#613: Master Parallel Selling Strategies to Speed Up Every Deal | Sam Mckenna | 30MPC Hall of Fame
30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales
Sam McKenna joins Nick Segelski and Armand Farouk on 30 Minutes to President's Club to explain how sellers can speed up complex deals by parallel-selling instead of waiting for one linear approval path. The
Key takeaways
- Ask whether the champion will present to the board, ask for permission, or tell the board they are buying, because each path requires different preparation.
- Start parallel processing with procurement early by scheduling the post-decision meeting now and asking for standard MSA terms, red lines, net terms, and litigation venue preferences.
Main topics
- parallel selling
- multithreading
Notable quotes
Are they presenting and waiting for feedback? Are they asking for permission to spend money with you or are they saying, hey, this is what we're going to do?
Conclusion
The episode offers a practical playbook for enterprise sellers who wan
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Sellers, cold outbound sucks for both you and your prospect. It takes an insane amount of effort, reply rates are in the tank, and you are fishing in the same pond as everybody else. I literally wrote a book on cold calling, but Sam McKenna, who's the CEO of Hashtag Sam Sales, completely changed my mind about what I thought social selling and great outbound prospecting is. Sam literally has broken 13 national sales records. She was recruited by LinkedIn because she was so good at LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and she built her business from scratch into a multimillion dollar business using exactly what she teaches in her social selling course that she built in partnership with 30 MPC. Go to 30 MPC.com forward slash Sam. Her new course teaches you how to use relationship data and your networks network to get warm introductions into your dream accounts. It would never answer your cold call, respond to your cold email or open the gift that you sent to their office. If you go to 30 MPC. We are giving away all of Sam's favorite LinkedIn sales now reports, alerts, and scripts that you can use to break into more accounts with less effort. Over the next four weeks, everything 30MPC is dropping is going to be focused on either social selling or one of our best ever Sam McKenna episodes. And the reason for that is at the end of the month, we are launching our social selling course with Sam. Today's episode is one of my favorites with her. We talk about parallel selling strategies to move your deals faster and create momentum in them. I hope you enjoy the episode. If you want to pre-order Sam's course, you can do that in the show notes. Enjoy the episode. Speaker 3 (1:44) Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. My name is Armand Farouk, and I'm here with my co-host, Nick Segelski. And today, we have a round two with the one and only founder of Sam Sales. It's Sam McKenna. Nick, why should people listen? Speaker 2 (1:58) So Sam has some phenomenal stuff around parallel processing next steps in deals, how you should be thinking about getting to power and involving multiple parties, both very early in the deal, but also late stage to accelerate the vendor review process. So you are not stuck trying to get a contract signed on New Year's Eve. This was a very good one, Armand. Three, two, one, let's roll. All right, Sam, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. Speaker 1 (2:26) All right. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me. Let's talk about first, are they presenting, asking, or telling? Who are we talking about? This is something we're talking about when we're specifically talking to a buyer that says, hey, we're going to go in front of a board and we're going to talk about your deal, right? So we can't get your deal done until we present to the board. That's going to happen in a couple of months. We'll let you know after that happens. Most people say. Okay, that's great. You know, nothing I can do until then. That's it. But here's the thing. You've got to think about what is actually going to happen when that person goes in front of the board. So one of the uncomfortable questions you have to think about when you're asking your buyer. about this deal is number one, are you going to be presenting, telling or asking the board for permission? Are they presenting and waiting for feedback? Are they asking for permission to spend money with you or are they saying, hey, this is what we're going to do? That's a key differentiator in thinking about how your deal is going to move forward. And then on top of that really quick. Has this person presented a deal of this kind to the board before? Is there pushback? Are there questions that usually come up? Is there something that you can help them prepare for? Because if this is the first time they're doing it and they're presenting, not asking or telling, you're going to be in for a different story for your deal than you probably thought. Speaker 2 (3:35) What's number two? Speaker 1 (3:36) Number two, thinking about parallel processing with procurement. So let's say for the same deal, person comes back to you and says, there's nothing we can do. I don't know. Let's say it's August. We can't do anything until this presentation happens in December. Great. Let's start talking to procurement. Can we get in front of procurement and get our MSA done? Can we go and do red lines? Can we understand how they buy, what the processes are, what stamps we need, what buying thresholds happen? Can we do all of that? And the buyer says we could, except we don't have approval yet to move forward. We won't have it until the board meeting happens. And because procurement is outsourced, we can't do anything with them until we have these levels of approval internally. So again, most reps would say nothing we can do. We can't touch procurement until then. So two things I would tell you to do here. Number one, make sure you have the meeting scheduled with procurement directly after that presentation happens, right? There's absolutely no harm in getting the meeting scheduled. Not only will this help you make sure that you get on their calendar now before everybody else is trying to do it, but to make sure that you get on your own legal and procurement team's calendar right now, again, before everybody is rushing. The second thing, ask for a standard MSA. You've done this before, buyer, presumably, right? So what are non-negotiables? What do you guys never agree to? Do you have net 45 terms, net 60, net 90? Do you only do litigation in Delaware, Texas? California? What does that look like? Because here's the thing, whatever they want, we're not going to ultimately agree to. We're going to have to go through our own legal procurement, rev ops, sales ops to get certain things done. So do that all in advance and have all that documentation ready and the meeting scheduled way before you ever need to. Speaker 2 (5:15) Round us out, Sam. What's number three? Speaker 1 (5:17) All right, let's think about who are the they's. Now, the grammatically incorrect sentence makes a lot of sense. So I want you to think about whether you are a leader or whether you are a rep. Every single time you hear the word they from your rep or from your buyer, you want you to ask yourself, do you know who is in that they? Is it they, the competition you have? Is it they, the buying circle? Is it they, the influencing committee? Who are the days? Because I think about every time I've heard that from a buyer and the buyer says, hey, we're going to look at this proposal. We're going to take it back to the team and then they're all going to decide together. And I say, that sounds great. Thanks. What I really need to say is that's awesome. Do you know who's in that buying committee? Who makes up those days? And I ask because I wonder if part of those are people who have been our clients before, if they have mutual connection with our executive team, if they've worked with our CS team before, right? If you buyer. or serious about working with us, tell us who those they's are, because man, we'll be able to figure out who they know, what experience they have, and help this deal move along. Same thing on the competition, right? When we hear they about the competition, they're submitting their proposal. They're going to answer the questions that we have by COB Friday. Who are those they's? We have to find that out, because if we don't know who the competition is, we're aiming in the dark. Imagine if we're selling, I don't know, a $250,000 car and they say, we're going to look at the competition. We don't know who that is. And then we later find out, I don't know, it's a Prius and maybe a 1989 Honda. Great cars, maybe not good competitors for our quarter of a million dollar car. Figure out who those days are. You'll open up a whole series of information that you need to know to get your deal done. Speaker 3 (6:53) Sam, that first takeaway is amazing. When someone's like, I'm going to the board, how do you suss out if they're presenting, asking or telling? Speaker 1 (7:01) I think what you need to think about is change the lens of how you look at this partnership with your buyer. We are so uncomfortable in asking uncomfortable questions because we don't want to upset anybody. We don't want to step on toes. If you instead about think instead that it's you versus them, think it's you two in cahoots, right? They want your software solution technology, whatever it is, as much as you want, let's be honest, their money and their revenue, right? When you go into this board meeting, one, is this the first time you've done this? And two, Are you presenting? Do you have to ask for permission? Are you telling them like, because you have authority to do this? Tell me about that. Simply by asking this, right? You're hopefully going to open up the conversation for them to be honest with you, tell you exactly what's going on. And for you to think about those questions that are forthcoming, those objections that they're going to get, you can build an analyst for them. You are going to make sure that they are prepared as all get out for this presentation or hopefully this. Now, if you think about that advice and you're