart the one on the one on the Celtics that I that I'm just nervous about, is I just, I'm worried about the heart, like the the passion for the game. They're good, they're all talented, but I don't know little disconnect. I'm a Jordan kid, right? So I've never seen somebody, I've never seen anybody like Jordan never, never like he would, you know, die on the court the flu when he dropped 40. You know what? I mean? Like, these guys these days are all soft, so, yeah, your wolves have definitely gone to sleep. Like, but, man, that kid's fucking nasty, right? People to watch the last dance, yeah? So that's how that, you know, the last dance so that that hit with COVID hit, right? And I've always talked, like, all these millennials, I'm like, and I would talk about Jordan, they like, no, LeBron, LeBron, LeBron. And I'm like, you just don't get it. Like, I don't know how to have this conversation with you if you've, if you've never really watched Jordan, right? And then COVID hit, and the last dance came out, like, right then. And so all these millennials, like, were basically forced, because it was, like, one of the best things on the TV. And they TV. And they like, I the amount of text messages and calls I got after that, being like, dude, okay, I get it. Like, see, there's just no comparison. Sorry. LeBron is a joke. I will never give I will never give him respect. I think LeBron is an absolute joke. So, yep, cry baby. He's ruined the NBA, you know or remember that one where he's lying down like this and his face and they kind of opened up his eyes to see if anybody was looking like, Fuck you excuse me,
Unknown Speaker
right, whatever.
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01:24:32John Barrows
Alright, guys, I'm gonna head out. I'm gonna go, you know, I got some more shit to do this afternoon, but I'm gonna try to shut it down this weekend. So anyways, really appreciate y'all joining me here. If you have any questions or anything I can help with, please don't hesitate to reach out. If there's anything you do to help me spread the word about what I'm doing over here, I'd really, really, genuinely appreciate it, and like I always say, just try to level up out there. All right, just just keep evolving. Keep evolving, because there will be a group that survives this now. US, and they're gonna be a big group that doesn't be in a group that does Alright. Cheers. You.
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