#607 - How to Turn Every Sales Pilot Into a Closed Deal | Shaun Crimmins
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales
In this episode of '30 Minutes to President's Club,' Shaun Crimmins shares a proven framework for turning sales pilots and proof-of-concepts
Key takeaways
- Define success criteria before the pilot begins—specifically, which metrics will be measured and what improvement constitutes a win.
- Focus on upstream metrics that you can influence during the pilot (e.g., knowledge coverage, ticket resolution time) rather than downstream business outcomes like revenue or bookings.
Main topics
- Running successful sales pilots and POCs
- Measuring tangible value in short timeframes
Notable quotes
"We're going to show you live in production improvements to those numbers. So that by the end of this pilot, not only are we going to show you what this overarching could look like over the next year of engagement, but we've already moved the metric they care about."
Conclusion
Shaun Crimmins' approach transforms pilots from passive demonstrations into active value engines by
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) And I think that is one of the differences that I've noticed in pilots over the last five years is that it used to be very much so show you how the tech works, demonstrate what is possible versus I can move a metric over a two week, four week period that ties to the case that I really want to make. And that is sort of the reverse engineering of the value case. It becomes a natural next step because I've already shown how I can influence the metrics over a four week period. Great. Now, if you extrapolate that out, here's what that actually equates to. So it's Speaker 2 (0:24) a, Speaker 1 (0:24) it's a different type of sort of environment, like a proof of value, but exactly how we think about it. Speaker 2 (0:33) All righty, Sean, you literally win 100 % of the pilots, trials, and POCs that you kick off. And today you are going to be teaching us step-by-step how you do that. Where the heck should we start? Speaker 1 (0:47) Okay, so first thing, we call it the baseline bet. So the customer has about two or three metrics that they already are reporting on, right? These are things that matter to them, not necessarily me. They actually write down a guess at where they stand today in week one, the actual number. And then we understand after the first week what it is and then compare it to what their guess was. But the concept here is that we are getting success criteria and their baseline metrics up front. So that by the end of week one, two, three, four, I am showing tangible progress against those numbers. And that's where we're mapping our sort of value asks to. Speaker 3 (1:18) Sean, I feel like I've had reps try to do this for years and people come back and like, I just don't know the numbers. And we're like, just guess. And they're like, I don't want to guess. How are you getting them to actually give you numbers? Speaker 1 (1:30) A lot of times it's through stories we're telling, right? So we will talk about, for example, we did this with ASOS and we'll say when we met with ASOS, they really didn't understand the concept of even knowledge coverage. So for us, that is an important concept that we explain to the customer and say, look. knowledge coverage we would define as there's an incoming question. Do you have an answer documented somewhere? And a lot of times people would actually tell you, okay, well, probably 50 % of the time, I think we would. And we read back to them and say, you're actually at like five to 15%. And by the way, we just made a bunch of updates in 48 hours. Now you're at 90%. So I think defining that for them can help draw it out. But a lot of it is, here's what we've seen. Here's other companies we worked with and how they've defined it and what they've seen before the pilot and where their metrics actually were. Speaker 3 (2:13) So let's like get serious with a specific example. Like when I was at outreach, sometimes we would say, okay, what's your reply rate? People would have no clue. And then we'd be like, well, we can't tell you we can increase your reply rate X percent if we don't know what the baseline is. In your world, what's like a common metric that you anchor on? And then how do you... talk to somebody to give you that actual number that they believe, because they all know what you're going to do, man. They all know that you're going to say, we're going to double this number and you should pay us all this money. So they're already kind of like hedging their bets a little bit. Like how are you getting them to give you a real number? Speaker 1 (2:48) I think the first thing is for us, at least it's knowledge coverage is how we would like it. That's a metric that matters, but nobody really has that. So we will start with whatever metrics that they actually are reporting on right now. Sometimes that is. tickets that are incoming, like if we're selling an IT case where, okay, here's our ticket resolution time, here's our deflection rate or how many times we don't need to actually answer a ticket. And it is never where they really want it to be. The way that we actually get that number from the customer though, is to say, look, throughout this four week pilot, we plan to actually show you live in production improvements to those numbers. So that by the end of this pilot, not only are we going to show you, here's what we project, we've actually done that work over the four week period. And they can now say, Not only has this pilot shown what this overarching could look like over the next, call it, year of engagement, but we've already moved the metric they care about and introduced new insights. For us, that's knowledge coverage, which no organization has anything documented or written down. So when we explain that concept and then show them where they are today baseline and the improvement, they lean in. But I think the key thing is, what are the things that you're already reporting on? And we feel confident enough that we will say, great, we're going to move that metric. in the next four weeks, nevermind a value case that's going to show you how we do it. We actually move to that. Can you Speaker 2 (4:02) just quickly rattle like the list of the top five, six, seven, eight most common metrics that you are using as the upfront success criteria? Mark, I'd also be curious to hear what you have done at either Dotebo or Outreach, just so folks can get a sense of like what you're anchoring to upfront. Speaker 1 (4:20) Yeah, okay. So it's very use case dependent. For us, it's a lot of IT service management use cases or customer support. So for us, that is ticket resolution time. That is the deflection rate. That is how many tickets are being resolved in any given day. It's the volume of tickets, the amount of time it takes to actually triage something. Ticket resolution time is a big anchor for us. Great. Mark, how about yourself? Speaker 3 (4:43) Yeah, I think at Outreach, since we have a GTM-oriented audience, that would be the most appropriate thing to share. We would look at how many people are you actually touching in a day per rep. That's a big leading metric that we could control. We might go after something like the number of sales activities somebody could do a day. But what we always tried to do was stay something that we could impact versus saying like reply rates or meetings booked because there's so many variables between what we would do. And what the rep would do, like if they picked a bunch of bad companies, a bunch of bad people, we could do everything perfectly and they still wouldn't book meetings and they're blaming us instead of the rep. And so that was always the key to us is like, what metrics can we absolutely control or impact like John's talking about? Sean, so one of the things I heard that sounded interesting to me was you said basically. We kind of start the beginning of the pilot with the metric that they're interested in, and we measure that. And then we measure that same metric at the end of the pilot and then show the delta. Is that right? 100%. That's the key to me, man. Like, you don't know your number? Tell you what, we're going to show you your number. And then we're going to show you that number go up over the next four weeks in this pilot. That seems like some secret sauce. Speaker 1 (5:56) Absolutely. And it sort of leads to one of the other things that we will usually do, which is map each value touch throughout the pilot. So, for example, knowledge-based coverage, or is there a documented answer to an incoming question, whether it's IT or customer support, is a metric that we effectively educate the customer on. So we say, great, you may not know what this is. Most people don't. We measured it for you, and here's what that number actually is. And then after the first week of the pilot, when we get access to their data, we improve that metric, usually by threefold. So for example, we worked with a customer that came to us, their knowledge base coverage to start the pilot at week zero or day one was 30%. Seven days later, we said, here's what that number actually was. By the way, it is now 90%. And you're going to keep this knowledge base at the end of the pilot, no matter what. So we just went through and documented and reverse engineered their whole business process. And now I'm handing that to them after one week. Now I have some asks of them driven by insights where I will say, okay, great, because now I'm thinking about my week two value touch. I'm saying, look, based on the data as well, there's different tools that if we connected to, we could actually start to auto-resolve these tickets or draft responses for people. That's my week two value. So I allude to it. And then I'm also touching on another metric for them, which is usually deflection or auto-resolution. But I have mapped out before I get into the pilot exactly when I'm delivering these value touches and what my ask is going to be pre-planned. Speaker 3 (7:22) Sean, as an experienced sales leader, selling past the close is like always this thing that sellers are willing to do. You're taking it to product or a ticket resolution time. But I think a lot of over eager reps might say, well, I need to tie it to revenue or risk or time. But I don't know if necessarily you can show