Why Being Right Loses IT Deals (And What Top Closers Do)

Ray Green - Verdict Is The Easy Part FINAL.txt

English (US)

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Let me tell you about a deal that should have closed and didn't die. Sells IT services. He's pitching somebody who's in their target market and has some money, like they're hiring there. They're investing in stuff like billboards you can see all over the state. So they they have some budget and they do a network assessment and it's red everywhere.

Right. Like they've got vulnerabilities, they've got security issues, network issues. They've got multiple admins. They've got like you name it, you know, the tech probably better than I do. And you see this and and he thinks well this is going to be a slam dunk. He presents this to his prospect as he's going through the prospect is basically agreeing with everything.

e should solve it. Pitch this: 2000

I know I'm right about this. Right being right about the problem doesn't win deals has almost nothing to do with whether you're going to win deals or not, and actually just judged a national sales contest of MSRP sellers, the top closers in that room, the people who are closing at 68, 71, 76% are not the people who are winning because they are the best technical sellers.

They are winning because of the delivery that they have and how they present their argument. They're winning for the same reason that you can give two trial lawyers the same case. One wins, one doesn't. Largely the same evidence, same judge, same circumstances for the most part. Why does one win and one not?

A lot of it has to do with the psychology of how people make decisions. In the better lawyers understand it, the better salespeople understand it, and they design the right process to ensure that they are going to get the conclusion that they should. And that includes asking targeted questions and using the evidence and how they how they structure the argument and strategy.

Now we're going to walk through what that is so that you can steal it by the end of this video. My goal is that you understand how to run this process with the different steps in the stages, why they work, and if it's done right, you get to the end in the closes. Anticlimactic. All right, let's dive in. If they have problems and you have the solution and they can technically afford the solution, why won't they buy?

I want you to hold that question, because that's what this entire talk, that's what this entire presentation is going to be about. And answer by the by the end of it. And the answer is and isn't what you think. Here's the first thing to understand. Being right does not close deals. The parallel that we're going to make throughout this this presentation here is that like the the trial lawyer case, right.

Having the truth on your side is not enough, like in the legal world, but also in sales. You know, being right. Finding the problem and being right does not guarantee you the outcome that you want. Prospects don't decide because you decide something matters. They don't decide because you know it matters.

How much you know doesn't impact their decision. So you understand the the the risk that are involved in the you know, how much these vulnerabilities mean and the value of the, the, the monthly bill that you're offering, like, hey, if you invest this, it solves so much stuff, you understand that, but they're not going to make decisions based on that.

They're not going to make decisions until they feel it. Okay. Because like, just agreement is not motivation. Like just because they're nodding their head while you're presenting your case does not mean that they are going to buy. People decide on emotion and then they justify that emotion with logic.

They make the decision here, and then they use this to justify that decision. So they they look for the facts that are necessary to ensure that the decision that I really want is the one that I'm going to make. So we start with how do people actually buy? What is the psychology behind how people make the decision to buy something?

I've been in sales and I've been in sales for 25 years. I've managed over $1 billion in sales. I was the the US chamber's managing director for for 15 years, meaning I ran, you know, national you know, field sales and phone sales and membership center and political fundraising and membership and, you know, a number of a number of other things.

Um, I've run turnarounds for for a couple of private equity companies. As a, as a CEO, I've been expert in residence at the world's largest MSP mastermind for for seven years. I've hired, trained, managed over 100 in the past year through MSP sales partners, my company, we've coached over 250 MSP, MSP sellers.

We fractionally manage Uh, MSP sellers all over the country. And I've seen under the hood of hundreds of MSP pipelines. So I've seen the process, I've seen the data, I know the conversion, I know what works, I know what doesn't. And that's the lens that I'm presenting this from, not from the lens of I know it all because I know it all.

I'm from the lens of I've seen a lot of these systems, and I'm simply showing you what some of the patterns are, and particularly with the the top sellers in the country, the first thing that I want to get into is a few psychology pieces. There's three, three things I'm not going to I'm not going to bore you with, like the theory of the shit.

Um, but there's three things that make the process work as well as they do. And I think that they're critical to, to understand, um, before you, before you jump in, that's, you know, it's basically like why people buy what they want. How pain is, is beats problems when you're selling and how your expertise as a technical person may even get in the way of you selling the first of those.

People buy what they want. They don't buy what they need. And I think this is really important to understand, because when we present a problem to somebody and we know that they need it, we get confused when they don't buy it and it's because they don't want it. And the reality is humans buy what they want.

They do not buy what they need. I'll give you a few examples. The first one is the gym, right? If we all bought and did what we needed, everybody would have a gym membership. Everybody would eat a lot more kale. We'd all be, you know, ripped and, you know, all in healthy and fit and not have nearly been because we know what it takes.

Like logically, you know, we know what it takes to to be healthy, to be fit. The fact is this a lot of us don't want to. I don't want to eat more kale, Ray. I don't want to go to the gym every day. I'd rather do something else. Even though I need to do that, I don't want to. Right. You see it all the time. The. The second one is similar to this deal that I told you about at the beginning of this.

Somebody who's spending millions of dollars on billboards, they're hiring like crazy. They've got money, right? Like they're making investments in the business and the foundation and the scalability, things like that are clearly important. And they won't spend a couple thousand dollars a month on it.

Why? They don't want to because they look at the $2,000 a month as an expense, as an expense that's going towards something else other than what they wanted to spend money on. They want to spend money on growth. They want to spend money on the new salesperson. They want to spend money on the new billboard or the new marketing campaign or whatever is going to drive more revenue.

It

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not so much. Maybe I need it, but I don't want it. And you can see the same thing with cars, right? Like, not many people are going to crush their their budget, their family budget for the Camry, right? Like you like that's that's not how it typically works. Typically when people buy the car that they shouldn't buy, like when they buy the when they want a Porsche.

Like I have wanted a Porsche since I was a kid. I'm going to go. I'm going to spend more than I probably should, and I'm going to break the bank. But damn it, I'm going to get the Porsche. I'm going to get the car that I actually want instead of the car that I need. People don't do that for the car that they need. They do that for the car that they want.

And it comes back to people are making decisions on emotion first and then they're justifying it with logic. Second, if I want the Porsche, it starts here. I want the Porsche. I've wanted one since I was a kid. Damn it, I deserve one. I'm going to get to the Porsche dealership, and that sales person is going to help me justify or rationalize this decision even when I probably shouldn't.

Emotion shows up in and in the. The logic justifies that from a sales standpoint. Emotion shows up as a pain, which is kind of the second point, the second element of this process. I'm going to get to problems or facts in pains or feelings. So if we make decisions based on emotion and then we justify it with logic, it helps to recognize that when we're talking about problems and only problems, we're talking about the facts.

We're talking about logic. We are not talking about the feelings. We're not talking about the stuff that they want necessarily. Right. So sales is emotion and logic and emotions driving that logic is justifying it. But if you're leading with problems and not leading with the emotional aspect of it, then it's going to obviously create create issues for you.

Now there's a there's a saying in sales. We say painkillers are easier to sell than, than vitamins. Right. And it's because people will pay to make a pain go away more so than they will to make a pain. Not ever come. What are you selling when you sell the the problem, you aren't necessarily selling the pain element of it.

So think about it this way. When it comes to tech, when it comes to it, the problem is the network issue. The problem is the security breach. The problem is whatever it is, the pain is the effect from that. It's what they actually feel as a result of it. I remember when I was running a company for this private equity group and it was an issue.

This was before I'd been into IT sales for a long time. There was clearly an issue. It was annoying as shit. There was like there was there were VoIP issues. There was this chat thing. There was. And I knew it was a problem. You know what the pain was for me as a CEO? The pain was all of my employees complaining to me Like when my employers complained to me when they stopped using the app on their phone because it didn't work anymore.

When I couldn't get Ahold of them anymore because they refused to to to log in to the app, or because the app wasn't working, or because they said the app required too much coverage, they didn't have the strong enough signal or whatever it was. The fact that I couldn't get Ahold of them, it wasn't the fact.

It was the pain, the annoyance and the frustration that came with it. Like because those were the emotional drivers. If you go to your doctor and you broke your shoulder, right? The broken shoulder is the fact, the pain is the actual pain, right? That's the actual break. Like, that's that's pain. Or if you break your shoulder, you've been training for an Iron man for nine months right now.

Your your season is gone or your triathlon is gone. That I promise you, if you've done that, if you've trained for a triathlon for nine, 12, 18 months, whatever it is, and you break something at the end, oh man, like that's worse than the pain, Right? So differentiating the the problems and the pains. Are you finding problems or are you finding pains?

So why do smart like technical sellers still lead with the facts? Like why do we like if we if this is true, why do we go in with the problem and the fact and the logic? It's because your expertise is kind of the liability, which is also weird. It's kind of counterintuitive. The more you know about tech, in many cases, the harder it is to sell tech, because, you know, all of the stuff under the surface chip and Dan Heath actually call that.

Authors call that the curse of knowledge. And the curse of knowledge is basically when you have enough knowledge about a particular topic that you can't unknow it. Right? Like the toothpaste is out of the tube, you know, once you know a certain amount of things, once you've been in tech for ten, 15, 20, 30 years and you know how all the shit works and you understand the implications of the problems and this and that, that actually becomes a liability because you forget what it's like to not know that.

So you start talking about things from your standpoint and even even you even try to dumb it down. Right. Like you try to make it layman for me, but you're dumbed down version still doesn't come remotely close to to anything that I can relate to. You forget what it's like to not know something. You talk in a way that doesn't necessarily resonate with what they're they're thinking.

So you're talking past each other and you're talking about like the root cause of something and they're like, ah, I just want the pain to go away. I go to my doctor, I've got a headache. And he starts giving me this, this lesson on, you know, on how migraines are caused and you know, what the different symptoms are and the neurological this and the data.

And I'm thinking this has given me a headache. Can you, can you just make the pain go away. Right. So it's the curse of knowledge ends up working against you. Now, here's actually a really good example of this. This is from Chip and Dan Heath. Um, do an experiment. I want you to do this, and I want you to tap a really well known song.

Like no humming, no, no whistling, nothing else. Just tap the song that's in your head. Take a really popular song, something everybody knows. And do it with me here. I'm going to leave. Leave some silence for you and we're going to tap it. Now I'm going to tap a song. You tell me if you know what this is.

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Do you know, maybe, like one out of a million? Do you know what that is? It's this happy birthday. Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm

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hmm hmm hmm.

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Well, when you were talking about technical stuff, what's often happening is it's that's what they're hearing. They're hearing this. I don't hear the same thing that you're hearing. You hear the thing clear as day in your head. You can see it clear as day. And you don't understand how they don't. Right.

That is what's happening. It is the curse of knowledge recap here. We've got people buy what they want, not what they need. And they make those decisions with emotion first and then logic and problems are facts, pains or feelings. The emotion piece. And you have the curse of knowledge, which tends to lead you to talk more about the problems, which is more about the logic, which isn't how people make decisions.

Right. And so once you once you get that foundation, it starts to click. Lawyers get that better than anyone. They know how to speak the way that juries think. And that's why two lawyers with the same evidence and the same judge, the same opportunity, can win a case and lose a case who can speak to the jury better in appeal to how they make decisions better.

Okay. So this is kind of the this is the model. And then you think about it a trial lawyer convinces a jury with emotion. And then the evidence supports that emotion. So like a trial lawyer is going to convince an emotionally driven jury with the evidence the same as you as a salesperson, and two behaviors are going to basically carry everything.

You're going to use questions as weapons, just like lawyers do, and you're going to build up to the closing argument, okay? You're not going to sell too soon, right? So what do I mean by that? First one is questions are the best tool, the most valuable tool that you have. Think about it like when when a lawyer is trying a case.

Are they asking questions just to learn stuff? Are they only asking questions to stuff that they don't know? Are they getting only the information from that person who's on the stand and going, oh, that's a new piece of information. Let me think about that. Like, no, like questions are a weapon. Questions are how they're making their case.

Yeah. They may pull some information. They're going to get somebody to to acknowledge something or admit something. And there may be some new information that comes out when they're asking questions. That is part of the of of the purpose of questions. That is not the only reason that you're asking questions.

In fact, it's probably of all the reasons and all the ways that you're leveraging questions and a lawyer's leveraging questions. That's probably the lowest on the on the priority scale. So yeah, you pull some information, but you're going to ask questions just to have like a prospect sit with the pain like activate a particular feeling.

So when I ask a prospect so how many times did that happen? Like, what was the impact of that? What did you do to solve that? You know, what have you tried to solve that up to now? Like, how long has this been going on? When you're asking those questions, the information is kind of helpful. But, you know, what's more helpful is for the prospect to sit with that and activate that feeling.

If there's real frustration, if there's real concern, like over compliance, over lawsuit, over this, over that the questions allow them to think through that and process that in front of you. Right. So that's that's another reason you're going to use questions. You also ask questions that you know the answer to so that they can reach the conclusion on their own.

Right. Like your questions I believe my own my own conclusions when I come to them more than I do if somebody else comes to them. Right. So if if the lawyer points the jury and says, this is what happened. Da da da da da. Okay, like that might have some credibility. But you know what has more, more credibility?

Asking questions in a way that somebody comes to that same conclusion on their own, because you've you've been strategic with how you're asking the questions and how you're thinking about things and how you set it up. And somebody goes, oh, I haven't thought about that. Why did that happen? Or why did that happen?

Why didn't they do that? I'm not sure. I've never. Have you ever had a prospect actually go I don't know, that's a really good question. Like, oh, man, now, you know, like that's that's gold. You ask questions to coach, right? Like to to to be an advisor. Like not not to just to be the sales person. You ask questions, to challenge people, to get them thinking.

And a lawyer is very much doing the same thing. A lawyer is getting the jury to think, I don't know. Is that right? Is that wrong? From a sales standpoint, there's so many even there's even more ways to leverage like coaching and challenging because it's not even the same dynamic. People aren't nearly as defensive as they would be on a on a witness or otherwise.

We're doing something wrong, I think, from a from a process standpoint. but you can. When somebody gives you an answer that has a built in limiting belief, like, oh, now, like compliance isn't that big of an issue, you can ask questions and say, well, yeah, it is. You know, like you can ask a question that gets them to reach the same conclusion and go, huh?

I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that. Or if I don't think this is important and you ask a challenging question and you get somebody to to really go, oh, and maybe there's a little bit of tension, right? Because you're, you're not necessarily calling me out. It's not like a statement, but the way that you're asking the question implies that I should rethink my answer if there's a little bit of tension.

A lot of times it's healthy. You can ask questions to to proactively address objections before they even come up. Right. Because the best rebuttals from a sales standpoint are not silver bullets in a playbook that I can I can write for you. I mean, we have playbooks, but let me I can guarantee you the best time to address an objection is early in the process.

It's in. You address those objections with questions early on. If I ask you a question about who's typically involved in decisions like this, and you say it's always you, and then we get to the end and you say, well, I've got to talk to 18 other people. And you say, well, okay, I'm confused. Like when we were talking earlier, you had mentioned was that has that has that changed or whatever it is?

Or if I ask you, why is this a today issue and not six months ago or six months from now? What makes it anything happen recently to to make this an important today and later? You tell me. Well, we're just not going to move forward. I think we're not ready yet. I can come back to your words and those are the best rebuttals.

The point is not the specific question here, or the point is how are you using questions? And this is why I always say, like all roads lead to discovery. Like in a sales process, all roads lead to discovery. All those objections and obstacles that you didn't address early on, or you didn't find or you didn't uncover.

You didn't unpack early on, come back to haunt you later in the process, and then you want these silver bullets to save you later on. It's having the information up front, which is exactly what a lawyer is doing, right? A lawyer's building up to the closing argument. They want to collect all the information, and they're not they're not even handling it like immediately.

Right. Like they're there's they're drawing that information. It's a poll based exercise. There's like, they're putting it all in a box. Right. And you're doing the same thing like you are. You're asking questions. You're getting the information that allows you to process that later. Second thing, you're taking those questions and you're building up to a closing argument, like you're not leading with the closing argument and you're not giving the closing argument throughout the entire case.

The only way that they're making case is like through the poll like poll based exercise, they're saving the information for the closing argument, right? So they're they're hoping people draw their conclusions on their own and they're getting to the end and they're saying, all right, boom. And I'm going to I'm going to make my case with the, with the closing argument based on everything that I've learned up to this point.

And it's very much the same thing from a sales standpoint. What you're doing is you're doing discovery, you're getting all of the information up to that point, and then you're making the case with your presentation. And all of it's designed to give you the information that you need to make the most strategic case later.

Each step basically sells the next step, right? Like, not the whole deal. You're not trying to win the case with the first witness. You're not trying to win your case with one piece of evidence. And if you what happens is if you start, if you sell too early in the process and you start pitching when you're supposed to be asking questions and pulling information, when you start selling and pitching before you've actually built a case, you cost yourself the credibility to the clothes that you're going to present is really just the sum of the case that you've already built.

And and this is like this is, in theory, like this is Here's here's some proof in the stages that you actually kind of go through to do this from a sales standpoint, right? So there's basically five stages in each case. Or each step builds and makes the case for the next step. Okay. Um, now and this is why I say it's not theory.

This is from, you know, the the sales person of the year MSP salesperson of the year, um, national thing that, that I judged a couple months ago. And you've got Roland, who's got a 76% close rate and 49 year. You've got Brad with a 72% close rate, 47 KM, you've got, um, Bradley with 68% close rate and 41 km. Right.

And and Bradley's shop actually has produced not not just a finalist this year, but a winner two years ago running the same process. And the thing is, this is not talent. It's not luck. It's not even like Brad and Bradley didn't even come from tech sales at all. The Roland is a is. Owns the business. But this is not knowledge.

It's not the credibility of the tech argument. Let me go through these stages real quick. So this is kind of the spine of this is you've got five main stages in the process. You've got one is is qualification, the second is discovery, third is assessment, fourth is to present. And then the fifth is the verdict or the decision.

And then there's like a connective tissue that holds all this together that that we call bam bam bam bam stands for book a meeting from a meeting. And that means at each stage in this process, you never let the next step not get scheduled. So at the end of the qualification, you always schedule the next step, and then you always schedule the next step and the next step and the next step.

From a sales standpoint, you never leave an action item without having the next action actually scheduled. Okay. So these are the these are the main steps in the process. So I'm going to go through each. Each step real quick. So the first is qualification keeping our legal analogy going. This is when a lawyer says do I even take this case right.

They they want to listen. Is this winnable. Like am I am I going to be wasting my time? Does this person have have money? Like I don't need to necessarily make the decision on whether I'm winning right now. I need to make the decision on whether I take this case from a sales standpoint. What I would highly recommend is at the qualification stage, you're qualifying at the prospect level, not at the opportunity level.

What I mean is, is this person in your target market? Not necessarily. Does this person have high intent and are they ready to buy today. And you know, there may be some exceptions to this. If you've got a pipeline that's overloaded and you're dropping deals left and right and you can't keep up with deals.

You get to the point. You can, you know, increase the friction level on your qualification and start start qualifying by intent, but the vast majority of the time qualify based on prospect like move into discovery. Once you determine is this somebody that I can sell something to at some point. Are they in my target market?

Do they qualify for the size of company? Do they qualify for the industry or for the geography or for whatever it is? And is there some need or your mild degree of interest? Today? As a salesperson, I want to use discovery to identify whether I can unpack like latent pains and things that they may not even be feeling today.

So I'm not at the qualification stage saying, listen, if you're not ready to buy, then I'm I'm not moving you through in this, okay? So it's basically early Intel, some general positioning and and I don't mean like hard selling your your company or anything. Like you don't want commission breadth just just reeking all over the place, like just, you know, is there?

Is this the right person? What you walk away with here is you've got kind of preloaded discovery, right? Like you've got an early stage. Who is this? Why are they calling or why are they taking the call? You go into discovery with a little bit more information. So the second step you bam bam from there to to discovery.

Discovery is where this is where the case is won in my view. Again all roads lead to discovery I this is where you are building the record. You're going to use questions as the weapon like we were talking about earlier. Right. Like this is this is where you do that. And if you run discovery properly, you walk out knowing a lot more than their technical setup.

The vast majority of these questions are not oriented around how many workstations do you have and how many users do you have, and what kind of server and what. This is like most of that shit you can get on an assessment and which we'll talk about or, or on a form, frankly, like this. Like what I want to know in when discovery is, hey, what's your guys's buying process like?

How do you make decisions like this? Who's who's going to be involved in that decision? Right. Like how is how is that going to work? Is there any real urgency here? What makes it urgency? Are there any real timelines? Is there anything really, really moving this deal forward? What are the problems. But more importantly, like we're talking about earlier, what are the pains that are associated here?

Um, what are the hidden objections that I'm likely to encounter later on? What's the price sensitivity? What's the budget? What's are there any obstacles beyond the objections? Are there going to be any process obstacles that I'm going to run into? You know, like these are the things that I look at from a from a process standpoint that I want to know at a discovery, I want to know those core things.

And that's what most people get wrong, is that even when they conduct a discovery, they're looking for the technical elements of discovery. And they miss all of this stuff. And this is the stuff again, go back to the beginning. This is the stuff that wins deals. And this is the stuff that costs deals. It's not necessarily the facts.

The big thing here is like understanding what the objections are going to be. So if they're not making decisions later on, you're not surprised by that. And that if there is a price thing that comes up or a decision maker issue that comes up, like you should have surfaced that here, what you kind of unlock here is the deal starts to get won at this stage, even though you're not presenting.

This is questions or weapons, right? This is where you start to win your your argument and start to understand what are the emotional drivers that are going to lead to a decision or not, and where that decision is probably going to end from discovery or sometimes combined with with discovery. But I recommend in discovery, I recommend, you know, at least 45 minutes of like, true actual discovery.

Uh, from there you do your assessment and your assessment is let's call this like where you're collecting the evidence, okay. Like this is where you're going to do your scan. You're going to do your evaluation, you're going to do your walk through. You're going to do whatever it is that you that you do to identify the problems, to identify the facts, to identify what are all those things that are going to help justify the emotional decision and carry more weight, right.

And help them make that decision a lot easier. And that's not to say the stuff doesn't matter at all. It just matters a lot less than you think. This is basically like your exhibits from a from a legal standpoint, like you're going to corroborate the testimony that you get from discovery with this evidence.

A lot of people don't like this, but like this is the cheapest, most commoditized input because anybody can run this part. Anybody can run the scan. And most, most of the time we're running like a third party tool or something like that, that other people can go by and they can come out with literally the exact same input.

So this part's actually easy to commoditized, which is another reason that it is not as powerful as we think from a sales standpoint. Evidence with no story ever really won a verdict, right? Like nobody ever said. Okay. Well. Fact. Fact, fact fact. Almost always. There's there's story and there's emotion that that go with it.

It matters like the assessment matters because it makes the discovery stronger, but it is commoditized. So keep that in mind. This is not enough to win deals, particularly if you're in a deal with three other viable competitors. And they all come in with a similar assessment. Okay. Now what do you do comes back to discovery from assessment.

Depending on how you run that, then you're going to present your argument like this is the closing argument. This is the sell right. This is, you know, the lawyer walking around making the case like weaving it all together into the story. Because I now know what you said is important. I now know what the real pains are.

I now know how we're going to quantify, you know what a quantify what those pains are, what it's really worked to you. We're going to address the problems. We're going to talk to the solutions. We're going to hit all of these things. And this is. This is the closing area. This is the fun part. Like for, you know, for for me.

But it's like it's not new evidence, right? You're just weaving all this stuff together. You're being really strategic with it and you're recapping the pain points. Like, let me let me remind you of what the challenges are. We're presenting. Why us? You know, why not? Why not? Other other people. So we're telling that story.

We're also differentiating ourselves. We're talking about our unique selling proposition or what makes us unique. We're talking about and highlighting the future state and where they want to be. Like I was, I was tell, you know, people like the people that are sellers stuff. People care far more about the transformation that you're going to deliver than they do the mechanism that you use to deliver it.

How is this going to work afterwards, and what's it going to mean to the pain, to the productivity, to the frustrations, to the. Uh, all all my stuff working like all of that. Like, what's the future state? The mechanism you used to do it is usually they're much more agnostic about that. Okay. You're going to talk about, um, how to to lower the perceived cost of switching.

Like, hey, switching is is not as hard as you probably think it is. Like, that's one of those hidden objections. And you're going to ask for the sale and ideally your output as you get a decision here. Like that's that's that's the goal. Um, obviously you don't always get the deal in in or the decision in this meeting, but that's the outcome that you that you want here.

And when you do this right, the verdict becomes much more anti-climactic because you're not saving up for for this, like for the for the close necessarily, like you've built your case long before it. So the objections, if you've run discovery the right way have already been handled, or you least know what those are going to be so that they're easier to handle.

And your ask is, is not arm twisting. It's like, is there any reason not to move forward today? You know, in that in that meeting. You're actually trying to get the, the the decision. You're trying to get the objections. You're trying to get the feedback and the questions that they that they have. And there's not a silver bullet like this is the some of the case.

Like there's not one liner at the end that's going to get you the deal. There's not one liner that's going to handle the objection. Typically there's there's some. But like very rarely it's it's there's not the silver bullet that you're looking for. It's the accumulation of all of the facts up to this point.

And then from here you're going to, you know, if you don't get the decision on the spot, then you bam, bam, right again, that's the thing. That's that's connecting all this together. It's like the, you know, the the legal equivalent is you set the next hearing, right, like a, like a scheduling order or something I think is, is what AI told me was anyway, um, but there's like a, you know, same, same concept.

You've already done the hardest part, right at, at the ask when you're asking for, for the money, you're asking for the decision. You've done the hardest part. You've gotten the facts. You've made your case. And what's missing is the trial skills. It's the it's the discovery before you present. It's the it's the discovery before the assessment.

It's finding out more about the decisions and more about the decision makers, and more about the process, and more about the objections and more about the pain, and more about the urgency and more about how they're, you know, who, who else they're talking to and how they're thinking about this like it's it's using the like your your questions as a weapon, as a technical seller, we're usually we're arguing with, with our head and we're hoping that they make decisions with their with their head.

And what this is what I'm talking about doing is just making a case even for it. It's like that. You're it's there's emotion that drives these decisions. And my challenge to you is at this point at like in discovery, stop talking, Stop presenting, stop selling. Start pulling information. Right? So stop tapping.

They aren't hearing it the same way that you are. Start pulling the information so that you can present it in the way that they hear it. So that when you go to present, they're hearing the rhythm. They're hearing what you're like. Like, I don't know, not not good at humming. Um, but you know, anyway, like, so the you want them to hear the way that your, the way that you hear it.

But you've got to understand where they're coming from in order to do that. This is going back to the $2,000 deal. This is where the deal was lost is in is in the discovery and earlier in the stage and not at the very end. And this is why whenever I hear this on your IT service, and I do a lot of people who have actual problems and somebody very knowledgeable who actually gives a shit, um, at, you know, selling the services with a company that does good work and they're losing deals to.

To people who aren't necessarily. And it's because of the angle and the delivery and and how they're going about the strategy of the messaging. And everything is fundamentally different. So go build the case. Here's what I would do next. Like everything that I just walked you through here is like the discovery questions qualification proposal.

I've got stuff in my the MSP sales toolbox. It's at MSP sales toolbox comm. I'll be a link below. Um, you know, with templates, playbooks, scorecards. We put we put new stuff in there every single month that you can dive into and all of it. So to help you sell more and sell better. Um, it's entirely free. And every month we put, we put new resources in there.

So again, links in the description. Feel free to grab it. And this was useful. Go ahead and subscribe. Appreciate you watching audios.